Blood Cries Afar (48 page)

It did not come. Later that night, at the very last moment, a letter arrived from William Marshal. He asked for a truce and for negotiations to be resumed. To these Louis acquiesced. Had this communication not arrived, the ensuing battle would have played a huge part in our story. But the preparation made for battle that day on Saturday 9 September was the last military activity of the war. The invasion had ended.

With the cessation of hostilities, our history of the war must draw to its end. The peace talks and their conclusion can be dealt with swiftly. The Marshal’s letter on 9 September had asked for Hugh de Malaunay to come and talk with the regent and his council.
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He returned with news on Monday that negotiations were set for Tuesday 12 September; the truce, guaranteed by the queen, William Marshal, the Earls of Warenne, Arundel and Salisbury and other barons, was extended to the Thursday. De Maulanay also informed Louis what was on the table in the talks from the royalists. Wendover writes that Louis was informed of the peace terms ‘to which if he agreed, would swear to secure for him and his men a safe departure from England; if not, they would injure him and bring him to ruin in every way’. Louis’s relief at these terms was at the French being allowed to leave England, as ‘it seemed useless for them to remain there any longer.’ Louis gathered about him not only his whole council but also the English barons and the leading citizens of London; they agreed to the preliminary terms. The
History of William Marshal
claims that the French excluded the English from their deliberations of this plenary council, but this is unlikely.

The next step was to formalise the peace process. On 12 September, Louis met with the regent, the king, the king’s mother and the legate Guala, resplendent in his scarlet robes. The meeting place was an island in the Thames at Kingston. Louis and his party were on one bank of the river, and the royalists on the other; they were rowed out to the island. And here they made formal peace.
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The terms were very similar to those nearly agreed upon in mid-June but for Louis’s refusal to accept the exclusion of Simon Langton and the three other clerics from the peace. Louis was no longer in any position to argue their cause and so they remained excluded; Guala told them to leave the country and obtain absolution from Pope Honorius. Otherwise it was much the same. The rebel and royalist protagonists, including London and the towns, were to have their rights and lands as on the eve of war. Both sides were to release prisoners captured since Louis’s arrival in May 1216; any ransoms already paid could be kept, while those that had not were not to be enforced. This helped rebels such as Robet Fitzwalter and Gilbert de Gant, but not others such as Nicholas de Stuteville who had started payments on his ransom before the end of the war and was thus presumably released. (De Stuteville actually died between the Battle of Lincoln and September, possibly from wounds received in the battle.)
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The terms excluded those caught as rebels, that is, those taken before Louis’s arrival; the agreement applied specifically to Louis’s men during his campaign. The English prisoners had to swear oaths of obedience to the king. Other terms were that: all land and property taken in the war were to be restored; King Alexander and Llewelyn could make their peace on similar terms; Louis was to write to Eustace the Monk’s family and tell them to restore the Channel Islands they had taken to Henry or lose the lands they held of Louis; Louis was to absolve all those in England from their oaths to him, thus releasing them from their obligations; and the English rebels and French had to swear never again to join forces against the King and his heirs or to act against them. Louis even made a nebulous promise to exert influence on his father to return the Angevin lands to Henry taken from John. And nebulous it proved to be.

These were good terms for the defeated party, especially for the French. That the former rebels the young Marshal and the Earls of Arundel, Surrey and Salisbury formed a major part of the royalist negotiating party probably helped, as did the seeming absence in the peace talks of the more hard line Earls of Chester and Derby. Although it was to be expected that the leading rebels did not achieve the gains they had fought for (Fitzwalter, for instance, did not take ownership of Hereford Castle and the Earl of Winchester did not gain Mountsorrel), their fate was very lenient and not what would have been handed out by King John. The treatment of Louis was particularly generous. No only was he spared any reparation payments, but all debts to him were to be paid. On top of this, agreed but not written down in the final treaty, Louis was to receive an extremely generous financial settlement to encourage his departure from England: 10,000 marks (about £7000). This amounted to ten times the annual tribute John handed over to the pope and almost a quarter of the crown’s annual income. William Marshal even guaranteed the money against his lands in Normandy. 4000 marks were given to Louis immediately and most of the money was stumped up within the year. A levy on knights’ fees – the biographer of the Marshal records how the royalists were prepared to contribute to the peace fund
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– helped to raise most of this sum, in effect the heftiest of insurance premiums against further French involvement in England.

