Luscombe D., Riley-Smith J. The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 4: c. 1024-c. 1198, Part 2
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England and the Angevin dominions, 1137–1204 561
a difficulty and recentlymade more difficult by the short-lived, yet troublesome,
rebellion of his brother, Elias. Most of all, the spectre confronting Stephen now
was not one of a woman trying to rule in a man’s world, nor of an alien Angevin
trying to conquer the Anglo-Norman world, but of Henry himself, Norman
duke, grandson and namesake of Henry I. Both Stephen and Eustace, realizing
that the stakes were changing, tried desperately to capture the newly knighted
youth in 1149 while he was in England.
Still, the political situation remained fluid. If Pope Eugenius continued
to be unmovable on the question of Eustace’s anointing, Louis VII’s coming
home from the crusade brought promise of a renewed alliance. The French
king was at odds with Count Geoffrey over his treatment of their vassal Giraud
Berlai, the seneschal of Poitou. Throughout 1150 diplomatic missions were sent
by the English, Normans and Angevins to Paris, each vying for Louis’s support.
The death of Abbot Suger, Louis’s chief adviser, who favoured supporting the
Angevins, and Geoffrey’s pressing of the siege of Giraud’s castle of Montreuil-
Bellay led the French king in 1151 to join his brother-in-law Eustace in an attack
on Normandy. Momentarily the Angevin cause was in jeopardy. Louis had yet
to recognize Henry as duke. If Normandy were overrun, perhaps Eustace might
claim the title. In any event, attacking Normandy kept Henry out of England.
It was a good strategy.
Count Geoffrey remained in Anjou during the crisis just long enough to
bring about a successful conclusion to his three-year siege of Montreuil-Bellay (a
feat which much impressed contemporaries), and then moved with an Angevin
army up into Normandy where he joined his son. Few in the French camp
were comfortable with the thought of an attack on the combined Norman–
Angevin armies, least of all Louis VII himself who, feeling ill, withdrew to Paris.
There, in August 1151 a complex process of disengagement followed in which
Eustace’s interests proved expendable. Geoffrey, Henry and Louis VII met for a
peace conference under the guidance of Bernard of Clairvaux. In the outcome,
Geoffrey made amends for his harsh treatment of the Berlai family, while Louis
accepted Henry’s homage as duke of Normandy, the price for which was the
duke’s agreement to the surrender of the Norman Vexin. Norman–Angevin
arms, skilled diplomacy and luck, with able assistance from the Cistercians,
had carried the day. Son and father finally were freed to concentrate their
energies on helping the Angevin party in England without compromising the
security of Normandy or Anjou.
Whatever frustrations Eustace felt with his brother-in-law’s about-face have
been lost to us; the Normans on the other hand were elated. Within days of the
peace conference, a war council was called to Lisieux on 14 September to make
ready the invasion of England. Count Geoffrey, having wisely stayed behind in
1139, 1142 and 1149,now,in1151, was prepared to leave Normandy and Anjou
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562 thomas k. keefe
for England and fight for his son’s right to the throne. The humiliation of
Bonneville-sur-Touques lay in the distant past. The conquest of Normandy,
the winning over of the Cistercians and the papacy, the siege of Montreuil-
Bellay, the facing down of the French king, had erased all that. Patience and
forethought had brought success. Then the unexpected happened. Geoffrey
died after a brief illness. The catch on Fortune’s Wheel once more released. At
the age of eighteen, Duke Henry became count of Anjou, Maine and Touraine.
The English invasion would have to wait while he took control of his father’s
county. It was precious time to lose.
Even with Henry on the continent, Stephen’s position in England was be-
coming more desperate. Lately, magnates on both sides in the civil war had
adopted a policy of ‘wait and see’. They entered into private agreements with
one another intent on limiting the scope of war and protecting their territorial
interests. The son and heir of Robert of Gloucester, for example, married the
daughter of the Beaumont, Robert, earl of Leicester, joining in some degree of
friendship the two principal rival baronial houses in the kingdom. Stephen’s
latitude for action against the Angevin party was becoming increasingly lim-
ited. The idea that he was rightfully king, but that Henry, not Eustace, was
rightfully heir, had gained ground among the magnates, as it had among the
church. That Stephen never tried to have the magnates swear fealty to Eustace
as heir, or perform homage, shows how little store he put on the mechanism
Henry I used to ensure his succession plan. After all, Stephen himself had
shown how chancy a mechanism it could be. Stephen had only one recourse
left, force. Rebuffed again by Pope Eugenius on the question of his son’s anoint-
ing, the king gathered together all the English bishops in London in March
1152 and demanded their blessing and acquiescence in Eustace’s anointing. To
a man, the bishops refused. Since Stephen had gained the throne through
perjury, they said, the son could not inherit. These were Eugenius’s words, but
they were Angevin sentiments, planted in minds long ago. Frustrated and out-
raged, Stephen imprisoned his bishops, but Archbishop Theobald escaped to
the continent. Faced with the hopelessness of trying to bully a unified English
episcopate, the king released the others.
