The Plantagenets (13 page)

In July 1170, Henry decided to act boldly. Crossing to England with his eldest son and a number of Norman bishops, he travelled to Westminster Abbey and had the younger Henry anointed king –
rex designatus
– by the archbishop of York, Roger de Pont l’Evêque. Around ten other bishops witnessed the ceremony.

When Becket learned of the outrageous breach of his privileges, he was incensed. After a short period of uneasy peace, on 30 November 1170 Becket crossed to England with the intention of disciplining those bishops who had partaken in the improper coronation. He preached fire from the pulpit in Canterbury Cathedral on Christmas Day, excommunicating virtually everyone he could recall that had ever wronged him. Then he announced severe sentences against those who had taken part in Henry the Young King’s coronation.

Word of Becket’s provocative and unrestrained activities in England reached Henry at his Christmas court in Bures in Lower Normandy. On receiving the news he uttered a phrase now among the most infamous in history: ‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’ (This is often, incorrectly, rendered as ‘will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’)

Within days, the archbishop had been murdered. On 29 December, four heavily armed men smashed through a side-door to Canterbury Cathedral with an axe. The archbishop of Canterbury was waiting for them inside. They were angry. He was unarmed. They tried to arrest him. He resisted. They hacked the top of his head off and mashed his brains with their boots.

The four knights who murdered Becket seem to have believed that Henry wanted them to do so. It was a belief that spread in the shocked
weeks and months following Becket’s death. Henry, having recently fancied himself the greatest man in Europe and inheritor of Henry I, was suddenly a pariah. Not only the Church, but the whole of European society was outraged by the murder. It seemed likely that Pope Alexander – who refused to speak to an Englishman for a week after he received news of Becket’s death – was ready to excommunicate Henry. Fortune’s wheel turned sharply downwards. Henry’s position, built so carefully on political cunning and dynamic leadership, was suddenly exploded, thanks to a few words spoken in anger.

Suddenly under the most intense pressure of his political career, the best the king could do was flee. He went to a corner of his empire where it was highly unlikely anyone would follow: Ireland.

Henry landed at Waterford in October 1171 and stayed in Ireland until the following year. It proved a useful and politic distraction, as it expanded the scope of his influence to the western limits of the British Isles, and kept him conveniently away from the European spotlight while the horror that greeted the archbishop’s death unfolded.

The situation in Ireland was complex. Although Henry had been granted a form of permission to invade Ireland by Pope Adrian IV in 1155, it had been a matter of limited urgency for him. But latterly, civil war had engulfed Ireland. The king of Leinster, Diarmait MacMurchada, was deposed by a coalition of enemies under Rory O’Connor and forced into exile in England. Henry had granted Diarmait permission to recruit an invasion force from among the Anglo-Norman barons, and Diarmait had used their support well, regaining his throne and handsomely rewarding the barons who had helped him. These included Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, the son of a former earl of Pembroke, whose nickname of Strongbow became famous across Europe. Gradually, Diarmait, Strongbow and their allies were taking on the role of Irish colonizers, and accruing to themselves the sort of autonomous power that Henry found troubling among any men whom he considered his vassals and subjects. Strongbow, in particular, was a troubling figure. Tall, fair and statesmanlike, he commanded respect and admiration from those – like the
writer Gerald of Wales – who wrote about him. He had married Diarmait’s daughter, Eve, and when Diarmait died in May 1171, had inherited the lordship of Leinster and huge amounts of territory in southern Ireland.

When Henry arrived, he brought with him a large army and threatening siege equipment. Yet this was a show of strength, not a serious attempt to throw men like Strongbow out of Ireland. Henry was satisfied at the recognition of his authority, and he was rewarded with this when all of Ireland’s invading lords and a large number of the native princes submitted to him. Strongbow was stripped of his lands and titles, and then regranted most of them as fiefs held explicitly from the English king. Lordship – and the pecking order of princes – was firmly established. Henry’s tidy mind was satisfied.

