The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  STANDING WITH THE KING

  William Marshal spent much of the summer of 1215 overseeing the defence of Wales, but proved unable to prevent significant losses to the native Welsh in northern Pembrokeshire, Carmarthen and the Gower. He remained on the sidelines through the autumn, as King John tried to mount a counter-attack against rebels, using Flemish mercenaries to bolster his military forces. In the south, at least, the barons were confined to London, and John managed to seize Rochester Castle – which had been held in the name of Stephen Langton – after a gruelling seven-week siege.

  In December, the king initiated a brutal campaign of destructive raiding across England, ravaging rebel-held territory. One chronicler described how John’s men were ‘running about with drawn swords and open knives’, ransacking ‘towns, houses, cemeteries and churches, robbing everyone, and sparing neither women nor children’. Alongside this indiscriminate violence John also tortured captives seized during these months, seemingly in a calculated attempt to intimidate his opponents. As a result, the royalist armies were described as ‘the limbs of the devil’ and likened to a plague of locusts covering the Earth. Such savagery had not been seen in the realm since the dark, anarchic days of King Stephen’s reign, seventy years earlier.

  A few barons buckled under this pressure, but most only became hardened in their resolve to resist the king’s hated regime. Pushed into a corner, the rebels now took the dramatic step of sending Saer of Quincy across the Channel, bearing an offer of the English crown to Prince Louis of France. The legitimacy of the Capetian’s claim – through right of marriage to King Henry II’s granddaughter – was questionable, but in the face of John’s loathsome predations, any lingering doubts over the wisdom or legality of this choice were discounted. Many leading members of the baronial faction also expected Louis to grant them additional lands in England in return for their support. The French prince duly declared that he would sail with the full might of his armies in the spring of 1216, but he also sent an advanced detachment of troops to London, and these men arrived in the capital in January.

  Some contemporaries welcomed the prospect of Capetian intervention. Gerald of Wales promoted Louis of France as ‘a new light’ that would banish the dark clouds of Angevin tyranny. Not surprisingly, the History was far less sympathetic, characterising the invitation to the prince as ‘a highly foolish course of action’, and declaring that the French forces billeted in London spent their time drinking ‘many a barrel and cask of fine wine’. King John recognised that Louis’ arrival would transform the balance of power in England. He therefore sent William Marshal and Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, on an embassy to France, in the vain hope that they might somehow convince Philip Augustus to abandon the invasion, but the Capetian monarch remained resolute.

  The arrival of a new papal legate – the Italian churchman, Guala of Bicchieri – in Paris on 25 April gave Philip greater pause. Guala expressed his entrenched scepticism regarding Louis’ supposed entitlement to the English crown, and then promptly sailed across the Channel to support King John’s cause. The French would now be wading into a war in which they stood to be branded enemies of the Church. Nonetheless, Prince Louis followed through with his invasion plan, landing at Sandwich, in Kent, on 22 May 1216. King John had contemplated meeting him head on in the field, but at the last moment he chose instead to retreat. This decision may have been influenced by the advice of William Marshal, who apparently warned the king not to gamble the fate of the realm on another pitched battle, though in truth, the earl’s precise movements throughout this period are unclear. It is likely that John also doubted the continued loyalty of his mercenaries, many of whom were waiting to be paid and had familial ties to France.

  King John ordered his eldest son, Henry, to be placed under close guard in Devizes Castle (in Wiltshire) and withdrew to Corfe Castle in Dorset, seemingly at a loss as to how he might defend his kingdom. This gifted Louis of France a free hand. He advanced through Kent, seizing Canterbury and later Winchester. The mighty fortress at Dover held out against attack under the command of the redoubtable Hubert of Burgh, as did Windsor and Lincoln Castle in the north-eastern Midlands. The defence of the latter stronghold was organised by Lady Nicola de la Haye, a remarkably formidable woman who had assumed the role of castellan after the death of her husband and son. But the Capetians’ triumphant arrival sparked a fresh surge of desertions from the royalist camp. These included the earls of Arundel, York and Surrey and, most shockingly, King John’s own half-brother, William Longsword. One chronicler suggested that this betrayal was inspired by the discovery that the king had used the opportunity afforded by Longsword’s brief captivity after Bouvines to seduce his wife, Ela of Salisbury. It is more likely that Longsword simply made a pragmatic decision to move with the tide, having determined that John’s day was done.

