1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (12 page)

The revolt of Eleanor and her sons triggered a greater war, since it was inevitable that rival rulers would seize the opportunity to cut Henry II down to size. The kings of France and Scotland, the counts of Flanders, Boulogne and Blois all joined in, and so did many nobles from Poitou, Normandy and England. Fortunately for Henry II, the war had hardly begun when his men captured Eleanor; allegedly she was wearing men’s clothes. When the rebellion was over, he pardoned his three older sons and restored them to their former positions. Eleanor, however, he kept in custody or under close surveillance, mostly in Winchester, for the rest of his life.

In the war of 1173–4 all of Henry’s sons – apart from John who was too young to be actively involved – were on the same side. But after that the quarrels between them became notorious. At stake was the family inheritance. When their father died, how was it to be divided up? Henry had not put together an empire that was intended to survive his death. He had built up a family firm, and was going to divide it between his sons. It had already been arranged that his eldest son, Henry, should inherit England, Normandy and Anjou, that Richard would have Aquitaine, and Geoffrey Brittany. Kings, of course, were also expected to provide for their daughters. If they did not wish to become abbesses – and it was not as easy now to push an unwilling girl into a nunnery as it once had been – they would be given in marriage, usually with a cash dowry, to a neighbouring prince. Thereafter the costs of supporting them were borne by their husband’s family. In 1168 Henry married his eldest daughter Matilda to the richest of all German dukes, Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony. Eleanor was given to King Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1170; and Joanna to William II, king of Sicily, in 1177. At this stage only John was unprovided for. For this reason his father nicknamed him ‘Sans Terre’, Lackland.

In fact, John was only nine when his father betrothed him to Isabel, one of the three daughters of Earl William of Gloucester. He was too young to marry without a special dispensation from the pope. Canon law set the minimum age for marriage at fourteen for boys and twelve for girls, but betrothals between children too young to marry were common, and they rarely led to marriage. John’s brother Richard was betrothed first to a daughter of the count of Barcelona, then to Alice, daughter of Louis VII by his second wife, but he married neither. As political circumstances changed, so new betrothals were arranged. In 1183 – when John was fifteen – it was rumoured that King Henry was thinking of arranging a marriage between Alice and John. Gossip said much more than this. Alice had been in Henry II’s custody since 1169. For years both the pope and the king of France had been pressing him either to marry her to Richard at once or return her to the court of France. He never did. When he died in 1189 Alice was still in his custody, as she had been for twenty years. Henry’s steadfast refusal to hand her over naturally gave rise to scandal. After his death the evidence that the king had seduced the young woman entrusted to his custody compelled her brother Philip Augustus to release Richard from the engagement. From then on Philip would not rest until he had brought down the family who had dishonoured his sister.

After Eleanor’s rebellion, if not before, Henry II had a number of mistresses, most famously Rosamund Clifford. Even so, and despite the political difficulties it would inevitably cause, Henry had been unable to resist the temptation to seduce the young French princess in his care. The rumour that he planned to marry off his mistress to his youngest son reinforced the impression that the old king was thinking of an entirely new division of his empire. This exciting or alarming prospect set his sons quarrelling between themselves and sparked off new rebellions against their father, first by Henry and Geoffrey, then by Richard.

These civil wars within the family were not intended as wars to the death. On the contrary, the brothers only intended to bring pressure on their father to give them what they believed was their due. As the eldest son, Henry endured the permanent frustration of living in his father’s shadow. That he had actually been crowned king of England during his father’s lifetime did not help – if anything, it made things worse because it highlighted the contrast between his rank and his powerlessness. No king of England had carried through the coronation of his own heir before, and after the failure of Henry II’s misguided experiment, none would in the future. Geoffrey joined his brother in rebellion because he wanted real control over Brittany – the duchy to whose heiress he had been married. After the deaths of his two older brothers Richard wanted his father to acknowledge him publicly as his heir, which Henry very publicly refused to do – predictably adding fuel to the rumours that he was planning a bright future for his youngest son.

