On paper the rebels’ endeavour seemed a desperate venture, as the really big baronial guns held firm and stayed loyal to John. The earls of Salisbury, Chester, Albemarle, Warren and Cornwall, plus William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, all lined up behind the king. So did the lords of Aubigny, Vipont, De Lucy, Basset, Cantelupe, Neville and Brewer; all these had pointedly paid the scutage demanded by John which the ‘northerners’ so vehemently objected to.18 Although numerically inferior to the rebels, John’s loyal barons carried far more weight in terms of power, land, money and prestige. The two most notable were William Marshal and Ranulph de Mandeville, earl of Chester. Though with no illusions about John, and in some instances having suffered just as much objective damage as the rebels, these men took the view that only egregious tyranny could outweigh their feudal oaths of allegiance, and in their view John had not yet crossed the invisible line separating an authoritarian monarch from a despot; it would be a mistake to underrate the medieval fear of chaos as Satan’s work. The prestige of Marshal and Mandeville was particularly important: Marshal brought the senior Irish lords in his wake, while the earl of Chester attached William Ferrers, earl of Derby, and other important lords to John’s standard. The open adherence of the earls of Warwick, Devon, Arundel and Surrey to the king also helped to tip the balance of power in his favour.19 There were also perhaps a hundred neutral or undecided barons. Gradually it seemed most intelligent for the more far-sighted of the king’s party to make common cause with these neutrals and try to hammer out a peace formula. It was not just that if John completely vanquished the rebels, he might not be able to resist the temptation to make himself an absolute ruler by turning and rending his erstwhile allies; it was also that the ever-present fear of the chaos principle accelerated daily, once it was realised that sons were taking up arms against fathers and brothers against brothers .20 Not even William Marshal’s gravitas saved him from this fate, since his eldest son joined the rebels. There was a generational tinge to the conflict also, since young men and heirs tended to join the rebels while their fief-holding fathers clung to the status quo. Bit by bit, then, it was the middle-of-the road centrist opinion that prevailed over the outright advocates of civil war, whether Eustace de Vesci and Fitzwalter on the one hand or the fire-eating reactionaries in John’s entourage on the other. Vesci, in particular, sustained a personal check when Innocent III singled him out and warned him not to vex or trouble the king.21
John had not been idle after the Epiphany meeting with the rebel barons. His reflex action to all challenges to his authority was to use force so, while pretending diplomacy, he began assembling an army. His first step was to order a nationwide renewal of the oath of allegiance, trying to manipulate the modalities of liege homage so that each subject taking the oath would bind himself to ‘stand by him against all men’. This was at once construed by the rebels (correctly) as the opening shot in John’s campaign against the charter.22 He sent commissioners to the ostensibly ‘loyal’ counties in the south and Midlands to rally their support, and called in knights from Poitou and Ireland. On 19 February John was persuaded to sign a safe-conduct allowing the ‘northern’ barons to travel to Oxford to confer with William Marshal, Stephen Langton and a quorum of other bishops who fancied themselves peacemakers .23 The conference took place on 22 February but, whatever tentative proposals were made then were soon overtaken by two dramatic new developments. In an act of consummate cunning, on 4 March John took vows as a crusader. He had not the slightest intention of travelling to Outremer but he knew that his father had taken the Cross without actually going on crusade, and could see the potential of such a manoeuvre to obfuscate issues and confuse the opposition. Moreover, by taking the Cross John put himself and his cause technically under the protection of the Church and, as a crusader, he was allowed three years’ grace before fulfilling his secular obligations.24 John’s act gives new meaning to the word machiavellianism. Meanwhile at the end of April there was good news from Rome. Both sides had lobbied the Vatican: John’s agent William Mauclerc reached the Eternal City on 17 February and at the end of the month Eustace de Vesci himself arrived with written representations to Innocent III from his confederates.25 The Pope quickly decided in favour of John.
