The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  The road to rebellion

  The first signs of a gathering storm could be detected by late 1172. In November, Young Henry and Queen Marguerite travelled to Paris to meet with her father King Louis VII of France, and he was said to have treated both as his children. The Young King and his wife then held their own Christmas Court, with William Marshal and the rest of his household, at Bonneville in northern Normandy, while Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine met at the great Angevin fortress of Chinon more than 200 miles to the south. In all likelihood, Young Henry was already preparing to challenge his father’s authority, perhaps even scheming with his Capetian father-in-law. The Old King must have had some sense of his son’s festering discontent, but he failed to predict the explosion that was about to rip the Angevin realm asunder.

  Henry II summoned his wife and four sons to a meeting on 25 February 1173 at Limoges, capital of the Limousin region in central Aquitaine. Leading dignitaries from southern France and Iberia, including the count of Toulouse and the king of Aragon, were also brought together. The Old King intended this grand Angevin gathering to serve as an affirmation of dynastic superiority and regional dominance. Instead, it sparked the greatest rebellion of his reign. The problems began when Henry II proudly announced to the assembly that he had secured a propitious marriage alliance for his youngest son John, then just five years old. The boy was to be betrothed to a daughter of the French magnate Humbert, count of Maurienne, and gifted possession of three of the most important castles in Anjou – Chinon, Loudon and Mirebeau. This was a crafty manoeuvre. With John obviously in no position to administer these fortresses in person, they would revert to the Old King himself and be kept from the clutches of Young Henry, the nominal ‘count of Anjou’, for years to come. His eldest son was bound to be displeased, but the Old King must have calculated that Henry would be forced to swallow his anger in this public setting. He was mistaken.

  Young Henry made a clear display of outrage, resolutely declaring that this plan offended his rights as count of Anjou and would never be accepted. What is more, he demanded that his father now hand over full possession of either Anjou, Normandy or England itself. The Old King’s bluff had been called, and the grave rift between father and son was suddenly clear for all to see. Both men were left fuming and unable to speak to one another ‘in a peaceable manner’. That evening, however, Henry II discovered that a greater game was in play. During a private audience, the count of Toulouse informed him that two of his other sons, Richard and Geoffrey, and, unthinkably, even his wife Queen Eleanor, were rumoured to be plotting his overthrow. A conspiracy had evidently been brewing for weeks, perhaps even months – one that threatened to shatter the Old King’s beloved empire.

  Henry II took immediate action. He seems to have discounted the story of Eleanor’s connivance because he left Richard and Geoffrey in her care – after all, as chroniclers would later attest, no queen in the annals of history had ever betrayed her husband in such a treacherous manner. But Young Henry was another matter. His meeting with Louis of France back in November now took on a different complexion. The Old King hurriedly set out for the north, taking Henry and Marguerite with him, and discreetly ordered that his castles be readied for war. The Young King must have had his military household with him at this point, William Marshal included, but it is unclear whether Henry was in any way compelled to accompany his father. According to one local chronicler, Henry II pretended to be embarking on a hunting excursion, but given that the party then travelled almost 150 miles, this excuse cannot have held for long. In all likelihood, the Young King was simply informed that he would be escorting the king, for as yet, no decisive breach had occurred.

  Young Henry finally made his move at Chinon, stealing from the castle in the dead of night, accompanied only by his ‘privata familia’ (the very closest members of his household), including William Marshal. In the chaotic rush of this sudden escape Marguerite was left behind, and amid the confusion, even some of the Young King’s most trusted servants did not realise, at first, what was happening, though it might be assumed that leading knights, like Marshal, were party to the flight. Once away from Chinon and racing through the night, it became obvious that Henry intended to openly rebel against his father, and every one of his followers had a choice to make. Where did their loyalties lie: with the Young King, their lord; or with his father, Henry II, the great Angevin monarch? The wrong decision could spell the end of a retainer’s career, perhaps even his life. Richard Barre, the bearer of Young Henry’s royal seal, turned around immediately and returned to Chinon, taking the seal with him. Rather humiliatingly, the household staff responsible for Henry’s baggage (including his clothes) did the same, but when they presented themselves before the Old King he sent them straight back to his son, along with a gift of ‘silver cups, horses and rich cloth’. Young Henry might now be an adversary, but he was still an Angevin with a royal dignity to preserve. Needless to say, his seal was not returned.

