Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  The great historian of Richard’s reign, John Gillingham, has made two further crucial points. A direct comparison of the resources available to John and Philip might just, on the concentration of force argument, show that Philip had greater power in Normandy, on the basis that the wealth of England and Aquitaine could not be entirely mobilised to defend Normandy. But such a comparison would be unreal, ignoring as it does the clear and obvious fact that Richard in 1198-99 had powerful allies on Philip’s eastern flank (in the shape of the German princes and Baldwin of Flanders), and that the combined resources of this coalition easily outweighed Philip’s.87 The overwhelming consensus of all the most reliable contemporary chroniclers was that in 1198-99 Richard was richer than Philip.88 Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the proposition that in 1203-04 John had inferior resources to Philip’s, this could only be, as a matter of pure logic, because he had alienated the allies Richard cultivated so assiduously, so that they departed on crusade and deprived John of the Angevin’s second front. Gillingham’s second argument in effect turns the ‘concentration of force’ thesis on its head. If it is accepted that it is not just a question of resources, but the direction and deployment of those resources, then we can easily appreciate that in 1197-98 Richard both outspent Philip in buying key allies but also won the propaganda war by being more generous.89 In short, even if we exclude the factors of treachery and mercenaries from the count against John, we discern a clear pattern of a successful Richard and failing John that has nothing whatever to do with revenues, resources or structures. It is surprising that the financial argument purporting to favour John has been given so much consideration, for Richard’s position in Normandy in 1194 was far weaker than John’s ten years later, as vast amounts of money had to be diverted from the war zone to pay the huge ransom in Germany. 1194 comes into the picture in another way, for it was John’s willingness to surrender most of upper Normandy to Philip in January that year which so alienated many of the Normans and led to the fracturing of the duchy, with ducal power only really strong thereafter in the central and western areas, from Rouen to the Cotentin.90

  In the propaganda war between Richard and Philip Augustus, Richard was always the winner, and indeed in the late 1190s Philip was widely regarded as an oppressive ruler.91 Only someone with an even worse reputation would lose a propaganda war against the French king, and John duly obliged. William of Newburgh made the important anti-deterministic point that personal charisma could transcend resentment caused by heavy taxation, and this Richard was always able to do; John clearly was not.92 Widely perceived as a great Christian hero, Richard was given the kind of leeway never permitted to John, as Ralph of Coggleshall pointed out.93 Yet even without the uneven personality contest, John never matched Richard. V.D. Moss roundly asserts: ‘John’s failure to match Richard’s fiscal performance as duke of Normandy must carry significant weight in any explanation of the duchy’s fall.’94 Of course, financial performance and propaganda persona can never entirely be considered separately, for John’s murder of Arthur affected his revenue collection as well as his general credibility. John lost control of the eastern marches of Normandy very early in his reign, and it was because of his own weakness that he eventually lost the entire province. It was his incompetence and double-dealing that alienated William des Roches and the rest of the great Norman magnates; it was his poor showing as a monarch that led Baldwin of Boulogne and the German princes to depart on crusade instead of allying themselves with him; it was his brutal and cowardly murder of Arthur that completed the process of disgust and disillusionment.95 Add to that his morbid fear of betrayal, his tendency to panic, the objective fact that most Norman nobles did betray him, plus the depredations of his mercenaries and it is truly staggering - and certainly against any conceivable version of Occam’s razor - that historians should have sought financial and structural reasons for his failure in Normandy.96 The brutal fact is this: John and John alone, because of his vices and failings, lost Normandy. Richard would never have done so - and indeed he held the whip hand against Philip until the end of his life and was clearly winning the Normandy war. Normandy would never have become part of Capetian France while Richard was alive, which is not to say that it could never long-term have suffered such a fate.97 We are concerned only with Richard and John, and it is as clear as anything can be that Richard was a winner and John a loser. Nothing succeeds like success, and men knew that Richard won battles and campaigns and could therefore be followed with confidence. With John the reverse was the case.

