The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  Yet defining the spirit of kingship was no easy task. Neither was ensuring, once it was defined, that the king stuck to its terms. Magna Carta ended with a security clause, providing for a council of twenty-five named barons to make war on the king if he broke the terms of the agreement. Yet this was nothing more than a contractual basis for civil war. Stating that a king should govern according to the law and making sure that he did so were, it turned out, quite separate matters. These questions would lie at the heart of every major disagreement between king and country for the rest of the Plantagenet years. And in the fierce, tense atmosphere of 1215, finding a definition and an agreement was to prove impossible.

  As a peace treaty – for this is what it was – Magna Carta was an immediate failure. There was a brief moment of hope on 19 June when the homage and oaths were made, the twenty-five ‘security barons’ were elected and a substantial number of rebels agreed to the terms of the charter as the basis for peace. ‘The king satisfactorily restored justice everywhere, lifting the sieges which he had begun,’ wrote Walter of Coventry. The production line began, and ‘a copy of the charter was circulated around the towns and villages and all who saw it agreed to it’. But not all the barons accepted the charter of liberties as drafted, and some chose at once to rebel. ‘Certain from across the Humber went away and renewed hostilities,’ the chronicler continued.

  Magna Carta sparked debate everywhere, and it was quite unacceptable to one man above all others: King John. In less than two months, John had secured an annulment of its terms from Innocent III, who wrote in a wonderfully bombastic dispatch that ‘we utterly reject and condemn this settlement and under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe it and that the barons and their associates should not require it to be observed: the charter … we declare to be null, and void of all validity forever.’ The war resumed, and this time it escalated. Before the end of the year, Philip II of France had declared John’s Crown forfeit, citing a ‘trial’ in which John had been found guilty of killing Arthur of Brittany. Invasion preparations were made for the French king and his son, Prince Louis, to come to England on the invitation of the barons, and depose the tyrant king.

  The French landed in Kent on 14 May 1216. Prince Louis found London waiting for him. ‘He was accepted with all alacrity and happiness, and they performed homage,’ wrote Walter of Coventry. Ignoring a papal interdict and excommunication levied on him by John’s ally, the papal legate Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, Louis then advanced to Winchester, before heading back to the south-east to besiege Henry II’s massive gateway fortress in Dover.

  As John moved about the country, attempting to lay siege to baronial towns and evade the enemies who wished to depose him, he grew desperate and disconsolate. Crossing the Wash in Lincolnshire in autumn 1216, he misjudged the tide and lost much of his baggage train. According to Ralph of Coggeshall: ‘he lost … his portable chapel with his relics, and some of his packhorses with many household supplies. And many members of his entourage were submerged in the waters of the sea and sucked into the quicksand.’

  During his desperate journeying, John contracted dysentery, and throughout October 1216 he grew gradually weaker. By the middle of the month he was being carried on a litter. When his party reached Newark in Nottinghamshire he was attended by the abbot of Croxton, who was a doctor. It was to no avail: John died on 19 October 1216, his country invaded and his royal authority utterly diminished. His body was not taken to Fontevraud, where his mother, father and brother were buried. Rather, he was buried at Worcester Cathedral, near the altar of St Wulfstan, who had been canonized earlier in John’s reign. For the first Plantagenet to have spent more time in England than out of it, to be buried in an ancient Anglo-Saxon city was perhaps fitting. To writers like Walter of Coventry, the problems of John’s reign were obvious. ‘John was indeed a great prince but scarcely a happy one,’ he wrote. ‘Like Marius, he experienced the ups and downs of fortune. He was munificent and liberal to outsiders, but a plunderer of his people, trusting strangers rather than his subjects … he was eventually deserted by his own men and in the end, little mourned.’ William Marshal’s biographer was more poetic. As John sank into his final illness, he wrote, he was racked with pain. ‘Death, that great harrier, that wicked harsh creature, took him under her control and never let him go until he died,’ he wrote. It was an appropriate way for England’s most callous and remorseless king to end his life.

  John’s reputation has become that of one of the worst kings in English history, a diabolical murderer who brought tyranny and constitutional crisis to his realm. The legends of Robin Hood began to circulate in their earliest forms towards the end of his reign, with the subjects of corrupt authority and the law of the forest at their heart. John’s name has over the years been associated with the worst evil of these stories, and he has been written off as a monster, a failure and a devil. Was anything he did more truly grotesque than those deeds perpetrated by his brother Richard, or his father? Probably they were not, yet John’s reputation suffered far more than theirs.

  In the most sympathetic analysis, John’s greatest crime was to have been king as fortune’s wheel rolled downwards. He had all of his family’s most ruthless instincts allied with none of their good fortune. He presided weakly over the loss of Normandy, and once the duchy was lost he was virtually helpless to win it back. He did not inspire men to great deeds with his personality, yet it is fair to wonder if Henry II or even Richard might have regained Normandy from the position that John occupied in 1204. It is easy to see why he trod the path he did between 1207 and 1211, and aside from the paranoid pursuit of personal vendettas it is hard to see what any other king in his position would have done differently. For four deceptive years, John had been master not only of his kingdom, but also of the English Church, England’s neighbours on the Celtic fringe and a powerful system of justice and government that was turned mercilessly towards the needs of the Crown. He failed to realize in good time what problems he was making for himself by dealing with his barons not as partners in an enterprise of kingship, but as forced creditors whom he could treat with cruelty and disdain.

