Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Things were starting to go de Born’s way, but he had one final obstacle to remove before the Young King could be persuaded to break ranks with his father and brothers. At young Henry’s side rode the original knight paladin sans peur et sans reproche, Sir William Marshal. Since 1170 the Young King’s mesnie (military household) had been led by Marshal, who was already famous throughout Europe. He had led something of a charmed life, having narrowly escaped death as a child. In 1152 his father Geoffrey Marshal was besieged by King Stephen in Newbury Castle. In accordance with the usual custom, he agreed to surrender on a given date and sent out his son William as hostage; then he broke his word and, by the laws of the sword, the boy’s life was forfeit. The ruthless Geoffrey shrugged the matter off: he said that as his wife was with him in the castle, he could spare a son, since he had both the hammer and the anvil with which to make others. Stephen reluctantly gave the order for the boy to be killed - he had to, or the whole business of hostage-taking would lose credibility. But when he emerged from his tent, he saw the child playing gleefully with the headman’s sword; his heart ruled his head and he pardoned the boy.28 When Henry II ascended the throne of England, young William Marshal was sent to Normandy to be brought up by his cousin the count of Tancarville. After receiving a thorough grounding in the use of arms, he proved himself a natural with lance and sword and soon made his mark in tournaments.

  In 1168 he became famous for prowess in real battle also. He was in Earl Patrick of Salisbury’s party when the earl was killed, sensationally - for great lords were not supposed to die in battle - during Eleanor of Aquitaine’s campaign against the earls of Lusignan. This death was considered murder by medieval reckoning for, by the rules, if you caught an enemy out hunting when he was not wearing his chain mail, you had to take him prisoner, not kill him. William donned his hauberk but his horse was immediately killed under him. He landed on the ground unharmed and then took up station by a thick hedge which protected his back, where he defied the men of Lusignan to try their luck. When they charged, he killed six horses and held his own against their mailed riders, being overcome finally only when a Poitevin rider jumped his horse over the hedge and was able to work round behind him; William was taken prisoner with a speared thigh. As a prisoner he was treated harshly to make him keen to pay the suggested ransom, and lay with his wound untended until a kitchen-maid took pity on him and gave him a dishcloth to bind up his wounded leg. William’s problem was that, as a landless younger son, he had no tenants to ransom him and might well have died in a Lusignan dungeon. It was Eleanor of Aquitaine, out of admiration for his gallantry in the Earl Patrick episode, who ransomed him from her private purse.29

  William Marshal soon became the Lancelot of his time - the knight everyone wanted to beat but no one could - and was acknowledged as the king of tournaments. Early medieval tournaments, and certainly those in the twelfth century, are much misunderstood, since there is an almost inevitable ‘feedback image’ from the ideal-type of tournament familiar from Malory. In the eleventh century one-on-one combat would have been regarded as a curiosity, since tournaments featured companies of knights fighting each other all day long. Knightly combat in this era, whether in a tournament or on the battlefield, was not concerned with killing opponents but capturing them for ransom. The ‘battleground’ was seldom a special area surrounded by caparisoned horses and gaily-coloured tents but simply the high road, at the side of which were wicker-work pens or ‘lists’ where those who found the going too tough could rest and recuperate on ‘safe’ ground until they felt energetic enough to rejoin the combat; indeed almost the only rule of ‘chivalry’ in this period was the sanctity of the lists, and all kinds of dirty tricks were employed to gain the advantage. When William Marshal became the Young King’s military counsel, he always advised him to hang back at the beginning of the day and make a limp showing, allowing the other side to exhaust itself during the heat of the day, then charge in the evening when the opponents were tired and prisoners could be picked up easily. Prisoner-taking was the name of the game; deaths in tournaments were rare except through falls from horses or being cut up by hooves. Ransom levels were set much lower than in real warfare, and usually the terms of captivity in these cases were not severe. The immediate advantage to the victor was that he took possession of the horse and chain mail, a considerable prize.30 In this way William Marshal soon became not just famous but wealthy. One summer, while fighting on the side of a Flemish knight, Sir Roger de Gaugi, he took 103 knights prisoner with their horses and mail plus many more riderless horses. Immensely strong - he was able to carry a knight in his armour clean off the battlefield - generous, wildly popular, he was said to be tolerant of most things except lending money at interest. A famous story was told of him that an interlocutor tried to make him angry by reciting the details of various ‘sins’: William listened impassively to tales of adultery, theft and the breaking of clerical vows but became incensed only when usury was mentioned.31

