Like his father, John had an insatiable love of hunting and hawking, partly to keep down weight. He, too, pursued the otter along the rivers. He pampered his falcons, ordering that a cherished gyrfalcon called Gibbon be fed plump hens and well-fed goats, supplemented once a week by a hare. He was unusually clean, taking baths and owning a dressing gown, and his clothes were magnificent, even for a king, some made from Byzantine or Arab fabrics. He was fond of backgammon, and he had a small library (among them a Pliny) that went with him on progress. He collected rings and gems that also accompanied him. Most must have been lost crossing the Wellstream in 1216, but a hoard found at Devizes Castle after his death included 111 rings set with sapphires, 107 with diamonds, twenty-eight with rubies, fifteen with diamonds and nine with garnets.
But the qualities that stand out most are not love of luxury or self-indulgence. They are treachery, cruelty, vindictiveness and avarice. He was suspicious to the point of mania.
The quarrel with the Church
Adam of Eynsham records that John did not receive the sacraments at Easter 1199 or at his coronation. ‘Close friends said he had never done so since reaching adulthood.’19 He hunted on fast days and ate meat on Fridays. Yet in his odd way he believed, hearing Mass regularly, giving alms, making offerings at shrines, and wearing a relic on a gold chain round his neck. He had a particular devotion to the Anglo-Saxon saint, Wulstan of Worcester.
With typical perversity he enjoyed teasing the saintly Bishop Hugh of Lincoln. When Hugh drew his attention to a sculpture of the Harrowing of Hell, he pointed to a carving of souls in Paradise, saying ‘You ought to show me those over here, as they’re the ones I shall be with.’20 While the bishop was saying an Easter Mass, he ostentatiously pocketed the gold coins he was meant to offer, and during a sermon asked him three times to keep it short as he wanted his dinner. Even so, John venerated Hugh, sitting by his deathbed and helping to carry his coffin; he was so moved by his death that he founded Beaulieu Abbey.
Probably he was unaware of Hugh’s prophecy – that Philip II would take revenge for Queen Eleanor’s desertion of his father and wipe out the English royal family. ‘Three of Henry’s sons, two of them kings and one a count, have already been destroyed by the French, who will only give the fourth a brief respite.’21 So long as John lived, Philip fought an unending duel with him.
One of the few men who could handle John, Archbishop Hubert Walter, died in July 1205, much to the king’s pleasure. Besides resenting Hubert’s dictatorial guidance and sheer ability, John had even suspected him of being in French pay. By now he was on bad terms with his other great supporter, William Marshal, whom he also suspected of treachery. In consequence, he took his sons hostage, confiscated his castles, and told household knights to challenge him to mortal combat. Wisely, William went off to expand the vast territory he had inherited in Leinster. His advice might have avoided the next catastrophe.
Among the rare Englishmen whom John trusted was his secretary John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich. Adept at raising money, de Gray, who had worked for him since before he came to the throne, was a boon companion. John wanted John de Gray to succeed Hubert Walter at Canterbury, but the monks of the cathedral chapter elected their sub-prior, sending him to Rome to obtain confirmation. The king was so angry that the monks gave in and elected de Gray, with the English bishops’ approval. After examining the case the pope, Innocent III, appointed a distinguished theologian living in Rome, Cardinal Stephen Langton, whom he consecrated in June 1207. The king refused to accept Langton, turning the monks out of their priory and seizing the cathedral’s revenues.
When Innocent placed England under an interdict in 1208, John’s reaction was to promise that if any clerics arrived from Rome, including the pope himself, he would send them back with their noses slit and no eyes. He also sent threatening letters to Innocent. But the bishops enforced the interdict, which meant there were no church services other than baptisms or the last sacraments for the dying, while the dead were buried in ditches without funeral rites.
However, John saw an opportunity to amass funds for his war chest. Seizing all Church property, from parish glebes to cathedral and abbey lands, he left just enough for the clergy to live on – women who lived in presbyteries, whether housekeepers or mistresses, were arrested and released only on payment of a fine. Monks had to pay heavily to keep their abbeys, although John did stay on good terms with one or two abbots, such as Sampson of Bury St Edmunds. To some extent the interdict’s impact was softened by Mass being said at monasteries or in fields.
