Richard & John: Kings at War (10 page)

Never a man to panic, Henry II calmly stood on the defensive, waiting to see what his enemies would do. His situation would have been perilous indeed, if there had been a first-class military mind directing the coalition, as he simply did not have the manpower to cover all the potential theatres of war. It would have been easy to catch Henry between two fires, depriving him of any local military supremacy, and he would have been forced to act lest the fence-sitters concluded he was losing and started stampeding to join the Young King. On paper, then, he had few obvious cards to play. What he did have was vast financial resources and, as a consequence of this, a fearsome battle-hardened army of ruthless mercenaries of alien tongue - Basques, Brabançons, Navarrese, Germans. The role of mercenaries was crucial in medieval warfare. They were usually either crossbowmen or light horsemen, armoured in mail, unable to face charging knights. These ‘routiers’ were essential for siegework, as knights got bored with it and could not be disciplined; mercenaries on the other hand, once paid, had either to obey orders or be hanged. Routiers were regarded as low-lives, beyond the pale, condemned to eternal damnation by the Church, since in canon law a man who risked his life for wages was a kind of suicide. A mercenary was automatically excommunicate, whereas a vassal following his liege lord escaped theological anathema because he was merely fulfilling his feudal obligation to a superior. Only real thugs and gangsters served as mercenaries; when not employed they banded together as highwaymen or ‘routiers’ properly so-called, to loot, rape and plunder. They were largely recruited from the Low Countries, where there was surplus population. Such was Henry’s secret weapon.
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Henry also took heart from the failure of large parts of faction-ridden Aquitaine to join his enemies - they used the civil war as a golden opportunity to pursue ancient feuds that Henry’s rule had hitherto dampened down - and from his low opinion of King Louis’s strategic skills. In this last judgement he was soon proved correct. Instead of coordinating simultaneous assaults on all parts of the Angevin empire, in May Louis and the Young King began operations with a less than inspired three-pronged probe into eastern Normandy, which gave Richard his first taste of battle; the idea was that all three armies would converge on Rouen while Earl Hugh of Chester led the Bretons in the west on a diversionary thrust. The Young King invested the castle of Gournay, Louis of France besieged Verneuil, while Philip of Flanders, commanding the northern operation, laid siege to Drincourt but lost heart after his brother Matthew of Boulogne was killed by a sniper’s crossbow quarrel at the end of August, and ordered a retreat. Louis ordered all coalition forces to pull back, but this was a grave error. Sensing that his moment had come, Henry made one of his lightning counter-attacks, first routing King Louis’s rearguard near Vernueil, then turning rapidly westwards to bottle up the Breton rebels at Dol, west of Avranches, in eastern Britanny. The Bretons had imagined themselves to be along for the easiest of rides but now, panic-stricken at Henry’s forced marches, they lost their nerve and surrendered without a fight; Earl Hugh and Ralph de Fougeres became Henry’s first prize captives of the campaign.
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The outcome was much as Henry had hoped and imagined. Louis, a man who liked easy victories, became despondent and put out peace feelers. A conference was held at Gisors, where Henry offered generous terms to his sons: four castles and half the revenues of Aquitaine to Richard, with similar proposals to Geoffrey and the Young King. He was even prepared to increase the revenues on the decision of an independent arbitrator but adamantly refused to waive his overall jurisdiction.
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Louis advised the sons to reject the terms, for Earl Robert of Leicester had put fire in his belly and proposed a new stratagem. The earl crossed to Norfolk with a force of Flemings and joined the English rebels at Framlingham. The grand rendezvous point for all the Young King’s English supporters was to be Leicester, but, as the East Anglian force under Earl Robert marched west, it was intercepted and defeated by a scratch force loyal to Henry II that was said to have been outnumbered four to one. Great slaughter ensued in the fens, and Earl Robert joined the lengthening roster of rebel captives. Freed from immediate anxieties in England, Henry campaigned in Touraine and on the Loire during November-January 1173-74, ignoring the usual ‘winter quarters’ break from fighting. After leading his Brabançons in a thrust south of Chinon, taking the castles of La Haye, Preuilly and Champigny and threatening the lands of Ralph de Faye, he had another of those amazing strokes of luck that always seemed to attend him. His wife Eleanor tried to escape from the war zone and join her sons, but on the road from Poitiers to Paris was captured while disguised as a man, betrayed, some said, by Henry’s secret agents in Poitou; henceforth she would be Henry’s prisoner and never see freedom again until his death. Meanwhile, a major French attack on the nodal town of Séez in southern Normandy was also beaten off by his forces. By the spring of 1174 the initiative seemed to lie with Henry, and Louis’s defeatism was again pronounced.
