The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  Marshal’s second ward was a young lad, around fifteen years of age, named John of Earley. In many respects, John’s background was strikingly similar to William’s own, being the orphaned son of a minor West Country nobleman (the late royal chamberlain William of Earley). John was given into Marshal’s care to receive a military education and, in the first instance, to serve as his squire. The two forged an exceptionally close bond and, as the years passed, Earley became one of William’s most trusted retainers and closest friends. Indeed, John’s personal recollections and eyewitness testimony would later prove to be crucial sources of information when the History of William Marshal came to be written. From 1186 onwards, John of Earley’s fidelity and near-constant presence became a prominent feature of William’s life.

  John of Earley was also one of the cornerstones of the mesnie that Marshal now began to assemble around him. Two other prominent knights entered William’s entourage in this period – William Waleran and Geoffrey FitzRobert. Both were from Wiltshire, one of the counties of Marshal’s childhood, and together they would enjoy long and successful careers at William’s side. Marshal had begun a slow, but significant transformation. He had lived the bulk of his life as a knight in service, but he was now becoming a lord in his own right, with knights who looked to him for protection and promotion. The burden of responsibility had begun to settle.

  Luckily for William, and his new knights, his career was flourishing. He was climbing the social ladder, though as yet he had not come close to its highest rungs. The History suggested that, from 1186 onwards, Henry II ‘showed great affection towards’ Marshal and appointed him ‘his chief advisor’, but this was a significant overstatement of William’s position and importance. As a leading household knight, Marshal was part of the Old King’s inner circle at court and he quickly became a notable commander in the field and a source of counsel on matters of martial strategy and military planning. But in the day-to-day business of governance and power politics, William still stood on the periphery. A range of documentary evidence from the Angevin court indicates that in eminence, Marshal still ranked well below men like Ranulf Glanville – justiciar of England (the man charged with governing the kingdom in Henry’s absence) – and the great magnate William Mandeville, earl of Essex.

  By the later 1180s, William Marshal clearly aspired to reach the level of these men. He decided not to marry Heloise of Lancaster, though he ‘acted as a most courtly guardian’, she remained, in the History’s polite terms, merely ‘his dear friend’. This suggests that William was both confident of his ability to rise higher in the king’s favour, and exceptionally ambitious. A small fragment of an otherwise unknown royal letter written in 1188, and only rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century, offers a momentary, but nonetheless remarkable, glimpse of Marshal’s impatient hunger for advancement and the methods he was willing to employ in its pursuit. By this stage, the Old King was hard-pressed by an ongoing conflict with the Capetian French and preparing to wage a major campaign on the Continent. He duly sent a missive to William Marshal entreating him to ‘come to me fully equipped as soon as may be, with as many knights as you can get, to support me in my war’. Henry then acknowledged, with extraordinary candour, that ‘you have frequently complained to me that I have bestowed on you only a small fee’, and went on to promise Marshal the great castle of Châteauroux in Berry ‘with all its lordship and whatever belongs to it’ by way of recompense.

  This text indicates that William was not above demanding due reward for his service, indeed it suggests that he routinely grumbled, wheedled and perhaps whined to the Old King in order to get his way. Given the fierce competition for crown largesse, it may well be that this type of incessant petitioning was commonplace among courtiers, but this evidence still reinforces the strong impression that Marshal’s conduct did not always conform to modern fantasies of lofty chivalric behaviour.

  THE OLD KING FALTERS

  In some respects, William was also fortunate to arrive in Henry II’s court at a time of burgeoning confrontation, when an especially high premium was placed on martial skill. The Old King was now in his mid-fifties and starting to show intermittent signs of the debilitating illness that would ultimately rob him of his life. Yet he remained stubbornly determined to preserve his grip over the Angevin Empire and content to manipulate his children if he believed it would advance his dynasty’s best interests. The balance of power within the royal family had been reset during William Marshal’s absence in the Holy Land. With Young King Henry’s death in 1183, Richard the Lion heart – the count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine – suddenly became Henry II’s eldest surviving son and primary heir. Queen Eleanor remained in captivity in England, though the conditions of her confinement had loosened briefly in late 1184 and early 1185, when she was permitted to attend the Christmas Court at Windsor and then make a fleeting visit to Normandy.