Later it was estimated that the king took 100,000 marks (£66,666) from the Church, although some clerics thought the real figure to be much higher.22 He dragged out negotiations with the pope to prolong the windfall, sending Langton back to France when he arrived at Dover. Innocent III then excommunicated John, and every bishop save one fled abroad. The king was unworried. When a cleric, Geoffrey of Norwich, announced that a clergyman did not owe loyalty to an excommunicate, he had Geoffrey wrapped in a lead cope that killed him. In 1211 he promised to hang Langton if he set foot in England.
John’s heyday
In his erratic way the king improved administration, which he saw as a means of increasing his power, and spent hours sitting on the bench with Exchequer officials, discussing financial problems and new ways of adding to the revenue. For the first time proper archives were kept, with dated documents. He also created a new office, the Wardrobe (originally a royal clothing closet), where he kept his private seal so that he could enforce his will more swiftly.
Possessing a detailed knowledge of the law, he asked his judges for their opinion on innumerable cases, as ‘his goal was to assert the continued primacy of royal justice’.23 Always on progress, he travelled twenty or thirty miles a day, meeting sheriffs, castellans, barons and abbots, joining the justices who rode with him in hearing disputes. He could be merciful – immediately pardoning a small boy charged with killing another by accidentally throwing a stone – and was tireless in hearing pleas, listening to plaintiffs in court and giving them private audiences. Barons might complain but most of his subjects got good treatment in his courts.
However, John’s taxation was ruthless. He extorted scutages for non-existent campaigns, racked up reliefs (death duties), and sold wardships, heiresses and rich widows to the highest bidder – increasing the sum paid by those who did not want to remarry. He levied ‘gracious aids’ on personal goods and tallages on royal manors, and enforced forest laws more severely. Jews did not escape, and both sexes were tortured to make them pay – when a Bristol Jew defied him, the king had one of his teeth pulled out every day until he gave in. Mercenaries were made sheriffs or justices, mulcting rich landowners with writs of false charges. In consequence, John amassed treasure exceeding any possessed by his predecessors. In 1208 he had 40,000 marks stored at Winchester, and in 1212 50,000 marks at Nottingham. This was a fraction of his wealth in coin, which in 1212 amounted to somewhere in the region of 200,000 marks – billions of pounds in today’s money.
Frontier policy
In 1209, John accused the King of Scots of sheltering his enemies. William the Lion hastily made peace ‘since he knew the English king was prone to all kinds of cruelty’,24 handing over his daughters as hostages, surrendering castles and paying an indemnity. In 1210 John dealt with the Irish Anglo-Normans, leading an army of English knights and Flemish infantry on a short campaign that brought them to heel – but left Anglo-Ireland facing a threat from native kings with whom he failed to reach a settlement, endangering the entire future of English rule.25 During 1211 he starved Llewelyn ap Iorwerth out of Snowdonia.
‘In Ireland, Scotland and Wales no man dared to disobey the King of England, which we all know was never the case under his predecessors, and appeared successful in every way he wanted, except for being robbed of his territories overseas and under the ban of the Church,’ wrote a chronicler.26
Uniting the barons – in opposition
At the end of 1211 Llewelyn burst into central Wales, killing English settlers. Bent on retaliation, next autumn, John gathered a great army at Nottingham where he hanged twenty-eight hostages who were the sons of Welsh chieftains. But letters came from his daughter Joan (Llewelyn’s wife) and the King of Scots, warning of a plot to use his excommunication as an excuse for handing him over to Llewelyn. The flight of Robert FitzWalter, Lord of Dunmow, and Eustace de Vesci, Lord of Alnwick, confirmed the warning. In a panic, the king dismissed the army, barricading himself inside Nottingham Castle for a fortnight, after which he arrested several magnates.
There was bound to be conflict with the barons, whom John had saddled with debts to the Crown or to Jewish money lenders, and with inflated feudal dues. In 1203 a ‘gracious aid’ had taken a seventh of their movable property and in 1207 another aid a thirteenth. Their biggest grievance, however, was the huge duties they paid to inherit their patrimony.
