Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  In other circumstances, and with two men of different and less obdurate temperaments, the crowning and anointing of young Henry by Thomas, his old guardian, might have served as a fitting occasion for the reconciliation between king and prelate.6 Indeed, Becket himself seems to have regarded young Henry’s coronation as one of the best chances for gaining peace from Henry II, a fact which added yet greater vehemence to the defence of his prerogative as archbishop of Canterbury to perform the coronation.7 Yet as an anonymous informant wrote to Thomas only days before the ceremony, the eventuality of the prince being crowned by York offered the frightening prospect of a new generation of hostility to the archbishop:

  What will you do, most unfortunate of men, if that which you have sighed for so long should be taken from you in a short space of time? If he who ought only to rule through you should be made king by the hand of another? Rather, what will you do if your enemy consecrates an enemy king for you, so that a much younger and stronger hand may rise against you in support of his father?8

  The fear was a very real one, for Henry II still possessed the papal mandate, obtained in 1161 while the see of Canterbury was vacant, authorizing Archbishop Roger of York to crown his son. Roger, a long-standing opponent of Becket, was only too eager to contest the primacy of Canterbury and claim the dignity of coronation for his own metropolitan church.9 He was also, moreover, a papal legate.10 From the moment of his consecration, Thomas had shown himself fiercely defensive of the rights of the church of Canterbury, and Henry knew that for Roger to perform the coronation would be a grievous insult to Becket.11 Yet the issue transcended personal animosity. For while Thomas regarded himself as the defender of the Church’s liberties against royal tyranny and loudly proclaimed the precedence of sacerdotium over regnum, Henry II saw his opposition on the issue of criminous clerks and his vehement rejection of the Constitutions of Clarendon as a direct attack on royal rights which had been enjoyed by his grandfather Henry I and earlier monarchs. To permit Becket to undertake the coronation of the future ruler of the Angevin lands would be tantamount to admitting defeat and condoning papal interference in the coronation itself. He would not have the sacrality of the new king so tarnished.

  For his part, Thomas, fully aware that the king might employ the earlier papal mandate to proceed without him, had instructed his agents at the papal Curia to obtain letters from the pope prohibiting the coronation from being undertaken by anyone save the archbishop of Canterbury himself. As he stressed in a letter to Roger, bishop of Worcester, in May 1170, Thomas was not against the coronation itself: ‘indeed, if the lord king pleases,’ he wrote, ‘we are prepared to crown his son in accordance with the obligations of our office and to show due honour and respect to them both’. But he evidently feared that not only Roger of York, but also Gilbert Foliot or the bishop of Salisbury might usurp his right to do so, and, as he had heard, the bishop of Sées had boasted that he himself would perform the coronation if required.12

  Henry responded by extracting an oath from all leading laymen, and a verbal promise from ecclesiastics, that they would not accept letters from Becket or the pope, or make any appeal to Rome without his permission. As early as Michaelmas 1169, an embargo had been placed on the English ports to prevent the arrival of any papal letters of prohibition, and harsh penalties were decreed for those attempting to deliver any such mandates, or for any clergy observing an interdict.13 On returning to England, Henry held his Easter court of 1170 at Windsor, to which almost all the nobles and great men of England had been summoned, as well as King William of Scotland and his brother David.14 The principal reason for their convocation soon became clear when shortly afterwards the great council met again at London to deliberate ‘concerning the coronation of Henry his eldest son’, while Roger archbishop of York, Hugh of Durham and other bishops were ordered to come to London for the ceremony.15 The London council had other pressing but related business.16 The king had been deeply concerned about the widespread abuses of his subjects by his sheriffs during his four-year absence on the continent, and he now ordered a great inquest. Throughout every shire, all men, noble, free or even villein, were made to swear on the Gospels that they would give truthful testament to a judicial eyre as to the nature and extent of the extortions made by the sheriffs and their men since the king had last crossed to Normandy in March 1166.17 The day set for the reports of this commission of inquiry – the ‘inquisitio mirabilis’ which scrutizined the exactions of lordship in the counties in the minutest of detail – was to be 14 June, the day set for young Henry’s coronation.18 This conjuncture was no accident, but conveyed an important political message: Henry II’s kingship, and now that of his son and heir, was concerned with upholding the law and good governance. The inquest was a tangible expression of the fulfilment of the oath taken at the coronation, which enjoined the enforcing of good laws and extirpation of the bad. In its wake, many of the sheriffs were dismissed and amerced, together with their bailiffs and officials.19 This purge was a much-needed crackdown on the corruption and exactions of royal officials in the localities, though its extension to a far wider-ranging inquiry into the sums raised ‘by judgment or without judgment’ by all landholders and their officials from their lands and from each hundred and village was undoubtedly the cause of alarm and resentment that would store up trouble for the future.20

