The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  The last days of Henry II

  Marshal’s moment of decision had arrived. There could be no more lingering hopes of recovery for the Old King, with the Angevin realm crumbling and his royal authority smashed beyond repair. Many who had remained faithful up to this point now abandoned Henry; some went directly to Richard, others merely waited, watching from the wings for a new regime to begin. William was perfectly placed to do the same, far from the king’s side. In 1183, the Young King Henry’s death had been swift and unheralded, leaving Marshal and his fellow household knights little or no time to consider their positions. No one seems to have thought to transfer their allegiance during those grim days at Martel, but there was every reason to do so now, confronted by the Old King’s slow and certain decline. If Marshal laid himself before the feet of the Lionheart and begged forgiveness for their recent encounter, he might yet salvage some reward and secure his future. But to do so, would be to forsake his reputation for honour and loyalty. During the flight from Le Mans he had been forced to act on impulse; now he had to time agonise over his decision.

  In the event, William rode to Chinon to stand by his king through his last, desperate days, arriving by the start of July 1189. With no choice but to accept defeat, Henry agreed to a final meeting with Richard and King Philip near Tours on 4 July, so that terms could be settled. The Old King was barely able to sit astride his horse, but Marshal rode with him, and tended to his needs in the hours before the conference began as they waited in a nearby Templar commandery. Henry was in such agonising pain that ‘he could neither suffer it nor endure it’, and wracked by the sense that his ravaged frame was rebelling against him, he apparently told William, ‘I feel I have neither body, heart, nor limb to call my own’, and Marshal could only watch as the king ‘first turned a violent red and then became a livid colour’.

  When Henry II finally arrived at the agreed meeting place, the grave extent of his infirmity could not be disguised. The Lionheart looked on, impassive and suspicious of some ruse, but Philip Augustus was genuinely shocked by the sight of his hated rival, now reduced to such abject frailty. The Capetian offered up a cloak so that the Old King might sit upon the ground, but Henry insisted on standing, starring down his opponents even as he conceded their terms. Richard was finally confirmed as Henry II’s successor throughout the Angevin realm and the French monarch was promised a tribute of 20,000 silver marks to seal the peace. The Old King’s one request was that the allies supply him with a list of ‘all those who, deserting him, had gone over to [Philip and Richard]’. As the conference came to an end, Henry was said to have mustered the energy for one final, parting barb. Leaning forward to seal the accord by conferring the ritual kiss of peace upon his son, the Old King whispered, ‘God grant that I may not die until I have had my revenge on you.’*

  King Henry was carried back to Chinon on a litter and confined to bed, but he could find no peace. The Old King now became fixated by the desire to make a last account of his supporters. The keeper of the royal seal, Roger Malchael, was sent to Tours to demand the list of turncoats promised by Philip. When Roger returned he was hurriedly ushered into a private audience with Henry, but could hardly bring himself to reveal the bleak truth, saying:

  ‘My lord, so Jesus Christ help me, the first name written down on this list here is that of your son, count John.’ When King Henry heard that the person he most expected to do right, and who he most loved, was in the act of betraying him, he said nothing more except this: ‘You have said enough.’

  This final act of treachery crushed the Old King’s spirits. He soon collapsed into a ‘burning hot’ feverish stupor, and ‘his blood so boiled within him that his complexion became clouded, dark, blue and livid’. Unmanned by agonising pain, he ‘lost his mental faculties, hearing and seeing nothing’, and though he spoke ‘nobody could understand a word of what he said’. On the night of 6 July 1189, with only a handful of servants in attendance, Henry’s will finally gave out. In the words of the History: ‘Death simply burst his heart with her own hands’, and a ‘stream of clotted blood burst forth from his nose and mouth’.

  In a last indignity, the household staff detailed to watch him looted his corpse, stealing ‘his clothes, his jewels, his money as much as each of them could take’, and this ‘rabble’ left the great monarch strewn, half out of bed, wearing only his ‘breeches and shirt’. When Henry’s body was later discovered, the whole castle was thrown into commotion. Marshal and the remaining members of the royal household rushed to the room and hurriedly covered their dead king with a cloak, sobered by the sight of this once mighty figure brought to such a wretched end. The chamber was then placed under close guard and clergymen arrived to wrap the Old King in a shroud and sing Mass.

