Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  The difficulties posed by the general silence of the chroniclers regarding the individual grievances of young Henry’s supporters is compounded by the fact that after the war was over Henry II demanded the surrender and destruction of all charters issued by the Young King following his flight to France, making it hard to recover the specific territorial ambitions of any but a handful of the most prominent rebels. William, Earl Ferrers, seemingly sought to gain the lands of Peverel, which had escheated to Henry II when William Peverel fled from England in 1155, while Hugh Bigod’s support of the Young King appears to have been primarily venal, with young Henry promising his long-sought-after goals of the custody of Norwich castle and the honour of Eye.236 There is little evidence for any attempts by Henry II to infringe on the extensive liberties enjoyed Hugh, earl of Chester, who had received the king’s own cousin Bertrada de Montfort in marriage.237 He had, however, succeeded his father, Ranulf II, in 1153 as a minor, thereby allowing the king to ignore the enormous territorial concessions Ranulf had demanded from Henry, when still duke, as the price of his support.238 Hugh may also have shared his father’s aspirations to increase still further his power in the north Midlands and Lincolnshire, something that Henry II was as keen to curb as Henry I and Stephen had been.239 Something of Earl Hugh’s independent spirit is glimpsed in the refuge he gave at Chester to two hermits whose wild claims respectively to be Harold II of England and Emperor Henry V of Germany might have stretched the credibility of all but the most gullible, but who nevertheless thereby called into question the legitimacy of Henry II’s kingship.240

  The disaffection of Roger de Mowbray provides a clearer example of why some lords might be so eager to support the Young King. Henry I had granted Nigel d’Aubigny, the re-founder of the Mowbray family, those lands in England forfeited by Robert I de Stuteville for supporting Robert Curthose. Early in Henry II’s reign, an agreement was reached between Robert (III) de Stuteville and Roger (I) de Mowbray, by which Mowbray relinquished ten knights’ fees and the important manor of Kirbymoorside. Beyond this, Mowbray felt his regional influence threatened by the rising power of the Stutevilles through royal service.241 Robert III de Stuteville had become sheriff of York in 1170, and Mowbray had been denied his claim to the custody of the city’s castle. Doubtless he now looked to the Young King to make good his claims. It was precisely this availability of two competing sources of authority, each granting claims of supporters against local rivals backing their opponents, that had created such chaos in the reign of King Stephen and made the outbreak of a war between royal father and royal son so potentially catastrophic.

  Some of the Young King’s leading supporters, such as Hugh of Chester, were young men, and Ralph of Diss noted that among those who deserted Henry II were some men he had brought up from childhood and on whom he had bestowed the belt of knighthood.242 Yet the conflict of 1173–74 cannot be seen merely as a ‘war of the generations’. In some cases, sons did indeed join the Young King’s party while their fathers remained loyal to the Old King, a long-established tactic of the nobility in times of major rebellion or civil war to ensure that, whatever the outcome, the family fortunes would be safeguarded.243 Yet equally, there were a number of fathers who supported the Young King together with their sons, such as William Patrick senior and his sons Robert and Engeram, all captured at Dol in August 1173, Robert de Mowbray with his sons Nigel and Robert, and Ralph of Fougères with his son Juhel.244 Some of the leading rebels, moreover, were anything but iuvenes; Hugh Bigod, in his seventies, may have been exceptional, but Robert of Leicester was in his forties and Roger de Mowbray had fought as a young man against the Scots at the battle of the Standard back in 1138. Whatever their individual grievances, the Young King offered such disaffected lords a crucial figurehead around whom to rally. Debonair, affable and open-handed, he cut a very different figure from his irascible and overbearing father. For all those who had experienced the Old King’s ira et malevolentia, or who had felt the weight of Angevin government too heavily, young Henry held out the prospect of change and a better future.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘The Cubs of the Roaring Lion Shall Awaken’

  THE OUTBREAK OF WAR, 1173

  Henry’s son strove to destroy his father; his boast is that he will bring him to St Denis conquered and captured in war – but the king, his father, has promised him something very different; declaring that he will see many a white, red and grey banner, many a lined shield, and many a splendid horse, and many a joust run against his enemies, before there is any question of his being routed and beaten in battle.

  – Jordan Fantosme1

  THE GATHERING STORM finally broke soon after Easter 1173. ‘The son took up arms against his father,’ noted Ralph of Diss, ‘at just the time when everywhere Christians were laying down their arms in reverence for Easter. Dissensions of this sort cannot end happily.’2 The unprecedented scale of the insurrection led Roger of Howden to pardonable exaggeration: ‘The whole of the kingdom of France and the king, the son of the king of England, Richard his brother count of Poitou, and Geoffrey, count of Brittany, and nearly all the earls and barons of England, Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou and Brittany, rose against the king of England the father, and laid waste his lands on every side with fire, sword and rapine; they also laid siege to his castles, and took them by storm, and there was no one to relieve them.’3

