Richard & John: Kings at War (2 page)

Farnham, Surrey, 2006

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IF WE JUDGE ONLY by reputation and mythology, Richard I was the greatest king of England in the Middle Ages and his brother John the very worst. The good brother/bad brother dichotomy is a staple of most myths, as old as Cain and Abel. And it is surely significant that Shakespeare saw dramatic potential in the flawed John Lackland, whereas Richard, a creature of epics, did not serve his purpose.
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Richard was supposed to be a second King Arthur, although the Dean of St Paul’s, Ralph Diceto, who chronicled his reign, established to his own satisfaction that the Saxon Cerdic (traditionally one of the historical Arthur’s enemies) was his ancestor. Shakespeare too never dealt with the greatest of all English stories - King Arthur and the Round Table - for its saga-like dimensions could not be accommodated in five acts. Richard and Arthur, it seems, were both too stubborn and irreducible even for Shakespeare. Richard I, Coeur de Lion, has always had a magnetic hold on the imagination for he seemed to be Arthur redivivus: the once and future king really had returned and, as foretold, had carried the Cross to Jerusalem.
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Yet even if we discount myth and legend, the historical Richard still has the power to astonish. He did, after all, start his life with certain gifts. He was lucky, for third sons born to royal dynasties rarely attained the purple. And he probably had the most impressive parentage of all English monarchs. Despite the voluntarists and the existentialists, it remains a fact that every human being is far more determined by parentage than we usually allow ourselves to admit. But this is a necessary explanation for Richard and not a sufficient one. John had the same parents but was a totally different individual. Here we almost confront a nature/nurture paradigm, for John’s education, socialisation and general formation were entirely different from his brother’s. Apart from the obvious factors of differential innate individual human psychology, we must look to environment, milieu and culture. In this respect Richard’s relationship with his mother and his upbringing in Aquitaine are the factors that most clearly differentiate him from John.

The man known to history and legend as Richard the Lionheart became king of England in 1189, just over one hundred years after the death of William the Conqueror. At the same time he assumed the titles of Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. To understand the implications of this tripartite title, we have to go back in time, to 1100, the year William the Conqueror’s son William Rufus was mysteriously killed in the New Forest. Henry, the youngest and only English-born son of the Conqueror then seized the royal treasure and was elected king in the only manner accepted as legitimate in Anglo-Saxon times: by the Witan. Henry I next quickly moved to defeat his brother Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, but his easy victory (Robert was kept in jail for twenty-eight years after the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106) brought him into collision with King Louis VI of France, and almost constant warfare marked the next twenty years. When Henry’s only legitimate son William was drowned at sea in 1120 in the White Ship disaster, Henry named his widowed daughter Matilda (previously married to Emperor Henry V of Germany) as his successor. In 1128 she was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of the count of Anjou. From this union came Henry, later to be the second English king of that name, and Richard’s father.
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Henry I’s death in 1135 plunged England into civil war. Stephen, son of Henry I’s sister Adela, seized the throne despite a previous oath of fealty to Matilda. Six years of anarchy and devastation followed, though some scholars think that the chaos and disruption were exaggerated in early propagandist accounts. Stephen seemed conclusively defeated in 1141, but the triumphant Matilda alienated London with her harsh taxation and personal greed. The so-called ‘Lady of the English’ was never crowned, for a rebellion overthrew her and placed Stephen back in the saddle. On her return to France, in 1148 Matilda renounced her own ambitions, made over her claims to her son and threw all her energies into securing the throne for the young Henry. In 1150 the 17-year-old became Duke of Normandy and the following year, when his father died, he added Count of Anjou to his titles. In January 1153 he landed in England to claim the throne. When Stephen’s son Eustace died, the 57-year-old Stephen, an old man by the standards of the time, gave up the struggle and acknowledged Henry as his successor, dying soon afterwards.
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Crowned king in 1154, Henry II founded the Plantagenet or Angevin dynasty of English kings and ruled a domain that stretched from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees - the inaptly named Angevin empire.

