The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  It is impossible to know whether this was a deliberate attempt at assassination, or even if it was, whether Young Henry was in any way complicit. The Old King’s death would certainly have cleared the way for Henry’s accession, but such a direct attack was incredibly risky. The excuse later given was that the garrison had believed they were under attack, yet as King Henry had been riding beneath his red and gold royal banner, it is difficult to believe such a mistake could have been made. That evening the Young King came to Aixe to parley and offer his apologies for the shocking incident, though his cause was not helped by the fact that the archers responsible remained unpunished. Obviously angry and suspicious, it was plain to see that Henry II now favoured Richard.

  There was a hiatus over the next two weeks, as the Old King and Duke Richard assembled their forces, ahead of an attack on Limoges. Suddenly confronted by the stark reality of his position, Young Henry’s nerve seems to have faltered. This was a war largely of his own making, yet it now dawned on him that, with the alienation of his father, outright defeat had become a real possibility. The exorbitant costs of the Gascon mercenaries drafted in by Aimar also began to bite, and the Young King was quickly running out of money. He was out of his depth. Before long, he resorted to the shameful expedient of looting the abbey of St Martial of its gold and silver just to meet his expenses. The last two weeks of February also witnessed a confused series of diplomatic exchanges between Henry and his father, some carried out face to face, others via envoys. Throughout, the Young King vacillated: offers of peace were made, but then rescinded, Henry restated his intention to crusade to the Holy Land – and seems to have actually taken the cross at this point – but when the Old King agreed to finance his expedition, he backed away from the plan.

  No resolution had been achieved by 1 March and, with their armies now in place, Henry II and Richard moved in to besiege the citadel in Limoges, using a mixture of encirclement and assault. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Young King had little choice but to mount a defence. The siege proved to be a grim affair for both sides. Late winter weather meant that it was still cold, and the rains lashed the besieger’s tents – in misery, some of the Old King’s troops asked to depart after just two weeks. Nonetheless, Young Henry’s prospects looked bleak. It was probably at this point, in March 1183, that the Young King’s seneschal – one of the leading men to have accused William Marshal the preceding autumn – revealed himself to be a ‘traitor’. Having judged Young Henry’s cause to be hopeless, he abandoned his lord and mesnie and went over to the Old King. According to the History, this act of treachery caused Henry to realise that the allegations against Marshal had been nothing more than ‘harmful lies’. This may have been the case; perhaps the whole plot really was revealed and discredited. It is also possible that, with his back against the wall, the Young King simply decided to put any lingering grudge or suspicion to one side. Whatever the truth may have been, Henry now needed a man of William’s prowess and quality in his retinue, and so his chamberlain Ralph FitzGodfrey was instructed to locate Marshal with all possible haste.

  Ralph was perhaps dispatched at the same time as Young Henry slipped away from Limoges – either by breaking through Henry II’s encirclement, or (more likely) by using the cover of a brief parley truce as an opportunity to abscond. Geoffrey of Brittany, Viscount Aimar and the lord of Lusignan were left to hold the citadel, while the Young King ranged across the Limousin and Angoulême, desperately seeking out supplies and spoils. Once again, he looted monasteries, plundering Grandmont, north of Limoges, and the abbey of La Couronne, but the booty taken kept his war effort alive. The citadel at Limoges stubbornly held out through April, and by early May the Old King had called off the siege. Having weathered the worst of the storm, it looked as though the tide was now beginning to shift in Young Henry’s favour. His support within Aquitaine remained strong, despite the attacks on local religious houses. Neighbouring powers like Duke Hugh of Burgundy and Count Raymond of Toulouse were also beginning to line up behind the Young King, preferring the prospect of his rule to the known ferocity of Richard’s regime.

  It was probably at this point, sometime in May, that William Marshal finally returned to the Young Henry’s side. Using the political connections forged on the tournament circuit, Marshal had secured letters of support and safe-conduct from King Philip of France, the archbishop of Rheims and the count of Blois so that he could traverse the war zone. Even Henry II eventually gave William leave to be reunited with the Young King, perhaps hoping that he might steer his wayward son on a more moderate course. In fact, Marshal’s arrival at Limoges may have encouraged Henry to go on the offensive; certainly by 23 May he had marched down the Vienne river valley to occupy the now un-garrisoned castle at Aixe, and then moved on south. After the cheerless uncertainty of the early winter, his prospects had been transformed. The Young King was still in deep financial debt to his mercenary forces, but Richard and the Old King were now on the back foot.

