The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  Some, like the earl of Salisbury, William Longsword, were content to back John’s claim from the start. Longsword was John’s half-brother, being a bastard son of King Henry II. Born around 1167, William was some twenty years younger than Marshal, and in certain respects their careers were not dissimilar. As his nickname would imply, Longsword was a distinguished knight and had fought in Normandy through the late 1190s alongside Richard the Lionheart. He also achieved power through marriage. When the earl of Salisbury (Marshal’s cousin) died in 1196, his six-year-old daughter and heir, Ela of Salisbury, was betrothed to Longsword, and he duly assumed control of the prestigious Wiltshire lordship. In John’s reign, the new earl would serve alongside William Marshal as a leading military commander and become a close associate of the Marshal family.

  Others were not so readily persuaded during the spring of 1199, and a number of barons even prepared their castles for war. Some may have been reluctant to back John because of his treachery in 1193 and 1194, but most were simply aware that there were gains to be made in the midst of a contested succession, and now wanted a guarantee of ample reward in return for supporting their endorsement. At a council convened at Northampton, William Marshal, Geoffrey FitzPeter and Hubert Walter stood surety for John’s intentions, pledging ‘their word’ that the magnates would receive ‘their due’. As a result, some of England’s greatest magnates, including Earl Richard of Clare, Ranulf, earl of Chester and David, brother of King William I of Scotland, ‘swore fealty and faithful service’ to John. Marshal had not acted as a ‘kingmaker’ in the full sense of the word, but he had certainly eased John’s path to power.

  Towards the end of May, John was ready to cross to England, having been invested as duke of Normandy at Rouen in late April – receiving the ducal sword and a delicately wrought golden circlet, topped with a border of roses. But Marshal did not await John’s arrival; instead he crossed back to Normandy and was with John when he sailed to England from Dieppe on 25 May. This desperately solicitous attendance upon the man who would soon be king looks telling. Though no record of their dealings in this critical period survive, it is likely that Marshal applied the same wheedling pressure for reward, remarked upon by Henry II in 1188, to the new heir-apparent John – currying favour and bidding for preferment. It was certainly the case that William benefited from royal largesse in the first years of John’s reign.

  THE BENEFITS OF LOYALTY

  On 27 May 1199, John was crowned and anointed in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Hubert. Immediately after the ceremony, the king rewarded the three men who had helped to orchestrate his coronation. Hubert was appointed as royal chancellor, while Geoffrey and William underwent their own ritual, receiving the symbolic swords of office from John that marked them as earls – the highest title achievable among the English aristocracy, with historical roots stretching back to the Anglo-Saxon and Viking eras. Geoffrey FitzPeter thus became earl of Essex, while Marshal could now style himself ‘earl of Pembroke’. In recognition of their loyalty to the crown, both men were accorded the honour of serving John at the royal feast that evening.

  William and Geoffrey had attained this eminence by following strikingly different paths: Marshal was the career soldier – the knight and commander who could prove his worth in war, yet navigate the world of politics; FitzPeter, the clerk and arch-courtier, was prized for his governmental efficiency and ability to nurture Angevin power and wealth. Geoffrey’s ascent reflected a broader, and deeply significant, trend – the increasing emphasis on administrative competence over martial prowess among the medieval English aristocracy. An earl’s sword may have been girded to Geoffrey’s side, but unlike William Marshal, he was no warrior. In times of conflict, when King John called upon FitzPeter, as earl of Essex, to uphold his ancient obligations to the crown – supplying knights for military service – Geoffrey would not lead his own war-band, but instead would pay a fixed fee into the royal coffers, which could then be used to hire troops. In the future, this increasingly popular system of payment (known as ‘scutage’) would have profound consequences, both for England and the institution of knighthood.