  Fully to trace the manifold consequences of the loss of Normandy would take one too far away from a dual biography of Richard and John. Among the many byways are those concerning the impact of 1204 on English law, and particularly the development of laws against treason and aliens. Under a system of divided loyalties, where barons did homage to both the duke of Normandy and the king of France under the complex system of overlapping fealty already noted, the notion of treason was both absurd and otiose, and vassals were still allowed to rebel against lords without incurring the dread charge of traitorous behaviour. This situation began to change after 1204, much more rapidly in England than in France.98 Because of divided loyalties, it was not easy to prove a charge of treason, but it started to become simpler once Philip and John were ruling distinct and non-overlapping realms. It was only much later in the thirteenth century that the French monarch St Louis insisted on an absolutely clear distinction between fealties. But the loss of Normandy did throw the issue of land tenure into sharper focus. In 1205 Philip Augustus confiscated the lands of all knights with property in Normandy who lived in England unless they returned by a given date; John retaliated by a similar order expropriating lands in England held by Norman knights who threw in their lot with Philip.99 Magnates faced a stark choice: they must decide whether their future lay in England or Normandy, for there was no halfway-house. This was a tough decision for the many barons who had lands in both countries, but at least their position was easier than that of the sub-tenants, wards, widows and others, whose feudal future depended on the judgement or whim of overlords, guardians or former husbands. At least it was possible to change one’s mind if the initial choice of lords and lands proved misguided; on payment of a suitable sum (officially a fine), barons could buy back their forfeited lands and change residences. It was only in 1244 that St Louis ended this free-and-easy system and insisted on a once-for-all choice: one must either be French or English with no backsliding.100 The only notable exception to the either-or binary land system imposed by John and Philip seems to have been the great paladin William Marshal, who retained a foot in both camps. He was allegedly given John’s permission to do homage to Philip for lands he continued to hold in Normandy, though Marshal angered John by telling him that this meant he could not make war on the French king, who was thereby a liege lord.101 It seems that the special status accorded to Marshal was resented by his less prestigious and powerful fellow-barons. The ageing Baldwin of Bethune advised John that he had been foolish to make such a concession and that he should make no further exceptions.102

  The schism between England and Normandy, after nearly 150 years of convergence, sharpened the distinctions between Frenchmen and Englishmen, so that in John’s later reign a tradition of hostility to France and all things French grew up; to some extent this was mirrored in Normandy where, as one of its distinguished scholars has remarked: ‘England suddenly became a forbidden land.’103 One obvious consequence of the loss of Normandy was that England began once more to be a sea power. Since England controlled the northern and western coasts of France after the Conquest of 1066, the Channel was secure, especially as for most of the twelfth century the other littoral powers (the counts of Boulogne and Flanders) were at least nominal English allies. Since John had to face the possibility that Philip Augustus might now mount an invasion of England, and also that he needed a fleet if he was to retain contact with Aquitaine, it is not surprising that the years after 1204 saw a drama
tic increase in naval activity, with more warships being built, more sailors hired and trained, and significant technological improvements coming on stream, including a primitive mariner’s compass, better rudders, lighthouses and more deadly armament on the war galleys, including Greek fire and boarding ladders and bridges.104 The naval preparations also connected organically with John’s long-term strategy, for he had not given up all hopes of a war of reconquest in Normandy. Many studies show John after 1204 building up his revenue steadily, against the day when he might challenge the French king to a rematch.105 Since the power of France really took off after the acquisition of Normandy, it is tempting to see these parallel developments as a skeletal form of the much later paradigm, perhaps not seen clearly until the Second Hundred Years War of 1689-1815, whereby a great land power confronted a great sea power - the elephant against the whale - although these tendencies were very much inchoate in the Middle Ages proper.