  As it was, a disastrous civil war, capped by an invasion by Philip II and Prince Louis, was John’s immediate legacy to his family. In 1215 Magna Carta was nothing more than a failed peace treaty in the process towards this bitter conflict. John was not to know – any more than the barons who negotiated its terms with him – that his name and the myth of the document sealed at Runnymede would be bound together in English history for ever. Yet this, in the long run, was the case. Magna Carta would be reissued time and again in the years immediately following John’s death, and interpreting Magna Carta would be at the heart of every constitutional battle that was fought during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As Henry III struggled to regain the rights and territories that his father had lost, Magna Carta would gradually come to define the terms of engagement between king and community. When it was reissued in 1225, it was nailed to church doors and displayed in town squares across England, gaining legendary status as a document whose spirit stood for the duty of English kings to govern within the laws they made. That, in a strange way, was John’s legacy. Perhaps the most ruthless lawyer ever to reign as English king would have appreciated the irony.

  Securing the Inheritance

  Henry III was nine years old when his father died, and he was crowned in a hurry. The ceremony was a west-country affair that took place in Gloucester Abbey, a safe haven behind loyalist lines in the midst of a civil war that engulfed England. Beneath the great nave of the Norman abbey church, a reduced smattering of ecclesiastical and lay lords watched uncertainly as the bishops of Winchester, Worcester and Exeter carried out the anointing, and placed a simple lady’s coronet on the child’s head. There were no regalia and little pageantry, for all the sacred robes and effects of a full coronation were at Westminster, which was controlled by the rebels. But there was no time to stand on ce
remony. This was an expedient, heavily simplified ceremony designed to transfer what was left of a Plantagenet king’s authority to the young boy.

  Henry was the elder of John’s two sons; his younger brother Richard was just seven years old in 1216. Even as a young child, Henry was notable for his serious countenance and manner of speaking. He would grow up to be deeply pious – devoted to all manner of cults, particularly that of the Virgin Mary – and such a voracious hearer of the mass that it sometimes interfered with his ability to conduct government business. The young king stood in Gloucester Abbey and, in a fragile voice, swore before the great altar that he would observe honour, peace and reverence towards God and the Holy Church and its ordained ministers all the days of his life; that he would give his people justice; that he would abolish bad laws and customs and observe the good.

  How realistic were these promises? Certainly Henry had to make them, for they were the sacred oaths of a king. But a truer reflection of the authority that kept England from collapse was evident when the child did homage for his kingdoms of England and Ireland to the pope, represented in person by the legate Cardinal Guala Bicchieri. He swore an oath to put England under the protection of the Church and a few men of God.

  Ninety miles away, Westminster was under the protection of the French – held by Philip II’s son Louis. Castles across the country were manned by garrisons of French knights, invited to England by the rebel barons, who wished to elect a new king from the house of Capet, rather than suffer under a fourth from the house of Plantagenet. The baleful end to John’s reign had left England partitioned, distressed nearly as badly as it had been during the early days of the Anarchy. Once again, the succession had become not simply a question of legitimacy, but a trial of strength.

  All those in the abbey church’s sparse crowd would have realized that this was a dreadful way to start a reign. The most uncertain transfer of power seen for nearly a century was placing the crown on the head of a child. No boy had been king since the time of Aethelred, in the days before the Conquest. And the precedents from that reign were miserable indeed: Aethelred had presided over a time of Viking raids and invasions, and had been deposed for a year. Grim times confronted England if it were to be thrown back into an age of Saxon chaos.

  A few men remained devoted to avoiding that fate. Henry III was fortunate to have around him a group of supporters committed not to seizing power for themselves, but to maintaining the fragile office of kingship as his predecessors had created it. On his deathbed John had realized the jeopardy that faced the Plantagenet legacy and begged for the elderly William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, to become his son’s guardian. Pembroke, now well into his seventies, had accepted the task at first with knightly reticence, and then in typically grandiloquent style, declaring that ‘if all the world deserted the young boy, except me, do you know what I would do? I would carry him on my shoulders … I would be with him and never let him down, from island to island, from land to land, even if I had to scavenge for my daily bread.’

  Notwithstanding the Marshal’s chivalrous pomp, it was not just to the solemn nine-year-old Henry’s advantage that such an attitude prevailed among a few good men in England. The future of the dynasty depended on it. The king – if he was ever to take office fully – would need officers committed to restoring his authority and rights against the most severe and fundamental challenge to them in living memory.

