The Demon's Brood (6 page)

What really interested Henry were legends of King Arthur and Merlin's prophecies, popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth's
History of the Kings of England
, translated as the
Roman de Brut
by Wace (who dedicated it to Queen Eleanor) and by Marie de France's
Lais
. According to Gerald, Henry unearthed Arthur's bones at Glastonbury, informing the monks that a bard who sang of ancient Britain had told him the body would be found 16 feet down, in a hollowed-out oak tree.

Court life was colourful, with tournaments and banquets where roast crane was served. Entertainment went on until after midnight. Music was provided by harpers, viol players and minstrels, stories were told by professional storytellers and jesters, there were jugglers, tumblers and clowns. A certain Roland le Fartère was given a small manor in Suffolk by the king on condition that every Christmas he gave a jump, a whistle and a fart before Henry and his courtiers. (
Unum saltum et siffletum et unum bumbulum
.)
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So many prostitutes flocked to the court that a ‘marshal of the whores' was appointed to control them.

Before a marriage producing seven children Henry fathered a number of bastards, the most notable being Geoffrey Plantagenet. He also seduced several ladies, one of whom married Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, after bearing the king a son. Even before the birth of his last child by Eleanor, he began an affair with Rosamund Clifford. Little is known about her except that she was the daughter of a knight from the Welsh Marches, young and very beautiful, and that the king kept her at the royal palace of Woodstock, within easy reach of Clarendon. When she died at the nunnery of Godstow in 1176, Henry buried her in a tomb before the high altar, a shrine at which, on his instructions, the nuns burned candles.

Henry terrified the toughest courtier. His rages verged on insanity, like the tantrum described by Becket in 1166 when he ripped off his clothes and ate the straw on the floor. However, what frightened them more was his inscrutability. As W. L. Warren (his best biographer) put it: ‘He was no godlike Achilles, either in valour or in wrath; but in cunning and ingenuity, in fortitude and courage, he stands not far below the subtle-souled Odysseus.'
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England had never known such prosperity, while the Plantagenet territories in France were unusually peaceful. Yet Henry nearly destroyed it all by announcing what would happen after his death – his eldest son Henry would rule England, Normandy, Anjou and Maine; Richard Aquitaine; Geoffrey Maine; and John Ireland.
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The flaw was that each son had set his heart on inheriting everything. Henry did not expect them to rebel and the mural at Winchester Castle mentioned by Gerald shows how much the discovery of their treachery hurt. ‘The eagle's four young are my sons, who won't stop tormenting me till I'm dead,' was how he explained the mural. ‘The youngest of whom I'm so fond will hurt me more painfully and fatally than the rest
put together.'
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What encouraged the boys to rebel was Henry's moral defeat by Thomas Becket.

Although genuinely devout, giving alms to the poor on a large scale, the king was determined to rule the Church in his territories, ignoring Pope Adrian IV's grumble in 1156 that he would not let clerics appeal to Rome. When the Bishop of Chichester declared in his presence that no bishop might be deposed without papal authority the king commented, ‘Quite right, a bishop can't be deposed', then gestured as if pushing with his hands: ‘But he can be ejected with a good shove.'
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It is unsurprising that his relations with the bishops were deteriorating by the time Theobald of Canterbury died in 1161.
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The pope at the time of Theobald's death, Alexander III, was threatened by an anti-pope, ‘Victor IV'; this enabled Henry to secure his chancellor Thomas Becket's election as primate in 1162, after a hasty ordination. Forty-four years old, the big, hawk-nosed Norman (who had actually been born in London in Cheapside) was so congenial that Henry could not do without his company; he even rode into Becket's hall, jumping his horse over the high table, then dismounting and demanding food. Henry thought that, as his best friend, the new archbishop would do whatever he wanted. But during the last century the great reforming pope Gregory VII had insisted that clergy were immune from the laws governing laymen; a view with which Becket agreed.

Judges told Henry that theft, robbery and murder were committed by clerics, who included not just priests but church doorkeepers and even church sweepers. They could only be tried by ecclesiastical courts, whose harshest penalties were defrocking or flogging. Henry was outraged by four cases in particular: those of a Worcestershire cleric who raped a girl and knifed her father; a Bedfordshire canon who murdered a knight; a Wiltshire
priest who had also committed murder; and a London clerk who stole a silver chalice.
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Becket refused to surrender them to the secular authorities, but had the canon banished and the clerk branded, sentencing the priest to lifelong penance in a monastery. It did not mollify the king.

