John (1199–1216)

Until the late nineteenth century, John’s reputation was one of the lowest. His decadent personal habits and taste for cruelty, which was egregious even in a brutal age (he had an appetite for ordeals and executions), cast a long shadow. In addition, his quarrel with the papacy turned all monk chroniclers against him. As the curator of the once formidable Angevin Empire he was soon to be humiliated by the loss of Normandy and all his northern French possessions. England was left only with the Channel Islands as the last remnant of the Norman duchy, and Queen Eleanor’s country of Aquitaine.

In some ways John was in fact a better ruler of England than his brother. But personal habits aside, he lacked Richard’s glamour as a holy warrior in an age when war was dominant–indeed he had had a purely ecclesiastical education in the typical way of a younger son. Partly as a result of his unwarlike nature, he ended up spending the greater part of his life in England, the longest period of any Norman king since William the Conqueror. Like Henry II he became intimately concerned with every detail of English life, and having the Angevin passion for royal administration he was forever journeying through his new realm. He also shared his father’s fascination with justice, and was noted for exercising his right to hear the cases of the King’s Bench. Though myth paints him as the venomous foe of the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, in fact King John took care to make the forest laws of his forefathers less harsh. Aged thirty-three when he came to the throne, he had matured from the silly youth of fifteen years before who had pulled the Irish elders’ beards.

Even so, John was a tyrannical, greedy and lawless ruler. Like William Rufus he was unscrupulous when it came to other people’s property, and made permanent enemies of the Church and the barons by his constant scheming to appropriate their wealth. By the end of his reign so deep was the distrust he inspired that men said he kidnapped the heirs to great fortunes and murdered them.

Although John’s accession to the English throne had been painless, it was a different matter in France. In 1199 war broke out between the two countries when the French king Philip Augustus decided to recognize as head of the Angevin Empire the thirteen-year-old Arthur of Brittany, John’s nephew. This did not get Philip very far, and the following year he had to accept John’s homage in relation to his French possessions. But the war he desired in order to dismember his greatest rival on French territory soon broke out again. John, who had just repudiated his childless wife Isabella of Gloucester, hit on the idea of marrying Isabella of Angoulême, which brought her territory into his empire and provided access to Aquitaine. Unfortunately Isabella of Angoulême had been engaged to an unruly and well-connected Poitevin baron named Hugh de Lusignan who was affronted by the King of England’s seizure of what he believed to be his property. He soon found many other turbulent Poitevin barons who resented the erosion of their powers by John’s autocratic ways.

Headed by de Lusignan they appealed to Philip Augustus as John’s overlord to right the wrongs being done to them by the King of England. This gave Philip his final chance to break up the Angevin Empire and he took it. John refused to answer the charges brought against him in the French king’s court, and in 1202 the court declared that he had forfeited all his lands in French territory. To ensure that the message was clear, Philip Augustus then recognized the fifteen-year-old Arthur of Brittany as the ruler of Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Aquitaine. With French armies Arthur invaded those territories himself, while Philip went into Normandy, his real objective, as capturing the duchy would give him control of the north coast–the natural hinterland for his capital of Paris.

At this point there occurred the event which blackened John’s name through history. Following his nephew to Poitou, where Arthur was besieging his grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine with the help of the Poitevin barons, John defeated him in battle–to everyone’s surprise, for Richard’s low opinion of John’s military capabilities was universal. He then imprisoned his nephew in his castle at Falaise, before moving him to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. By 1203 Arthur was dead, almost certainly murdered. Contemporaries believed that it was John himself who had performed the deed, by night and in disguise, probably in one of his famous Angevin rages.