Henry, on the other hand, had a decisively better spring. In March, Louis
VII divorced his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and foolishly let the ex-queen
return on her own to Poitou. In May, ‘either suddenly or by design’, Eleanor
married Henry, whom she had met the previous August in Paris.
8
The events,
which in a matter of months had made Henry overlord of virtually all of
western France, left observers astonished. Within weeks of the marriage, he
was at Barfleur ready to sail for England.
8
Robert of Torigny, Chronica,p.165.
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England and the Angevin dominions, 1137–1204 563
Louis VII’s response to his ex-queen’s remarriage, however, ended any chance
for an English expedition in the summer of 1152.Instead, Henry found himself
facing the other way, fighting for all his possessions, including Normandy and
Anjou. Louis wanted to ruin his vassal, to confiscate his lands and redistribute
them among a coalition expressly formed for this purpose. The coalition was
made up of Eustace, count of Boulogne, who had rushed over from England
with renewed hopes, Henry, count of Champagne, the betrothed of the eldest
daughter of Louis and Eleanor, who had been declared legitimate before the
divorce and promised part of Aquitaine as her inheritance, Robert, count of
Perche, Louis’s brother, and Geoffrey of Anjou, Duke Henry’s brother. Robert
of Torigny gives the details of the fighting, reporting that the duke’s masterful
defence of his possessions won him praise, even from his enemies.
9
Inalittle
more than two months, by early September, Henry had secured the Norman
frontier from attack and crushed his brother’s rebellion in Anjou. This was
the first of many similar victories to come as Henry fought great coalitions
over long distances in protecting his Angevin dominions. The year 1152 not
only brought him great resources, it also fixed his reputation. Here was a man
who would be king. Finally, in January 1153, braving winter seas, he sailed for
England–anewendgame had begun.
On a bitter January morning, Duke Henry and King Stephen, each at
the head of his troops, met face to face near Malmesbury, separated only by
the River Avon, swollen by winter rains. Torrents of rain and sleet poured
down upon the two armies. Yet, it was not adverse weather conditions which
prevented the all-out battle the duke and king sought as the moment of final
reckoning. Magnates on both sides, like the church, desired peace, not wanting
to engage further in the risks of war. Stephen lost confidence in the lords
serving him, agreed to a truce and withdrew to London. For the next six
months it seemed as if both men intentionally avoided one another in their
campaigns. Stephen still held the loyalty of the major towns, like London, with
their resources of money and manpower. Henry moved about, making grants
and concessions to churches and magnates. Rewards were given to longtime
supporters, such as the fitz Hardings of Bristol, while enticements for defection
were offered to royalists. When the dominant magnate in the midlands, the
Beaumont, Earl Robert of Leicester, openly declared for the duke, the strength
of the king’s cause suffered measurably. And when in late July or early August
Henry finally marched to relieve the Angevin outpost of Wallingford, which
had held out under siege even after the death of Brian fitz Count, Stephen
had to react. However, their confrontation at Wallingford ended in the same
fashion as it had at Malmesbury: the opposing armies refused to fight.
9
Ibid., pp. 165–6, 169.
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564 thomas k. keefe
Peace negotiations, which had been progressing behind the scenes through-
out the year, now were conducted in the open. Archbishop Theobald of
Canterbury took part with Bishop Henry of Winchester and others in fix-
ing the terms. The basic idea went back to the early 1140s: Stephen was to
remain king as long as he lived, Henry would inherit after his death. Feeling
betrayed, Eustace left his father’s court for East Anglia in a destructive rage.
His sudden death on 17 August 1153 ended any hesitation Stephen might have
had about concluding the negotiations. He seemed most concerned about se-
curing and enlarging the inheritance of his youngest son, William, still a boy.
