Blood Cries Afar (34 page)

Louis arrived in England on 21 May at Stonor on the Isle of Thanet just ahead of his main fleet, landing with just seven ships, through a combination of keenness and the compulsions and disruptions of the storm and its effects on his squadrons, many of which had turned back until the winds subsided. Louis wished to be the first ashore. He missed his footing slightly and landed in the water instead of on the earth. From a crowd that had gathered on land, a priest emerged with a crucifix. Louis kissed the crucifix and planted his lance in the ground. He had come with his army to claim the throne of England as his own.

His full force appeared off the coast the following day. John hastened to Sandwich to gauge its size for himself. For decades English armies had crossed the Channel to fight in France; now that was all turned on its head. The long-threatened French invasion of England was now a reality staring him defiantly in his face. The moment was at hand and the crisis was upon him. John had been fearing this event for years; but he had also been preparing for it. His naval force might have been rendered temporarily inoperative, but on land he had amassed his troops in readiness. At this critical juncture, John had the opportunity to seize the military initiative from the onset: he could have been in position to attempt to prevent Louis’s invasion force from landing or engage with it in a pitched battle and drive it back into the sea. He did neither. Instead, he fled. The French poured onto land unopposed.

Was John’s reaction an ignominious one of panic? William the Breton would have us believe this. According to his account, Louis sought battle even though he and his men were the worse for wear after the arduous crossing and were outnumbered three-to-one. The Anonymous, who says that Louis initially had 200 knights with him, depicts John as riding along the bank and sounding off his trumpets after the main fleet arrived but this ‘little emboldened his men, and little comforted them, great was the display of French power’.
⁴³⁹
John is an easy target to criticise in his military role and he may indeed have lost an important chance at the onset. But as we have seen battle avoidance was a mainstay of medieval warfare and this advice was given by the old warrior William Marshal, according to the Dunstable annalist. John’s decision was taken because he had an even greater fear than the French joining up with the baronial forces: he could not trust his own men. Wendover explains John’s thinking: ‘as he was surrounded by foreign mercenaries, he did not dare attack Louis on his landing, in case they all deserted him in battle and went over to Louis’s side; he therefore chose to retreat rather than engage in battle in uncertainty.’
⁴⁴⁰
Remember that one of the attractions of Louis was that he was from the French royal family; the barons hoped that John’s foreign troops, many of whom were French themselves, would not fight against the son of their overlord king. Even without this threat, the knowledge of Hastings in 1066 must have played heavily on his mind; John did not want to lose his kingdom, and perhaps his life, that day.

But, as mentioned above, John is an easy target to criticise. John had proven himself energetic and thorough in his preparations for this war, expending vast amounts of treasure and sweat in building his massive army. But at the decisive moment to what avail had it been to him? One must question the wisdom of building an army so dramatically augmented by foreign mercenaries. The idea of these was that they could be trusted above his own barons, if the pay was forthcoming. If John’s position was such that he could realistically place limited faith in his own countrymen, then he had little recourse than to look across the Channel for forces. Yet if these in turn were potentially undependable then what was the massive outlay of money for? Untrustworthy himself, he placed little trust in others. The significance here is that John had not fully utilised these men when they might have had their greatest effect in the months before the invasion: had John crushed the baronial revolt and its epicentre in London, there would have been no French invasion and no potential clash of loyalties. John was in the precarious position he found himself in late May 1216 precisely because he had failed to achieve military victory against a much weaker enemy before the French arrived on the scene. He compounded this failure with the current one, leaving Louis to establish his army on land unopposed.

John seemed to realise that his reluctance to commit fully to the grim but necessary task at hand was another failure. He resorted to character and slinked speedily away from the coast and was well on the way to Dover before most of his men even knew he had gone. When captains such as Robert of Béthune and Baldwin d’Aire realised the King was no longer with them, they were angered and critical. When they followed him to Dover, they found him there greatly agitated and disheartened. John’s woeful lack of leadership skills, highlighted and exposed cruelly in times of extreme pressure, did not bode well for his campaign.

