Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  These rich and strategically important lands made a handsome territorial provision for Henry’s youngest son, and also promised to extend Angevin influence to the south-east as far as the Val d’Aosta and Turin. Gerald of Wales was no doubt guilty of hostile exaggeration when he claimed that Henry’s desire to secure the Maurienne match was a further step in fulfilling his ambition to gain the imperial throne itself, though others too thought Henry had designs on Italy, and Peter of Blois believed that the Italian opponents of Barbarossa had even offered him the kingdom.17 Control of some of the Alpine passes would certainly greatly strengthen Henry’s hand in any dealings with emperor and pope alike, and the seriousness of his intentions at least in this respect is revealed by the fact that Alice’s dowry specifically included a number of key castles controlling certain of the major routes over the Alps.18 More immediately, it bolstered Henry’s authority in south-eastern France and afforded the opportunity to place decisive pressure on his long-standing opponent, the count of Toulouse.19

  That Henry regarded the Maurienne match as a key element in his grand diplomacy is indicated by the fact that while he was at Montferrat he received Alfonso II, the king of Aragon, and Raymond of Toulouse. The two men were bitter rivals, so in an attempt to reconcile them and to establish a more general peace in the region Henry took them to Limoges, where he convened a great assembly.20 In the presence of Queen Eleanor, young Henry and his brother Richard, and a great number of magnates, Henry II established peace between them.21 The full significance of Henry’s deal with Humbert, moreover, had been fully grasped by Count Raymond. Ever since Henry’s great but unsuccessful expedition against Toulouse in 1159, relations between Raymond and Henry had been strained, if not outright hostile.22 Now, however, on 25 February 1173, Raymond became the man not only of Henry II, but also of the Young King, as the heir to the headship of the Plantagenet family, and of Richard as count of Poitou.23 He was to hold his county of Toulouse ‘from them in fee and by hereditary right, for the service of coming to the summons of the king or the count of Poitou to aid him in his war’ with 100 knights for forty days.24 Clearly, the Maurienne match and the submission of Toulouse were intimately linked, for immediately after Raymond’s submission, Henry II received custody of Alice of Maurienne.25 Faced with the imminent prospect of Plantagenet control of eastern Provence, Raymond felt he had little choice but to make peace on the best terms he could, while Henry himself strove to indicate the benefits of his lordship by brokering peace with Aragon.26

  As surety, Henry II was given custody of four of Humbert’s castles, ‘reputed to be the best fortified by man or nature’.27 Only one detail remained to be decided. Not unnaturally, Count Humbert was anxious to know what provision Henry intended to make for his daughter’s prospective husband. Henry replied that he would give John the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau in Anjou, which earlier counts of Anjou had sometimes granted as an appanage to younger brothers or sons.28 The Young King, however, took deep offence and vociferously objected to this offer. It was not that he had a personal grudge against John himself: he can have had little contact with his youngest sibling, now a child of barely six, who had been raised from early boyhood at the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou.29 The three castles, moreover, would in reality have remained in the Old King’s control. Yet with Richard invested as count of Poitou and duke of Aquitaine, his second brother Geoffrey installed as duke of Brittany, and now his youngest brother endowed with a rich trans-Alpine domain, the Young King must have felt his position to be increasingly anomalous and unfair. In such circumstances, it deeply rankled that part of his future inheritance in Anjou was being granted to his young brother; far more importantly, John was being given these castles at a time when young Henry still had neither a realm nor even any demesne lands to call his own. He refused to countenance the proposed grant to John and responded by making an outright demand for either Normandy, England or Anjou to rule in his own right.30 Henry’s flat refusal was the final straw for the Young King; ‘he declined to heed his father’s wishes,’ noted Roger of Howden, ‘would not hear any talk of a peaceful settlement, and sought a suitable opportunity to withdraw from him’.31 The Old King succeeded in finalizing the settlement with Humbert despite the younger Henry’s protests, but an open rift had now developed between father and son.32

