Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (28 page)

But despite these losses and his relatively advanced age of fifty-seven, Stephen was not ready to give up without a struggle and he tried to bring Henry to battle at Malmesbury. But he found his support drifting away – and drifting towards Henry. Following this, the Midlands – always a hotly contested zone – surrendered to Henry, and Stephen, in desperation, sought to make a last stand at Wallingford. Instead, both sides were brought to agree to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement.

Its broad outlines had been sketched several times before, in the abortive negotiations which had punctuated the conflict. Stephen should remain as king for his lifetime, for he was the crowned and anointed sovereign. But Henry should succeed him, since he was generally viewed as ‘the lawful heir’.

Both sides came together in a great court at Winchester on 6 November. Stephen and Henry, now acknowledged as Stephen’s adoptive son and heir, made a joint progress to Westminster to celebrate Christmas together. Huge, cheering crowds lined the way; there were solemn processions and assemblies and a dawning realization that peace had come at last. There was gratitude for the negotiators, such as the archbishop of Canterbury, who was congratulated on having ‘restored order to our distracted country’, and almost millenarian hopes for Henry: he was, the prior of Westminster told him, ‘the new light … a leader given to us by God … [who] shall found a new Jerusalem’.

For five months following the treaty, England was ruled by an effective diarchy of king and duke. Stephen, by virtue of his rank, was the senior partner. But it was Henry who impressed the Anglo-Saxon chronicler as the real power behind the throne: ‘all the people loved him’, he reports, ‘for he did good justice, and made peace’. As was only to be expected after two decades of civil war, there were eddies of mistrust and even rumours of rupture between the two former opponents. These the chroniclers (who thrived on stories of conflict in high places as much as any modern journalist) assiduously played up. But Henry was more relaxed. Indeed, he was so confident about the durability of the arrangements for the succession that he left England at Easter to return to Normandy along with his two leading adherents: Earl Reginald of Cornwall and Earl Robert of Leicester.

He did not have to wait for long. After a brief Indian summer as unchallenged king, Stephen died in October. His body was taken to Faversham in north-east Kent and buried alongside his wife Matilda and son Eustace in the abbey which he had founded there. Few seemed to mourn his passing.

Instead all eyes turned to ‘the new light’. Contrary winds kept Henry in Normandy till 7 December. But despite this six-week absence, ‘no man’, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler noted approvingly, ‘durst do other than good for the great fear of him’.

Finally, the weather turned. Henry set sail from Barfleur and landed the following day on the coast of Hampshire. Like Henry I, he made straight for Winchester to secure the treasury. That done he went to London and was crowned at Westminster on 19 December ‘before an immense concourse of people’.

So far so good. But whether he would ‘found a new Jerusalem’ remained to be seen.

Chapter 10
‘Touch Not Mine Anointed’

Henry II

HENRY WAS TWENTY-ONE
when he became king. But, having first intervened in English affairs seven years before, at the age of only fourteen, he was already a political old hand and fully able to recognize the weight of expectation vested in him. He had also had time to develop his own model of kingship and deploy his own extraordinary talents.

Henry was gifted with genuine charisma: he had piercing grey eyes and his physical presence was mesmerizing: ‘his face was one upon which a man might gaze a thousand times and still feel drawn to gaze on again’. And he had a single, overriding goal:after years of anarchy and the degradation of the monarchy he was determined to restore the crown to the power it held under Henry I. For this Henry was his grandsire’s grandson: in abilities, temperament, political skill and even, to a large extent, in appearance. Like Henry I, he was shortish, barrel-chested and with a tendency to run to fat. He had also inherited his grandfather’s inexhaustible energy, his restlessness, his addiction to hunting, his gross sexual appetites, his personal simplicity, his attention to detail, his acute intelligence and his memory.

But his Angevin ancestors left their mark as well. He had that family’s red hair, which he kept close cropped, and a redhead’s temper to boot. Napoleon jumped on his hat in his rages; both Kissinger’s feet left the ground simultaneously in his; while Hitler, allegedly, chewed carpets during his paroxysms. Henry went further, and, on one documented occasion, ate his bedding. He ‘fell out of bed screaming, tore up his coverlet, and threshed around the floor, cramming his mouth with the stuffing of his mattress’.

