Henry could now afford to regroup, retrench and consolidate. Louis dithered over his next move right through spring and into summer. Finally, he opted for the strategy he should have employed from the very beginning. To draw Henry from his position in Normandy, the coalition would have to mount a major threat to England and this time the omens were propitious, for King William of Scotland was finally ready to make his move. In collusion with northern rebels under Roger de Mowbray and secretly advised by the bishop of Durham, William crossed the border, laid siege to Carlisle and proceeded to gobble up a string of lesser castles at Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth. Yet the war in England soon bogged down in an inconclusive struggle in the Midlands, centring around the rebel stronghold of Leicester, with coalition forces maybe just having the edge for a while. But King William’s campaign in the north-east was running out of steam, with Carlisle, held for Henry II, still defiant, and meanwhile King Henry’s bastard son scored a crushing victory over Roger de Mowbray, who was trying to link up with the rebel core at Leicester.68 And still Henry remained unperturbed in Normandy, refusing to cross the Channel and provide Louis with the opportunity he yearned for: another invasion of the northern Angevin empire. The coalition therefore braced itself for what it hoped would be the masterstroke: a substantial invasion of England to be led by Count Philip of Flanders and his Flemings. Finally alarmed by this, Henry sailed from Barfleur to England on 7 July. When the coalition learned of his arrival, they foolishly did not press on with the invasion plan and instead Philip of Flanders joined Louis for a large-scale assault on eastern Normandy and Rouen.69
Yet even while they drew up their forces outside Rouen, Henry enjoyed yet another slice of his almost supernatural good luck. On arrival in England, the king visited Becket’s tomb at Canterbury and, barefoot and fasting, submitted to a public scourging, to show that the cause of the rebels had nothing to do with vindicating the cause of St Thomas. A few days later it seemed that God had given him the nod of approval. On 13 July King William of Scotland and his knights were surprised in the mist near Alnwick by a scratch force of loyalists; among the few who survived the resultant slaughter was William himself. The capture of the Scottish king tore the heart out of the rebels, who felt themselves accursed. Henry moved rapidly down to the Midlands, where the opposition collapsed like a house of cards.70 So easy was his victory that the king was back in Barfleur on 8 August, just a month after he had departed. Thinking he had all the time in the world, Louis had gone about the siege of Rouen in a leisurely fashion, and now he was taken in the rear. So desperate was Louis to seize Rouen that he tried to take the city by trickery, breaking the sacred terms of a truce as part of the subterfuge, but just failing, again in the most aleatory circumstances. When Henry and his army arrived next day and began mauling the French troops, Louis once more lost heart and retreated. By the end of September he was suing for peace.71 As King Henry’s treasurer gloatingly remarked: ‘So the mighty learned that to wrest the club from the hand of Hercules was no easy task.’72
Yet if Louis so signally bowed the head to a greater general, the 16-year-old Richard was made of sterner stuff. The capture of his mother seems to have enraged him so that the iron entered his soul. In the spring of 1174 he tried to capture the great mercantile centre of La Rochelle, using the trading rivalry of nearby Saintes against it. But the young Richard was no match for his father, who made another of his lightning swoops, westward, while Richard imagined he was celebrating Whitsun in Poitiers. Richard and a handful of followers made an undignified scramble to escape and fled downstream to the castle of Taillebourg, leaving behind most of his military stores and equipment, to say nothing of his best knights and archers captured in Saintes.73 But the Scottish king’s debacle and Louis’s weakness soon left the young duke of Aquitaine out on a limb. The three-week truce between Louis and Henry on 8 September expressly excluded Richard, who now became king Henry’s target. Not daring to face his father in battle, Richard steadily retreated, increasingly at a loss and angry as he realised the scale of his desertion by Louis and the Young King. Finally convinced that his cause was lost, on 23 September Richard threw himself on his father’s mercy. Weeping, he prostrated himself before the king and begged forgiveness.74 Henry raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace, but punished him by more stringent terms than those refused at Gisors. At the reconvened conference on 29 September at Montlouis (between Tours and Amboise), Richard accepted half the revenues of Aquitaine but only two non-castellated demesnes. The Young King did much better: two castles in Normandy and £15,000 annually. On the other hand, he was forced to accept the conditions that had originally propelled him into rebellion: he had to grant John the disputed castles and revenues in England, Normandy and Anjou.75
