The Book of Ancient Bastards (29 page)

Cowardly, Duplicitous, and Effective

( A.D. 1165–1223)

By the grace of God there is born to us this night a King who shall be a hammer to the English.
—Member of the Parisian mob (attr. Gerald of Wales)

Born in A.D. 1165 to the ailing French king Louis VII, Philip was crowned king at age fifteen after his father suffered a stroke and began to lose his mental faculties. Louis had been a good man, and a lousy king. His son, clever, cowardly, and calculating, would prove a lousy man and a good king.

Philip did more to strengthen the French crown and expand its power than any other king since Charlemagne. And he did it in large part by destroying the wide-ranging holdings of fellow royal bastard Henry II of England and his quarrelsome bastard sons. Furthermore, he did it by playing them off against each other. Forming close personal friendships with each of Henry’s sons, he supported them in their frequent rebellions against their father.

Initially, relations between Philip and Henry’s son Richard were good—but they soured. The two went on crusade together in the Holy Land, then began to squabble over who was running the show in their combined military campaigns. Tensions rose. Philip was touchy because he was a physical coward who eschewed most forms of combat. Plus, he saw an opportunity to peel off more of Richard’s properties in northern France while Richard was distracted by crusading in the Holy Land. Claiming that he was needed at home, Philip made ready to withdraw. Richard’s reply was scathing: “It is a shame and a disgrace on my lord if he goes away without having finished the business that brought him hither. But still, if he finds himself in bad health, or is afraid lest he should die here, his will be done.”

Philip made him pay for the remark. While Richard was still in the Holy Land, Philip presented documents to Richard’s representatives in Normandy, purporting to be from Richard and returning parts of northern France to the French crown. They were forgeries.

The two monarchs went to war soon afterward, and stayed at war until Richard’s death in A.D. 1199.

Once the incompetent John succeeded his brother, Philip managed to reverse the roles the two men’s fathers had played: he outwitted the dimwitted English king at every turn, just as Henry II had done with his own father decades earlier. This culminated in Philip’s taking the duchy of Normandy from the English late in John’s reign.

Bastard Bigamist

Philip’s first wife died young in childbirth, and in A.D. 1193, he took Ingeborg, the daughter of the king of Denmark, as his second wife. But Philip couldn’t stand the sight of her. Setting her aside, he tried to get the marriage annulled on the grounds that they were too closely related by blood and that he hadn’t consummated the marriage. Not bothering to wait for a dispensation from the pope, Philip married a third time, siring several children by his new wife, Agnes of Merania. But Ingeborg hung in there, refusing to concede that they hadn’t sealed the wedding with sex. Eventually the pope agreed with her, and Philip was forced to accept her back as queen of France in A.D. 1213, by which time Agnes had died.

Stupid Is as Stupid Does

( A.D. 1165–1223)
—Physically large, with a much-noted resemblance to Richard the Lionheart, whose favorite he was, Otto was by common consent an unreliable braggart, a rather stupid, bungling, inefficient but arrogant man, who let his tongue run away with him and made lavish promises he had no intention of keeping.
—Frank McLynn, Richard & John: Kings at War

The son of Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony, and Matilda Plantagenet, this future Holy Roman Emperor was big, loud, handsome, and dumb. Raised in England by his grandfather, Otto was slated at various times to become earl of York and king (by marriage) of Scotland. Both ploys proved to be busts, so his favorite uncle Richard made him count of Poitou.

Otto looked the part of a king, even if he didn’t possess much ability, and the Plantagenets had big dreams for him. So when Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI died in A.D. 1197, Richard I advanced Otto as a candidate to succeed him as both Holy Roman Emperor and king of Germany (in truth, there wasn’t much difference between the two at that point), hoping to use Otto as a counterweight in his ongoing feud with the French king, Philip Augustus.

Nearly a decade of civil war in Germany followed, as Pope Innocent III backed first Otto, then one or the other of the two rival claimants of the throne.

