Richard & John: Kings at War (6 page)

For much of his early life Richard exists for us only in occasional glimpses. We find him more and more in the company of his mother, as when he and Eleanor laid foundation stones for the monastery of St Augustine in Limoges in 1171, yet usually the record is shadowy. But in 1172 he finally emerged into the clear daylight of documented history. Aged fourteen and rising fifteen, on Trinity Sunday 10 June of that year in the abbey church of St Hilary in Poitiers he was formally invested as duke of Aquitaine. This dark thick-walled cathedral church positively pullulated with history. Here Charles Martel had prayed before his great victory over the Moors at Tours in 732 by which legend, if not history, credited him with having saved Europe from Islamic serfdom. Here too King Henry’s faithful servant Earl Patrick of Salisbury was buried. Sensuousness ruled that Sunday, for the air inside the Church was thick with incense, while sumptuary laws seem to have been waived, allowing a riot of colour within the hallowed walls, as even serfs donned motley and bright raiment. On the altar steps the immensely tall youth Prince Richard stood proud, alongside his mother, at fifty by all accounts still a beauty. Eleanor was bedecked in gorgeous fashion: with her greying locks hidden under a silk kerchief, she displayed on her head the gleaming, gilded coronet of Aquitaine, her grandpaternal bequest; while, to show she was also queen of the Angevin empire she wore a scarlet cloak on which were picked out three golden leopards of Anjou. In either hand she held a sceptre: in the right was the golden staff of Aquitaine and in the left the golden rod she had carried at her coronation as Henry’s queen eighteen years before. She was every inch the regal presence, graceful and impassive during the long liturgical service, her gaze fixed on the altar in the solemn way she had learned since childhood. Richard seemed truly the golden warrior, his long shoulder-length blond hair and fair skin melting into an aureate haze with gold trappings that adorned yet another leopard-spotted mantle.
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The bishop descended to the choir and conducted the royal couple to the foot of the altar. As Eleanor and her son knelt there, the bishop removed the coronet from her head and placed it on Richard’s momentarily before returning it to her; one of his deacons at once stepped forward with a plain silver-girt crown that Richard would wear until the true coronet came to him permanently on his mother’s death. The symbolism was clear to everyone. The bishop then motioned to the abbot’s chair, where Richard took his seat to receive honours in his own right. A deacon in embroidered dalmatic approached bearing a wide scroll of scarlet silk, handed it to the bishop and withdrew as his superior unfurled it. Then all heads in the Church were lowered as the sacred lance of St Hilary was produced; lance and banner were the true signs of ducal authority and both were now blessed. Since a lance could not be proffered to a woman, the bishop ignored Eleanor and presented the lance to Richard. Laying his hands on the insignia of office, Richard then swore a solemn oath as duke of Aquitaine. When the cheering from the congregation died down, the banner of St Hilary was produced and another oath taken on this precious relic. Richard faced his vassals and swore that he would follow the banner wherever it took him on behalf of Holy Mother Church and God’s Right; the implication was that when adult he would crusade in the Holy Land. So finally ended the
Ordo and Benedicendum Ducem Aquitaniae
. Both participants and congregation had fasted overnight to witness the sacred event, so that when the doors of the Church were flung open both noble and commoner rushed out to gorge themselves at festivities. But Richard was not yet done with sacred ceremonies. A few days later, in Limoges, he was once more proclaimed duke in the Church of St Martial. The climax of this ceremony came when the ring of St Valerie was slipped on Richard’s finger. The martyred St Valerie was the patron saint of Aquitaine and her allegedly thousand-year-old body was still preserved at Limoges - proving to its citizens that Limoges was more important than Poitiers. This time Richard did not hand back the relics to the priestly caste after touching them but retained the ring and wore it during the feast that followed, returning it to its sanctuary at the high altar only late at night. The ulterior significance of the two ceremonies at Poitiers and Limoges was not just that Richard had come of age and entered man’s estate; he had also asserted his right to the dukedom of Aquitaine independently of any feudal duties he might owe his father Henry or King Louis of France. In symbolic terms the saints Hilary and Valerie, protectors of Aquitaine, had allowed him to ‘take seizin’ of their relics; it followed, then, that only those saints could deprive him of his rights, regardless of what Louis and Henry said or did. Eleanor, always wildly possessive about Aquitaine, had used particular artifice to make sure her favourite son would inherit her duchy.
