13
In the aftermath of the battle of Bouvines, a tide of rebellious unrest swept across the kingdom of England. An increasingly vocal and cohesive party of discontented barons began to call for concessions from the crown and, through the autumn of 1214, their demands became more coherent, even as their ranks swelled beyond the core of northern magnates to include many major landholders from the south of England. The movement was spearheaded by the likes of Robert FitzWalter – who began, in 1215, to style himself as the ‘Marshal of the Army of God’ – and Eustace of Vesci, and enjoyed some veiled support from the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton.
With his coffers all but empty and his reputation in tatters, King John was too weak to simply ignore or overthrow the emerging baronial faction. The ranks of his steadfast supporters diminished with each passing month, as the nascent rebellion gathered momentum. William Marshal remained loyal, as did John’s half-brother William Longsword (after he had been ransomed from the French) and Ranulf, earl of Chester, but the balance of power was tilting away from the crown. As both sides readied themselves for civil war, attempts to broker a settlement began in January 1215. William Marshal found himself at the heart of these convoluted negotiations between the king and his nobles and, after five months, this process culminated in the sealing of a peace treaty containing sixty-three clauses – a document that became known as the Great Charter or Magna Carta.
THE GREAT CHARTER
Magna Carta has come to be regarded as one of the most significant documents in world history, achieving a near-mythical status. It is often described as a cornerstone of Western democracy: characterised as the ‘first written constitution in European history’, a ‘charter of liberties’ or ‘bill of rights’ that curbed royal power, paving the way for the English Parliamentary system of government and the template for the Constitution of the United States of America. Magna Carta changed the balance of power, and the nature of kingship, in England. It also impacted upon the expectations and experiences of knights and nobles for decades, even centuries, to come. At first glance, then, it would seem that William Marshal’s close involvement in the forging of the Great Charter of 1215 merits an especially honoured place in the catalogue of his many storied achievements.
The accord was perhaps the ultimate expression of a transformation that reshaped medieval England – a tectonic shift away from the age of conquest towards that of settlement. This gradual process of evolution had been percolating, almost unseen, in the background of William Marshal’s life and would continue after his death. It was marked by the increasing emphasis placed upon the rule of law within society, and the determined dissection of the reciprocal bonds of service and obligation that linked lords, knights and their subjects. But can Earl William really be regarded as one of the architects of Magna Carta, and does this document actually deserve its vaunted reputation?
Marshal’s role in the forging of Magna Carta
William Marshal served as King John’s leading lay negotiator throughout the first half of 1215, as the settlement enshrined in Magna Carta was deliberated. William was now perhaps sixty-seven years old – one of the great, established figures of the English aristocracy – trusted by his king and respected by the barons. While the latter group might have detested many of John’s other supporters, such as Peter des Roches and Faulkes of Bréauté, they knew only too well that Marshal had endured his own difficulties with the king, and as such might harbour some sympathy for the baronial cause. All of this made Earl William an ideal intermediary. His connection with the Templars may also have proven useful, given that the Order played a supporting role in these events.
For much of the time, Marshal worked in tandem with Stephen Langton. The archbishop may have offered some early inspiration to the baronial party, perhaps encouraging them to consult archived documents such as the ‘Coronation Charter’ of King Henry I dating from 1100 – a text which seemed to offer a historic framework of precedents around which they could shape their otherwise nebulous demands for royal reform. For much of 1215, however, Langton sought to present himself as a neutral mediator and servant of the realm.
The first significant meeting between John and the barons took place in January 1215, in London’s New Temple (the Templars’ centre of operations in the city). It proved to be an ill-tempered encounter, with the magnates arriving clad in armour and determined to demand that the terms of governance established in Henry I’s ‘Coronation Charter’ be reinstituted. King John equivocated, requesting a pause in discussions until April so that he could consider this request, but assured them that he would satisfy their demands in due course. William Marshal and Archbishop Stephen both made pledges confirming that the king would hold to his word and meet the barons on the agreed date. As a result, a truce was settled until after Easter (which fell on 19 April).
