Richard & John: Kings at War (54 page)

John was avaricious, miserly, extortionate and moneyminded. Like Philip Augustus, he preyed particularly on the Church, exhibiting clear signs of insensate greed and cupidity. Some go so far as to say that his notorious quarrel with the papacy was ultimately actuated by his lust for abbey lands and monastic wealth, rather than personal or political ideology.
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He begrudged money spent on anything other than his personal pleasures, though as a hedonist he could be lavish and profligate. He liked to live high on the hog and measured his own magnificence by a groaning board, such as the one provided for the Christmas feast in 1206 at Winchester, where 20 oxen, 100 pigs, 100 sheep and 1,500 chickens were roasted, and 1,500 eggs consumed.
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He liked to spend on gorgeous raiment and gold-trimmed robes and, like many epicureans, was fascinated by jewellery, of which he kept a vast collection; whenever he saw someone with a precious stone he desired, he tended to fine the person and stipulate that the fine had to be paid in the form of the coveted jewellery. He also liked to spend money on gaming and betting, though he was a very poor gambler.
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Yet most of his money was spent on his mistresses, for John was a notoriously unfaithful husband and ran a veritable harem of lemans, concubines and
grandes horizontales
. Occasionally the names of the mistresses surface in the official records, especially the financial ones. Thus we can identify Clementia and Suzanne, the widow Hawize, countess of Aumale, and a fair unknown to whom in 1212 he sent a chaplet of roses from the justiciar’s garden.
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The names of his known bastards were Joan, daughter of Clementia, Geoffrey and Richard (both of whom had military careers), Oliver and Osbert; Oliver and Richard were born to ‘noblewomen who had scandalous liaisons with John’; and there were certainly others, whose names escaped the official records.
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Some say that lechery was not unusual in a medieval king, and five not a particularly high tally of natural children, especially when set alongside someone like Henry I, who sired at least twenty-one illegitimate offspring. But this defence ignores two crucial factors. There are hints in the sources that John’s sexual tastes ran to perversion, possibly sado-masochistic. And John sacrificed political aims and the well-being of his empire to his personal lusts, in that he alienated his barons by pursuing their wives and daughters.
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As the historian Nicholas Vincent has well said: ‘A king who dallied with the wives and daughters of his leading barons was likely to excite far more bitter resentment than a king who confined his extra-marital entertainments to low-born courtesans.’
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Another pronounced characteristic of John was restlessness - a quality that was inevitably traced to his father. He became irritated and even angry with priests who said Mass slowly or waffled through sermons, on one occasion sending a servant to tell the preacher in the pulpit that he was bored and wanted his dinner.
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John also resembled Henry II in his peripatetic court and the speed with which it moved around the realm. The triumphal progress through France in June-August 1200 shows a man dedicated to haste - and this would have had his opponents in the Church nodding their heads, as John perfectly exemplified the old patristic formula that all haste was the work of the devil (
omnis festinatio ex diabolo est
). Starting at Caen, he took in Falaise, Le Mans, Chinon and Loches in under two weeks. On 18 June he was in Angers, at the end of June in Tours, at the beginning of July in Poitiers, on the 14th in Bordeaux, then to St Sever in Gascony, and finally on a zigzag course back north, through Agen, Périgeux, Angoulême and Poitiers (again) before returning to Angers at the end of August.
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Yet these bursts of frenetic energy alternated with periods of indolence, such as the famous occasion in 1203 when, according to Roger of Wendover, John stayed in bed until midday and spent the rest of the day feasting and carousing even while Philip Augustus overran Normandy.
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The lazy workaholic is not an unknown phenomenon, and indeed interpreting John is a bit like biblical exegesis in that virtually any proposition can be sustained by picking out certain tendentious passages in the writings of the chroniclers. One historian gave up and concluded: ‘Almost any epithet might appropriately be applied to him in one or other of his many and versatile moods.’
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Yet when all allowances for the bias of hostile witnesses have been made, what remains is a clear indication of manic-depressive behaviour, bipolar affective disorder, cyclothymia - a diagnosis which would also account for the violent mood swings and tempestuous rages.