  But then, on 26 May, Young Henry fell ill with a fever at Uzerche, some thirty-five miles south of Limoges. At first he was able to keep moving, passing the small castle of Martel two days later, and travelling on to plunder the Old King’s favoured shrine at Rocamadour. By early June, however, he was back at Martel and so weak that he had to be confined to bed. His fever remained high, but he also contracted ‘a flux of the bowels’ – what today would be termed dysentery. Like Henry II in 1170 and young Philip of France in 1179 before him, Young Henry’s life was now in danger.

  Realising that he was no longer in any position to wage a war, the Young King sent an envoy to his father, asking that he come to Martel so that they could be reconciled. Fearing for his son’s condition, Henry was said to have considered setting out on the journey, but in light of the treachery witnessed at Limoges that February, his advisors counselled him to decline. A ring of ‘forgiveness and peace’ was sent in his stead. As the days passed, Young Henry’s condition deteriorated. Wracked by pain, his body became severely dehydrated, even as his physicians struggled to bring him back to health. William Marshal and the rest of the Young King’s closest household knights waited with him at Martel, their anxiety deepening. There was no doubt that Henry was now gravely ill, but at only twenty-eight, he surely had the strength and resilience of youth on his side.

  By 7 June, however, it was clear that for Young Henry there would be no recovery – no last-minute reprieve. He was dying. That day he made a private confession to the bishop of Cahors, prostrating himself naked on the floor before the prelate’s crucifix to renounce his attempt to seize Aquitaine and to receive the ritual of Mass. Four days later, on 11 June, Henry was at the point of death. The Young King now repeated his confession in public, before William and the other members of his mesnie, and then received absolution for his sins and the last rites.

  On that final day, the man who had been destined to become King Henry III of England dictated his last testament. His body was to be buried alongside his forebears, the great dukes of Normandy, in the cathedral at Rouen. A heartfelt appeal was made to his father Henry II ‘to deal mercifully’ with his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, his wife Queen Marguerite of France and his knights ‘to whom he had made many promises which he had been unable to fulfil’. Turning to Marshal, ‘his most intimate friend’, Henry bid him take up the cloak upon which he had affixed his crusading cross, and begged him ‘to carry it to the Holy Sepulchre (in Jerusalem) and with it pay my debts to God’.* After that his face became ‘sallow, wan and livid’. The Young King’s dying moments became a tableau of penitence. A hair shirt was placed on his emaciated body, a noose around his withered neck. With this rope he was dragged from his bed and laid upon the ash-strewn floor, with large stone blocks placed beneath his head and feet. Clutching the Old King’s ring of peace to his chest, he fell unconscious and died soon thereafter.

  The cult of the Young King

  For William Marshal and those others huddled inside the castle at Martel, the mixture of s
hock and disbelief at Young Henry’s passing left them ‘quite out of their minds and greatly disturbed’. The Old King, too, was said to have been gripped by the ‘deepest grief’ when he heard the dreadful news, and ‘bursting into tears, he threw himself to the ground, greatly bewailing his son’. The beautiful, golden-haired Young King had died a pointless, squalid death. With his demise, the resistance in Aquitaine soon collapsed. Regardless of the anguish he must have felt, William Marshal was forced to confront the unseemly issue of Henry’s debts. Challenged by one of the Young King’s mercenary commanders – now angry at the prospect of not being paid – William had to pledge himself against the money owed, though King Henry II later settled the arrears.

  Nonetheless, Marshal and the other loyal members of the Young King’s mesnie did their best to follow their late lord’s final wishes. Given the summer heat, careful preparations had to be made before Henry’s corpse could be moved. The internal organs of the royal dead were often interred separately, so the Young King’s brains, eyes and bowels were removed, and later laid to rest at Grandmont Priory, even though this was one of the religious houses he had ransacked. The rest of his body was packed with salt, stitched into a bull’s hide and then placed within a lead coffin. William and his fellow knights were now ready to begin the long funeral procession to Rouen, more than 300 miles north of Martel. The Young King’s bier was ‘carried on the shoulders of his comrades through villages, castles and towns, with people running from everywhere to look’.

