Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (17 page)

The canons of St Paul’s welcomed Louis with a solemn procession in the cathedral. Louis swore on the holy gospels that he would restore to his new vassals all their rightful inheritances and good laws. He installed himself in the palace of Westminster, and wrote to King 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. The mayor of London and the leading citizens swore their faith to him.

Louis considered himself,
de facto
, the king of England.

* * *

But, of course, there is more to being a king than considering yourself one. How did Louis act, now that he was in this favourable position? How would he seek to govern?

Given that – according to his own justification – Louis was claiming the throne by right, he did not see England as a ‘conquered’ country. Thus he would need to find a way of establishing an administration which recognised this situation and which integrated in positions of authority those who had accompanied him from France with those who had invited him to England. Of course, at this point he did not have the whole realm under his control, so creating and running all the complex machinery of a proper government would be difficult to achieve until he was more firmly established. But some steps could be taken to set up the bare bones of an administration: he named Simon Langton his chancellor, and also called on the services of two other men who were members of his expedition, Guy d’Athies – who had been a member of his administrative household in France – and the French chamberlain Ours de la Chapelle.

A priority in a war-torn land was the establishment of a system of justice, and here Louis made some headway, appointing men to hear legal cases in those areas where he held sway. He also made grants of land to various followers, thus indicating that he felt he had the right to do so. One charter which has survived was dated 21 November 1216; in it Louis grants the manor of Grimsby to one William of Huntingfield. The first six names on the witness list are the earl of Winchester (Saer de Quincy), Robert Fitzwalter, Ours the chamberlain, the viscount of Melun, Simon Langton and Guy d’Athies – a mixture of English barons and French household members.

One very interesting point about this charter is that although Louis clearly gives himself the authority to determine who should hold the manor of Grimsby, he does not style himself in it as ‘king of England’. Instead, he is described as ‘Ludovicus domini regis Francie primogenitus’, or ‘Louis, eldest son of the lord king of France’. The seal, made of green wax and depicting Louis armed and on horseback, is now broken, but from the remaining lettering around the outside it is just about possible to extrapolate that a similar form of wording is used: ‘Sigill[um Lud]ovici p[rimogeniti regis Franci]e’. This nomenclature which Louis used about himself is a point to which we will return later.

Other aspects of Louis’s proto-government were not so well organised. His financial situation was irregular; he tried to impose some order by insisting on tributes from Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, but he did not have the systems in place to enforce payments except on an ad hoc basis. Louis did not mint his own coins: the Empress Matilda had done so during her abortive attempt to claim the English crown some eight decades previously, as a mark of her implied and asserted status of monarch, but Louis’s administration was not in a position to organise such an undertaking. Indeed, his government was very much improvised, and could hardly be anything else. Before he could embed it properly, he needed to work on gaining control of the rest of England.

Before Louis could take many further steps in this direction, however, catastrophic news arrived. In order to form a successful regime he would need to have a good working relationship with the Church, but it was either during his ride to London or shortly after he arrived that the news reached him that he was under sentence of excommunication from the papal legate. He would have known that this was a possibility for some time, since the threat had been made previously by Guala, but for a lifelong devoted Catholic it still must have come as something of a shock. Louis had lived his life according to the rules of the Church, and now the Church had expelled him from its community, decreeing that he was outcast, that divine services could not be said in his presence, and that he could not even enter a place of worship. If he were to die while excommunicate he would go straight to hell where he would burn for eternity.

Why did he not give up his campaign in order to make immediate peace with the Church? The answer appears to lie in a combination of factors. Firstly, although it was a fearsome punishment for any devout person, by this stage it has to be said that excommunication might have been losing some part of its shock value simply by over-use. Philip Augustus had been excommunicate for a number of years, as had John. Pope Innocent had not hesitated to welcome either of them straight back into the fold as soon as they had made their peace, or as soon as it suited the papacy. Louis had not seen his father visited with any form of divine retribution while he was outside of the Church.

A second reason is that Louis, with his chivalric background, had been brought up to keep his word. He refused to renege on a promise, as Roger of Wendover tells us: ‘He had given his oath to the barons of England that he would come to their assistance, and therefore, he would rather be excommunicated by the pope for a time than incur the charge of falsehood.’ Louis was being put in what must have been, to him, an impossible situation: disobey the Church on one hand, or break his word on the other. The two lay in the balance, but what tipped the scales was surely that his desire to be king of England was overwhelming: he was a powerful, intelligent and energetic man who had been brought up to rule, and there was nothing on the horizon for him in France for many years, King Philip still being in the best of health and unwilling to relinquish any of his responsibilities. Therefore Louis’s chivalric ideals, the martial side of his character and the chance to campaign won out against his religious faith.

However, his determination to ignore the excommunication did not mean he had to deny his religion entirely, for the final factor in the equation, and the one which he proclaimed most publicly, was that the excommunication had been performed by the legate, not by the pope in person, and that the Holy Father would no doubt see fit to rescind the penalty once the facts were explained to him. Simon Langton, Louis’s chancellor in England and a man of the cloth himself, released a statement saying that Louis believed the pope to have been misinformed by his subordinates and that he had sent word to him to clarify matters; he gave orders to the clergy that while they awaited a definitive answer from the pope himself, the excommunication should be ignored. He and Elias of Dereham preached Louis’s cause loudly in the churches of London, and made it known that the archbishop of Canterbury was in Rome seeking to lift the sentence. The archbishop was of course Simon’s exiled brother Stephen Langton, whose interests would be much better served by having Louis on the throne rather than John, so he could be counted on to do everything in his power to help.