  Despite Becket’s issuing of a number of mandates forbidding the coronation, and his desperate attempts to smuggle papal letters of prohibition into the kingdom, Henry’s cordon on the ports and his officials’ vigilance ensured that these did not reach their intended recipients.21 Becket later claimed that one of his agents had succeeded in placing such a prohibition into Archbishop Roger’s hand the Saturday before the coronation, but Roger swore that he had never received or seen any such papal letters.22 Henry II’s cousin, Roger, bishop of Worcester, was forbidden by Queen Eleanor and the constable of Normandy, Richard du Hommet, from crossing the Channel to attend the coronation: officials had stopped him at Dieppe, for they ‘had sure intelligence’ that he would not allow the archbishop of York to crown young Henry ‘while the archbishop of Canterbury, whose prerogative it was to crown kings, was still alive’.23 Eleanor, who by 1170 was becoming increasingly distant from her husband, appears to have supported the coronation of her eldest son; the delegation of power to the young Henry could only strengthen her position, and would help pave the way for the investiture of Richard as count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine.24 Shortly before the day set for the coronation, young Henry was sent over from Normandy in the keeping of Richard of Ilchester, and bishops Henry of Bayeux and Froger of Sées.25 Margaret and her household waited in readiness at Caen with Queen Eleanor to cross the Channel.26 But in what appears to have been a calculated insult to Louis VII, Henry II decided that Margaret was not to be crowned alongside her husband, and ordered her to remain with Eleanor in Normandy.27

  A Royal Knighting?

  On Sunday 14 June 1170, the feast of St Basil, the magnates of the realm gathered at Westminster for the coronation of young Henry.28 According to one of Thomas Becket’s informants and Gervase of Canterbury, Henry II knighted his eldest son prior to the ceremony of coronation.29 At fifteen, Henry could be considered relatively young to receive the arms of knighthood, although the age deemed suitable varied considerably and owed much to political circumstances.30 Dubbing to knighthood was one of the most important events in the life of a nobleman. It marked both coming of age and entry into an elite order of warriors, the order of knighthood, which, as Perceval is told by his tutor in arms in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal, ‘is the highest order that God has set forth and ordained’.31 Though knighting might take place on campaign, it frequently took place at court, and for the sons of kings or great nobles the bestowal of arms had long been regarded as a necessary preliminary to investiture.32 King Stephen, for example, had bestowed knighthood on his eldest son Eustace around 1147 before endowing him with lands and the county of Boulogne, while in 118
5 Henry II would make John a knight before intending to establish him as king in Ireland.33 Following John’s death in 1216 in the midst of a civil war, the magnates regarded it as proper to dub his son Henry as knight immediately before his coronation at Gloucester, even though he was only nine years old.34

  By 1170, rituals for dubbing were well developed, and young Henry would have been familiar with the rich symbolism attached to them. The aspirant might spend the previous night in vigil in church, before taking a ritual bath of spiritual purification, reflecting the rite of baptism. Both John of Salisbury in his Policraticus and Stephen of Fougères in his Livre de manières, written in the 1170s, speak of the knight taking from the altar the sword with which he was to be belted, a ritual symbolizing his duty to uphold justice and defend the Church, widows, orphans and the poor.35 The young man then had the sword belt girded on him and golden spurs attached to his feet; he pledged an oath of knighthood, and then received the colée or symbolic blow from the lord who was knighting him.

