Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  The victory at Mirebeau had been the pinnacle of John’s continental success. In August of 1202, he had returned to Normandy triumphant, having eliminated the Lusignan threat. By autumn the rebel strongholds were in his hands and he and Isabella celebrated Christmas in Caen, according to a contemporary chronicler, “dining sumptuously and lying in bed till dinner-time.”

  The royal marriage had begun with the scandal perpetuated by John’s petulant “theft” of Isabella from her intended bridegroom. And tongues never did stop wagging about them, nor pens cease their scratching. Many of the enduring historical accounts of John and Isabella’s marriage began with the writing of Roger of Wendover, a monk at St. Albans during the early thirteenth century. Although Roger larded his chronicles with improbable embellishments, historians have dined out on that fatty biographical feast for generations, repeating and regurgitating the even more implausible flourishes supplied by Matthew Paris, Wendover’s successor at St. Albans.

  Paris was also wildly imaginative, and pro-baronial, and it is his depiction of Isabella of Angoulême as “an incestuous, evil, adulterous woman” that has survived the ages and cemented her (erroneously earned) reputation as a harpy. Paris’s Chronica Majora reported the alleged firsthand findings of master Robert of London who in 1211 was King John’s emissary to the emir of Morocco. Robert of London, evidently well out of his embassy, informed the emir that John was married to a harridan, “hateful to him, and who hates him, too. She has often been found guilty of incest, sorcery, and adultery, so that the king her husband, has ordered those of her lovers who have been apprehended to be strangled with a rope in her own bed.”

  Well, that’s juicy stuff—quite the lurid picture of this royal marriage—but not one scintilla of proof has appeared over the ensuing centuries to bolster Paris’s assertions. The same treatment of fancy as fact holds true for Paris’s predecessor. Roger of Wendover (writing in 1225, some nine years after John’s death) staunchly maintained that the reason King John lost Normandy within a year of his spectacular victory at Mirebeau was because he was overcome by “sorcery or witchcraft”—so infatuated with his wife, “finding all kinds of delights in his queen,” that nothing else mattered to him but lying in her arms, indulging his passion for her in “incorrigible idleness,” making love, not war. Roger asserted that John “was enjoying every kind of pleasure with his queen, in whose company he believed that he possessed all that he wanted.”

  But there has never been any proof of the charges that John preferred to loll about in lascivious luxury with Isabella instead of ruling his country. In fact, the pair were married for more than six years before Isabella became pregnant. If the numerous tales of unbridled lust are true, they don’t take into account that Isabella bore her husband no children from 1200 to 1207. There was no mention of miscarriages, nor of ill health on the part of either party, although John did spend a considerable amount of time on the battlefields of France. So, if the medieval chroniclers, as well as one of John’s more recent biographers, the twentieth-century historian Alan Lloyd, are to be believed—and the royal couple behaved like a pair of randy rabbits during their first few years of marriage, yet Isabella did not become pregnant for several years—where is the evidence of their libidinousness? They weren’t exactly practicing birth control, and Isabella’s one job as queen was to beget an heir to the throne.

  She gave birth to their first child, the future Henry III, in 1207—another reason some scholars like to posit that she may have been prepubescent at the time of her marriage. Between 1207 and 1215, Isabella bore John five children—two sons, followed by three daughters. By 1207, when John was gray-haired and somewhat stout, but nonetheless filled with energy, Isabella was probably still in her teens.

  Therefore, it is possible that John and Isabella’s hyperactive sex life is merely mythological, handed down through the centuries as fact. And it’s also doubtful that Isabella was to blame for encouraging John to make another fatal error in judgment that cost him England’s continental lands. He was, after all, not a terribly brilliant military strategist. For example, he had released the Lusignans in exchange for their oaths of loyalty. Unsurprisingly, they broke their promises as soon as it was convenient to do so, and renewed their intriguing against him.