  After these departures the Young King demanded a formal oath of allegiance from his remaining followers. Having some sense what was to come, he was determined to surround himself only with those of proven fidelity. Some, like his steward William Blund, refused to swear and were allowed to return unharmed to Chinon. Most, like William Marshal, remained. They now set out with Henry to meet with Louis of France some 180 miles away, on the outskirts of Paris. As far as the Young King was concerned, these men had affirmed their steadfast devotion; but in Henry II’s eyes they were now guilty of the most heinous crime of treason against the crown. A formal list of these ‘diabolical’ traitors was later drawn up and the five leading members of Young Henry’s mesnie were all named. This roll call of dishonour survives to this day – copied by the great twelfth-century historian Roger of Howden, into his account of King Henry II’s reign. So it was that the great William Marshal made his first known appearance in a contemporary chronicle, and the man who would one day become England’s peerless knight was named an enemy of the state.

  ‘A WAR WITHOUT LOVE’

  King Henry II may have sensed that some form of confrontation with his eldest son was all but inevitable even before the meeting at Limoges began. But he could not possibly have guessed that Young Henry’s rebellion would spark a massive uprising that would see his authority challenged in almost every province of the Angevin Empire. In the immediate aftermath of the Young King’s flight from Chinon, his brothers Richard and Geoffrey travelled to the Ile-de-France to join him, and Eleanor’s complicity in the whole affair was revealed. The queen appears to have made a calculated decision to challenge her husband’s authority, but her motives remain uncertain. Some have suggested that she was spurred to action by feverish jealousy over Henry II’s infidelities, most notably his affair with the beautiful English woman ‘Fair’ Rosamund Clifford – later legends even suggested that Eleanor had Rosamund assassinated in 1176. But this explanation probably owes more to chivalric fiction than reality. Now in her fifties, the queen may have been worried about being excluded, but not from Henry’s bedchamber. Like her husband, Eleanor was a political animal; one seemingly determined not to be sidelined as she aged. Her primary concerns in 1173 were probably to cement her own position in Aquitaine and to advance her sons’ careers, especially those of Young Henry and Richard.

  In the spring of 1173 the ‘rebels’ gathered at a great assembly in Paris organised by King Louis VII. The Young King was proclaimed Henry III, England’s rightful ruler, and using a new royal seal helpfully provided by the French monarch, he set about binding a number of powerful allies to his cause. Documents were drawn up promising rich rewards of lands and income to the likes of Young Henry’s cousin Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders – one of the most powerful magnates in northern France, who at the age of thirty-one, was fast earning a reputation as a fearsome warrior and a canny political operator. Philip’s brother, Count Matthew of Boulogne, was similarly drawn into the conflict, as were the count of Blois and King William of Scotland.
The Young King was building a powerful alliance, but to what purpose, and at whose behest?

  Most historians have suggested that either Eleanor or Louis VII orchestrated the entire affair, discounting out of hand the possibility that Young Henry – the ‘feckless’ playboy – might have been the architect of his own fate, even though he was now eighteen. It is true, of course, that Henry’s visit to Paris in November 1172, and his connection to Louis through Marguerite, all pointed to the Capetian king as an active ally. Louis was, at the very least, a co-conspirator in the rebellion, but that did not make him its instigator. The queen’s influence is perhaps even more intriguing, given that she may have retained an agent within the Young King’s entourage – none other than William Marshal, her former household knight. But frustratingly, Marshal’s precise role in these events remains unknown. As a leading member of Young Henry’s mesnie, William must have been an influential voice and perhaps encouraged this bold move to action. On balance, Young Henry appears to have played a significant role in planning and then executing the confrontation with his father. Certainly, he is unlikely to have been a mere puppet manipulated by others.