  The allied leaders had conceived a coherent and ambitious strategy.4 Normandy had to be wrested from Henry II’s control, for it was the linchpin of the Plantagenet empire.5 Placed between England and the Angevin heartlands of Anjou, Maine and the Touraine, its strategic importance was reflected in the fact that King Henry either stayed in or passed through Normandy in all but four of his thirty-five years of rule, and it was from Rouen, second only to Westminster in its importance as an administrative centre of the Plantagenet lands, that the majority of Henry II’s charters were issued.6 By taking Normandy, the allies would cut Henry’s empire in half, and either isolate him in England or force him to retreat to the Angevin heartlands of the Loire. As long as Henry held Normandy he could receive essential supplies of men and, still more significantly, of money from England, while from Rouen he might strike out at any uprising or the penetration of the Norman border by the Young King and his supporters. This was to be a war fought on many fronts, but its most important theatre would be Normandy.7

  To achieve this objective the allies planned a three-pronged attack on the duchy, with Rouen as their chief target.8 While Henry II was forced to guard his extensive frontiers and face a number of local insurrections spread over his far-flung domains, the Young King and the allies had the advantage of being able to concentrate their forces against key points of the Norman frontier.9 Ralph of Fougères and his Breton supporters, aided by Earl Hugh of Chester, would threaten the Avranchin and push eastwards. Young Henry together with Philip of Flanders would invade from the north-east, while Louis would attack further to the south in the valley of the Avre, where the fortress of Verneuil guarded an area devoid of natural defences.10 By this means they avoided a direct attack on the Vexin, with its formidable chain of fortresses. Having broken through the duchy’s border defences, they would advance in a pincer movement on Rouen, control of which would secure their hold on upper Normandy. It was a sound strategy, albeit one that Henry II could have readily foreseen: Louis had attacked Verneuil in 1153, and in the war of 1167–68 the French king and his allies had followed a similar plan.11 Plans were laid for a number of risings in Aquitaine and Anjou, while an invasion by William the Lion of northern England would aim to join forces with a powerful concentration of rebel garrisons in the Midlands. Troops sent from Flanders would both assist the Scots and reinforce the uprising planned by Hugh Bigod in East Anglia. Even if Henry II did not lose control of England, these attacks would pin down men and resources and prevent him reinforcing his position in Normandy.

  The allies’ ultimate intentions had they succeeded in such a strategy are harder to ascerta
in. There were doubtless some in the coalition who would have relished the destruction of Henry II. Yet for all the high vaunts made at the council of war at St Denis, it seems unlikely that the Young King himself envisioned the complete downfall of his father. Writing soon after the war, Wace believed that ‘if the French could realize their ambitions, the King of England would own nothing on this side of the Channel; if they could do so, they would send him back across it in disgrace’.12 By contrast, Jordan Fantosme suggests that the aim was to force Henry II to cede to young Henry complete and independent control of England.13 As he has Count Theobald tell King Louis, ‘He [Henry II] will find no safety anywhere, be it in open country or forest, if he does not restore to the Young King his rightful inheritance (l’eritage), the realm of England. If he is prepared to act wisely, you will let him keep Normandy, if your rage dies down.’14 The Old King would thus have his holdings reduced to his patrimony of Anjou and Normandy, while his sons would assume autonomous rule in England, Aquitaine and Brittany. In either eventuality, Louis would succeed in dividing the constituent elements of the Plantagenet empire, with its continental lands held directly as his fiefs. By contrast, however, the great cross-Channel magnates cannot have wished for a division of realms under two rival rulers: confronted with just such a situation in 1087 and 1100, which threatened to weaken their power and place them in a grave political dilemma, many of the most powerful Norman lords had rebelled first against William Rufus then against Henry I in favour of Robert Curthose in an attempt to reunite the kingdom and duchy under one ruler. While there may have been fewer such lords holding great estates in England and Normandy by 1173, such factors meant that once they had declared for young Henry against his father, men such as Robert of Leicester and Hugh of Chester were irrevocably committed to seeing the Young King obtain direct rule over an undivided Anglo-Norman realm. For his part, young Henry must have realized that his wide-ranging territorial concessions to his allies would seriously weaken Plantagenet power and diminish his own inheritance, at least in the short term. Nevertheless, it was a price worth paying to finally extricate himself from political subordination.

  Opening Gambits: Pacy and Gournay

  In May, the allies began to probe the defences of the duchy. A force of Flemings pushed down the valley of the Eure towards Pacy, in what was probably an attempt by Robert, earl of Leicester, to regain control of this important fortress and castlery pertaining to his Norman honour of Breteuil.15 Local Norman forces, however, succeeded in gradually driving them back, and Ralph of Diss recorded the mocking story of how a ‘little woman’ had broken down the bridge by which they had crossed the Eure, so that in their precipitous retreat many were drowned.16 The assault on Pacy may have been planned to coincide with an attack in greater force by the Young King himself against Gournay in the Pays de Bray, to which he could rightfully lay claim as part of his wife Margaret’s dowry.17 This key marcher lordship lay well to the north of the near-impregnable fortress of Gisors, yet no major castle stood between it and a direct march on Rouen itself.18 In a daring ambush, the Young King captured Hugh II de Gournay, his son and eighty knights, burned the town of Gournay and forced its burgesses to ransom themselves.19 As with other lords of the Vexin caught between competing rulers, the allegiance of the Gournays was as fluid as the political situation demanded: if Hugh was loyal to Henry II, it is unsurprising subsequently to find his son Hugh the younger as an active supporter of the Young King.20

