Richard & John: Kings at War (53 page)

Superficially, an era of peace seemed to have descended. Philip referred to the new king of the English as ‘our dearly beloved John’.
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John toured his continental dominions, from Caen in Normandy to St Sever in Gascony (June-August 1200), and visited Philip in Paris, where he was made much of. Philip appeared willing to accept the reality of a powerful neighbour on his doorstep, but those who knew the French fox were only too aware that he was merely awaiting the next family dispute, border quarrel or tussle over local sovereignty to show his teeth again. Only the truly naive could not have been suspicious about the many trips Philip made in the year 1200 to the sensitive marchlands of Normandy.
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Indeed many English chroniclers thought that John was a classic dupe for having concluded a treaty on terms so advantageous to France; Gervase of Canterbury dubbed him ‘John Softsword’, and the nickname stuck.
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Apologists for John, however, say that he had no real choices. The Angevin empire was geared for defence, not mobility and attack, as the system of castles in Normandy showed quite clearly.
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To counter the lightning martial probes Philip favoured and to get round the obstacles imposed on military action by feudal custom, Richard had been forced to introduce a standing army in all but name. This, plus his innovation of campaigning all year round, placed enormous strains on the exchequer, and provoked in his critics the familiar charge that he was a monomaniac or military fanatic.
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The truly costly item in the accounts was the hire of mercenaries, routiers and Brabantines. Richard’s heavy taxation had caused many rumblings, and even a rich realm like the Angevin empire could become overstretched if it had simultaneously to defend frontiers from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees. Critics of Richard said he simply borrowed money from international banks or Jewish moneylenders, then left it to underlings to work out how to make the repayments.
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There is no need to get snarled up in the heated debate about the exact state of the empire’s finances in 1199 - had Richard left his realm virtually bankrupt or was this simply ‘spin’ put on the situation by John’s propagandists (and his later admirers)?
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The fact is that John, rightly or wrongly, thought he could not afford protracted warfare against Philip, and this was the deep subtext of the treaty of Le Goulet.

The extent to which Le Goulet has become a battleground for modern historians is little short of astonishing. One of John’s most prominent modern defenders has this to say: ‘The contrast with Richard’s gusty bravado and reckless resort to expensive adventures no doubt justified to small minds the epithet ‘Softsword’, but if John had tried a firm sword it would have shattered in his hands.’
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This follows the familiar pattern of the pro-John faction, which, on a purely
a priori
basis, dubs all chroniclers hostile to John ‘unreliable’ - a very good example of ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. Gervase of Canterbury’s famous (or notorious) judgement on John merely echoes what other chroniclers thought. Ralph of Diceto criticised the peace of Le Goulet severely, and especially the size of the dowry given to Blanche of Castile. Andreas of Marchiennes, another excellent source, said that in the Le Goulet treaty John made the entire war against Philip meaningless by giving to the French king the very things for which the campaign had been waged in the first place. Roger of Howden also took a ‘jaundiced though discreet’ view of the peace terms.
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So, although the most balanced interpretation of John’s actions at Le Goulet is in terms of his false perception of the differential resources available to both sides, there are grounds for interpreting his actions even more pessimistically, in terms of sheer cowardice or incompetence. Some say that John was shaken by the sudden death of Mercadier, his most able captain, at Bordeaux on 10 April 1200. Others, like Diceto, stress the sheer quantity of bad advice John received: ‘less than prudently’; ‘on the advice of evil men’; ‘in a manner unworthy of the royal majesty’ - these are some of the phrases Diceto predicates on John’s actions in 1200.
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But Le Goulet was not John’s only failure in the first year of his reign. He also showed the lack of a sure touch by his less than subtle treatment of two people Richard had dealt with tactfully and diplomatically. John decided to assert himself against his half-brother Geoffrey, who as archbishop of York seemed overmighty and arrogant. While Geoffrey was away in Rome, John kept back the rents from the archiepiscopal estates for his own use and then, on his return from Rome, summoned him to court to explain his high-handed actions.
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While his attitude to his half-brother (to whom he owed a moral debt for past services) may be regarded as merely petty, his dealings with William, king of Scotland, are more suggestive of bad-tempered incompetence. It appears that ‘William the Lion’ originally favoured Arthur for the succession and had even intrigued along these lines with William Longchamp.
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On Richard’s death, William offered fealty to John in return for the northern earldom for which he had petitioned Richard in vain. John detained William’s envoys at court and instead sent back one of his own, counselling patience. When the Scottish envoys pressed the matter immediately after John’s coronation in England, John replied by brusquely summoning William to meet him at Northampton.
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The Scottish king responded angrily, threatening that if the earldom was not handed over within forty days, he would invade England. John called William’s bluff, ignored him, went to France and returned to the issue only in March 1200 when he again summoned William to meet him, this time in York. Again the summons was refused, and it was only in October 1200, when John sent a seven-man embassy north of the border with letters patent, guaranteeing safe-conduct, that William finally came south, to Lincoln, to do homage. John got his way, postponed consideration of the northern counties indefinitely, and engendered a period of strained relations with Scotland.
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John’s first year as king had hardly been auspicious. It did not help that he had ascended the throne just before the year 1200, when the superstitious forecast an apocalypse, as they always did at a century’s end; this time the canard was that Antichrist had been born in Egypt and the world had entered the final days.
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Famine, dearth and pestilence stalked both France and England; crime was at epidemic levels throughout the Angevin empire, with the saintly bishop Hugh of Lincoln experiencing a succession of footpads, highwaymen and brigands on his 1199 journey to Aquitaine to see Richard.
