A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  In 1169 a small company of knights landed at Bannow Bay near Waterford. They were followed a year later by a much more formidable group, which was led by the Earl of Pembroke, Richard de Clare, known as ‘Strongbow’. The subtlety of de Clare’s general approach to Irish politics can be gauged from the way in which he ordered seventy citizens of Waterford to be thrown into the sea after their legs had been broken. Terror worked. In short order, Strongbow and his knights had recovered Leinster, at which point, in 1171, Diarmait conveniently died, leaving Strongbow, who had married Diarmait’s daughter Aoife, as his successor. It was now that Henry II woke up to the fact that what had begun as an expedition of assistance to an Irish ruler had turned into the creation of a virtually autonomous Norman colony. He took decisive action, crossing to Ireland itself where, in the wattle palace at Dublin, he received the homage of most of the native Irish kings as well as of the Norman knights. Henry’s policy (like that of countless generations who crossed the Irish Sea after him) was intended as damage containment, and he was unquestionably seen by the indigenous Irish nobility as an arbitrating overlord, not a conqueror. But the consequences of the Anglo-Norman presence in eastern Ireland were anything but limited. Temporarily stopped in their tracks, the Norman colonists still managed to push west, deep into Gaelic Ireland, halted only by the most powerful of the resisting Irish kings, Ruaidri Ua Conchobair (Rory O’Connor). However, in a generation or two, within their new ‘pale of settlement’ (the area of English rule), they created a feudal Ireland, complete with castles, manors, walled towns, monasteries and a French-speaking knightly caste, utterly unlike the cattle-droving, kinship-based clans of the indigenous Gaels. Ancient kingdoms were treated like Midhe, which was granted to Hugh de Lacy and transformed into the ‘Liberty’ of Meath – ‘liberty’ meaning something like its precise opposite, a holding granted by the king conditional on the acceptance of his overlordship.

  An expanded realm was, in fact, the last thing Henry II needed. By the third decade of his reign, no matter how hard and how far he rode, it was apparent to the king that it was increasingly difficult to keep his overextended territories as a coherent dynastic estate, much less any kind of unified polity. There was a bitter irony that his endless travels and travails had all been on behalf of the Angevin family firm; but it was precisely from within the family that the most serious threats arose. He and Eleanor had had eight children, four of whom were sons, which was an astonishing asset in a time when male heirs were notoriously hard to bring to maturity. But a mural at Winchester Palace of an eagle viciously attacked by its own young (another of Becket’s ominous dreams) better summed up the relationship between the king and his brood. For that hostility Henry was, himself, at least partly to blame. Suspicious of their ability and their integrity, he delegated power to them only grudgingly, and then, quite as often and abruptly, withdrew it again, leaving them to smoulder with humiliation. The eldest son, Henry, ‘the flower of chivalry’, was much doted on by his father, but just as the king fretted over his son’s vanity and addiction to idleness and gaming, he compounded the problem rather than solved it, by ostentatiously keeping him from access to power or the purse. The coronation in June 1170 only increased young Henry’s sense of the emptiness of his dignities as ‘king’ of England and Duke of Normandy and drove him into rebellion. Crushingly defeated in the rebellion against his father, he was, astonishingly, pardoned by Henry II and given more responsibilities, but he died of dysentery in 1183. The second son, Geoffrey, as bright and as devious as his grandfather, Geoffrey of Anjou, was given charge of Brittany but was trampled to death by a horse in one of the tournaments his father so despised as foolishness. This moved the third and fourth sons, Richard and John, up the waiting list, where their impatience was encouraged by the one member of the Angevin household who was evidently most eager to see Henry II’s power and pretensions receive their comeuppance: his long-estranged, long-suffering wife, Eleanor.

  Early in the reign, it had looked as if Eleanor would, indeed, be the consort for which she was so richly qualified. When Henry travelled to Normandy or Anjou, she often acted as regent in his absence. Her own court attracted troubadour poets and musicians, the cult of love transported from southern France to southern England! Bearing Henry eight children, she aged as gracefully as she could but not gracefully enough to keep her husband from the arms of mistresses, above all Rosamond Clifford, Rosa mundi (the rose of the world), for whom he built a love bower at Woodstock. After 1163 Eleanor and Henry spent less and less time together. The queen went back to Aquitaine, re-establishing her troubadour court in Poitiers and devoting all her energies to educating her sons (especially Geoffrey and Richard) and encouraging them to prise their inheritance from their father’s grip. If this meant they had to ally themselves with Henry II’s natural enemies – even the Capetian kings of France – so much the better. In 1173 Eleanor took the drastic step of fomenting the war of the sons against the father and managed to escape Henry’s besieging army only by dressing in man’s clothes and fleeing for asylum to her ex-husband, Louis VII of France. Recaptured, she was kept under strict surveillance in England, her household was reduced to a bare minimum, and her travels were closely monitored by the understandably suspicious Henry II. This quasi-imprisonment was to last for ten years.

