The Plantagenets (82 page)

Away from parliament, the Plantagenets had given England a complex and deep-seated system of royal government in the localities. Government was no longer the exclusive preserve of churchmen and clerks attendant on the king and the great magnates dominating their own territories. Rather, the business of government was carried out by a combination of trained, bureaucratic professionals at Westminster, and laymen in the shires who were drawn from the
community but worked on behalf of the Crown. Judges and lawyers, clerks and accountants, sheriffs, bailiffs, coroners and escheators were drawn from middling ranks of men whose birth might now lead them to expect a professional career as much as a military one. As a result, the political community, which under Norman rule had comprised a handful of the greatest bishops and barons, had expanded so far that even the better class of peasants – men and women such as those who had rebelled in 1381 – felt that they had a stake in royal government and the right to voice their disgruntlement in surprisingly sophisticated terms. The principles of Magna Carta, whose successive reissues had been pinned to virtually every church door in the realm during the thirteenth century, had permeated the consciousness of men of all classes and backgrounds. When Jack Cade’s rebels rose against Henry VI’s administration in 1450, it was evident that the English lower orders had a more keenly developed sense of their place in the English polity than at any time in previous history. Whereas Norman England had been little more than a colonized realm, ruled from above and afar, the England created by the Plantagenets had become one of the most deeply engaged and mature kingdoms in Europe.

The symbolism of kingship, too, had evolved. The country now had two national saints: St Edward the Confessor and St George. Together they exemplified the two faces of Plantagenet kingship: the pious, anointed, sanctified king, and the warrior with God on his side. Earlier English saints, such as St Edward the Martyr, or St Edmund, were now largely forgotten, as St Edward and St George were woven skilfully into the narratives of English history, the fabric of the great buildings, and the iconography of kingship. Both saints would continue to exert a powerful hold on the English imagination – St George, in particular, would become emblematic of English military glory. ‘Cry “God for Harry, England and St George,”’ wrote Shakespeare, looking back on the reign of Henry V and the zenith of English fortune in the Hundred Years War. With those words, the cult that Edward III had encouraged and given form in the Order of the Garter was immortalized in the national imagination.

The two Plantagenet saints sanctified the two key centres of English kingship. Edward the Confessor had come into his own during the reign of Henry III, and his glorious tomb at the heart of the remodelled abbey was the very hub around which the Plantagenet family mausoleum had been built. Interestingly, access to this mausoleum was not an automatic privilege of royalty. Edward II, despite being named after the Confessor himself, had led too egregious a life to die as a king. As punishment for his shameful reign he had been interred apart from the rest of his family at Gloucester Abbey. Neither, in 1400, was Richard II’s body at rest at Westminster. Rather, the superb double tomb with Purbeck marble base and copper effigies that he had commissioned in 1395 held only the corpse of Anne of Bohemia. Richard, quite literally for his sins, had been buried at King’s Langley – the resting place of that great villain Piers Gaveston. It was not until Henry V’s accession in 1413 that Richard’s body was moved to Westminster, belatedly to lie beside his wife and the Confessor at whose tomb he had prayed for protection before facing Wat Tyler’s rebels at Smithfield in 1381.

If the royal tombs at Westminster were where St Edward was most venerated, then the Garter Knights Stalls in St George’s Chapel at Windsor were where the more recent national saint received his celebration. (The chapel, rebuilt by Edward IV, later became an alternative burial-place to Westminster for English monarchs.) Edward III’s creation of the Order of the Garter, dedicated to St George and the honourable code of martial chivalry, reinvented the relationship between the soldierly king and his leading noblemen. It provided a spiritual, honorific narrative for the bitter and ravaging wars that Edward and his sons had waged against France. St George had to a degree supplanted even the mythical King Arthur as the hero of English conquest. Undoubtedly, the cult of Arthur – a popular hero effectively stolen from the Welsh under Edward I – had been developed in the Plantagenet years, and Arthuriana had risen from a staple of popular storytelling to a reliable trope of royal pageantry. (Popular stories had developed, for their own part, with the rise of outlaw ballads such as the rhymes of Robin Hood.) But the cult of St George,
as it had been developed during Edward III’s reign, was more potent still. While Arthur gave Edward I an imaginative reason for conquering Wales and subjecting Scotland, the banner of St George had served an even more useful end: uniting in common purpose the king with his nobles and the knightly classes, and finally enthusing England with the cause of war across the Channel. This feat had eluded every other Plantagenet king since 1204, when John had lost Normandy and the Anglo-Norman realm had begun its painful, permanent partition.