  On paper William was the perfect mentor and guardian for the Young King, who was obsessed with tournaments. But there were several problems. In the first place, even when coached by William and taught all his lore, Young Henry was not very good at jousting. Although tall, strong and handsome, he simply could not be bothered to put his back into knighthood as a real professional would: his attention span was too limited, he was too easily bored and in jousting, as in so many other ways, he was a dilettante. Gradually he became more and more irritated with William’s success and fame. In tournaments opponents tried to unhorse William Marshal but ignored the Young King. Troubadours composed poems about the great Marshal, not about the great Henry. It did not help matters that William could be tactless and, in his cups, could rival d’Artagnan’s Gascon boastfulness. The Young King liked to try to put him in his place by reminding him of his duties as a liegeman. But events always seemed to conspire to place him in a bad light and William in a favourable one. On one occasion the Young King found himself out of money in a Flemish town, unable to pay the (inevitably) huge bills run up by himself and his sycophantic entourage. The burghers simply refused to accept his word that he would pay, closed the gates against him and lined the walls to prevent him from leaving. Condemned to remain a virtual prisoner until money was fetched from his duchy in Normandy, the Young King was providentially delivered by William Marshal, who pledged on his word of honour as a knight that the debt would be paid.32 Immediately the situation was transformed and the gates opened, for the solemn promise of the greatest knight in Christendom was an international currency. Unlike both Old and Young Kings William Marshal always kept his word.

  Yet another problem was that Henry II banned all tournaments in his domains, as did Kings Louis and Philip in France proper (the Ile de France). Enforcement of this law was impossible in Aquitaine and intermittent in Normandy, but sometimes the Young King dared not defy his father openly and was forced to decamp to Flanders or Brabant, in terms of tournaments the Reno or Las Vegas of their day. Henry Il’s opposition to tournaments was twofold: they damaged crops and property and they were condemned by the Church, which Henry was anxious to conciliate in the post-Becket years. According to canon law, tournaments stood in much the same light as mercenaries: they were anathematised as a form of suicide, and this was confirmed by Canon 14 of the Second Lateran Council in 1139. In theory, to be granted absolution after Confession for having taken part in a tournament, you had to give back all ransom money, horses and armour gained through jousting, so that not a groat of financial profit remained.33 Since William Marshal was honourable, he often nagged the Young King about holding tournaments in Normandy, thinking they should be held only in the godless Low Countries. For all these reasons the Young King chafed under Marshal’s tutelage and looked for a way to take him down a peg. We may suspect the direct or indirect influence of Bertran de Born in the final parting of the ways. The Young King was notably uxorious and cherished his wife queen Margaret, who was popular, even though she indulged her
selfish and calculating brother Philip. Despite the reputedly happy marriage, the royal couple were childless, as a son born to Margaret died in infancy and there were no further pregnancies. Suddenly rumours began to proliferate that the admiration Margaret expressed for William Marshal and the easy relations they enjoyed betokened something more than mere liking. After listening to troubadour-inspired tittle-tattle that Marshal was now Lancelot in another sense, with Margaret as Guinevere, the Young King angrily accused Marshal of being over-familiar with his wife. Intemperate words were exchanged, and William Marshal stormed from the meeting, leaving his service immediately after. The Young King claimed he had dismissed Marshal for ‘conduct unbecoming’.34

  When the Young King suddenly quit the 1182 campaign with Richard against the count of Angoulême and rushed back to a tournament in the Low Countries, it was clear that Bertran de Born’s poison had done its work and he had removed the main moderating influence on Henry II’s eldest son. Time had not mellowed or improved the Young King: instead of twelve years’ experience since his coronation he had merely one month’s worth repeated more than a hundred times. Henry was classically one of those personalities that relish freedom without authority, rights without duties, power without responsibility. At the very moment Henry was carrying out his administrative overhaul in England, in the years 1176-79, the Young King chose to be absent on the continent, flitting into tournaments in the Low Countries whenever it was suggested he did anything useful in Normandy. As Ralph of Diceto tersely put it: ‘Henry the son of the king of England, leaving the kingdom, passed three years in French contests and lavish expenditure.’35 He spent money like water, indulging in the kind of mindless fripperies more redolent of the Sun King at Versailles five centuries later. Some of his jeux d’esprits recall the lunacies of Domitian or Elagabulus, the most decadent emperors of ancient Rome. On one occasion he held a banquet for a hundred knights, all of them called William. Whenever his father asked him to help Richard in Aquitaine, the Young King would take an unconscionable time about getting there, would then half-heartedly join in a siege, then become bored and depart without a word to anyone.36

