Richard & John: Kings at War (72 page)

When the dust settled and John had accepted papal overlordship of the British Isles, the barons thought again and concluded they had backed the wrong horse. During the interdict and excommunication John had pulverised the clergy, coerced, browbeat and bled them dry to a degree they would have thought impossible. Custom, habit, charter, religious mores and folkways had all gone out of the window. The Church, on paper the most stable part of the entire political system, had been convulsed and all but destroyed by a spectacular demonstration of despotic willpower, and seventeen monasteries had virtually ceased to exist.
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Ecclesiastic properties had been confiscated, exploited and sold off, wealth, lands and benefices seized, and senior divines had cravenly bowed the head. If John could do this to the Church, brushing aside excommunication and anathema, what might he not be able to do to the far less securely entrenched barons? There seemed no end to John’s arbitrary government, and the awful example of William de Braose, a favourite one day, a refugee outlaw the next, seemed to portend what might be in store for the rest of them.
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Moreover, to get his deal with Rome, John had waived the principle of lay rights in ecclesiastical appointments, which was in effect a serious truncation of baronial power. The magnates had backed John against the Pope but now, to their horror, they found that the Pope was backing John against them; they had muffed the opportunity to catch him between two fires by making themselves the papal allies in 1207. Even worse, Innocent III was still fuming at their ‘perfidy’ and determined to punish them. When they broke into rebellion in 1215, they were immediately condemned by Rome in pointed terms. Innocent wrote: ‘The enemy of the human race who hates good impulses (sc. the Devil) has stirred up the barons with his cunning wiles so that, with a wicked inconsistency, the men who supported him (John) when he was injuring the Church rebelled against him when he turned from his sins and made amends to the Church.’
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With John seemingly stronger than ever, the outlook for the barons seemed dire in 1212-13. They could not defeat John, and their only hope was that he would self-destruct. This he now obligingly proceeded to do.

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JOHN NEVER ACCEPTED THE loss of Normandy as a permanent feature of the political landscape but, preoccupied as he was with other matters, principally the struggle with the papacy, it took him almost ten years to prepare his counterstroke against Philip Augustus. His abiding ambition was to build a European confederacy that would gradually tighten the noose on France, which was why the continuing German civil war and events in the Holy Roman Empire were top of his foreign policy agenda. The empire that had humiliated Richard the Lionheart collapsed into anarchy after the death of Emperor Henry VI in September 1197.
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The late emperor’s brother Philip of Swabia claimed the Crown, but the majority of electors in the empire favoured Otto of Saxony, son of Henry the Lion and Maud, Henry II’s daughter. As Otto IV, Henry II’s grandson enjoyed a precarious hold on the empire from 1198 to 1212 - precarious not only because the new duke of Austria backed the Swabian prince but because Philip Augustus did too.
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All the best observers thought that Otto was a poor choice as ruler. Physically large, with a much-noted resemblance to Richard the Lionheart, whose favourite he was, Otto was by common consent an unreliable braggart, a rather stupid, bungling, inefficient but arrogant man, who let his tongue run away with him and made lavish promises he had no intention of keeping.
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John initially regarded him with suspicion as a possible rival for the English throne, but Otto’s preference for the German crown removed that problem. But it cannot have helped after 1199 that whenever John looked at Otto he was reminded of Richard and, moreover, that Otto claimed Richard had bequeathed his jewels and two-thirds of his treasure to him; he was correct about the jewels, but the treasure story was a fantasy.
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It was typical of Otto that he continued to claim the revenues due to him as putative earl of York (Richard had apparently promised him the earldom) even when he was king of Germany. Not surprisingly, John had no compunction about double-crossing him when it suited his book. But in foreign affairs John was constrained by
realpolitik
not personal predilections. The alliance of the two Philips, Capetian and Hohenstaufen, was as much a feature of international relations as the contrary alliance of Otto with John, Welf and Angevin.
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Although John occasionally had to ditch Otto because of the requirements of treaties with Philip Augustus, the deep currents of European affairs drew them together. John showed his awareness of where Angevin interests naturally lay by letters, loans, gifts and presents to Otto and by granting commercial and trade preference to the German and Flemish cities that supported him.
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Otto curried favour with John by offering to make a truce with Philip of Swabia so that he could concentrate his attentions on attacking Philip Augustus and seizing Rheims and Cambrai.