St Edward and St George are not the only saints who had risen during the Plantagenet years. Around them were a clutch of other heroes, whose memories were considered blessed, even if they were not all formally canonized. These were the great men who had fallen in opposition to the Plantagenets. At Canterbury, St Thomas Becket’s tomb was the lucrative centre of England’s finest pilgrimage site. The shrine to the cantankerous archbishop murdered by Henry II was steeped in blood and lore, and its holiness rivalled that of many of the continental sites that lay on the pilgrimage roads between the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris and Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Beginning with Henry II himself, successive Plantagenets came to St Thomas’s shrine alternatively to pray for fortitude and to give thanks for victory, and the site would remain a place of the utmost holiness until 1538, when Henry VIII ordered it destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries. The shrine was cast down and Becket’s bones were thrown in a creek. Today only a small candle and a plaque mark the holy site, although Becket’s name is still one of the most famous in English history, and his murder remains one of the great events in the English historical canon. He is certainly more famous today than the other great Plantagenet opponents, Simon de Montfort and Thomas earl of Lancaster, although in both cases miracles were associated with their remains and shrines.

The legacies of each of the Plantagenet kings depended largely on their success in battle, and it was also through their military accomplishments that the dynasty left its stamp on England. Just as English government and political culture had changed during the Plantagenet years, so too had almost every aspect of military strategy and tactics.
Henry II, Richard I and John had much in common with their Norman predecessors: the art of war was the art of siegecraft. The great engagements of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries took place almost exclusively before the walls of castles and fortified towns. Henry II’s largest deployment of the combined troops of his Plantagenet dominions took place – albeit unsuccessfully – before the walls of Toulouse in 1159; Richard I made his name storming Acre and Jaffa, before meeting his death at another siege, in Châlus-Chabrol. John lost Normandy because he failed in his daring attempt to retake Château Gaillard in 1203 from Philip Augustus; his attempt to defeat Philip in a pitched battle, when his allies rode against the king of France at Bouvines in 1214, was the defining disaster of his reign. Three eventful years later, the Plantagenet dynasty was saved from obliteration by Philip’s son Prince Louis at another siege, when William Marshal stormed the town of Lincoln in the name of Henry III and drove the French back towards the Channel.

From the middle of the thirteenth century, however, pitched battles had begun to replace sieges as the decisive means by which the English made war. Battles were initially the necessary recourse of beleaguered Plantagenet kings whose reigns had dissolved into civil war: Simon de Montfort was hacked brutally to death at the battle of Evesham in 1263, and Thomas of Lancaster beheaded on the battlefield following his defeat by his cousin Edward II in 1322. From the late thirteenth century onwards, English kings began to rely far more frequently on the art of the pitched battle to engage their enemies abroad, too. Edward I’s armies stunned Scotland with victories at Falkirk and Dunbar; Edward II was undone at Bannockburn. Edward III learned much about the art of war from his humiliating defeat at Stanhope Park in the miserable summer of 1327, he was revenged at Halidon Hill in 1333, and thereafter an English array on a battlefield became one of the most terrifying sights imaginable.

The military innovations that developed in Edward III’s reign – his use of dismounted men-at-arms to fight at close range, and mounted archers to disrupt cavalry charges and rain sharp death on infantry – would earn him some of English history’s most famous battlefield
victories. The Hundred Years War gave England a sense of military parity with France that would characterize relations between the realms deep into the Napoleonic era. The names of Crécy and Poitiers still ring through the ages, and the revolution in military tactics would later be crowned by Henry V’s astonishing victory at Agincourt on St Crispin’s day in 1415, where the image of the indomitable English archer was cemented. The importance of these fearsome bowmen in the development of English myth, lore and legend is impossible to overstate. English archers riding into battle beneath the cross of St George and the quartered leopards of England and fleurs-de-lis of France; kings of England fighting hand to hand with the French on enemy soil; the Black Prince earning his spurs at Crécy: these remain iconic images in English history, romanticized by generations.

