The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  While the fighting continued above ground, a secondary battle was being waged beneath the surface. The allies sent in sappers to undermine Neufchâtel’s battlements, and these siege specialists proceeded to dig tunnels beneath the walls, carefully buttressing their excavations with wooden supports as they went. Once complete, these mines would be packed full of branches and kindling, set alight and left to collapse, thus bringing down the wall above, though on this occasion it appears that no tunnels were actually fired. Facing the combined onslaught of sapping and frontal attacks, Neufchâtel’s garrison decided that further resistance was futile and duly capitulated. This significant success was soured, however, when Matthew of Boulogne succumbed to his injury. His death sent a shockwave through the Flemish contingent and left his brother Philip of Flanders too grief-struck to continue with the war. When he withdrew, Young Henry’s advance faltered. This setback was compounded by King Louis’ marked lack of success to the south, where his army was driven from Verneuil and forced into humiliating flight. The first phase of the rebellion had ended in failure.

  Throughout the war, King Henry II proved himself to be a canny and adroit commander. Facing a swelling tide of unrest, and confronted by enemies on many fronts, he remained calm and cautious. Trusting that those barons and castellans still faithful to the crown could hold the provinces, the Old King staunchly refused to be drawn into precipitous action. Like any medieval military leader, Henry was exceptionally wary of pitched battles, because these open confrontations were highly unpredictable. Most twelfth-century generals avoided full-scale clashes of this type unless they enjoyed absolutely overwhelming numerical superiority, and as a result, battles were remarkably rare in this era. Indeed, through all his long years of campaigning, William Marshal would only fight in one engagement that could be properly classed as a battle, and even that was set within the context of a siege.

  In 1173, King Henry II committed his forces only when an overwhelming threat presented itself and stayed back from the front line whenever possible. Instead, he used his well-stocked treasury to employ some 20,000 ruthless Brabançon (Flemish) mercenaries to fight in his name. Henry recognised that his capture would be catastrophic. The fear was not execution – such an act of cold-blooded regicide would have been virtually unimaginable – but the removal from power through enforced ‘retirement’. Some seventy years earlier, Henry II’s great-uncle, Robert Curthose, had been plucked from the board in this way and then frittered away the rest of his days in prison. The Old King had no intention of following in his footsteps.

  After the abortive invasion of Normandy, the two sides were deadlocked, and attempts at reconciliation that summer foundered. It was probably around this time that Queen Eleanor tried to leave Aquitaine and join her sons. Rumour had it that she disguised herself as a man in an attempt to evade capture, but she was seized nonetheless and taken into custody. With Queen Marguerite also under close guard, Henry II now had two valuable hostages. A lull in the fighting followed, indeed a truce may even have been proclaimed between Christmas and Easter, though if so the Young King seems to have broken it by attempting a daring, but ultimately fruitless midwinter attack on southern Normandy. It was not until the spring of 1174 that hostilities recommenced in earnest.

  Young Henry’s rebellion was faltering and his uncle, King Louis, had proved to be a largely ineffective ally. Meanwhile, Henry II and his royalist supporters were making significant headway in Anjou, Maine and Aquitaine. The Young King needed to land a telling blow, but the plan he now concocted with Count Philip of Flanders involved considerable risk. Young Henry was to attempt a full-scale invasion of England itself; almost a repeat of 1066, but this time with landfall made in East Anglia. Royalist strongholds in the north were already under attack from King William of Scotland, and there were others in England who favoured Young Henry’s cause. A fleet was prepared on the Flemish coast and in mid-May the first ships sailed. This advance force of just over 300 men successfully established a beachhead and later seized control of Norwich. Now primed to strike, all the Young King needed was a favourable wind. Henry waited on the coast of Flanders for weeks, and William Marshal must have been beside him during these long days of anxious anticipation. But through June and early July the wind stubbornly refused to change.