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This was hubris since, although Innocent III had recognised Otto as the legitimate emperor-elect, Otto had not yet been formally crowned and the civil war in Germany still raged. But Otto set a lot of store on the endorsement by Innocent, and the Pope for his part saw Otto as the future for Germany (certainly in the early years) and in a letter of March 1202 even pressed John to make over to Otto the monies promised by Richard; needless to say, John ignored the papal request.
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In 1204 both John and Otto sustained terrible reverses. While John lost Normandy, Otto suffered a series of hammer blows. First his brother the Count Palatine went over to the enemy, followed shortly by the archbishop of Cologne and the duke of Brabant, thus shattering Richard the Lionheart’s carefully constructed Rhenish confederacy. Then in 1206 Cologne, the city whose commercial interests were so tightly bound up with England’s and which had received ‘most favoured’ status from John, capitulated. Deserted by most of his powerful backers (even the Pope opened negotiations with Philip of Swabia), Otto fled to Denmark and thence across the North Sea to England.
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There he was given a hero’s welcome and accorded all the honours of a state visit, even being received in audience by John at Stapleford. He and John jested about how they would carve up Philip Augustus’s realm; Otto gave John a great golden crown and John gave Otto six thousand marks.
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How Otto was supposed to regain his position in Germany was unclear, but suddenly fortune dealt him a hand when Philip of Swabia was assassinated (21 June 1208).
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Even for the doubters Otto now seemed a better bet than anarchy and chaos, so he was invited to resume as king of Germany. Otto next ingratiated himself with the Pope by interceding with John on behalf of Stephen Langton and in 1209 sent his brother the Count Palatine to England for the same purpose. Although John was not yet in the mood to heed these overtures, he cemented the German alliance by making the count a 1,000-mark a year pensioner of England.
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By this time John was dreaming of a great coalition of the northern European powers directed at Capetian France. He stepped up the diplomatic momentum by sending his new favourite the earl of Salisbury on an embassy to the German princes.
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In November 1209 John received the news that Pope Innocent III had crowned Otto Holy Roman Emperor in Rome the month before.
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The ambitious Otto requited this papal favour by conquering Tuscia, Apulia and Calabria and then invading Sicily in blatant defiance of the Pope’s wishes. By one of those amazing twists which typified international relations in the Middle Ages, a year later the very same pope who had crowned Otto excommunicated him.
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The Pope and Philip Augustus together now raised up a new rival to Otto: the young Hohenstaufen prince Frederick. Meanwhile John and Otto, both now under sentence of papal excommunication, hit back at Innocent and Philip by assisting yet another ruler who had fallen under the papal anathema: Raymond of Toulouse, married to John’s sister Joan. Raymond was backing the Albigensians of south-western France, the Gnostic movement denounced for heresy by Innocent III. The Pope had sent an army of ‘crusaders’ under Simon de Montfort against the Albigensians and they began by besieging Toulouse. Otto and John poured money and materiel into the defence of Toulouse and their kinsman, and Raymond made such a good showing that the ‘crusaders’ lost heart and raised the siege (121 1).
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John seemed to be riding the crest of a wave now with Otto and Raymond as confrères; it occurred to him that he could do even better if the princes of the borderlands of France and Germany - Boulogne, Flanders, Lorraine, the Netherlands - could also be brought into the alliance, giving him the grand coalition he had always dreamed of.

John was now aiming to rebuild the coalition of princes in the Low Countries that Richard had managed so triumphantly and that had been allowed to lapse only through his (John’s) fecklessness. His chief agent in the complex negotiations that followed was Renaud of Dammartin, count of Boulogne, an ambitious soldier-scholar-diplomat, as much at ease in the company of troubadours as on the battlefield.
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Renaud had joined the long list of those who loathed Philip Augustus when the French king seized his fiefs of Mortain, Domfront and Aumale in Normandy. Renaud then took a mighty oath that he would spend the rest of his life compassing Philip Augustus’s downfall.
