Richard I and John

A younger son, spoiled by his mother, intimidated by his father, King John had shown signs of unpleasantness from early youth. In 1185, aged just eighteen, he been sent to rule Ireland, where he outraged the Irish kings by laughing at them and pulling their long red beards. In the 1190s, whilst Richard was abroad, John stirred up rebellion in England. For this he was pardoned: ‘Forgive him, he is merely a boy’, had been Richard’s verdict. At the time, John was already twenty-seven years old. After 1199, a chain of violence and treachery led directly from his coronation to the loss of his continental estate. Shortly after being crowned, John divorced his first wife in order to marry a southern French heiress, Isabella of Angoulême. Despite the fact that Isabella was perhaps only eight years old, John seems immediately to have consummated the marriage. A local baron, to whom Isabella had previously been betrothed, was so outraged that he rebelled. He was joined in rebellion by the King’s fifteen-year-old nephew, Arthur of Brittany, the son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey, who had died in 1186. Many had argued, even in 1199, that as the son of an elder brother, Arthur, the nephew, had a better claim to the English throne than John, the wicked uncle. In 1202, John decisively crushed Arthur’s rebellion, following a lightening raid on the fortress of Mirebeau just south of the Loire. Arthur himself was taken prisoner together with a large number of his supporters.

The prisoners were in most cases later ransomed or released, with John apparently taking great delight in the formulation of passwords and secret codes by which he could communicate with their gaolers. Arthur, by contrast, simply vanished. The most likely explanation is that he was murdered, either by John in person or by a subordinate, perhaps by the King’s French captain Peter de Maulay, following a drunken dinner. His body, it was alleged, was thrown into the Seine but later dredged up in the nets of fishermen and buried in secret ‘for fear of the tyrant’. Be that as it may, Arthur’s disappearance supplied a pretext for appeals by the barons of northern France to their feudal overlord, the Capetian King Philip Augustus. The combination in Arthur’s story of youth, abduction, murder and a body thrown into water neatly encapsulated themes familiar from the cults of other child martyrs and must have heightened the sense of outrage against King John. Kings in the past, such as Henry I with Curthose or Henry II with Eleanor of Aquitaine, had incarcerated their brothers or wives. They did not, however, stoop to murder within the royal family.

In 1203, Philip invaded Normandy. Rather than stay and fight, John took ship from Barfleur to Portsmouth, landing on 6 December 1203. After him came whatever could be salvaged from the Plantagenet treasure trove, including a portion, but from the historian’s point of view sadly only a small portion, of the archive previously used for the government of northern France. One hundred and thirty-seven years after Duke William had landed at Pevensey to do battle at Hastings, and forty-nine years (almost to the day) since Henry II had crossed to be crowned as the first of England’s Plantagenet kings, John’s landing only a few miles up the English coast threatened to sever the last of England’s ties to Normandy. Within sight of Normandy and a day’s sailing from the nearest English port, only the Channel Islands remained under English rule, pearls dropped from the necklace of the Norman empire, havens for wreckers and pirates: England’s medieval, and rather chilly, Tortuga.

The loss of Normandy was not entirely the fault of King John. A large burden of guilt might be attached to his elder brother. Lionhearted though he may have been, even in the East Richard had experienced almost as much military failure as success. His captivity in Germany, itself the product of his recklessness and refusal to placate the ego of the Duke of Austria, placed him in the same tradition as the feeble King Stephen, captured and ransomed fifty years before. Henry II had been absent from England for several years at a stretch, without this leading to civil unrest. Richard, by contrast, through his promotion of his former chancellor, William Longchamps and his failure to take decisive action against his brother John, left his realm in the care of regents who were quite incapable of working with one another, let alone of containing the threat of civil war. Money was Richard’s sole concern on the eve of his departure, to such an extent that he was prepared to sell off valuable rights over the King of Scots that his father had won, boasting that he would sell London itself if the price were right, leaving the Jews to carry the blame for the financial hardships to which his policies contributed, leading in turn to the most notorious pogrom in English history.

