Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  John realised that another trial of strength with Philip would require years of careful planning and preparation. He therefore turned away from the affairs of France and began to interest himself in his own Celtic fringes. The easiest to deal with of the three non-English regions in the British Isles was Scotland, since the overall cause of problems between that nation and England was the Scots’ demand for Northumbria and this the English kings adamantly refused to give up. From the very earliest days John’s relations with William of Scotland had been far more fractious than Richard’s and the pattern of shadow-boxing evident from early in the reign persisted into the first decade of the thirteenth century. John met the king of Scots at York in May 1207, and even set up a further meeting for 11 November that year, but William claimed the notice given was too short, and temporised so successfully that the two monarchs did not meet again until 1209.47 In that year John sent William a friendly invitation to meet in Newcastle, possibly because, being in Northumberland, it was ‘neutral’ territory, possibly because William was ill and John wanted to save him the trouble of the extra journey to York.48 Either way, the ensuing meeting was very short, as William was genuinely ill. There was enough time for John to demand that William restore the castles of Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh and that William’s son Alexander be sent into England as a hostage. Evidently William did not make a satisfactory answer to this demand, for we next find John in hostile mood towards the Scots.49

  Why the sudden enmity in summer 1209? One explanation is that William had reacted angrily and intemperately when John built a castle at Tweedmouth to destroy Berwick. Another is that William made the mistake of harbouring some of John’s enemies, especially recalcitrant bishops caught up in the great crisis with the Pope (see Chapter 16). Yet a third is that there was a conspiracy of northern barons against John that year in which William was implicated. Needless to say, all these explanations have had their passionate scholarly expositors and detractors. 50 But probably the profoundest underlying cause of tension was that John got wind of Philip Augustus’s attempt to bring Scotland into his orbit by offering a dynastic marriage. The much-married serial monogamist Philip was once again tiring of his current wife and seeking to get an annulment of the latest marriage.51 What is much clearer is the upshot. Hearing that John was assembling an army south of the border preparatory to full-scale invasion, William sent him a more emollient message, but John continued grim and implacable and advanced as far as Bamburgh by the end of July 1209. Matters were now very serious but William was too ill to organise effective resistance and so was forced into a shameful climb-down. Wishing to buy time, he was forced into the humiliating treaty of Norham in August 1209. This stipulated that William was to pay John an indemnity of 15,000 marks, to send thirteen hostages into England and to agree to the marriage of his daughters to John’s sons. For the sake of peace John accepted the Scots king’s disingenuous denial that he had ever negotiated a marriage with Philip. Finally, William’s son Alexander was to hold William’s lands in England from John; William’s hope was that, whereas John could not stomach ceding Northumbria to him, he might be prepared to do so in future to his son - a hope that was almost certainly vain.52

  For two years the Scots lay low. The instalments of the agreed indemnity were paid on time, although the means remains a mystery since the king of the Scots was already heavily in debt to Jewish moneylenders and owed the estate of ‘Aaron the Jew’ the sum of £2,776.53 John and William met again, at Durham in February 1212; each swore to protect the other in all just quarrels. This was more than just empty diplomatic protocol, for William was beginning to be hard pressed within his own dominions.54 A serious rebellion in Scotland had been engineered by a formidable pretender, Guthred McWilliam, challenging the Anglo-Scottish ‘culture creep’ in the name of Gaeldom. The ageing William went to Durham determined to secure the succession for his son Alexander at all costs, but John made it plain that the price of his support would be high. The powerful English baron Eustace de Vesci fled to Scotland when John nipped one of the many baronial revolts in the bud, but John told William that he required Alexander to come south of the border and be held as hostage until the Scots gave Vesci up. Under pressure from his Scottish nobles, William refused the request, arguing that John already held his hostages from the treaty of Norham in England, a surety for Scotland’s good faith in the matter of Vesci. The record until December 1214, when William died, is far from clear, but it does not appear either that Vesci was surrendered or that any significant concession was made, even though John sent an army of mercenaries into Scotland to suppress the rising by Guthred McWilliam. Alexander succeeded his father without any help or hindrance from John, and the most plausible inference is that John made no move in Scotland as he already had his hands tied with a full-blown war in Wales.55

