King of the North Wind, page 17
If any freeholder has died, his heirs should remain possessed of such seisin as their father had of his fief on the day of his death; and they should have his chattels from which they may execute the dead man’s bequests; and afterwards they should seek out the lord and pay him the relief and anything else that is due from the fief … And if the lord of the fief should deny the heirs the seisin of the said deceased which they claim, the justices of the lord king shall cause an inquiry to be made by twelve lawful men as to what seisin the deceased had on the day of his death; and as that inquiry establishes it, so shall restitution be made to his heirs. And if anyone shall do anything contrary to this and is convicted of it, he shall be at the king’s mercy.202
By making the inheritance of land more certain, the number of violent incidents fell. Brawls were not uncommon in cases of disputed land or property, and by providing a legal solution Henry diminished this threat to public order.
In ensuring that property disputes were heard in his courts, rather than in the courts of the local lords, Henry also brought more coin to his treasury. The profits of justice were a staggering source of wealth for the Crown. During 1176–7, income from court fees, fines and the forest was in the region of £30,300; to put this in perspective, farm payments that year were only £4,300.203 (Not all the proceeds of justice reached their rightful destination: the king’s judges not only received a salary, but they took bribes too, whether of money, food or other gifts. These kickbacks never appeared in the pipe rolls.)
But it was not all about the money. It is probable that Henry had loftier considerations too; as king, it was his duty to protect his subjects’ lawful rights to inherit their land, unmolested.204 He insisted, for example, on protections for the rights of widows: any widow who had been wrongfully deprived of any portion of her dower on her husband’s death could now petition the king’s court to remedy the position.205 Even Gerald of Wales, ever the harsh critic, believed Henry to be ‘a fine administrator of justice for the downtrodden’.206
As his reign progressed, Henry’s influence on the rule of law was felt everywhere – from the thousands of standard-form writs, marked with the king’s seal, that began the judicial process, to his assizes, his streamlining of the myriad courts, his investigations into corruption, and his hand-picked itinerant justices, invested with the authority of the king. By the end of Henry’s reign, theoretically at least, the king’s justice was available to anyone who could afford to pay for it.
VIII
Henry was ‘the one who holds England and all the seaboard between Spain and Scotland, from shore to shore’.207
The area under Louis’ control was slight compared to that of his mighty vassal. When Henry was crowned, Louis accepted the inevitable; he made an accommodation with him and, apart from a small number of battles where the English king easily defeated him, Louis gave Henry little trouble for twenty years. Henry, following his mother’s advice, let Louis keep his dignity, when he could.
To compete with the might of Henry FitzEmpress would, for Louis, have been ill-advised. To his contemporaries, Henry ‘prospered in everything, as though accompanied by the favour of God’.208
Henry had broken the power of any magnate who dissented. Instead, the first threat to his rule came from close to home: his younger brother. Geoffrey was jealous of Henry’s power and disappointed in his inheritance of just a few castles, including Chinon, Mirebeau and Loudon. He spread the story that on his deathbed, their father left instructions that should Henry become king of England, he was to relinquish Anjou, Touraine and Maine to Geoffrey.209
Geoffrey was an opportunist looking for an inheritance. He had attempted to kidnap Eleanor on her journey to Poitou in 1152, following her divorce from Louis, presumably to force her into marriage and gain Aquitaine. In December 1155 Geoffrey demanded his fictitious inheritance and went to war. The following month, Henry crossed to Normandy to deal with him.
He met with Louis, who recognised him as count of Anjou. By now, Louis had decided to forgive Henry for his marriage to Eleanor, at least publicly. Henry then brought in his immediate family to coerce Geoffrey into submission – at Rouen, Geoffrey was forced to hold peace talks with not only Henry, but also their mother, Matilda, their aunt Sibylla, countess of Flanders, and William, their brother. We can imagine the pressure exerted on Geoffrey by his family. Geoffrey, however, saw this as his only opportunity to gain real power for himself and refused to listen. He left Rouen for Anjou to fortify his castles, but few would join him now Louis had recognised Henry as count.