  Richard’s major rival looked for a time to be the Old King’s son, Geoffrey, count of Brittany. But, in August 1186, he fell from his horse during the grand mêlée of a French tournament and was badly trampled by the horses of his own household knights. Severely wounded, Geoffrey died later in Paris, leaving behind a wife who was already two-months pregnant. She eventually gave birth to Geoffrey’s only male heir, Arthur. This left Henry’s and Eleanor’s youngest son, John, who was now entering his twenties, as the only adult challenger for power.

  Fate had thus conspired to place Richard in a similar predicament to that long endured by his elder brother Young Henry. He had become the new restless heir in waiting, thwarted by his father and threatened by his sibling. By the late 1180s, the Lionheart’s priority was to secure an unequivocal confirmation that he would inherit the English crown. But Richard was also determined to hold on to the prized province of Aquitaine, having poured years of his life into subduing the duchy. Unfortunately, the Old King was still smarting from Young Henry’s two rebellions and had not the slightest intention of anointing another heir during his own lifetime. His policy was to withhold power and equivocate on the issue of the succession in the belief that the resultant mixture of hunger and anxiety would compel loyalty. Just as he had with Young Henry, the Old King expected Richard to wait obediently in the wings, and he was only too happy to drop hints that John should be handed Aquitaine, or perhaps even groomed for the crown, if that kept the Lionheart in his place.

  But in falling back upon this familiar strategy, King Henry had miscalculated. The world had moved on, even if his thinking had not. No longer the virile young monarch, Henry was likely to struggle to defeat a major uprising. Richard was also a more ruthless and experienced opponent than his elder brother. Above all, the Old King underestimated Philip Augustus, the Capetian king of France. The rather skittish, feeble teenager of 1180 had grown into his crown and was fast maturing into a lethal adversary. Like Henry II, Philip understood that efficient governance could fill the royal coffers, giving him the wealth to challenge Angevin dominance in France, and he also shared the Old King’s gift for political machination. Not for nothing would one contemporary describe him as ‘wily and as cunning as a fox’. To Philip, the power held by the upstart lordlings from Anjou was an unconscionable insult to the ancient royal majesty of his Capetian house. Their possession of the Norman Vexin and their influence over the contested region of Berry to the south-west were particularly galling. He was determined to reassert the might of the French monarchy, and willing to break promises, betray friendships and wage bloody wars to achieve this goal.

  King Philip recognised that Richard the Lionheart’s frustrations might be turned to his own advantage. He was also intent upon resolving the issue of his half-sister Alice’s status. She had been betrothed to Richard in 1169 and taken into Angevin custody, yet no marriage had taken place and it was strongly rumoured that the French princess had become Henry II’s lover. In all probability, Philip’s concern over her fate was not driven by filial affection, but the cold realities of dynastic politics. Alice’s
marriage to Richard would bring a dowry that might enable Philip to leverage access to the Vexin. The union could also produce heirs and thus bring the Capetians a stake in the Angevin realm.

  Angevin-Capetian rivalry (1187–88)

  King Philip made his first serious attempt to test Henry II’s resolve in 1187, launching a major incursion into Berry – the semi-independent territory that dangled invitingly between Aquitaine and the southern reaches of the French kingdom. The campaign scored an early success when the frontier fortress of Issoudun submitted to French authority, but the great prize of this region was the powerful lordship of Châteauroux. Its young heiress, Denise, had been Henry II’s ward ever since her father died leaving no male heir in 1176, and the great castle of Châteauroux and all its dependants remained in Angevin hands.

