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England, 1154. Nearly a century after the Battle of Hastings.

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The country has been torn apart by a savage civil war.

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William the Conqueror was long dead.

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For 30 years, his grandchildren had been locked in a life-or-death struggle for the crown of England.

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The realm was in ruins.

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And then there appeared a young king, brave and charismatic,

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who stopped the anarchy.

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His name was Henry and he would become the greatest of all our medieval kings.

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He should be as well known to us as Henry VIII or Elizabeth I.

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But if he is remembered at all today, it is as the king who ordered the murder in the cathedral,

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or as the father of the much more famous and impossibly bad King John,

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and the impossibly glamorous Richard the Lionheart.

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Henry II has no great monument to his reign.

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No horseback statue of him stands outside Westminster.

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Yet he made an indelible mark on our country -

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the father of the common law, the godfather of the English state.

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But Henry was cursed - brought down by the Church, his children,

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and most of all by his queen, the older, beautiful, all-powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine.

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This is the story of Henry II and his family.

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In all of British history, there has never been anything quite like it.

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Henry II, his wife Eleanor, and their children Richard and John,

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were the most astonishing of all the family firms to have run the enterprise of Britain.

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They did so with a furious energy that either entranced or appalled their subjects.

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They had a capacity for both creation and self-destruction.

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What their intelligence built, their passions destroyed.

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They were called the Angevins,

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named after the French-speaking province of Anjou.

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At the height of their power, they were the masters of everything that counted in Christendom.

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England was the linchpin of an empire that stretched from the Scottish Borders to the Pyrenees -

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much bigger than France itself.

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Not since the Romans and never again has England been quite so European.

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The dynasty had its roots in a civil war

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that was being fought by two cousins, Stephen and Matilda,

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the grandchildren of William the Conqueror.

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Stephen seized the crown, but if Matilda couldn't beat him with an army, she could do so with a wedding:

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one that would found a dynasty and reduce Stephen's ambitions to dust.

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In 1128, Matilda married Geoffrey of Anjou,

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nicknamed "Plantagenet" because he wore a sprig of yellow broom, or "planta genista", in his hat.

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His family emblem was three lions.

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Along with his money, power and territory, Geoffrey gave Matilda something even more important.

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A son, Henry.

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As the boy Henry grew up, it became apparent that from his mother he'd inherited steely single-mindedness,

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lots of physical courage and a phenomenally foul temper.

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From his father he'd got instinctive charm and knife-sharp political and military intelligence.

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But the quality that anyone who ever met Henry most vividly remembered -

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the overflowing tank of energy

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that made him the most hyperactive king in British history -

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this was all his own.

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This was the Age of Chivalry, when the myth of Arthur and Camelot was at its most popular.

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Right from the start, Henry was groomed by his ambitious parents to take England away from Stephen,

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to become a new King Arthur.

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And to do this, of course, he would need a Guinevere.

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As it happened, the perfect candidate had just become available.

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Eleanor of Aquitaine.

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But the match was a gamble. He was 19, she was pushing 30.

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He was relatively inexperienced,

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Eleanor had seen as much of the ways of the world as it could possibly offer.

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And yet something rather surprising happened between the teenage Arthur and the mercurial Guinevere.

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Something not supposed to happen in a marriage of political convenience.

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The parties actually fancied each other.

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Henry found himself at the altar in 1152 beside an older woman described as a graceful, dark-eyed beauty.

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Disconcertingly articulate, strong-minded and jocular, hardly the veiled damsel in the tower.

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One likes to think that for her part Eleanor saw not just the usual feudal spur-clanking bonehead,

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but beyond a stocky frame and barrel chest, someone who was an intriguing peculiarity -

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the rare prince who looked right with a falcon on one hand and a book in the other.

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But it was Eleanor's homeland, Aquitaine, that was the greatest prize.

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A vast stretch of land between Anjou and the Pyrenees.

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A place where wine-steeped Latin culture had been polished anew by Provencal sensuality.

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Its capital here in Poitiers, the home of troubadours and courtly love.

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No wonder then that Eleanor grew up, as her contemporaries put it, welcoming, vivacious,

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her handsome head perhaps turned by all those lovelorn lyrics of knights enslaved by beauties

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and bent on besieging their virtue.

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So this is what Eleanor brought to the match.

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Grandeur, territory, wealth - a lot of wealth - and the glamour of Aquitaine.

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No wonder Henry thought that with this marriage he'd got, well, pretty much everything.

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Everything, that is, except the crown of England.

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In 1153, Henry Plantagenet crossed the Channel. His father Geoffrey had already taken Normandy from Stephen,

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so now it was up to Henry to take England.

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Faced with an exhausted nation and defecting barons,

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Stephen caved in. A deal was struck.

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Stephen would be allowed to die on the throne on condition he named Henry as his heir.

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Within a year Stephen was dead

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and Eleanor and Henry were crowned together at Westminster Abbey, King and Queen of England.