  As the slow-moving cortège passed through the landscape of Aquitaine, Anjou and then Normandy, an atmosphere of feverous collective grief took hold, especially among ordinary townspeople and the peasantry. Young Henry was idolised as the great flower of chivalry, and many mourned the loss of a man who, it was believed, would have ruled as a king of justice and mercy. In part, the power of this conviction, and the sheer, unexpected force of the sentiment that now began to sweep across the Angevin realm could be explained by the fact that Henry had never actually held or exercised full regnal power in his life. He had been able to play the role of the chivalric figurehead without ever having to enforce laws or raise taxes. With his hands unstained by the grubby work of governance, he became the perfect king of the imagination.

  Even so, the cult of the Young King that quickly sprang up in June 1183 went beyond mere political adoration, and began to parallel the charged devotional outpouring that had followed Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170. Claims for the late Henry’s sanctity were made as William and his comrades marched his corpse north: illnesses were supposedly cured as the funeral procession passed, lepers came forward to touch the bier and a great shaft of heavenly light was said to have shone down on the coffin at night. When the procession reached Le Mans, the crowds became so overwrought that the bishop halted the funeral party and had the Young King’s body quickly interred within the local cathedral – the resting place of Henry’s paternal grandfather, Geoffrey Plantagenet. This may have been a rather unscrupulous attempt to relocate Young Henry’s cult to Le Mans (after all, there were fortunes to be made from pilgrim traffic). The Old King was said to have been enraged by the hasty burial, issuing the dean of Rouen with a special royal warrant so that the corpse could be recovered. In a rather gruesome final act, Henry’s body was duly dug up in mid-July, carried to Rouen Cathedral and laid to rest ‘with due honour . . . on the north side of the high altar’. William Marshal had buried his first king. It would not be his last.

  The cult surrounding the Young King proved short-lived. With Henry II still in power and Young Henry now cast as the vanquished rebel, there were few Angevin nobles or clerics willing to risk their careers by repeating stories of his ‘miracles’. In fact, Young King Henry received a scourging press from most late twelfth-century chroniclers. For these historians, writing during the reigns of the Old King and his successors, Henry was easy game – a wayward princeling who died young and left no great court historians to sing his praises. In their accounts, he became little more than a mutinous traitor. Walter Map claimed to have known Henry as ‘a friend and intimate’, but condemned him nonetheless as ‘a false son to his father’ who ‘befouled the whole world with his treasons’. Gerald of Wales offered some degree of balance, accusing the Young King of ‘monstrous ingratitude’, while acknowledging that he had been ‘an honour to his friends, a terror to his enemies and beloved by all’.

  Only a few of Young Henry’s closest contemporaries offered a more immediate impression of his achievements and character. The famed troubadour, Bertrand of Born, composed a ‘planh’ (lament) on Henry’s death, praising his largesse, courtesy and chivalry; styling him as the ‘sovereign of all courtly knights’ and the ‘emperor of champions’. Perhaps the most heartfelt memorial was offered by Henry’s chaplain, Gervase of Tilbury. He wrote that the Young King was ‘a solace to the world while he lived’ and that ‘it was a blow to all chivalry when he died in the very glow of youth’. Gervase concluded that ‘when Henry died heaven was hungry, so all the world went begging’.

  The Young King was a tragic figure – a man who seemed to forever see true greatness just beyond his grasp; cut down long before his time, with all his promise squandered. He had been William Marshal’s greatest patron and, despite their brief estrangement, one of his closest friends. Henry had transformed William’s career and marked him as a man. Marshal would cherish the Young King’s memory for the rest of his days, but for now his first task was to fulfil Henry’s crusading vow by travelling to the Holy Land.