  In the days that followed, William helped to carry Henry II’s body to the nearby abbey of Fontevraud, and the corpse was laid out in state to await Richard’s arrival, so that the son might pay his last respects to the father he had forsaken. Marshal stood vigil, his grief mixed with a dreadful unease. A new king would now be proclaimed, a man whom William had unhorsed outside Le Mans and resisted to the bitter end. There could be little doubt that the Lionheart would exact his revenge, stripping Marshal of his status and condemning him to exile or worse. William was about to learn the true cost of loyalty.

  8

  DEFENDER OF THE REALM

  Richard the Lionheart arrived at Fontevraud around 10 July 1189. As he entered the great abbey church and saw the body of his father, his face was said to have been an emotionless mask, such that ‘nobody could say if he felt joy or sadness in his heart’. He stood impassive for long minutes, staring down at the man who had been his mentor, ally, monarch and enemy. In a very real sense, Richard had hounded the Old King to his death. With his eyes focused solely upon the dogged pursuit of power, the Lionheart had betrayed his family, sided with the Angevins’ avowed foe and waged open war upon his kin. Now all his cherished ambitions had been fulfilled and Henry’s corpse lay cold and lifeless before him. It was perhaps in these moments of quiet reflection that the full burden of kingship settled on his shoulders, as he felt the weight of all that he had done, and began to glimpse the trials that lay ahead.

  At last, Richard turned from the body and ‘asked for the Marshal to come to him immediately’. With only the Old King’s chancellor, Maurice Craon in tow, the two men rode out into the verdant countryside surrounding Fontevraud. The History preserved a dramatic record of this tense encounter. After a long pause, Richard finally broke the silence, apparently saying: ‘Marshal, the other day you intended to kill me, and you would have, without a doubt, if I hadn’t deflected your lance with my arm.’ This was a dangerous moment. Should William accept this comment, he would allow the Lionheart to save face, yet at the same time admit to having sought his death. According to the History at least, he chose the harder path, replying: ‘It was never my intention to kill you . . . I am still strong enough to direct my lance [and] if I had wanted to, I could have driven it straight through your body, just as I did that horse of yours.’ Richard might have taken mortal offence at this blunt contradiction. Instead, he was said to have declared: ‘Marshal, you are forgiven, I shall never be angry with you over that matter.’

  The Lionheart may have been testing or toying with William during this meeting, but it is likely that he had decided how to deal with Marshal even before he arrived at Fontevraud. Richard would soon be crowned king. He had a fragile realm to defend and a crusade in the Holy Land to fight. He could ill afford to discard a man of William’s quality. Over the last month, Marshal had proven his resolute loyalty to the king and his martial prowess. He was precisely the kind of supporter that the Lionheart would need in the months and years ahead. Perhaps there was, at first, a lingering grudge over their confrontation outside Le Mans, but Richard was shrewd enough to recognise that this had to be put to one side. If he was to prevail as king, such resentments could not govern his actions.

  Resolved to draw William
into his own circle, the Lionheart offered to confirm the Old King’s pledge of the wealthy heiress, Isabel of Clare’s, hand in marriage. But he took care to emphasise that Henry II had only promised Isabel to Marshal; the actual gift of her guardianship would come as a result of Richard’s own patronage. As the Lionheart’s leading modern biographer, Professor John Gillingham, noted, with this act Richard ‘in effect, made William a millionaire overnight’. Marshal was then entrusted with an urgent mission: instructed to travel to England, ‘take charge of my land and all my other interests’, and bear a secret message to Queen Eleanor. Once they returned to Fontevraud, William received a number of royal writs (letters of instruction), including one confirming his appointment as Isabel’s guardian, and he then set out for the north almost immediately.

