Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  In the simulated ambience of peace and goodwill William Marshal thought he discerned a good chance to patch up his quarrel with the Young King. He offered to refute the calumny that he had been queen Margaret’s lover by challenging any of his accusers to single combat. The peevish Young King said that Marshal was simply offering a contest he was sure to win, which was no proof at all. Marshal riposted that he would face any three champions on successive days and, if any of them beat him, he would admit his guilt whatever the truth. The Young King still did not fancy the odds so, in desperation, Marshal offered to have a finger cut from his right hand just before the joust, promising he would fight with the wound still bleeding. When the boorish Young Henry would not even accept this offer, Marshal asked for a written passport and set off on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Magi at Cologne.50 This high drama aside, the Christmas court was notable mainly for backstairs intrigue. Among the thousand knights who assembled in the vast halls of the Caen palace was the inevitable Bertran de Born, who had already been doing his best to whip up opposition to Richard. His sirvente on the subject of Clairvaux was both arch and insinuating: ‘Someone had dared to build a fair castle at Clairvaux in the midst of the plain. I should not wish the Young King to know about it or see it, for he would not find it to his liking; but I fear, so white is the stone, that he cannot fail to see it from Mateflon.’51 Meanwhile at Caen de Born lobbied both the Old King and Richard for support against his brother Constantine who held the family castle at Hautefort. In a bizarre but not untypical melange of caddish-ness and chivalry de Born claimed that only the beauty of Henry II’s daughter Matilda, now married to the exiled duke of Saxony, prevented him from dying of boredom during the tedious proceedings at Caen.52

  Naturally his best chance to regain Hautefort was finally to tip the Young King over into rebellion, but the Old King’s diplomacy at first made this a difficult aim to compass. Henry announced a conference at Mirebeau where the disaffected barons of Aquitaine could put their grievances to him. Then he persuaded an initially very reluctant Richard to hand over Clairvaux to him. Finally, he sought to bind up the wounds of the Angevin empire by a complex skein of renewed oath-taking. First his sons were to swear perpetual fidelity to him; this they did without demur. Then he sought to impose oaths of overlordship binding his younger sons to the Young King. Geoffrey accepted readily enough - it fitted well with his own designs - but Richard refused adamantly. He pointed out that royal brothers were supposed to be equal in status and so he should not have to swear an oath of submission on the Gospel; if the Young King had rights of primogeniture from his father, he, Richard, had a countervailing right of inheritance from his mother. In feudal terms Richard was right for, though Henry II had inherited portions of his empire from his mother and father, Aquitaine was his only by the right of marriage to Eleanor. Moreover, Richard’s arguments about equality were validated by the existing system of homage: the Young King did homage to the king of France for Normandy, as did Richard for Aquitaine, so, feudally speaking, both brothers were on the same footing.53 In other words, Richard’s case was that, in trying to get him to swear an oath of subjection to the Young King, Henry II was trying to change the rules and make Aquitaine answerable to the rest of the Angevin federation rather than to France.

  After much cajolery Richard finally agreed to pay the required homage provided the Young King made a solemn pronouncement that Richard and his heirs would possess Aquitaine forever. At this point the Young King drew back and upset all his father’s careful diplomacy. He refused the proferred conditions because the new terms of homage conflicted with the secret assurances he had already given de Born and the Aquitaine rebels. On 1 January 1183 the Young King came clean and admitted as much: he told his father he had pledged himself to the rebels because of the Clairvaux affair. But Henry II trumped this ace by pointing out that Richard had already handed over Clairvaux to him. He insisted that the oaths of peace and the amended terms of homage be implemented and told the Young King that he intended to force the rebels to re-affirm the original treaty at Mirebeau. Finding themselves in a trap, Geoffrey and young Henry recast their plans. Geoffrey ‘volunteered’ to go south and bring the Limousin rebels to Mirebeau and the Young King, in collusion with him, then announced that he would follow Geoffrey to bring maximum pressure to bear. His true intention, of course, was to get the rebellious barons to sign up to him as duke of Aquitaine.54 Even more deviously, he got his father to agree that at Mirebeau the rebels would not have to confirm the original treaty but could negotiate a new one instead. When Richard heard of this new instance of ‘goalpost moving’ he exploded. In an angry scene with his father he remonstrated vociferously: why had he and Henry campaigned together to crush the rebels in 1182 if a farcical surrender to their demands the next year was to be the net outcome? Tempers ran high at the father-son conclave. Finally losing patience with his father’s approach, Richard told him bluntly that Aquitaine came from his mother, not the Angevins, and therefore it lay outside the king’s jurisdiction. The meeting ended badly and Richard stormed out; he swept out of the court contemptuously, without royal permission, and rode south to fortify his castles in Poitou.55

