As a teenager, John never looked likely to rival Richard in any department. As an adult he never grew taller than 5ft 5ins. He had thick, dark-red curly hair and a powerful, barrel-chested body which in later life ran to fat. In terms of bookish learning John had been well educated, first at Fontevrault, then in the household of the Young King and finally with the justiciar Ranulf Glanville, the chief legal officer of England. Chroniclers noted a similarity between him and his brother Geoffrey. Gerald of Wales said that ‘one was corn in the ear, the other corn in the blade’.3 Observers had already tagged Geoffrey as the most gifted of the Devil’s Brood, for he had some of Richard’s talent as a warrior and greater abilities than the Young King in fighting tournaments, yet as a courtier he had a genius for silky intrigue, beguiling words, and manipulative flattery. Like most accomplished liars, he knew all the arts of deception, so that he was rarely taken in by the falsehoods of others.4 John could not match Geoffrey in all these areas, but he was his equal in cunning, and some have rated him the most intelligent of Henry II’s sons, surpassing even Geoffrey. On his day he could be genial, witty, generous and hospitable. Yet as a boy he seemed at first destined to go the way of the Young King: devoted to instant gratification, pleasure and luxury, he could not bear to be crossed in anything and preferred idleness and debauchery to the professional training of knighthood. Hunting, hawking, drinking, gambling (especially backgammon) were his favourite pastimes. He also liked music, though he had no time for troubadours and the kind of song-making that so entranced Richard and the Young King. He loved sumptuous clothing, finery and jewellery (particularly gold artefacts) and in another era he might almost have been considered a dandy or an aesthete. Lethargic, dilatory and insouciant, living purely for the moment, he was the epitome of selfishness and immaturity; his one saving grace was that he was excessively deferential to both parents.5
Two aspects of John’s early formation are worthy of special attention. One is that his early contact with the Church at Fontevrault seems to have turned him violently against the Christian religion. He devoured recondite works of theology and even liked to take them on campaign with him later in life, but he read them so that he would have ammunition for mocking religion. Always something of a bookworm by the standards of medieval monarchs, he later acquired many patristic manuscripts from Reading Abbey as well as works by French historians and some of the ancient classics (Pliny the Younger was a particular favourite). He loved making esoteric anticlerical jokes in the later manner of Swift or Voltaire, but the wit depended on a close knowledge of Church theory and practice. He liked to make gratuitously ribald and blasphemous remarks - ‘By God’s teeth!’, ‘By God’s feet!’, etc. - and to shock churchmen by his heretical stance on items of Church doctrine; his favourite motif was the patent absurdity of the Resurrection. Once, when a buck was slaughtered at the end of a hunt, he remarked pointedly: ‘You lucky beast, never forced to murmur prayers or be dragged to Holy Mass.’6 John may well have been the first atheistic king in English history. The other facet of his early life, paradoxically in the light of the foregoing, was that he was taken under the wing of the other Geoffrey in Henry II’s life: the illegitimate son he had sired on a famous courtesan named Ykenai shortly before his marriage to Eleanor. Born around 1151 and brought up initially in the same household as the legitimate sons, Geoffrey was trained for the priesthood but did not take his final vows and, some time in the 1160s, became Archdeacon of Lincoln. Later he was bishop of Lincoln and, after Henry II’s death, archbishop of York. Always staunchly loyal to King Henry, the bastard Geoffrey was a great consolation to him during the dark days of 1173-74 when all his adult sons were against him. After the famous victory over King William of the Scots in 1174, the Old King famously said to the illegitimate Geoffrey: ‘You alone have proved yourself my lawful and true son. My other sons are really the bastards.’7
