Richard & John: Kings at War (15 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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 Geoffrey 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.

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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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