Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Henry’s extreme restlessness is well conveyed by Peter of Blois. ‘If the king has promised to remain in a place for a day - and particularly if he has announced his intention publicly by the mouth of a herald - he is sure to upset all the arrangements by departing early in the morning. As a result you see men dashing around as if they were mad, beating their packhorses, running their carts into one another - in short giving a lively imitation of Hell. If, on the other hand, the king orders an early start, he is certain to change his mind, and you can take it for granted that he will sleep till midday. Then you will see the packhorses loaded and waiting, the carts prepared, the courtiers dozing, traders fretting, and everyone grumbling. People go to ask the maids and the doorkeepers what the king’s plans are, for they are the only people likely to know the secrets of the court. Many a time when the king was sleeping a message would be passed from his chamber about the city or town he planned to go to, and though there was nothing certain about it, it would rouse us all up. After hanging about aimlessly for so long we would be comforted by the prospect of good lodgings. This would produce such a clatter of horse and foot that all Hell seemed let loose. But when our courtiers had gone ahead almost the whole day’s ride, the king would turn aside to some other place where he had, it might be, just a single house with accommodation for himself and no one else. I hardly dare say it, but I believe that in truth he took a delight in seeing what a fix he put us in. After wandering some three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some filthy little hovel. There was often a sharp and bitter argument about a mere hut, and swords were drawn for possession of lodging that pigs would have shunned.’10

  Henry liked to appear generous in public and hospitable to strangers, tipping his servants lavishly, giving alms expansively, relieving the plight of the poor from his private granaries and even making good the losses of shipwrecked crews. He had a particular feeling for those in peril from the sea, and ordained heavy penalties for wreckers or plunderers of shipwrecks. When in the spotlight, he came across as courteous, polite, patient, stoical and solomonic. Such apparent charm and saintliness is often a defence mechanism, a mask under which very dark forces are hidden. The real Henry was wilful, secretive, manipulative, volatile, crafty, slippery, vindictive, brooding, unforgiving, treacherous, cynical, mendacious, perjurious and maybe even nihilistic. ‘He was always ready to break his word’, said Gerald of Wales, while Thomas Becket, his former friend and later mortal enemy said that in slipperiness he surpassed Proteus.11 Only a small circle of intimates saw the real Henry. He was too intelligent to prize waging war as a thing in itself, as William the Conqueror had, but, in anticipation of Clausewitz, saw it pragmatically as the pursuit of political ends by other means. The one thing he could not abide was any opposition to his will, and any such occurrence elicited a volcanic outburst. He was spectacular when angry, when the usual persona was dropped and a furious, near madman was observed. Such were his carpet-chewing rages that he would often roll around on the floor, screaming and yelling or grind his teeth audibly. On one occasion he fell out of bed in a rage, tore the stuffing from his mattress and began masticating it.12 His taste for women bordered on satyriasis, and in this area he was ruthless and unscrupulous, taking women for one-night stands or longer affairs entirely as the fancy took him. His habitual infidelity and the many bastard children he produced would cause much trouble during his reign. Some said his libido was such that he had to hunt all day to avoid spending it in bed, though Henry himself always adduced the weight-loss argument. He also knew how to assuage the rage of jealous husbands and fathers. With a deep, though cynical, understanding of human nature, he knew when to employ the carrot and when the stick and when to meld them.13 Walter Map maintained that his mother, the Empress Matilda, had inculcated this lesson. ‘I have heard that his mother’s teaching was to this effect, that he should spin out the affairs of everyone, hold long in his own hands all posts that fell in, take the revenues of them, and keep the aspirants to them hanging on in hope; and she supported this advice by an unkind analogy: the untamed hawk, when raw meat is frequently offered to it and then snatched away or hidden from it, becomes keener and more prone to obey and attend.’14

  Such was Richard’s father. Yet Richard inherited more than just his father’s genetic legacy, since there was a wider Angevin culture involved in his paternity. Emerging from the mists of history in the ninth century, the rulers of Anjou came to the fore in the succeeding century, acquiring the title of count, and consolidating their power base in the Loire valley partly through conquest and partly by astute intermarriage with the ruling families of adjacent domains such as Amboise, Vendôme and Maine. The Angevins later became famous for their stone castles - at Montbazon, Saumur, Touraine, Langeais, Chinon and Loches - and the wealth of the two main cities, at Angers and Tours.15 Anjou was thought to have the perfect climate - Mediterranean heat tempered by breezes from the Atlantic - and was known as the Garden of France. It was a land of vineyards and heterogeneous flowers and trees representing its median position in the French-speaking world: on the one hand oaks, broom and camellias, on the other cedars, palms and fig. The Angevins had the reputation for being warlike, ferocious, ambitious and expansionist, with the ruling classes notably tall, good-looking and often with a distinctive red-gold hair ‘à la Titian’. Notably anticlerical (with the exception of the saintly Fulk II the Good in the tenth century), the Angevin male noble was a byword for debauchery, womanising and feuding. The Normans, who detested the Angevins, routinely described them as barbarians who lived like animals, gnawed joints of meat like savage beasts, looted like pirates, desecrated churches and executed priests and monks for sport.16

