The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  In twelfth-century England, land was power, and arbitrating land disputes between his greatest subjects was a vital function of the king himself. Now, in theory, all the land in England could be protected, contested and recovered simply by purchasing a writ from the king’s chancery. This would begin an action of novel disseisin, ultimately managed by the local sheriff. The writ was short and formulaic. The thirteenth-century legal writer Bracton recorded that devising the wording of the writ had caused Henry and his counsellors many sleepless nights. If this was true – and it has the ring of truth about it – then it was with good reason. Royal law and royal officials were now indispensable to the functioning of political landed society not only when the royal magnates came into contact with the court, but every day, at county level. Moreover, one of the king’s most important roles, from the perspective of his barons, was devolved to a simple bureaucratic machine. Disputes could be settled by an application to chancery, rather than an appeal to the king in person – an invaluable development, given the vast size of the Plantagenet dominions, and Henry’s penchant for travelling around them relentlessly and at speed.

  In 1178 the royal council (or curia regis) was reorganized. Instead of following the king wherever he went, hearing appeals for justice as they travelled, five members of the royal council were appointed to remain at Westminster, to hear legal cases full-time. This effectively became England’s supreme court and would, in time, become known as the Court of King’s Bench. The legal machinery of England was established, independent of King Henry II but exercising his full authority (and generating handsome fees for its services as it did so).

  By 1179, further writs governing land law were available, and yet more of the king’s traditional, personal legal role had devolved to a chancery mechanism. Darrein presentment established rights over appointments to Church benefices. Mort d’ancestor settled disputes over inheritances. The writ de recto, or ‘writ of right’, allowed lesser men who felt they had been denied justice by their local lord’s private court to appeal to the royal court over his head. This writ had existed for some time, but now it too became formulaic and invested the sheriff as the leading authority for ensuring that justice was done at a county level. It all amounted to the start of a revolution in royal government.

  So, as Henry settled the Plantagenet dominions after the throes of the Great War, England was slowly transformed. The castles that dotted the landscape, either occupied by the king’s servants or licensed by him for use by barons, became potent symbols of the royal monopoly on military power in general. The Assize of Arms of 1181 encouraged the development of scutage – payments made by magnates in lieu of supplying troops and military service, which helped to further demilitarize the English barons. In the shires of England, the fingers of royal justice were suddenly everywhere. The power of the Crown was rooted firmly, deep into English society. From those roots it would flower in the most extraordinary ways in years to come.

  In February 1182 Henry, preparing to celebrate his forty-ninth birthday, held a great council at Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire, where he announced that he had made his will. It was firmly non-political. He made bequests to the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. He left 5,000 silver marks to the religious houses of England and 1,000 silver marks to those of Anjou. Two hundred gold marks were left to assist with the dowries of poor virgins in Normandy and Anjou. He commanded his four sons – Henry, Geoffrey, Richard and John – to cause his will ‘to be firmly and inviolably kept; and whoever shall oppose or contravene it, may he incur the indignation and anger of Almighty God, and mine and God’s malediction’.

  After the will was made, Henry continued to travel far and wide across his lands, dividing his time mainly between England and Normandy. But in a sense, he had completed his mission. The judicial reforms of the 1170s marked the last aggressive phase of his energetic rule. He had been in perpetual motion for more than three decades. It was time to consider his legacy. After 1182 Henry’s thoughts were turning to the best way to turn over his vast territories to the new generation of Plantagenet princes. It would be here, however, that all his decades of triumph would dissolve, finally, into heartbreak.

  A World on Fire

  For all his inventiveness and natural vigour, by the time Henry II approached his fiftieth birthday in 1183 he was feeling old. A busy life had taken its toll. His legs, long bowed from a life in the saddle, now ached constantly. He had been kicked in the thigh by a horse in 1174, and the injury left him with a wound – perhaps a fractured femur – that never properly healed. It affected his general health and slowed him down. He must have walked with a permanent limp. He still moved incessantly around his territories, but his travels were now interrupted by occasional bouts of illness. Although Henry was pressed by Rome to take the Cross and lead a new crusade to the East, it was becoming clear that he would do no such thing.

