Blood Cries Afar (38 page)

The dominant figures of the new royalist leadership were William Marshal, Peter des Roches, Ranulf of Chester and Guala. The first three were all experienced, supremely competent military commanders. They were supported, at John’s direction, by Falkes, Savary and William Brewer. As Church has noted, this was a clear indication of John’s determination not to compromise with the rebel leadership: these were ‘the hard men of John’s regime … Each of these men had the taint of his master about him and no doubt there were many in the baronial camp who had suffered at their hands.’ John had assembled a regency and military council for his son of men either ‘of natural authority’ or ‘whose “lack of squeamishness” made them ideal royal servants’.
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Of course, these men had been advising the King and fighting for him all along; but John was no longer there to overrule them or to dictate political or military strategy.

The implications of this were huge for royalists, rebels, the uncertain and the French. The French had lost their greatest political and military asset. The baronial tide turned as anti-Johaninne rebels quickly understood the implications of the sudden transformation and became pro-Henricians. John’s death was ultimately a game changer.

The council had inherited a military situation that had certainly improved since the summer of 1216. Of the King’s final campaign, Holt has judged that John’s ‘last convulsive actions showed a sound strategic grasp’: he had strengthened royal garrisons, threatened northern baronial estates and prevented the ‘danger of united action between King Alexander and Prince Louis and of the concentration of all the rebel forces against the royalist garrisons in the south’.
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There is something to be said for this assessment, but it is too definite. John’s swift decline and death distortedly preserves in aspic the successes of his last campaign. It had been energetic and with some purpose, but also frenetic, indecisive and limited in tangible gains. The French and rebels were still entrenched in a third of the country with major areas contested elsewhere.

The new council were able to build on the successes, but had John lived how much would these successes have meant in real terms? Would he have been able to keep them? Probably not. Incursions from King Alexander in Scotland and the activities of the northern rebels would in all likelihood simply have won the lands and castles back again in another round of advances and retreats. But the real issue, and the one that made John’s final military successes more lasting, was the political impact of his death. The political momentum was now firmly on the loyalists’ side. This is what shifted the balance.

On the morning following the King’s death, a monk called John de Savigny came to the town of Newark. On entering he encountered members of John’s household scurrying out of the castle laden down with all manner of goods and booty. The dead monarch was suffering the final indignity of having all his moveable valuables stolen; there was not even enough cloth left to afford his corpse a decent covering. Holt has made the intriguing suggestion that the rumours of the loss of the King’s treasure at the Wash may have been started at this time, a clever diversion by those in John’s household ‘to cover their own acquisitive misdeeds’.
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This is a very cynical observation and therefore a convincing one. The monk kept vigil over John’s body and offered a mass for the king, who had been embalmed by the Abbot of Croxton, the Abbot having already cut out John’s heart, a gift, it would seem, to his abbey. The body was transported to Worcester Cathedral in solemn procession under a mercenary guard and there, in accordance with the dead King’s wishes, buried by Bishop Silvester.

On 28 October, at nearby Gloucester Cathedral, his nine-year-old son was crowned Henry III of England in an emotive ceremony led by Guala. On John’s death the council members at Gloucester had sent for Henry from Devizes, William Marshal eagerly going out to meet him near Malmesbury. The first words we hear from the young King, ‘the well-brought-up child’, are: ‘Welcome. I wish to tell you truly, that I give myself to God and yourself, so that in God’s name you may take charge of me.’
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At this, the little boy burst out crying, causing those around him to weep, too. A hasty discussion came to the rapid conclusion that Henry should be crowned as soon as possible. First Henry was knighted by William, in a scene that captures the pathos of the moment: ‘they straight away dressed him in his child-sized robes of state; he was a fine little knight.’
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From Rome, Pope Honorius III sent out reams of letters in support of Henry, and also to Philip Augustus, Louis, King Alexander and the barons to cease their hostilities and for the English to submit to the new King.

