Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (14 page)

Throughout this period of conflict in England, the barons looked across the Channel to the powerful and stable royal line in France. In marked contrast to the discontent, conflict and usurpations which had characterised the Anglo-Norman monarchy since 1066 (Gerald of Wales notes that the Plantagenets were ‘princes who did not succeed one another in regular hereditary order but rather acquired violent domination through an inversion of order by killing and slaughtering their own’), the French had experienced over two hundred years of smooth successions from father to son. Philip Augustus had been on the throne for thirty-five years, and his five immediate predecessors had enjoyed reigns of between twenty-nine and forty-eight years each. He had an adult son, a younger son and two grandsons. The barons might be understandably wary of offering the throne to Philip himself (and besides, he was now fifty years old so possibly not a long-term prospect), but Louis was a younger man, a proven warrior, a prince with a reputation for being moral and just; he came from a dynasty which had a tradition of involving a council of nobles in its decision-making process; he had a claim via the blood of his wife, John’s niece. And on a more practical level, with the might and resources of the French crown behind him, he was likely to be successful. This tipped the balance in his favour against other possible candidates such as King Alexander of Scotland (who was descended from the old Anglo-Saxon kings of England) who did not have the military might to back up a potential claim. And Louis being French had an additional advantage: many of John’s mercenaries were from various regions of France, so having Louis at the head of the campaign might mean that John would be deprived of their services, as he had been in Poitou in 1214. Of further comfort to the barons was the fact that Louis, if and when he became king, would probably not reside in England permanently, thus giving them more scope for their own activities. This was not unusual as Henry II and his predecessors had spent much of their time on the Continent, so there was precedent for a cross-Channel king. All in all, he was the perfect choice. A party of barons headed by Saer de Quincy, the earl of Winchester, Henry de Bohun, the earl of Hereford, and Robert Fitzwalter sailed for France in September 1215.

September was the month in which John was expecting the arrival of the new mercenaries he had engaged from Aquitaine and Flanders; he headed to the Kent coast in anticipation. However, there were storms and heavy seas during that month and instead of the expected ships, waves of drowned corpses washed up on the shores along Kent and Suffolk.

While John was bemoaning his losses on the coast the barons decided to take advantage of his situation by capturing Rochester Castle, which would bar his route back to London. The castellan there had been loyal to John for many years but, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, he opened the gates to the rebels. This irritated John, who moved to assault it; there would now be actual armed conflict on English soil between the king and his subjects. A line had been crossed.

The barons had garrisoned Rochester well: ninety-five knights and forty-five sergeants held it under the leadership of William d’Albini, an able commander. However, as they expected Rochester to hold until the delegation returned from France they had made no back-up plans for reinforcing it and had no second force ready to relieve a siege. John, on the other hand, was prepared for the long haul. He had siege machinery built and remained at Rochester for seven weeks, conducting the operations personally – the longest he had ever spent in one place since his accession to the throne sixteen years earlier. Roger of Wendover tells us: ‘The siege was prolonged many days owing to the great bravery and boldness of the besieged, who hurled stone for stone, weapon for weapon, from the walls and ramparts on the enemy.’ The keep resisted all attempts at assault so John turned to mining: a tunnel was dug under the wall, held up by wooden posts, then filled with flammable material including the fat of forty pigs which John sent for specially, and set alight. As the timbers burned and collapsed the roof of the mine caved in, bringing one of the four towers of the keep crashing down. The garrison, by this point starving and forced to eat their horses, retreated to the other half of the keep and resisted a little longer but eventually realised it could not hold out and surrendered on 30 November 1215. John’s first inclination was to execute them all, but he was persuaded not to on the basis that similar treatment would then be meted out to royal garrisons by the barons. In the end only one man was hanged, a crossbowman who had previously been in John’s service.

While John was at Rochester the survivors of his mercenary fleet finally arrived. John marshalled his forces and looked over the Channel, waiting for the invasion which was now inevitable.

