WHAT DID WILLIAM MARSHAL DO ON CRUSADE?

There's a peculiar silence in Marshal's famous biography concerning his mission to Jerusalem in the 1180s. Why?

In 1183/4 William Marshal, self-styled ‘greatest knight’ of the Middle Ages, went to the kingdom of Jerusalem. Why? Well, because he said he was gonna.

Specifically, when Marshal was at the deathbed of Henry The Young King in June 1183, he agreed to fulfil that wayward young man’s crusading vow – and to take his cloak to Christ’s tomb at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

This was a big undertaking. And in a sense, it was not a sure thing that Marshal would agree. He and the Young King had been close for a long time – Marshal had overseen the Young King’s knightly training and then ridden on his tournament team in the 1170s.

But they’d fallen out over whispers (probably unfounded) that Marshal was sleeping with the Young King’s wife and queen, Margaret. It was only a late recall to favour that meant Marshal was with Young Henry when he died.

All the same, Marshal prided himself on being a paragon of chivalric duty. And since he’d agreed, he was now duty-bound.

As they said in the golden age of hip-hop, word is bond.

So once the Young King was buried, Marshal went to his grieving(ish) father, Henry II, and obtained permission to head east, along with the funds and supplies to get him there.

Then he set out, and spent the better part of two years away from Europe, only returning home in the winter of 1185/6.

So far so good. After all, it’s the twelfth century. Jerusalem was in crusader hands, following the First Crusade of 1096-9. Saladin was on the march and the kingdom of Jerusalem was not far away from being in existential peril.

They needed all the good knights they could get.

Yet here’s the weird thing. In William Marshal’s epic, 19,000+ line verse biography, commissioned shortly after his death by his family and friends, Marshal’s sojourn in the east is glossed over with bizarre haste.

It is effectively a lacuna in an otherwise extremely detailed text.

The biographer is weirdly coy about the entire expedition. He tells us William went to the Holy Land, and stayed for two years, that he proved himself generous and brave, and that he became a legend in his own lifetime while he was there.

He says that people including ‘King Guy of Jerusalem and all the men in the king’s household’ were upset when Marshal announced he was going home in late 1185.

But then the biographer says he can’t go into any further detail ‘because I was not there and didn’t witness them, nor can I find anyone who can tell me the half of them.’

That’s weird. I’m telling you, that’s really weird.

But why am I telling you that? Well, because last week I had to think about it in detail for the first time in about 10 years. I was writing episode 17 of This Is History: A Dynasty To Die For – my new podcast about the Plantagenets. That episode is all about Marshal, and it covers the years immediately following Henry The Young King’s death. (It’ll be out in a few weeks’ time; episode 4 launched today.)

So I had to think about why we know so little about his time in the east. Why is this swept under the carpet? Did he get drunk and embarrass himself? Did he marry a stripper? Does what happens on crusade stay on crusade?

Here’s what I’ve concluded. I’m telling you here because I think some or all of this might not make the final cut of the episode (there’s too much else to talk about) and I have to tell someone, and you lot seem like you might listen/care.

When Marshal went to Jerusalem, it was a very dodgy time for the kingdom. The king. Baldwin IV, was dying of leprosy. He had named as his co-king his nephew, a toddler, also called Baldwin.

Around the leper Baldwin IV and child Baldwin V swarmed two rival factions, vying for control of the crown and the kingdom. One faction centred on Baldwin V’s parents, Sibylla and Guy. From what little we can glean from Marshal’s biography, it was this lot that Marshal fell in with.

But then he left them. And, as the biography says, they weren’t happy about it. The biography incorrectly identifies Guy as ‘King Guy’ – a post Guy didn’t attain until 1186, after Marshal was gone.

Does that hint at the fact that Marshal regretted not sticking around specifically to see Guy become king? Maybe. We can’t know. But I think the mention of it is does hint at the fact that Marshal felt that he could – even should – have stuck around longer in general.

In effect, I think he rued having left the Holy Land in the lurch – dropping out of Guy and Sibylla’s circle when they needed all the help they could get. And he hated not having been around in 1186-7, when Saladin stepped up his assaults on Jerusalem, culminating in the battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187, when the True Cross was lost and Guy’s army defeated, and the fall of Jerusalem itself in the autumn of the same year.

Marshal prided himself on seeing a job through, and sticking by those he served. My hunch is that he didn’t want to talk about his trip to the east because he regretted having fallen short of his own standards when he was there. And his biographer respected that wish, by drawing a veil over it in the History.

Anyway. I’m glad I got that off my chest. There’s going to be more about this when we get to ep17 of This Is History in a few weeks.

I hope you’ll enjoy that, too.