Richard & John: Kings at War (21 page)

Henry II was caught in the coils of his own double-dealing, for soon Loches and other key strongholds in the Angevin heartland were threatened as Philip’s success became breakaway. Alarmed by the turn of events, Henry sent a deputation to Philip to protest against his invasion of Aquitainian territory. When this made no impression, he assembled an army, made ready to cross the Channel himself, sent out raiding armies on French dominions and began helping Richard to recover Berry. After narrowly escaping destruction in a terrific Channel storm, he landed in Normandy on 11 July 1188.
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Wrongfooted as a result of a bad miscalculation - that Henry and Richard would never again make common cause - Philip was forced to withdraw from Berry to protect his northern border with Normandy, leaving Richard free to recover most of his lost territories. Yet the fortress of Châteauroux stubbornly held out. While in a scrimmage outside the gates, Richard was thrown from his horse but quickly rescued when a giant of a man, a butcher by trade, plucked him from the ground.
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Meanwhile the Philip-Henry confrontation was heading towards the inevitable stalemate. Henry simply camped on the Normandy borders and made no attempt to invade France, as he feared the prospect of a pitched battle. Philip struck south again but his campaign ran into the sands when Richard moved into the Loire valley to meet him. Philip retreated to Paris and Richard, seeing him gone, rejoined his father in Normandy. The king of France was running out of options, for his barons advised him he should not be making war on the Angevins or any other fellow Christians at this juncture when every last fighting man was needed for the crusade in the Holy Land.
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Yet another peace conference was arranged at Gisors. On the Feast of the Assumption, 15 August 1188, Philip, Henry and Richard convened under the eye of Holy Mother Church, with papal envoys frantically beseeching the great lords to compose their quarrel so that the crusade could begin. But this three-day conclave began badly and ended in farce or bathos. On the second day a French knight made fun of a Welsh archer in Henry’s service for his strange accent and weird attire. The Welshman fitted an arrow to his bow and shot the shaft into his taunter’s head. The wound was not fatal, but now, under the famous tree of Gisors which was supposed to guarantee safe conduct and no blow could be struck, the French knight showed King Philip the arrow sticking from his skull and asked for satisfaction. Philip angrily declared the conference at an end. William Marshal, who was with Henry, hardly improved matters by intervening to suggest that, although his liege lord accepted responsibility for this crime, both sides should make up by a general joust. When this was angrily spurned, he suggested a four-against-four duel of champions; as he was the greatest knight in Christendom, this was a contest he clearly expected to win.
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Philip simply became more angry at this absurd offer of ‘compensation’ and stalked away angrily. Brooding in his tent, he finally found a way to avenge himself on Henry for the egregious breach of traditional ceasefire terms at the tree of Gisors. That night he sent out a party of axemen who cut down the famous elm tree and used it as firewood. News of this ‘sacrilegious’ act caused a sensation, but Philip was making it clear that he had had enough of the endless deadlock at these colloquys and of Henry II’s endless lies. He was in effect declaring that there could be no dealing with Henry and the only recourse was war to the death.
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On 30 August the Angevin army crossed the border and marched towards Mantes, burning and looting as it went in a particularly devastating raid. Richard was involved in a successful skirmish with a French knight, William de Barres, which further increased the diapason of ill-feeling caused by the Gisors conference. De Barres surrendered to Richard and was released on parole - the standard practice in both war and tournaments - but escaped on horseback, to Richard’s great fury. The French then added chivalric insolence to injury by claiming that the real cheat was Richard because he had thrust his sword into William’s horse, although, as William Marshal’s career showed, this too was standard practice.
