Lionheart

by Douglas Boyd

  Leaving Prince Henry to keep order in Normandy with William the Marshal’s support and counsel, Henry rode south with Richard to reimpose ducal authority on their perpetually squabbling vassals in Poitou and Aquitaine. These months with his father gave him the taste for real warfare. Where Henry could be both ruthless and, when the occasion called for it, diplomatic, Richard would always take the violent way out of a problem, although the other side of his complex character included a love of church ritual. When singing in the Mass, he was known to deal a vigorous beating to any monk who was not singing in tune or with sufficient gusto.

  During August father and son took a break from the often bloody business of state to go hunting together near Angers. Travelling north afterwards, Henry left Eleanor to guide Richard’s first ducal months, an arrangement that suited him well, for he disliked having Eleanor near him more than ever since her menopause had rendered her unable to provide further princes and princesses.

  In Bayeux, Henry met papal legates who also urged him to effect a rapprochement with Becket. All this was part of a power struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederik I Barbarossa, who wanted to extend his rule of northern Italy all the way south to meet the territory of William II, ruler of the Norman kingdom of the Two Sicilies, to whom Henry had betrothed Princess Joanna. On 18 November 1169 at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, south of Paris, Henry restored Becket’s confiscated property in England and asked him to officiate at the coronation of Prince Henry. This was in the nature of an olive branch, extended for reasons of geopolitics, since a coronation did not have to be conducted by the archbishop of Canterbury, the rival archbishops of York having also officiated at coronations since the Norman Conquest. Becket, however, did not grasp the olive branch that could have ended the dispute between Church and Crown there and then. He was by now arguably mad. In addition to the verminous hair shirt he wore, provoking sores all over his body, and the daily flagellations he underwent, Becket had osteomyelitis of the jaw after being locked into the sewers of the monastery at Pontigny with a tooth abscess as self-imposed penance for sexual desires, and had also refused any pain relief during an operation to remove two splinters of bone from the jaw.2

  As Becket stubbornly, or insanely, pursued the road to martyrdom, Henry’s mood was black at the Christmas court in Nantes – a venue decided on to make the point to the Bretons that Geoffrey and his bride Constance of Brittany were truly their count and countess. So much for Geoffrey. Henry had also resolved to have Prince Henry crowned by the archbishop of York in a ceremony copying the Capetian tradition of coronations for a crown prince to ensure an undisputed succession on his father’s death. His determination to do this without delay caused him to cross from Barfleur to Portsmouth on 3 March 1170, setting sail against all advice during a gale that sank the largest ship in the royal convoy with the loss of some 400 souls.3

  When the Plantagenet Empire was apportioned at Montmirail, no provision was made for John – hence his nickname, Jehan sans Terre, or John Lackland in English. His character was not improved by being despatched as an oblate to the abbey of Fontevraud, an experience that made him an atheist with a lifelong detestation of religion and those in holy orders. Convinced that he had been deprived of his rightful share in the family fortunes, he was, and remained, an unloved and unlovable paranoid prince whose ill humour was hardly improved by the knowledge that a day’s ride to the south of the cloister in which he languished, Richard was already living the life of a warrior-poet, overtaking his tutors in swordplay, riding the best horses that money could buy and on occasion riding down vassals and peasants who had incited his wrath, for the code of what later was known as chivalry had little place in the twelfth century.

  Eleanor had herself flouted feudal protocol, which forbade vassals to marry without their suzerain’s consent, when she married Count Henry of Anjou. But in Poitiers she grasped with both hands the traditional right to arrange the marriages of her vassals to her own advantage. Her court had at any time up to sixty marriageable heiresses being courted by at least that number of young knights, all of whom could acquit themselves well with sword or lance, knew how to set a falcon on its prey and could ride a mettlesome destrier as though of one flesh with their mount. But that was not enough for the woman who had inherited the duchy of Aquitaine at the age of 15. Her love of elegance required of them in addition good manners, fashionable attire and the ability to conjure a tune from a lute or turn words into poetry.

