The Plantagenets (9 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
Henry, Matilda, Richard and Geoffrey – by Christmas 1158 Henry and Eleanor had four healthy children below the age of four. Three more children would survive to adulthood: Eleanor (b.1162), Joan (b.1165) and John (b.1167). A gap of four years, in which Henry was away from his wife, managing the further reaches of his realm, separated the two bursts of procreation.
While Eleanor devoted herself to her first long cycle of pregnancies, Henry travelled frequently about his kingdom, addressing issues of government and diplomacy whilst finding time to indulge his great passion for the hunt. As he travelled, Henry grew familiar with the best locations both for government and the chase. Very swiftly after his arrival, work began to transform the hunting lodges of Clarendon and Woodstock into full-blown palaces to match the sumptuous comfort of any in Europe.
But all the palaces in the world could not answer the pressing question of the 1150s: how could the new king heal a country so deeply damaged by civil war? England had supplied Henry Plantagenet with what the chronicler Richard of Poitiers described as ‘the honour and reverence of his royal name’. But this rich land, with its ports and towns, its hard-drinking, hard-working populace and its ancient history, needed to be rescued from the doldrums. Henry must reimpose on his new realm the royal authority enjoyed by his grandfather Henry I. It amounted effectively to a mission of reconquest.
The realm was a shambles. Under Stephen royal revenue had fallen by two thirds. Royal lands, castles and offices had been granted away, often in perpetuity. The county farm – a staple royal income collected by the sheriffs – was running dismally low. Earldoms with semi-regal powers proliferated, and in places the country was not only ungoverned but seemingly ungovernable. Relations between Church and Crown were in stalemate following a long-running feud between Stephen and Archbishop Theobald over their respective jurisdictions. Fortresses built as the Normans had conquered south Wales had fallen into the hands of barons and native rulers. The far north of England was effectively ruled by the king of the Scots.
Henry’s first task was to stamp out the few embers of rebellion. His coronation charter had quite deliberately avoided confirming any liberties or possessions that had been granted by Stephen, either to churchmen or to lay magnates. Anything granted since Henry I’s reign was therefore held to be illegitimate, unless reconfirmed by the new king. He ordered the return to the Crown of all castles, towns and lands that had been granted away under Stephen, followed by an abolition of the earldoms that Stephen had granted to his supporters. In many cases, confiscated lands were granted back to their holders, but Henry was sending a clear message: lordship now began with him, and everyone owed their position and their possessions to the Plantagenet Crown.
At the same time, directly after Christmas 1154, Henry set in motion a rapid decommissioning programme to enforce the destruction of illegal castles and the expulsion of foreign mercenaries. Hundreds of castles fell in a juddering demolition project during the course of 1155. The sound of falling timber was accompanied by a rush from the shores of Flemish soldiers, so despised by the chroniclers and ordinary people alike.
Henry had to take serious direct action only against a few of the magnates. William of Aumerle, who had cemented his position in Yorkshire so as to make it virtually untouched by royal influence, was deprived of his lands and of Scarborough castle, the towering stone stronghold that sat on a headland, dominating sea approaches and
the windswept north-east of the realm. Roger of Hereford, a Welsh Marcher lord of the sort disinclined to obey royal authority, was persuaded to surrender castles at Gloucester and Hereford by the sensible mediation of his cousin, Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford.
Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester – Stephen’s brother – chose to flee the country rather than to submit to his brother’s successor. In doing so, he forfeited to Henry six castles. The only magnate who required serious military measures to be taken against him was Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore castle, who in the late spring clung to three castles in the Midlands and forced Henry to march an army against him. Even he was allowed to keep his lands after making formal submission to Henry.
This was a lightning clean-up operation, undertaken in the spirit of reconciliation, not revenge, which owed a great deal to Henry’s earlier successful diplomacy in establishing and prosecuting the terms of the peace of Winchester. That there was so little resistance to him, and no threat of a serious rival for the throne, demonstrated the broad appeal of Henry’s strong, unified lordship. He was wielding the sword and the scales of justice like a king; moreover, he continued to procreate, quite literally sowing the seeds of future stability. But speed of reconciliation was a necessity, not a luxury. For England was only one part of the extensive Plantagenet domains.