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Clearly nerves were on edge on both sides, with the monarchs especially fretting at the burdensome costs of maintaining knights and archers in a combination of idleness and constant readiness. Then there were the calls of both harvest and vintage in the autumn, and the constant undertow of criticism, especially from the clergy, that putative fellow-crusaders should not be trying to kill each other. So, despite Philip’s vow that there would be no more talk, circumstances forced him to agree to yet another conference on 7 October 1188, this time at Châtillon on the border of Touraine and Berry. Philip hoped to find a way to drive an entering wedge between Richard and Henry but began cautiously, offering to waive his conquests in Berry on condition that Richard handed back his gains in Toulouse to Count Raymond. Richard replied that he wanted the two matters kept separate, but offered to accept Philip as arbitrator between him and Raymond. Clearly he thought he could not trust Henry and suspected him of still wanting to cut him out of the succession in favour of John; an entente with Philip was therefore his insurance policy. This unilateral decision in turn enraged Henry, who felt he should have been consulted. When Philip escalated matters by asking for the surrender of a castle as an earnest of Henry’s good intentions while he (Philip) arbitrated between Richard and Raymond, the Old King stormed out in a rage.
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Now that Richard was negotiating directly with him and was not part of an Angevin united front, Philip could deluge his ally with all the rumours, all the intelligence both hard and soft, that his spies brought him about Henry’s future intentions. One circumstantial detail that nobody could argue round was that John had not taken the Cross. Why not? Was Henry simply waiting until Richard had left for the Middle East before making his move and naming John as his successor? Philip kept such suspicions at white heat. His agents claimed to have uncovered a plot whereby every vassal in Anjou and Aquitaine would be forced to pay homage to John; when Richard returned from crusade, with his own loyal forces depleted by a hard campaign against Saladin, he would find John installed in Aquitaine with the citadels of every castle there barred against him. On Philip’s advice, Richard decided, despite his natural repugnance, that he would marry Alice as a point of policy, and in return Philip would press Henry to say before the whole world that he recognised Richard as his undoubted and indefeasible heir. Agreed on all points, Richard and Philip then demanded another colloquy with Henry, who could not refuse unless he was to stand forth as the man who prevented the Crusade from setting out; Henry had had enough trouble with the papacy over Becket to be unwilling to face a fresh threat of excommunication.
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Accordingly, a fresh conference took place at Bonsmoulins on 18 November. Richard and Philip arrived together, rather ostentatiously making the point that they were now allies. They began with a kind of ‘dumb show’ where Philip suggested an exchange of conquests to Richard and he indignantly rejected it. Presumably this charade was meant to allay suspicions about their collusion, but it fooled no one. The atmosphere at the conference was notably tense. On the first day the parties managed to control themselves, but on the second day there were raised voices and angry exchanges, and by the third swords had been drawn. Richard made three demands that Henry found unacceptable: he must be proclaimed heir apparent to Henry in Normandy and England; he must immediately come into possession of all other Angevin fiefs; and he must marry Alice without delay. When Henry declared that these demands were simple blackmail, Richard replied: ‘Now at last I must believe what I previously thought was incredible.’
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Without more ado Richard knelt and swore fealty to Philip. The breach between father and son was irreparable. That evening, when Richard rode off with Philip to Amboise, he began laying plans for calling out his vassals in Aquitaine for war against Henry. The Old King seemed bewildered and crushed by the turn of events. In his retinue he had Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury and Hugh, bishop of Lincoln and now he turned on them, claiming that God had deserted him and, as his servants, they should have interceded for him. When the divines cautioned him against blasphemy, Henry whipped himself into new heights of execration. ‘Why should I venerate and honour Christ,’ he asked, ‘who has allowed a mere stable-boy to insult and dishonour me?’ When the bishops protested, he made obscene and atheistic references to the Christian God, so startling that Gerald of Wales, who reports the conversation, could not bring himself to mention the exact words.