Much of what we know about the personality and character of Henry II comes from Walter Map, a clerk at Henry’s court, also Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral; from Peter of Blois, his secretary; and from Gerald of Wales, for many years a member of his court. Although Map is not always impeccable as a historical source - his taste for levity makes him accept any old scurrilous or apocryphal story as gospel - there is no reason to think that his physical portrait of Henry is inaccurate. A redhead who wore his hair short, Henry appeared more leonine than his famous lionhearted son. Of medium height, with ruddy, freckled complexion, Henry had a large head and grey, implacable eyes which were said to glow red or become bloodshot when he was angry. Stocky, broadchested, with strong and massively developed arms, Henry was a charismatic personality, whose magnetism seemed concentrated in the ferocious-looking face and eyes; Map said there was something about the man that made you want to stare at him over and over again.
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His voice was harsh and guttural, liable to crack and produce falsetto notes. In modern terms he would be called a ‘fitness freak’, for he was obsessed with keeping his weight down by constant exercise and even fasting; observers said that this was a wise precaution since he had a natural tendency to obesity. In a hard-drinking and gourmandising age Henry was notable for his abstemious attitude to food and drink.
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Henry was not a believer in the king as star, dressed in sumptuous raiment, with a dazzling entourage of flunkies and hangers-on. He cultivated a more popular persona, wearing functional, hunting or casual clothes, albeit of the finest material; he was often seen with needle and thread, mending a torn tunic. He refused to wear gloves, except when hawking, so that his calloused and horny hands suggested a son of toil rather than a monarch. As a hunter he was a perfect Nimrod, particularly delighting in the exploits of birds of prey and in riding down stags with hounds.
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Primarily a man of action, he was also intelligent, articulate and literate - unusual traits in twelfth-century rulers; he had been tutored by the top scholars of his day both in England and France. With a retentive memory, genuine academic curiosity and a thirst for learning, Henry possessed what passed in his day for encyclopedic knowledge, and this made him self-confident, intellectually audacious and combative in debate. Something of an intellectual by the standards of his day, he liked to retire to his private apartments with a book and was well read for a layman. ‘With the king of England,’ said Peter of Blois, his one-time secretary, ‘it is school every day, constant conversation with the best scholars and discussion of intellectual problems.’
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His memory was not just attuned to learning and linguistic attainments - his Latin was reputedly excellent and he had a smattering of other tongues - but was used to manipulate men and events, for he could recall names and faces at a moment’s notice. Superficially he was a model of courtesy, charm and politeness, affable, sober, modest, generous and stoical. Hardworking, energetic and indefatigable, he rose before dawn and spent his days campaigning or hunting. It was not unusual for him to ride five times the distance of his courtiers or to go for long walks on his quick-striding muscular, bowed legs, sometimes trekking so far that his feet were cracked, sore and blistered. At court he seldom sat but bounded around, and paced about, wearing his followers out by his refusal to sit down. Disdaining regular hours, he was a notorious ‘night owl’ who liked to keep his courtiers awake into the small hours of the morning. He liked to conduct political business while doing something else, polishing a spear, perhaps, or adjusting a bow. Almost unbelievably impatient, he bolted his food, and could never be still for an instant. At Mass he fidgeted, pulled at his courtiers’ sleeves, whispered jokes and scribbled notes or doodled as if he were a naughty boy. The single word that sums up Henry is restlessness. As Walter Map put it: ‘He was impatient of repose and did not hesitate to disturb almost half Christendom.’ Peter of Blois expressed it another way after vainly following his master’s tracks through Normandy and Aquitaine: ‘Solomon says that there are three things difficult to be found, and a fourth hardly to be discovered: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground; and the way of a man in his youth. I can add a fifth: the way of a king in England.’
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Modern observers might diagnose a form of depression or even attention deficit syndrome.