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The early 1170s saw Richard complete the transition to manhood. There is remarkable unanimity about certain key features of his character and personality. His appearance was often commented on. He was very tall - though the hyperbolic estimate of 6ft 5ins, a similar height to that ascribed to Harald Hardrada of Norway, evinces merely the medieval cavalier way with numbers and statistics - and had his father’s penetrating blue eyes. The hagiographic chronicler Richard de Templo described him at the time of his coronation: ‘He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had quite long arms which were particularly suited to drawing a sword and wielding it to great effect. His long legs matched the rest of his body.’
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Although we know nothing of the details of his military education, his later career makes it clear he must have been an apt pupil with sword and lance. His education in arms, and his prowess with them, made him a believer in military solutions and in violence as a means to an end. The contrast with his more hedonistic elder brother Henry was marked; as Gerald of Wales commented: ‘Henry was a shield but Richard was a hammer.’ Where some men, his brother Henry among them, prized tournaments as things-in-themselves, Richard valued them only as an aid to martial training and seems to have taken part in only a few jousts, reserving his formidable skills as horseman and swordsman for the battlefield. He was also uninterested in the traditional ducal and regal pursuits of hunting and hawking, indulging in them only when killing time or held up by contrary winds when trying to set sail. Richard despised dilettantism and admired professionalism and ruthlessness. He even affected to be pleased about his family’s reputation as the devil’s brood and gloried in the apophthegm about his family attributed to St Bernard: ‘From the Devil they came and to the Devil they will return.’
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But Richard was not just a rough-hewn warrior. As a talented musician and songwriter, he had a command of Latin sufficient to discomfit a less erudite archbishop of Canterbury, and could parry and thrust with words as deftly as with the sword. There is simply too much evidence of his eloquence, verbal sharpness and skill in debate to be discounted as merely the flattery of sycophantic courtiers. His conversational style was described as bantering, half joking, half serious; he never made the classic mistake of the half-intelligent, which is to mistake earnestness for profundity.
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Like his father, he believed in putting the over-mighty clergy in their place from time to time. Much later in Richard’s career the great preacher of the day, Fulk of Neuilly, ventured to chide him for having three daughters, Superbia, Luxuria and Cupiditas (pride, avarice and sensuality) and suggested that he would never receive the Grace of God as long as they remained at his side. Richard thought a moment, then replied: ‘I have already given these daughters away in marriage. Pride I gave to the Templars, Avarice to the Cistercians and Sensuality to the Benedictines.’
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Turning the tables on him, the troubadour Bertran de Born called Richard ‘Nay and Yea’. This was an enigmatic accolade, which some have construed to mean that Richard was fickle and volatile, saying first one thing and then its opposite or that he said one thing and meant another. But, bearing in mind Bertran de Born’s close association with Eleanor and Richard rather than Henry II, the most likely interpretation is that the troubadour was paying a genuine compliment, stressing a capacity for self-confidence, quick decision and terse delivery - Richard Black and White, as it were.
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Yet above all Richard was a product of the South and a lover of Aquitaine which was why, in later life, to the consternation of Anglocentric historians he neglected England and Normandy. More than once Richard dabbled in the affairs of Spain, and it is surely not too far fetched to regard this interest as the seedbed of the later crusader, for Spain was famous most of all for its struggle against Islam and the Moorish invaders. Although the author of the famous pilgrim’s guidebook inveighed against the Gascons for their drunkenness, lechery and poor table manners - they squatted around a fire instead of sitting at table, they shared the same cups and the same bedrooms and presumably therefore possessed women in common - he came close to apoplexy when he described the Basques and the people of Navarre. Among the crimes set down to
their
account were the following: they all ate out of a single cooking-pot like pigs at a trough; their speech was most akin to dogs barking; they had no shame about exposing their genitals especially when warming themselves at a fire; they treated women like beasts of the field and sometimes literally so as they practised bestialism with mules and horses and even attached chastity belts to these animals to prevent interlopers enjoying their ruminant favours.
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But to Richard this sort of propaganda was arrant nonsense; he preferred the freedom, hedonism and sybaritism of the warm south to the straitjacket of the priest-ridden north. Unquestionably the major influence in this as in so many other aspects of his young life was his mother, who idolised him and called him ‘the great one’. Richard’s status as his mother’s favourite son is well conveyed in state documents, where Eleanor habitually refers to him as her ‘dearest son’ (
carissimum
), while John is merely her ‘dear son’ (
dilectum
). The warmth of the relationship between mother and son was now about to have explosive and potentially catastrophic consequences.

