Biographies & Memoirs

6

THE QUESTION OF LOYALTY

William Marshal’s betrayal remains shrouded in uncertainty and mystery. It was only recorded in his biography, the History of William Marshal, yet given that its author decided to include a record of these events, and to address the accusations, it seems certain that a grave rift did occur. According to the History, a faction within Young Henry’s military household became jealous of William’s preferred status: envying the renown he had gained, the wealth he had accrued and, perhaps above all, his constant proximity to the Young King.

Five conspirators supposedly decided to engineer Marshal’s downfall, hatching a ‘treacherous plot’ to ‘sow discord between [William] and his lord’. The biographer stated that he could only name two of the men responsible. They were Adam of Yquebeuf, a Norman knight who, like Marshal, had been a core member of Henry’s mesnie since the early 1170s, but who had not enjoyed the same storied tournament career; and a newer arrival, Thomas of Coulonces. Both had fought at the great Lagny tournament in 1179. William’s biographer refused to reveal the identity of the remaining three plotters because their relatives were still alive when the History was written in the 1220s, but he did later specify that one of them – perhaps even the ringleader – was the Young King’s seneschal (the officer in charge of administering the household), and this office was held by Peter FitzGuy in the 1170s, so this may be the third man.

The accusations levelled against Marshal took two forms. First, it was suggested that William was brazenly acting above his station, stealing the limelight and thereby usurping honour and renown due to the Young King. Not only had Marshal assembled his own military retinue, he was also said to have employed a herald, Henry ‘li Norreis’ (‘the Northerner’), who would proudly strut through the lists before a tournament proclaiming the war-cry ‘Dex aïe lei Marschal’ (‘God for the Marshal’) – a rather cheeky and ill-advised extension of Young Henry’s own chant ‘Dex aïe’. The description of William’s second supposed crime was more direct. It was said that he had been ‘fornicating with the queen’ (‘il le fait a la reïne’), or more literally, that he had been ‘doing it to the queen’.

The five conspirators apparently moved with great care once they decided to blacken Marshal’s name. Deeming it too risky simply to go directly to the Young King, they slowly began spreading their rumours within the household, trying to insinuate, without themselves being caught in an open allegation. Peter of Préaux, one of the five Préaux brothers in the mesnie, heard these early whispers and immediately warned William ‘to be very much on his guard’, urging him to take pre-emptive action by speaking to Henry ‘before the [Young King] should show him any hatred’, but Marshal refused to do so. Eventually, Adam, Thomas and the other plotters found a proxy to do their dirty work – a young intimate of the king named Ralph Farci. Ralph was invited to a small gathering, plied with copious amounts of alcohol and, in the course of the evening, the tale of Marshal’s crimes was retold. The seed had been sewn. That same night, while still drunk, Ralph took the rumour to Henry, and though the Young King refused at first to believe such scurrilous hearsay, when each of the five conspirators came forward to say that ‘the matter was well known, heard of by people and actually seen’, the story began to gain purchase.

Young Henry still seems to have harboured doubts. He reacted neither with blind rage, nor violence. Instead, he simply began to treat William with cold detachment. In the rarefied atmosphere of a royal household, where public demonstrations of favour were critical to a retainer’s status, this sudden change in disposition was damaging enough. As the History reported, ‘the king was very upset and ill-disposed towards the Marshal’, refusing to speak to him. It was soon obvious to all that William was no longer ‘cherished by the king or in such a position of influence’, and evident that instead, Henry ‘hated him with all his heart’.

The case against William

Could William Marshal really have been guilty of these crimes? The accusations of prideful arrogance and vain display are more than plausible, though William’s actual intent may not have been malicious. Marshal was not the only knight-banneret to serve in the Young King’s entourage, but he was now one of the fêted celebrities of the tournament circuit, and he seems to have relished the renown and fame that victory brought. Having risen at an extraordinary pace from relatively humble origins, it was almost inevitable that, to some, he might seem a social upstart – a mere knight, trying to step out beyond Young Henry’s shadow.

William lived in an aristocratic society fascinated by knightly culture and chivalric ideals. In this world, there was a natural tension between a lord or king and his knight. Each might display estimable virtues – the Young King was revered for his largesse; Marshal for his prowess. But which quality took precedence? If a knight was actually a better warrior than his lord, did that make him more worthy of praise? This question did not just apply to William and Young Henry. It was one of the simmering social dilemmas of the day, and would be repeatedly rehearsed and explored in the chivalric ‘Romances’ – the popular fiction of the late twelfth century. These epic stories of knightly endeavour and courtly intrigue, often set in the Arthurian world, evolved out of the earlier chanson de geste and were just then starting to grip the imaginations of noble courts across Europe. Not surprisingly, their fictionalised plots and characters often reflected their audience’s real-life concerns, and one of the central dynamics of Arthur’s relationship with Lancelot was the question of pre-eminence between a king and his leading knight. The accusation that William was somehow competing with his lord and comporting himself with unseemly grandeur was understandable given this obsession with the contest for renown. In fact, it is perhaps a testament to the strength of Henry and Marshal’s friendship through the 1170s that this inherent tension had not caused an earlier rift.

What of Marshal’s illicit affair with the queen? Is it conceivable that William could have carried out such an act of betrayal? The affair might have been driven by lust or love, with Marguerite perhaps irresistibly drawn to Marshal by his famed prowess. After all, in the world of courtly literature, the tension between characters like Arthur and Lancelot often culminated in adultery – with Guinevere choosing the great knight over her husband the king – and this plot was echoed in a number of Romance stories already circulating in that period. The power of sexual desire to shape human behaviour was well understood in this period. The medieval Church sought to promote the sanctity of celibacy, warning that sex out of wedlock was a deadly sin. Even within marriage, intercourse was proscribed: being permissible only in pursuit of procreation, not physical pleasure, and strictly forbidden on feast days or fast days – of which there were more than 200 per year.

But for all that, many of the men and women living in twelfth-century Europe had a surprisingly frank and natural approach to sex. Regular lovemaking was thought by some to be essential for the maintenance of good health, and sexual pleasure was also encouraged, especially for women, because it was widely believed that procreation could only occur when a woman experienced an orgasm. Bawdy entertainments were also popular. It was in William Marshal’s lifetime that the humorous poems known as fabliauxcame into vogue. They typically dealt with tales of sexual conquest or misadventure, made use of toe-curlingly explicit language and, by the 1180s, were all the rage in the aristocratic circles of northern France.

It is also the case that, in William’s world, male adultery was commonplace – indeed, most noble-born men were expected, as a matter of course, to have mistresses, and some chroniclers actually expressed amazement at the very idea that a lord might stay faithful to his wife. King Henry II had a number of well-known mistresses, including ‘Fair’ Rosamund Clifford and the Welsh noblewoman Nest Bloet. It was also rumoured that Henry took King Philip II’s half-sister Alice of France as a mistress, even though she had been betrothed to his son Richard. Nobles serving in the king’s household were not expected to see their wives, instead official royal whores catered for their sexual needs.