  By this time the Old King was back in Normandy, and urgent messages of alarm from England had reached him. Henry II now had no choice but to attempt an immediate sailing, regardless of the weather. Taking Eleanor and Marguerite with him, he set out from Barfleur around 7 July 1174. The sea was roughening and the wind was ‘blowing directly against them’ according to one close contemporary; understandably nervous, the crew doubted that a crossing could be made. It was said that Henry stood on the deck ‘in front of everyone’, and ‘lifting his eyes to Heaven’, prayed to God that he might make ‘a safe landing’. Was his story about to end in disaster on the water, just like that of William Ætheling in 1120?

  By some accounts it was not until dawn the next day that the coast was spotted. The royal ship had been blown off course, but somehow found its way to Southampton, allowing Henry to disembark unharmed. From there he sped to Canterbury and the new shrine to the martyred Thomas Becket. The motives behind Henry’s sudden pilgrimage that July are difficult to untangle. He was driven in part it would seem, by a heartfelt desire to give thanks for his safe passage and perhaps an authentic sense of remorse for Becket’s murder. But the Old King had also made a calculated decision to mark his arrival in England with an extreme and public act of atonement – one that could leave his subjects in no doubt that their true, pious and God-fearing monarch had returned. So it was that, on 12 June, King Henry II came walking barefoot to Canterbury Cathedral, ‘with streaming tears, groans and cries’, begging for absolution. Stripped to the waist, before a hushed crowd, Henry was beaten with rods by a gaggle of prelates. Once scourged of his sin, the king promised an annual endowment of £40, so that ‘lamps [might] burn perpetually around the martyr’s tomb’ in veneration of St Thomas.

  In the immediate aftermath of this visit, news arrived of a startling victory for royalist forces in the north; William of Scotland had been captured near Alnwick and his insurrection crushed. To many this seemed like an act of divine providence. With the pendulum now swinging in his favour, Henry II rapidly quashed the remaining pockets of resistance in England, securing the kingdom. Back on the Continent, the Young King realised that his chance had passed and the invasion was called off. While his father remained preoccupied in England, Young Henry and William Marshal joined Count Philip and King Louis to launch a second invasion of Normandy in late July. If they could seize Rouen then something might still be salvaged from the wreckage of the rebellion. Mustering every remaining ounce of manpower, they laid siege to the great ducal city with a ‘vast and terrible’ army, and began to assemble engines of war. But Rouen was heavily defended, strongly fortified and, lying on the banks of the River Seine, could not be fully encircled. The allies proved unable to tighten the noose and, moving with his legendary speed, Henry II re-crossed the Channel and relieved Rouen on 11 August. The Young King had been outplayed. Torching their siege machines and tents, the rebel armies began a despondent retreat. The war was over.

  In the end, Young Henry had been unable to overcome his father’s cool-headed resolve and seemingly inexhaustible resources. As one of the Old King’s supporters smugly declared, the rebels had learnt ‘that it was no easy task to wrest the club from the hand of Hercules’. Had luck been with him, or if Louis of France had proved to be a more dynamic collaborator, then victory might well have been possible. As it was, the Young King was forced to make peace on his father’s terms. At a gathering near Tours, on 30 September 1174, he witnessed a formal treaty finalising the settlement, and so too did William Marshal. Henry II was magnanimous in victory. His eldest son was to receive an allowance of 15,000 Angevin pounds per annum, and rights to two Norman castles (when his father saw fit to release them). Richard and Ge
offrey were similarly promised incomes and lands. Most of those who had supported the Young Henry’s cause were permitted to keep their lordships – though unsanctioned castles were destroyed across the realm – and the majority of prisoners were released. The Old King had brought his cubs to heel, and few could doubt that he would now watch them with a far more wary and vigilant eye. Only Queen Eleanor remained unforgiven. Perhaps Henry judged her to have been the spider at the centre of this treacherous conspiracy; it may be that he was simply appalled by her unbidden betrayal. She was taken into close confinement and would spend the next decade and more in captivity in England.

