Bringing Them Up Royal: How the Royals Raised their Children from 1066 to the Present Day

by David Cohen

  Eleanor took her beloved Richard to her native France when he was twelve. There, he witnessed a peculiar and, in some ways, peculiarly charming medieval institution. His mother created the ‘Court of Love’ in Poitiers and presided over this philosophical fancy with Marie of Champagne, one of her daughters by her first marriage. A contemporary book – The Art of Courtly Love – described how royal ladies would listen to lovers’ quarrels and decide on questions of romance; altogether it recorded twenty-one cases in detail, including one that raised the perennial question of whether true love could exist in marriage. The married mother and married daughter did not think so.

  In Poitiers, Richard grew up highly aware of the rules of chivalry. One of the oddities of the code was that knights had to obey their lord, but not necessarily their father. The events of the next few years would show that, just as medieval kings could betray their sons, princes could betray their fathers too.

  Perhaps because of the confusions of the Civil War, Henry II tried to do something no other English king has done. He made his eldest son, who was known as Henry the Younger, joint king. By 1170, Henry II ruled England and a third of France as well as Ireland. It was not so strange to give his eldest son serious responsibilities but the scheme caused trouble for a variety of reasons. Kings never find it easy to give up power and, after eighteen years, the marriage of Eleanor and Henry had turned sour and the son wanted more power than his father would allow him to wield.

  In 1171, his mother took fourteen-year-old Richard on a journey through Aquitaine in an attempt to placate troublesome local lords. The teenage Prince cut an imposing figure in the Middle Ages as he was 6ft 5in. tall – a veritable giant, given the average height at the time. Eleanor was proud that her son was brave and politically shrewd, given his youth.

  Richard joined his brothers, Henry and Geoffrey, in a revolt against their father in 1173, when Henry the Younger finally tired of the limits his father imposed on his authority. There was also the sore of Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. Some medieval chroniclers suggest that Henry the Younger found it hard to forgive his father for having had a man who often acted as his foster father killed. Richard’s motives were simpler: he was furious that his father had abandoned his mother for a younger woman, Rosamund Clifford. He decided to avenge Eleanor and, according to the historian Jean Flori, she was only too ready to see her sons revolt against their father. The family battle now took a turn that echoes tensions and ploys in stepfamilies today. Eleanor’s first husband, Louis VII, backed her three sons by her second husband in the war against their father. Louis even knighted Richard personally, which under the rules of chivalry obliged Richard to be loyal to him, rather than to his biological father.

  Luck then favoured the older Henry. Some of his soldiers captured Eleanor and Henry put his wife under arrest. Richard was left to lead his campaign against his father on his own. Then the two old and wily Kings, Henry II and Louis VII, agreed a truce in September 1174, which left Richard in a difficult position. Louis had abandoned him and his own father, whom he had betrayed, had a much larger army. Richard then did something magnificently dramatic and brave: he went to his father’s court at Poitiers on 23 September 1174. There, he fell at Henry’s feet, weeping, and begged for forgiveness. Medieval chroniclers are sometimes maddening; not one of them describes this scene in detail. All we know is that it ended with Henry giving his son the kiss of peace. The penitent Richard was also given two castles in Poitou, but Eleanor remained her husband’s prisoner – the King knew Richard would obey him if his mother’s life might be at risk.

  In the way of many fraught marriages, Eleanor and Henry never seemed quite able to end their passionate love-hate relationship and, in the 1180s, Eleanor once more began appearing at Henry’s side from time to time as she was still married to him.

  When Henry II died in 1189, Richard became King. Mother and son shared in the triumph. Eleanor rode to Westminster and received oaths of fealty on behalf of her favourite son. He trusted her to rule and she did so in his name, signing herself as ‘Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England’.

  On 13 August 1189, Richard landed at Portsmouth, but he did not stay very long in England. A few months later, he set off for the Holy Land on the Third Crusade. He placed Eleanor in charge of England as his Regent. Richard finally reached the Holy Land and took Acre, but he could not take Jerusalem. He and the Sultan Saladin finally agreed a three-year truce in September 1192. Richard then left for England, but, again, a shipwreck proved a turning point.

