Read Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Online
Authors: David Starkey
There was soon an even stranger reversal of fortune. Flambard quickly escaped from the Tower and fled to Normandy. There he plotted with Duke Robert, who had returned from crusade, to dethrone Henry. The conspiracy failed. But it led to years of fratricidal war. The war ended with Robert’s crushing defeat at Tinchebrai on 28 September 1106. Henry annexed Normandy and imprisoned his brother for life.
It was, to the day, the fortieth anniversary of the battle of Hastings. William of Malmesbury noted the coincidence with glee: the English had conquered Normandy; defeat was avenged and revenge was sweet.
Henry I
IN 1106, AT THE TIME OF HIS GREAT VICTORY
at Tinchebrai over his eldest brother Robert, duke of Normandy, King Henry I was thirty-eight years old. Only six years previously, he had been a near-landless younger son, unmarried and with uncertain prospects. Then, in quick succession, he had seized the throne of England; married a queen of unimpeachably royal blood and fathered a son who was the heir of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the Norman kings. Now, with the conquest of the duchy of Normandy which followed the battle, he had reconstituted his father, William the Conqueror’s, empire by his own hands.
I
Henry was also fortunate in his historian and younger contemporary, William of Malmesbury. William was the greatest English historian since Bede and in Henry he found a subject worthy of his talents. The king was, he writes:
of middle stature; … his hair was black, set back on the forehead; his eyes mildly bright; his chest brawny; his body fleshy. He was face-tious in proper season, nor did multiplicity of business cause him to be less pleasant when he mixed in society … He preferred contending by counsel rather than by the sword: if he could, he conquered without bloodshed; if it was unavoidable, with as little as possible … He was plain in his diet … He never drank but to allay thirst … His sleep was heavy and interrupted by frequent snoring. His eloquence was rather unpremeditated than laboured; not rapid but deliberate.
The impression is of a man of powerful appetites, which were held in control by an equally powerful will and intelligence. And, commanding himself, he was able to command others as well. The result was that contemporaries were convinced of his greatness as a ruler. He was, William of Malmesbury concluded, ‘inferior in wisdom to no king of modern times and … clearly surpassing all his predecessors in England’.
But Henry’s standing has proved less easy to communicate to subsequent ages. Especially in England. Here Henry reigned thirty-five years. Nevertheless, thanks to his iron grip, nothing much happened. In Normandy, however, it was a different story. Partly this was due to the primitiveness of the duchy’s structure of politics and government and to its faction-ridden and unruly nobility. But there was also the destabilizing influence of the powerful and hostile rulers based just beyond the Norman frontiers: to the east, the count of Flanders; to the south-west, the count of Anjou; and to the south, the king of France, who was not only a neigh-bour but, in theory at least, the king-duke’s feudal overlord. All were jealous of Henry’s power and took every opportunity of stirring the seething pot of Norman politics.
Most dangerous of all, however, was the fact that Henry’s brother Robert left an infant son, William, who was aged five at the time of his father’s defeat and capture. Henry, once Duke Robert was safely in his hands, showed no compunction in condemning him to a perpetual imprisonment that was ended only by his death twenty-eight years later in 1134 at the age of over eighty. The son, however, was another matter. Sensitive as usual to public opinion, Henry felt obliged to leave him at liberty ‘for fear that it might be held against him if the boy came to any harm while in his hands’. It was a bad blunder, of which Henry soon repented. But by then it was too late. The boy was spirited out of his clutches and, flaunting the provocative surname of ‘the Clito’ or ‘royal-born’, grew up to become a thorn in his uncle’s flesh and, as pretender to Normandy and perhaps to England, the focus of every plot and alliance against him.
The result of all this was that Normandy was to occupy a disproportionate amount of Henry’s time: he spent the greater part of his reign in the duchy. England, in contrast, was left to fend for itself. Which it did – as well as supplying the wealth that enabled Henry repeatedly to take on and defeat the apparently overwhelming coalitions lined up against him.
