Richard & John: Kings at War (56 page)

By feudal law, John should have denounced the Lusignans in his court before proceeding to despoil them, but a regard for legal niceties was never his strong point when his own interests and desires were concerned. The Lusignans therefore appealed over his head to the nominal feudal overlord Philip of France. Philip proceeded cautiously. He was not eager for another war with John at this time, while he was locked in conflict with the papacy over the bigamous marriage to Agnes of Meran, and his inclination was to pour oil on troubled waters. In a would-be solomonic judgement he tried to ‘part the combatants’, on the one hand telling the Lusignans to desist from their siege operations in Poitou, on the other inviting John to a conference and rolling out the red carpet for him.
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He went in person to meet John at the Normandy frontiers, where John had recently arrived from England, flushed with another of his perfidious triumphs. The king of England had just perfected a new financial scam. Having ordered his feudal army (not the mercenaries) to assemble at Portsmouth for a campaign in France, telling his lords to bring all their power and the money for campaigning expenses, he promptly dismissed the knights and their host, but first he relieved them of their expense money and proceeded to hire mercenaries.
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John congratulated himself on taking a shortcut through the usual resistance to taxes and levies, but his actions were regarded by his own barons as shifty and underhand. He felt himself to be on a winning streak, and was flattered and gratified when an emollient Philip invited him to a state visit to Paris in June. On this occasion Philip Augustus once more laid it on with a trowel and appeared, if anything, over-accommodating, even vacating the royal palace so that John could be lodged there.
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He told his guest he would disregard the Lusignans’ appeal if John did his feudal duty and heard their case in his own court. Unfortunately, John was one of those personalities who regard compromise and statesmanship as weakness. He concluded that Philip must be hiding some weakness that prevented him from being ‘strong’ and resolved to solve the Lusignan problem in his own repressive way.

John so clearly felt he was the master of events in the summer of 1201 that he even displayed momentarily the flickering generous touch, intermittently in evidence, that his defenders always pounce on with gusto. He settled a generous widow’s dowry on Berengaria and, on the strength of this magnanimity, started negotiations for an alliance with Sancho of Navarre.
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Feeling overconfident, he showed his true character next by the way he dealt with the Lusignans. They had asked for the exhaustive processes of feudal custom to be set in train; very well, he would show them there was pain as well as gain in making feudal appeals. Using the letter but not the spirit of feudal law, he invoked the procedure whereby trial by combat would decide an accusation of treason. He formally charged the Lusignans with long-standing treachery against the Angevin dynasty and offered to prove the truth of his words by a duel to the death with royal champions, issuing individual challenges to dozens of members of the Lusignan family. John then provided a list of his champions, from which it became clear that he had simply bought the services of all the premier duellists and specialists in man-to-man combat in Western Europe. The Lusignans quite rightly declined to play with such a rigged deck, and appealed once more to Philip, pointing out the incontestable fact that John was denying them justice and making a mockery of the very notion of trial by their peers.
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Credibility required that Philip acted, but he patiently exhausted the repertoire of peaceful conflict resolution. He secured a promise from John that a proper trial, not a travesty, would he held, but then John went back on his word by endless prevarication. He fixed a date for the trial and a venue, then switched both time and place. When Philip continued to press him, he fixed a definite date but then refused to offer the Lusignans a safe-conduct to attend their trial.
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Becoming more and more irritated, Philip told John that there was no way out of this maze: a feudal overlord like himself
had
to guarantee due process. To underline his seriousness, he insisted that John give him three castles as an earnest of his intentions. John responded to this by sending the archbishop of Canterbury to Paris with an entire rigmarole of specious verbiage and bad faith.
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By Easter 1202 Philip had had enough of the stalling and evasions. He ordered John to appear before a court of barons in Paris to answer a charge of default of justice. Not yet done with his logic-chopping, John replied that by ancient custom the duke of Normandy was obliged to attend a French court only if it met on the boundaries of France and Normandy. But Philip was fully the equal of such casuistry. He replied that he had summoned John, not in his capacity as duke of Normandy, but as duke of Aquitaine, count of Poitou and count of Anjou.