  Richard’s ship was forced aground on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, which was hostile territory. He got close to Vienna shortly before Christmas 1192, but was captured by soldiers of the army of Leopold V, the Duke of Austria. Capturing a king who had saved part of the Holy Land was an outrage to Christendom, however, and the Pope excommunicated Leopold. If he did not wish to burn in Hell for eternity, he was told to hand his prisoner over to Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor. Henry needed money to raise an army in southern Italy, so he demanded a ransom of 150,000 marks. Eleanor slaved to raise this vast sum, roughly twice the annual income of the English crown. She imposed new taxes, looted the gold and silver treasures of every church and slowly gathered the ransom. In February 1194, she paid it and Richard was released. The moment he was free, Philip of France sent a sharp message to Richard’s youngest brother, John: ‘Look to yourself; the devil is loose.’ Philip clearly believed in sibling rivalry and expected one brother to kill the other. Eleanor, however, nagged her sons to make peace and persuaded Richard to name John as his heir.

  Five years later, Richard was besieging the castle at Chalus in the evening. One soldier was standing on the walls, crossbow in one hand, clutching a frying pan in the other as a shield, and took a shot which missed. At the same moment, another crossbowman, who had some grudge against the King, also shot at the King. This second arrow pierced the King’s left shoulder. Eventually, a surgeon removed the arrow but he did so clumsily, ‘carelessly mangling’ the King’s arm in the process. Richard’s wound became gangrenous.

  Eleanor hurried to her son’s side but even she could not cure him of gangrene. Richard died in her arms on 6 April 1199. It was a fitting Oedipal ending to their long romance.

  The angry grandson

  It is impossible not to mention the next part of the family saga because it is unique. The key player was Richard’s nephew, Arthur of Brittany. Arthur’s father was Geoffrey, Henry II’s fourth son. In 1190, before Richard and John were reconciled, Richard named Arthur as his heir to the English throne. Around 1194, under pressure from his mother, Richard changed his mind and named his brother John as his heir. Young Arthur refused to accept this betrayal, but his first reaction was to take refuge with his uncle. John treated his nephew kindly at first, but that soon changed. Fearing for his life, Arthur fled and did what any resourceful twelve-year-old would do: he raised an army. He knew Eleanor could still influence her one surviving son and trapped her in the town of Mirabeau. Arthur became the first grandson in recorded history to besiege his grandmother.

  John sent troops against the delinquent teenage Prince and Arthur was captured. Sadly, no chronicler appears to have recorded the scene when Eleanor asked her grandson what he thought he was up to. Arthur then vanished mysteriously in April 1203. One rumour suggested his jailers were too frightened to kill him and so his uncle John had to murder him personally. The Margam Annals provide the macabre details:

  After dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he [King John] was drunk and possessed by the devil, he slew him with his own hand, and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine. It was discovered by a fisherman in his net, and being dragged to the bank and recognised, was taken for secret burial, in fear of the tyrant, to the priory of Bec called Notre Dame de Pres.

  William de Braose, previously Arthur’s jailer at Rouen, did well after the boy disappeared. John showered him with lands and titles, which made contemporaries very
suspicious. Years later, de Braose’s wife accused the King of murdering Arthur. The unwise Maud was imprisoned and starved to death in Corfe Castle in Dorset.

  Having been rescued from her grandson’s siege, Eleanor became a nun. She had had a life filled with ‘life events’: she had seen her sons wage war on her husband, her husband ensure that his Archbishop was murdered, one of her own sons killed and one grandson slaughtered by one of her sons. For the last three years of her life, she lived a more meditative existence and her tomb suggests she read the Bible a great deal. Violent as the Old Testament is in many places, it is somewhat more serene than Eleanor’s own family history. It seems worth stressing the statistics: between 1066 and 1216 six kings ruled; one had a brother killed, another murdered his nephew.

  One Oedipal fantasy fulfilled – Edward III and his mother

  Over a century after King John died, the royal family enacted an almost perfect Oedipal drama. The four central characters were Edward II, his wife Isabella, their son Edward and Isabella’s lover, Roger Mortimer.

