John Lackland
9781465680044
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The fifth son, the eighth and last child, of Henry II. of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine was born at Oxford, in the “King’s manor”—that is, the palace of Beaumont—on Christmas Eve 1167. Of their six other surviving children, the three younger were daughters; the last of these, Joanna, was then two years old. The eldest living son, Henry, was nearly thirteen; Richard was ten, and Geoffrey nine. The boy Henry had, when an infant, been acknowledged by the barons of England as heir to the crown, and in 1160 had done homage to Louis of France for the duchy of Normandy. In 1162 preparations had been made for his crowning in England, and he had again received the homage of the barons, to which that of the Welsh princes and the Scot king was added in 1163. Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine had been destined for her second surviving son, Richard, as early as 1159, when he was not yet two years old. In the summer of 1166 the king had secured Britanny for Geoffrey by betrothing him to its heiress. The whole Angevin dominions, with one exception, were thus, in design at least, partitioned among John’s brothers before John himself was born. The exception was, indeed, an important one; in the contemporary accounts of Henry’s plans during this period for the distribution of his territories, there is no mention of Anjou and its dependency Touraine. The reason, however, is obvious. Anjou was the cradle of his race, the very heart and centre of his dominion, the one portion of it which he had inherited from his forefathers in unbroken male descent, by a right which had been always undisputed and indisputable. The destiny of Anjou was therefore as yet unspecified, not because Henry was reserving it for a possible younger son, but because its devolution to his eldest son, as head of the Angevin house after him, was in his mind a matter of course. It was in fact Henry himself who gave to his new-born child the name which has clung to him ever since—“Johans Sanz Terre,” John Lackland.
