The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain (5 page)

1183–9

The sons of the ageing king were impatient for power and jealous of each other. Their continued opposition to their father marred his later years and ensured the break-up of his empire. Young Henry aspired to the complete overlord-ship of all Angevin lands. Richard was intent on independent control of his dukedom of Aquitaine. Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, had ambitions he was careful to keep concealed. One chronicler described him as ‘a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler’
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. The youngest, John (14 in 1183), was never going to be content with the remote kingdom of Ireland.

In February 1183 Geoffrey egged on his eldest brother to grab Aquitaine in league with some of Richard’s disaffected barons. They hoped to distract the king by rekindling civil war, but Henry had done too well his work of bringing the great English magnates to heel, and the new conflict remained a family affair. It was all the more bitter for that. When Henry arrived before the walls of Limoges to reason with his sons Young Henry ordered archers on the walls to fire at his father. The king settled to besiege Limoges while Richard furiously harried the rebel barons in a hideous orgy of revenge. The brief war ended when Young Henry died of dysentery (11 June).

The king now had to make new provisions for the division of his lands, and this inevitably stirred resentment among his surviving sons. He required Richard to relinquish Aquitaine to John, and when he refused John conspired with Geoffrey to wrest the province from Richard by force. A raid in August 1184 only provoked Richard into an attack on Brittany. When all the king’s attempts to reconcile these differences failed, the chronicler Roger of Howden reports that Henry ‘gathered a large army to wage war on his son Richard’
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in April 1885. Now Henry found a use for his discarded wife. Just as Queen Eleanor had allied with her boys 12 years earlier, so now Henry forced her to act in concert with him against them. He demanded that Richard yield to his mother her own inheritance of Aquitaine in return for assurances that Richard would succeed to all his father’s lands. It seemed that, at last, all was settled.

But misfortune continued to dog the dynasty. John, who had been sent over to Ireland to be crowned and to stamp his authority on the island, returned in December 1185 having wasted a great amount of money, stirred up a great deal of resentment and failed to win the acceptance of the Irish barons. In the following July Geoffrey was killed in a jousting accident. The future of the Angevin dynasty now lay in the hands of John, widely regarded as a graceless wastrel, and Richard, who, according to the chroniclers, was a mindless brute for whom politics was a matter of terrorism and bloodshed. Geoffrey’s death had further complicated international affairs because Philip Augustus of France demanded the guardianship of his infant son. Discord
between the two kings was put on hold in October 1187 when, in response to an appeal from Pope Urban III, they agreed jointly to mount a crusade. All Christendom had been shocked by the news that the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem had been conquered by the Muslim leader, Saladin. Advance contingents were mustered and despatched to the Holy Land while Henry and Philip Augustus imposed a new tax, the Saladin tithe, to pay for a full-scale expedition. This was bitterly resented, and Henry faced the prospect, after many years of internal peace, that his English barons might, once more, rise against him. Meanwhile, the peril of Jerusalem failed to push into the background the three-way conflict of Henry, Philip Augustus and Richard.

After months of alternate fighting and negotiation the three met at Bonmoulins in November 1188. Gervase of Canterbury tells us that: ‘On the first day they were sufficiently restrained and discussed calmly. On the following day they began little by little to bandy words. On the third day, however, they started to quarrel and so sharply countered threats with threats that the knights standing about were reaching for their swords.’
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Richard demanded assurances that he would succeed to Henry’s throne, but the king refused. Perhaps he feared to contemplate his own demise. Perhaps he genuinely could not decide what was best for his empire. Perhaps, as Richard suspected, his father intended to replace him as heir with his favourite son, John. Whatever the truth, the end result was that Richard publicly transferred his allegiance from Henry to Philip Augustus.

Desultory fighting continued until the following summer,
when Richard and his ally besieged Henry in Le Mans, his birthplace. Henry and a small retinue escaped, leaving behind a burning town. By July he was at Chinon in the Loire valley. Near there, sick in body and depressed in mind, he met his adversaries. The French king presented a humiliating list of demands. Listlessly Henry assented. He returned to Chinon and there received a list of all the great men who had defected to Richard. At the head of the list was that of his other son, John. That was, for him, the last straw. He stopped fighting the fever that was raging through his body and, on 6 July 1189, he died.

RICHARD I AND JOHN 1189–1216

During the reigns of Henry II’s two turbulent sons England became an offshore kingdom, increasingly separated from the rest of the Angevin empire. Richard reigned for ten years (1189–99) but spent no more than six months in England during all that time. A brave and skilful leader in battle, he was also immersed in the ideals of chivalry as exalted by the poets and singers who attended the court of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Contrary to the enduring legend of ‘Richard the Lionheart’, there was another side to his character: he could be cruel, short-tempered, ruthless and, quite possibly, homosexual. His brother John was given lands on both sides of the Channel but had no share in the government of the country, which he resented. He tried to oust Richard’s officials from power, but it was not until Richard lay dying that he nominated John as his heir.

The dukes of the continental Angevin lands refused to recognize John, and his 17-year reign (1199–1216) saw him lose his grip on these territories. By the time of his death the continental possessions owned by Henry II had been lost to the king of France, and the failure of Henry’s sons to keep their inheritance intact led to the emergence of England as a separate nation state.

