The Plantagenets (3 page)

Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, English pre-eminence dissolved. Part VII charts just how rapidly fortune’s wheel – a favourite medieval metaphor for the vicissitudes of life – could turn. After 1360 Edward’s reign began to decay, and by the accession of his grandson Richard II in 1377 a crisis of rule had begun to emerge. Richard inherited many very serious problems. The Black Death, which ravaged Europe’s population in wave after wave of pestilence from the middle of the fourteenth century, had turned England’s economic order upside down. Divisions among the old king’s sons led to fractured foreign policy, while France, revived under Charles V and Charles VI, began to push the English back once more towards the Channel. But if Richard was dealt a bad hand, he played it diabolically. Plantagenet kingship and the royal court imported trappings of magnificence; the first great medieval English writers – Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower and William Langland – set to work. But Richard was a suspicious, greedy, violent and spiteful king, who alienated some of the greatest men in his kingdom. By 1399, the realm had tired of him and he was deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke.

That is where this book ends. It would be perfectly possible, in theory, to have carried on. Direct descendants of Edward III continued to rule England until 1485, when Henry Tudor took the throne from Richard III at Bosworth. Indeed, the name ‘Plantagenet’ first came into royal use during the Wars of the Roses, when in 1460 the Parliament Rolls record ‘Richard Plantaginet, commonly called Duc of York’ claiming to be king of England. Thereafter, Edward IV and Richard III awarded the surname to some of their illegitimate children – a nod to royalty outside the official family tree, whose use denoted a connection to an ancient and legendary royal bloodline stretching back to time almost out of mind.

I have defined England’s Plantagenet years as being between the dates 1254 and 1400 for three reasons.

First, this was the only period of the English Middle Ages in which the Crown passed with general certainty from one generation to the next without any serious succession disputes or wars of dynastic legitimacy. With the exceptions of Arthur of Brittany and Prince Louis of France, who made hopeful but ultimately fruitless claims at the beginning and end of King John’s torrid reign, there were no rival claimants to the English Crown during the Plantagenet years. The same cannot be said either for the Norman period that ended with King Stephen’s reign, or the century following Richard II’s deposition, when the Plantagenet dynasty split into its two cadet branches of Lancaster and York.

Second, I have chosen to write about the period 1254–1399 simply because it seems to me that this is one of the most exciting, compelling periods in the Middle Ages, during which some of the greatest episodes in our nation’s history took place. And third, I have limited this story to these years for reasons of practicality. This is a long book, and could be many times longer. Dearly though I would love to take the story of the Plantagenets through to the grisly death of the dynasty under Henry Tudor, it would simply not be possible in a volume light enough to read in bed. A second part will one day complete the story.

This book has been a pleasure to write. I hope it is a pleasure to read, too. A number of people have helped me write it. Nothing would have been possible without my peerless agent Georgina Capel. I also want to thank Dr Helen Castor for her extraordinary generosity, wisdom and encouragement as we discussed almost every aspect of the book. Ben Wilson and Dr Sam Willis helped with naval matters. Richard Partington offered useful advice about Edward III. Walter Donohue, Paul Wilson and Toby Wiseman gave invaluable comments on the manuscript at different stages. Any errors are mine, of course. My editor at Harper Press, Arabella Pike, has been as patient as ever and piercing with her observations and notes on the text. Her team, including Kerry Enzor, Sophie Ezra, Steve Cox and Caroline Hotblack, have also been very helpful and tolerant. The staff at the British Library, London Library, National Archives, London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Library have been exceptionally kind, as have
the keepers, guides and staff at the innumerable castles, cathedrals and battlefields I have visited in the course of researching this journey through three centuries of European history.

Above all, however, I should like to thank Jo, Violet and Ivy Jones, who have put up with my incessant scribbling, and to whom it is only reasonable that this book is dedicated.

