Richard & John: Kings at War (14 page)

Geoffrey planned his strike against his father meticulously. First he established that the quid pro quo for non-interference in Breton folkways was that his writ should run in all corners of Britanny. He campaigned against the nominally independent Viscount Guiomar of Leon and crushed him in 1179. With growing confidence he then dismissed Roland of Dinan and replaced him with his own henchman Ralph de Fougeres - a known enemy of both Richard and Henry II.
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A better judge of human beings than the Old King could have inferred a lot about Geoffrey’s true filial feelings from that alone. While Guiomar, following the example of so many defeated magnates in this era, departed on crusade, Geoffrey allowed his eldest son to have nominal suzerainty over the north-west of the duchy but established his own hegemony by fortifying the port of Morlaix and occupying it with his own troops. Cunningly, Geoffrey established tight administrative and ecclesiastical control before his masterstroke in 1185, when his famous Assize established the principle of primogeniture in succeeding to fiefs.
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In June 1182 he used the occasion of a visit to his father at Grandmont to intrigue with the anti-Richard barons of the Limousin. The chroniclers tended to impute Geoffrey’s motives to simple moral depravity, to see him as Original Sin incarnate, but it may be that Geoffrey’s devious mind was working towards the day when his father was dead. If a revolt removed Richard and the feeble Young King assumed the Crown, it would not be hard for Geoffrey to become the power behind the throne and the real decision-maker in the land. Everyone thought that, as a third son, he had done extremely well, but Geoffrey thought Britanny far too small a cockpit for his ambitions.
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By autumn 1182 rebellion was again breaking out in Aquitaine. The perfidious Taillefer brothers and their ally viscount Aimar once more broke their word, hired mercenaries and denounced the treaty to which they had put their names. This was the moment for the trio of plotters, Geoffrey, Bertran de Born and Philip Augustus, to find the
casus belli
that would justify waging war on Richard, and he fell into their trap by fortifying and rebuilding Clairvaux Castle, a fortress nominally in Anjou, which he aimed to use against his next most likely opponent, viscount Chatellerault of Poitou.
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Clairvaux was disputed territory, as under one interpretation of feudalism it belonged to Poitou and on another to Anjou. The Young King naturally claimed that Richard was fortifying strongholds in his (Henry’s) domain but, unless he was simply being disputatious or trailing his coat, he should have submitted the dispute to the Old King.
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Nonetheless, he was confident that in an armed challenge to Richard he would have the support of his father. Some say the Old King was losing his touch in not acting decisively right at the beginning, but other authorities claim that the real problem was located in Henry II’s erratic personality: ‘Although extremely sensitive to what he took to be betrayal in others, Henry II showed a remarkable capacity for deceiving himself about his sons, and an astonishing indulgence even to their most patent duplicity.’
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The upshot was that he prevaricated and, instead of issuing a judgement, summoned all his sons to a Christmas court at Caen: it was to be a magnificent occasion, and none of his sons or liegemen were allowed to hold any other court that Yuletide.

In the simulated ambience of peace and goodwill William Marshal thought he discerned a good chance to patch up his quarrel with the Young King. He offered to refute the calumny that he had been queen Margaret’s lover by challenging any of his accusers to single combat. The peevish Young King said that Marshal was simply offering a contest he was sure to win, which was no proof at all. Marshal riposted that he would face any three champions on successive days and, if any of them beat him, he would admit his guilt whatever the truth. The Young King still did not fancy the odds so, in desperation, Marshal offered to have a finger cut from his right hand just before the joust, promising he would fight with the wound still bleeding. When the boorish Young Henry would not even accept this offer, Marshal asked for a written passport and set off on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Magi at Cologne.
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This high drama aside, the Christmas court was notable mainly for backstairs intrigue. Among the thousand knights who assembled in the vast halls of the Caen palace was the inevitable Bertran de Born, who had already been doing his best to whip up opposition to Richard. His
sirvente
on the subject of Clairvaux was both arch and insinuating: ‘Someone had dared to build a fair castle at Clairvaux in the midst of the plain. I should not wish the Young King to know about it or see it, for he would not find it to his liking; but I fear, so white is the stone, that he cannot fail to see it from Mateflon.’
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Meanwhile at Caen de Born lobbied both the Old King and Richard for support against his brother Constantine who held the family castle at Hautefort. In a bizarre but not untypical melange of caddish-ness and chivalry de Born claimed that only the beauty of Henry II’s daughter Matilda, now married to the exiled duke of Saxony, prevented him from dying of boredom during the tedious proceedings at Caen.