While Louis took control of Sandwich on 23 May, with all its ships, wine, meat and booty, John continued his flight further inland to Guildford and thence, distressed, to Winchester by 28 May with a Flemish rearguard protecting his movements all the way. Before retreating from Dover, he left this new, powerful fortress in the capable hands of the justiciar Hubert de Burgh (a reflection of its importance); with him were a large garrison of Flemish knights (as many as 140 calculates the Anonymous) and sergeants, and plentiful supplies to withstand a long siege. Louis proceeded to subdue the whole district around eastern Kent with ease, except for Dover. Dover was to be to Louis what London had been for John: an obstinate focus of prolonged resistance. Canterbury surrendered without a struggle, Guala himself deserting the city in undignified haste ahead of the French advance, and from there Louis reached Rochester around 25 May, the scene of John’s triumph the previous autumn. The barons and Louis’s French troops in London were now able to leave the capital and at long last meet up with their leader at Rochester. Here Robert Fitzwalter, Hugh Bigod, Saer de Quincy, William de Mandeville, Robert de Vere, William Marshal the Younger and others paid homage to Louis.

They soon made good their earlier defeat at Rochester on 30 May, the castle holding out for less than a week. It had taken John almost two months to win it. That Rochester fell so precipitously was not merely a measure of military pressure, but its often vital concomitant: political momentum. Louis’s arrival, supported by his large invasion army, transformed the situation in England. Now that he had finally made good on his word and turned up in England, there was confidence and expectation amongst many that John’s reign was over and that if they were to be part of Louis’s success and its consequent benefits they should declare themselves for him now. Those who had made peaceful overtures to John in the preceding months when they were completely on the defensive, now reverted to their true, pro-French colours; many waverers and even fair-weather supporters of John soon followed their example, clearly sensing
fin de regime
in the spring air. These considerations outweighed any expected, wholesale national reaction to the presence of a foreign invader on English soil (this was to come later); this speaks volumes as to how far John had alienated his subjects. The momentum was with Louis, just as it was with his father in his conquest of Normandy in 1203–4.

Against this, repeated proclamations of excommunication, as again pronounced when Guala reunited with John at Winchester on 28 May, counted for little. Louis entered the capital triumphantly on 2 June to a rapturous reception. The canons of Saint Paul’s, unperturbed by Guala’s frantic condemnations, welcomed Louis warmly with a procession in the cathedral. No fewer than twelve of the country’s twenty bishops welcomed Louis as the new defender of the English church. Perhaps Louis’s satisfaction was marred a little by Westminster Abbey’s refusal to grant him entry (one of only five London churches which obeyed excommunication protocol) and, more importantly, that the Tower of London remained neutral and treated him similarly, for the time being at least.
⁴⁴¹
William Hardel, the mayor of London and a host of others paid homage to the French Prince. From the start, Louis acted in every way as the rightful King of England. He swore on the holy gospels that he would restore to his new vassals all their rightful inheritances and good laws. He wrote to Alexander of Scotland and then to all the barons who had not yet done homage to him, instructing them either to do so or ‘to leave the kingdom of England with haste’.
⁴⁴²

It had been a perfect start for Louis: all his forces safely across the Channel; no men lost; Sandwich, Canterbury and Rochester all secure; and now a real sense of palpable success in his claim to the throne with his experiences in London. The outcome so far had vindicated not only his careful, lengthy planning but also the stubborn, if largely passive, resistance of the barons in the capital. Louis would have hoped that the impressive impact of his arrival and the momentum that it had created would persuade his opponents that the sensible option was to abandon the despotic John and come over to him. Indeed, Wendover reports that many on the King’s side abandoned him, ‘quite certain that Louis would obtain the kingdom’ while many of John’s continental troops – but not the Poitevins – either headed home or joined with Louis.
⁴⁴³
But the real struggle was only just beginning.