Whatever the truth about Arthur’s death, it was of no benefit to his uncle John. Philip’s forces swiftly overran Anjou, Touraine and Maine, while Brittany came over to France out of anger about Arthur’s murder. By 1204 Normandy too belonged to the French crown. Theoretically, of all the English possessions the duchy was the most difficult for France to seize. It had a long connection to England, and the pro-English feeling was greatly strengthened by the trading links between the two countries. What was more, many of its barons were Anglo-Normans who held property on both sides of the Channel. It had magnificent defences against France, the greatest of which was Richard’s Château Gaillard. But the barons were very disaffected, and Philip Augustus was a better strategist than John, who tended to procrastinate and stayed in England when he should have been fighting in Normandy. Although Château Gaillard held out for six months until early March, John had really abandoned Normandy long before that. When his mother Eleanor died the following month, the last feelings of Norman loyalty towards the English crown evaporated. By Midsummer Day 1204 all the great possessions in northern France that King John had inherited from William the Conqueror and Geoffrey of Anjou were lost.

The loss of Normandy was an event of central importance for England. Although it was viewed as a disaster at the time, it forced the great Anglo-Norman barons to choose whether their loyalties were to England or to Normandy, for they could no longer hold land in both. The Norman Conquest was superseded by the renewed development of the English as a nation and a unified state under an exclusively English king. No longer linked by the Angevin Empire, the Duchy of Aquitaine, which was all that remained of the English crown’s French possessions, became in effect an independent English colony.

A permanent English navy to guard the Channel became a matter of pressing importance, as it had not been since 1066. Until 1204 much of the coast facing southern England belonged to friendly Normandy, so most of the ordinary business of guarding the coast in peacetime could be handled by the towns known as the Cinque Ports–Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich (Winchelsea and Rye became six et sept later). By a longstanding arrangement, in exchange for freedom from taxes and the right to tax within their own walls, they were legally required to provide fifty-seven ships for use by themselves and the king. But after the loss of Normandy these measures were supplemented partly by impressment and partly by the turning over to the royal government of any merchant ships captured in the Channel.

If the king now had a reputation for being unlucky, after his quarrel with the papacy he was believed to be cursed. In 1205 Hubert Walter, who had remained Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Although technically it was the right of the monks of the Cathedral Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral to elect the head of the Church in England, it had been generally accepted since William the Conqueror that the king would play a large part in the choice. Unfortunately the monks behaved foolishly. They secretly elected their undistinguished sub-prior Reginald without the king’s permission and sent him to Rome to receive the pallium from Pope Innocent III. But, though Reginald had been warned not to boast about his new position until the pope had confirmed it, the sub-prior, being both indiscreet and vain, insisted on travelling very slowly in tremendous pomp towards Rome as befitted his new dignity, attended by priests and outriders. As a result, the king soon found out what was going on and despatched his own royal candidate to Rome instead, the Bishop of Norwich, who was equally unworthy of this great office.

Neither of these choices satisfied the great pope of the middle ages, Innocent III. He insisted that the monks’ chapter elect Cardinal Stephen Langton, a distinguished English theologian living in Rome, and he then invested him as Archbishop of Canterbury. But John did not take this lying down, and refused to allow the new archbishop into the country. There was some justification for this: in all the battles between the papacy and the English kings no pope had ever dared to appoint the head of the English Church against England’s wishes. Nevertheless, John’s stand derived less from principle than from his desire to have his own creature running the Church who would help milk the tantalizingly wealthy Church lands. A stalemate ensued, since the pope for his part would not recognize the Bishop of Norwich. It was broken by Innocent III putting the whole country under an interdict. All religious services were forbidden.

This was only the beginning of the pope’s campaign to use all the weapons at his disposal to bring the King of England to heel. Although the interdict meant very little to the irreligious John, it was a catastrophe for ordinary people. Churches were closed. Weddings could not be celebrated. The dead were buried in unconsecrated ground to the great distress of the population. Only the first and last rites of baptism and extreme unction (the sacrament of the dying), out of fear for the soul, were permitted. Church bells, which in days without clocks marked the passing hours, were eerily silent as if in reproach.

But the impatient king, unmoved by what to everyone else seemed a curse, used the interdict as an opportunity to seize the property of the wealthy abbeys and bishoprics. When in 1209 the pope went further and excommunicated the king himself, John appropriated the lands of England’s archbishoprics. With the income from these estates the king raised large armies of mercenaries and settled any quarrels he had with the Scots, Welsh and Irish to his satisfaction. He made Llywelyn Prince of Gwynedd submit to him; then, crossing to Ireland, he divided the east into counties on English lines and reduced their barons to order.