  By the summer of 1216 a vast swathe of northern and eastern England supported the French prince. As the History observed, ‘the king ran out of resources’ and thus ‘very few of the men stayed with him’. Some two-thirds of England’s aristocracy renounced John, and even a sizeable portion of the king’s own household knights turned against him, including Robert of Roppesley, who had been named in Magna Carta as one of his leading advisors. The collapse of Angevin rule now seemed inevitable.

  William Marshal remained on the southern Welsh March through much of this period, defending the border and holding the west of England for the royalists alongside Ranulf, earl of Chester. In spite of his engrained antipathy towards King John, William’s biographer painted a vivid and admiring picture of his hero’s unfailing fidelity to the broken monarch, writing that as ‘a man of loyal and noble heart, [Marshal] stayed with him in hard and difficult circumstances’. The History had persistently downplayed William’s proximity to John’s regime, but at this stage, its author could not hold back from commending the earl’s ‘steadfast’ behaviour and the ‘good faith’ he showed to ‘his lord and king’.

  Even so, Marshal may have paused to consider his position in the early spring of 1216. Royal records show that, on 10 April, a grant of safe conduct was provided so that Aimery of St Maur, the Master of the Templars in England, could escort Young William Marshal to a meeting with his father. No record has survived to indicate the nature of their discussion (as with so much of Young William’s activities in this period, the episode was ignored in the History). It is possible that Earl William tried to persuade his eldest-born to return to the royalist side, or it may be that he encouraged him to maintain close contact with the French – hedging the Marshal family’s bets, so as to protect the dynasty’s long-term interests. Young William certainly pursued advantage under the Capetian claimant: rushing to declare his allegiance to Louis and then receiving confirmation of his right to act as marshal of the prince’s court in England. However, Young William’s attempts to assert rights to Marlborough Castle were blocked.

  If Earl William entertained thoughts of desertion, he certainly did not act upon them. It must have been apparent that John’s cause was lost, yet just as he had done with King Henry II in 1189, Marshal refused to forsake his royal master. This was all the more remarkable because he found himself in a distinctly different position in 1216. William was no longer simply a household knight. He was now a great magnate of the realm: a man of power and responsibility, with a vast lordship and a large family to protect. His relationship with John had also been troubled and tempestuous. Marshal had good reason to dislike, perhaps even to detest, his monarch, yet as the biographer remarked, ‘whatever the king had done to him, [William] never abandoned him for anyone’. Even the author of the History seems to have been perplexed by this unswerving devotion, but the greatest test of Marshal’s fidelity was yet to come.

  King John’s reign reached its bitter end in the autumn of 1216. He had marched north in the hope of mounting one last campaign and bringing aid to Nicola de la Haye at Lincoln, but he contracted ‘a violent fever’ in early October. With his body already
weakened, the king’s ‘pernicious gluttony’ supposedly prompted him to gorge himself on peaches and freshly brewed cider, and as a result he became afflicted with dysentery. As his illness took hold, John seems also to have been gripped by a sense of guilt and remorse. On 10 October he made a grant to one of William of Briouze’s surviving daughters, Margaret, for the ‘sake of the souls’ of her parents and brother. The king limped on to Newark, south of Lincoln, but there his condition worsened. On 18 October, he was said to have made a deathbed confession of his many sins, and to have spoken of the hope that William Marshal might ‘forgive the harm and wrongs which I have unjustly done to him’. Later that night he ‘lost his strength [and] his mind’, and at some point in the small hours he died – a man of forty-eight years, who had presided over the disintegration of the great Angevin Empire and brought the kingdom of England to its knees. A number of chroniclers confidently predicted that the late king would be condemned to Hell. One even added that: ‘Foul as it is, Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John.’