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The task was difficult, for Philip Augustus dominated Flanders after 1202, following Count Baldwin IX’s capture at Adrianople and subsequent death in captivity. In the power vacuum Philip successfully manipulated the regent, Baldwin’s brother Philip of Namur and even became ward of Baldwin’s daughters. So inept was Philip of Namur and so easily dominated by his more powerful namesake that it was said he practised an idiosyncratic form of wearing sackcloth and ashes, parading through the streets of Valenciennes with a notice attached to his neck which read: ‘I ought to die like a dog.’
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Philip controlled the regent partly through lavish subsidies, and for a while he and John tried to outbid each other by raising the ante for the castellans of the key fortresses: St-Omer, Bruges, Ghent, Lille, Cassel. Count Renaud decided to leave Philip of Namur till last and began his campaign by enlisting his kinsman Count Théobald of Bar (Lorraine) .
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Together Renaud and Théobald achieved their first coup by getting Otto’s brother Henry (the Count Palatine) to travel to England and engage in a formal anti-French alliance with John; the count sealed the bargain by doing homage to the English king.
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Another Lorrainer persuaded into the coalition was Henry, duke of Limberg. The temporary adherence of the slippery duke of Brabant, a man who was said to be unable to lie straight in bed, was more trouble than it was worth.
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By 1212 Renaud was ready for his greatest stroke: the winning of Flanders for John’s coalition. Here the key figure was Ferrand, duke of Flanders, one of Philip Augustus’s placemen. When Philip of Namur died, the French king imposed Ferrand, son of Sancho I of Portugal, and gave him the Flemish heiress Joan as his wife, thinking this was certain to cement Ferrand’s loyalty. But for all Philip Augustus’s cunning, he had an Achilles heel in the shape of his impulsive son Louis, the classic spoiled royal brat. Philip understood his son’s weaknesses but was too much the doting father to rein him in. He paid heavily for his paternal indulgence. In an evil hour Louis took it into his head to seize the fiefs of Aire and St-Omer (in Ferrand’s domain) for himself, claiming that they were his mother’s dowry.
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Unable to proceed against the interloper without making war on Philip himself, Ferrand had to endure the taunts of his subjects, who accused him (rightly) of being a French poodle and suggested he return to Portugal.
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Stung by these reproaches and angry with Philip for having allowed this humiliation to develop, Ferrand was receptive to the feelers put out by Renaud. After much hesitation, Ferrand joined John’s coalition and this proved a popular move in Flanders, where the English wool trade was so important. The crisis came in April 1213 when Philip Augustus was preparing an invasion of England. He asked Ferrand to take part but the duke refused. Philip invaded Flanders forthwith and at first won a series of victories. Tournai, Cassel, Lille, Bruges and Ghent all fell to French arms, and Ferrand was forced to take refuge in Zeeland.
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Even before his coalition was complete, John had been aching to land forces in France and reverse the verdict of 1204. His initial intention had been to take an expedition to Poitou in 1212 for an invasion of Normandy. With five years of looted Church money in his coffers, John faced the problem not so much of revenue as of manpower. Utilising methods similar to Domesday Book, John’s officials held an exhaustive census of available manpower in every shire of England, and extra cash was raised by an official investigation into offences against the Forest Laws, with the inspectors-general given wide powers to fine and punish.
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But the revolt under Llewellyn in Wales (see p.339) threw all John’s plans into disarray. To deal with the Welsh threat he ordered the host assembled at Portsmouth for the voyage to Poitou to muster instead at Chester.
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As previously mentioned, the Welsh expedition in turn foundered on alarming rumours of baronial conspiracy and even more hair-raising canards of royal assassination and the rape of Queen Isabella. So seriously did John take the reports that he put his five-year-old son and heir Henry (later Henry III) into safekeeping in a heavily garrisoned castle.
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The flight of the would-be rebellion’s ringleaders, Robert Fitzwalter and Eustace de Vesci, handed the initiative to John. He destroyed two of Fitzwalter’s castles (Benington in Hertfordshire and Castle Baynard in London), and broke up Vesci’s network of followers in the north .
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But as the scope of the revolt he had nipped in the bud became clear, John realised he had had a narrow escape. For purely prudential motives he ostentatiously began a charm offensive, curtailing the powers of his Forest commissioners and other over-mighty officials. He relieved traders and foreign pilgrims of many irritating taxes and ‘fees’ imposed at seaports, and held himself forth as a protector of widows. In a word, he aimed at the reputation of ‘Good King John’.
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