He spent six months in Ireland in all, reorganizing jurisdictions and establishing his rights and prerogatives as high king. And as he busied himself, the horror that had engulfed Christendom following Becket’s murder began to subside. Pope Alexander III thawed sufficiently to write to Henry, commending him for his efforts in Ireland. The pope told the Irish bishops that the English king was ‘our dearest son in Christ’, who had ‘subjugated this barbarous and uncouth race which is ignorant of divine law’, and demanded that they assist him as best they could. In spring 1172, Henry was sufficiently rehabilitated to return to the Continent for a reconciliatory meeting that would produce a peace between king and Church, known as the Compromise of Avranches.

The Compromise ended Henry’s painful breach with the Church. It was a worldly agreement that decreed that a concordat might in theory be made between Church and State, while avoiding most of the bigger questions about how that could practically be achieved. Henry was obliged to drop his insistence that his English bishops observe the letter of the Constitutions of Clarendon, and there were some well-meaning clauses pertaining to crusading obligations. It allowed all parties to go about their business with face saved and conflict averted. Yet to some contemporaries, it seemed that Henry ought still to be punished for his harsh words of Christmas 1170. And so it proved.
Within a year of the Compromise of Avranches, divine punishment was visited on the king of England. According to the Chronicle of Battle Abbey: ‘the Lord’s martyr, or rather the Lord, for his martyr, seemed to seek vengeance for the innocent blood.’ The punishment came from a quarter that hurt the Plantagenet king most of all: his family.

The Eagle’s Nest

The rebellion that gripped the Plantagenets in 1173 was, on the heels of the Becket affair, the most serious crisis Henry dealt with during his reign. Apparently out of nowhere, Henry’s wife and his three eldest sons rose in arms against the 39-year-old king. Together with a patchwork of allies that included some of the most powerful men in Christendom, the Plantagenet children raised men and garrisoned castles far and wide across their extensive territories. Henry, taken at first by surprise, soon realized that he faced united opposition from across Europe, galvanized by the involvement of his family. He was forced to fight on multiple fronts for more than a year as his network of territories juddered and threatened to collapse. He would later liken the war to the experience of an eagle, pecked and destroyed by its own chicks.

The trouble began with Henry the Young King. In early 1173, the younger Henry was approaching his eighteenth birthday. He was on the cusp of manhood, and married to Louis VII’s daughter Princess Margaret. Henry has been portrayed by the chroniclers as a feckless and fatuous youth. In person, he was tall, blond and good-looking, with highly cultivated manners. He was a skilled horseman, with a real fondness for the tournament and a huge household of followers who egged on his chivalrous ambitions. He was a twice-crowned king, for his controversial coronation by Roger archbishop of York had been followed in August 1172 by a second ceremony in Winchester, where his wife was crowned alongside him. On both occasions, Henry had been anointed with chrism – an especially holy oil – and treated
with extraordinary reverence in the company of vast numbers of knights. At one coronation banquet he had been personally served by his father. The young king revelled in his own magnificence, and was widely seen as arrogant, greedy and glib.

Despite his exalted position as his father’s heir, the Young King was also, paradoxically, denied the real fruits of kingship. Henry planned for him the succession to England, Normandy and Anjou. But as he approached manhood the Young King’s access to landed revenue and power – the essence of kingship – was strictly limited. Although endowed with titles, he was never properly invested with the lands and revenues of his kingdom, duchy or county. He was heavily in debt, as a result of maintaining a lavish courtly lifestyle without the means to pay for it. And his pride was wounded. Henry II had been sixteen when the full duchy of Normandy was settled on him. Henry the Young King was nearly two years older and had virtually nothing. The frustrations that he felt during his long wait to inherit were fed enthusiastically by his father-in-law Louis VII.

The breach between Henry and his father occurred as a result of the old king’s arrangements for the six-year-old John’s marriage. To provide for John, Henry gave him a wedding gift of three castles: Chinon, Loudon and Mirebeau. These fortresses were strategically important, lying between Anjou and Maine. Chinon in particular was an important centre of Plantagenet power – a linchpin in what the Young King viewed as his rightful inheritance. All, therefore, were part of the power bloc that young Henry felt he had been denied. Within days of the castles being granted, the furious young Henry slipped away from his father’s company and rode for the court of the French king. A rebellion had begun.