  In accordance with his last wishes, the king’s body was carried south-west to Worcester Cathedral – a site dedicated to one of his favoured saints, Wulfstan. William Marshal heard the news of John’s demise and came north from Gloucester with the papal legate Guala to bury yet another king. The earl had now served, and survived, four crowned and anointed monarchs. It seemed that the days of the Angevins were at an end. A new era would surely dawn, with a French prince wearing the English crown.

  THE GREATEST CHOICE

  In spite of his ignominious end, King John was afforded a regal funeral. His body had been arrayed ‘in royal robes’, and William Marshal and Guala ensured that he was honoured with ‘a service befiting a monarch’, before he was laid to rest. The earl even sent John Marshal to fetch precious silks with which the king’s tomb could be covered. Once this ceremony was complete, however, the beleaguered remnants of the royalist party had to face a stark reality. Their prospects were dreadfully bleak. More than half of the kingdom lay in the hands of the baronial rebels and their French allies, including the city of London, while the crown’s treasury lay all but empty. And the heir to this sundered realm was a nine-year-old boy, John’s son, Henry; a figure seemingly bereft of support.

  With King John dead and buried, William Marshal faced the most momentous decision of his entire career, a choice that, in many ways, would define his life, and the fate of England. As a young household knight, William had fought alongside the Young King Henry; now another Angevin of that same name lay in desperate need of his aid. But would Marshal champion Henry’s claim, or turn aside and watch him fall as Louis of France swept to victory? In terms of cold-blooded, political calculus, the correct path was blindingly apparent: William should abandon the royalist camp and forsake Henry. The earl was now perhaps sixty-nine years old. The time was ripe to withdraw from the front line and hope to weather the storm of dynastic revolution, ensconced on the Welsh March or in Ireland. William’s established link to the Capetian dynasty, through the oath of homage sworn for his Norman estate at Longueville, made subjection to Prince Louis a natural step. William Longsword had understood, like so many others, that the wind of change was blowing. It was clear that Marshal should follow his lead.

  The stakes set before William could not have been higher. All the labour of his life – the pursuit of power, wealth and office; the long path forged from anonymous knight to earl of the realm – now stood to be squandered. Should Marshal falter, the future of his wife and children, of the dynasty he had established, might well be shattered. The prospects of the faithful household knights he had sheltered and nurtured also hung in the balance. And William was no self-sacrificing saint. Without the drive of ambition and some willingness to plot, scheme and manipulate, he could never have achieved such glittering eminence amidst the cut-throat world of the Angevin court. Nor would he have survived the predations of King John’s reign. Marshal’s careful manoeuvring around John during the 1190s and his equivocation on the issue of his Norman lands proved him to be a political animal.

  But William Marshal was not merely a politician. He was also a warrior and a knight; a man who had lived his long life in accordance with the ideals of chivalry, pursuing and preserving honour. The earl had cultivated a well-earned reputation for steadfast loyalty. It seems clear that the royalist faction expected Earl William to defend the late king’s heir. Indeed, John appears to have placed Henry into William’s care before his death. According to the History, John asked his knights ‘to see that [Earl William] takes charge of my son and always keeps him under his protection, for my son will never govern these lands of mine with the help of anyone but Marshal’, and this bequest was confirmed in another contemporary source. William had never turned his back on a lord or king; could he bear to do so now? Could he countenance the public shame, reflected in the eyes of his own closest retainers, of renouncing this charge; the muddying of his cherished good name and, perhaps, the fracturing of his own conception of himself. Something of the same dilemma had lain before John of Earley in 1208, and he had chosen to lose land and power, but avoid dishonour. Perhaps William had already made his choice as he rode to attend John’s funeral; certainly he must have understood that the decision could not be long postponed.