In the event every one of the Plantagenet feuds of the 1180s ended with the death of one of the family. The rebellion of 1183, during which Henry II came close to being killed by an arrow, ended abruptly when his eldest son fell ill and died – to his father’s intense grief. Geoffrey died suddenly in Paris in 1186 and was buried in Notre Dame. The war of 1189 ended with the defeat of the sick and exhausted Henry II by the combined forces of Richard and Philip Augustus. On 6 July, just a few days after his capitulation, the old king died. Many blamed Richard and John for their father’s death. It was reported that when Richard inspected his father’s body, blood flowed from the corpse’s nostrils as a sign that the dead man recognised his murderer. Many thought that Henry had died because he had received the appalling news that John had deserted him. John had remained loyal to his father throughout the family feuds of the previous six years, but when he calculated that the old king’s cause was lost he changed sides. Henry died in despair, cursing the day he had been born. In his long reign he had made many enemies, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Bretons, the king of France, the pope, even his own archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, but none of these had been able to overcome him. What, in the end, brought him down was his own family.

Eventually John did marry Isabel of Gloucester – at his brother’s insistence. After Richard came to the throne he had no intention of marrying Alice, but he didn’t want John to marry her either. The archbishop of Canterbury prohibited the wedding on the grounds that John and Isabel were too closely related – he was a great-grandson and she a great-granddaughter of Henry I – but it went ahead anyway. John appealed against the archbishop’s ban and the papal legate in England recognised his marriage as lawful pending the outcome of an appeal to Rome. Since John did not actually pursue the appeal, his marriage remained conveniently both legal and voidable. No doubt John preferred it that way. It is even possible that he never slept with Isabel. The new king of England was determined to go on crusade; if he were to die, John could expect to inherit the throne, and would then want a wife of higher status than an earl’s daughter. Sex with Isabel would complicate an attempt to get the ‘marriage’ annulled. In any case for a king’s son there was plenty of sex on offer elsewhere. John had at least seven illegitimate children, most probably born before he became king.

In dynastic politics the accidents of birth and death were crucial, and were themselves often the result of passion – or its absence. While on crusade Richard married Berengaria, a daughter of the king of Navarre, but the marriage turned out badly. They spent little time together and had no children. In the second half of the twentieth century it became fashionable to say that Richard was gay, and this is still widely believed, although it derives entirely from an anachronistic reading of the evidence. The well-informed English chronicler Roger of Howden reported that in 1187 Richard and King Philip of France shared a bed, but it was common for people of the same sex to do this then. It was an expression of trust not of sexual desire. It was common then, too, for men to kiss or hold hands, but these were political gestures of friendship or of peace, not erotic passion. It is a mistake to assume that an act that had one symbolic meaning eight hundred years ago carries the same message today. Richard was accused by rebels against his authority as duke of Aquitaine of ‘carrying off his subjects’ wives, daughters and kinswomen by force and then, when he had sated his own lusts on them, handing them on for his soldiers to enjoy’. He had an illegitimate son called Philip on whom he bestowed the lordship of Cognac. If he was bisexual, as is also suggested today, it was clearly a well-kept secret. His enemies – and he had plenty, particularly at the French court – accused him of many things, of murder, of disloyalty to the king of France, of betraying Christendom in making peace with Islam, but they never accused him of what they saw as ‘unnatural vice’. Since, however, he and Berengaria evidently did not enjoy the ‘harmony of the bed’, he still had no legitimate children when he was unexpectedly killed in April 1199. It was this that finally brought John, the runt of the Plantagenet litter, to the throne.

