History of England 1-6

Yet his return to papal favour came at a price. He was forced to concede that churchmen would only be tried in church courts. So was established the practice known as ‘benefit of clergy’, which was slowly extended to cover literacy as well; anyone who could read a short passage from the Bible, generally the beginning of the fifty-first psalm, known as the ‘neck verse’, was spared the death penalty. ‘Benefit of clergy’ was in fact not removed from the provisions of the criminal law until the 1820s.

God may have blessed him against his enemies, but He cursed him with his children. The remaining years of Henry’s reign were dominated by the struggles with his four sons who, like their Angevin forebears, were violent and rapacious. Henry had, in theory, divided his empire. His eldest son, Henry, was destined to inherit the kingdom of England together with Anjou and Normandy; the second son, Richard, was granted the dukedom of Aquitaine. The third son, Geoffrey, became by marriage duke or count of Brittany. The youngest son, John, had nothing at all; hence arose his nickname ‘John Lackland’.

It was a most quarrelsome family from the vicissitudes of which Shakespeare could have profited greatly. The play of these warring parties would have out-Leared Lear. The brothers were united only by self-interest; selfishness was in their blood. They were concerned only with their honour and with their power; they fought one another over the extent of their respective territories; they built castles in each other’s lands, and they refused to allow the king to mediate between them.

In some spasm of dynastic madness, the two eldest sons rose in rebellion against their father. In this act of subversion they were aided and abetted by their mother who had, for all practical purposes, severed herself from her husband. When the king marched up to Limoges, the headquarters of the young Henry, he encountered a storm of arrows. Yet the king’s army prevailed and, in fear of his liberty, the prince escaped from the city. He wandered through his dominion, picking up very little support, and in the process succumbed to dysentery. The young Henry had lacked the resolution and competence of his father; he was at the time considered to be a perfect prince, courteous and debonair, but he would have made a wholly disappointing king. He seemed to be capable of rule, but only as long as he never ruled. He died in the summer of 1183, unreconciled to the father who had become his enemy.

And then there were three. It was supposed that Richard, now the eldest son, would come into Henry’s patrimony. In return the king demanded that he transfer the sovereignty of Aquitaine to Prince John; Richard, standing on the principle of natural right, refused to do this. He fled from the court and returned to Aquitaine. The king advised John to recruit an army and march against his elder brother. But John had no army of his own and instead allied himself with his other brother, Geoffrey, who had command of a large army of mercenaries in Brittany. Together the two younger sons marched against their elder brother. They achieved very little, apart from some vainglorious victories in skirmishes, and in retaliation Richard invaded Brittany itself.

It seemed to Henry II that his empire was in an advanced state of upheaval, and that it might fall apart under the combined strains of these internecine wars. He summoned his three sons to England. Here it was agreed that John should become king of Ireland, effectively cancelling his claim to Aquitaine. Richard returned to his dukedom. But he was not to rest easy in this apparent success. It seems likely that the king had now decided to reverse the order of inheritance and to bequeath England and Normandy to Geoffrey; these Anglo-Norman territories fitted well with Geoffrey’s fiefdom of Brittany. It was a neat territorial redaction, but it was soon undone. Geoffrey was killed while jousting at a tournament in Paris.

And then there were two, Richard and John, known to the more romantic nineteenth-century historians as Richard the Lionheart and Evil King John. In truth very little separated them, both of them rapacious and arrogant with no interest in their English kingdom except for the purpose of enrichment. Henry kept his sons at bay for five years, principally by refusing to name his successor, but as he grew older the issue became more and more important. In 1188 Richard agreed to submit his duchy to French jurisdiction, much to the displeasure of his father.