  The Lionheart dealt with many of his late father’s barons and retainers in a similar fashion. Those who had remained faithful to the last were rewarded. Baldwin of Béthune, for example, received the valuable lordship of Aumale in Normandy, William des Roches, who had covered Henry II’s retreat from Le Mans with Marshal, was accepted into Richard’s military household and Hubert Walter was appointed as bishop of Salisbury. Less favour was shown to those who had turned away from the Old King in his last months, though Richard’s younger brother John was left unpunished. The Lionheart also took care to repay his own leading lieutenants for their service, such that Andrew of Chauvigny received the honour of Châteauroux. Richard went on to meet with Philip Augustus near the great castle of Gisors in the Norman Vexin. The pair had parted as allies, but with the Lionheart now leading the Angevin dynasty, they would soon be forced to confront one another as deadly adversaries. For now, terms of peace were agreed, with the French king returning all recently captured territory, including Berry, and Richard pledging 40,000 silver marks as compensation for their recent campaign.

  THE REWARDS WAITING IN LONDON

  William Marshal raced north through Anjou and Maine, but paused en route in Normandy to take possession of Isabel of Clare’s lands at Longueville near Dieppe (in the duchy’s north-eastern reaches), before crossing the Channel – a sure sign that he was now determined to reap the benefits of Richard’s patronage while he could. Once in England, William travelled straight to Winchester, where Eleanor had already been released after fifteen years in captivity. This must have been a strange encounter. When they last met, Marshal had only recently left the queen’s own service and was a mere household knight in his mid-twenties. Now, William was around forty-two and well on the way to becoming a great baron, while Eleanor was an elderly, yet still sprightly, woman in her late sixties. As always, their connection – seemingly so fundamental to Marshal’s early career – can only be glimpsed. The content of the Lionheart’s intriguing message to his mother is lost to history, and frustratingly William’s biographer merely recorded that the message was safely delivered.

  Marshal then made his way ‘to the fine city of London’ to claim his bride. As a royal ward, Isabel was residing in the White Tower of London, under the protection of Henry II’s justiciar Ranulf Glanville. At first Glanville was reluctant to release the heiress into William’s care, presumably on the grounds that Richard had yet to be crowned and thus lacked the official authority to apportion a guardianship, but Marshal pressed his case and the justiciar eventually relented. So it was that William finally met his future wife, Isabel of Clare, the lady of Striguil. At around sixteen years old, she was less than half Marshal’s age, but by birth and eminence she was his superior. Her celebrated father, Richard Strongbow, had been one of the great Marcher lords who helped Henry II to conquer territory in Wales and Ireland, and had himself earned the hand in marriage of an Irish princess, Aoife (Eve) of Leinster, Isabel’s mother. Isabel had been a crown ward since 1185, so even though Marshal was now being foisted upon her, the prospect of marriage after four years of uncertainty may well have felt like a release.*

  Isabel held title to one of England’s major lordships. At its heart lay a swathe of territory in the southern borderlands with Wales, including the formidable stone castle of Striguil (now known as Chepstow). Elsewhere, Isabel had rights to major manors at Caversham (near Reading) and Long Crendon (to the east of Oxford), the Norman estate of Longueville and significant claims to land in west Wales and Ireland. Her hand in marriage was an inestimable prize – one that would transform William into a leading magnate of the realm. The History conveyed a clear sense of his excitement, noting that ‘now that he had her in his possession he had no wish to lose her’, and so immediately made plans for their wedding.

  Given Marshal’s flourishing prospects, there were now plenty of powerful men willing to cultivate his favour. One such, Richard FitzReinier – a city sheriff – gave him lodgings, probably in the environs of St Paul’s Cathedral, and even offered to cover the expenses of the marriage ceremony. William now had a brief moment to draw breath in London. By 1189, the city was set firmly on the path to becoming England’s unquestioned capital and was already one of Europe’s greatest urban centres – with a population of around 40,000, only Paris was bigger. Its growth reflected a much broader trend of urbanisation. Indeed, Marshal lived through a period in which scores of new towns were created in England, including Newcastle upon Tyne, Liverpool and Portsmouth, and the subsequent rise of the ‘burgess’ or merchant class of townsfolk would transform the balance of power in medieval society in the decades and centuries that followed.

