Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  This was the point where Henry II took a hand. Alarmed at the turn of events in Ireland, in October 1171 he landed with an army at Waterford and proclaimed himself overlord of Ireland. Gervase of Canterbury claimed that Strongbow had invited him to Ireland and Henry accepted purely because he wanted to get out of England until the sound and fury over the Becket murder died down. This makes little sense, and preferable is the version that Henry had always coveted Ireland and cunningly used Strongbow as a stalking horse, intervening at the right moment to ‘part the combatants’ in a way later politicians would emulate.25 Yet this too is ultimately unconvincing, for the letters patent that Henry issued to king Dermot do not show him notably enthusiastic - which would explain why it took Strongbow three years (until 1170) to decide to chance his arm. What is certain is that Henry was angry when he heard that Strongbow was trying to make himself Dermot’s heir in Leinster and ordered him home.26 He went to Ireland to nip Strongbow’s ambitions in the bud, for the adventurer’s unexpected success - and especially the amazing victory over Rory O’Connor outside Dublin - opened up the possibility that Ireland would go the way of Sicily and become yet another breakaway Norman kingdom.27 It may be asked why Henry did not simply expel the Norman invaders, but he was a realist who knew that this was a ‘hydra’s head’ and that dozens more freelance adventurers and mercenaries would follow the trail that Strongbow had blazed. Strongbow meanwhile manoeuvred cleverly, in full knowledge of how dangerous Henry could be: he offered to surrender all his Irish conquests if the king granted him Leinster as a fief. After a show of anger Henry agreed, provided Strongbow surrendered all castles and important ports.28

  Henry’s stay in Ireland turned into a six-month sojourn, as the worst storms recorded in the Irish Sea that century kept him in Dublin until Easter 1172. But he used the time well and achieved his main ambition - to show what would happen to anyone, Norman or Irish, who defied him. The supposedly modern doctrine of ‘credibility’ was alive and well in the twelfth century. Strongbow was confirmed as lord of Leinster, but without Dublin, Wexford and Waterford, which Henry garrisoned with his own men. He also gave the kingdom of Meath to Hugh de Lacy to counteract Strongbow’s power; de Lacy was given the title of constable and the powers of a viceroy.29 This was a first-class appointment, but the Old King did not have the courage of his convictions. De Lacy was shrewd and far-sighted, and cultivated a policy of peace and reconciliation which might have yielded spectacular long-term dividends. Unfortunately Henry suspected him of having Strongbow-like ambitions, particularly when he married Rory O’Connor’s daughter in 1180, which made it seem like a rerun of the union between Strongbow and Dermot’s daughter.30 Having originally appointed de Lacy to stop Strongbow becoming too powerful, he then had to go into reverse and raise the so-called earl of Pembroke up again. This was why Hugh de Lacy served as viceroy only in 1172-73, being replaced by Strongbow in the years 1173-77. It was only on Strongbow’s death in 1177 that Hugh regained the viceroyalty, which he held until 1184. After dealing with his Normans by divide and rule, Henry was content to accept an oath of fealty (personal loyalty) from the Irish kings; he did not insist on homage, which would have changed the terms on which they held their land. Rory O’Connor, after some peevish indecision, eventually became the king’s man, which put him, like the other kings, under a personal, not feudal obligation.31

  Henry’s divide and rule policy in Ireland (Rory O’Connor, Strongbow, Hugh de Lacy) fell apart in 1177. The death of Strongbow coincided with the aftermath of serious rebellion, caused by the abuse of power by Henry’s military commanders. At the same time Hugh de Lacy’s power was increasing alarmingly, to the point where he was the true overlord in the land, and some even suspected him of aiming explicitly at a crown. Henry dealt with the crisis by dividing Ireland into fiefs, preempting any attempt by the local Norman warlords to carve up the country into their own private fiefs. More significantly, he appointed John king-designate of Ireland, although the nine-year-old clearly could not yet be sent across the sea to claim his realm.32 An anxious seven years passed, with Henry’s attention often elsewhere - on Richard, the Young King and Geoffrey principally - but at last the Old King thought his favourite son was ready for the task. In 1184 Henry announced that the ‘total dominion’ of Ireland would pass to John. He sent John Cumin, archbishop of Dublin, to prepare the way for John’s arrival and recalled Hugh de Lacy; to prevent a power vacuum Philip of Worcester was sent as governor of Ireland pending John’s takeover.33 On the fourth Sunday of Lent, 1185, Henry knighted John and tried to confirm him as king of Ireland by getting the Vatican to confirm Adrian IV’s original promise. The papacy itself was in a state of flux in these years, with Adrian being succeeded by Alexander III and then Alexander by Lucius III. Alexander had confirmed Adrian’s ‘donation’ to Henry, but Lucius changed tack and proved unwilling to go along with Henry’s ideas for an Irish crown for John. It was only when Urban III succeeded Lucius late in 1185 that the Vatican once again smiled on Henry and issued the necessary bull recognising John’s kingship.34

