Marriage As Tactical Response: Henry II and the Royal Wedding of 1160
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MFK-Mendip Job ID: 10282BK-0103-1 5 - 954 Rev: 10-08-2004 PAGE: 1 TIME: 06:48 SIZE: 60,01 Area: BOOKS OP: R English Historical Review Vol. CXIX No. 483 EHR(A5)/0013–8266/3027/954 ᭧ Oxford University Press 2004, all rights reserved Marriage as Tactical Response: Henry II and the Royal Wedding of 1160 ON 2 November 1160, at Neubourg in Normandy, a wedding took place that had significant consequences for the political status quo in England and France. The husband was Henry, eldest surviving son of Henry II Downloaded from and Eleanor of Aquitaine. The wife was Margaret, elder daughter of Louis VII of France from his second marriage, to Constance of Castile. It is remarkable that the union took place at all, considering the numerous barriers, both theoretical and practical, that stood in its way. The couple were related within the seven forbidden degrees, and had not expressed http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ formal consent to their marriage, as the Church demanded.1 More problematic, however, and more noteworthy to contemporary com- mentators, was the age of the husband and wife. Henry and Margaret ‘were still little children, crying in the cradle’, he only five years of age, she a mere two.2 They had already been betrothed for two years at the time of their wedding. By anyone’s standards, the youth of the couple should have been an impediment to their nuptials. Yet Henry II press-ganged the children into service as pawns in his diplomatic chess at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Library on February 22, 2012 game, their union orchestrated for purely political ends. These facts, at least, are well enough known. Historians have explained the marriage as a ploy by Henry II to regain control of Margaret’s dowry, the coveted castles of the Norman Vexin; as a response to a renewed alliance between Louis and the house of Blois-Champagne; or as a consequence of Henry’s supposed ambitions to gain the throne of France for himself or his descendants.3 Relevant as they may be, none of these views can fully explain the timing of the event. A re-examination of chronicle and documentary evidence can shed light upon shorter-term reasons for the timing of the marriage (especially concerning the consanguinity issue) that have been neglected. I wish also to make some brief observations on the use of marriage in the twelfth century as a political tool, but in a ‘tactical’ rather than a ‘strategic’ context. Strategy refers here to the implementation of a 1. On the children’s relationship, see p. 6. 2. Roger of Howden, Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs, R[olls] S[eries] LI, i, (London, 1868) p. 218. Translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 3. John T. Appleby, Henry II – The Vanquished King (London, 1962), pp. 68–70; G. W. S. Barrow, Feudal Britain – The Completion of the Medieval Kingdoms 1066–1314 (London, 1956), p. 169; Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings (Oxford, 2000), pp. 46–7; Jacques Boussard, Le gouvernement d’Henri II Plantagenét (Paris, 1956), pp. 423–4; George P. Cuttino, English Medieval Diplomacy (Bloomington, 1985), p. 40; John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (London, 1984), p. 28; A. L. Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 1087–1216 (Oxford, 1951), pp. 323–4; J. H. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire: or the Three Reigns of Henry II, Richard I, and John (AD. 1154–1216) (London, 1903), pp. 23–4; W. L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973), p. 90. EHR, cxix. 483 (Sept. 2004) OUPEHR OUP: THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW ceh020 MFK-Mendip Job ID: 10282BK-0104-1 5 - 955 Rev: 10-08-2004 PAGE: 1 TIME: 06:48 SIZE: 59,06 Area: BOOKS OP: R AND THE ROYAL WEDDING OF 1160 955 deliberate plan, often lengthy in its preparation and negotiation, which produced a definite and predictable advantage for both parties to a marital alliance. This process has been well documented in the twelfth-century context.4 By contrast, tactical marriage was often far shorter in its gestation period, and was undertaken just as much to obstruct or counter the political programme of a rival as it was to promote one’s own agenda. What defines tactical marriage is its reactive and confrontational quality, its function as a response to events. The twelfth century has been cast as an era of opposition between Downloaded from competing views of the way marriage should work, pitting an increasingly dominant Church against fathers and families wishing to oversee the destinies of children and other close relatives.5 Diplomatic, economic and property-related motivations for arranging marriages often clashed with spiritual priorities.6 Yet as a result of diverse clerical http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ opinions surrounding the issues of consent and consanguinity, there remained much