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The laws of chivalry seemed in abeyance, both as a result of the Lionheart’s year-round campaigning and the new savagery: one half Brabantine atrocity, one half Philip’s Byzantine liking for blinding prisoners. John was distrusted by his fellow princes, despised by his barons and deeply unpopular with the common people. It was not just that he walked in the shadow of the great Richard; he was widely regarded as cruel, treacherous, cowardly and politically inept; had not Philip made him an international laughing-stock with the terms of Le Goulet? He had no charisma that would bind men to him, no track record of success in war, and he had a reputation for meanness withal, that contrasted markedly both with the perception of Richard as an openhanded king and the reality that he was lavish with money when it came to buying allies.
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The great lords who abandoned John in the winter of 1199 and set off on crusade were essentially saying three things: they would be more secure, richer and in every way better off in the Holy Land than in Western Europe while John was king; they could not be sure that he rather than Philip was going to win the struggle for power in greater France; and they regarded John as a morally unsavoury character, who had tried to harm his nephew and would doubtless do the same to them if given a chance; moreover, he was now in alliance with a wife-beater and anti-crusader in the form of Philip Augustus, which rather proved the point.
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Contemporary chroniclers and observers were virtually unanimous in finding John an unprepossessing monarch. Aged 32 when he ascended the throne, he always evinced remarkably consistent character traits, few of them, unfortunately, very appealing. He cut a poor figure physically, being no more than 5ft 5ins tall.
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Contemporaries thought him a poor general and even a cowardly one, though modern historians have not usually been willing to share that view.
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But not even modern revisionism can shake the universal consensus that John was a deeply unpleasant individual: cruel, miserly, extortionate, duplicitous, treacherous, mendacious, suspicious, secretive, paranoid and lecherous. There can be no serious doubts about his cruelty, for even if we discount the many accounts from hostile witnesses, there are simply too many well attested instances of barbarous behaviour that cannot be argued away. Men were hanged by the thumbs and the hands, roasted on gridirons and tripods, and prisoners were blinded with salt and vinegar. Roger of Wendover tells the story of one Geoffrey of Norwich who was thrown into jail and then weighted down with a cloak made of lead or iron, so heavy that the unfortunate man quickly expired.
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Even more repulsive was John’s treatment of Maud of Saint-Valéry, wife of William de Braose, at one time John’s chief henchman in Ireland. When John finally broke with de Braose, he captured Maud and her son and (in 1210) starved them to death in a dungeon at Windsor Castle.
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John had no compunction about mistreating or murdering women and children, and the comment of the historian Nicholas Vincent hits the nail on the head: ‘The chivalric code of honour was never much more than a light veneer, a superficial application of courtesy and civilization to what was, underneath, a far grimmer and more violent reality. At the court of King John the veneer appears to have worn perilously thin.’
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John indeed always liked to starve people to death, and he visited the same fate on forty knights captured at Mirebeau. Modern defenders of John, unable to deny his cruelty, try to deal with it by ahistorical and anachronistic attenuation, principally through what has been termed the argument
ad Hitlerum
; that is to say, they insinuate the idea that his atrocities were small beer alongside those of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, conveniently ignoring that John lacked both the technology and the political culture for mass killing; there is simply no way of telling how a particular individual temperament would react in an entirely different milieu, but the circumstantial pointers are scarcely favourable.
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That there was a morbid side to John’s cruelty seems clear from his Nero-like delight in bloodshed in the arena - in John’s case in the judicial combats that he would often defer to a time and place of his convenience, so as not to miss any nuance of the gory spectacle.
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It is almost a stereotype of the despotic personality that cruelty goes hand in hand with extreme suspicion and paranoia, and the paradigm certainly worked out in John’s case. He liked to exact an oath from his staff that they would report immediately any comment made about him, especially if it was negative.
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Treacherous himself, he expected treachery in others. There are those who cannot afford to trust because they cannot afford to fail, but such a defence is scarcely possible for a man who had inherited the Angevin empire and was therefore, by definition, already a success. In John’s case pathology rather than circumstance provides the answer. Unpredictable, quick-tempered, capricious, a nurser of grudges and a brooder over ancient wrongs, John liked to lull his victims into thinking themselves secure in the king’s affection before making lightning strikes that compassed their downfall. His action at Evreux, when he pretended to be on Philip’s side, gulled his way inside the citadel, but then slew the men of the garrison and paraded their heads on poles, is typical of the man.
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John’s defenders are once again on shaky ground, and they usually attempt to palliate his worst excesses by tracing them to an unhappy childhood and then blaming that on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Yet even his most zealous modern defenders tend to give up when faced with the catalogue of his two-faced crimes. One of them finds John ‘secretive and suspicious, over-sensitive to the merest flicker of opposition’, while another agrees on his ‘inability to manage his magnates . . . his suspicion of them contributing to their distrust of him’. Kate Norgate, John’s first modern biographer, went further and spoke of his ‘almost superhuman wickedness’.
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The combination of cruelty, suspicion and paranoia receives its most eloquent testimony in the story of his treatment of Peter of Wakefield in 1213. Peter, a harmless crank regarded by fellow rustics as a prophet, made the mistake of prophesying that John would no longer be king by Ascension Day. John imprisoned Peter at Corfe until the due date had passed, then dragged him ‘at the horse’s tail’ to Wareham, where he was hanged. John then meted out the same fate to Peter’s son just in case he shared his father’s views.
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