Free The Plantagenets by Dan Jones Page B

Winchester – Stephen’s brother – chose to flee the country rather than to submit to his brother’s successor. In doing so, he forfeited to Henry six castles. The only magnate who required serious military measures to be taken against him was Hugh Mortimer, lord of Wigmore castle, who in the late spring clung to three castles in the Midlands and forced Henry to march an army against him. Even he was allowed to keep his lands after making formal submission to Henry.
    This was a lightning clean-up operation, undertaken in the spirit of reconciliation, not revenge, which owed a great deal to Henry’s earlier successful diplomacy in establishing and prosecuting the terms of the peace of Winchester. That there was so little resistance to him, and no threat of a serious rival for the throne, demonstrated the broad appeal of Henry’s strong, unified lordship. He was wielding the sword and the scales of justice like a king; moreover, he continued to procreate, quite literally sowing the seeds of future stability. But speed of reconciliation was a necessity, not a luxury. For England was only one part of the extensive Plantagenet domains.
    In 1156 Henry was forced to leave England, to deal with a rebellion in Anjou led by his younger brother Geoffrey. The troublesome junior Plantagenet believed that under the terms of their father’s will, Henry’s accession as king of England ought to have triggered the handover of Anjou, Maine and the Touraine to Geoffrey, as second son. And indeed, it was quite possible that this had been the elder Geoffrey Plantagenet’s intention. There was no precedent for a single man to rule England, Normandy and Anjon as one.
    Yet Henry had no intention of handing over the Plantagenet heartlands to his vexatious younger brother. Geoffrey had shown himself untrustworthy and disloyal when in 1151 he had joined forces with Louis VII and Eustace to attack Henry’s positions in Normandy. Giving Geoffrey lands that sat directly between Henry’s duchy ofNormandy and Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine would be asking for trouble. It would also damage Henry’s ambition to rule his extraordinary patchwork of territories under his own, direct, sovereignty.
    But Geoffrey had to be appeased. And it was a sign of the seriousness of this rift between the brothers that on 2 February 1156 a family conference was held in Rouen under the matriarchal eye of the Empress Matilda. Henry met Geoffrey along with their youngest brother William and their aunt Sibylla countess of Flanders, to negotiate a deal. To isolate his brother diplomatically, Henry had performed homage to Louis VII for Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine in late January, and had sent an embassy to the newly elected Pope Adrian IV to request release from the oath he had sworn to uphold his father’s will. He was determined to hold on to Anjou, whatever the cost.
    The peacekeeping efforts came to nothing. Soon after the conference broke up, Geoffrey formally rebelled. The quarrel was resolved only later in the year when the people of Nantes and lower Brittany elected Geoffrey as their new count. It was a stroke of luck that found Geoffrey a rich new territory to call his own and doused his disappointment at being, as he saw it, disinherited by his newly elevated elder brother.
    A delighted Henry vouched for Geoffrey’s election to this strategically useful new position. He paid off his brother’s claim to a Plantagenet inheritance with the gift of a single border castle – Loudon – and a cash pension. This was an acceptable price to pay for quashing a distracting rift. Moreover, Geoffrey’s new position in Nantes extended the Plantagenet family enterprise further downstream along the Loire, and closer to the Breton seaboard – virtually the only piece of French coastline they did not already control.
    This appeased Geoffrey until he rather conveniently died in 1158. But it also showed that, for all his brilliance in pacifying his new kingdom, Henry would