The chancellor’s house and table were open to the needs of any visitors to the king’s court of whatever rank . . . Hardly a day did he dine without earls and barons as his guests. He ordered his floors to be covered every day with new straw or hay in the winter, fresh bulrushes or leaves in the summer, so that the multitude of knights, who could not all fit on stalls, could find a clean and pleasant space, and leave their precious clothes and beautiful shirts unsoiled. His house glittered with gold and silver vases, and abounded in precious food and drink, so that if a certain food was known for its rarity, no price would deter his ministers from buying it.30
The young prince Henry thus became part of a glittering court, famed for its opulence and conspicuous consumption, as well as for the élan of the chancellor’s military household. For the boy, Thomas’ lifestyle was a dazzling example of lordly pomp and magnificence, accompanied by two of the mainsprings of good lordship, largesse and franchise – the open-handed and great-hearted conduct expected of a nobleman.31 ‘Hardly a day went by,’ noted FitzStephen, ‘when he did not make a gift of horses, birds, clothes, gold or silver wares or money . . . the chancellor had such a gift for giving, that he found love and favour throughout the Latin world.’32
Given Becket’s prominence in public affairs, first as chancellor then as archbishop, his direct contact with the prince while still in his household must have been limited, and his instruction, whether in letters, courtly manners or other necessary accomplishments, would of necessity have been delegated to tutors. Equally, Henry was too young to have had any serious engagement with members of the brilliant intellectual circle of clerks surrounding Thomas. Nevertheless, Becket himself provided young Henry with a role model of a knightly commander and warrior. Thomas’ own path to greatness had been through the clerical household of Archbishop Theobald, but once in the king’s service Becket strove to cut a chivalric figure. On Thomas’ elevation to the primacy in 1162, his rival Gilbert Foliot sourly jested that the king had done a marvellous thing in turning a worldly man and a knight into an archbishop.33 In reality, as a clerk in minor orders, Becket could not be knighted himself, but he undoubtedly relished his own role as a ‘father of knights’ and bestowed the arms of knighthood upon his young protégés.34 Moreover, he effectively transformed the chancellorship into a great military, as well as administrative office. On the Toulouse campaign in 1159 he had led an impressive retinue, which FitzStephen claimed numbered 700 knights. During hostilities with Louis VII in the Vexin in 1161 Thomas fielded a still more powerful contingent, swelled by large numbers of stipendiary knights, who each received ‘three shillings to take care of horses and squires, and all these knights sat at the chancellor’s table’.35 Becket himself even engaged one of the leading French knights, Enguerrand de Trie, in single combat, unhorsing him and taking his destrier as booty.36
Whether young Henry, who was in Normandy at the time, witnessed this feat of arms is unknown, but in a world in which the numbers in a lord’s following and the level of wages paid to his knights directly proclaimed his own status and dignity, the size and extravagance of Becket’s retinue, even when archbishop, was to remain an important exemplar for the prince.37 Something of the impression created on the young Henry by the chancellor’s household may perhaps be glimpsed through the earlier reminiscences of the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, who was raised in the household of Robert Bloet, the great prince-bishop of Lincoln and formerly William Rufus’ chancellor, who ‘was looked upon as everyone’s father and god’.38 As an old man, the archdeacon recalled how:
when, throughout my boyhood, adolescence and young manhood, I saw the glory of Robert, our bishop – I mean his handsome knights, noble young men, his horses of great price, his golden and gilded vessels, the number of courses at dinner, the splendour of those who waited upon him, the purple garments and satins – I thought nothing could be more blessed.39
By contrast, Henry II, it has been said, ‘in appearance . . . might easily have been mistaken for one of his own huntsmen’.40 Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate the wealth, ceremony and dignity of Henry II’s own court, about which Becket’s biographers or indeed other chroniclers writing of the 1150s and 1160s say little: it is only from a casual mention by Robert of Torigni, for instance, that we hear of the rich gifts including gold, silks, horses and camels that were presented to Henry II by a great embassy from the Muslim king of Valencia in 1162.41 The surviving financial records reveal that Henry II’s court enjoyed a sumptuous material culture, with expensive clothing and rich plate, while Walter Map could remark in passing that the king ‘is always robed in precious stuffs, as is right’.42 His court had a highly developed protocol, which, at least by the 1180s, was probably regulated by a king of arms.43 Yet it is hard not to see the influence of Thomas on the younger Henry’s extravagant display once he became king. In the later 1170s, during his prominent participation in the tournament circuit of northern France, the Young King himself would attract large numbers of knights into his own mesnie by offering prodigally high wages, and in 1182 a key element in the renewed settlement with his father was that Henry II should provide him with the revenue to keep 100 knights in his household: outside times of war, this was a very high number even for a royal familia and was ruinously expensive.44 Indeed, from the 1170s, young Henry would come to fulfil a role closely analogous role to that of Chancellor Thomas as the showcase for Angevin wealth and splendour.