  The battle lines were now clearly drawn. The Young King and Geoffrey were fighting against Richard, and expected their father to join them after Richard’s ‘unreasonable’ behaviour. The Young King secretly hoped that, with Richard defeated, he would then be able to dethrone his father and inherit the entire empire. Richard was determined this would not happen and, rather than accept such an outcome, was prepared to break away from the Angevin federation and declare Aquitaine an independent duchy. Much hinged on Henry II’s actions: would he really go to war against Richard on behalf of rebels the two of them had just defeated? And what was the king of France’s role in all this? Just to be on the safe side the Young King sent his beloved wife Margaret to Philip’s court in Paris. He then rode south to join Geoffrey and the rebels at Limoges. At first everything went well for the insurgents. Aimar and his mercenaries browbeat the city of Limoges into joining the revolt, and every day news of the disarray in the Angevin family brought more recruits and waverers to the rebel banner. On paper Richard faced a daunting and almost impossible task, given the strength of the forces arrayed against him. But none of his enemies possessed his military genius. In no mood for peace or compromise, he first struck out at Geoffrey’s forces in Britanny and scattered them. Then, on 12 February, after riding non-stop for forty-eight hours, he and his cavalry fell on Aimar’s routiers at Gorre near Limoges, when the mercenaries confidently imagined he was still the other side of Poitiers. Richard himself slew the mercenary leader William Arnald and with the others used his draconian exemplary methods of drowning, blinding and hanging. Aimar and a handful of followers managed to get away only because Richard’s horsemen were too exhausted to pursue them.56

  The Old King now came south with a handful of followers to try to patch up a peace before his empire disintegrated. Already angered by reports that his son Geoffrey had persuaded the disaffected Aquitaine nobles not to meet him at Mirebeau, he was thrown into incredulous consternation as he approached Limoges. The garrison in the citadel of St Martial there - it was yet another city with a clear bifurcation between town and castle - panicked and attacked the tiny royal party; Henry narrowly escaped with his life. He then sought safety with Richard at Aixe, where the Young King visited him and tried to explain away the armed contretemps outside Limoges. Shocked and angry at such lèsemajesté , the Old King would not listen. The Young King returned to Limoges to tell the rebels that one moment of madness had placed the king on Richard’s side; the dauntless Aimar made ready for a siege. There followed two weeks of pointless overtures and negotiations while Richard and his father assembled enough troops to deal decisively with the enemy. During one of these parleys the king was again shot at, and an arrow would have found its target if his horse had not suddenly reared its head and caught its death blow from the shaft.57 Still shaken by
the Young King’s treachery and scarcely able to believe that his cosseted heir might actually wish him dead, Henry grimly built up his forces, gradually and remorselessly tipping the scales against the rebels. There is some evidence that the Young King himself thought he had gone too far and tried to save himself from the vortex of events, but Geoffrey and Aimar held him to his unfaithful course. Reduced to appealing to the Taillefer brothers to rise again and attack Richard’s castles, the Young King found his fortunes momentarily enhanced when Philip Augustus finally made the first moves in what would be a thirty-year war against the Angevins. The arrival of his Brabançons for a time reduced Aquitaine to a chaos of plundering mercenaries, guerrillas and condottieri. Atrocities proliferated, especially at St Léonard de Noblat and Brantôme where the routiers left hardly a stone standing and massacred the inhabitants to the last infant.58 With the entire south in a state of vicious civil war, the evil genius of the piece, Bertran de Born, managed to wrest Hautefort from his brother.

