1173-1189: Henry II Part II - Securing the Plantagenets

The first major rebellion after Becket's death took place in 1173 and once again the Scots tried to take advantage of it with an invasion. Henry was forced into the expedient of using mercenary troops to put down the revolt. He succeeded and the reign was relatively untroubled by armed revolt from that point on but the rebellion may have strengthened the realisation in the immediate aftermath of the murder that division from the Church was unwise.

From the point of view of dynastic continuity, Eleanor of Aquitaine proved not only wealthy and formidable but also fecund. She secured the Plantagenets by ensuring there was no lack of heirs to the throne in an age when the first sign of weakness in the direct line would be seized upon by the barons to push their own agenda - even displace the monarch for a puppet or one of their own.

There were four players in the medieval political game, three of consequence and one to be watched with care lest it become troublesome - the indigenous English whose 'middle class' were embedded in the lower reaches of the Church. The barons (always incipient warlords) were only controlled through energetic use of power under conditions of dynastic strength allied to the ideological legitimacy that royalism was given by the Church in the local version of the Constantinian Settlement. Authority was vested in a secular overlord in return for the overlord's acceptance of the moral boundaries to be set by religion and the privileges to be accorded to its guardians.

The rapid acceptance that murdering Becket was an error is testimony to Henry's understanding that he needed the Church to rule. Another result of Becket's murder may have been a new sensitivity to the opinions of churchgoers on the part of the Crown. In 1177, for example, for whatever reason, a monk stole the bones of St. Petroc from Bodmin Priory and took them to Brittany. The King proved himself active in the search for them and their return.

Henry's sexual activity represented another facet of royalism - the need to strengthen the primus inter pares of the ruling family in any tussle with the barons where any debates over legitimacy might permit these barely suppressed warlords an opportunity to test their own strength against the centre and rivals alike. The swiftness of Henry's reaction to Strongbow's irruption into Ireland (which we will deal with later) is testament to his sensitivity to any one mainland-based aristocrat developing sufficient material strength to take advantage of weakness in the royal house.

Henry's second son (another Henry) by Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in February 1154 but William, the heir, died in 1156 (aged three). In the same year, they had a daughter, Matilda. Then, in 1157, Richard (Duke of Aquitaine and later to be King) was born. There was Geoffrey (Duke of Brittany) in 1158, Eleanor in 1161, Joan in 1165 and John (later King John) in 1167 so an already a healthy line of heirs and marriageable assets for the Dynasty existed well before the Becket crisis. The old Empress Matilda, meanwhile, had died in 1167.

The young Princess Matilda (who died in 1189) started the asset-building process by being married off to Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony in 1168 at the ripe young age of 12. Princess Eleanor (aged 17) was to be married off to Alphonso VIII of Castile in 1176. In 1170, Prince Henry, meanwhile, at the age of 16 was crowned 'King of the English' (even referred to as Henry III by some chroniclers but not to be confused with the later Henry III) in order to establish his position as heir-presumptive. He died in 1183 of a fever, leaving his brother Richard as heir. Geoffrey, next-in-line, died in a tournament in 1186. The attrition rate on royal heirs was high but when Henry died, he still had two sons who could succesively take up the Crown.

Becket's murder and the reining back of Henry's ambition to centralise judicial power at the expense of the Church and eliminate or reduce corruption and criminality in order to control the barons (which was the essential political purpose of the reforms in the earlier part of his reign as well as to connect the royal house with the people through direct rule) meant that many issues had to remain unresolved. Nevertheless, the King's commitment to reform continued in 1176 with the division of England into 'circuits', each with its own set of travelling judges. This system, adapted to the needs of each period, continued until reforms in the nineteenth century but the Assize system was not finally abolished until as late as 1972 (to be replaced by the Crown Court).