John had not understood quite what a formidable enemy he had made. In 1212, incensed by the King of England’s behaviour, Pope Innocent decided to use the final and most potent weapon in his repertoire. For some time the Curia at Rome had claimed that, if a ruler of a Christian country failed to obey the pope, the rest of the princes of Christendom might depose him. Innocent now issued the threat of deposition against John and entrusted the mission to his greatest ally, King Philip Augustus. It was a task the French king was more than happy to take on.

At the news that Philip was preparing an invasion, King John performed a remarkable about-turn. He could not run the risk of an invasion which might lose him the throne: he was unpopular among ordinary people because of the interdict and the English barons were discontented after the loss of their Norman lands. Though the king sent messages to the pope that he would accept his nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop, with Philip Augustus’ forces at his back, Innocent could make the King of England accept sterner terms. Not only was Stephen Langton to be Archbishop of Canterbury, but all the priests John had expelled because they had obeyed the interdict and refused to say Mass should be allowed to return to England. Most important of all, John was to yield up the crown of England into the hands of the papal legate, Pandulf. In return for swearing to be the pope’s vassal he would receive the crown back but would rule England as a fief of the papacy. England was to pay a thousand marks a year to Rome for this privilege.

John agreed to all this. At least it meant that England was free from the threat of invasion. John had not given up all thought of wresting back his old patrimony of Anjou as well as Poitou. With his nephew the new Holy Roman Emperor Otto, who had himself been deposed by the pope, he continued with a confederacy of northern European princes to attack the French king. But the attempt foundered on John’s military irresolution or, as it seemed at the time, his cowardliness. He retreated south from a battle for Anjou with Philip’s son Louis that he might have won, while the confederacy’s armies with an English contingent were heavily defeated by Philip himself, at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214.

The Battle of Bouvines was final confirmation that the Angevin Empire was lost forever to England: henceforth the French monarchy would become one of the four great powers of western Europe. It also marked a turning point in John’s domestic fortunes. Humiliated once again, he now had to return home and face the demands of the baronage and the Church. In his absence abroad they had united under the inspiring leadership of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. At his suggestion, they insisted that John issue a new charter of the laws of England like that of Henry I to restore confidence in the increasingly tyrannical crown. When the king refused, the barons mustered for war–with Langton’s active support.

Two thousand of them, and the soldiers and knights holding land from them, gathered at Stamford in Lincolnshire and began moving south. The vast array of armed men and horses was composed of all the groups in England which previously had had nothing in common–the northern and southern barons, the marcher lords, the civil service or official nobility created by Henry II and the tenants-in-chief. Once London had been captured by the rebels, John realized that he would have to give in to their demands in order to fight another day. On 15 June 1215 on the long, low plain of Runnymede near Windsor, on an island in the middle of the Thames, King John reluctantly fixed his seal to the remarkable document known to history as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter.

In many ways Magna Carta is a document of its time. It was a restatement of the existing rights and laws which the English had enjoyed since charters issued under Henry I and II, but it also reflected the grievances of the barons and the erosion of their rights under the Angevin kings. Magna Carta contained their demands for a greater share of power. At the same time, it contained many clauses which have a timeless appeal. Addressed ‘to all freemen of the realm and their heirs for ever’, it may be seen as a document addressed to all classes. As such, it is generally considered to represent the beginning of English liberties.

Superb administrators though the Norman and Angevin kings were, and though they had made England part of a progressive European civilization, they had ruled as despots. Magna Carta changed all that. It legally limited the power of the king, forbidding him to ignore the law and authorizing a council of twenty-five barons to enforce it by all possible means, including imprisonment, if he did try to overrule it.

