Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  The barons’ performance so far had been remarkably lacklustre: they lacked energy, ideas or even a common strategy, with half-hearted sieges of Northampton and Oxford Castles going on when they should have been relieving Rochester.20 Meanwhile they had virtually advertised their weakness by putting out equally half-hearted peace feelers to John throughout November and December.21 They also concentrated on setting up administrations in the east and north of the country, controlled by their partisans, and seeking ways and means to implement clause 61 of Magna Carta, instead of making an all-out effort to defeat John. The consequence was that, by drawing in mercenaries from the continent, the king grew gradually stronger and the rebels weaker; in particular, he retained control of some 150 castles throughout the kingdom which, lacking siege artillery, the barons were unable even to put a dent in. 22 As Christmas 1215 approached, the one advantage they enjoyed was that the Celtic fringes, which John had thought definitively subdued, once more rose in rebellion. Preoccupied as he was with the Charter in summer 1215, John was also forced to spend a great deal of time on Irish affairs; from May to July the Close and Charter Rolls are full of letters and writs relating to Ireland.23 Although William Marshal and the Irish barons gave John unstinting support, the native Irish became the first exponents of what would become a seven-hundred-year-old truism: England’s danger is Ireland’s opportunity. Seeing John caught up in civil war, the Gaelic chieftains struck hard. Aed Ua Neill defeated an English army in Ulster, destroyed Clones Castle and gutted the port of Carlingford in County Louth. Cormac Ua Mail Sechnail attacked the castles of Kinclare in Westmeath, Athboy in Meath and Birr in Offaly.24 So concerned did John become about the state of affairs in Ireland that he persuaded his papal ally to enter the fray. In February 1216 Innocent III wrote to his legate in Ireland to tell him to put down all conspiracies against John in Ireland and to punish all clerics who communicated with the English barons and other excommunicated persons.25 Meanwhile the whole of Wales blazed into rebellion: the unprecedented situation arose whereby not only were all the Welsh princes in alliance with each other but also with the English barons. Llewellyn was on the warpath again and captured the town and castle of Shrewsbury in May 1215 (the fall of this town to the Welsh was also unprecedented); all the evidence suggests this move was concerted with the barons’ seizure of London.26 Alexander II of Scotland was also in the field, threatening Carlisle and euphoric at the award to him by a baronial court of the long-coveted lands of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. 27

  Yet the Celtic fringes could act only as gadflies on John’s flank. To overthrow him the barons needed intervention from France, and they hit on the idea of trying to substantiate a claim to the English throne from Louis, son of Philip Augustus. The lack of a pretender to John’s crown was a perceived weakness in the barons’ revolt and they had earlier tried to plug the gap by putting forward the claims of Simon de Montfort, titular earl of Leicester. Whether the notorious cruelties and atrocities visited by de Montfort on the Albigensians - as part of Innocent III’s crusade against these harmless heretics - persuaded the barons that he would prove a more tyrannical king than John ever was, or whether it was simply that the extremists in the baronial party found him unacceptable, by late summer this idea was definitively abandoned. Geoffrey de Mandeville headed a faction that besought Prince Louis to cross the Channel and save them from ‘this tyrant’.28 What the basis for Louis’s claim was supposed to be in terms of succession or feudal law is unclear. The pragmatic reason for the choice was to strip John of his foreign mercenaries, since most of the routiers were subjects of Louis (he had inherited the county of Artois from his mother), Philip Augustus or their allies .29 The barons’ ploy was utterly cynical: they had no intention of ceding the English crown to Louis’s heirs, and simply wanted to have him as a temporary ruler to unseat John, after which they would make up their own minds on whether they wanted a permanent arrangement. John had spotted the likelihood of a baronial overture to France and, incredibly, tried to get in first. Not surprisingly, Philip Augustus treated his absurd overtures with contempt.30 The barons began negotiating with France as early as September 1215, once it was clear Magna Carta was not going to hold. The only energetic response they made to the siege of Rochester was to send the earls of Winchester and Hereford to France with an explicit offer of the Crown to Louis.31

  The mercurial Louis was keen, but his father was more cautious. The arrival of the earls in Paris was soured by a ludicrous scene when Philip Augustus presented them with a declaration, purporting to come from the barons’ leaders, stating that French help was no longer needed since a lasting peace had been signed between king and magnates. The earls were able to convince the French king that this was a crude forgery put out by John to obfuscate and diminish the credibility of the barons,32 but Philip remained suspicious on other fronts. Were the rebels serious in their offer or merely desperate because the fortunes of war had started to favour John? What guarantees were the barons offering his son and his heirs? How could the French be sure that this was not some cynical ad hoc offer, which would be withdrawn once John was defeated?33 His own position was difficult. Having suffered under the papal lash because of his adulterous marriage, he had no wish to enter into conflict with Innocent III again, and it seemed as though Innocent was backing John to the hilt over this baronial rebellion. Philip Augustus therefore decided on a ‘wait and see’ policy. He handed the entire matter over to his son, saying that he must act as he thought fit. Louis at once earmarked a ‘small’ force of Frenchmen to embark for England, and promised that he himself would follow with a much larger force at Easter 1216. The immediate expedition was not quite so exiguous as Louis pretended: altogether it was 7,000 strong, including 140 knights. The Frenchmen landed in the Orwell estuary and proceeded to London, where they proved to be as lacking in energy as the barons. They did not venture out of the capital all winter and made free in the fleshpots, inconvenienced only by having to drink beer when their wine ran out, as one of John’s mercenary captains scornfully reported.34