When Philip of Swabia, the leading candidate for the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, was assassinated in A.D. 1208 , the pope switched his allegiance to Otto. In exchange for the pope’s backing, Otto offered him most of the imperial fiefs in Italy, plus the right to appoint all German bishops. Otto had no intention of actually honoring this promise, and once the pope had crowned him Holy Roman Emperor later that same year, he blithely ignored the pope’s insistence on his new rights. Instead, he reconquered all of northern Italy and menaced the pope in Rome.

Enraged, Innocent (a fellow bastard, and not someone to be trifled with) excommunicated him the next year. This move signaled a shift in Otto’s fortunes. Allied with his uncle John (the king of England) against the other contender for the throne, Frederick of Hohenstaufen (who was allied with Philip Augustus), Otto again invaded Italy, then turned northward, and with his uncle, got flattened in the Battle of Bouvines in A.D. 1214.

Finished politically, he limped off to his family’s possessions in Brunswick to hide out and lick his wounds. He was deposed as both king of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor within a year. Three years afterward he died under mysterious circumstances.

Bastard’s Demise

Depending on which source you’re reading, Otto either died of a drug overdose or was stricken by a debilitating illness (possibly dysentery) and begged the local abbot to help him purge himself of his sins in a most colorful manner: “deposed, dethroned, he was flung full length on the ground by the Abbot, confessing his sins, while the reluctant priests beat him bloodily to death. Such was the end of the first and last Welf Emperor.”

A Saintly King with Locusts for Relatives

( A.D. 1207–1272)

His mind seemed not to stand on a firm basis, for every sudden accident put him into passion.
—Anonymous contemporary account of Henry III

In A.D. 1207, a son was born to King John of England, a baby boy who would grow up to be very little like his sour, saturnine father. Sweet-natured, pious Henry III (named for his grandfather, the restless, brilliant bastard Henry II) was generous to a fault, suffered from abandonment issues, and was easily manipulated by his French relatives. The one characteristic he shared with his father was that he was a disaster as a king.

Henry was, to put it bluntly, a bungler. Weak-willed and vacillating, he tended to follow the counsel of the last person in the room to give him a suggestion. To top it off, Henry never got over either the death of his father or his mother’s literal abandonment of him while he was still a child. Constantly seeking approval and looking about for surrogate father figures, when he married, he allowed his wife’s family (the Savoyards) to dominate his government, enriching themselves in the process.

Not to be outdone, Henry’s half-brothers by his mother’s second husband swooped down onto England once they were close to adulthood, hoping to cash in on the king’s largesse. They were not disappointed. Henry showered his brothers with titles, property, and honors. He even managed to get one elected bishop of Winchester despite the fact that he was illiterate, still in his teens, and hadn’t spent a day as a priest!

“The Lusignans” (as Henry’s half-brothers and their followers were known, in recognition that they were the sons of Hugh of Lusignan) repaid Henry’s largesse with repeated acts of violence towards their rivals, looting, pillaging, even killing neighbors, all while Henry turned an uncritical blind eye. This brought them in conflict with the Savoyard relatives of Henry’s wife, and in turn with a confederation of nobles concerned with Henry’s attempts to rewrite the Magna Carta, the document granting English subjects certain rights and privileges that Henry’s father had signed under protest in A.D. 1215.

The result was two decades of bloody civil war. By A.D. 1265, the fighting had largely ceased, but Henry’s grip on reality, never all that strong, began to lapse. In A.D. 1268, he had a bout of what can only be described as temporary insanity, renounced his Christian faith, and claimed to be a follower of the old Germanic gods Odin and Thor. A week later he came to his senses and proclaimed himself once again a Christian. He died five years later, succeeded by another, more capable bastard: his son, Edward Longshanks.

Orphaned Bastard

John died in A.D. 1216, leaving his nine-year-old son as king. In situations such as this, the queen mother usually served as regent, with nobles to help her rule in the underaged monarch’s name. John’s widow, Isabella of Angouleme, had no love for England, though, and four years after John’s death left for France and a second marriage (to a French nobleman named Hugh of Lusignan), abandoning her young son as well as her adopted country in the process. For all intents and purposes the boy king was orphaned while barely into his teens.