  As with Richard I, we have been left surprising details about Edward III’s wet nurse, Margaret of Daventry. Edward gave her a pension and gave her daughter a gift of 100 marks when she got married. He even helped Margaret thirty years after she had nursed him, when she had to fight a case in court. One historian believes that Margaret was the only woman who had really loved Edward as a child.

  In 1326, the French King Charles IV (Isabella’s brother) demanded Edward II perform homage for the Duchy of Aquitaine. Edward did not want to leave England so Isabella went to France and agreed with the French King that her son Edward would perform the homage. As soon as she landed in France, Isabella conspired with her lover, Roger Mortimer, to have her husband deposed. She had been infuriated by Edward II’s relationships with two men – first Piers Gaveston, and then Princess Diana’s ancestor, Hugh Despenser. It was not just a question of sex; the besotted King had even given Piers his wife’s jewels. To bolster her position, Isabella had her son Edward engaged to the twelve-year-old Philippa of Hainault. Isabella and Mortimer then invaded England. Edward II was so unpopular that his men deserted him and he had to give up the throne to his son.

  Endless intrigues marked the start of Edward III’s reign. His mother’s lover, Roger Mortimer, now the de facto ruler of England, acquired estates and titles, while Isabella herself stole the huge sum of £20,000 from the Exchequer. Mortimer felt insecure, however, in relation to the King and humiliated Edward in public. Tensions in the family increased after Edward and Philippa had a son; but having a son gave Edward courage. With a few trusted men, he stormed into his mother’s bedroom at Nottingham Castle and took her lover prisoner. Isabella pleaded for Mortimer’s life and Edward did not have him killed there and then. Only too aware of Isabella’s obsession with jewels, Edward seized all of them. Capturing Mortimer and humiliating his mother made it obvious that Edward had all the qualities a King needed.

  Edward also knew how to wait: he kept Mortimer a prisoner and then had him indicted by Parliament. To no one’s surprise, Mortimer was found guilty and sentenced to death. Perhaps for his mother’s sake, Edward spared her lover being quartered and merely had him hanged at Tyburn. To kill the man who murdered your father is a variation on the Oedipus complex, of course. Edward then did something that Freud would have understood. To assuage his guilt it has been argued that he commissioned the poem The Lament of Edward II, which praised his father and even presented him as a virile heterosexual, whose evil wife conspired against him.

  Having paid this literary homage to his dead father, Edward was able to mend his relationship with his mother. Isabella forgave him for having her lover killed and he in turn forgave her for having had his father murdered. By the time she died in 1358, her son had proved a capable ruler. However, Edward was not able to ensure that his children and their descendants did not fight each other, which led to the Wars of the Roses.

  Sibling rivalry and the Wars of the Roses

  The Wars of the Roses were a three-decades-long struggle between the House of York and the House of Lancaster, two royal houses that were, in fact, closely related. It was a textbook case of sibling rivalry. Everyone who played a significant part could trace their ancestry back to Edward III. The wars began because the descendants of Edward’s third son wanted to make sure the descendants of his second son never sat on the throne. There was nothing especially Yorkist or Lancastrian about either side.

  In 1902, M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, wrote a play, The Admirable Crichton, in which the butler rises to power and takes charge of the family he had initially served. Barrie never mentions that his fiction actually occurred over five centuries earlier.

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  The Humble Origins of Henry VII (1400–1603)

  The Bishop of Bangor had a butler. We know little of either the Bishop or his butler, except that the latter was ambitious for his family. Around 1415, he arranged for his son, Owen, to serve in the household of Henry V, hoping the lad would rise in service.

  After the French were defeated at Agincourt, the King of France permitted his daughter, Catherine of Valois, to marry the all-conquering Henry V. In December 1421, she gave birth to a son: the future Henry VI. The father would never see his heir, because Henry was fighting in France again and did not bother to return to see his wife and child. At the end of August 1422, he fell ill and died. He was only thirty-five years old; his widow was not yet twenty-one.