  Wales presented John with far more problems than Scotland. Stability there during the reign of Henry II had been guaranteed by Henry’s alliance with the uncontested supreme native ruler Rhys ap Gruffyd, who bestrode Welsh history of the second half of the twelfth century like a colossus. But when Henry died in 1189, succeeded by a man who had no interest in Wales, the older pattern of factionalism and chaos reasserted itself, even more so when Rhys himself died in 1197. As earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan during his obscure years, John knew all about the turbulence of Welsh politics, and he knew from bitter experience that it was a reflex action of discontented marcher lords and border barons to make common cause with Welsh princes. At his accession there were no less than three rival claimants as ruler of South Wales: Rhys’s sons Griffith and Maelgwyn and the more impressive Gwenwynwyn, son of Owen Cyfeiliog, prince of Powys. With English help Griffith seemed to have won the struggle by 1198 but he died in 1200, when Gwenwynwyn’s star definitely started to ascend. But at this very moment a contender burst onto the scene, later to be acknowledged as Rhys’s true spiritual successor: Llewellyn ap Iorweth, prince of North Wales. In a few years Llewellyn made all of South Wales his virtual appanage while John looked on, content to stir the pot occasionally and play divide and rule from a distance.56 He eventually decided that an alliance with Llewellyn was the best policy, an idea in which the Welsh prince readily acquiesced. In July 1202 he promised to do homage to John as soon as he returned from Normandy, in 1204 he was betrothed to John’s illegitimate daughter Joan, and in 1206 he married her.57

  John had eliminated the main opposition to Llewellyn by confining Gwenwynwyn in an English prison, but he was released in 1208 after doing homage to the English king. John’s overall triumph seemed secured when all the princes of North and South Wales did homage to him at Woodstock in October 120958 but, as so often in John’s reign, auspicious omens were merely the calm before the storm. The very next year saw a serious rift between John and Llewellyn when the Welsh prince decided to support the recreant William de Braose, who fled to Wales from Ireland just as John was setting sail across the Irish Sea (see below, p.344-45). In May 1211, fresh from what then looked like a military triumph in Ireland, John summoned Llewellyn’s rivals as allies and crossed the border into Wales at the head of a formidable army. He took the castle of Dyganwy but soon got bogged down in the mountain country of the north. While Llewellyn proved a master of guerrilla warfare, logistics and commisariat defeated John, whose army was soon starving and on the brink of collapse. John withdrew to re-equip his forces and make more methodical preparations for a tough campaign; he returned to the fray in July that year. Alarmed by John’s pertinacity, Llewellyn sent his wife (John’s daughter) to negotiate terms. John insisted on draconian terms for peace. Mid-Wales was reserved as an English enclave, thirty hostages were taken, and Llewellyn had to pay heavy reparations in the form of cattle and horses.59 Following hard on the treaty of Norham with William of Scotland and the campaign in Ireland in 1210, this triumph at first seemed to set the seal on John’s achievements in the British Isles. Walter of Coventry boasted: ‘In Ireland, Scotland and Wales there was no man who did not obey
the nod of the king of England - a thing which, it is well known, had never happened to any of his forefathers. ’60

  This was premature, for the wily Llewellyn was merely playing for time. The following year he pulled off the stroke that William of Scotland had tried and failed, namely securing an alliance with Philip Augustus.61 Secure in this powerful pledge of foreign support, Llewellyn denounced the treaty his wife had negotiated the year before. Angrily John took to the field once more. He diverted an impressive host assembled for a projected campaign in France to Chester and made such thorough preparations that no less than 8,500 men were dragooned into service as labourers for a massive castle-building project he had in mind. So determined was John that eighteen galleys and other naval craft were earmarked for an amphibious assault on Wales.62 Yet another baronial conspiracy distracted John so that he was unable to advance into Wales for the fire-and-sword chastisement he had intended; frustrated and therefore in a state of homicidal anger, he hanged 28 of the Welsh hostages. This was a bad mistake: Welsh princes who had previously been suspicious of Llewellyn’s ambitions now came to suspect John of wanting to have the whole of Wales under his dominion - a return to the situation under Henry I a hundred years earlier. When Llewellyn raised his standard as the purported saviour of Wales, his rivals joined him against the ‘English tyrant’. John perfectly verified the description by putting a price on the head of every Welshman delivered to him.63 While the barons and a new war with Philip Augustus preoccupied John, Llewellyn seized his chance and by the end of 1213 was again dominant in most of Wales. His real moment of glory came in the year 1215. While John and the barons argued and agonised over Magna Carta, Llewelyn swept all before him; Shrewsbury, Cardigan and Carmarthen all fell to his armies.64 It is amazing that some historians still seem impressed by John’s dubious achievements in Wales. His policy there was characterised by myopic short-termism, and he made the particular mistake of taking Gwenwynwyn out of the political equation, allowing Llewellyn to become over-powerful.