When Henry II sent his son to England with Becket in April 1162 it was on a dual mission. Archbishop Theobald had died on 18 April 1161, and, although he delayed an immediate appointment and enjoyed the revenues of the vacant see, Henry was determined that his chancellor and friend should become the new archbishop of Canterbury.45 This had probably also been the wish of Theobald himself, and in 1162 Cardinal Henry of Pisa had joined with King Henry in urging Thomas to accept the post of archbishop.46 Becket was, or so his biographers insisted, most reluctant, sensing an inevitable conflict with his lord, but he eventually was persuaded.47 Henry II’s most eminent biographer, W. L. Warren, has argued that Henry had pressed the archbishopric upon him as a means of rewarding Becket for his past services, but also of moving him aside, for the failure of the Toulouse expedition had shaken Henry’s confidence in Becket’s judgement, and his influence with the king was already in decline by 1162: Becket’s increasing intransigence as archbishop was thus a reaction to his removal from Henry’s inner counsels.48 Yet such a view is hard to reconcile with Henry’s great anger at Becket’s resignation of the chancellorship soon after his elevation to the archbishopric, and with the key role the king had evidently envisaged for Thomas in a regency government in conjunction with his eldest son.
From at least the summer of 1161, Henry II had been giving thought to the coronation of young Henry. In June of that year, during the vacancy at Canterbury following Theobald’s death, he had secured a mandate from Pope Alexander III, Quantum per carissimum, which was addressed to Roger, archbishop of York, granting him permission to carry out coronations and instructing him to crown young Henry whenever the king should wish it.49 Yet whatever Henry’s intentions when he obtained these instruments, by the summer of 1162 he was determined that his son would be crowned by Thomas, the new archbishop of Canterbury. Certain evidence of Henry II’s intent was his purchase, recorded in the Pipe Rolls, of over £38 worth of gold from the London financier William Cade for the making of a crown and regalia for his son’s coronation.50 Such a crowning in the lifetime of a ruler would be unprecedented in post-Conquest England. Why then did Henry wish to have his son raised to regal dignity at such a young age, and at a time when Henry II’s own position seemed so unshakably strong? To answer this central question it is necessary to examine the nature of anticipatory succession, the precedents which informed Henry II, and his own perceptions of Angevin kingship in the early years of his reign.
Anticipatory Succession: Motives and Precedents
The practice of antic
ipatory succession, marked by the coronation of an heir during the ruler’s lifetime, had long been established in many European royal dynasties. The first Carolingian kings, Pepin and Charlemagne, had used the anointing of their sons as kings by the pope as a means of validating a new dynasty and securing its succession.51 In the absence of blood right to rule, consecration had long served as a powerful act of legitimization. In the Old Testament itself, unction had been used not only to consecrate new kings but to validate the substitution of one ruler for another: when Saul was set aside as king of Israel, the priest Samuel in turn anointed the new ruler, David, whose authority was hallowed and legitimized as the ‘christus Domini’.52 As a mechanism to strengthen the position of a newly established dynasty, anticipatory association had been equally vital to the consolidation of early Ottonian power,53 and still more so to that of the Capetians.54
In 987, Hugh Capet had displaced Louis V, the last Carolingian king of West Frankia, but as his dynasty had no hereditary right to the throne, he had engineered by sleight of hand the consecration of his son Robert II only a few months after his own coronation.55 In turn, Robert the Pious (r. 996–1031) had his eldest son Hugh crowned in 1017, and on his death his younger brother Henry became associate ruler in 1026. Henry assumed sole kingship on his father’s death in 1031, but in 1059 he had his seven-year-old son Philip crowned. Thereafter, though they had effectively suppressed any move to make the kingship elective beyond the formality of the approval of noble assemblies and their acclamation at the coronation itself, the Capetian dynasty faced no serious challenge to its right to succeed