Richard & John: Kings at War (74 page)

It was at this juncture that Archbishop Stephen Langton arrived at Winchester where (on 20 July) the papal ban on John was lifted, on the express condition that he renewed his coronation oath and promised to uphold the ancient laws of the kingdom. Langton moved on to St Albans and London, unaware of what was in the king’s mind. Once he realised he hastened after the northbound John, caught up with him at Northampton and remonstrated with him, pointing out that his precipitate action was contrary to the oaths sworn at Winchester.
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A duel of wills developed all the way from Northampton to Nottingham, with John still adamant that he intended to chastise the North, and Langton warning him and his troops that they risked re-excommunication. Finally John saw sense: the folly of breaking with the Pope again after having just patched things up was too much even for him. As a face-saving device he marched farther north before announcing that the expedition to Poitou was now postponed until the spring of 1214. With Langton as mediator, the northern rebels were formally reconciled at Wallingford on 1 November, on the strict understanding that John pledged himself to maintain the laws of Henry I and his charters, and the liberties contained therein;
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Langton had actually been working on a scheme to curb John’s power by means of these charters when he had to break off and race to Northampton.
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But it was an uneasy peace, a truce of convenience, agreed by John only because he was desperate to sail to Poitou. All the underlying problems remained.

Although the Poitou expedition had now been postponed twice, John was determined it would finally take place in 1214. Throughout the winter the usual (and by now almost formulaic) naval and military preparations went ahead. John showed his distrust of the barons by summoning them to a council at Oxford in November to discuss the coming campaign but ordering them to come unarmed.
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At Christmas John held court at Winchester, trying by a display of sumptuous magnificence to keep at bay the misgivings he must have felt about leaving England in such a turbulent condition.
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At Canterbury in January he received Count Ferrand of Flanders, who did homage to him, though scholars do not agree whether this means he was accepting John as overlord of Flanders.
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We may infer that John made him another hefty subsidy, for about this time he was obliged to subvent Count Raymond of Toulouse, another short-staying visitor to England, to the tune of 10,000 marks to keep alive the flickering Albigensian defence against Simon de Montfort. Raymond’s position after de Montfort had defeated the king of Aragon at Muret in September 1213 was truly desperate, but John could do little more for him, for the papal legate at once demanded the removal of this ‘heretic’ from England.
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In January too John announced his plans for the government of England while he was away. Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, was appointed justiciar, in place of Geoffrey FitzPeter who had died in October, and was to have another of John’s favourites, William Brewer, as assistant justiciar. This appointment was deeply unpopular both with the barons, who despised des Roches as a foreigner and John’s lickspittle, and with the hierarchy, who remembered his role during the interdict.
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But John admired des Roches, whose name indicated his nature - ‘hard as a rock’ said one annalist.
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It was the wrong appointment to make if he wanted to conciliate the barons, whose uncertain attitudes continued. In the event, many of the earls and magnates did not come to John’s final muster and failed to send their knights, leaving in the air the question of whether they would consent to pay fines and scutage in lieu of service. To John’s continuing irritation, William Marshal made it plain he would not accompany John to wage war on his (Marshal’s) other overlord, Philip Augustus. But by this time John desperately needed Marshal; he instructed des Roches to ensure that all new measures ordained for the good of the kingdom were carefully discussed for their religious implications with Stephen Langton and for their political ones with Marshal.
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On 2 February 1214 John embarked at Portsmouth with his queen, his elder son Richard, his niece Eleanor of Britanny and a large treasure chest (‘an incalculable treasury of gold, silver and precious stones’) to pay the expenses of the campaign in Poitou. With him went his household knights, his mercenaries and the lesser knights of small fortune who could not afford to defy him.
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Adverse weather delayed the expedition in the Solent for a week, so that it was 15 February before he arrived in La Rochelle, his intended base during the campaign. At about the same time William, earl of Salisbury set out for Flanders with a crack regiment of English troops, a large number of mercenaries and money enough for lavish subsidies to the northern allies. Opinions are divided about Salisbury. An illegitimate son of Henry II (and thus John’s half-brother), he was tall, massively built, and considered a good soldier (he was nicknamed Longsword - an obvious contrast to John’s soubriquet), though modern historians tend to see him as a braggart and blusterer.
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But he enjoyed John’s confidence, and the energy displayed in equipping and sending two large expeditions to the Continent simultaneously shows John at his best. It was said that he had been secretly setting aside money for years for this grand design of catching Philip Augustus between two massively powerful armies, with Poitou as the anvil and Flanders the hammer; and that the secrecy was such that his clerks were not allowed to note in the official archives the names of those who had received bribes and sweeteners for this purpose.
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John at first achieved striking success. His welcome in La Rochelle was cordial, not only because it was an ‘English’ town that depended for its prosperity on English trade but because the magnates of Poitou had become alarmed at the growing power of France and were willing to set one ruler against another so as to regain their old independence; French chroniclers cynically said that treachery was in the lifeblood of the Poitevins - ‘affection will no more hold a Poitevin than chains will bind a Protean’ was William the Breton’s gloss.
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Despite criticism for Fabian tactics - remaining so near to the La Rochelle seaboard for so long - the truth was that John could not advance against Philip until he was sure of the loyalty of all the Poitevin magnates along the proposed line of march; for this reason, if no other, it seems absurd to credit John with a ‘grand strategy’ of cutting through France from south-west to north-east to join his Flemish allies. The fact that a local lord held the castle of Milecu, a few miles from La Rochelle, against him was hardly an auspicious omen; John had to reduce this stronghold before going any farther.
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John’s itinerary can be followed in sketchy outline, though not all the details are clear: Mervant (20 February); Niort (25 February); the siege of Milecu (2-4 March); Angoulême (15 March); Saint-Junien (17 March); Aixe (18 March); La Souterraine (23 March); and thence through the Limousin again to the Charente, passing through Limoges and Angoulême.
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In April he marched into Gascony as far as La Réole to reassure himself that his southern flank was secure. His boasts in dispatches to England - ‘immediately on our arrival 26 castles and fortified places were restored to us’
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was belied by the reality on the ground.

