Richard & John: Kings at War (7 page)

In later years John was notable for quasi-autistic tendencies, and he always seemed to have a grudge against the world. This has been plausibly linked to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s neglect of him. Some cultural historians have alleged that John’s infancy was not especially lonely and deprived, both by the general standards of royal childhood and the ethos and values obtaining in the twelfth century. Mothers, it is said, bore children but they did not nurture them, and it was servants, tutors and others who brought them up.
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But this collides with the known fact that Eleanor was much more involved with her older children, and especially Richard, than most high-born ladies of the time
and
that, in addition, she signally neglected John.
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John’s upbringing was markedly different from that of his siblings in a number of ways. Because of the seven-year age gap between him and Geoffrey, he had no brother with whom he could bond. He saw far less of his mother than his brothers had.
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He had very different relations with his sisters from those of his brothers; he did not know his eldest sister at all, and even Joan, his companion in Fontevraud, was sent off to be married when she was nine. With an absent mother, no grandmother and no sisters during his formative adolescent years, it would not have been surprising if John developed misogynistic tendencies, and there is much in his later career that points in that direction. John’s upbringing lacked stability also. Because he was his father’s favourite and constantly with him - which also meant constantly travelling and being on the move with the itinerant court - he lacked the security of a settled home environment, which Eleanor certainly provided, for three elder sons.
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Given that Eleanor and Henry were far from model parents for a variety of reasons, some of them obvious in the narrative already provided, and the ‘Devil’s Brood’ were never easy children at the best of times, John’s problems as a child can be seen as overdetermined and exponential.

From the very first John showed himself to be a peevish, cross-grained individual. The chronicler Richard of Devizes once saw the youth virtually frothing at the mouth in a fury of frustration while he lambasted Chancellor Longchamp: ‘His whole person became so changed as to be hardly recognisable. Rage contorted his brow, his burning eyes glittered, bluish spots discoloured the pink of his cheeks, and I know not what would have become of the chancellor if in that moment of frenzy he had fallen like an apple into his hands as they sawed the air.’
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There were other such incidents. Fulk Fitzwarin was a playmate of John’s at Henry’s court and was often the recipient of the young prince’s foul tempers. ‘It happened one day that John and Fulk were alone in a chamber, playing chess. John took the chessboard and struck Fulk a great blow with it. Fulk, feeling hurt, kicked John hard in the stomach, so that he banged his head against the wall and became faint and dizzy. When John swooned, Fulk became frightened and thanked his stars that there was no one in the room but themselves. He rubbed John’s ears and eventually brought him round. John then went wailing to his father the king. “Hold your tongue,” said Henry, “you are always squabbling. If Fulk has done what you say, you probably deserved it.” He then called for John’s tutor and ordered him to be thrashed for having complained.’
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John was a thorn in his father’s side before he could walk and talk, and the reason for this was the shambolic feudal system itself. Throughout his reign Henry was constantly looking over his shoulder at his nominal overlord, Louis of France. The French king loomed as a more formidable threat once he sired a son with his new wife Adela of Champagne. Contemporary eyewitnesses tell us that Paris was a riot both of colour and humanity in August 1165 when Louis was finally able to announce the birth of a male heir. Through a cacophony of church bells and tocsin calls the capital of France seemed to be on fire as the common people spontaneously lit hundreds of bonfires. A public proclamation established that the child’s name was Philip and promised that he would make France great: ‘By the Grace of God there is born to us this night a King who shall be a hammer to the English.’
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Philip was brought up to hate the English and their kings, his hatred doubtless fuelled by the rueful and envious broodings of his father, who both detested Henry and Eleanor personally and resented their great power. Louis once told Walter Map: ‘Your lord the king of England, who lacks nothing, has men, horses, gold, silk, jewels, fruit, game and everything else . . . We in France have nothing but bread and wine and gaiety.’
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The significant thing from Richard’s point of view is that within two years in the 1160s two men were born who were to prove his mortal and implacable enemies: Philip of France and his own brother John.