  The animosity between Angevins and Normans must have abated by the beginning of the twelfth century, for Fulk, count of Anjou, the fifth of that ilk, pulled off a great coup by arranging a brilliant marriage for his son Geoffrey with Matilda, daughter and heiress of Henry I of England; Fulk departed on crusade in the Holy Land and handed over Anjou to Geoffrey as a wedding present. But the marriage was not a success, largely because Matilda was such a domineering personality; this was the very quality that lost her England when she had Stephen on the ropes in 1141. Headstrong, overbearing, tactless, haughty, arrogant and abusive, Matilda alienated everyone she came in contact with, even her own kinsmen. The general consensus was that Matilda was an over-masculine woman; her lack of the traditionally feminine qualities appalled contemporaries who thought her a freak of nature. Since Geoffrey was cold, shallow, sly and selfish, the love of power and the cunning so observable in Henry II would appear to have come from mother and father respectively, rather than the other way round, as in conventional expectations. And since Matilda acted like a virago and indicated to her husband that, as a king’s daughter, she had married beneath her, it was not long before he ignored her and consoled himself with a harem of mistresses. Nonetheless, the duty of founding a new dynasty had to be performed, so it was into this loveless union that Henry II was born on 5 March 1133 at Le Mans.17

  Henry II would continue the Angevin pattern of contracting unhappy marriages and, even more so, conformed to the tradition of family feuding that everyone agreed was the Achilles heel of the Angevins.18 What the young Richard thought of this dubious legacy we can only guess, but we know for certain that he relished yet another aspect of the Angevin tradition, which was that the family was, quite literally, the devil’s brood. The Angevins had annexed the legendary story of Melusine as their own. A woman of stunning beauty married one of the counts of Anjou and bore him four children. She seemed the perfect wife in all respects but one: she refused to attend Mass or, if forced to go, always found an excuse to leave before the Consecration of the Host. Gradually suspicions arose and the count’s courtiers warned him that his wife’s behaviour was causing a scandal. The count decided to put her to the test. He insisted she attend Mass then, as the moment for the Consecration approached, hemmed her
in with four armed men so that she could not leave the church. As the retainers went to lay hands on her, she slipped from their grasp, seized two of her children and began to ascend into the air before the horrified gaze of the churchgoers. Like a wraith she floated out through a window; neither she nor the two abducted children were ever seen again. The conclusion was that the countess was the devil’s own daughter, who could not look upon the body of Christ.19 What the fate was of the two children she left behind was not recorded, but presumably they were held to have grown up and reproduced the devil’s spawn.

  Henry II was a towering personality but his wife, the mother of Richard and John, was scarcely less so. Born in 1124, Eleanor, countess of Poitou and duchess of Aquitaine was a notable beauty who first became a queen in 1137 when the ailing king of France, Louis the Fat, married his seventeen-year-old son to her; he succeeded to the throne of France as Louis VII a month later when his father, worn out with gout and gluttony-induced obesity, died - but scarcely in the legendary position in the saddle, since for the last ten years of his life he had been too corpulent to mount a horse. Eleanor of Aquitaine had a dark complexion, black eyes, black hair and was curvaceous with a superb figure that never ran to fat even in old age. She was also at the time the western world’s richest and most prestigious heiress. From her father Duke William X, ruler of a dynasty originally established in Poitiers in the ninth century - and thus in many ways very like the Angevins - she had inherited vast territories.20 The exact feudal relationship of the dukes of Aquitaine to the Capetian kings of France is a disputed academic subject, but it is clear that Aquitaine in the twelfth century was a virtually autonomous and decentralised principality, with only the most tenuous relationship with the kings of France. The dynastic marriage in 1137, and Duke William X’s death in the same year, undoubtedly moved Aquitaine into the orbit of France though, by transferring nominal power to Paris, it simply increased the anarchy and warlordism in the south. Not only did the rulers of Aquitaine make merely a nod in the direction of the kings of France but their own power was severely circumscribed: their vassals paid them lip-service only and the dukes’ writ really ran only in and around the immediate environs of Bordeaux and Poitou.21

