Blood Cries Afar (18 page)

Relationships with the Papacy proved crucial this year. Over Christmas, Stephen Langton and the Bishops of London and Ely had gone to Rome to press for action against their King; Innocent, currently in ascendancy in Europe, was feeling receptive to their calls for intercession and was keen to turn the screws on John, issuing him with an ultimatum for June. Wendover writes that in January the pope wrote to Philip, commissioning him to undertake a crusade against a John deposed by the Papacy and to claim the throne of England for the Capetians. This may have been an exaggeration of the contents of secret letters from Innocent; more recently, academic opinion has moved to discount the deposition because French chroniclers do not discuss it, as they surely would have done had it been the case. However, William the Breton, in his neglected
Philippidos
, does talk at this stage of Philip taking vows to act ‘against the schismatics’ (
contra schismaticos
) in England.
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Given the alliances forged the previous year, it is likely that there was at least an understanding of what Philip had planned (and chroniclers were soon certainly to give this impression). And what Philip had planned, with or without the blessing of a fully fledged crusade, was a French invasion of England in 1213.
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Philip had been assiduously preparing for this for some time. He was now taking advantage of developments in Artois and Flanders, along the north-east seaboard of France, where he had seized land from Renaud, Count of Boulogne and towns from Ferrand, Count of Flanders, pushing the former into John’s camp and leaving the latter wavering. The nature of these disputes is complex but John was quick to offer assistance to disaffected French subjects just as Philip was to English ones. Renaud of Dammartin was a key player in the years 1213–14. He was always ready to change sides and the French King was rightly suspicious of his shockingly poor record of loyalty. Philip, whose patience he had tried, determined that this was going to be the last time. Historians have differed in their judgment of Renaud: ‘This remarkable, cultivated, ambitious, and versatile man’ says one; ‘unstable’ another.
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It is safe to say that he was an opportunist who, like many French nobles, feared Philip’s growing regional power. The territory gained by the Capetian gave him more and better opportunities for invasion staging posts, and assembly points were established at Gravelines, Boulogne and Damme. At Soissons on 8 April, Philip held a major council in readiness for the enterprise of England, attended by the great barons of his kingdom. Louis was to take and hold England as an apanage; even if crowned king, he was still to defer matters of land redistribution and homage to his father.

John was now facing his gravest threat since the loss of Normandy and he made careful and thorough preparations for war, as he had the previous year. In a letter to all the sheriffs in England, he called for mercenaries to join him and demanded that all who were obliged to take up arms muster at Dover ‘to defend our person and themselves, and the land of England’.
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This patriotic exhortation was backed up with menace: John made it clear that he wanted to know who came and who did not; those who failed to make an appearance were to be branded as cowards and condemned to slavery. A huge army (’sixty thousand’, of course) gathered on the coast. John also ensured that the navy was at full strength and readiness; stronger than the French in this area, he planned to intercept the French in the Channel and ‘and drown them in the sea before they could even set foot on land’.
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His navy sharpened its fighting skills with raids on Dieppe, Fécamp and on the Seine. John’s confidence in the navy was in sharp contrast to his confidence in his barons: another reason why John placed so much emphasis on maritime defence was that there was less likelihood of being deserted on the field of battle, a real fear of his.

It was at this critical juncture that John played what most historians agree was his masterstroke: he submitted to the pope. On the 13 May he met the papal legate Pandulf, accepted Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, agreed compensation payments to Rome, and agreed to render England as a papal fief. England was now under the special protection of the pope. The Barnwell annalist captured both the logic and the shame of this action: ‘The King provided wisely for himself and his people by this measure, although to many it seemed ignominious and a monstrous yoke of servitude.’ He goes on to say that there was no swifter or more effective way of avoiding the looming threat, for now, as we have seen above, ‘there was no prince in the Roman world who would dare attack him or invade his lands.’
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But Philip Augustus was just such a Prince. He was not so easily deterred from a major campaign as John, even after Pandulf warned him in the third week of May that to persist with the invasion would incur an excommunication. Philip was livid with the legate at this turn of events, railing at the injustice of it all after he had spent ‘sixty thousand pounds’ on fitting out the expedition in the name of the pope. To rub salt in his wounds, John had dramatically upstaged Philip’s own reconciliation with the Papacy. In an overlooked episode, at Soissons in April Philip was reconciled with Ingeborg, thereby healing a significant, long-standing rift with the Church and garnering even greater blessings for his enterprise. Surely this would have played a major factor in influencing John to make his own, even greater, reconciliation with Rome the following month? The diplomacy of this period was intense indeed.