Dan Jones
Battersea, London
January 2012

PART I

Age of Shipwreck

(1120–1154)

It was as if Christ and his saints were asleep

–
THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE

The White Ship

The prince was drunk. So too were the crew and passengers of the ship he had borrowed. On 25 November 1120, nearly two hundred young and beautiful members of England and Normandy’s elite families were enjoying themselves aboard a magnificent white-painted longship. She had been loaned by a wealthy shipowner for a crossing from Normandy to England, and now bobbed gently to the hum of laughter in a crowded harbour at Barfleur. A 70-mile voyage lay ahead across the choppy late-autumn waters of the Channel, but with the ship moored at the edge of the busy port town, barrels of wine were rolled aboard and all were invited to indulge.

The prince was William the Aetheling. He was the only legitimate son of Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy, and Matilda of Scotland, the literate, capable queen descended from the Cerdic line of Wessex kings who had ruled England before the Norman Conquest. His first name, William, was in honour of his grandfather, William the Conqueror. His sobriquet, ‘Aetheling’, was a traditional Anglo-Saxon title for the heir to the throne. William was a privileged, sociable young man, who exuded a sense of his dual royalty and conformed to the time-honoured stereotype of the adored, spoiled, eldest son. One Norman chronicler observed William ‘dressed in silken garments stitched with gold, surrounded by a crowd of household attendants and guards, and gleaming in an almost heavenly glory’; a youth who was pandered to on all sides with ‘excessive reverence’, and was therefore prone to fits of ‘immoderate arrogance’.

William was surrounded by a large group of other noble youths. They included his half-brother and half-sister Richard of Lincoln and Matilda, countess of Perche, both bastard children from a brood of twenty-four fathered by the remarkably virile King Henry; William’s cousin Stephen of Blois, who was also a grandson of William the Conqueror; Richard, the 26-year-old earl of Chester, and his wife Maud; Geoffrey Ridel, an English judge; the prince’s tutor Othver; and numerous other cousins, friends and royal officials. Together they made up a golden generation of the Anglo-Norman nobility. It was only right that they travelled in style.

The owner of the
White Ship
was Thomas Fitzstephen. His grandfather, Airard, had contributed a longship to the Conqueror’s invasion fleet and Fitzstephen judged that carrying future kings to England was therefore in his blood. He had petitioned the king for the honour of carrying the royal party safely back from Barfleur to the south coast of England. Henry had honoured him with the passage of the prince’s party, but with duty came a warning: ‘I entrust to you my sons William and Richard, whom I love as my own life.’

William was a precious charge indeed. He was seventeen years old and already a rich and successful young man. He had been married in 1119 to Matilda, daughter of Fulk V, count of Anjou and future king of Jerusalem. It was a union designed to overturn generations of animosity between the Normans and Angevins (as the natives of Anjon were known). Following the wedding, William had accompanied King Henry around Normandy for a year, learning the art of kingship as Henry thrashed out what the chronicler William of Malmesbury described as ‘a brilliant and carefully concerted peace’ with Louis VI ‘The Fat’, the sly, porcine king of France. It was intended as an education in the highest arts of kingship, and it had been deemed effective. William had lately been described as
rex designatus
– king designate – in official documents, marking his graduation towards the position as co-king alongside his father.

The highest point of William’s young life had come just weeks before the
White Ship
prepared to sail, when he had knelt before the corpulent Louis to do homage as the new duke of Normandy. This
semi-sacred ceremony acknowledged the fact that Henry had turned over the dukedom to his son. It recognized William as one of Europe’s leading political figures, and marked, in a sense, the end of his journey to manhood.

A new wife, a new duchy, and the unstoppable ascent to kingship before him: these were good reasons to celebrate – which was precisely what the Aetheling was doing. As the thin November afternoon gave way to a clear, chilly night, the
White Ship
stayed moored in Barfleur and the wine flowed freely.

The
White Ship
was a large vessel – apparently capable of carrying several hundred passengers, along with a crew of fifty and a cargo of treasure. This must have been a considerable vessel, and the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis called it ‘excellently fitted out and ready for royal service’. It was long and deep, raised and decorated with ornate carvings at prow and stern, and driven by a large central mast and square sail, with oarholes along both sides. The rudder, or ‘steer-board’, was on the right-hand side of the vessel rather than in the centre, so the onus on the captain was to be well aware of local maritime geography: steering was blind to the port side.