Louis was not the type to hang around and hope for the best. He intended to capitalise on his momentum and seek out John while the Angevin was still on the back foot. He would have guessed from his own knowledge and that of the barons that John’s reversal would be affecting him adversely and that he should keep the pressure on. The chronicler Robert of Auxerre reports that John had lost his nerve and was unable to act. On 6 June Louis led a large army out of London making for the King at Winchester while another force set out to assert control of the eastern counties. It was as if the forces of the long pent-up barons and early French arrivals had now combined with the massive influx of Louis’s army to burst out of the capital and flood across the land. Meanwhile, Alexander of Scotland besieged Carlisle again while pro-baronial factions stirred up more trouble in Wales and Ireland. The desultory civil war was over and the driving war of conquest had begun. ‘The realm was thrown into chaos,’ writes Warren.
⁴⁴⁴

The day before Louis’s departure, John had actually quitted Winchester and retreated farther west to the safety of the formidable Corfe Castle. While Louis led his men, John used his as a buffer against the enemy. Louis’s first objective was Reigate Castle, owned by the Earl of Warrene; he reached it on 7 June to find it abandoned. He entrusted its care to Robert de Courtenay. The following day Louis took Guildford and on the 10th he arrived before Farnham, a castle belonging to Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester. Hardly had Louis set up a siege camp when the garrison surrendered the next day. By the 14th Louis was before Winchester. Here, for the first time, the French Prince met with real resistance.

Before leaving Winchester, John had reorganised his forces. He sent Falkes de Bréauté to defend the region around Oxford, centred on his royal castle there, while Savary de Mauléon was charged with preparing the defences of Oxford. We can determine here that John knew he had to draw up a defensive line before the French proceeded too far west and undermined royal support there. De Mauléon fired the suburbs to deny the oncoming enemy resources and shelter (Coggeshall claims John personally committed this incendiary act); the fire, however, spread into the city razing perhaps as much as half of it to the ground. The flames were seen by the rebel forces. Louis ordered his army to arrange itself into battle order and to approach the city quietly and carefully. He found the city deserted and entered it. However, before having left to meet up with John, Savary had left garrisons in Winchester’s two castles, its main one in the west and another in the east called Wolsevey belonging to des Roches and captained by the young squire Oliver, whom the Anonymous identifies as an illegitimate son of John. Louis wished these garrisons to be checked so they could not sally forth and fire the rest of the city or make a surprise attack on his camp; he instructed Robert de Béthune and Baldwin de Belvoir to see to this task which they performed with assiduous labour. Louis’s siege engines went to work on the main castle, his perriers and mangonnels bombarding its tower. The siege lasted until 24 June. On this day Savary came from the King to discuss surrender terms of the castles with Louis; the garrisons were allowed to withdraw and Louis took full possession of Winchester. Louis awarded Count Hervé of Nevers with the city and main castle. With this success emerged the first inkling of trouble in the Franco-baronial alliance. William Marshal the Younger contested Adam de Beaumont’s marshalship of the army; Louis, fearing loss of English support, granted this to him. This was to be the first of many squabbles and evidence of growing friction between the rebel barons and the French over the increasing share of spoils, which did much to cause acrimony among their ranks.

More serious to John than the loss of Winchester was the flurry of high-level desertions to Louis while he was in the city and what it said about John’s expected chances. These were pretty devastating to John on the political, military and personal level. Four great earls changed sides and submitted to Louis: three who were previously seemingly committed supporters of the King – Arundel, Warren and Salisbury – and Aumale. With them went 430 knights and thirteen castles. Salisbury, William Longsword, was the king’s half-brother; William the Breton suggests that he was looking for vengeance for John’s unwarranted advances (‘incest’, William claims) on the Earl’s wife when he was captive in France after the defeat at Bouvines.
⁴⁴⁵
Salisbury and the consistently inconsistent Aumale soon returned to John, but it must have shaken the King at the time. Another deserter was Warin Fitzgerald, a chamberlain of the exchequer, a castellan in possession of over 100 knights’ fees. Within a fortnight Hugh de Neville let John know that he was ready to hand over Marlborough, a town which owed its charter to John, and John Fitzhugh followed him. John tried to stop and even reverse this flow with increasingly desperate attempts at reconciling himself with his estranged barons, even the de Braose family, and safe-conducts were offered to any thinking of returning to his service. At the same time, rallying himself into more solid action, he checked the readiness of royal castles in Wiltshire and Dorset while instructing Bayonne to send galleys against the French.