The battle of Crécy, which was fought as the idea of the Order of the Garter was percolating in Edward III’s mind, began the military career of the Black Prince and a brief but brilliant period of English military supremacy that has been admired ever since. So much of England’s royal iconography – particularly that connected with the Order of the Garter – stems from Plantagenet military triumphs in France. We should not forget, either, the potency of the myths and memories connected to Richard I, the Lionheart of the Third Crusade. The term ‘crusade’ still has acute political resonance for Christians and Muslims attempting to live side by side in the twenty-first century – it is unhistorical but extremely tempting for modern rhetoricians to reach back and view our present culture clash as an extension of the wars that were waged between Richard and Saladin more than eight hundred years ago.

Out of the Plantagenets’ military legacy emerged, too, the foundations of the relationships between England and the rest of the British Isles, which have largely endured ever since. Before the Plantagenets, only the mythical King Arthur had ever been said to hold dominion over Wales, Ireland and Scotland as well as the kingdom of England. Yet this goal of a unified Britain under English mastery was conceived and very nearly realized by Plantagenet kings from Henry II onwards. It was Henry who first made Scotland a kingdom under English
control, as revenge for William the Lion’s involvement in the Great War of 1173. Edward I went further, receiving the humiliating homage of a Scottish king, and removing the sacred Scottish coronation stone from Scone Abbey to form a solid base for his coronation chair at Westminster, where it sat for seven centuries until its return in 1996. Yet as Edward and his grandson Edward III discovered, Scots never could be compelled to love English kingship – and indeed, the hostility that was aroused by brutal Plantagenet campaigns north of the border has never truly abated. The cause of Scottish nationalism is rooted in the events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and if Scots nationalists should this century achieve their aim of cutting their ties with the British union, it will feel for many like the long culmination of a historical process that began in the high Middle Ages.

In Wales, too, the mark of the Plantagenets remains near-indelible. The ring of castles built by Edward I from the 1280s still stands, monuments of a long-ago conquest that still reminds the inhabitants of north and west Wales of the struggle for mastery that took place so long ago, and that set many of the conditions of relations between Wales and England to this day. No less longstanding are the grievances of the Irish against English conquerors. For some, the beginning of the long and troubled history of Anglo–Irish relations goes back to the Papal bull
Laudabiliter
, granted in 1155 by the only English pope, Adrian IV, to the first Plantagenet king, Henry II. Of all the Plantagenet kings, only Henry II, John and Richard II ever set foot in Ireland, and none with especially laudable consequences. Yet they did enough both to establish the idea of English dominion across the Irish Sea and to arouse the consequent violent resistance of the affronted native Irish. This was only the beginning of a story that has yet to end; but it was a beginning nonetheless.

Besides all this, the Plantagenets changed England in very obvious ways. The realm was not simply constituted differently in 1400; it looked different. Eight generations of builders and patrons of the arts had transformed the English landscape. The Plantagenets had established grand castles, palaces and hunting lodges. They had employed
the great artists and architects of their age. Westminster, Windsor and the Welsh castles were the most obvious, but during two and a half centuries of rule the realm had also matured in myriad other ways. London was transformed – the capital had expanded rapidly and was well on its way to becoming a major international trading centre. At Dover the massive fortress rebuilt by Henry II during the later years of his reign loomed over the white cliffs, daring any Frenchman to invade. A golden age of cathedral building had seen Gothic spires and flying buttresses erected across the realm. Brick-building had been reintroduced to the realm for the first time since the Romans left. New towns and ports had sprung up – most of them before the population collapse that accompanied the Black Death. Portsmouth was the military town established by Richard I, but others such as Harwich (given its charter in 1238 by Henry III) and Liverpool (established by King John in 1207) had flourished under royal patronage, too. At the same time, the population collapse of the fourteenth century had seen many villages abandoned, though to say that this was attributable to the direct influence of the Plantagenet kings would be to overstate the case.