room for autonomous action in the lay community.7 Doubts over the exact definition of an age of consent for marital partners played into the hands of secular leaders.8 So too did inconsistent application by Church powers of rules on marriage within the forbidden 4. For the importance of marriage in twelfth-century French politics, see Georges Duby, at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Library on February 22, 2012 Medieval Marriage – Two Models from Twelfth-Century France, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore and London, 1978), and The Knight, the Lady and the Priest – The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray (Harmondsworth, 1983). A relevant recent collection of studies is Theodore Evergates (ed.), Aristocratic Women in Medieval France (Philadelphia, 1999). For England, see J. C. Holt, ‘Politics and Property in Early Medieval England’, Past and Present, lvii (1972), 3–52, and ‘Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xxxii–v (1982–5). A more general approach can be found in Christopher Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989). John Gillingham, ‘Love, Marriage and Politics in the Twelfth Century’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, xxv (1989), 292–303, argues for the possibility of emotional attachments even within overtly political marriages. 5. Duby, Medieval Marriage, p. 3. For a dissenting view, see David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985), p. 86. A recent contribution arguing for the importance of political motives in papal decisions on marriage is provided by David d’Avray, ‘Lay Kinship Solidarity and Papal Law’, in Pauline Stafford, et al. (ed.), Law, Laity, and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, (Manchester and New York, 2001), pp. 188–99. 6. On property considerations in twelfth-century marriage, see Michael Sheehan, ‘The Influence of Canon Law on the Property Rights of Married Women in England’, Medieval Studies, xxv (1963), 109–24 (reprinted in Michael Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies (Toronto, 1996), pp. 16–30); Diane Owen Hughes, ‘From Brideprice to Dowry in Mediterranean Europe’, Journal of Family History, iii (1978), 262–96; Jack Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 66–7 and Appendix II; and Herlihy, pp. 98–111. 7. For differing emphases among canon lawyers (especially Gratian and Peter Lombard) on the need for consent, see John T. Noonan, Jr., ‘Power to Choose’, Viator, iv (1973), 419–34; Michael Sheehan, ‘Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages: Development and Mode of Application of a Theory of Marriage’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, NS i (1978), 1–33 (reprinted in Sheehan, Marriage, Family, and Law, pp. 87–117); and James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago and London, 1987), pp. 235–9 and 262–6. 8. See Charles Duggan, ‘Equity and Compassion in Papal Marriage Decretals to England’, in Willy Van Hoecke and Andries Welkenhuysen (ed.), Love and Marriage in the Twelfth Century (Leuven, 1981), pp. 59–87; Charles Donahue Jr., ‘The Canon Law on the Formation of Marriage and Social Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, Journal of Family History, viii (1983), 144–58; and Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, pp. 332–5. EHR, cxix. 483 (Sept. 2004) OUPEHR OUP: THE ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW MFK-Mendip Job ID: 10282BK-0105-1 5 - 956 Rev: 10-08-2004 PAGE: 1 TIME: 06:48 SIZE: 59,06 Area: BOOKS OP: R 956 MARRIAGE AS TACTICAL RESPONSE: HENRY II degrees of physical or spiritual relationship.9 Betrothals functioned as little more than statements of intent, agreements that could be easily revoked if diplomatic priorities were to change, or if the impediments of canon law intervened.10 In 1158, during a period of peace between Henry II and Louis VII, the two monarchs had arranged for just such a betrothal. Their children were to be married at some future point, with the castles of the Norman Vexin as the newborn Margaret’s dowry.11 After an ostentatious embassy led by chancellor Thomas Becket concluded the negotiations, Henry Downloaded from himself came to Paris later in the year to collect Margaret, whose custody he had arranged as part of the deal.12 The betrothal epitomized a strategic marital pact: it represented a public agreement between two families to undertake a mutually beneficial exchange of assets in the future, with the transaction personified by the family members who http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ would be united in wedlock.13 Relations deteriorated in 1159, especially during Henry’s unsuccessful attempt to capture Toulouse, which Louis opposed in person.14 An eventual truce late in the year led to a formal peace agreement in May 1160. Louis once again pledged the Vexin and its castles as Margaret’s dowry. The French king retained tenure of the at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies Library on February 22, 2012 9.