One means of cowing them was taking sons or nephews as hostages. In 1208 William de Briouze, a henchman who had lost favour, offered to surrender his three grandsons, but when royal officers came to collect them, his wife Matilda refused, shouting, ‘I’m not going to hand over any children to King John, who murdered his nephew Arthur.’27 After hunting her down in 1210, John had Matilda starved to death at Windsor with her eldest son – one report says they were given a flitch of bacon and a sheaf of oats, and that, driven mad by thirst, she gnawed the boy’s cheeks before she died. They were murdered because Matilda knew what had happened to Arthur.28
Besides henchmen who had served him well in France, he employed Flemish and Welsh bodyguards, who were lavishly paid to put down any opposition. ‘There were English barons whose wives or daughters had been raped by the king’, writes Roger of Wendover, adding that he reduced many to poverty with unlawful taxes, driving others into exile and seizing their estates. ‘Above all and behind all he was secretive and suspicious, over-sensitive to the merest flicker of opposition, relentless in revenge, cruel and mocking when he had men in his clutch.’29 Understandably, ‘the king’s enemies were as many as his barons’.30
While a small landowner could appeal to the king against a baron and have his case settled by a jury, there was no way a baron could appeal against the king – ‘the under-tenant had access to a system of justice which was far more predictable than that available to the great man opposed to his equal in the king’s court . . . The magnate in the king’s court was altogether less certain and secure.’31 For John would seize the estates of a baron who failed to pay fines or feudal aids, when humbler men could not be dispossessed without judgement against them in the courts.
During 1212 the king was terrified by a Yorkshire holy man, Peter the Hermit, who foretold he would be dead by Ascension Day next spring. Shaken by this and by other signs of his unpopularity, he relaxed forest laws and remitted a number of taxes. Then William Marshal came to the rescue, urging Irish barons to swear an oath of loyalty to John. Realizing he had at least one dependable supporter, he recalled William, who suggested he could strengthen his position by reaching a settlement with Pope Innocent.
The pope had been on the point of deposing him and asking Philip of France to take his place when his envoys reached Rome. Even so, Philip went on with plans for invasion and in May 1213 an English army gathered near Canterbury to be ready when it landed. However, John’s bastard half-brother the Earl of Salisbury destroyed Philip’s fleet off the Flemish coast. The king then made peace with Rome, agreeing to everything the pope demanded – Langton as archbishop, reinstatement of exiled clerics, return of Church property and payment of compensation. He also placed England and Ireland under papal overlordship. At the Templar commandery of Ewell, kneeling at the papal legate’s feet, on 15 May he surrendered the kingdom to the pope, receiving it back as his feudatory.
Finding himself still alive on Ascension Day, John had the clairvoyant Peter the Hermit, who had prophesied his imminent death, drawn behind a horse’s tail till he died, marking the occasion with a great feast for the court.
At Winchester Cathedral on 20 July Archbishop Stephen Langton publicly absolved the king, ending his excommunication, while John swore to bring back the laws of the English kings before him, especially Edward the Confessor’s. The interdict stayed in force for another year, until John repaid the Church. However, Innocent let him keep two-thirds of the money he had plundered.32
The last campaign in France
Now was the moment for the king to recover his lost lands in France, the motive behind all his policies. But there was a new obstacle. Peace with the Church forced him to allow the return of Robert FitzWalter and Eustace de Vesci, who had posed as martyrs for religion, and now led the magnates in insisting on better government. They had absorbed the pre-Conquest belief that the king should rule according to the advice of his witan.
A council of bishops that convened at St Albans in August to discuss compensation for the Church was joined by not only earls and barons but by humbler men who demanded a return to the laws of Henry I. In London, at St Paul’s, Langton showed a group of magnates the old king’s coronation charter with its promise of good laws. Unfortunately for John, his justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter died at this moment, a man whose tact might have calmed the situation. ‘When he gets to hell, he can go and say hello to Hubert Walter, whom he’s bound to find down there’, John joked inanely, adding, ‘By God’s feet, for the first time I really feel I’m King of England and the master.’33 Led by Eustace de Vesci, the barons of northern England then announced they did not have any duty to fight in Poitou or pay for troops. John marched north to crush them but was persuaded by Langton to compromise at a parley at Wallingford on 1 November. Later that month he summoned his magnates and four knights from each shire to an unsatisfactory meeting at Oxford.