  The other key men around the new king included the wealthy Poitevin Peter des Roches, John’s former justiciar and bishop of Winchester. Des Roches had crowned Henry, and despite his widespread unpopularity in the country at large, was to become his tutor and mentor, on and off, for the next two decades. Then there was Bicchieri, representing the pope as Henry’s feudal overlord, whose presence in the royal camp could be expected to add legitimacy to the cause. Finally there was Hubert de Burgh, the Norfolk-born loyalist who had served John for more than a decade. In the office of justiciar, de Burgh presented an acceptable face of government to those who mistrusted ‘aliens’. These men would form the core of a working coalition whose first and urgent task was to see off the invasion and resolve the crises that engulfed the realm.

  The first crisis was military. The rebellious northern barons had a dangerous leader in Prince Louis, and he and his allies had captured and held castles all over England. Many were garrisoned by foreign mercenaries. Louis had broad control over the south-east, and French ships patrolled the Channel. The only way to rid the realm of the French was in battle.

  The future of Henry’s reign was decided at Lincoln. It was the last and perhaps the greatest military engagement of William Marshal’s long and distinguished life. Having assembled 400 knights and 250 crossbowmen from all parts of the kingdom in Newark after Whitsun in 1217, Marshal marched his men straight to Lincoln, arriving on 20 May to find that Louis’s forces had entered the walled city and were besieging the castle. The French prince himself was further south, besieging Dover, and the count of Perche was in command at Lincoln, surrounded by the bulk of the rebellious English earls. The French knew that Marshal was arriving, but they procrastinated over strategy. As they did so, Marshal was addressing his knights with a speech to rival that written by Shakespeare for Henry V: ‘These men have seized and taken by force our lands and our possessions,’ he said. ‘Shame on the man who does not strive, this very day, to put up a challenge … if we beat them, it is no lie to say that we will have won eternal glory for the rest of our lives.’

  The rhetoric worked. Marshal took charge of the loyal knights, telling them to be ready to slit their own horses’ throats if they needed to take shelter behind the carcasses in the open plain that lay before the northern entrance to the city. Bishop des Roches commanded the crossbowmen, and Ranulf earl of Chester one group of knights, but they could only watch with awe as Marshal led a direct frontal cavalry attack on the city and the French besiegers. The old man was so desperate to join battle that he almost forgot to put on his helmet before he charged the enemy. When he adjusted his armour and led the first charge, he ploughed into the French defenders with such force that he punched a hole three lances deep in their lines. If this was the last chance to save the dynasty he had served all his life, then Marshal was determined to give it his all.

  Six bloody and brutal hours of fighting ensued. It was a grisly, awful scene: the air filled with the deafening clang of weapons upon helmets, lances shattering and flying in splinters into the air, limbs crushed and severed by blows from swords and maces, and sharp daggers plunging into the sides of men and horses alike. They fought through the city, until the streets heaved with heads and blood and human entrails. ‘The noise,’ recalled Marshal, ‘was so great that you would not have heard God thunder.’

  At the end of the fighting, the French were roundly defeated. Almost every major rebel baron was captured, and the count of Perche died when a spear was thrust through his eye and into his brain. When the news of the loss reached Prince Louis in Dover, he immediately raised his siege, made for London and began to think of terms for withdrawal.

  But the war would not end before the French suffered worse humiliation. In August they were beaten at sea, when Hubert de Burgh commanded a resounding naval victory at Sandwich over French troops led by the pirate captain Eustache the Monk – who would later become the subject of his own Robin Hood-style outlaw romance. The English showered the French with arrows, and blinded them by throwing quicklime downwind, to burn out their eyes. Eustache the Monk was captured hiding in the ship’s bilges. He was offered a choice: beheading on the side of a siege engine, or on the ship’s rail. It is not recorded which fate he chose.

  It was all enough for Prince Louis. Henry’s regency government had shown its mettle on the battlefield, and the French prince was happy enough to pocket a bribe and leave. His departure averted the greatest external threat to the English Crown in a century.

  From Marshal to Magna Carta

  William Marshal, regent of England, had lived to t
he age of seventy-three before his health began to fail him, but in the spring of 1219, after a distinguished life of service, he died. For many in England this was a matter of great dismay, for Marshal was as close to a non-partisan figure as existed: a loyal critic of the Crown, who had been unwavering in his support of Plantagenet kingship but never afraid to criticize when he felt that they were behaving improperly or ruling badly.

  Marshal’s life story was interwoven with all the great kings of his age: Henry II, Henry the Young King, Richard I, John, Louis VII, Philip II and latterly, in battle, the future Louis VIII. He had held the torch for the passing of Plantagenet kingship to another generation, but his age now was past. Without his guiding hand, and sureness of principle and mind, the world looked set to prove an awkward and turbulent place.

  In the days before he died Marshal dealt with many things, not least his children’s futures, and his wish to be invested as a Knight Templar in fulfilment of his crusader’s vow. Most important of all, he thought of Henry III’s future, and how best the child king should be educated to ensure the prosperity of his kingdom. As he lay suffering, he called for the twelve-year-old king, and took him by the hand. He told him that he wished him to be passed into the care of the new papal legate Pandulph (who had replaced Guala in 1218), and then exhorted the king to lead a better life than his father.