Henry the Young King, 1155-1183 Read online

  In stark contrast, the poems of Bertran de Born relating to the war of 1183 had as their stated purpose to inflame war in Aquitaine between the nobles and Richard, and to stir the Young King to action in their support.74 As the Provençal vida (a semi-fictional biographical introduction) prefacing his verses put it, Bertran was ‘a good knight, and a good fighter and a good squire of ladies, and a good troubadour, and wise and well spoken, knowing how to deal with bad and good – and all this time he was at war with his neighbours’.75 His poems are not without interpretative difficulties: they can only be dated approximately, so that their chronological arrangement remains a matter of (sometimes differing) editorial choice, while their highly allusive nature, including references to leading figures by a senhal or enigmatic pseudonym, has resulted in a plurality of interpretation. Nevertheless, even the small number of poems relating to the Young King provide a vivid reflection of the political climate in Aquitaine in 1182–83 and of the outlook of the lesser nobility of Aquitaine who looked to young Henry as their liberator.

  The single most important vernacular text relating to the Young King remains the History of William Marshal, composed some time between 1224 and 1229 by John, a trouvère, for William Marshal’s eldest son William, and probably written in the Marshal lands of Gloucestershire and Gwent, centred on Chepstow.76 Though it dates from some forty years after young Henry’s death and is clearly influenced by romance and chansons, the poem draws directly on the Marshal’s own reminiscences, as well as other materials and testimony, such as that of the Marshal’s former household knight John d’Earley.77 The poet’s account of the Marshal’s life is partisan, self-justificatory, and highly selective in the events it describes, yet it provides an intimate and unmatched view of William’s service in young Henry’s household between 1170 and 1183, of the nature of the tournament in the 1160s and 1170s, and of the Young King’s prominent role in the tournament circuit of northern France. Although it is particularly coloured by its attempts to justify and explain away the Marshal’s quarrel with young Henry in 1182 and his expulsion from the Young King’s mesnie or household, the History’s depiction of the Young King nevertheless remains a highly positive one, reflecting the close bond between the two men, as well as the esteem and deep affection in which many of the Marshal’s contemporaries held the king. Like the shattered fragments of a once great stained-glass window, these sources, even when pieced together, afford only partial and haphazard traces of the Young King. Imperfect and impressionistic though it often is, such evidence allows a different vision of the young Henry, and of a king whose status and actions played a fundamental role in the fortunes of the Angevin empire.

  CHAPTER 2

  Born in the Purple

  EARLY CHILDHOOD AND INFANT MARRIAGE, 1155–1160

  Like as arrows in the hand of the giant, even so are the young children.

  Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate.

  – Psalm 127:4–5, Nisi Dominus

  ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE was already pregnant with her second son when on 19 December 1154 she was crowned, together with her husband Henry II, at Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury.1 It was a time of great hope and expectation.2 At last, King Stephen’s troubled reign and the bitter civil war, when men ‘said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep’, were over.3 Even before his coronation, Abbot Ailred of Rievaulx had told Henry that ‘not without merit does everyone proclaim you the glory of the Angevins, the protector of the Normans, the hope of the English, and the ornament of the Aquitanians’.4 The new king, ‘the most energetic of young men’, was just twenty-one, but he was already a seasoned military commander, a forceful leader and, as William of Newburgh later noted, ‘at his very outset he bore the appearance of a great prince’.5 His marriage to Eleanor in May 1152, only eight weeks after her divorce from King Louis of France, had made him ruler of her vast and wealthy duchy of Aquitaine. It also gave him a wife who bore him that most essential of things for a medieval ruler and dynast – sons. There had been a number of reasons for Louis’ divorce from Eleanor: the marriage had long been a stormy one, and Eleanor famously was said to have complained that Louis was more of a monk than a king.6 Rumours of her infidelity with her uncle Raymond of Antioch during the Second Crusade may have been unfounded, but they had been as persistent as they were scandalous.7 The marriage was eventually annulled on the technical grounds of consanguinity, but what had ultimately forced Louis into a separation which cost the house of Capet control over one-third of France was the couple’s failure to produce a male heir.8 Henry and Eleanor were to have no such difficulties, and in 1153 the duchess had given birth to William, the first of eight children.9 In London on 28 February 1155, their second son, Henry, was born to now royal parents.10 He was the first of the line of the counts of Anjou to be ‘born in the purple’, and this distinction as the son of an anointed king of England would come profoundly to shape his expectations and perception of his status.