In reality, John was simply looking for time to seek the support of Rome and hopefully raise a military force with which to defeat the barons. By the end of April, the patience of Robert FitzWalter, Eustace of Vesci and their allies was running thin. They assembled at Brackley in Northamptonshire, with an eye to launching armed rebellion. The baronial party had grown considerably. Two notable converts to the cause were Saer of Quincy, earl of Winchester (FitzWalter’s close friend and associate), and the new earl of Essex, Geoffrey FitzPeter’s son and heir, Geoffrey of Mandeville – who turned against the crown after John demanded the vast sum of 20,000 marks in return for a marriage licence.
Marshal and Langton were sent by the king to placate the barons at Brackley. At a meeting on 27 April, FitzWalter’s party issued a further list of demands. These were relayed back to John and declined out of hand. As a result, the barons laid siege to Northampton Castle, and the king’s position then deteriorated rapidly. On 17 May, the rebels seized control of London – now widely recognised as ‘the capital of the crown and realm’ – and the city became a centre of dissent. This setback to John’s fortunes promoted a fresh wave of defections to the baronial party, forcing the king to re-engage with the process of arbitration, if only as a stalling tactic, so that he could use money borrowed from the Templars to hire mercenaries.
A period of intense negotiation followed. According to one version of events, William Marshal was sent to London to inform the barons that John was ready to agree terms, though in reality the process appears to have been more convoluted (involving numerous meetings, exchanges and emissaries). As the king was now residing in Windsor, some eighteen miles west of London, a halfway meeting point was chosen; an obscure spot in the countryside known as Runnymede. It was here – on 15 June 1215 – that the provisions of peace were finally settled and laid out in a long and detailed document. The sheer scale and scope of this agreement meant that it was later described as ‘the Great Charter’. No signatures were appended to this original version of Magna Carta. Constructed as a royal charter, it was validated by the king’s seal, with at least thirteen copies subsequently produced by the chancery. William Marshal was afforded a prominent position in the text, appearing as the first named English magnate, said to have given ‘advice’ to the king on the terms agreed and to be one of those who remained a ‘loyal subject’. The names of a further fifteen barons followed, including William Longsword, William of Warenne, earl of Surrey, Hubert of Burgh and John Marshal.
In the past, historians have suggested that William Marshal may have been one of the main authors of the 1215 Magna Carta. In 1933, the American academic Sidney Painter claimed that Marshal ‘was probably perfectly capable of inspiring the Great Charter’ – possessing ‘the necessary administrative experience . . . wisdom and statesmanship’ – and thus, ‘should share the honour’ due for having ‘procured for England her beloved charter’. In fact, at best, we can suggest that Earl William may have encouraged continued discussion and moderation on both sides in the months that led up to Runnymede, but beyond this it is impossible to gauge the exact degree of Marshal’s input. Elsewhere, it has been argued that the learned Stephen Langton must have been the Great Charter’s primary originator, but although he does seem to have inserted a number of key clauses relating to the Church, in other respects the archbishop’s impact appears to have been quite limited. In fact, no one knows precisely who drafted the terms set out on 15 June and, given that the final document was the product of forceful debate and argument, its contents could not truly be said to have been conceived by a single mind.
A number of northern barons were dissatisfied with the agreement from the start, believing that it had not gone far enough, but most of the rebels laid down their arms on 19 June. With a limited peace in place, William Marshal was sent to hold the Welsh March. Yet even though this treaty had been the subject of prolonged negotiation, its terms were soon disregarded, and the truce it engendered proved to be desperately short-lived. This may explain why William Marshal’s seemingly historic involvement in the sealing of Magna Carta was completely ignored in the History. The swift pace of events meant that the 1215 version of Magna Carta was quickly superseded and largely forgotten in the 1220s, when the biographer was writing his account. It is also possible that the History’s silence was more studied, being a deliberate attempt to skirt over potential embarrassment. Other sources make it clear that Earl William’s eldest son and heir, Young William Marshal, had joined the baronial party in May 1215. Given that it was Young William who later commissioned the History of William Marshal, it would not be surprising if its author deemed it politic to ignore his patron’s complicity in the rebellion – an uprising that was later viewed, at best, with ambivalence.