  Yet the most salient consequences of the loss of Normandy for John were those occurring in England. Deprived of the battleground in Normandy that had occupied so many years of the life of his father and brother, John naturally looked around for military glory nearer to home, and so he became more closely involved in the affairs of the Celtic fringes than either of his two successors had ever been. It is often cast up at Richard that he spent almost no time in England, as against John, who spent most of his reign there, but what is forgotten in the comparison is that John had no real choice. John was indeed the first king of foreign stock to travel widely in England, to make a real impact on the country, and to leave his traces in many different English localities, but he did not have northern France as his playground, as Richard did, and lacked the sentimental regard for Aquitaine that Richard possessed.106 Philip Augustus’s triumph in Normandy spelled trouble for Scotland, Wales and Ireland. If the flight of John’s barons from Normandy consequent on Philip’s land settlement there was in some ways a pre-echo of the flight of the Jacobite lords after the Williamite land settlement in Ireland in 1691, with severe losses occurring on both occasions, at least in the years after 1204 the dispossessed Normans had alternative lands to conquer in compensation.107 But there was trouble in store for John too as a result of the flight of the barons. Having given up (or been forced to give up) their Norman lands, the new barons domiciled in England had more time to concentrate on the affairs of the island, with unpleasant consequences for John, especially as this development went in tandem with a growing body of opinion that argued that feudal obligations did not include the duty of English men to serve on the continent. There are even those who say that the discontent and troublemaking among the Norman barons marooned in England had a cultural tinge, since they yearned for the ethos of jousting and the troubadours, yet England was very far from being a centre of tournaments but rather of pedestrian, picayune and peace-loving pursuits.108 At all events a yawning gap soon opened up between the barons and John, increasingly cocooned with his household knights. The events of 1204 lit a fuse that would eventually explode with Magna Carta in 1215.

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  FOR A YEAR JOHN pondered his military response to the loss of Normandy. Logic pointed to an expedition to Poitou, since Eleanor of Aquitaine’s death in 1204 removed the legal obstacle to Philip’s expansion in that direction. Sure enough, once he had mopped up in Normandy, Philip sent William des Roches on the invasion of Poitou with a strong army of mercenaries under Cadoc. Des Roches gained marked early success: the dithering barons like the viscount of Thouars threw in with Philip, and the entire territory was soon in French hands, except for the port of La Rochelle and the castle of Niort.1 Saumur, Poitiers, Loudun, Chinon, Loches, Tours and Amboise were all in Capetian hands, and Philip rubbed it in by making a triumphal tour of his conquests.2 Further French expansion was problematical, for Angoulême was held by Isabella in her own right and not simply as John’s wife (Count Aymer died in 1202), but that might not have stopped Philip Augustus. What gave him pause was the sudden stiffening of resistance in the far south, as Aquitaine made it plain that it preferred a distant English king as overlord, one who would not interfere too much, to a strong centralising French monarch. John decided to seize the moment; 28,000 marks were raised from scutage, and the money was sent to Bordeaux to prepare and equip a host of 30,000 Aquitaine loyalists against John’s expected disembarkation there.3 But now John faced the Richard factor in reverse. If England had been nothing to Richard, who neglected it in favour of his beloved Aquitaine, by the same token Aquitaine was nothing to the English barons who were now being asked to pour blood and treasure into a major venture in south-west France. For them the prime concern was Normandy. Many of them had lands in Normandy that looked certain to be lost irretrievably unless John waged a war of reconquest there. It was the lesser nobility, owning but a few manors, who were hardest hit and pressed most vehemently for a campaign in Normandy. It was only a handful of them who were able to pull off the

  3. The French Campaigns

  ingenious kind of swap arranged by Ellis of Wimberville and Alan Martell; since Martell had lands in England and Wimberville in France, though both had their main abode in the other country, they simply agreed to an exchange.4

  It is clear that in the year 1205 John and his barons were in serious disagreement about the strategy to be adopted against Philip, and some scholars say that the discord went beyond military matters, that the outlines of 1215 were already in sight. The three great lords of Chester, Pembroke and Leicester, with massive land holdings in Normandy, led the way into conflict with John by coming to a private agreement with Philip Augustus: for a payment of five hundred marks from each of them he agreed not to confiscate or expropriate their estates for a year and a day; if these were still under his control by that time, they would do homage to him.5 It was quite clear to everyone that there had either to be a rapid reconquest of Normandy by John or a permanent settlement with Philip, and that this expedient was simply to buy time. John grudgingly agreed to the temporary arrangement made by the trio with Philip, and the earls of Chester and Leicester confidently looked forward to a war of reconquest. The position of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, was different. He had long regarded himself as the equal, if not superior, of anointed kings, and seems to have hoped for a settlement with himself as tertius gaudens, somehow owing allegiance to both kings and serving two masters, and with all his estates intact. It followed that William Marshal headed those who advised a campaign in Aquitaine rather than Normandy, but it also followed that the barons who stood to lose out heavily if John did not reconquer Normandy resented William Marshal and whispered to John that here was an overmighty subject who was unreliable.6 The details of court life in 1204-05 are notoriously obscure but acrimonious exchanges were frequent. In some men’s eyes the factionalism at court and the uncertainty about the future seemed mirrored in the chaos principle at large in Nature, for the winter of 1204-05 was extraordinarily severe. The Thames froze after Christmas, and snow and ice took such a toll that the rock-hard soil could not be ploughed until late in March. Meanwhile crops were destroyed wholesale, and the spectre of famine loomed. The cost of foodstuffs became hyperinflationary, with oats ten times the pre-Christmas price by March 1205 and a handful of vegetables fetching half a mark on the open market. The superstitious said that God had punished John for his sins by taking Normandy from him and was now extending his wrath to England.7