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When they emerged they were the French-speaking sovereigns

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of an enormous realm which stretched from the Pyrenees, through the vineyards of Gascony,

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along the cod-fish-run coastal waters of Brittany, then over the Channel to England,

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along the length and breadth of the country to the Welsh borders

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and the windy moors of Cumbria and Northumbria.

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And it was a perfect time to come into this colossal inheritance.

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For the mid-12th century really was the springtime of the Middle Ages.

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Literacy and learning were spreading from the cathedral schools in Paris and Canterbury.

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Monasteries were being founded at a record pace and although they were supposed to be purged of worldliness,

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before long they were the engines of economic power, producers of wool, masters of the mills and rivers.

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So if this was indeed springtime,

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Henry and Eleanor had just got themselves the fattest and the ripest fruit.

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Still, it's unlikely they ever thought of it as a true empire in the Roman sense of a single realm.

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Its regions were treated separately, according to their customs.

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While Westminster was increasingly at the heart of administration,

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Rouen in Normandy, Chinon in Anjou and Poitiers in Aquitaine were just as important.

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It was, rather, the greatest and grandest family estate in all Christendom.

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That surely was enough to be going on with.

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It was one thing to stand around counting off one's possessions.

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It was quite another thing to know what one was supposed to do about being king.

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Especially king of a country so promising but so peculiar as England, with all its Anglo-Saxon names

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and institutions like shire courts, writs and sheriffs.

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What did Henry Plantagenet know of Huntingdonshire,

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or, for that matter, what did Huntingdonshire know of Henry Plantagenet?

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Henry, of course, spoke virtually no English at all.

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What he would have grasped, though, if only from his coronation oaths,

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was that Kings of England were supposed to be both judge and warlord.

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In fact, the Coronation Oath, preserved intact from Edward the Confessor,

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who was increasingly being held up as some sort of ideal monarch,

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pretty much spelled out the job description of the King of England.

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One was - protect the Church. Two was - preserve intact the lands of your ancestors.

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Three, do justice and four, and most sweeping of all, suppress evil laws and customs.

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Fulfilling one and two went without saying,

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but what was surprising about Henry was that he took vows three and four just as seriously.

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Before Henry, justice was "Do what I want. I'm the king."

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By the end of Henry's reign, getting the king's justice didn't depend on the king being there in person.

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Henry had established permanent, professional courts sitting at Westminster or touring the counties,

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acting reliably in his name.

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Now, law became "Listen to what my judges have to say."

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By 1180, those judges could consult England's first legal textbook

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for the precedence on which to base their decisions.

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The law now had its own kind of majesty.

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It was vow number one, though, the protection of the Church,

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which quite unpredictably would cause Henry II the greatest grief.

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It was to provoke a kind of spiritual civil war,

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in its way every bit as unsettling as the feudal civil war

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and which, in its most dreadful hour, would end with bloodshed in the cathedral.

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And this was especially ironic

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since at the outset the Church seemed to be the strongest pillar of Henry's administration.

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Its literate clerics initiated him into the mysteries of governing England.

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So when the Archbishop of Canterbury offered up one of its brightest proteges, Thomas Becket,

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for the office of Chancellor, Henry listened, looked and gave him the job.

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So who exactly was this Becket, then?

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Well, for a start he was the first commoner of any kind to make a mark on British history.

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And the possibility that someone like Becket,

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a merchant's son with an impoverished Norman knight clanking around in the family closet,

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could end up as the king's best friend, said something about the possibility

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of the great swarming city itself.

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At the heart of the emerging capital was the great church of St Paul

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and around it, upriver from the grim pile of the Conqueror's Tower,

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were wharves thick with ships loaded with wool going out, wine, furs or silks coming in.

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In this teeming world Becket's father strutted, owner of one of the grandest houses in Cheapside.

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Becket was a real Londoner,

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with a natural flair for doing what Londoners liked doing most - the getting and spending of money.

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Spectacle, costume and despite his notoriously delicate gut, Becket also enjoyed good food and drink.

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He was street smart and he was book smart. In short, from the get go Becket was a big league performer.

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He was a player.

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They were, in a way, a match of opposites. Becket was older by a decade and as Chancellor,

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willing to deal with administrative detail that bored the king.

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Becket was tall, self contained, his forehead creased with frown lines.

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The king was square shaped, packed with hectic passion, a real Plantagenet powerhouse.

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Above all, Becket was able to keep up with the relentless pace set by Henry himself.

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Medieval courts were itinerant affairs, travelling 20, 30 miles a day,

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eating in a royal forest or by the roadside.

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But Henry, who made a fetish of exercise out of a fear, some said, of growing fat, never slowed down,

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barely arriving at one of his palaces before chasing off again.

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Clarendon Palace was the most magnificent hunting lodge in England.

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All that's left of it now is this raw, ivy-covered stump of stone.