  With a large retinue and accompanied by the chronicler Gerald of Wales, specially chosen as historian of the expedition by Henry, John sailed to Waterford. The incursion on Irish soil was well prepared, and Henry had spent a vast amount of money making sure that his favourite son had all the dignity, trappings and resources of a real king.35 The local Irish nobility thronged to meet him, but John struck a wrong, indeed an absurd, note right away. As one of the magnates approached him to make the kiss of peace, John pulled his beard. This was the signal for his entourage to behave like a pack of schoolboys: they made fun of the Irish barons and showed them marked discourtesy, astonishing their would-be hosts by their callow effrontery. The delegation left John’s presence as soon as possible and made its way to the court of the king of Limerick. They told the king that their new supposed overlord was a mere stripling, newly hatched and wet behind the ears as it were, and his entourage was a bunch of similarly ill-endowed youths, matching their master in greenhorn ignorance, naivety and rudeness.36 The king of Leinster had previously agreed with his colleagues in Connacht and Cork that, other things being equal, they would accept John as the new high king of Ireland and make formal submission to him. But the envoys’ reports suggested that other things were not equal, that they had been sent a court jester as a ruler and that, if this was how John behaved when confronted by missionaries of peace, what egregious injustice might he not mete out if genuine complaints and grievances were brought before him. They decided to remain aloof, to pay no homage to John, and to wait and see what transpired. John had scarcely set foot in Ireland before he had persuaded a host of erstwhile enemies to make common cause against him.37 As he moved north to Dublin, John found himself spurned and avoided instead of being hailed as a redeemer. Learning nothing from this, he and his riotous companions spent their time wenching and carousing by the banks of the Liffey, further alienating the locals by staggering around drunkenly in a variety of sumptuous raiment.

  The new high king compounded his initial blunder by making land grants to his cronies, in Tipperary, Waterford and Wexford, and building castles to enforce his rule, in Waterford, Tipperary and Kilkenny. Not only did John’s henchmen and acolytes start alienating the previous Norman settlers, but the new charters creating the estates made it clear to the native Irish that John envisaged no real place for them in the future scheme of things.38 Old allies of Henry II from 1171, such as the king of Thomond, were soon converted into deadly enemies. Ireland became the cockpit of armed warfare, with skirmishes and battles galore instead of the peaceful transfer of power Henry II had hoped for. On one occasion a hundred severed heads were presented to John as proof of the punishment that all Irish ‘rebels’ would receive. But there was also severe fighting around the castles of Ardfinnan and Tibberaghny as well as in Meath, where one of the Irish kings was treacherously slain during a parley with the Normans.39 The casualty rolls in John’s army mounted alarmingly, and soon
the man who would be king of Ireland found himself seriously short of money. John then made things worse by refusing to pay his troops their wages, leading them to desert in droves and begin plundering the countryside, thus giving an extra twist to the spiral of violence and alienating the local population still further. The idea of a partnership between Irish and Normans, which Hugh de Lacy had pushed and which to sceptics seemed a forlorn hope even in the days of Strongbow, was given its definitive coup de grâce by John.40 Hugh de Lacy, the real power in Ireland, cooperated formally with John and even accompanied him on part of his itinerary, but distanced himself from the ill-advised new land grants John made to his cronies, hinting to the Irish that peace would be possible if they could deal with him alone. Indeed, the only significant military victories gained in 1185 were not won by John but by de Lacy and his lieutenant William Le Petit.41 John, who often managed to combine stupidity with cunning, left Ireland after eight months of fruitless activity, having achieved nothing. He complained to his father that de Lacy would not relinquish the reins of power and in particular prevented the Irish kings from paying him tribute or sending hostages. Whether Henry, who was well informed by Gerald of Wales and from other sources, took this excuse for John’s incompetence seriously is doubtful, but any thought of curbing Hugh de Lacy was made otiose when he was assassinated the following year.42