The question of absolution for sins against the Church caused more of a problem. This could not be formally and ceremoniously granted to Louis and his followers on the day of the peace because the clergy present did not have their appropriate garb with them, and also because Louis contested the humiliating manner of penitence he was required to undertake: to proceed in the ceremony barefoot and shirtless, wearing only woollen undergarments as befits a true penitent. Guala, who had insisted on this, relented to the request that Louis be allowed to wear a tunic. The following day, Wednesday 13 September, the bishops and Louis duly attired, the French Prince went through the mortifying experience of public penance. By this act he and his followers were accepted back into the Church. ‘There,’ says Ralph Coggeshall, ‘Louis in the presence of all was absolved from excommunication and renounced the kingdom of England.’
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Louis returned to London to prepare for his departure from England. Here he reflected on his great invasion, which a year earlier had achieved so much and which had the potential to achieve so much more. What had gone wrong to bring him to this? In reality, not a huge amount. The French campaign was a long one – fifteen months from beginning to end – and there were bound to be setbacks. Louis’s great disadvantage was the royal network of castles against him, especially Dover and Lincoln. Even so, he and his followers had done extremely well in either taking or neutralising so many of these. Dover Castle was the biggest problem; Louis’s inability to take this despite massive effort not only kept him bogged down in the south-east instead of expanding further into the west but also prevented him from a full consolidation of his gains in the south-east of England. He had little choice other than to try and take it as he relied on a safe highway across the Channel to bring in reinforcements and supplies from France. His failure here was a serious one but not, apart possibly from his temporary abandonment of the siege to reduce lesser castles first, a strategic error. Even the temporary abandonment had some merit: recognising how hard a nut Dover was to crack, trying to isolate it and leaving it without hope of relief might have eventually worked. It had come perilously close to falling. As Robert Bartlett has rightly noted, with over 200 castles involved in the conflict, ‘the civil war was predominantly a castle war.’
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We have only to follow troop movements, especially in the period leading up to Lincoln, to establish this. Castles were the dominant feature of all medieval warfare.

The loss of Lincoln was a very major blow, and one that should not have happened from the rebel side. There were possibly two major mistakes here from Louis’s forces. One was the incomplete investiture of the castle that allowed royalists to enter it; it may have been the case that the rebel army was not strong enough to permit this and that its leaders felt that being outside of the city walls left them too vulnerable to enemy attack. The other was the lost opportunity to take advantage of their greater numbers against the royalists in the open; the Anglo-French forces were instead surprised in the city where the confines of Lincoln meant that this numerical superiority could not be deployed to the same effect. With Lincoln back in royalist hands, Louis was largely restricted once again to the south-east and was back at the position where he had started the campaign. However, his fleet from Calais in August promised to revitalise his war effort, replace the manpower lost at Lincoln and compensate with supplies the logistical shortfall that came with the subsequent loss of lands; it threatened the royalists with a prolonged and indefinite conflict in which perhaps neither side could gain the upper hand. Louis had revealed his potential to do this on his return from France in the spring, when he rapidly made good the losses in the south during his absence. The fleet’s resounding defeat denied Louis both the resources he needed to continue the war and the time to rebuild them: with the Channel blocked and the royalist forces free to converge on London, Louis simply could not sit and wait for yet more reinforcements (even if they could be recruited) as he had done after Lincoln. Thus on 9 September he was considering one last sortie from the capital.

One leading authority on Angevin England believes that Louis’s greatest military mistake occurred just before the Battle of Lincoln. After his successes on his return to England following Easter in 1217, Louis, when at Winchester, ‘made a decision that was to cost him the war. He divided his army into two. Whilst one force was sent to relieve the Mountsorrel Castle, besieged by the Earls of Chester and Derby, Louis himself set out to complete his year-long assault on the royalist stronghold at Dover.’
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This is the legendary military blunder of splitting one’s forces and a good case can be made for it being so here. Yet was this really such a flawed strategy? It necessitated that the royalists, too, divided their own forces. More importantly, it reflected Louis’s understanding of the political reality; if his English followers (in this case the powerful Earl of Winchester) did not feel supported in their battles by him, then it was but a short step for them to make their peace with the crown and change sides.

The political angle was central to all involved in the war, especially locally and in the regional interests of the barons. Everywhere barons were motivated by what they could gain from the conflict, and many were ready to lend their sword to whichever prince was more likely to fulfil their personal objectives. Thus Robert Fitzwalter had his eyes on Hereford Castle; William Mowbray wanted York; Gilbert de Gant coveted the title of Earl of Lincoln; and Alexander II wanted great swathes of the north. Louis conceded all these while trying to balance the often contesting demands of his French followers. It was a difficult path to tread and, despite the chroniclers’ criticisms of Louis’s preference to his fellow Frenchmen, Louis negotiated it quite successfully. The majority of barons who were with him at the beginning of the invasion were with him at the end. As David Carpenter has pointed out in his important study of the minority of Henry III in the aftermath of the war, the most bitter resentments on both sides were directed not so much towards former enemies but to former allies, those who had broken their oaths.
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The political situation followed the military one; success in the war generated political profits. We see this most clearly after the defeat at Lincoln when within three months 150 of Louis’s followers transferred their allegiance to the crown. It could be argued strongly that John’s death was a notable exception where a political event was dominant, leading to a flow back to the royalist side. However, John’s death removed not just an unloved and mistrusted ruler, but also an incompetent military leader. The biographer of William Marshal reports that King Philip of France, on hearing of John’s death, believed that Louis could no longer win, as now the ‘land will be well defended’.
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Whether true or not, the sentiment is clear: the death of John was a serious blow to Louis’s chances. The ebb and flow of the war is not marked by proclamations, issues of Magna Carta and excommunications, but by the bloody force of military events. Military momentum was rewarded by political momentum. Ultimately Louis lost because defeats at the engagements of Lincoln and Sandwich left him too weak to wage war. Louis failed to conquer England simply because his armies lost in battle.

The monastic chroniclers wished to believe, of course, that victory was God-given. The Barnwell annalist declared: ‘It was truly a miracle that the heir of the King of France, having advanced so far into the heart of the country with a great army and having succeeded in occupying so much of it, helped by the barons, and had taken it so quickly, was forced to abandon this kingdom without hope of recovering it. It is because the hand of God was not with him.’
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Louis felt more sorely the fact that the hand of his powerful father was not with him.

There was one other force that Louis had to contend with, and over which he had little control: national feeling. Louis could never escape from the fact that he was a foreign Prince with foreign troops laying claim to the throne of England through the force of a foreign invasion. This is a contentious point to make, not least because it is an intangible one. Most historians play down this aspect and prefer to see the royalist cause motivated more by fighting for the Church.
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It is true, as Tyerman points out, that Louis’s forces are commonly characterised as the enemies of God and the Church; this was great propaganda, but so of course was appealing to national sentiment. He still recognises that ‘xenophobia and traditionalism both contributed to support for Henry’ but considers it comparatively unimportant.
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However, throughout the chronicles and poems the French are simply and constantly referred to as the French, or as
transmarine
, foreigners from across the sea. Wendover calls them ‘scum’ and the biographer of William Marshal never misses an opportunity to mock and humiliate the foreign enemy and its ambitions in England; both exhort defence of the homeland and fighting
pro patria
. A poem written just after Lincoln calls up ‘the strength of England’ and when the other sources use the term ‘England’ the modern reader can readily identify with it.
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Much of the hatred for John rested, as the Barnwell chronicler noted, on the king’s perverse preference for foreigners over the English.
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The sense of the English fighting for their country against a foreign invader comes through the contemporary accounts with robustness and clarity.