  Surrounded by toadies and sycophants, all young wastrels like himself, the Young King adored to spend money, but hated its reality. Groaning with debt which he yearned not to pay, or to write off by simple decree, he was rescued time and again by his father or William Marshal, which simply made him more resentful, since that meant, in his mind, that they were patronising him or ‘giving him laws’. At the same time Bertran de Born and the other troubadours urged on him the credo that largesse was a ruler’s most desirable quality - not surprisingly, since they would end up the major beneficiaries of a glad-handed prince. To encourage him in his mindlessness, his courtiers showered him with compliments, making him out to be the greatest knight in Christendom, the flower of chivalry. Pro-French propagandists joined in the encomia, especially after the Young King’s death.37 Gerald of Wales wrote: ‘He was the honour of honour, worthy to be the ornament of the whole world; the splendour, glory, light and summit of chivalry; surpassing Julius Caesar in cunning, Hector in courage, Achilles in strength, Augustus in conduct, Paris in beauty . . . He was another Hector, the honour of his knights, the terror of his foes, the love of all; a thunderbolt of war, in every mind the chief hope or the chief fear; in peace mild, affable, kind and generous; in war terrible.’38

  The Old King was visibly ageing and the Young King was both heir apparent and joint king. But he did not have the patience to wait until he could succeed to the throne naturally. By 1182 the temptations had once again become too great. He wanted the real powers Richard enjoyed in Aquitaine and he wanted them now. His visits to Aquitaine had persuaded him that there was wholesale opposition to Richard in the duchy and he could win a civil war against him there, but he was not certain what side his father would take in such a fratricidal dispute. In autumn 1182 he asked Henry to be given outright rule in Normandy, but the king refused. The Young King stormed off, declaring he would take the Cross, and went to Paris to see the young monarch Philip Augustus, who realised that here could be the first instrument of his lifelong campaign to destroy the Angevins.39 Philip liked the Young King personally and was grateful for the help he had given him in 1180-81 when some of the French nobles under the counts of Blois and Flanders had opposed his succession. Henry II soon cajoled his son back to his side by offering him an increased annual allowance (equivalent to £110 a day) and a year’s pay for his troops plus the upkeep and subsistence of a hundred knights; in return the son swore an oath that he would remain faithful to the king and make no more demands. The Young King now had three choices: he could remain loyal to his father in accordance with his oath; he could go to Jerusalem on crusade; or he could make war on Richard. The last always seemed the most tempting prospect. Richard himself had crusading ambitions - indeed that was the rationale for his heavy taxation of Aquitaine - and the Young King had no wish to compete in Outremer with a proven warrior. Dozens of prominent would-be rebels were just waiting for the nod from the Young King before rising against Richard, and they had already opened secret channels to the young man, promising they would recognise him as duke of Aquitaine. From all sides the Young King heard the same story - that Richard ‘oppressed his subjects with burdensome and unwarranted exactions and by an imperious despotism’.40

