Richard & John: Kings at War (71 page)

John was lucky in that Innocent did not extract the last pound of flesh. Bowled over by John’s submission, the Pope swung from over-suspicion of the English king to over-trust, and wrote to him with a warmth and enthusiasm he seldom evinced to others. In sending Nicholas of Tusculum as his personal representative, he described the legate as ‘an angel of salvation and peace’.
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He gave Nicholas secret instructions to go easy on John in the matter of reparations, so Nicholas cut through the acrimony over what John actually owed to churches and monasteries by compounding the debt at the round figure of 100,000 marks, over the angry protests of the English clergy that John was getting away with financial murder and that the true debt was at least half as much again. So unswayed was Nicholas by these remonstrations that he actually allowed John to pay the 100,000 marks in instalments: he was to make a down-payment of 40,000 and pay the rest off at 12,000 a year. When the interdict was lifted, Nicholas allowed John to get away with a down-payment of just 13,000.
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But if the clergy thought John had gulled the Pope and his representatives, many thought Innocent had humiliated the English nation and its king. John was overcompensating for his former excesses, and many who had previously criticised him for dragging England into an unnecessary conflict with the papacy now attacked him for having sold out the true interests of England.
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Interestingly, many of the critics were themselves churchmen, and even Stephen Langton thought John had gone too far in allowing papal power to extend to England; he particularly resented Nicholas of Tusculum’s high hand in making appointments to vacant sees and benefices which he saw as his own prerogative.
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The high point of John’s new entente with the Pope came on 20 July 1213 in a solemn ceremony at Winchester Cathedral when John welcomed as archbishop the man he had vowed would never occupy that office. Stephen Langton for his part formally absolved the king of excommunication. John then swore on the Gospels that he would defend the Church at all times and revive the good laws of former times, and especially the codes of Edward the Confessor; moreover that he would abolish all bad laws and hear all issues in his courts with justice as the ruling principle, guaranteeing human rights to all men.
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By thus appearing as the patron condescending to a suppliant, Langton regained some of the prestige lost to Nicholas of Tusculum. Innocent had given Nicholas plenipotentiary powers which the legate had exercised injudiciously and with some want of tact. It particularly incensed the ultramontane clergy, who had been steadfastly loyal to the papacy, that Nicholas, with the Pope’s blessing, rewarded the trimmers, apostates and royal lickspittles, so that those who had lacked the courage and integrity to break with John now received the glittering prizes: among those so despised were William Cornhill, who became bishop of Lichfield, and Walter Gray who was appointed to the archbishopric of York, left vacant by Geoffrey. John’s half-brother was never recalled from exile, as might have been expected.
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The most scandalous case of papal betrayal of his faithful occurred at Durham. Here the chapter assumed from John’s submission that it could now exercise the ancient canonical right to elect a new bishop, and chose the saintly Richard Poor, dean of Salisbury. Yet, with Nicholas’s connivance, John imposed his old henchman John de Gray, lately justiciar of Ireland.
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Once again Innocent seemed to be letting the king get away with the ecclesiastical equivalent of daylight robbery. Innocent evidently considered that
raison d’état
and his new Concordat with John meant far more than justice, meritocracy or canon law. Langton hit back by dragging his feet, seemingly in no hurry to restore England to full Christian status; it was only pressure from Nicholas that finally got the interdict rescinded in July 1214. With stunning predictability, the reparations immediately began to dry up. A further 6,000 marks was paid in August-November 1214, but thereafter John ‘forgot’ about the balance, pleading the pressure of other concerns.
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The political implications of John’s entente with Rome were spectacular since, once the king had deferred to Innocent and accepted him as overlord, he simply could do no wrong in the pontiff ’s eyes; Innocent thereafter connived at the most flagrant despotism on John’s part. The diplomatic revolution this entailed was akin to Richard’s reversal of alliances in the late 1190s but perhaps even more striking, for here now was Innocent allied to the man he had recently excommunicated, who in turn was allied to the Pope’s bitterest enemy, the excommunicate German pretender Otto, while ranged against them were the Pope’s erstwhile allies Philip Augustus and Frederick of Hohenstaufen.
