Richard & John: Kings at War (70 page)

By 1209 Innocent III had lost patience both with John’s relentless stalling and bogus offers of talks and with the failure of the interdict to have much impact on England. Sterner measures were clearly called for, so in the summer of that year he instructed Stephen Langton to pronounce a sentence of excommunication on King John whenever he thought fit.
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Langton tried one last time, sent his brother on a further mission and even crossed the Channel himself under a safe-conduct to confer with John’s ministers at Dover. But the king’s insincerity was patent, so in November Langton, safely back in France, formally promulgated the decree of excommunication, placing John beyond the Christian pale.
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Excommunication was an altogether more serious matter than the interdict. Although the general strike by the clergy caused inconvenience, hardship and disturbance, by and large people could live with it. But excommunication, in effect an ecclesiastical sentence of outlawry, meant that nobody could aid or abet the king without suffering the loss of their immortal souls. If the thirteenth century really was an age of belief, the effect should have been immediate and catastrophic. To be sure, hitherto collaborationist bishops like Jocelin of Bath concluded that the game of fence-sitting could no longer be played and withdrew abroad, but once again the immediate impact of the Pope’s escalation of the crisis was disappointing. Scholars are divided about the reason: some say it is simply that fear of John and his easy way with a hanging rope overrode the fear of eternal damnation; others that the Church had cried ‘wolf ’ too often in the past, using excommunication for trivial reasons and thus undermining its credibility.
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Probably, disappointed at the impact of the interdict, Innocent had revised his expectations and hoped rather that the sentence of excommunication would have a steady, drip-drip, erosive effect: political dissidents, economic malcontents, wavering barons, rebels in the Celtic fringes and indeed anyone opposed to John could ‘legitimate’ their stance by arguing that John was no longer a Christian king and that the Pope had removed all grounds for allegiance to such a person.
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The Scottish campaign of 1208-09, for instance, was marred by fears that John’s troops would desert once they heard he had been excommunicated.
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Moreover, the effect on morale had to be considered. How could John hope to combat Philip Augustus in Europe when Philip now stood forth as the champion of the Pope and Christianity while John was an outlaw and apostate? As a moral leper, John was, in the eyes of Christendom, in no better case than Saladin faced by Richard.

John’s response to the excommunication was to lift the mulcting of the Church up another notch. From phoney ‘fines’ and ‘fees’ he moved to outright plunder, seizing ecclesiastical plate and melting it down. He also ran a neat line in extortion, for instance blackmailing the monks of Montacute that he would reinstate the prior they had just deposed unless they paid the ‘consideration’ of sixty marks.
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It has been estimated that the sums paid into the exchequer from Church sources rose from only £400 in 1209, before the excommunication, to £24,000 in 1211.
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Ecclesiastical friend and foe were swept alike into John’s ravening maw. Even after the excommunication, two Cistercian monks stayed loyally in attendance on the king, one of them, the abbot of Bindon, acting as his almoner.
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But this did not help the wider Cistercian movement, which seemed to have suffered more grievously than the rest of the regular clergy; more than 15 per cent of the revenue extorted by John from the Church came from the Cistercians, and many of their monasteries were dissolved, with the monks seeking refuge with other orders.
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John acted particularly ruthlessly towards the clergy who fled after the decree of excommunication, expropriating their property without compensation and expelling proxy prelates appointed to their benefices by the exiles. In two especially vindictive acts, the woods of the archbishop of Canterbury were sold, and the bishop of London’s castle at Stortford destroyed.
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Defenders of John like to say that ‘only’ £11,000 a year was extracted from the Church over six years, in addition to the income from vacant sees and abbeys which would have been taken by the Crown in normal circumstances, and that this sum must be set in a context where the total annual income of the English Church was some £80,000.
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Another common defence is that when the great abbeys were allowed to manage their own property on payment of a fine, they were allowed to keep back very generous sums for their own subsistence when returning the accounts to the king’s officers.