  John of Marmoutier, writing in the later 1170s, gives a vivid picture of the ensuing ceremony when describing the knighting of young Henry’s grandfather Geoffrey le Bel by King Henry I at Rouen in 1128:

  On the great day, as was required by the custom for making knights, baths were prepared for use. The king had learned from his chamberlains that the Angevin [i.e. Geoffrey] and those who came with him had come from the purification ceremony. He commanded that they be summoned before him. After having cleansed his body, and come from the purification of bathing, the noble offspring of the count of Anjou dressed in a linen undershirt, putting on a robe woven with gold and a surcoat of a rich purple hue: his stockings were of silk, and on his feet he wore shoes with little golden lions on them. His companions, who were to be knighted with him, were all clothed in linen and purple. He left his privy chamber and paraded in public, accompanied by his noble retinue. Their horses were led, arms carried to be distributed to each in turn, according to their need. The Angevin led a wonderfully ornamented Spanish horse, whose speed was said to be so great that birds in flight were far slower. He wore a matching hauberk made of double mail, in which no hole had been pierced by spear or dart. He was shod in iron shoes, also made from double mail. To his ankles were fastened golden spurs. A shield hung from his neck, on which were golden images of lioncels. On his head was placed a helmet, reflecting the lights of many precious gems, tempered in such a way that no sword could break or pierce it. He carried an ash spear with a point of Poitevin iron, and finally, a sword from the royal treasure, bearing an ancient inscription over which the superlative Wayland had sweated with much labour and application in the forge of the smiths.36

  Though more than a little touched by epic and romance traditions, this description certainly reflected elements of contemporary practice in the 1170s, if not perhaps the 1120s. Yet how far young Henry’s own knighting resembled such splendid events is unknown – if, indeed, he was knighted on this occasion. For the History of William Marshal makes the explicit but seemingly contradictory statement that the Young King was knighted in 1173 soon after the outbreak of his rebellion, and by none other than William Marshal. Though this latter story has been doubted, the History reiterates the claim when describing how at Gloucester in 1216 the magnates debated who should knight the child Henry III. They decided on the Marshal not only because of his pre-eminence and valour, but because he had already knighted one king. In knighting the Young King’s nephew, Henry, William would thus, it notes, have dubbed two kings to knighthood.37 Given the enormous importance of the act of dubbing in aristocratic society it is hard – though not impossible – to believe that the History, for all its evident bias, would dare to invent and foreground a story concerning so central and symbolic an event.38

  There are further anomalies. Despite the fact that the knighting of the king’s son was such a significant ceremony, often marked by great festivities, neither Roger of Howden, whose account is closely contemporaneous, nor Ralph of Diss makes any mention of young Henry’s knighting.39 This is despite the fact that Roger was careful subsequently to record the dubbings of Henry II’s other sons and had specifically noted King Henry II’s dubbing of David, William the Lion’s younger brother, at Windsor in April 1170.40 As John of Marmoutier’s account reveals, moreover, the knighting of the eldest son of a king or great lord often involved the subsequent dubbing of a number of his young companions.41 In 1149, King David of Scotland had knighted Henry of Anjou together with Robert, earl of Hereford, ‘and the sons of some men of birth’, while the young Malcolm IV immediately followed up his own knighting by Henry II at Périgueux in 1159 by dubbing thirty of his young nobles who had accompanied him on the great expedition to Toulouse.42 Yet there is no reference to such a group knighting of young Henry’s noble companions. Nor did Henry II attempt to levy an aid for the knighting of his eldest son, though custom entitled him to it – in marked contrast to his concerted efforts to raise the aid towards the marriage of his eldest daughter Matilda in 1167.43 The circumstances of the coronation itself, with Henry II seeking to steal a march on any attempt by Becket to thwart the ceremony, may perhaps account for such omissions, though it is clear that a great assembly of magnates had been summoned to Westminster. Certainly magnificent robes of green cloth, shoes, leggings and silk garments had been made for young Henry in 1170, costing the substantial sum of £9 15s., and these may have been intended for knighting as much as for the coronation.44 It remains difficult to reconcile these conflicting accounts. It may be that Becket’s informant and Gervase were mistaken, merely assuming that the ritual had taken place, but it is possible that young Henry may in fact have been knighted twice, first by his father on 14 June 1170, then again by William Marshal in 1173 at the outset of his rebellion as a gesture of defiance and of independence from his father.45 If so, contemporaries would have appreciated the differing emphases of these rituals; the first was a ceremony of investiture of a prince by a king, the second a dubbing in the field of a new knight on his first real campaign by a warrior already famous for his prowess and chivalry. Whatever the case, young Henry was now to experience a still greater and far more profound transition than that from youth to knight, for the ensuing ceremony of coronation would transform him from the son of a king to an anointed monarch, hallowed and set apart by God.46