In January 1164, during a council at Clarendon, Henry introduced laws stipulating that clergy and laity must settle disputes in the royal courts, and that clerics found guilty by church tribunals must be defrocked and handed over to his own courts. Appeals to Rome were forbidden. The ‘Constitutions of Clarendon' took Archbishop Thomas by surprise. While refusing to put his seal on the document, he reluctantly gave verbal assent. Then he changed his mind, arguing that to try clerics in lay courts amounted to a double trial. Henry responded by using Becket's refusal to let a vassal be tried by a lay tribunal as grounds for arraigning him for contempt of court, besides suing him for ‘debts' incurred when chancellor. Summoned before a council of the realm at Northampton in October, the defiant bishop was so awe-inspiring that the assembled magnates dared not pronounce sentence, and he fled to Flanders.

From abroad Becket excommunicated Henry's ministers, calling on the king to atone for the harm he had done the Church, and threatening to excommunicate him too. But the English bishops supported the king, allowing clerics to be tried by lay courts. Henry attempted to obtain Rome's support, so unsuccessfully that he swore he never wanted to see a cardinal again, if it meant turning Muslim. Finally, Pope Alexander placed England under an interdict, which forced Henry to let the archbishop return at the start of winter 1170. Ominously, the king refused to exchange the kiss of peace with him.

Before he left France, Becket excommunicated the Archbishop of York and two bishops for crowning Henry's son without his
permission. In Normandy, when, during Christmas 1170, York warned Henry he would never have peace while Thomas lived,
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the king bellowed that courtiers whose careers he had made were traitors in letting him be treated so disgracefully. Four knights immediately set off for Canterbury where they surrounded the archbishop in his cathedral. Although he could have escaped, he let them hack him to death, one blow slicing off the top of his skull and spilling his brains on the paving.

Henry reacted more like a friend than an enemy. In tears, he kept to his room for three days, refusing to eat. Aware that the Church would use the universal horror to wring concessions from him, he avoided Pope Alexander's commissioners by going to Ireland.

In 1155, at Henry's request, Pope Adrian IV had granted him the entire country of Ireland, sending an emerald ring in token of investiture, in the hope that conquest would bring the Irish Church under papal control. But the king had deferred an invasion. What forced his hand now was a group of Anglo-Norman barons from Wales led by Richard, Earl of Clare (‘Strongbow'), who, except in the mountains and bogs, easily routed Irish tribesmen armed with axes, javelins and long knives. Now, having subdued all Leinster, Strongbow was acting as an independent prince.

Henry arrived in October 1171 with an army on 400 ships, staying for six months, most of the time in a wattle-and-daub palace at Dublin. Strongbow and the barons submitted to Henry's lordship – and were thus regranted the lands they had conquered – while many native kings paid homage, although not the High King, Rory O'Connor. At Cashel, Henry presided over a council of Irish bishops, who swore fealty. Without fighting a single battle, when he left in April he was recognized as ‘Lord of Ireland' by three-quarters of its rulers.

He came back to find Europe blaming him for Becket's martyrdom. At Avranches Cathedral in spring 1172 he admitted before the papal legates that he had been unwittingly responsible, swearing on the Gospels how deeply he regretted it and promising to accept any terms. These were: sending 200 knights to defend the Holy Land, cancelling the Constitutions of Clarendon and restoring the see of Canterbury's lands. After public penance, Henry received absolution. But while the English clergy regained their legal immunity, the king lost very little. Within a decade, most of the disputes for which Becket died had been resolved by negotiation.
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The Becket affair misled Henry's enemies in England and France into thinking he was insecure. A Lincolnshire knight, Roger de Estreby, claimed that St Peter and the Archangel Gabriel had told him to warn Henry that if he went on Crusade and obeyed their commands, he would reign gloriously for another seven years – otherwise, he would die within four. Among the commands were to condemn no one to death without fair trial, ensure every man entered into his inheritance, dispense justice without bribes, reward services to his ministers and officials, and expel all Jews minus their money and bonds.

