by Dan Jones
John began to plan a massive invasion, scheduled to land in Poitou and push north during the spring and summer of 1214. Clearly, it was vital that he convinced his barons to go with him. But the northern barons, led by Eustace de Vesci, now back in England and uneasily reconciled with the king, refused to serve, claiming they could not afford to do so. Faced with baronial intransigence for a second time in his reign, John flew into a predictable rage; but this time, unlike in 1205, he would not be deterred from his ambition. He spent autumn 1213 preparing the ground for an invasion under what he described in a letter to his sometime Poitevin ally Aimery de Thouars as ‘an unbelievably large force’.
In order to pay for that force and to flex his muscles over the recalcitrant barons, John’s financial exactions reached new heights. His exploitation of his feudal dues and the profits of justice mounted wildly in the months before the invasion. He levied scutage – a tax substituting cash payments for the barons’ feudal obligation to provide knights to serve in the king’s army – at three marks per knight’s fee, the heaviest rate ever recorded. The reliefs and fees on feudal incidents became astonishingly high. William Fitz Alan was charged 10,000 marks for succession to the Fitz Alan barony. John de Lacy paid 7,000 marks for the honour of Pontefract. Widows were being charged up to £1,000 to keep their dowries and not be forcibly married. The greatest sale of all was the offering of 20,000 marks from Geoffrey Mandeville, who paid the sum for the hand in marriage of John’s first wife, Isabel of Gloucester. And these were not notional debts: Geoffrey was expected to pay for his queenly bride in four instalments over a mere nine months.
The cash raised did not lie idle. John’s money began flooding the Continent and he established a coalition centred on the support of his nephew, the Emperor Otto IV. The counts of Holland, Boulogne and Flanders joined the resistance to Philip in north-west Europe. The plan was to trap him in a pincer movement between two forces: the first, under Salisbury, would attack Philip from Flanders, the second, under John, would move up from Poitou to strike at the French from the south. Thus, in February 1214, John sailed from Portsmouth for La Rochelle, in a galley laden with precious gemstones and riches in silver and gold and carrying numerous English nobles, as well as Queen Isabella and John’s five-year-old second son Prince Richard. This was no whimsical campaign. It was to be the glorious recapture of John’s birthright.
The campaign started well. Throughout the spring, John employed a combination of diplomacy and siegecraft to secure Poitou and its environs. Peace was made with the troublesome Lusignan family, who had been so slighted back in 1202 when John had whisked his queen, Isabella of Angoulême, out from under their noses: to bring them back to favour a marriage was arranged between John’s daughter Joan (born in 1210) and Hugh de Lusignan’s son and heir. In early June, with Poitou successfully secured, John moved on to Brittany, taking Nantes by siege. Angers, in the heart of Anjou, swiftly opened its gates. With Philip reluctant to join battle, John was showing that the spirit of Plantagenet bellicosity lived on.
Then, disaster struck. John was besieging the castle of la Rocheaux-Moines in the company of some of his Poitevin barons when he heard that Philip’s 26-year-old son Prince Louis was approaching at the head of an army. John decided that the moment was ripe for a pitched battle. Yet his allies suddenly lost faith. The Poitevin barons who had accompanied him for months fulfilled their reputation for inconstancy. They simply upped and ran, refusing to risk battle with the house of Capet. With a speed that belied the painstaking and expensive diplomacy with which John had built his coalition, the southern alliance melted away. Instead of fighting Prince Louis, John could only retreat before his advance and take cover back where his expedition had begun, in La Rochelle.
Despite the humiliation of retreat in the south, John could still hope that the northern allies in his pincer movement would show their mettle. While he waited in La Rochelle, on 27 July the northern coalition assembled under Emperor Otto IV’s fluttering banner of the dragon and golden eagle, and made ready for the destruction of the French king on a plain near the village of Bouvines.