  The Causes of Conflict

  Conflict between fathers and sons was a widespread phenomenon in the political structures of medieval Europe.33 Heirs reaching manhood and impatient for a share of power confronted fathers often still in their prime and unwilling to relinquish hard-won authority. In Anjou, for example, Fulk Nerra’s son Geoffrey Martel had been involved in a serious quarrel with his father during the 1030s,34 while Fulk le Réchin was opposed by his son Geoffrey Martel II in 1103.35 Similarly in Normandy, a bitter dispute between William the Conqueror and his eldest son Robert Curthose had blighted the king’s final decade and led to a fateful disruption of his plans for the succession to the Anglo-Norman realm. In open rebellion by 1079, Robert had gained the support of the king of France and inflicted a humiliating defeat on his father at the siege of Gerberoy. Despite a brief period of reconciliation, relations quickly broke down, and Robert was forced into exile until the Conqueror’s death in 1087.36

  After describing the Young King’s desertion of his father in 1173, the learned Dean Ralph proceeded carefully to set out for the readers of his history numerous examples of earlier rebellious sons, drawn from the Old Testament and from the history of the Assyrian, Persian and other eastern empires, as well as from those of Rome and Byzantium. His catalogue also included many of the conflicts between rulers and their sons in the early medieval kingdoms of the west, including the Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian and Staufen dynasties, as well as more recent examples from Normandy, Anjou and Poitou.37 Abbot Suger of St Denis had praised Louis VI for not upsetting ‘his father’s lordship over the kingdom by any sort of plot, as other young men customarily do’, but the Capetians had not been been immune from such disputes.38 That the French royal house, moreover, was less troubled than its Angevin rivals in the twelfth century by disputes between reigning kings and their sons was in part accidental. Louis VII, who acceded in 1137, had no sons until Philip’s birth in 1165; the resulting age discrepancy between father and son ensured that Philip posed little threat to Louis’ rule, and he only assumed the kingship after Louis’ debilitating stroke in 1179.

  The Young King’s own confrontation with his father was in many ways closely analogous to that of Robert Curthose with William I a century earlier. Indeed, when writing his history of the Norman dukes for Henry II, the poet Wace evidently considered the conflict between King William and Robert still to be such a sensitive subject that he omitted all reference to it in his Roman de Rou, instead holding up Henry I’s son William Aetheling as the model of a loyal son and virtuous prince.39 Their quarrels stemmed from many of the same underlying tensions: a young man, who had been publicly recognized as the king’s or duke’s heir, was of age and ambitious to exercise some form of devolved rule, yet the father had refused to cede any authority to him, despite having both patrimony and extensive acquisitions within his control. Robert’s frustrations had been fuelled by the fact that though he had been acknowledged by the magnates of Normandy before his father’s expedition in 1066, and during his father’s absence had been given a degree of authority in the duchy, reflected in his title as count, King William had subsequently resumed effective control of Normandy from 1067. Likewise robbed of inheriting Maine after the death of Margaret, its heiress to whom he had been betrothed, Robert had remained unmarried: without a wife or lands, he remained a ‘youth’ even into his thirties, unable to attain the status of a fully adult male or adequately to remunerate his companions.40

  Young Henry, by contrast, was only eighteen in 1173, but despite being married to a daughter of the king of France he was still regarded as being under a form of tutelage, and had enjoyed nothing of his wife’s dower. As Rog
er of Howden noted, ‘he took it badly that his father did not wish to assign him any of his own lands where he could dwell with his queen’.41 Not only had he received the homage and fealty of the magnates in 1162 and 1170, but he had been crowned and anointed a king of England. Such a dramatic elevation in status had naturally raised his expectation of devolved rule or active condominium. As William of Newburgh explained: ‘When this prince grew to manhood, he desired to obtain the reality of kingship as well as the oath of allegiance and title of the same, at the least to reign jointly with his father.’42 Contemporary charters, indeed, proclaimed exactly such co-rule. A deed issued on 18 February 1173 in the archbishop of York’s court at Ripon was ‘given in the nineteenth year of King Henry, grandson of Henry the Elder and in the third year of the reign of Henry the son of the same king’.43