  The earl of Pembroke

  William Marshal was now in his early fifties and remained a distinguished military figure. His recent promotion placed him in the uppermost ranks of England’s nobility – the grant of the earldom of Pembroke further enhanced his status and brought a major lordship in the far reaches of west Wales. The Clare dynasty (of Marshal’s wife Isabel) held a long-standing entitlement to this region, but it had been in royal hands since the 1150s. William took possession of his new lands in 1200, gaining direct control of a territory twice the size of Striguil with claims upon the neighbouring Welsh castles of Cardigan and Cilgerran. Marshal seems to have been understandably proud of his new position. Pembroke now became the centrepiece of his ever-expanding lordship – though Striguil continued to serve as an important Marshal residence – and William immediately began to use the title ‘earl of Pembroke’ in official documents.

  Even so, Marshal did not adopt a new seal. Many men of similar eminence had elaborate seal-dies fashioned during this period to reflect their elevated standing in society. The wax seals that these great magnates of the realm appended to documents echoed those used by the king, were replete with symbols of authority and often bore a dynasty’s ‘coat of arms’. One of William’s peers, Robert FitzWalter (who inherited a major barony in Essex and London in 1198), commissioned a fabulously ornate, silver seal-die that showed him decked out in full armour, sword raised, astride a warhorse – and this is now on show in the British Museum. For all his ambition, William Marshal seems to have rejected such ostentatious displays of rank; for the remainder of his life, he retained the same small, simple seal that he had used as a household knight in the late 1180s. During the time of Henry the Young King, William had proudly proclaimed his promotion to the level of ‘knight-banneret’, sporting his own colours and war cry. Now, twenty years later, he seems to have acted with more caution. We can only speculate about what Marshal’s decision to keep his diminutive seal might indicate in respect to his character – perhaps it was born out of humility or disinterest in the trappings of power, or it may have reflected a conscious, and confident attempt at understatement.

  The History of William Marshal made no direct acknowledgement of its hero’s appointment as earl of Pembroke, recording only that ‘many fine gifts were made’ after John’s coronation. This was a staggering omission given the importance of the earldom to William’s career. The History’s portrayal of John had always been guarded, but the text became increasingly evasive on the issue of Marshal’s dealings with the new monarch. The fact that William owed his greatest honour to King John’s patronage was excised; indeed, Pembroke itself was virtually written out of the History, being mentioned only once, and even then not in connection with Marshal.

  William’s biographer tried to conceal it, but there is no doubt that Marshal was showered with favours in this period. In addition to the grant of Pembroke, he was reappointed sheriff of Gloucestershire, with the keeping of the royal castles of Gloucester and Bristol. Other members of the Marshal dynasty also basked in the glow of crown benefaction, with William’s ‘nephew’ John Marshal (the namesake and bastard son of his elder brother), receiving the guardianship of a Norfolk heiress, Aline of Rye. William himself was now, unquestionably, one of the most powerful and influential men in England. With Striguil, Pembroke and the longstanding claim to Leinster in Ireland, the new earl could begin to plot a glorious future for his dynasty – lifting the Marshal line to unimagined heights, achieving a form of immortality.

  William may have seen little option but to support John’s claim in April 1199 – recognising that he was the only successor likely to be accepted in England, and potentially able to save Normandy. But Marshal had benefited richly nonetheless. There were many others who likewise pursued advantage in the period, some with far more predatory determination. One of the leading ‘sharks’
was Marshal’s northern neighbour in the Welsh Marches, William of Briouze – who had succeeded to his family’s lands in the early 1190s. He had been present at Châlus when Richard I died and later verified the Lionheart’s deathbed confirmation of John’s status as his heir. Under the new regime, Briouze enjoyed spectacular extensions to his lands in Wales and reclaimed his family’s rights to Limerick in Ireland, though most of these benefits came with the price of fixed ‘fines’ – monies owed to the crown – which left Briouze shouldering a mountain of debt. Like Marshal, Briouze rose high in John’s favour, and both were to be found in the monarch’s company almost constantly in the early years of the new century. But John would not prove to be an easy king to follow.

