Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Edward I made 2,891 journeys during his reign, a move every four days, and his son made 1,458.4 The king would travel with a great entourage in tow, which included not just the Lord High Steward and Lord Great Chamberlain but also such characters as the Keepers of the Cups and of the Dishes, the Master Steward of the Larder, Usher of the Spithouse, Chamberlain of the Candles, Keeper of the Gazehounds, Cat Hunters and Wolf Catchers and Keepers of the Tents, as well as bakers, butlers, grooms, and servants. As the king approached a castle, men were sent ahead to remove unwelcome elements, including prostitutes and “laundresses and gamesters,” petitioners, and people with lawsuits.

  The House of Anjou fought amongst themselves relentlessly. Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey had tried to abduct Eleanor after her divorce from Louis VII and three years later he rebelled against his brother once again; in the end Henry paid his brother £1,500 a year to submit, but luckily, he died soon after. Now Henry and Eleanor’s eldest, Henry, had grown frustrated with his lack of power, and in 1172 father and son fell out publicaly and, to the old king’s surprise and horror, young Henry took up arms against him. Escaping with his knights, young Henry offered his men the opportunity to head back to the old king; some did so, but Marshal was one of those who continued to ride with Henry, both men putting their futures in danger as traitors. The rebellion may have been encouraged by Eleanor.

  Now Richard and his brother Geoffrey began to make trouble. Richard, although lacking his elder brother’s glamor, had a ruthless streak and a military genius than even in his mid-teens was taking shape. The two boys, aged just sixteen and fifteen, rose in armed rebellion against their father in 1178, supported by Eleanor and the Scots, who rolled across the border; Henry’s bastard son Geoffrey went north to fight off the invaders, and the Scots king was captured near Alnwick. “My other sons are the real bastards,” the king told Geoffrey afterward.

  Although the rebellion was defeated and Eleanor imprisoned, the following decade war broke out again; father and son were close to peace when the young Henry caught a fever while plundering a shrine in southwest France in 1183. Surrounded by his retinue of knights, including William Marshal, Henry died holding a ring his father had sent him as a token of forgiveness. For Marshal it was a devastating loss, but he also now found himself in a precarious position, a rebel against the rightful king. Before he had died Henry had entrusted his friend to go on crusade for the sake of his soul; Marshal approached the old king and, swearing homage, asked his leave to carry out his son’s final wishes. Impressed by the young knight’s devotion and honor, King Henry granted Marshal permission to travel to Palestine, assuring the young knight he would find a place for him on his return.

  Eleanor’s son Geoffrey followed his brother to the grave three years later, trampled to death during a tournament, yet another victim of the sport. The king’s woes did not end there though, for his attempts to persuade his heir Richard to hand Aquitaine to his brother John provoked another rebellion. With his mother, Richard joined forces with the young King Philippe of France against the king in a war far more bitter than anything that came before.

  The two sides agreed to peace talks at Le Mans, where Richard and Philippe were shocked by the enfeebled state of the old king, who resembled an elderly man although only in his early fifties. Henry was feverish and shivering with cold; Philippe offered him a blanket which the old king refused. In front of everyone Henry and his son embraced, and the old king whispered in his ear: “God spare me long enough to take revenge on you.” Between the two armies, in no man’s land, Richard—not wearing any armor—stumbled across Marshal, and the knight charged straight at him. Richard screamed “By God’s legs, Marshall, do not kill me! That would be wrong, I am unarmed!” At the last moment Marshal instead plunged his lance into Richard’s horse, spitting out “let the devil kill you, for I won’t.”

  The peace of Le Mans was a trick. A few miles back from the meeting point Richard and Philippe were preparing for an assault on their enemy as he made his way back. The king’s health was waning, and it was clear to all around him that soon power would reside with Richard; Henry’s supporters began to melt away, and the old man was left with a shrinking band of knights to protect him. But Marshal stood firm.

