Richard & John: Kings at War (8 page)

Louis was furiously angry once he realised how he had been duped. Henry called in the papal favour immediately by achieving the marriage of young Henry on 2 November 1160. Louis mustered his forces for war but thought better of it and instead patched up an uneasy truce with the slippery Henry. But the 1160s found Henry obsessed with securing an undisputed succession for his eldest son. It was unfortunate for him that this decade also saw him locked in conflict with Thomas Becket, who was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in 1162. As Henry’s relations with Becket worsened, he found himself in a dilemma for which not even his devious mind could compass a solution. Pope Alexander, now secure in his papal office, felt he had already adequately discharged his debt to Henry over the election, angering his ally Louis of France in the process, but now here was Henry asking him for two further major favours, mutually incompatible. Henry wanted his eldest son crowned king in his lifetime, as the Capetians liked to do, and he also wanted Becket transferred to a titular see where he could not intervene in politics. A weary Alexander explained that he could grant one of the two boons but not both, since a true coronation had to be performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, following papal permission. Unable to cut the Gordian knot, Henry eventually had his son crowned king of England on 24 May 1170, with Becket’s bitter rival Archbishop Roger of York officiating.
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Thereafter young Henry was always known as the Young King to distinguish him from the Old King, his father and namesake. This coronation was a fiasco in another sense, apart from its dubious legality, for Margaret was unable to cross from France for the ceremony (some say she arrived late, others that she was deliberately delayed at Caen), leading Louis to suspect that Henry was trying to cut her out of the succession.
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Fearing papal sanctions in the form of an interdict or excommunication, Henry came up with yet another ingenious plan. He offered Becket a peaceful return to England on a ‘no fault’ basis and the opportunity to recrown his son. Becket accepted at a meeting with the king in France on 22 July 1170.

Becket did not live to carry out a proper coronation, as he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December 1170. Henry came close to joining him in eternity the very same year. In August he lay seriously ill at Domfront in Normandy and thought likely to die. In a will drawn up at the time he confirmed the arrangements made with Louis at Montmirail the year before and codified some of the arrangements made then and since.
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The young Henry’s situation was regularised both by the dubious coronation and by the fact that he had already done homage to Louis’s son Philip in his capacity as Louis’s Seneschal. Geoffrey’s position, too, was clearer, since in May 1169 the 10-year-old had crossed from England to Britanny and accepted the homage of the Bretons at Rennes; he received another bonus two years later when Conan the Little died, handing him the territory of Richmond in Yorkshire as well. But Richard, who had almost certainly not been present at Montmirail, received fresh confirmation as the heir of Gascony and Poitou. His position in the south had been further cemented with his betrothal at Montmirail to Lady Alice (Alys), second daughter of Louis of France by his second wife, Blanche of Castile.
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The arrangement was that Alice was to be brought up in the land of her betrothed but, instead of sending her to Aquitaine, the devious Henry kept her with him at his own court, which spent most of the time travelling between England and Normandy. Henry’s thinking in making the decisive tripartite division between his three eldest sons was that his ‘empire’ was actually too fractious and unruly to be governed from the centre, and this was particularly so in the south, which was so turbulent that it could not be managed from England or Normandy but only from Poitiers or Bordeaux. Henry was well aware of the Poitevins’ taste for rebellion: it was commonly said that they had the hairy shins of wolves since they behaved like wolves to their neighbours. To keep the feudal pyramid coherent, Richard did homage for his holdings to Henry the Young King. So within a year Henry had done homage to Louis, Louis had invested the Young King with the Duchy of Normandy and the counties of Maine and Angers, and both Geoffrey and Richard in turn had done homage to the Young King. When Henry II recovered from the near-fatal illness, he was almost immediately consumed by the crisis arising from the murder of Becket. A year of public sorrow and contrition led in 1172 to his formal submission to the Pope at Avranches and his public absolution, after he swore that he had neither commanded nor desired Becket’s death. In August the same year Henry the Young King was crowned again, this time with his wife Margaret alongside him, in Winchester Cathedral.
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Immediately after the reconciliation with the Church at Avranches, Henry turned his attention to the problems of Richard and John, and this was to lead to the greatest crisis of his reign. Henry had not so far paid much attention to the South during his reign, but now he decided to cut off King Louis from Spain and in the process neutralise his old enemy Count Raymond of Toulouse, who had been intriguing with Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany to become lord of Provence. An axis comprising Louis, Raymond and Frederick Barbarossa was an alarming idea, so Henry acted decisively to nip this inchoate development in the bud. He began by neutralising Louis and Raymond’s endeavours south of the Pyrenees by betrothing his daughter Eleanor to King Alfonso II of Castile. Then he sought a marriage for his son John with the daughter of Count Humbert of Maurienne, whose domains stretched from the shores of Lake Geneva to Turin, including all the Alpine passes between. The count, aware of his strategic position but desperately short of cash, agreed to a dowry of 5,000 marks and the recognition of John as his heir. Alarmed by this encirclement through dynastic marriage, both the king of Aragon-Barcelona and his long-term enemy Raymond of Toulouse suddenly saw the dangers of being destroyed piecemeal by the Angevin empire. Consequently, when Henry met Count Humbert at Montferrat in the Auvergne to discuss the details of John’s marriage (January 1173), both King Sancho VI of Aragon-Castile and Count Raymond thought it politic to attend. Henry secured one of his greatest diplomatic triumphs when the great lords accompanied him back to Limoges. There, in February 1173, in company with Alfonso of Castile and his rival Sancho of Navarre, he not only received Count Raymond’s homage for Toulouse but acted as ‘honest broker’ in arranging a peace treaty between Raymond and the king of Aragon.