  John was no more successful long-term in Ireland. Since his ill-starred voyage there in 1185, much had happened but even to a wily politician like John most of it must have seemed esoteric and obscure. Richard I has often been blamed for having no interest in England but he had even less in Ireland, and did not even deprive John of his title of Lord of Ireland when his other fiefs were taken away from him in 1194. The result was near-chaos, with bloodshed, mayhem, revolt, rebellion and mini-civil wars the norm, and native Irish princes and English interlopers making a series of ad hoc indiscriminate alliances. It has been suggested that one factor in the chaos was that nearly all the leading actors in the English invasion of Ireland died young (Strongbow, Hugh de Lacy the elder, Robert FitzStephen, Maurice FitzGerald, Ramond le Gros, Miles of Cogan), leaving minors, heiresses or indirect descendants as successors; consequently the fiefs were temporarily administered by Crown agents who were woefully ignorant of conditions in Ireland.65 Meanwhile feuds between the native O’Conors and O’Briens weakened the position of the indigenous Irish in Connacht and Munster, making straight the ways for the English conquerors; Rory O’Conor, the last high king of Ireland, died in 1198. When Henry II died the dominant English figure in Ireland was the swashbuckling adventurer John de Courcy, who had conquered Ulster, Cortes-like, with a handful of men and been appointed justiciar by Henry. In circumstances that remain obscure de Courcy fell foul of Richard and was removed as justiciar in 1191 but, so murky are the sources for this decade, we do not know who, if anyone, succeeded him in this post. As de Courcy’s star dipped, another energetic Norman conqueror moved into the power vacuum. This was William de Burgh, who conquered most of modern Limerick and Tipperary and began meddling in the affairs of the all-Irish province of Connacht. Meanwhile the sons of Hugh de Lacy allied themselves with John de Courcy and attempted the conquest of Munster and Leinster.66

  John the great centraliser tried to rationalise the chaos in Ireland and began by appointing Meiler FitzHenry as justiciar.67 He neutralised John de Courcy in Leinster by strengthening the position of William Marshal, who had extensive holdings there, although he had never visited Ireland. He cajoled, bribed or persuaded the de Lacy brothers to jettison de Courcy and work closely with Meiler instead, and broke de Courcy by transferring the lordship of Ulster to Hugh de Lacy in 1205.68 Most of all, he employed accelerated promotion to boost the position of his favourite William de Braose. Scion of an ancient Norman family that had come over with William the Conqueror after the conquest of 1066, de Braose came to the fore around 1180 when he succeeded his father as a lord of the Welsh Marches and acquired the reputation of being tough, fearless and ruthless.69 Richard had liked his martial qualities and John appreciated them too, though there was always a time-bomb ticking away in the John-de Braose relationship, since de Braose knew the full facts about the murder of Arthur, and John knew that he knew.70 In the early years of John’s reign de Braose prospered mightily: he quickly became the most powerful English baron in South Wales, rich marriages were arranged for his children and one of his sons was given a bishopric; John even wrote off his extensive debts to Henry and Richard.71 A man of chilling ambition, he persuaded John to make him lord of Limerick in Ireland also, which brought him into immediate collision with William de Burgh, who was still governor of Limerick city.72 At first de Braose had difficulty enforcing his new land grant, as de Burgh and other Leinster grant holders did not relish their demotion from tenants-in-chief of the king to undertenants of de Braose and initially de Burgh and the other recalcitrants were supported by the justiciar Meiler. But in 1203 clear orders went out from John in England; the justiciar was ordered to ally himself with the de Lacy brothers and expel de Burgh from Limerick, which was duly accomplished.73 Evidently John then had second thoughts, or his machiavellian instinct for divide and rule got the better of him, for he restored all his Irish lands to him (except the ones in Connacht he did not control but which de Burgh, typically, still laid claim to).74

