The Plantagenets (14 page)

‘The king of England,’ came the reply.

Not so, retorted Louis, looking at the younger Henry. ‘The king of England is here.’

War had been joined, and both sides prepared for a long fight. Louis VII and the Plantagenet boys attracted a wide coalition of the disgruntled to join them, many enticed by ridiculous promises of enrichment from Henry the Young King’s realms once they had been secured. Puffed up with pride when Louis had a special seal cut for him, young Henry set about using it. The whole county of Kent was signed away, along with important territories in Mortain and Touraine and thousands of pounds of revenue. With such gifts on offer Philip count of Flanders, Matthew count of Boulogne, and Theobald count of Blois all joined up enthusiastically.

In England, they were joined by Robert earl of Leicester, son of the elder Robert who had served Henry II loyally as joint-justiciar until his death a few years previously. Several northern earls and the bishop of Durham also joined the revolt, as did Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. Finally, the rebels recruited William the Lion, the king of Scotland, who had succeeded his father in 1165 – a man so hated by Henry II that the very mention of his name in a pleasant light was said once to have sent Henry into spasms of rage, in which he thrashed about on the floor of his bedchamber, eating the straw from his mattress. William was promised all the lands that his predecessor Malcolm IV had held in England during the Anarchy.

These gifts of land and sovereignty show how callow the eighteen-year-old Young King was, and how limited his real understanding of kingship. Throughout the Great War that raged during the following eighteen months, Henry the Young King served mainly as a puppet for Louis VII and those allies who wished to erode Plantagenet power wherever they could.

The first stage of the war took place during the summer of 1173. In May the allies attacked towns in the Vexin, without success. In June and July they had greater success, capturing Aumale and Driencourt – but at the latter Matthew of Boulogne was hit by an arrow fired from the castle walls and killed. In July, Louis and Henry the Younger besieged Verneuil, but the siege held out for long enough for Henry II
to arrive in relief. The allied troops fled and Henry’s men slaughtered their rearguard as they gave chase.

Meanwhile, in late June, William the Lion and the Scots attacked Northumbria. It was not an impressive campaign. They failed or declined to capture the castles at Wark or Warkworth, ravaged the area around Newcastle-upon-Tyne without consequence and engaged in a huge and bloody melee before the vast stone walls of Carlisle. The loyalist forces were led by the castellan Robert de Vaux. They fought with valour and courage, and seized provisions and booty from the Scots, which allowed them to withstand the subsequent siege. When news reached the Scots that a loyal army was approaching from the south under the justiciar Richard de Lucy, they melted away to cause minor nuisance elsewhere in the border region.

The rebel strategy during 1173 was elementary and unsuccessful. They tried to open multiple fronts, dragging Henry II around and hitting him hardest when he was absent. Yet this played to Henry’s greatest strength: moving at pace around his dominions, acting decisively, and deploying mercenaries with pinpoint accuracy to break resistance. He moved his troops around on punishing forced marches – at one point apparently crossing Normandy from Rouen to Dol in two days. He packed his armies with fearsome Brabanter mercenaries: costly but highly skilled, mobile and vicious. Henry wrote that he favoured them for their skills in battle, fearlessness on the attack, and ferocity exceeding that of wild beasts.

Henry’s energetic tactics not only cowed his less resolute enemies; they also exposed the French king as a bad general and a dreary, listless leader. This was quickly obvious, and Henry did his best to exploit it, offering his sons generous terms to lay down their arms during peace talks at Gisors. But the talks were soon abandoned when Robert earl of Leicester, who had joined forces with the rebels, created a scene, drawing his sword and shouting obscenities at Henry. Clearly, the king still had enough militant opponents across his vast domains for war to extend through the summer.

As war continued on multiple fronts, Henry benefited from having highly competent subordinates across his lands. The very nature of
his lordship was to establish each of his territories under the administration of talented men who could operate the machinery of government in his absence. Unlike his sons and their allies, he had no need to bribe men to stick by his cause. Men like Richard de Lucy, the justiciar of England, supported their king primarily through loyalty and the bonds of service. Despite everything that had gone before, the Church supported him too.