  The death of young Henry in 1183 seemed to bring about a temporary reconciliation. Eleanor was released from captivity, allowed to tour Aquitaine and to see her daughter Matilda. But this greater freedom also gave her greater liberty to plot a revenge. In the second serious round of hostilities, in 1189, she was again a major instigator of trouble. The king was now fifty-six, and his relentless life in the saddle had finally taken its toll. Eleanor encouraged her surviving favourite, Richard, to demand from Henry that he be publicly and immediately acknowledged heir in England, Normandy and Anjou. But Henry suspected that this would only quicken, rather than satisfy, his son’s impatience and balked, thus triggering the revolt he had meant to prevent. One rumoured explanation was that Henry was sleeping with the French princess, Alais, whom the king had designated as Richard’s bride. Perhaps Richard’s sense of dishonour and humiliation became unbearable when Alais bore Henry an illegitimate child, for then Richard was prepared to take the same road as his brother Henry had done sixteen years before: kneel at the feet of the king of France, Alais’s brother, Philip Augustus, and swear to be his vassal.

  The war went disastrously for Henry II. Watching his birthplace, Le Mans, burned by the armies of Richard and Philip, the king agreed to terms, humbling himself before the two younger men. To onlookers he appeared to embrace Richard in the kiss of peace, but what he really said as he took his son in his arms was: ‘God spare me long enough to take revenge on you.’ Worse followed. Henry asked to see a list of all those who had conspired against him so that he might pardon them. The first name was his youngest son, John. This must have been deeply wounding, since Henry had provoked Richard in the first place by attempting to wrest some lands from him and transfer them to the under-endowed John. Two days after seeing that John was a treacherous ingrate, he died, his chroniclers said, of shock and heartbreak. The only child present at the deathbed was his illegitimate son, Geoffrey, whom Henry had made his chancellor. ‘The others,’ he said, before he expired, ‘are the real bastards.’ After the usual vulture-like picking-over of the king’s jewels and clothes by his attendants, Henry’s body was re-costumed in the kind of finery he had shunned in his life, and in Arthurian style he was carried on a black-draped barge down the river Vienne to the abbey of Fontevrault. When Richard eventually came for a cursory visit to his father’s tomb, it was said that blood poured from the nostrils of the corpse. There were other alarming portents. Just before the king’s death, according to Gerald of Wales, the fish in a certain pool in Normandy, near the castle of Exmes, had engaged in a nocturnal aquatic battle that was so violent that scarce any survived to the next morning.

  There were many, however, like Eleanor, who was now
in her seventies, who greeted the death of Henry II quite dry-eyed. For her, as for many, it was an occasion for uninhibited rejoicing. With Richard, the preux chevalier (gallant knight), with his intensely blue eyes and red-gold locks, a character formed by Eleanor’s educated passions, finally seated on the throne, she could assert herself again in the business of the state. In England, Richard lost no time in proclaiming that he would be his mother’s, not his father’s, son. Henry’s most unpopular high officers of state were shown the door, and a flamboyant, crowd-pleasing show was orchestrated for his coronation. The Westminster ceremony in 1189 (the first to be reported in detail) dripped with gold. Emulating Charlemagne, Richard picked up his own jewel-encrusted crown and tendered it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a clear gesture of precedence. In addition to the usual regalia, he was invested with a golden sword and spurs and a golden canopy held by four barons above his head. The only ill-omen was a bat that flew, unnervingly in daylight, about the throne, striking the superstitious assembly with consternation. More seriously, the gift presented by the Jews of London was suspected of being the token of a sinister plot. Rumours spread. A general massacre ensued, described by the chronicler Richard of Devizes as a holocaustum, who added, irritably, that it took so long to ‘send them to the devil, that the work had to be continued a second day’. To his credit Richard, who, like his father had taken the Jews under his protection, attempted to outlaw this first wave of English pogroms. But he was in a hurry to fulfil his coronation oath to take the Cross, and a few months after he had left for the Holy Land the mass murders began again. In York, rather than surrender to the doubtful neutrality of the local authorities, the Jews holed up in the old Norman castle, slit the throats of their women and children and died in their own fire.