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Three aspects of John particularly appeal to a modern sensibility. First, his love of books. He had a small library which he carried round with him on his restless travels and often swapped titles with the abbot of Reading; we hear of John’s interest in Pliny and in the history of England - not something one can ever imagine Richard bothering with.
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In an age when attention to personal hygiene did not rank as one of the human priorities, John was positively oriental in his liking for baths and cleanliness; the records show that between 29 January and 17 June 1209 he took eight baths at different places on his itinerary and even possessed a dressing gown.
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Yet what most intrigues the historian of the early twenty-first century is John’s alleged atheism. The circumstantial evidence for John’s status as unbeliever is strong - he did not attend Communion as an adult - and is explicitly declared by Matthew Paris.
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The counter-arguments designed to make out John as devout are unconvincing. True, he kept up outer show and paid lip-service to official religion, but for purely prudential reasons; John was far from a stupid man and realised that religion was a kind of social cement, in terms of which a sceptical king was in an exposed position. True, he occasionally made donations to religious foundations, but this was merely giving back with the left hand part of the vast sum he had extorted with the right. And would a true believer really have dug in for a long war of attrition with the papacy, as John did? Not even Henry II nor Richard, two men much more audacious and dauntless than John, went so far as this. It is interesting that the one man in English history to go farther down the anti-papal path than John did was Henry VIII, like John a despot who recognised no authority superior to his own will, and like him with a contemporary reputation as Europe’s new Nero. Professional historians determined to have John as a loyal son of the Church insist that we should be able to find documentary proof of his atheism, as if John would have been foolish enough to state in a charter or other official document that he did not believe in God. Desperate to find real evidence that John was a devout Christian, his apologists have sometimes tried to cancel out his atheism with his greed, alleging that he preyed on Church wealth out of cupidity, not ideology.
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John’s apologists like to say that he was a man plagued by bad luck, but it was arrogance and stupidity rather than ill-fortune that characterised his next significant move after the treaty of Le Goulet. John decided to make a dynastic marriage that would cock a snook at Philip of France, but the initial problem was that he was already married. It will be recalled that in 1189 he married his cousin Isabella of Gloucester, related to him in the third degree of consanguinity. This meant that according to canon law the couple could not be legally married unless the Pope relaxed the ruling.
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Archbishop Baldwin clashed mightily with John by forbidding the pair to cohabit and summoning John to appear before his ecclesiastical court. John allowed no one who was not his feudal superior to ‘give him laws’, and contemptuously ignored the summons; Baldwin responded by laying an interdict on his lands. John outwitted the archbishop on that occasion by appealing to a papal legate who was visiting England, and got the interdict lifted, pending the Pope’s decision on granting a dispensation for the marriage. The papal legate made the would-be solomonic decision that John’s marriage was lawful until the Pope decreed otherwise. But Archbishop Baldwin died in the early stages of the appeal to Rome, and no one thereafter had the interest or the energy to pursue the matter. John and Isabella remained in marital limbo, their union neither declared null and void nor valid and indissoluble. This twilight state of affairs suited John very well, especially as he gained Isabella’s dowry and the earldom of Gloucester, but he had no special feeling for Isabella and even toyed with a marriage to Alice in 1191.
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Although John and Isabella were probably still cohabiting in 1196, they had no children. Possibly for this reason, or because his vaulting ambitions already directed his gaze to farther horizons, this was also the year John started taking soundings about an annulment.
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The matter became more urgent when John became king in 1199, and at the end of that year he demanded that the bishops of Normandy declare the marriage void. The tame clerics complied, and their lead was followed by the even more influential trio of bishops in the south, those of Poitiers, Saintes and Bordeaux - with the Gascon primate the prime mover in John’s marital schemes.
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Pope Innocent III rightly took the view that all six diocesan lords were acting out of sycophancy and looked about for a way to bring John to heel. It required Isabella to appeal to the Vatican, but this was the one thing Isabella did not do, almost certainly because John had bought her off.