  For the opening months of the war, and indeed for much of the period of his rebellion, the Young King’s own movements remain shadowy: no fiscal records survive pertaining to his own or Louis’ expenditure on his behalf, while the chroniclers largely concentrate on the actions of his father. Though William Marshal doubtless had vivid memories of the conflict, the author of the History considered it prudent to pass quickly over the events of the great rebellion, save for one incident that served to highlight the honour of the Marshal and his importance to the Young King. According to the History, young Henry was just within the frontiers of Anjou at either Vendôme or Trôo when he learned that his father was marching on him from Tours with his army, intending to besiege him and take him prisoner.21 The Young King took counsel with his followers, including a number of leading French lords. Some argued for withdrawal, but others angrily rejected such advice as cowardly and shameful; the Young King’s forces were strong, they argued, and they should make their stand.22 Once resolved to resist, his men pointed out that the Young King had not yet been knighted: ‘“We would all be a more effective force if you had a sword girded on; that would make the whole of your company more valorous and more respected, and would increase the joy in their hearts”’.23 The Young King readily agreed, and, much to the jealousy of many of the French nobles present, he bestowed this great honour on William Marshal as ‘the best knight who ever was or who will be’, even though ‘he had not one strip of land to his name or anything else, just his chivalry (ne rein fors sa chivalerie)’.24 Accordingly, the Marshal girded his young master with a sword ‘and kissed him, whereupon he became a knight, and he asked that God keep him most valorous, honoured and exalted, as indeed God did’.25

  It was not uncommon to knight young men on campaign, usually prior to battle or at a major siege.26 Yet if young Henry had indeed been girded with the belt of knighthood before his coronation in 1170, then his dubbing in 1173 may have represented a second knighting, this time by his companions in arms, intended to symbolize his new independence from his father.27 Whatever its veracity, the History’s anecdote provides a valuable glimpse of the forces available to young Henry, noting that Louis VII had sent him 400 hand-picked knights, including the French king’s youngest brother, Peter de Courtenay, Raoul, count of Clermont-en-Beauvaisis, Bouchard V, lord of Montmorency, and William des Barres.28 If the History does not exaggerate, this was a very powerful field force: 400 knights, for example, had represented the entire strength of Louis VI’s army at the battle of Brémule in 1119.29 As Count Raoul was Louis VII’s constable, and William des Barres an experienced knight of the French royal household,30 Louis was providing the Young King not only with military clout but with the guidance of veteran warriors. If these lords and their military households were assigned to his support from the outset of the war, it would explain the Young King’s initial success at Gournay in May. The History also states that Geoffrey, count of Brittany, was present among his eldest brother’s forces, even though he was then only fifteen and was not to be knighted until 1178.31 Of all his brothers, young Henry was to be closest to Geoffrey, and his appearance alongside the Young King in 1173 is an early indication of the bond that would subsequently be strengthened first by shared participation in the tournament circuit of northern France from the late 1170s, then again in war itself in 1183.

  Diplomatic Moves and the Appeal to Rome

  The Young King accompanied these opening military actions by waging war on the diplomatic front. On 3 June, an ecclesiastical council, convened in London under the watchful eyes of Richard de Lucy and Reginald of Cornwall, had elected Richard, prior of Dover, as archbishop of Canterbury.32 A week later, however, with preparations for the consecration at Canterbury in readiness, Prior Odo produced a letter addressed to himself and the convent of Canterbury from the Young King. Styling himself ‘Henry, Dei gratia, king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, son of King Henry’, he contested the election as having been held without his consent.33 This was improper, he explained, because as an anointed king he had been entrusted with the kingdom and its well-being.34 The Young King notified the prior that he had appealed to Rome both in writing and by messenger to the legates, cardinals Albert and Theodin, as well as to ‘our faithful men’, the bishops of London, Exeter and Worcester.35 He also challenged the episcopal elections held in late April, which had seen Richard of Ilchester elected to the see of Winchester, the king’s natural son Geoffrey to Lincoln, Geoffrey Ridel to Ely, Robert Foliot to Hereford, Reginald the Lombard to Bath, and G
oscelin to Chichester.36 This was an astute move on the Young King’s part, which attempted to block the promotion of some of his father’s most loyal servants. He did so, moreover, not simply on the grounds that, as king, his assent was necessary for the legality of the elections, but on the grounds that some of those chosen by Henry II were unsuitable for office. As leading agents of Henry II in his struggle with Archbishop Thomas, Ilchester and Ridel already were of ill repute at the Curia, and the Young King sought to exploit this, accusing Ridel, for example, of ‘many things’ including immorality and his involvement in Becket’s murder.37 Thomas, moreover, had only very recently been canonized (on Ash Wednesday, 23 February 1173) by Alexander III, who ‘commanded that his memorial should be inscribed in the catalogue of the saints, and he further enjoined by his apostolic authority, that the day of his passion should be held and celebrated as a festival’.38