  What Richard made of the erotic ambiance of his mother’s court when not occupied with his knightly training is hard to say. The gay saber of the southern civilisation had produced the courts of love, whose canon was that love could not exist between husband and wife4 and that it had to be sought outside the marriage. Marriage among the nobility was joined for political reasons and love was an unfulfillable dream for the ladies of the court. One anonymous contemporary troubadour expressed the dilemma:

  En un verger, sotz fuelha d’albespí

  tenc la domna son amic còsta sí …

  Bels doucs amics, baisem-nos ieu e vos

  aval els pratz on chanto’ls auzelós.

  Tot o façamen despiech del gilós …

  [In an orchard, beneath the hawthorn tree / the lady holds her lover lovingly. / O sweet my friend, let us kiss in bliss / while down in the meadow birds sing this / sweet defiance of my jealous husband …]

  The influential future saint Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux criticised the luxury of the court at Poitiers, where the ladies wore floor-length dresses and sleeves so long that they had to be knotted up out of the way for the slightest activity. According to the chronicler Geoffroy du Vigeois, the price of furs and fine cloth doubled in the south-west of France, where even bishops were ashamed to wear the simple clothes of their parents’ generation, demanding that their tailors slash the voluminous sleeves of outer garments to reveal the precious material beneath. As to where the material came from, historian Alfred Richard records that in 1172 Richard richly rewarded a Poitevin merchant named Geoffroy Berland with Eleanor’s consent. Probably in return for a loan that was not repaid, Berland was granted an exclusive franchise to rent out stalls to merchants who had the courage and good fortune to cross war-torn France with linen goods from Flanders, French woollen goods, various furs and silk, which they sold to the public at the annual fair marking the end of Lent.5

  The instruments musicians played at Eleanor’s court included recorders in several pitches, transverse flutes, Pan pipes, simple bagpipes, crumhorns and other double-reed wind instruments, the five-stringed lute played with a quill plectrum, harps, the bowed viol and the rebàb and rebec, two bowed stringed instruments of Moorish origin, the former having a sound board of skin and the latter a sound board of thin wood. Perhaps the strangest looking was the chifonie, a viol whose strings were made to vibrate not by a bow but by a cylindrical brush turned by a handle at the bottom of the instrument, rather like a hurdy-gurdy, and therefore capable of producing sustained notes.

  This contemporary Occitan song captures the atmosphere in Eleanor’s court:

  A l’entrada del tens clar, per jòia recomençar

  e per gelos irritar, vol la reina mostrar

  qu’el es si amorosa. El’a fait pertot mandar

  non sia jusqu’a la mar pucela ni bachelar

  que tuit no vengan dançar en la dança joiosa

  [In spring, the queen / worries her husband by showing him / that she still knows what love is. / She summons to her from far and wide / every unwed knight and maid / to join her in the joyous dance.]

  Unlike his father, who wore his clothes carelessly, Richard adored dressing up and was happy to pen a verse or two when not engaged in more violent pursuits. The darker side of his character included a greed for gold that would literally be the death of him and a fascination with, and love of, slaughter – whether of animals in the hunt or of his fellow men when given the slightest excuse. For the next twenty years, until he inherited the throne of Englan
d, Richard regarded the comital court in Poitiers as his home, inasmuch as anywhere was home to a prince incessantly at war or enjoying the hunt. He already showed a fair resemblance to his father at the time Henry II married Eleanor in 1152, and grew to be well over 6ft tall, heavily built, with a trained warrior’s stance, reddish hair and blue eyes. To impress his vassals with her favourite son’s bearing and authority, Eleanor summoned them to a plenary court at Niort during Easter 1170, where they were to pay homage to him.