  Young Henry sought more than a mere token of land or increased allowance when he challenged his father. His goal was nothing less than the overthrow of the Old King’s regime and the seizure of his Angevin heartlands, and this attempted coup enjoyed remarkably widespread support. The Young King and his allies incited insurrection across the realm – such that Henry II soon faced attacks along the Scottish border, unrest within England itself and revolt in Aquitaine – while they focused their own resources on an invasion of Normandy. By the summer of 1173 the entire realm was in the grip of a destructive civil war and it seemed that the dark days of King Stephen’s reign were about to be repeated.

  Contemporaries characterised this bitter, internecine struggle as ‘a war without love’. But some eyewitnesses were also aware of its underlying causes and sympathised with Young Henry’s predicament. The cleric Jordan of Fantosme, then living in southern England, noted perceptively that ‘a king without a realm is at a loss for something to do; at such a loss was the noble and gracious Young King’. In spite of being broadly supportive of Henry II’s position in his chronicle, Jordan actually laid much of the blame for the conflict at the Old King’s feet. After describing Young Henry’s coronation, he addressed a direct complaint to Henry II, stating that: ‘After this crowning and this transfer of power you took away from your son some of his authority, you thwarted his wishes so that he could not exercise power. Therein lay the seeds of a pitiless war.’

  Very little is known of William Marshal’s conduct in this conflict beyond the fact that he remained loyal to the Young King. The author of the History seems to have been determined to offer a balanced – but also remarkably vague – account of the rebellion, and perhaps he was reflecting Marshal’s own equivocation as he looked back on this treacherous struggle. The biography mourned the fact that ‘many noblemen died’ in the conflict, stating that the land was ‘ravaged by the war’ and that ‘on both sides there were excesses’. The physical damage to the landscape during this ‘savage’ conflagration left ‘many a castle and many a town . . . razed to the ground’, and the scars were obviously evident many decades later, because the History noted that ‘in many places there are still the remains of what the war left’.

  Neither the Young King, nor Henry II, was explicitly blamed for the war in the History of William Marshal, with the latter described as ‘very wise and courtly’. This was the same agile avoidance of criticism witnessed in the account of young William’s time as King Stephen’s hostage in 1152. Just as he had done then, the biographer laid the blame upon the losengiers (deceivers) who offered evil counsel to both father and son. The History indicated that there was a difference of opinion within the Young King’s inner circle, with some advising Henry ‘to turn against his father and use force to reduce him’, while others cautioned that ‘it would be very wrong to act in this way’. Marshal’s own opinion was never explicitly stated. Perhaps this meant that William stood as a voice of reason and reconciliation in this period; or it may well be that this was merely the sanitised version of events that he chose to recall. In the course of the war, Marshal was surely called upon to fight in the front line and to offer military counsel, but he remained inexpert in certain aspects of martial conduct – most notably siege-craft – and this raised the importance of others with more experience of command, like Philip of Flanders and King Louis VII.