  But John’s problems did not even end there. While he and his barons argued about the most rational military response, they could by no means assume that Philip Augustus would simply loll in idleness on the other side of the Channel. The possibility that he might invade England was real and deeply troubling, exciting all John’s latent paranoia and tendency to panic. At a council in London in January 1205 John decreed that the whole kingdom was to be organised into a giant commune for defence of the realm, and all persons above the age of twelve had to take an oath of allegiance to the commune. Constables would be appointed in every borough and
hundred and they would serve under the direction of the chief constables of the county and bring their levies at their command; anyone failing in duty to the commune was to be regarded as a public enemy;8 there was indeed a whiff of the French revolution about the panic of 1205. A quota system for national defence was adopted: nine knights were to equip and pay a tenth at the rate of two shillings a day. Anyone failing to rush to arms when the enemy landed on English shores would be visited with the most condign penalties: those with land would be disinherited forever, while those without would be reduced to perpetual slavery.9 No ship was allowed to leave any English port without the express permission of the king. It is difficult to know whether all this was hysterical overreaction. Certainly the dukes of Brabant and Boulogne (Henry and Renaud respectively), formerly enemies but now allies and supporters of Philip, had often claimed lands in England as the true property of their wives (on the grounds that they were grand-daughters of Stephen and Matilda, barefacedly robbed of their property by Henry II) and for once seemed to have an opportunity to enforce their claims.10 Some have speculated that John’s insistence on oaths of loyalty and dire penalties for treason show that he really feared a stab in the back from his own barons more than an invasion by Philip, and the lack of confidence between king and baron was almost overtly evinced at a council at Oxford held on 27-29 March 1205. John insisted on yet another oath of obedience and the barons agreed, but first they in turn compelled the king to agree that he would, with their advice, maintain the rights of the kingdom inviolate, to the utmost of his power.11 The entente between John and his magnates hardly sounds like a marriage made in heaven.

  One of John’s problems was that, although he had a personal household of sycophants, hangers-on and yes-men, he had no close relationship with any noble of repute and, moreover, disliked most of them. He positively hated Ranulf, earl of Chester, and suspected him of treason, mainly on the specious grounds that he had married the widowed Constance of Britanny, Arthur’s mother. But this marriage was entirely the product of political circumstance, not sentiment and had no deep roots. Ranulf cared nothing for Arthur, nor Constance for him, it seemed, as she shortly decamped to yet another marriage (with Guy of Thouars) without even bothering to get a divorce. Yet Ranulf evidently knew too many of the dirty little secrets of John’s court (probably also about the murder of Arthur), so he became a favourite scapegoat for John’s paranoid rages.12 In April 1203 John accused him of plotting with the Bretons but was forced to back down when Roger Lacy, commandant of Château-Gaillard, backed Ranulf ’s protestations of innocence in every detail. In December 1204 John suddenly took it into his head that Ranulf had been plotting with some Welsh rebels led by Gwenwynwyn and ordered his estates seized, and once again unimpeachable witnesses forced John to stay his angry hand.13 John could blow hot and cold with Ranulf and keep him in a state of nervous tension but he had few options when it came to another of his hate figures: Hubert Walter, the archbishop of Canterbury. Hubert was Richard’s man and had governed England expertly in Richard’s absence during 1194-99, and it was probably this that most rankled with John. But because Hubert had been treated with respect by greater men than John, and could not abide the new king’s shallowness and duplicity, he probably treated him with less than the deference John thought his due. It was also one of Hubert Walter’s ambitions to achieve a permanent peace between John and Philip Augustus - yet another issue that made him anathema in John’s eyes.14