There was also a major reorganisation of the English militia with the Assize of Arms in 1181. The intention was to create a country force loyal to the King that would offset the retained forces of the barony but also preclude the need for mercenary forces with their attendant costs to the Treasury.  All freemen of England were to own and bear arms in the service of the King, swearing allegiance on pain of "vengeance, not merely on their lands or chattels, but on their limbs". The link between 'freemen' (basically the equivalent of the propertied middle class today) and the Crown on the one hand and the opposition to the Crown of the 'free' Barons with their individualism and attempts to constrain centralised power is perhaps the start of the great political division in the Kingdom between what were later to be called Tories (the party of the Crown or State) and the Whigs (the Party of increasingly tamed warlords and their retainers).

Money was always a concern and the King would expropriate where he could - evidently not from the barons but, in 1186, Henry had no compunction in appropriating the fabulous wealth of Aaron the Jew of Lincoln, whose wealth was said to exceed that of the King himself, on Aaron's death.

The Church, in its own self interest, had checked the growth of administrative order at its own expense (an order that also looked like tyranny to the freebooters in the aristocracy) and ensured that the royal attempt to transfer control of the population was limited. The Church's position, with its sixth of the population given clerical privileges, remained essentially unchallenged. The balance of power between barons, dynasty and church was thus very fine.

Caught between potential anarchy, incomplete order and ideology, the probability was that violence or the threat of it would return in some form as soon as the Crown weakened, a baronial faction achieved significant national power or the Church was instructed to intervene in politics from outside or decided to use its reserve ideological power to intervene for or against a King who 'went too far'. In fact, the 'the proto-Tories' could rely on the Church so long as they respected it and no doubt the Church's protective stance towards the 'free men' who attended mass helped cohere the population around the King, a process which eventually led to a coherence around the 'nation'.

Remnants of Old London Bridge

The second part of Henry's reign, though secure, was troubled by disasters (although how much the disasters were a result of better reporting through chroniclers and how much a genuine upsurge is a moot point). The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral was gutted by fire in September 1174 and its rebuilding (completed in 1185) saw the first appearance in England of the pointed arch introduced by William of Sens (which we will cover in a later posting) alongside other cathedral building. 1176 also saw the building of the first stone bridge over the Thames - the Old London Bridge. A great fire destroyed much of Rochester in Kent in 1177. Glastonbury Abbey was also badly damaged by fire in 1184, with rebuilding starting immediately. Lincoln Cathedral was destroyed in an earthquake in 1185 and in 1186 a great fire swept through Chester. One suspects a connection here between heavy use of wood in construction and increased use of artificial light (a sign of economic prosperity) which might lead to the heavier expenditure but greater security of stone for important building works.

Henry left England for the last time in 1188 and died at Chinon the next year to be succeeded by his son Richard.

1154-1172: Henry II Part I - The Problem of Becket

In December 1154, Henry II, founder of Plantagenet Dynasty (which will last until 1399), was crowned King and immediately appointed Thomas Becket as his Chancellor, apparently on the recommendation of Theobald Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost immediately as well, Henry began a campaign to limit clerical power as part of a wider project to restore power to the royal courts which had lost ground during the anarchic preceding two decades . In Becket, he seems to have misjudged, taking a perfect example of corporate man, loyal to obeying the role he has given like a caricature of Sartre's waiter, and misreading him as loyal to the person, himself, as Crown. This misjudgement was long masked by Becket's diligence in acting out his new given role as royal agent to the full in difficult negotiations with the Church. We all know the type - modernity certainly cannot survive without men who cease to be persons and become the roles they are assigned to - and, in this, Becket was a modern avant la lettre.

Henry perhaps thought he could solve the problem of appropriate jurisdiction by ensuring that Becket became Archbishop of Canterbury in June 1162 (Archbishop Theobald having died in the previous April). It is not that there was not a fundamental identity of interest between Church and Crown in the maintenance of social order. Quite the contrary. A hint that the English still need to be placated by their Continental rulers and shown the legitimacy of royal and Church rule through respect for English tradition is demonstrated in the almost standard performance art of honouring an English saint - in Henry's case, it was the transfer of the allegedly undecayed remains of St. Edward the Confessor to a new shrine built on the orders of the King.

