Richard & John: Kings at War (81 page)

John’s assault on Rochester town was something of a walkover. The Brabantines and Flemings routed the citizen levy with contemptuous ease, and the panic-stricken rabble raced for the Medway bridge only to find it gone; with undisguised relish the mercenaries described how they cut down men ‘many of whom would gladly have fled to London if they could’.
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The citadel, naturally, was a different proposition. In command in Rochester Castle was William of Aubigny, lord of Belvoir, by repute one of the ablest of the rebel commanders. He had at his side ninety-five knights and forty-five men-at-arms but they were desperately short of provisions. John saw the chance for a knockout victory that would demoralise the barons in London. He ordered all the blacksmiths in Canterbury to work day and night making pickaxes, and meanwhile staged a deliberate campaign of terror to weaken the resolve of the defenders, burning, looting and marauding in the town in full view of the garrison, deliberately showing contempt for the ‘Army of God’ by acts of overt blasphemy and sacrilege, such as stabling their horses in the cathedral.
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The barons in London seemed paralysed by John’s energy. Although Fitzwalter had promised William of Aubigny that they would return at once if the king was bold enough to besiege them, for two weeks they sat in London, biting their nails in indecision, dithering and prevaricating. At last, on 26 October Fitzwalter set out with 700 knights but got only as far as Dartford before unaccountably turning back. Clearly Fitzwalter’s cowardice was at the root of this: he was said to have panicked when he heard that John had been reinforced from the continent and now possessed a formidable host.
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Roger of Wendover’s contempt for the barons was palpable: he portrays them as staggering drunkenly from stews to gaming table while their comrades faced John’s fury at Rochester. Once again they rationalised their folly, telling each other that huge reinforcements were expected by the end of November, and the Rochester garrison could easily hold out until then.
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The Rochester garrison was actually in a desperate plight from the very first day of John’s siege, and it says much for the calibre and valour of William of Aubigny that he held out so long. John threw everything at the citadel and exhausted his store of military knowledge. ‘Living memory does not recall a siege so fiercely pressed or so staunchly resisted’, said the most reliable annalist of the time.
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John tried mining, sapping, direct assault and finally assault by siege engines; five trebuchets pounded the castle day and night. The defenders were convinced they could expect no mercy from John so fought like tigers. According to Roger of Wendover, John finally defeated Aubigny in a singular way: on 25 November he ordered his new justiciar to send him with all speed ‘forty bacon pigs of the fattest, and of those which are least good for eating, to be put to set fire to the stuff that we have got together under the tower’.
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A tunnel was dug, shored up by timbers and filled with all manner of combustibles; then the fat of the forty pigs was used as a kind of porcine Greek Fire. The resulting conflagration finally brought the corner towers of the keep crashing down. But even in the burning ruins of the gutted keep the defenders fought on like madmen, contesting every foot. At last, when human courage could do no more, they surrendered, on 30 November, St Andrew’s Day.
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Their worst fears seemed about to be realised when John erected a gallows and announced he would hang every last man. But Savaric de Mauléon, no humanitarian, protested and pointed out to John that if men as brave as these were hanged, not only would the barons retaliate, involving both sides in a savage ‘no prisoners’ war (which the Pope would hardly sanction), but they would score a huge propaganda advantage, as John would seem to have proved that he was a vicious tyrant, just as his enemies alleged. John took the force of the argument, and contented himself with hanging a single crossbowman who had deserted from his household service. He imprisoned the wealthy knights until ransoms could be paid for their release, leaving the men-at-arms to languish in jail against the unlikely event of their raising a ransom.
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John’s success at Rochester caused a great éclat. The myth of the impregnable castle had taken a hammering, and from now on no rebel would feel safe in a keep or citadel.