* * *

While John was being humiliated by his barons, Louis had been in the south of France fulfilling his vow to crusade against the Cathar heretics. The crusade had been led for some time by the formidable military leader Simon de Montfort (not to be confused with his son and namesake who would later play a significant part in English history), and Louis took with him a force including Guy de Châtillon and his father the count of St Pol, and Philip de Dreux, bishop of Beauvais. Louis modestly took his position in the host as crusader rather than leader, assuring Simon that he would leave the command to him, and that he would not seek to seize for the crown any lands Simon captured. Louis’s time in the south was to prove short before the autumn end of the campaigning season, when he returned to Paris to hear the news from England, but he was able to assist Simon in capturing the great city of Toulouse before he left. And his light touch paid eventual dividends: when Simon was later recognised officially by the pope as lord of many of the lands he had taken, he would come to Paris to do homage to King Philip for the duchy of Narbonne, the county of Toulouse and the viscounties of Béziers and Carcassonne, meaning that the French crown became direct overlord of these lands without too much effort; previously they had been subject to the duke of Aquitaine, a title held by the Plantagenets since Henry II’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152.

The opportunity for Louis to engage in a bigger and more glorious military campaign arose when the English delegation headed by Saer de Quincy, Henry de Bohun and Robert Fitzwalter arrived at the royal court in Paris. Without beating around the bush they declared that the barons of England had sworn never to hold their lands from John; they paid homage to Louis for them and offered him the crown of England if he would consent to come and take it.

What prince would not jump at the chance of chasing such a glittering prize? Louis, as might be expected, was raring to go; Philip, unsurprisingly, was more circumspect. The king’s suspicions were aroused when a letter from England arrived shortly after the delegation, saying that the barons there had made their peace with John and that the embassy needed therefore to be cancelled. Despite their protestations of innocence, Philip accused the men before him of treachery and demanded twenty-four noble hostages before he would discuss the matter further. Twenty-four sons of the nobility were duly sent for and arrived in France to be lodged in some comfort at Compiègne; the letter turned out to have been forged by John’s agents.

Louis, without waiting on the niceties, immediately agreed to support the baronial cause, and he sent a first contingent of 140 knights across the Channel in December 1215 to join the barons holding London, and another fleet of twenty ships in January 1216. Their first and presumably unintended effect on the war was the loss of a key ally: during a tournament which was organised as part of a joint military training exercise, Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex and Gloucester, did not arm himself properly and was killed by a wound to the stomach inflicted accidentally by a French knight.

Events were moving a little too fast for Philip, who liked to make sure he had all bases covered and every possible justification for his actions before he embarked on any new endeavour. The situation presented him with something of a dilemma: if Louis were to lose, then the reputation of the French crown, which Philip had been building and consolidating for so many years, would be soiled. John might end up in a stronger position and therefore want to attempt to regain his continental possessions, leaving Philip with another war to fight. On the other hand, if Louis were to be victorious he would make immense gains in power and influence and, as a king, would be the equal of his father and no longer subject to his control, with everything that implied in the light of Henry II’s conflicts with his son Henry the Young King, still fresh in Philip’s memory. But when would Philip ever again get such a chance to overthrow the Plantagenets once and for all? And however powerful Louis might eventually become, better him on the English throne than John. Philip agreed in principle to have the judicial case heard for Louis’s claim to the English crown, and a council of the French nobles was summoned.

In the meantime John had not attempted a siege of London, which would be difficult – although, had he tried and succeeded, he might have won the war outright before it really started. Instead he launched devastating raids into the lands of the rebel barons in the northern counties, killing and burning as he went. The revolt against him began to stutter; the troops Louis had sent over so far were of some help to the barons but they were not enough to turn the tide. Louis needed to go in person, which meant that he had to persuade the nobility of France of the justness of his claim.