  According to Robert of Torigni, abbot of Mont Saint-Michel, who enjoyed a close relationship with the royal family, William had been named after Eleanor’s dynasty.11 Her father and grandfather had been called William, as had many of the earlier dukes of Aquitaine and counts of Poitou. But their second-born was named after his paternal great-grandfather Henry I, a conscious invocation of the most powerful of the Anglo-Norman kings, ‘the famous King Henry, the Lion of Justice’, who as Walter Map wrote was ‘not so much emperor or king as father of England’.12 In 1156, Henry II decreed that the laws of his grandfather were to be inviolably observed throughout the kingdom, and as he grew, the young prince Henry was to become increasingly aware of the profound influence upon his father of the figure of Henry I as a touchstone of kingship, good governance and regalian right.13 Latin and vernacular histories of Henry I had been produced, while John of Salisbury, writing in 1159, noted that stories of Henry I’s great victory at Brémule over Louis VI in 1119 were so familiar that they needed no repetition.14 The magnificence of Henry I’s court and his use of royal ceremonial as a manifestation of power and authority were strong influences on the Plantagenet court from 1154.15 As a young man, Henry II had styled himself ‘Henry, son of the daughter of King Henry’, and it was as this king’s grandson that John hailed Henry II himself as ‘destined . . . to be the greatest king of the whole age among the British lands, as well as the most fortunate duke of the Normans and Aquitanians, surpassing all others not only in power and wealth but also in the splendour of his virtues’.16 In his two namesakes, the infant Henry thus had before him formidable exemplars of kingship.17

  The child was baptized by Richard de Belmeis, bishop of London, whose great cathedral church of St Paul’s dominated the city of London.18 The city, noted Thomas Becket’s clerk and biographer William FitzStephen, ‘as historians have shown, is a much older city than Rome, for though it derives from the same Trojan ancestors, it was founded by Brutus before Rome was founded by Romulus and Remus’. It had been distinguished by being the birthplace of Thomas, but, adds FitzStephen, among the kings and conquerors which it had produced, ‘in modern times also London has given birth to illustrious and noble monarchs’, most notably the Empress Matilda and ‘Henry III’ – the young Henry.19

  Young Henry’s birth had been timely indeed, for his elder brother William was sickly. When at Wallingford on 3 April 1155, Henry II commanded the barons assembled in a general council to swear fealty to William ‘for the kingdom of England’ as his firstborn, they also promised that if William died prematurely, they would recognize his brother Henry.20 The site for this act of recognition was not accidental. The great fortress of Wallingford, guarding a vital crossing of the Thames, had been a key Angevin stronghold throughout the long civil war and had seen much bitter fighting.21 But it was also here that in 1153, King Stephen and Duke Henry had been compelled by the magnates to step back from a bloody pitched battle and instead neg
otiate a lasting settlement.22 A place indelibly associated with civil strife now witnessed a promise of lasting peace in the recognition of the heirs to a new king.

  Though in 1154 Henry II had faced no overt challenge for the throne, his designation of William and Henry was a necessary precaution against the claims of potential rivals.23 The Treaty of Winchester had passed over King Stephen’s surviving son William of Blois, and although he had received a substantial landed endowment with the hand of the Warenne heiress, Henry held him in suspicion, as his subsequent treatment of the earl was to show.24 There was also, moreover, the very real threat still posed by Henry II’s own younger brothers, Geoffrey and William. On the sudden death from fever of their father Count Geoffrey in September 1151, Henry, who had already been invested with the duchy of Normandy the year previously, had moved swiftly to take control of Anjou as well.25 His brother Geoffrey, however, who was his junior by just one year, claimed that he had been bequeathed the county of Anjou as his father’s dying wish.26 In 1152 he had risen in open rebellion with the all too ready assistance of King Louis VII of France and a powerful coalition of Henry’s enemies. Geoffrey’s defection had been made more serious by the fact that it occurred at a time when Henry was still heavily engaged in his war with King Stephen for the throne of England. Henry had nevertheless been able to contain Geoffrey’s revolt in Anjou, and by making a separate agreement with him had detached him from Louis and the coalition.27 But Henry can have been under no illusions about the fragility of this accord, while his brother’s ambitions went even beyond control of Anjou: in 1152, Geoffrey, when only sixteen, had attempted to kidnap the recently divorced Eleanor of Aquitaine as she travelled from the Île-de-France to Poitiers, in order to marry her himself.28

