Richard & John: Kings at War (3 page)

Such was Richard’s father. Yet Richard inherited more than just his father’s genetic legacy, since there was a wider Angevin culture involved in his paternity. Emerging from the mists of history in the ninth century, the rulers of Anjou came to the fore in the succeeding century, acquiring the title of count, and consolidating their power base in the Loire valley partly through conquest and partly by astute intermarriage with the ruling families of adjacent domains such as Amboise, Vendôme and Maine. The Angevins later became famous for their stone castles - at Montbazon, Saumur, Touraine, Langeais, Chinon and Loches - and the wealth of the two main cities, at Angers and Tours.
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Anjou was thought to have the perfect climate - Mediterranean heat tempered by breezes from the Atlantic - and was known as the Garden of France. It was a land of vineyards and heterogeneous flowers and trees representing its median position in the French-speaking world: on the one hand oaks, broom and camellias, on the other cedars, palms and fig. The Angevins had the reputation for being warlike, ferocious, ambitious and expansionist, with the ruling classes notably tall, good-looking and often with a distinctive red-gold hair ‘à la Titian’. Notably anticlerical (with the exception of the saintly Fulk II the Good in the tenth century), the Angevin male noble was a byword for debauchery, womanising and feuding. The Normans, who detested the Angevins, routinely described them as barbarians who lived like animals, gnawed joints of meat like savage beasts, looted like pirates, desecrated churches and executed priests and monks for sport.
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The animosity between Angevins and Normans must have abated by the beginning of the twelfth century, for Fulk, count of Anjou, the fifth of that ilk, pulled off a great coup by arranging a brilliant marriage for his son Geoffrey with Matilda, daughter and heiress of Henry I of England; Fulk departed on crusade in the Holy Land and handed over Anjou to Geoffrey as a wedding present. But the marriage was not a success, largely because Matilda was such a domineering personality; this was the very quality that lost her England when she had Stephen on the ropes in 1141. Headstrong, overbearing, tactless, haughty, arrogant and abusive, Matilda alienated everyone she came in contact with, even her own kinsmen. The general consensus was that Matilda was an over-masculine woman; her lack of the traditionally feminine qualities appalled contemporaries who thought her a freak of nature. Since Geoffrey was cold, shallow, sly and selfish, the love of power and the cunning so observable in Henry II would appear to have come from mother and father respectively, rather than the other way round, as in conventional expectations. And since Matilda acted like a virago and indicated to her husband that, as a king’s daughter, she had married beneath her, it was not long before he ignored her and consoled himself with a harem of mistresses. Nonetheless, the duty of founding a new dynasty had to be performed, so it was into this loveless union that Henry II was born on 5 March 1133 at Le Mans.
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Henry II would continue the Angevin pattern of contracting unhappy marriages and, even more so, conformed to the tradition of family feuding that everyone agreed was the Achilles heel of the Angevins.
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What the young Richard thought of this dubious legacy we can only guess, but we know for certain that he relished yet another aspect of the Angevin tradition, which was that the family was, quite literally, the devil’s brood. The Angevins had annexed the legendary story of Melusine as their own. A woman of stunning beauty married one of the counts of Anjou and bore him four children. She seemed the perfect wife in all respects but one: she refused to attend Mass or, if forced to go, always found an excuse to leave before the Consecration of the Host. Gradually suspicions arose and the count’s courtiers warned him that his wife’s behaviour was causing a scandal. The count decided to put her to the test. He insisted she attend Mass then, as the moment for the Consecration approached, hemmed her in with four armed men so that she could not leave the church. As the retainers went to lay hands on her, she slipped from their grasp, seized two of her children and began to ascend into the air before the horrified gaze of the churchgoers. Like a wraith she floated out through a window; neither she nor the two abducted children were ever seen again. The conclusion was that the countess was the devil’s own daughter, who could not look upon the body of Christ.
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What the fate was of the two children she left behind was not recorded, but presumably they were held to have grown up and reproduced the devil’s spawn.