When Henry II appointed this Geoffrey to be John’s unofficial guardian, he was doing a number of odd things. In the first place, he was aiming at the solidarity between natural and legitimate progeny he had always hankered after but which his wife Eleanor, for obvious reasons, had opposed. Secondly, he was putting together in partnership the two offspring he most cared for, one from either side of the blanket. Thirdly, and unwittingly, he was increasing John’s anticlericalism for, when it came to role models, it was his silver-tongued deceiver of a full-brother Geoffrey whom John preferred, rather than the episcopal half-brother. Yet for all his priestly exterior, the bastard Geoffrey was fully his legitimate namesake’s equal when it came to worldly ambition. Although the chapter of Lincoln had elected him their bishop, and he enjoyed the considerable revenues of this diocese, Geoffrey still declined to take Holy Orders. He calculated that the dark days of 1173-74 might come again and that this time all the legitimate sons, including John, would rise against the father; in that case, it was not inconceivable that King Henry might disinherit the lot of them and nominate his beloved bastard as his successor. Geoffrey vacillated so long that at last the Pope made a new appointment to the see of Lincoln. Henry then named Geoffrey his chancellor until, much later, the offer of the archbishopric of York made him abandon his fastidious lay stance and he accepted priesthood and diocese together. Henry clearly ran the risk that this ambitious cleric might be another Becket; like him he had also been Chancellor. Although Geoffrey did not disappoint him, the fact that Henry had put John under his wing once again demonstrated that he was utterly hopeless as a judge of human nature when it came to his sons. The most John derived from Geoffrey’s tutelage was more insight into machiavellianism and a greater contempt for churchmen.8
At Michaelmas 1183 King Henry dramatically evinced his hostility to Richard and his partiality for John. He summoned both sons to Normandy and peremptorily ordered Richard to hand over Aquitaine in return for John’s homage. Superficially the demand was reasonable, since everyone in the royal family was to move up a rung after the Young King’s death, with Richard stepping into his dead brother’s shoes and John into Richard’s. But Richard had not toiled in the heat of battle in Aquitaine for eight years simply to give the duchy away on his father’s haughty say-so; besides, he correctly reckoned that if he accepted his ‘promotion’, he would end up a cipher like the Young King. Even his bitter foe Bertran de Born saw the force of Richard’s position: he opined that a prince who lived on the charity of another did not deserve to be a true monarch but only a king of fools.9 Richard stalled convincingly and asked for three days’ grace before he gave his final answer. At nightfall he rode away at full speed for Poitou; when he was far enough away he sent an envoy to tell his father he would never give up Aquitaine. Henry was reduced to impotent fury. His problem was that he had neglected the south and never built up a power base in Aquitaine: there was a ‘Court’ party of Richard and his followers and a ‘Country’ party of the rebels but no king’s party.10 To compound the Old King’s problems, Philip Augustus of France weighed in with the demand that the marriage portion of the Young King’s widow - Gisors and the castles of the Vexin - should be returned to France. At a conference at the traditional meeting place by the tree at Gisors on 6 December 1183 Philip agreed to let Henry keep the Vexin temporarily, on the strict understanding that he pay queen Margaret 2,700 livres and that the Vexin passed into the hands of whichever of his sons eventually married Alice, Louis VII’s daughter. The suggestion here was clear and sinister: Henry was toying with the idea of cutting Richard out by marrying Alice to John. Henry then did homage to Philip for all his continental possessions, implying that the hierarchy worked Philip-Henry-Richard not simply Philip-Richard, as Richard claimed.11
Yet neither threats nor blandishment, feudal blackmail nor cajolery could force Richard to give up Aquitaine. Finally in anger and frustration the Old King told John that if he wanted the duchy he would have to take it by force. Richard was prepared for that obvious next step, and showed his defiance by binding lords to him by generous gifts at his Christmas court at Talmont, north
