Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Can la freid’ aura venta

  deves vostre pais,

  veyaire m’es qu’eu senta

  un ven de paradis

  per amor de la genta

  (When the cold wind blows from the direction of your country, it seems to me that I felt a breeze from paradise for love of the lady)51

  We know for certain that the young Richard was deeply influenced by troubadour culture, and he was always generous to poets. It is known that he was profoundly interested in music and probably aspired to the skill attributed to the perfect prince in the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn. This prince, unlike Machiavelli’s later version, is a master not of statecraft and double-dealing but of musical instruments - ‘there was no musical instrument known to mortal man in which the princely Horn did not surpass everyone’. His talent was especially marked when he plucked the harp: ‘anyone who watched how he touched the strings and made them vibrate, sometimes causing them to sing and at other times to join in harmonies, would have been reminded of the harmony of heaven’.52 Richard may not have been the virtuoso performer thus alluded to, but his popularity among the troubadours attests to his skill as a songwriter and his mastery of the art of political satire in song and vernacular form; there is a well-authenticated story that the adult Richard capped a political chanson from the duke of Burgundy with one of his own, full of sardonic humour. The jongleur Ambroise thought Richard a highly talented songwriter and librettist. The Cistercian monk Ralph of Coggleshall was an eyewitness when Richard ‘conducted’ the clerks of his royal chapel when singing in the choir, urging them with hand gestures, facial expressions and body language to greater polyphonic efforts, much as a modern maestro might do.53

  Richard saw almost nothing of his father during the first ten years of his life. When he was two years old, in 1159, he may have glimpsed him when Henry came south for an ill-fated campaign against Toulouse. Henry considered that Toulouse was rightfully part of the duchy of Aquitaine, as it had once been a major city in the Carolingian kingdom of Aquitania. But in the eleventh century the counts of Poitiers had established themselves as dukes of Gascony and, as part of the knock-on effect, the counts of Toulouse had tried to reconstruct the old Roman province of Septimana by building political alliances with Narbonne and Carcassonne, extending their links with Provence (then part of the German empire) and even with Barcelona and Spain. The city of Toulouse lay at the nodal point of communications and trade routes west-east between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean and north-south between the Massif Central and the Pyrenees. Without control of Toulouse, the Poitevin control of Aquitaine was both weakened and incomplete. In 1159 Henry asserted his right to the city as part of the ‘dowry’ consequent on his marriage to Eleanor. King Louis of France also coveted Toulouse, and had even campaigned to acquire it while still married to Eleanor, so he could not allow his great rival to gain possession of so important a prize. He began by diplomatic stalling, hoping to bog Henry down, but the restless English king soon decided to force the issue by arms. He assembled a huge army and marched south. Louis then hoodwinked him by going to Toulouse and offering it his protection. Henry next faced the ticklish problem of having to press the siege and take his nominal feudal overlord (Louis) prisoner. While he procrastinated, autumn came on and his army began to be ravaged by sickness. Diversionary attacks by Louis on Normandy soon had Henry marching north again, leaving his Toulouse campaign as an embarrassing failure. Many historians feel that the debacle outside Toulouse marked the end of Thomas Becket’s influence on Henry. Becket had been a ‘hawk’ over the campaign and had raised 700 knights himself. His advice was that Henry should not hesitate to assault Toulouse and take Louis prisoner, for the French king had forfeited his status as feudal overlord by fighting against Henry in breach of existing treaties. Henry was persuaded by other courtiers that Becket’s advice was unsound and, in the aftermath of the fiasco, began to reinterpret his old friend as a man of seriously flawed judgement. Becket, for his part, may have seethed inwardly that he was no longer the king’s right-hand man and, consciously or unconsciously, may have decided to assert himself against Henry once he became archbishop of Canterbury.54

  Between 1159 and 1167 Henry visited Aquitaine just once, in 1161 when he laid siege to, and captured, the castle of Castillon-sur-Agen on a flying visit.55 For the most part, Henry’s overriding interests lay in the north. Aquitaine was notorious as a province where the local lords guarded their autonomy fiercely and resented encroachments from feudal overlords. Henry aimed at the typical Anglo-Norman centralism and chafed at the ‘anarchy’ of Aquitaine. Eleanor was quite happy with the old system and with the military guardianship of her maternal uncle Ralph de Faye, seneschal of Poitou, whom she regarded as her strong right arm. Henry, though, mistrusted de Faye and appointed his own men to many important military and ecclesiastical posts.56 The extent of disaffection, feuding and anarchy in Poitou has been much debated by academic specialists, but Henry himself was in no doubt that it constituted a threat to his authority and that Eleanor was too soft on recreant local lords. The barons of Aquitaine responded to his cracking of the whip by withdrawing their collaboration from Henry and speaking openly of his ‘tyranny’. In 1167 Henry decided that he would have to make another visit to Aquitaine. His particular aim was to curb the power of two aristocratic families, the Lusignans and the Taillefers, counts of Angoulême, whose castles controlled all the land routes between Poitiers, Saintes, La Rochelle and Bordeaux. Unable to make common cause, the Taillefers and Lusignans took a terrible mauling from Henry, with estates laid waste and the great castle of Lusignan razed to the ground. It was only the fact that Henry was once again called north by the threat from King Louis of France that saved the Lusignans and Taillefers from utter destruction and enabled them to rebuild their fortunes.57 Leaving Earl Patrick of Salisbury as his military satrap in Aquitaine, Henry sped north. Heartened by his departure, the Lusignans returned to the ruins of their castle and set about rebuilding it. When he heard this, Henry turned in his tracks, putting off a summit conference with the French king. Unfortunately, Louis construed the postponement as an insult and was soon intriguing with the Lusignan and Taillefer rebels. The next important development was the death of Earl Patrick after an ambush by the Lusignans. The unsavoury episode left Henry with the feeling that the Poitevins were unregenerate traitors.58