Gone were the days when Innocent III forced John to make special exceptions for Vesci. His former protégé was now firmly in the rebel camp, and Innocent doubtless took a grim satisfaction in disappointing the hopes of those who had so grievously disappointed his during the interdict. Although the documentary evidence Vesci produced of John’s stalling, prevarication and duplicity was compelling - and archbishop Stephen Langton himself was fuming at John’s wriggling tergiversation - for Innocent in 1215 the overriding consideration was that John had placed himself in the papal camp twice over: by making himself a papal vassal and England a papal fief; and by taking the Cross. Innocent had already shown which way the wind was likely to blow by prohibiting the election to the archbishopric of York of Simon Langton, Stephen’s brother, purely because that was what John wanted.26 On 19 March 1215 he wrote his formal pronouncement on the dispute in England. A letter to the barons condemned leagues and conspiracies against King John, especially since they would have the effect of delaying his holy purpose of going on crusade.27 The same day Innocent wrote to Stephen Langton to rebuke him for failing to mediate between the king and the rebels, and for having allegedly given succour and comfort to the northern barons.28 Innocent followed up this initial salvo with a fresh barrage on 1 April. He ordered the barons to pay for the Poitevin scutage of 1214, again citing the imminence of the crusade as the reason; if the barons wanted justice he added naively, they could seek it from the Vicar of Christ himself.29 Finally on 7 July he reprimanded the English bishops for their lukewarm support for King John and their sympathy for the rebels, declaring that they were indulging in a wicked conspiracy against God’s holy work and a ‘worthy’ king who was prepared to carry the fight for the true faith to Outremer; if they did not themselves wish to be dismissed from office, they should immediately excommunicate the rebels.30
It infuriated Stephen Langton that Innocent either could not or would not see through John’s obvious ploys, and the disingenuous pretence of going on crusade. But John played his machiavellian hand to perfection. Until the shoal of letters from Innocent arrived in England, John was the very model of a meek son of the Church, appearing conciliatory at all points and even rescinding the order to the knights of Poitou to join him.31 Needless to say, when Easter came there was still no answer to the barons from the king: John stalled shamelessly, keeping Stephen Langton and William Marshal closeted on detailed negotiations he had no intention of honouring, while he waited for the papal letters to come in. For the barons Innocent’s intervention was the last straw. They responded defiantly, first mustering at Stamford then meeting at Brackley near Northampton and issuing a fresh sheaf of demands, presumably a hardening of their initial conditions, since the next we know is that John rejected them outright. ‘Why do these barons not ask for my kingdom at once?’ he said scornfully. ‘Their demands are idle dreams, without a shadow of reason.’ There followed the customary John tantrum, in which he claimed the barons were trying to turn him into a slave. In vain did Langton and Marshal represent to him that he ought to make some concession. Raging and frothing, John insisted that the two ‘mediators’ return and repeat to the rebels word for word what he had said.32 The barons then decided that the time for diplomacy was past; on 3 May they formally renounced their homage and fealty, in effect declaring that they no longer recognised John as king. Fitzwalter was appointed commander-in-chief of rebel forces and assumed the grandiose title of ‘Marshal of the army of God and Holy Church’. They marched back to Northampton, occupied the town and besieged the castle, held for John by Geoffrey of Martigny, kinsman and protégé of the notorious and much feared mercenary leader Gérard d’Athée.33
The rebels soon realised that John was a tough nut to crack. Perhaps they had underestimated how ma