The significance of Magna Carta in 1215
The Great Charter sealed at Runnymede is one of the most famous, treasured and widely misrepresented documents of the Middle Ages. Four copies of this version of Magna Carta are known to have survived into the modern era: two reside in the British Library in London, one is held in the archives of Salisbury Cathedral, another in Lincoln Cathedral. They are regarded as priceless heirlooms of the English nation. Yet for all its renown, the charter actually had a surprisingly limited impact upon the course of events in 1215. As a political tool it was defunct within three months, and by the end of the year its terms were regarded as null and void by all parties. This does not mean that the text should now be dismissed or discounted, merely that it must be assessed in its proper context.
The 1215 Magna Carta was not intended to serve as a universal bill of rights. In the first instance, it was expressly designed as a peace treaty and thus contained a series of conditions, conceded by the crown in response to intense baronial pressure, that were supposed to lead, in the words of the charter, to the ‘better ordering’ of the kingdom. Robert FitzWalter and his allies did not view their demands as either revolutionary or even innovative. Over successive generations, their families had endured the predatory exploitation of the Angevin dynasty, and these abuses – and the blatant profiteering from feudal law – had now become intolerable under King John’s failing regime. The barons thus wished to restore the ‘ancient liberties’ they had enjoyed before the advent of the Angevins; to return to the supposed golden age of justice evoked in King Henry I’s Coronation Charter, when established customs were upheld.
In fact, they were trying to recreate a fantasy. This Coronation Charter, listing fulsome promises of fair governance, had been issued when Henry I came to power in 1100 and he was desperate to secure support against his brother and rival for the crown, Duke Robert of Normandy. Once his position was assured, King Henry chose to ignore most of his pledges, so the notional period in which barons and landholders received fair treatment from the crown never actually existed. They did not know it at the time, but in 1215 the barons were asking for more than any English monarch since the Norman Conquest had ever been willing to grant.
The barons’ primary concerns were decidedly self-serving. They wished to safeguard their own welfare and ensure better treatment from the king. As a result, many of Magna Carta’s clauses dealt with issues of inheritance, landholding and military service, and sought to limit the fees and fines exacted by the crown, and to reduce the rate of scutage (the money owed, per knight, in lieu of military service). Clause forty-nine addressed John’s habitual seizure of hostages from his nobles and demanded the immediate release of persons currently held in this manner. At a fundamental level, the aristocrats who negotiated the terms of Magna Carta were not driven by egalitarian impulses; nor did they set out, in the first instance, to secure basic human liberty and equality for all.
Nonetheless, the rebel barons and King John were contending for supporters in 1215, both hoping to secure popular backing for their respective causes. To that end, the baronial party introduced some provisions to Magna Carta that appealed to the interests of the knightly class and the wider population. Clause twenty-nine, for example, guaranteed knights fair terms of service and treatment, while clause eight specified that widows could not be compelled to marry against their will. Aspects of the document related more broadly to ‘the community of the whole land’. The charter’s most famous clauses, thirty-nine and forty, stated that ‘no free man shall be seized or imprisoned’ or suffer other forms of persecution, losing ‘rights’ or ‘standing’ in society, ‘except by the lawful judgement of his peers, or by the law of the land’. They went on to enshrine a far-reaching royal proclamation: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’ It was these passages, tucked away in the middle of the document, which gave rise to the idea that Magna Carta affirmed the basic and universal human rights to justice and liberty, later inspiring such phenomena as trial by jury.
