Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (12 page)

The combatants are engaging each other over the whole plain in such a close melee that those who are striking and those who are being struck are so close to each other that they barely have room to raise their arm to strike another blow.

Lances are shattering, swords and daggers hit each other, combatants split each other’s heads with their axes, and their lowered swords plunge into the bowels of horses.

Loose horses are running here and there across the field, some giving out their last breaths, some with the entrails spilling out of their stomachs, some kneeling and falling to the ground … there is hardly one place where you cannot see dead men and dying horses.

By the end of the day the allies were in disarray. Otto had fled the field; William of Salisbury had been taken prisoner after being bludgeoned to the ground, his helmet broken by the mace of the warlike bishop of Beauvais; Ferrand of Flanders and, after what even his enemies recognised as a heroic rearguard action, Renaud of Boulogne were captured.

The battle of Bouvines changed the course of medieval European history; it is as legendary in France as Agincourt is in England. But Philip’s great victory would not have been possible without Louis’s contribution in the south: it was father and son working in tandem that had defeated their massed enemies. Matthew Paris even goes so far as to say that ‘the French rejoiced less in the victory at Bouvines than in the defeat inflicted on the king of England by Louis, because they hoped that in him they would have a valiant sovereign who would outshine his father’. While we must make allowances for Matthew’s hindsight, it is clear that neither success would have been possible without the other.

While Philip was rejoicing in his victory, giving thanks to God and making arrangements for the detention of his prisoners, Louis stayed in Anjou until September, recapturing the castles taken by John and subduing resistance. Over the summer he suffered a loss when the gallant marshal Henry Clément died of a fever, possibly an after-effect of wounds sustained. He was much mourned, but his death did not halt Louis in his campaign: the twenty-six-year-old prince could take charge of his own army as an experienced and competent commander. Following his retreat and the defeat of his allies, John caused little trouble; ‘Woe is me!’, Roger of Wendover has him lament. ‘Since I became reconciled to God, and submitted myself and my kingdoms to the Church of Rome, nothing has gone prosperously with me, and everything unlucky has happened to me.’ John and Philip sealed a truce at Chinon on 18 September 1214, after which Louis was finally free to return to Paris and meet his new son Louis, who had been born in April.

The repercussions from the victories at La-Roche-aux-Moines and Bouvines were profound for all concerned. Otto abdicated in 1215, leaving Philip’s ally Frederick of Hohenstaufen as Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and France free from fear of attack from that direction; Otto himself died in internal exile in 1218. The two French counts who had traitorously taken up arms against their rightful king were dragged away from Bouvines in chains and imprisoned. Ferrand remained in captivity until he was eventually released in 1227. Renaud was stripped of his lands and titles in favour of his twelve-year-old daughter Matilda, who, handily (and perhaps inevitably), was married to King Philip’s thirteen-year-old son Philip Hurepel, who became count of Boulogne. Renaud was imprisoned in arduous conditions for thirteen years, chained to a heavy log and unable to take more than a pace in any direction. When Ferrand was eventually released and he was not, he finally gave up hope and committed suicide in 1227. Some months after Bouvines there was a slightly tardy exchange of prisoners, at which point Robert de Dreux was swapped for the earl of Salisbury, who was none too pleased that brother John had appeared in no hurry to pay his ransom.

John returned defeated to England with his reputation in tatters, to further conflict with a country full of barons who had refused to join him on the campaign anyway. Louis finally went to Languedoc to fight on behalf of the Church and to hone his formidable military skills even further. A year later, when the question of England arose again, the invitation to Louis to come over and take the crown from John came from the English barons themselves, and he was ready.

CHAPTER THREE

THE INVITATION

I
N ORDER TO
understand why the barons of England should take so radical a step as to seek to overthrow their king, and why their choice of replacement should be the son of the king of France, we must leave Louis for a while and spend some time with John.

John had never been a popular figure, suffering by comparison with his glamorous and chivalrous older brothers Henry, Richard and Geoffrey. This had not mattered too much while he was merely John Lackland, unlikely to rule any substantial territories, but it became a significant factor once he was king, and his behaviour did nothing to improve the situation.

John’s initial success, capturing his rival Arthur and eliminating both the boy and any further resistance to his accession, proved to be the high point of his reign and the only time he could legitimately claim to be in control of the vast empire his father had left. After that his lands and reputation were gradually chipped away. In 1203–4 he proved no military match for Philip Augustus, who used the presumed murder of Arthur as an excuse to declare John’s title of duke of Normandy (for which he owed homage to the French king) forfeit and to invade and capture Normandy. This was a huge blow to John’s kingship and it lost him more than just land. Most of the earls and barons of England had ancestral homes in Normandy as well, as they were the direct descendants of those who had come to England with William the Conqueror; owning lands on both sides of the Channel was no problem when the same man was liege lord of both, but now that England belonged to John and Normandy to Philip, the barons had to choose between their two estates, keeping one and losing the other as they could not swear allegiance to two kings at once.