  Philip laid siege to Châteauroux with a substantial force in the early summer of 1187, but was repulsed by its garrison. That June, the Old King and Richard hurriedly joined forces to launch a counter-attack and, as the Angevin and Capetian armies moved into position, it looked for once as if a major pitched battle was unavoidable. Nothing is known of William Marshal’s movements at this point, though in all likelihood he was present in the Old King’s military retinue. Envoys shuttled between the two camps and Richard seems to have played a significant role in brokering a last-minute peace deal with Philip. On 23 June a two-year truce was finalised and both sides withdrew. However, the Lionheart then shocked his father by suddenly switching sides, riding back to Paris with Philip in a very public demonstration of friendship. It seems that the two men had plotted a temporary rapprochement of their own, finding that it served both their interests to unnerve the Old King. The message implied by Richard’s display of affection for the French monarch was obvious. If deprived of Aquitaine or his wider inheritance, the Lionheart would follow the example set by Young Henry in 1172, by breaking with his father and siding with the Capetian enemy. Henry II seems to have been wholly unprepared for this treachery and immediately sent a stream of messengers to his son, begging him to return. Richard was eventually drawn back into the Angevin fold, but it was apparent that in future his loyalty would only be secured at a price.

  It was at this precise moment, with the balance of power between Henry II, Richard and King Philip delicately poised, that Latin Christendom was struck by disaster. Just two weeks after the confrontation at Châteauroux was averted, Guy of Lusignan, king of Jerusalem, was lured into battle in Palestine. His army was annihilated by Saladin at the Horns of Hattin on 4 July 1187 and, three months later, Jerusalem fell into Muslim hands. This calamity sent a shockwave through Western Europe and, with the preaching of a massive new crusade to avenge these injuries and reclaim the Holy Land, thousands of knights took up arms. According to the History of William Marshal ‘the number of those taking the cross was so great . . . that there was no man convinced of his worth who did not abandon wife and children to become a crusader.’

  Amid this groundswell of crusading enthusiasm, it proved impossible for the great crown monarchs of the West to ignore the call to holy war. Richard took the cross at Tours in November 1187 – the first major lord to do so north of the Alps – and both Henry II and Philip Augustus followed suit in January 1188, after an impassioned sermon by the new archbishop of Tyre, recently arrived from Palestine. Jerusalem’s fall and the launching of the Third Crusade served merely to complicate the interplay between the Angevins and Capetians. The Lionheart’s apparent enthusiasm for the expedition alarmed both the Old King and Philip, because Richard’s precipitous departure might overturn Henry’s plans for the succession and leave the issue of Alice’s marriage unresolved. Meanwhile, Richard himself was unsettled by the fact that his younger brother John had made no move to take the cross – surely a sign that he hoped to seize power in the Lionheart’s absence. The papacy strictly prohibited any attacks on a crusader’s lands while he was fighting in the East, but neither Henry II, nor Philip Augustus, trusted the other to respect this law. Their mutual suspicion was so entrenched that detailed plans had to be laid for a simultaneous departure, because neither king would leave Europe without their rival in tow. The resultant delays meant that it would be three years before the main Angevin and Capetian crusading contingents reached the Levant. Other crusaders set out with greater speed. The Poitevin lord, Geoffrey of Lusignan, left France in the autumn of 1188 and went on to earn renown fighting in the crusade’s first titanic confrontation – the great siege of Acre. Europe’s elder statesman, the mighty German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa began an overland march at the head of a massive army in May 1189 and many expected him to seize overall leadership of the campaign.