2

EVEN WHILE SHE CHERISHED her beloved Richard, Eleanor of Aquitaine continued her amazing career as queen and woman. Apart from her other qualities, she was a childbearing machine of superb efficiency. In September 1158 she gave birth to her fourth son Geoffrey, her seventh child, and the fifth with Henry. Geoffrey as an adult turned out to be short of stature, but fair and handsome, looking more Norman than Poitevin. The most charming of the Devil’s Brood, he would also prove the most untrustworthy. Shrewd, cunning, a humbug and hypocrite with a compulsive tendency to deceit, Geoffrey had one saving grace: charm. With his mother’s vivacity, he was a plausible, persuasive rogue, and with his ‘gift of the gab’ he could talk his way out of anything, and into a multiplicity of intrigues, usually directed at his father. Gerald of Wales described Geoffrey as ‘overflowing with words, soft as oil, possessed, by his syrupy and persuasive eloquence, of the power of dissolving the seemingly indissoluble, able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite and a dissembler’. Roger of Howden’s assessment was along the same lines but pithier: ‘Geoffrey, that son of perdition’.
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In 1161 Eleanor bore her second daughter, also called Eleanor and in 1165 her third, Joan (or Joanna). John, born on Christmas Eve 1166, and named for the saint’s day, was her last child, the product of a rare marital coupling when Henry held one of his itinerant courts at Angers. Twenty-nine years separated the birth of Eleanor’s first child, Mary, from the last-born, and the age gap between John’s mother and father now loomed alarmingly: Eleanor was 42 but Henry still only 34. The adult John always struck observers as being the most purely Poitevin of Henry’s sons, being short and dark, a true child of the south. In time he would rival Geoffrey for treachery. He saw little of his mother during his childhood, as in 1169 she dropped him off at the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou, in the care of the Church, ostensibly to be trained as an oblate and, it seems, he remained there five years. According to some sources, at the age of six he was moved to the household of his brother Henry, the ‘Young King’ where he received the rudiments of knightly training. His academic education was entrusted to Ranulph Glanville, one of Henry’s senior officials.
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But modern scholars tend to doubt this story, and instead emphasise the five-year continuity at Fontevraud, the termination of which can be precisely dated to July 1174, for on the eighth of that month Henry II took John with him from Normandy to England.
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Much about John’s early years is doubtful, but some aspects have become clearer as a result of modern research. For a long time it was thought that the story that he was born in Oxford was simply a corruption of the known fact that his brother Richard was born there; it now appears that both brothers may have emerged from the womb there.
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It also seems likely that Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in 1124 (rather than 1122, the traditional date), and that her childbearing record has been obfuscated by Ralph of Diceto’s clear statement that Henry II and Eleanor had
six
sons, two of whom died in childhood. This means that in addition to William (1153-56), somewhere along the line there was another short-lived male baby.
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Also a date of 1124 rather than 1122 for Eleanor’s birth means that she may have borne John not quite so dangerously near the menopause as has sometimes been thought - though all such generalisations are difficult, for in the twelfth century fifty counted as extreme old age. It always used to be thought that Eleanor slowed down in her childbirth pattern, whether because of stillbirth or lowered fertility with the onset of the menopause, and there may be truth in these assertions, but a last child at 42 puts Eleanor more in the realm of naturalism than mythology.
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But why was John, unlike his brothers, placed in Fontevraud from the age of three to seven-and-a-half ? It is highly unlikely that he was earmarked for a career in the Church, and the misleading term ‘oblate’ probably means no more in this context than that he was a ‘boarder’ at the abbey. John and Joan were the two youngest children, both put into care at Fontevraud because of Eleanor’s absence on the business of Aquitaine. In some ways it was an odd choice for John, for it was a ‘double abbey’, ruled by an abbess, where the women outranked, and were served by, the men
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; it was a questionable environment for a prince, and an absurd one if John were really being trained as a prince of the Church, where male hierarchy was the dominant ethos. Many plausible reasons have been given for the choice of Fontevraud: it was equidistant from Eleanor’s domains in the south and Henry’s in the north; both children, and especially Joan, needed female attendants; the abbey had close ties to both Henry’s and Eleanor’s families; the nuns were aristocratic ladies; and, possibly clinchingly, Henry’s first cousin Matilda of Flanders was there as a nun in the years 1169-74.
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