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Henry could now afford to regroup, retrench and consolidate. Louis dithered over his next move right through spring and into summer. Finally, he opted for the strategy he should have employed from the very beginning. To draw Henry from his position in Normandy, the coalition would have to mount a major threat to England and this time the omens were propitious, for King William of Scotland was finally ready to make his move. In collusion with northern rebels under Roger de Mowbray and secretly advised by the bishop of Durham, William crossed the border, laid siege to Carlisle and proceeded to gobble up a string of lesser castles at Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth. Yet the war in England soon bogged down in an inconclusive struggle in the Midlands, centring around the rebel stronghold of Leicester, with coalition forces maybe just having the edge for a while. But King William’s campaign in the north-east was running out of steam, with Carlisle, held for Henry II, still defiant, and meanwhile King Henry’s bastard son scored a crushing victory over Roger de Mowbray, who was trying to link up with the rebel core at Leicester.
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And still Henry remained unperturbed in Normandy, refusing to cross the Channel and provide Louis with the opportunity he yearned for: another invasion of the northern Angevin empire. The coalition therefore braced itself for what it hoped would be the masterstroke: a substantial invasion of England to be led by Count Philip of Flanders and his Flemings. Finally alarmed by this, Henry sailed from Barfleur to England on 7 July. When the coalition learned of his arrival, they foolishly did not press on with the invasion plan and instead Philip of Flanders joined Louis for a large-scale assault on eastern Normandy and Rouen.
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Yet even while they drew up their forces outside Rouen, Henry enjoyed yet another slice of his almost supernatural good luck. On arrival in England, the king visited Becket’s tomb at Canterbury and, barefoot and fasting, submitted to a public scourging, to show that the cause of the rebels had nothing to do with vindicating the cause of St Thomas. A few days later it seemed that God had given him the nod of approval. On 13 July King William of Scotland and his knights were surprised in the mist near Alnwick by a scratch force of loyalists; among the few who survived the resultant slaughter was William himself. The capture of the Scottish king tore the heart out of the rebels, who felt themselves accursed. Henry moved rapidly down to the Midlands, where the opposition collapsed like a house of cards.
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So easy was his victory that the king was back in Barfleur on 8 August, just a month after he had departed. Thinking he had all the time in the world, Louis had gone about the siege of Rouen in a leisurely fashion, and now he was taken in the rear. So desperate was Louis to seize Rouen that he tried to take the city by trickery, breaking the sacred terms of a truce as part of the subterfuge, but just failing, again in the most aleatory circumstances. When Henry and his army arrived next day and began mauling the French troops, Louis once more lost heart and retreated. By the end of September he was suing for peace.
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As King Henry’s treasurer gloatingly remarked: ‘So the mighty learned that to wrest the club from the hand of Hercules was no easy task.’
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Yet if Louis so signally bowed the head to a greater general, the 16-year-old Richard was made of sterner stuff. The capture of his mother seems to have enraged him so that the iron entered his soul. In the spring of 1174 he tried to capture the great mercantile centre of La Rochelle, using the trading rivalry of nearby Saintes against it. But the young Richard was no match for his father, who made another of his lightning swoops, westward, while Richard imagined he was celebrating Whitsun in Poitiers. Richard and a handful of followers made an undignified scramble to escape and fled downstream to the castle of Taillebourg, leaving behind most of his military stores and equipment, to say nothing of his best knights and archers captured in Saintes.