But he was ready for his great overseas campaign. While he attacked Philip II from the south-west, Otto of Brunswick (now Emperor Otto IV), the Duke of Brabant and the Counts of Boulogne, Flanders and Holland, would invade France from the north. He sent his half-brother Salisbury to reinforce them, then sailed for Poitou on 2 February 1214, with an army of mercenaries, taking gold, silver and gems for use as bribes. He left England in the hands of a justiciar, the Bishop of Winchester, a former knight from Touraine who had been the only prelate to stay loyal to him during the interdict.34
The expedition was welcomed at La Rochelle, which depended on English trade. Hoping to win over the barons of Aquitaine, John spent two months marching through Angoulême, La Marche, the Limousin and Gascony, securing the Lusignan clan’s homage through bribery. Early in summer he struck north, defeating a French army and capturing Nantes, the Breton capital. In June he occupied Angers as an Angevin count, holding court. Encouraged, he prepared to attack Paris, which Philip II – in the north, trying to intercept the Emperor Otto’s invasion – was unable to defend. En route, he besieged the castle of Roche-au-Moine near Angers, the last obstacle to his advance.
When it was about to surrender, Philip’s son Louis arrived from Chinon with 800 knights and the Poitevin lords, whose troops formed a substantial part of John’s army, refused to fight him. Losing his nerve, the king returned to La Rochelle, where he waited anxiously for news of his northern allies. Despite frantic pleas, the barons of England refused to come to his aid.
On 27 July on some marshy fields near Bouvines, a village between Lille and Tournai, 24,000 imperial troops confronted Philip’s slightly smaller army and a confused battle was fought until Otto’s wounded horse ran away with him and the French won a crushing victory. This ended all John’s hopes, if at first he did not realize it, sending money to the emperor and ordering Peter des Roches to hire 300 Welsh mercenaries for a fresh campaign. In September, however, he accepted a truce from Philip based on the status quo. Next month, he sailed into Dartmouth, humiliated. Normandy and Anjou were lost for ever.
Magna Carta
When at La Rochelle John had demanded financial compensation from magnat
es who had failed to accompany him while his justiciar, Peter des Roches, had outraged the entire baronage by abusing the law. Further taxes were the last straw for the northern lords led by Eustace de Vesci, who refused to pay despite Peter’s threat to confiscate their estates. Nor were they more amenable after John’s return. Protests came from East Anglia, led by Robert FitzWalter, then from all over England. In autumn 1214 the barons assembled at Bury St Edmunds to voice their grievances and at Epiphany 1215 met in London, fully armed, demanding reforms. The king promised to discuss their complaints at Northampton on the Sunday after Easter, but they did not trust him.
Early in the spring of 1215, five earls and forty barons – almost the entire nobility – elected FitzWalter ‘Marshal of the army of the Lord and Holy Church’, then gathered at Stamford before marching south. Their army consisted of 2,000 knights, with many more sergeants (mounted men-at-arms) and foot soldiers. Occupying Northampton, they besieged the castle but, failing to take it, advanced on London. En route, they renounced their feudal homage to the king – questioning his occupancy of the throne.
However, John had powerful allies in the Earls of Chester, Derby, Devon, Salisbury, Surrey and Warwick, who were the richest magnates in England, and in William Marshal. He was also backed by Archbishop Langton, eight other prelates, the Master of the Temple and the papal legate. He could rely, too, on lesser but extremely able men, such as Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches. On Ash Wednesday 1215 the king swore an oath to go on Crusade, which secured Innocent III’s support. Early in May he gave the city of London a charter allowing its citizens to elect their mayor annually.
John’s anxiety to avoid armed confrontation shows in a draft that historians call the ‘Unknown Charter of Liberties’, drawn up before June. Referring to Henry I’s coronation charter, this contains such concessions as scaling down feudal dues, granting freedom of inheritance, abolishing scutage and military service overseas, cancelling debts to Jews and relaxing forest laws. ‘Why don’t the barons ask for my entire kingdom?’, he had commented. ‘What they’re demanding is stupid and altogether unrealistic, with no sort of logic behind it.’35 Yet the document shows he was ready to grant a good deal.
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