Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (13 page)

As we have seen, Philip’s plans were thwarted by the naval victory at Damme and by John ceding England as a papal fief, a decision which took many of the barons by surprise and which was not universally popular. Pope Innocent was at first not entirely convinced of John’s sincerity and he sent his legate Pandulf to England to check that the offer was serious. It was, though it is likely that John’s decision to cede the realm was a political move rather than being the result of some kind of religious conversion. Whatever the motivation, it worked: John gained immediate papal favour, his excommunication and the Interdict would in due course be lifted, and he was able to use the support of the pope in all his subsequent disputes with the barons.

Part of the agreement was that John would recognise Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, which he did. However, Stephen found his traditional archiepiscopal powers curbed: normally he would have been the pre-eminent churchman in England, but as it was now a papal fief it came under the jurisdiction of the papal legates, Pandulf and his colleagues who arrived later, Nicholas de Romanis and Guala Bicchieri. They were there to support the king in all matters on behalf of his new overlord the pope, but Langton was (perhaps understandably) less than wholehearted in his support for John and tried to mediate between him and the barons. He was later suspended from his position by Pandulf and in 1215 was summoned to Rome to explain himself, not to return to England for another three years.

Another item in the agreement with the pope was that John should reconcile himself with Robert Fitzwalter – still posing in exile as a heroic religious fugitive – who returned to England and began encouraging further discord.

John had little success in trying to persuade his barons to join with him to invade Poitou in 1214. They gave an array of excuses, positioning themselves variously as faux-moral (they could not in conscience follow John while he was still excommunicate), as poor (they had spent all their money preparing to defend England against the proposed invasion the previous year), or as legal sticklers (they were not bound by their oaths to serve overseas). Unwilling to have his invasion compromised by this display of his inability to command his own subjects, John hired mercenaries and made deals in Poitou, sending back demands to England that those who had not joined him should pay scutage – a tax whereby knights or nobles could ‘buy out’ their military commitments in cash – which were almost universally ignored. When John returned, defeated, in the autumn of 1214, he faced not only widespread lack of support but also further antagonism relating to his choice of regent during his absence: Peter des Roches, the foreign bishop of Winchester, whose rule had been unpopular.

A few words should be said here about the effect of the burgeoning conflict on those lower down the social scale. The earls and the great barons, those who controlled much of the land and with whom the king might expect to have some kind of personal relationship, made up only a tiny minority of England’s population in the early thirteenth century: approximately a hundred out of a total of some four million. Below them were about a thousand knights (who controlled enough land to enable them to sustain a ‘knightly’ status – that is, one which gave them sufficient resources not just to live on, but also to train, mount and equip themselves and a retinue), and perhaps ten times as many minor landowners who held a manor or two which granted them some local importance. Allowing for the significant minority of men and women who were members of religious communities, this means that the remaining approximately 95 per cent of England’s population was engaged in agriculture or trade. Many of the actions of the king and the barons effectively passed these people by: goods still needed to be manufactured and sold, crops grown and harvested, and the weather watched carefully, regardless of who was on the throne or who controlled the land they lived on. But other events affected them and their families deeply. The Interdict meant that they were excluded from church services and their deceased loved ones could not be buried in consecrated ground; and a decade of rising inflation had seen the all-important price of wheat double, and hunger become widespread. But discontent was one thing; having the power and the resources to do something about it was another. Thus when the groundswell of feeling against King John turned to open rebellion, it was led not by the common people (who played very little part in the war other than as incidental victims, as we shall see) but by the barons.

The ringleaders were a group known as the Northerners, as their lands were mainly in the north of England. Among them was the ubiquitous Robert Fitzwalter, now claiming that John had tried to force himself upon Fitzwalter’s daughter. Eustace de Vesci chimed in with an accusation against John concerning an attempted seduction of or attack on his wife, and further anti-John propaganda, now directed at him personally rather than at his kingship or administration, began to circulate. It is difficult to tell whether these rumours had any truth in them, but it is possible and even plausible. We have already heard some of the invective which the Minstrel of Reims pours out against John in this regard; but in his
History of the Dukes
another more sober and reliable chronicler, the Anonymous of Béthune, tells us of the king: ‘He lusted after beautiful women and because of this he shamed the high men of the land, for which reason he was greatly hated.’ It was not so much that John was unfaithful to his marriage vows – this was par for the course for a medieval king, and John openly acknowledged half a dozen illegitimate children – but that the barons felt that their own wives and daughters were not safe. The Waverley annalist notes that the accusations against John were starting to pile up: ‘For some [John] had disinherited without judgement of their peers; some he had condemned to a cruel death; of others he had violated their wives and daughters; and so instead of law there was tyrannical will.’

The combination of personal, political and financial motives behind the rebellion makes it difficult to identify any one overarching reason which pushed the barons over the edge – or even to identify a coherent group of these barons, as loyalties fluctuated – but John could evidently see the threat on the horizon as he strengthened the garrisons of his royal castles with troops of mercenaries. In January 1215 the disaffected barons met John in London, and much was made of the old coronation charter of Henry I – renowned as a just king – in which he promised to uphold the ancient laws and liberties of the realm and the rights of the nobles.