The army that took to the field against Philip at the battle of Bouvines was a typical medieval affair – loud, violent and disorganized. Each leader had his own men and his own standard, and such grand strategy as existed was fairly rudimentary. Cavalry charges were the main weapon used by either side. At times the battle would have resembled the melee of the tournament field, but with added intent. Men humped heavy lances and pounds of chainmail, which could suffocate its wearer to death if he fell awkwardly in the churned mud of the field. Bloodcurdling screams and the sickening crunch of piercing heavy metal into human and horse flesh, grunts of effort and the thick gurgling breath of the dying would have raged all around, as close hand-to-hand fighting left the plain at Bouvines gouged and bloodstained.
The English troops present rallied around the earl of Salisbury’s blue banners with yellow lions rampant emblazoned upon them. They fought bravely on the right flank. The leaders from both sides were at the centre: both Otto IV and Philip were unhorsed during the fighting. The battle raged for three long hours – first in favour of the imperial troops and then, as the fighting wore on, tipping towards the French.
And it was the French who were victorious in the end. Their cavalry charges, led by some of the finest knights in Europe, gradually overwhelmed the coalition forces. Otto and Philip led their knights in a melee, which was settled decisively in the French favour. Otto was protected manfully by a group of Saxon knights, yet eventually he had no choice but to flee the battlefield, narrowly escaping capture as he galloped. Elsewhere on the field, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne and the earl of Salisbury were less fortunate. They were all taken prisoner and escorted back to Paris, where the citizens and students of the university danced and sang in the streets for a week to celebrate the famous victory their king had won.
Far away in La Rochelle there was no dancing. Only despair greeted the news that the coalition had given their all and lost. John had invested everything in the campaign of 1214, and he had been beaten, let down by the men at his back and his allies on a distant battlefield. He was forced to sign a five-year truce with Philip Augustus in the autumn, at a price that was rumoured to be 60,000 marks. Financially, the hoarder king was ruined. He had spent all he had on war preparations, and had cut off his main source of fast cash by reconciliation with the Church. His military reputation, which had soared in the years of mastery over Britain, was trampled back where it had been for most of his younger days: into the mud. Everything John had worked for since 1205 had ended in disappointment, abandonment and betrayal. After Bouvines, John the commander was all but finished.
Magna Carta
Defeat at Bouvines was catastrophic for John. When he returned to England from the Continent he was weaker than he had ever been before. Victory and the recovery of a large portion of the Plantagenet lands might have justified the extortions of the reign, just as Richard I’s glorious achievements both in Outremer and France had made good the expense of his crusading fund and king’s ransom. Yet John returned to England with his whole regal policy discredited. Defeat had fixed the borders of the Plantagenet empire: the only patch of territory in mainland France that remained loyal to the English Crown was Gascony and the area around Bordeaux. It was a pitiful rump of what had once been the sprawling duchy of Aquitaine, and as a beaten king John returned to his realm a dangerously vulnerable figure.
Baronial disquiet, which had been bubbling up since 1212, now burst into the open. The feeling was growing among a broad coalition of English barons that John’s methods must somehow be constrained: that the king who had wielded his powers and prerogatives so mercilessly should now be brought under some sort of control. The unfathomable question was what sort of bell could be tied to the cat.
Two meetings between king and barons during the winter of 1214– 15 failed to resolve their differences. In January 1215, John met around forty dissatisfied
barons in London, where he stalled for enough time to write to Rome and place the case before his new feudal overlord, the pope. During the spring both sides wrote to Innocent III. The barons submitted demands that John should be made to obey the Charter of Liberties that had been issued by Henry I on his coronation in 1100; that the king should be forced to stand by his own coronation oath to observe good law and exercise justice; and that demands for English barons to pay scutage or provide armed men to fight on the Continent were unfair and illegal. John’s papal envoys relied upon the king’s position as a reconciled son of Rome who ought not to be troubled by rebellions from his subjects: a position that was strengthened when John took the Cross on 4 March. As a crusader he was now explicitly warded by the wrath of St Peter from attack by fellow Christians.
