Lionheart (11 page)

As the broker of the peace, Louis insisted that a treaty be drawn up, under which the princes and the barons who had supported them accepted Henry’s sovereignty in return for pardons and guaranteed possession of the lands and castles that had been theirs two weeks before the uprising. For the princes, it was a rewrite of Montmirail, under which Richard was awarded half the tax revenue of Poitou and two unfortified and ungarrisoned castles for his personal residences, with the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau – the dispute over which had triggered the rebellion – confirmed as given to Prince John, who was also awarded other properties on both sides of the Channel. In addition, Henry undertook to release 1,000 ransomable captives, which was many times more than the coalition had taken. Of the princes’ mother there was no mention. Henry needed to make an example to ensure his sons would think twice before defying him again and it suited the princes’ self-interest to let her accept all the blame for the rebellion.

In 1964 some amateur historians cleaning the twelfth-century chapel of Ste Radegonde at Chinon discovered a fresco hidden beneath layers of lime wash (see plates 22 and 23). The painting has been dated to immediately after the rebellion and shows a richly dressed and crowned figure identified as red-bearded Henry of Anjou making a gesture that says,
I am in command here
. He is leading Eleanor away to her long captivity in England. The dark-haired girl with her is Joanna, who is known to have shared the journey. She seems to be begging her parents to stop fighting. The two beardless youths riding behind are the princes Geoffrey and Richard, who is grabbing from his mother’s hand a white gyrfalcon, which was the emblem of the duchy of Aquitaine. Geoffrey is copying his father’s gesture as a sign of obedience.

That says it all. Richard and Geoffrey renewed their homage to their father; Young Henry was excused from doing this on account of his title making him theoretically equal to Henry. As for Eleanor, all that was known was that she was locked up in one of England’s grimmest castles known as Old Sarum, on a windswept hill outside Winchester, and was likely to stay there for the rest of her life.

N
OTES

1.
  As John Calvin was later to comment, if all the extant pieces of the alleged True Cross were gathered together, they would fill a very large ship.

2.
  J. Attali,
Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent
(Paris: Fayard, 2002), p. 197.

3.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 164.

4.
  Ibid, p. 161.

5.
  Ibid, p. 166.

6.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 40–6.

7.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 1, p. 170.

8.
  Jordan Fantosme, quoted in Bartlett,
England under the Norman and Angevin Kings
, p. 255.

9.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 173.

10.
  Abridged by the author. For the full Latin text, see
Recueil
, Vol 16, pp. 629–30.

11.
  
Recueil
, Vol 13, p. 158.

12.
  Ibid, Vol 12, p. 420.

13.
  Ibid, Vol 13, p. 158.

14.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 61.

15.
  
Recueil
, Vol 13, pp. 158–9.

16.
  Ibid, p. 443.

17.
  W. Stubbs, ed.,
The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury
, Rolls Series No 73 (London: Longmans, 1879–80), Vol 1, p. 148.

18.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 1, p. 194–5.

19.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 63.

20.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 179.

21.
  Ibid, p. 180.

6

Death of a Prince

H
enry II held his Christmas court of 1174 at Argentan in Normandy, after which he obliged his sons to accompany him on a lengthy pacification of the continental possessions to ensure they were seen by his vassals to be again under his thumb. In Poitou and Aquitaine, the castles of vassals that had remained loyal to him were strengthened and allowed to stand with garrisons sufficient to put down any further unrest; those castles reinforced by the rebels were reduced to the state in which they had been fifteen days before the outbreak of hostilities. Cities like La Rochelle that had not taken part in the uprising were rewarded with new privileges. That done, he departed for England in May with Young Henry, whose loyalty he still mistrusted.

According to Alfred Richard, the nineteenth-century archivist of the
départment
of Vienne and therefore custodian of the charters of the counts of Poitou, Henry II had no such worries about Richard. He judged correctly that his second son would be no threat, once given a significant force, paid for from the taxes of Poitou and Aquitaine, to satisfy his vanity and lust for warfare. Starting in midsummer, Richard set out at the head of a small army, augmented by the household knights of several vassals, to punish his former supporters as cruelly as he had attacked the partisans of his father during the rebellion, tearing down their castles and spreading terror in his wake. By no means every vassal backed down on hearing of his approach. Near Agen, the powerful lord Arnaud de Bouville prepared to withstand Richard’s siege of his castle at Le Castillon de St-Puy.
¹
Richard ordered a battery of siege engines to be transported there and hammered away at the stout fortifications for two months before breaching them and taking prisoner thirty knights and many sergeants-at-arms, whose ransoms covered the expense of the siege. According to custom, once the castle was razed to the ground that should have sufficed, but he went further. To ensure that nothing could be cultivated there and that no one would be able to live there for years to come, he had the ground around it spread with salt, as the Romans were reputed to have done to Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War.