  By June 1204, the entirety of Normandy was in Philip’s possession. John had also lost Anjou, Maine, Touraine, and Brittany—and all within a single year, as one by one his vassals had capitulated to Philip, and his territories had fallen like a row of dominoes into the French king’s hands. Only Poitou and Aquitaine remained in English possession. But in 1205, Poitou, too, fell to Philip’s invading army. By then, John had scarcely a friend on the Continent.

  It could be argued that few English kings were as unpopular as John. There’s probably a superstitious reason as to why there has never been a King John II. John’s distracting sexual passion for his wife, whether real or imagined, was only one reason he was soundly disliked and accounted a royal pain by his subjects. They had plenty to gripe about. Rather than appoint local nobles to administer his estates, he gave mercenary captains these prominent (and powerful) positions as seneschals, or stewards, of his Norman holdings. These mercenaries treated John’s vassals as enemies, pocketing their tributes and tax payments.

  Their corrupt behavior naturally engendered the enmity of John’s barons, whose anger was compounded by the king’s practice of surrounding himself with foreigners, landless knights, “bachelors” (young unknighted men), and bannerets (poor men he had raised up from nowhere and trusted to handle his affairs).

  John managed to keep his thumb on the barons by squeezing exorbitant sums from them. There was a tax, levy, or fine on just about everything from marriages to inheritances to purchasing his goodwill, in case a noble fell out of royal favor for whatever reason. John levied two major tallages (a form of taxation) in 1203 and 1207; and in 1210 he instated a massive tallage against the Jews, the medieval monarchs’ perennial cash cows. Brutal measures were implemented to ensure payment. After one Jew balked at having to forfeit the astronomical sum of ten thousand marks of silver (the amount levied upon each Jew in the kingdom), John commanded that a tooth be extracted for each day he continued to resist. After seven days, the man painfully relented. The 1210 tallage angered Christians as well. Many of them owed enormous sums to the Jewish moneylenders and were forced to repay their loans so that the Jews had the coin to hand over to the crown.

  John was also fully capable of disliking men just because they were rich or powerful. And he made a practice of taking his own subjects as hostages. Sons of prominent barons were made security for their fathers’ obedience; and the king made good on his threats. In July 1212, John hanged twenty-eight sons of Welsh chieftains who had broken their faith with him. And he impounded nobles’ lands when they defaulted on loans from the crown, forcing the men and their families into penury and starvation.

  It was no surprise, given his cruelty, that John feared assassination. The queen and their children were closely watched and John went everywhere with an armed bodyguard. His mania for secrecy rivaled that of America’s two political Dicks, Nixon and Cheney; he demanded that members of his entourage spy on one another, and developed a system of secret verbal codes and signals. However, because John was too paranoid to write them down and stash them in a safe place, he occasionally forgot his own signs.

  By the end of 1212, with enemies mounting on all sides, John recognized the necessity for a major ally. He had angered Pope Innocent years earlier by insisting on his own choice of archbishop, and in 1209 His Holiness excommunicated him. The papal interdict extended to all of John’s subjects. They were deprived of the sacraments, unable to receive baptism, a church-sanctioned wedding, or burial in consecrated ground. It was Innocent’s hope that the interdict would turn John’s subjects against him. But the common man was not as concerned with the strictures of the Church as the pope had surmised. John did lose a number of his clerical ministers, who, fearing for the fu
ture of their souls, fled to the Continent or quit the king’s service in protest of his apostasy. But he also had several lay counselors and administrators in his employ; and consequently, the business of governing the realm remained largely unchanged.

  Finally, in 1213, John hit upon a plan to obtain military and financial aid from Rome so that he could defend England from the threat of French invasion. He shrewdly made himself a vassal of the pope by agreeing to go on crusade—at an unspecified date, of course, in order to indefinitely prolong having to make good on his promise. It was a classic “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” strategy. Here’s why the delay was a good move for the Vatican as well: If John were to depart immediately for the Holy Land, rather than postpone his crusade, King Philip of France might take advantage of his absence to invade England and claim the crown. The last thing Rome wanted was the creation of such a vast royal dominion, because it would challenge, if not diminish, papal power and authority.