A fair wind was blowing up from the south, and it promised a rapid crossing to England. The crew and passengers on William’s ship bade the king’s vessel farewell some time in the evening. They were expected to follow shortly behind, but the drinking on board the
White Ship
was entertaining enough to keep them anchored long past dark. When priests arrived to bless the vessel with holy water before its departure, they were waved away with jeers and spirited laughter.

As the party ran on, a certain amount of bragging began. The
White Ship
and her crew contained little luggage, and was equipped with fifty oarsmen. The inebriated captain boasted that his ship, with square sail billowing and oars pulling hard, was so fast that even with the disadvantage of having conceded a head start to King Henry’s ship, they could still be in England before the king.

A few on board started to worry that sailing at high speed with a well-lubricated crew was not the safest way to travel to England, and
it was with the excuse of a stomach upset that the Aetheling’s cousin Stephen of Blois excused himself from the party. He left the
White Ship
to find another vessel to take him home. A couple of others joined him, dismayed at the wild and headstrong behaviour of the royal party and crew. But despite the queasy defectors, the drunken sailors eventually saw their way to preparing the ship for departure. Around midnight on a clear night lit by a new moon, the
White Ship
weighed anchor and set off for England. ‘She [flew] swifter than the winged arrow, sweeping the rippling surface of the deep,’ wrote William of Malmesbury. But she did not fly far enough. In fact, the
White Ship
did not even make it out of Barfleur harbour.

Whether it was the effects of the celebrations on board, a simple navigational error, or the wrath of the Almighty at seeing his holy water declined, within minutes of leaving shore the
White Ship
crashed into a sharp rocky outcrop, now known as Quillebeuf, which stands, and is still visible today, at the mouth of the harbour. The collision punched a fatal hole in the wooden prow of the ship. The impact threw splintered timber into the sea. Freezing water began to pour in.

The immediate priority of all on board was to save William. As the crew attempted to bail water out of the
White Ship
, a lifeboat was put over the side. The Aetheling clambered aboard, together with a few companions and oarsmen to return him to the safety of Barfleur.

It must have been a terrifying scene: the roars of a drunken crew thrashing to bail out the stricken vessel combining with the screams of passengers hurled into the water by the violence of the impact. The fine clothes of many of the noble men and women who fell into the ocean would have grown unmanageably heavy when soaked with seawater, making it impossible to swim for safety or even to tread water. The waves would have echoed with the cries of the drowning.

As his tiny boat turned for harbour, William picked out among the panicked voices the screams of his elder half-sister Matilda. She was crying for her life – certain to drown in the cold and the blackness. The thought of it was more than the Aetheling could bear. He commanded the men on his skiff to turn back and rescue her.

It was a fatal decision. The countess was not drowning alone. As the lifeboat approached her, it was spotted by other passengers who were floundering in the icy waters. There was a mass scramble to clamber to safety aboard; the result was that the skiff, too, capsized and sank. Matilda was not saved, and neither now was William the Aetheling, duke of Normandy and king-designate of England. He disappeared beneath the waves. As the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon put it: ‘instead of wearing a crown of gold, his head was broken open by the rocks of the sea.’

Only one man survived the wreck of the
White Ship
. He was a butcher from Rouen, who had boarded the ship at Barfleur to collect payment for debts and was carried off to sea by the revellers. When the ship went down, he wrapped himself in ram-skins for warmth, and clung to wrecked timber during the night. He staggered, drenched, back to shore in the morning to tell his story. Later on, the few bodies that were ever recovered began to wash up with the tide.

The news was slow to reach England. King Henry’s ship, captained by sober men and sailed with care and attention, reached his kingdom unscathed, and the king and his household busied themselves preparing for the Christmas celebrations. When the awful word of the catastrophe in Barfleur reached the court, it was greeted with dumbstruck horror. Henry was kept in ignorance at first. Magnates and officials alike were terrified at the thought of telling the king that three of his children, including his beloved heir, were what William of Malmesbury called ‘food for the monsters of the deep’.