My favorite of the Devil's Brood

September 23rd, 1158 is the birthday of my personal favorite of the Devil’s Brood, Henry and Eleanor’s third surviving son, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany. There was just a year between Geoffrey and Richard, which may have accounted for the constant friction between them. Geoffrey, of course, has gotten short shrift by historians as he was the only son not to wear a crown, and as a result, they tended to accept at face value the critical judgments passed on Geoffrey by the contemporary chroniclers. One historian even went so far to as to claim Geoffrey was motivated by “mindless malice.” It was Geoffrey’s bad luck that there were no Breton chroniclers to record his reign over the duchy or to put his actions in the proper perspective. When seen through a Breton prism, his conduct is far more comprehensible, if not always admirable. I have often recommended Dr Judith Everard’s excellent study of 12th century Brittany, Brittany and the Angevins, and I recommend it again for anyone wanting to understand Geoffrey’s career and the turbulent relationship between the Bretons and the English and French monarchs.
No one should doubt that the death of one man can exert a profound impact upon history. Richard’s carelessness at the siege of Chalus not only altered English history, it changed the course of German history and would bring untold miseries to the people of Languedoc because of the Albigensian Crusade. Perhaps Geoffrey’s death in that French tournament did not have such far-reaching consequences, but it is interesting to speculate what might have happened had Geoffrey not died so prematurely. My own belief is that there would not have been a King John and there would have been a King Arthur, for in a contest for the English crown between Geoffrey and John, my money would have been on Geoffrey. That is assuming, of course, that the trajectory of Richard’s life would remain the same, with him dying at Chalus without an heir of his body.
While this date is memorable to me because of Geoffrey, it is also the date of the battle of Blore Heath in 1459, the first major battle of the War of the Roses. I did not get to dramatize it in Sunne, unfortunately, for it was an unusual battle. Queen Marguerite had instructed Lord Audley to ambush a force led by the Yorkist commander, the Earl of Salisbury, brother to Cecily Neville and father of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick; there is an unsubstantiated tradition that Marguerite was present at the battle. Although Salisbury was considerably outnumbered, he managed to prevail. Audley was slain and when they saw that victory was going to the Yorkists, five hundred Lancastrians switched sides in the midst of the battle and attacked their own, which helps to explain the paranoia of the Lancastrians at Barnet Heath, when in the confusion of the fog, the Earl of Oxford collided with the men led by John Neville. Here is a link to an excellent website devoted to the battle of Blore Heath for those who’d like to find out more about it. http://www.bloreheath.org/index.php