by Simon Schama
It was as a politician, rather than as a governor, that John was most obviously a failure. The Angevin empire under Henry had been sustained by a shrewd combination of charisma, feudal loyalty, appeals to self-interest and, when necessary, intimidation. The trick of the thing was so to distribute rewards and punishments among the barons that the inevitably aggrieved few would always be outnumbered (and out-castled) by the preferred many. John’s problem, however, was that he had great difficulty in believing that any of those professing loyalty would ever be more than fair-weather friends. (And it must be said that the example of the way his own brothers had treated their father was itself unlikely to do much to shake this pessimistic cynicism about the value of allegiance.) By projecting his own low valuation of the bonds of loyalty on to the baronial class as a whole, John supposed that when he rewarded baronial service with grants of land, he had made not a friend, but a future conspirator. So, instead of creating the kind of loyalist coalition that, until almost the end, had bolstered Henry’s survival, John preferred to rely on men and measures about which he had no illusions at all: mercenaries, hostages, blackmail and extortion. Assuming disloyalty, he ended up by guaranteeing it.
John’s pathetic sense of insecurity is not a surprise. The runt of the Angevin litter, he had been ridiculed by his father and virtually ignored by his mother in favour of her darling Richard. But once he was king in his own right and with his mother Eleanor an octogenarian tigress, her claws sharpened against the enemies of her last son, John still failed to grow into his throne, the agitated sense of vulnerability habitually making him opt for fear rather than persuasion to get his way.
Nowhere did the king manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory so damagingly as in Normandy. Attacked from the east by the army of Philip Augustus and in the west by supporters of Geoffrey’s son, his nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, John showed himself (in contrast to his nickname ‘Softsword’) to be a formidable general. He mobilized a lightning forced march overnight to the castle of Mirebeau, where Eleanor, his mother, was being besieged. The dawn attack was a complete surprise and a phenomenal success. The twelve-year-old Prince Arthur was taken prisoner. But perhaps he had been reading too much Geoffrey of Monmouth, for in a startling encounter Arthur not only refused to acknowledge his uncle as rightful king but threatened him with the consequences of his ‘usurpation’. John’s panicky response was to make little Arthur disappear. The most plausible account of what happened to the youth is from the hand of an annalist monk at Margam Abbey, Glamorgan, who was patronized by William de Briouze, then John’s faithful follower (although later his enemy and victim), who was with him at Rouen and in a position to know exactly what happened. According to the annalist, John, when drunk after dinner on the Thursday after Easter, ‘slew him [Arthur] with his own hand and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine. It was discovered by a fisherman in his net, and being dragged to the bank and recognized, was taken for secret burial in fear of the tyrant to the priory of Bec.’
So Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legend in which Arthur was betrayed by an evil nephew was reversed, with the wicked uncle this time the villain. Whatever the truth, the rumours of Arthur’s murder had an even more potent effect on politics than Becket’s had had for Henry II. John’s Norman loyalists fell away, both in dismay and disgust, and John himself slunk back to England, as one by one the major castles and cities of ducal Normandy fell to the king of France, Philip Augustus. After a long, nightmarish siege (in which the citizens of Les Andelys who were caught between the two camps virtually starved to death), the untakable Château Gaillard was taken.
Insular historians might find the stripping away of Normandy from the Angevin lands a blessing in disguise, which would allow the Plantagenets to fulfil their proper destiny as mighty English kings. But no one saw it that way at the time. It was, rather, a catastrophe: it was both the breaking of the ducal-royal patrimony that William the Conqueror had put together and a failure to live up to the first of the coronation oaths. Without either the revenues of Normandy or Henry II’s habit of parsimony, it meant that revenue – desperately needed to defend England from a feared French invasion and to beat back the Scots – now had to come from John’s island subjects alone. John found himself in precisely the opposite position from his father. Under Henry the immense expansion of Angevin-controlled lands and his success in fending off attacks had created a myth of martial potency and a rational incentive for land-hungry barons to flock to his banner. But although John attempted to compensate for his losses in France by expeditions to Ireland and Wales, at some point he began to give off a kind of negative charisma, in which attachment to his cause seemed to promise more grief than satisfaction, and the allegiance that had snowballed with Angevin successes now began to melt away in the glare of defeat.