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His brilliant diplomacy made Richard’s inheritance in Aquitaine even more secure, but there remained the problem of John. Henry had often joked that his youngest son should be called ‘Lackland’ as he lacked the vast territories his brothers commanded
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, but the joke backfired on Henry. On the journey to Limoges, Count Humbert had time to reflect on the rather one-sided marriage arrangements and asked rather pointedly what John would be contributing to the marriage. Caught off guard and on the spur of the moment, Henry incautiously said that, why, of course, John would be inheriting the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau; on the spot he signed a document assigning this trio of fortresses to John.
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It was at this point that the Young King came clearly into the historical picture in his own right, having so far played the dutiful son. The 18-year-old was the original fairy-tale prince: popular in his time he has been a favourite of romancers ever since and was the only one of the Devil’s Brood not to attract harsh criticism. To begin with, he was tall, fair and good-looking: ‘the most handsome prince in all the world, whether Saracen or Christian’.
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Looking like a northerner but with the southerner’s traditional taste for frivolity and dissipation, charismatic, affable, courteous, benign, charming, young Henry was a creature of romance in more senses than one. A devotee of tournaments, he filled his kingdoms with jousts and thus enhanced the status of knights. ‘Henry the Young King made chivalry live again, for she was dead or nearly so. He was the door by which she entered. He was her standard bearer. In those days the great did nothing for young men. He set an example and kept men of worth by his side. And when men of high degree saw how he brought together all men of worth they were amazed at his wisdom and followed his lead.’
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Yet against these undoubted advantages, the Young King had many grave faults. He was vain, shallow, irresponsible and impatient, a man who wanted the good things of life
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and was unwilling to wait. A hedonist and wastrel, permanently in debt, he was prodigal, improvident, insouciant and foolish; the notion of paying his way or balancing budgets was unknown to him. Henry had tried to train him in court politics and administration, especially after the first coronation in 1170, but the young man proved an unwilling apprentice, lazy, incompetent and empty-headed. As with most charismatic figures, he was given the benefit of the doubt, and sagacious observers, bedazzled by his charm and magnetism, put their intellectual faculties on hold and indulged in a primitive form of sun worship. Henry was bored by everything that did not involve adventure, pleasure or high excitement of all kinds. Essentially a case of arrested development, the Young King always remained a child at heart, a hopeless politician, incapable of thinking things through or calculating several moves in advance like his father, unable to concentrate on anything serious. Like many weak men he took advice from the last person he had spoken to and then changed his mind as successive opinions were delivered.
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It is clear that, at least when his son was a youth, Henry II idolised the young man. His desire to decentralise his empire was sound but his understanding of human nature was poor for, by dividing his domains and setting up his sons as rivals to his power, even ordering his vassals to do homage to them, he was putting irresistible temptations in front of them; some writers have suggested that he committed the classic King Lear mistake. But the Young King did not lack malicious advisers who urged him to assert himself against his father. Shortly after the second coronation and before Henry II’s great conference at Limoges, where he made the incautious promise to give John the three castles, Henry the Young King had a meeting with King Louis (November 1172), who mischievously urged him to assert himself as a king in fact as well as name now that he had been crowned.
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Perhaps an even more salient influence on the Young King were the troubadours, the propagandists of chivalry itself. Throughout the Young King’s life the troubadour Bertran de Born was never far away, fanning discontent between father and son for his own reasons. ‘I would that the great men should always be quarrelling among themselves’, he wrote, in a highly revealing statement.
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Some have always seen Bertran de Born as the evil genius behind the Young King. The classic medieval statement is in Dante’s vision of Hell, where the troubadour is found in the eighth circle, walking with his head in his hand, swinging it by the hair as if it were a lantern. Dante puts the following words into his mouth: ‘I am Bertran de Born, he that gave to the Young King the ill encouragement. I made father and son rebellious to each other. Achithophel did not more with Absalom and David by his wicked goadings. Because I divided persons so united, I bear my brain, alas!, divided from its source which is in this trunk.’
