Richard & John: Kings at War (11 page)

At first he was able to pick off his enemies one by one, but by the beginning of 1176 they had made common cause, presenting a formidable coalition of southern barons: the count of Angoulême, Viscount Aimar of Limoges, Viscount Raymond of Turenne and the lords of Chabanais and Mastac. Even the dauntless Richard soon found the task beyond him, and went to England in April 1176 to consult his father on the next step. Henry made available large sums of money and fresh cohorts of mercenaries, only to find that his opponents in turn had hired a force of Brabançons, commanded by the count of Angoulême’s eldest son, Vulgrin Taillefer.
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On his return to the continent, Richard hastened to meet this force in Poitou and defeated it in May at Bouteville near Angoulême.
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Pressing on to Limoges, then a city in two parts, Richard cunningly made use of the ancient rivalry between ‘city’ and ‘citadel’ (the two different parts of the town) to force its capitulation after a couple of days’ siege. Early in July the Young King joined him at Poitiers. Young Henry had petitioned his father for permission to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but the Old King suspected this was just a ploy to enable his eldest son to raise another rebellion. He therefore ordered him to assist his brother in the Aquitaine campaign. The Young King, however, flounced off once he had got a taste of Richard’s martial ability. He did not like campaigning, resented being under Richard’s orders, and was jealous of his military talents.
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Undeterred, Richard took the castles of Châteauneuf and Moulinef and then pressed on to Angoulême for a final reckoning with Aimar, Angoulême, Chabanais and the others. Bottled up in the citadel these grandees seemed to have nothing to lose by fighting on, and desperate combat was expected in a last-ditch stand, but the rebels surrendered tamely after just six days. Richard sent the great lords prisoner to England for Henry to deal with; at Winchester on 21 September 1176 William of Angoulême and the other Aquitaine rebels had to make the self-same obeisance on their knees that the humbled Richard had endured two years earlier.
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But Richard was already a military hero as a result of this campaign; truly he had won his spurs.

By 1176 the career of Henry II fully justified his treasurer’s boast that he was ‘the greatest of the illustrious rulers of the world’.
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He had decisively relegated Louis of France to second place, and even the great Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, was no longer the colossus of yore after his defeat at Legnano by the Lombard League in this very same year. Henry’s fame had spread to the point where in November 1176 his court at Westminster received envoys from Barbarossa, from Emperor Manuel Comnenus in Constantinople, the duke of Savoy and the count of Flanders. He was clearly recognised as a power broker in Spain, and the kings of Aragon and Castile asked him to act as arbiter in all their disputes, pledging themselves to abide faithfully by any decision. Even the king of Sicily was interested in Europe’s new supremo, and asked for the hand of his daughter Joan in marriage.
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For the first time in its history England was a major European power. Henry and his second son were both recognised as great warriors. But the 19-year-old Richard was already showing himself to be a very different proposition from his 46-year-old father. Henry waged war only when he had to.
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Richard, on the other hand, loved war and everything about it, clearly placing himself on a line that runs through history from Alexander the Great to General George Patton. The shrewd Gerald of Wales put his finger on the fundamental flaw in Richard’s personality, which was that he ‘cared for no success that was not reached by a path cut by his own sword and stained with the blood of his adversaries’.
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Even if Aquitaine had not been a notorious cockpit of anarchy, the omens for peaceful resolution of its problems were not favourable.

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AS HENRY II APPROACHED the medieval equivalent of old age in his mid-forties, he tried as far as possible to take a back seat in the administration of his dominions, hoping that active involvement in the Angevin empire could be left to his sons. His basic plan was that the Young King would continue to be groomed for the succession, which made England his main sphere of influence; Geoffrey would act as the king’s deputy in Normandy and Britanny and Richard would rule in Aquitaine. Roughly speaking, one might say that Henry aimed at a kind of Angevin federalism, where each province would be self-governing and even have its own coinage. But his federalism was always the strong federalism of an interventionist monarch, not the weak version of one who was tired of life or politics. He was prepared to cut a lot of slack for his restless sons, but would not tolerate the same latitude being given by the sons towards subject lords. And his own restlessness often worked against his basic project. In the late 1170s he was concerned to bring Aquitaine finally under effective central control and he also began to dabble in Spanish affairs. Given that Richard already faced a thornier problem than Geoffrey - for in Aquitaine there was simply Henry’s nominal overlordship and a lot of internally independent vassals - Henry’s expectations placed greater stresses on Richard’s shoulders than on those of his brothers. It would be an exaggeration to call the situation in Aquitaine anarchy, but there were no strong central structures of law and politics there, as in England, Normandy or Anjou and, moreover, the south had not yet felt Henry’s mailed fist, as this area had not been the cockpit of the struggle against King Louis of France.
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In the years before Richard was formally recognised as duke of Aquitaine - in 1179 - all this began to change.