  The world was moving on. King Louis VII died aged sixty on 18 September 1180, after a long illness that ended in a series of paralysing strokes. His fifteen-year-old son was crowned as co-king a year before Louis’s death, and now he succeeded him fully, as Philip II. Henry had to negotiate treaties and make policy in consultation with a teenage boy, rather than a man a decade older than himself. Indeed, Philip was younger than all three of Henry’s eldest sons, and only a matter of months older than Henry’s youngest, John. Among them, Henry seemed like a figure from another time. The whole of France, it seemed, would soon belong to these boys.

  Henry the Young King was to be Philip II’s new sparring partner. It seemed as though the Young King could barely wait for his moment to arrive. He too had been crowned as junior king, and he occasionally styled himself in charters as ‘king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Aquitaine, son of King Henry’, while referring to his father as ‘of famous memory’. The Young King was obsessed with the prospect of succeeding his father, and Philip’s full accession to the Capetian throne only sharpened his hunger.

  The Young King’s practical experience of ruling, however, was still virtually non-existent. He was twenty-eight years old in February 1183, and despite all his assumed titles and his marriage to a Capetian princess, he was still allowed very little actual power. As a result he had developed almost nothing in the way of political intelligence or military skill. He still struck many contemporaries as vain, shallow and immature, with notions of grandeur but no idea whatever of the real business of kingship. Denied the opportunity to learn the art of ruling, the Young King devoted most of his time and energy to the tournament field. Along with Philip count of Flanders and Baldwin count of Hainault he was a regular on the glamorous European sporting circuit. His tournament captain was William Marshal, a man who had been his tutor until 1170 and was developing a reputation as one of the most brilliant and chivalrous knights in Europe. The Young King spent exorbitant amounts of money styling himself as a dazzling knightly hero, whose fame stretched across Europe. When Philip II was crowned at Reims in 1179, it was the Young King who represented the Plantagenets at the ceremony, carrying the Capetian crown during the procession and bringing 500 knights to the celebratory tournament that followed.

  Yet for all this finery, the Young King’s experience at Philip’s coronation must have emphasized to him just how little real power he wielded. In frustration, he began to try flexing his muscles within the Plantagenet territories, with results for Henry II that were embarrassing, and almost calamitous.

  During the late summer of 1182, the Young King renewed his demands to his father for what the chronicler Roger of Howden described as ‘some territory, where he and his wife might dwell, and from which he might be able to support knights in his service’. The implication was that he wished to take formal possession of the duchy of Normandy. Henry refused. Just as he had in 1173, the Young King flew into a humiliated rage and took himself away to the French court, to ally himself defiantly with his young brother-in-law Philip II. It was only with repeated offers of an increased allowance that Henry II co
uld coax the Young King back, and bring him to a family conference that was held immediately after Christmas. Henry presided over a meeting at Le Mans that included the Young King, his two eldest brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, and the duke of Saxony, who had recently been expelled from his duchy along with his wife, Henry’s eldest daughter Matilda.

  Henry’s aim at the meeting was to ensure that all three of his elder sons remained reconciled to his plans to divide the Plantagenet dominions for the future. That meant placating his eldest son with some sign of his exalted status that would not alienate the younger sons too much. The solution Henry attempted was to demand that all the boys gave him a solemn oath of their allegiance to their father, before requiring Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to the Young King, for their respective duchies of Aquitaine and Brittany.