  The Young King caged

  Young Henry was not imprisoned as such, but nonetheless he was forced to live the next year-and-a-half in the equivalent of an open cage, travelling under his father’s watchful gaze at almost all times. At a succession of formal gatherings, the Young King was made to reaffirm his allegiance, and a renewed oath of fealty for himself and his men given near Bayeux was witnessed by Rotrou, the archbishop of Rouen. On 8 May 1175, father and son crossed over to England and remained within the kingdom for the rest of that year.

  William Marshal evidently recalled this period as one of almost restful inactivity, as the History stated that the Young King and his knights now resided in a ‘fine and beautiful place’, and gave themselves over to the recreations of hunting and hawking. William’s biographer maintained that it was only after months of such idleness that Henry and his household became restless. Recognising that ‘a long period of rest is a disgrace to a young man’, the Young King supposedly sought leave from his father ‘to go over the Channel for my sport’ – that is, to begin attending the kind of knightly tournaments that were still banned in England. Historians have generally accepted this account and therefore concluded that, in the wake of the failed rebellion, both Young Henry and William Marshal became detached from the world of high politics and military conflict. By early 1176, both men are supposed to have thrown themselves into the obsessive pursuit of tournament glory, with barely a thought for the real world beyond. In reality, this was at best only half the story.

  An array of detailed evidence allows us to track the movements of the Young King’s household within England, and it turns out that, far from putting up their feet in some rural idyll, Henry and his knights travelled hundreds of miles during the course of 1175, zigzagging across the kingdom, usually at the side of the Old King. Young Henry can be placed in London, Oxford, Canterbury, Woodstock, York, Windsor and Winchester, often attending major assemblies with the likes of the Scots, the Irish and papal legates. It is possible that Henry II was deliberately parading his son through England simply to proclaim his own supremacy and flaunt his wayward heir’s new-found docility. But perhaps he was also trying to gauge his son’s allegiance, wondering already whether the Young King’s political and military career might be rejuvenated. Certainly, Henry II was not content to merely release his son into the tournament world, even in 1176.

  The Young King did eventually grow restless under this close surveillance. By early 1176 he was suggesting that he and Marguerite might undertake the long pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in north-western Iberia. But Henry II judged this to be a ruse cooked up by ‘evil hangers on’ to buy Young Henry a measure of freedom, and vetoed the journey. After Easter, however, the Old King relented somewhat. His heir would be permitted to travel south, but only so that he might assist his brother Richard – now the well-established count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine – in quelling another outbreak of provincial unrest. Thus, in the summer of 1176, William Marshal accompanied the Young King on his journey to Poitiers, returning to fight once again in the region that had witnessed Patrick of Salisbury’s ‘murder’ and his own despairing captivity. Much of the focus in 1176 was on suppressing Angoulême, to the south of Poitou, but it was back in the city of Poitiers itself that Young Henry’s hostility to his father bubbled to the surface once more.

  Once out of England, and free of Henry II’s constant supervision, the Young King began to expand his household. Over time he drew a number of skilled clerics and administrators into his service, including a relative of the Salisbury and Marshal families, Gervase of Tilbury (who served as his personal chaplain), and the theologian Ralph Niger. At first, however, his primary focus was to recruit knights. The inner circle of his mesnie, like William Marshal and Robert Tresgoz, remained, as always, by his side. But Henry sought new warriors, and he took the defiant step of welcoming in French and Norman knights who were deemed ‘enemies’ of the Old King – presumably men who had been named traitors during the rebellion. Perhaps Henry was simply seeking to reassert his independence, but his father construed this as wilful insubordination.