In 1156 Henry was forced to leave England, to deal with a rebellion in Anjou led by his younger brother Geoffrey. The troublesome junior Plantagenet believed that under the terms of their father’s will, Henry’s accession as king of England ought to have triggered the handover of Anjou, Maine and the Touraine to Geoffrey, as second son. And indeed, it was quite possible that this had been the elder Geoffrey Plantagenet’s intention. There was no precedent for a single man to rule England, Normandy and Anjon as one.
Yet Henry had no intention of handing over the Plantagenet heartlands to his vexatious younger brother. Geoffrey had shown himself untrustworthy and disloyal when in 1151 he had joined forces with Louis VII and Eustace to attack Henry’s positions in Normandy. Giving Geoffrey lands that sat directly between Henry’s duchy of
Normandy and Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine would be asking for trouble. It would also damage Henry’s ambition to rule his extraordinary patchwork of territories under his own, direct, sovereignty.
But Geoffrey had to be appeased. And it was a sign of the seriousness of this rift between the brothers that on 2 February 1156 a family conference was held in Rouen under the matriarchal eye of the Empress Matilda. Henry met Geoffrey along with their youngest brother William and their aunt Sibylla countess of Flanders, to negotiate a deal. To isolate his brother diplomatically, Henry had performed homage to Louis VII for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine in late January, and had sent an embassy to the newly elected Pope Adrian IV to request release from the oath he had sworn to uphold his father’s will. He was determined to hold on to Anjou, whatever the cost.
The peacekeeping efforts came to nothing. Soon after the conference broke up, Geoffrey formally rebelled. The quarrel was resolved only later in the year when the people of Nantes and lower Brittany elected Geoffrey as their new count. It was a stroke of luck that found Geoffrey a rich new territory to call his own and doused his disappointment at being, as he saw it, disinherited by his newly elevated elder brother.
A delighted Henry vouched for Geoffrey’s election to this strategically useful new position. He paid off his brother’s claim to a Plantagenet inheritance with the gift of a single border castle – Loudon – and a cash pension. This was an acceptable price to pay for quashing a distracting rift. Moreover, Geoffrey’s new position in Nantes extended the Plantagenet family enterprise further downstream along the Loire, and closer to the Breton seaboard – virtually the only piece of French coastline they did not already control.
This appeased Geoffrey until he rather conveniently died in 1158. But it also showed that, for all his brilliance in pacifying his new kingdom, Henry would have to work with the unceasing effort of an Alexander or a Charlemagne if he wished to keep his vast continental possessions from breaking apart.
The 1150s were a glorious decade for Henry. From a position of relative insignificance and general insecurity in 1151, he had extended his lordship far and wide. The progress was relentless and impressive. In 1155 Pope Adrian IV (the only Englishman ever to boast that title) gave Henry a blessing to expand his power in Ireland, when he granted the papal bull
Laudabiliter
, exhorting Henry to reform the Irish Church. Henry did not act on
Laudabiliter
straight away, but a principle had been established. In 1157 Henry took the homage of Malcolm IV of Scotland at Peveril castle, regaining the northern counties of England that had been usurped during the civil war, and exchanging them for the earldom of Huntingdon, which was a traditional Scottish honour. The same year, Henry drove his influence into Wales, aiming to re-establish the dominant position in the south that had been established by his Norman ancestors. He was almost killed during an ambush in Ewloe Wood, near Flint, during one of the major military exercises of the campaign, and found the warlike, master-guerrilla Welsh as fierce an enemy as every one of his predecessors had. But the two great Welsh princes Owain of Gwynedd and Rhys ap Gruffydd of Deheubarth were persuaded to submit in the face of a massive show of military strength. This in turn freed Henry in 1158 to use the threat of military force to claim the county of Nantes, thus expanding his direct power into the duchy of Brittany. And in the same year, he betrothed his eldest son Henry to Louis VII’s daughter Margaret, with the Norman Vexin – a tiny but strategically vital portion of the borderlands between the Île de France and
Normandy – given as a dowry to be delivered on the celebration of the marriage.