  Richard refused. As duke of Aquitaine he owed homage to the king of France, not the king of England, and he had no intention of altering the status quo. He had spent the most part of the decade since the Great War establishing his pre-eminence in Aquitaine, honing his fine military brain in the ceaseless effort to stamp down the rebellious vassal lords of his mother’s duchy. That task had lately grown far more difficult thanks to his eldest brother. The Young King had been making treacherous overtures to the barons of Aquitaine, insinuating that he could offer them better lordship than Richard’s, and stirring up tension and rebellion that his brother had to fight hard to keep in check. There was no love lost between the genuinely brilliant soldier Richard and his vain and posturing brother. At Le Mans their feud spilled over into bitter argument, and Richard stormed out of the conference, returning to Aquitaine to fortify his castles. The Young King sent his wife to safety in Paris, allied with Geoffrey – who was described memorably by Gerald of Wales as ‘overflowing with words, soft as oil … able to corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue; of tireless endeavour, a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler’ – and prepared to attack. Henry II had little choice but to back Richard. Thus, the old king celebrated his fiftieth birthday, on 5 March 1183, attempting to bring some order to what threatened to be a disastrous battle between the Plantagenet family’s younger generation.

  The Young King’s conduct in the short war that ensued was appalling. He negotiated in bad faith with his father, had his servants attack diplomatic envoys, robbed townspeople, churches and shrines throughout Aquitaine to pay for his mercenaries and attempted – without much success – to raise the lords of Aquitaine in a general revolt against Richard’s rule. Henry II and Richard hired soldiers and scrambled from town to town, keeping control of a dangerous situation as best they could.

  Eventually, it was fate rather than strategy that brought hostilities to a close. In early June, shortly after carrying out a sacrilegious attack on a church in the Quercy, the Young King was struck down with dysentery. After a short and severe illness he died on 11 June, in the southern town of Martel. Before he died the Young King asked his former tutor and tournament companion, William Marshal, to carry to Jerusalem the crusader’s Cross that he had recently taken. At the end of the month his body was brought for burial to Rouen, the capital of the duchy of Normandy that he had long craved. The world was rid of a glib and troublesome young man. The Young King had never been allowed to grow up, but he had also shown precious few signs of wishing to do so. Even so, with his death Henry the Younger threw all of his father’s carefully laid plans for the Plantagenet succession into disarray.

  Once he had recovered from his grief, Henry began to plan a new future for the Plantagenet realms. In the autumn of 1183 he told Richard that he should now give up Aquitaine to his youngest brother John. The implication was that Richard should step into the Young King’s shoes as heir to England, Normandy and Anjou, and allow John to take over the inheritance of Aquitaine.

  Richard, once again, adamantly refused. Aquitaine was his, and he was as unprepared to hand it over to his youngest brother as he had been to his eldest. By late 1184 Henry realized that his eldest son was intractable. He allowed Richard to return to Aquitaine, and made preparations to send John to Ireland, to make good his theoretical title of king. Meanwhile, he gave consideration to a plan to promote Geoffrey to the Young King’s inheritance – joining Brittany (of which Geoffrey was duke by his marriage to Constance) permanently to the Plantagenet patrimony and leaving Richard to his own devices in his beloved Aquitaine. Yet Richard would not accept this, either. He raised an army and raided Geoffrey’s borders.

  In frustration, Henry snapped. He brought over from England the only person who he could reasonably say had a better right to Aquitaine than Richard himself. Queen Eleanor, who had been silently imprisoned for many years, was now brought to Henry’s side, and the old king demanded that Richard surrender his duchy back to his mother. Practically, of course, this meant surrendering Aquitaine to Henry, for although Eleanor was now freed from prison, she remained Henry’s captive rather than his wife, let alone an independent person. Richard, however, was finally persuaded. He gave in and handed formal control of Aquitaine to his father. For the next two years, Henry avoided making any firm decisions on the future of the Plantagenet dominions.

  Yet if the problem was averted, it was hardly solved. Henry stalled and bided his time, working out the questions of border security that had arisen between himself and Philip II as a result of the Young King’s death. But with neither Richard nor Geoffrey installed either as co-king or heir presumptive, Henry’s grip on the future – always as important as his grip on the present – remained weak.