Yet Poitou could not be made solid pro-John territory simply by marches and countermarches. In May John brought diplomacy into play by trying to placate the hostile Lusignans, even offering his daughter Joan in marriage to Hugh of La Marche (Hugh of Lusignan). But when the powerful clan continued to drag its collective feet, John decided on stronger measures. He quickly took Geoffrey of Lusignan’s castle of Mervant, then moved against the stronger fortress of Voucant, where Geoffrey and two of his sons had barricaded themselves. A three-day assault by trebuchets brought Geoffrey to heel; he and his sons surrendered themselves to the English king’s mercy.
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John’s thrust against the Lusignans finally brought the French into the field against him, for Geoffrey’s third and most easterly castle at Montcontour, the toughest nut to crack of the trio, was suddenly reported to be under siege from Louis, Philip Augustus’s son. On 25 May John made rendezvous with the three Lusignans (Geoffrey and his brothers the counts of La Marche and Eu) at Parthenay, where John confirmed the marriage contract of Hugh with his daughter Joan, stressing what a great favour this was, as Philip Augustus, playing his usual diplomatic games, had tried to spike the proposal by offering his son as a husband for Joan instead.
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A plethora of Poitevin barons attended and witnessed the marriage contract at Parthenay (like so many of these proposed dynastic marriages it was fated never to take place), indicating that John’s campaign had been successful so far. Heartened by this showing, he decided to attempt the recapture of Anjou, lost to Philip in 1204-05.

This was the crucial moment when, if operations on the two allied fronts really had been coordinated, John might have been able to score a glittering victory. Even though Philip could raise an army estimated at some 20,000 in all (including 3,000 knights),
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he would still have been stretched thin if the army of the north under Salisbury, Ferrand and Otto IV had been ready to invade France the instant John struck north into Anjou. As it was, Philip had to divide his army to deal with the dual threat; he faced north, leaving his son Louis to confront John in the south. It was a supremely perilous moment for France, for if the allies were victorious in the north the momentum of victory would almost certainly sweep John back across Normandy and possibly even into Paris itself. It was therefore in a jaunty mood that John struck north-west across the Loire on 1 June, having first feinted in the direction of Louis’s army.
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He captured Ancennis (on the Anjou-Britanny border) easily, feinted again, this time towards Angers, before doubling back and besieging the seaport of Nantes - a far more convenient base for operations against Britanny and Normandy than La Rochelle. The garrison at Nantes sortied against John but they and the citizen levies were badly defeated on the bridge outside the city. John took several important prisoners, among than Philip Augustus’s cousin Peter of Dreux, count of Britanny. This victory seems to have struck terror into the burghers of Anjou’s capital Angers, for they immediately opened their gates to John’s Anglo-Poitevin army; on 17 June he entered the erstwhile capital of the Angevin empire in triumph.
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The triumph was soured by Philip Augustus’s Anjou seneschal William des Roches, who still defiantly held the castle of Roche-aux-Moines, a few miles from Angers. Instead of ignoring this and working round it, or because he thought it too great a threat to the Nantes-Angers road, John proceeded to waste two weeks on a futile siege of this stronghold. While he was so engaged, word came in that Prince Louis, hitherto as elusive as a phantom, had at last put in an appearance and was marching to the relief of the fortress, probably as a result of direct orders from his father.
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From the reports of his scouts John learned that he had a clear numerical advantage over Louis; he was keen to offer battle and the headstrong Louis, when this challenge was officially made, was just as keen to accept.
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But now at last John discovered just what his conquest of Poitou was worth, for the Poitevins flatly refused to risk themselves and their fortunes in pitched battle. The ringleader of the Poitevin opposition was that habitual trimmer and turncoat Aimeri of Thouars, who mocked and ridiculed John’s pretensions as a warrior. Raging, fuming but impotent, John had no choice but to return in humiliation all the way back to La Rochelle; faced with the treachery of the Poitevins and with all his old paranoid fears revived, it was the first place where he felt genuinely safe. There was no disguising the fact that his ‘retreat’ was more like a panic-stricken rout; in the general shambles he abandoned siege engines, tents, baggage and materiel. Louis pursued the English as far as Thouars, causing the demoralised Anglo-Poitevins to sustain further losses through drowning when crossing the Loire.
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John had already dispatched so many boasts to England about his glittering military triumphs that he was in a quandary about how to ‘spin’ the latest debacle. It is hard not to have grudging admiration for the effrontery with which he presented the ruin of his entire campaign. After licking his wounds for a week in La Rochelle, he summoned up the energy to indite the following pack of lies, beneath whose surface, however, it was possible for the discerning to perceive the king’s true plight:

The King to the earls, barons, knights and all his lieges in England, greetings. Know that we are safe and well and that everything, by the grace of God, is prosperous and happy with us. We return manifold thanks to those of you who have sent us your knights to serve in the preservation and recovery of our rights, and we earnestly entreat those of you who have not crossed with us to come to us without delay, being assiduous for our honour, to help in the recovery of our territory (save for those who in the opinion of our reverend fathers the lords Peter bishop of Winchester, our justiciar, and of Master Richard Marsh and William Brewer, should stay in England), doing so much in this matter that we are bound in perpetual thanks to you. Assuredly, if any of you should have understood that we bore him ill-will, he can have it rectified by coming here
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