That the barons chose to appeal to the spirit of Henry I’s charter was illuminating. The Charter of Liberties, which had been confirmed by Henry II in 1154, promised (among other things) that the king would not plunder Church property, nor charge outrageous fees for inheritances, marriages and widows’ remarriages, nor abuse wardships, nor extend the royal forest. These were all requests that could fairly be directed at King John; but the choice of Henry I’s charter also demonstrated that the barons viewed their grievances with the king as part of a grand scheme of Plantagenet government dating back more than a century. It was a reasonable position for the barons to take, but their arguments were ignored. Innocent appointed Archbishop Langton to mediate between king and barons, but he also held legal hearings on the dispute in Rome. There, rather than attempting to arbitrate the dispute fairly, Innocent found wholly in favour of his vassal, the crusader King John. Innocent wrote to the English barons insisting that they should pay their scutage and cease making demands of the king. It was a blunt judgement that did nothing to address the serious political disquiet in England. The only possible outcome was civil war. On 5 May 1215 a group of rebels formally defied John, renouncing their homage and fealty – effectively rejecting him as king of England.
The barons who opposed him were led by the plotters of 1212: Robert Fitzwalter, who styled himself by the magnificently pompous title of ‘Marshal of the army of God’, and Eustace de Vesci. The latter was the foremost of a group of northern barons including William de Mowbray, Richard de Percy and Roger de Montbegon, lord of Hornby in Lancashire. The northerners were a tight-knit group, bonded by marriage, kinship and territorial proximity, and all had personal cause to dislike John in particular and Plantagenet government in general. Around these rebel leaders was a band of magnates from East Anglia and the home counties, which included most prominently Richard de Clare, earl of Hertford, and his son Gilbert, and Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex and Gloucester. Other barons included Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, Henry de Bohun, earl of Hereford, and William Marshal’s son, William the younger. Plenty – in fact, almost all – of the rebellious barons opposed John on grounds of self-interest and some – like Fitzwalter – were simply unscrupulous and belligerent. But the rebels were also bound together by the germ of an ideology: a sense that John’s government in particular and Plantagenet government in general were both in need of fundamental reform.
Once they had renounced their homage, however, there was very little reform that could take place without recourse to bloody warfare. On 10 May John wrote to the rebel barons stating that he ‘would not arrest or disseise them or their men nor would he go against them by force of arms except by the law of the land and by judgement of their peers in his court’. He made personal overtures to those whom he had dealt with particularly severely during the build-up to the Poitou campaign. He offered to submit to arbitration by a panel of eight barons, chaired by the pope himself. His terms were rejected, and on 12 May John ordered the confiscation of rebel lands. There was now no escaping the fact that England was, for the first time since 1173, at war with itself.
The third week of May saw a dash for London between the earl of Salisbury – who had been released from prison following the defeat at Bouvines – and a group of rebel barons, led by Fitzwalter. They raced through the dark of night to reach the capital, which was crucial to the symbolic and strategic control of England. London was an economic powerhouse, a city of culture and prosperity; a city in the form of a fortress. Its great stone walls rose in the east and west into castles – William the Conqueror’s Tower of London in the east, Baynard’s castle in the west. Its skyline prickled with scores of little church towers, like needles around the central spire belonging to the vast wooden-roofed cathedral of St Paul’s, perched proudly on top of Ludgate Hill. London was a hub of trade and of political power. Holding the city had been the key to King Stephen’s survival against Matilda during the Anarchy; and in spring 1215 it once again became the bejewelled key to controlling England.
On a quiet Sunday morning, 17 May, the rebels reached London, emerging from the short dark of a spring night as the sun was drying the dew from the city’s rooftops. The bells in the church towers were clanging with their fat, metallic call to morning worship, as the seven gates in the city walls were cranked open to allow forces hostile to the king of England into the capital. ‘The rich citizens were favourable to the barons,’ wrote the chronicler Roger of Wendover. ‘And the poor ones were afraid to murmur against them.’ By the time Salisbury reached the city to claim it for the royalists, it was too late. Guards loyal to the king’s enemies manned the city gates. Inside the walls, scribes were compiling documents to be sent to all earls, barons and knights thought still to be faithful to John, demanding that they abandon ‘a king who was perjured’ and come over to the rebel side. With London, the rebel barons had their wedge. John’s hopes of crushing resistance to his rule were over.
