Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (36 page)

The opposition of the papacy may also have been a factor in Philip Augustus’s decision not to support Louis overtly, therefore denying him the resources of the French crown. This certainly influenced the course of the war: had Louis been able to flood England with troops called up in the name of the French king, or had he been in possession of the substantial funds he needed to hire additional mercenaries, he might have had sufficient resource and momentum to tip the balance irrevocably his way. As it was, the lack of money and men meant that he had to leave England for over a month at a pivotal point in the campaign in order to beg his father for more. If this had resulted in immediate gain then the benefits of this tactic might have outweighed the disadvantages, but of course as it transpired he suffered the double blow of leaving the French court empty-handed
and
returning to England to find that William Marshal had broken the truce in the meantime and that many of his supporters had defected. Louis was thus forced to spend the next few months playing catch-up in order to regain his previous favourable position, and by the time the ever-loyal Blanche’s reinforcements set out it was too little, too late, and the Henrician army had had time to prepare to repel them at sea.

One major factor in the campaign about which Louis could do nothing was the death of John, which as we have seen changed the complexion of the war considerably. Louis’s portrayal by Guala and William Marshal as the foreign invader come to disinherit a blameless young boy, as opposed to the Christian prince invited by the barons to overthrow the tyrant John, provided a number of the war’s waverers with the excuse to change sides and grab at the bait dangled by Marshal. The self-interest of the barons was of course another variable in Louis’s equation; many of them were simply out for what they could get, swapping their allegiances back and forth whenever one side was in the ascendant. Even those English barons who supported Louis all through the war, such as Robert Fitzwalter and Saer de Quincy, had invited Louis to take the throne more because their own interests would be better served by having him on the throne than John, than out of any sense of personal loyalty to him.

But, however much Louis might have felt that some events were out of his hands, he would have known that all military leaders were liable to face unexpected setbacks, and that they needed to deal with them as they arose. What of those factors which
were
under his control? Could he have done anything differently which would have ensured his ultimate success? In Louis’s favour was the fact that he was able to subdue so many castles in such a short space of time; his siege tactics proved effective over and over again and this gave momentum to his campaign. He was a whirlwind, taking the initiative and not sitting back and waiting for events to unfold: his personal presence gave heart to his men, with enemies retreating when they knew or even suspected that he was on his way at the head of his troops. But he could not be everywhere at once, and he needed to deploy his stretched resources to best effect – and this is where things went wrong.

Louis’s forces, even without him, should have taken the decision to attack the oncoming army on the open ground outside Lincoln. Of course we cannot be completely sure of what Louis might have done had he been there in person, but his previous experience suggests, firstly, that he would not have made the elementary mistake of the young count of Perche in miscounting the enemy; and, secondly, that he would have been more inclined to opt for direct action. Although pitched battles were generally avoided by thirteenth-century commanders, in this particular case opting to fight outside the walls of the city would have been the more sensible option, and a more experienced leader might have chosen this course of action instead of staying within the walls with the attendant risk of becoming trapped in the narrow streets – something which had nearly cost Louis his own life at Bailleul in 1213 as the town burned around him. This personal experience would certainly have been a factor in any decision he might have made. But however we might speculate on this point, what remains indisputable is that if Louis had been present in person at Lincoln in May 1217 then his forces would have benefited from having one clear leader in command rather than a committee; this would have simplified matters considerably. However, as we have seen, Louis was not there: he was at Dover with the other half of his army.

Some historians have pointed to this division of his forces in May 1217, when he sent some north to Mountsorrel (from where they subsequently moved to Lincoln) and took the rest south to Dover, to be the decisive factor in the whole war; conventional wisdom says this is not a good tactic. But splitting his army had worked for Louis before, for example when he left part of it in London while he blazed a trail south and west to take Winchester – not to mention the division of forces in France in 1214 which led to success at La-Roche-aux-Moines and Bouvines – and he did not really have any choice. If he had committed all his forces northwards he could have lost his gains in the south, including any headway he had made at Dover. But if he had committed everything to Dover, the Henricians could have mustered unmolested further north and then marched to surround him. Even with the benefit of hindsight, if he were in the same situation again he would probably be forced to act in the same way.

Louis’s greatest military error was his failure to capture Dover Castle, for having the huge fortress in enemy hands was a twofold problem. Firstly, it meant that the English had a stronghold from which they could launch attacks, meaning he had to deploy a substantial part of his resource to keep an eye on it. This would be the case with any major stronghold, but Dover’s particular position caused a second difficulty in that it also commanded the Channel – which stopped Louis from bringing in reinforcements easily, which was what he needed to do in order to break through and end the siege, thus putting him in a vicious circle from which he could not escape.

But Louis’s biggest mistake of all was not military. He was a fine leader of men and armies, and his military strategy was as good as it could have been given his situation and the resources available to him. He was, however, slightly less adept at politics and his greatest error was political: his failure to act on his proclamation as king and to get a crown put on his head in June 1216 when he first arrived in London and when it was there for the taking. He did not organise a coronation because of good reasons, or at least reasons which seemed good at the time: there was no archbishop of Canterbury, he could not use Westminster Abbey, and he was excommunicate. But under the circumstances half a coronation would have been better than none: it would have given him at least some legitimacy and enabled him and his supporters to position themselves differently. The Henricians, rather than fighting to repel an invader, would have been trying to depose a crowned and anointed monarch, a very different situation and one that had worked out well for King Stephen some eighty years previously. If Louis was going to be the sort of king who remained a few political and strategic steps ahead of the game (as his father had always done), he ought to have been able to foresee the consequences of his non-coronation and to act accordingly. As we noted in Chapter 4, this failure to do so may also indicate a hint of arrogance, for Louis evidently did not believe that his campaign was going to fail.

