As a result, Richard of Canterbury was compelled quickly to send his own messengers with letters to the pope, and soon after hastened to Rome in person.39 Gilbert Foliot also wrote to the pope supporting the candidacy of the bishops elect of Winchester, Hereford and Ely.40 He noted that out of respect for the pontiff the consecration would be delayed till Alexander could consider the matter, but informed him that the Young King’s letters of objection appeared suspect on a number of grounds.41 Nevertheless, the Young King succeeded in obtaining postponement of the consecration of all the bishops elect until the following year. Throughout the period of conflict, he and Louis were to keep an influential presence at the Curia: when in late March or early April 1174 Richard and Reginald, elect of Bath, finally travelled to Rome to seek confirmation of their election, they ‘found many opponents from France, and a greater number of still more implacable ones from England against them’.42 One of the Young King’s advocates was Master Berter of Orléans, who was said to have jested wryly to Pope Alexander that Geoffrey Ridel had a canonical excuse for not attending the Curia: he had a wife.43 Though no others are known by name, they may have included men such as Ralph Niger, a former clerk in Thomas’ circle and already an implacable opponent of Henry II.44 Whether for those who had suffered at the Old King’s hands on account of their support for Becket, or for university-trained clerics such as Berter ambitious for promotion, championing the cause of the younger Henry held out the prospect of high ecclesiastical preferment: a challenge to the elections to key English bishoprics both prevented Henry II from installing his leading clerks in positions of power and kept these posts open for other aspirants.
The hand of young Henry’s clerical advisors can clearly be seen in the long letter sent by the Young King to Pope Alexander, probably in conjunction with his appeals against the episcopal elections, in which he justifies his actions in taking up arms.45 Again adopting the style Dei gratia rex, but deliberately omitting it from references to his father, he began by admitting that many were shocked by the serious and detestable quarrel which had arisen between his father and himself.46 As many had reminded him, God had especially commanded that one should honour one’s parents, and that those persecuting them were disgraced and ill-fortuned. Since he had incurred blame for so inhuman and terrible a crime, to the damage of his renown, the Young King now appealed to the apostolic authority: if he had acted excessively, he would embrace the pope’s correction and was ready to accept the counsel of the holy Roman Church.47 He set out his own grievances against his father, stressing the indignity not only of being an anointed king without any power to implement his duties, but also of being subject to the control of his father’s unworthy ministers.48
In an astute attempt to win the pope’s support the Young King then moved from a rehearsal of his own circumstances to a denunciation of Henry II’s flagrant abuses of the Church, and expressed his wish to abrogate a number of offensive clauses of the Constitutions of Clarendon. These included the punishment in royal courts of clerics first convicted in ecclesiastical courts; the prohibition of excommunication without the king’s prior consent; the need to seek the king’s permission for clerical appeals to Rome; and the king’s right both to the revenues of a vacant see and to have elections for abbacies and bishoprics held in the royal chapel.49 Henry II’s record concerning prolonged vacancies and his scarcely concealed manipulation of supposedly ‘free’ elections to high ecclesiastical offices were notorious, but to press home his point the Young King’s letter included the text of a writ purportedly sent earlier that year by Henry II to the chapter of Winchester: ‘Henry, king of the English, duke of the Normans and count of the Angevins to his faithful monks of the church of Winchester, greeting. I order you to hold a free election, but nevertheless forbid you to elect anyone but Richard, my clerk, archdeacon of Poitiers.’ This writ was undoubtedly an unscrupulous forgery, even if it reflected the reality of Henry II’s control over such key appointments.50 Nevertheless, the Young King’s manifesto can only have reinforced papal suspicion of Henry II at a time when Becket’s canonization had heightened still further the vivid memories of his martyrdom.