  In July 1186, fate once more intervened. In the spirit of family disloyalty that was so widely ascribed to him by the chroniclers, Geoffrey had struck up a close friendship with Philip II, anticipating perhaps that the day might come when he needed the French king’s military support against his own father or brothers. He was in Paris for the summer when he was badly injured in a tournament. On 19 August he died, probably from complications with his wounds. He was buried with great honour in the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. It was said that at his funeral King Philip was so wrought by grief that he attempted to throw himself into his friend’s open grave.

  Henry had lost yet another son. And although few mourned Geoffrey with the intensity shown by Philip – Roger of Howden called Geoffrey a ‘son of perdition’ and a ‘son of iniquity’ – Henry was now even more troubled than before. He would not countenance the obvious solution: making Richard sole heir. Henry never seemed to believe that anyone would be his equal in holding together the vast conglomeration of Plantagenet lands. Even when the Patriarch of Jerusalem had travelled all the way to England in January 1185 and laid the keys to the Holy City, the Tower of David and the Holy Sepulchre at Henry’s feet, begging him to travel to the East and accept the title of king of Jerusalem, Henry had decided, after consulting his greatest barons, that he was better served defending the Plantagenet dominions in Europe than the Christian possessions under threat from Saladin. It was this dogged refusal to let go that had made Henry such a great ruler; but it would shortly be his undoing.

  Geoffrey’s death brought relations between Henry II and Philip II – who would in time be known to his supporters as Philip Augustus – into a new phase. For the first six years of the young French king’s reign, their relationship had been cordial. Henry had assisted in making peace between Philip and the count of Flanders. Philip had enjoyed close friendships with both Henry the Young King and Geoffrey. Now, though, the 23-year-old Philip began to chafe at Henry’s influence in France, and there was no relationship with Richard or John to mollify him. Indeed, in Richard’s case there was a lingering dispute over the fact that the Plantagenet prince had been engaged to Philip’s elder half-sister Alice since 1161. She had been kept at Henry’s court for the best part of twenty-five years, but a marriage had never been formalized. Indeed, there were ugly rumours that Henry had seduced the girl himself.

  From 1186, relations between the Plantagenet and Capetian crowns cooled sharply. Several impo
rtant border wars broke out. Since Henry would not consent to Richard and Alice marrying, the Vexin border country between France and Normandy, which was discussed as Alice’s dowry, came back under dispute. Philip claimed to be overlord of Brittany, where Geoffrey had left as his heirs two young girls and a baby boy called Arthur. There were also mounting disputes in Berry and in the county of Toulouse – the scene of the great feudal showdown between Henry and Louis VII in 1159. It was the first serious period of conflict between the English and French kings since the Great War.

  Philip could not yet match Henry for wealth, experience or military cunning, but in 1187 he began to explore other ways to discomfit his rival. The most obvious was Richard. There were cracks in the relationship between the erstwhile duke of Aquitaine and his father, into which Philip began to thrust probing fingers. Henry’s studious avoidance of settling the succession on Richard, and his growing enthusiasm for John, suggested that the Plantagenet inheritance was far from settled. Richard was impatient to leave Europe and join the crusading movement to the East. He could not do so until his status as heir was confirmed.

  In the summer of 1187, Philip attempted to strike up his third successive friendship with a Plantagenet prince. When Richard visited Paris, the French king plied him with all the charm he could muster. According to Roger of Howden, ‘Philip honoured Richard so highly that every day they ate at the same table and shared the same dishes; at night the bed did not separate them. The king of France loved him as his own soul and their mutual love was so great that the lord king of England was stupefied by its vehemence.’ Roger’s comment about Richard and Philip sharing a bed has since been read as a reference to Richard’s sexuality. It was not. Rather, it was an acknowledgement of the strong and sudden political friendship struck up between the young king of France and the Plantagenet heir presumptive. Philip played on Richard’s fears of disinheritance and may even have suggested that Henry intended to marry Alice to John.