Adultery initiated by a noble-born woman, however, was a different matter – a rare and scandalous occurrence. Nonetheless, it was not unheard of – Queen Eleanor herself had been accused of pursuing an incestuous affair with her uncle during the Second Crusade. The treatise on courtly manners authored by Daniel of Beccles towards the end of the twelfth century offers a glimpse of the mores of the day. Beccles was not at all surprised that noble ladies might be possessed by lust – like many contemporaries, he believed that women possessed an insatiable sexual appetite; he also thought it only natural that they would find well-endowed men irresistible. In light of this, he helpfully offered two pieces of advice to knights trying to fend off the sexual advances of their lord’s wife: first, pretend to be ill; second, never, under any circumstances, tell your lord. Walter Map also related the rather salacious story of a queen who lusted after a handsome young knight at court named Galo. One of the warrior’s friends tried to solve the problem by suggesting to the queen that Galo was actually a eunuch, but she promptly sent one of her ladies-in-waiting to seduce him with strict instructions to ‘put her finger on the spot [and] bring back word of whether he was man or no’.

It is obvious that lust and adultery were real possibilities in the setting of an aristocratic household; even an illicit affair with a married woman of royal birth might not have been utterly unimaginable in this period. But no other shred of evidence suggests that William Marshal and Queen Marguerite were in any way familiar with one another, nor is there any hint that either of them had a reputation for licentious behaviour. The History of William Marshal maintained a discrete silence regarding the more raucous celebrations that must have followed many tournaments – what the historian David Crouch described as the ‘après-tournoi’ entertainments. In fact, almost nothing is known of William’s sexuality in the 1170s and 1180s – there are no traces of mistresses or illegitimate children. The same is true of Marguerite; beyond the one child she conceived with Henry in 1176, she remains a virtually invisible cipher. All of this makes the accusation of an adulterous affair hard to believe.

The muted nature of the Young King’s reaction was perhaps even more telling. In similar circumstances, his one-time ally, Count Philip of Flanders, had responded with merciless fury. In the summer of 1175 Philip accused a knight named Walter of Fontaines of committing adultery with his wife, Isabel of Vermandois (Young Henry’s cousin). Walter denied the charges and offered to prove his innocence, but he was never given the opportunity. Instead, supposedly driven by his ‘fury’, the count had Walter beaten with cudgels to within an inch of his life. A makeshift gallows was then erected above a foul-smelling latrine trench. Walter was stripped, bound and strung up by his feet, with his head left dangling into the cesspit until he died of suffocation.*

Henry the Young King’s response in late 1182 seems remarkably mild by comparison. The shock of the accusations levelled against one of his closest friends and confidants – the man under whose watchful gaze he had grown up over the last thirteen years – must have been devastating. TheHistory admitted that Henry’s ‘hatred for the Marshal was violent and bitter’, and that as a result ‘[William] withdrew from his lord’s company, not coming anywhere near him’. Nonetheless, Marshal was not immediately banished or publicly punished – a stark contrast to the brutal treatment meted out to the Young King’s vice-chancellor Adam for his treachery in 1176. It is also notable that other members of Henry’s mesnie, past and present – including men such as Baldwin of Béthune – remained on close terms with William, though this might be explained by William’s elevated status and fame. The only other hint of a reaction related to Queen Marguerite, as she was subsequently removed from Young Henry’s court and sent to her brother Philip of France in Paris. At first glance this seems to indicate a serious marital rift, but in fact her dispatch to the Capetian capital took place only in February 1183, and might easily be explained by the fractious political climate at that particular moment. On balance, there has to be a very strong possibility that the whole accusation of an adulterous affair was a fabrication, and seen as such by the Young King, though the charge of dishonouring Henry by supplanting his position remained. With the surviving evidence, however, the exact truth of these events remains hidden.

Into exile

In the late autumn of 1182, William and the Young King attended their last tournament together, held north of Paris, between Gournay and Ressons, but it was a lamentable affair and the estrangement between the two former friends was obvious to all. Both men seem to have been ill at ease with the public exposure of their quarrel: Henry was left ‘blushing with shame and the Marshal likewise . . . full of anger and shame’. Philip of Flanders reportedly counselled the Young King not to ‘let the Marshal slip away from him’, but Henry refused to make any effort at a rapprochement. William’s accusers had achieved their goal – he had fallen from favour. Once the tournament was done, Marshal absented himself from the mesnie, going into a kind of voluntary exile. Soon after, the Young King travelled to visit the great Cistercian abbey of Fontevraud, near Chinon – a monastery favoured by the Angevins. There he issued two charters that survive to this day, one in its original form, the other in a later medieval copy. Both documents bear the names of Henry’s leading household knights. William Marshal’s name – so often in pride of place at the head of this type of witness list – is absent, and tellingly, his position has been usurped by none other than Thomas of Coulonces. The second named conspirator, Adam of Yquebeuf, is also listed just behind Gerard Talbot, Robert Tresgoz and John of Préaux. The Young King’s household had been reordered.

William Marshal made one final attempt to clear his name at the massive Angevin assembly held by King Henry II at Caen, in Normandy, that December. The annual Christmas Court was always a time of celebration and lavish feasting. These gatherings offered a perfect opportunity for the public affirmation of royal eminence and largesse, and gave a chance for the thronged aristocracy to see and be seen – to marvel at the unrivalled regal spectacle, while flaunting their own status. The assembly in 1182 was especially ostentatious, with nobles gathered from across the Angevin realm, and guests from Germany and Gascony in attendance. All four of Henry II’s sons were present, as was his daughter Matilda and her husband Henry, the Lion of Saxony, with a grand retinue of 1,000 knights.

The Christmas Court was also a time when nobles might present their grievances or seek royal justice – indeed, at this same gathering, Marshal’s old patron the lord of Tancarville openly complained to the Old King that his role as chamberlain of Normandy was being usurped. By this point, news of William Marshal’s alleged crimes had already been brought to the attention of Henry II, but it was to the Young King himself that William came during the feast. Marshal seems to have been oblivious to the swirling currents of political tension pulsing just beneath the surface at Caen. The Court that year was alive with intrigue and machination – a greater game was afoot – but William was concerned only to achieve some measure of reconciliation with Young Henry.