  The Barnwell annalist, a less biased medieval chronicler than his contemporaries, wrote of John’s decision to ally himself with Rome: “The king provided wisely for himself and his people by this deed, although to many it seemed ignominious and a monstrous yoke of servitude. For matters were in such extremity . . . that there was no shorter way—perhaps no other way—of evading the impending danger. For from the moment he put himself under apostolic protection and made his kingdom part of St. Peter’s patrimony, there was no prince in the Roman world who would dare attack him or invade his lands to the damage of the Apostolic see; since everyone stood in greater awe of Pope Innocent than of his predecessors for many years past.”

  But the pope did expect John to eventually make good on his promise, warning the king that if he reneged on his bargain, his excommunication, and that of every one of his subjects, would be reinstated. But the pontiff never bothered to scold or lecture John on his personal morals. And looming large was the issue of marital fidelity to the woman he had once been so besotted with that he was willing to risk his kingdom.

  Depending on the source, John is said to have sired between five and twelve royal bastards by various mistresses, one of whom was a noblewoman. He was largely reputed to have seduced several of his barons’ wives and daughters (or at least tried to), an early form of sexual harassment that was soundly censured in his day, as well as by modern chroniclers of his reign. Recent historians suggest that all of the royal bastards were born before John’s marriage to Isabella of Angoulême, and the illegitimate children were given the surname Fitzroy (which means “son of the king”).

  But even though John may not have impregnated women after his second marriage, there is no indication that he stopped hitting on them. Some of his lovers have been identified. There was the “widow Hawise,” a woman named Suzanne, and another named Clementia. In 1212, the king sent a chaplet of roses, plucked from his justiciar’s garden, to an unnamed mistress. John was also rumored to have lusted after the wife of one of his vassals, Eustace de Vesci, but the woman cleverly hired a professional prostitute to take her place in the bed. Eustace de Vesci was one of the nobles who took up arms against John in the baronial uprisings of 1212-1216, so it’s possible that the king’s libido had something to do with de Vesci’s hostility.

  A “maidservant of the king’s friend” named Susan also received gifts from John. And the wife of John’s chief forester, Hugh Neville, had to promise the king two hundred chickens in exchange for the privilege of sleeping with her own husband.

  Now that the litany of John’s licentious transgressions has been recited, it should be noted that much of what has been written about John’s libido, particularly that his purported lust for women of his own class earned him the enmity of his barons, was composed several years after his death, offered as one of the key reasons the nobles rebelled against him in 1215. But these lurid stories deserve to be mentioned because they have been repeated through the centuries, helping to cement John’s reputation as an evil man and an even worse king.

  And they do help to explain some of the abuses of power that so angered a number of John’s barons, leading to their demands for the codification of a king’s responsibility to his vassals and vice versa. That document, considered by history to be John’s crowning achievement, would become known as the Magna Carta. Centuries of schoolchildren have been taught that the Magna Carta was a lengthy charter of laws that John was forced to sign under duress at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, as a result of a mass uprising of rebellious knights and barons.

  Not quite. For starters, John didn’t actually sign the document; he affixed his great seal to it. More important, the barons had been angry with John for years over a number of issues, leading to several violent skirmishes between their armies and John’s knights. Many of the rebels believed that John had committed personal wrongs against them and their families, including unlawful confiscation of their castles and other property. The barons had grown increasingly testy because they’d seen the government of the counties pass from hereditary lords to the king’s sheriffs. Royal tribunals increasingly impinged on the authority and existence of the barons’ own courts. And John had elevated to positions of authority in his government foreigners, mercenaries, and professional administrators, instead of promoting from within the ranks of the nobility.

  In 1214, baronial discontent reached a boiling point, according to John’s biographer W. L. Warren. The barons sought a restoration of the laws and rights established by King Edward I—except for one hitch. No one knew just what those laws and rights were. The nobles were lost in a haze of nostalgia for a less tyrannical reign.