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But in Henry's time the place would have been full of courtiers and dogs and hawks and horses.

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That's the way the king liked it -

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a kind of scruffy power to his entertainment.

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In fact, Becket saw right through Henry's game of studied informality.

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The way he avoided wearing the crown, his preference for ordinary riding clothes.

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Becket knew that when Henry extended the hand of friendship,

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he was capable of following it by frosty withdrawals of affection,

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unpredictable explosions of carpet-biting, incendiary fury.

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It was this pseudo-sibling relationship that gave Becket the confidence, later on,

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to treat the king as a virtual equal, with catastrophic results for all concerned.

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Time and again he'd tell his dwindling band of followers,

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"Look, I know this looks bad but trust me. I know the way this man operates."

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Even in the early days, beneath the jesting, there was, if Thomas looked for it, a kind of ominous tension.

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When, for example, the king and the chancellor rode through London,

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Henry pointed to the countless destitute and eyeing Thomas' gorgeous scarlet and grey miniver-edged cloak,

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let it be known how charitable it would be to clothe the poor man's nakedness.

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"Well, yes," said Becket, "YOU should attend to it right away."

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"Oh, no, no, YOU should have the credit,"

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insisted the king, pulling at Becket's cape.

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An undignified tug of war then followed, with both men trying to pull the capes off each other.

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At last the chancellor had no alternative but to allow the king to overcome him

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and give his cape to the poor man.

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Yet if Henry suspected Thomas of getting above himself - and if he did, he wasn't alone -

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it didn't get in the way of Becket coming to mind for the top job in the country,

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the newly vacated post of Archbishop of Canterbury.

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In fact, Becket's worldliness must have made him seem precisely the right kind of man

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for the job Henry wanted to do, which was to put the Church in its place.

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Monarchs had long taken it for granted

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that they were directly anointed by God, safely above the Church.

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But the popes of this period begged to differ.

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Kings, they said, reported to popes, not the other way around.

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This wasn't just an academic quibble. This was a fight to the death.

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There were two flash points.

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The first was whether law-breaking clergymen could be judged in the King's courts like everyone else.

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The second was whether bishops had the power to excommunicate royal officials.

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By making Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry believed he could depend on someone

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who would share his view of the subordinate relationship of Church to State.

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The King was in for a shock.

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At the beginning, at least, there seemed to be a good deal of the old Becket about the new Becket.

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The array of fancy foods and company of young cosmopolitan scholars remained.

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But all was not how it appeared.

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Becket ate none of the feast.

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Beneath his grand garments, he may well have begun to wear the hair shirt

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found later on his murdered body.

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When the king began to realise that a mysterious transformation had taken place in Becket,

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when, for instance, the Archbishop stood up in public and opposed, in the most militant language,

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the King's demand for a new tax on the Church, Henry Plantagenet went altogether ballistic.

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Nothing made him more enraged than a friendship, as he saw it, betrayed.

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It all came to a head here at Clarendon, early in 1164,

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when Henry summoned a special council of the princes of the Church and the most important nobles of the realm.

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There he asked - well, actually, he demanded -

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that they assent unconditionally to what he chose to call the "customs of the realm".

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Becket was no idiot. He knew exactly what this meant. Royal control over the clergy.

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He'd seen it coming for months and had been urging his bishops to resist it at all costs.

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After endless prevarication, in the end Becket refused the king's demands, ordering total resistance,

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a position from which he'd never budge.

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The king now moved the way he liked best - through the law.

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In October 1164, Becket was brought to trial at Northampton,

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accused - and this was the killer - of improper use of funds when he'd been chancellor.

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The half-joking comments about fancy clothes that Henry had thrown Becket's way stopped being funny.

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They'd become a deadly criminal accusation.

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When Thomas decided to dress up for the trial in full archbishop's rig

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and carry a huge silver cross, Jesus-like,

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his greatest rival, the Bishop of London, tried to seize it from him, but Becket's grip was like iron.

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"A fool he was, a fool he'll always be," was the Bishop's comment on this performance.

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The trial broke up with Becket storming out. "Perjurer, traitor!" yelled Henry's barons.

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"Whoremongers, bastards!" replied the archbishop.

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Convicted on the charges, Becket knew he was in dire peril and fled on the nearest horse.

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He must have thought he was running for his life.

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Becket and a small group of die-hard followers landed on the Flemish coast.

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They were broke, demoralised, prostrate with exhaustion

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and flooded with the grim realisation of what they'd done.

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They'd made themselves outlaws for Christ.

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This is where Becket's little family of God ended up.

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The Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, about 100 miles south-east of Paris.

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Built in sparkling white limestone, it seemed a stunning advertisement for purity.

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A perfect match for Thomas' temperament.

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But this was no monkish retreat.

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It pretty soon became apparent that what Becket had established here was a real government in exile.

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He had his own pan-European intelligence network.