Yet even without the unwelcome news that Louis, the supposed monk, had proved himself lusty enough to sire a son, Henry faced myriad problems in securing solid successions for his sons while unwinding the Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of medieval feudalism. In theory feudalism was a clearly constructed pyramid of hierarchical rights and duties; in practice it was arcane and confusing. Some writers have likened the power of the Capetian kings of France to the modern United Nations; to use Walter Bagehot’s terms, the ‘dignified’ aspect of feudal overlordship was impressive but the ‘efficient’ reality was that those who were formally vassal-states and vassal-kings defied their superiors with impunity, just as superpowers do with the UN today. Just as, other things being equal, nation-states like to make a show of deference to the UN to ward off the spectre of international chaos, so in the eleventh century vassal rulers saw ceremonial, religious and hierarchical reasons for paying lip-service to notions of fealty. Most of the de facto independent states within the confines of modern-day France recognised the king of the royal territory in the Ile de France as their feudal superior and accepted their technical position as fiefdoms by swearing oaths of homage. Technically, homage was the acknowledgement of land tenure, while fealty implied oath-taking, though naturally the formal acceptance of overlordship was usually combined with an oath of fealty. These oaths were the most important form of legal obligation in medieval society but, as has been widely realised, the paradox was that by the time the oath was the most important foundation of legal titles, it was itself largely a legal fiction; some scholars have gone further and suggested that most of so-called feudalism is a fiction.
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Men swore homage simply to get the feudal lord’s seal on their title deeds, then broke their oaths shamelessly. In the twelfth century the role of the oath as the guarantor of the feudal pyramid - king, dukes, great counts, lesser counts, barons, knights, peasants - was still potent though of steadily diminishing importance. From 1066 to 1204 it made no sense for a king of France to give orders to his ‘vassal’ the duke of Normandy, and, if he did give them, they were sure to be disregarded or disobeyed. Nonetheless, the dukes of Normandy still went through the farce of doing homage for the duchy.

Feminist historians have gone to great lengths to try to work up the importance of women in the society of the Middle Ages, but there is really no need for any special pleading, as females were of overriding importance, if only because, biologically, they survived better than infant males. Nubile heiresses had to be found husbands and, by definition, in exogamy, a woman marrying ‘out’ handed her husband new fiefs if and when her brothers died. These new fiefs were the source of much of the conflict among medieval states. Female inheritance of land conceivably could - and often did - bring mortal enemies together as fellow-subjects under a common government.
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Blood-feuds cut across the lines of feudal obligation and, in any case, female inheritance almost made nonsense of the supposed hierarchical pyramid by making the vassal more powerful than the lord. In the eleventh century every great man held a number of otherwise unconnected fiefs, each with its separate traditions and history, and held these fiefs from a number of lords. If the lords made war on each other, the vassal had to choose between them, so inevitably ended up being branded as traitor by one of them. To take the example of Henry II in France, he was count of Anjou and Maine and lord of Touraine by direct inheritance from his father, duke of Normandy through his mother, duke of Aquitaine through his wife, and in addition had shadowy claims to Auvergne, Toulouse and Britanny in the form of homage from local lords plus a claim to the hereditary Seneschalty of France. The office of Seneschal was in the gift of the king of France, and Louis had cunningly given it to Henry as it was the Seneschal’s duty to suppress rebellious vassals. One of Louis’s great rivals therefore had a duty to waste his substance and resources subduing men who in terms of
realpolitik
should have been his friends.

