The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain Read Online Free PDF Page B

Richard Fitz Neal, treasurer to the Exchequer, it took the form of a discussion between a master and a disciple.
    1183–9
    The sons of the ageing king were impatient for power and jealous of each other. Their continued opposition to their father marred his later years and ensured the break-up of his empire. Young Henry aspired to the complete overlord-ship of all Angevin lands. Richard was intent on independent control of his dukedom of Aquitaine. Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, had ambitions he was careful to keep concealed. One chronicler described him as ‘a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler’ 5 . The youngest, John (14 in 1183), was never going to be content with the remote kingdom of Ireland.
    In February 1183 Geoffrey egged on his eldest brother to grab Aquitaine in league with some of Richard’s disaffected barons. They hoped to distract the king by rekindling civil war, but Henry had done too well his work of bringing the great English magnates to heel, and the new conflict remained a family affair. It was all the more bitter for that. When Henry arrived before the walls of Limoges to reason with his sons Young Henry ordered archers on the walls to fire at his father. The king settled to besiege Limoges while Richard furiously harried the rebel barons in a hideous orgy of revenge. The brief war ended when Young Henry died of dysentery (11 June).
    The king now had to make new provisions for the division of his lands, and this inevitably stirred resentment among his surviving sons. He required Richard to relinquish Aquitaine to John, and when he refused John conspired with Geoffrey to wrest the province from Richard by force. A raid in August 1184 only provoked Richard into an attack on Brittany. When all the king’s attempts to reconcile these differences failed, the chronicler Roger of Howden reports that Henry ‘gathered a large army to wage war on his son Richard’ 6 in April 1885. Now Henry found a use for his discarded wife. Just as Queen Eleanor had allied with her boys 12 years earlier, so now Henry forced her to act in concert with him against them. He demanded that Richard yield to his mother her own inheritance of Aquitaine in return for assurances that Richard would succeed to all his father’s lands. It seemed that, at last, all was settled.
    But misfortune continued to dog the dynasty. John, who had been sent over to Ireland to be crowned and to stamp his authority on the island, returned in December 1185 having wasted a great amount of money, stirred up a great deal of resentment and failed to win the acceptance of the Irish barons. In the following July Geoffrey was killed in a jousting accident. The future of the Angevin dynasty now lay in the hands of John, widely regarded as a graceless wastrel, and Richard, who, according to the chroniclers, was a mindless brute for whom politics was a matter of terrorism and bloodshed. Geoffrey’s death had further complicated international affairs because Philip Augustus of France demanded the guardianship of his infant son. Discordbetween the two kings was put on hold in October 1187 when, in response to an appeal from Pope Urban III, they agreed jointly to mount a crusade. All Christendom had been shocked by the news that the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem had been conquered by the Muslim leader, Saladin. Advance contingents were mustered and despatched to the Holy Land while Henry and Philip Augustus imposed a new tax, the Saladin tithe, to pay for a full-scale expedition. This was bitterly resented, and Henry faced the prospect, after many years of internal peace, that his English barons might, once more, rise against him. Meanwhile, the peril of Jerusalem failed to push into the background the three-way conflict of Henry, Philip Augustus and Richard.
    After months of alternate fighting and negotiation the three met at Bonmoulins in November 1188. Gervase of Canterbury tells us that: ‘On the first day they were sufficiently restrained