1189–91

‘England is cold and always raining.’ That was Richard’s opinion of the island that formed part of his inheritance. He had no interest in it, save as a source of revenue. His two passions were Anjou and crusading. By the time of his accession Richard had vowed to go on a crusade to the Holy Land, and his chief concern was to gather an army to recover Jerusalem from the Saracen conqueror Saladin, who had taken the city in 1187. He raised taxes, granted charters, sold offices of state and even demanded huge payments from those already in office to retain their positions. For 10,000 marks he released King William of Scotland from his oath of fealty. By these and other measures Richard was able to raise an army of 8,000 mounted and foot soldiers and a hundred ships.

Richard’s coronation was marred by one of the worst atrocities of the age. Henry II had encouraged Jews to settle in several cities, and they performed a valuable service as money-lenders – there were, of course, no banks at this time – but the Jews were never popular. People resented being financially dependent on them, hated their exclusivity and considered them as enemies of the Christian faith. They were not allowed to attend the coronation (a holy Christian rite), but two prominent Jews did attend in order to present gifts to the new king and assure him of the loyalty of their community. They were thrown out. A rumour spread that Richard (a devout Christian champion about to fight the
enemies of the faith in the Holy Land) had ordered a massacre. Mobs went on the rampage through London’s streets, killing any Jews they could lay their hands on, burning their houses and ransacking their property. The violence spread to other towns and cities, but the worst outrages occurred in York.

In March 1190 the leader of the Jewish community, fearing for the safety of his friends and neighbours, obtained permission from the warden of the castle to move the Jews into the castle, and they were allowed to find refuge in a wooden tower that formed part of the fortifications. There they were besieged by an angry mob, aided by the county militia. The victims were urged to save themselves by converting to Christianity, but their religious leader, Rabbi Yomtov of Joigney, told them to kill themselves rather than deny their faith. In response, parents killed their children, their wives and then each other. Several died when the tower caught fire, and many others were cut down trying to escape the flames. At least 150 men, women and children died in this tragedy. Richard and his deputies denounced the massacre, and some ringleaders were arrested and punished, but government action was far from thorough, and most offenders escaped.

Richard could hardly wait to embark on his next military adventure. Before the end of 1189 he had left England and would not return for more than four years. He arrived in the Holy Land in June 1191 and found a crusader army engaged in a long and, so far, unsuccessful siege of the Muslim fortress of Acre. The walls of the fortress were thick
and impregnable, but Richard solved the problem by offering his men a generous reward for every stone they excavated. After little more than a month Acre capitulated. Richard and Philip imposed severe terms on Saladin: the Muslims in the town were to be ransomed for 200,000 gold crowns, some being kept hostages until full payment was made. On 20 August Richard, apparently believing that the terms of the agreement were not being met, brought 2,700 hostages out of the town and had them slaughtered in full sight of Saladin’s army.

By this act, shocking to all – Christian and Muslim alike – who followed the chivalric code, Richard made sure that Acre could not serve as a rallying point for his enemies. He pushed on to Jerusalem. At Arsuf he successfully confronted Saladin’s host in pitched battle. On this defeat of the mighty Saladin hung Richard’s future reputation. But it was not followed up by the retaking of Jerusalem. Within sight of the city the king halted and turned back towards the coast, for he knew that the taking of the Holy City made no sense strategically. From afar, Jerusalem was a glittering prize; close to it was an isolated city in enemy-controlled territory that could not long remain in Christian hands.

The arrangements he made for the government of the country in his absence constituted a recipe for disaster. There was no place in the administration for his remaining brother, John, who was ordered to remain outside England for three years. Richard nominated as his heir, in the event of his dying childless, his nephew Arthur (son of his late brother, Geoffrey). He compensated John generously – and rashly – with
a large grant of land. The 22-year-old prince retained Ireland and was now granted the counties of Nottinghamshire, Derby, Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, as well as castles and lands in other parts of the country. John’s position was, however, subordinate to Richard’s justiciars, the men who acted as regents in the king’s absence. These were Hugh de Puiset, Bishop of Durham, who controlled all the country north of the Humber, and William Longchamps, the chancellor and Bishop of Ely. Not only was John jealous of his brother’s officials but also they were at odds with each other.

Longchamps was ambitious, arrogant and grasping, and in 1190 he had little difficulty in shouldering his colleague aside. Furthermore, he had the pope appoint him as legate (the pope’s personal representative) so that he became the supreme authority in both church and state. He was of humble Norman origin and had worked his way up the ladder of preferment by cleverly changing sides during the wars between Henry II and his sons. He spoke no English and openly held the people of the country in contempt. He travelled around with a train of 1,000 men-at-arms, who had to be fed and housed wherever he went. He took every opportunity to extract money from Richard’s subjects in order to support his own extravagant lifestyle and to raise yet more funds for the cash-strapped king. In all this Long-champs was an effective representative of Richard, and he continued to enjoy royal favour. He strengthened the Tower of London with new walls and ditches and made it his impregnable base. His behaviour provoked enormous resentment. The chronicler William of Newburgh commented:

‘The laity found him more than a king, the clergy more than a pope, and both an intolerable tyrant.’
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John, meanwhile, enjoyed similarly royal power and status. He was released from his ban and returned to England early in 1191. His power base in the west and the Midlands enabled him to maintain an impressive court and a military entourage that rivalled the justiciars’. Many of the barons transferred their allegiance to John and encouraged him to undermine Longchamps’s authority. In April a council of leading nobles and churchmen patched up a truce between the parties and recognized John as heir to the throne. But three months later another meeting shifted power back towards Longchamps. Richard had sent his own agent, Walter of Coutances, Bishop of Rouen, to restore order, support his justiciar and check the pretensions of his brother. He summoned both parties to meet him at Winchester and tried to lower the political temperature, but neither rival was interested in a peaceful compromise.