For almost thirty-six years Henry had ruled England and, for twenty-nine of them, Normandy. But although he had managed to hold back his enemies, he had never satisfied them and never brought them on his side. The barons had suffered because of what they saw as his dictatorial style. Yet it says something for his reign that he survived for so long, especially as the baronage was, on many occasions, at breaking point. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that, ‘He was a good man, and was held in great awe. In his days no man dared to wrong another. He made peace for man and beast.’ But after Henry’s death there was to be little peace. Henry was barely embalmed when Stephen – his nephew, the Count of Blois, Champagne and Chartres, and, by his mother, a grandson of William the Conqueror – had the throne of England.
Stephen was consecrated on Christmas Day, 1135. According to the twelfth-century chronicler, Walter Mapp (1140– c.1209), a clerk in the Royal Household, Stephen did not fit the template of his, often cruel, predecessors. This is perhaps why the prospects for civil war and anarchy were so strong. One of Stephen’s first decisions was to revive the holding of a court, a levee. King Henry had more or less abandoned these gatherings because he thought they were too costly, but this was Stephen’s first chance to receive oaths of loyalty. And so the most important people in England gathered at the royal court where they were required publicly to display allegiance to the new King. However, a significant figure missing from that gathering was Robert of Gloucester, an important ally of Matilda.
Robert’s support was so crucial to Stephen’s future that the court was adjourned until Robert could be present. After considerable negotiations, Robert pledged his loyalty to the King. But he laid down conditions and Stephen was forced to accept this qualified homage. For a while there was uneasy peace. There were small rebellions, but these were dealt with. Stephen crossed to Normandy where there were further uprisings, but when he got back, it was to face anarchy. The Scots were invading from the northern counties, the Welsh were in rebellion but, most dangerously, Robert of Gloucester was preparing for war. The oath of homage was broken. In the early years of his reign Stephen lost the support of the three essential elements of his strength: the baronage, who were sure that this was the long-awaited moment to press their claims; the novel civil service now also began to stand aside from the new King; and much of the Church was against him. King David of Scotland, persuaded of the English decay, crossed the border and laid claim to Northumbria. The Archbishop of York advanced against him with the support of the northern counties and, in a murderous battle at Northallerton, the Archbishop and his forces repulsed and slaughtered the invaders. This reverse, far from discouraging the malcontents, was the prelude to civil war.
Moreover, in 1139, Matilda arrived in England to claim her inheritance including, she thought, the throne. She was not without support, particularly from the bishops. Stephen could not fend off the rebellion. Certainly he was unable to bring together the forces of those who had sworn allegiance to him at court. At the Battle of Lincoln, Stephen was captured and jailed, and Matilda for nearly a year virtually ruled England. But rebellion produced too many factions that held good and so England dissolved into not its first civil war, and not its last.
This was a war of many of the barons who had been dominated by the late king. It was also a chance for the Scots to reclaim territory in England that they believed to be theirs. As ever, the people suffered. Contemporary witnesses write that there was unspeakable cruelty. There was famine: dogs and horses were eaten, and thousands upon thousands starved to death. Stephen was incarcerated at Lincoln but within nine months he was released and was probably more popular than ever. Thanks to her often arrogant and unfeeling behaviour, Matilda had made few friends among the English. So when, in 1145, Stephen’s forces scored a great victory at Faringdon in Berkshire, everyone understood that Matilda’s fortunes had ebbed and so indeed those of the Church that had once stood as her ally. Then came one of those step-changes in any nation’s history. A new monarch upon whom the expectations were as awkward as the crown of statehood was about to be anointed. The process started when the leader of Matilda’s faction, Robert of Gloucester, died in 1147. Who would lead for Matilda? The answer: her son, Henry Fitz-Empress. Fitz means ‘son’ while ‘Empress’ reflected his mother’s title through her first marriage to Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor. The emblem of his father Geoffrey of Anjou’s house was the Planta Genesta, the broom. And so Henry would now become known as Henry Planta Genesta, Henry Plantagenet.