The Assembly of Melun, as it came to be known, was held between 23 and 25 April 1216. King Philip presided but did not take an active part for either side (interposing his view only where his own interests were affected) while a council of French nobles listened to Louis and his advisers arguing against the papal legate Guala Bicchieri, who did everything he could to prevent the expedition.

Louis was impetuous and eager to get the talking over and done with so he could move forward with his military preparations. Nevertheless, he needed at least a fig leaf of justification so he had a team of legal advisers (including Simon Langton and Robert de St Germain, who, as we have seen, had been among his retainers for some time) draw up an argument for him. Meanwhile a third English churchman, Elias of Dereham, was in Rome to plead on his behalf.

The discussion went back and forth as Louis (‘looking upon the legate with a scowling brow’, according to Roger of Wendover) and his advisers made their case. In summary his arguments were on three grounds: that John had lost his right to the English throne, which was now vacant; that Louis was the legitimate heir to that throne; and that the papacy had no right to intervene in the matter.

From the available evidence it would seem that Louis was better at fighting than he was at talking, and not all of his points were entirely convincing. His case that John had vacated the throne was in three parts: firstly, that John had rebelled against his brother Richard and attempted to seize the crown while Richard was away on crusade, for which he had been condemned as a traitor and therefore forfeited his right to the throne; secondly, that John had murdered his nephew Arthur and had been condemned in a French court by the judgment of the king and of his peers, therefore forfeiting all his possessions; and, thirdly, that John had reneged on his oath to uphold the rights and customs of the English Church and nobility. He had not consulted them about his decision to hand the entire kingdom over as a papal fief; he had done away with good customs and introduced bad ones; he had attacked the lands of his own barons. For this reason he was not fit to rule and the barons were entitled to elect a successor.

The first two of these arguments do not stand up to much scrutiny. Following John’s attempted seizure of the throne from Richard the brothers had been reconciled and Richard had later designated John as his successor. As to the murder of Arthur, Philip might have exercised his right to strip John of his duchy of Normandy (although he appears to have done this unilaterally, as there are no official records of any formal ‘court’ being convened to condemn John at the time) but he could not depose him as king of England, as this was a separate title even though it was held by the same man. The third accusation was more serious. As with all kings since William the Conqueror, John had sworn at his coronation to preserve peace and protect the Church, to maintain good laws and abolish bad, to dispense justice to all. If there was any doubt that he had broken this oath, then his subsequent revocation of the charter, which in itself formed a genuine peace treaty and reiterated in different words and more detail the coronation oath, sealed this accusation. Effectively (and as other, later kings of England would find), a king could only rule if his nobles allowed him to.

Assuming that Louis succeeded in convincing the assembly that the throne of England was now empty, he now needed to demonstrate that he was the man to fill the vacancy. The papal legate Guala argued that if John were to be deposed then the new king should be his eight-year-old son, Henry (John also had a second son and three daughters). This, of course, did not suit the barons: the two young boys were in their father’s power and little Henry would be ruled by his father as some kind of puppet, therefore making very little change to the status quo. So Louis and his advisers argued that in forfeiting his right to the throne John had also forfeited the rights for his heirs – a tenuous claim which went against normal practice. We may recall at this point that as recently as two years previously Philip Augustus had succeeded in bringing the county of Boulogne under royal control by disinheriting the treacherous Renaud de Dammartin in favour of his daughter, who was married to Philip’s son Philip Hurepel.

If the claims of John’s children were to be ignored then the rest of the family tree needs to be examined. Interestingly, one fact which does not seem to have been put forward at any point by Louis or his advisers was that Louis was a direct descendant of William the Conqueror: his paternal grandmother, queen mother Adela, was the granddaughter of her namesake Adela of Blois, who was William’s daughter (and also, as it happened, the mother of King Stephen of England). Perhaps this relationship had become less readily apparent in the 130 or so years since the Conqueror’s death, or perhaps it was considered less relevant after such a passage of time. As it was, the arguments relating to heredity were centred on the family of Henry II.