  But the king had to be off. For Richard’s passion for the crusade was not some idle piety. It defined him. He had been brought up in Poitiers, in his mother’s world of chivalric idylls and Arthurian poetry. In all likelihood he heard directly from Eleanor heavily embellished stories of the Christian war in the Holy Land, and he could hardly have failed to notice when, after a convenient fire at Glastonbury Abbey, excavations prior to reconstruction revealed two bodies, widely believed to be Arthur and Guinevere. Also found was an ancient sword, immediately taken to be Excalibur. Once equipped with it, Richard was ready for God’s work. He may also have wanted to atone for Henry’s failure to respond to the pleas of the aged Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem, who, in 1185, had brought the keys of the Holy Sepulchre in the forlorn hope of persuading the Plantagenet to become the next king of Jerusalem.

  There was no question, then, that (unlike Henry II) he would make good on his coronation vow to take the Cross. Equally, however, there was no question what the result would be. As one chronicler put it: ‘As the earth shudders at the absence of the sun, so the face of the kingdom was changed by the departure of the king. Nobles became busy; castles were strengthened, towns fortified, moats dug.’ In other words, it seemed that the long era of predictable, secure Henrician government, in which overmighty barons or officials could be kept in check by the threat of a royal visitation, was now in jeopardy. Those fears were confirmed by Richard’s entrusting government largely to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, who swiftly colonized its offices with his own dependants and made the royal administration an instrument of favouritism rather than its monitor. When Richard’s younger brother John, Count of Mortain, set himself up as a rival focus of loyalty, the barons alienated by Longchamp flocked to him.

  Not that John was motivated by a budding sense of the interests of the realm. Richard had anticipated that, in his absence, his brother would make trouble and also that he might be bribed to keep his hands off England. So John was assigned the revenues of six English counties on condition that he stayed out of England for three years, by which time Richard assumed that he would have returned from the crusade. Unwisely, Eleanor persuaded him to rescind the agreement. John swiftly returned and even more swiftly began to act as if he already had the keys to the kingdom, travelling with his private army. Longchamp and his men were turned into fugitives, leaving John to establish a virtual state within a state, complete with his own court. When news came, in 1192, that Richard had been captured on his way back from the Holy Land, John lost no time in proclaiming his brother dead and himself king. Richard was, of course, very much alive, but incarcerated in Austria, where his fate had become the trophy in an undignified bidding war between prospective ransom-hunting princes. His predicament drew from Eleanor, in a letter beseeching the intervention of the pope, a heartbreakingly poignant reflection on her turbulent life:

  Moi Aliénor, par la colère de Dieu reine de l’Angleterre [by the wrath of God, Queen of England], duchess of Normandy, unhappy mother, pitied by no one, the wife of two kings, I have arrived at this miserable old age which plunges me into ignominy. I was also the mother of two kings. The Young King and the Count of Brittany lie in dust and their unhappy mother is doomed to be incessantly tortured by their memory. Two sons remain but they exist to add to my miseries. King Richard is in irons; his brother John ravages the kingdom with fire and sword. I know not which side to take. If I leave, I abandon the kingdom of my son torn by civil war, the country bereft of wise council and consolation. If I stay I may never see the dearly beloved face of my son again. No one will work fervently for his deliverance. O Holy Father draw the sword of St Peter against the wicked . . .

  But the sword of St Peter was not much help. The king’s ransom was set at 34 tons of gold – three times the annual revenue of the Crown and a punishing burden that would lie heavily on England for a generation. When Philip Augustus of France (who had encouraged John in his ambitions) heard that Richard was finally at liberty in 1194 he sent a friendly message: ‘The devil is out. Look to yourself.’ Richard eventually caught up with his terrified, treacherous brother at Lisieux in Normandy and then took a leaf straight out of his detested father’s book by deciding to crush the traitor with condescension. Raising the prostrate, terrified John to his feet, he gave him the kiss of peace and said: ‘Think no more of it, John, you are only a child [he was twenty-seven at the time] who has been led astray by evil councillors.’

