The Plantagenets (2 page)

FRENCH KINGS, 1060–1422

H
OUSE OF
C
APET

H
OUSE OF
V
ALOIS

PREFACE

Who were the Plantagenets? The name was not used by any of the characters in this book to describe themselves, with the exception of one: Geoffrey, count of Anjou, a handsome, belligerent, red-headed young man born in 1113, who wore a sprig of yellow broom blossom in his hat and decorated his shield with lions. It was from the Latin name (
planta genista
) of the broom that the name Plantagenet derived, while lions passant guardant would become the heraldic symbol of English kingship, carried before vast armies who took to the field everywhere from the chilly Lowlands of Scotland to the dusty plains of the Middle East. There is some irony here: Geoffrey never visited England, took scant direct interest in the affairs of the realm and died in 1151, three years before his eldest son inherited the English Crown.

Nevertheless, Plantagenet is a powerful name. The kings who descended from Geoffrey ruled England for more than two centuries, beginning with Henry II, who inherited the Crown in 1154, and ending with Richard II, who was relieved of it by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. They were the longest-reigning English royal dynasty, and during their times were founded some of the most basic elements of what we today know as England. The realm’s borders were established. Her relationships with her neighbours – principally Scotland, Wales, France and Ireland, but also the Low Countries, the papacy and the Iberian states that would eventually become Spain – were established. Principles of law and institutions of government that have endured to this day were created in their essential forms
– some deliberately, others by either accident or under duress. A rich mythology of national history and legend was concocted, and the cults of two national saints – Edward the Confessor and St George – were established. The English tongue rose from an uncultured, rather coarse local dialect to become the language of parliamentary debate and poetic composition. Great castles, palaces, cathedrals and monuments were raised, many of which still stand as testament to the genius of the men who conceived them, built them, and defended them against attack. Heroes were born, died and became legends; so too were villains whose names still echo through the pages of history. (Some of those villains wore the crown.) Several of the most famous and dramatic battles in European history were fought, at Bouvines and Bannockburn, Sluys and Winchelsea, Crécy and Poitiers. Military tactics were revolutionized between a Norman age in which warfare was the art of siegecraft, and the dawn of the fifteenth century, during which pitched battles were commonplace and the English – with their brave men-at-arms and deadly mounted archers – were the scourge of Europe. Likewise, by the end of the Plantagenet years the English had begun to explore art of war on the open seas. Naval tactics lagged some way behind tactics in the field, but by the middle of the fourteenth century something resembling an English navy could be deployed to protect the coasts and attack enemy shipping. It is undeniable that during the Plantagenet years many acts of savagery, butchery, cruelty and stupidity were committed, but by 1399, where this book ends, the chilly island realm which had been conquered by William, the bastard of Normandy, in 1066 had been transformed into one of the most sophisticated and important kingdoms in Christendom. At its heart lay the power and prestige of the royal family.

That is the process described in this book; but this is also a book written to entertain. It is a narrative history, and it tells some of the great stories of England which took place between the sinking of the
White Ship
in 1120 and the solemn deposition of Richard II in 1399. They include the great civil war between Stephen and Matilda; the murder of Thomas Becket by Henry II’s knights; the Great War of
1173–4; Richard I’s wars against Saladin on the Third Crusade; the Barons’ War against King John and the agreement of Magna Carta; Henry III’s hapless attempts to deal with the barons of a later age including his brother-in-law and nemesis Simon de Montfort; Edward I’s campaigns in Wales and Scotland; Edward II’s peculiar romance with Piers Gaveston and his dismal abdication in 1327; Edward III’s provocation of the Hundred Years War, in which he fought alongside his son the Black Prince and captured the king of France, and the subsequent institution of the Order of the Garter to celebrate England’s new martial supremacy; the fierce mortality inflicted on Europe by the Black Death; Richard II’s heroism against Wat Tyler’s rebels during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which was followed by Richard’s tyranny and his final fall, deposed by Bolingbroke. These stories are exciting in their own right; they are also part of an English historical canon that still, even in the cultural chaos of the twenty-first century, defines England as a nation and as a people. The Plantagenet kings did not just invent England as a political, administrative and military entity. They also helped to invent the
idea
of England – an idea that has as much importance today as it ever has before.

This is a long book, and it could have been longer still. For ease of reading I have divided the text into seven sections. Part I, ‘Age of Shipwreck’, illustrates the dismal state to which England had sunk by the end of its period of Norman rule, which began under William the Conqueror and continued during the reigns of two of his sons, William Rufus and Henry I. After the death of the latter, a vicious and paralysing civil war engulfed England and Normandy. It was fought between rival claimants, the Conqueror’s grandson King Stephen and his granddaughter the Empress Matilda, and it took nearly two decades to resolve it in favour of the latter. During that time England was effectively partitioned between two courts and two competing governments, leaving public authority splintered and the countryside a smouldering ruin, infested with mercenaries. Only with the accession of Matilda’s son – her eldest child by Geoffrey Plantagenet, a dishevelled, quick-tempered but brilliant boy known as Henry FitzEmpress – was the realm reunited and restored to good
governance. Henry FitzEmpress became Henry II, and through a combination of some good fortune, immense personal energy and a great deal of military capability and hard-headed purpose, Henry set about establishing himself, and by association the English Crown, as the master of a patchwork of territories reaching from the borders of Scotland to the foothills of the Pyrenees.