Within a few weeks of Richard’s departure, a gang of local thugs forced the Jewish population of York first to seek refuge within the royal castle, and then, when the tower where they were sheltering seemed doomed to fall, to commit suicide, as Christian witnesses saw it, in deliberate and gruesome re-enactment of the suicide pact of the Zealots at Massada in 71 AD. The period of a crusade was always a time of danger for the Jews, as with the allegations involving St William at Norwich in 1144, in the midst of another crusade, when once again those unable to make the journey to the East in person may have turned against a local ‘eastern’ population as a means of sating an unsatisfied craving for military glory. Even so, never before had royal administration shown itself so powerless to protect the Jews. When order was eventually restored in England, it was at the hands of ministers such as Walter of Coutances, Hubert Walter and William Marshal, all of whom owed their first promotion at court not to Richard but to his father, a far better judge of character and a far better manager of men. William Longchamps, Richard’s own favourite, was meanwhile forced to flee from England dressed as a washerwoman, pursued across Dover beach by a local sailor outraged to learn that the object of his amorous attentions was a man in drag.

As government dissolved into French farce, and as the French themselves prepared to lay siege to Normandy, Richard’s only concern remained war and the means to pay for it. Even after the financing of his crusade, and even after the ransom had been raised to pay for his release from captivity, in the last two years of his reign he extorted fines from his subjects for the reissue of all royal charters previously awarded, using the entirely spurious argument that his great seal had been lost in the East, when in fact it had been mislaid for no more than a few days. Richard’s taxation, his sale of justice and his debased reputation for respecting the terms of even those privileges which he himself had granted led inexorably towards that sense of common grievance against the crown which was to cause such problems for his successor, King John. Meanwhile, by failing to produce an heir, and by leaving the inheritance to the throne open to the most unscrupulous of the claimants, he sowed the seeds of hatred between his brother, John, and his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, that was to lead to John’s murder of Arthur, and hence not only to John’s forfeiture of his French estates but to the most notorious act of Plantagenet tyranny since the martyrdom of Thomas Becket.

Nineteenth-century historians were in no doubt that Richard was a boastful, southern French absentee, resident in England for less than three months, yet responsible for a vast wastage of English public finance. To the Victorians, Richard seemed to have the manners of a cad. His repeated public confessions of sexual misconduct, all the more terrifying because imprecisely defined, were exactly, so the Victorians thought, what one might expect of a Frenchman. In recent years there has been something of a revival in Richard’s reputation, partly because the story of his reign is such a gift to narrative historians in search of exciting stories set in exotic locations, in part, bizarrely enough, because of attempts to integrate Richard within the counter-culture of the 1960s by proposing that his sexual appetites, so publicly confessed, were homosexual. In every sense a man’s man, he could join Alexander of Macedon or Frederick of Prussia as a model of that particular queer aesthetic in which beards, battles and army boots remain the order of the day.

In 1187, Richard is said to have shared the same bed as King Philip of France. At Messina in 1190, on his way to crusade, he stripped naked to do public penance for his unspecified sins and, on his return in 1195, having been warned by a hermit to amend his lifestyle and thus to avoid the fate of the city of Sodom, he once again did penance, so we are told, returning to the bed of his wife from which he is assumed to have strayed. Even so, none of Richard’s enemies accused him of deviant sexual practices, as they surely would have done had his homosexuality been widely known. In 1182, it was for his kidnap and alleged rape of the women of Aquitaine that he was criticized by the Yorkshire chronicler, Roger of Howden, and he undoubtedly fathered at least one child in southern France: Philip, later lord of Cognac. Sharing a bed was a political, rather than a sexual gesture, and it may have been the punishment, not the crimes, of the city of Sodom which inspired the hermit’s outburst in 1195. For all of these reasons, the case for Richard’s homosexuality has never been satisfactorily proved. By contrast, his part in the collapse of Plantagenet authority in France seems both well documented and undeniable.

Such a highly personal narrative of the loss of empire has to be supplemented with other factors, political, social and economic. Ever since Henry II’s accession in 1154, indeed for much of the period since the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, it had been unclear whether Normandy and England were to be treated as two distinct entities or as an inseparable Anglo-Norman whole. Like William the Conqueror, Henry II had several times proposed to partition his continental lands amongst his sons. Purely by accident, the tensions between father and sons and the military successes of Richard had prevented such partitions from taking effect. At a more profound level, the cross-Channel entity brought into being in 1066 had been breaking apart almost from the moment of its creation. As early as the 1080s, individual Anglo-Norman families had been inclined to divide their estates in each new generation, between one branch established chiefly in Normandy, another branch in England. English and Norman national identities, far from merging, had tended towards an ever sharper divide, with myths of nationhood emerging on either side. The English, even those of Norman or Anglo-Norman descent, were said by the French to have tails. A decade after 1204, the Norman-born soldiers in the King of England’s army were claiming that their ‘Normannitas’ entitled them to occupy the front row of the King’s cavalry in battle, just as the men of Kent claimed that it was they who should take precedence over all others in the English infantry.