In the first weeks of November, Stephen and Henry met at Winchester where
the king took Henry as his adoptive heir. William was well provided for by
being assured of his mother’s extensive lands in England (she had died in May
1152), the Anglo-Norman estates conferred on his father by Henry I, the cross-
Channel lands of the earls of Warenne which were to come to him through
marriage, and other significant properties, towns and castles in England. If
William was not to inherit the kingdom, he would be its greatest magnate,
and would rule independently, as his brother had done in Boulogne. By this
arrangement Stephen preserved his family’s honour and future power as best
he could under the circumstances. From Winchester king and duke went on
to London, where during the Christmas holidays a formal treaty was prepared
and witnessed at Westminster.
No one at the outset of 1154 could easily have predicted how long the treaty
would hold or whether the civil war in England truly was finished. Powerful
forces had combined to put a stop to the war, not the least of which was pressure
from the papacy, skilfully brought to bear by the Angevins. But Bernard of
Clairvaux and Eugenius III had died in the summer of 1153 along with Count
Eustace, whose coronation they had helped prevent. The Angevin victory, if it
was to be maintained, would have to depend after all upon Stephen’s continued
cooperation and the goodwill of the magnates themselves. And when Duke
Henry hastily quit England for the continent in April after a plot against
his life by Flemish mercenaries had been uncovered, it could not have been
foreseen that Stephen, even at the age of sixty, would die only months later
in October, and that Duke Henry would become king on 19 December 1154
within a year of the treaty’s signing unopposed. Looking back, the events of
1151–4 were extraordinary. They brought into being an Angevin dominion
scarcely imaginable in the 1140s centred on the older Anglo-Norman state, but
including much of central and southern France. It would take four more years,
however, for the young king Henry II to secure this vast dominion. With this,
the history of these regions was changed for generations to come.
The flight of Henry of Blois, the bishop of Winchester, into self-imposed
exile at Cluny in the autumn of 1155 was a clear signal that no resistance to
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England and the Angevin dominions, 1137–1204 565
Henry II’s rule in England was possible after the king’s methodically decisive
actions in breaking the power of the few barons who defied him following his
coronation. If anything, Henry II’s most serious challenge in his first year as
king arose on the continent, not in England, and came from his own brother,
Geoffrey. In December 1155 Geoffrey raised a revolt in Anjou calling for the
fulfilment of their father’s will: that when and if Henry gained England, he
should turn over the Touraine, Anjou and Maine to Geoffrey to complete
his inheritance, which in 1151 had included the strategically located castles of
Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau.
10
At word of the revolt, Henry II crossed from Dover to Wissant on the coast of
Boulogne in January 1156 and reached Rouen by 2 February. In the next weeks
a family conference was held in the Norman capital to discuss the dispute.
Several Angevin family members directly or indirectly affected gathered there:
Henry II, William his youngest brother, Matilda his mother, Sibylla countess of
Flanders his aunt, and Geoffrey. Henry saw to Geoffrey’s diplomatic isolation
by securing papal and Capetian assent to his retention of Anjou. Indeed, he
performed homage to Louis VII for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine the very
week before the conference began, and had sent an embassy to the English
pope Adrian IV months earlier with a request to be released from his oath to
uphold the will because he had sworn it under duress. Perhaps this isolation, or
the promise of a fair hearing by the family in the presence of Empress Matilda,
is what drew Geoffrey away from his Angevin strongholds to Rouen. Whatever
the case, a peaceful resolution of the conflict could not be agreed upon. When
Geoffrey withdrew from Rouen into Anjou, Henry followed.
Not until summer, 1156, did Henry finally force his brother into submission.
Later in that same year, after Geoffrey had renounced his claims to their father’s
lands in favour of an annuity and the possession of a single castle (Loudun),
Henry helped him become the new count of Nantes, extending Angevin power
along the Loire and into Brittany. With Anjou firmly in hand, Henry, joined
now by Eleanor, journeyed to Aquitaine where he punished the vicomte of
Thouars for supporting his brother’s revolt. And if any lingering doubt over
the propriety of Henry’s overlordship of Anjou remained, it was removed with
Geoffrey’s unexpected death a short time later, in 1158.Bythis date England,
Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine were all under control, and Henry, at the age
of twenty-five, stood foremost among the princes of western Christendom.
Henry II’s success in governing his vast dominions with their varied popu-
lations and frontiers rested, in part, on his boundless energy and pragmatism.
10
William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, i,pp.112–14;Hollister and Keefe (1973); and
Keefe (1974). Compare Le Patourel (1984); Flanagan (1989), pp. 273–6; and Chibnall (1991), p. 155
n. 65.
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566 thomas k. keefe
His energy is seen in his constant travels, his pragamatism in his selection of
advisers. Among a group of ten or so of the king’s most influential advisers
during the late 1150s and 1160swere his uncle, Reginald earl of Cornwall;
his mother, Empress Matilda; William of Aubigny earl of Arundel, Queen
Adeliza’s widower; the justiciars Robert earl of Leicester and Richard of Lucy;
the king’s brother William fitz Empress; the English chancellor Thomas Becket;
the Norman constable Richard of Hummet; and the Archbishops Theobald of
Canterbury, Roger of York and Rotrou of Rouen. These individuals, with few
exceptions, came from an older generation, one divided by civil war, yet now
working largely in harmony with their ruler. Of this group, only Becket would
prove a disappointment. Too late, Henry II recognized the mistake of changing
his once faithful chancellor into the primate of all England. The lesson would
be a harsh one.
In July 1163 at the council of Woodstock, Archbishop Thomas Becket infuri-
ated Henry II by attacking a crown project to turn the annual aid paid to sheriffs
into royal revenue. Henry II shouted, ‘By the eyes of God, it shall be given as
revenue and entered in the royal rolls: and it is not fit that you should gainsay
it, for no one would oppose your men against your will.’ To which Becket
responded, ‘By the reverence of the eyes by which you have sworn, my lord
king, there shall be given from all my land or from the property of the church
not a penny.’
11
W. L. Warren sees in this exchange a ‘unilateral declaration of
independence by Becket’.
12
If so, the archbishop was playing a most dangerous
game. His behaviour in 1163, and in the coming years as his quarrel with Henry
II intensified, was conditioned in part by his choice of a role model, Anselm of
Bec, archbishop of Canterbury and defiant opponent of Kings William II and
Henry I. A month or so before the Woodstock confrontation, Becket had lob-
bied, albeit unsuccessfully, at the council of Tours for Anselm’s canonization.
A biography of Anselm, now lost, had been prepared by John of Salisbury in
support of canonization. As R. W. Southern remarked, ‘Henry II might have
noted an ominous significance in his [Becket’s] admiration for Anselm.’
13
When Henry promoted Becket to the see of Canterbury, he was expecting a
Lanfranc, a Roger of Salisbury. What he got instead was a reincarnated Anselm,
and an imperfect copy at that. Becket, unlike Anselm, proved to be an inept
politician whose defiance, often miscalculated, hopelessly alienated the king
and his closest advisers. One such series of miscalculations, which began in
1163 with Becket’s attempt to restore, as Anselm had done, tenures lost by
the archiepiscopal see, climaxed in January 1164 with the death of Henry II’s
brother, William fitz Empress, and ended with the archbishop’s own murder in
11
Edward Grimm, ‘Vita S. Thomae’, pp. 373–4.
12
Warren (1973), p. 459.
13
Southern (1966), p. 337.
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England and the Angevin dominions, 1137–1204 567
1170 at the hands of, among others, a former member of William’s entourage.
It is a story of struggle for castles, baronies and political influence, a story of
two individuals, Thomas Becket and William fitz Empress, tied together by
fate in death, deaths which left their imprint on the remainder of Henry II’s
reign.
Prior to the 1163 Woodstock confrontation, Becket had petitioned the crown
for the restoration of certain tenures which had once belonged to the see of
Canterbury. He sought from Henry himself the return of the Kentish cas-
tles of Rochester, Saltwood and Hythe together with the barony of William
of Ros, and demanded from Roger of Clare, earl of Hertford, homage for
Tonbridge Castle and its town. According to the Actus pontificum,Henry
and his courtiers were angered by the suits.
14
Becket’s contemporary biogra-
pher, William fitz Stephen, suggests as much, saying that the dispute with the
earl seriously hurt the archbishop’s standing at court because nearly all of the
English aristocracy were related to the Clares in some degree.
15
The suits, however, were not without legal basis. Canterbury’s lordships over
Hythe, Saltwood and Tonbridge can be traced back to the eleventh century.
The other claims were of more recent origin. In 1127, King Henry I had granted
to Canterbury control of Rochester Castle in perpetuity, while King Stephen
had made a similar gift of the Ros barony in 1136.Ifsuccessful in pressing these
suits, Thomas Becket, as archbishop of Canterbury, would become a dominant
force in Kent. Possession of the castles of Rochester, Tonbridge, Saltwood and
Hythe would go far to give the archbishop baronial power and independence
to match his spiritual power and independence as head of the English church.