In May 1170, to ensure an undisputed succession Henry had had his fifteen-year-old eldest son, also named Henry, crowned king at Westminster by the Archbishop of York. Unfortunately the ‘
Rex Filius
' or ‘Henry III' was greedy. Hoping to take his father's place, he went to his father-in-law King Louis for help, joined by his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, who had been secretly encouraged by their mother. In 1173 rebellions in favour of the ‘Young King' broke out on both sides of the Channel, while Louis attacked Normandy and the Scots raided down into the Midlands. Northampton was sacked, Nottingham
and Norwich went up in flames, and for a time there was anarchy in London.

Among those who rebelled were the Earls of Norfolk, Chester, Derby and Leicester (son of the king's justiciar), with many lesser lords. In the words of Ralph de Diceto, a future dean of St Paul's, they did so because the Old King ‘punished oppressors who plundered the poor'.
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Young Henry offered lavish rewards. In England old Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, who looked back to the ‘freedom' of Stephen's reign with nostalgia, was to have a bigger chunk of East Anglia; William, the King of Scots would take the three northern counties (as in Stephen's time) and his brother Cambridgeshire; while Philip of Flanders was promised all of Kent. Normandy, the revolt's real centre, was going be carved up in the same way.

But in October Hugh de Lacy routed Leicester's Flemish mercenaries at Fornham in Suffolk, where peasants with bad memories of foreign ‘castlemen' from the previous reign massacred 3,000 fugitives, drowning them in the marshes. Confined to the North and Midlands, the rebels had no proper strategy while the Old King possessed better troops. His hand was strengthened when Queen Eleanor was caught fleeing to Paris – dressed as a knight and riding astride – as a consequence she was unable to mobilize her barons in Aquitaine.

Next spring, having routed his Breton enemies the Old King dealt with the Scots. Before doing so, he had himself flogged by the monks of Canterbury at Becket's shrine; within twentyfour hours some Yorkshiremen had captured King William in a Northumberland fog, whereupon the rebellion in England collapsed. Henry then returned to Normandy, driving out Louis. By autumn 1174 all his enemies had sued for peace.

Henry allowed the Young King two castles in Normandy with an annual allowance of £15,000, besides providing for Richard and Geoffrey. The King of Scots was released after acknowledging Henry as overlord and surrendering five key strongholds. The biggest loser was Queen Eleanor, who spent several years
in confinement. Meanwhile, as the war reminded people of the miseries of Stephen's time, Henry had no more trouble in England.

Abroad, it would be different. One-eyed, red-faced, unkempt, charmless, a timid young man fearful of assassins and hardmouthed horses, Philip II of France was a brilliant statesman who dreamed of making his kingdom what it had been in Charlemagne's day, and was determined to conquer the Plantagenet lands. He acquired a war chest by expelling Jews from his territory and seizing their money.

Only seventeen, Henry's second son Richard, as titular Duke of Aquitaine, had been given the job of cowing the barons of the Angoumois, Limousin and Périgord. He did so savagely, Gerald of Wales commenting that Richard was only happy when marking his steps with blood. He was also accused of ‘abducting his vassals' wives, daughters and women folk, and using them as concubines before handing them on to his troops'.
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Egged on by Geoffrey, the Young King told the Aquitanian barons that he would make a kinder duke than Richard. The Old King tried to defuse the situation, commanding his three sons to make peace. Early in 1184 he told Richard and Geoffrey to do homage to their oldest brother. Richard refused, saying he was his mother's heir, whereupon the Young King and Geoffrey seized his city of Limoges. Their father spent all Lent trying to evict the pair, his horse being hit by a crossbow bolt on one occasion.

Leaving Limoges, the Young King plundered the shrines at Rocamadour and Grandmont (where he knew his father wanted to be buried) to pay his troops, but contracted dysentery, which killed him in June. He had been so handsome and eloquent that Walter Map called him ‘a little lower than the angels', while adding he was like Absalom, a parricide who desired his father's death.
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Even so, Henry threw himself on the ground and howled on hearing of his death. When the king asked the rebel troubadour Bertran de Born, ‘You used to boast of your brains
– what's happened to them?' and Bertran answered, ‘I lost them the day you lost your son', he burst into tears.
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