  The brothers’ enmity, however, was no anomaly, and reflected the harsh realities of power in the territorial principalities of twelfth-century France. Their father, Count Geoffrey, had himself refused to give Maine to his younger brother Helias once he had subdued Normandy, and after suppressing Helias’ revolt in 1145, had imprisoned him until his death.29 In the previous century a fierce war had erupted between Geoffrey the Bearded, nephew and successor of Count Geoffrey Martel, and his younger brother Fulk le Réchin who, having vanquished him, took his brother’s place as count in 1067 and kept Geoffrey imprisoned at Chinon for twenty years.30 Stories of similar strife could be found not just in the earlier history of the house of Anjou, but in those of several of its rival dynasties, not least in Normandy.31 Duke Richard III faced rebellion by his younger brother Robert, and it was even rumoured that he had been poisoned by him, while fraternal conflict had been prominent during the reign of William Rufus in England and his brother Robert Curthose in the Norman duchy. In 1155, it had been but twenty years since Duke Robert of Normandy had died in captivity after languishing in the custody of his younger brother Henry I since his defeat at Tinchebray in 1106.32 Nor were the Capetians immune from such rivalry; in 1149, Louis VII’s younger brother Robert, count of Dreux, who had returned from the Second Crusade before the king, having quarrelled violently with him, was at the centre of a dangerous plot, which at the least aimed to unseat the regent, Abbot Suger, even if contemporary fears that he planned to overthrow Louis himself were exaggerated.33

  Henry II’s youngest brother, William FitzEmpress, also known as William ‘Longsword’, had been left neither lands nor castles by their father, but as the careers of Henry I of England or of King David I of Scotland amply testified, it was unwise to underestimate the ambition of a landless youngest brother.34 It was thus no coincidence that in the September following the recognition of Henry’s sons by the nobles of England at Wallingford, one of the chief matters discussed by a great council at Winchester was the possible conquest of Ireland, which Henry II intended to bestow on William. Not for the last time, however, William’s expectations were disappointed when the scheme was shelved, in part because of the opposition of their mother, the Empress Matilda.35 Nevertheless, Henry II ensured that his youngest brother received extensive estates in England, and by 1156 William held lands in nine counties, mostly concentrated in Kent, Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk.36 When in that year their brother Geoffrey again took up arms in revolt, having rejected terms offered by Henry, William remained loyal and accompanied the king on his campaigns to reduce Geoffrey’s castles in Anjou, including the siege of the great fortress of Chinon.37 Geoffrey submitted, was allowed to keep one of his Angevin castles, Loudun, and was granted an annual revenue of £1,000 from England and 2,000 livres angevins.38 Soon afterwards, however, an opportunity came to secure for him a more tangible endowment. The citizens of Nantes ejected Hoel, son of Duke Conan III of Brittany, and invited Geoffrey to be their count. Henry readily assented to a move which, to some extent at least, recompensed his disaffected brother and also extended Angevin power to a major commercial entrepôt at the mouth of the Loire.39 Henry II’s own struggle with his brother Geoffrey nevertheless epitomized three of the central themes that would dominate the young prince Henry’s life: his father’s refusal to relinquish control of any part of his paternal inheritance, the hostility between brothers over the division of their father’s lands, and the ruthless exploitation by the king of France of disputes within the Angevin family.

  The wisdom of having the magnates recognize the infant Henry at Wallingford was all too quickly revealed when his brother William, as feared, succumbed to illness and ‘passed away like the morning dew without staying for the sun’s warmth’, aged only three.40 On 2 December 1156, he was buried at Henry I’s royal foundation at Reading, at the feet of his great-grandfather, whose magnificent tomb stood before the high altar.41 It is probable that Queen Eleanor’s admission to the confraternity of Reading abbey was in response to her benefactions to the monks on behalf of her firstborn son, and it was at the queen’s request that Henry II issued a confirmation to Hurley priory, for the soul of William.42 Young Henry thus became chief heir to his father, a king who, as William of Newburgh noted, ‘possessed the dignity of more extensive empire than any other who had hitherto reigned in England, for it extended from the further boundary of Scotland to the Pyrenean mountains’.43