  Whether Richard actually met his father on these occasions we have no means of knowing, but both the major campaigns in the south were relevant to Richard quite apart from the paternal incursion into the maternal domains. On the 1159 campaign Henry met Count Raymond Berengar of Barcelona, an important ally in the war against Toulouse, made a treaty of alliance and sealed it with the betrothal of the two-year-old Richard to one of the count’s daughters. But, as with so many of the slippery Henry’s solemn promises, this ‘betrothal’ simply answered his political requirements of the moment. Nothing came of it, and the shadowy daughter of the count of Barcelona vanished into the historical obscurity that is ever the lot of most of mankind (some say she died in infancy).59 By the time Louis’s pressure on Normandy forced him north from Aquitaine in 1168, Henry was once more ready to use Richard as a political bargaining counter. At a peace conference in Montmirail in January 1169, called when both sides had wearied of the interminable war between them, Henry stated that it was his intention to take the Cross and crusade in the Holy Land. Since he wanted the future of his domains settled, he proposed making his son Henry his clearly nominated heir in Normandy, Anjou and Maine, with Richard as the plainly accredited future duke of Aquitaine. Both sons would do formal homage to Louis for their domains and, to seal the compact, Richard would be betrothed to Louis’s daughter Alice (Alys).60 Much of the conference at Montmirail was taken up with Louis’s attempts to mediate between Henry and his erstwhile friend and now exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. The archbishop managed the rare feat of alienating both sides by his intransigence but he proved a shrewd prophet. He told Lou
is the reason he would not give the categorical assurances of submission Henry required was because Henry was not to be trusted; he was an inveterate oath-breaker and perjurer.61 Louis soon learned to his cost that Becket was right. Henry took the peace treaty hammered out at Montmirail as a green light enabling him to deal mercilessly with the rebels of Aquitaine, who were even then rebuilding the castles he had destroyed. So far from going on crusade, Henry made it clear that his concerns would always centre on the extended Angevin ‘empire’. In a further campaign in the spring and early summer of 1169 he dealt harshly with the unruly barons of Poitou: the count of Angoulême was forced to submit and a well-known local resistance leader Robert de Seilhac died in unsavoury circumstances in one of Henry’s prisons.62 But Henry could never devote all his energies to Aquitaine. Not only was he at war with the kings of France for most of his reign, but he also had military operations in Britanny, Normandy, Wales, Scotland and even Ireland to dissipate his attention and resources. And 1170 was a critical year for Henry for other reasons. In August that year he was seriously ill and for a while thought likely to die. But throughout the year he had a renewed confrontation with the rambunctious Thomas Becket to deal with - a crisis that ended only when four of his knights took literally an ‘if only’ angry aside from the king (‘will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ were the alleged words, though scholars claim there is no evidence he ever spoke so explicitly) and murdered him in Canterbury Cathedral on 29 December.63

  For much of his early life Richard exists for us only in occasional glimpses. We find him more and more in the company of his mother, as when he and Eleanor laid foundation stones for the monastery of St Augustine in Limoges in 1171, yet usually the record is shadowy. But in 1172 he finally emerged into the clear daylight of documented history. Aged fourteen and rising fifteen, on Trinity Sunday 10 June of that year in the abbey church of St Hilary in Poitiers he was formally invested as duke of Aquitaine. This dark thick-walled cathedral church positively pullulated with history. Here Charles Martel had prayed before his great victory over the Moors at Tours in 732 by which legend, if not history, credited him with having saved Europe from Islamic serfdom. Here too King Henry’s faithful servant Earl Patrick of Salisbury was buried. Sensuousness ruled that Sunday, for the air inside the Church was thick with incense, while sumptuary laws seem to have been waived, allowing a riot of colour within the hallowed walls, as even serfs donned motley and bright raiment. On the altar steps the immensely tall youth Prince Richard stood proud, alongside his mother, at fifty by all accounts still a beauty. Eleanor was bedecked in gorgeous fashion: with her greying locks hidden under a silk kerchief, she displayed on her head the gleaming, gilded coronet of Aquitaine, her grandpaternal bequest; while, to show she was also queen of the Angevin empire she wore a scarlet cloak on which were picked out three golden leopards of Anjou. In either hand she held a sceptre: in the right was the golden staff of Aquitaine and in the left the golden rod she had carried at her coronation as Henry’s queen eighteen years before. She was every inch the regal presence, graceful and impassive during the long liturgical service, her gaze fixed on the altar in the solemn way she had learned since childhood. Richard seemed truly the golden warrior, his long shoulder-length blond hair and fair skin melting into an aureate haze with gold trappings that adorned yet another leopard-spotted mantle.64