In September, the focus of war moved to England, where the earl of Leicester and another rebel baron, Hugh Bigod, hired bands of Flemish weavers-turned-mercenaries and attempted to ravage England. They landed in Framlingham and attempted to move north-west through East Anglia towards the Midlands. As the hired soldiers tramped through the countryside, the flat, chilly plains rang with their battle songs.

No one who remembered the dark days of the Anarchy can have been pleased to see Flemings back in England. At Dunwich women and children hurled rocks at the rebel army. Henry’s justiciar Richard de Lucy gathered a great deal of support from the English magnates, though it was said that they were still outnumbered four to one when battle was joined in the marshland at Fornham, near Bury St Edmunds. But the loyalists won a resounding victory, scattering the earl’s knights and leaving the mercenaries to be attacked by local people. Many of them drowned in the fenland bogs.

The winter, which was no season for medieval warfare, brought the customary truces. But when spring broke in 1174, war resumed. Now it was England where the situation grew perilous. William the Lion had regrouped during the winter and his forces were swelling. The loyalists suffered a series of defeats at Northampton, Nottingham and Leicester, while the situation in Northumbria was uncertain. To cap it all, Philip of Flanders had sworn on a holy relic that he would undertake a full-scale invasion of England before early July 1174. After repeated pleas from the English magnates, Henry left his continental lands and sailed for England.

Henry put to sea in July 1174 at Barfleur, with a vast army of Brabanter mercenaries and the women and children of his immediate family: the Young King’s wife Queen Margaret, and his younger
children Joanna and John. He also took with him a number of captives, including his own wife.

Conditions at sea were wild, with a rough wind and violent waves. When his sailors expressed concern, Henry stood before his entire crew and told them that if God wished him to be restored to his kingdom, He would deliver them safely to port. He did.

God’s will was at the top of Henry’s mind. He arrived in Southampton with one object before he engaged in battle. It was perhaps the masterstroke of his entire campaign. Rather than head directly for East Anglia, where Philip of Flanders had landed and was mustering his forces, Henry made for Canterbury.

Henry could be a stubborn man, but he was usually sensitive to others’ perception of him. He knew that many people thought the Lord had rained rebellion and discord upon him in revenge for Becket’s death. He also realized that while the cause of rebellion was tangled up with the cause of the blessed martyr Thomas there could be no hope of peace.

Three days after his landing, Henry arrived in Canterbury determined to put on a show. Ralph de Diceto described the scene:

When he reached Canterbury he leaped off his horse and, putting aside his royal dignity, he assumed the appearance of a pilgrim, a penitent, a supplicant, and on Friday 12 July, went to the cathedral. There, with streaming tears, groans and sighs, he made his way to the glorious martyr’s tomb. Prostrating himself with his arms outstretched, he remained there a long time in prayer.

With the bishop of London looking on, Henry protested with God as his witness that he had not intended Becket’s death, but acknowledged that by his rash words he had inadvertently caused it. Diceto continued:

He asked for absolution from the bishops then present, and subjected his flesh to harsh discipline from cuts with rods, receiving three or even five strokes from each of the monks in turn, of whom a large
number had gathered … He spent the rest of the day and also the whole of the following night in bitterness of soul, given over to prayer and sleeplessness, and continuing his fast for three days … There is no doubt that he had by now placated the martyr …

Indeed he had. With this extraordinary show of public penance Henry had won the most important propaganda battle of the war. The chronicles buzzed with reports of this great king prostrate, half-naked and bleeding as he was whipped in the harshest manner.

And as Diceto wrote, God and the martyr were listening. Far away from Canterbury, on the morning after King Henry’s penance, William the Lion was resting, his helmet by his side as he ate breakfast. The Scottish king had renewed his attacks from the previous year on the northern castles he had been promised in return for his complicity in the rebellion. The castle of Wark had withstood fierce blows with picks and siege-irons, an assault with catapults and an attempt to burn it down. The Lion had sent forces against Carlisle and Prudhoe, also without success. As he breakfasted he contemplated his next move: an attack on the formidable polygonal shell of the castle at Alnwick.