  John wanted to control Ireland personally and he wanted deputies he could rely on, which meant that at first he leaned on de Braose and William Marshal, but John’s almost reflex instincts of mistrust meant that he encouraged the English adventurers in Ireland to engage in a ‘potentially deadly game of snakes and ladders’75 in which treachery, murder and hostage-taking were reliable constants. Apart from the internecine struggle for dominance in Ulster, Leinster and Munster, all the Norman adventurers had their eyes fixed farther afield, on Connacht, the only province still under native Irish rule.76 The death of Roderic O’Conor in 1198 was the signal for civil war in Connacht between his sons, in which the English took an avid part. John de Courcy and the Lacys (Walter and Hugh, whose power base was in Meath) supported Cathal Crovderg O’Conor while William de Burgh and his Limerick acolytes backed Cathal Carrach, who was at first victorious. Then the new justiciar Meiler FitzHenry led the cohorts of Leinster against Cathal Carrach and turned the tables in a campaign in which Carrach was slain and his brother emerged triumphant.77 De Burgh then tried to stage a coup against Crovderg but was himself expelled. Yet the unfortunate Irish ruler had no illusions about the ambitions of the Normans to cross the Shannon and reduce him to vassalage. Crovderg would eventually ‘solve’ his problem by ceding two-thirds of Connacht to John himself, leapfrogging over his adventurer-barons, in return for the sum of one hundred marks a year, on the sole condition that the remaining third was guaranteed to him and his heirs in perpetuity. John accepted this deal but overegged the pudding by insisting that Meiler FitzHenry chose the two-thirds to be ceded. Not surprisingly, Crovderg refused these humiliating terms, and there the matter rested until John came to Ireland in person in 1210.78

  Meanwhile in the rest of Ireland the faction-fighting and semi-civil war between the English adventurers continued. The six-headed dragon of discord comprised de Braose, de Burgh, John de Courcy, the Lacy brothers and Meiler FitzHenry. When Meiler and Walter Lacy fell out, having cooperated earlier to dish Joh
n de Courcy, John tried to punish both by granting the entire custody of Limerick to de Braose. John at various times dealt with the adventurers he did not favour by summoning them to England; this was the fate both of John de Courcy and Walter Lacy.79 But Meiler FitzHenry upset John’s plans by promptly falling out with de Braose; in exasperation John privately vowed to replace his justiciar. The already cloudy Irish waters were further muddied when William Marshal insisted, against the wishes of a most reluctant king, on visiting his Irish domains in 1207 - Marshal was lord of Leinster by virtue of his 1189 marriage to Isabelle, Strongbow’s daughter. Marshal was a big fish in the Angevin empire considered as a totality and in Ireland he was more like a leviathan in the power stakes. Predictably the turbulent justiciar especially resented his coming and appealed to John. John did what he always did in such circumstances, which was to summon both men back to England. This would-be clever move solved nothing for both the followers of Marshal and Meiler FitzHenry carried on a war by proxy, ranging from intrigue to battlefield encounters. Meanwhile John made his preferences clear by welcoming Meiler and cold-shouldering Marshal.80 John then detained Marshal in England and sent Meiler back to Ireland, roundly declaring that no one had a right to question his justiciar’s rights to sieze fiefs if he (John) commanded it; he also ordered Marshal’s knights to return to England. 81 This ukase was aimed at Marshal, but Meiler saw the chance to use it to strike also at de Braose. This was a bad miscalculation, for de Braose was still John’s special favourite, and when Meiler moved against the de Braose interests in Limerick, John sharply rebuked his justiciar.82