The leaders of the rebellion arranged that a copy of Magna Carta should be read by the sheriff to a public meeting in each county in England. Every important church and town in the kingdom was to have a copy, so that everybody could know what their rights were and what they should take for granted. Over the next eight centuries the rights proclaimed by Magna Carta powerfully informed not only England’s national consciousness but many cultures influenced by Britain and British emigrants, including those of the United States, India and Australia. Magna Carta has been one of England’s greatest contributions to political thought, an early expression of the democratic ideal that the rule of law ensures rights for everyone by virtue of their humanity and regardless of their wealth or poverty.

Among its many clauses, the charter guaranteed the rights and liberties of the English Church, not only to prevent future quarrels over the appointment of the head of the Church but also to allow chapters in cathedrals to elect their bishops. The rules of inheritance were emphasized, to stop John from ignoring them as was his wont; the procedure for collecting scutage was laid down; the urgent early-thirteenth-century problem of the indebtedness of the knightly class to Christian and Jewish moneylenders was ameliorated; and certain weights and measures were standardized.

The barons made no attempt to limit the jurisdiction of the king’s courts, though they had curtailed some of their own. The Great Charter also enunciated some fundamental principles of justice which have echoed down the centuries, like Clause 40, ‘to no one will we sell, deny or defer, right or justice’. But it also expressed the reverence for the rule of law which was the spirit of the age. Clause 39 guaranteed for the first time in English history that no freeman could be imprisoned, deprived of his property, outlawed or molested without a trial according to the law of the land in which he must be judged by his peers. Most importantly for future generations, the king was prevented from raising new taxes on the people without the permission of the council of barons.

But, though John sealed Magna Carta, slippery as ever he had no intention of holding to it. The war between king and barons began again when he fled to the Isle of Wight. From there he appealed for help to his liege lord the pope, having further ingratiated himself with him by hastily taking the Crusader oath. He begged him to free him from Magna Carta, which he said insulted the crown and therefore the Holy See. Nothing loath, Innocent III declared the Great Charter illegal, and suspended the Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton for refusing to excommunicate the English bishops and barons who had produced it.

With an army of foreign mercenaries John escaped from the Isle of Wight, made his way through England and marched into Scotland to attack King Alexander I, who had supported the rebels. Behind him he left a large number of foreign troops to harry the barons’ estates; this they did so successfully that the barons decided to ask Philip Augustus for help and to offer his son the crown of England. Speciously asserting that John’s murder of his nephew Arthur of Brittany required that he be deprived of the English crown, Philip’s son Louis invaded England–claiming the throne in the name of his wife Blanche of Castile, Henry II’s granddaughter and John’s niece. In November 1215 some 7,000 Frenchmen sailed up the Thames to support the barons and citizens of London.

The real possibility that England would undergo a new French conquest was averted by the death of the already unwell king. Having led an expedition north to capture the important city of Lincoln, in October 1216 John passed away at Newark in Nottinghamshire after a gastric upset caused by a supper of peaches and new cider. Though his heir Henry III was only nine years old, he had the advantage of youth and innocence to make him a rallying point for national enthusiasm and he was endorsed by the papal legate, Guala. To nobles like William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke and Hubert de Burgh, he was the acceptable face of Plantagenet legitimacy. With the support of the Church, they would rule in his name for eleven years.

Henceforth until the end of the fourteenth century when a new dynasty seized the throne, the kings of England were known by a different name. They could not be called Angevins, since they no longer held the land in France which entitled them to. Instead, because the family badge of the Angevin counts was the yellow broom called in French plante genêt (genista to us today) they became known as the Plantagenet kings.

John was and remains England’s most unpopular king. Despite his competence he had the reputation for being both cruel and unlucky. Not only did he lose Normandy, so earning again the title Jean Sans Terre which his father had affectionately given him, or John Lackland as later generations called him when English became the spoken language instead of French. He is also said to have lost the crown jewels of England when, in October 1216 shortly before he died, his baggage train was sucked down in a whirlpool formed by the incoming tide as it crossed the channel of the Welland. At a point still known as King’s Corner between Cross Keys Wash and Lynn, as the king supposedly watched from the northern shore, half his army disappeared beneath the waters of the Wash and the crown of England was never seen again. This episode would enable many schoolchildren to joke that John had lost the crown of England in the Wash.