  The bishop descended to the choir and conducted the royal couple to the foot of the altar. As Eleanor and her son knelt there, the bishop removed the coronet from her head and placed it on Richard’s momentarily before returning it to her; one of his deacons at once stepped forward with a plain silver-girt crown that Richard would wear until the true coronet came to him permanently on his mother’s death. The symbolism was clear to everyone. The bishop then motioned to the abbot’s chair, where Richard took his seat to receive honours in his own right. A deacon in embroidered dalmatic approached bearing a wide scroll of scarlet silk, handed it to the bishop and withdrew as his superior unfurled it. Then all heads in the Church were lowered as the sacred lance of St Hilary was produced; lance and banner were the true signs of ducal authority and both were now blessed. Since a lance could not be proffered to a woman, the bishop ignored Eleanor and presented the lance to Richard. Laying his hands on the insignia of office, Richard then swore a solemn oath as duke of Aquitaine. When the cheering from the congregation died down, the banner of St Hilary was produced and another oath taken on this precious relic. Richard faced his vassals and swore that he would follow the banner wherever it took him on behalf of Holy Mother Church and God’s Right; the implication was that when adult he would crusade in the Holy Land. So finally ended the Ordo and Benedicendum Ducem Aquitaniae. Both participants and congregation had fasted overnight to witness the sacred event, so that when the doors of the Church were flung open both noble and commoner rushed out to gorge themselves at festivities. But Richard was not yet done with sacred ceremonies. A few days later, in Limoges, he was once more proclaimed duke in the Church of St Martial. The climax of this ceremony came when the ring of St Valerie was slipped on Richard’s finger. The martyred St Valerie was the patron saint of Aquitaine and her allegedly thousand-year-old body was still preserved at Limoges - proving to its citizens that Limoges was more important than Poitiers. This time Richard did not hand back the relics to the priestly caste after touching them but retained the ring and wore it during the feast that followed, returning it to its sanctuary at the high altar only late at night. The ulterior significance of the two ceremonies at Poitiers and Limoges was not just that Richard had come of age and entered man’s estate; he had also asserted his right to the dukedom of Aquitaine independently of any feudal duties he might owe his father Henry or King Louis of France. In symbolic terms the saints Hilary and Valerie, protectors of Aquitaine, had allowed him to ‘take seizin’ of their relics; it followed, then, that only those saints could deprive him of his rights, regardless of what Louis and Henry said or did. Eleanor, always wildly possessive about Aquitaine, had used particular artifice to make sure her favourite son would inherit her duchy.65

  The early 1170s saw Richard complete the transition to manhood. There is remarkable unanimity about certain key features of his character and personality. His appearance was often commented on. He was very tall - though the hyperbolic estimate of 6ft 5ins, a similar height to that ascribed to Harald Hardrada of Norway, evinces merely the medieval cavalier way with numbers and statistics - and had his father’s penetrating blue eyes. The hagiographic chronicler Richard de Templo described him at the time of his coronation: ‘He was tall, of elegant build; the colour of his hair was between red and gold; his limbs were supple and straight. He had quite long arms which were particularly suited to drawing a sword and wielding it to great effect. His long legs matched the rest of his body.’66 Although we know nothing of the details of his military education, his later career makes it clear he must have been an apt pupil with sword and lance. His education in arms, and his prowess with them, made him a believer in military solutions and in violence as a means to an end. The contrast with his more hedonistic elder brother Henry was marked; as Gerald of Wales commented: ‘Henry was a shield but Richard was a hammer.’ Where some men, his brother Henry among them, prized tournaments as things-in-themselves, Richard valued them only as an aid to martial training and seems to have taken part in only a few jousts, reserving his formidable skills as horseman and swordsman for the battlefield. He was also uninterested in the traditional ducal and regal pursuits of hunting and hawking, indulging in them only when killing time or held up by contrary winds when trying to set sail. Richard despised dilettantism and admired professionalism and ruthlessness. He even affected to be pleased about his family’s reputation as the devil’s brood and gloried in the apophthegm about his family attributed to St Bernard: ‘From the Devil they came and to the Devil they will return.’67