Marshal’s sudden appearance at Caen was unexpected. The History noted that he was ‘made very welcome by the high-ranking people’, though his enemies were ‘greatly displeased’. William clearly felt the eyes of the crowd upon him, because by now the accusations against him were ‘public knowledge’. He presented himself before the Young King and requested an opportunity to prove his innocence through trial by combat. William offered to fight no less than three opponents, one after the other, stating that if bested he would willingly go to the gallows. He even suggested that his accusers could try cutting off one of the fingers from his right hand to see if that would make him ‘admit defeat’. But Young Henry remained unmoved, bluntly refusing any such trial or test. With that, Marshal’s fall from grace was complete. He was now effectively banished from the Young King’s military household. Realising that he might face arrest, imprisonment or even attack, William requested and received letters of safe conduct from Henry II, and these saw Marshal safely to the borders of the Angevin realm. His exile had begun.

In early 1183, William Marshal found himself without master or mesnie for the first time in fifteen years. Now around thirty-six, he was suddenly out in the cold. News of the scandal – or at least of the ‘strife between the Marshal and his lord’ – spread across northern France, but William’s famed prowess as a tournament champion meant that other nobles, outside the Angevin world, were still willing to recruit him into their own households. The History was rather coy about Marshal’s behaviour in this period. His biographer was happy enough to admit that a bidding war to secure William’s services broke out, with Philip of Flanders offering £500, Duke Hugh of Burgundy matching that sum and the lord of Béthune proposing to pay £1,000, and throw in the hand-in-marriage of his beautiful daughter to boot. According to the History, Marshal declined all of these offers, remaining in effect a free agent, but this may have been a convenient blurring of the truth, designed to maintain the impression of William’s unbroken loyalty to Young Henry. In fact, William probably entered the count of Flanders’ entourage for a brief time, as charter evidence indicates that Marshal accepted the substantial endowment of one quarter of the income drawn from the Flemish town of St Omer from Philip, presumably as remuneration for joining his tournament team.

There is certainly no suggestion that William struggled to make ends meet in early 1183, and was said to have ‘led a very fine, sumptuous and magnificent existence in France’. This was no return to the frightening uncertainty of 1166 and his short-lived ostracism from the Tancarville household. Marshal also struck up a close friendship with another prominent figure from the tournament circuit, the great James of Avesnes. Once the annual break in chivalric games began with the coming of Lent, the pair made a pilgrimage to Cologne in Germany, where a great golden casket, thought to contain the bones of the Three Magi who visited the infant Christ, could be venerated. It seems likely that William only returned to France in mid- to late April 1183. At some point thereafter he apparently met the Young King’s chamberlain, Ralph FitzGodfrey, on his travels. The History described Ralph literally seeing Marshal approaching along on the road and galloping up to greet him. The chamberlain had spent weeks scouring the towns and cities of northern France looking for William, and he bore an urgent message from the Young King. The accusations against William had been discredited and he would now be welcomed back into Henry’s household. But Ralph urged him to come with all possible speed, because the Young King was in the middle of a bloody war in Aquitaine.

THE FINAL GAMBIT

Seemingly unbeknown to William, the inexorable march towards this conflict had begun almost the moment he left the Christmas Court at Caen. Henry II and his sons moved on to the city of Le Mans in late December and the Old King recognised, amid the tense and fractious atmosphere, that he must finally take some decisive action to clarify the balance of power between his heirs. At first he ruled in favour of Young Henry. On 1 January 1183, Richard and Geoffrey were required to pay homage to the Young King, thus acknowledging the subjection of Brittany and Aquitaine to his ultimate overlordship. Geoffrey readily acceded to his father’s demand and, though Richard grumbled, eventually he too agreed, but only on the proviso that Young Henry first guaranteed his rights to Aquitaine in perpetuity. With the hard-won terms of this pact in place, Henry II must have thought that his eldest son would be mollified. The pre-eminent status that he yearned for could now be confirmed.

In fact, any semblance of peace was about to unravel before the Old King’s eyes. Standing before his father, brothers and a large crowd of Angevin courtiers, Young Henry placed his hands on a copy of the Holy Gospels and ‘swore that from that day forward . . . he would remain loyal to King Henry [II]’, but he also confessed that ‘he had pledged to support the barons of Aquitaine against Richard’ and that these magnates now wished to declare him as the new duke. This was a public declaration of war against his brother, the Lionheart. Young Henry had summoned the courage to force a confrontation, backing the Old King into a corner from which he would have to choose which of his sons to support. The Young King must have hoped that this gambit might not only force his father to confirm Young Henry’s status as Angevin overlord, but also bring him actual territory of his own, either won through arms in Aquitaine or earned through his father’s concession of Normandy. But Young Henry was playing a dangerous, unpredictable game.

At first, a frustrated Henry II made desperate efforts to hold the family together, compelling his quarrelling sons to accept a new pact at another assembly at Angers, but this was little more than a facade. The Old King’s position was incredibly finely balanced. Should he support his eldest son and primary heir, the renowned paragon of chivalry; or back Richard, the hardened warrior with a proven track record of wielding power in the real world? Our ability to judge Henry II’s intentions is impaired by vague or contradictory evidence at this point. Contemporaries seem to have been confused and uncertain of the Old King’s position, quite probably because he kept his cards close to his chest. As one of the most experienced, subtle and canny politicians of the age, Henry was moving with care and caution. According to the English chronicler Ralph of Diss, the Old King did reveal his tacit approval of Henry’s cause, after Richard ‘exploded with anger’, refusing any further talk of peace. ‘[Falling] into a rage’, Henry was said to have ‘threatened difficulties for Richard’ – suggesting that the Young King ‘was going to tame Richard’s pride’ – and urged Geoffrey to ‘stand faithfully by his brother as his liege lord’.

In fact, it may be that the Old King had simply resigned himself to the fact that his two eldest sons were going to come to blows and that, in some sense, the contest for Aquitaine would serve as a test of their skill and ambition, and he planned to support whoever emerged victorious. In public, at least, Henry II announced yet another assembly – to be held, this time, just north of Poitiers – the notional plan being for the Aquitanian aristocracy to air their grievances against Richard. But none of his sons was interested in further negotiation. Geoffrey travelled to the Limousin, supposedly to arrange a truce, but immediately declared his support for the Aquitanian cause and sided with the local baron, Viscount Aimery of Limoges.

The Young King followed in February 1183, and it was at this point that his wife, Queen Marguerite, was sent to Paris. Some eight months earlier, Young Henry had made a point of visiting Limoges and offering his patronage to its famous abbey dedicated to St Martial. Now the city became the rallying point for his forces. Little remains of the heart of medieval Limoges in the modern city (barring some recently unearthed remnants of the crypt of St Martial’s), but in 1183 the area was dominated by the great abbey and the viscount’s neighbouring citadel. This latter structure had been largely demolished on Richard’s orders in 1181, so work now began apace to rebuild its walls using wood, earth and scavenged masonry.

