Profiles In Virtue - William li Marischal, "The Greatest Knight Who Ever Lived"

For the first of these posts, on a thoroughly appropriate day, I am taking a very easy subject: William Marshal, first Earl of Pembroke, known in his lifetime (as was Charny) as the greatest knight who ever lived.  Marshal lived from about 1147 to May 14, 1219, served five kings - three of them named Henry, and one of them generally all but forgotten today - was the one man who is known ever to have unhorsed Richard the Lionheart, was one of the four men that same worthy trusted to govern England while on Crusade, and was one of the prime negotiators on Magna Carta.

Effigy of William Marshal.  No jokes here.

With such an impressive life, it is easy to forget that William Marshal was, for all intents and purposes, a mercenary.  The difference between Marshal and other, equally influential men who were equally hungry for rewards, lands, and honors is that Marshal could not be bought twice.  This drew him praise in his own time; what, therefore, were the assumed virtues of the late twelfth century, that Marshal stood out even among his peers?

The prime virtue was, of course, social standing, though it was rarely framed directly as such - the farther up the ladder you were, the better your assumed starting position.  Kings and the Church were appointed by God, and the closer to their seat you were, the better.  Social climbing was expected.  To use Marshal's personal example, his father switched sides at least once during the English civil war between Stephen and Matilda, and part of the reward for his own service to the Plantagenet family was that he was married to a rich heiress, Isabel de Clare, and made the Earldom of Pembroke, at a time when there were no English social ranks between Earl and King.  The reason that this was a virtue is that social climbing meant security - much of Marshal's early career was spent in attracting and keeping a patron; once patronage was secured, a knight could reasonably expect security, if not comfort, for himself and his immediate family, though it was likely that his sons would start the entire cycle over again.  This was not the Victorian period, where social climbing was expected but never discussed; naked ambition was a virtue, within limits beyond which it became a vice (see the Lusignan family for a case where it was regarded as almost a hereditary vice), whether it was the contest to become bishop or abbot, or to find a powerful patron to grant lands and honors.

Marshal was not particularly unique in his social climbing; if he was unique it was in that he was able to attract and keep a succession of powerful patrons, starting with Henry the Young King, unique in that he was crowned during his father's lifetime, though never king regnant, as he died well before Henry II.  Indeed, Marshal was so dedicated in his youth to social climbing that he managed to turn this particular period virtue into a vice - he was dismissed from the Young King's service, potentially for being too demanding of rewards for his service, above and beyond the routine demands of a successful knight.  In medieval terms, he had committed the sin of pride, or rather, of excessive pride.

However, when the Young King rebelled against his father, one of the first people he sent for was William Marshal.  It was here that Marshal demonstrated the virtue most associated with him, loyalty.  The Young King's rebellion was doomed from the start, because he was just not the half-badger, half-fox that his father, Henry II, was - and, also, he developed dysentery and, instead of the physically robust tournament champion of earlier years, he was physically incapable of leading and rapidly deteriorated.  Followers deserted him as he retreated castle to castle, but even at the very end, William Marshal stayed loyal.  When it became obvious that the Young King was dying, it was to Marshal that he gave his cloak, with its fresh-stitched crusader's cross on it, to be taken to Jerusalem.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that Marshal had stayed loyal to the Young King right to the end, Marshal came into the service of the Young King's father, Henry II, to whom he displayed the same unstinting loyalty; when all of Henry's surviving sons rebelled against him, Marshal stayed with the old king, and it was while covering old Henry's retreat that Marshal famously unhorsed Prince Richard, dropping his lance-point at the last minute to kill the horse rather than the prince.  When, his health broken, Henry died, Richard became king, and Richard supposedly took the Marshal out for a ride, just the two of them, and casually mentioned how bad Marshal's aim had been that day, that he had struck the horse when he could have struck the man, and Marshal replied along the lines that he would not contradict the king, but the prince he had unhorsed certainly knew better.  The reply apparently satisfied Richard; Marshal once again had a powerful patron, who recognized that Marshal, once bought into service, stayed bought.  It was an expensive investment - the heiress Isabel de Clare, and much though not all of her lands - but it was one Richard could afford.