  Like so many others caught up in the confusing welter of feudal loyalties, William Marshal, returning from Cologne, could not be sure where his primary loyalty lay, to King Henry or to the liege lord who had dismissed him. He decided to resolve the conflict by placing himself at the Young King’s side and trying to steer him in the direction of peace. Always Henry had at his side the guardian angel William Marshal and the angel of darkness Bertran de Born. This time events worked in Marshal’s favour, for it turned out that the Young King’s seneschal, who had been the principal accuser against Marshal in the charge of adultery with Queen Margaret, had concluded that the Old King would prevail in the coming test of strength and had decamped from Young Henry’s court. For the flaky Young King this fact, much more than Marshal’s offer of trial by combat at Caen, was the clincher. He welcomed William Marshal back enthusiastically and asked him whether there was any way out of the current impasse. Marshal said that the face-saver for all knights who had made a disastrous mistake was to take the Cross. In a solemn ceremony in Limoges the Young King vowed he would go on crusade, provided only that all existing rights reverted to him on his return.59 But all this soon seemed academic for at last, by the beginning of March, Richard and his father concluded they had sufficient forces to deal decisively with the enemy. Ignoring the bands of plundering routiers, they concentrated on the citadel of St Martial and dug in for an arduous siege. Now out of money, the Young King was reduced to becoming a routier himself, plundering and rampaging through the land, looking for money to pay his mercenaries, particularly targeting churches and monasteries. By the beginning of May his fortunes were rising again, for even Richard and Henry, the masters of siegecraft, had found St Martial a nut too hard to crack. Facing large-scale desertions from the demoralised besiegers, lashed by wind and rain in their tents while their foes in the citadel taunted them, Henry and Richard raised the siege. The pendulum of war seemed to be swinging decisively the Young King’s way when other great magnates, following King Philip’s example, began thronging into Aquitaine, principally Hugh, duke of Burgundy and Raymond, count of Toulouse. It was only with the sudden arrival of their ally King Alfonso II of Aragon that the Old King and Richard were able to hold their own. The Young King, elated by the turn of events, went over to the offensive at Limoges and captured Richard’s old base at Aixe. Then fate intervened. Suddenly, on 26 May 1183 young Henry fell ill with a fever. The end came soon; he died on 11 June.60

  On his death the rebellion collapsed like a house of cards; since the entire purpose of the revolt was to make the Young King duke of Aquitaine, there was no longer any point in the struggle. Hugh of Burgundy and Raymond of Toulouse returned home. Bertran de Born ruefully reflected that he had backed the wrong horse and now thought he should have raised up Geoffrey instead.61 Heartened by yet another dramatic pendulum swing, Richard and Henry returned to Limoges to besiege St Martial. On 24 June Aimar surrendered and the citadel was razed to the ground. While Henry headed back to Anjou, Richard and Alfonso besieged Bertran de Born in his ‘impregnable’ castle of Hautefort; it fell after seven days and was returned to Constantine.62 As Richard proceeded to lay waste the lands of the count of Périgord, one by one the rebels surrendered; either their castles were demolished or King Henry’s troops occupied them. Geoffrey was punished by being deprived of all castles in Britanny. Bertran de Born was left with a lifelong grudge against King Alfonso for the loss of Hautefort. Henry II rewarded the Spanish monarch lavishly for his help, but it is recorded that Alfonso took all this money home with him instead of ransoming his men, or at least so the bitter Bertran de Born claims.63 Henry took the Young King’s death very hard. ‘He cost me much, but I wish he had lived to cost me more’, was his magnanimous tribute. Perhaps at some level he resented the fact that Richard had now moved into pole position as heir apparent, or maybe his confidence was shaken in his (Richard’s) hold on Aquitaine, for when the rebels laid down their arms Henry resumed direct control of some of the castles he had given Richard before the war.64 Richard accepted the loss of face stoically, consoling himself with the thought that he would soon succeed the ailing Henry. Certainly his martial reputation, which had dipped in April-June during the abortive siege of St Martial, was even more widely acknowledged than before. Bertran de Born, his implacable enemy, paid tribute to Richard’s gifts of tenacity, resourcefulness, unswervingness, claiming that it was unlikely his side could have prevailed ultimately even if the Young King had not died and describing his foe as ‘more dangerous than a wounded boar’.65 And he also recognised, as Henry II never seemed to, that Richard’s motivation was always the love of Aquitaine which he had inherited from his mother. It was for Aquitaine, de Born conceded, that Richard had ‘gained and given and spent so much wealth, and dealt and received and withstood so many a blow, and endured so much hunger and thirst, and so much fatigue from Agen as far as Nontron’.66 Always a poor judge of his sons, Henry was now about to precipitate a fresh crisis in his empire by his failure to understand this simple fact about Duke Richard of Aquitaine.