  On May 17, 1215, the rebels easily entered London. Friends opened the gates for them and they took the city with little resistance. These barons and their supporters then sent letters to every man who was still loyal to John, threatening them with violent reprisals if they did not switch their allegiance.

  So on June 10 at Staines, John committed himself to an early draft of what would become the Magna Carta, affixing his seal to a document titled “The Articles of the Barons.” The treatise was then submitted to the rebels and underwent a few revisions during the ensuing days.

  The Magna Carta was the result of at least four slightly different documents, a negotiated settlement that was the work of many hands and influences. Essentially it reduced the king’s role from autocrat to chief executive operating under the supervision of a baronial committee.

  Many of the clauses in the Great Charter were written as a direct result of, or a response to, John’s abuses of power—including taking English subjects as hostages for perceived disloyalty or nonpayment of debts to the crown; his engagement of foreigners or “aliens” in his armies as seneschals of his castles; and his burdensome taxation.

  Although the Magna Carta began as a verdict on John’s reign, some clauses in the charter, such as “The English Church shall be free” or “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice” have stood the test of time. The latter was a tremendous advance for the common man. No longer could a moneyed landowner buy his way out of a lawsuit or a judgment against him.

  But the version of the Magna Carta that King John approved survived just a little longer than ten weeks, repudiated by extremists on both sides and declared invalid by Pope Innocent III, who agreed with John that kings ruled by divine right and had no business capitulating their power to recalcitrant nobles.

  During the months following the signing of the Magna Carta, John prepared to withstand a French invasion led by Louis, the son of Philip of France. Louis sought to claim the English throne on the grounds that his wife, Blanche of Castile, was a granddaughter of Henry II. Some of John’s most disenchanted barons had even chosen to accept Louis as their lord.

  In the summer of 1216, Louis arrived on English shores and his army quickly took control of the southern counties. Meanwhile, Alexander of Scotland was marching down from the north. Numerous powerful lords, including John’s own half brother, William
of Salisbury, were among the defectors to Louis’s camp.

  King John, who had already lost his continental lands, was now in danger of losing England.

  At the end of September, John was in Lynn arranging for supplies to be sent to his Norman strongholds; but evidently, he feasted too well during his sojourn there, and contracted dysentery. The medieval chronicler Roger of Wendover, who was fond of listing gluttony among John’s catalog of sins, insisted that the king aggravated his condition by “surfeiting himself with peaches and new cider.”

  Still ailing and in great pain, John traveled through the chilly mists and fogs from Lynn to Wisbech on October 11, and the following day his caravan began the arduous journey over the numerous rivers that empty into the Wash. His destination was Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire. But John was about to encounter more bad luck. Roger of Wendover wrote that the king’s baggage train met with an accident as the carts attempted to ford the Wellstream (now the River Nene; the Wellstream is the Nene estuary). Because the caravan was in too much haste to wait for the tides to recede, the packhorses and some of John’s servants were mired in quicksand. According to the chroniclers, John’s household effects and the equipment of his portable chapel, including its holy relics, were lost in the goop.

  The disaster seemed to aggravate John’s physical condition. Over the following week his health worsened. Although his body was racked with fever, he was nonetheless determined to press on and confront his enemies. When he reached the Bishop of Lincoln’s castle in Newark on October 16, the abbot of Croxton was summoned to attend him.

  John was too ill on October 18, 1216, to read his messengers’ dispatches, which contained peace offerings from a number of rebels. But he was able to dictate a will before the abbot heard his confession and administered last rites. He died that night. In accordance with the tradition of burying a sovereign’s internal organs in locations other than where the body is interred, King John’s intestines were taken away by the abbot of Croxton. John’s corpse was laid to rest according to his wishes in the Church of the Blessed Virgin and St. Wulfstan in Worcester. The last of the Angevin kings was gone for good.