The extraordinarily divergent courses of Henry’s reign in England and in Normandy gave rise to some of the most interesting analytical passages in contemporary historians. Shrewdest and most succinct, as usual, was William of Malmesbury:
Normandy, indeed, though not very wide in extent, is a convenient and patient fosterer of the abandoned. Wherefore, for a long time, she well endures intestine broils; and on the restoration of peace becomes more flourishing than before; at her pleasure ejecting her disturbers, who feel themselves no longer safe in the province, by the open passes into France. Whereas England does not long endure the turbulent; but when once received into her bosom, either surrenders, or puts them to death; neither, when laid waste by tumult, does she again soon recover herself.
Henry’s own
coup d’état
at the beginning of his reign perfectly illustrates the truth of this dictum: England had surrendered to his firm grasp in a matter of days and did not stray from its allegiance thereafter.
Moreover, the phenomenon was specifically
English
– that is, Anglo-Saxon. And Henry had likewise allied himself to this English sentiment by his marriage to Edith, even though as queen, Henry’s English bride took the Norman name Matilda. The English naturally rejoiced and welcomed the couple, however optimistically, as one of them. But, despite the change of name, the Norman grandees sneered at the
mésalliance
: all but a handful, according to William of Malmesbury, who was half-English himself, ‘openly branded their lord with sarcasms, calling him
Godric
and his consort,
Godgifu
’.
The satire was many-layered.
Godric
and
Godgifu
were the commonplace names of humble, God-fearing folk. So their employment mocked the new queen’s rather ostentatious piety, which it was assumed Henry would share. Another target was the dullness of their court, which contrasted with the rackety brilliance of Rufus’s establishment. Finally, and above all, the names were
Anglo-Saxon
, which, in the mouths of the Anglo-Norman smart set, turned them into racial insults: Henry, the aristocracy was saying, had married a native and gone native himself.
And Henry’s own behaviour gave substance to the charges. Above and beyond his marriage, he openly played the Anglo-Saxon national card and raised the
fyrd
(the old Anglo-Saxon land-army) against his brother Robert. The problem with the
fyrd
, however, as the battle of Hastings had shown all too clearly, was that its infantry tactics were no match for the Norman cavalry. Henry set himself to remedy this as well:
He frequently went through the ranks [William of Malmesbury explained] instructing them how to elude the ferocity of the cavalry by opposing their shields, and how to return their strokes: by this he made them perfectly fearless of the Normans, and ask to be led out to battle.
Thus, by a strange reversal, a Norman king was teaching the Anglo-Saxons how to fight their Norman masters.
The Anglo-Norman elite drew its own conclusions. Henry, they decided, was about to become too powerful and they must close ranks. Another historian, Orderic Vitalis, who also straddled the cultures as the product of a mixed marriage of a Norman father with an English mother, takes up the story.
The earls and magnates of the kingdom [he reports] met together and discussed fully how to reconcile the rebel [Robert of Bellême, earl of Shrewsbury] with his lord. For, as they said, ‘If the king defeats a mighty earl by force and carries his enmity to the point of disinheriting him, as he is now striving to do, he will from that moment trample on us like helpless slave girls.’
‘Let us’, they therefore concluded, ‘make every effort to reconcile them, so securing the advantage of our lord and our peer alike within the law, and, at the same time, by quelling the disturbance, we will put both parties in our debt.’
Henry met the peers in open-air conference near Robert of Bellême’s castle of Bridgnorth and they did their best to win the king round to a compromise. But Henry’s resolution was stiffened by the presence of a force of three thousand
pagenses milites
(‘country knights or troops’). ‘Henry, lord king,’ they cried out, ‘why do you listen to men who urge you to spare a traitor and let a conspiracy against your life go unpunished? … Storm the fortress … and make no peace with [the traitor] until you have him in your hands, dead or alive.’
‘These words’, according to Orderic, ‘put heart into the king.’ He rejected the proffered mediation; took a hard line and had all the success his nobles feared. First, he browbeat the garrison of Bridgnorth into surrender; then, having cleared a new road to bring up his vast army, he laid siege to Robert himself in Shrewsbury. Faced with overwhelming odds, Robert submitted. The king left him with his life. But he and his followers were stripped of all their English lands and sent into exile in Normandy.