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He had his letter smugglers with the know-how to get through the blockade Henry had imposed on communication.

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And he had his own versatile propaganda department.

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But most of all, Becket had his own unwavering sense of self-righteousness.

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Pretty soon, though, Henry used his own formidable power to turn the screws on Becket's supporters.

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There were arraignments and arrests,

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terrifyingly sudden summary evictions, the seizure of land and property.

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Anyone - anyone - who so much as thought about saying a good word for the traitor archbishop

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risked, at the very least, deportation.

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Messengers caught carrying his mail were thrown into prison.

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Innocent relatives, incriminated by family association, were turned into exiles themselves.

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It took two painful years of back- and-forth diplomacy and increasingly impatient signals from the Pope,

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to arrange even talks about talks.

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After a series of abortive reconciliations in 1170,

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it looked as though peace might finally break out.

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The location was to be a meadow surrounded by woods near the village of Freteval.

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"A beautiful place", remarked one observer.

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Only later did he find out that the locals called it "traitor's meadow".

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Henry and Thomas rode out to each other and the King took off his hat in salutation.

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The two of them then embraced and sat for hours talking,

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the archbishop's posterior mortified by the chafing of his secret goat-hair underwear.

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For once the King was in no mood to quarrel

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and agreed not only to restore Thomas to all his powers and authority,

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but also to treat those who were Becket's enemies as his own.

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When it was all over and Becket had got everything he wanted,

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a dam broke and a tearful wave of emotions swept through him.

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Becket dismounted and flung himself in front of the king's horse.

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The king got off his own mount

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and walked over to his old friend, who'd become his bitterest enemy, and bodily lifted him up,

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put one foot in the stirrup and hoisted Becket back into the saddle.

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They then rode over together to the end of the field to the royal tent

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where the king announced that henceforth they were, finally, reconciled

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and that he would now be a most kind and most generous lord.

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After the peace was publicly announced, Henry asked Thomas to ride with the court awhile,

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but Becket declined. This turned out to be mistake number one.

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The king had wanted to catch the moment, hold it a little longer.

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His good mood could vanish as quickly as his bad temper could reappear.

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Mistake number two was much worse.

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As the king had pardoned Becket's closest followers,

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someone suggested that likewise, Thomas might like to forgive those who had stayed loyal to the king.

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"It's not the same," said Becket.

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And it was this fanatical inability to meet halfway, to let bygones be bygones,

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that proved to be Becket's fatal error.

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The last meeting between the king and Becket took place on the banks of the River Loire,

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and in a mood of sad friendliness the king says to Becket,

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"You know, if only you could do what I tell you to do, I'd entrust you with everything."

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No reply and one imagines a long pause, a sigh, a shrug of the shoulders and the king goes on,

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"Well, go in peace and we shall meet either in Rouen or in England."

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And then another pause and Becket comes out with something absolutely amazing.

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He says, "My Lord, if we part on these terms, we shall not meet again in this life."

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And the royal temper flares up and Henry says, "Why, do you take me for a traitor?"

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Meaning "Do you suppose that I will abandon you when I've given you my protection?"

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And Becket looks at the king and says, "Heaven forbid."

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And I think as he allowed that parting shot, so full of pained sincerity and wise-guy irony,

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Becket must have made the sign of the cross.

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Thomas Becket's ship came into the harbour at Sandwich, probably on the morning of December 1st, 1170

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and was greeted not only by a throng of poor people, but by three royal officials armed to the teeth.

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As the stones of Canterbury came into sight, he got off his horse, took off his boots

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and walked barefoot the rest of the way through anthem-singing crowds of devotees.

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And when he arrived home Thomas Becket did what he said he would do to all those who had opposed him

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during his six years of exile.

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Shouting the dreaded curse, "May they be damned by Jesus Christ,"

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he excommunicated them.

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But the bishops were not in hell. They were at Henry's court near Bayeux, pouring venomous reports

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in the king's ear about Becket's impossible, virtually treasonous arrogance.

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And Henry, who typically seemed to have forgotten about the promises at Freteval,

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raised his head from his pillow and let out a roar of Plantagenet anathema.

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And it was not, "Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

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but a much more alarming outcry.

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"What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household

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"who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric?"

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To anyone who'd witnessed Henry's terrible melt-down or had even heard about it,

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his words could only mean one thing.

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That he wanted the interminable, insufferable Becket problem to go away.

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Not go away as in six feet under, perhaps, but then if that's what it took, so be it.

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He was, after all, a traitor and well, what happens to traitors?

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The four knights who would kill Becket had no doubt about what Henry had in mind

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and rushed to Normandy to take a ship to Kent.

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Dawn the next day, December 29th, 1170, Becket's last.

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Reginald FitzUrse, William de Tracy, Robert Le Bray and Hugh de Morville

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arrived in England and set off for Canterbury.

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At around three, they burst into the archbishop's palace where they found Thomas with his advisers.