  A ‘CRUEL AND LECHEROUS’ KING

  King John was thirty-one years old when he assumed the English crown in 1199. He had been judged handsome, though slightly built, in his younger days, but a dissolute appetite for fine wine and rich food meant that he tended to corpulence as the years passed. Measurements taken in the late eighteenth century, when John’s tomb was opened, showed that he was five-foot-six-and-a-half inches tall – around average for the time. In physical terms he may have seemed rather unimpressive when compared to Young King Henry and Richard the Lionheart, and in a real sense he had lived his life in the shadow of these elder and greater brothers. But now his time had come, just as a new century dawned.

  John was one of England’s most notorious and controversial kings: reviled by many in the Middle Ages and often condemned by historians today; the first of his name to rule the realm, and the last. Though another two Richards and seven Henrys would follow in the centuries to come, John’s infamy was such that no other English monarch has ever borne his name. In the course of his turbulent reign, the great Angevin Empire forged by his father would be dismembered, the kingdom of England brought to its knees and the rival Capetian French left ascendant. These years of catastrophe would define the shape and course of William Marshal’s later life.

  Some of John’s failings had been apparent even before his coronation. The betrayal of the Old King in 1189 and the attempted coup of 1193–4 proved that, like all of his brothers, he possessed a marked capacity for treachery, but in John this was fatally allied to a dearth of political judgement and an inclination to cruelty. Nonetheless, in the last years of the twelfth century he had shown some quality, loyally supporting Richard and acquiring a degree of skill in the art of war. Though he lacked the Lionheart’s creative genius and vision, John was at least capable of decisive action. Concerns about his character and competence lingered, but in 1199, there was every hope that the burden of kingship would bring greater maturity and purpose to his behaviour.

  The character and failings of King John

  John would prove to be a troubled and troublesome monarch. Not the near-demonic, villainous figure of legend perhaps, nor the indolent fool conjured up by chroniclers in the decades after his death – the man supposedly content to lie abed with his young wife while the French ransacked the realm; but a dangerous, unpredictable king, distrustful, petty and malicious. This was the deeply flawed individual that William Marshal now had to serve, attempting to navigate his capricious nature and survive his predations. Within a year of John’s coronation problems were already apparent, with the well-informed eyewitness, Ralph of Diss, declaring the new king’s actions to be ‘unworthy of the royal majesty’.

  In some respects, John was not so dissimilar from his fêted forebears. He was born of a line of overbearing and exploitative monarchs. There had been a strong edge of tyranny and oppression to Old King Henry’s reign, while the Lionheart taxed his subjects relentlessly to fund his military campaigns. Richard had also shown a capacity for brutality and sexual violence. He executed and mutilated mercenaries in the early 1180s and was said, around the same time, to have molested the women of Aquitaine; during the Third Crusade, he put thousands of Muslim captives to the sword. But crucially, Henry II’s and Richard I’s military and political successes had silenced most critics, and their abuses of power were directed against groups who might be deemed ‘outsiders’, at least in the minds of the Angevin and Anglo-Norman elite.

  By contrast, John quickly developed a reputation for mistreating his own nobles, stepping beyond the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour and alienating the very families upon whom his power depended. As one of his followers would later admit, John was a ‘cruel and lecherous’ man. By 1200, Western European nobles had become increasingly intolerant of arbitrary or unnecessarily vicious punishment (at least when meted out among their own ranks), so John generally refrained from open execution. Instead, his preferred method of retribution involved incarcerating enemies and then slowly starving them to death. Stories of his licentious sexual indiscretion also abounded. Kings were expected to have mistresses, but not to pursue the wives and daughters of their own nobles. Rumour had it that John tried to bed the northern baron, Eustace de Vesci’s wife Margaret and, indeed, was only prevented from the act when a prostitute, dressed to resemble the noblewoman, was sent to his room. The king was also accused of attempting to force himself on Robert FitzWalter’s daughter, Matilda. For the moment at least, William Marshal and his family avoided such altercations, but the earl was now operating in a dangerous and unpredictable political environment – standing alongside a monarch who was condemned as an ‘enemy of nature’ by contemporaries.

