Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Trying to divide and rule, John decided that it would be the lesser of two evils if he could encourage William Marshal’s ambitions - if that also meant he could cock a snook at Hubert Walter. He therefore pointedly cut Hubert out of the loop and sent Marshal (together with vice-chancellor Hugh of Wells) on a secret mission to Paris. Marshal took the opportunity to make it a point of understanding with John that, while in Paris, he could press his own plans to safeguard his Normandy lands, even if that meant paying homage to Philip.15 John grudgingly consented but then almost immediately repented, for word got out in the court that William Marshal had been granted this ‘dispensation’ and other, more minor and therefore more hard-pressed barons, lobbied to have the same privilege extended to them.16 Marshal and Hugh of Wells met Philip at Compiègne and seem to have put forward some phantom peace proposals which, in Marshal’s mind at least, were merely the diplomatic prelude to his real purpose - getting Philip to guarantee his Normandy lands. Philip asked for time to consider all John’s proposals but went for the jugular by pointedly reminding Marshal that the said period of grace of a year and a day had almost expired. ‘You may find it the worse for you if you do not do me immediate homage,’ were his reported words.17 Marshal thereupon went through the form of homage. Meanwhile Hubert Walter had learned of the secret mission and sent his own envoy to Paris to warn Philip that according to the laws of England Wells and Marshal had no power to conclude a treaty. Philip then humiliated his two guests by pointing this out at their next meeting, at Anet. Meanwhile Hubert Walter’s special agent (Ralf of Ardenne) further stirred the pot by speeding back to England and telling John that the terms of the homage sworn by William Marshal compelled him to side with the French king in any dispute with the English monarch.18 John, in another of his paranoid rages, declared that the lords of England would be assembled to hear a charge of treason against Marshal. John had some justification for his anger. The formula by which Marshal tried to avoid having to take sides was that he offered Philip Augustus ‘liege homage on this side of the sea’. As one of John’s biographers rightly remarks: ‘It is a curious formula for which no precedent can be found in feudal law, and its precise meaning is not clear.’19

  The collision between John and William Marshal was in many ways an accident waiting to happen. Richard had his differences with Marshal but he knew how to distinguish the political and the purely personal, as John did not. Although John did not in Marshal’s case harbour the extreme dislike, and even hatred, he felt for Hubert Walter or Ranulf of Chester, nonetheless he was always uneasy around him. Although he turned to him for advice, particularly on the affairs of Normandy, on which he considered him expert, confirmed him as earl of Pembroke and permitted him a degree of frank speaking rarely vouchsafed to other courtiers, John was always cool towards Marshal. He resented his gravitas, his proud bearing, his poise and dignity, his prestige as a warrior and jouster, his reputation as a counsellor, his skill as a negotiator and the way people spoke of him as the most loyal servant of the Angevins. Marshal for his part thought John wrong on almost every issue of policy and secretly despised him; he went through the motions of being King John’s man but his heart was not in it; he yearned for the halcyon days of the Young King, the only Angevin he had ever truly loved .20 The contretemps over the homage to Philip brought all the latent antagonism to the surface. On paper John had a case in his suspicion of Marshal. In feudal law it was recognised that one could hold fiefs from different lords and even that one could do homage to them in respect of these fiefs, but there was no precedent for Marshal’s attempt to have it both ways and to owe personal service to two masters. Marshal was in effect trying to evade the law of excluded middle by claiming that in France he was Philip’s man and in England John’s - a position that raised theological and philosophical possibilities. If Marshal was travelling with John’s fleet to France and the vessels were intercepted by Philip’s warships in mid-Channel, on what side would Marshal fight then? On the other hand, John had clearly been foolish in (out of spite for Hubert Walter) granting Marshal permission to do homage to Philip without thinking through the implications of such a step.21 The issue remained in limbo for the moment but would burst out again with a vengeance later in 1205.

