Blood Cries Afar (12 page)

John heard the news of Château Gaillard’s fall on the day he was making his hunting arrangements for his return to the duchy. But John was never to return to Normandy as its duke. Philip immediately established his grip on the region by repairing the castle’s ruined defences so that they were, in the words of William the Breton, ‘more solid than they had ever been’. Given Philip’s eye for detail and his mastery of siege warfare, this is wholly credible. This was the castle that symbolised control of Normandy. The implications of its loss were grasped straightaway by the duchy’s inhabitants; within three months it was totally subjected to French rule. Philip, ever the cool customer, did not let success go to his head. His gaze was set on Rouen, the capital of Normandy, and which lay farther down the Seine.
¹⁴⁷

Rouen prepared for the siege: resources and supplies poured in while the defences were made ready. The city’s strong walls and triple ditch made it a formidably strong objective (as Henry V discovered during his six-month-long investiture of it between 1418–19). Its Angevin loyalties were reinforced by those who had fled to the city before the Capetian advances. All the time negotiations prompted by the Papacy continued apace, but these were little more than diplomatic formalities and they achieved nothing. It was during these talks that William Marshal, in an act of
realpolitik
, paid homage to Philip for his Norman lands while still serving his English lord.

Contrary to what might have been expected, Philip did not make straight for the city but instead directed his army to the west: a strategy which was to reap great reward at minimal cost. John’s preparations for war, initiated at Oxford just after Christmas, were now tardily coming to fruition. If Rouen held out against a besieging French force then Philip could expect to face another relief expedition from England, this time larger than the one he had confronted at Château Gaillard and while deeper in hostile territory. Rather, he determined on the piecemeal territorial conquest of Normandy, leaving its capital isolated and increasingly surrounded, and hence reducing its strategical value. On 7 May he took Argentan and the satellite castles of his next objective, Caen. Intelligence gathered from Norman deserters revealed Falaise to be deeply demoralised, a condition not unsurprising giving Château Gaillard’s recent loss. The stronghold of Falaise withstood the French forces for only a week, despite the extensive defence excavations John had recently carried out there; Lupescar, its commander, bowed to the tide of events and went over to Philip, taking his mercenaries with him. It is possible that Lupescar’s actions were in part prompted by financial incentives offered by the townspeople of Falaise who did not wish him to resist the French king: they feared the material and personal damages that a siege would inflict on them, a telling effect of Philip’s ruthlessness at Château Gaillard. With Falaise gone, Caen soon followed without a fight; with it went Bayeux, Lisieux, Coutances, Barfleur, Cherbourg and lesser places. In the first week of May, Breton forces under Guy de Thouars, burning with revenge for Arthur’s murder, had broken through Normandy’s southwestern defences and destroyed Mont Saint-Michel, a task which had to be completed quickly as the tides that transformed the rock into an island gave them only limited opportunities to do so. They then moved on to sack Avranches, linked up with French forces and joined Philip at Caen. Here Philip divided his army into two. Guy de Thouars, the Count of Boulogne (erstwhile ally of John), William des Barres, a large body of French knights and the mercenaries who had changed sides at Falaise completed the subjugation of south-western Normandy where castle after castle fell in rapid succession, a sure sign of military and political momentum. Philip, meanwhile, now turned to Rouen.

Philip must be given full credit for his strategy. The successful sweep south west and link-up with the Bretons left, as Philip intended, the ducal capital exposed and friendless. The political and psychological effects of this were as important as the explicitly military ones. Prince Louis attempted a similar approach during his invasion of England in 1216–17 when he was confronted by Dover Castle: he temporarily abandoned the difficult siege of this castle to first subdue lesser ones around it. John, too, tried this for London in 1216. In eastern Normandy all that was left of John’s defences were Arques, Verneuil and Rouen itself; these decided to act in unison during the crisis. They saw clearly that the writing was on the wall in one form or another. The duchy’s records of government had already been shipped to England before the end of May; and the indecent haste with which Falaise and Caen had capitulated had done nothing to stiffen the resolve of the remaining Angevin pockets. They felt the acute vulnerability that Philip had designed for them.