ny mercenaries and well-fortified castles he had under his aegis. At all events they found Northampton Castle to be impregnable, at any rate given the absence of trebuchets which they did not possess; they raised the siege after a fortnight and switched their attentions to Bedford. Here they had better luck, for its constable William de Beauchamp surrendered it to them.34 John meanwhile was not idle. He ordered a general muster at Gloucester and, on 30 April, ordered his forces to proceed to Cirencester for a further rendezvous. Reassured that the fortresses in London, Oxford, Norwich and Bristol were all unassailable and as soon as he received the good news from the Pope, John renewed the request for help from the knights of Poitou and Flanders, and based himself in London, granting the city the right to elect its own mayor in future as a guarantee of its loyalty.35 But if John thought he had thereby secured the capital, he soon received a rude awakening. On Sunday 17 May rebel forces were secretly admitted to London by a powerful dissident faction, acting with speed and precision before the implications of John’s charter of privileges became common knowledge. 36 The euphoric rebels then plundered all known royal partisans and instituted a mini-pogrom against the Jews, confiscating their money and tearing down their houses. They then issued a general declaration, calling on all undecided magnates to come off the fence or risk the loss of their property. Fire-eating threats were made to all neutrals that the rebels would ‘direct their banners and their arms against them as against public enemies, and do their utmost to overthrow their castles, burn their dwellings and destroy their fishponds, orchards and parks’.37 Some have interpreted this declaration as a sign of rebel weakness, but for John it was a devastating blow that convinced him that some accommodation with the barons was inevitable.38
John hit back with a mixture of threats, cajolery, promises, bribes and sweeteners. On 9 and 10 May he published letters promising to submit all points of difference between him and the barons to papal arbitration, doubtless now confident that Innocent would back him to the hilt. He also offered a concession: ‘Know that we have granted to our barons who are against us that we shall not take them or their men, nor disseise them, nor go upon them by force or arms, except by the law of our realm or by the judgement of their peers in our court.’39 John tried to put flesh on these bones by offering to have two particularly controversial reliefs, those imposed on the earl of Essex and the bishop of Hertford (significantly relating to inheritances from two of John’s most hated families, the Mandevilles and the Braoses) reviewed by a jury of their peers.40 If John could be trusted, this was a significant concession, as it was an implicit admission that the barons had genuine grievances and that he himself had acted arbitrarily and unjustly, but could he be trusted? Might this not simply be a ruse to get the barons to disarm, whereupon the ‘concession’ would be at once rescinded? What guarantees was the king offering? Also, it seemed just too transparent a ploy to abandon the general demands of the charter for the satisfaction of a few particular ones on an ad hoc basis. But the offer was speciously reasonable, deliberately made to seem attractive to waverers, and some of the barons took the bait, influenced no doubt by John’s ‘carrot and stick approach’: alongside the silky purr of diplomacy the king applied the resounding thwack of main force by granting rebel lands to his favourites. Some of the less obdurate rebels began to buckle at this point. When Henry Braybrooke had two manors seized, he secured a safe-conduct to come and talk to John about the terms on which he could be reconciled. Even more dramatic was the coming to heel of Simon Patishall. On 15 May John alienated his manor of Wasden to one of his placemen; within a week Patishall had used the good offices of the abbot of Woburn to make his peace with the monarch.41
Stalemate and stand-off, almost ‘phoney war’, seemed the main feature of the civil war by mid-May, with the rebels entrenched in London and John based at Winchester (but even now pursuing his peripatetic existence - Fremantle (Wiltshire) 17-19 May, Silchester 19 May, Winchester 19-20 May, Odiham (Hampshire) 21-22 May, Windsor 22-23 May, Winchester 23-24 May). While the king sent a plethora of negotiators and mediators to treat with the rebels, with Stephen Langton always foremost, he tried to extinguish baronial hopes in the west, so that he would not be threatened by a two-front war. There seem to have been two (and possibly three) expeditions to the West Country under the earl of Salisbury. One was supposed to relieve the rebel siege of Exeter, but the city fell before the royal troops could get under way properly. It was either on this or a subsequent occasion that the embarrassed Salisbury, believing the enemy were preparing an ambush near Sherborne (Dorset), crept back to Winchester with his tail between his legs, claiming that he was hopelessly outnumbered.42 John is said to have remarked scornfully that Salisbury’s approach was no way to take fortresses. It seems that the earl was indeed unduly fainthearted, for when John sent him back with reiterated orders to relieve or retake Exeter, boldness won the day. Once again Salisbury’s scouts brought him alarming news of an ambuscade near Sherborne, but this time the earl preferred to take his chances with a concealed enemy rather than return for another shaming tongue-lashing from John. Salisbury’s army was mainly composed of Flemish mercenaries and their ferocious reputation preceded them, to the point where the rebels in Exeter did not relish trying conclusions with them and lamely evacuated the city.43