In 1147 Henry was a teenager, just fifteen, and six weary years were to pass before he could claim the throne. By that time, the architects of anarchy as well as loyal opposition would be dead, so would King David of Scotland and so would Stephen’s eldest son, Eustace. He died pillaging the abbey estates of Bury St Edmunds, and was hardly mourned. After this, the people, the bishops and the magnates, tired of war, persuaded Stephen to adopt Henry as his son and therefore his heir. Fourteen months later, in 1154, Stephen was dead and Henry Plantagenet arrived to claim his throne.
Henry’s royal bloodline flowed from William the Conqueror and, on his grandmother’s side, from the Anglo-Saxons. To the English people the young Henry Plantagenet represented a hope of strong, peaceful government. They had suffered the consequences of anarchy while lords and masters had attempted to regain from Stephen the influence they had lost during the reign of Henry I. There had been famine, cruelty and uncertainty. And now there was a renewal of kingship and a reminder that the King of England was also the ruler of Normandy. In fact, England was a single colony in Henry’s empire that ran from the outer islands of Scotland all the way south to the Pyrenees. It is this constant reminder that England was part of a wholly owned geopolitical conglomerate of States, factions and national and dialectic interests that should stay with us for another two centuries and more so that we can understand the process of civil war, as well as the England versus France rivalry, which led to the Hundred Years War that lasted from 1337 to 1453.
When we judge the historical and lasting contribution of one period on the centuries and people that and who followed, then we should gather the spirit and value of the rule of Henry II. Walter Mapp, in his notebook Of Courtiers’ Trifles, tells that Henry II was:
A little over medium height, a man blessed with sound limbs and a handsome countenance, one upon whom men gazed closely a thousand times, yet took occasion to return. In physical capacity he was second to none, lacking no courtesy, well read to a degree both seemly and profitable, having a knowledge of all tongues from the coasts of France to the river Jordan, but making use of only Latin and French [here again, the king of England who spoke only in French]. In making laws and in ordering the affairs of government he showed discrimination, and was clever in devising new and undiscovered legal procedure; he was easy to approach, modest and humble; though vexed by the importunity of suitors and litigants and provoked by injustice, he bore all in silence. Nevertheless he was ever on his travels, and in this respect he showed little mercy to his household which accompanied him. He had great experience of dogs and birds and was a very keen follower of hounds; in night-watches and labours he was unremitting.
It is also said that Henry never sat down unless it was to eat or ride.16
Here was the simple insight into the first ruler of the House of Plantagenet, the father of Richard Coeur de Lion and King John, and the husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204). Eleanor’s own position was not simply as the daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine and therefore a political bride. She had been married to King Louis VII for fourteen years. She was beautiful, full of life. Louis was unbending, worthy, pious. Eleanor once said she was married to a monk, not a king. On one occasion, Pope Eugenius III actually ordered them to sleep in the same bed. The result was, or seems to have been, the birth of a child – but only a daughter and kings, especially French kings, needed a son and heir. This Eleanor had not managed and so in 1152 the marriage was annulled; she immediately married Henry II and bor
e him five sons – William (who died as an infant), Henry, Richard, Geoffrey and John. She eventually joined forces with Richard against her husband, was imprisoned and stayed there until Henry II’s death in 1189.
Medieval kings were rarely ordinary although, given the strife of the times, that is what most would have wished for. Henry was not in that mould. This was the king who destroyed the Adulterine Castles built by barons as bases for their pillage of surrounding hamlets, villages and townships, and who reclaimed the lands given away by Stephen to raise money. Here was the man who sent his knights to Canterbury to rid him of Thomas à Becket, and who sent his Norman knights from Pembroke to Ireland and so started the long English agony of Irish occupation. It was this king who owned more land in France from Anjou to Poitevin to Normandy than the King of France but who was a subject of that monarch.