Then, disaster struck. A band of Yorkshire knights who had been tracking the Scots from Prudhoe to Alnwick launched a surprise attack. A fierce battle broke out in which all of the Scottish knights were either killed or captured. William the Lion was among those taken prisoner.

It was late at night, and Henry was in bed at Canterbury when the news of William’s capture at Alnwick reached him, brought by an exhausted messenger who had flogged his horses non-stop from the north to be first with the news. Brimming with joy, the king leapt out of his bed and roused all his barons to tell them the incredible news, thanking God and the martyr Thomas for his good fortune. With one fortuitous event, the heart was ripped out of the rebellion.

With only the slightest military effort, Henry now consolidated his power in England, vanquishing his enemies in the Midlands and East Anglia. Those who were not subdued by force had surrendered
to the old king by the end of July. On 8 August 1174, Henry was back in Barfleur. He had been away from the Continent for less than a month.

During that time Louis, Henry the Young King and Philip of Flanders had broken into Norman territory and besieged Rouen. It had been Henry’s chief gamble that he would be able to smash his way to a rapid victory in England before the citizens of Rouen gave in. The gamble had been rewarded. Now, confident of victory, he gathered another force, containing fierce Welsh mercenaries as well as his trusted Brabanters. The French soon dropped their siege. Shortly afterwards Louis VII sued for peace.

The Great War had been won. ‘Peace was restored after the kingdom’s shipwreck,’ wrote Henry’s treasurer, Richard FitzNigel. ‘The most powerful men who conspired … learned that it is difficult or impossible to snatch the club from the hand of Hercules.’ Henry’s skill and good fortune as a general had allowed him to outflank the inferior French king and his own callow sons. He had survived the betrayal of his wife Eleanor, who was now locked away in an English castle. He could afford to be merciful to his sons when they made peace at Montlouis in 1174.

Having demonstrated his mastery at Moutlouis, Henry allowed that everyone who had rebelled might have their lands and possessions back in the same state as a fortnight before the rebellion began. He endowed each of his sons with castles or revenue – although not the power that they craved, for Henry lived in justifiable fear of dispersing his landed power before his death. The Young King received two castles in Normandy and £15,000 of revenue from Anjou in return for confirming the wedding grants of border castles that had been made to John. Richard received two mansions in Poitou and half its annual revenues. Geoffrey received half of Brittany’s annual revenues, and arrangements were made to formalize his marriage to Constance, the heiress to the duchy. Having given all this, Henry forbade his sons to ask for any more than he should choose to give them, then sent Richard and Geoffrey off to Poitou and Brittany to stamp out the embers of the rebellion they had stirred up.

Henry reserved his real wrath for the older heads among the rebels. It was his wife who most appalled him. Eleanor had abused her position overseeing Richard’s fledgling regency in Aquitaine. She had stirred her three eldest sons to rebellion with the same callousness as had her former husband in Paris. And she had rebelled against her sex and status. Henry kept Eleanor in prison at Chinon castle for several months after the rebellion ended. Then, as the summer heat baked the thick stone walls in July, she was removed, transported across the country in the company of Henry’s two rebellious English earls (Leicester and Chester) and sent to Salisbury castle in England. She was kept in courteous imprisonment, or palace arrest, in various southern English castles for the remainder of Henry’s reign. She made a few appearances at court as the years passed, but she was never again trusted by Henry II, who briefly attempted to secure papal approval for a divorce. This came to nothing, and Eleanor remained an exile from the duchy she loved: a punishment that smacked of carefully thought-out cruelty.

The last significant rebel with whom Henry had to deal was William the Lion. If Eleanor received the most psychologically cruel treatment for her part in the rebellion, then William was punished with the harshest political terms. On 1 December 1174 he was forced to agree to the Treaty of Falaise. Sealed at York, this made William a personal liegeman of both Henry II and Henry the Young King, confiscated castles and ordered the forced allegiance of the Scottish barons, bishops and clergy to the English Crown and Church. The Scottish Crown was thus subordinated to England’s, its dignity formally crushed.