Unfortunately, the document’s precise terms and stipulations also made it all but inevitable that the king would soon disown and disregard the accord finalised at Runnymede. Clause one seemed to render the treaty inviolate, with John stating clearly: ‘To all free men of our kingdom we have also granted, for us and our heirs forever, all the liberties written out below.’ But the barons overstepped the mark towards the end of Magna Carta, in clause sixty-one, by imposing excessively punitive conditions and controls upon the crown. A self-elected group of twenty-five barons were to supervise the enactment of the charter’s terms and to judge the king’s actions. Crucially, should John or any of his supporters ‘offend in any respect against any man, or transgress any articles of the peace’, the twenty-five were empowered to ‘assail [the king] in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing [his] castles, lands [and] possessions’. This represented a massive infringement on royal power. John was prepared to concede clause sixty-one on 15 June, but only to secure a temporary cessation of hostilities, during which he could retrench his position. Such a grievous derogation of crown authority could never have been endured by a medieval monarch of the early thirteenth century. This provision alone ensured that John would seek to overturn Magna Carta at the first possible opportunity. Indeed, by the middle of July he had already secretly contacted the pope, requesting that Rome condemn the document.
The treaty agreed on 15 June would form the essential blueprint for far more enduring and significant settlements in the future, and William Marshal would play a leading role in this process. But the direct force of the 1215 Magna Carta was undermined in early September, when a damning papal pronouncement arrived in England. Pope Innocent III offered his unflinching support for King John – Rome’s new vassal – and condemned the Runnymede accord as ‘shameful and base, but also illegal and unjust’. Innocent stated that the charter ‘dishonours the Apostolic See (Rome), injures the king’s rights and shames the English nation’, and as a result, declared it ‘null and void’. John now had a formal mandate to ignore the terms of Magna Carta, but elsewhere, few in the baronial party heeded the pope’s scorching rhetoric. Indeed, even the Latin Church’s leading representative in England, Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, staunchly refused to renounce the charter. He was formally suspended from his office by Rome as a result. With both sides assuming such entrenched positions, a full-scale civil war was inevitable.
STANDING WITH THE KING
William Marshal spent much of the summer of 1215 overseeing the defence of Wales, but proved unable to prevent significant losses to the native Welsh in northern Pembrokeshire, Carmarthen and the Gower. He remained on the sidelines through the autumn, as King John tried to mount a counter-attack against rebels, using Flemish mercenaries to bolster his military forces. In the south, at least, the barons were confined to London, and John managed to seize Rochester Castle – which had been held in the name of Stephen Langton – after a gruelling seven-week siege.
In December, the king initiated a brutal campaign of destructive raiding across England, ravaging rebel-held territory. One chronicler described how John’s men were ‘running about with drawn swords and open knives’, ransacking ‘towns, houses, cemeteries and churches, robbing everyone, and sparing neither women nor children’. Alongside this indiscriminate violence John also tortured captives seized during these months, seemingly in a calculated attempt to intimidate his opponents. As a result, the royalist armies were described as ‘the limbs of the devil’ and likened to a plague of locusts covering the Earth. Such savagery had not been seen in the realm since the dark, anarchic days of King Stephen’s reign, seventy years earlier.
A few barons buckled under this pressure, but most only became hardened in their resolve to resist the king’s hated regime. Pushed into a corner, the rebels now took the dramatic step of sending Saer of Quincy across the Channel, bearing an offer of the English crown to Prince Louis of France. The legitimacy of the Capetian’s claim – through right of marriage to King Henry II’s granddaughter – was questionable, but in the face of John’s loathsome predations, any lingering doubts over the wisdom or legality of this choice were discounted. Many leading members of the baronial faction also expected Louis to grant them additional lands in England in return for their support. The French prince duly declared that he would sail with the full might of his armies in the spring of 1216, but he also sent an advanced detachment of troops to London, and these men arrived in the capital in January.