The power of the monarchy over these lands may have been impressive but Henry II needed wise administrators and his own genius to manage such vast tracts with their own histories, feudal customs and practices and all of which had to have a common bureaucracy and jurisprudence. He established the Exchequer as the central financial control. He deported mercenaries, brought the baronage under sharper if not absolute control and gradually regained royal authority over England. He established what is now the jury system and what was until recently the assize and grand assize courts. Henry II was a confident, intelligent king and a man full of energy. He needed to be. His first task was, naturally, to re-establish central government rather than rely on the feudal system, with the power in the hands of the barons. And, apart from his Continental empire, Henry inherited unresolved business closer to home. He needed to give some order to his relationship with Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Scots had never regained the dominance achieved under King David I, who had died in 1153. They’d gained control of the northern counties from a weak king suffering civil war and David’s successors could not hold them against a strong and well-organized Henry.
The new King of Scotland, Malcolm, paid homage to Henry and Scotland did not regain its independence until Richard I came to the throne. As for Ireland, Henry immediately considered an invasion. Probably the objection of his mother, who influenced many of his ideas, prevented this. But he did have one supporter for an expedition: the Pope. He saw it as a way of bringing Ireland under the direct influence of the Holy See, but that came later, after the death of Becket, and largely at the request of the Irish themselves. Of immediate concern to Henry was Wales.
In 1157, Henry II launched an expedition against the Welsh prince, Owen Gwynedd. It was a disaster. A truce was agreed. Henry’s attempts to subjugate north and then south Wales continued to fail. And it wasn’t until the peace of 1171 that he was content to leave the Welsh princes to get on with their own affairs. They visited England, they settled their nation’s differences, they celebrated their peace with music and verse. And in 1176, at the festival of Christ’s Mass, they gathered in the newly built Cardigan Castle for the first Eisteddfod. By then, and far away from bards and musicians, Henry’s efforts to reform England were taking shape. In this, Henry II was defeated. But these were the beginnings of a remarkable reign that was to last more than three decades. It was a period of war, legal reform, the invasion of Ireland and the building of a palace in Dublin; a period of the break-up of his marriage, the rebellion of his sons, his own final anguish and the humiliation and the death of Thomas Becket.
CHAPTER SIX
1166–89
Henry II is usually remembered for three things: he was the first Plantagenet king; he developed the idea of the assizes; and, of course, Thomas Becket was martyred.
At the age of seventeen, three years before he became King of England, Henry became Duke of Normandy. His interests, responsibilities and complicated relationships with France dominated much of his private and public life. His education prepared him to rule with more than the two strong arms and courage of the double-handed swordsman. He was taught by the poet, Peter of Saintes. At the age of nine he began his studies in Bristol, where he was influenced by the scientist Adelard of Bath. He was instructed in ethics by William of Conches. Little wonder then, that as Henry II, he should be remembered more for his administrative genius and moral agonies rather than his military achievements and failures in France.
William fitz Stephen describes the London of Henry II in his Materials for the Life of Thomas Becket as the capital of England and one which, he says, ‘extends its glory farther than all the others and sends its wealth and merchandise more widely into distant lands’. He adds that, ‘It is happy in the healthiness of its air; in its observance of Christian practice; in the honour of its citizens; in the modesty of its matrons.’ He says that the Tower of London is fixed with mortar, ‘tempered by the blood of animals’. He describes the Palace of Westminster as a ‘building incomparable in its ramparts and bulwarks’.
Obviously this picture of London, of which any tourist board would be proud, doesn’t reflect the fact that England as a whole was less than well ordered. One aspect of twelfth-century society in need of reform was the law. Henry Plantagenet’s chief justice, Rannulf Glanvill, supervised the setting out of the first comprehensive record of legal procedure: it was based on a new system of juries and writs. The assizes were developed.