  The Young King must have imagined that he was safe in Poitiers, far from Henry II’s gaze, but he was mistaken. In August, a scandalous discovery was made. A member of Young Henry’s own household, his chancellor Adam, was caught attempting to send a message detailing his lord’s questionable actions back to the Old King in England. Within the context of a medieval mesnie – the intimate fellowship in which iron-cast fidelity was expected – this was a grave act of treachery; one that incriminated both the spy Adam and his master Henry II. The Young King convened a summary court to try his chancellor – on which William Marshal likely sat – and a death sentence was passed. Only the bishop of Poitiers’ imploring intervention saved Adam from the gibbet. Moved to mercy, Henry had the renegade stripped naked and whipped through the city streets, before packing him off to Normandy.

  It was probably only from this point onwards, in the late summer of 1176, that Young Henry began increasingly to turn away from the dynastic struggles of the Angevin realm, sickened by his father’s meddling. It would be almost three years before he set foot in England again. That December he held his own Christmas Court in Normandy with Queen Marguerite. By then she was pregnant with their first child, and perhaps this sparked new schemes and ambitions, but they were extinguished when the baby boy died at birth in the summer of 1177. Twice in that same year, the Young King reluctantly followed Henry II’s orders to lead military forays into the region of Berry, east of Poitiers. But his heart was elsewhere. Together with William Marshal, he had turned to the tournament. For now, at least, both men would seek to make their mark on the world of chivalry.

  5

  TOURNAMENT CHAMPIONS

  William Marshal was drawn into the world of the tournament from late 1176 onwards and, for the next three years, both he and Henry the Young King became increasingly obsessed by these knightly contests. With his political ambitions stymied, the tournament offered Henry a new arena in which to earn the respect of his peers, to achieve a degree of renown, even celebrity, which might somehow offset the rankling sense of dissatisfaction that still gnawed at this king without a kingdom. For William and his fellow household knights, meanwhile, these chivalric games offered a chance to redeem some of the frustrations of the last five years – time spent in the loyal service of a lord and king, loved and honoured, yet ultimately incapable of advancing their careers. Triumph in these contests would serve not only to affirm their prowess after the defeats endured during the rebellion; it could also bring them rich material rewards. It is little wonder that Henry and his knights were soon in the thrall of the tournament.

  This period of intense dedication to the tournament circuit had a transformative effect on William Marshal’s career. Up to this point, he had shown himself to be a competent knight and loyal retainer, moving through a series of military households and coming to the notice of the Angevin dynasty. In spite of the glory that the History of William Marshal was already prepared to associate with his name, in real terms William remained relatively little known or recognised outside select social circles, such as the Young King’s entourage. Marshal’s tournament successes wrought a dramatic change, bringing him international renown and considerable wealth, and cementing his already close connection with Young Henry. William became the p
reeminent figure within the Young King’s mesnie and, for the first time, truly began to stand out within a much larger peer group of knights, drawn from across Western Europe. Now around thirty years of age – a hardened warrior in peak physical condition – he proved able to prosper in these chivalric contests when others enjoyed only mixed fortunes, or in the worst cases, faced financial ruin, suffered injury or even death.

  This was not simply luck, though there must have been an element of good fortune, because William succeeded across such a large number of events, spread over more than five years. He evidently turned tourneying into an art, almost an industry. Indeed, as an old man, William would claim that he captured no less than 500 knights during his tournament career. So what made him a winner, and what do his achievements in this hugely competitive environment reveal about his qualities and nature as a man? The answers lie within the History of William Marshal, but as always, the text has to be read with care.

  The biographer dedicated a large portion of his work to this phase of William’s life, giving over some 2,300 lines of the History to describing his tournament exploits, when just thirty-six had been expended on the six years Marshal spent training at Tancarville. This probably reflected William’s own enthusiasm for his glory days as a tournament champion. This period seems to have been etched into his memory as one of the happiest phases of his life: a time of few responsibilities, but many victories, and a source of countless stirring tales. Needless to say, the History often presented William as the all-conquering hero of these contests, but a nuanced picture of Marshal’s progress through the tournament world can be reconstructed. It reveals a knight who was skilled in feats of arms and horsemanship, but also resolutely acquisitive, devious, proud and even preening.