Becket’s actions, as it turned out, were ill-advised but his motives were natural
enough. The former chancellor, who had aided his monarch in recovery of
alienated estates, set out on a duplicate course upon entering his own realm.
After the confrontation at Woodstock, though, the studied opinion of the
royal judges hearing the suits, no doubt with some prompting, was a complete
denial. Henry was not about to alienate the families of Clare and Ros or reward
defiance with grants of castles and knight service. It would have been foolish
on his part to do so.
Following Woodstock the quarrel became more a test over church–state
issues: the archbishop’s right to excommunicate tenants-in-chief without first
consulting the king, the king’s right to try criminous clerks in secular courts.
In the autumn of 1163, alarmed by Becket’s behaviour and potential for trou-
blemaking, Henry pressed the English bishops to recognize certain customs
governing the interaction of church and state. Predictably, Becket refused to
14
Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, ii,p.391.
15
William fitz Stephen, Vita sarcti Thomae Cantuariensis,inMaterials,p.43.
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568 thomas k. keefe
assent to any customs that would weaken church prerogatives. Henry then
played trumps, stripping the archbishop of the castles and baronies of Eye and
Berkhampstead, which he had held since his days as chancellor. All that Becket
would be left with now was Canterbury itself.
Hurt by the king’s move, Becket lost little time repaying in kind. He used
his office to ruin Henry’s plans for the marriage of his brother, William fitz
Empress. After the death of Stephen’s son, William of Blois, in 1159,Henry
planned to marry his widow, Isabella of Warenne, to his brother. This Becket
now prohibited on the grounds of consanguinity and it was within his right
to do so since the two were distant cousins. For the moment, Becket had his
revenge. Henry kept the game and the rivalry alive by selecting Berkhampstead
as the site for his Christmas court. Perhaps it was here, in apartments the
archbishop had built for his own pleasure, that the council of Clarendon,
where Henry forced the bishops to agree to his customs, was planned.
Angered, William sought consolation and advice in Normandy from his
mother, Empress Matilda. What soothing words she had for her youngest
son are unknown. William died on 30 January 1164, just two days after the
conclusion of Clarendon. Henry was distraught over the news of his brother’s
death. More than that, he held Becket directly responsible.
16
The quarrel now
was more than a fight over castles or church independence; it was personal.
In the years to come, members of the dead prince’s household nursed a deep-
seated hatred for the archbishop. They too would have revenge. Richard le
Bret, one of Becket’s murderers in 1170, was heard to cry out as he swung his
sword: ‘Take this for the love of my lord William, the king’s brother.’
17
Henry employed all his diplomatic skills and resourcefulness to distance
himself from Becket’s murder. In time he recovered, reaching a rapprochement
with the papacy and outraged clergy. While these delicate negotiations were
underway, the king kept out of the eye of the storm, first disappearing into
Brittany, then intervening in the affairs of Ireland. This unsettled period,
however, brought to the surface a new problem Henry II never proved able
to manage: the disaffection of his queen, Eleanor, and their sons. Empress
Matilda’s death in 1167 had removed an experienced voice whose wise counsel
may have prevented the coming family crisis. Where before Henry had been
the master of his success, he now became its uncertain prisoner.
Queen Eleanor had borne Henry II eight children, all but one of which
survived infancy. In 1170, their four sons and three daughters ranged in age
from fifteen to three years old. The eldest daughter, Matilda, was wed to
Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, one of Germany’s great lords. Her sister,
16
Stephen of Rouen, ‘Draco Normannicus’ ii,p.676.
17
William fitz Stephen, Vita sancti Thomae Cantuariensis,inMaterials,p.142.