At Rouen we witness another example of why Philip Augustus had such a reputation for the subjugation of strongholds. Force and logistical expertise were not the only ingredients of his poliorcetic success. Before the gates of Rouen, he played on the defendant’s fears, self-interest and common sense to come to an agreeable conclusion. Faced with the might of Philip’s conquering army, the leading figures of the capital’s community considered, as Falaise did, not only the mortal dangers they faced but also the financial threats that a siege would entail. Rouen’s civic and trading riches rested in large measure on its privileges and rights; if John could no longer guarantee these then Philip might instead; but he would only be predisposed to do so if the city submitted quietly without forcing him to expend French blood and treasure. Philip, ever cautious and calculating, had been alert to such sensibilities throughout the Normandy campaign and had confirmed the liberties of the places now under his control. This had happened at Falaise, the fate of which was so influential on decision making in Rouen. If resistance failed, the capital’s jealously guarded and coveted privileges could be revoked and instead granted to rivals.

Rouen’s military commander, John’s ‘trusty and well-beloved’ Peter des Préux, assessed the long-term hopelessness of the situation. He knew that only direct intervention from England could save the situation and harboured doubts that King John would provide the
deus ex machina
. Peter, who had enjoyed a close friendship with Richard the Lionheart, knew John’s character and had less faith in him than his predecessor; John, conversely, had relied heavily on Peter and his brothers over the years in keeping Normandy secure. Rouen could look to its own formidable defences for a while if it so wished, but the balance of gains and losses made this option an unattractive one. Des Préux and the castellans of Arques and Verneuil made a truce with Philip on 1 June, in which all three agreed to surrender if help was not forthcoming within 30 days. They wrote to John in supplication and could not have been overly surprised by the tone of John Softsword’s reply: they were not to expect any help from him and they were to act as they saw fit. This was not an exhortation to arms that would steel his subjects’ nerves to counter Philip’s threats, for the French King had added psychological intimidation to the incentives for surrender. Philip had explained to the citizens, governors and castellans of the towns and castles in his path that they should accept him as their lord now that John had abandoned them (not least by fleeing to England at Christmas). Wendover writes: ‘he begged them as a friend to receive him as their lord since they had no other; but he declared with an oath that if they did not do so willingly, and dared to vie against him, he would subdue them as enemies and hang them all on the gibbet or flay them alive.’
¹⁴⁸
After Château Gaillard, few doubted this threat. Hostages had been offered to Philip and their safety, along with that of the city, was put before faith in John. On receiving John’s reply, de Préaux did not even wait for the truce to expire; on 24 June the strong fortresses of Arques, Verneuil and the capital of Normandy, considered invincible by many, surrendered to the French king. John had already lost Maine and Anjou. Now, too, Normandy was lost.

This was a momentous occasion in English history. Nicholas Vincent has recently summed up its significance: ‘it fatally tarnished the military and political reputation of King John and set the Plantagenet kings on the road to harsher taxation, failed attempts to recover the duchy and, in the aftermath of this failure, the breakdown in relations between kings and barons that resulted in Magna Carta. King John’s road from Normandy to Runnymede was a straight one.’ David Carpenter has judged that ‘The Capetian Conquest of Normandy was a turning point in European history. It made the Capetian kings dominant in western Europe, and ended the cross-Channel state.’
¹⁴⁹
The French were in command of the northern seaboard. Paris, at times within just a day’s ride of English forces in the twelfth century, was now safe. And England lay under threat of invasion.