  4

  WHILE HIS THREE BROTHERS battled for supremacy in the great conflict of 1183, the 16-year-old John finally began to emerge from the obscurity of his childhood. Hitherto he had featured largely as a bargaining counter in Henry’s dynastic ambitions. The proposal to marry him to Alice, the daughter of the count of Maurienne, had triggered the great war of 1173-74 but, undaunted by this experience, when the would-be bride died, Henry switched tack and announced in 1176 that John was to be a great lord in both Wales and Normandy. He would be made count of Mortain and would marry Isabella of Gloucester, heiress to that great earldom on the Welsh Marches.1 It was typical of Henry that this scheme was almost immediately put into cold storage and another plan, to make John king of Ireland, was put in its place, though the idea of the earldom of Gloucester, to be held simultaneously, was kept on; there was nothing unusual about this as an idea in itself, since Geoffrey was the earl of Richmond in England as well as being duke of Britanny. Henry also announced that the earldom of Cornwall was being reserved for John.2 So, by the time he was nine, John had already been betrothed to two different girls and been earmarked for four different great offices. Not surprisingly, people were confused: was it conceivable that John could one day be count of Mortain, earl of Cornwall, earl of Gloucester and king of Ireland. The one thing that was clear was that John was his father’s favourite son, at least of the legitimate brood. Henry had a higher opinion of the Young King but the younger Henry had betrayed him too often. The Old King never warmed to Geoffrey but entertained no particular animus against him, but he gradually came to hate Richard, especially as Richard continued to defy him over Aquitaine. Here was a tangled family constellation indeed. On the one hand was a king with a queen who had rebelled against him and whom he kept in captivity; on the other was a collision of affections for their children. Eleanor adored Richard, liked the Young King, tolerated Geoffrey and despised John. Henry II adored John, liked the Young King, tolerated Geoffre
y and hated Richard.

  Why were Richard and John mother’s favourite and father’s bête noire and vice versa? Something of the bonds between Eleanor and Richard has already been explained, but her distaste for John may have been because he was born as the result of a casual and ‘one-off ’ coupling with the king when he had already virtually set her aside in favour of his many mistresses and especially the royal favourite Rosamund Clifford. Some historians even construe John’s entry into Fontevrault at the age of six as a signal instance of maternal ‘dumping’. Henry’s partiality for John may have been because the traumatic events of 1173-74 left him bitter and unable ever again to trust his three eldest sons fully. But there was clearly something more, some mysterious alchemy that allowed Henry to look with indulgence on his youngest son’s foibles and weaknesses: in a phrase, John was the classical ‘spoiled brat’. John’s defenders claim that Henry discerned in him from an early age a personality like his own, and an inchoate grasp of statecraft and administration that exceeded his brothers’. Henry’s distaste for Richard was because he and his second son were fundamentally in competition for the same space; the pair suffered from the familiar lack of attraction in the case of people who are too alike. Both were hard men, and rather cold, both warriors whose rage could boil over in an instant, both worshippers of power and devotees of the strong, centralising state. They despised time-wasting, hedonism, frivolities and tournaments and were alike in their intelligence and cast of mind. Perhaps most significantly, both could take the long view and sacrifice short-term expediency for long-term gain. Richard was marginally less cunning and certainly less cynical than his father; their differential attitude to crusading is instructive. Yet, most of all, we are probably reduced to that baffling phenomenon: visceral dislike.