‘Assize’ comes from the old French word for ‘sitting’. A jury sat to assess. And the writ meant, in theory at least, that a man could appeal to the king to put right a wrong of that man’s lord and master. The record of the Assize of Clarendon is the first big piece of Henry II’s legislation and the earliest document of his major administrative changes. The date is 1166, a hundred years after the Norman Conquest:
And let anyone who shall be found accused or notoriously suspect of having been a robber or murderer or thief. Or a receiver of them, since the lord King has been King, be taken and put to the ordeal of water. And if the lord of the man who has been arrested shall claim him by pledge within the third day following his capture, let him be released on bail with his chattels until he himself shall stand trial . . . And when a robber or murderer or thief has been arrested, let the sheriffs send word to the nearest justice that they have arrested such men, and that the justices shall send word back to the sheriffs informing them where they desire the men to be brought before them.
So bail may be set, and dates set for hearings. It sounded very fair. However there were a few zero-tolerance (as we would now have it) ideas. Anyone, for example, caught red-handed didn’t get a trial. Nor did a person who admitted guilt, even if they denied it later. And the law now attached great importance to a suspect’s criminal record or even local knowledge, that the accused was a villain.
These are just a few of the laws from the Assize of Clarendon. The law was set out so that no one could have any doubts. The community was expected to maintain the law. Moreover, the law was there to be seen to be done, which meant that punishment was clear-cut and sometimes gruesome:
Let him go to the ordeal of the water. And if he fails let him lose one foot. And for the sake of stern justice he shall likewise lose his right hand with his foot, and he shall abjure the realm, and within forty days be banished from the kingdom.
Henry II was trying to make sure that the law was not simply legal memory. He wanted documents to which one could refer to and which could be amended. The law was becoming articulate and, therefore, an institution. And that other institution, the Church, watched with more than a little interest. Just as Henry was bringing secular reforms in his kingdom, so the Roman Church had been re invigorated, by the late Pope Gregory VII. Pope Gregory believed that the King’s single religious role was total obedience to the Church. Conflict between Church and State was inevitable and that inevitability was clearly expressed by Becket.
Thomas Becket was a month away from his thirty-sixth birthday when Henry II came to the throne in 1154. Henry was barely twenty-one. Thomas Becket was born in London, the son of a merchant from Rouen. As a student he had never exce
lled. In fact, his Latin was so poor that on one occasion, at the Council of Tours, he was so ashamed that he refused to preach. Even as Archbishop, he had a tutor who would explain the complicated theology of the scriptures. But by the time he became a minister in Henry II’s household, he was already Archdeacon of Canterbury and Provost of Beverley. It was thanks to the then Archbishop, and his mentor, Theobald, that Becket became Chancellor of the King’s household. Theobald’s hope was that Becket would guard the interests of the Church. Instead, he became the King’s secretary, diplomat and even judge, and was won over by the glamour of court life so much that he often took the King’s side rather than that of the Church. No wonder then that when the archbishopric of Canterbury fell vacant, the King made every effort to have Becket elected. Henry believed that if his friend were Chancellor and Archbishop, then the ambitions of the Church in State affairs would be curbed. Some in the Church were cautious about the appointment and the King’s emissary; Richard of Luce tried to reassure the clergy that the friendship of King and Chancellor could only mean harmony, not division. Richard of Luce also reminded the gathered clergy of the consequences of not accepting the King’s wishes: ‘The King is most zealous in everything which concerns the things of God and displays the most utmost devotion towards the holy Church, especially towards this Church of Canterbury, which he recognizes in all humility, loyalty and filial affection as his particular mother in the Lord.’
At last, with one dissenting opinion from Bishop Gilbert of London (who probably wanted to be Archbishop himself ), the clergy accepted Becket as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Becket would not have it that he would be the King’s man. He threw away his credentials to the King’s court. He was now the Pope’s courtier, not Henry’s – although the Pope was markedly uneasy about what would be seen as a schism between London and Canterbury.
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