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This divorce by mutual consent irresistibly recalled John’s mother’s separation from Louis VII, especially as in both cases the royal personages initiating the divorce had hidden agendas of their own.

It was during the tour of his French dominions in the summer of 1200 that John took his fateful decision to remarry. While staying with Hugh the Brown (Hugh Le Brun) at his ancestral seat of Lusignan in early July, John summoned Ademar of Angoulême and Guy of Limoges to pay homage to him.
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At this stage John seemed determined to stick with the Angevin-Lusignan alliance that Richard had pioneered. It will be recalled that the Lusignans, lords of lower Poitou and doughty crusaders, had waged a forty-year war with Henry II and Richard, which came to an end only when Richard struck up a notable friendship with Hugh of Lusignan in the Holy Land. Hugh had even visited Richard during his captivity in Germany, and in return Richard had elevated the Lusignans at the expense of their territorial rivals, the Angoulême family, headed by Ademar.
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South of Poitiers the Angevin empire had a shaky existence, with scattered Plantagenet garrisons and outposts vying for hegemony with the local feudal aristocracy who held the real power on the ground. The Angevin rulers had total control only along a narrow coastal strip running from La Rochelle through Oléron and Saintes to Bordeaux. The phantom nature of much ‘imperial’ control in the south was the origin of the tedious and wearisome wars (in 1167-69, 1173-74, 1176, 1178-79, 1183, 1188, 1194) waged by Henry II and Richard in the south.
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Simplifying, one can even say that the reigns of Henry and Richard centred on two main themes: the never-ending war in the south and the struggle against the kings of France for the Vexin in Normandy. An Angevin ruler, lacking the military force to impose proper centralised control, had to play divide-and-rule in the south, encouraging the lords of Angoulême and Lusignan to struggle between themselves for the much coveted rich county of La Marche (an Angevin possession since 1177), to which they both laid claim. Alarmed by the chaotic and rapidly changing scene following the sudden death of Richard, Hugh of Lusignan realised that John would not necessarily feel bound by the purely personal ties of friendship that had united him and Richard. Taking matters into his own hands, in January 1200 Hugh actually kidnapped Eleanor of Aquitaine and released her only when John made a solemn promise to assign La Marche to him and reject the claims of Ademar of Angoulême.
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Hugh of Lusignan can have feared nothing from the meeting of John and Ademar, for the count of Angoulême had recently added to his de facto independent status (in feudal theory he was supposed to be a vassal of the dukes of Aquitaine but had always enjoyed semi-autonomous status) by the de jure stance of accepting King Philip of France not the duke of Aquitaine (John) as his overlord.
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But Ademar brought an intriguing, secret proposition from Philip which the devious John listened to eagerly. Philip suggested that the way forward was for John to marry Ademar’s only daughter Isabella, as this dynastic match would solve both John’s problems in the south and the complications of overlapping homage and feudal duties owed by the count of Angoulême.
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There was an obvious problem straightaway, which was that Isabella was already engaged to Hugh of Lusignan himself. But Ademar was not pleased with the prospect of this wedding, which he saw as a patronising sop from Hugh because the Lusignans were already nine-tenths of the way towards winning the struggle for La Marche. John was no fool and he saw immediately what Philip’s game was: to alienate the Lusignans from the Angevins once more. Yet the alternative was potentially an even worse prospect. If the Lusignans and Ademar of Angoulême made common cause and Lusignan, La Marche and Angoulême all became one bloc, the new alliance would control the valley of the Charente between Poitou and Gascony, dominate the crossroads of central France and occupy all the Roman roads south, especially from Poitiers to Bordeaux; Aquitaine, in short would be cut off from the rest of the Angevin dominions with its survival as part of the empire in serious doubt.
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The alienation of the Lusignans was therefore a gamble John would have to take, and perhaps it appealed to the gambling side of him. Others have speculated that John always hated the Lusignans, associated them with Richard, deeply resented their kidnapping of his mother, and saw a chance to destroy them once and for all.
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There was certainly something defiant and deliberately confrontational about the way John planned his elaborate double-cross.