  By the early summer of 1205 John was becoming increasingly confident that Philip would not invade England; all his military actions seemed to be concentrated in central and southern France. John therefore strained every nerve and harnessed all possible resources to mount a dual counteroffensive against the French; this was his way of cutting the Gordian knot, the paralysis created by two opposite groups of advisers counselling very different strategies.22 One expedition was destined for Poitou, to be commanded by John’s shadowy bastard son Geoffrey, and this was to have its jumping-off point at Dartmouth in Devon. Meanwhile a much larger army and navy were being assembled at Portsmouth, ready for a strike across the Channel and a landing in Normandy. The pincer strategy thus envisaged required colossal feats of organisation, planning and logistics. A quarter of the revenue for the year was spent solely on military and naval preparations.23 The entire kingdom hummed and pullulated with the sights and sounds of a realm stretched to maximum capacity for war-fighting. Wagons and carts streamed across the country en route to the south coast, their cursing and sweating drivers enduring traffic jams, road bottlenecks and tailbacks. With bacon, venison, wool, sailcloth, wood and iron on board the groaning wagons, destined for use during the manufacture of everything from ships to crossbows, the country resembled a gigantic itinerant fair. Some observers said that John’s preparations eclipsed even Richard’s preparations for the crusade.24 Even when we allow for the exaggerations of the chroniclers, who provided an impossible tally of 1,500 ships, it is clear that in 1205 John assembled the greatest force yet seen in English history, with a total of some 30,000 men, all allegedly ‘ready and willing to go with the king over the sea.’25 He held a preliminary muster of the land forces at Northampton in May, declared himself satisfied and arrived at Porchester Castle on the Solent on the last day of the month. For ten days he commuted between Porchester and Portsmouth, overseeing fleet preparations, then on 9 June announced that all had been done to his satisfaction and that he was ready for the great enterprise.

  John’s preparations show a keen interest in sea power, but it must be emphasised that he was building on foundations laid by Richard. When he set out for the Holy Land, Richard assembled a fleet drawn from all the ports of the English and Bristol channels: 33 of the more than one hundred vessels came from the Cinque Ports, three each from Shoreham and Southampton, and the rest from Brixham, Dartmouth, Plymouth, Bristol and divers other ports.26 There was thus a pre-existing administrative apparatus for fleet assembly that John could draw on. Moreover, in 1196 Richard built seventy cursoria - seaworthy vessels primarily used on patrol along the Seine, and which John had used in his abortive attempt to raise the siege of Château-Gaillard in 1203. It was Richard too who had founded Portsmouth, under the protection of the royal castle at Porchester, as an embryonic naval dockyard. It was therefore Richard rather than John who was the true father of English sea power.27 Yet because of the loss of Normandy, John had perforce to exceed in degree anything Richard achieved as a naval planner. His originality lay in extending the idea of the mercenary force into the maritime area, with forty-five galleys being built in 1203-04 to patrol the waters around southern England. Galleys - equipped with both sails and banks of oars to secure independence from the wind - were always the principal type of warship, but they were expensive and John soon found the need to supplement them from other sources.28 In effect he decreed a nationalisation of all shipping, ordering the constables in southern ports to seize all vessels that could be converted for war purposes, even if the craft could carry no more than half a dozen horses. In his energetic moods John could be a dynamo, and he had his own early version of the Churchillian ‘Action This Day’. The Patent Rolls habitually contain the injunctions ‘Hasten immediately’ or
‘Work day and night.’29 The rise of sea power under John helped some of his favourites, who attained high positions in the navy. William of Wrotham and Reginald of Cornhill became in effect the very first lords of the admiralty,30 while John’s half-brother William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, became the first admiral of the fleet. Longsword was the only great magnate who was a genuine crony of John’s. John liked to carouse and roister with him and even paid his gambling debts.31