Nevertheless, Alexander III kept a judicious distance from the conflict, neither openly supporting Louis and the allies against Henry II, nor unleashing the thunders of Rome against the Young King in response to the Old King’s own appeals for his aid.51 In his attempt to win hearts and minds, moreover, Henry II also wrote to his allies among European rulers, including William II of Sicily. They expressed their regret, but, other than their sympathies, could send little by way of effective support to him.52 Still less effectual were the letters composed by Peter of Blois for Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen directly rebuking both Queen Eleanor and the Young King for the folly of their opposition to King Henry and exhorting a swift return to obedience.53 Nevertheless, Rotrou’s censure of young Henry vividly captures the shock and outrage of Henry II’s own supporters at his son’s inception of what they regarded as an unjust and unnatural conflict, for, Rotrou warned, he was engaged in the worst kind of civil war:
You fight not against barbarian nations but your own intimate followers and domestics (familiares et domesticas). It is not foreign lands you invade, nor hostile strongholds, but your own country. You afflict people who are subject to you; you pursue in a hostile manner not a rebel, not an enemy, but your father – indeed, not your father, but yourself. By fighting, you do not enlarge for yourself that inheritance which was granted to you by paternal concession, by the general wish of the people, and by the oaths of the nobles. Rather, you now usurp it as a tyrant and invader, by spoliation of churches, oppression of the poor, by arsons and homicides, and ultimately, by parricide.54
Aumale and Drincourt: The Assault on North-East Normandy
While his agents pursued their diplomatic offensive at the Curia, the Young King prepared for a major campaign. Despite his success at Gournay, any further advance into the duchy would have been dangerous while the strong castles of Aumale and Neufchâtel-en-Bray, also known as Drincourt, remained untaken to the north.55 Accordingly, around 29 June, Count Philip and young Henry led a large army against Aumale, one of the principal bastions of the duchy’s vulnerable north-eastern border.56 It was held by its count, William ‘le Gros’, a veteran warrior in his sixties who had distinguished himself at the defeat of the Scots at the Standard back in 1138, and Simon, count of Evreux, an important border lord whose loyalty Henry II had worked hard to maintain.57 Despite this, Aumale now surrendered to the forces of Philip and the Young King with such indecent haste that its commanders and others in the garrison were strongly suspected of treason.58 Whether Aumale had fallen through cowardice or complicity, it augured badly for Henry II. The loyalties of frontier magnates in this region were notoriously fragile, and the defection of Henry, count of Eu, quickly followed.59 Howden directly linked the outbreak of open rebellion in England and elsewhere with the news of Aumale’s fall.60
The allies moved quickly to exploit these successes. In early July, while King Louis led a great army up through the Chartrain to invest the key town of Verneuil in the south-east, the Young King and his brothers Richard and Geoffrey joined Philip and Count Matthew for an attack on Drincourt.61 This pushed their advance to the river Béthune: beyond this, only the small castle of Saint-Saëns on the Varenne stood between them and a direct march to Rouen through Bray and the Roumois. The strategic importance of Drincourt, however, was reflected both in its strength and by its elite garrison of knights commanded by two of Henry’s fideles, Doun Bardolf and his brother Thomas, who put up a far more spirited resistance than the defenders of Aumale.62 Nevertheless, after a sustained period of battering by siege engines, the castle’s defences began to weaken, and Count Matthew adjudged the time was right for an all-out assault on 25 July. This, however, was the Feast of St James, and the Young King and his nobles, ‘showing honour to the blessed apostle’, absolutely refused to take up arms that day.63 Young Henry’s reticence reflected the
great importance to the Angevin family of the cult of St James, which though soon to be eclipsed by that of Becket remained one of the foremost objects of pilgrimage in England. Henry II invoked the protection of the relic of the hand of St James for Channel crossings and sought the saint’s intercession on military campaigns: in 1163, for example, he visited Reading prior to his Welsh campaign.64 His son had been imbued with a similar reverence, but may also have learned from his father the wisdom of abstaining from fighting on major holy days. During his campaigns of 1166–67 in Brittany, Henry II had prepared his forces for battle on the vigil of the feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul (29 June), but had been dissuaded from giving battle the next day by Hamo of Savigny, a holy man whom he greatly respected. Hamo prophesied that as a result of respecting the apostles’ feast day Henry would meet with great success within the year; and so, noted the Life of Hamo, it transpired, for King Henry both subdued the Bretons and established a truce with the king of France.65