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When the knights came in, he studiously ignored them.

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Reginald FitzUrse broke the silence by saying he had an important message from the king -

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Becket should go to Winchester and give an account of his conduct.

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Becket said he had no intention of being treated like a criminal. Things rapidly got ugly.

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FitzUrse ominously declared that Becket was no longer under the king's peace.

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Ought Becket to have temporised, to have made an escape while there was still time?

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"My mind is made up," he told his follower John of Salisbury, "I know exactly what I have to do."

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"Please God you have chosen well," replied John.

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And instead of bolting, Thomas proceeded to the cathedral for vespers.

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He made sure the door was open to receive the congregation. He had chosen his place.

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He had written in his mind his last and greatest performance.

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They caught up with him here, in the north transept of the cathedral,

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and Becket must have seen right away that they meant business

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because they were got up in the standard kit of terrorist thugs.

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Face and head covered. Chain mail of course.

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They were carrying naked swords and shouting, "Where is the traitor?"

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Becket replied, "Here I am, no traitor to the king, but a priest of God."

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The archbishop seemed calm, but no-one else was.

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His attendants, all except two, disappeared into the shadows of the church.

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But the 52-year-old Becket was, remember, a Cockney. A street fighter.

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Tough as old boots under the cowl. And when he stood rooted to the spot he became physically,

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as well as theologically, the immovable object.

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At such times the kind of talk he'd picked up in his Cheapside childhood came back to him. Ripe and abusive.

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"Whoremonger!" he yelled at FitzUrse,

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who must suddenly have felt ridiculous clanking around in all that armour.

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What do you do when you can't stand feeling ridiculous any longer?

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Whoosh, goes the adrenaline, bang goes the gun, or in this case, the sword,

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through Becket's attendant's arm then slicing through the top of the archbishop's head.

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The crown hung by a thread of flesh as Becket sank to the floor murmuring,

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according to his chroniclers,

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"For the name of Jesus and the protection of the Church, I'm ready to embrace death."

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Then, thank God, came the coup de grace.

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Another mailed arm, another downward slash to the head,

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so hard that the sword blade broke in two on the stones.

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To finish the job, a third warrior stood on the archbishop's neck, stuck the end of his sword

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into the open cavity of his skull, scooped out the brains

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and spread them on the floor.

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"Let's be off," he said. "This fellow won't be getting up again."

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BELL TOLLS

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It was around 4.30 in the afternoon.

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The door was open. Frightened people who had come for the service gathered round the body.

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But it was by no means a flock who thought Becket was a saint. "He wanted to be a king", said one.

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"Now let him be one."

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But then it all changed.

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Becket's chamberlain reattached the bleeding scalp to his head

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with a strip of material torn from his own shirt

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and the monks began to prepare Becket's body for burial.

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And then they discovered what no-one, until that moment, had known.

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The hair shirt with lice crawling busily in it.

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Thomas the immovable had been Thomas the self-mortifier. Thomas the humble.

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They let him lie washed in his own blood

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and over the clotting body laid the archiepiscopal garments.

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By chance there was a marble sarcophagus, ready for someone else's burial here in the crypt

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and a space to lower it into.

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So down went Becket, arrayed in the full rig,

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the dalmatic, the pallium, the cope, the chasuble, the orb and the ring.

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He'd always thought kit mattered, had Thomas Becket.

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And for just what exactly had Becket laid down, some would say thrown away, his life?

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Some fantastic notion, already out of date, that the Church could lay down the law to the State?

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All our modern instincts seem to say, "Oh come on, look at Henry and you find reality.

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"The guardian of the common law, the engineer of government. The smasher of anarchy."

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And you'd be quite wrong.

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Becket - headstrong, infuriating, over the top, theatrical Becket, made a huge difference.

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His view of the Church lasted. The Angevin empire did not.

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The actual murderers got off pretty lightly -

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hiding out in Yorkshire, excommunicated, told to go on Crusade.

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But the real judgement Henry reserved for himself and the verdict was guilty as charged.

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In 1174, he made a pilgrimage to Canterbury where Becket's blood was said to work miracles.

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Over the last miles, Henry walked barefoot in a hair shirt, as Becket had done four years earlier.

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At the tomb he confessed his sins and was whipped by the monks.

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However tough his punishment, though, the blood would never wash away. Henry, the hero of the common law,

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will always be remembered as the biggest of England's crowned criminals -

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the murderer in the Cathedral.

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Henry II would rule for another 20 years, long enough to see his embryonic legal system

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grow into a thriving network of courts.

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Up and down the land, these new courts were to settle not just the usual disputes of blood and mayhem,

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but all manner of painful rows over inheritances, estates and properties.

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How ironic, then, that the only family that would not accept the king's justice was his own.

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Because if there was one person who was likely to think of the king not as judge but as transgressor,

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it was his wife.