Richard, it was generally thought, had treated his younger brother with remarkable generosity – far too generously, said many. In England, in addition to the Gloucester inheritance, he was given control of the counties of Derby, Nottingham, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, and in Normandy the county of Mortain. As soon as John heard that Richard had been taken prisoner in Germany while on his way back from crusade, he betrayed him. In January 1193 he made an alliance with Philip of France, promising to hand over to him strategic fortresses along the Norman border, and agreeing to ditch Isabel and marry Philip’s sister Alice – this would surely have been a marriage of political expediency. But Alice was held by the counsellors, headed by his mother, Eleanor, who were governing in Richard’s name and they were certainly not going to release her to marry a traitor. So nothing came of John’s scheme to marry his father’s ex-mistress. By January 1194 Philip had given John control of three major Norman frontier fortresses, Arques, Drincourt and Evreux, and in return had received John’s promise that he would cede the whole of eastern Normandy to him. To offer to surrender lands that had been held by his ancestors for nearly three hundred years was a staggering betrayal, not just of his own crusader brother but of the whole dynasty.

No sooner had Richard been released than John changed sides again. Indeed, he did this so quickly and quietly that he was able to go to Evreux and have its French garrison killed while they still thought he was their commanding officer. He had now betrayed the king of France too. Treachery was a matter of deception and timing. It was one thing to oppose your father openly, and even – as Richard had done – to take up arms against him. It was quite another to pretend to be loyal but switch allegiance precisely at that moment when your support was most needed. John’s record of treachery between 1189 and 1194 was such that William of Newburgh called him ‘nature’s enemy’. After 1194 he seems to have worked hard to recover his brother’s trust and by 1197 he was regarded as heir presumptive to all of Richard’s dominions. When a wound from a crossbow bolt turned gangrenous, Richard named John as his successor.

When John became king he divorced the childless Isabel and married Isabella of Angoulême, in August 1200. His new queen was young; she looked about twelve, observed one chronicler. Their first child, Henry, was not born until 1207, and hence was still far too young to play a political role in 1215. Had there been an active heir to the throne in 1215, those who opposed John would have turned to him; there would have been no Magna Carta.

In other ways too family politics played its part in the making of Magna Carta. It was believed that the two fiercest of John’s baronial enemies, Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter, had personal reasons for taking up arms against him – even, John thought, trying to assassinate him. Eustace was angered by John’s attempt to seduce his wife, Margaret, daughter of King William of Scotland. According to later gossip, the de Vesci honour was only saved by the device of placing a suitably disguised prostitute in the king’s bed in place of Margaret. Robert FitzWalter announced far and wide that the king had attempted to rape his daughter. A monk of Waverley Abbey accused John of violating the wives and daughters of his barons. According to the author of the
Histoire des ducs de Normandie
, who was in the service of one of John’s commanders, the king was ‘a very bad man, cruel and lecherous’.

There was nothing unusual about a king having mistresses, including aristocratic mistresses; most of them did. Indeed, William of Newburgh said that for a young king to remain celibate was a greater miracle than raising someone from the dead. But John’s assaults on unwilling women of high status, the wives and daughters of his barons, was quite another matter. Whether true or not, as hostile propaganda these accusations of sexual harassment helped to establish the image of him as an immoral and bullying king who was unable to keep his desires under control.

Immediately after concluding peace, we will remove from the kingdom all alien knights, crossbowmen, sergeants and mercenary soldiers who have come with horses and arms to the hurt of the realm
.

Magna Carta, Clause 51

I
n 1215 the ethos of the English nobility and gentry was military. Their houses were often designed to look far more defensible than they really were. Fencing masters and weapons instructors trained young aristocrats to handle weapons, and these skills were much admired. A model knight such as Tristan ‘learned to ride nimbly with shield and lance, to spur his mount skilfully on either flank, put it to the gallop with dash, wheel and give it free rein, and urge it on with his knees, all in strict accordance with the chivalric art’. The knightly art of fighting on horseback was extremely difficult to master – for horse as well as rider. Hunting helped to hone some of the necessary skills, but for real training in the art of chivalric combat, you had to go to the tournament, a serious war-game devised in the twelfth century.