Some contemporaries welcomed the prospect of Capetian intervention. Gerald of Wales promoted Louis of France as ‘a new light’ that would banish the dark clouds of Angevin tyranny. Not surprisingly, the History was far less sympathetic, characterising the invitation to the prince as ‘a highly foolish course of action’, and declaring that the French forces billeted in London spent their time drinking ‘many a barrel and cask of fine wine’. King John recognised that Louis’ arrival would transform the balance of power in England. He therefore sent William Marshal and Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, on an embassy to France, in the vain hope that they might somehow convince Philip Augustus to abandon the invasion, but the Capetian monarch remained resolute.
The arrival of a new papal legate – the Italian churchman, Guala of Bicchieri – in Paris on 25 April gave Philip greater pause. Guala expressed his entrenched scepticism regarding Louis’ supposed entitlement to the English crown, and then promptly sailed across the Channel to support King John’s cause. The French would now be wading into a war in which they stood to be branded enemies of the Church. Nonetheless, Prince Louis followed through with his invasion plan, landing at Sandwich, in Kent, on 22 May 1216. King John had contemplated meeting him head on in the field, but at the last moment he chose instead to retreat. This decision may have been influenced by the advice of William Marshal, who apparently warned the king not to gamble the fate of the realm on another pitched battle, though in truth, the earl’s precise movements throughout this period are unclear. It is likely that John also doubted the continued loyalty of his mercenaries, many of whom were waiting to be paid and had familial ties to France.
King John ordered his eldest son, Henry, to be placed under close guard in Devizes Castle (in Wiltshire) and withdrew to Corfe Castle in Dorset, seemingly at a loss as to how he might defend his kingdom. This gifted Louis of France a free hand. He advanced through Kent, seizing Canterbury and later Winchester. The mighty fortress at Dover held out against attack under the command of the redoubtable Hubert of Burgh, as did Windsor and Lincoln Castle in the north-eastern Midlands. The defence of the latter stronghold was organised by Lady Nicola de la Haye, a remarkably formidable woman who had assumed the role of castellan after the death of her husband and son. But the Capetians’ triumphant arrival sparked a fresh surge of desertions from the royalist camp. These included the earls of Arundel, York and Surrey and, most shockingly, King John’s own half-brother, William Longsword. One chronicler suggested that this betrayal was inspired by the discovery that the king had used the opportunity afforded by Longsword’s brief captivity after Bouvines to seduce his wife, Ela of Salisbury. It is more likely that Longsword simply made a pragmatic decision to move with the tide, having determined that John’s day was done.
By the summer of 1216 a vast swathe of northern and eastern England supported the French prince. As the History observed, ‘the king ran out of resources’ and thus ‘very few of the men stayed with him’. Some two-thirds of England’s aristocracy renounced John, and even a sizeable portion of the king’s own household knights turned against him, including Robert of Roppesley, who had been named in Magna Carta as one of his leading advisors. The collapse of Angevin rule now seemed inevitable.
William Marshal remained on the southern Welsh March through much of this period, defending the border and holding the west of England for the royalists alongside Ranulf, earl of Chester. In spite of his engrained antipathy towards King John, William’s biographer painted a vivid and admiring picture of his hero’s unfailing fidelity to the broken monarch, writing that as ‘a man of loyal and noble heart, [Marshal] stayed with him in hard and difficult circumstances’. The History had persistently downplayed William’s proximity to John’s regime, but at this stage, its author could not hold back from commending the earl’s ‘steadfast’ behaviour and the ‘good faith’ he showed to ‘his lord and king’.