  King John’s most damaging character flaws were a marked inability to inspire confidence in others and his own profoundly suspicious nature. As the History of William Marshal observed: ‘He who trusts no one is distrusted by all the world.’ Royal records reveal the extent of John’s paranoia, offering a glimpse of the incredibly elaborate system of coded communication that he instituted. By this confusing scheme, certain royal orders were supposed to be deliberately ignored by crown officials, unless accompanied by a special covert sign – a process that was not aided by the fact that John sometimes forgot his own code. The king also had a worrying tendency to promote followers to positions of power, but then seek to strip them of their lands and titles when he decided they had become over-mighty. Where King Henry II had kept his courtiers hungry, John allowed them to feed, but then ripped away their rewards without cause or warning.

  Under such a capricious regime, William Marshal had to tread a cautious path. But the course of John’s troubled reign would also reveal the web of interdependence that connected the Angevin dynasty to its aristocracy. Medieval kings relied on their nobles to uphold royal authority throughout the realm, but that support was not unconditional. Crown monarchs had long been expected to rule with a firm, but generally fair hand; but there was an increasing sense that they also ought to adhere to the same chivalric notions of honour and justice implicit in ‘knightly’ conduct. Kings who were more minded towards tyrannical exploitation needed access to an ample supply of lands and honours with which to buy acquiescence. But unfortunately for John, his reign coincided with a period of grave contraction, not fresh conquest. Under these conditions, William Marshal’s well-attested reputation for unflinching loyalty would be put to the ultimate test.

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE

  John’s reign would be marred by a succession of crises, but not all of the blame for these calamities can be laid at his feet. At the moment of his accession, the new king faced challenges that would have tested the mettle of any ruler. From the beginning, John’s claim to power was contested outside of Normandy and England. In other areas of the Angevin realm, such as Anjou, Maine and Brittany – where the system of primogeniture predominated – Duke Arthur of Brittany’s claim (as the son of John’s elder brother) was upheld, in spite of the fact that he was still only twelve years old. Naturally, the Capetian King Philip Augustus was happy to encourage a damaging succession dispute among the Angevins and recognised that the young Breton might be easily manipulated. The French monarch thus declared his support for Arthur’s cause and duly received his homage for the Angev
in lands on the Continent.

  While John gained the support of the English and Norman aristocracy after Richard I’s death – thanks in part to William Marshal – elsewhere, many well-established servants of the crown, like Andrew of Chauvigny, sided with Duke Arthur. The most influential of these supporters was William des Roches, a skilled knight similar to William Marshal, who had prospered under King Richard. After the Third Crusade, des Roches had also fought alongside the Lionheart during the wars with Capetian France, earning the hand in marriage of Marguerite of Sablé, heiress to estates in Anjou and Maine. But in 1199, des Roches backed Arthur of Brittany’s claim and, in return, was appointed seneschal of Anjou, with control of Le Mans.

  This schism among the Angevin aristocracy was inevitable, given the lack of clarity surrounding the succession in the late 1190s. Before the disaster at Châlus, Richard must have expected that he would have many years in which to finalise his choice of heir, and probably still hoped to produce a son of his own. Nonetheless, John initially made some progress towards a reconciliation. William des Roches began to question Philip Augustus’ underlying intentions in the autumn of 1199, when the French king invaded Angevin territory and laid waste to the fortress of Ballon. Des Roches protested that Philip had overstepped his authority, given that this region belonged to Duke Arthur, but the Capetian remained unrepentant. King John managed to exploit this estrangement, winning des Roches to his side (and confirmed the seneschal’s hereditary right to his office as part of the bargain). This was a major coup. Like William Marshal, des Roches had the power and influence to shift ‘public’ opinion in the Angevin heartlands. He duly delivered Le Mans into John’s hands and brokered a peace with young Arthur. When the boy and his mother, Constance of Brittany, travelled to Le Mans to discuss a settlement, John looked to be on the brink of reunifying the empire. Unfortunately, John’s unsavoury reputation cost him dearly. Almost as soon as he set foot in Le Mans, Arthur heard rumours that the king ‘intended to take him captive and throw him into prison’. That same night, the young duke and his mother fled, along with a number of Angevin nobles. The chance had been missed.