  John was meanwhile as restless as his enemies were supine. Enormously elated by the news that the castles of Tonbridge and Bedford had surrendered to his mercenary captains - in both places it was Rochester all over again, with pleas for relief being sent out to the barons by the garrison but ignored35 - he decided to emulate William the Conqueror’s strategy after Hastings in 1066, marching all round London and trying to close the ring on it. He left Rochester on 6 December, marched through Essex and Surrey into Hampshire and completed the circle by proceeding to Windsor and then east to St Albans. It was in St Albans, at a council of war on 20 December, that he decided on his winter strategy. His army would be divided, and one detachment, under the troika of the earl of Salisbury, Fawkes de Bréauté and Savaric de Mauléon, would pen the rebels up in London; with the other detachment he himself would march north and reconquer the rebel-held territory there.36 This was typical of John’s tendency to go for the softer option. A Richard or even a Philip Augustus would have concentrated all their attention on London, for this was the principal head of the hydra-like rebellion. Admittedly, a siege of London would have been difficult, protracted and costly, and maybe that was the key to John’s dilemma, for if he ran short of funds to pay his mercenaries, it would be his army, not the barons’, that collapsed. The chaos in England meant that he had been living largely on the stored wealth of past taxation, nothing more was coming in, and the reservoir was beginning to run dry. A ‘harrying of the north’ expedition like William the Conqueror’s notorious expedition in 1067, a pure campaign of looting and plunder, in other words, would keep his routiers happy and allow him to replenish his war chest. On the best-case scenario, he would be able to restore royal administration everywhere except London, start the taxes flowing, and at the same time depress and demoralise the enemy.37 All the same, he should have gone for the jugular and attacked London. John was neither the first nor the last to discover that in warfare periphera
l strategies rarely work.

  John’s march north was a chapter of atrocities - rape, arson, murder, pillage - even worse than William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north - ‘scenes of atrocity such as events in the reign of Stephen alone in English history afford a parallel’.38 John added war crimes and crimes against humanity to his tally of depravity as his army marched to Nottingham. The track of his army ran through Dunstable, Northampton and Rockingham and a trail of wanton destruction marked its path. Everything was killed, destroyed or put to the torch: humans, cattle, sheep, poultry, buildings. Such was John’s lust for slaughter and mayhem that even when his men were exhausted by the day’s burning, looting and raping, he sent out parties at night to fire all the hedges and villages within a ten-mile radius. Scorched-earth tactics hardly does justice to a mindless insistence that his army march along roads where every single thing should be uprooted, burnt and charred; he told his intimates that his heart leapt like a fawn when he saw the visible evidence of his revenge on enemies in the form of smoking stumps and gutted houses. All human beings his troops encountered were butchered or raped unless they were rich enough to pay massive ransoms.39 The reign of terror paid off. Rebel castellans lost their nerve and bolted rather than face such a horde of ravening dervishes. He spent Christmas at Nottingham, in the understated words of one chronicler, ‘not in the usual manner but as one on the warpath’.40 Rather than spreading yuletide peace and goodwill, John seemed determined that his men should live out the meaning of Tacitus’s description of the Romans: ‘they created a wilderness and called it peace’. On the feast of St Stephen (26 December) John evinced the Christmas spirit by serving notice on the garrison of William of Aubigny’s castle at Belvoir that if they did not surrender at once, their lord would be taken and starved to death. The garrison knew the king meant business and duly surrendered.41

  The whirlwind of terror and destruction continued north, through Newark, Doncaster, Pontefract, York, Northallerton, Durham and Newcastle. Only occasionally did John rein in his brutal mercenaries, as when he cut off the hand of a man who had seized a cow in the church-yard - it was not the cow he was concerned with but possible ecclesiastical, and papal, repercussions.42 The Church aside, only huge payments in the form of taxes or ransoms could ward off the Flemings and Brabantines posing as the wrath of God. The towns of York and Beverley bought John off for £1,000 and the holders of large houses had to pay anything between 80-150 marks for the privilege of not having their manors burned down around their ears. Minor knights could usually buy freedom from atrocity for anything between ten and a hundred marks, provided they threw in a couple of palfreys as a sweetener.43 As he neared Newcastle, John focused on Alexander of Scotland, who had tried to set his seal on the baronial grant of Northumberland by a vain siege of Norham Castle. John determined to punish him and told his followers: ‘By God’s teeth we shall run the little sandy fox-cub to his earth.’ An alternative, and perhaps more plausible version is that he vowed ‘to run the red fox out of his lairs’.44 January 1216 saw the first invasion of Scotland since 1072 and the first by an English army since 1097. On the 11th of the month John reached Alnwick, then took and burned Berwick on the 15th, making sure that his routiers tortured the inhabitants before butchering them. The madness of King John was surely proven by his insistence on personally setting a torch to the house in which he lodged overnight.45 He then took and burned Roxburgh, Dunbar and Haddington, but he dared not stay more than ten days in Scotland because of the reports of fresh dangers in England, so turned back before reaching Edinburgh. The dauntless Alexander thereupon reinvaded England in February and laid siege (unsuccessfully) to Carlisle.46