It didn’t help that in 1208 John chose to pick a fight with the formidable and learned Pope Innocent III, which he couldn’t possibly win. Doubtless he imagined he was replaying his father’s axiom that the Church owed its first allegiance to him and not to Rome. But when he refused to accept Stephen Langton, the pope’s nominee for Archbishop of Canterbury (and a compromise between John’s candidate and the Canterbury chapter’s choice), he took the country down a disastrous road. An interdict was placed on England, which in effect meant a spiritual lock-out. No subject of the king could receive the sacrament of marriage or be buried in consecrated ground. John responded by seizing Church property, which led to his excommunication and eventual capitulation, in 1213, when he surrendered England itself to be a fiefdom of the pope. In its way this improbable strategy was an adroit move, for it transformed John overnight from the most cursed to the most blessed of Christian rulers. Armed with the papal blessing, he made a final run at the aggressive Philip Augustus, but failed to be present in person at the battle of Bouvines in 1214, where his armies went down to disastrous defeat, sealing the doom of the Angevin empire.
Had John won the battle of Bouvines, in all likelihood there would have been no Magna Carta. For the famous ‘charter’ sealed by John at Runnymede in mid-June 1215 was conceived, in the first instance, opportunistically by a coalition of barons who were resolved to take advantage of the king’s defeat and to push back the centralizing power of the Angevins. Bouvines had given the green light for a full-scale rebellion to break out in the north. The barons, who, if the chronicler-monk Roger ofWendover is right, met at Bury to consider the ‘charter’, meant it to be some sort of golden mean, around which both contentious parties might find agreement, thus sparing the realm a return to the miseries of the tempus werre. And as was invariably the case in movements of reform, the language in which the barons presented their demands was nostalgic rather than revolutionary. The Angevin kings were always harking back to the ‘customs’ they insisted had obtained in the time of Henry I. Well then, they would out-hark John, requiring that he reinstate the ‘good laws of Edward the Confessor’ (whatever they were). No one should read the Magna Carta as if it were some sort of primitive constitution. It was not, as has been aptly said, a charter of liberty but a charter of liberties, in the medieval sense of exemptions: a catalogue of things that the king would not henceforth be permitted to do.
Inevitably, many of these prohibitions amounted to tax relief for the landed and armoured classes. Much emphasis was put on the most glaring abuses of feudal sovereignty: the power, for example, to force a baronial widow to remarry purely in order that the king might collect an arbitrarily set fee for remarriage, a fee that, depending on the family’s conduct towards the king, might be lenient or deliberately ruinous. Once it had been conveniently ruined, the king could move in and collect on the estate. This was the sort of thing that had to stop. But if the main driving force behind the charter was the narrow interests of the baronial classes, the forms in which they expressed those grievances, and their rights to have them addressed, do indeed deserve all the historical significance conventionally attached to it. Paradoxically, it was the ambit
ious, restless Angevin monarchy itself that had inadvertently schooled the barons in just what it was they were missing. By granting towns ‘charters of liberties’ in return for tolls and taxes paid on commerce, the Angevins established the idea of such charters as contracts made between the king and his subjects. By taking law out of the hands of baronial courts and putting it into courts of royal justice, the government made the more alert barons acutely aware (especially when members of their own class were arbitrarily imprisoned, harassed, ruined or even killed) that they had nowhere to go to obtain redress for their own grievances. Astonishingly, then, the legally minded but equally bloody-minded Angevins turned out to be the schoolmasters of their own correction.
So, if Magna Carta was not the birth certificate of freedom, it was the death certificate of despotism. It spelled out for the first time, and unequivocally, something with which the Angevins themselves, as the highest justices of the realm, could not conceivably quarrel: that the law was not simply the will or the whim of the king but was an independent power in its own right, and that kings could be brought to book for violating it – that they should, for example, show due cause why a person’s body might be confined (habeas corpus) and not just declared to be detained at the inscrutable pleasure of the prince. All this, in turn, presupposed something hitherto unimaginable: that there was some sort of English ‘state’ of which the king was a part (albeit the supreme part) but not the whole. And it was in the name of that state that the barons added something startling to the charter: a proposal that a body of twenty-five of them would be instituted to monitor compliance with the charter and, if necessary, to act as collective ombudsmen, hearing cases in which Crown officials were themselves accused of infringing the charter.
John, of course, had no intention of putting the Angevin monarchy into commission. Had London not fallen to the rebel army in the spring of 1215, he might not even have felt the tactical need to consent to the charter as a way of dividing the moderates from the hard-core rebels among his opponents and giving himself time to rally his own loyalist forces. But it was significant that the ante had been so much upped by mere talk of a charter of liberties that John felt he had to issue it himself, so that it would appear, at least, to be a free grant of the king and not (as has been traditionally assumed) something imposed on him.