  During his early childhood, young Henry remained in the care of his mother Eleanor and her immediate household, as was customary. While relations between royal or noble parents and their offspring have sometimes been characterized as emotionally distant, Eleanor appears to have had considerable affection for her children and as a well-educated woman and patron in her own right, it seems likely that she took a keen interest in their education and upbringing.44 Nevertheless, the queen’s direct involvement in their rearing was limited by the significant role she played in affairs of state, particularly during Henry’s frequent absences, despite her near-continuous pregnancies.45 Instead, the child’s daily care was entrusted to a wet-nurse, who would have been the most immediate and consistent source of female love in his early years.46 A masculine presence was provided by a master (magister), Mainard, who was assigned to young Henry as early as 1156.47 Despite his title, Mainard was not necessarily a cleric, or even a teacher. His appearance in Henry’s first year suggests that his role, at least initially, was supervisory rather than primarily educational, with responsibility, still probably within the queen’s household, for the care, discipline and protection of the king’s son.48 He was to remain Henry’s magister until at least 1159, and his role appears to have been similar to that of the nutricii who were appointed to help raise the children of Fulk V and Geoffrey le Bel.49 Eleanor’s household as queen contained some trusted servants from her own duchy of Aquitaine, and it may have been in these early years, rather than as an adult, that young Henry became conversant with the langue d’oc, as well as with the Anglo-Norman French that would have been his principal language.50 It is likely that he also had contact with his maternal grandmother, the redoubtable Empress Matilda, during visits to the duchy’s capital, and the favoured royal residence close by at Quevilly.51 Though she had ostensibly reti
red from active politics to the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pré, opposite Rouen on the south bank of the Seine, she continued to advise her son Henry II until her death in 1167, and played an important role as peacemaker between her two eldest sons.52 It was in her honour that Henry and Eleanor’s third child, born in June 1156, was named Matilda.53

  From his earliest years, young Henry experienced the itinerant nature of his royal parents’ government. In the summer of 1156, Eleanor and her children crossed to Normandy to join Henry II before journeying south on a great progress through the duchy of Aquitaine.54 The family celebrated Christmas at Bordeaux, but in February 1157 young Henry returned with Queen Eleanor and his sister via Southampton to London.55 Henry II’s was a cross-Channel empire, and these early voyages in the royal galley or esnecca were to be young Henry’s first taste of numerous Channel crossings.56 These were routine enough – an estate in Kent was even held for the service of holding the king’s head when he was seasick – but were nonetheless fraught with danger of shipwreck.57 The disaster of the White Ship, in which Henry I’s only legitimate son, William Aetheling, was drowned with many of the royal court following the vessel’s wreck off Barfleur in 1120, had been both a dynastic and a national catastrophe, still etched in men’s minds: ‘No ship that ever sailed’, wrote William of Malmesbury, ‘brought England such disaster, none was so well known the wide world over.’58 In 1131, Henry I himself had been caught in such a violent storm when crossing the Channel that he had vowed to remit the heavy land tax known as Danegeld for seven years.59 It was little wonder then that on occasion Henry II himself would send to the abbey of Reading for its greatest relic, the hand of St James, to invoke the saint’s protection before boarding ship, and he was careful to choose important holy days, especially the feast days of the Virgin, or their vigils, for crossings of the Channel.60 Similar fears of wreck would trouble his eldest son. One of the miracle stories relating to Thomas Becket compiled by William of Canterbury relates how, some time after 1170, the young Henry was detained at Barfleur by severe weather while waiting to cross to England. Accordingly, he requested Rotrou, archbishop of Rouen, to consecrate an altar to St Thomas in the church of St Saviour’s in Barfleur. The next day, the winds subsided and the sea, hitherto impassable for fifteen days, could be navigated. The place itself soon became a site of miracles, where many blind and lame were cured.61 No doubt the Young King knew all too well the fate of William Aetheling, but his anxieties had been fuelled by a more recent maritime catastrophe: in March 1170 a great tempest in the Channel had damaged and scattered the king’s ships, sinking a large transport vessel with 400 souls on board, including many members of Henry II’s household.62 The danger always remained, and in 1177 young Henry’s chancellor, Geoffrey, provost of Beverley, was to be drowned with around 300 others when their ship was wrecked by storms when crossing from England to Normandy.63