  At the end of January John turned south again, cutting a swathe of destruction through a different stretch of countryside. The journey south followed the same pattern of rapine, fire, atrocity, scorched earth, cruelty and barbarism. A rapid march took him through Newcastle and Durham to Barnard Castle by 30 January, after which he swung east to the North Sea and, passing through Skelton, paused to catch breath at Scarborough (12-14 February). He then swung west to York, south to Pontefract and east again in a loop to reach Lincoln, where there was an extended, four-day stopover (23-27 February). Having chastised the north, it was now his intention to ravage that other heartland of the rebels, in East Anglia and Essex. He was at Fotheringhay at the end of February, and from there launched his locusts on Norfolk and Suffolk.47 A vanguard went ahead while John had another pause at Bedford (29 February - 3 March). After rampaging and ravishing through Bury St Edmunds, his hordes came to rest outside the castle of Roger of Bigod at Framlingham, which collapsed before him as all the other rebel strongholds had done.48 Swinging down through Ipswich, he laid siege to Colchester on 4 March. Although the garrison here had been stiffened by some of the French troops who had finally levered themselves out of the stews and gambling dens of London, it proved no more capable than other defenders; surrender was immediately agreed on condition the French troops were allowed to march out free, leaving their English comrades to languish in prison until ransomed. When the French reached London, their alleged perfidy in agreeing to such self-satisfying terms caused a sensation. The barons called them traitor, arrested them and even contemplated a mass execution, until someone pointed out that that was a sure way to deter Louis and Philip Augustus from coming to England. It was decided to hold them to await Philip’s pleasure.49

  On 25 March John proceeded to Hedingham, seat of Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford. This too surrendered and de Vere, an important rebel leader, came to beg the king’s mercy and renew his oath of fealty. His submission was a clear sign that the barons were losing heart. Soon other important magnates were joining the queue to make submission. The earl of Clare and his son were the next in a series of defections from the rebel ranks, and very shortly members of the inner circle like Robert de Ros, Peter de Bruis and the egregious Eustace de Vesci were trying to discover what terms they could make.50 A string of safe-conducts signed by the king showed how clearly the rebels had been cowed by John’s lightning campaign of terror. The Gadarene rush of one-time fire-eaters to compose their peace with John threatened to become a mass panic. John played his hand cleverly. Those who returned to their allegiance found that it was a simple matter to regain their confiscated lands. Indeed, by March the claims for recovery of expropriated manors were so numerous that the Chancery devised a common-form writ to deal with them.51 The process was accelerated because John’s southern detachment had not been idle while the king was harrying the north, but had overrun the whole of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire and even Middlesex, confining the barons even more closely in London.52 John had every reason to feel complacent about what he had achieved through war crimes. He was now amply supplied with money, more than enough to keep his brutal mercenaries happy, and, just to make sure there was no temptation to desert, he topped up their pay and perquisites with further lavish bonuses. Next John announced that his victorious army would march on London.53 But he had tarried too long in the north. Facing mortal peril, the barons had at last secured the massive reinforcements from France they had been hoping for.

  The previous arrival of 7,000 French troops ought to have been the fillip the barons needed to galvanise them into decisive action, but a weary defeatism and lassitude seems to have overcome them during the winter of 1215-16, to the point where they convinced themselves that only the appearance of Philip Augustus or his son in England would suffice to overthrow John. Around Christmas there was another embassy to France, this time headed by the two top-ranking magnates, Saer de Quincy and Robert Fitzwalter. The duo entreated Louis to come at once to England to be crowned but did not explain how that could be done when Stephen Langton was still in Rome - even if he could be persuaded openly to defy Innocent III in this matter. Philip Augustus cut through the nonsense by asking for further security - more particularly twenty-four hostages for the barons’ good faith.54 So desperate were the rebels for French help that they a
greed, and the hostages were conveyed to Paris by two further baronial envoys, the earls of Hereford and Gloucester. Evidently Philip Augustus and Louis then asked for action from the barons before making the crossing, and to encourage them dispatched another large force of infantry and crossbowmen headed by three hundred knights. This second expedition sailed up the Thames and joined their compatriots in London on or around 7 January 1216; Louis meanwhile took an oath that he would follow with a third force in about two weeks’ time.55 He was, however, reliable only in his unreliability. Although a third body of troops reached London from France at the end of February, Louis was not with them, only a letter from him claiming that he would be ready ‘with God’s grace’ to cross from Calais on Easter Sunday, 10 April.56