Map 2 Normandy, to illustrate the campaigns of 1173
Count Matthew, however, did not share such scruples. On the refusal of the Young King and his supporters to join in the storming, he ‘was furious and indignant with them, and demanded that he should be allowed to keep whatever booty and spoils he might take that day’. The Young King consented, despite the great importance of such booty to the morale and finances of his men. Matthew’s forces duly attacked the walls of the castle, but during the assault the count of Boulogne was struck just below the knee by a crossbow bolt, ‘shot as it were from heaven’.66 Count Philip had his brother taken back to Flanders, but he died some days later from his wound.67 Ralph of Diss also saw the workings of divine retribution in Matthew’s fatal wounding on the feast of St James, noting that it was five years to the day since the count had sworn fealty to Henry II, touching a number of relics including the hand of St James.68
Despite this setback, the allies pressed home their siege. Realizing that they could not resist another such assault, the constables of Drincourt sought and were granted a respite from the besiegers in which to seek King Henry’s aid, promising that they would yield the castle on terms if this was not forthcoming. Notwithstanding Matthew’s death, Philip and the Young King were no doubt eager to display chivalric magnanimity to these loyal defenders and thereby encourage the more rapid surrender of other castles to them. Henry II, unable to come to his castellans’ assistance, gave them permission to yield the castle to the count of Flanders.69
Aumale and Drincourt had fallen to the allies. But the death of Count Matthew had been a bitter blow and immediately confronted Count Philip with a dynastic crisis. Having no children of his own, Philip had made Matthew his heir. He was now forced to break off campaigning to arrange for his other brother, Philip, bishop elect of Cambrai, to demit his ecclesiastical office and take up the arms of knighthood as his new successor.70 With their offensive on the north-east frontier of the duchy stalled, the Young King moved south to join King Louis at the great siege of Verneuil.71
War in the Midlands: The Siege of Leicester72
While the allies were pounding at the frontier defences of Normandy, in England it was the turn of Henry II’s forces to take the offensive. On 3 July, the justiciar Richard de Lucy and Henry II’s uncle Reginald of Cornwall, with ‘the army of England’, laid siege to the castle and town of Leicester.73 Though Earl Robert had withdrawn to France, he had left powerful garrisons in Leicester and its two dependent fortifications at Mountsorrel and Groby.74 Whether the siege was a response to the garrison’s depredations or a pre-emptive strike intended to overawe other potential rebels, it indicated the central role the earl of Leicester played in the Young King’s rebellion.75 The Midlands were to prove the epicentre of the insurgency in England: the defection of Leicester along with William, Earl Ferrers, who held the castles of Tutbury and Duffield, created a powerful bloc of rebel castles stretching up to the lands of Earl Hugh of Chester, together with Hamo de Masci’s castles of Dunham and Ullerwood, and Geoffrey de Cotentin’s castle at Stockport.76
Despite their lord’s absence, the garrison of Leicester under the constable, Ansketil Mallory, put up a sustained resistance. To co-ordinate their operations with the wider allied strategy, the Young King had sent them one of his trusted household knights, William of Dive, who also had links with the household of Earl Robert, and who was subsequently installed as castellan of the castle of Mountsorrel.77 In Leicester, the powerful castle, flanked to the west by the river Soar, was situated at the south-west corner of the town, whose walls followed the line of the former Roman defences and probably preserved much of the Roman walls.78 Pressed home for three weeks, the royalist siege revealed the great resources in men, material and logistics available to Henry II, which the Young King’s allies in England, and even Louis VII in northern France, could barely hope to match. The sheriff of Shropshire, for example, sent a force of 410 archers and other infantry, while 156 carpenters and an engineer ‘to make machines for the army at Leicester’ were paid from the account of the counties of Warwickshire and Nottinghamshire. The sheriff of Gloucester supplied 10,000 crossbow bolts from St Briavels, the royal centre of bolt and arrow production in the Forest of Dean, while other shrievalties furnished more siege materials.79 These preparations also reveal the crucial role played in the war by the sheriffs, the key agents of royal authority in the shires. The great majority were men of modest rank, career administrators who owed their positions to Henry II: throughout the war, the Young King was unable to detach any of them from his father’s cause, and their unshakable loyalty to the Old King was to prove a major factor in his ultimate victory.