  The Coronation of the Young King

  Young Henry was solemnly crowned king in the presence ‘of almost all the earls, barons and nobles of the kingdom’ in the great abbey of Westminster, built by his ancestor Edward the Confessor and the site of royal inaugurations from the time of Harold II.47 The coronation was attended by the majority of the English episcopate, including Hugh Puiset, bishop of Durham, Gilbert Foliot of London, Joscelin of Salisbury, Walter of Rochester, Richard of Chester and Bartholomew of Exeter, while of the Norman bishops Henry of Bayeux and Froger of Sées were also present.48 After six long years of his quarrel with the king, Becket had few supporters remaining among the higher clergy in England. Some, indeed, notably Archbishop Roger of York and Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, were openly hostile to him. Though as a body they were concerned to safeguard ecclesiastical liberties against perceived encroachments by the secular power, they realized the need for a modus vivendi with the king and had been placed in an invidious position by Thomas’ stubborn refusal to compromise. Equally, there was little if any popular sympathy for the bruised rights of the rancorous archbishop of Canterbury, still in exile. As Roger of Howden noted, the ceremony took place ‘with the great joy of the clergy and people’.49

  Chroniclers nevertheless give few if any details of the coronation itself. Such ceremonies usually received brief notices in contemporary annals, whose authors either assumed knowledge of their particulars or were not privy to them. Despite its great political significance, for example, Henry II’s own coronation in 1154 was recorded laconically.50 In the case of the Young King, the reticence of chroniclers was increased by the grave embarrassment felt even by write
rs loyal to Henry II at the deliberate violation of Canterbury’s prerogatives, while, crucially, most wrote with hindsight of the coronation’s direct role in precipitating the events which resulted in Thomas’ murder.51 It is not until the accession of Richard I in 1189 that we possess the first detailed description of a medieval English coronation, provided by Roger of Howden, even though Roger was almost certainly also an eyewitness to the ceremony in June 1170.52 Yet while some of the details of the ceremony of 1189 may have been innovations, it is likely that in its main outline it followed the coronations of 1154 and 1170, all three being conducted according to the version of the coronation ordines known as the Third Recension.53 It is thus possible tentatively to reconstruct the principal elements of the Young King’s coronation, even if some of its more distinctive features, such as the part played by Henry II himself, remain unknown.54

  The solemnities began with a great procession of the clergy ‘vested in silken copes, with the cross, torch bearers, censers and holy water going before them’, who processed to the inner chamber of the adjacent royal palace of Westminster to receive the prince.55 Flanked by Archbishop Roger and Bishop Hugh, young Henry was led in procession to the abbey church, walking on a rich woollen cloth that had been laid the whole way from the palace to the high altar, while the choir sang the anthem Firmetur manus tua, ‘Let thy hand be strengthened, and thy right hand be exalted . . .’56 The crucifers, torch bearers and censors again led the solemn train, followed by the priors and abbots. Next came the bishops, while behind them came magnates each bearing elements of the regalia, including the rod and sceptre.57 Next, three of the greatest laymen bore the swords of state, in their ornate golden sheaths.58 A fine example of such a bearing sword, used for the imperial coronation of the Young King’s nephew Otto IV in 1198, is extant, complete with its gold repoussé scabbard depicting great Old Testament kings, and with a verse from the Laudes regiae inscribed on its hilt – ‘Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.’59 It is probable that William the Lion, king of Scotland, bore the first sword, later identified as ‘Curtana’ or the ‘sword of mercy with its blunted tip’, and that he was placed by his royal rank in a position of pre-eminence between the two other sword bearers.60 The presence at the ceremony not only of King William but of Godred, king of Man and the Isles, served to emphasize the imperial dimension of Plantagenet lordship within the British Isles.61 It equally underlined the distinctive sacral nature of English kingship, for while the kings of Scots were invested according to long-established rituals, they were not as yet anointed as kings.62 After the sword bearers, six earls and barons carried a chequered board or scaccarium on which lay other regalia and the royal robes, while they were followed by one of the most senior earls, carrying a great golden crown.63 Finally, under a silken canopy, came young Henry himself, flanked by the archbishop of York and the bishop of Durham.