  Now 12 years old, he was as at home in the saddle as on his own feet, and considered by his household knights to be a young warrior-poet in the traditions of the long line of counts of Poitou and dukes of Aquitaine.6 From Niort, the queen travelled with him to Poitiers, where the counts of Poitou were traditionally proclaimed ex officio abbot of St Hilaire. Officiating at the ceremony, Archbishop Bertrand of Bordeaux and the bishop of Poitiers presented the young prince with the lance and standard that signified his authority as count of Poitou in an impressive service that ended with a huge procession, in which everyone sang the responses in Latin, hailing him as princeps egregie!7 It was a prophetic moment: in the years to come, they would realise that he was indeed, even for those turbulent times, an egregious prince – a titular abbot who was personally responsible for several thousand violent deaths.

  Determined to make the political point that Richard was her son, and therefore in the line of ‘native’ dukes of Aquitaine and not an incomer like his father, Eleanor then travelled with him in some state to Limoges, where Henry had alienated both clergy and laity after their wedding in 1152. Limoges was, in a sense, two towns jostling for position. There was the city proper with the cathedral, bishop’s palace and the workshops where the famous Limoges enamels were produced. There was also the citadel with the abbey of St Martial and the viscount’s fortress. Geoffroy du Vigeois, then a monk at the abbey of St Martial, described how his bishop placed on the finger of the adolescent duke the ring of martyred St Valérie, patron saint of the city, making Richard her symbolic bridegroom, much as a nun was said to marry Christ.8 The importance of the ring came from a new ‘life’ of St Valérie having been written, portraying her as the martyr of Limoges. According to this story, Leocadius, Roman procurator of Gaul, was killed in a rebellion of the local tribes in 42 CE, leaving only one daughter, Valeria. The new procurator, referred to as Étienne, was by tradition supposed to marry the girl to signify the continuation of Roman power. He departed to subdue the Bretons, during which time Valeria was converted to Christianity by St Martial. On Étienne’s return, she refused to marry him, saying that she already had a husband in Christ. Not unnaturally angered by this, Étienne ordered her to renounce Christianity, but she refused and paid the penalty of death by beheading.

  At the root of these moves lay more than just Eleanor’s fiercely possessive adoration of her favourite son and her determination to see him holding court in his own right in the ducal palace in Bordeaux. By having Richard swear fealty directly to Louis and formally installing him in this way, she was seeking to make it more difficult for Henry to reverse the restoration of Aquitaine to her bloodline. She next travelled north to Normandy, en route to the coronation of her eldest son, at which her attendance would have been normal but, to spite her for securing Richard’s titles, Henry did not invite her to the ceremony in England. It was also a calculated insult to Louis VII that Young Henry’s wife Marguerite Capet was not in her husband’s entourage when Prince Henry crossed the Channel on 5 June with the bishops of Sées and Bayonne. Knighted by his father soon after arriving in England, he was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Roger of York on Sunday 14 June 1170.9

  To counter the very real danger of an emissary from Becket crossing to England and preventing or complicating Young Henry’s coronation, the Norman justiciar Richard fitz Richard of Le Hommet had been ordered to close all Channel ports on the French side. The ruse succeeded brilliantly: Bishop Roger of Worcester was compelled to kick his heels in Dieppe, unable to cross the Channel and excommunicate all those involved in the coronation, as he had been instructed to do by Becket. This did not stop Becket from excommunicating at a distance the bishop of Salisbury and Gilbert Foliot, who had been his rival for the see of Canterbury and was now bishop of London – this for the ‘sin’ of assisting at the coronation service.

  Once crowned, 15-year-old Prince Henry was formally referred to as Henry III or Henry the Young King, with his father designated ‘the old king’, although only 37 years old. To make Young Henry’s kingship official, his father had a seal engraved with which he could issue charters under his own name. Like many another young man born with a solid gold spoon in his mouth, Young Henry was often carried away by his own importance. At the coronation feast, his father, in a typically informal moment, carried in the platter bearing the decorated and stuffed boar’s head. The archbishop of York tried to smooth over an inappropriate remark from Young Henry by saying that it was a privilege to be served by a king. Compounding the initial insolence, Young Henry joked that he saw nothing wrong in the son of a count waiting on the son of a king – a deliberately insulting way of reminding Henry II of his comparatively lowly origin.