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But the Scottish king’s debacle and Louis’s weakness soon left the young duke of Aquitaine out on a limb. The three-week truce between Louis and Henry on 8 September expressly excluded Richard, who now became king Henry’s target. Not daring to face his father in battle, Richard steadily retreated, increasingly at a loss and angry as he realised the scale of his desertion by Louis and the Young King. Finally convinced that his cause was lost, on 23 September Richard threw himself on his father’s mercy. Weeping, he prostrated himself before the king and begged forgiveness.
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Henry raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace, but punished him by more stringent terms than those refused at Gisors. At the reconvened conference on 29 September at Montlouis (between Tours and Amboise), Richard accepted half the revenues of Aquitaine but only two non-castellated demesnes. The Young King did much better: two castles in Normandy and £15,000 annually. On the other hand, he was forced to accept the conditions that had originally propelled him into rebellion: he had to grant John the disputed castles and revenues in England, Normandy and Anjou.
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Henry II’s indulgence to his rebellious sons, akin to Napoleon’s notorious connivance at his brothers’ faults and crimes, to say nothing of his leniency towards other rebel leaders, attracted astonished comment at the time, and not everyone approved his merciful approach. It was said that he should have followed up his advantage by smiting King Louis hip and thigh and, in particular, that he should have extirpated the troublesome Flemings. Yet Henry was as good as his word: he made peace on the basis of how things were before the war began, except that he insisted on demolishing a swathe of rebel castles. It was said that after 1174 ruined castles could be seen throughout the Angevin empire, visible testaments to Henry’s determination that his supreme power could not be denied.
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But there were no executions or forfeitures and the king did not levy ransoms for those captured in battle. By 1177 even those rebel lords who had been most uncompromising in their opposition to Henry were free once more: the earls of Chester and Leicester, Ralph de Fougeres. King William of Scotland paid the heaviest price for the events of 1173-74: he had to declare himself Henry’s liegeman, to make a public submission at York and to surrender five castles in Scotland. Henry did, however, draw the line at declaring himself overlord of Scotland or intervening in Scottish affairs.
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All this was misconstrued by those who habitually confuse restraint with weakness. Henry’s motives for smoothing things over were simply that he did not want an endless cycle of war and civil disturbance, which a draconian reaction to the rebellion would certainly have engendered, and he was concerned that the barons who had taken no part in the rebellion on either side had converted themselves into local warlords, largely free of royal influence. He derived immediate satisfaction in other ways, tightening up central government, making tax evasion more difficult, taking a hard line on the forest laws. Above all, he made sure that men loyal to him occupied every castle in England.
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But he could not long allow the ‘neutral’ magnates to be virtual kings in their own domains, and this problem was particularly acute in Aquitaine, where most of the great barons had held aloof during the armed struggle of 1173-74. It soon became abundantly clear that they had not had the slightest interest in the cause of the Young King, but had simply used his revolt as an excuse to throw off the Old King’s overlordship. It may be that Henry was particularly impressed by the cool-headed way the 17-year-old Richard had handled himself during the latter stages of the rebellion, for in January 1175 the king sent his second son to Aquitaine with a dual set of orders: he was to raze all castles occupied by the rebels during the rebellion and he was to bring to heel the neutral lords who now bade fair to turn their bailiwicks into independent principalities.
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In effect Henry appointed Richard his Regent in the south, with full powers over all Angevin armed forces there and all revenues and officials. There was a prime irony here, in that Richard was turning against some of the very people he had urged to rebel against his father, but Henry had given him a bed of nails, since the ‘independent’ lords of Aquitaine were arrogant, contumacious and self-confident, not having tasted the horrors visited on Normandy, Britanny and the north by the combination of mercenaries and blitzkrieg. Richard at once proved his calibre and evinced a genius at siegecraft by reducing the powerful castle of Agillon-sur-Agen, even though his critics have always tried to belittle this feat, on the grounds that the castellan, Arnold of Bouteville, was not a major baron.
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