King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts. Claudia Gold
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">220 In 1152, at Barfleur, forced to abandon his plan to sail to England as he turned to defend Normandy instead, he moved his army along at such a breakneck pace that Robert of Torigni and Gerald of Wales noted that horses died.221
Louis, unable to fend off Henry’s whirlwind attacks, developed a fever and sought peace. Louis’ allies, including an apoplectic Eustace, who had only remained in France to murder Henry, were forced to comply. By the autumn, Henry had routed them all, as swiftly as Hermes. Louis, Henry’s overlord for his lands in France, had failed utterly to bring his rebellious vassal to heel.
Henry was now free to return to Eleanor in Aquitaine, where they embarked on a progress of her lands. Henry made known what sort of a duke he would be; at Limoges, the abbot of Saint-Martial withheld money, and the people of the town attacked his men. Henry’s brutal response was to raze the walls of the town, his instinct in Aquitaine being to keep the local lords under his control with a heavy hand.
While Henry had been preoccupied with marrying Eleanor and fighting Louis and his allies, the Angevin party in England was desperately fending off Stephen’s attacks. When Stephen’s men captured Wallingford on the banks of the Thames, not strategically important in itself but a potent symbol of Angevin strength, its defenders begged Henry to help them.
As far as Stephen and Louis were concerned, England was lost to Henry; it would be impossible for him to leave France. Eustace continued his relentless pursuit, and Louis, Henry knew, would stick to their truce only to resume his attack in the spring.
But they had underestimated Henry FitzEmpress. He was a gambler, trusting his intuition that Eustace would follow him, and that Louis and Geoffrey would not be overly troublesome in their harassment of his lands. He left a now pregnant Eleanor in Rouen with his mother, gave Normandy over to Matilda’s charge, and sailed from Barfleur during a storm, two weeks after Christmas, at the beginning of 1153. No one but a madman or Henry would have sailed in such conditions, and no one expected him in England. He sailed with a mercenary force of 140 knights and 3,000 foot soldiers in thirty-six vessels, paid for with borrowed money, ready to seize his birthright.222
A new man, the ‘King of the North Wind’, was about to storm Stephen’s world.
* Medieval church law stipulated that if you had sexual relations with a relative by marriage, or with someone related to you within the degrees forbidden by the church, you were guilty of incest. It also decreed that if you had already had sexual relations with a close relative of your future husband or wife, you were barred from marrying them as you would be committing incest.
† William’s bride was not on the White Ship. She travelled instead with King Henry.
‡ A mark was roughly equivalent to two-thirds of a pound.
§ These lands, known as the Papal States, were ruled over directly by the papacy for over 1,000 years, until 1870.
Act II
Henry was drawn ‘as much to the business of arms as to the toga; to war as much as to books’.
Gerald of Wales, On the Instruction of Princes
I
Henry was poised on the threshold of unimaginable power. But he would have to work for it.
He sailed to England through a tempest to relieve his friends and claim his crown. Once again, luck was with him. He and his mercenaries landed safely, probably at Wareham in Dorset, on 6 January. This time, Stephen took the threat of Henry seriously.
Eustace, obsessed with Henry, followed his prey from France across the winter seas. Both sides expected this to be the final bloody battle between enemies whose camps had been fighting for nearly twenty years, and Eustace did not want to miss his victory. Only one man could be crowned king of England. The pope had refused Eustace; now only Henry’s murder would enable him to inherit the throne on Stephen’s death.
The chroniclers talked of Henry’s coming in almost messianic terms. The author of the Gesta had England ‘shaking’ at Henry’s arrival; Henry of Huntingdon wrote of England, ‘That wretched country, before reduced to ruin, but now regaining new life by the prospect of his coming to her assistance’, where Henry is cast as the saviour of a battered land.1 Henry of Huntingdon positioned the young duke as inheritor of all that had been his namesake grandfather’s, Henry I:
Heir to thy grandsire’s name and high renown,
Thy England calls thee, Henry, to her throne:
Now, fallen from her once imperial state,
Exhausted, helpless, ruined, desolate,
She sighs her griefs, and fainting scarcely lives:
One solitary hope alone survives.
‘Save me, oh save me! Henry; or I die …’2
But this was retrospective propaganda. These dazzling words aside, Henry had not yet won.
He did not go directly to the aid of his friends at Wallingford; it was firmly royalist territory where Stephen had erected at least two additional castles and, together with Eustace, had gathered his army. Henry did not yet feel strong enough to be so far from towns loyal to his cause – Bristol, Gloucester and Devizes – and their supplies. Instead he marched his men sixty miles or so north of his landing place to Malmesbury in Wiltshire, to besiege the castle, ensuring Stephen’s appearance. Stephen duly dashed his men westwards to fend off the attack.
Henry ‘threw himself straight into the siege, for delay was not his way, and soon took it’.3 He stormed the town and took the castle; these tactics would form Henry’s distinctive movements in defensive warfare – swift, decisive, brutal and nearly always effective. But disappointingly there was no battle. Numbed by freezing rain and hungry – famine had ravaged the area – Stephen’s army refused to engage; Henry was forced to agree to a truce. Malmesbury’s castellan handed the fortress over to him without a fight.
Stephen’s men slowly turned to Henry, not least because a number of the most influential magnates felt that in doing so, they would end the civil war. Stephen was evidently ‘gloomy and downcast’ by the defections; the author of the Gesta records that the king was dispirited and ‘noticed that some of his leading barons were slack and very casual in their service and had already sent envoys by stealth and made a compact with the duke’.4
By early spring, many of the country’s leading magnates stood firmly behind Henry – his uncle, Reginald earl of Cornwall, William earl of Gloucester, John the Marshal, and Robert of Dunstanville. Henry had a stunning coup when the powerful and respected magnate Robert earl of Leicester, one of the Beaumont twins, came over to his side. Robert, close to Henry I, had been at the old king’s bedside as he died. Although previously, if only nominally, loyal to Stephen, he now saw England’s future with Duke Henry rather than a weakened Stephen, or Eustace. Gervase of Canterbury wrote that by April, ‘he began to take the duke’s part and for some time ministered to his needs’.