  By the autumn of 1182, however, Bertran de Born was beginning to despair. He had no hopes of Philip Augustus, whom he now despised for his lack of martial talent. And the southern barons were genuinely afraid of Richard and wanted an almost cast-iron guarantee of success before they would rise against him. As de Born said: ‘I am making a sirvente against the cowardly barons, and you will never hear me speak of them, for I have broken a thousand spurs on them without being able to make a single one of them run or trot.’41 This was the point at which yet another angel of darkness came to his aid. The most evil of all the Angevins finally emerged from the shadows. Knighted by his father in 1178 at twenty, Geoffrey, lord of Britanny combined the qualities of the Young King with those of his younger brother John. On the one hand he was handsome, charming and debonair; on the other cruel, scheming, serpentine, mendacious and untrustworthy. In some ways he was by far the most natural ally for Bertran de Born since he believed in mindless violence - he would gut houses and lay waste towns on a whim - and was forever changing sides. He had no fixed beliefs and would fight with anyone against anyone. An indefatigable intriguer, he poisoned Richard’s mind against the Young King when he performed so badly at Berry while simultaneously stoking resentment in the Young King against Richard.42 Careful and methodical, he did not at first reveal his hand as duke of Britanny. Unlike Richard, he made no real attempt to impose his father’s law and left the old traditions and folkways of Britanny alone and gave his easy-going minister Roland de Dinan a free hand. In 1181 Henry II allowed him to marry Constance, heiress of the late Conan IV of Britanny. Since the Old King habitually interfered in his sons’ private lives and had humiliated Richard by not allowing him to marry Alice, this concession could be seen as a great favour. Henry indeed seemed very indulgent towards Geoffrey and there is even some evidence that he secretly encouraged him to meddle in his brothers’ affairs in Normandy and Aquitaine on the ‘divide and rule’ principle. But Geoffrey secretly hated his father. In his mind Henry had toyed with him by allowing the marriage to Constance after a lifelong betrothal. Moreover, even when he became duke of Britanny by rights of succession through his marriage, Henry would still not let him rule there independently.43 His resentment towards his father thus had the same cause as Richard’s, but Richard did not harbour deep, abiding hatred the way Geoffrey did.

  Geoffrey planned his strike against his father meticulously. First he established that the quid pro quo for non-interference in Breton folkways was that his writ should run in all corners of Britanny. He campaigned against the nominally independent Viscount Guiomar of Leon and crushed him in 1179. With growing confidence he the
n dismissed Roland of Dinan and replaced him with his own henchman Ralph de Fougeres - a known enemy of both Richard and Henry II.44 A better judge of human beings than the Old King could have inferred a lot about Geoffrey’s true filial feelings from that alone. While Guiomar, following the example of so many defeated magnates in this era, departed on crusade, Geoffrey allowed his eldest son to have nominal suzerainty over the north-west of the duchy but established his own hegemony by fortifying the port of Morlaix and occupying it with his own troops. Cunningly, Geoffrey established tight administrative and ecclesiastical control before his masterstroke in 1185, when his famous Assize established the principle of primogeniture in succeeding to fiefs.45 In June 1182 he used the occasion of a visit to his father at Grandmont to intrigue with the anti-Richard barons of the Limousin. The chroniclers tended to impute Geoffrey’s motives to simple moral depravity, to see him as Original Sin incarnate, but it may be that Geoffrey’s devious mind was working towards the day when his father was dead. If a revolt removed Richard and the feeble Young King assumed the Crown, it would not be hard for Geoffrey to become the power behind the throne and the real decision-maker in the land. Everyone thought that, as a third son, he had done extremely well, but Geoffrey thought Britanny far too small a cockpit for his ambitions.46

  By autumn 1182 rebellion was again breaking out in Aquitaine. The perfidious Taillefer brothers and their ally viscount Aimar once more broke their word, hired mercenaries and denounced the treaty to which they had put their names. This was the moment for the trio of plotters, Geoffrey, Bertran de Born and Philip Augustus, to find the casus belli that would justify waging war on Richard, and he fell into their trap by fortifying and rebuilding Clairvaux Castle, a fortress nominally in Anjou, which he aimed to use against his next most likely opponent, viscount Chatellerault of Poitou.47 Clairvaux was disputed territory, as under one interpretation of feudalism it belonged to Poitou and on another to Anjou. The Young King naturally claimed that Richard was fortifying strongholds in his (Henry’s) domain but, unless he was simply being disputatious or trailing his coat, he should have submitted the dispute to the Old King.48 Nonetheless, he was confident that in an armed challenge to Richard he would have the support of his father. Some say the Old King was losing his touch in not acting decisively right at the beginning, but other authorities claim that the real problem was located in Henry II’s erratic personality: ‘Although extremely sensitive to what he took to be betrayal in others, Henry II showed a remarkable capacity for deceiving himself about his sons, and an astonishing indulgence even to their most patent duplicity.’49 The upshot was that he prevaricated and, instead of issuing a judgement, summoned all his sons to a Christmas court at Caen: it was to be a magnificent occasion, and none of his sons or liegemen were allowed to hold any other court that Yuletide.