  John’s political failure in Ireland was as clear-cut as anything could be, so it is astonishing that there have been attempts to rehabilitate his reputation in this area.43 Even more obvious was his military failure. John signally failed to adapt normal Norman warfighting to Irish conditions. It soon turned out that heavily armoured knights were worse than useless in thickly wooded countryside, especially as the cavalry charge, relying as it did on a concentrated cloud of horsemen, could not be used in such circumstances. The heavy armour and the high curved saddles on the destriers made mounting, remounting and dismounting extraordinarily difficult and militated against speed - the essential factor when fighting what were virtually guerrillas. What was needed for the new warfare of skirmish and rapid disengagement was a body of light horsemen who could pursue the enemy into hills or rough terrain. To counter-attack the Irish shock weapon of mobile slingers, John should have deployed equally mobile and agile bowmen, who were available in Wales. Most of all, perhaps, the system that worked so well in England and France - building great castles from which armies sallied forth - had to be changed so that the fortresses became more akin to block-houses, built right across Ireland in accordance with a clear, overarching strategy.44 The clear impression is that John was too lazy to think all this through and too tight-fisted to lay out the sums of money for its implementation. His failure was particularly galling both to himself and his father, as his brother Richard had solved far more complex military problems in southern France. Richard, it seemed, was a real warrior; John was merely a dilettante wastrel.

  At first the Old King’s reaction to John’s hangdog return to England in disgrace was to send him back to Ireland with another army, a determination strengthened by the arrival of the papal bull from Rome confirming the kingship together with a crown of peacock feathers embroidered with gold.45 John was actually on his way back to Ireland in 1186 and had got as far as Chester when he was hurriedly recalled.46 His father had received the sensational news that his other son, and John’s sometime ally against Richard, Geoffrey had been trampled to death at a tournament in Paris. The truth was more prosaic: he died on 19 August from a fever contracted after being badly cut up by horses’ hooves, and it was this fact alone that saved him from dying excommunicate. Instead of being anathematised, he received a splendid funeral in Notre Dame Cathedral. Philip of France, his close friend, was said to have been so grief-stricken that he was with difficulty prevented from throwing himself into the grave alongside him.47 Not only was this a crisis for the Angevin family, but Philip immediately claimed custody of Geoffrey’s two daughters and threatened an invasion of Normandy if Henry II did not hand them over. Henry patched up a hurried truce with Philip, to last until January 1187, and the centre of political gravity again switched to the south of the Angevin empire. In 1185, while John was in Ireland, Richard had been engaged in yet another of the interminable wars with Raymond of Toulouse, probably in collusion with the perennial and seemingly irrepressible Angevin nemesis, viscount Aimar.48 In 1186 Richard counter-attacked and in April played his trump card: a new treaty made with King Alfonso at Najac-de-Rouergue enabled him to launch Spanish troops against Raymond. The count of Toulouse buckled under the threat and sent frantic appeals to King Philip, pointing out that he could not face the host Richard had now assembled.49 The year 1187 opened with both sides dazed by the rapid pace of events and therefore playing for time with new truces and ceasefires. In February Richard joined his father in Normandy, and together they parleyed with Philip at Gisors, extending the truce to midsummer. But peace did not come by a thousand truces; rather the two sides hardened in their attitude and determined to make their next armed encounter decisive.50