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It had been 20 years since Henry and Eleanor had been partners, in bed and in government.

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Since then, Eleanor had had to suffer the humiliation of a string of mistresses.

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What tormented her was not Becket's shrine,

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but the shrine Henry had built to his favourite mistress, Rosamund Clifford.

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Betrayed and alienated, Eleanor turned her formidable energy and intellect

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to the business of getting her just desserts through her children.

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She did everything she could

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to make them feel their father was robbing them of their rightful power and dignity.

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The sons rose to the bait and what a bunch they were, Henry and Eleanor's four sons.

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There was young Henry, officially the next King of England,

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but in reality still having to apply to his father for pocket money.

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He rebelled, only to end up dying of dysentery.

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And then there was Geoffrey, as bright and devious as his namesake grandfather,

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given Brittany but then trampled to death by a horse.

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This left Richard, Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart.

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Physically brave, chivalrous and brutally ambitious.

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And the youngest, John. Vindictive, self-serving but undoubtedly clever.

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Henry saw in him perhaps the only prince who could properly inherit the government.

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Between them, Richard and John managed to undo in their own spectacular ways,

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not only the prospects of the kingdom,

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but, in the space of 15 years, the entire empire their father had so skilfully constructed.

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It was on Richard that Eleanor pinned her hopes.

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She was even prepared to go as far as to encourage an alliance

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between Richard and her husband's bitterest enemy, the King of France.

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So in 1189 Richard declared war on his father.

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This time, Henry faced defeat, forced to watch as his barons defected to Richard.

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The beleaguered Henry had no choice but to negotiate and agree terms which humbled him before his own son.

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To onlookers, he appeared to embrace Richard in a kiss of peace.

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What he really said was, "God spare me long enough to take revenge on you".

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When the king asked to see the names of those who had joined Richard,

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to his horror the first on the list was his beloved son, John.

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Faced with this ultimate treachery, Henry read no more.

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He died two days later in his castle at Chinon, some chroniclers say of a broken heart.

436
00:44:56,600 --> 00:45:01,520
The only child at his deathbed was one of his illegitimate sons.

437
00:45:01,520 --> 00:45:06,560
"The others" he said with Lear-like bitterness, "are the REAL bastards".

438
00:45:10,600 --> 00:45:16,280
A barge took his body down river to Fontevrault Abbey.

439
00:45:16,280 --> 00:45:23,240
When Richard finally viewed the tomb, it is said that blood poured from the nostrils of the corpse.

440
00:45:35,200 --> 00:45:41,720
In fact, when Henry II died here at Chinon in 1189, hardly anyone mourned.

441
00:45:41,720 --> 00:45:45,840
It seems that most people were off breaking open bottles

442
00:45:45,840 --> 00:45:51,720
to celebrate the accession of his son, Richard, the darling of popular folklore and legend.

443
00:45:51,720 --> 00:45:58,400
From the very beginning, then, Coeur de Lion had won the public relations battle with his father.

444
00:45:58,400 --> 00:46:01,640
He was already the superstar of the dynasty.

445
00:46:05,480 --> 00:46:11,040
To prove it, to show that the old regime had passed, that a new glamour had arrived,

446
00:46:11,040 --> 00:46:14,280
Richard put on a show-stopping coronation.

447
00:46:14,280 --> 00:46:18,680
As if in reverie of Camelot, he had himself dripping in gold.

448
00:46:18,680 --> 00:46:23,440
Golden sword, golden spurs, a golden canopy over his head.

449
00:46:23,440 --> 00:46:29,960
To celebrate the new reign, the Jews of London presented Richard with a special gift,

450
00:46:29,960 --> 00:46:35,520
a gesture that was immediately interpreted by the populace as a sinister plot,

451
00:46:35,520 --> 00:46:38,280
and which triggered a general massacre.

452
00:46:40,520 --> 00:46:46,280
Richard of Devizes in his Chronicle, was the first to use the word "holocaustum",

453
00:46:46,280 --> 00:46:49,480
to describe the mass murder of England's Jews.

454
00:46:53,240 --> 00:46:58,760
To his credit, King Richard made strong efforts to forbid this first waves of pogroms.

455
00:46:58,760 --> 00:47:03,000
The problem was that he was never around to enforce things.

456
00:47:03,000 --> 00:47:06,840
It's an irony - the king whose statue stands outside parliament

457
00:47:06,840 --> 00:47:11,440
and so is supposed to personify some sort of elemental Englishness,

458
00:47:11,440 --> 00:47:14,600
spent less time in this country that any other monarch.

459
00:47:14,600 --> 00:47:18,880
The three lions on his coat of arms were Plantaganet lions.

460
00:47:18,880 --> 00:47:23,120
The Cross of St George stood for Aquitaine, not England.

461
00:47:30,560 --> 00:47:35,400
Eager to do God's work, Richard vanished to the Holy Land.