Henry’s extreme restlessness is well conveyed by Peter of Blois. ‘If the king has promised to remain in a place for a day - and particularly if he has announced his intention publicly by the mouth of a herald - he is sure to upset all the arrangements by departing early in the morning. As a result you see men dashing around as if they were mad, beating their packhorses, running their carts into one another - in short giving a lively imitation of Hell. If, on the other hand, the king orders an early start, he is certain to change his mind, and you can take it for granted that he will sleep till midday. Then you will see the packhorses loaded and waiting, the carts prepared, the courtiers dozing, traders fretting, and everyone grumbling. People go to ask the maids and the doorkeepers what the king’s plans are, for they are the only people likely to know the secrets of the court. Many a time when the king was sleeping a message would be passed from his chamber about the city or town he planned to go to, and though there was nothing certain about it, it would rouse us all up. After hanging about aimlessly for so long we would be comforted by the prospect of good lodgings. This would produce such a clatter of horse and foot that all Hell seemed let loose. But when our courtiers had gone ahead almost the whole day’s ride, the king would turn aside to some other place where he had, it might be, just a single house with accommodation for himself and no one else. I hardly dare say it, but I believe that in truth he took a delight in seeing what a fix he put us in. After wandering some three or four miles in an unknown wood, and often in the dark, we thought ourselves lucky if we stumbled upon some filthy little hovel. There was often a sharp and bitter argument about a mere hut, and swords were drawn for possession of lodging that pigs would have shunned.’
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Henry liked to appear generous in public and hospitable to strangers, tipping his servants lavishly, giving alms expansively, relieving the plight of the poor from his private granaries and even making good the losses of shipwrecked crews. He had a particular feeling for those in peril from the sea, and ordained heavy penalties for wreckers or plunderers of shipwrecks. When in the spotlight, he came across as courteous, polite, patient, stoical and solomonic. Such apparent charm and saintliness is often a defence mechanism, a mask under which very dark forces are hidden. The real Henry was wilful, secretive, manipulative, volatile, crafty, slippery, vindictive, brooding, unforgiving, treacherous, cynical, mendacious, perjurious and maybe even nihilistic. ‘He was always ready to break his word’, said Gerald of Wales, while Thomas Becket, his former friend and later mortal enemy said that in slipperiness he surpassed Proteus.
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Only a small circle of intimates saw the real Henry. He was too intelligent to prize waging war as a thing in itself, as William the Conqueror had, but, in anticipation of Clausewitz, saw it pragmatically as the pursuit of political ends by other means. The one thing he could not abide was any opposition to his will, and any such occurrence elicited a volcanic outburst. He was spectacular when angry, when the usual persona was dropped and a furious, near madman was observed. Such were his carpet-chewing rages that he would often roll around on the floor, screaming and yelling or grind his teeth audibly. On one occasion he fell out of bed in a rage, tore the stuffing from his mattress and began masticating it.
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His taste for women bordered on satyriasis, and in this area he was ruthless and unscrupulous, taking women for one-night stands or longer affairs entirely as the fancy took him. His habitual infidelity and the many bastard children he produced would cause much trouble during his reign. Some said his libido was such that he had to hunt all day to avoid spending it in bed, though Henry himself always adduced the weight-loss argument. He also knew how to assuage the rage of jealous husbands and fathers. With a deep, though cynical, understanding of human nature, he knew when to employ the carrot and when the stick and when to meld them.
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Walter Map maintained that his mother, the Empress Matilda, had inculcated this lesson. ‘I have heard that his mother’s teaching was to this effect, that he should spin out the affairs of everyone, hold long in his own hands all posts that fell in, take the revenues of them, and keep the aspirants to them hanging on in hope; and she supported this advice by an unkind analogy: the untamed hawk, when raw meat is frequently offered to it and then snatched away or hidden from it, becomes keener and more prone to obey and attend.’
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