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What seems to have infuriated Henry most of all was that his bluff had been called and he had been outwitted by a son whose intelligence he despised. For years he had kept Alice in play as a political pawn, knowing very well that Richard would not marry her because she was a royal mistress. Now, prompted by the cunning Philip, Richard had stated openly that he wished to marry Alice. It was quite clear to Henry that Richard could not have thought up such a devastating change of tactics for himself and that he was now firmly in Philip’s pocket. Gradually, though, his advisers talked him round. William Marshal said that the king owed it to himself and his realm to try to bring Richard back to his side. Henry tried the old ploy of bombarding his son with dozens of envoys, all pleading with him to return, but the Old King had cried wolf once too often and Richard was not impressed. William Marshal told Henry bluntly that the idea of ‘turning’ Richard was hopeless.
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Hearing from his messengers that each new overture served only to make Richard indite another letter calling out further feudal levies, Henry bent his energies to securing his castles in Anjou. The agent for this mission was his faithful bastard son and now Chancellor, Geoffrey.

Henry was faced with a terrible crisis, worse than all he had endured with the Young King, as he no longer had the energy to deal tirelessly with it, as in earlier years. He was disconcerted to find that all the great knights of Aquitaine were declaring for Richard.
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At root Henry was to blame: for his machiavellianism over the succession, his dishonesty over Alice, his partiality for John and his basic manipulative deviousness. It is possible, as some historians have maintained, that he was not planning to supplant Richard with John, that he believed too strongly in hereditary, indefeasible right for that, that he was simply the victim of his own deviousness. The historian W.L. Warren wrote. ‘Henry had adopted the tactic of trying to discipline Richard by keeping him in uncertainty and had then become caught in the coils of his own deviousness. ’
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It is true that he made no overt steps in John’s favour, except to prevent him from taking the Cross. One view is that Henry knew in his heart that Richard would succeed but refused to acknowledge him publicly because of the harm that had been caused when he announced the succession of the Young King prematurely.
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Yet there is much that points the other way, towards a genuine desire to displace Richard in favour of his beloved John, and the endless vacillations and policy shifts may instead indicate a man determined that John should be king but uncertain how exactly to achieve that aim.
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Certainly the analogy with the Young King was disingenuous, as Henry must have known. The Young King was an idler and wastrel who had eschewed responsibility and proven himself incompetent in government. With Richard the reverse was the case. And it is unconvincing to think that Henry was still playing manipulative games with no ulterior purpose in the years 1187-89, unless we conclude that he was stupid rather than cunning. Whereas he could have got away with sheer deviousness for its own sake or to control Richard before the Crusade became a pressing issue, once that loomed across the face of Europe, only an idiotic ruler would have continued in the same vein. The obstinacy in the face of pressure from the pope and Christian Europe in general surely points towards a grim determination to make John king, whatever the political cost.
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That Henry’s star was fading was obvious at his last Christmas court, held at Saumur. Of his family only John was present; even more ominously most of his great barons stayed away, clearly awaiting the moment to transfer their allegiance to Richard or Philip. The truce agreed at Châtillon to last until the New Year 1189 was extended until Easter, but halfway through Lent Henry fell ill at Le Mans and took to his bed. The archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Tours and the archbishop of Rouen acted as a triumvirate of fathers-confessor and persuaded the Old King to confess his sins in a proper canonical form. Even close to death Henry remained devious and now he tried to con the Almighty, admitting to ‘sins’ that could be extenuated as
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but denying graver ones of which he was obviously guilty. At first the bishops refused absolution on the grounds that Henry had not made a firm purpose of amendment; this was why they felt free to divulge his bogus confession. Yet in the end they were persuaded that Henry’s fear of Hell was enough to make his confession genuine - quite how is a mystery, as Henry continued his atheistic ravings - and granted him the sacrament. Informed of Henry’s illness, both Richard and Philip refused to believe that it was genuine and suspected some typically Henrician trick. Once the truce lapsed, they continued their raiding to the point where Britanny, seeing no counter-movement from the Old King, rose in revolt. The Angevin empire was starting to come apart at the seams.
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Desperately Henry sent envoy after envoy to Richard, but the time for that had long gone; although many in the Old King’s entourage were convinced that he was now genuinely sorry for the shabby way he had treated Richard, the harsh fact was that his eldest son no longer believed a word he said.
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