to the throne of France.56 They continued, however, to use anticipatory succession in a variety of circumstances, most notably to secure the succession of an eldest son when challenged by a younger brother or half-brothers, to confirm the succession of a younger son on the sudden death of an older brother already so associated, or to associate a son with the rule of a royal father who was ailing or incapacitated.57 Louis VI ‘the Fat’ (r. 1108–37) had been crowned and anointed at Orléans in 1108 only after the death of his father Philip I (r. 1060–1108), but from c.1100 he had increasingly taken over the effective running of the kingdom, and had been styled rex designatus.58
There can be little doubt that Henry II’s desire to have young Henry crowned in 1162 owed much to Capetian practice. Nevertheless, Louis VII’s own lack of sons before the birth of Philip in 1165 meant that it was his own coronation as a boy in 1131 that remained the most immediate precedent.59 Louis VI’s eldest legitimate son Philip, born in 1116, had been associated with his kingship as rex designatus from 1121, and was crowned at Rheims in 1129.60 In 1131, however, after he was killed in a riding accident Louis VI’s second son, Louis, was quickly crowned by Pope Innocent II at Rheims.61 Though these circumstances were far more urgent than those of 1162 for young Henry, the coronation of the future Louis VII as a child – as with the earlier example of Philip I – indicates that for the young Henry to be crowned at the age of seven was not exceptional, and that seven was considered the minimum age for such a coronation.62 Thereafter, Louis appeared in his father’s charters as Ludovicus rex junior until he succeeded his father as sole ruler in 1137, and it would similarly be as Henricus rex junior that the Young King was often styled after his eventual coronation in 1170.63
Henry II, however, was equally cognizant of contemporary imperial Byzantine and German practice, as well as the use of anticipatory succession in kingdoms with more direct links to his own.64 In the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, anticipatory coronation had been used to counter the potentially dangerous circumstances first of a female heir, then of a minority, and then of the terminal illness of the ruling king. Melisende, eldest daughter and heir of Baldwin II, was crowned as his co-ruler in 1128, and succeeded him in 1131.65 Soon after the death of her husband Fulk, Henry II’s grandfather, she had their son Baldwin III crowned as her co-ruler on Christmas Day 1143.66 And when in 1183 the kingdom of Jerusalem faced an imminent succession crisis with the rapidly deteriorating condition of the leper king, Baldwin IV, his nephew Baldwin V was crowned and anointed as his co-ruler, even though he was only five years old.67 Likewise, in the Norman kingdom of Sicily, King Roger II had his son William crowned and anointed as a ‘rex consors regni’ by the archbishop of Palermo at Easter 1151.68
In the kingdom of England, however, the practice of crowning a son in the lifetime of his father had few precedents.69 In the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, it had been common for kings to associate younger brothers or sons as co-rulers, and the practice was still visible in later ninth-century Wessex. Yet as far as can be seen, there was no ceremony of consecration of associate rulers, even after the kings of Wessex had succeeded in becoming kings of England during the tenth century. Seemingly, the only pre-Conquest instance occurred in 787, when Offa, the great king of the Mercians (r. 757–96) and overlord of much of England, had his son Ecgfrith consecrated as king, almost certainly in imitation of recent Carolingian practice.70 The event was closely linked to a legatine visitation and Offa’s creation of an archbishopric at Lichfield, intended as a counter to a hostile archbishop of Canterbury and Kentish resistance to Offa’s authority. It had as its primary purpose, however, the overriding of existing customs of succession, whereby a number of eligible members of the royal kindred were held to be throne-worthy.71 When on Offa’s death in 796 Ecgfrith became sole ruler, it was ‘the first time that a son had succeeded his father in Mercia for many generations’.72 Nevertheless, despite the potential inherent in the consecration of associate rulers for the development of a more patrilineal model of succession, it was not an example followed by subsequent Anglo-Saxon kings before 1066.