With the battle lines being drawn, other local magnates started to offer Young Henry their support, including Geoffrey of Lusignan – the man who had attacked Earl Patrick of Salisbury’s entourage in 1168. Viscount Aimery also summoned mercenary forces from Gascony. It is difficult to know who had the Young King’s ear during this critical period, as the conflict that he had engineered gathered pace. Denied the counsel of his old friend and retainer William Marshal, he must have turned to the remaining intimates within his household and perhaps also to his younger brother, Duke Geoffrey of Brittany. If so, he was in grave peril of being led astray.

Now in his mid-twenties, Geoffrey was a devious, scheming sycophant. In the words of one contemporary, he was ‘smooth as oil’ and ‘a hypocrite in everything’; his ‘syrupy and persuasive eloquence’ gave him the ‘power of dissolving the apparently indissoluble’; indeed, he was a man who could ‘corrupt two kingdoms with his tongue’. This unsavoury character had given every impression of acquiescence at Le Mans on 1 January, but he must surely have been angling for his advantage; judging that by backing Young Henry, for now at least, he might gain future advantage. Geoffrey could draw on the martial resources of Brittany, and he instructed Breton mercenaries to cross into Aquitaine and threaten Poitiers, but he was not to be trusted.

A family at war

By early February it was obvious to Richard that his brothers were about to mount an offensive. Fuming at his father’s inaction, the Lionheart left for Poitiers to prepare for a direct military confrontation. Richard was not a man who played at war, but a brutal, efficient and relentless commander, already tried and tested through years of campaigning. In short order he crushed the Breton mercenary force, executing all prisoners, and then on 10 February he led his troops out of Poitiers on a forced march south-east. For two days and two nights they rode incessantly, covering seventy-five miles, to reach the outpost of Gorre, only twelve miles west of Limoges. There, Richard made short work of a party of the Gascon mercenaries serving Young Henry’s faction: most were slain, the rest taken captive. Having made his lightning strike, the Lionheart retreated a short distance down the Vienne river valley to the fortress of Aixe. There his prisoners were either drowned, put to the sword or blinded. The statement was clear. This was the manner in which Richard would wage war, should his brothers be foolish enough to persist in their aggression.

In mid-February King Henry II finally came south to intervene. He must have already begun summoning military forces from across Anjou and Normandy, but was as yet supported by only a small contingent of knights. The Old King arrived at Limoges intending to speak with Henry, apparently still undecided as to whose cause he would support. But as his party rode up to the makeshift citadel, arrows were suddenly loosed from within. One struck and wounded a knight standing close to the king; another flew directly towards Henry II’s chest. At the last second his horse reared up and the missile struck the beast in the head. The Old King had been inches away from severe injury, quite possibly even death. In the ensuing chaos, the royal household hustled Henry II to safety and he travelled directly to Richard’s castle at Aixe. His choice had been made for him – he would now back the Lionheart.

It is impossible to know whether this was a deliberate attempt at assassination, or even if it was, whether Young Henry was in any way complicit. The Old King’s death would certainly have cleared the way for Henry’s accession, but such a direct attack was incredibly risky. The excuse later given was that the garrison had believed they were under attack, yet as King Henry had been riding beneath his red and gold royal banner, it is difficult to believe such a mistake could have been made. That evening the Young King came to Aixe to parley and offer his apologies for the shocking incident, though his cause was not helped by the fact that the archers responsible remained unpunished. Obviously angry and suspicious, it was plain to see that Henry II now favoured Richard.

There was a hiatus over the next two weeks, as the Old King and Duke Richard assembled their forces, ahead of an attack on Limoges. Suddenly confronted by the stark reality of his position, Young Henry’s nerve seems to have faltered. This was a war largely of his own making, yet it now dawned on him that, with the alienation of his father, outright defeat had become a real possibility. The exorbitant costs of the Gascon mercenaries drafted in by Aimar also began to bite, and the Young King was quickly running out of money. He was out of his depth. Before long, he resorted to the shameful expedient of looting the abbey of St Martial of its gold and silver just to meet his expenses. The last two weeks of February also witnessed a confused series of diplomatic exchanges between Henry and his father, some carried out face to face, others via envoys. Throughout, the Young King vacillated: offers of peace were made, but then rescinded, Henry restated his intention to crusade to the Holy Land – and seems to have actually taken the cross at this point – but when the Old King agreed to finance his expedition, he backed away from the plan.

No resolution had been achieved by 1 March and, with their armies now in place, Henry II and Richard moved in to besiege the citadel in Limoges, using a mixture of encirclement and assault. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Young King had little choice but to mount a defence. The siege proved to be a grim affair for both sides. Late winter weather meant that it was still cold, and the rains lashed the besieger’s tents – in misery, some of the Old King’s troops asked to depart after just two weeks. Nonetheless, Young Henry’s prospects looked bleak. It was probably at this point, in March 1183, that the Young King’s seneschal – one of the leading men to have accused William Marshal the preceding autumn – revealed himself to be a ‘traitor’. Having judged Young Henry’s cause to be hopeless, he abandoned his lord and mesnie and went over to the Old King. According to the History, this act of treachery caused Henry to realise that the allegations against Marshal had been nothing more than ‘harmful lies’. This may have been the case; perhaps the whole plot really was revealed and discredited. It is also possible that, with his back against the wall, the Young King simply decided to put any lingering grudge or suspicion to one side. Whatever the truth may have been, Henry now needed a man of William’s prowess and quality in his retinue, and so his chamberlain Ralph FitzGodfrey was instructed to locate Marshal with all possible haste.

Ralph was perhaps dispatched at the same time as Young Henry slipped away from Limoges – either by breaking through Henry II’s encirclement, or (more likely) by using the cover of a brief parley truce as an opportunity to abscond. Geoffrey of Brittany, Viscount Aimar and the lord of Lusignan were left to hold the citadel, while the Young King ranged across the Limousin and Angoulême, desperately seeking out supplies and spoils. Once again, he looted monasteries, plundering Grandmont, north of Limoges, and the abbey of La Couronne, but the booty taken kept his war effort alive. The citadel at Limoges stubbornly held out through April, and by early May the Old King had called off the siege. Having weathered the worst of the storm, it looked as though the tide was now beginning to shift in Young Henry’s favour. His support within Aquitaine remained strong, despite the attacks on local religious houses. Neighbouring powers like Duke Hugh of Burgundy and Count Raymond of Toulouse were also beginning to line up behind the Young King, preferring the prospect of his rule to the known ferocity of Richard’s regime.

It was probably at this point, sometime in May, that William Marshal finally returned to the Young Henry’s side. Using the political connections forged on the tournament circuit, Marshal had secured letters of support and safe-conduct from King Philip of France, the archbishop of Rheims and the count of Blois so that he could traverse the war zone. Even Henry II eventually gave William leave to be reunited with the Young King, perhaps hoping that he might steer his wayward son on a more moderate course. In fact, Marshal’s arrival at Limoges may have encouraged Henry to go on the offensive; certainly by 23 May he had marched down the Vienne river valley to occupy the now un-garrisoned castle at Aixe, and then moved on south. After the cheerless uncertainty of the early winter, his prospects had been transformed. The Young King was still in deep financial debt to his mercenary forces, but Richard and the Old King were now on the back foot.