J
ohn’s loss of Normandy was as disastrous to England as Philip’s conquest of the duchy was beneficial to France.
¹⁵⁰
The long-standing Capetian goal to obtain control of the northern seaboard and expel the English from Normandy had been spectacularly achieved. The tables had been decisively turned: now it was England that was under threat from invasion, and it immediately went on invasion alert. Of course, the new geo-political reality did not preclude further English campaigns into French territory – these were still mounted on a large scale – but a real psychological and material blow had been delivered to the English. For over a century, the duchy had been viewed primarily as a strong forward post on the continent for invasion into France; in strategic terms, it was an offensive asset. Now, however, the English believed that they had lost a defensive asset, a large buffer zone that had kept the French from operating on the shores just across the channel. The gains also further secured their access to the Flemish coast, not least because now they could more safely assemble and move ships along the coast. Implicit in Richard’s continental campaigning was an understanding of this. But the disaster had implications far beyond geo-politics; the consequences for domestic politics, royal finances and, above all, military considerations, are the subject of this chapter.

In the brief survey of the relationships between European powers that follows, the dealings between England and France with the Empire and the Papacy were dominated by two overriding concerns: for England, all efforts were concentrated on regaining the lost territories in France; for France, the wish was to consolidate and expand gains on her home territory, an objective that could be aided by taking the offensive to England itself. Invasions of England remained an active option of French policy exercised into the eighteenth century, and threatened (as we have seen in chapter one) into the nineteenth. English dreams of recovery in France began fading after the Hundred Years War, despite the long drawn out and optimistic claims of royal titles over the centuries; invasions by Edward IV and Henry VIII did little to keep these dreams alive. In reality, such campaigns and assertions of sovereignty were used more to apply political and diplomatic pressure in pursuance of much more modest objectives. The loss of Calais in 1558 during Queen Mary’s reign finally put paid to the hereditary hopes of the English crown (but not the claims).

Long before then all hopes of re-establishing the Angevin Empire had been abandoned: the empire technically came to an end in May, 1259, by the Treaty of Paris.
¹⁵¹
This treaty, concluded by John’s son and successor, Henry III, and Philip Augustus’s grandson, Louis IX, saw the English renounce all claims to Normandy, Poitou, Touraine, Maine and Anjou. In a poor return for this, the English King was acknowledged as Duke of Aquitaine, for which he paid homage to the King of France. Although the treaty did mark the formal demise of the Angevin Empire, it did little to alleviate Angevin-Capetian or Anglo-French rivalry, the antagonism persisting for centuries to come.
¹⁵²
As argued in chapter one, Richard the Lionheart’s continental campaigns were undertaken as much for the good of England’s security as for his own Angevin patrimony, and the security concerns for both sides remained to the fore long after 1259. War and politics may be tribal, religious, dynastic, national, civil or inter-communal, but they remain war and politics, they remain power struggles. In 1204, the struggle that led ultimately to the Treaty of Paris might have led instead to Anglo-Imperial dominance of France or to another Norman conquest of England. These years of diplomacy, alliances and sporadic campaigning led to the pivotal, epochal engagement at Bouvines in 1214 and the French invasion of England in 1216.

England’s close relations with Germany went back a century to 1114 when Henry I married off his daughter Matilda to the Emperor Henry V, an ‘early warning to France’.
¹⁵³
Commercial ties with continental Europe grew even stronger as a result of this. One such tie was the burgeoning Flemish cloth industry’s demand for English wool, something that inevitably intertwined political and economic interests between the two regions throughout the medieval period. This trade connection was instrumental in attracting the Counts of Flanders away from Capetian influence. There was also a great deal of trade with other areas of the empire, especially Cologne and the Rhineland. Under Henry II, relationships with the empire had become so close there was even a resentful backlash in England, John of Salisbury railing: ‘Who has appointed the Germans to be judges of the nations?’ and calling Germans ‘brutal’ and ‘headstrong’.
¹⁵⁴
Such outbursts of national indignity should be remembered when we discuss the effects on English identity caused by the French invasion.