The fact that the body was personally carried to its new resting place in 1163 by the King, the Archbishop and the Abbot of Westminster shows us how ideologically significant this bit of theatre was and perhaps how the former Chancellor was still thinking (as Archbishop) of political realities that served his King. At this point, it could be argued, Church and Dynasty were in perfect balance, holding on to the allegiance of the people at the expense of the conquering warlords whose excesses were something that Henry was determined to limit. The subsequent lack of co-operation by the Church in permitting the framework for the control of those excesses leads to a crisis in which the Archbishop was to be 'martyred' in order to ensure the Church's long term victory in drawing the line in the sand that suited it.

The crisis started with the January 1164 ratification of King's preferred national code of conduct, really a restoration of many practices normal in the reign of Henry I, at the Council of Clarendon. However, the Church had accrued an increased social and judicial power in the period of anarchy between the two Henries. Archbishop Becket, backed by his Bishops, rejected 'The Constitutions of Clarendon' because they limited that power. The breach between King and Archbishop became so serious that nine months later, following the Council of Northampton (October 1164), Becket was tried and found guilty of feudal disobedience. This brought into the open the issue of the primacy of Becket's fealty as a former Chancellor to the feudal chain of command or his fealty to 'God' through the Church. Since the trial was conducted within a feudal context, Becket justifiably feared for his life and he made a night time escape to Grantham. He was in voluntary exile in Europe within the month.

The King was not in the wrong as far as the restoration of national order was concerned. The absence of leading aristocrats on the crusades and the confusion created by the civil war had resulted in a considerable degree of continuing lawlessness. An enforceable legal structure that was national (and therefore royal) in scope was required to ensure order and order was, on balance despite its oppressive and brutal nature, mostly in the best interests of the people. Henry ordered an enquiry into the rise of criminality (shades here of periodic modern state panics about such things) and, at the Assize of Clarendon (1166), he introduced reforms that shifted the legal system from one dominated by ordeal or combat to one dominated by evidence-gathering and the jury operating under oath although the process, even here, was to be gradual. Some minor elements of the older Germanic system of trial by strength rather than the Roman system of 'justitia' would persist into the early nineteenth century. Power was to be transferred from local barons to appointed royal judges but the same process threatened to bring the sixth of the population classed as clergy under royal jurisdiction. In this matter, the Church was deeply reactionary, as much as the barons who were to try to claw back their power under King John (it is perhaps ironic that the reactionary Magna Carta is seen now as such a progressive document when this was never its intention).

It is at this point that Becket decided to return to Canterbury in December 1170, only to be murdered at the end of that month by four of Henry II's knights (Reginald Fitzurse, William de Tracy, Hugh de Morville and Richard Le Breton), almost certainly on Henry's orders. If this was an attempted coup against the English Church, it failed because Henry had underestimated the ideological power of the Church and its ability to disrupt the system of fealty owed to the Crown through proferring an alternative legitimacy based on the magical thinking of Judaeo-Christianity to which the vast majority of the population was culturally bound. A secure royal system was now at the point of potential destabilisation. Henry, who was clearly no fool even if he had miscalculated on this occasion or perhaps had lost control of his own retainers, was quick to change course, understanding that, at the end of the day, the Church needed the Crown as much as the Crown needed the Church.

There was no benefit or possibility for a medieval monarch in trying to create early modern monarchical absolutism against a Church that mediated between it (the Crown) and what passed for the middle classes and which acted as restraint on any number of minor and major barons ready to go back to the life of plunder that they had enjoyed in the recent Civil War. Not for the first time, the Church created a link between itself and the people and pacified popular feeling by creating a cult around Becket at Canterbury Cathedral where a shrine in the crypt recorded 14 miraculous cures within months. The boil of potential for instability was lanced by the King offering contrition for the acts of his agents and the Church exploited the situation to halt the drive against its privileges. In return, the Church then played its role in dampening down popular discontent by diverting it into the opiate of cultism. Things haven't changed much since the Angevin era if you substitute the terms State for Crown and Media for Church.