  Catherine doted on her young son, who was her constant companion and her comfort. The English nobles, however, were determined to keep her under control and passed an Act of Parliament to prevent her remarrying without the King’s consent. They added an unpleasant rider: the one-year-old King could only give that consent when he was an adult. Facing seventeen years of loneliness, Catherine turned for consolation to the butler’s son. Owen was so obscure that historians are unsure of his position in the royal household; one theory is that he was keeper of the Queen’s wardrobe, or he might have been in charge of buttons. Still, he must have cut some dash because Catherine, daughter of the King of the France and widow of the King of England, fell in love with him. He clearly had the gift of advocacy, too, as he persuaded Parliament to grant him the rights of an Englishman (the Welsh had no rights at all in England at the time). Owen’s family name was Tudor.

  The evidence as to whether Catherine and Owen Tudor married is lost in the mists of time, but they had at least four children. After Catherine died in 1437, Owen managed to convince his stepson, Catherine’s son Henry VI, to let him and his children come back to court. Pious Henry welcomed his stepfather, half-brothers and half-sisters back.

  Owen had climbed high, so it was no surprise when his own son, Edmund, married Margaret Beaufort, the twelve-year-old daughter of the Duke of Somerset. Margaret became pregnant, but, two months before she gave birth, her husband died. Then her labour was particularly difficult: at one point, both she and the child nearly died because her body was so small. She never gave birth again.

  Margaret and her son, the future Henry VII, remained in Pembroke Castle until the boy was three or four years old. She was still only sixteen and, for reasons that are not totally clear, she then abandoned him. Henry reacted in a way that would not surprise psychologists: he became anxious, and particularly anxious to please his mother. For the rest of his life, he tried to win Margaret’s approval. For her part, she stayed in contact with him and encouraged him. She wrote to her son and very occasionally visited him, although these visits became less frequent after her marriage to the Duke of Buckingham’s second son.

  Margaret had left Henry in the care of a nobleman, Lord Herbert, who was not an ideal guardian as he managed to get himself executed. The boy then stayed with Herbert’s widow, Blanche, in Pembroke Castle but the castle itself was soon under siege by men who were loyal not to Henry VI, but to his Yorkist rival Edward IV.

  In 1470, the fortunes of war changed. For once, Henry VI got the upper hand and Edwa
rd had to flee to France. Henry VI summoned his half-brother and predicted he would one day be king. It did not seem likely when, a few months later, Edward returned with an army. London put up no resistance; Edward later took Henry VI prisoner and, within hours, Henry died. One chronicle claimed his death was due to ‘melancholy’, but many historians believe it had nothing to do with his state of mind. Rather, Edward ordered Henry’s murder.

  Henry Tudor managed to escape and set sail for Brittany. The Italian historian Polydore Virgil claimed Edward reacted ‘very grievously’ to the news that ‘the only imp of Henry VI’s brood has escaped’. The Duke of Brittany allowed the teenager to live at his court, but toyed with the idea of handing the boy over to King Edward. At one point, Henry was taken to the port of St Malo, but he managed to persuade the Duke not to put him on a ship bound for England. In Brittany, the boy learned how to plead for his life.

  Henry Tudor’s childhood might be compared to that of a twentieth-century refugee. His mother had left him, his guardian had been executed, he had to flee England; he had come back to England but then had to flee again. When he was about twelve, Henry’s life became a little more settled and from the relative safety of France he had the pleasure of seeing nearly everyone else who might claim the English throne die. Murder, plague, illness and old age all took their toll. So Henry, the ambitious butler’s great-grandson, became the main Lancastrian claimant to the throne. It had taken just over sixty-five years for the butler’s progeny to become royal-in-waiting. The Life Events Scale does not contemplate such vertiginous upward mobility.

  There were sibling rivalries between Richard III and his brother Clarence, and historians disagree on whether Richard conspired to have his brother tried for treason and executed. The King, Edward IV, had the ultimate responsibility, however. He died in 1483 without apparently having murdered any other members of his family. His son succeeded him, but Edward V was killed within a few months. Some traditions, fuelled by Shakespeare, claim that Richard ordered the murder and then took the precaution of having the murderers murdered so that they could never betray him. The Mafia could have learned a thing or two from the so-called hunchback king.