Rarely has a king of England ascended to the throne in less propitious circumstances. The royalist party were acutely aware of their precarious position. Willliam Marshal is recorded as saying: ‘If all the world deserted the young boy, except me, do you know what I would do? I would carry him on my shoulders and walk with him thus, with legs astride, I would be with him and never let him down, from island to island, from land to land.’
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Hardly had the new King changed out of his coronation robes when news came that Goodrich Castle, only eighteen miles away, was besieged that morning and already in peril of falling. Nearly three-quarters of England’s 133 barons were with the rebels at the time of John’s death, including nineteen of the 27 most powerful ones. Louis was secure in the south-east and most of the eastern half of the country. In the north and west, Alexander of Scotland and Prince Llewelyn harassed his enemies on the Scottish and Welsh borders. And of course there was London. Nor was there much left in the royal coffers to finance the war. On the King’s death, the Earl of Salisbury advised Hubert de Burgh to give up Dover as the cause was lost and in the royalist camp a council considered that a retreat to Ireland might be necessary.
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The royalists looked for support from Ireland, which materialised more in the form of passive quiescence than anything else; from the still large mercenary force, if payments could be kept flowing; and, in the south-east, from Willikin of the Weald and the almost surreptitious, but still real, help of the Cinque ports. But most of all they looked to the system of royal castles. These protected the now largely subdued west while giving bases for offensives eastwards. The Anonymous offers a long list of some of these and their castellans.
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In the north were Philip of Oldcoates at Bamburgh, Hugh de Balliol at Newcastle and Brian de Lsile at Knaresborough; stretching over the midlands were Robert de Gaugi at Newark, Philip Mark at Nottingham, Nichola de Hay at Lincoln, Falkes de Bréauté’s string of castles mentioned discussed above (Bedford, Northampton, Oxford, Buckingham, Cambridge and Hertford); and in the south were Dover under Hubert de Burgh, Windsor under Engelard de Cigogné,and Peter de Maulay at Corfe (where the constable had care of Richard Fitzroy, the King’s younger, illegitimate son, and the main hoard of royal treasure). The west was by now largely secure from Louis; Gloucester, Worcester and Bristol kept a check on incursions from Llewelyn; while William Marshal, as Earl of Pembroke, was a powerful force in south Wales. For all his advantages, Louis still knew that ‘the royal castles were many and well fortified.’
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And the royalists also had Henry. The boy king’s great merit was that he was not his father. Through long years of oppression, financial exactions, arbitrary justice, cruelty mistreatment of his great barons, military failures and ineptitude, John had forged the alliance against him. He united the rebels in being not just for something, but against something – against someone. There were few to defend John’s odious rule for reasons other than he was King and for his followers’ self interest. John’s death was therefore a disaster for Louis: ‘Even a child king presented a more formidable opponent than John had done.’
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The sins of he father could not be visited on the son, especially when the son was an innocent nine-year-old. As David Carpenter has memorably expressed it: ‘Henry shrugged and the weight of John’s crimes fell from his shoulders.’
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John’s death came suddenly and caught all the protagonists off balance. Initially, at least, there was a stalemate, something already perhaps on the horizon indicated by the truce agreed at Dover just four days before he died.
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The royalist council quickly tried to adapt to the new situation and set about winning back nearly half of England. The members of the council were boosted by the pope’s actions and by the ecclesiastical establishment in England outside of London lining up on the new monarch’s side. In November the council met in Bristol. Hubert de Burgh was there, the truce at Dover enabling him to travel. There was some friction between him and the marshal for, as justiciar, Hubert was the highest official in the kingdom after the monarch himself. William’s role was clarified as
rector
of the kingdom. The council’s first actions were political. Letters were sent to barons commonly offering pardons and restitutions of land for those who came back into the royalist fold. William d’Albini, captured at Rochester Castle, paid a ransom of 6000 marks and paid homage to Henry; in return he received Sleaford Castle. Then, on 12 November, in a highly significant act, Magna Carta was reissued. This ‘cut the ground from beneath the feet of the rebels who had called in Louis of France’ and ‘removed the young King from faction and set him firmly and squarely on a legal relation with his subjects’.
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Some changes were made to the original, for example, clause 50 was quietly dropped, as it would not do to repeat the call for removal of such alien officers such as Engelard de Cigogné while they were performing such sterling work defending royal castles at Windsor and elsewhere.

But in the medieval world the sword was mightier than the pen, and a far more significant act had already occurred at Dover. When Louis heard the news of John’s death he called Hubert de Burgh to a parley, telling him that without a protector he could not hold the castle long; he promised Hubert rewards and a leading position among his advisers should he submit. Hubert took the proposition back to the garrison but they refused the offer, wishing instead to honour the rightful heir to the crown and to avoid the opprobrium of treachery and cowardice. On hearing their reply, Louis made a fateful decision: he lifted the siege. As Wendover reports, the French ‘determined to subjugate the smaller castles throughout England so that, having taken these, they could attack the larger ones’.
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Louis was making the same mistake that John had in failing to take London; he was allowing a major stronghold to exist in the heart of his territory. Louis has been much criticised for his new strategy but his actions are easily explicable: with John gone and the situation radically transformed, Louis needed to gather momentum again and to ensure that his absence did not hand that momentum to the royalists. In effect, he needed to combine itinerant kingship and military successes to reassure his own side. Nonetheless, it proved a disastrous mistake. He went quickly to London with his army to reassess the situation. As soon as they had left, the Dover garrison sortied out and burned the buildings Louis had erected before the castle. They followed this up by ravaging the countryside, pillaging and destroying it to deny the French supplies later, while stocking up the cellars in the castle to enable the garrison to survive a renewed siege for many months.

At first, it appeared that Louis’s change of direction was vindicated. While the regency council was in Bristol, Louis was besieging Hertford Castle. He was here on 12 November with his engines of war arrayed around the walls, battering at them for 25 days. The garrison, under the command of Walter de Godardville, one of Falkes de Bréauté’s captains, caused heavy casualties before surrendering on 6 December. Under the rules of war, the garrison were allowed to march free with their horses and arms. This arrangement appears to be part of a truce which was meant to give Berkhamstead up to Louis at the same time. But again the success was marred by squabbling over the rewards for Louis’s followers. The Anonymous claims the castle was handed over to Robert Fitzwalter, to whom it had previously belonged; but Wendover says that the French complained that the castle should not be given to a baron who had betrayed his monarch – in other words, it should be given to the French. Louis procrastinated, intending to wait until after the conquest was completed.
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Louis moved immediately to Berkhamstead where its captain, Waleran the German, renounced the truce agreement made at Hertford. This powerful castle had recently been fortified and repaired with timbers from the local forest, so Waleran, a veteran warrior, was feeling confident. He made his intentions clear from the start. As the English barons were setting up their siege camp, knights and sergeants erupted from the castle and caused havoc, seizing supply-carts and baggage, and even snatching the standard of William de Mandeville, a major loss of face for the leading rebel commander. The garrison attempted to use the standard to confuse the besiegers in a later sortie, but the enemy had expected such a move and drove them back into the castle. The besiegers suffered many dead before Waleran was ordered to surrender the castle on 20 December under a new general Christmas truce that lasted until either 13 or 20 January.

Louis placed Raoul Plancöet in charge of the castle and made for St Albans on 21 December, extorting money from the local populace along the way. He tried to make William of Trumpington, abbot of the rich and famous abbey, pay homage to him. William refused, declaring that he would only do so if he were released from his homage to the King. At this, an enraged Louis threatened to torch the town and its abbey. Saer de Quincy, the Earl of Winchester, granted William some leeway and the fearfully intimidated abbot paid 80 silver marks to escape destruction. Such exactions were common; the Dunstable annalist reporting his home town having to pay Louis 200 marks for protection. Louis then returned to his stronghold of London.
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