Philip persisted with his great undertaking nevertheless. Warren has reflected on why Philip should press on with the invasion at all. One factor may have been that his awareness of baronial feeling against John augured well, as it had before the fall of Normandy; and another that it was a way of preventing John landing his army in Poitou. But Warren believes that the whole operation was ‘hazardous’, extremely ‘optimistic’, and that these wasted resources would have been better deployed in annexing Aquitaine. He sums up with: ‘One can only conclude that Philip’s sense of mission against the house of Anjou had reached the proportion of megalomania, and that he would not be satisfied with anything less than its complete destruction.’
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Philip was far too prudent and meticulous a King for this assessment. Aquitaine, with its loyalties and economic connections to England and distance from Paris was a challenge of a different order, as Philip knew and history was to prove. We have not long seen how he took his time to consolidate his conquest of Normandy, and settled for a truce at Thouars in 1206. Ambitious? Undoubtedly. Megalomaniac? Unlikely. Preventing John’s expedition to Poitou points to the real reasons. The opportunity to take the war to England was probably paramount in his thinking, for the same reasons we have discussed for Richard fighting his wars in France. Philip would be sparing his own subjects while giving the message in the starkest of terms to John’s that the English King was failing in his primary obligation to protect them. Also important were the unknown consequences of kicking down John’s front door. If his whole house started shaking then the barons could bolt outside and run towards Philip. This proved to be the case for Louis in 1216.
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All that Philip needed to proceed with the invasion was the active support of Ferrand of Flanders, not least to secure the French positions along and behind the Flemish coast. Philip, however, was not prepared to return the Count’s towns and so Ferrand, son of King Sancho I of Portugal, declared on 24 May at Ypres that he was not prepared to join with the Capetians. The implications of this were clear: Ferrand would gravitate fully into the Angevin orbit and Philip would have to count him as a foe. Philip turned his war machine on Flanders.

What followed was an intense outburst of brutal and sharp warfare. The French King wanted Bruges and Ypres, preferably – always preferably – by negotiation if possible. Ghent required a siege. He advanced his invasion force into Flanders, ‘destroying everywhere in his path by fire, and putting the inhabitants to the sword’.
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He led the bulk of his forces – up to 240 knights and 10,000 infantry – to Ghent leaving behind a contingent to protect his fleet that had followed up from Gravelines to Damme. The fleet was too large (William the Breton gives a figure of 1700 ships) to all beach or dock here, so the rest anchored at the mouth of the River Swin. Ferrand quickly entered into a formal alliance with John who did not delay in sending help and in great force – perhaps as many as 700 knights augmented by mercenaries – under the command of Renaud de Dammartin, Hugh de Boves and William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury. In a remarkably short time, on Thursday 28 May these arrived not far from Damme at Muiden. The main French force was still at the siege of Ghent. Those left with the fleet, including the mercenary captain Cadoc, were too preoccupied with the ransacking of Damme and the ravaging of the surrounding area to notice the threat; in so doing, they had left the fleet largely without defence. The allies arrived at Swin on Saturday 30 May to the astonishing spectacle of this huge but vulnerable target. Salisbury seized the moment and immediately launched a surprise attack on the fleet. It was a violent and spectacular success. John’s men cut the cables of 300 ships laden with corn, wine, meat, flour, wine and arms and other stores; they stripped another 100 of their supplies before burning them. The biographer of William Marshal paints a vivid picture of ‘ships at sea burning and belching forth smoke, as if the very sea were on fire’. The booty was immense; the effect on Philip’s invasion was terminal.