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Naturally his best chance to regain Hautefort was finally to tip the Young King over into rebellion, but the Old King’s diplomacy at first made this a difficult aim to compass. Henry announced a conference at Mirebeau where the disaffected barons of Aquitaine could put their grievances to him. Then he persuaded an initially very reluctant Richard to hand over Clairvaux to him. Finally, he sought to bind up the wounds of the Angevin empire by a complex skein of renewed oath-taking. First his sons were to swear perpetual fidelity to him; this they did without demur. Then he sought to impose oaths of overlordship binding his younger sons to the Young King. Geoffrey accepted readily enough - it fitted well with his own designs - but Richard refused adamantly. He pointed out that royal brothers were supposed to be equal in status and so he should not have to swear an oath of submission on the Gospel; if the Young King had rights of primogeniture from his father, he, Richard, had a countervailing right of inheritance from his mother. In feudal terms Richard was right for, though Henry II had inherited portions of his empire from his mother and father, Aquitaine was his only by the right of marriage to Eleanor. Moreover, Richard’s arguments about equality were validated by the existing system of homage: the Young King did homage to the king of France for Normandy, as did Richard for Aquitaine, so, feudally speaking, both brothers were on the same footing.
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In other words, Richard’s case was that, in trying to get him to swear an oath of subjection to the Young King, Henry II was trying to change the rules and make Aquitaine answerable to the rest of the Angevin federation rather than to France.

After much cajolery Richard finally agreed to pay the required homage
provided
the Young King made a solemn pronouncement that Richard and his heirs would possess Aquitaine forever. At this point the Young King drew back and upset all his father’s careful diplomacy. He refused the proferred conditions because the new terms of homage conflicted with the secret assurances he had already given de Born and the Aquitaine rebels. On 1 January 1183 the Young King came clean and admitted as much: he told his father he had pledged himself to the rebels because of the Clairvaux affair. But Henry II trumped this ace by pointing out that Richard had already handed over Clairvaux to him. He insisted that the oaths of peace and the amended terms of homage be implemented and told the Young King that he intended to force the rebels to re-affirm the original treaty at Mirebeau. Finding themselves in a trap, Geoffrey and young Henry recast their plans. Geoffrey ‘volunteered’ to go south and bring the Limousin rebels to Mirebeau and the Young King, in collusion with him, then announced that he would follow Geoffrey to bring maximum pressure to bear. His true intention, of course, was to get the rebellious barons to sign up to him as duke of Aquitaine.
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Even more deviously, he got his father to agree that at Mirebeau the rebels would not have to confirm the original treaty but could negotiate a new one instead. When Richard heard of this new instance of ‘goalpost moving’ he exploded. In an angry scene with his father he remonstrated vociferously: why had he and Henry campaigned together to crush the rebels in 1182 if a farcical surrender to their demands the next year was to be the net outcome? Tempers ran high at the father-son conclave. Finally losing patience with his father’s approach, Richard told him bluntly that Aquitaine came from his mother, not the Angevins, and therefore it lay outside the king’s jurisdiction. The meeting ended badly and Richard stormed out; he swept out of the court contemptuously, without royal permission, and rode south to fortify his castles in Poitou.
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The battle lines were now clearly drawn. The Young King and Geoffrey were fighting against Richard, and expected their father to join them after Richard’s ‘unreasonable’ behaviour. The Young King secretly hoped that, with Richard defeated, he would then be able to dethrone his father and inherit the entire empire. Richard was determined this would not happen and, rather than accept such an outcome, was prepared to break away from the Angevin federation and declare Aquitaine an independent duchy. Much hinged on Henry II’s actions: would he really go to war against Richard on behalf of rebels the two of them had just defeated? And what was the king of France’s role in all this? Just to be on the safe side the Young King sent his beloved wife Margaret to Philip’s court in Paris. He then rode south to join Geoffrey and the rebels at Limoges. At first everything went well for the insurgents. Aimar and his mercenaries browbeat the city of Limoges into joining the revolt, and every day news of the disarray in the Angevin family brought more recruits and waverers to the rebel banner. On paper Richard faced a daunting and almost impossible task, given the strength of the forces arrayed against him. But none of his enemies possessed his military genius. In no mood for peace or compromise, he first struck out at Geoffrey’s forces in Britanny and scattered them. Then, on 12 February, after riding non-stop for forty-eight hours, he and his cavalry fell on Aimar’s routiers at Gorre near Limoges, when the mercenaries confidently imagined he was still the other side of Poitiers. Richard himself slew the mercenary leader William Arnald and with the others used his draconian exemplary methods of drowning, blinding and hanging. Aimar and a handful of followers managed to get away only because Richard’s horsemen were too exhausted to pursue them.