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Finally cornered, John made clear the contempt he had been disguising: he refused either to surrender the three castles or to attend the hearing in Paris. In feudal terms he was now a contumacious vassal.

When Philip’s barons met, they quickly confirmed that John was, in international law terms, an outlaw. The penalty for contumacity was forfeit of his fiefs of Aquitaine, Poitou and Anjou. Philip now had the perfect excuse he needed to complete the task he had long looked forward to: destruction of Angevin power outside England.
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Prince Arthur was already a key player in the drama, especially when the death of his mother Constance in September 1201 drove him ever deeper into Philip’s orbit. Philip knew which power levers to pull, summoned Arthur to do homage and promised him the hand of his daughter Mary. He also knighted Arthur and declared him John’s successor in all fiefs save Normandy, which he retained for his personal domain.
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The fact that Normandy had expressly not been included as a subject for the decision of the court, so as to checkmate John’s prevarications, nonetheless gave John the excuse he needed to present Philip’s actions as aggression. He launched into a propaganda offensive to portray himself as the injured party, particularly targeting religious houses.
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Yet in all other ways he was on the defensive. Philip’s position improved immeasurably between 1201 and 1202. Under papal interdict for the bigamous marriage to Agnes, Philip was saved by Agnes’s fortuitous death in July 1201. Moreover, in 1201 he had been constrained by the presence in Europe of Richard’s old allies on his eastern flank, Baldwin of Flanders and the German princes, who could conceivably make common cause with John. By 1202 these powerful magnates had all departed on crusade. The Fourth Crusade, a notorious shambles that never even reached the Holy Land and ended with the disgraceful sack of Constantinople in 1204, took a raft of putative anti-Philip pieces off the diplomatic chessboard. Baldwin of Flanders fared even worse than Richard by becoming a short-lived emperor of Byzantium and then ending his days as a prisoner of the Bulgarians. Even those German princes who remained at home were no use to John, for they were sucked into the vicious faction fighting between the new Holy Roman Emperor Otto and his deadly rival Philip of Swabia.
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The war between John and Philip that now commenced was to be a disaster for the Angevins. No amount of special pleading, purporting to show that France was now richer and commanded more resources than the Angevin empire, can disguise the fact that the years 1202-04 show John simply outclassed by a better general and a more astute politician. Since Philip had no reason to feel jealous of John, as he had of Richard, or patronised and overawed, as he had been by Henry II, his personal feelings for John were probably warmer than for his predecessors, as evinced by the sumptuous reception in Paris in 1201; it may have helped that the two men were roughly the same age (Philip was a year senior), though critics are divided on the impact of kinship (John’s mother having been married to Philip’s father).
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Like John, Philip was quick-tempered; like John, Philip had his fair share of conflicts with the Church and the papacy; like him he was a bon vivant; like him he had turbulent relations with women and he was also something of a sexual oddity, though no stories of perversion sully the image of Philip. But there the similarities end. Philip may have been a cold fish, but he was never cruel as John was, and there was nothing ‘manic’ or bipolar about his steady, plodding, patient and focused march towards his political goals.
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Alongside Richard he may have seemed cowardly and timid as a warrior, but he was more than a match for John. Above all, he had been tempered in the fire, annealed by exposure to Henry II and then Richard. He had spent an entire adult life contending with Angevin monarchs, and John was the third, and least considerable, of those he encountered. While John was playing the buffoon in Ireland in 1185, or indulging in petty intrigues while Richard was in the Holy Land, Philip had been learning his craft, pitting his wits against Henry II, Saladin and the Lionheart. While John was in obscurity during 1194-99, Philip, though on the back foot against Richard, was building up his strength and learning valuable political and military lessons. Already bald, Philip by now looked the part of an elder statesman, while the chroniclers still tended to view John as an immature playboy, a spoiled brat who had ascended to the purple through luck, essentially a child raised to man’s estate.