Piece by piece, and front by front, Henry was proving to all the princes and kings with whom he rubbed shoulders that the Plantagenets were a power to reckon with. Already, as the 1150s drew to a close, Henry was the master of more territory than any of his ancestors could ever have dreamed of. And yet he was ever driven by ambition. The world, it seemed, was not enough.
Thus, in midsummer 1159, in the season when the sun beat mercilessly down upon the southern valleys of France, a gigantic army rumbled towards the city of Toulouse. Inside the walls, 35,000 souls quaked with fear as they listened to the tread of foot soldiers, the thud and creak of warhorses and wagons, the blare of trumpets and drums, and the monstrous drag of siege engines. As the army marched, it wreaked destruction. Cahors, Auvillars and Villemur were ransacked and torched. Crops were burned, and property plundered. The whole region of Toulouse contemplated a new scouge of the west. ‘Henry the second … terrifies not only the Provençals as far as the Rhône and the Alps,’ wrote the author and diplomat John of Salisbury. ‘[He] also strikes at the princes of Spain and Gaul through the fortresses he has destroyed and the peoples he has subdued.’
The army with which Henry II crossed southern France in June 1159 was the largest he would ever raise. The cost in England for mercenaries exceeded £9,000: more than the previous year’s entire royal income. The poet Stephen of Rouen wrote that Henry came with ‘iron, missiles and machines’, while the Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni called it ‘the military force of the whole of Normandy, England, Aquitaine and the other provinces which were subject to him’. There was no doubt as to his purpose. Henry came in conquest: to take Toulouse from its ruler, Count Raymond V, and add it to the duchy of Aquitaine. ‘The king was claiming the inheritance of his wife Queen Eleanor,’ wrote Torigni, laconically. But Henry was doing more than that. He was engaged in a wide-reaching campaign to assert his rights as overlord to a vast expanse of territory that stretched from the foothills of Scotland to the Pyrenees.
The army included many great nobles. His recently reconciled neighbour Malcolm IV of Scotland sailed south with a flotilla, joining Henry’s army at Poitiers. Southern lords including Raymond-Berengar IV, count of Barcelona, and Raymond Trencavel, lord of Béziers and Carcassonne, joined in too, gleeful at the prospect of harassing a neighbour. And somewhere in the middle rode the churchman who had organized the campaign: Thomas Becket, chancellor of England and archdeacon of Canterbury, wearing helmet and hauberk, his armour gleaming in the sun. Becket had command of what is said to have been a personal troop of seven hundred knights. This figure is almost certainly an exaggeration; even so, we can be sure that Becket mustered a strong military force, particularly for a cleric.
The siege of Toulouse lasted from June to September 1159 and represented the height of Henry II’s ambitions in Europe during the early years of his reign. Henry had expended considerable time and effort reforming and securing the vast territories he had accumulated between 1149 and 1154. But he had no intention of making do with his lot. Toulouse marked the logical conclusion of a policy that he developed following the pacification of England. Viewed from the distance of centuries Henry’s tactics resemble imperial expansion: he used armies, quite often massive armies, to encroach on territory on the fringes of his already extensive borders to become not merely a king and a duke, but an emperor.
In reality, his policy was more pragmatic. Henry aimed, in simple terms, to pursue all his rights, in all his capacities, at all times. There were occasions when he used military means, and others when he used diplomacy. He drove hard to have his lordship recognized wherever he could do so, tidying up all the fraying parts of his huge network of territories by waging wars against the fringes. Toulouse was just another border region, in which his authority was challenged. He was not so much leading a war of conquest as of recognition.
Toulouse, however, was a famously tough nut to crack. Eleanor of Aquitaine held a rather tortuous claim to the county via her paternal grandmother, Philippa, who had been passed over for inheritance in the 1090s. In 1141 her first husband Louis VII had attempted to
invade in much the same manner as Henry did in 1159, but had been repulsed. That did not discourage Henry II. He had a decent claim, the wherewithal to raise a large army, and the political momentum gained from success against the Welsh and the Bretons. Both had been overawed by his ability to raise large armies. As he turned to Toulouse, Henry simply ratcheted up the same policy.