Yet they could not be said to have won. John might be a king who had lost the confidence of a large swathe of his barons, but he was still legitimately the king, with the support of the pope. He could in theory still dispossess and outlaw his enemies, and his only aim in the dispute was to crush the opposition to his rule. The rebels, meanwhile, had a harder task to grasp. They wished to reform government, not so as to depose or fundamentally hobble kingship, but so as somehow to bring it within ‘reasonable’ bounds. They were searching for a way to force the king to govern peacefully and fairly within the law – yet they were doing so by breaking the law and making war upon him. It was a situation of deep complexity for both sides. So as the rebels camped in London during the early summer, and John took his court upriver to Windsor, the roads and waterways between the two camps were scoured by messengers from both sides, attempting to find a way in which the proud king could be cajoled into putting his seal to a document that answered some of his rebels’ demands.
After a month of wrangling, a solution emerged. Some time between 10 and 15 June, baronial envoys agreed with the king that a document now known as ‘the Articles of the Barons’ could form the basis for a final negotiation of a peace. This list of forty-nine aims set out what the barons hoped to achieve from King John. It concerned issues of justice and feudal precedent, such as the well-argued matters of wardships, inheritances and widows; scutage payments and the obligation to serve in armies outside the realm; and the extent of the royal forests. The articles formed an agreed schedule for detailed negotiation, and several more days of hard and detailed bargaining ensued. Eventually there emerged another document that could be sworn over by the negotiating parties and was signed off by the king. This was agreed upon by 18 June, when John’s chancery sent out writs commanding his officers in the shires to stop making war on his enemies. On 19 June at Runnymede in Berkshire, barons started renewing their abandoned homage to John, who was wearing the regalia of the Empress Matilda to emphasize the ancient status of his kingship. In return, John, his allies and selected rebel barons began swearing oaths to obey the terms of an agreement which is among the most famous in English history: Magna Carta.
Read today, Magna Carta seems to reflect a difficult compromise: an agreement that neither si
de quite welcomed. On the one hand, Magna Carta granted sweeping rights: ‘the English Church shall be free … the city of London is to have its ancient liberties.’ On the other, it was full of highly exact statements of English custom: clauses laid out the specific conditions under which a scutage could be levied on the kingdom, where bridges should be built, and the laws concerning Jewish debts. It was agreed that £100 was the fee for an earl or baron’s inheritance and 100 shillings for a knight’s. On the matter of wardships, the king promised to take ‘no more than reasonable revenues, reasonable customary dues and reasonable services’ – although what was ‘reasonable’ was undefined. It was promised that ‘a widow shall have her marriage portion and inheritance forthwith and without any difficulty after the death of her husband; nor shall she pay anything to have her dower …’, and also that ‘no widow shall be forced to marry so long as she wishes to live without a husband’. The king promised that ‘no scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom unless by common counsel … except for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight and for once marrying our eldest daughter’.
Yet whereas many of the clauses in Magna Carta were formalized processes about specific policies pursued by John – whether with regard to raising armies, levying taxes, impeding merchants, or arguing with the Church – the most famous clauses aimed deeper into the heart of Plantagenet rule. Clause 39 reads: ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined … except by lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.’ Clause 40 is more laconic. ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’ These clauses addressed the whole spirit of John’s reign, and by extension the spirit of kingship itself. For the eleven years in which John had resided in England, the country had tasted a form of tyranny. John had used his powers as king in an arbitrary, partisan and exploitative fashion. He had broken the spirit of kingship as presented by Henry II back in 1153, when he travelled the country offering unity, good lordship and legal process to all.