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The implications of all this would become dramatically manifest in 1214. Meanwhile the period of bitter enmity between Innocent and John, followed by the close bonding subsequent to the lifting of the excommunication, had more immediate implications for another important group: the English barons. Relations between the Angevin kings and their barons had always been brittle - this was, after all, one of the deep undercurrents of the Young King’s rebellion against Henry II in 1173-74
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- but it may be that by their constant wars, and the opportunities thus held out for enrichment, Henry and Richard warded off the worst of the baronial backlash. The loss of Normandy and John’s ceaseless quest for more money brought the struggle between king and barons back to centre-stage. Whereas under Richard the levy of scutage or shield-money had been occasional and intermittent, John converted it into a virtual annual tax.
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In the struggle of king versus barons, the monarch held nearly all the cards. Henry II had specialised in increasing the Crown’s executive power, using ad hoc agents instead of the barons and extending the scope of royal courts while taking as many castles as possible into the regal orbit, where they could be controlled by loyal castellans. While not neglecting any of these methods, John’s preference was for the financial scam, especially the vagueness surrounding succession duties (that early form of inheritance tax) due from an heir succeeding to a barony. As the official guide to these taxes put it: ‘there is no fixed amount which the heir must pay to the king; he must make what terms he can’.
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John liked to set these ‘reliefs’ at a very high level, forcing the new fief-holder into a permanent cycle of indebtedness. The going rate was supposed to be £100, but John increased the ‘norm’ to six hundred marks. And since the amount taxed was entirely at the whim of the king, John liked to punish anyone who had displeased him by levying an enormous amount: sums of 7,000 and even 10,000 marks (one-tenth the ransom for Richard in Germany) were recorded.
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Since the average baronial income was around £200 a year, any extraordinary rate of relief plunged the unfortunate baron into lifelong debt-bondage. The only hope was that, in return for excessive sycophancy or sterling military service, John might remit the debt or at least part of it, but in general he preferred to keep the barons under his thumb rather than allow them the freedom which debt liquidation would bring.
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And he would certainly have regarded all modern notions of insolvency or bankruptcy with contempt: if you could not pay the debt, you forfeited your lands.
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It was not even possible to escape the royal tentacles by borrowing and transferring the debt to a less grasping creditor. The only way out was to use Jewish moneylenders, since lending money at interest was forbidden to Christians under medieval canon law. But, quite apart from the consideration that one was still subsidising John, who allowed the Jews to operate on the sole condition that he could raid their funds whenever he felt like it by the system of ‘tallages’, the law ordained that the king was every Jew’s heir, so that when a moneylender died the monarch inherited all his cash, property, promissory notes and IOUs. To escape from John’s coils via Jewish credit, therefore, ran the risk that one could pay out a fortune in interest and still end up back at the start as the king’s debtor.
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John’s main tactic, then, was to burden the barons with such heavy debts that they were effectively gelded both by the repayments and the threat of expropriation if they failed to make them. But he also encouraged a cash nexus whereby barons were expected to pay for an entire range of ‘goods and services’. He would let a man know that he was out of favour but could be reinstated on payment of a certain amount, usually hundreds of pounds; he would fine one local lord for allowing an outlaw to escape, another for marrying without permission, yet another for putting a fish-weir in a river without going through the necessary bureaucracy, and so on.
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On the other hand, greedy and corrupt barons would approach John with cash offers to secure particular favours: a fief, the wardenship of a forest, the position as constable of a castle, the guardianship of a minor’s estate. One of John’s favourite wheezes was to control the supply of rich heiresses as brides, releasing them onto the marriage market only when the appropriate funds had changed hands. He was not above accepting money for favours and then not granting them.
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Always a master of the double-cross, John was said to prowl the country sniffing out so-called crimes and misdemeanours for which he could levy a fine. John made it clear that all who were not for him were regarded as being against him and should expect to pay the consequences; why should enemies have the same access to courts and royal justice as friends and loyal subjects, he reasoned.