  Yet the reality was very different. Contemporaries recognized the anomalous position in which young Henry found himself, and even those unswervingly loyal to Henry II acknowledged that the Young King had been wronged. At the very outset of his poem, composed in the immediate aftermath of the great war of 1173–74, Jordan Fantosme summed up the paradoxical position of young Henry: ‘A king without a kingdom is at a loss for something to do: at such a loss was the noble and gracious Young King’.44 Referring to the coronation of 1170, Jordan boldly censures Henry II, implying that he must bear ultimate responsibility for the recent war: ‘After this crowning and this transfer of power you took away from your son some of his authority, you thwarted his wishes so that he could not exercise power. Therein lay the seeds of a war with no love lost (guerre senz amur). God’s curse be on it!’45 Wace, in a preface added to the Roman de Rou in or shortly after 1174, similarly criticized a policy which could only lay the Young King open to the wiles of the Angevins’ enemies: ‘Through our new king, who cannot rule as king (par nostre novel roi, qui roi ne peut regner), they [the French] thought they could capture or lay waste the whole of Normandy; in order to do harm to the father, they gave the sons bad advice (lez fils mesconseillierent).’46 If Henry was to crown his son, then he must give him the reality of authority to accompany this kingship.

  The Young King’s grievance at being denied any realm to rule directly was heightened by the fact that Angevin precedent and the practice of contemporary rulers alike afforded ready examples of the effective delegation of power to eldest sons by their fathers. Philip I of France (r. 1060–1108) had in his lifetime invested his son Louis (the future Louis VI) with the Vexin, Mantes and Pontoise.47 In Anjou, Geoffrey Martel, son of Fulk le Réchin, had been associated in the government with his father from 1103 until his death in 1106, while Fulk V had associated Geoffrey le Bel with his rule.48 In Flanders, Count Thierry had not only committed the rule of the county to his son Philip during his three visits to the Holy Land, but each time on his return had ruled jointly with his son.49 In the empire, Frederick Barbarossa had had his eldest son Henry elected as king of the Romans in 1169, while earlier, in 1167, his younger son Frederick had been invested with the dukedom of Swabia, though both were still children.50 Examples were equally ready to hand of rulers who, when they had augmented their rule by the acquisition of new territories, had given an eldest son lands and power. King Stephen had made his eldest son Eustace count in 1147 at the time of his knighting, possibly investing him with Boulogne.51 King David of Scotland had granted his eldest son Henry co-rule of much of his greatly enlarged ‘Scoto-Northumbrian realm’: while David retained sole rule of ‘Scotia’, the heartlands of the kingdom of Scots between the Forth and the Spey, Earl Henry had exercised active condominium in Cumbria, Lothian and his earldom of Northumberland until his premature death in 1152.52 In the Norman kingdom of Sicily – which like the Anglo-Norman regnum was an island kingdom with the extensive ‘cross-channel’ territories of Apulia and Calabria – King Roger II had made his eldest son Roger (d. 1148) duke of Apulia and increasingly from the later 1130s entrusted running of affairs on the mainland to him.53 The example, however, which must have been foremost in the Young King’s mind was that of Henry II himself, who when just eighteen had been granted rule of Normandy by his father Count Geoffrey in 1151, while the latter retained control of Anjou.