There were, as always in medieval warfare, interludes of gracious living. The cook was an important member of a noble household because, in that time of poor hygiene, one mistake by him could kill his employer. After a particularly memorable feast, in great good humour Richard impulsively knighted his cook, making him ‘lord of the fief of the kitchen of the counts of Poitou’ as confirmed by a charter bearing many great names as witnesses and Richard’s own as undisputed count. Arise, Sir Cook!

Richard’s war against his own vassals was prosecuted by an army of
routiers
– mercenaries attracted by his generous rates of pay. The rebellious barons did the same, so that mercenary fought mercenary, with the rural poor paying the heaviest price as always, when their orchards were cut down, vines torn up and crops burned. At the end of Lent 1176 Richard pursued his victorious march into the Limousin, taking Limoges after a short siege. Retiring victorious to Poitiers, he found that Young Henry had at last succeeded in escaping their father’s tyranny by pleading a need to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Instead, the two princes joined forces to besiege Châteauneuf, which capitulated after two weeks. Richard now had the bit between his teeth, or rather an unquenchable thirst for blood and power that led him to besiege Angoulême, in which city were many of the nobles who had fled his invasion of the Limousin. Their combined forces should have enabled a stout defence, but after six days they surrendered the city and themselves. Richard despatched Count Vulgrin III of Angoulême, Aymar of Limoges and other important prisoners under escort to Henry II in England. He sent them back to Aquitaine, where they were confined in a fortress literally ‘at the king’s pleasure’.

Both Richard and Young Henry obeyed their father’s summons to his Easter court of 1176 in England, perhaps already knowing what was afoot. In October 1175 the old king had invited the papal legate Huguet to come to Britain, where he was generously rewarded for using his legal skills to draw up a form of divorce from Eleanor, who was still holding out resolutely in her prison. Had the divorce gone through, no legal means could have prevented her regaining her dower lands and contemporary opinion was that this would have been as gross an error on Henry II’s part as when Louis VII divorced her. So it is a mystery why the king even contemplated the step. The answer may lie in his desire to marry ‘fair Rosamund’ – his mistress Rosamund Clifford – and legitimise his infant son by her, so that he could then disinherit all his sons by Eleanor. The plan, if such it was, came to naught with the child’s death and Rosamund’s retirement to Godstow convent.
²

One might have thought the successful campaign in Poitou would form some kind of bond between the two princes who shared command, but they parted in some acrimony, each considering himself superior to the other. Young Henry chose to remain in Poitiers, where an increasing number of young nobles who had taken part in the rebellion of 1173–74 flocked to his standard. As before, the old king had his spies in Young Henry’s entourage, one of whom was the Young King’s vice-chancellor, Adam de Chirchedun. After a letter from him to Henry II was intercepted, Young Henry had him put on trial before a court of his followers. Their verdict was that Adam should be killed for treason but the bishop of Poitiers interceded to point out that the condemned man was a deacon of York and therefore should not be judged in a lay court. Frustrated, Young Henry instead ordered that Adam be stripped and whipped through the streets of Poitiers, then sent north to prison in Argentan, being whipped also through the streets of every town along the way. The intention, of course, was to ensure that he died without actually being executed.

Richard was, to put it mildly, relieved when his older brother departed, heading into Normandy at the command of Henry II, to escort 11-year-old Princess Joanna across France on the first stage of her journey to Sicily, having been betrothed to its ruler William II, king of the Two Sicilies. On the second leg, through the county of Toulouse and onward, it was Richard who escorted her.

Confident of his authority after the successes in the field during 1176, Richard held his own Christmas court in the ducal palace of L’Ombreyra at Bordeaux before taking advantage of the mild winter weather to lead his Brabanter mercenaries south to attack the cities of Dax and Bayonne, taking particular pleasure in punishing those vassals – the term ‘robber barons’ described them exactly – who habitually robbed pilgrims en route to Compostela. It was with justifiable satisfaction that he afterwards informed his father that he had imposed a
pax ricardi
in all his possessions. As happened repeatedly, he abandoned his mercenaries to find their own way home, plundering and raping their passage through the Limousin. So insufferable were their depredations that the barons of the county led by Viscount Aymar of Limoges engaged them in a series of battles near Brive, in which, on the Sunday before Easter 1177, they killed over 2,000 of the Brabanters, including their commander.
³

Having spent two years in England, Henry II now learned of an agreement between the German emperor and the pope which effectively put a stop to his plans to acquire the crown of Lombardy. He therefore crossed the Channel on 18 August 1177 with Prince Geoffrey, fully resolved to curb the freedom Richard and Young Henry had been enjoying. In Rouen, papal legate Cardinal Pierre informed him that Louis VII’s cause had been taken up by Pope Alexander III, who required that Richard be married without further delay to Princess Alais Capet, failing which she and her dowry must be returned to her father. But Alais was now sharing the old king’s bed, so he prevaricated, saying that he must first meet with Louis to talk it over.