For Henry II to fall out with his eldest son was understandable – perhaps even inevitable. The situation became serious when Richard (who was fifteen) and Geoffrey (fourteen) also joined the rebellion, riding from their mother’s side at Poitiers to join Louis. ‘The sons took up arms against their father at just the time when everywhere Christians were laying down their arms in reverence for Easter,’ wrote the chronicler Ralph de Diceto. Public opinion pointed to Eleanor of
Aquitaine as the person who stirred her younger sons to join the revolt against the old king. Henry himself certainly seems to have believed it, since he had the archbishop of Rouen write a letter to his wife reminding her of the duty to ‘return with your sons to the husband whom you must obey and with whom it is your duty to live’.

Why Eleanor turned against her husband after such a long period of quiet loyalty is still something of a mystery. It has been attributed to peevishness at having been discarded by her husband for his mistress Rosamund Clifford (which had no basis at all in fact), or resentment at the influence of Henry II’s mother, the Empress Matilda (ludicrous, since Matilda had died in 1167). It is likely that she had a rather more substantial grievance.

In 1173 Eleanor was as politically disenchanted as her eldest son. During the first fifteen years of her marriage to Henry, she had been occupied with producing children. Since John’s birth that period in her life had been over, and she had assumed a new place in the grand Plantagenet federation. She returned to her role as duchess of Aquitaine, exercising political control over the great southern quarter of the Plantagenet dominions that she had brought to them in her own right. Yet in 1173, she – like Henry the Young King – found her political role undermined by the reality of life with Henry II. Even as she acted out her part as duchess of Aquitaine, Eleanor’s independent control over her duchy was slowly being eroded. Ignoring his wife’s perogative over her own duchy, Henry had begun to dispose of parts of Aquitaine as he saw fit. He granted Gascony as their daughter Eleanor’s dowry when she married the king of Castile. Then, when making a peace with Raymond, count of Toulouse, he made the count do homage to Henry the Young King – who held no rights in Aquitaine. This was a move which implied to Eleanor that her husband had begun to see her duchy as subject to the Anglo-Norman Crown, rather than an autonomous part of the broader Plantagenet dominions. Like her eldest son, Eleanor began to feel that she had been granted the most hollow form of power. She chose to rebel in search of the real thing.

It was not an entirely selfish rebellion, for Eleanor did not view Aquitaine’s independence solely in the light of her own prestige. It
was also a vital matter for her favourite son, Richard. Under the Plantagenet succession plan, Richard was to become duke of Aquitaine. To that end he had been installed in 1170 as count of Poitou – the natural first post on the way to becoming duke. Eleanor had set up a regency council for Richard and took a very keen interest in his development as a politician. Her worries were therefore his. Would Richard, when he reached eighteen, be scavenging for scraps of real public authority in the duchy that Eleanor was teaching him how to govern? This would have been an intolerable situation for both of them.

And so Eleanor rebelled, and with her sons began to contemplate a grand coalition with one man whom she would never have imagined siding with again in her long life: her former husband Louis VII of France. At the end of February she set out on horseback across country for Paris, where Henry, Richard and Geoffrey were already ensconced with the French king.

For the second time in her life, she rode in mortal danger across the French countryside. The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury tells us that to hide her famous face on her way north Eleanor dressed in male costume as she headed from the castle of Faye-la-Vineuse, near Poitiers, in the direction of Chartres. Despite her disguise, she did not reach her destination. Eleanor was nearly fifty now, and not the same vigorous young woman who had evaded potential husbands during her flight to Henry in 1152. As she made her way along the roads, she was recognized. She was arrested by Henry’s agents, and taken to Chinon castle. When news leaked to the chroniclers of the day that she had been taken while dressed in male clothing, there was an outpouring of scandal and disbelief.

Eleanor was captured early, but she had already guided her sons into the French king’s arms. When Henry II discovered their treachery he sent messengers to Paris, instructing the boys to quit their foolishness. The messengers found Henry the Young King in the company of Louis VII. When they asked him to return to his father, Louis VII interjected: ‘Who asks?’