  William Marshal’s decision

  In the immediate aftermath of King John’s burial, Marshal returned to Gloucester, and an armed force was sent south to Devizes, with strict instructions to take possession of the young heir, and to ‘let nobody prevent them from coming [north] with him’. Earl William then set out to meet the boy on the road near Malmesbury (in Wiltshire). Their encounter in the open countryside was charged with emotion. According to the History, Henry was so small that he had to be carried in the arms of one of his knights. Coming before William Marshal, he declared, ‘I give myself over to God and to you, so that in the Lord’s name you may take charge of me.’ The earl was said to have replied: ‘I will be yours in good faith [and] there is nothing I will not do to serve you while I have the strength.’ Young Henry reportedly wept, and so too did Marshal and those gathered around them.

  William Marshal thus placed the full weight of his support behind Henry’s claim. The earl would now face the ultimate challenge of his life – the battle to rekindle the fortunes of the Angevin dynasty, defeat the barons and the French, and save his boy-king. Other historians have suggested that Earl William leapt at the chance to support King John’s young heir, seeing it as one more opportunity to achieve yet greater advancement. But this view seems to be conditioned by hindsight, and misrepresents the reality of the moment. In October 1216, most considered young Henry’s cause to be hopeless. Victory, and any rewards it might bring, would have seemed like distant dreams to all involved, including the nearly seventy-year-old Marshal. William might expect to hold the leading position within the royalist faction, but given the monumental struggle that lay ahead, that was cold comfort. The motives behind his fateful decision remain open to debate. Perhaps he could not resist the chance to lead one last campaign or was determined to preserve his own reputation. It may even be that he acted out of pure, selfless dedication to the dynasty that he had served for the last five decades.

  14

  THE GUARDIAN OF THE REALM

  William Marshal’s decision to support young Henry’s claim to the English crown was critical to the fortunes of the royalist cause. A handful of other magnates might have championed the boy-heir, had William stepped back from the fray or decamped to the baronial faction, but none possessed Marshal’s breadth of experience or his illustrious reputation. Yet, having bound himself to Henry on the road near Malmesbury and escorted him to Gloucester, the earl had to make a swift and determined effort to uphold the boy’s interests. In these first days, speed of action was paramount. Henry was only nine years old, but his rights to the English crown had to be asserted immediately, for fear that Prince Louis of France might seek to have himself proclaimed king – not least b
ecause the rebels and their French allies controlled access to Westminster Abbey, outside the walls of the city of London, the traditional venue for royal coronations.

  THE ADVENT OF KING HENRY III

  The royalists did enjoy one significant advantage: the unswerving support of the papal legate Guala of Bicchieri, and the bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches – a rather disreputable, but nonetheless formidable, character. With the backing of the Church, a coronation was hurriedly arranged for 28 October 1216, and regal robes were cut down in size to fit the diminutive Henry. Custom dictated that only a dubbed knight could become king, so Marshal duly performed the ceremony. The boy was then crowned and anointed as King Henry III by Bishop Peter, with Guala presiding over the ceremony in Gloucester Cathedral, and affirming the young monarch’s status as the pope’s ‘vassal and ward’.

  With the new king proclaimed, all thoughts turned to the impending civil war, and the question of who should lead the royalist faction. As a churchman, Guala was in no position to command military forces, and while Peter des Roches was more than happy to engage in combat, he remained a divisive figure. The only obvious candidates for the office were William Marshal and Ranulf of Chester, who had yet to reach Gloucester. Earl William made no move to snatch power that day, despite vocal calls raised in the immediate aftermath of the coronation for him to step forward and ‘protect the king and the kingdom’ as overall leader. Marshal recognised that consensus would be crucial in the struggle ahead, and he understood that he could ill afford to alienate a key ally of Ranulf’s standing, but he also appears to have been unsure of his own position. Begging for time to consider his next step, and await the imminent arrival of the earl of Chester, William retired to his rooms.