  Insults came in all shapes and sizes. It was ostensibly to avenge the insult to Marguerite that Louis now invaded Normandy, causing Henry II to hasten to a meeting with him at Vendôme on 22 July, when he agreed to crown Marguerite in the near future. Still prepared to resolve the dispute with Becket, Henry authorised Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen to set up yet another meeting with him on 22 July at Fréteval in central France, which was later to be the setting for a momentous encounter between Richard and Louis VII’s son Philip Augustus. There, Henry went as far as he could to build a bridge for the exile’s return, admitting that the coronation of the Young King had been a mistake and asking Becket to re-crown him in England, together with his wife Marguerite Capet as the Young Queen. The contentious Constitutions of Clarendon were not mentioned.

  In an additional effort to prevent his erstwhile chancellor from persuading the pope to place all England under interdict, Henry offered to go on crusade as a penance for his past behaviour10 and to entrust Young Henry and the country to Becket as regent during his absence. Knowing the king as he did, Becket presumably treated this generous offer as just another of Henry’s promises. Henry refused him the kiss of peace, saying that he would get that once back in England.

  Two weeks later, on 10 August, the old king fell ill in Domfront with a high fever, possibly malaria. Rumours of his imminent death ran throughout Christendom after he dictated a last will and testament confirming the division of power as at Montmirail, with Richard to be duke of Aquitaine, counselled by his mother.11 Nearly two months passed before he could celebrate his recovery by a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine at Rocamadour in Quercy.12 Grateful to still be alive, Henry was in a less rancorous mood than he had been for a long time when he and Eleanor discussed betrothing 8-year-old Princess Eleanor to Alfonso, the 14-year-old King of Castile, because her betrothal to the son of the German emperor had been broken off due to Henry’s intriguing with Saxony, Lombardy and Sicily.

  What Richard was doing at this time is a mystery. When the monks of St-Aignan near Saintes came to Chinon to complain that the seneschal of Poitou was illegally taxing the salt produced by the community, it was not Richard, but Eleanor acting in his name, who signed the charter confirming the community’s ancient privileges and Richard’s signature is not among those appended thereto. Similarly, a charter given to a daughter house of Fontevraud Abbey, confirming its right to gather firewood for heating in the forest of Argenson, was given by Eleanor and witnessed by several functionaries, but not signed by Richard, always bored by the minutiae of feudal governance. Even when he did sign charters, prudent beneficiaries ensured that Eleanor confirmed them afterwards.13

  In October, Becket had another meeting with Henry II near Amboise before making the fatal decision to return to his duties at Canterbury under safe conduct
from the king. In seeming contradiction (for he was suffering pain at a level that blocks rational thought), he continued issuing letters of excommunication right up to 30 November, the day before he landed at Sandwich, heavily in debt but bringing with him a library of books and scrolls weighing half a ton and a whole shipload of wine that was hijacked by ill-wishers somewhere between his landing and the arrival in Canterbury on 2 December. If Henry had been expecting gratitude, he was to be disappointed. Becket continued to provoke him by issuing further excommunications of royal officers and refusing to rescind his excommunication of the English bishops.

  Summoned like any other vassal to Henry’s Christmas court of 1170 at Bures in Normandy to account for her stewardship of the duchy, Eleanor was present when Bishop Gilbert Foliot and two other excommunicated prelates protested about Becket’s unmitigated arrogance. Young Henry was holding his own Christmas court at Winchester, but Richard, Geoffrey, John and Princess Joanna were all at Bures, witnesses to what was about to happen. Furious that Becket was still defying him, despite all the concessions he had made, Henry’s mood was such that his chamberlain Ranulf de Broc14 incited four household knights – Hugh de Morville, who had been an itinerant justice in the north of England, Reginald fitz Urse, Richard de Brito and William de Tracy, a former chancellor of Becket’s – to travel to England and there rid the king of his most troublesome vassal.