  The two sides met again in the summer, when Henry demanded that his son show him a list of those now in rebellion; as he was read the first name he replied that he needed to hear no more, for at the top of the list was his youngest and favorite son, John. Broken-hearted, Henry surrendered to Philip in July 1189 and expired two days later from a brain haemorrhage. The only son to stay by the king at his deathbed was his bastard Geoffrey.

  Henry’s son became Richard I, called “the Lionheart” on account of his courage, and one of his first acts was to call for William Marshal. In his final months the old king had rewarded Marshal for his loyalty with the hand of Isabel de Clare; she was the daughter of Richard de Clare—or “Strongbow,” the Anglo-Norman warlord who had conquered Ireland—and his Irish wife, and Isabel came with most of south Wales and eastern Ireland.

  Many men in that position would have hanged Marshal on the spot but Richard forgave him, as well as all who stood loyal to his father. He sent Marshal to England to maintain order there and free his mother. The new king also allowed the marriage to go ahead and Marshal, now in his mid-forties, headed to London to claim his sixteen-year-old bride, all of a sudden one of the largest landowners in the west.

  Richard’s friendship with King Philippe, however, turned into a bitter rivalry. The Lionheart spent most of his reign on crusade, where after a brilliant series of victories he fell out with Philippe and Leopold of Austria. This feud led to Richard being held captive in Germany, in exchange for which English taxpayers had to raise a “king’s ransom” or thirty-four tons of gold, the equivalent of four years’ national expenditure.

  During his imprisonment, Richard’s brother John revolted against his rule, in alliance with Philippe of France, but when the king arrived back in March 1194, he forgave his brother, left almost immediately to return to fighting. However, in 1199, in Limousin, southwest France, a cook armed with a crossbow took aim at Richrd during the siege of a small castle. The king stood posing to mock the sniper, a young boy who was using a saucepan as a shield. Despite wearing no armor himself, Richard applauded his first shot; the boy fired again and hit the king in the left shoulder; fatally, as it turned out.

  Even the smallest of wounds in battle could prove to be lethal before the medical breakthroughs of the nineteenth century, and gangrene, or green rot, claimed a large number of lives; in the Lionheart’s case the wound was not that serious, but the removal of the arrow was botched. Having spent his entire adult life in battle, he would have seen the rot take many men and knew his fate.

  The peasant claimed that Richard had killed his father and two brothers, but as a last act of chivalry, the dying king pardoned him and asked that he be released after his death. Afterwards, however, Richard’s chief mercenary Mercadier, had the boy flayed alive.

  “TRULY A LITTLE SHIT”

  In Game of Thrones, the minstrel Marillion writes a bawdy ballad about Robert, the boar, and “the lion in the kings’ bed,” a reference to Jaime’s cuckolding of the king, and so Joffrey has one of his men rip out the man’s tongue.5 Although Henry I did actually have a minstrel blinded for singing a critical song, the king who most matches Joffrey’s cruelty, cowardice, and lack of political sense is Richard’s brother John, who inherited the throne upon his brother’s sudden death; on one occasion he punished a pathetic old “rustic” who had prophesized his downfall by having him and his son torn to pieces by horses.

  One of the few known events of John’s childhood involves the game of chess, which had been brought to Christian Europe by the eleventh century, most likely via Spain. Chess was, surprisingly, quite a violent pastime, in that there are numerous recorded incidents of brutal fights breaking out over the game, which then featured very heavy pieces that would hur
t if used as a weapon. During one game, Bauduin, illegitimate son of a nobleman called Ogier, “is said to have received such a violent blow with a rook” from another player “that both his eyes flew out of his head.”6 The chronicler Alexander Neckam recorded that during chess matches “insults are frequently uttered and the game does not maintain the dignity of a serious occupation but degenerates into a brawl.” Among the advice Neckam offered to aristocrats was: “If you lose money playing at dice or chess, do not let anger plant savage rage in your heart.” It was wisdom John did not heed. As a child he had been playing chess with a Fulk FitzWarin during which he “took the chess board and struck Fulk a great blow with it,” very seriously injuring him.7

  John was violent and a letch, merciless and cruel, and broke every promise he made. Two leading barons accused him of sexual crimes against a wife and daughter respectively, while he even tried to seduce the wife of his half-brother while he rotted in a French jail.

