The fifth son, the eighth and last child, of Henry II. of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine was born at Oxford, in the “King’s manor”—that is, the palace of Beaumont—on Christmas Eve 1167.[2] Of their six other surviving children, the three younger were daughters; the last of these, Joanna, was then two years old. The eldest living son, Henry, was nearly thirteen; Richard was ten, and Geoffrey nine. The boy Henry had, when an infant, been acknowledged by the barons of England as heir to the crown,[3] and in 1160 had done homage to Louis of France for the duchy of Normandy.[4] In 1162 preparations had been made for his crowning in England, and he had again received the homage of the barons,[5] to which that of the Welsh princes and the Scot king was added in 1163.[6] Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine had been destined for her second surviving son, Richard, as early as 1159,[7] when he was not yet two years old. In the summer of 1166 the king had secured Britanny for Geoffrey by betrothing him to its heiress.[8] The whole Angevin dominions, with one exception, were thus, in design at least, partitioned among John’s brothers before John himself was born. The exception was, indeed, an important one; in the contemporary accounts of Henry’s plans during this period for the distribution of his territories, there is no mention of Anjou and its dependency Touraine. The reason, however, is obvious. Anjou was the cradle of his race, the very heart and centre of his dominion, the one portion of it which he had inherited from his forefathers in unbroken male descent, by a right which had been always undisputed and indisputable. The destiny of Anjou was therefore as yet unspecified, not because Henry was reserving it for a possible younger son, but because its devolution to his eldest son, as head of the Angevin house after him, was in his mind a matter of course. It was in fact Henry himself who gave to his new-born child the name which has clung to him ever since—“Johans Sanz Terre,” John Lackland.[9]
1169
Two years later the scheme of partition was fully developed, and now Anjou was explicitly included in it. At Epiphany 1169 Louis of France granted to the younger Henry the investiture of Anjou and Maine, on the understanding that the boy was to hold these fiefs, as well as Normandy, in his own person, directly of the French crown. Richard was invested, on the same terms, with the county of Poitou and the duchy of Aquitaine. Britanny was granted to young Henry, to be holden by his brother Geoffrey of him as mesne lord, under the king of France as overlord.[10] The one fragment of the continental dominions of the Angevin house which the king of England formally reserved to himself was Touraine; his homage for it was due to a prince of inferior rank, the count of Blois, and his paternal pride chose rather to perform that homage himself than to suffer it to be performed by any of his sons.[11]
1170
All these arrangements were as yet merely prospective. Henry had no intention of abdicating, nor of depriving Eleanor of her rights as duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou, nor even of dispossessing the reigning duke of Britanny. His purpose was simply to insure that, were he himself unexpectedly to become disabled or die, there should be no fair pretext for fighting over his inheritance or defrauding any of his sons of their shares, but that they should be bound to each other, and their overlord Louis bound to each and all of them, by such legal ties as none of the parties could lightly venture to set at defiance. In June 1170 the scheme was completed by the coronation of the younger Henry at Westminster. Two months later the elder king fell sick at La Motte-de-Ger, near Domfront. Believing his end to be at hand, he confirmed the partition of January 1169, and solemnly bequeathed the one son who had no share in it—John—to the guardianship of his eldest brother, “the young king,” “that he might advance him and maintain him.”[12] One contemporary historian adds: “And he (the king) gave to his youngest son John the county of Mortain.”[13] The meaning of this probably is that Henry expressed a wish, or made a suggestion, that his successor should provide for John by investing him with Mortain.[14] From the days of the Conqueror downwards, this Norman county had always been held by some junior member of the Norman ducal house. Henry I. had granted it to his favourite nephew, Stephen; it had passed to Stephen’s son William, and afterwards to his daughter Mary; in 1168, Mary’s husband, Count Matthew of Boulogne, had ceded it to Henry II., on condition that a heavy sum charged upon its revenues should be paid annually to his two daughters.[15] Its actual value, therefore, was now very small; and Henry on his recovery seems to have abandoned, for the time at least, his project of bestowing it on John. A year later his diplomacy had wrought out a scheme for providing John with a far more splendid, as well as more valuable, endowment than Mortain, by betrothing him to the presumptive heiress of Maurienne.
1171–1172
A proposal for this marriage was made by Count Humbert of Maurienne and accepted by Henry in 1171.[16] Humbert was then a widower for the third time, and had only two daughters. The marriage contract, which was signed at the close of 1172,[17] provided that if he should yet have a son, that son should inherit scarcely anything but the little county of Maurienne itself, which was only a small and comparatively unimportant part of Humbert’s dominions, stretching as they did along both sides of the Alps and including all the passes between Gaul, Germany and Italy. Except Maurienne, and a very trifling portion of land reserved as a dowry for his younger daughter, all Humbert’s territories—Rossillon-en-Bugey, the county of Belley, the valley of Novalesia, Chambéry and its dependencies, Aix, Aspremont, Rochetta, Mont-Major, and La Chambre on the western side of the Alps; and on their eastern side, Turin, Cavaur, Colegno, with the homage and service of the count of Canavesia, and that which the viscount of Aosta owed for Châtillon, and also Humbert’s claims on the county of Grenoble—were devised absolutely and unconditionally to John and his bride, and were, if Henry so willed, to be secured to them immediately by the homage of all Humbert’s subjects in those regions to the little bridegroom; while if Humbert should die without a son, Maurienne itself was to be added to John’s inheritance. The price stipulated for all this was five thousand marks, of which one thousand were paid over at once by Henry to Humbert.[18] It was not till the infant bride had been actually delivered over to her intended father-in-law, who was to bring her up in company with her betrothed till both were old enough to be married, that Humbert asked what was to be John’s share in the heritage of the Angevin house. Henry, seemingly on the spur of the moment, proposed to give the boy three castles with the lands appertaining to them—Chinon, Loudun, and Mirebeau.[19] Chinon was in Touraine; but Loudun and Mirebeau were in Anjou. The project was defeated by young Henry’s refusal to allow any part of his county to be settled upon his little brother, and it thus gave the immediate occasion, though it was certainly not the real cause, for his revolt.[20]
1173–1174
When that revolt was subdued {1174 Oct.}, the political relations between King Henry and his elder sons were settled upon a new footing. The terms of this new settlement, while confirming the arrangements made at Montmirail for the devolution of Henry’s territories after his death, left no room for any doubt of his intention to keep them all, for the present at least, in his own hands. He covenanted to give to his eldest son, so long as he remained dutiful, two castles in Normandy and a yearly revenue of fifteen thousand pounds Angevin; to Richard, two castles in Poitou, and half the revenues of that county; to Geoffrey, half the dowry of Constance till they should be married, and the whole of it after that event. Richard and Geoffrey had to do homage to their father “for what he granted and gave them,” but young Henry was excused from doing the like in consideration of his regal dignity. For John there was now made a carefully detailed provision; he was to receive an income of a thousand pounds from the royal demesnes in England, any escheats which the king might choose to give him, the castle and county of Nottingham, the castle and lordship of Marlborough; two castles and a revenue of one thousand pounds Angevin in Normandy, and from the Angevin lands the same amount in money, with one castle in Anjou, one in Touraine, and one in Maine; and this settlement young Henry was made to promise that he would keep “firmly and inviolate.”[21]
1175–1176