Henry II’s indulgence to his rebellious sons, akin to Napoleon’s notorious connivance at his brothers’ faults and crimes, to say nothing of his leniency towards other rebel leaders, attracted astonished comment at the time, and not everyone approved his merciful approach. It was said that he should have followed up his advantage by smiting King Louis hip and thigh and, in particular, that he should have extirpated the troublesome Flemings. Yet Henry was as good as his word: he made peace on the basis of how things were before the war began, except that he insisted on demolishing a swathe of rebel castles. It was said that after 1174 ruined castles could be seen throughout the Angevin empire, visible testaments to Henry’s determination that his supreme power could not be denied.76 But there were no executions or forfeitures and the king did not levy ransoms for those captured in battle. By 1177 even those rebel lords who had been most uncompromising in their opposition to Henry were free once more: the earls of Chester and Leicester, Ralph de Fougeres. King William of Scotland paid the heaviest price for the events of 1173-74: he had to declare himself Henry’s liegeman, to make a public submission at York and to surrender five castles in Scotland. Henry did, however, draw the line at declaring himself overlord of Scotland or intervening in Scottish affairs.77 All this was misconstrued by those who habitually confuse restraint with weakness. Henry’s motives for smoothing things over were simply that he did not want an endless cycle of war and civil disturbance, which a draconian reaction to the rebellion would certainly have engendered, and he was concerned that the barons who had taken no part in the rebellion on either side had converted themselves into local warlords, largely free of royal influence. He derived immediate satisfaction in other ways, tightening up central government, making tax evasion more difficult, taking a hard line on the forest laws. Above all, he made sure that men loyal to him occupied every castle in England.78
But he could not long allow the ‘neutral’ magnates to be virtual kings in their own domains, and this problem was particularly acute in Aquitaine, where most of the great barons had held aloof during the armed struggle of 1173-74. It soon became abundantly clear that they had not had the slightest interest in the cause of the Young King, but had simply used his revolt as an excuse to throw off the Old King’s overlordship. It may be that Henry was particularly impressed by the cool-headed way the 17-year-old Richard had handled himself during the latter stages of the rebellion, for in January 1175 the king sent his second son to Aquitaine with a dual set of orders: he was to raze all castles occupied by the rebels during the rebellion and he was to bring to heel the neutral lords who now bade fair to turn their bailiwicks into independent principalities.79 In effect Henry appointed Richard his Regent in the south, with full powers over all Angevin armed forces there and all revenues and officials. There was a prime irony here, in that Richard was turning against some of the very people he had urged to rebel against his father, but Henry had given him a bed of nails, since the ‘independent’ lords of Aquitaine were arrogant, contumacious and self-confident, not having tasted the horrors visited on Normandy, Britanny and the north by the combination of mercenaries and blitzkrieg. Richard at once proved his calibre and evinced a genius at siegecraft by reducing the powerful castle of Agill
on-sur-Agen, even though his critics have always tried to belittle this feat, on the grounds that the castellan, Arnold of Bouteville, was not a major baron.80
At first he was able to pick off his enemies one by one, but by the beginning of 1176 they had made common cause, presenting a formidable coalition of southern barons: the count of Angoulême, Viscount Aimar of Limoges, Viscount Raymond of Turenne and the lords of Chabanais and Mastac. Even the dauntless Richard soon found the task beyond him, and went to England in April 1176 to consult his father on the next step. Henry made available large sums of money and fresh cohorts of mercenaries, only to find that his opponents in turn had hired a force of Brabançons, commanded by the count of Angoulême’s eldest son, Vulgrin Taillefer.81 On his return to the continent, Richard hastened to meet this force in Poitou and defeated it in May at Bouteville near Angoulême.82 Pressing on to Limoges, then a city in two parts, Richard cunningly made use of the ancient rivalry between ‘city’ and ‘citadel’ (the two different parts of the town) to force its capitulation after a couple of days’ siege. Early in July the Young King joined him at Poitiers. Young Henry had petitioned his father for permission to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but the Old King suspected this was just a ploy to enable his eldest son to raise another rebellion. He therefore ordered him to assist his brother in the Aquitaine campaign. The Young King, however, flounced off once he had got a taste of Richard’s martial ability. He did not like campaigning, resented being under Richard’s orders, and was jealous of his military talents.83 Undeterred, Richard took the castles of Châteauneuf and Moulinef and then pressed on to Angoulême for a final reckoning with Aimar, Angoulême, Chabanais and the others. Bottled up in the citadel these grandees seemed to have nothing to lose by fighting on, and desperate combat was expected in a last-ditch stand, but the rebels surrendered tamely after just six days. Richard sent the great lords prisoner to England for Henry to deal with; at Winchester on 21 September 1176 William of Angoulême and the other Aquitaine rebels had to make the self-same obeisance on their knees that the humbled Richard had endured two years earlier.84 But Richard was already a military hero as a result of this campaign; truly he had won his spurs.
By 1176 the career of Henry II fully justified his treasurer’s boast that he was ‘the greatest of the illustrious rulers of the world’.85 He had decisively relegated Louis of France to second place, and even the great Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, was no longer the colossus of yore after his defeat at Legnano by the Lombard League in this very same year. Henry’s fame had spread to the point where in November 1176 his court at Westminster received envoys from Barbarossa, from Emperor Manuel Comnenus in Constantinople, the duke of Savoy and the count of Flanders. He was clearly recognised as a power broker in Spain, and the kings of Aragon and Castile asked him to act as arbiter in all their disputes, pledging themselves to abide faithfully by any decision. Even the king of Sicily was interested in Europe’s new supremo, and asked for the hand of his daughter Joan in marriage.86 For the first time in its history England was a major European power. Henry and his second son were both recognised as great warriors. But the 19-year-old Richard was already showing himself to be a very different proposition from his 46-year-old father. Henry waged war only when he had to.87 Richard, on the other hand, loved war and everything about it, clearly placing himself on a line that runs through history from Alexander the Great to General George Patton. The shrewd Gerald of Wales put his finger on the fundamental flaw in Richard’s personality, which was that he ‘cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with the blood of his adversaries’.88 Even if Aquitaine had not been a notorious cockpit of anarchy, the omens for peaceful resolution of its problems were not favourable.
3
AS HENRY II APPROACHED the medieval equivalent of old age in his mid-forties, he tried as far as possible to take a back seat in the administration of his dominions, hoping that active involvement in the Angevin empire could be left to his sons. His basic plan was that the Young King would continue to be groomed for the succession, which made England his main sphere of influence; Geoffrey would act as the king’s deputy in Normandy and Britanny and Richard would rule in Aquitaine. Roughly speaking, one might say that Henry aimed at a kind of Angevin federalism, where each province would be self-governing and even have its own coinage. But his federalism was always the strong federalism of an interventionist monarch, not the weak version of one who was tired of life or politics. He was prepared to cut a lot of slack for his restless sons, but would not tolerate the same latitude being given by the sons towards subject lords. And his own restlessness often worked against his basic project. In the late 1170s he was concerned to bring Aquitaine finally under effective central control and he also began to dabble in Spanish affairs. Given that Richard already faced a thornier problem than Geoffrey - for in Aquitaine there was simply Henry’s nominal overlordship and a lot of internally independent vassals - Henry’s expectations placed greater stresses on Richard’s shoulders than on those of his brothers. It would be an exaggeration to call the situation in Aquitaine anarchy, but there were no strong central structures of law and politics there, as in England, Normandy or Anjou and, moreover, the south had not yet felt Henry’s mailed fist, as this area had not been the cockpit of the struggle against King Louis of France.1 In the years before Richard was formally recognised as duke of Aquitaine - in 1179 - all this began to change.