  He was also a drunk and kept a vast stock of wine to fit out his fifty castles. In 1201, King John’s stock of wine at Southampton featured 105 tuns of Poitevin wine, 143 tuns of Angevin wine, and 150 tuns from Le Blanc in Indre. But then this was not unusual at the time, since most people would have drunk several pints of beer a day and, if they were wealthy, wine too. Court rolls—which appeared fully in Henry II’s time—invariably mention alcohol in many crimes and accidents. And Richard fitz Neal, a churchman in the service of Henry, wrote that crime in England was generally explained by “the drunkenness, which is inborn in the inhabitants.”8

  A contemporary, Geoffrey de Vinsauf, who despite his name was English, wrote of “that drinker, England” (Anglia potatrix).9 Indeed, local government since Saxon times had entirely revolved around beer sessions, with each parish having a guildhouse (a drinking house) where decisions were made. The common assembly house was identified as “an assembly of drinkers,” and this might not have been an entirely terrible thing, since there is some research linking alcohol and high levels of trust in a society.10 In medieval Paris, where the English comprised one-third of all students, they were famous for heavy drinking; described as “most discerning . . . outstanding for their manners, elegant in speech and in appearance, strong in intelligence and wise in their advice” and yet having three failings, women, “Weisheil” and “Drincheil” the latter two being toasts.11

  Alcohol consumption in Europe fell considerably from the seventeenth century, with the advent of coffee, tea, and better access to clean water, and aside from events such as London’s gin epidemic, the overall trend has been downward.12

  John had deserted his first wife to take twelve-year-old Isabella of Angouleme, which came as a surprise to her fiancé Hugh de Lusignan. The wronged man appealed to his lord, Philippe of France, who demanded that John appear before him; when he failed to show up Philippe declared his lands in France, including all of Normandy, Brittany, and Anjou, forfeited. At the same time John’s nephew Arthur, his brother’s posthumous son, went to war with him.

  And so, in 1200 Eleanor found herself, alongside notorious mercenary captain Mercadier—the flayer—besieging her own grandson Arthur in western France. She was now seventy-six, but in the ensuing peace treaty, in which King Philippe’s twelve-year-old son Louis was to marry one of her granddaughters, she went to Castile to choose one for him. It was a one-thousand-mile round trip across snow drifts and the sometimes impassible Pyrenees mountains and when she arrived she chose the younger, Blancha, who came back with her to be married in cold, far-away Paris; Louis and Blancha would become the great-grandparents of the Iron King, Phillipe the Fair.

  Arthur demanded the crown of England, and so John traveled to Normandy, where he invited his nephew around for talks in his castle and then beat him to death.

  Philippe Auguste used John’s appalling behaviour as a pretext to annex Normandy, whose people were sickened by John’s mercenary troops. Not that the French king was much better, as King Philippe “cleansed the city with fire and the sword,” and as always, war was merciless for the small folk. In 1204, Philippe’s army swept across Normandy, driving the Plantagenets out entirely. John lost Chateau Gillard when the invaders used latrines to sneak into the building, after some two thousand people had been thrown out of the castle and left to starve, unable to pass the French lines. Later attempts by John to retake Normandy ended only in failure and increased taxes and trouble among the noblemen.

  But although increasingly hostile to the monarch, the barons also fought among themselves. All major lords had their own private armies, composed of bannermen sworn to service, and their disputes often spilled over into violence. Those leading barons in John’s time each had a retinue of knights, varying in size between ten and one hundred, who themselves had squires tied to them and below them yeomen and villeins. During the Anarchy many barons had begun a tradition of private peace treaties, which even involved effectively pretending to fight when their overlords demanded their service. They limited the number of knights they brought while also pledging to return any captured booty, making the whole thing a charade. During Henry II’s reign, the Earls of Leicester and Chester, neighbors constantly squabbling over land, agreed to give each other fifteen days’ notice of any war.