But then, on 26 May, Young Henry fell ill with a fever at Uzerche, some thirty-five miles south of Limoges. At first he was able to keep moving, passing the small castle of Martel two days later, and travelling on to plunder the Old King’s favoured shrine at Rocamadour. By early June, however, he was back at Martel and so weak that he had to be confined to bed. His fever remained high, but he also contracted ‘a flux of the bowels’ – what today would be termed dysentery. Like Henry II in 1170 and young Philip of France in 1179 before him, Young Henry’s life was now in danger.

Realising that he was no longer in any position to wage a war, the Young King sent an envoy to his father, asking that he come to Martel so that they could be reconciled. Fearing for his son’s condition, Henry was said to have considered setting out on the journey, but in light of the treachery witnessed at Limoges that February, his advisors counselled him to decline. A ring of ‘forgiveness and peace’ was sent in his stead. As the days passed, Young Henry’s condition deteriorated. Wracked by pain, his body became severely dehydrated, even as his physicians struggled to bring him back to health. William Marshal and the rest of the Young King’s closest household knights waited with him at Martel, their anxiety deepening. There was no doubt that Henry was now gravely ill, but at only twenty-eight, he surely had the strength and resilience of youth on his side.

By 7 June, however, it was clear that for Young Henry there would be no recovery – no last-minute reprieve. He was dying. That day he made a private confession to the bishop of Cahors, prostrating himself naked on the floor before the prelate’s crucifix to renounce his attempt to seize Aquitaine and to receive the ritual of Mass. Four days later, on 11 June, Henry was at the point of death. The Young King now repeated his confession in public, before William and the other members of his mesnie, and then received absolution for his sins and the last rites.

On that final day, the man who had been destined to become King Henry III of England dictated his last testament. His body was to be buried alongside his forebears, the great dukes of Normandy, in the cathedral at Rouen. A heartfelt appeal was made to his father Henry II ‘to deal mercifully’ with his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine, his wife Queen Marguerite of France and his knights ‘to whom he had made many promises which he had been unable to fulfil’. Turning to Marshal, ‘his most intimate friend’, Henry bid him take up the cloak upon which he had affixed his crusading cross, and begged him ‘to carry it to the Holy Sepulchre (in Jerusalem) and with it pay my debts to God’.* After that his face became ‘sallow, wan and livid’. The Young King’s dying moments became a tableau of penitence. A hair shirt was placed on his emaciated body, a noose around his withered neck. With this rope he was dragged from his bed and laid upon the ash-strewn floor, with large stone blocks placed beneath his head and feet. Clutching the Old King’s ring of peace to his chest, he fell unconscious and died soon thereafter.

The cult of the Young King

For William Marshal and those others huddled inside the castle at Martel, the mixture of shock and disbelief at Young Henry’s passing left them ‘quite out of their minds and greatly disturbed’. The Old King, too, was said to have been gripped by the ‘deepest grief’ when he heard the dreadful news, and ‘bursting into tears, he threw himself to the ground, greatly bewailing his son’. The beautiful, golden-haired Young King had died a pointless, squalid death. With his demise, the resistance in Aquitaine soon collapsed. Regardless of the anguish he must have felt, William Marshal was forced to confront the unseemly issue of Henry’s debts. Challenged by one of the Young King’s mercenary commanders – now angry at the prospect of not being paid – William had to pledge himself against the money owed, though King Henry II later settled the arrears.

Nonetheless, Marshal and the other loyal members of the Young King’s mesnie did their best to follow their late lord’s final wishes. Given the summer heat, careful preparations had to be made before Henry’s corpse could be moved. The internal organs of the royal dead were often interred separately, so the Young King’s brains, eyes and bowels were removed, and later laid to rest at Grandmont Priory, even though this was one of the religious houses he had ransacked. The rest of his body was packed with salt, stitched into a bull’s hide and then placed within a lead coffin. William and his fellow knights were now ready to begin the long funeral procession to Rouen, more than 300 miles north of Martel. The Young King’s bier was ‘carried on the shoulders of his comrades through villages, castles and towns, with people running from everywhere to look’.

As the slow-moving cortège passed through the landscape of Aquitaine, Anjou and then Normandy, an atmosphere of feverous collective grief took hold, especially among ordinary townspeople and the peasantry. Young Henry was idolised as the great flower of chivalry, and many mourned the loss of a man who, it was believed, would have ruled as a king of justice and mercy. In part, the power of this conviction, and the sheer, unexpected force of the sentiment that now began to sweep across the Angevin realm could be explained by the fact that Henry had never actually held or exercised full regnal power in his life. He had been able to play the role of the chivalric figurehead without ever having to enforce laws or raise taxes. With his hands unstained by the grubby work of governance, he became the perfect king of the imagination.

Even so, the cult of the Young King that quickly sprang up in June 1183 went beyond mere political adoration, and began to parallel the charged devotional outpouring that had followed Thomas Becket’s murder in 1170. Claims for the late Henry’s sanctity were made as William and his comrades marched his corpse north: illnesses were supposedly cured as the funeral procession passed, lepers came forward to touch the bier and a great shaft of heavenly light was said to have shone down on the coffin at night. When the procession reached Le Mans, the crowds became so overwrought that the bishop halted the funeral party and had the Young King’s body quickly interred within the local cathedral – the resting place of Henry’s paternal grandfather, Geoffrey Plantagenet. This may have been a rather unscrupulous attempt to relocate Young Henry’s cult to Le Mans (after all, there were fortunes to be made from pilgrim traffic). The Old King was said to have been enraged by the hasty burial, issuing the dean of Rouen with a special royal warrant so that the corpse could be recovered. In a rather gruesome final act, Henry’s body was duly dug up in mid-July, carried to Rouen Cathedral and laid to rest ‘with due honour . . . on the north side of the high altar’. William Marshal had buried his first king. It would not be his last.

The cult surrounding the Young King proved short-lived. With Henry II still in power and Young Henry now cast as the vanquished rebel, there were few Angevin nobles or clerics willing to risk their careers by repeating stories of his ‘miracles’. In fact, Young King Henry received a scourging press from most late twelfth-century chroniclers. For these historians, writing during the reigns of the Old King and his successors, Henry was easy game – a wayward princeling who died young and left no great court historians to sing his praises. In their accounts, he became little more than a mutinous traitor. Walter Map claimed to have known Henry as ‘a friend and intimate’, but condemned him nonetheless as ‘a false son to his father’ who ‘befouled the whole world with his treasons’. Gerald of Wales offered some degree of balance, accusing the Young King of ‘monstrous ingratitude’, while acknowledging that he had been ‘an honour to his friends, a terror to his enemies and beloved by all’.