  JOURNEY TO THE HOLY LAND

  Honouring Young Henry’s request was no simple matter – it involved a journey of more than 2,000 miles, almost to the edge of the known world – but William undertook this last act of service nonetheless. His pilgrimage seems, first and foremost, to have been driven by selfless dedication and authentic religious devotion. With the Young King defeated and dead, there was little advantage to be gained from upholding his memory, and that summer William found himself in a precarious position, deprived of a lord and patron. Had William’s first priority been to secure his future, he would have focused on finding a new post in a military retinue, either within the Angevin realm or alongside the likes of Count Philip of Flanders. This was certainly the route chosen by most of his peers – the former members of Young Henry’s household. Over the next few years, knights such as Baldwin of Béthune, Robert Tresgoz and Gerard Talbot managed to ingratiate themselves with the Old King. They were accepted into royal service and began the slow process of seeking favour, climbing the ladder to preferment.

  Marshal chose a different path. After the Young King’s burial in Rouen, William made a firm commitment to travel to the Near East by taking the crusaders’ cross himself. In many respects, this was a step away from royal service and an interruption to his career – one that prevented him from seeking personal advancement. Now in his mid-thirties, Marshal was at a critical juncture in his life, facing fateful choices. He had been party to two failed rebellions against Henry II and had endured scandalous accusations about his conduct in late 1182. His prospects were not assured. But William had also watched Young Henry’s agonising death with his own eyes, and the experience seems to have left its imprint. He was clearly determined to carry out Henry’s dying wish, by bearing his cloak to Jerusalem, and later events would suggest that Marshal was also moved to ponder his own mortality and faith.

  This is not to suggest that William was simply the saintly retainer, his eyes fixed only on the distant Holy City. He was willing to make some sacrifices in 1183, but he was also a realist. Once the Young King had been laid to rest, Marshal sought an audience with Henry II. According to the History, he came before the Old King simply ‘to take his leave’, that is to seek royal permission for his pilgrimage, and this consent was duly granted. But this was also a crucial opportunity for William to gauge his standing with the king and to achieve a measure of reconciliation. Henry evidently knew that his eldest son had charged Marshal with a crusading obl
igation before his death, and seems to have respected William’s fidelity, while also recognising his martial renown. As a result, the Old King promised to hold a place for Marshal in the royal household, probably in response to William’s request for such a guarantee. Henry even gave Marshal 100 Angevin pounds ‘to assist him on his pilgrimage’, though he also took ‘two fine horses’ from William – supposedly as surety of his return from the East – and together these ‘magnificent’ steeds were apparently worth 200 Angevin pounds.

  Marshal had laid the groundwork for a prosperous future in Western Europe should he return from the Levant, but in spite of the Old King’s commitment, William seems to have considered the possibility that he might remain in the Holy Land. In mid-summer 1183, he travelled back to England ‘to take leave of his friends, his sisters, his immediate family and all his other kinsmen’, calling upon one of his sisters, Matilda, who had married the minor southern English landholder, Robert of Pont-de-l’Arche.* William may also have visited his elder brother John Marshal, who had retained the hereditary royal marshalcy, but otherwise enjoyed little crown favour under Henry II. The journey to England was certainly a detour for William Marshal and seems like the act of a man placing his affairs in order ahead of a prolonged, perhaps even permanent, absence.

  Many knights of William’s age, background and station had forged new careers in the Levant. For much of the twelfth century, the crusader states established after the Latin Christian (or Roman Catholic) conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 offered manifold opportunities for men of Marshal’s class. By travelling to defend the Holy Places, these knights could do ‘God’s work’ and at the same time find advancement, even lands of their own. The Burgundian knight, Reynald of Châtillon, was a case in point. He had fought on the Second Crusade in the contingent of King Louis VII of France in his mid-twenties, but remained in the East. In spite of being a relative unknown, Reynald married Princess Constance of Antioch, heiress to the northern crusader state, in 1153, and ruled as prince of Antioch for eight years. Captured by Muslims, he spent fifteen years in prison in Aleppo before being ransomed (a period of incarceration that rather put Marshal’s own experience in 1168 in the shade). By the time he was freed, Constance had died and a new ruler of Antioch had been declared, but Reynald soon secured another advantageous union, this time with the heiress of the great desert lordship of Transjordan (east of Palestine). This brought him command of the formidable fortresses of Kerak and Montreal, and put him in the front line of the holy war with the mighty Sultan Saladin.