In the interests of brevity, I will pass over much of Marshal's career under Richard and John to bring up a couple of salient points from later in his career.  First was his role during the Barons' Rebellion of 1215.  Marshal was loyal to King John, despite John's every attempt to break even the Marshal's famous loyalty, but he was by this point Earl of Pembroke, a powerful figure in Wales and Ireland, and an elder statesman of the realm, having been involved intimately in the highest levels of royal politics since he was a retainer of the Young King.  Even John's enemies regarded Marshal as a voice of reason, and he played a key role in the signing of Magna Carta, as one of the counselors who advised John to accept its terms.  I suspect this is because John, who was for all his flaws an intelligent man, recognized that if Marshal, who had served his father and two of his brothers even when their cause was beyond lost, said that this was the only way out, this was the only way out.

John, in fact, held Marshal in high enough regard that Marshal became part of the regency council for Henry III, his young son.  When John died, England was in the midst of a succession crisis.  Henry II and Richard I were viewed as heavy-handed, but successful kings; John was viewed as a heavy-handed, arbitrary, unsuccessful, and unlucky king, the kind of king who had lost what the Chinese would call the Mandate of Heaven, symbolized by his not only dropping the spear of state when he was taking office as Duke of Normandy, but joking about it.  Most of Normandy was lost under John, and so the barons of England were ready to replace him with another claimant - Louis, crown prince of France, who was married to a granddaughter of Henry II.  Thus, siding with Louis would still be siding with the Plantagenet line, and would even allow Marshal to reclaim his family's lost lands in Normandy.  There were, in short, powerful incentives for a social climber to switch sides, and under similar circumstances, Marshal's father had done precisely that.

The question was put to Marshal, if he could support Louis, a man grown and a legitimate claimant, over Henry III, a mere boy and the son of a man so hated that his own barons had invited in an outsider to be king.  After all, under similar circumstances in the midst of another civil war, he had supported the claims of John, a grown man, over Arthur of Brittany, still in his teens.  Marshal considered the matter carefully, in light both of the virtue of acquisition, and the virtue of loyalty, and gave his reply:

If I have to pay his way from my own purse, and carry him from island to island upon my own back, I will do so, until King Henry has his rights.

William Marshal was by this time about seventy.  Despite this, he took the field and, at Second Lincoln, defeated an army twice the size of what he fielded, notoriously being so desperate to get at the enemy that during the final charge - a charge he led, ensuring that no man on that field could reasonably stay back when a man literally old enough to be their great-grandfather was out front - he forgot his helm.  The forces loyal to Prince Louis suffered a crushing defeat and fell back on London; Marshal was in the process of besieging this city when the war ended due to French naval losses in the Channel.

After this, he re-issued Magna Carta, made a soft peace with the Barons, and generally did his best to settle affairs.  England, and the Angevin continental possessions, had been involved in more or less continuous turmoil since about 1190, and the kingdom, and the Marshal, were ready for peace, not punishment.  He was an old man, old by the standards of any age, with decades in the saddle behind him, and it had begun to tell on even this famously robust man.  By 1219, he was obviously dying, and settled his personal affairs and those of the regency, took holy orders as a member of the Templars, and died on May 14, 2019.

As I said at the beginning of this, Marshal was in many respects a typical knight of his period, with all the vices thereof - socially ambitious, to a modern eye greedy, comfortable with violence, and largely indifferent to the effects of the constant low-intensity warfare of his day.  However, these were the norm of his time.  Warfare was fought at the intensity of Afghanistan or Vietnam as a matter of course, and war could last decades of indecisive skirmishing.  Especially in his youth, he was arrogant, and he made decisions on a regular basis, most involving Prince, later King, John, that he came to regret, though he made them for reasons he thought good.  At the same time, he was famously brave, he was a good steward of the lands entrusted to him (much of John's reign was spent improving the Earldom of Pembroke), and, even as he was socially grasping, he was loyal.  His father changed sides as the wind blew; William Marshal, "the greatest knight that ever lived," would rather take up arms again in his seventies than betray an oath.  Yet he did not do so foolishly - it is impossible to imagine, for instance, that when he turned his horse against Richard during the retreat to Chinon, that he thought Henry could win.  He consciously chose to remain loyal, even when others changed sides without penalty.

It is this choice to exercise loyalty, even at personal cost, that makes William Marshal virtuous, not his strength, not his ambition, not his rise from second son of a minor lord to regent of England.  It was his choice to be loyal that made William Marshal extraordinary.