462
00:47:35,400 --> 00:47:38,040
John immediately set himself up as a rival,

463
00:47:38,040 --> 00:47:44,040
creating a virtual state within a state, complete with his own court and mercenary army.

464
00:47:44,040 --> 00:47:51,320
In 1192, when news arrived of Richard's capture on his way back from the Crusade,

465
00:47:51,320 --> 00:47:55,280
John quickly declared his brother dead and himself king.

466
00:47:57,680 --> 00:48:04,880
Eleanor was torn to pieces by this fratricidal struggle. She'd been bred to do what Angevins do best,

467
00:48:04,880 --> 00:48:08,760
to preside over government, to manipulate politics.

468
00:48:08,760 --> 00:48:13,000
But now she was paralysed by the tragedy of her own family.

469
00:48:13,000 --> 00:48:20,120
In desperation she turned to the Holy Father, to whom she wrote an extraordinary letter.

470
00:48:22,320 --> 00:48:27,840
"I, Eleanor, Queen of England, unhappy mother, pitied by no-one,

471
00:48:27,840 --> 00:48:31,360
"have arrived at this miserable old age.

472
00:48:33,440 --> 00:48:39,720
"Two sons lie in dust and their unhappy mother is tortured by their memory.

473
00:48:41,640 --> 00:48:48,080
"King Richard is in irons. His brother John ravages the kingdom with fire and sword.

474
00:48:49,720 --> 00:48:52,760
"I know not which side to take.

475
00:48:52,760 --> 00:48:57,920
"If I leave England, I abandon the kingdom of my son John, torn by civil war.

476
00:48:59,040 --> 00:49:04,080
"If I stay, I may never see the dearly beloved face of my son Richard again."

477
00:49:07,200 --> 00:49:13,200
There was nothing the Pope could do about her plight.

478
00:49:14,280 --> 00:49:16,760
Money, however, could do the trick.

479
00:49:16,760 --> 00:49:22,480
Two years and 34 tons of gold later, Richard was ransomed into freedom,

480
00:49:22,480 --> 00:49:26,120
but his kingdom was bankrupt.

481
00:49:28,600 --> 00:49:34,160
The cost of acting out heroic war games was measured in blood as well as money.

482
00:49:34,160 --> 00:49:40,760
Showing contempt for the defenders of the besieged castle by standing in front of them without armour,

483
00:49:40,760 --> 00:49:46,240
a lone archer's bolt found the join between Richard's neck and his shoulder.

484
00:49:46,240 --> 00:49:48,440
The wound turned gangrenous.

485
00:49:48,440 --> 00:49:56,760
Within ten days the Lionheart was dead. A triumph of daredevil romance over common sense.

486
00:50:00,040 --> 00:50:04,480
His body was laid in a tomb at the foot of his father's in Anjou.

487
00:50:04,480 --> 00:50:09,960
The heart of the Lionheart was taken to the great cathedral at Rouen in Normandy,

488
00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:15,800
which seems fitting since this city was always more of a capital to Richard than London.

489
00:50:17,920 --> 00:50:24,040
His brother John, who succeeded him, was buried in England, mostly in Worcester Cathedral,

490
00:50:24,040 --> 00:50:28,920
because the monks of Craxton Abbey had taken care to steal away his entrails,

491
00:50:28,920 --> 00:50:33,840
making John in death, as he'd been in life, one is tempted to say, gutless.

492
00:50:37,560 --> 00:50:42,280
It was as a politician that John was most obviously a wretched failure.

493
00:50:43,840 --> 00:50:50,120
Under his father the empire had been sustained by a shrewd combination of charisma and feudal loyalty.

494
00:50:51,520 --> 00:50:57,200
John's problem was his difficulty in believing that anyone would ever be more than a fair-weather friend.

495
00:50:57,200 --> 00:51:01,360
So he relied on blackmail and extortion,

496
00:51:01,360 --> 00:51:04,920
threats to the barons rather than promises.

497
00:51:04,920 --> 00:51:08,920
Assuming disloyalty, he ended up guaranteeing it.

498
00:51:12,360 --> 00:51:16,920
So when John needed the barons most, when Normandy was threatened by the French king,

499
00:51:16,920 --> 00:51:20,040
they weren't there for him.

500
00:51:20,040 --> 00:51:23,200
The result was a catastrophic defeat.

501
00:51:23,200 --> 00:51:27,960
The loss of Normandy ripped the heart out of Angevin power.

502
00:51:32,520 --> 00:51:36,160
Whether or not there was a secret meeting at Bury St Edmunds

503
00:51:36,160 --> 00:51:40,920
with all the major nobles in England sworn to force John to accept reform,

504
00:51:40,920 --> 00:51:45,000
it's certainly true that from defeat sprang rebellion.

505
00:51:50,760 --> 00:51:54,080
At some point the barons drafted a document

506
00:51:54,080 --> 00:51:58,600
that went well beyond forcing John to stop being vindictive,

507
00:51:58,600 --> 00:52:04,680
proposing instead a catalogue of things the king would not be allowed to do.