  Meanwhile in Britanny, Geoffrey’s death had created a complicated situation that would eventually have grave repercussions for John. Geoffrey’s title as duke derived from his marriage to Constance, daughter of Conan, and it followed that the fief must pass to her children. When Geoffrey died Constance was pregnant, and Britanny waited to see if she would produce a son; otherwise the inheritance would go to Constance’s infant daughter Eleanor. Sure enough, in March 1187, she gave birth to a boy. Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had gradually been released by Henry from the harsh, earlier terms of her imprisonment, was now sufficiently back in the saddle that she felt able to intervene in matters like the name of her grandchild. Constance, though, knowing of the latent antipathy of Bretons for the Angevin overlordship, thought it would be politic to humour her subjects with a homegrown name. Since King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table were currently all the rage, she named her son Arthur. Eleanor of Aquitaine was irrationally enraged by Constance’s ‘defiance’ and made it the work of what remained of her life to see that the Breton prince would never gain the throne of England - for as Geoffrey’s son, he was second only to Richard and ahead of John in the succession. But the squabble over Arthur’s name was as nothing to the dissension over the issue of wardship. Eleanor of Aquitaine at first claimed the right to educate her grandson, but Henry overruled her, thinking the guardianship of a possible successor should be his. But now arose the irony of ironies. Geoffrey had always been trouble while he was alive, but now his shadow seemed to loom over the realm from the grave. His famous Assize of 1185, possibly the only worthwhile achievement of his life, explicitly gave the feudal overlord the wardship of ophaned minors. Philip of France was quick to seize his opportunity. He sent envoys to Britanny to demand that Arthur be given up to him, in accordance with the explicitly stated laws of Britanny. Henry refused to surrender the boy, but he was angry about this latest development, as he always liked to cloak his machiavellianism in a tissue of feudal legal nit-picking and logic chopping; yet in this instance he was caught out in a barefaced ‘might is right’ posture. 51

  Pressing home his advantage, Philip again raised the issue of his sister Alice. The agreement of March 1186 had not made it clear whether the Angevins kept the Vexin if Alice remained unmarried. The disingenuous Henry II now explained his reluctance to marry Alice to any of his sons on the grounds that it would confuse the question of whether the Vexin belonged to Normandy by hereditary right.52 But Philip had every justification for wanting to see a speedy resolution of Alice’s future: she was now twenty-six and Henry’s ludicrous insistence that Richard was too young to marry fooled nobody. Partisans of Henry have claimed that his motivation was political: he wanted to keep Alice as a pawn, to have her in his power so Philip could not marry her off to anyone else. It is astonishing how certain some modern historians are that Henry never seduced Alice, when general probability is massively on the side of this version of events. Henry had a lo
ng-standing reputation for seducing female wards and hostages, including the daughter of Eudo of Porhoet, one-time pretender to the dukedom of Britanny.53 Demands for documentary evidence of illicit sexual liaisons are intrinsically absurd, but they allow the sceptics to shelter behind an absence of charters or pipe rolls. Yet the overwhelming likelihood is that in the case of Alice Henry was actuated by purely carnal motives. All the (admittedly circumstantial) evidence points to the fact that Alice was his mistress, and had been since 1180; moreover, he wanted to keep it that way. Richard, it seems, had refused to marry Alice because he was not prepared to take his father’s leavings, but Henry dared not admit this to Philip. There is additional evidence that Alice bore Henry a son, who died in infancy.54 Another theory is that Henry was planning to marry Alice and beget sons who might one day inherit both the kingdom of France and the Angevin empire. It was rational to expect that Eleanor of Aquitaine might die soon, for at sixty-four she was already very old in medieval terms. If he hastened her end by poison or some other form of murder while she was in his custody, that would certainly mean war to the knife with Richard at the very time Philip Augustus was flexing his muscles. Whichever interpretation we adopt, it is clear that the entire issue was a running sore. Any time Philip wanted a casus belli, he had only to resurrect this grievance and have international opinion on his side.

  The winter of 1186-87 saw a period of ‘phoney war’, with both sides marking time but the initiative lying with France. Finally in June 1187 Philip made his move and invaded Berry. Richard and John held Châteauroux long enough for Henry to come up with the main army and force Philip to raise the siege. It would have been normal practice at this stage for Philip to retire prudently, but the flame of anti-Angevin anger burned brightly within him and he felt that his prestige and credibility were at stake. He therefore went for the option few monarchs in Western Europe ever risked in this era: pitched battle. It is worth mentioning that neither the warrior-prince Richard nor Henry II himself had ever fought a real battle hitherto - most of their engagements were either skirmishes or surprise attacks where one side was massacred. Fortunately, perhaps, at this very juncture a legate arrived from Pope Urban III to admonish both sides that Christian troops should not be wasted in this way, as they were needed in the Holy Land. Nobles on both sides tried to work out a solid peace treaty and, when this proved impossible, settled for a two-year truce. In the course of these negotiations, something happened to sour Richard considerably. The best guess is that Philip, alarmed by the combined power of the Angevins, tried to suborn Richard and told him of Henry’s offer to marry Alice to John, with Aquitaine as John’s wedding present.55 In a fury, when the conference broke up he did not go with his father but accompanied Philip to Paris.