Even so, Marshal may have paused to consider his position in the early spring of 1216. Royal records show that, on 10 April, a grant of safe conduct was provided so that Aimery of St Maur, the Master of the Templars in England, could escort Young William Marshal to a meeting with his father. No record has survived to indicate the nature of their discussion (as with so much of Young William’s activities in this period, the episode was ignored in the History). It is possible that Earl William tried to persuade his eldest-born to return to the royalist side, or it may be that he encouraged him to maintain close contact with the French – hedging the Marshal family’s bets, so as to protect the dynasty’s long-term interests. Young William certainly pursued advantage under the Capetian claimant: rushing to declare his allegiance to Louis and then receiving confirmation of his right to act as marshal of the prince’s court in England. However, Young William’s attempts to assert rights to Marlborough Castle were blocked.
If Earl William entertained thoughts of desertion, he certainly did not act upon them. It must have been apparent that John’s cause was lost, yet just as he had done with King Henry II in 1189, Marshal refused to forsake his royal master. This was all the more remarkable because he found himself in a distinctly different position in 1216. William was no longer simply a household knight. He was now a great magnate of the realm: a man of power and responsibility, with a vast lordship and a large family to protect. His relationship with John had also been troubled and tempestuous. Marshal had good reason to dislike, perhaps even to detest, his monarch, yet as the biographer remarked, ‘whatever the king had done to him, [William] never abandoned him for anyone’. Even the author of the History seems to have been perplexed by this unswerving devotion, but the greatest test of Marshal’s fidelity was yet to come.
King John’s reign reached its bitter end in the autumn of 1216. He had marched north in the hope of mounting one last campaign and bringing aid to Nicola de la Haye at Lincoln, but he contracted ‘a violent fever’ in early October. With his body already weakened, the king’s ‘pernicious gluttony’ supposedly prompted him to gorge himself on peaches and freshly brewed cider, and as a result he became afflicted with dysentery. As his illness took hold, John seems also to have been gripped by a sense of guilt and remorse. On 10 October he made a grant to one of William of Briouze’s surviving daughters, Margaret, for the ‘sake of the souls’ of her parents and brother. The king limped on to Newark, south of Lincoln, but there his condition worsened. On 18 October, he was said to have made a deathbed confession of his many sins, and to have spoken of the hope that William Marshal might ‘forgive the harm and wrongs which I have unjustly done to him’. Later that night he ‘lost his strength [and] his mind’, and at some point in the small hours he died – a man of forty-eight years, who had presided over the disintegration of the great Angevin Empire and brought the kingdom of England to its knees. A number of chroniclers confidently predicted that the late king would be condemned to Hell. One even added that: ‘Foul as it is, Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John.’
In accordance with his last wishes, the king’s body was carried south-west to Worcester Cathedral – a site dedicated to one of his favoured saints, Wulfstan. William Marshal heard the news of John’s demise and came north from Gloucester with the papal legate Guala to bury yet another king. The earl had now served, and survived, four crowned and anointed monarchs. It seemed that the days of the Angevins were at an end. A new era would surely dawn, with a French prince wearing the English crown.
THE GREATEST CHOICE
In spite of his ignominious end, King John was afforded a regal funeral. His body had been arrayed ‘in royal robes’, and William Marshal and Guala ensured that he was honoured with ‘a service befiting a monarch’, before he was laid to rest. The earl even sent John Marshal to fetch precious silks with which the king’s tomb could be covered. Once this ceremony was complete, however, the beleaguered remnants of the royalist party had to face a stark reality. Their prospects were dreadfully bleak. More than half of the kingdom lay in the hands of the baronial rebels and their French allies, including the city of London, while the crown’s treasury lay all but empty. And the heir to this sundered realm was a nine-year-old boy, John’s son, Henry; a figure seemingly bereft of support.