Only a few of Young Henry’s closest contemporaries offered a more immediate impression of his achievements and character. The famed troubadour, Bertrand of Born, composed a ‘planh’ (lament) on Henry’s death, praising his largesse, courtesy and chivalry; styling him as the ‘sovereign of all courtly knights’ and the ‘emperor of champions’. Perhaps the most heartfelt memorial was offered by Henry’s chaplain, Gervase of Tilbury. He wrote that the Young King was ‘a solace to the world while he lived’ and that ‘it was a blow to all chivalry when he died in the very glow of youth’. Gervase concluded that ‘when Henry died heaven was hungry, so all the world went begging’.

The Young King was a tragic figure – a man who seemed to forever see true greatness just beyond his grasp; cut down long before his time, with all his promise squandered. He had been William Marshal’s greatest patron and, despite their brief estrangement, one of his closest friends. Henry had transformed William’s career and marked him as a man. Marshal would cherish the Young King’s memory for the rest of his days, but for now his first task was to fulfil Henry’s crusading vow by travelling to the Holy Land.

JOURNEY TO THE HOLY LAND

Honouring Young Henry’s request was no simple matter – it involved a journey of more than 2,000 miles, almost to the edge of the known world – but William undertook this last act of service nonetheless. His pilgrimage seems, first and foremost, to have been driven by selfless dedication and authentic religious devotion. With the Young King defeated and dead, there was little advantage to be gained from upholding his memory, and that summer William found himself in a precarious position, deprived of a lord and patron. Had William’s first priority been to secure his future, he would have focused on finding a new post in a military retinue, either within the Angevin realm or alongside the likes of Count Philip of Flanders. This was certainly the route chosen by most of his peers – the former members of Young Henry’s household. Over the next few years, knights such as Baldwin of Béthune, Robert Tresgoz and Gerard Talbot managed to ingratiate themselves with the Old King. They were accepted into royal service and began the slow process of seeking favour, climbing the ladder to preferment.

Marshal chose a different path. After the Young King’s burial in Rouen, William made a firm commitment to travel to the Near East by taking the crusaders’ cross himself. In many respects, this was a step away from royal service and an interruption to his career – one that prevented him from seeking personal advancement. Now in his mid-thirties, Marshal was at a critical juncture in his life, facing fateful choices. He had been party to two failed rebellions against Henry II and had endured scandalous accusations about his conduct in late 1182. His prospects were not assured. But William had also watched Young Henry’s agonising death with his own eyes, and the experience seems to have left its imprint. He was clearly determined to carry out Henry’s dying wish, by bearing his cloak to Jerusalem, and later events would suggest that Marshal was also moved to ponder his own mortality and faith.

This is not to suggest that William was simply the saintly retainer, his eyes fixed only on the distant Holy City. He was willing to make some sacrifices in 1183, but he was also a realist. Once the Young King had been laid to rest, Marshal sought an audience with Henry II. According to theHistory, he came before the Old King simply ‘to take his leave’, that is to seek royal permission for his pilgrimage, and this consent was duly granted. But this was also a crucial opportunity for William to gauge his standing with the king and to achieve a measure of reconciliation. Henry evidently knew that his eldest son had charged Marshal with a crusading obligation before his death, and seems to have respected William’s fidelity, while also recognising his martial renown. As a result, the Old King promised to hold a place for Marshal in the royal household, probably in response to William’s request for such a guarantee. Henry even gave Marshal 100 Angevin pounds ‘to assist him on his pilgrimage’, though he also took ‘two fine horses’ from William – supposedly as surety of his return from the East – and together these ‘magnificent’ steeds were apparently worth 200 Angevin pounds.

Marshal had laid the groundwork for a prosperous future in Western Europe should he return from the Levant, but in spite of the Old King’s commitment, William seems to have considered the possibility that he might remain in the Holy Land. In mid-summer 1183, he travelled back to England ‘to take leave of his friends, his sisters, his immediate family and all his other kinsmen’, calling upon one of his sisters, Matilda, who had married the minor southern English landholder, Robert of Pont-de-l’Arche.* William may also have visited his elder brother John Marshal, who had retained the hereditary royal marshalcy, but otherwise enjoyed little crown favour under Henry II. The journey to England was certainly a detour for William Marshal and seems like the act of a man placing his affairs in order ahead of a prolonged, perhaps even permanent, absence.

Many knights of William’s age, background and station had forged new careers in the Levant. For much of the twelfth century, the crusader states established after the Latin Christian (or Roman Catholic) conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 offered manifold opportunities for men of Marshal’s class. By travelling to defend the Holy Places, these knights could do ‘God’s work’ and at the same time find advancement, even lands of their own. The Burgundian knight, Reynald of Châtillon, was a case in point. He had fought on the Second Crusade in the contingent of King Louis VII of France in his mid-twenties, but remained in the East. In spite of being a relative unknown, Reynald married Princess Constance of Antioch, heiress to the northern crusader state, in 1153, and ruled as prince of Antioch for eight years. Captured by Muslims, he spent fifteen years in prison in Aleppo before being ransomed (a period of incarceration that rather put Marshal’s own experience in 1168 in the shade). By the time he was freed, Constance had died and a new ruler of Antioch had been declared, but Reynald soon secured another advantageous union, this time with the heiress of the great desert lordship of Transjordan (east of Palestine). This brought him command of the formidable fortresses of Kerak and Montreal, and put him in the front line of the holy war with the mighty Sultan Saladin.

Another knight who made his fortune in the East was Guy of Lusignan, one of the two brothers who had ambushed Earl Patrick of Salisbury and William Marshal in Poitou in 1168. At some point in the 1170s, Guy had travelled to Palestine, perhaps in part to atone for Patrick’s death, but like Reynald he achieved sudden advancement through marriage in 1180, wedding Sibylla of Jerusalem, the sister of King Baldwin IV. In light of Baldwin the Leper King’s desperate ill health, Guy now had his eyes on the crown of Jerusalem itself – a staggering transformation of fortunes, given that just fifteen years earlier he had been an Aquitanean outlaw on the run from Henry II. With such precedent, it would be surprising if William did not entertain at least some thoughts of a Levantine future.

William’s pilgrimage to Jerusalem

Marshal does not appear to have travelled to the Holy Land with a knightly retinue of his own. The small entourage he had assembled by 1179 seems to have been disbanded by the time of his exile in December 1182, and it is quite possible that he was accompanied by only one or two servants, including his squire – a low-ranking warrior named Eustace Bertrimont, who would remain a member of William’s household for many years to come. No detailed record of Marshal’s journey eastwards has survived, but it is almost certain that he would have sailed to Palestine, for while the First Crusaders had marched overland to reach the Near East, the vast majority of pilgrims and crusaders now travelled by ship. William may have embarked from a Channel port or, perhaps more likely, from a southern-French centre of pilgrim traffic like Marseille. His crusader status – signalled by the cross sewn on to his clothing – afforded him a degree of protection and freedom to travel unhindered in Christian lands.