of La Rochelle. And now for the first time we hear another famous name in Richard’s biography, that of Mercadier, most famous commander of routiers and from this moment Richard’s faithful comrade. Mercadier first made his mark in February 1184, when he sacked Excideuil as punishment to Aimar of Limoges, who was still trying to take advantage of disharmony within the Angevin family.12 Less surprisingly, the figure of Richard’s brother Geoffrey started to loom more and more in the saga. Although Richard and Geoffrey had been formally reconciled in the summer of 1183, Richard, rightly, did not trust him. Manipulating John with great ease, Geoffrey inveigled him into the invasion of Aquitane and together the brothers raided Poitou. Richard responded with his favourite stratagem when dealing with Geoffrey: a retaliatory raid into Britanny. The resulting anarchy was not at all what the Old King wanted. In autumn 1184 he summoned all three sons to England, and in December, at Westminster, they were once more publicly reconciled.13 To set the seal on family amity Henry even released Eleanor of Aquitaine from house arrest for the occasion. But he was no nearer solving the problem of princess Alice, whom he still kept jealously at his court, combining adultery with raison d’état. One way out might have been to marry one of his sons to Frederick Barbarossa’s daughter and the other to Alice. The emperor was willing and the project got some way off the ground, for in 1184 an imperial embassy led by the archbishop of Cologne actually went to England and arranged the betrothal of Richard to one of Barbarossa’s daughters - not Agnes, as is so often stated. Unfortunately the girl died before a match could be arranged, yet another of the medieval millions who died in anonymity.14 Henry prevaricated and kept both Richard and John in England over Christmas 1184. By sending Geoffrey to Normandy as ‘governor’, he was probably throwing out a very broad hint to Richard that, if his defiance continued, he might inherit nothing or, at least, if he so passionately wanted to hang on to Aquitaine, he would have to forgo the rest and see another brother installed as king. Richard said nothing, obtained his ticket of leave from England as soon as possible, and returned to his beloved province early in the new year.15
This was the juncture where Henry decided to make John king of Ireland and send him there with an expedition. But first he had to put Richard in his place. He declared him responsible for the continuing hostilities between him and Geoffrey and announced that there would be a definitive solution of the problem. When he crossed to Normandy in April 1185 to muster an army, it seemed that military force was to be the answer. Then suddenly, whether because of a sudden brainwave or because this was his intention all along and he simply wanted to make Richard sweat, he announced that Eleanor of Aquitaine would be restored to her suzerainty of the province and that henceforth the duchy would be ruled in a tripartite fashion by himself, Eleanor and Richard. This cut the ground from under Richard, as he could scarcely deny the claims of his beloved mother, the source of his own legitimacy as ruler of the duchy.16 But Henry’s third part of the control in the south turned out to be a forlorn hope and, with Eleanor still virtually a prisoner, the reality was that Richard was in place in Aquitaine and there was little Henry could do about it unless he wished to campaign there in person. The cliché about possession and the law had never seemed so apt. In May 1186, at yet another of the endless parleys at Gisors, Henry finally agreed with Philip of France that Richard would definitely marry Alice, but once again the date of the wedding was left maddeningly vague and postponed into the future. The real loser from Gisors was Geoffrey. Realising that this agreement meant the end of his hopes of inheriting England and Normandy or of being king, he went down the same route as the Young King. Effectively he abandoned his father, threw in his lot with Philip, was rewarded by being appointed seneschal of France, and finally laid ostentatious claim to the territory of Anjou.17
Vexed by Richard and Geoffrey, Henry had to face the alarming fact that no role had yet been found for his beloved John, now eighteen and old enough to make a mark in the world. Early in 1185 the right opportunity seemed to have arrived, for the patriarch of Jerusalem arrived with an unusual proposition. Baldwin IV, the Christian king of the Holy Land, was dying from leprosy, and it occurred to the patriarch, to whom it fell to find a successor, that the house of Anjou was the answer. The royal house of Jerusalem was, after all, a cadet branch of the house of Anjou, and where better to look than in England, where there were three royal sons without a crown? The patriarch caused a minor sensation in England, as much for the keys of the Holy Sepulchre he brought with him as for his stirring oratory, which was said to have moved his aristocratic audience at the Reading court to tears. But Henry, the hard-headed pragmatist, had reports from his spies that made Jerusalem seem a bed of nails: it