Henry II was a towering personality but his wife, the mother of Richard and John, was scarcely less so. Born in 1124, Eleanor, countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine was a notable beauty who first became a queen in 1137 when the ailing king of France, Louis the Fat, married his seventeen-year-old son to her; he succeeded to the throne of France as Louis VII a month later when his father, worn out with gout and gluttony-induced obesity, died - but scarcely in the legendary position in the saddle, since for the last ten years of his life he had been too corpulent to mount a horse. Eleanor of Aquitaine had a dark complexion, black eyes, black hair and was curvaceous with a superb figure that never ran to fat even in old age. She was also at the time the western world’s richest and most prestigious heiress. From her father Duke William X, ruler of a dynasty originally established in Poitiers in the ninth century - and thus in many ways very like the Angevins - she had inherited vast territories.
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The exact feudal relationship of the dukes of Aquitaine to the Capetian kings of France is a disputed academic subject, but it is clear that Aquitaine in the twelfth century was a virtually autonomous and decentralised principality, with only the most tenuous relationship with the kings of France. The dynastic marriage in 1137, and Duke William X’s death in the same year, undoubtedly moved Aquitaine into the orbit of France though, by transferring nominal power to Paris, it simply increased the anarchy and warlordism in the south. Not only did the rulers of Aquitaine make merely a nod in the direction of the kings of France but their own power was severely circumscribed: their vassals paid them lip-service only and the dukes’ writ really ran only in and around the immediate environs of Bordeaux and Poitou.
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From the earliest days Eleanor’s marriage was controversial: many said it was invalid by canon law as being within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. Childless until the age of 23, when she finally bore a daughter, Eleanor was a disappointment to her husband in every respect but her undoubted physical charms. A year later, in 1146, according to the chronicler Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, she had an affair with Count Geoffrey of Anjou (Henry II’s father), although many modern historians discount the story.
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An emancipated woman by the standards of the time, she accompanied King Louis on the disastrous Second Crusade (1147-49), where she was said to have led her own troops and dressed like an Amazon. More stories of infidelity followed her on the crusade: she was alleged to have had an affair in Antioch with Count Raymond of Poitiers, the city’s ruler. The entire saga of promiscuity, infidelity, seduction and rape in the Middle Ages is a thorny subject on which scholars disagree vehemently: some see medieval royal households as a hotbed of casual rape and forced concubinage, while others accuse chroniclers like Map and Gerald of Cambridge of anti-Angevin propaganda, misogyny or both.
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Whether Eleanor really was unfaithful as charged, or simply the victim of hostile, educated contemporaries, it seems clear that by the end of the Second Crusade, King Louis, whatever his initial besotment, was estranged from his wife. When Eleanor spoke of an annulment and stressed the fourth and fifth degrees of kinship by which she and Louis were consanguineous, the king arrested her and placed her in humiliating purdah. Following a perilous return from Jerusalem, the warring royal pair sought the intercession of the Pope in an interview in Rome, but Eugenius III sided with Louis and refused to grant an annulment.
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Marital relations must have been resumed, for Eleanor gave birth to another daughter in 1150. But in 1151 the 18-year-old Henry of Anjou, Geoffrey’s son, came to Paris to pay homage to King Louis for his guarantee of Normandy, part of a ‘definitive’ peace patched up that year between Louis and Geoffrey of Anjou. Once again the historical record is cloudy: Eleanor romancers claim that at this meeting Henry saw the 29-year-old Eleanor and, so far from being put off by the eleven-year gap in their ages, fell madly in love with her. It is even alleged that the pair became lovers at this point, and that the entire courtship and marriage was a matter of impulse, disturbed hormones and unfettered emotions. Some say Eleanor had tired of Louis’s effeminacy and generally lacklustre calibre as a lover and wanted a husband who could dominate her; alternatively, the ‘power devil’ theorists claim she aimed to dominate her husband.