  It was during these days at Porchester that John tried to settle accounts with William Marshal. In the presence of the assembled barons, he revived the charge that in paying homage to Philip Augustus, Marshal had acted treasonably. Marshal calmly replied that he had done no more than John had given him permission to do. ‘In that case,’ said John, ‘come to France with me and fight for the recovery of my inheritance against this king to whom you have rendered harmless homage.’ Marshal replied that feudal law made this impossible: one could not with honour fight against an overlord to whom one had paid homage. John turned to his barons in triumph: was this not express treason, he asked? Before they could answer, Marshal cut in with a stirring appeal: ‘Let this be a warning to all of you. What the king is planning to do to me he will do to all of you once he becomes powerful enough.’ The words struck home. To John’s horror and fury the barons began to back away, shuffling uneasily, mumbling and muttering excuses that they had other pressing business. ‘By God’s teeth,’ John exploded, ‘it is plain to see that none of my barons are with me in this: I smell treason, the whole thing looks ugly and I must take counsel with my bachelors.’32 His young henchmen naturally agreed that Marshal could have no cogent reason for not accompanying his liege lord to France. The problem was: who was to bell the cat? One of the more intelligent household knights pointed out that if William contested the justice of John’s decision, the issue could be decided only on the field of combat, by a judicially sanctioned duel, and which of them had the prowess to beat Marshal in single combat? There was a general murmur of agreement, and a general consensus emerged that the best action was to take no action. Seeing that no one was prepared to stand forth as his champion, John stormed away to dinner in high dudgeon. After a couple of days fuming in impotent fury, he finally decided to let the matter drop and to adopt correct and civil, if frosty, relations with the overmighty William Marshal.

  But the barons were not at odds with John only on the issue of Marshal. Their reluctance to support the king against him derived from their general reluctance to take part in the expedition in the first place. Despite the many straws in the wind indicating that he might have a rebellion on his hands, John ignored the evidence and waited only for the one wind he really cared about: the favourable breeze that would carry him to Normandy. Seeing that winks and nods were unavailing, the two men with the greatest prestige in England, Hubert Walter and William Marshal, decided to take the bull by the horns, with the enthusiastic backing of virtually the entire English aristocracy. They began by urging John to think again and to abandon the ‘quixotic’ expedition to Normandy, piling argument on argument until the king could stand it no longer. Philip Augustus was too powerful, they said, he had overwhelming local superiority; the English and the king himself could end up trapped like the Athenians at Syracuse in 413 BC; to trust the Poitevins as allies was folly as they were notoriously treacherous. Besides, if the expedition cleared from Portsmouth, England would be left undefended, inviting a counterstrike from the count of Boulogne, who would never have a better chance, since any campaign would be a walkover with the entire English army abroad. A king should not be a gambler, they advised, and especially one who had no heir and could easily die in Normandy. John listened but gave no indication that he had heard anything he wanted to consider even for a moment. In desperation the two envoys fell to their knees in tears, beseeching him to see reason. When John still remained obdurate, they showed the steel beneath the deference: ‘if he would not listen to their entreaties, they would forcibly detain him lest the entire kingdom be thrown into chaos by his departure’.33 Walter and Marshal were actually demonstrating statesmanship, trying to head off a situation that would lead to civil war or constitutional crisis, for they foresaw that a direct order from the king to embark would be met by almost universal refusal by the barons. In tears of rage and frustration John was hustled away to Winchester by his closest advisers to sleep on it and come up with second thoughts.34 But there were none. Next morning John was back at Portsmouth, this time apparently trying to whip up the ‘patriotic’ feelings of the ordinary soldiers and sailors against their ‘cowardly’ masters. He actually boarded the royal galley with his household knights and cruised up and down the Channel for three days, trying to shame the barons into joining him. But it was all in vain. He finally realised that both he and the expedition were going nowhere. In a rage he put into Studland at Dorset and announced the indefinite postponement of the Normandy expedition.35