Many of the families which by 1200 could claim Norman descent no longer possessed much by way of Norman land. Those marooned in England after 1204, like the Welsh in nineteenth-century Patagonia, wore their Normannitas as a proud badge of nobility, but in France itself they would have been laughed at as the most Anglicized of country cousins. Only at very top of society, chiefly amongst the royal family and in the case of half a dozen of the twenty or so earls, were there individuals with significant holdings on both sides of the Channel, still uncertain by 1200 as to whether their principal interests lay in Normandy or in England. The earls of Chester, taking their title from their vast estate in the east Midlands, yet also major landholders in the Avranchin and the Bessin regions of Normandy, might hesitate after 1204 as to where their best interests lay. Families such as the Bohons or the Chesneys, with only small inherited estates in Normandy but vast resources in England, could have few doubts as to whether they should stay in France or accompany King John into ‘exile’.

As for the Plantagenet dominions further south, from La Rochelle to the Pyrenees, still in King John’s hands after 1204, Henry II had never attempted to create Anglo-Poitevin or Anglo-Angevin baronies, to bring his southern subjects into direct contact with England or to bind together his empire in the way that William the Conqueror had bound England to the lords of Normandy, by granting them significant English estates. As a result, the southern French never thought of themselves as in any way of mixed English descent. On the contrary, England to them represented a major source of wealth and, at least through to the 1240s, of administration that was effective without being excessively predatory. The south had been spared the worst excesses of warfare or oppressive government after 1154. By contrast, ever since the 1080s, Normandy had served as a battlefield, disputed first between the sons of the Conqueror, thereafter between King Stephen and the Plantagenets, finally between the Plantagenets and the Kings of France. War weariness, and an active hatred for the King’s mercenary soldiers, especially for the Flemings, perhaps helps to explain the growing Norman disaffection with King John. As early as 1174, during the civil war against Henry II, Flemish mercenaries had been singled out as particular objects of hatred, being massacred in their hundreds by the population of East Anglia in what amounted to an anti-Flemish race riot.

Unfortunately for the men of Poitou and Gascony, after 1204 prepared to remain loyal to King John, a similar xenophobia marked their reception in England. After 1204, it was the French exiles introduced to court, in particular the former mercenary captains from southern Anjou, compromised by their previous service to the Plantagenets, granted refuge in England, used by King John and later by Henry III as a means of maintaining contacts with the lost Plantagenet domain, who bore the brunt of a backlash in England against ‘aliens’. The greatest of these exiles was Peter des Roches, a clerk native to the Touraine (the region of the city of Tours), in 1205 elected bishop of Winchester, one of the richest sees in Europe, thereafter chief patron both of Frenchmen at the English court and of dreams of continental reconquest. By his enemies, Peter was branded a ‘Poitevin’, not because he or the majority of his friends were natives of Poitou but because Poitou’s fissile baronial politics had become a byword for treachery and double-dealing for at least the past fifty years. As one of the King’s chief ministers, from 1214 onwards, Peter was dogged by rhetoric in England against the ‘aliens’. Ironically enough, this was rhetoric itself first stirred up in the 1190s by the French-born King John, in an attempt to discredit William Longchamps, the French-born minister of Richard I, left in charge of England whilst Richard himself was absent on crusade. Many of those who afterwards were responsible for spreading anti-alien rhetoric were themselves either of French birth or closely linked to France. There is no one so good at deriding the faults of others as one who fears that these are faults shared between critic and criticized.

Finally, as in all modern debates from which statistics and the spirit of Karl Marx are never far distant, it has been argued that, by 1200, Philip of France was far richer than the King of England and therefore ideally placed to seize the Plantagenet lands. The argument here depends upon comparison between the English and Norman Pipe Rolls and the one surviving budget that we have for French royal income and expenditure. The debate has proved interminable and hotly contested, since not only is it impossible to arrive at agreed totals for these accounts, but it will never be possible to establish how great a proportion of royal income was audited in writing. More significant than these statistical wranglings is the fact that, from the 1160s onwards, England underwent a significant period of inflation. The cost of paying a knight’s wages more than doubled. The causes here are uncertain: perhaps monetary inflation brought about by the release into the economy of significant new supplies of silver, from the mines of Cumbria perhaps, and above all from the Harz mountains of Germany.