  Lying astride the River Thames, London was perfectly placed to serve as a centre of trade and commerce, just as Western Europe was emerging on to the world stage as a major economic power. William thus found himself in a vibrant and increasingly cosmopolitan city that summer – a place where everything from Egyptian gemstones, to Chinese silks and Arabian gold could be purchased. Like Le Mans, London had been a Roman settlement and an enclosing circuit of ancient walls dating from that period still stood on the northern banks of the Thames, though they were crumbling along the water’s edge. For the first time in a millennium a magnificent new stone bridge was even then being built across the broad river; commissioned at enormous cost by Henry II in 1176, it took more than thirty years to construct, but would stand until 1831. In one sense London was a centre of Christian devotion, boasting more than a hundred churches by 1189, so William had his pick of sites in which to marry. There were those, however, who condemned the city as a den of vice, with one contemporary complaining that ‘whatever malicious thing can be found anywhere in the world can be found [in London]’, adding that it was packed with ‘actors, jesters, smooth-skinned lads, Moors, flatterers, pretty boys . . . quacks, belly dancers [and] sorcerers’.

  William and Isabel were wed in late July. In all likelihood, they followed the normal custom of undergoing a simple ceremony on the church steps – perhaps even those of St Paul’s itself – with Marshal presenting his bride with a token symbolising his dower gift, possibly a ring or even a knife. Only then would the couple have entered the building, prostrating themselves before the altar to receive Mass and, after Communion, William would have exchanged the kiss of peace with the attendant priest, and then finally turned to embrace his new wife.

  Before Richard the Lionheart arrived in England and the incessant whirl of court life began anew, the couple were able to steal a few weeks together, lodging at the nearby manor of Stoke d’Aubernon, eighteen miles south-west of London – a ‘peaceful spot, well-appointed and a delight to the eye’. To begin with, at least, William and Isabel’s marriage was simply a political match, but they seem to have developed a relationship based on real affection and mutual respect. In time, they would have no less than ten children, including five sons, the eldest of whom was born within a year. It is also true that, even in an age when male infidelity was commonplace and broadly reported, there is no evidence that Marshal ever took a mistress. On balance, there is a good chance that their union was happy and intimate. Even so, William’s career in royal service led to long periods of separation, and by mid-A
ugust that summer he was drawn back into the maelstrom of power politics.

  In defence of the realm

  Richard landed in England on 13 August 1189, having already been confirmed as duke of Normandy in Rouen. His coronation followed on 3 September in Westminster Abbey, just two miles upriver from the city of London. Richard’s elevation marked the very first occasion when medieval chroniclers described the ceremonial creation of an English king in precise detail. Though the History strangely made no mention of it, William Marshal is thus known to have played an important role in the ritual that day, and he was also joined in the abbey by his brother John Marshal and cousin, William FitzPatrick of Salisbury. John, in particular, appears to have benefited from his younger brother’s rising fortunes. Having himself enjoyed little promotion under Henry II, the elder Marshal had in recent years become an associate of the Lionheart’s brother, Count John, though that connection had done little for his prospects. It is not clear whether William actively lobbied for favour to be shown to his elder sibling, but John certainly enjoyed a short-lived renaissance in his own career after 1189.*

  The coronation ceremony began with a solemn procession, accompanied by sonorous ‘chants of praise’, that saw Richard taken from the royal palace to the abbey doors, and then through to the altar. Bishops, abbots and clergy led the way, carrying ‘holy water, the cross, tapers and censers’. They were followed by the leading crown officers and the great barons of the kingdom, each carrying portions of the royal regalia and robes of majesty. John Marshal came bearing ‘a huge pair of golden spurs’; William Marshal carrying the royal cross-tipped sceptre (one of the key symbols of authority) and William of Salisbury with the royal rod of gold, topped by a dove. Richard’s brother, John, bore a golden sword, drawn from the royal treasury, while William Mandeville had the honour of carrying the ‘great and massive crown, decorated on every side with precious stones’. As William Marshal and the assembled throng looked on, Richard knelt before the altar and swore sacred oaths to protect the Church and rule with justice. The central drama of the ritual was performed by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury. The Lionheart was stripped to his undershirt and breeches, his chest bared. The prelate then poured holy oil upon Richard’s head, chest and arms, each site representing knowledge, valour and glory. Once clad in his regal raiment and holding the great symbols of office, the vast crown was finally placed upon his head.