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But - very appropriately in this instance - not by bread alone . . . Religious life suffered badly, to the point where by the end of 1211 only one bishop was left in England.
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Once John de Gray was sent to Ireland to be justiciar (February 1208) and the other bishops fled after the decree of excommunication, there remained only Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. The irony about des Roches was that he had himself been the centre of a disputed election in 1205; on that occasion when the hostile parties held a fresh election under the Pope’s eyes, he emerged as the unanimous choice.
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It was a poor return for the lavish privileges Innocent III had showered on him that des Roches should have emerged as the most disloyal divine of all in the eyes of the Vatican. Beyond the absence of the Church’s princes was the paucity of religious life at the grass roots. Some attempt was made to keep up the tempo of devotion, with sermons being preached in churchyards, and Innocent made some concessions to a liturgically challenged faithful by allowing monks to celebrate Mass once a week behind locked doors; in 1212 he even allowed the dying to receive the
viaticum
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But the ordinary parishioners were denied the sacraments, church weddings and burials in consecrated ground. What was worrying for the Church was that nobody seemed to mind; if this continued, religion might cease to exert its grip altogether. Increasingly, the common people murmured and wondered why they had to pay church tithes if the Church was doing nothing for them.
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The Vatican meanwhile grew increasingly concerned at the behaviour of priests who, having no work to do, spent their time in brothels and taverns or dallied with the world in business or money-making; having let the genie out of the bottle with the interdict and the excommunication, it might not be so easy to get it back in again.
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For John there were hidden worries too. If he could shrug off the authority of the Pope and Holy Mother Church with no other moral authority than his will and his say-so, might it not occur to the toiling masses that there was then no reason why they should not jettison a purely instrumental and pragmatic ruler as well? This was doubtless the reason why John tacked in and out of hatred and contempt for the Church and upholding its moral authority as a necessary corollary to his own. One story has it that John encountered a sheriff ’s officer in charge of a handcuffed prisoner and learned that the man had slain a priest on the highway. ‘Loose him and let him go,’ said John, ‘he has slain one of my enemies.’
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That was John in irreligious, atheistic mood. But the cunning self-serving John was the one who issued orders that anyone speaking evil against the clergy should be hanged from the nearest oak tree.
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This is another way of saying that John had perforce to weigh short-term gains against long-term implications. In the short-term the quarrel with Innocent had made him rich and his coffers were overflowing; the ordinary taxpayer had meanwhile been relieved of the heavy financial burden of the expeditions to Scotland, Wales and Ireland in 1210-12. This was what led contemporary chroniclers to say that John was both happy and successful, going about with whistling insouciance, devoting himself to hunting and other pleasures: ‘he haunted woods and streams, and greatly did he delight in the pleasure of them’.
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Yet in the long term his sights were set on the recovery of Normandy, and he was aware that he could scarcely fight Philip Augustus with force of arms while he was waging a bitter battle of wills with the Pope, especially as that enabled Philip to portray himself as the protector of Christianity, civilisation and spiritual values. That was why John never entirely suspended negotiations with the Vatican, and envoys continued to travel back and forth from Rome.
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In the summer of 1211 he allowed a papal legate, Pandulph, to enter England and argue the Pope’s case before a royal council at Northampton. Pandulph’s terms for an end to the interdict/excommunication were that John should finally accept Stephen Langton, reinstate the exiled bishops and clergy and restore their confiscated property. John summarily rejected these terms.