Given that the Young King was buried in Rouen in mid-July, and that William first travelled to England, the earliest likely date for his departure for the Levant was September 1183 and, in all probability, he set out before the Mediterranean sea-lanes closed for winter in early November. In one sense, Marshal was travelling ‘out of season’, or at least against the prevailing stream of traffic. In the years after Jerusalem’s recapture, tens of thousands of Western Europeans had seized the opportunity to visit the Holy Places, some travelling, like William, as crusaders, others simply as pilgrims. Typically, these men and women would sail to the East in early spring and then return in the autumn. With fair winds, the voyage across the Mediterranean could take as little as twenty days, but a journey of four to six weeks was not uncommon. Most arrived in Palestine at the thriving port of Acre, a bustling, cosmopolitan hub of trade and commerce; one that even welcomed Muslim merchants and travellers in spite of the ongoing holy war.

William’s first priority was to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem and fulfil his promise to Young Henry. That brought him inland, through the Judean hills, to the Holy City itself – a great, walled metropolis and the epicentre of the Christian faith. Marshal’s ultimate destination was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, believed to have been built on the site of Jesus Christ’s death and his resurrection. For William, like all medieval Latin Christians, this was the most sacred space on Earth. It was here that the First Crusaders had come on 15 July 1099 – fresh from massacring Jerusalem’s Muslim population – to give thanks to their God for victory. Exactly fifty years later to the day, a grand reconstruction programme, initiated by King Fulk (Henry II’s grandfather) and his half-Armenian wife Queen Melisende, had been completed. It was this magnificent structure, with a spectacular domed rotunda enclosing the supposed site of Christ’s tomb, that Marshal entered, finally discharging his duty to the Young King.

During his time in the East, William became friendly with members of the two celebrated Military Orders – the Templars and the Hospitallers. These religious movements combined the ideals of knighthood and monasticism, and their adherents were regarded as the ultimate holy warriors, forming the elite core of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s armies. Given his own background and the martial renown he had garnered in Western Europe, the association with these revered knightly orders was natural. According to the History, the Templars and Hospitallers ‘loved the Marshal very dearly because of his many fine qualities’ and he must have been equally impressed by their legendary discipline and skill-at-arms. In Jerusalem itself he would have visited the Templar compound (now part of what is the Aqsa Mosque) on the Haram as-Sharif or Temple Mount, where he would also have seen the Dome of the Rock transformed into the Latin ‘Templum Domini’, topped by a huge cross rather than a crescent. It is very likely that William also visited the massive hospital in Jerusalem, where up to 2,000 poor or sick Christians could be treated.

Marshal may also have seen the most treasured relic in Palestine – the True Cross – a golden crucifix believed to contain a piece of the very cross upon which Christ had died. This sacred object had been miraculously ‘discovered’ after Jerusalem’s conquest in 1099 and came to be regarded as the vital totem of Latin military might, being carried into battle at the heart of the kingdom’s forces. Many believed that, with the True Cross in their midst, victory was assured.

A knight in the East

William Marshal spent two years in the Holy Land, but virtually nothing certain is known of his actions in this period. The History recorded that William performed ‘many feats of bravery and valour’ during his stay, achieving as much as ‘if he had lived there for seven years’, adding that these ‘fine deeds’ were ‘still known about today’ and widely discussed. But Marshal’s biographer then declared that he could not describe these marvellous exploits because: ‘I was not there and did not witness them, nor can I find anyone who can tell me half of them.’ This leaves much of this phase of his life as a frustrating blank.

As a result, most historians have been content simply to pass over William’s time in the East in a few sentences, concluding at best that ‘a crusade was the supreme adventure’ and that William ‘undoubtedly performed [great deeds] against the forces of the redoubtable Saladin’. In fact, considerably more can be deduced. Through the use of an array of other contemporary sources, it is possible to construct a detailed account of the kingdom of Jerusalem’s history in these precise years between the autumn of 1183 and early 1186. This picture is revealing because it demonstrates that Marshal arrived in a Latin realm that was on the brink of disaster, and that the looming shadow of this catastrophe was obvious to all. More importantly, and perhaps surprisingly, in spite of the simmering tension with the Muslim world, William happened to reach Palestine in a period of relative calm just before the destructive storm of 1187 broke.

The kingdom of Jerusalem was in an embattled state in 1183. That June, Saladin had finally managed to overcome Muslim rivals in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. This gave the sultan control of an arc of territory running south to Damascus, and then on to Egypt and the great city of Cairo, effectively surrounding the kingdom of Jerusalem. However, his ambitious plan to unite the Muslim world remained incomplete, as he had yet to subdue the Iraqi city of Mosul, and Saladin was determined to assemble a grand coalition of Islamic forces before attempting a mass invasion of Latin Palestine. This meant that, although the sultan did prosecute two exploratory attacks on Christian territory in the autumn of 1183 and the summer of 1184, his real focus lay elsewhere.

It is just possible that William Marshal saw almost immediate action in September 1183, after Saladin marched his forces into Galilee in the northern reaches of the kingdom of Jerusalem. A large Latin army was assembled in response to this incursion and pilgrims waiting in Acre to sail back to Europe were even pressed into service. It may be that William joined this draft as a new arrival in the second half of September, but it is perhaps doubtful that he reached the Levant so quickly. Baldwin the Leper King’s illness meant that the Latin forces were commanded by none other than Guy of Lusignan. Given that this was Guy’s first experience of leading a large field army he did an admirable, if unspectacular job, advancing in close formation to threaten Saladin’s forces, yet staunchly refusing to be drawn into a hasty confrontation. Barring some limited skirmishing, there was no determined combat and, faced with a stalemate, Saladin withdrew. Thus, even if Marshal did participate in this campaign, he would hardly have been party to a titanic confrontation.

Saladin moved on that autumn to besiege Reynald of Châtillon’s massive desert castle at Kerak, on the route linking Damascus with Arabia and Egypt, and the sultan returned to attack the fortress for a second time in the summer of 1184. On both occasions, Latin armies marched to break the siege, and it must be likely that William joined one or both of these expeditions, but neither resulted in fighting, as the Muslim sultan retreated as soon as the Christians approached. In this period, Saladin moved with extreme caution, testing his enemy and building his own forces. There were no other notable campaigns in Palestine during Marshal’s time in the East. By the spring of 1185, Saladin was more interested in battering distant Mosul into submission and, to forestall a war on two fronts, agreed a twelve-month truce with the kingdom of Jerusalem. The resultant lull in fighting dismayed newly arrived crusaders, including a party of frustrated European knights, who appeared in early 1186 only to be strictly forbidden from launching an attack on Muslim territory for fear of inciting a massive reprisal.