Louis’s delicacy over the specific requirements of the coronation was not mirrored by William Marshal and his colleagues: they voiced no qualms about the legitimacy of the ceremony when they had Henry ‘crowned’ in October 1216 – not at Westminster, not by the archbishop of Canterbury, and not even with an actual crown. Later on they were to recognise that a more valid coronation was necessary, which was why Henry was crowned for a second time, in London in 1220. But the original ceremony served its purpose by giving Henry more of an official right to the throne than Louis; this proved to be a decisive factor in the war.

* * *

The English line of succession in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was by no means clear; in the 150 years preceding Louis’s invasion, starting with the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066, the English throne had been passed undisputed from father to eldest son only once, when Henry II was succeeded by Richard I in 1189. With no recent tradition of smooth transition, the backdrop to Louis’s campaign was that the throne could be claimed not only by hereditary right, but also by election or conquest – and he could make a case on all three grounds, albeit that the most prominent blood claim was Blanche’s, his own descent from William the Conqueror being overlooked. But a man’s claim to rule territories in right of his wife was a concept which was widely accepted at the level of the peerage in both England and France, where earldoms and dukedoms were held in this way. Louis’s position should have been further strengthened when John died, as Henry III, being nine years old, could have been deemed unfit to rule.

The closest parallel in terms of previous succession disputes is that of Stephen and Matilda in the 1130s. As the only surviving legitimate child and therefore heir of the previous monarch, Henry I, Matilda’s claim should in theory have taken precedence, but she was deemed unfit to rule by some of her nobles on the grounds of her sex. Stephen, with only a tenuous blood claim – made even more fragile by the fact that he was not even the eldest son in his own family – sailed from France, gained the support of the nobles and was proclaimed king. Stephen got round his lack of hereditary right by saying that he was the grandson (in the female line) of a great king from the past, and that he could claim the throne by right of election ahead of the closest blood heir.

On the grounds of becoming king of England by election, Louis had a reasonable case; he was, after all, invited to take the throne by representatives of the nobility, and he was openly welcomed and proclaimed king when he arrived in the country. However, this was not enough to secure his position, for he did not do what Stephen had done within days of landing on English soil: he was not crowned or anointed. In the thirteenth century it was the coronation ceremony that effected the transformation from man (or, in rare cases, woman) to monarch. The crown was the all-important symbol of kingship; the anointing with oil the sign of God’s favour – hence the significance of the Capetians crowning their sons in their own lifetimes to demonstrate the validity and sacred nature of their dynasty, and the rush to hold a coronation, any sort of coronation, for Henry III.

The ritual outweighed all other factors such as conquest, primogeniture, heredity and election. If conquest and
de facto
control of the realm were all that were required, why would William I have bothered to have himself crowned? If primogeniture had been the paramount concern in the transmission of the crown then William would have been succeeded by his eldest son, Robert Curthose, and then by Robert’s son William Clito; the coronation of Robert’s younger brother William II put paid to this. If hereditary right was the principal criterion then Henry I would have been succeeded by his daughter Matilda, not his nephew Stephen; but Stephen’s coronation made all the difference as it made him a king, and this could not be undone. Louis, as we have seen, could make quite a decent case for himself via the right of election, but this was not enough on its own: he might
claim
the throne by election, but he could only
succeed
to it by coronation.

Louis himself was aware of this distinction. While he was in England he assumed the right to distribute lands and castles as he saw fit, but he did not style himself ‘king of England’ – he referred to himself as the ‘eldest son of the lord king of France’. There was recent precedent for similar nomenclature in John’s actions: John technically claimed the throne of England as of 6 April 1199, the date of his brother Richard’s death, but he was not crowned until the feast of the Ascension on 27 May. During the intervening seven weeks he issued charters which referred to him as
dominus Angliae
, that is, ‘lord of England’; he did not change his style to
rex Angliae
, ‘king of England’, until after his coronation. In the early thirteenth century regnal years were counted from the day of a king’s coronation, not from the date of the death of his predecessor, as that was the day he became king. There was no sense, as there would be later, of monarchy transmitting itself instantly (‘the king is dead; long live the king’) – instead the death of one king meant an interregnum until the coronation of his successor. The two examples of monarchs of England or Britain who are recognised officially but who were never crowned (Edward V and Edward VIII) date from the fifteenth and twentieth centuries when the principle of the transmission of monarchy was different. In the thirteenth century the coronation was paramount, and this is why Louis is not, and never has been, styled King Louis I of England.

* * *

Although Louis never succeeded in becoming the official king of England, he had a much greater influence on English history than he is generally given credit for. His story therefore needs to be included in the narrative of the development of England and its government in the Middle Ages, which too often moves in a deceptively smooth manner from John and Magna Carta to Henry III without examining the reasons for, or the background of, the transition.

Louis did not do all that much wrong during his campaign. His main problems were that he, personally, was the driving force behind his victories; that his absence was a significant factor in his defeats; that he could not be in more than one place at once; and that he was a better warrior than politician. Thus his quest for the throne of England was ultimately unsuccessful, but he did leave an important legacy in the form of a new and different constitutional situation. His campaign resulted in an increased Church influence over England for some time: the legates Guala and Pandulf both wielded great powers in the name of the pope. There is also an argument to be made that Louis’s invasion permanently weakened royal power in England, as it (and the ongoing threat that he might relaunch it, given the chance) meant that Henry III swore to uphold Magna Carta so that he could retain the support of his barons.