Only one lord successfully managed to retain his lands in both locations: the canny and not altogether scrupulous William Marshal, earl of Pembroke and Striguil. Initially a protégé of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marshal had come to greater prominence in the 1170s as a tournament companion of Henry the Young King, and he went on to serve each of the Plantagenet kings in turn. He had been rewarded with the hand in marriage of the rich heiress Isabelle de Clare, more than twenty years his junior, which had endowed him with extensive lands and great wealth. Marshal had fought on John’s side in Normandy and was then sent by John as an ambassador to Philip Augustus in 1204 to negotiate a truce; while he was in France he took the opportunity which the mission offered and paid homage directly to Philip for his holdings in Normandy. This did not please John, as Marshal would no longer be able to fight against Philip if Philip was his overlord. However, after a cool period which lasted several years Marshal returned to English royal favour and kept his lands in England as well. The other barons were not so fortunate and were forced into a direct choice: most of them chose England, meaning that their energies and their ambitions were now concentrated there.

This did nothing to halt John’s troubles. As kings his father and brother had inspired loyalty and affection; John sought to rule by fear and insecurity. He would not put his trust in anyone who was not completely in his power, and he frequently took hostages (many of them children) from noble families to ensure their good behaviour, which did not endear him to the barons. He also kept his lords in a state of financial dependency, charging huge fees known as ‘reliefs’ to heirs in order to allow them to succeed when their fathers died, then holding the debt over their heads as a threat, knowing that if he ever called it in they would be bankrupt. For example, Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex, was forced to offer 20,000 marks (some £13,333, a mark as we will remember being 13s 4d or two-thirds of a pound) for the honour of marrying the heiress of Gloucester, John’s ex-wife Isabelle, and succeeding to her lands – at a time when most earldoms raised an annual income of some £200 to £400. Matilda de Braose was asked for the frankly ludicrous sum of 50,000 marks for ‘the king’s grace’ (which sounds suspiciously like protection money) when her total wealth amounted to 24 marks and a few gold pieces. Matilda and her family were harried, persecuted and eventually destroyed by John in a personal vendetta: John asked her and her husband William de Braose to hand over their sons as hostages, but Matilda made the mistake of saying in public that she would never hand her children over to a man who had murdered his nephew (William had been appointed by John as Arthur of Brittany’s gaoler after his capture, and might be supposed to have had a great deal of inside information on what had happened to the boy). John immediately called in all the family’s financial debts and confiscated William’s estates in Devon and in Sussex. When they fled to Ireland and Wales he had them hunted down; Matilda and her eldest son William (a married man in his thirties, but as heir still subject to his father as head of the family) were captured and deliberately starved to death on John’s order in 1210, while William senior made it to France only to die there, a broken man, a year later.

That this could happen to someone who had always stood high in John’s favour meant that other barons became nervous and suspicious, wary of their own positions. But instead of providing any kind of reassurance John went in the opposite direction: his unwillingness to trust anyone who was not completely under his thumb meant that he relied more and more heavily on shipped-in mercenaries whose whole livelihoods rested on his whim, rather than on his less dependent barons. The English nobles hated and despised these ‘foreigners’, and the Barnwell annalist was convinced that one of the root causes of the desertion of John by his subjects was the favour he showed to ‘aliens’.

John also provoked the Church. When the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died in 1205 the task of electing a successor fell, as was the custom, to the monks of Canterbury. One faction elected a fellow monk named Reginald as Hubert’s successor, while another favoured the candidate proposed by John, his supporter John de Gray, bishop of Norwich. Both sides appealed to the pope, who, after some consideration, set aside both claims and appointed Stephen Langton, one of the foremost biblical and theological scholars of his time and a cosmopolitan figure who had studied in Paris and Rome. Pope Innocent consecrated Stephen as the archbishop of Canterbury in 1207 but John refused to recognise the appointment; he barred Stephen from entering England and Stephen was forced into exile. In March 1208 England was placed under Interdict and after his continuing refusal to accept the new archbishop John was excommunicated by the pope in 1209. The other bishops of England deserted him and soon only one remained: Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, one of John’s foreign cronies who had only recently been appointed to that rich see.

The Interdict, of course, had the same strictures as those previously imposed on France, which we mentioned earlier. It affected everyone, not just the king: through no fault of their own the people of England were unable to attend Mass and were denied the sacraments, something of serious import at this time. Ralph of Coggeshall gives a flavour of their misery:

Oh what a horrible and miserable spectacle it was to see in every city the sealed doors of the churches, Christians shut out from entry as though they were dogs, the cessation of divine office, the withholding of the sacrament of the body and blood of Our Lord, the people no longer flocking to the famous celebration of saints’ days, the bodies of the dead not given to burial according to Christian rites, the stink infecting the air and the horrible sight filling with horror the minds of the living.

Ralph is perhaps being slightly overdramatic here, as there is evidence that some Church activities still proceeded despite the Interdict. The baptism of infants was permitted, and as long as they took place behind closed doors, with no bells, and not in the presence of any excommunicants, the regular rounds of services could continue in monasteries.

John’s response to the religious crisis was to confiscate Church lands and incomes for his own benefit, which made his coffers swell but his popularity sink even further. In 1212 there was an unsuccessful plot to assassinate him, with one of the ringleaders being a lord named Robert Fitzwalter. Fitzwalter, a regular troublemaker with an over-inflated sense of his own importance, had been in dispute with John since the fall of Normandy a decade earlier (Fitzwalter had surrendered his castle of Vaudreuil there to the French without a fight, so John had refused to pay his ransom, meaning he had had to sell lands to raise the funds himself) and he now fled to France where he managed to convince many people that he was a martyr fleeing from the unjust rule of an excommunicate king. His whispers in the ear of Philip Augustus may have influenced Philip’s plans to invade England in 1213.