William Marshal(c. 1146–1219)

William Marshal was born about 1146, fourth son of John FitzGilbert the Marshal, hereditary marshal of the royal household under King Stephen, and Sibyl of Salisbury. The Marshal's office his father held was a court rank, not a great-magnate one: it ran the king's mews, the king's hostlers, and the king's household troops, paid by fee in cash and not in land. The fourth son of a court officer in the middle of the Anarchy, the civil war between Stephen and Matilda that ran 1135 to 1153, was born to a precarious inheritance. He was about five years old in 1152 when his father garrisoned Newbury Castle on Matilda's side against Stephen's siege army and offered William up as a hostage to guarantee a brief truce. John FitzGilbert used the truce to reprovision the castle rather than surrender, and Stephen's troops marched the small boy out to the gallows below the walls to hang him in reprisal. Stephen could not bring himself to do it. The boy was instead held in the king's household for the remainder of the siege, fed at the king's table, and returned to his father at the end of the war. The story enters the *Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal*, the verse biography commissioned by his eldest son in 1224, as the first event of his career.

He was sent at thirteen to the household of his cousin William de Tancarville, Chamberlain of Normandy, for the standard knightly apprenticeship of the period. He was knighted in 1166 at the age of about twenty, fought in the cross-Channel campaigns of the next two years, and entered the tournament circuit of northern France and the Low Countries about 1170. The tournament of the twelfth century was not the choreographed jousting that the late-medieval lists became. It was a paying spectator sport in which two armed teams of forty or fifty knights apiece engaged in a controlled cavalry battle across an open field. The losing knights were captured and ransomed; the winners took the horses and arms of the prisoners and split the cash. Marshal was, by the testimony of his biography and of independent chronicle sources, the most successful jousting knight of the European tournament circuit through the 1170s. The *Histoire* records him taking a hundred and three knights prisoner at the single tournament of Pleurs in 1177 and over five hundred across the decade. He gave the proceeds to his retainers and reinvested in horseflesh.

Henry II appointed him tutor-at-arms to the young Henry the Young King in 1170 and Marshal served the boy through to the Young King's death of dysentery in 1183. He served Henry II until that king's death in 1189 (he was at Le Mans for the old king's final retreat and at Chinon for the death), and Richard I appointed him to the Council of Regents during the Third Crusade and gave him Isabel de Clare, daughter and heiress of Richard Strongbow, in marriage in 1189, an act that turned the landless household knight at forty-three into the Earl of Pembroke and Striguil, the holder of the lordship of Leinster, and one of the four or five greatest barons in the realm. He served King John against the French through John's reign, witnessed Magna Carta on the meadow at Runnymede on 15 June 1215 as one of the twenty-five named guarantors of the document, and stayed loyal to John through the First Barons' War of 1215-16 even when most of the great magnates of the realm went over to the French Prince Louis. John died of dysentery at Newark on 19 October 1216 with the war still running and a French army holding the eastern half of the country.

John's heir Henry III was nine years old. The funeral cortège brought the small boy from Devizes to the abbey at Gloucester for an emergency coronation on 28 October 1216, twelve days after his father's death, conducted with a plain gold circlet (the regalia were lost in the Wash a fortnight before) and with William Marshal carrying the boy from the abbey door to the throne. The next morning the prelates and the loyalist barons present chose Marshal as Rector regis et regni, regent of king and kingdom, on the unanimous principle that the only man capable of running the realm through the war was the seventy-year-old marshal who had served Henry II, the Young King, Richard, John and now Henry III. He accepted the office with what the *Histoire* records as visible reluctance and on the explicit condition that the leading bishops and barons would not desert the boy. He confirmed Magna Carta in November 1216 in the boy's name, the act that turned the document from a baronial peace treaty with John into a constitutional foundation of the English realm.

He fought one more battle. The decisive battle of the First Barons' War was at Lincoln on 20 May 1217. Marshal was seventy and had not been at the head of an army in a generation. He led the relief column up from Newark in person, refused to wait for reinforcements his commanders advised, charged the French baronial army inside the city walls at the gallop, and broke them in a four-hour street fight. The French and their English baronial allies surrendered or fled. The naval action off Sandwich in August 1217 destroyed the French reinforcement fleet; the Treaty of Lambeth in September ended the war on terms that confirmed Henry III's crown and restored the rebel English barons to their lands. He had won the war. He continued as regent for the remaining two years of his life. He died at Caversham on the Berkshire bank of the Thames on 14 May 1219, about seventy-three years old, having taken vows as a Knight Templar on his deathbed under a long-standing pledge. He was buried in the Temple Church at the London headquarters of the Templars on the Strand, where his effigy in armour, hand on sword, still lies in the round nave. The Marshal name in its English form, the office of mareschal scaled up from horse-servant to court rank, carries him as its foundational figure; Stephen Langton, who preached at his funeral, said of him that *he was the greatest knight that has ever been*.