As a military leader Richard was improving all the time. Since Henry was keen to intervene in the affairs of Spain, he began by ordering Richard to make sure the road from Bordeaux south to the Pyrenees was as secure as roads at the height of the Roman or Mongol empires. Clearing the farrago of bandits, feudal levies and rebellious lords from the traditional pilgrim route meant sustained warfare. Basing himself at Bordeaux for the Christmas feast of 1176, Richard swept south early in the new year and laid siege to Dax and Bayonne while his armies of Brabançons trawled the entire territory from Bordeaux to Cize on the Spanish border. Having emulated his father with a stunning winter campaign, waged over the Christmas festivities when no one was ever supposed to be on the warpath, Richard prematurely announced that the pacification of Aquitaine was complete and discharged his mercenaries.
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No longer on the payroll, the savage Brabançons began to pillage and plunder the countryside. The backlash was severe: an ‘army of peace’ organised by the disgruntled clergy and nobility caught the Brabançon marauders off guard near Brive and slaughtered them mercilessly.
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Henry thought that Richard had his hands full in the far south, so sent the Young King on an auxiliary mission to bring to heel the rebellious territory of Berry in north-east Aquitaine. Here was yet another collision between Angevin centralising power and local folkways. Ralph de Deols, lord of Berry, died and left his daughter as sole heiress. In England an unmarried heiress was at the disposal of her overlord, who could marry her off to a husband of his choice, but this right was not recognised in Berry. When King Henry claimed wardship of the heiress, and her kin refused to give her up, warfare was the inevitable result. But Richard was irritated by the arrival of the Young King for two different reasons. In the first place his uninvited intervention clearly encroached on Richard’s rights as duke of Aquitaine but, then, he proceeded to campaign so feebly that Richard concluded he must secretly be favouring the rebels.