  Any hope that the Angevins and Capetians might set aside their differences in the interests of the holy war were shattered in June 1188, when King Philip broke the supposed two-year truce, launching a second invasion of Berry that this time brought the surrender of Châteauroux. Around the same time, Capetian forces prosecuted a series of destructive raids into Norman territory. The History of William Marshal described this as ‘war on a vast scale’, decrying the fact that ‘the land was laid waste and shamefully damaged’. Richard moved to defend the major fortresses of neighbouring Touraine, such as Loches, while launching punitive raids of his own into Berry, but the bulk of the region was now in French hands. At the news of this French aggression, Henry II ‘summoned a huge army’, including thousands of Welsh mercenaries. It was at this point that William Marshal received his call to arms and the promise of Châteauroux once it was retaken. Together with the king, he crossed to Normandy on 11 July and took up a defensive position in the northern duchy, prompting Philip Augustus to pull back to the French heartlands.

  The Old King seems once again to have been caught flat-footed by the Capetian offensive, because rather than responding with an immediate attack of his own, he dispatched a diplomatic mission to the French court. The party was led by the eminent archbishop of Rouen, Walter of Coutances, but also included William Marshal. In reality, the deputation looks to have been little more than a stalling tactic, designed to give Henry time to muster his armies. Once in the presence of the Capetian king, Archbishop Walter bluntly demanded reparations for the damage recently inflicted on Angevin territory, and Philip unsurprisingly demurred, declaring his intention to hold Berry and recover the whole of the Norman Vexin. Nothing may have come from the embassy, but it marked Marshal’s first deployment as a high-level envoy, further signalling his rising status.

  William also appears to have played a leading role in devising Angevin military strategy that summer. Both sides in the conflict had already employed the tactic of mounted raiding or chevauchées, with which Marshal had first become familiar in Poitou back in 1168. In spite of the History’s voluble criticism of the Capetians’ recent use of these ravaging assaults, the biographer now happily recorded that William advised the Old King to launch a sudden, devastating incursion into French territory, suggesting that, caught unawares, the Capetians would ‘suffer greater damage’. According to the History, Henry responded enthusiastically: ‘“By God’s eyes!” said the King “You are an excellent man and have advised me very well; it will be done exactly as you say.”’ On 30 August, the Angevin forces crossed into French territory near Pacy-sur-Eure and marched south-east. The biographer noted that their ‘hearts were set on causing great destruction [and] they made no secret of burning the whole countryside as far as Mantes’. The Old King rode further south to Bréval, where he ‘burned and destroyed everything he came to and never held back for anything’, taking ‘fine, handsome booty’ as he went. When he heard of the assault Philip Augustus was said to have been ‘full of grief’.

  This form of scorched-earth warfare, targeting enemy resources, might have been commonplace in the twelfth century, but it still left terrible scars on the rural landscape and local population. Perhaps most chillingly of all, it is clear that these raids were not random acts of chaotic rampage. Instead, William and his peers had turned the ch
evauchée and its associated forms of assault into methodical campaigns of destruction and calculated brutality. Count Philip of Flanders was said to have offered the following advice: ‘Destroy your foes and lay waste their country, by fire and burning let all be set alight, that nothing be left for them, either in wood or meadow, of which in the morning they could have a meal.’ Contemporary sources also detailed the techniques involved, noting the use of scouts and scavengers to ransack settlements and seize ‘money, cattle, mules [and] sheep’, while specialist ‘incendiaries’ or ‘fire-starters’ torched villages and farmsteads, leaving ‘the terrified inhabitants [to either be] burned or led away with their hands tied’. Incursions of this type were specifically designed to inspire dread and panic, and were said to send ‘a surge of fear [sweeping] over the countryside’.

  Marshal went on to prosecute a second ravaging expedition along the eastern frontier of Touraine, near the fortress of Montmirail, and on this occasion the History recalled that the Old King instructed William to ‘burn and destroy the entire region, sparing nothing’. The biographer then gleefully described how Marshal and his men marched through landscape ‘burning, robbing and plundering as they went’. Scant effort was made to justify these atrocities, though the History did make the remarkable suggestion that this raid might be considered ‘a great act of chivalry’ if it brought the enemy to his knees, because peace might then be restored. William and his contemporaries evidently felt little or no compunction about this grim feature of medieval warfare.