John’s strategy now was to tighten the noose around the rebels in London while he waited for reinforcements to come in from overseas. Hubert de Burgh was put in charge of the new army to be formed from the foreign knights, and meanwhile John tried to close the ring by mustering forces at Marlborough and Reading and then ordering them to a general rendezvous between Odiham (Hampshire) and Farnham (Surrey). That John was thinking of investing London from both sides is clear from the instruction to Stephen Langton on 26 May that he should hand over Rochester castle (in Langton’s custody by right of his being the archbishop of Canterbury) and allow the king to garrison it with his own men; the subtext is clear - John had no confidence in Langton’s ultimate loyalties.44 John indulged himself in his favourite stalling tactics by negotiating interminable truces and safe-conducts with the barons, under the guise of an earnest quest for peace.45 The stalling extended to the papacy. John kept Innocent III warm by writing that it was only the rebellion that prevented him setting out on the much-desired crusade.46 But the first week in June saw a major setback to his plans. Northampton Castle suddenly collapsed under the fury of the townspeople, who massacred some of the garrison. Then simultaneous news came in that Lincoln had fallen to the rebels and that the garrison still holding out in the Tower of London was likely to capitulate at any moment.47 There were four rebel armies in the field but, even more seriously, England had lurched into financial and administrative anarchy. Taxes were no longer being paid or courts attended, while debtors and criminals awaited the outcome of the civil war.48 To some of John’s more thoughtful advisers, the slide towards anarchy was ominous. It was not inconceivable that the political void would lead to total social breakdown, with a peasant rising as the ultimate nightmare. The king might well find that, even if he defeated the barons, he had a rural jacquerie on his hands. He would certainly not get any money in the future. It was time to bow to the inevitable and strike a deal with the rebel magnates.
On 8 June John issued a safe-conduct for the rebel leaders, enabling them to make a journey to and from Staines between 9-11 June. On 10 June he himself came down from Windsor to the water meadows near Staines to meet rebel leaders and commit himself to a draft schedule.49 A preliminary version of Magna Carta (the Great Charter) known as the ‘Articles of the Barons’ was haggled over, but in the end John agreed to affix his royal seal to it, to show that he had agreed the provisions in principle. 50 He then sent William Marsal and an embassy to London to tell the dissidents there what had happened: ‘that for the sake of peace and for the welfare and honour of his realm, he would freely concede to them the laws and liberties which they asked; and that they might appoint a place and day for him and them to meet, for the settl
ement of all these things’.51 When both sides had discussed the terms among themselves, a formal ceremony of acceptance took place at Runnymede on the 15th. Both sides pitched their tents a short distance from each other on a long level stretch of grassland that ran down to the riverbank. The barons came with a large party of well-armed knights, perhaps still not quite trusting John.52 It was an impressive assembly, with anyone who was anyone in English politics present: Stephen Langton, Pandulph, all the senior bishops, the Master of the English Templars, William Marshal, Hubert de Burgh, the earls of Salisbury, Warren and Arundel and a host of other dignitaries and warriors.53 Magna Carta concludes with the words ‘Given in the meadow that is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines, 15 June’. Several more days were to elapse, however, while the Chancery clerks and their rebel equivalents hammered out the exact wording. Finally, when copies had been made and distributed on all sides, there was a further ceremony on 19 June, when the rebel barons formally renewed their oaths of allegiance to the king. This was a necessary quid pro quo, for a solemn grant by the Crown could not be made to rebels still in the field against that selfsame royal authority.54
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