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Above all other considerations was the fact that the royal will acknowledged no superior tribunal. If the monarch wanted something badly enough, that was the end of the matter, and this was why so many contracts, warranties and guarantees contained the escape clause: ‘save in the case of royal violence’. If John wished to seize and expropriate, he liked to have specious reasons for doing so but, at the limit, he was quite prepared for the brutal exercise of blatant power, based only on his will:
fiat pro lege voluntas
.
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However, even John realised that to subvert the entire system of custom, law and tradition in favour of arbitrary despotism might eventually drag down the institution of monarchy itself, which was why he was mindful of rumblings of excessive discontent and thought better of levying scutage in the years 1207-08; fortunately his conflict with the Church in these years enabled him to shift the financial burden from the barons to the bishops and abbots.

In addition to heavy taxation, arbitrary fines and ‘reliefs’, expropriations and forfeitures, new taxes on chattels and ploughlands, the tenants-in-chief of feudal England had specific and personal grievances relating to the destruction of their castles, the corrupt disposal of manors through tame courts and tribunals appointed from John’s yes-men and heavily overseen by the king himself, the asset-stripping of estates while in wardship and the indignity of forced marriages of widows and heiresses.
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John expected unquestioning obedience and faithful commitment to duty from his barons while ignoring their rights. It is often lamented that in the modern world people demand rights without duties but in John’s England it was the other way round. When the barons expected rewards for their uncomplaining acceptance of John’s arbitrary fees, taxes and reliefs and their support for him in the never-ending wars, they found instead that his favours were bestowed either on his household knights or, even more alarmingly, on alien mercenary captains.
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Names like those of Fawkes de Bréauté, Savary de Mauléon, Peter des Roches and, especially, Gérard d’Athée - all men John had brought with him from France to England - loom large in contemporary annals. These were the men who did John’s dirty work for him, who enforced his tyranny at the point of a sword and whose presence so close to the throne was so bitterly resented.
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Gérard d’Athée it was who acted as John’s spearhead when he finally compassed the destruction of William de Braose. So highly did John think of him that he paid 2,000 marks for his ransom from Philip (who had captured him when the castle of Loches fell in 1205), brought him to England and made him master of the county and castle of Gloucester - the action that decided William Marshal to self-exile himself in Ireland. The ruthless d’Athée, who had made his name in the brutal suppression of Touraine, visited his special methods on the Welsh marches and was John’s strong right arm there for many years. He died in 1213 but was so universally loathed that he was the only adventurer explicitly and expressly named in Magna Carta as the scourge of England.
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There were good reasons, then, why John should have feared the possible reactions of the barons during his conflict with the Church. As Roger of Wendover put it, he had ‘almost as many enemies as he had barons’.
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His immediate instinct was for hostage-taking. The return of the paranoia of 1204-05 was evident in the way he took hostages not just from the barons but from his own mercenary captains. In 1212 he decided to haul in a fresh batch of the sons, nephews and kinsmen of his hard-pressed magnates and once again most of the barons meekly rolled over and gave him what he wanted. Two notable exceptions were Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter who fled, respectively to Scotland and France, after the failure of a plot to murder John.
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Yet John had little to fear from the barons during his struggle with Rome. Politically it would have made sense for them to increase the pressure on John when he was engaged with the Pope, yet they seem to have feared that a capitulation to the Vatican would break down the natural spheres of influence: the Pope had his, the king had his, the barons had theirs. In modern terms one might say that John’s magnates favoured the pluralism of civil society, and that in supporting the autonomy of the king of England from the Pope they were also asserting their own autonomy from him. Neither John nor Innocent III saw it that way. For John the barons’ attitude meant they were weak, which in turn meant he could pile further humiliation on them. For the Pope the barons’ attitude was rank betrayal of their Christian duty, and he commented acidly on their failure to do anything for the Church.
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