II
Henry’s absolute victory over his rebellious vassal marked a turning point. ‘After Robert was exiled’, Orderic writes, ‘the realm of Albion [England] remained in peace and King Henry reigned prosperously for thirty-three years, during which time no one again dared to rebel against him in England or hold any castle against him.’ And, on this side of the Channel at least, the king’s triumph was widely welcomed. ‘Rejoice,’ the English told Henry, ‘give thanks to the Lord God, for you have begun to rule freely now that you have conquered Robert of Bellême and driven him out of your kingdom.’ Orderic couches these words in a kind of irregularly rhymed Latin verse: are they his translation of an early English political song?
But, while England rejoiced, Normandy suffered. Orderic, who witnessed events close at hand, resorted to the language of the Apocalypse to highlight the contrast. ‘Like the dragon of whom John the Apostle writes … who was cast out of heaven and vented his bestial fury by warring on the dwellers on earth, [Robert of Bellême], driven from Britain, fell in wrath upon the Normans.’ Moreover, what was most striking of all, Henry’s own attitude also became different when he crossed the water and exchanged the role of king for that of duke.
The difference showed most clearly in Henry’s conduct in war with France. Louis VI of France allied with Henry’s deadly rival, William the Clito. In 1119, the French king determined to meet Henry in battle. The result was the disastrous skirmish at Brémule in which the French knights were defeated and their king himself fled from the field of battle, ‘trembling’ from fear of being betrayed or captured. This, despite its petty scale, was a victory to compare with his triumphs at Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury. But Henry exploited it differently. Indeed, save symbolically, he refused to exploit it at all.
He was of course sensitive to the fame he had won and eager to memorialize it by securing an appropriate trophy: ‘King Henry’, Orderic writes, ‘purchased the standard of King Louis for twenty marks of silver from the knight who had captured it, and kept it as a memorial of the victory which God had given him.’ Otherwise, his first concern was the comfort and dignity of his temporarily despoiled opponents. ‘He sent back’, Orderic continues, ‘the king [of France]’s horse to him next day, with the saddle and bridle and all the trappings that become a king.’ And he made sure that William the Clito’s horse, which had also been captured in the melee, should be returned to him in the name of his own son and heir, William the Æthling, together with other necessaries for the exile.
Nor was there any chorus of vengeful ‘country knights’, as at Bridgnorth, clamouring for blood. Instead, both sides behaved with equal restraint:
I have been told [Orderic reports] that in the battle of the two kings, in which about nine hundred knights were engaged, only three were killed. They were all clad in mail and spared each other on both sides, out of fear of God and fellowship in arms; they were more concerned to capture than to kill the fugitives. As Christian soldiers they did not thirst for the blood of their brothers, but rejoiced in a just victory given by God, for the good of holy Church and the peace of the faithful.
This clearly is not war as we understand it. Instead, it was a blood sport in which surprisingly little blood was spilled; a game, played according to strict rules, which minimized casualties both on the field of battle and after it; and a trial by battle, in which God was thought to be on the side, not of the big battalions, but of right and justice.
The name given to this complex of values is ‘chivalry’. The name comes from the French
chevalier
: that is, horse-mounted soldier or knight. Orderic, as we have seen, is careful to emphasize that the combatants at Brémule all belonged to this group. They were ‘knights’, he says; ‘they were all clad in mail’, while the fate of the horses in the battle figures almost as prominently in his account as that of their riders. Such heavily armed, mounted troops were another Norman innovation. As was the chivalric ethos which they personified. For not only had the Anglo-Saxons fought on foot, they had also taken a much more ‘total’ attitude to war. For them, all was fair in conflict: they usually killed defeated enemies, whatever their rank, and regularly employed unsporting devices like entrapment and assassination to eliminate their foes. Worst of all was the fate of captured royal rivals or pretenders. Instead of the ‘courtesy’ which Henry extended to the Clito, a defeated Anglo-Saxon claimant faced either death or, at best, savage mutilation by blinding and amputation.