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But a year later events at home and abroad had weakened his position to the point where he sent a fresh embassy to Rome under the abbot of Beaulieu to accept on his behalf the terms refused the year before. Innocent decided to make John sweat and at first said that the offer of 1211 was no longer on the table; since John had turned down the terms then, it was his fault that peace had not been restored; moreover, since then, John had committed fresh outrages against the Church and shown himself unworthy of generosity. Nevertheless, Innocent concluded, ‘so that we may overcome evil with good’ he was prepared to stretch a point and allow John to sign up to the 1211 deal, provided it was ratified in a watertight way. Moreover, in addition to receiving back the exiled prelates, John must show his good faith by readmitting Robert FitzWalter and Eustace Vesci, the exiled leaders of the disgruntled barons with a full pardon; as a first instalment on the peace plan, John would also be required to pay over £8,000.
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John’s embassy narrowly averted the next stage in the Pope’s campaign against John, which was to declare him formally deposed as king and his subjects released from any allegiance. Innocent was prompted to this apocalyptic course by exactly the same developments that led John to accept the Pope’s terms: on the one hand Philip Augustus was at last preparing his long-threatened invasion of England, and on the other John’s barons had finally lost patience with him and were beginning to break rank. Stephen Langton had actually left Rome with Innocent’s bulls declaring John deposed, which he intended to publish in France, but was overtaken on the road by Pandulph, who explained the changed situation.
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John was to be given until June 1213 to ratify the terms agreed with the Pope by his envoy, failing which Langton was to promulgate the bulls. This time, however, John was not stalling and really intended to submit. To ensure no eleventh-hour contretemps - perhaps he did not entirely trust Langton’s discretion - Innocent sent his legate Nicholas of Tusculum to recover the papal bulls from the archbishop and burn them.
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Nevertheless, Innocent remained deeply suspicious of John and laid contingency plans in case he reneged. He wrote to Langton as follows: ‘It often happens that a ruthless foe, finding himself cornered, treacherously pretends peace and after the peace attempts treachery, in order to outwit by guile those he could not by force. Wishing, therefore, with careful precaution to guard against such treacheries, by the authority of this letter we grant you this power: if King John should violate the peace that has been restored between him and the English Church, then (unless after due warning he makes amends to you) you will, after consultation with the Pope, reduce him and his kingdom, by apostolic authority, to the state of excommunication and interdict that they were in before the restoration of peace.’
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Beset by multitudinous problems, John was in Kent waiting nervously for the return of his envoys. One of them, Brother William of Ouen crossed the Channel to confer with John, then recrossed to confirm to Stephen Langton that the king had ratified.
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Finally Pandulph came over for the formal treaty signing and met John at Dover on 13 May. The king reiterated his acceptance of the deal negotiated in Rome, and three of his barons (the earls of Salisbury, Warenne and Ferrers) plus the count of Boulogne stood as guarantors of his good faith.
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Two days later, at the house of the Templars at Ewell near Dover, John pulled a rabbit out of the hat. He issued a charter making England and Ireland feudal fiefs of the Holy See, with himself as the Pope’s vassal. Technically, he resigned the kingdoms of England and Ireland to Innocent and received them back under the bond of fealty and homage, on a pledge to pay 1,000 marks a year to the Holy See, 700 for England and 300 for Ireland. This charter was witnessed by John de Gray, by Geoffrey Peter, the justiciar, the count of Boulogne, and the earls of Salisbury, Pembroke, Surrey, Winchester, Arundel and Derby as well as three members of his own household.
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It was then ratified in St Paul’s Cathedral on 3 October in a solemn ceremony in the presence of Nicholas, cardinal-archbishop of Tusculum and sealed with a golden bull. John’s formal release from excommunication was, however, delayed until the following July when Langton finally returned. The interdict took even longer to be rescinded because John, typically, haggled about the reparations due to the English Church. Once in England, Langton set up a commission to assess the clergy’s losses, which took time, and there were many disputes, principally arising from the fact that John had bullied monasteries into giving him quittances for what he had taken from them.
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Yet in Innocent’s eyes, in the euphoria of victory, all this was mere detail. He was delighted with the unexpected turn of events which so enhanced the prestige of the Apostolic See, and sent off a fulsome letter to John, praising him for having known how to turn evil into good.
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