On the Sunday, Ferrand joined up with the allies who then hoped to capitalise further on their victory by turning on Damme itself. Philip, who knew the power of forced marches, responded to the news with accustomed celerity. The
Philippidos
has the French King declaring; ‘There is no point in stopping to hold counsel … The only thing to do now is the work of our arms.’ For the sake of speed, he dispatched Duke Peter of Brittany at the head of squadrons of light cavalry to relieve Damme, with other troops under the King following as quickly as possible. The first troops arrived on Monday. This time it was the allies’ turn to be surprised. The Duke, Prince Louis and William des Barres went for them at speed. The latter took to flight and to their ships. The tide was out, leaving a large number of ships still settled on the banks, so hundreds of John’s men could not escape by sea. Some clambered into small boats but many drowned in their haste. There was much slaughter; William the Breton puts allied fatalities at 2000, an inflated figure probably, but still an indication of the scale of the carnage. The French took numerous prisoners, the Count Renaud narrowly escaping being one of them. The counter-attack was small consolation for Philip. Seeing the extensive losses incurred by his fleet – Wendover talks of ‘irreparable damage’ – he knew the invasion was over. He torched what remained; not ‘out of his mind with rage’ and frustration as William Marshall’s biographer claims, but to prevent their being taken by the enemy. The presence of a strong English fleet offshore would have kept the rest of the French trapped at Damme anyway.

Philip once again sent out his incendiaries into Flanders and took Ghent. He eventually withdrew having achieved few conclusive results other than the unintended one of strengthening support for Ferrand against him. Even Damme was lost as the war continued intermittently into the spring of 1214. In England, John was overjoyed at this remarkable victory. Not only had the Damme operation brought spoils and glory, it had destroyed any invasion attempt for a considerable time; Philip’s naval forces had still not recovered by the following summer. John wished to profit from the momentum he was gaining and to deploy his buoyant forces, morale high, in a major Poitevin campaign in July. This involved yet another muster. The response was overwhelming indifference. Knights grouped together to approach the King to tell him that their constant readiness since spring, as decreed by John, meant that their financial means had been exhausted; they were prepared to go with John if he met their expenses, but John would have none of this. Barons from the north, that centre of anti-John sentiment, refused point blank to accompany the king, making the case that their feudal obligations did not extend to service overseas. As Ralph of Coggeshall also points out, they claimed ‘that they were already too worn out and impoverished by expeditions in England’.
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John’s temporary mastery of the British Isles had come at a high price. There had been at least five military musters over the previous year – four in 1213 alone – and the barons had had enough. In addition to these considerations, it is worth remembering that a campaign of national defence against a foreign invader who brought war into one’s own territory and threatened to appropriate land was always likely to elicit a more positive response than one for conquest abroad. In successfully denying the King for the first time they had laid down a significant marker.
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Once again John flew into one of his incandescent rages, and once again he took to the sea, this time to Jersey, in the forlorn hope that he would be followed. He was not.

John still headed a considerable force of mercenaries and continental troops. With these he went North again to repeat his earlier exercise of intimidation and to bring the Northerners to heel. Now another great victory – his diplomatic adeptness with the Papacy in May – exacted a small but telling toll: at the end of September Archbishop Stephen Langton chased after the King and at Northampton warned him that his actions contravened oaths and agreements made at the time of his submission to Rome. Langton threatened John’s army with excommunication and the King gave way. On 3 October at St Paul’s in London, John formally rendered, through the papal representatives Pandulf and Cardinal Nicholas of Tusculum, his kingdom of England to the Papacy. For the rest of the year the terms for the final settlement were agreed. These were not as onerous as they may seem. As Christopher Harper-Bill has concluded, John ‘lost remarkably little of the additional revenues he had accrued to the royal coffers during the Interdict, nor … of his effective ecclesiastical patronage. The political advantage, moreover, which stemmed from his submission to the Papacy was considerable, both before and after his unexpected death.’
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