None of Louis’s secular supporters, presumably of varying degrees of devoutness themselves, chose to desert his cause due to his excommunication – they preferred pragmatism and to follow the prince of France who had proved himself a leader rather than a prince of the Church who knew nothing of war or campaigning. Most of the clergy of London, too, chose to obey the present chancellor rather than the absent legate, and in the end only five churches observed the excommunication protocol and denied Louis entry. Unfortunately one of these was Westminster Abbey, the place where English kings were crowned, so Louis’s coronation could not take place immediately. Louis appears to have taken this with equanimity: he was in no particular hurry. He saw himself as the
de facto
king of England, John having been declared deposed and having voluntarily abandoned his crown when he fled from the invading forces and away from the centre of government.

Was there also a touch of arrogance at work here? At this point, Louis was in a very favourable position, and he was no doubt confident that matters would proceed according to plan. Barons were flocking to his side as each week went by, and there did not seem to be any concerted resistance effort; so all in all he could feel that there was plenty of time for him to worry about his coronation once he had the whole realm firmly under his control. Also, proclaim as he might that his excommunication was mistaken, Louis knew that his opponents could use it against him to claim that his coronation was not valid, and it would be better if there were no doubts about the legitimacy of the ceremony in future. It could be delayed until both Westminster Abbey and the archbishop of Canterbury were available.

Although Louis did not know it yet, this was to be the biggest mistake of his life.

* * *

Meanwhile, Louis’s messengers had reached Pope Innocent in Rome in May, and the Holy Father was presented with a dilemma. Louis had defied the legate he had sent to the Assembly of Melun and had invaded England despite Guala’s objections, a direct challenge to papal authority. Moreover, his opponent was John, Innocent’s vassal, and the realm invaded was a papal fief. This called for Innocent to intervene. On the other hand, Louis was known to be a good son of the Church who would not act against its interests – and as the certain future king of France, as well as the potential king of England, he would be a figure of immense power and influence in the years to come. He was also Innocent’s best hope for a swift resolution to the Albigensian crusade. The pope noted to the messengers:

If your lord Louis is conquered, in his harm the Church of Rome is harmed, and we consider an injury to him as one to ourselves; we always indulged the hope, and we indulge it now, that he would be in all its times of need the arm, in oppression the solace, and in persecution the refuge of the Church of Rome.

The result was that he officially resolved nothing, and Louis’s messengers were left to kick their heels in Rome as they waited for an answer. This apparent indecision and prevarication seem uncharacteristic of the canny Innocent, so it is possible that he was waiting for more news about the progress of the invasion, and which side was more likely to win, before he officially declared support for one ‘king’ or the other.

So Louis, in London during the first week of June 1216, received neither confirmation of his excommunication nor news of its overturn. He could not let the lack of religious news halt the momentum of his military campaign, however. His allies in other parts of the kingdom were acting in his interests – the excitable teenage King Alexander of Scotland was besieging Carlisle, and there were outbreaks of pro-Louis conflict in Wales – but they could not be expected to continue if Louis were to remain entrenched in London. John had fled but he was still at large in the west of the country, so the next priority must be to capture him before he could muster his remaining resources, while also taking charge of wider territories. Louis therefore divided his forces into three: he left a garrison within London’s walls in order to defend the city, and sent a second force under Robert Fitzwalter to subdue the eastern counties. He himself rode for Winchester in order to engage John, in an effort to put a swift end to the war.

This is where all Louis’s years of training and of education in the knightly arts paid off. Thanks to the hard work of his youth he was fit and strong, able to bear the weight of his armour, the long days in the saddle and the discomforts of campaign life with ease. Apart from four days in London he had been on the move almost constantly since his arrival in England, and this was imperative in thirteenth-century warfare. To sit still was to become stagnated and lose momentum; an army needed to be fast and sharp, with a leader who could plan ahead, but who could also react to unexpected events as they happened.

There was a string of castles in Louis’s path to Winchester which would need to be captured in order to secure the territory behind him as he went. A day after leaving London his force arrived at Reigate, owned by William de Warenne, earl of Surrey (referred to in most contemporary documents simply as earl Warenne). Warenne had hitherto been a staunch supporter of John, who was his cousin, but Louis encountered no resistance at Reigate and entered it unopposed. Warenne had not declared for him, but evidently he was not prepared to stand in his way, either. Louis then took Guildford, advanced on Farnham and had barely set up a siege before the garrison surrendered. The country was falling into his hands exactly as planned, and it was not until he reached Winchester on 14 June 1216 that he encountered the first real resistance.

As Louis and his army approached the great city, they saw smoke and flames reaching into the sky. John had fled again, further west to Corfe Castle, and as he left he had ordered the suburbs of Winchester to be burned to the ground. The primary purpose of this was to deny the oncoming force shelter and resources, regardless of the fates of those people who lived and worked there. We have already noted that this was a tactic used frequently in the early thirteenth century, but in the normal course of events it would be an invader destroying enemy territory, or a lord razing a town which had defied him; that John was prepared to take this course of action on home ground, against a city which was not standing against him, demonstrates his desperation.

The war was to have profound consequences for many of the common people of England, who suffered all the ills of it without reaping any of the benefits. Most of them were undoubtedly more interested in their own crops or livelihoods than in who sat upon the throne, a social level which was so distant from their own experience that it could barely be imagined. But the people and even the clergy were powerless, as Matthew Paris describes: