1000 Years of Annoying the French Read online

  It is said that by flaunting this relationship, Henry was trying to goad Eleanor into annulling their marriage, in which case he would have made her an abbess and inherited all her lands. But not only did she resist the provocation, she actively encouraged Henry’s own sons to begin hacking away at his empire with their princely swords.

  Suddenly, the King of England was under attack from France – by his own sons. The biggest troublemaker was his second son (but the oldest surviving one), who was also called Henry. The Young King, as he was known, bore an old grudge against his father. He had spent most of his childhood as the foster son of Thomas Becket, and is said to have declared that Thomas showed him more fatherly affection in a day than King Henry had in a lifetime – he was therefore mightily upset about Becket’s murder.

  Young Henry was married to Marguerite de France, the daughter of King Louis VII by a second marriage. This union had been a tactical move by Henry II to increase his influence in France, but now rebounded on him, because in 1173 Young Henry went to live with Louis (who was also, remember, his mother’s ex-husband) in Paris, where he began to plot a rebellion.

  At first, he was helped by his mother Eleanor, who was based in Aquitaine at the time. She sent two of her younger sons, Richard (the future Lionheart) and Geoffrey, to join the plotters, and would have gone to Paris herself if Henry (that’s her husband, King Henry II) hadn’t objected to this dubious reunion with her ex-husband and had her taken prisoner.

  The French-led revolt went ahead, with Louis and Young Henry storming Normandy from the south, while various French counts attacked from the east. King Henry II, though, had come prepared. Instead of relying on the fragile loyalty of all the noblemen in his vast domains, he had hired a mercenary army of so-called Brabançons – fierce, unconventional fighters originally from Brabant on the Dutch–Belgian border, who had been used by King Stephen in England to inflict some of the worst atrocities of the Anarchy. They trounced the French attackers and sent the surviving rebels skulking back to Paris, where the weak Louis VII announced that he had had enough of all this messy rebelling.

  But Henry II’s success was short-lived. He had such a great empire, and so many eligible, ambitious sons, that he became like the ageing lion at the head of a pride – the young males were forever snapping at his heels, looking for signs of weakness, and were encouraged in this by the senior lioness, Eleanor. Both Young Henry and Richard kept up their demands for land, squabbling all the while between themselves about who was going to inherit what, and King Henry II was doomed to watch his family disintegrate.

  Young Henry died of dysentery after a failed attempt to take another of his father’s possessions, the town of Limoges in central France. Soon afterwards, his brother Geoffrey, who had taken permanent refuge in Paris after the failed revolt, was killed there in a jousting tournament.

  Only John remained faithful and by his father’s side, although he wasn’t much of a consolation – in the end, it was John who finished Henry off.

  In the summer of 1189, Richard heard that his father wanted to give Aquitaine to John. Furious at the idea of losing such a profitable chunk of his rightful inheritance as the oldest surviving son, Richard launched yet another of his patricidal rebellions in Anjou. And this time he found the only true chink in Henry’s armour – he persuaded young John to betray his father.

  Henry II’s chaplain, a Welsh-Norman chronicler called Gerald of Wales, describes a painting in one of the rooms at the royal castle of Winchester. It depicted an eagle being pecked by three chicks, while another, smaller one looked on. And when asked the meaning of the bizarre scene, Henry is said to have explained that the chicks were his four sons, and that the youngest ‘whom I now hold in dear affection, will one day cause me more grievous and more mortal pain than all the others’. Whether this is a true story or a parable after the event, it was now chillingly apt.

  Henry went out to Anjou to defend himself, but Richard and his allies (who included Louis VII’s son, Philippe Auguste) were running rampant, and Henry eventually decided to give in to all their demands. In any case, by now John’s betrayal had almost broken the old King’s heart.

  Mere days after giving in to his sons and their French allies, Henry II died at Chinon Castle (where he had once imprisoned his wife Eleanor) on 6 July 1189. It is said that he died of grief, and that when Richard rather hypocritically came to pay his respects to the body, Henry’s nose started to bleed, as if to show his errant son how many headaches he had caused.

  Not that Richard was the emotional type – he had himself crowned Duke of Normandy, and then headed straight to London to be enthroned as King of England.

  For sale: one capital city, full of antiques

  Richard I (the Lionheart) is remembered as a great English king, but in fact he spent only seven months of his ten-year reign in the country he was supposed to be ruling. He preferred to rampage abroad, and was usually to be found defending the inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean against any kind of religious freedom they might aspire to, or kicking potential usurpers out of the immense French landholdings that he inherited from his parents – Richard was not only King of England but also Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Count of Anjou and Nantes, and Lord of Brittany.

  He held little affection for England, and even said that he would have ‘sold London if he could have found a buyer’, to pay for his crusades.

  It was while Richard was off crusading that his younger brother John continued the family tradition of anti-sibling plotting, thereby making himself the villain of countless Robin Hood films, along with his co-baddie the Sheriff of Nottingham. Or so legend would have us believe. Because despite the assurances of tourist boards everywhere from Hadrian’s Wall to Wiltshire, it seems unlikely that Robin Hood ever existed. Or, at least, that the one-and-only Robin Hood as we know him existed – it was a very common name in the Middle Ages, Robin being a diminutive of Robert and Hood an alternative version of Wood. Robin Hood may also have been a collective term for outlaws that had been inspired by a real case, just as the word ‘hooligan’ comes from Houlihan, the name of a disreputable family in 1890s London.

  Folk ballads telling of a Robin Hood’s heroic exploits date back to the thirteenth century, and are mostly about resisting authority – not a surprising theme at a time when the common people were being worked almost literally to death by rich landowners, and could be hanged by a lord just because he felt like it. In a ballad called the Gest of Robyn Hood, written down at the end of the fifteenth century but apparently much older, ‘Robyn’ identifies his targets to his friend ‘Litell Johnn’ like this:

  These bisshoppes and these archebishoppes,

  Ye shall them bete and bynde;

  The hye sherif of Notyngham,

  Hym holde ye in your mynde.

  Bishops, archbishops and the sheriff: the pillars of medieval authority, begging to get knocked down.

  The Robin in these ballads doesn’t always give to the poor; in one of them, he lends a knight some money to repay a debt to an abbot. And in the early sources, there is almost no mention of Robin supporting King Richard against his brother John – this seems to have been added later to give Robin a higher cause than local wealth redistribution. In fact, to the average Englishman Richard was more of a financial burden than a king; in 1193 he was taken hostage by one of his many enemies, Henry VI of the Holy Roman Empire, who put in a ransom demand for 150,000 marks (about three times the English Crown’s annual income). The money was raised by massive across-the-board tax increases for the English, probably made worse by John, who offered 80,000 marks as a bribe to keep Richard in prison.

  Richard’s release and return to save England from John’s mismanagement usually come as the dramatic ending to Robin Hood’s tale, but in fact Richard didn’t hang around long to show his gratitude to his English subjects – the call of war, and of French-bashing, was too strong. Looking to take advantage of the Lionheart’s spell behind bars, Richard’s old ally
Philippe Auguste, now King Philippe II of France, was trying to seize English-held lands in Normandy and Anjou. So Richard immediately grabbed all the money he could lay his hands on and left England yet again, never to return.

  The war with Philippe Auguste was apparently made worse by an intense personal animosity between the two men. It was rumoured that he and Richard had been lovers back in the days of their alliance against Henry II. That ardour had cooled, but the two had gone on a joint crusade in the Holy Land, and, as with so many exes, holidaying together had only made things worse. At the siege of the city of Acre in 1191, Richard took an active part in the fighting despite being seriously ill with scurvy, and was even reported firing a crossbow at the walls while lying on a stretcher. Philippe Auguste, meanwhile, was laid up with dysentery and stayed out of the action, provoking Richard into making some deeply wounding remarks about shirkers.

