The Historical Afterlife of Two Capetian Co- Kings Who
Chapter 7 The Historical Afterlife of Two Capetian Co- Kings Who Predeceased Their Fathers William Chester Jordan One of the Capetians’ greatest successes was the smooth and largely unchal- lenged transfers of authority after Hugh Capet until the accession of Philip II Augustus. Every king after Hugh down to and including Philip II had two cor- onations, one as the king’s eldest son and while his father lived, the other after the older man died. This system, co-kingship or associative kingship, has been well- studied by a number of scholars, including notably Andrew Lewis, who have been interested in determining its roots and parallels in other royal and aristocratic traditions of inheritance.1 What it attempted to do was to assure that no king’s death left a power vacuum, since the new king would already be a reigning and anointed monarch. Of course, to what extent any junior king had responsibilities depended on the senior king’s personality, on his health, and on the political conditions in the interval between the son’s accession and his father’s demise. But it is pretty clear that the Capetians were luckier in this respect than several other dynasties that sporadically practiced associative kingship contemporary with them or later on. For example, in the twelfth century Henry II of England’s son, Henry the Young King, was willful, resentful, peevish, stupid, and altogether charming. These are my words, but they mirror W. L. Warren’s in his magisterial 1973 biography of Henry II: “He [the Young King] was gracious, benign, affable, courteous, the soul of liberality and generosity.
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