Nor in post-Conquest England before the reign of King Stephen did Anglo-Norman kings adopt the practice of crowning their chosen successors in their own lifetime. William the Conqueror had designated his eldest son Robert as his heir to the duchy of Normandy, but his original intentions regarding succession to the kingdom of England are hard if not impossible to ascertain: if William had ever contemplated associating Robert with his kingship in the Capetian manner, the latter’s repeated rebellions put paid to any such plans and resulted in the king’s final deathbed bequest of England to his second son, the childless William Rufus.73 Rufus’ youngest brother and successor, Henry I, had only one legitimate son, William, to whom Orderic Vitalis accords the Anglo-Saxon title of ‘Aetheling’ or ‘prince’. He had been recognized as Henry’s heir at the age of twelve, when ‘all the free men of England and Normandy’ performed homage to him.74 Following the death of Queen Matilda in 1118, her role as regent during Henry I’s absences from the kingdom was assumed by William, aided by Bishop Roger of Salisbury and other of Henry I’s leading curiales – a precedent of which Henry II was no doubt well aware.75 There is no evidence that William was anointed king, but in 1119 he attested a charter of Henry I issued at Rouen in 1119 as ‘Dei gratia rex designatus’, and in describing events in 1120 the well-informed York chronicler Hugh the Chantor calls William ‘rex et dux iam designatus’.76 In 1120, Louis VI had finally recognized William Aetheling as his father’s heir to Normandy, and one chronicler speaks of him as ‘rex Normananglorum futurus’.77 William’s demise soon afterwards, however, in the wreck of the White Ship makes it impossible to know how far, if at all, Henry I intended to associate him as co-ruler in the actual governance of the duchy.78
The title ‘heir and king designate (heres et rex designatus)’ was also adopted before 1144 by Henry, only son of King David I of Scotland.79 Though this has been seen as a direct emulation of Capetian practice, the close relationship between David and his brother-in-law Henry I makes it more probable that in this case the immediate influence was the example of William Aetheling.80 Associated with his father’s rule from c.1128, when he was aged about thirteen, Henry subsequently participated in the joint governance of the ‘Scoto-Northumbrian realm’ which David had carved out in the northern counties at the expense of King Stephen.81 On Henry’s premature death, his
eldest son, Malcolm, though only a young child, was associated with his rule by King David. A striking image of this condominium is furnished by the illuminated initial of Malcolm’s grant to Kelso abbey, in which the beardless young Malcolm sits crowned, enthroned and holding a sceptre beside his venerable grandfather, who himself holds a drawn sword to symbolize his superior authority.82
It was, however, the exigencies of a bitter civil war that led King Stephen to go beyond the insular tradition of designating an heir by attempting to have his own son Eustace crowned in his own lifetime. Such a move, which had strong support among the magnates at Stephen’s court, was intended to secure the house of Blois on the throne of England and to counter the growing significance of the young Henry FitzEmpress, in whom the Angevins’ hopes of an eventual succession now principally lay.83 Eustace, who had performed homage to Louis VII for Normandy in 1137,84 was knighted by his father in 1147 and advanced to comital rank.85 Stephen, however, regarded it as essential to gain papal support for Eustace’s coronation. For while Innocent II had confirmed Stephen’s own claim to the throne, the question of succession was fiercely disputed by the Angevins, who equally pressed hard Henry’s claims at the Curia. It was for precisely this reason that the pope refused to endorse Eustace’s coronation, for by agreeing to it, the papacy would effectively be pronouncing on the issue of succession and the outcome of the civil war, which it refused to do. Instead, it resorted to diplomatic temporizing. When as early as 1143 approaches had been made to Celestine II, the pope had written to Archbishop Theobald, ‘forbidding him to allow any change (innovatio) to be made in the kingdom of England in the matter of the crown, for that matter was in dispute and so any claim for the transfer to the right was to be refused’.86 This policy was followed by his successors Lucius II and Eugenius III, and when in 1151 Henry Murdac, archbishop of York, made a sustained effort to persuade the latter to crown Eustace, he met with no success.87 The failure to secure Eustace’s coronation was a body blow to the fortunes of the house of Blois. While Eustace lived, he had continued to prove a formidable opponent to Henry Plantagenet, but on his death in 1153 it had been papal hostility that in large measure had led Stephen to abandon any attempt to have his second son William acknowledged as his heir.88
Henry the Young King, 1155-1183 Page 8