turned out that the so-called king was little more than a general of feudal armies with little civil authority, that he had no real powers beyond the charisma of whichever personality occupied the throne, and that the Holy Land was a snakepit of intrigue, backstabbing, factional strife and political uncertainty. The hapless patriarch, not knowing his man, came hopefully to an interview with Henry at Clerkenwell on 18 March 1185, only to find himself the principal player in a farce. Primed by Henry, each of the English barons trooped forward to say that his considered, unbiased opinion, given without any consultation with anyone else, was that England was at present in crisis and no members of the royal family could be spared for Jerusalem. After much cant and humbug about his soul, Henry nearly found his elaborate charade scuttled by John, who begged on bended knee for permission to take up the patriarch’s offer. By indignantly turning this down, Henry showed the patriarch that he had only ever been trifling with him.18
In 1185 Henry II sent his beloved John to Ireland to be king there. Henry’s turbulent relations with Ireland went back at least as far as 1167 and possibly earlier. Ever since William Rufus allegedly saw the Irish coastline from Wales on a clear day, it had been at the back of the minds of the Norman kings of England that the island to the west would make easy pickings, but always the situation in France absorbed their attention. Some said that Henry II had set his sights on Ireland as early as the council of Winchester in 1155 but that his mother the empress had opposed an invasion scheme.19 Modern historians tend to scout this idea and stress instead the interest of Pope Adrian IV (the only English pope, born Nicholas Breakspear) in modernising and reforming the Irish church, which was beyond the control of Rome. According to this view, Henry had no real interest in Ireland but was pointed in the direction of conquest by the papal bull Laudabiliter promulgated by Adrian in the mid-1150s, which explicitly named Henry as true king of Ireland and defender of the faith there. Adrian and his theologians played on Henry’s fear of anarchy by portraying Ireland as a land of benighted, ravening savages, beset by heresies, religious deviancy, pagan-Christian syncretism and all manner of ‘vice’ placing immortal souls in peril.20 What disturbed Normans and pontiffs alike was the essential ‘otherness’ of Ireland. There seemed to be no strong ruler whom one could threaten or cajole, for the so-called ‘high king’ was not a true monarch in the sense understood in the rest of Western Europe but part of a ‘triarchy’ of king, Church and brehons or traditional lawmakers. Irish rulers were far more constrained by the Church and traditional laws, which even in late Anglo-Saxon England had been largely a system of rubber stamps for the king. In sum, Ireland was not even like England in 1066 but like the same realm at a much earlier phase of development, as the shrewd observer William of Newburgh noted.21
For reasons not entirely clear, twelfth-century Ireland became a theatre of conflict between traditionalists and modernisers; the kings of Munster and Leinster were the modernisers while the king of Connacht was the conservative. In the ideological wars in Ireland in the 1150s and 1160s the conservatives seemed to be winning until, in 1167, king Dermot MacMurrough of Leinster went to Europe to seek aid from Henry II. He met Henry in Aquitaine and got letters patent from him allowing the recruitment of freelances in England.22 In 1170 the most famous of these went to Ireland - Richard, son of Gilbert d
e Clare, 1st earl of Pembroke, and better known to history as Strongbow, a ‘busted’ earl down on his luck, whose pedigree, said Gerald of Wales, was much longer than his purse .23 Strongbow taught king Dermot new military techniques: building motte-and-bailey forts, using disciplined infantry, heavily armoured knights and skirmishing archers. Dermot soon gained the upper hand in Ireland and began to aspire to the high-kingship, but died in 1171, having first married his daughter to Strongbow. On the strength of this union, and in defiance of Irish law and custom, Strongbow claimed to be his heir in Leinster. Next Rory O’Connor, king of Connacht, besieged Strongbow in Dublin. Strongbow offered to be his vassal if he could keep Leinster but Rory refused, thinking he had the Norman interloper in a trap. To universal consternation, Strongbow sortied from Dublin and routed Rory’s army; there now seemed little between Strongbow and the coveted high-kingship.24
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