The story of Henry II’s rule over his vast dominions, and their gradual, if unintended coherence into a form of empire is the subject of Part II, ‘Age of Empire’. It charts Henry’s astonishing conquests, his catastrophic dispute with his one-time best friend Archbishop Thomas Becket and the king’s struggles with his feckless children and extraordinary wife Eleanor of Aquitaine, which some contemporaries believed were divine punishment for Becket’s death. ‘Age of Empire’ also explores Henry’s revolutionary reforms of English law, justice and bureaucracy – reforms that gave England legal processes and principles of government that endured for centuries.

Despite the feats and achievements of his astonishing reign, Henry II is one of the lesser-known Plantagenet kings. Not so his third son Richard I, ‘the Lionheart’ who inherited the Plantagenet empire in 1189, during the white heat of Europe’s most enthusiastic crusading years. Richard – who spent a surprisingly small amount of time in England given the heroic status he achieved there within decades of his death – devoted his life to defending and expanding the horizons of Plantagenet power. This led him to conquests as far afield as Sicily, Cyprus and the kingdom of Jerusalem during the Third Crusade, before he returned, via an expensive imprisonment in Germany, to fight for his inheritance against the French king Philip II ‘Augustus’. ‘Age of Empire’ ends in 1204 when Richard’s brother, King John, suffered a humiliating defeat to Philip, lost the duchy of Normandy and disgraced his family’s military legacy in a reign that would influence relations between England and France for almost 150 years.

The repercussions of John’s military failure are explored in Part III, ‘Age of Opposition’. After the loss of Normandy, the kings of England were forced to live permanently in England: a state of affairs that brought John rapidly into conflict with his barons, churchmen and
Celtic neighbours. ‘Age of Opposition’ begins during the dark days of John’s reign, during which military successes against Wales, Scotland and Ireland were clouded by the unusual cruelty of a defective king. John’s use and misuse of the sophisticated system of government bequeathed him by his father, Henry II, provoked one of the greatest constitutional crises in English history. In 1215 England collapsed into a long civil war, at the heart of which lay a question: how could a realm discipline a tyrannical king? It was a question that a failed peace treaty known as Magna Carta sought unsuccessfully to answer. But Magna Carta expressed some important principles of English government, and the great charter subsequently became a rallying cry to opponents of the Crown during the reign of John’s son Henry III and the early career of his grandson Edward I. It was Magna Carta to which all opponents of the Crown would turn at moments of crisis for the rest of the thirteenth century. Chief among these opponents was a man called Simon de Montfort. Henry III and Edward’s wars with de Montfort eventually brought the ‘Age of Opposition’ to a close.

Part IV begins in 1260, towards the end of the long period of intermittent civil war between Plantagenet kings and their barons. The royal hero of this time was Edward I, a tall and relentless king who was said to be so fierce that he once literally scared a man to death. Under Edward’s belligerent leadership, the English were finally induced to cease fighting one another and turn their attentions on their neighbours: Scotland and Wales. Edward I’s brutal attempts to become the master not only of England but the whole of Britain are the subject of ‘Age of Arthur’. The popularity of Arthurian tales and relic-hunting increased as a new mythology of English kingship was explored. Edward cast himself as the inheritor of Arthur (originally a legendary Welsh king) who sought to reunite the British Isles and usher in a great new age of royal rule. Despite flurries of outrage from his barons, who began to organize political opposition through the nascent political body known as parliament, Edward very nearly succeeded in his goals, and his influence over England’s relations with Scotland and Wales has never entirely waned.

Edward I was undoubtedly one of the great, if not one of the more personally endearing Plantagenets. His son, Edward II, was the worst of them on every score. In Part V, ‘Age of Violence’, this book examines the desperate tale of a king who failed completely to comprehend any of the basic obligations of kingship, and whose reign dissolved into a ghastly farce of failure in foreign policy, complete isolation of the political community and murderous civil war. Edward’s disastrous relationships with his favourites Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger wreaked havoc on English politics, as did the brutish behaviour of Edward’s cousin Thomas, earl of Lancaster, who waged uncompromising war on the king until the earl was executed in 1322. Through Lancaster’s belligerence and Edward’s inadequacy, kingship was debased, degraded and finally attacked by the king’s own subjects; the pages of English history between 1307 and 1330 become stained with blood. Part V aims to explain how this came to be so – and how the ‘Age of Violence’ was eventually brought to an end.

The greatest of all the Plantagenet kings was Edward III. Edward inherited the throne as a teenage puppet king under his mother and her lover Roger Mortimer, who were responsible for the removal of Edward II. He soon shook off their influence, and the next three, triumphant decades of his reign are described in Part VI, ‘Age of Glory’. In these years, the Plantagenets expanded in every sense. Under the accomplished generalship of Edward, his son the Black Prince and his cousin Henry Grosmont, England pulverized France, and Scotland (as well as other enemies, including Castile), in the opening phases of the Hundred Years War. Victories on land at Halidon Hill (1333), Crécy (1346), Calais (1347), Poitiers (1356) and Najera (1367) established the English war machine – built around the power of the deadly longbow – as Europe’s fiercest. Success at sea at Sluys (1340) and Winchelsea (1350) also gave the Plantagenets confidence in the uncertain arena of warfare on water. Besides restoring the military power of the English kings, Edward and his sons deliberately encouraged a national mythology that interwove Arthurian legend, a new cult of St George and a revival of the code of knightly chivalry in the Order of the Garter. They created a culture that bonded England’s aristocracy
together in the common purpose of war. By 1360, Plantagenet kingship had reached its apotheosis. Political harmony at home was matched by dominance abroad. A new period of greatness beckoned.