As a military leader Richard was improving all the time. Since Henry was keen to intervene in the affairs of Spain, he began by ordering Richard to make sure the road from Bordeaux south to the Pyrenees was as secure as roads at the height of the Roman or Mongol empires. Clearing the farrago of bandits, feudal levies and rebellious lords from the traditional pilgrim route meant sustained warfare. Basing himself at Bordeaux for the Christmas feast of 1176, Richard swept south early in the new year and laid siege to Dax and Bayonne while his armies of Brabançons trawled the entire territory from Bordeaux to Cize on the Spanish border. Having emulated his father with a stunning winter campaign, waged over the Christmas festivities when no one was ever supposed to be on the warpath, Richard prematurely announced that the pacification of Aquitaine was complete and discharged his mercenaries.2 No longer on the payroll, the savage Brabançons began to pillage and plunder the countryside. The backlash was severe: an ‘army of peace’ organised by the disgruntled clergy and nobility caught the Brabançon marauders off guard near Brive and slaughtered them mercilessly.3 Henry thought that Richard had his hands full in the far south, so sent the Young King on an auxiliary mission to bring to heel the rebellious territory of Berry in north-east Aquitaine. Here was yet another collision between Angevin centralising power and local folkways. Ralph de Deols, lord of Berry, died and left his daughter as sole heiress. In England an unmarried heiress was at the disposal of her overlord, who could marry her off to a husband of his choice, but this right was not recognised in Berry. When King Henry claimed wardship of the heiress, and her kin refused to give her up, warfare was the inevitable result. But Richard was irritated by the arrival of the Young King for two different reasons. In the first place his uninvited intervention clearly encroached on Richard’s rights as duke of Aquitaine but, then, he proceeded to campaign so feebly that Richard concluded he must secretly be favouring the rebels.
Then the Old King heard disquieting rumours that Louis of France did not intend to stand idly by. Fearing possible intervention against the Young King in Berry, Henry sent an embassy to Paris, demanding a final resolution of the agreement to marry Margaret and Alice, Louis’s daughters. In short, he asked that the Vexin be handed over as Margaret’s dowry and Berry likewise be earmarked for Alice.4 This was cool cheek on Henry’s part, for everyone knew that it was Henry who had broken the terms of the previous agreement by hanging on to Alice far too long - she had been fifteen years at Henry’s court and, it was widely whispered, was already his mistress. Indeed the situation had alre
ady reached the stage where Pope Alexander, primed by Louis, was threatening to place the entire Angevin empire under a papal interdict if the Alice marriage was not soon celebrated. For a year the nuncio at Henry’s court had been insisting that Alice either be married to Richard forthwith or returned to her father.5 Always a master of stalling, Henry signed a new fourfold agreement with Louis in September 1177 at the so-called Colloquy of Ivry. He agreed to submit the Berry dispute, in which Louis claimed an interest, to arbitration; he agreed that Richard would marry Alice; and he proposed a non-aggression pact with Louis on condition that the two of them went on crusade to save the beleaguered Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. This last condition was crucial: Louis dearly wanted to take the Cross but dared not leave for Palestine with France and his young son Philip at the mercy of the Angevins.6 But Henry had no more intention of going on crusade than he had of returning princess Alice. Moreover, in typical Henrician mode and again in defiance of this agreement, he and Richard continued campaigning in Berry and solved the issue there by military force, under the pretext that he (Henry) finally had time to punish the rebels who had submitted to him at Winchester in September 1176.7 Henry continued to enrage and outwit Louis. In November 1177 he and the French king held a fruitless conference at Graçay about their competing claims in the Auvergne. Then, in a political coup that demonstrated how clearly money could speak, Henry suddenly purchased the vast fief of La Marche from a despondent and abdicating duke. Technically subject to Aquitaine, La Marche had always enjoyed virtual independence, so here was another signal instance of Henry’s tightening power.8
Richard & John: Kings at War Page 8