  From the earliest days Eleanor’s marriage was controversial: many said it was invalid by canon law as being within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity. Childless until the age of 23, when she finally bore a daughter, Eleanor was a disappointment to her husband in every respect but her undoubted physical charms. A year later, in 1146, according to the chronicler Gerald of Wales and Walter Map, she had an affair with Count Geoffrey of Anjou (Henry II’s father), although many modern historians discount the story.22 An emancipated woman by the standards of the time, she accompanied King Louis on the disastrous Second Crusade (1147-49), where she was said to have led her own troops and dressed like an Amazon. More stories of infidelity followed her on the crusade: she was alleged to have had an affair in Antioch with Count Raymond of Poitiers, the city’s ruler. The entire saga of promiscuity, infidelity, seduction and rape in the Middle Ages is a thorny subject on which scholars disagree vehemently: some see medieval royal households as a hotbed of casual rape and forced concubinage, while others accuse chroniclers like Map and Gerald of Cambridge of anti-Angevin propaganda, misogyny or both.23 Whether Eleanor really was unfaithful as charged, or simply the victim of hostile, educated contemporaries, it seems clear that by the end of the Second Crusade, King Louis, whatever his initial besotment, was estranged from his wife. When Eleanor spoke of an annulment and stressed the fourth and fifth degrees of kinship by which she and Louis were consanguineous, the king arrested her and placed her in humiliating purdah. Following a perilous return from Jerusalem, the warring royal pair sought the intercession of the Pope in an interview in Rome, but Eugenius III sided with Louis and refused to grant an annulment.24

  Marital relations must have been resumed, for Eleanor gave birth to another daughter in 1150. But in 1151 the 18-year-old Henry of Anjou, Geoffrey’s son, came to Paris to pay homage to King Louis for his guarantee of Normandy, part of a ‘definitive’ peace patched up that year between Louis and Geoffrey of Anjou. Once again the historical record is cloudy: Eleanor romancers claim that at this meeting Henry saw the 29-year-old Eleanor and, so far from being put off by the eleven-year gap in their ages, fell madly in love with her. It is even alleged that the pair became lovers at this point, and that the entire courtship and marriage was a matter of impulse, disturbed hormones and unfettered emotions. Some say Eleanor had tired of Louis’s effeminacy and generally lacklustre calibre as a lover and wanted a husband who could dominate her; alternatively, the ‘power devil’ theorists claim she aimed to dominate her husband.25 Furthermore, it is alleged, Henry’s desire was fanned when his father warned him against Eleanor’s wiles and cautioned his son that he had already ‘known’ her. It is more likely that hardheaded calculation carried the day: both could see the material advantages of marriage to the other should the opportunity present. In Henry’s case the chief consideration is likely to have been that Aquitaine was an even more important power base than Normandy at this juncture, when he had still not secured a firm promise of succession to the English throne from Stephen. The chance came in 1152 when Louis, frustrated by the lack of a male heir after fifteen years of marriage, finally agreed to an annulment. The marriage between Louis and Eleanor had effectively been on the rocks since 1147-48, there were persistent rumours about the queen’s infidelity and her alleged infertility or at least inability to conceive a son, and by now personal incompatibility between the couple had hardened into mutual antipathy.26 We may infer that Eleanor and Henry had laid contingency plans and the fortuitous death of Henry’s father Geoffrey (he developed a fever after swimming in the Loire) removed another obstacle. When a synod of bishops formally annulled Eleanor’s marriage in March 1152, she acted quickly, but she had to. Once she was no longer married, she was a potential prey for land-hungry suitors and if she did not marry Henry rapidly she ran the risk of being abducted, raped and dragooned into a forced marriage. In fact, as she travelled to meet Henry, both Count Theobald of Blois and Geoffrey of Anjou (Henry’s brother) tried to seize her.27

  All turned out successfully and on Whit Sunday, 18 May 1152, Henry and Eleanor were married in Poitiers. At a stroke Henry doubled his continental possessions and gained massively in wealth, power and status; indeed he was richer in lands and economic and military resources, more powerful, in a word, than Louis, supposedly his feudal superior. The marriage caused a sensation. Louis declared himself shocked and angered by the marriage, feeling both that Eleanor had duped him into an annulment when she had already planned her next step and that Henry had broken feudal law by taking her as his wife. Anti-Eleanor historians have always suspected her of cold-blooded revenge and humbug, in that she married her ex-husband’s greatest political rival, who was himself within the degrees of consanguinity that provided the ground for her annulment. 28 But many scholars feel that Louis’s complaints had little substance: there was no need for Henry to seek Louis’s permission before marrying Eleanor, nor was he debarred from using the ducal title until he had paid a feudal ‘relief ’ to Louis, as the king alleged. Louis was not the only one, both then and later, to believe that Eleanor had manipulated him through a diabolical lust for power, but the plain fact is that Louis needed the annulment more than she did, as he was desperate to beget a male heir. As for the unseemly haste in which Henry and Eleanor supposedly celebrated their wedding, Louis’s third marriage followed after an even shorter gap than that between the annulment and Eleanor’s union with Henry.29