The only other military offensive in these years was a small-scale, illegal raid, conducted by Guy of Lusignan in October 1184 against Bedouin nomads living near the fortress settlement of Darum (on the kingdom of Jerusalem’s southern border with the Sinai). These Bedouin often provided the Latins with valuable intelligence about Saladin’s movements, and were therefore afforded official protection by the Jerusalemite crown, so Guy’s unsanctioned plundering expedition infuriated King Baldwin IV. Given their past history in Poitou, it would be easy to imagine that William Marshal still harboured considerable ill-feeling towards the Lusignan ‘murderer’ of 1168. In fact, one of the few additional details recorded in the History about Marshal’s time in the Holy Land was that he was on good terms with Guy of Lusignan, so it may be that William was party to this rather disreputable raid.

Clearly, William had precious little opportunity to perform the ‘many feats of bravery and valour’ alluded to in the History. In military terms at least, Marshal was probably left somewhat disillusioned by the experience of his crusade; certainly he can have had few tales of glorious daring to relate on his return to Europe and this may well explain his biographer’s cursory treatment of these years.

At the world’s end

In spite of the lack of decisive military confrontation, William can have been in no doubt that the kingdom of Jerusalem was plunging inexorably towards disaster. While Baldwin the Leper King clung on to life – his twenty-three-year-old body ravaged by crippling deformity and blindness – Marshal would have witnessed the destructive squabbling over the succession, and the office of regent, to which Guy of Lusignan was party. When Baldwin IV died in April 1185 and was succeeded on 16 May by his seven-year-old nephew and namesake, Baldwin V (Sibylla’s son by her first marriage), the crisis only deepened. The realm descended ever further into political chaos and the Latins became paralysed by factionalism.

It was against this backdrop of spiralling Christian disunity and mounting Muslim strength that a last desperate appeal for aid from Europe was mounted. In the early summer of 1184 a high-level delegation was sent to the West, led by the head of the Latin Church in Palestine, Patriarch Heraclius, and the masters of the Templars and the Hospitallers. Given William Marshal’s proximity to both King Henry II and the Military Orders, it is possible that he offered some advice or mediation as the embassy was preparing to depart. Patriarch Heraclius’ party travelled first to the pope in Rome, then made an early winter crossing of the Alpine passes to reach King Philip of France in Paris. The mission arrived in England in early 1185 and was greeted with honour by the Old King. On 10 February, Heraclius consecrated a new Temple Church in London – its circular architecture designed to evoke a sense of physical union with the rotunda of the Holy Sepulchre. Then, on 18 March, Henry II convened a weeklong council, just one mile to the north at Clerkenwell, to debate the Angevin response to Heraclius’ pleas for assistance. The patriarch had brought the keys to the Holy Sepulchre and the Tower of David, Jerusalem’s citadel, as well as the Latin kingdom’s royal banner, to offer in ritual submission, but in the end Henry II proved unwilling to mount a new crusade for fear of abandoning his own realm to the predations of the Capetian French.

By this time, it was apparent to those living in the kingdom of Jerusalem that a catastrophe was looming. Shortly before his death in around 1185, Archbishop William of Tyre wrote that it now seemed inevitable that the ‘palm of victory, which had so often been earned’ by the Christians, would soon pass to their Muslim foes, and he expressed his deeply held fear that Jerusalem could not be saved. If William Marshal had considered forging a new life in the Levant in 1183, he likely discarded those plans in the face of this mounting evidence of imminent collapse.

Yet for all the frustration and dread that must have coloured his visit to the East, Marshal’s pilgrimage had a lasting spiritual impact. The surviving sources for William’s life afford few glimpses into his interior world, so it is difficult to gauge the depth of his faith. He lived through an age in which Christian devotion was virtually universal in Europe. Few would have paused for even a second to consider whether they believed in God, because his existence was considered an undoubted reality, affirmed for all to see through miraculous intervention on Earth. This is not to suggest that the Christianity of medieval Europe was blindly ignorant and unthinking, merely that for most, religious adherence was a natural, almost innate, feature of daily life. Profound questions were being asked about the ways in which Latin Christian faith might be defined or best expressed, and the efficacy of the Church – and the papacy in particular – was open to challenge because of obvious abuses and materialism.

Many knights like William Marshal were plagued by doubts about the inherent sinfulness of their worldly profession, because Christian doctrine condemned most forms of bloodshed and violence. William appears, in large part, to have rejected such misgivings. He seems to have believed at a fundamental level that, so long as his conduct as a warrior conformed to the broad precepts of chivalry, his knightly career presented no particular barrier to religious purity. Marshal showed little interest in deep issues of theology, and entertained no aspirations to sanctity. Instead, he appears to have been moved by a conventional concern to live what he considered a decent Christian life, one that might earn him a place in Heaven after his death. He had come to Jerusalem to fulfil a promise to the Young King Henry, having just witnessed his tortured death. Not surprisingly, William gave some thought to his own mortality before he left the Holy Land. Most pilgrims and crusaders who visited the Holy City returned to Europe with some token of their journey – many First Crusaders had returned carrying palm fronds in imitation of Christ. William bought two large lengths of precious silken cloth in Jerusalem to serve as his funerary shroud. These were carefully wrapped, packed away and borne back to the West in secret, awaiting the eventuality of his death. Marshal also made a binding commitment at this point to end his days within the Templar Order, though this too was done in secrecy. For now, not a word of either of these provisions was spoken, even to his closest confidants. These were his private, heartfelt preparations for his own day of judgement.

After an absence of some two years, William Marshal returned to Western Europe at some point between the autumn of 1185 and the spring of 1186. A little over a year later, the cataclysm that had been threatening finally struck. The boy King Baldwin V died in 1186 and was succeeded by Guy of Lusignan, through his marriage to Sibylla of Jerusalem. By 1187, Saladin had forged an alliance with Mosul and was ready to mount a full-scale assault on Palestine. That summer the sultan invaded Galilee once again, at the head of some 40,000 troops, and this time Guy marched to confront him in open battle. On 4 July, Saladin scored a crushing victory that left thousands of Latin Christians dead and the remainder in captivity. King Guy was taken prisoner and the relic of the True Cross was seized by the sultan’s horde. Reynald of Châtillon was executed by Saladin’s own hand, and some 200 knights of the Military Orders were also put to death. Later that year, Jerusalem itself was recovered for Islam and the sultan ordered the huge cross atop the Dome of the Rock to be ripped down and smashed. When the tidings of these catastrophes reached the pope, he promptly died of shock and grief. In the weeks and months that followed, the devastating news raced across Europe, triggering a new call to arms for the campaign known as the Third Crusade – one that the Angevins could not ignore.

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