Leicester castle continued to remain impregnable against the royalist attacks, but the outbreak of fire within the town finally forced the townsmen to sue for peace. After levying a fine of 300 marks from the leading citizens, de Lucy expelled the burgesses, but permitted them to take their possessions to whichever of the king’s towns, castles or vills they wished.80 He then had the town’s gates and part of its walls pulled down. Leicester’s fate was both a dire warning to any other towns that might consider insurrection in the name of the Young King, and a deliberate blow to the status and prosperity of the rebel earl of Leicester. Yet before the justiciar and his colleagues could finish their task by reducing Leicester castle itself, news of the invasion of northern England by William the Lion forced them to break off the siege on 28 July and grant the garrison a truce until Michaelmas.81
The Invasion of William the Lion
Assembling his army at the traditional mustering site of Caddonlee, Selkirkshire, close to the major royal stronghold of Roxburgh, William had invaded Northumberland, probably in mid July.82 His army had been stiffened by a force of Flemings, disembarked at Berwick or one of the other Scottish east coast ports.83 Their first target was the castle of Wark, which had been heavily re-fortified by Henry II after its recovery in 1157.84 Its castellan, Roger de Stuteville, nevertheless judged his position so grave that he sought a respite of forty days from King William to seek aid from Henry II, and pledged to yield the castle if relief was not forthcoming within this time.85 The Scots army now moved down the rich coastal plain of Northumberland, harrying and burning. It was not without reason that William of Newburgh called them ‘that savage people who would spare neither sex nor age’, for the Scots and Galwegian levies had a black reputation for their ruthless conduct in war.86 Reginald of Durham describes how the terrified inhabitants fled to take sanctuary in churches, setting up makeshift dwellings and tents in the cemetery enclosures.87 King William may well have been counting on a shift in loyalties among the northern magnates. Some of the older among them, such as Odinel de Umfraville, lord of Prudhoe, had served his father Earl Henry, while William himself had held the earldom of Northumberland from 1152 to 1157.88 Even after Henry II’s resumption of the northern counties in 1157, William remained lord of extensive holdings in Tynedale, and must have still been a familiar figure in Northumberland.89 Jordan Fantosme r
eveals considerable sympathy for William, and has Henry II’s castellans, even though opposing him, speak with respect of his claims to the earldom he regarded as his patrimony.90 Such claims, moreover, had been strengthened by the Young King’s grant of the earldom to William in 1173.91
Yet if he had hoped to win over the leading northern families such as the Stutevilles, de Vauxs, de Vescis and Umfravilles, King William was to be disappointed. At Alnwick, the Scots were repulsed by the stiff resistance put up by William de Vesci, and though Roger FitzRichard deemed the castle of Warkworth too weak to be defensible, he fell back on Newcastle upon Tyne, a fortress far too powerful for the Scottish army to take by assault.92 The campaigns of 1173–74 would sharply reveal the absence of an effective siege train to be a critical flaw in King William’s ability to wage an effective war of conquest in northern England.93 Despite this, William now moved his forces into Cumbria and besieged Carlisle, for as Jordan has the king’s counsellors tell him, ‘of all the lands you lay claim to, Carlisle is the chief’.94 Henry II had greatly strengthened the castle’s outer defences, and it had been put in a state of readiness in 1173.95 It was thus with some confidence that its castellan, Robert de Vaux, refused the Scots’ summons to yield it.
William launched a major assault, probably on the more accessible southern side where the town protected the castle, but the Scots were successfully repulsed.96 Realizing he must resort to attrition, the king sent out raiding parties to ravage the countryside and collect supplies, while the main army remained investing Carlisle.97 The king of Scots ordered that churches and religious houses be spared, but the royal mandate was not always obeyed and the Scots and Galwegians were accused of widespread plundering of churches.98 Yet as William tightened his blockade of Carlisle, he received news that an English army under Richard de Lucy and the constable, Humphrey de Bohun, were hastening to the town’s relief. The king, perhaps urged on by some of the younger firebrands, was all for offering battle and winning his inheritance by force of arms, but this time sounder counsel prevailed. For the Scots to hope to vanquish an Anglo-Norman army greatly superior in knights and well-equipped troops in the open field was clear folly, as the rout of David I’s mighty host at the battle of the Standard in 1138 had painfully revealed. Bitter at heart, William the Lion bowed to the inevitable, and ordered a precipitous retreat to the safety of Roxburgh.99 Elements of the Carlisle garrison gave pursuit, and Robert de Vaux employed much of the substantial booty they gained to strengthen his defences and reward his men for their stout resistance.100 The English field army then advanced into Scotland and de Lucy proceeded to lay waste much of Lothian.101 No attempt was made to besiege Roxburgh, Edinburgh or other powerful strongholds, for the justiciar’s fast-moving force had no siege equipment, and aimed only at a punitive strike to deter the King of Scots from further support for the rebels in England.
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