Geoffrey eventually submitted to Henry in the summer, and settled for an allowance of £3,000 and the county of Nantes in Brittany, which Henry arranged for him.210 Although Henry was harsh with the viscount of Thouars, who had assisted Geoffrey in his uprising, he was generous and forgiving with his brother. Later, this would be a pattern when those he loved rose up against him; his cup of forgiveness was too deep. But the problem of Geoffrey ever rebelling again was removed when he died suddenly in 1158. He was twenty-four years old.
Henry was rarely defeated. Nantes was given over to him in 1158; he acquired Brittany in 1166, betrothing his legitimate son Geoffrey to its heiress, Constance, and deposing Constance’s father, Conan – the duchy was fully subjugated by 1173; and the Welsh princes, Owain of Gwynedd and Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth, were both forced to pay him homage. The kings of Scotland had taken advantage of Stephen’s weak rule to encroach south of the border, taking Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. Henry, however, drove them back. Although they took every opportunity to harass him, Henry’s capture of William the Lion in 1174 left the Scottish kings weak dependants of the English crown.
Henry the victor was magnanimous; on the rare occasions that he faltered in battle – Toulouse in 1159 (his first taste of defeat), and in Wales in 1165 – he was ruthless with himself, and others.
In 1159, Henry attempted to conquer the county of Toulouse in Eleanor’s name – she claimed it through her maternal grandmother, Philippa. Whoever held Toulouse had access to the tremendous wealth generated by trade between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic via the River Garonne. Henry already held Bordeaux, where the river flowed into the Atlantic, through his marriage to Eleanor. Toulouse was ruled by Louis’ brother-in-law, Count Raymond V: he was married to Louis’ sister Constance. As far as Henry and Eleanor were concerned, Count Raymond was not the rightful ruler. Louis had attempted to win Toulouse for Eleanor in 1141, but had failed. Now, Henry left Eleanor in England as regent, and gathered an enormous army. They arrived in July.
The Toulouse expedition was the largest campaign of Henry’s career: he threw everything he had at it. Thomas Becket was a particular advocate and had raised taxes for the campaign. (He was later accused of charging the church an excessive amount.) Thomas’s retinue alone sported 1,900 cavalry and 4,000 infantry.211 Henry was joined by his ally Ramon Berenguer IV, count of Barcelona and prince of Aragon. In return for Ramon’s military support, Henry agreed to a marriage between Ramon’s daughter and his son, Richard. Together, they planned that one day the couple would rule Aquitaine.212
Count Raymond placed himself inside Toulouse, preparing for a long siege. Toulouse had access to fresh water inside the city, and it was protected by three sections of seemingly impenetrable walls. The count believed it would be impossible to take by force. Henry was not, however, disheartened; he had rarely lost a siege.213 But all hope of success was stymied when Louis decided to support Raymond. Louis feared Henry’s power; he knew that if Henry took Toulouse, his own land route to Rome would be severed.214 He placed himself in the city, making it morally impossible for Henry to attack; Louis, after all, was overlord for his lands in France. Henry attempted to draw Louis out of the city by sending forces north to attack his lands, but Louis would not budge. Henry was forced to retreat.
Just as Louis had failed in 1141, so did Henry. But it was not a complete disaster. Henry lost no territory. He even made some gains in the Vexin. He captured the city of Cahors, roughly seventy miles north of Toulouse, and the region of Quercy.
Henry’s burning of the countryside around Toulouse was devastating for the population; but a thwarted Henry was not simply being vindictive. It was a show of power.
In the end, it was not battle that ravaged Henry’s army, but sickness. Many of his men succumbed at the end of September. Casualties included William of Boulogne, Stephen’s surviving son who had tried to assassinate Henry. William died in October, childless. Henry now broke the remnants of Stephen’s family. He ordered Stephen’s daughter, Mary of Boulogne, out of her convent at Romsey and forced her into marriage with his cousin, Matthew of Flanders, to strengthen his influence there, and to gain access to its famous men of war. Matthew, on his marriage, became count of Boulogne and a surviving document from 1163 stipulated that Matthew, together with his father Thierry of Flanders, provide Henry with 1,000 knights, as required, in return for £500 per year.215 William was buried, separated from his family in death, at the Poitevin abbey of Montmorel; his mother, father and Eustace all lay at Faversham Abbey in Kent.