John procrastinated, and both sides appealed to Rome; John, of course – following his decision to cede England as a papal fief – was more likely to gain the pope’s support, and he increased his chances by taking the cross on the holy day of Ash Wednesday in March 1215. It is likely that he had very little intention of ever going on crusade, but by swearing the vows he was entitled to the special protection of the Church. The barons did not wait for confirmation from Rome that the pope supported John, but held another meeting in April. Prominent among the nobles there were those with personal grudges against John: Robert Fitzwalter, Eustace de Vesci and Geoffrey de Mandeville. Saer de Quincy, the earl of Winchester, was also to the fore: he was Fitzwalter’s cousin and had been with him at the infamous surrender of Vaudreuil castle in Normandy eleven years previously, which had weakened the English position before its collapse.

The barons sent an ultimatum to John, that he should abide by the Articles of the Barons, as the demands were now called; he refused. Rebellion turned to war, and Robert Fitzwalter, now styling himself rather grandiosely as ‘Marshal of the Army of God’ as a direct riposte to John’s nominal status as a crusader, led a force which attacked the castles at Northampton and Bedford. What is particularly remarkable about the situation was the way in which the barons at this point started acting together. Previously they had been something of a disparate group, each looking out for his own interests while John sought to play them off against each other, so the fact that a large proportion of them were now united in this common cause points to the depth of feeling against the king. The revolt spread, and on 17 May 1215 the city of London opened its gates to the barons in support of their cause. The barons sent letters to all those still siding with John which, in the words of Roger of Wendover, told them to ‘Abandon a king who was perjured and who warred against his barons, and together with them to stand firm and fight against the king for their rights and for peace.’

There were eruptions of pro-baronial violence in other areas of the country, and King Alexander in Scotland and Prince Llewelyn in Wales were poised to take advantage of the situation, threatening John on all sides. With his capital also under rebel control John had no choice but to agree to the barons’ demands, and on 15 June 1215 he set his seal to the document known at the time as the Charter of Runnymede but more famous afterwards as Magna Carta. This document, which was copied and circulated around the country, is often portrayed now as a great charter of liberties, declaring freedom from tyranny and the rights of all, but equality for different classes (and sexes) was certainly not its original intention. Rather, the detail demonstrates what was important to the thirteenth-century noblemen who conceived it, with clauses such as fixing reliefs – the fees which heirs had to pay to inherit their lands and titles – at set amounts, ensuring that widows did not remarry without the consent of their overlords, and removing unpopular foreigners from high office. In effect it was a document concerned with short-term and immediate practical reforms which would protect the nobility against an autocratic king who did not abide by existing laws and customs. The authors did not trust John to keep to the terms of the charter of his own free will: there was to be a committee of twenty-five barons that would effectively oversee his actions. If the king did not abide by the terms, then (according to clause 61) the committee of barons could ‘distrain and distress us in all ways possible, by taking castles, lands, possessions and in any other ways they can, until it has been put right in accordance with their judgement, saving our person and the persons of our queen and children’.

John appeared to submit to the will of his lords, but inwardly he seethed at the unprecedented challenge to his authority as God’s anointed sovereign, and the chroniclers in England are in agreement that even after the sealing of the charter, the peace was uneasy. The Dunstable annalist emphasises the impermanence of it; Ralph of Coggeshall says that it was no more than a ‘
quasi-pax
’; and the Barnwell annalist tells of how John fortified royal castles and stayed near his own strong points. Matthew Paris tells us that John ‘secretly prepared letters’ and sent them to the foreign mercenaries holding his castles, ordering them to resupply and re-garrison in expectation of war, and adds: ‘He then commenced gnashing his teeth, scowling with his eyes, and seizing sticks and limbs of trees, began to gnaw them, and after gnawing them to break them, and with increased extraordinary gestures to show the grief or rather the rage he felt.’ While John’s gestures of rage might be exaggerated, what is beyond doubt is that at the same time as he was promising to keep the provisions of the charter he was already sending messengers to the pope asking him to annul it.

Some of the barons were unhappy at making terms with John at all. They were suspicious of his seeming compliance and organised tournaments near London as an excuse to be near the capital and armed. The
History of the Dukes
tells us that in council with the king at Oxford in July 1215 a group of lords publicly insulted him by refusing to attend him in his chamber, where he was bedridden with an illness, meaning he had to be carried into their presence, whereupon they refused to stand when he entered. Once he had recovered, John sent to Aquitaine and Flanders for mercenaries.

A reply from Pope Innocent (in Rome) on the subject of Magna Carta was received. It was dated 24 August 1215, thus indicating that John must have written to him almost as soon as the charter was sealed, and that Innocent had lost no time in responding. Innocent did not mince his words:

An agreement which is not only shameful and base but also illegal and unjust … we utterly reject and condemn this settlement, and under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe it … the charter, with all undertakings and guarantees, whether confirming it or resulting from it, we declare to be null and void of all validity for ever.

John rescinded the charter in September and the barons came to a final conclusion: if the king could not be controlled, he would have to be overthrown. Matthew Paris is once again a trifle exaggerated but nonetheless eloquent on the subject of their disappointment in the king and their despair:

Cursing the king’s fickleness and infidelity they thus gave vent to their grief: ‘Woe unto you, John, last of kings, detested one of the chiefs of England, disgrace to the English nobility! Alas for England already devastated, and to be further ravaged! Alas! England, England, until now chief of provinces in all kinds of wealth, you are laid under tribute; subject not only to fire, famine and the sword, but to the rule of ignoble slaves and foreigners, than which no slavery can be worse. We read that many other kings and princes have contended even unto death for the liberty of their land which was in subjection; but you, John, of sad memory to future ages, have designed and made it your business to enslave your country which has been free from times of old … you have bound by a bond of perpetual slavery this noble land, which will never be freed from the servile shackle unless through the compassion of Him who may at some time deign to free us.’