Then the Old King heard disquieting rumours that Louis of France did not intend to stand idly by. Fearing possible intervention against the Young King in Berry, Henry sent an embassy to Paris, demanding a final resolution of the agreement to marry Margaret and Alice, Louis’s daughters. In short, he asked that the Vexin be handed over as Margaret’s dowry and Berry likewise be earmarked for Alice.
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This was cool cheek on Henry’s part, for everyone knew that it was Henry who had broken the terms of the previous agreement by hanging on to Alice far too long - she had been fifteen years at Henry’s court and, it was widely whispered, was already his mistress. Indeed the situation had already reached the stage where Pope Alexander, primed by Louis, was threatening to place the entire Angevin empire under a papal interdict if the Alice marriage was not soon celebrated. For a year the nuncio at Henry’s court had been insisting that Alice either be married to Richard forthwith or returned to her father.
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Always a master of stalling, Henry signed a new fourfold agreement with Louis in September 1177 at the so-called Colloquy of Ivry. He agreed to submit the Berry dispute, in which Louis claimed an interest, to arbitration; he agreed that Richard would marry Alice; and he proposed a non-aggression pact with Louis on condition that the two of them went on crusade to save the beleaguered Christian kingdom of Jerusalem. This last condition was crucial: Louis dearly wanted to take the Cross but dared not leave for Palestine with France and his young son Philip at the mercy of the Angevins.
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But Henry had no more intention of going on crusade than he had of returning princess Alice. Moreover, in typical Henrician mode and again in defiance of this agreement, he and Richard continued campaigning in Berry and solved the issue there by military force, under the pretext that he (Henry) finally had time to punish the rebels who had submitted to him at Winchester in September 1176.
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Henry continued to enrage and outwit Louis. In November 1177 he and the French king held a fruitless conference at Graçay about their competing claims in the Auvergne. Then, in a political coup that demonstrated how clearly money could speak, Henry suddenly purchased the vast fief of La Marche from a despondent and abdicating duke. Technically subject to Aquitaine, La Marche had always enjoyed virtual independence, so here was another signal instance of Henry’s tightening power.
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Henry’s policies in the late 1170s have to be understood in light of a threefold aim. He continued his long, bitter conflict with Louis and France, opting for diplomacy until and unless Louis lost patience; meanwhile he was determined once and for all to break the local power of Angoulême and its allies - the same who had caused him so much trouble in 1175-76 - because Angoulême commanded the important trade routes in the Charente valley and was potentially poised to dominate west-central France; and finally he aspired to be
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power in northern Spain. Unfortunately the later ambition collided with an equal and opposite one entertained by the young King Alfonso II of Aragon, count of Barcelona, who had fantasies of being the ‘emperor of the Pyrenees’ and in 1178 allied himself with Castile as a prelude to gobbling up Navarre.
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The fact that Alfonso stood forth as a champion of troubadour culture at the very moment Richard was finding himself at odds with the troubadours within Aquitaine added further ingredients to a very turgid political bouillabaise. It was mainly to counter the expansionism of Aragon that Henry in 1178 again sent Richard to the far south. As Richard advanced on Dax, he received some welcome tidings: Alfonso’s ally the count of Bigorre had been seized by the townspeople who wanted to hand him over to Richard to avoid the rigours of a siege.
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Alarmed by this development, Alfonso, who regarded Bigorre as his true friend, was forced to come in person before Richard to plead for his comrade and ally and to give surety for his behaviour. Triumphant on the Spanish border, Richard then turned back to deal with the opposition in Angoulême, now led by Count William’s son Vulgrin. William himself, after the humiliation at Winchester, departed for a pilgrimage in the Holy Land and, as his son had not made the submission, technically he was within his rights to resist Richard. Vulgrin allied himself with the powerful baron Geoffrey de Rancon, an important figure in Poitou and the veteran of revolts in 1168 and 1173-74. De Rancon’s castles at Pons and Taillebourg were so situated as to be able to cut communications between La Rochelle and Saintes in the north and Bordeaux in the south,
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so it was to the investment of these strongholds that Richard applied his already formidable skills in siegecraft.

The siege of Pons began badly, as it became clear that Geoffrey de Rancon had laid in huge food supplies and would not crack easily. For Richard, on the other hand, his credibility as duke of Aquitaine hinged on being able to bring Geoffrey to heel.
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To save face, he invested, forced to surrender and then demolished five easier targets, the castles at Richemont, Genzac, Marcillac, Grouville and Anville. Having thus restored his men’s morale after the humiliation at Pons, he gambled everything on an attempt to reduce the supposedly impregnable fortress of Taillebourg - a task no one had even attempted before because of its supposed impossibility. The stronghold of Taillebourg was situated on an outcrop of rock on the right bank of the River Charente. Three sides were inaccessible on account of the sheer rock face and the fourth, approached over marshy ground, was protected by a triple ditch and a triple wall; additionally, the castle was well stocked with food and defended by well-armed men. On 1 May 1179 the dauntless Richard brought up siege engines and trebuchets and began bombarding this fourth side, pitching his tents alarmingly close to the walls. With his wonderful eye for ground, he saw that the one weak card in an otherwise unbeatable hand was that Taillebourg would have to open the town gates if the burghers wanted to make a sortie. He then unleashed his troops on a scorched-earth rampage around the nearby fields and vineyards. Seeing the smoke of their ravaged property drifting skywards on a daily basis, the defenders finally took the bait and sallied out on 8 May. The sortie was repelled with heavy losses and, as the defeated throng crowded back into the town that lay beneath the citadel itself, the pursuers followed them in before the gates could be closed. Richard’s troops spent three days ostentatiously laying waste the town and taunting the garrison in the citadel with having seized most of their supplies. Finally the defenders in the citadel could take no more and surrendered.
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Aghast at this ‘impossible’ exploit, Geoffrey de Rancon threw in the towel and surrendered Pons also. Outflanked by this surprise development, Vulgrin had no choice but to capitulate. Richard methodically razed Taillebourg and Pons then went on to demolish the walls of Angoulême and Montignac, controlling the River Charente, which he had demanded as the price of making peace with Vulgrin.