  So Richard now devoted the remaining five years of his life to fighting France’s land-grabbing king. And he was so successful that, after the Battle of Gisors in northern France, in September 1198, he made the ultimate statement of his, and England’s, independence from the old feudal allegiance to the King of France. Until then, as a duke or count of French territories, Richard, like all English monarchs, had theoretically been a feudal vassal of Philippe Auguste. But now Richard adopted the royal motto that has survived to this day, ‘Dieu et mon droit’ (‘God and my right’) – a neat explanation, in French so Philippe Auguste would get the message, that an English king owed allegiance to no one but God. And even then he had his rights.

  It was, however, France that finally killed Richard.

  In March 1199, he was putting down a revolt by a minor French nobleman in his territory of Aquitaine, and was leading a routine siege of Châlus Castle, which was defended by only a few knights, one of whom was using a frying pan as a shield. Richard was feeling so confident of victory that he went wandering around the moat one evening without his chainmail, daring the castle’s defenders to shoot at him. Unfortunately, the one with the frying pan did just that, hitting Richard in the neck with a crossbow bolt. The wound became infected after an incompetent surgeon* tried to pull the arrow out, and Richard was soon on his deathbed.

  Legend has it that as the Lionheart lay dying, he had the offending French crossbowman brought to him for forgiveness. The soldier turned out to be a boy, probably called Pierre Basile, who told Richard that he had fired his arrow in revenge because the English had killed his father and brother. According to English versions of the story, Richard was so touched that he blessed the boy and gave him a large cash present.

  Certain French sources allege that Richard treacherously had the archer killed, but this is an anti-English falsehood. What actually happened, it seems, is that immediately after Richard’s death on 6 April 1199, the leader of his mercenaries (who was himself French, by the way) had all Châlus Castle’s defenders brutally executed by hanging them from the ramparts. And he saved the cruellest punishment for young Pierre Basile, who was skinned alive, no doubt as punishment for shooting the hired soldiers’ rich employer.

  But then French historians will say anything to tarnish an English king’s reputation.

  A fond, and strangely peaceful, family reunion

  In death, as in life, Richard spread himself thinly. His entrails were buried in the chapel of the castle where he died, at Châlus; his heart was taken to Rouen in Normandy; his brain was buried in Charroux Abbey in Aquitaine, and the rest of him went to take part in a touching, but rather surprising family reunion.

  The Royal Abbey of Fontevraud, in the heart of Anjou, was founded in 1101, and resembles a castle as much as a religious community. It has forbidding outer walls, a gothic central courtyard that looks more like a jousting arena than a cloister, and a tower with a cluster of turrets like organ pipes (though they are in fact pointed chimneys). At its heart is a huge church, which is as pristine white as the rest of the buildings except for a few touches of colour in the middle of the nave that are fenced off to preserve the last flecks of paint from the ravages of history.

  These are the decorated tombs of an unlikely collection of people. Here, lying side by side, their heads resting peacefully on stone pillows, are the effigies of Henry II and his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. And at their feet, apparently content for once to be in a position of inferiority, is their son Richard the Lionheart.

  If there is an atmosphere of intense peace about the unlikely trio, it is probably because their bodies are no longer buried here – their mortal remains disappeared when the abbey was looted during the French Revolution. But it seems almost miraculous that they should ever have been reunited at Fontevraud, just a few kilometres from Chinon Castle, where Henry II died after losing a battle to Richard, and where Eleanor was locked up by her errant husband. The area can’t have conjured up many warm family memories.

  They are all here because Eleanor seems to have decided that family comes first. Henry II had nominated the abbey as the Plantagenets’ royal mausoleum, and Eleanor, who outlived her husband by fifteen years and spent most of her final years at the abbey, respected his wishes. Although she seems to have had the last laugh – her effigy is several centimetres higher than his.