Needless to say, this was all a sham. John had no intention of abiding by the charter a minute longer than he had to. He lost no time in appealing its illegality to his new and staunchest ally, the pope, and Rome duly obliged by damning it as the work of traitors and rebels against their anointed lord and annulling it outright. It had lasted less than three months. Freed from its constraints, John now launched an all-out war in the autumn of 1215, personally directing the siege of his father’s castle at Rochester in Kent, which had opened its gates to the rebel army. John oversaw the battering and may have thought up the tunnel into which the fat of forty pigs was poured and set alight, bringing down one of the corner towers. Through much of 1216 the king fought a war on two fronts – against a French invasion, the first successful incursion since 1066, which was led by Philip Augustus’s son, Louis VIII, who now claimed the throne of England, and against his own barons. At first, John seemed to be fighting a losing battle. By May 1216 Louis and his English allies had taken London and it looked very much as if the next king of England would be Lewis I. But the more experience the barons had of French power, the less they liked it. And perhaps John knew this, for he fought a dogged rearguard action, harried and threatened but showing the authentic Angevin strain of animal ferocity when cornered.
Fighting gave him an appetite. At Lynn in Norfolk, facing the windswept waters of the Wash, John ate a meal so hearty that he was stricken with a violent and unceasing spasm of dysentery. A fever took hold. On 11 October, while he was attempting to reach Wisbech, a wind got up that disoriented horses, carts and riders, trapping them in blowing quicksand. Some (not all) of the baggage carts – those containing John’s precious jewels and his household effects – were lost.
It was as if Merlin’s warning to Vortigern in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History, that his tower of power was built on subsiding foundations, had again come true.
A week later, after making a solemn will asking that he be buried (unlike his father and brothers) in England, in the abbey church at Worcester, John died on 18 October. His nine-year-old son, the ‘pretty little knight’ Henry, was quickly crowned at Gloucester and almost immediately the baronial opposition disintegrated. The barons’ conflict, after all, was with the father not the son. And even those who had fought temporarily alongside Louis of France much preferred to see a Plantagenet boy on the throne, guided by the veteran regent William Marshal, than to become a satellite of the king of France.
More had been lost than King John’s baggage. The loss of Normandy ripped the heart out of the great Angevin realm that Count Geoffrey of Anjou had constructed, even though Gascony remained (for the time being) under English suzerainty. Along with the unbroken territorial span of the empire that never was went myths of Plantagenet invincibility and their pretensions to be treated as the dominant power of western Europe. By way of compensation, English power had been projected more forcefully than ever in Britain itself, especially in Wales and Ireland. In massive fortresses, like Dover Castle (which resisted the French invasion), its presence continued to dominate the margins of the island state. In the end, however, the impact made by the Angevins should be measured less by mileage or masonry than by magistrates. For in re-issuing the Magna Carta in 1216, 1217 and again, with amendments, in 1225, the barons of England were, in effect, paying the Angevins a backhanded compliment. By pressing so very hard on their kingdom, the dynasty had produced in necessary counter-response a generation of men who educated themselves in the business of the state. The dynasty left behind not just castles and churches, not just ceremonies and tournaments, but tribes of busy justices, sheriffs, burgesses and knights of the shire, whose understanding of the law would be as important for them as their knowledge of battle.
So the best thing that can be said about the Angevins is perhaps that they left behind an England that no longer needed them. They had been rough parents. But the unlikely result of their way of doing things had been that their subjects had developed their own brand of feisty truculence. When, on the death of John in October 1216, William Marshal proclaimed with typical chivalry that, if everyone else abandoned the boy he would carry the young king, Henry III, on his shoulders, ‘step by step, from island to island, country to country and I would not fail him even if it meant begging my bread’, he sounded like some sweetly superannuated Lancelot. But for once England didn’t want an Arthur. It had the Magna Carta instead. And that, it was hoped, would be Excalibur enough.
CHAPTER 4
ALIENS AND NATIVES
IN THE SECOND half of the thirteenth century the nations of Britain found their voice. Their speech is defiant, and angry enough to warn their own princes never to betray their homeland to the English.
In 1282, in the northern Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, a proclamation drawn up by the ‘lords of Snowdonia’ declared: ‘the people of Snowdon assert that even if their own prince should give overlordship of them to the King [of England] they themselves would refuse to do homage of any foreigner of whose language, customs and laws they were ignorant.’ In Arbroath in 1320 the barons and earls of Scotland warned their king that: ‘as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we, on any conditions be brought under English rule.’ Two years earlier, in Ireland, the king of England had been put on notice that: ‘on account of the endless perfidy of the English and to shake off the harsh and insupportable yoke of servitude to them and to recover our native freedom, the Irish princes are compelled to enter a deadly war.’
Historians are professionally fretful about reading the story backwards rather than forwards, projecting the languages and institutions of our own time into a past quite innocent of them. Nationalism, we are trained t
o assume, is a modern invention. But what then do we make of these utterances with their passionate attachment to territory and local memory? They document, unmistakably, if not nationalism, then at least ‘nativism’, a politics of birthplace, of land and language. After these voices were heard, Britain would never be the same.