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But the influence of the troubadours, real or alleged (and it probably was real), cannot alone explain the scope and extent of the Young King’s discontents. Young Henry had about him in his own dissolute court his own version of the young Prince Henry V’s Poins, Pistol, Bardolph, Peto and Falstaff; in this as in other ways the relationship of Henry II and his son uncannily pre-echoes that of Henry IV and Henry V, and all the evidence suggests that these ‘irregular humorists’ constantly stirred the pot about their master’s political impotence. It angered the Young King that his father would give him no real power and that when he gave an order to his father’s agents and officials in England, it was habitually disregarded. He was supposed to be the crowned king of England and had received the homages of Normandy and Anjou, yet his father had assigned no lands whose revenue would allow him and his queen to live in the proper state. His father chose the members of his household and had even had the ‘impertinence’ to dimiss one of them.
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His explicit demand for his inheritance had been brushed aside as a poor joke on two occasions when he lobbied his father. Henry’s answer presumably would have been that he had tried to give his son responsibility but he had shirked it; a true king needed to be administratively competent, not just a showpiece figurehead in glittering finery. Yet the putative answer is unconvincing: Henry should have taken the measure of his son’s failings before promoting him so high so fast. Another grievance was that Henry would not allow him unlimited access to money to fund his lavish lifestyle. He had to borrow money from private sources, usually Jewish moneylenders who in this era were despised as much for the sin (so defined in canon law) of Usury as for being ‘the killers of Christ’. To make matters worse, the moneylenders regarded Henry’s son as a bad risk, since he had no real security in his lands and possessions.
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Then there was the fact that Henry and Pope Alexander had made all the decisions about the archbishopric of Canterbury without consulting him. Shortly after his first coronation Henry had met Becket at a famous conference at Freteval on the borders of Touraine in France and agreed to the terms of the exiled archbishop’s return to England. Reasons of high politics and relations with the papacy were involved in Henry’s decision to seek a compromise, but one of the terms accepted was that Becket would be able to discipline the archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury who had assisted at the first coronation of the Young King. Becket’s heavy-handed excommunication of all three clerics (with the authority of a papal bull) just before he crossed the Channel was one of the precipitants towards his murder at the end of the same year, but what infuriated the Young King was that the divines who had officiated at his own coronation had now been branded ecclesiastical outlaws. Pointedly he refused to receive Becket at Windsor when the archbishop returned to England. The restoration of harmony with the Pope and the appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury in 1170-72 had likewise been carried out without any consultation with the Young King.
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But most of all the Young King enviously compared his own career unfavourably with that of his father when a young man; at seventeen Henry II had been ruling fatherless in Normandy and now the Young King was already nearly two years older than when Geoffrey of Anjou had handed over the duchy of Normandy to his son. There was the added consideration that Henry II was still only forty. How long would the Young King have to wait? Now came the last straw: the demand for the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau. This was a grotesque interference in the Young King’s domain, and was anyway a transparent ruse whereby Henry wrested back control of three key fortresses from an eldest son who had angered him both by his peremptory demands and his intrigues with King Louis. The Young King would have none of it. Not only did he not give his consent, as Count of Anjou, to the handover but he used the occasion to demand, yet again, the real transfer of some part of the lands he had supposedly inherited: it did not matter which - it could be England, Normandy or Anjou.
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And so the six-year-old John became the pretext for a mighty struggle between the two Henrys. As one historian has noted, the issue of the castles ‘stirred up a trouble which was never again to be laid wholly to rest until the child who was its as yet innocent cause had broken his father’s heart’.
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The Young King, a poor politician, showed his hand by telling his father that King Louis and the barons of Normandy and England wanted the transfer of lands. The shrewd Henry II immediately realised that this was no sudden temper tantrum by his son but part of a long-planned and deeply-plotted manoeuvre. He therefore insisted that the Young King accompany him on his progress north to Normandy. As yet, he did not realise how far the tentacles of the plot reached, so left his wife with Geoffrey and Richard at Poitiers. This was despite a warning from the two-faced Raymond of Toulouse - who had been stirring the pot with Richard and Eleanor - that his entire family was ranged against him: ‘I advise you, King, to beware of your wife and sons.’ A conspiracy of such dimensions seemed incredible, so Henry concentrated on the Young King, virtually dragging him and his entourage with him as far as Chinon. There, on 5 March 1173, the Young King bribed the castle guards to lower the drawbridge, allowing him and his followers to decamp by night. There followed a long and breathless pursuit across what is now north-west France, across the Loire, towards Normandy, through Le Mans, Alençon and Argentan. But it was all in vain: on 8 March the Young King crossed the French border and headed for Paris. Henry II sent a deputation of bishops across the frontier to demand his son’s return. In a famous scene, King Louis asked the envoys who had sent them on such a bizarre errand. They replied that it was the king of England who sent them. ‘What nonsense,’ Louis replied, ‘the king of England is here. His father may still pose as king, but that will soon be over, for all the world knows he has resigned his kingdom to his son.’
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