  The only mystery is why John isn’t beside his brother Richard; there is a fourth tomb in the nave at Fontevraud, but it is that of John’s French wife Isabelle. The reason for John’s exclusion from the communal forgiveness seems to be that by the time he died, Fontevraud, along with the rest of Anjou and almost all of England’s other territories in France, had been lost. And guess whose fault that was …

  Bad King John, the accidental hero

  John was a truly awful King of England. He was mocked by his contemporaries as ‘Lackland’ and ‘Softsword’ – the latter a reference to his military incompetence, but clearly also a medieval joke about his private parts. In fact, John had only one redeeming feature as far as Anglo-French history is concerned – he was very adept at annoying France.

  Within months of his accession, he became embroiled in a French love triangle that would delight modern tabloids. In 1200 he met the above-mentioned Isabelle, daughter of the Count of Angoulême, and, smitten by her beauty (and her large land-holdings), he had her abducted and married her, despite the fact that she was only twelve years old and was already betrothed to a French nobleman.

  At the time, abduction of under-age girls was not an uncommon seduction technique, but the cheated suitor complained to the French King, Richard’s old (alleged) lover and enemy, Philippe Auguste, who summoned John to answer for himself. John refused, on the grounds that, as King of England, he was his own master and answerable to no one – Dieu et mon droit, n’est-ce pas?

  Philippe Auguste countered that, despite any clever mottos that Richard might have dreamt up, the King of France was still John’s feudal lord in Aquitaine, and therefore had authority over him. He duly stripped John of all his French lands except Gascony, which he didn’t want because it was home to the troublesome Basques and too far from Paris to be kept under control.

  This confiscation weakened John so much that the French even felt emboldened to invade his traditional family stronghold of Normandy. At a stroke, Henry II’s and Richard the Lionheart’s empire, which had draped across the west of France like an immense red English curtain, was more or less reduced to England and Biarritz.

  Next, John got into a standoff with the Church about who had the right to choose the Archbishop of Canterbury – the same old row that had provoked John’s father Henry II into having Thomas Becket’s brains bashed out. The Pope brought God into the argument by excommunicating John and declaring Philippe Auguste of France the true, divinely blessed King of England. In a fit of self-preservation, in 1213 John backed down, and even agreed to make the Pope the feudal lord of England, offering to pay a rent to Rome. A humiliating defeat, but it turned into an anti-French victory because it took all the wind out of Philippe Auguste’s sails – he had been amassi
ng an army on the Channel coast to come and stake his claim on England, and now had no excuse to invade. At the same time, by a huge stroke of luck, an English fleet encountered and destroyed the French navy, rubbing salt water into Philippe Auguste’s wound.

  With uncharacteristic, and unwise, boldness, John followed up these lucky breaks by attacking France. But his army was beaten in summer 1214 at the Battle of La Roche-aux-Moines in Anjou (where John distinguished himself by running away from the fighting) and again at the Battle of Bouvines, in the far north of France, after which John was forced to accept unfavourable peace terms, effectively renouncing any remaining claim he had to Normandy and Brittany.

  Sadly for King John, it seems to have been too early in history for an Englishman to know that once you have successfully annoyed a Frenchman, it is much more satisfying to leave him to sulk about it rather than giving him a chance to get back at you.

  The English get a French king

  The consequence of this series of humiliations and misjudgements was that John’s own barons distrusted him so much that they made him sign the Magna Carta, which essentially protected the barons themselves from injustice at the hands of any future ruler as bad as John.

  To make things doubly safe, the barons also invited the French crown prince Louis to come and usurp the English throne – for a short while in 1216, he was actually Louis I of England. A heinous betrayal by the English barons, one might think, but a perfectly logical one. Many of them held lands both in England and Normandy, and therefore felt no exclusive allegiance to either side of the Channel. In fact, they probably reasoned that a French king who ruled over Normandy and England was just as good a feudal lord as an English king – he might even be better if he avoided getting himself into costly wars and demanded less tax.