And all because someone had uttered a misplaced word of praise for the king of Scots!

These ungovernable rages could easily have undone all his good qualities. But Henry knew himself well enough rarely to take important decisions in them. And his councillors and attendants likewise knew him well enough to disregard what he uttered when the rage was on him.

Only once, and with immeasurable consequences, do they seem to have taken him at his angry word.

I

Henry’s first task was to assemble the personnel of his government. Here again, he was building on the foundations his grandfather had laid. The great administrative offices of state had originally appeared in the first Henry’s reign; so had the pools of administrative talent. And Henry drew directly on these in his reappointment of Bishop Nigel, the surviving representative of Roger of Salisbury’s administrative clan, as treasurer. But service to Stephen was no drawback either in Henry’s eyes, and he appointed men of talent regardless of previous loyalties and betrayals.

Henry’s final appointment was to the chancellorship. Here he was guided in his choice by Archbishop Theobald, who recommended his favourite clerk, Thomas Becket, archdeacon of Canterbury. Becket, son of a middling City merchant of Norman stock, was the consummate man of business. Indeed, he was to the chancellorship what Roger of Salisbury had been to the justiciarship: he made the office rather than the office making him. Hitherto it had been a second-rank position, whose holder remained in charge of the king’s chapel as well as supervising the staff of royal writing clerks who made up the Chancery proper. Becket elevated the chancellorship from this clerical-bureaucratic backwater into a kind of ministry of all departments, with himself as minister of all the talents: secretary, soldier, diplomat and judge. He excelled at every role he took; won the king’s absolute confidence and friendship; became very rich and spent his wealth with a delighted ostentation which made the sharpest contrast with the frugality of the king.

In 1158, for example, he performed a formal entrée into Paris to begin negotiations for a marriage between Louis VII’s daughter and Henry’s eldest surviving son. Chancellor Becket rode in procession through the streets, surrounded by a swarm of flunkies and squires and followed by wagons loaded with barrels of beer and chests of gold and richly caparisoned packhorses mounted with monkeys. When Henry himself arrived, he was less impressively equipped than Becket’s servants.

But it was all done, as Becket’s successor in the chancellorship and namesake, Thomas Wolsey, would have said, for the king’s honour.

Henry’s administrative appointments were all very well. But the real weakness of royal government in Stephen’s reign lay, not so much at the centre, as in the localities. It was this that Henry now proceeded to remedy. He would show himself to his kingdom: seeing and being seen. And, above all, he would impose his will – even on his greatest subjects. One of the most contentious clauses of the Treaty of Winchester, which had ended the civil war, was the requirement that the barons should demolish unlicensed or (in the contemporary jargon) ‘adulterine’ castles. At the Christmas court, held at Bermondsey immediately after his coronation, Henry reiterated this order.

And woe betide any great lord who defied the young king’s command. Henry confronted a series of over-mighty lords who had taken advantage of royal weakness and established quasi-regal power in their domains. One by one the defiant grimaces were wiped off their faces and they surrendered their castles to the overwhelming royal force that appeared in their locales.

Hugh de Mortimer was not to be faced down, however. ‘Estimating the king to be a mere boy and indignant at his activity’, he tried to fortify his castles of Cleobury, Wigmore and Bridgnorth against the king. Henry marched against him in person, put all three castles under siege, and surrounded Bridgnorth with a wall and ditch so that Hugh could not escape.

Hugh’s submission to the king was turned into a piece of high political theatre. It was witnessed by a specially convened and impressively well-attended great council of bishops, earls and barons.

Bridgnorth had also been the scene of an earlier royal victory. Over fifty years previously, in 1102, Henry I had defeated
his
over-mighty subject, Robert of Bellême, in a similar set-piece siege, and, by his victory, had secured an unchallenged hold on England. In view both of his identification with his grandfather and the fact that he had ‘at his finger tips a ready knowledge of nearly the whole of history’, it seems inconceivable that the younger Henry was unaware that he was treading so precisely in the older Henry’s footsteps.