To an already complex structure Henry II added another layer when he sought a role for his sullen, jealous and rebellious brother Geoffrey, who had intrigued with King Louis against him. Originally possessor of the castles of Chinon, Loudon and Mirabel - and disappointed at these meagre morsels dispensed to him by Henry - Geoffrey lost even these as a result of allying himself with Louis and finding himself on the losing side. Henry, showing the complaisant attitude to treachery by kith and kin that was to be a marked feature of the Devil’s Brood, found a niche for him as Count of Nantes or Lower Britanny. The duchy of Britanny proper had been stable until the death of Conan III in 1148, but thereafter the territory was rent by civil war. Worn down by the endless factional turmoil and weakened by Geoffrey’s acquisition of Nantes, Duke Conan IV (or ‘Conan the Little’) gradually became tired of the struggle. When Geoffrey died at 24 in 1158 he tried to regain Nantes, but Henry claimed it was his as the inheritance of his brother.
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Crushed and demoralised, Conan lingered on a few more years until, in 1166, he sought permission from Henry to retire to his fief at Richmond in Yorkshire. With no sons, and his sister Constance certain to be married to a foreign lord, he realised that the game was up anyway. Henry nominated Constance’s husband as a cipher duke and forced him to do homage to him personally for Britanny. At the conference at Montmirail in 1169 which ended the war between Henry and King Louis, Conan IV accepted that his daughter should be betrothed to Henry’s son Geoffrey.
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Realising that Britanny was now a lost cause, he chose to do homage to Henry rather than Louis as overlord of the duchy. Since the Devil’s Brood had all done hierarchical homage among themselves and Henry II had made the meaningless gesture of accepting Louis as his feudal lord, it followed that a Breton knight now owed fealty to the following, in ascending order: Duchess Constance, daughter of Conan; to Geoffrey, her betrothed; to the Young King Henry, to whom Geoffrey had done homage; to the Old King (Henry II); and finally to King Louis. Unless all these were in agreement, our putative Breton knight was bound to end up acting treacherously to someone.

The arrangements for Henry II’s first born proved particularly troublesome, especially as the machiavellian king tied them up with devious political manoeuvrings of his own. Both King Louis of France and the dukes of Normandy claimed the border territory between their domains along the lower Seine as part of their sovereign territory. These marches were known as the Vexin, and the Vexin became a regular and predictable bone of contention between Henry and Louis; possession of the frontier fortress of Gisors was particularly sought after. In 1151 Henry had been forced to cede Gisors to Louis but he always hankered after its return.
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Thinking like a chess player, the cunning Henry contrived a way to get it back without force of arms. The key was the new Pope. The year 1159 saw a protracted struggle for the Apostolic Succession in Rome between Victor IV, backed by the German emperor, and Alexander III, backed by Louis of France; it was another papal schism, another year of pope and anti-pope of the kind that would bedevil the Middle Ages. Alexander feared that Henry II would back Victor against him as an automatic reaction to Louis’s backing of his own candidacy. But Henry had taken soundings in England, which convinced him Victor was so unpopular there that his own endorsement of Victor would carry significant political risks for himself. Determined, therefore, to back Alexander, he pretended to be agonising over the choice so as to wring a crucial concession from the new Pope. Two cardinals visited Normandy to canvass support for Alexander, so Henry told them his recognition of Alexander would depend on the Pope’s recognition of an immediate marriage between his son Henry and Margaret of France.
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The marriage of a six-year-old boy to a four-year-old girl seemed on the face of it more than a little peculiar, especially as the would-be bride was the daughter of the groom’s mother’s first husband, but there was no obstacle in canon law, since the annulment of the union of Eleanor and Louis meant that in the Church’s eyes no marriage had ever existed. Now Henry played his masterstroke. Louis could hardly oppose the wishes of a pontiff he had played such a major part in electing, so Henry insisted that Louis’s daughter Margaret be given the fortress of Gisors as a dowry. The fortress would not actually pass into the hands of the English king’s son until the marriage was celebrated, and in the meantime Gisors would be occupied by the Knights Templar as stakeholders. It did not take great sapience to foresee that the limbo period of the Templars would be a very short one - and this is indeed what transpired.
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