Most English landlords could respond fairly effectively to the crisis. Their estates, previously leased for a fixed annual ‘farm’, were brought back into direct demesne management, with the lord now taking the full profit of his lands. The King could not respond so easily. His estates in the English counties were traditionally managed by local sheriffs, for a fixed county farm payable at the Exchequer. As the real value of these farms began to dwindle through the effects of inflation, and as the sheriffs therefore pocketed an ever greater sum in profits over and above the fixed rent that they were obliged to pay at the Exchequer, the King could try to increase the county farms or to charge the sheriffs additional annual rents, known as increments. King John even attempted an experiment in direct management, by which sheriffs no longer paid a farm, keeping all excess profits for themselves, but were paid an annual allowance by the Exchequer, in return being expected to account for all profits, not merely for their traditional fixed farms. Neither measure succeeded. Courtiers and the great men necessary for the effective government of England baulked at serving merely as paid bailiffs, or at abandoning so large a proportion of the profits that they now received from local government. In the meantime, inflation bore down upon the King’s revenues, placing John in an ever weaker financial position, both in respect to the King of France and to his own English barons.

The events of 1204, culminating in Philip Augustus’ acceptance of the surrender of Rouen, the ducal capital, had an enormous impact not upon the future history of Normandy, now united to the French crown, but on England. One consequence, pregnant with future significance, was the construction of an English fleet of royal galleys, at least fifty ships, powered by oarsmen rather than sail, built for speed, to overtake and seize ships dependent upon the wind, to police the shipping lanes, to impound contraband and to take prize from enemy merchantmen. Some of the technology here may have been devised in the 1190s to assist Richard’s warfare on the Seine, including the importation of shipbuilding techniques from Bayonne, in the far south of Plantagenet Aquitaine, and the construction of a major new naval base at Portsmouth. Even so, King John has some qualifications to be accounted the true founder of the Royal Navy, created in direct response to the loss of Normandy and the transformation of the Channel from a vector of communication into a bulwark against the threat of French invasion.

Another, even more significant consequence of the loss of Normandy was the arrival in England of a King now determined to amass the sort of treasure necessary to launch a reconquest of his lost continental estate. At the time, no one was aware that the breach between England and Normandy would prove permanent. King John, like the French friends whom he brought with him into exile, was determined to regain his lost lands. By the very nature of things, most barons owed money, often very considerable sums of money, to the King. What mattered was not how much was owed but the terms for its repayment. Just as today, men and women are happy to negotiate mortgages for vast sums of money that they would be quite incapable of financing if the entire sum had to be repaid over a matter of months or a few years, so in the Middle Ages debts to the crown could be repaid over decades or even centuries without the debtor being forced into bankruptcy. John not only increased the levels of debt that burdened his barons, but in certain cases, and in a deliberate attempt to ruin the debtors, demanded summary payment of the money owed. It was in this way, for example, that he turned against William de Braose, at one time amongst his closest cronies, ruined, perhaps for disclosing the true fate of Arthur of Brittany. William was forced into exile in Ireland. His wife and children were supposedly starved to death in Windsor Castle.

The King’s ‘Fine Roll’, the list of payments negotiated with the King, was on occasion transformed into a clubland wagers book, with men offering bizarre payments for favour or grace: ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville offers 200 chickens to lie one night with her husband’, ‘Robert de Vaux offers five of the best riding horses so that the King might stop talking about the wife of Henry Pinel’, and so forth. England, previously governed at a distance by absentee kings who passed much of their lives across the Channel, now had a King in permanent residence, travelling the country, eyeing up the profits and, if the chroniclers are to be believed, the daughters and wives of his barons. The experience was not a happy one. Debauchery and adultery had been characteristics of English kingship since at least the time of Henry I. Where Henry I or Henry II had managed to bed the wives and daughters of their barons with a minimum of complaint, however, John once again merely stirred up ill feeling. Where Henry II’s reputation had been salvaged despite the murder of a sainted archbishop, John was incapable of living down even the disappearance of Arthur, his unloved Breton nephew.