508
00:52:04,680 --> 00:52:06,760
It was called Magna Carta.

509
00:52:11,440 --> 00:52:15,840
Anyone expecting to find in it some sort of primitive constitution

510
00:52:15,840 --> 00:52:20,040
is going to be in for a bit of a shock when they read the details.

511
00:52:20,040 --> 00:52:27,240
The liberties enumerated here boil down largely to tax relief for the armoured and landed classes.

512
00:52:30,720 --> 00:52:35,720
But even if the Magna Carta is filled with the moans and belly-aching of the barons,

513
00:52:35,720 --> 00:52:42,240
that belly-aching turned out to have profound consequences for the future of England.

514
00:52:42,240 --> 00:52:46,280
For by putting so much weight on the authority of common law,

515
00:52:46,280 --> 00:52:52,560
the Angevins had stirred in the nobility a dawning realisation that this was their law too.

516
00:52:53,720 --> 00:52:56,640
A generation before, the barons couldn't have cared less

517
00:52:56,640 --> 00:53:00,080
about the rights of men held in prison for unstated causes.

518
00:53:00,080 --> 00:53:06,240
That was what happened to commoners. But under John, bad things had happened to THEM.

519
00:53:06,240 --> 00:53:10,640
Land stolen, widows hounded, heirs made to disappear.

520
00:53:14,120 --> 00:53:19,680
So now was the time to use the weapons Henry II's revolution in justice had put into their hands,

521
00:53:19,680 --> 00:53:26,680
and by an amazing irony, the Angevins became the schoolmasters of their own correction.

522
00:53:28,160 --> 00:53:34,960
Henry II's transformation of royal justice had come back to bite his own dynasty.

523
00:53:36,800 --> 00:53:44,840
So if it isn't exactly the birth certificate of democracy, it is the death certificate of despotism.

524
00:53:44,840 --> 00:53:49,600
It spells out, for the first time, the fundamental principle

525
00:53:49,600 --> 00:53:54,200
that the law is not simply the will or the whim of the king.

526
00:53:54,200 --> 00:54:02,640
The law is an independent power unto itself and the king could be brought to book for violating it.

527
00:54:07,480 --> 00:54:14,400
None of this was apparent right away. Ten weeks after Magna Carta had been signed, it was annulled by the Pope

528
00:54:14,400 --> 00:54:18,160
and John went back to fighting his battles by the sword,

529
00:54:18,160 --> 00:54:23,720
against the rebel barons and against the first successful invasion by a king of France.

530
00:54:23,720 --> 00:54:28,240
For a few months in 1216, much of England was ruled by the Dauphin.

531
00:54:35,560 --> 00:54:40,720
John died on campaign in Norfolk, facing the windswept waters of the Wash.

532
00:54:40,720 --> 00:54:45,080
Fighting had quickened his appetite and he ate a meal so hearty

533
00:54:45,080 --> 00:54:48,520
it paid him back with a fatal spasm of dysentery.

534
00:54:48,520 --> 00:54:55,680
As for the barons of England, they had no appetite for civil war, much less rule from France.

535
00:54:55,680 --> 00:55:02,840
So when John's 9-year-old son was proclaimed Henry III at Gloucester Cathedral, they rallied to him.

536
00:55:05,400 --> 00:55:10,080
But what they were rallying to was not so much a person now as a contract -

537
00:55:10,080 --> 00:55:14,000
the understanding guaranteed by the reissue of the Charter

538
00:55:14,000 --> 00:55:20,280
that from now on the government of England had to be accountable to the sovereignty of the law.

539
00:55:25,360 --> 00:55:31,840
The ramshackle conglomerate of the Angevin empire had fallen apart almost as quickly as it had risen,

540
00:55:31,840 --> 00:55:36,320
but in the England to which it was reduced something solid was left.

541
00:55:36,320 --> 00:55:40,920
Something that's best measured not in masonry or mileage,

542
00:55:40,920 --> 00:55:43,200
but in magistrates.

543
00:55:43,200 --> 00:55:46,280
So the best thing that can be said for the Angevins

544
00:55:46,280 --> 00:55:50,000
was that they left behind a country that didn't need them any more.

545
00:55:50,760 --> 00:55:57,080
Why hunt for Excalibur when you had something much more potent - Magna Carta?

546
00:56:12,360 --> 00:56:17,840
There's much more to discover and debate on the BBC History website.

547
00:56:17,840 --> 00:56:22,080
We've organised special activities round the country.

548
00:56:22,080 --> 00:56:29,560
To find out more, call the History Events line on 08700 10 60 60.

549
00:56:33,040 --> 00:56:39,040
Subtitles by Veronica Wells BBC Scotland - 2000

550
00:56:39,040 --> 00:56:43,040
E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk