The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain (6 page)

In another move to try to maintain a balance Richard had Henry II’s illegitimate son, Geoffrey, appointed as Archbishop of York. The justiciar saw this as a threat to his position and sent men to arrest Geoffrey when he arrived at Dover. Longchamps’s soldiers dragged the archbishop from the altar of the nearby priory. This shocking event was far too reminiscent of the Becket episode to be tolerated, and it played into John’s hands. He and Walter of Coutances summoned Longchamps to appear before a council near Reading, at which it was clear he would be dismissed from office. The justiciar declined to attend. Instead he set off for London and shut himself up in the Tower. After a three-day siege he
surrendered on 10 October, and at the end of the month he left England in the hands of John and Walter of Coutances, who now assumed the office of justiciar. The barons acknowledged John as heir to the throne and, thus, jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

1192–9

Richard left the Holy Land but was shipwrecked and captured. This played into the hands of Philip II of France. He had left the Holy Land ahead of his comrade-in-arms with the object of benefiting from Richard’s absence to nibble away at his continental lands. He knew that John’s nobles were divided in their allegiance, some preferring Arthur as heir to the throne, and that John was locked in a struggle with the justiciar as he tried to extend his authority. Philip offered to do deals with John and with Emperor Henry VI. He promised to back John in a bid for power and tried to persuade the emperor either to hand Richard over or keep him a prisoner indefinitely.

News also reached Richard of John’s misdeeds at home, and in September 1192 he signed a peace treaty with Saladin and set off on the journey back to England. He was shipwrecked off the Adriatic coast near Dubrovnik and attempted to make his way home overland. But he had made too many enemies. He was captured and in January 1193 delivered into the hands of the Emperor Henry VI, who grasped the opportunity to take political and pecuniary advantage of this piece of good fortune.

In this situation the dowager queen, Eleanor, once more entered the limelight. She had all the barons renew their oath of loyalty to Richard, restrained John, organized the defence of England’s southern coast to guard against a surprise attack by Philip and zealously set about gathering a ransom for the king. It was largely thanks to his mother’s efforts that Richard was persuaded to overlook his brother’s disloyalty. It was Eleanor, now in her seventies, who travelled to the emperor’s court and made the final arrangements for Richard’s release. The king returned to his English realm in March 1194. Having firmly re-established his authority, he left after two months, never to return.

Richard’s remaining years were spent in warfare with Philip, something welcomed by the troubadour, Bertran de Born:

Now the warm season has arrived

When English ships with come to French ports

And the bold, worthy king will land.

King Richard. The like there never was.

Then we’ll see gold and silver in plenty.

Siege weapons constructed,

Loaded for bombardment.

We’ll see great towers shiver and collapse

And enemies captured and imprisoned.
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John thought it wise now to make a great show of supporting his brother, who rewarded him by restoring many of his lands and nominating him as his heir to the throne. It was
in April 1199 that Richard, the hero of chivalric romance, died in a rather unchivalric and unromantic way. While engaged in the siege of Châlus he was involved in a petty feud with someone who fired a crossbow bolt at him. Though the projectile was extracted, the wound turned septic, and he died in pain after several days.

1199–1213

John, the last of the turbulent sons of Henry II known collectively as the Devil’s Brood, was 31 when he came to the throne. He possessed few of Richard’s virtues and most of his vices. ‘No one may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly’ was the verdict of one troubadour.
³
The condemnation is not wholly fair, for John could display moments of courage and commitment. What he lacked was consistency. Episodes of energetic, even brilliant, activity were interspersed with long periods of inactivity. All too often he was thrown off course by blinding rage or debilitating passivity. Where Richard was unusually tall and sinewy, John was short and rather stout. Where Richard was essentially a man of action, John was a thinker. Where Richard was content with a soldier’s simple life, John hankered after luxury, display and self-indulgence. What both brothers shared was the Plantagenet tendency to violence, cruelty and hasty temper. Richard’s character has been distorted by legend into the personification of the perfect, Christian knight. By the same process John has been demonized as the archetypal ‘bad king’.

In fact, he was a hard worker who took the responsibilities of government seriously and, like his father, cared about justice. Though he had been nominated by Richard, he had to fight for his crown. England and Normandy recognized John as king. Aquitaine remained loyal to Eleanor. Brittany, Anjou and Maine looked to 12-year-old Arthur. John was, therefore, immediately plunged into the old, complex task of keeping the Angevin empire together. Things began well. By the Treaty of Le Goulet (May 1200) Philip recognized John’s title to Normandy and England, and Arthur did homage to John for Brittany and his other territories. But the rift was far from being completely closed.

John had a genius for making enemies, and he soon added fresh names to the list of those who did not respect or trust him. In an attempt to strengthen his hold over his continental possessions he unceremoniously divorced his wife in order to pursue a more prestigious and politically useful marriage. First, he began negotiations with the king of Portugal for the hand of his daughter. Then he changed his mind and pursued a marriage alliance with the Count of Angoulême. It mattered not that Isabella of Angoulême, whom he planned to marry, was already engaged to the son of the Count of La Marche. This led to an unnecessary war, which Philip was only too ready to join. By the summer of 1202 John faced a formidable array of foes. Philip (as John’s feudal overlord) summoned the contending parties to his court to discuss a settlement, and when John refused to attend he stripped him of his continental lands and transferred his support to Arthur, giving the duke his daughter in marriage.

To wage war successfully John needed money, men and weapons. He hired mercenaries and taxed his subjects, both lay and ecclesiastical, to pay for them. His demands were extortionate, but he did create an impressive fighting force. Particularly, he built the best navy England had seen up to that time and established Portsmouth as its permanent base. Diplomatically, he prepared for war by reaching new agreements with the Welsh princes and the Scottish king.

The military initiative, however, remained with John’s enemies – until the king was roused to fury by Arthur’s latest stratagem. The young duke laid siege to the aged Eleanor of Aquitaine in her castle of Mirebeau (August 1202), and John immediately rushed to his mother’s assistance. His uncharacteristic haste took Arthur and his army completely by surprise, and the teenage duke was thrown into prison at Rouen. He was never seen again.

There were several accounts of how young Arthur met his end, most of them written by monastic chroniclers who disliked John and deliberately spread stories to discredit him. The commander of Rouen Castle asserted that John had sent agents to castrate his nephew and that Arthur had died of shock as a result of their bungled surgery. It may be that Arthur died of disease while in prison and that the story of his murder was invented by John’s enemies. Whatever the truth, the young man’s disappearance turned yet more people against John. Brittany and Normandy threw off their allegiance, and in March 1204 Richard I’s ‘impregnable’ castle at Chateau Gaillard, on cliffs above the Seine, was captured by Philip, who went on to take Rouen and the whole of
Normandy. In the same month Eleanor of Aquitaine died. It was the end of an era.

As his continental possessions fell from his control, John had to rely on raising more money and men in England to deal with the crisis. He put the whole country on a war footing, either to face the threat of invasion or to recover the lost provinces. In January 1205 John summoned a council that set up a nationwide organization of constables in every community who were to be responsible for training and mustering all males over 12 years of age. The king imposed fresh taxes on the barons and the church, including the first ever income tax. In the summer John proposed to gather his largest army and convey it to France in a huge fleet. But most of the barons simply refused to support the venture and it had to be aborted.

National unity was further undermined by a conflict between the king and the pope. In July 1205 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died. John tried to replace him with one of his close supporters, but this was resisted by the cathedral chapter, who put forward their own candidate. Pope Innocent III now intervened, rejecting both nominees and summoning the parties concerned to Rome. Proceedings continued until the end of 1206, when Innocent made his own appointment, Stephen Langton. John refused to allow Langton to enter the country, and he remained on the continent for the next six years. The king retaliated by throwing out the Canterbury monks and seizing the cathedral revenues.

At about the same time, Geoffrey, Archbishop of York, fell
out with the king (his half-brother) over the issue of taxation and refused to allow his clergy to pay John’s latest levy. Then, in the summer of 1207, he too fled abroad. Several other bishops followed suit, and Innocent placed England under interdict, which meant that the clergy were forbidden to take services. John’s subjects could not be married in church or buried in consecrated ground. The pope further threatened John with excommunication if he refused to come to terms. John responded by confiscating more church property, and Innocent carried out the threatened excommunication in November 1209. Instead of submitting, John became even more defiant. Isolated and angry, he hit out against churches and monasteries. Over the next two years he filched over £100,000 from the clergy. Because the only chroniclers of these years were monks, who exaggerated or even invented stories about John’s bad behaviour, his reputation has permanently suffered.

As well as amassing considerable wealth and putting England in a state of military preparedness, the king used diplomacy to create alliances that would help him regain his continental possessions. By 1212 he had formed a league against Philip that included the Emperor Otto IV, the Count of Flanders and various northern European dukes. But before he could cross the Channel with all his men of war John had to watch his back. In 1211 he led an army to Ireland to ensure the loyalty of the barons there. He marched through eastern Ireland and forced into exile his two most troublesome vassals, Hugh de Lacy and William de Braose, and in an act of calculated cruelty he had de Braose’s wife
and son locked up in Windsor Castle and starved to death. Such individual examples of brutality highlighted John’s oppressive policy and turned most of his influential subjects against him.

In 1212 John prepared for a major invasion of France, but plans for the campaign had to be abandoned when Philip successfully intrigued with Llewelyn-ap-Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd, who had made himself master of much of Wales. The rebels destroyed the castle at Aberystwyth and captured the castles of Rhuddlan and Degannwy. John led his army to the border and had his fleet brought round to Chester in order to bring the Welsh to submission. Then he abandoned the enterprise and disbanded his force. The reason? Rumours of conspiracy among his own followers. Egged on by the pope, Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter planned to murder the king or abandon him to his enemies in the forthcoming campaign. John’s mounting unpopularity made him increasingly suspicious, and his suspicion made him increasingly tyrannical.

By now it was clear to John that he would have to make his peace with the church. In November 1212 he sent an embassy to Rome offering his submission. Matters became more urgent when news arrived the following spring that Philip was planning an invasion of England. The terms of John’s humiliating surrender were finally confirmed by papal bull in October 1213. John agreed to allow Stephen Langton to take up his post and to make full restitution of everything he had confiscated from the church. More importantly, he surrendered his kingdom to the pope and
received it back as a papal vassal for an annual tribute of 1,000 marks.

1213–16

The final years of John’s reign began well. Philip assembled a large fleet at Gravelines to conquer England and place his son, Louis, on the throne, and he confidently expected to receive the support of many of John’s vassals against their excommunicated king. John’s submission to Pope Innocent was a blow, but the French king continued with his plan. John, meanwhile, had not been idle. He had assembled in the southeast his own force augmented by that of his ally, the Count of Flanders. On 28 May 1213 his fleet of 500 ships crossed to Damme, the port of Bruges, to which Philip had moved his ships. The Anglo-Flemish force fell upon 1,700 vessels, which were unprotected because Philip’s troops were engaged in the siege of Ghent. They plundered and burned at will and put a stop to Philip’s invasion plans.

John now intended a quick counter-strike, and this would have been the ideal moment for a successful campaign. Unfortunately, his barons declined to support him. By now they identified themselves as ‘English’ and had little interest in risking life and limb to help the king recover his foreign lands. In fury John marched northwards to deal with his recalcitrant barons. The newly arrived Stephen Langton hurried after him and, with difficulty, dissuaded him from vengeful action (November), but John was committed to his allies and determined to recover his territory, and he pressed
on with the strategy agreed with his continental comrades. While Otto and his contingent advanced from the Low Countries, John landed at La Rochelle (February 1214) and struck northwards, crossing the Loire between Nantes and Angers. All was going well until he learned that Prince Louis was coming to meet him. Without waiting to do battle, John fled in disorder (July), claiming that retreat was forced on him by the disloyalty of his Poitevin vassals. Meanwhile, Philip faced Otto at the Battle of Bouvines, where he was victorious. This battle was one of the turning points in European history: it ended the imperial reign of Otto IV; it established Philip as the most powerful monarch in Europe; and it marked the end of the Angevin empire.