Another person who took a serious interest in history was Bishop Henry of Winchester. For twenty years this princely bishop, secure in his royal blood, his vast wealth and his talents as a political intriguer, had helped make and unmake the rulers of England. No more. Faced after Bridgnorth with the need to bow the knee to Henry with the rest, he baulked and fled. Henry took advantage of the fact that he had left the realm without permission to strip him of the earldom of Hampshire, which he had effectively held, and seize and demolish his many castles. He was left with his bishopric. But it was princely no longer.

With Bridgnorth and the fall of Bishop Henry, England was now Henry II’s as unquestionably and unconditionally as it had been his grandfather’s. But Henry was not content with England. Instead he aspired to the dominion, even the empire, of all Britain, which, under the vague title of
bretwalda
, had been claimed by the greatest of the Anglo-Saxon kings.

He began with Scotland, which under David I had taken advantage of the civil wars in England to push its borders south. Here Henry enjoyed his customary good luck. For David was succeeded by his grandson, Malcolm IV of Scots, who was aged only eleven at the time of his accession and was to be surnamed ‘the Maiden’. Such a youth was no match for Henry, and when he was summoned to meet the king at Chester in July 1157, he agreed to surrender all his grandfather’s gains in England. At the same time, he paid Henry homage and joined him in the major campaign which Henry now launched against the Welsh, who had also taken advantage of the anarchy of Stephen’s reign to regain great swathes of territory from the Anglo-Norman marcher lords.

The meeting of Henry and Malcolm at Chester was, almost certainly, another piece of historicist playacting laid on by Henry as royal drama-turge. For it was at Chester that Henry’s Anglo-Saxon predecessor, Edgar, following his ‘imperial’ coronation at Bath in 979, had been rowed in the Dee by six or eight Scottish, Welsh, and Irish kinglets in an act of ritual homage. Henry, I think, was ticking off this list. Following Malcolm’s homage, only Ireland was left.

Henry determined to tick that too. And, as his luck would have it again, he had an important ally in the quest. For, a few days before his own coronation in December 1154, a new pope had been crowned: Nicholas Breakspear, who reigned as Adrian IV. Breakspear was the first (and last) Englishman to ascend the throne of St Peter. After a flattering embassy from Henry, the new pope had no hesitation in giving his blessing to Henry’s conquest of Ireland.

It remained only to secure the agreement of the English political establishment. Once again, Henry’s sense of the dramatic came into play: the deed would be done at Winchester. Bishop Henry’s flight from his see had set the seal on Henry’s political dominance in his original kingdom of England. Where better to inaugurate the conquest of his new?

The great council duly met at Winchester on 29 September 1155. But Henry encountered stiff opposition and the project had to be shelved. The king did not forget it, however. Nor, fired with the prospects of fresh conquests and fresh spoil, did his leading courtiers.

But England, even Britain, was only a part of the vast conglomeration of territories that Henry ruled. These now demanded his attention, and almost six out of the next seven years, from 1156 to 1162, were spent on the Continent – seeing off rivals, recovering old claims and pressing new ones.

His first challenge came from his younger brother, Geoffrey, who had been left their father’s territories in Anjou and Maine. Anjou lay at the heart of Henry’s French dominions. He wanted it. So first he contained Geoffrey by diplomacy, isolating him at a family conference and having their father’s will set aside by the ever-obliging Adrian IV. Finally, in compensation, he reduced him to the single castle of Loudun. Then he installed Geoffrey in Nantes. And when Geoffrey died unexpectedly in 1158, Henry got his hands on Nantes as well.

He also wanted the territories of the Vexin, which lay between Normandy and the Ile de France. Henry had sacrificed the Vexin in 1151 to secure Louis VII’s recognition of his claim to Normandy. Now he set himself to recover it. In a summit conference at Paris in 1158, Henry and Louis agreed on the marriage of Louis’s daughter Marguerite to Henry’s eldest surviving son Henry, with the Vexin as Marguerite’s dower. Louis thought that the marriage was a promissory note rather than cash in hand since the groom was less than four and the bride was only a few months old.