Henry’s second difficult campaign was in 1165, against the Welsh princes. Disregarding their homage, they took advantage of Henry’s preoccupation, when he was away from England in Normandy on a diplomatic mission. While Henry attended a conference with Louis and the count of Flanders, and met with ambassadors from the court of Frederick Barbarossa, the princes took up arms against Henry. He had to rush back to England to raise an army against the Welsh, whom he fought in the Vale of Ceiriog.
Henry’s army numbered some 3,000 sergeants and many knights.216 This was a large army by twelfth-century standards. It remains difficult to be exact, particularly when the chroniclers are so vague, mentioning a ‘powerful company’, but giving no hard numbers.217
But the outcome was inconclusive, and Henry withdrew with his hostages. He blinded and hanged twenty-two Welshmen, including five Welsh princes.218 Henry was magnanimous in victory; but in an indecisive fight, or a loss – as with the burning of the Toulouse countryside – he would show his strength through monstrous acts. He may have looked to his grandfather Henry I not only as an exemplar of strong leadership, but also for lessons in the infliction of cruel punishments.
Long, drawn-out campaigns, in Toulouse, and against the Welsh, were Henry’s weakness in war. When he acted as an attacker, his characteristic methods of quick assaults, taking castles with astonishing rapidity, meant there was no one to touch him. But whenever Henry was forced to invest in a protracted campaign, long in the planning, he rarely saw a decisive victory.
IX
Henry and Eleanor had at least eight children together over fourteen years, and Henry loved them with ‘extreme tenderness’.219
Not only did he love them; they also formed another weapon in Henry’s arsenal, the girls to make advantageous marriages, and the boys to aid their father in running his empire – or at least that was the idea. The fact that Henry did not pay sufficient attention to his wife, or effectively train his sons for leadership, was to have lasting consequences.220
Nevertheless, during the latter part of the 1150s and the 1160s, Henry and Eleanor’s family grew. Louis, who remained without a son until 1165 when his third wife, Adela of Champagne, finally gave birth to a male heir, must have looked on in horror. His most powerful vassal, the man who had taken his wife and formed the biggest threat to Capetian power, produced son after son.
Their eldest child, William, died in 1156 when he was two years old. Henry was not in England. He was on the continent dealing with Geoffrey’s insurrection, and he left Eleanor as regent. She buried their infant son at Reading Abbey at the feet of Henry I, his great-grandfather.221 Henry would not return to England for nearly a year. But he had left Eleanor pregnant, and when he returned she presented him with their third child, a new baby daughter, named Matilda.
Henry and Eleanor’s second child, Young Henry (Henri), had been born at the end of February 1155. In 1156, when the toddler William died, one-year-old Henri became heir to the throne. Siblings followed in steady succession – Matilda in 1156, Richard in 1157, Geoffrey in 1158, Eleanor in 1161, Joanna in 1165 and John in 1166. Eleanor spent much of the first fifteen years of her marriage either pregnant or the mother of very young children, which may have been one of the reasons why she was a far less active patron than her sister queens and queen consorts.222
But even in her later years, we have little evidence of Eleanor’s direct patronage, although one historian wrote, rather curiously, that Eleanor was ‘the progenitor of the French “renaissance” of the twelfth century’.223 Although many historians and novelists have written of Eleanor as the ‘queen of the troubadours’, presiding with her eldest daughter by Louis, Marie countess of Champagne, over the celebrated courts of love, it is simply untrue.224 We have little evidence that mother and daughter saw one another again after Eleanor fled her marriage, although the possibility for a meeting was there, firstly at Poitiers sometime between 1170 and 1173, and again in 1191 as Eleanor travelled through Champagne on her way to pay Richard’s ransom.225
Medieval royal families were not close in the modern sense; Henry and Eleanor did not spend a great deal of time together when their children were young, and the nature of Henry’s rule over his vast conglomerate of lands meant that he travelled more than most, seeing his young children rarely.