  The subsidiary expedition from Dartmouth to Poitou did, however, manage to clear from English shores, as did a small force under the earl of Salisbury, sent to shore up the garrison at La Rochelle. The only immediate result was the ransoming of two of John’s cronies taken captive after the fall of Loches and Chinon, Hubert de Burgh and Gérard d’Athée, two men, not coincidentally, cordially loathed by the English barons.36 But John began patiently to lay the foundations for a great campaign in Aquitaine that would take advantage of local antipathy to Philip Augustus. First he strengthened the defences of the Channel Islands - a major way-station on the seaborne route to the Bay of Biscay. In the winter of 1205-06 he built eight huge transport ships and sent chests of treasure to Poitou to consolidate the loyalty of the magnates there.37 Next he undertook an extensive tour of northern England to win hearts and minds in the early months of 1206, successfully whipping up support from the northern lords; the itinerary took him first to Yorkshire and then to Cumberland, Lancashire and Cheshire.38 Finally, he assembled another armada of warships and transports, though on a less spectacular scale than for the ill-fated Normandy expedition of 1205; once again the Cinque Ports were the principal providers. Again the rendezvous was at Portsmouth, though this time there was no foot-dragging by the barons, mainly because the great lords who sailed with him were largely the barons of the north he had so effectively conciliated in his charm offensive a few months earlier.39 John was in good heart, for Niort and La Rochelle still held out, the former courageously defended by Savary de Mauléon, one of the few prisoners taken at Mirebeau and released under a promise of fealty who had actually kept his word.40 With a formidable fleet John and his army sailed for La Rochelle on 29 April and arrived there on 7 June.

  John was further encouraged by the influx of Aquitaine vassals eager to fight Philip, but wisely decided he was still not strong enough to try conclusions with Philip in a pitched battle. He therefore marched out to Niort and relieved the defenders there, then feinted towards Poitiers before turning abruptly south towards the Garonne. His objective was the supposedly impregnable castle of Montauban, said to be so secure against attackers that not even the great Charlemagne had been able to breach its defences. John was back to his military best on this campaign. As if in emulation of his legendary brother he took just fifteen days to reduce Montauban, using powerful siege engines. The spoils from Montauban’s fall on 1 August were impressive: not just horses, arms and money but a quantity of wealthy noble prisoners, whose ransom would bring him another small fortune.41 Confident that his position in Aquitaine was now secure, he headed north and was back at Niort by 21 August, whence he proceeded to raid across the Poitou/Berry border. That John was on a winning streak was clear when the ace trimmer, the viscount of Thouars, once more changed his allegiance and returned to John’s fold. As if this was not enough, from England came the news of the death of his old enemy Hubert Walter. John exulted in his usual brutal manner: ‘Now for the first time I am king of England!’ he exclaimed with typical hyperbole.42 With northern Poitou under his control, John next
aimed at Anjou, aiming his thrust at the precise point on the Loire where Anjou, Poitou and Britanny meet. After fording the Loire in a histrionic and melodramatic manner, implying that he was a God-endorsed saviour (in reality he took advantage of unusually low water levels), he fought his way into Angers and held court in the home of his ancestors.43 In September he pressed on as far as the border with Maine, all the time emphasising his credibility but taking care not to encounter Philip’s main army. Finally Philip was stung into action and led his host to the borders of Poitou. John, who had achieved all his propaganda objectives, was anxious not to be sucked into a pitched battle and put out peace feelers. Philip’s ready acquiescence seemed to signal that, as long as his position in Normandy was not threatened, he was prepared to tolerate John’s hegemony in the south.44 The truce agreed between the two monarchs on 13 October 1206 was to last for two years. During that time each sovereign would retain the homage and services of the lords who had fought for him in 1206, and disputes were to be settled by a tribunal of four barons, two from either side. Trade and communications were to continue as normal.45 John had reason to be satisfied. He had secured his mother’s inheritance and retrieved his situation in Poitou, while gaining invaluable experience in seaborne and amphibious operations. But he may have realised that he had been lucky, both in that Philip’s aims in the south were not expansionist and that the perilous voyage around Ushant and into the Bay of Biscay had proceeded without mishap. A decisive campaign against Philip would mean bringing a larger army by that route, and the potential for disaster by shipwreck and storm was clear.46