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England and the Angevin dominions, 1137–1204 569
Eleanor, was betrothed to King Alfonso of Castile. The eldest son, Henry, was
married to Margaret, daughter of King Louis VII of France and his second
wife Constance of Castile, while another son, Richard, was bethrothed to her
uterine sister, Alice. Their brother, Geoffrey, was betrothed to the heiress of
Brittany, Constance, in whose name Henry II had taken over governance of
the duchy from her father, leaving the youngest children Joanna and John
as yet without provision. After two marriages and four daughters, Louis VII
finally had had a son and heir, Philip, by his third wife Adela of Blois, whose
ownbrothers, the counts of Champagne and Blois, had been married to Louis
VII’s eldest daughters by Eleanor in the early 1160s. The French king may well
have envisioned the day when his son and heir would rule over a kingdom
whose prominent barons were his brothers-in-law. Certainly, it was in Louis
VII’s mind that the Angevin dominions be broken into their constituent parts
in the next generation. Under the treaty of Montmirail in 1169,Henry II
had agreed to as much by formally designating his son Henry as the heir to
England, Normandy and Anjou, Geoffrey as the heir to Brittany and Richard as
the heir to his mother’s Aquitaine. Again in 1170,afew months before Thomas
Becket’s murder, while Henry II lay seriously ill at a small castle near Domfront
on the Norman frontier with Maine, he made out a will reaffirming the above
inheritance scheme. More importantly, he had engineered the anointing of
his son and namesake as co-king of England that summer, fixing the English
portion of the inheritance in a fashion which had eluded Stephen. But there
were two absences from the anointing, the archbishop of Canterbury, whose
right it was to crown the kings of England, and the younger Henry’s wife,
Margaret, who should have been made a queen. No doubt, Henry II calculated
the effect of the anointing on Louis VII and Becket, hoping that the French king
would persuade the archbishop to quit his exile, return to England and redeem
both their honour by a second crowning, which would include the French
princess. The calculation worked. Becket did return, but the consequences
were tragic. In his manipulations, Henry II snared himself, giving Louis VII
the advantage of playing off his sons against him.
In May 1172 Henry II returned to Normandy, having spent seven months
in Ireland, to receive absolution from the papal legates awaiting him there for
his complicity in Thomas Becket’s murder. Once reconciled with the church,
he was willing to accede to Louis VII’s wish for a recrowning of young Henry
with Margaret’s inclusion as his queen. This was done at Winchester in August.
Earlier that summer Richard had been formally installed as duke of Aquitaine
in separate ceremonies at Poitiers and Limoges in the presence of his mother,
Eleanor. So, the inheritance scheme worked out in 1169 was taking on a greater
reality, although Henry II never intended to give up any of his authority at this
stage; if anything he was intent on maintaining his ‘old path of family politics
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570 thomas k. keefe
and territorial expansion’.
18
He had been working on a marriage proposal
with Count Humbert of Maurienne since 1171. The count’s lands controlled
all the passes through the western Alps. Since Humbert had two daughters
but no sons, Henry II was willing to pay up to 5,000 marks to secure his
youngest son, John’s, marriage to the count’s heir, whichever daughter it might
turn out to be. A meeting took place at Montferrat in early February 1173
to draw up an agreement. Later in the month the court moved to Limoges
where Count Raymond of Toulouse, with the kings of Navarre and Aragon
looking on, performed homage in turn to Henry II, Henry the young king
and Richard. It was a splendid display, one far removed from the necessary
penitential humiliation of his scourging by the papal legates months before.
The young king had watched that scene. When his father, at Count Humbert’s
urging, agreed to give the Angevin castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau
to the five-year-old John to finalize the marriage arrangement, he exploded
in anger. Louis VII already had pointed out to his son-in-law that he was
twice crowned, but lord of nothing in any real sense. The young Henry now
demanded that his father hand over any one of his inheritances: England,
Normandy or Anjou. After all he was within days of his eighteenth birthday,
about the same age as Henry II was when Count Geoffrey released Normandy.
The demand was promptly refused. It is hard to imagine that what occurred
next was completely spontaneous. Eleanor, Henry II found out, was plotting
against him with their sons. And, behind the plotting, stood his overlord, the
king of France.
In the civil war which consumed the next two years, Henry II once again
proved himself the luckiest and most resourceful of princes. With the kings of
France and Scotland, the counts of Boulogne, Flanders, Dreux and Blois all
arrayed against him, with his wife and sons in rebellion, with their rebellion
supported by numerous magnates throughout the Angevin dominions, he
triumphed. And he triumphed from a distance. The count of Boulogne’s death
from a chance crossbow shot in the summer of 1173 ended his brother the count
of Flanders’s campaign deep into Norman territory that year, while Eleanor’s
capture and imprisonment as she tried to leave Poitou to join he sons in Paris
prevented her involvement in the war. Similarly, the capture by the king’s men
of the earl of Leicester in the autumn of 1173 and of the king of Scotland in
the summer of 1174 broke the back of the rebellion in England. On each of
these occasions Henry was elsewhere. He effectively managed his men and
resources from afar, trusted his subordinates to perform their tasks and chose
the right moments to intervene in person. The size of the Angevin dominions
was never an important factor in their defence. What was important was the
18
Gillingham (1984a), p. 62.
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