  Much of Richard’s authority was based, in fact, on the cavalier gesture, the code of honour, the full-tilt charge. But although sustaining the chivalric charisma of the Crown was important, it was only half the practice of sovereignty as reinvented by Henry II. The rest was political intuition. And in this department, too, Richard developed his own psychological edge over his adversaries. To look at the colossal ruin of Chateau Gaillard, the ‘saucy château’, is to see Richard’s energy translating itself into strategic intelligence. Built above the banks of the Seine, north of Paris, it was sited deliberately as close as possible to the border between Plantagenet Normandy and the territories of the king of France. Defensively impregnable, supplied by both water and land routes, it was a base for harrying offensive operations when needed; the last word in military engineering, it was meant to make a statement and the statement was, in effect, ‘Don’t even think about it’. ‘Were its walls made of butter,’ Richard is reputed to have said, ‘they would still stand.’

  Richard died in 1199, besieging a castle near Limoges that belonged to a rebellious vassal. Exasperated by the prolonged resistance and bent on punishment, Richard refused a surrender to the outnumbered occupants. After a hard day’s battering, he took archery practice, displaying his contempt for the defenders by going unarmoured, protected only by an esquire walking in front and holding a small shield. On one occasion he noticed a solitary defender on the battlements reduced to using a frying pan as a shield, whose quixotic bravura both amused and touched the king. He was less amused, however, when a bolt from the lone archer’s crossbow struck him at the join of shoulder and neck. The wound turned fatally gangrenous. Knowing his end was near, the dying king magnanimously ordered that the bowman be spared the general hanging that would follow the surrender of the c
astle. And so he was. After the king’s death, he was flayed alive instead.

  Nothing remains of Richard in England, save the Victorian statue outside the House of Lords, which gives the utterly misleading impression that he was, somehow, a quintessentially English king. But barely a year out of the nine and a half of his reign was spent in England. The heart of Lionheart was buried in Rouen, and the rest of him was interred in the family mausoleum at Fontevrault near Chinon; both perfectly apt places for a sovereign who evidently assumed that the centre of his realm lay on the far side of the Channel. His brother John, who succeeded him, however, was buried in England, mostly in Worcester Cathedral, although the monks of Craxton Abbey took care to secrete away the entrails (which, in the medieval way of things, needed swift burial), leaving the king as gutless in death as, it was said, he had been in life.

  Not only in every Robin Hood romance but even in their own day, the two brothers were thought of as the embodiments of the good and wicked ruler. Richard was lauded as a paragon, who was courageous, magnanimous, pious and disinterested; John was reviled as shifty, rapacious, cruel, vindictive and self-serving. But they had much more in common than the cartoon stereotypes allow for. They were both violent. John was detested for his cold-blooded execution of twenty-eight sons, taken as hostages from the Welsh princes and nobles with whom he was warring. But Richard slaughtered 2700 hostages at the siege of Acre to express his displeasure at Saladin’s tardy payment of their ransom. They were both rather vain and given to ornamental excess. Richard’s taste for oriental-Poitevin splendour ran to gold brocade. John was fond of jewels and plate, and one of the most intriguing items listed on the baggage he would lose in the Wash just before his death were pieces of glass, which, it has been suggested, were window-pieces carried around on his travels so that they could be fitted into apertures, custom-cut, wherever he happened to lodge. Depending on how much aversion John provokes, his travelling windows might equally be thought of as the refinement of a cultivated prince or the peep-holes of a paranoid. Neither cared for England so much that they balked at making it the fiefdom of another ruler if personal survival dictated. Richard handed the realm over to the Holy Roman Emperor to get out of prison; John delivered it to the pope to escape excommunication and win an ally in his war against the king of France. Above all, both worked the Angevin system of spoils and extortion for all it was worth (and it was never worth quite enough to get either of them out of trouble). Barons were forced to cough up scutage (shield-money) to avoid personal military service, while heirs and widows paid ‘relief’ before being allowed to succeed to their father’s estate or to remarry. During both reigns the power of government and the scope of the law that might support, or resist, it expanded immensely as it had during the time of their father. Yet both kings, when the mood and the need took them, were quick to abandon the forms of legality for purely arbitrary acts of coercion. Richard, the absentee, could offload the odium for taxation and vexation on to his minions and ministers; John, the ubiquitous, neurotically hands-on interventionist, got all the blame for his government’s excesses.