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Furthermore, it is alleged, Henry’s desire was fanned when his father warned him against Eleanor’s wiles and cautioned his son that he had already ‘known’ her. It is more likely that hardheaded calculation carried the day: both could see the material advantages of marriage to the other should the opportunity present. In Henry’s case the chief consideration is likely to have been that Aquitaine was an even more important power base than Normandy at this juncture, when he had still not secured a firm promise of succession to the English throne from Stephen. The chance came in 1152 when Louis, frustrated by the lack of a male heir after fifteen years of marriage, finally agreed to an annulment. The marriage between Louis and Eleanor had effectively been on the rocks since 1147-48, there were persistent rumours about the queen’s infidelity and her alleged infertility or at least inability to conceive a son, and by now personal incompatibility between the couple had hardened into mutual antipathy.
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We may infer that Eleanor and Henry had laid contingency plans and the fortuitous death of Henry’s father Geoffrey (he developed a fever after swimming in the Loire) removed another obstacle. When a synod of bishops formally annulled Eleanor’s marriage in March 1152, she acted quickly, but she had to. Once she was no longer married, she was a potential prey for land-hungry suitors and if she did not marry Henry rapidly she ran the risk of being abducted, raped and dragooned into a forced marriage. In fact, as she travelled to meet Henry, both Count Theobald of Blois and Geoffrey of Anjou (Henry’s brother) tried to seize her.
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All turned out successfully and on Whit Sunday, 18 May 1152, Henry and Eleanor were married in Poitiers. At a stroke Henry doubled his continental possessions and gained massively in wealth, power and status; indeed he was richer in lands and economic and military resources, more powerful, in a word, than Louis, supposedly his feudal superior. The marriage caused a sensation. Louis declared himself shocked and angered by the marriage, feeling both that Eleanor had duped him into an annulment when she had already planned her next step and that Henry had broken feudal law by taking her as his wife. Anti-Eleanor historians have always suspected her of cold-blooded revenge and humbug, in that she married her ex-husband’s greatest political rival, who was himself within the degrees of consanguinity that provided the ground for her annulment.
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But many scholars feel that Louis’s complaints had little substance: there was no need for Henry to seek Louis’s permission before marrying Eleanor, nor was he debarred from using the ducal title until he had paid a feudal ‘relief ’ to Louis, as the king alleged. Louis was not the only one, both then and later, to believe that Eleanor had manipulated him through a diabolical lust for power, but the plain fact is that Louis needed the annulment more than she did, as he was desperate to beget a male heir. As for the unseemly haste in which Henry and Eleanor supposedly celebrated their wedding, Louis’s third marriage followed after an even shorter gap than that between the annulment and Eleanor’s union with Henry.
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But in human affairs perception is all, and reality nothing. Whatever the merits and demerits of the case, Louis felt that he had been double-crossed. Perhaps his courtiers hinted, as many later historians have, that in letting Eleanor go he had behaved with egregious stupidity. He summoned the allegedly errant pair to explain and, when they ignored him, he declared war and put together a formidable coalition of Henry’s enemies who hated him for one reason or another. Among those he enlisted were Eustace of Boulogne, Geoffrey of Anjou, Henry of Blois, count of Champagne and his brother Théobald, count of Blois - some disappointed suitors of Eleanor, others political rivals or personal foes. Yet in a six-week campaign Henry smashed his enemies then turned north and began preparing an invasion of England.
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The great risk Henry had taken was that Eleanor would be unable to provide him with an heir but in 1153 she confirmed his best hopes by giving birth to a son, William. The same year saw Henry’s triumphant landing in England, the fortuitous death of Stephen’s son Eustace and Stephen’s reluctant acceptance of Henry as the next king of England. The run of good fortune continued: in August 1154 Eleanor announced that she was pregnant again, in October Stephen died, and in December Henry and Eleanor were crowned king and queen of England in Westminster Abbey. Henry’s family was soon expanding. In 1155 Eleanor gave birth to another boy, Henry and in the same year Henry acknowledged a bastard son, Geoffrey, as part of his household. But the next year brought mixed fortunes. The three-year-old heir William died, and to balance this loss Eleanor could produce ‘only’ another girl, Matilda. Nonetheless, many historians feel that during her childbearing years Eleanor had, if not quite the perfect love match, then at least the kind of relationship she wanted.
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