With King John dead and buried, William Marshal faced the most momentous decision of his entire career, a choice that, in many ways, would define his life, and the fate of England. As a young household knight, William had fought alongside the Young King Henry; now another Angevin of that same name lay in desperate need of his aid. But would Marshal champion Henry’s claim, or turn aside and watch him fall as Louis of France swept to victory? In terms of cold-blooded, political calculus, the correct path was blindingly apparent: William should abandon the royalist camp and forsake Henry. The earl was now perhaps sixty-nine years old. The time was ripe to withdraw from the front line and hope to weather the storm of dynastic revolution, ensconced on the Welsh March or in Ireland. William’s established link to the Capetian dynasty, through the oath of homage sworn for his Norman estate at Longueville, made subjection to Prince Louis a natural step. William Longsword had understood, like so many others, that the wind of change was blowing. It was clear that Marshal should follow his lead.
The stakes set before William could not have been higher. All the labour of his life – the pursuit of power, wealth and office; the long path forged from anonymous knight to earl of the realm – now stood to be squandered. Should Marshal falter, the future of his wife and children, of the dynasty he had established, might well be shattered. The prospects of the faithful household knights he had sheltered and nurtured also hung in the balance. And William was no self-sacrificing saint. Without the drive of ambition and some willingness to plot, scheme and manipulate, he could never have achieved such glittering eminence amidst the cut-throat world of the Angevin court. Nor would he have survived the predations of King John’s reign. Marshal’s careful manoeuvring around John during the 1190s and his equivocation on the issue of his Norman lands proved him to be a political animal.
But William Marshal was not merely a politician. He was also a warrior and a knight; a man who had lived his long life in accordance with the ideals of chivalry, pursuing and preserving honour. The earl had cultivated a well-earned reputation for steadfast loyalty. It seems clear that the royalist faction expected Earl William to defend the late king’s heir. Indeed, John appears to have placed Henry into William’s care before his death. According to the History, John asked his knights ‘to see that [Earl William] takes charge of my son and always keeps him under his protection, for my son will never govern these lands of mine with the help of anyone but Marshal’, and this bequest was confirmed in another contemporary source. William had never turned his back on a lord or king; could he bear to do so now? Could he countenance the public shame, reflected in the eyes of his own closest retainers, of renouncing this charge; the muddying of his cherished good name and, perhaps, the fracturing of his own conception of himself. Something of the same dilemma had lain before John of Earley in 1208, and he had chosen to lose land and power, but avoid dishonour. Perhaps William had already made his choice as he rode to attend John’s funeral; certainly he must have understood that the decision could not be long postponed.
William Marshal’s decision
In the immediate aftermath of King John’s burial, Marshal returned to Gloucester, and an armed force was sent south to Devizes, with strict instructions to take possession of the young heir, and to ‘let nobody prevent them from coming [north] with him’. Earl William then set out to meet the boy on the road near Malmesbury (in Wiltshire). Their encounter in the open countryside was charged with emotion. According to the History, Henry was so small that he had to be carried in the arms of one of his knights. Coming before William Marshal, he declared, ‘I give myself over to God and to you, so that in the Lord’s name you may take charge of me.’ The earl was said to have replied: ‘I will be yours in good faith [and] there is nothing I will not do to serve you while I have the strength.’ Young Henry reportedly wept, and so too did Marshal and those gathered around them.
William Marshal thus placed the full weight of his support behind Henry’s claim. The earl would now face the ultimate challenge of his life – the battle to rekindle the fortunes of the Angevin dynasty, defeat the barons and the French, and save his boy-king. Other historians have suggested that Earl William leapt at the chance to support King John’s young heir, seeing it as one more opportunity to achieve yet greater advancement. But this view seems to be conditioned by hindsight, and misrepresents the reality of the moment. In October 1216, most considered young Henry’s cause to be hopeless. Victory, and any rewards it might bring, would have seemed like distant dreams to all involved, including the nearly seventy-year-old Marshal. William might expect to hold the leading position within the royalist faction, but given the monumental struggle that lay ahead, that was cold comfort. The motives behind his fateful decision remain open to debate. Perhaps he could not resist the chance to lead one last campaign or was determined to preserve his own reputation. It may even be that he acted out of pure, selfless dedication to the dynasty that he had served for the last five decades.