  The king was getting more deranged as the years passed by. All kings held the children of enemies as hostages, and if things went wrong they sometimes suffered appalling fates, but the Plantagenets took it to excess. In 1165 King Henry had ordered hostages from Wales to be blinded and castrated, with the women having their noses and ears cut off. John went further by taking as prisoner twenty-eight boys aged around twelve, the sons of Welsh leaders, and then having them all hanged.

  In Westeros, Ramsay Snow marries Lady Hornwood in order to gain her home but then leaves her to starve to death in a cell in a tower; she chews off her own fingers before dying. In real life, Marshal’s main rivals as landowners on the Welsh borders were the de Briouzes, William de Briouze being a loyal follower of John during his Normandy campaign. The de Briouze family had been powerful magnates for at least four generations, and its head a ruthless figure himself typical of the Anglo-Norman warrior caste. His great-grandfather, another William de Briouze (or de Braoise), had fought at Hastings and been rewarded with land in Sussex, Surrey, and Berkshire, and his son and grandson had expanded their territory across the south-east, the latter in the service of Henry II. The current William de Briouze, the Fourth Lord of Bramber, had been born during the Anarchy and become a major proprietor in the border area. In one notorious incident in 1175, de Briouze had invited three Welsh princes and a number of lords to a feast at Abergavenny Castle to mark the end of the year and toast peace. De Briouze blamed one of them, Seisyll ap Dyfnwal, for the death of his uncle, and had not forgotten nor forgiven; thus at the end of the night when the order was given his men murdered all the Welshmen. Later de Briouze hunted down ap Dyfnwal’s seven-year-old son and killed him.

  King John had been generous with William de Briouze, giving him estates in Wales, including the Lordship of Gower in the south of the country and Glamorgan Castle; he also received land in Limerick. And yet the king had grown increasingly suspicious of him, perhaps because de Briouze knew too much about the circumstances of Arthur’s unnatural death.

  Whatever the reason, the king demanded that William de Briouze pay the crown the debts of £3,500 which he had racked up. The baron was unable to do so, so the king requested that he hand over his eldest son, also William; the baron refused, and fled to Ireland in 1210. Unfortunately, that year John’s men captured his wife and the younger William, and when Matilda de Briouze blurted out that they knew about Arthur’s murder, she and her nineteen-year-old son were taken prisoner and starved to death in Corfe Castle in Dorset, the stronghold where John spent much of his reign. A chronicle described the scene: “On the eleventh day the mother was found dead between her son’s legs, still upright but leaning back against her son’s chest as a dead woman. The son, who was also dead, sat uprigh
t, leaning against the wall as a dead man. So desperate was the mother that she had eaten her son’s cheeks.”13 The father died soon after, of grief. The line continued, however, for the younger William had already fathered four sons, who were raised in secret by a loyal Welsh retainer.

  The king had also demanded that Marshal hand over his eldest son William, which he felt forced to do, before heading to his estates in Ireland to keep away from the unstable king, who openly threatened him.

  By 1212 John was isolated—excommunicated by the Church for refusing the Pope’s choice of Archbishop of Canterbury, and detested by the barons, as well as the common people. John’s attempt to win back Normandy in 1214 led to disaster at the Battle of Bouvines on July 27, taking place in intense heat with men “fighting half-blinded by the sweat cascading down inside their helmets, with a heavy dust kicked up by the thousands of horses.”14 During the course of the battle the Count of Flanders laid his lands on the king of France “but he drew back at the last moment, stunned by the horror of what he was about to do and by fear of committing a mortal sin if he tried to kill the man who was not only his natural lord, but was also placed under God’s especial protection (by virtue of the unction of coronation).”15 The English commander, William Longsword, was clubbed on the head by the bishop of Beauvais and taken prisoner.

  John’s disastrous defeat, on top of his cruel behavior, led a group of mostly northern barons to renounce homage and fealty. They even refused to rise to their feet when the king entered the room—a great and deliberate insult in a world in which every relationship was about fealty. They were led by two lords, Eustache de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter, whose womenfolk had both suffered sexual injury at his hands; among the other rebels was Richard Percy, head of that rising northern family.