Richard & John: Kings at War (16 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In 1170 the most famous of these went to Ireland - Richard, son of Gilbert de 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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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