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The Old King now came south with a handful of followers to try to patch up a peace before his empire disintegrated. Already angered by reports that his son Geoffrey had persuaded the disaffected Aquitaine nobles not to meet him at Mirebeau, he was thrown into incredulous consternation as he approached Limoges. The garrison in the citadel of St Martial there - it was yet another city with a clear bifurcation between town and castle - panicked and attacked the tiny royal party; Henry narrowly escaped with his life. He then sought safety with Richard at Aixe, where the Young King visited him and tried to explain away the armed contretemps outside Limoges. Shocked and angry at such
lèsemajesté
, the Old King would not listen. The Young King returned to Limoges to tell the rebels that one moment of madness had placed the king on Richard’s side; the dauntless Aimar made ready for a siege. There followed two weeks of pointless overtures and negotiations while Richard and his father assembled enough troops to deal decisively with the enemy. During one of these parleys the king was again shot at, and an arrow would have found its target if his horse had not suddenly reared its head and caught its death blow from the shaft.
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Still shaken by the Young King’s treachery and scarcely able to believe that his cosseted heir might actually wish him dead, Henry grimly built up his forces, gradually and remorselessly tipping the scales against the rebels. There is some evidence that the Young King himself thought he had gone too far and tried to save himself from the vortex of events, but Geoffrey and Aimar held him to his unfaithful course. Reduced to appealing to the Taillefer brothers to rise again and attack Richard’s castles, the Young King found his fortunes momentarily enhanced when Philip Augustus finally made the first moves in what would be a thirty-year war against the Angevins. The arrival of his Brabançons for a time reduced Aquitaine to a chaos of plundering mercenaries, guerrillas and condottieri. Atrocities proliferated, especially at St Léonard de Noblat and Brantôme where the routiers left hardly a stone standing and massacred the inhabitants to the last infant.
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With the entire south in a state of vicious civil war, the evil genius of the piece, Bertran de Born, managed to wrest Hautefort from his brother.

Like so many others caught up in the confusing welter of feudal loyalties, William Marshal, returning from Cologne, could not be sure where his primary loyalty lay, to King Henry or to the liege lord who had dismissed him. He decided to resolve the conflict by placing himself at the Young King’s side and trying to steer him in the direction of peace. Always Henry had at his side the guardian angel William Marshal and the angel of darkness Bertran de Born. This time events worked in Marshal’s favour, for it turned out that the Young King’s seneschal, who had been the principal accuser against Marshal in the charge of adultery with Queen Margaret, had concluded that the Old King would prevail in the coming test of strength and had decamped from Young Henry’s court. For the flaky Young King this fact, much more than Marshal’s offer of trial by combat at Caen, was the clincher. He welcomed William Marshal back enthusiastically and asked him whether there was any way out of the current impasse. Marshal said that the face-saver for all knights who had made a disastrous mistake was to take the Cross. In a solemn ceremony in Limoges the Young King vowed he would go on crusade, provided only that all existing rights reverted to him on his return.
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But all this soon seemed academic for at last, by the beginning of March, Richard and his father concluded they had sufficient forces to deal decisively with the enemy. Ignoring the bands of plundering routiers, they concentrated on the citadel of St Martial and dug in for an arduous siege. Now out of money, the Young King was reduced to becoming a routier himself, plundering and rampaging through the land, looking for money to pay his mercenaries, particularly targeting churches and monasteries. By the beginning of May his fortunes were rising again, for even Richard and Henry, the masters of siegecraft, had found St Martial a nut too hard to crack. Facing large-scale desertions from the demoralised besiegers, lashed by wind and rain in their tents while their foes in the citadel taunted them, Henry and Richard raised the siege. The pendulum of war seemed to be swinging decisively the Young King’s way when other great magnates, following King Philip’s example, began thronging into Aquitaine, principally Hugh, duke of Burgundy and Raymond, count of Toulouse. It was only with the sudden arrival of their ally King Alfonso II of Aragon that the Old King and Richard were able to hold their own. The Young King, elated by the turn of events, went over to the offensive at Limoges and captured Richard’s old base at Aixe. Then fate intervened. Suddenly, on 26 May 1183 young Henry fell ill with a fever. The end came soon; he died on 11 June.
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