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Philip began the war in his usual unimaginative way, concentrating on the Seine valley and laying siege to the frontier fortresses of Normandy. It was left to Arthur and the Poitevins to display flamboyance by a thrust into the Loire valley, but their energy alarmed Eleanor of Aquitaine, who feared they meant to capture her, so she sent urgent messages to John in Le Mans, pleading for rescue. Fortunately John was in the energetic phase of his bipolar cycle, and he responded with unwonted rapidity and imagination. Taking his army of mercenaries on a forced march of eighty miles in forty-eight hours, he achieved total surprise as he fell upon the enemy unawares. Arthur had urged caution and the need to wait for reinforcements, but the Lusignans argued that if they captured Eleanor of Aquitaine, John’s position in the entire south would collapse.
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With Eleanor now trapped in the keep of Mirebeau castle, Arthur and the Lusignans were complacent, leisurely preparing the
coup de grâce
against the citadel. A force one thousand strong, including Arthur’s 200 knights, had no answer when John and his ally William des Roches (seneschal of Anjou and John’s right-hand man in the south) swept in on them in the early hours of 1 August. Panic overtook the bleary-eyed or still somnolent men; and Geoffrey de Lusignan was actually breakfasting off roast pigeons when he was taken by John’s men. Completely surrounded, the entire enemy force was caught in John’s net; no one of any significance escaped.
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It was probably John’s finest victory, the more unexpected for being out of character with his usual martial achievements, and the only time he showed the Lionheart’s elan in the field. It was the greatest success for English arms until Crécy, and Philip was momentarily stunned. John permitted himself some public boasting about his exploit, while William Marshal went out of his way to send taunting messages to his old enemy the Lusignans.
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Philip broke off his campaigning in Normandy and headed south to see if he could retrieve anything from the disaster but he was too late. John made a slow and triumphant progress back to Normandy, exhibiting his heavily manacled prisoners to the people of the towns through which they passed as if they were part of a freak show. The prize catch was Arthur, and he and Geoffrey de Lusignan were imprisoned at Falaise. The Lusignan patriarch Hugh was lodged in a dungeon at Caen, while the non-ransomable prisoners were shipped over to England and held in Corfe castle and other Dorset strongholds. The disaster of Mirebeau might have led anyone less determined than Philip Augustus to sue for peace immediate ly.
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By the autumn of 1202 John was in a dominant position, but if ever there was a time when the moral prevailed over the material it was now. The aftermath of Mirebeau was a test of character that Richard would not have failed, but John managed to do so, evincing distinct self-destructive tendencies withal. He began by alienating William des Roches, the real brains behind the triumph at Mirebeau. Des Roches had given his best advice and employed his best strategy and tactics on the clear understanding that he would decide Arthur’s fate if the young prince was captured.
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John agreed, but then, predictably, went back on his word once he had Arthur in his power. This was fatuous folly. True, des Roches was ambitious, but his ambition could easily have been contained by granting him local hegemony in the Loire valley. The despotic John construed des Roches’s reasonable demands concerning Arthur as ‘giving him laws’ and cast about for ways to take the strut out of his over-mighty vassal. The removal of Arthur to Falaise was a slap in the face to des Roches, and could not have been read in any other way by anyone who was not a milksop. The result was predictable. Des Roches at once abandoned John and persuaded Aimeri de Thouars (previously won over at great cost by Eleanor of Aquitaine) to go with him.
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The upshot was that John faced continuing warfare in northern Poitou with formidable enemies, when by a scintilla of statesmanship he could have concentrated all his military resources against Philip Augustus in the Seine valley. Trying to paper over the disastrous cracks he himself had caused to appear in his anti-Philip alliance, he did an about-face and tried to curry favour with the Lusignans - the exact thing he should have done two years earlier. Magnanimously he released them from jail on their oath that they would remain loyal - he took pledges and castles as security - but once the birds had flown the coop, they made plain their contempt for John by joining des Roches and Aimeri of Thouars.
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William Marshal was stupefied at John’s naivety and folly in allowing the anti-Angevin party in central France to emerge from the debris of Mirebeau even stronger than before. But it is sometimes observed that treacherous personalities can never quite imagine that anyone else could ever be quite as perfidious. Maybe it was thus with John. It is even more likely that, once he realised his error, he gave short shrift to the less useful prisoners. The story of an attempted mass break-out by twenty-five prisoners at Corfe, which ended with their being surrounded and then starved to death, has more than a whiff of ‘shot while trying to escape’ about it.
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