  In the majority of these cases, the active association of sons in rule was a logical and pragmatic response to a ruler’s expansion of his territorial power base, whether through marriage, inheritance, purchase or conquest. Direct governance of one or more such acquisitions provided valuable experience of rulership for sons, ensured the immediate presence of a member of the dynasty, and might act as a focus for regional loyalties. Concurrently, the father’s status as superior was symbolized by his retaining direct control of the most prestigious element of his domains, whether ancestral lands or a kingdom. Crucially, by giving eldest sons not just titles but the real exercise of power, rulers such as Roger II, King Stephen and David I helped to ensure the loyalty of their sons and never had to face the consequences of creating deeply disaffected heirs. Yet despite setting so much store by the coronation of his eldest son, Henry II paradoxically baulked at conceding him direct territorial power.54 It was one thing to designate the younger Henry heir to the patrimony, as he had at Montmirail in 1169, and to ensure his recognition as future overlord of the Angevin lands and their hegemony, but it was quite another to hand over any part of its heartlands. Henry II was in part guided by important strategic considerations: to grant Normandy to his eldest son would mean that the Old King would lose direct control of the vital link between England and his other continental domains, potentially – though by no means inevitably – hampering his effective rule. England, moreover, was the source of Henry II’s greatest supply of revenue. As – if not more – powerful was the fear that any such grant would mean a diminution of his own status. Unlike Frederick Barbarossa, who could designate devolved rule to his sons Henry VI and Frederick yet continue to reign unchallenged as emperor, Henry II had no formal imperial authority – even if Guernes of Pont-Sainte-Maxence could refer to him in 1174 as ‘king and emperor’ (reis e emperere).55 England was the source of his sovereign kingship, while by the same token Henry could scarcely give up direct control of Anjou, his own patrimony.56

  Beyond such considerations, Henry, like William the Conqueror when faced with the request of Robert Curthose for a territory to rule, felt the dynast’s profound reluctance to share power.57 It was no coincidence that both rulers had come to power early and had not themselves experienced the frustrations endured by their own sons. If sons began to openly demand lands, moreover, such reluctance could only turn into outright refusal, for in such circumstances any concession would be seen as weakness, especially if sons had the backing of external opponents such as the king of France. As Jordan Fantosme noted of Henry’s stance at the outset of the war in 1173, ‘he would choose death rather than life before his son came to that power [the kingdom of England], so long as he could smite with sword and lance’.58

  Such a view did not stand in isolation among rulers. How far Henry I would have faced pressure for devolved rule of England or Normandy from his only legitimate son William Aetheling as ‘rex designatus’ cannot be known, though the mounting threat of William Clito to Henry I’s control of Normandy goes far to explain the apparent solidarity between father and son before Aetheling’s premature death aged only seventeen in the wreck of the White Ship. More certain, however, is that despite having subsequently worked so hard to secure the allegiance of the Anglo-Norman barons to his daughter Matilda and her Angevin husband, Geoffrey le Bel, it was Henry I himself who dealt their chances of securing the succession on his death a grave blow by refusing to countenance their establishment of effective power bases in England and Normandy during his own lifetime.59 Indeed, a dispute over control of key castles had caused an open rift between the king and his son-in-law that was ongoing at the time of Henry I’s death, giving Stephen another major advantage in his race for the throne.60 Nor was young Henry alone in being an anointed king deprived of actual power b
y a parent jealous of retaining full control. In the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, Fulk V’s widow Queen Melisende had had her son Baldwin III crowned in 1143, but resisted his assumption of full kingship long after he had attained his majority in 1145. Baldwin’s mounting frustration reached a climax in 1152, when he demanded that Fulcher, patriarch of Jerusalem, crown him in the church of the Holy Sepulchre without his mother being present. When Fulcher refused, the young man processed through the city adorned with a laurel wreath in place of the crown which had been withheld from him.61

  Yet while queen mothers might retain a considerable degree of authority once their sons had assumed full rule, as the reigns of Richard I and Louis IX demonstrate, the investiture of an eldest son with significant powers in the lifetime of his father might pose a very real threat to that ruler’s authority and become a potent rallying point for disaffected nobles.62 If there were instances of sons loyally enjoying condominium with their fathers, there were also alarming examples of fathers being challenged, defeated and even deposed by sons impatient for rule. Henry II was all too well aware of the fate of Emperor Henry IV of Germany (1056–1106), who had faced an attempt by his son Henry, whom Otto of Freising refers to as ‘Henry the Younger’, to supplant him.63 In 1105, the emperor had been captured and forced to surrender the imperial regalia, and, though he subsequently rallied his forces and defeated his son’s army outside Liège, Henry IV died before he could fully regain power.64 As Henry V, this rebellious son was to become the first husband of Matilda, Henry II’s mother.65 For the Old King, it was an uncomfortably close precedent.