But this was not unusual. Sons went to live with other aristocrats for their education and military training about the age of seven, and girls were married young. Henri went to live in the household of Thomas Becket when he was seven (or perhaps younger.) John and Joanna spent their early years in the care of the nuns of Fontevraud, and John later went to live in the household of his eldest brother Henri, and then to Henry’s justiciar, Ranulf de Glanville. By 1183, Ranulf was his tutor and his education must have been superb.
We know little about the children’s education – far less than we do about Henry’s. From later evidence, we can deduce that the boys all received some education. Despite his reputation for curiosity and learning, and Peter of Blois’ description that he was never without ‘weapons or books’, we have no concrete evidence that Henry owned a library; it is likely, however, that he did. John built up a formidable library in adulthood, containing works in both Latin and French, and Richard’s Latin was good enough for him to correct Archbishop Hubert Walter’s.226 The archbishop of Rouen was evidently concerned that Henri should receive a rounded education, one that extended beyond just chivalry.227
We know even less about the girls’ education. Henry arranged their marriages when they were still very young, as he wove his diplomatic web throughout the courts of Europe. They all left England for their husbands’ courts between the ages of eleven and thirteen – Matilda for Saxony when she was eleven (the husband her father chose for her, Henry the Lion, was twenty-seven years her senior); Eleanor for Castile in 1174, when she was thirteen, promised to King Alfonso to prevent Louis forming an alliance; and Joanna for the Norman kingdom of Sicily in 1176 when she was eleven – and any education they received continued in their new homelands. Henry’s aunts had been educated when they were young, and it is likely that Eleanor was educated too. Master Matthew, one of Henry’s tutors, had also tutored Geoffrey’s sisters; there is no reason to suppose that Henry would not have given an exemplary education to his own daughters.228
Because Henry and Eleanor travelled so much, other attachments were formed. Richard had a wet nurse named Hodierna, whom he adored. He gave her a pension and arranged for her son, Alexander Neckham, to became abbot of Cirencester. John was cared for by a woman called Agatha, to whom Eleanor was generous.229
It was rare that the whole family was together, except for occasional Christmas courts. They were together at Cherbourg for Christmas 1162, and later in the 1160s, Eleanor had all the children with her at Angers, except for Henri who stayed in England.230 Henry may have wished to see his children more, but his ceaseless travelling prevented it. He usually tried to see Eleanor at Christmas, despite the dangers of the Channel crossing in winter; at least four of their children were born in September or October. Henry would not allow his punishing schedule to let him neglect the begetting of heirs, and Christmas meetings were the perfect excuse.
That Henry was a loving father is demonstrated by his treatment of his eldest illegitimate son, also called Geoffrey. Henry planned his education with care. When Geoffrey was in his early twenties, he sent him to study at the law schools of Northampton, and he possibly studied in Paris. Later, after 1175, he was at the schools in Tours.231 As an adult, Geoffrey filled his household with scholars. He counted Peter of Blois a friend; Peter dedicated his life of St Wilfred to Geoffrey.232
Henry had this son brought up alongside his legitimate children and he would raise him high. It is likely that Geoffrey was the child Henry liked best.
At the beginning of the 1160s, Henry appeared unstoppable. He was married to an ‘incomparable’ woman; he had sons to succeed him and daughters to marry into the royal families of Europe; Thomas Becket, an exceptional administrator and soldier, was his chancellor; his court was brilliant; his closest advisors served him well; he had begun the extensive reforms to law and administration throughout his domains; he was rich; he was successful in war and diplomacy, and he was on the brink of becoming the most powerful prince of his generation.
The only thing that could possibly have stopped him was himself.
* Henry’s and Eleanor’s second child Henry was known, from his coronation during Henry II’s lifetime in 1170, as ‘Henry the Young King’. I refer him as ‘Henri’ throughout this book in order to avoid confusion with Henry II.
Act III