  The History of William Marshal described only one significant deed in any detail during the rebellion – at the height of the conflict, William supposedly knighted the Young King. Prior to this, the History made no mention of the fact that Henry had not attained knightly status, and its claim has to be doubted. It would have been very unusual for the young royal not to undergo a dubbing ceremony before his coronation, and a well-placed contemporary recorded that Henry was indeed knighted by his father’s hand in June 1170. The 1173 ‘knighting’ in the History seems to have been constructed both to inflate Marshal’s reputation and to subtly impute that William ennobled the Young King in the midst of an otherwise dishonourable conflict. Henry’s retinue supposedly encouraged him to be dubbed, because his lack of knightly status was ‘not to everyone’s liking’, adding that ‘we would all be a more effective force if you had a sword girded on’. William’s biographer then hammered home his hero’s standing and renown. Even though there were high-ranking ‘counts and barons’ present, Henry allegedly chose Marshal to perform the ritual because he was ‘the best knight who ever was or will be’ – a significant overstatement of his reputation and achievements at this stage. As a result, William ‘gladly girded on his sword and kissed him, whereupon he became a knight’. In his biographer’s opinion, Marshal had just transformed the Young King’s status, even though he himself ‘had not one strip of land to his name or anything else, just his chivalry’.

  The great rebellion

  The Young King and his allies made their first move in June 1173, launching a coordinated invasion of Normandy. Aiming to capture the ducal capital of Rouen through a pincer movement, King Louis of France led an attack towards the border fortress of Verneuil from the south, while Young Henry advanced from the north-east at the head of a large coalition force, including his brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, and the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. By this point William Marshal’s former patron, the lord of Tancarville, chamberlain of Normandy, had also sided with the Young King, bringing one hundred knights to the cause.

  Young Henry enjoyed initial success, seizing the castle of Aumale on Normandy’s eastern frontier almost immediately (probably as a result of its commander switching sides) and then marched on to besiege Neufchâtel-en-Bray. This was a strange reversal for William Marshal. Seven years earlier, he had fought his first military engagement at this town, battling alongside the lord of Tancarville to defend Normandy from invasion. Now, as William returned in the company of his old master and beside the Young King, he had become the invader.

  Marshal had certainly seen at least one siege in his life to date, having been present as a hostage when King Stephen sought to capture Newbury Castle in 1152, but the investment of Neufchâtel was probably his first direct experience of this form of military engagement. Like the mounted raid, or chevauchée, the siege was an essential feature of medieval warfare. In William’s world, castles were almost ubiquitous. The ruling elite used strongholds to maintain strategic, economic and administrative control of territory, and virtually every town or city was, to one degree or another, fortified by walls or a citadel. Disputed regions, like the borderlands of Normandy, were guarded by a dense network of forts, and most of these were constructed of stone by the mid-twelfth century. As a result, most territorial wars revolved around hard-fought contests for control of castles, and William Marshal would himself engage in countless sieges (both as aggressor and defender) in the course of his long career.

  Tw
o strategies were open to William and Young Henry when they arrived with their allies at Neufchâtel in the summer of 1173. As Marshal knew only too well from first-hand experience, the town contained a stout stone fortress, surrounded by suburbs, which would not be easily overcome. Neufchâtel could have been subjected to an encirclement siege: surrounded by a tight cordon and cut off from resupply, such that its garrison would eventually be starved or intimidated into submission. This was an exceptionally effective technique – though it often boiled down to a bleak, and sometimes savage, test of will – but it was time-consuming and potentially hazardous for an attacking force, who might easily find themselves isolated or confronted by a relieving army.

  Needing to push on at speed towards Rouen, the Young King’s army adopted an assault-based strategy at Neufchâtel. Facing the castle’s formidable defences, the allies deployed a number of siege-engines (probably fairly rudimentary stone-throwing weapons, capable of propelling ten- to twenty-pound projectiles) and unleashed a fierce aerial bombardment. These volleys might inflict some damage on the walls, potentially causing a breach, but they also provided valuable cover under which direct attacks using battering rams and scaling ladders could be launched. Fighting in one of these offensives was a risky affair – garrisons used every available means to stem an attack, from unleashing scouring volleys of arrows and crossbow bolts, to pouring boiling pitch and burning sand down on advancing troops. William and Young Henry emerged from this first siege unscathed, but Count Matthew of Boulogne was less fortunate. In the midst of a frontal assault, he took an arrow in the knee and, when the wound became infected, he was left struggling for his life.