The barons’ performance so far had been remarkably lacklustre: they lacked energy, ideas or even a common strategy, with half-hearted sieges of Northampton and Oxford Castles going on when they should have been relieving Rochester.
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Meanwhile they had virtually advertised their weakness by putting out equally half-hearted peace feelers to John throughout November and December.
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They also concentrated on setting up administrations in the east and north of the country, controlled by their partisans, and seeking ways and means to implement clause 61 of Magna Carta, instead of making an all-out effort to defeat John. The consequence was that, by drawing in mercenaries from the continent, the king grew gradually stronger and the rebels weaker; in particular, he retained control of some 150 castles throughout the kingdom which, lacking siege artillery, the barons were unable even to put a dent in.
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As Christmas 1215 approached, the one advantage they enjoyed was that the Celtic fringes, which John had thought definitively subdued, once more rose in rebellion. Preoccupied as he was with the Charter in summer 1215, John was also forced to spend a great deal of time on Irish affairs; from May to July the Close and Charter Rolls are full of letters and writs relating to Ireland.
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Although William Marshal and the Irish barons gave John unstinting support, the native Irish became the first exponents of what would become a seven-hundred-year-old truism: England’s danger is Ireland’s opportunity. Seeing John caught up in civil war, the Gaelic chieftains struck hard. Aed Ua Neill defeated an English army in Ulster, destroyed Clones Castle and gutted the port of Carlingford in County Louth. Cormac Ua Mail Sechnail attacked the castles of Kinclare in Westmeath, Athboy in Meath and Birr in Offaly.
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So concerned did John become about the state of affairs in Ireland that he persuaded his papal ally to enter the fray. In February 1216 Innocent III wrote to his legate in Ireland to tell him to put down all conspiracies against John in Ireland and to punish all clerics who communicated with the English barons and other excommunicated persons.
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Meanwhile the whole of Wales blazed into rebellion: the unprecedented situation arose whereby not only were all the Welsh princes in alliance with each other but also with the English barons. Llewellyn was on the warpath again and captured the town and castle of Shrewsbury in May 1215 (the fall of this town to the Welsh was also unprecedented); all the evidence suggests this move was concerted with the barons’ seizure of London.
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Alexander II of Scotland was also in the field, threatening Carlisle and euphoric at the award to him by a baronial court of the long-coveted lands of Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland.
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Yet the Celtic fringes could act only as gadflies on John’s flank. To overthrow him the barons needed intervention from France, and they hit on the idea of trying to substantiate a claim to the English throne from Louis, son of Philip Augustus. The lack of a pretender to John’s crown was a perceived weakness in the barons’ revolt and they had earlier tried to plug the gap by putting forward the claims of Simon de Montfort, titular earl of Leicester. Whether the notorious cruelties and atrocities visited by de Montfort on the Albigensians - as part of Innocent III’s crusade against these harmless heretics - persuaded the barons that he would prove a more tyrannical king than John ever was, or whether it was simply that the extremists in the baronial party found him unacceptable, by late summer this idea was definitively abandoned. Geoffrey de Mandeville headed a faction that besought Prince Louis to cross the Channel and save them from ‘this tyrant’.
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What the basis for Louis’s claim was supposed to be in terms of succession or feudal law is unclear. The pragmatic reason for the choice was to strip John of his foreign mercenaries, since most of the routiers were subjects of Louis (he had inherited the county of Artois from his mother), Philip Augustus or their allies .
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The barons’ ploy was utterly cynical: they had no intention of ceding the English crown to Louis’s heirs, and simply wanted to have him as a temporary ruler to unseat John, after which they would make up their own minds on whether they wanted a permanent arrangement. John had spotted the likelihood of a baronial overture to France and, incredibly, tried to get in first. Not surprisingly, Philip Augustus treated his absurd overtures with contempt.
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The barons began negotiating with France as early as September 1215, once it was clear Magna Carta was not going to hold. The only energetic response they made to the siege of Rochester was to send the earls of Winchester and Hereford to France with an explicit offer of the Crown to Louis.
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The mercurial Louis was keen, but his father was more cautious. The arrival of the earls in Paris was soured by a ludicrous scene when Philip Augustus presented them with a declaration, purporting to come from the barons’ leaders, stating that French help was no longer needed since a lasting peace had been signed between king and magnates. The earls were able to convince the French king that this was a crude forgery put out by John to obfuscate and diminish the credibility of the barons,
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but Philip remained suspicious on other fronts. Were the rebels serious in their offer or merely desperate because the fortunes of war had started to favour John? What guarantees were the barons offering his son and his heirs? How could the French be sure that this was not some cynical ad hoc offer, which would be withdrawn once John was defeated?
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His own position was difficult. Having suffered under the papal lash because of his adulterous marriage, he had no wish to enter into conflict with Innocent III again, and it seemed as though Innocent was backing John to the hilt over this baronial rebellion. Philip Augustus therefore decided on a ‘wait and see’ policy. He handed the entire matter over to his son, saying that he must act as he thought fit. Louis at once earmarked a ‘small’ force of Frenchmen to embark for England, and promised that he himself would follow with a much larger force at Easter 1216. The immediate expedition was not quite so exiguous as Louis pretended: altogether it was 7,000 strong, including 140 knights. The Frenchmen landed in the Orwell estuary and proceeded to London, where they proved to be as lacking in energy as the barons. They did not venture out of the capital all winter and made free in the fleshpots, inconvenienced only by having to drink beer when their wine ran out, as one of John’s mercenary captains scornfully reported.
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John was meanwhile as restless as his enemies were supine. Enormously elated by the news that the castles of Tonbridge and Bedford had surrendered to his mercenary captains - in both places it was Rochester all over again, with pleas for relief being sent out to the barons by the garrison but ignored
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- he decided to emulate William the Conqueror’s strategy after Hastings in 1066, marching all round London and trying to close the ring on it. He left Rochester on 6 December, marched through Essex and Surrey into Hampshire and completed the circle by proceeding to Windsor and then east to St Albans. It was in St Albans, at a council of war on 20 December, that he decided on his winter strategy. His army would be divided, and one detachment, under the troika of the earl of Salisbury, Fawkes de Bréauté and Savaric de Mauléon, would pen the rebels up in London; with the other detachment he himself would march north and reconquer the rebel-held territory there.
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This was typical of John’s tendency to go for the softer option. A Richard or even a Philip Augustus would have concentrated all their attention on London, for this was the principal head of the hydra-like rebellion. Admittedly, a siege of London would have been difficult, protracted and costly, and maybe that was the key to John’s dilemma, for if he ran short of funds to pay his mercenaries, it would be his army, not the barons’, that collapsed. The chaos in England meant that he had been living largely on the stored wealth of past taxation, nothing more was coming in, and the reservoir was beginning to run dry. A ‘harrying of the north’ expedition like William the Conqueror’s notorious expedition in 1067, a pure campaign of looting and plunder, in other words, would keep his routiers happy and allow him to replenish his war chest. On the best-case scenario, he would be able to restore royal administration everywhere except London, start the taxes flowing, and at the same time depress and demoralise the enemy.
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All the same, he should have gone for the jugular and attacked London. John was neither the first nor the last to discover that in warfare peripheral strategies rarely work.

John’s march north was a chapter of atrocities - rape, arson, murder, pillage - even worse than William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north - ‘scenes of atrocity such as events in the reign of Stephen alone in English history afford a parallel’.
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John added war crimes and crimes against humanity to his tally of depravity as his army marched to Nottingham. The track of his army ran through Dunstable, Northampton and Rockingham and a trail of wanton destruction marked its path. Everything was killed, destroyed or put to the torch: humans, cattle, sheep, poultry, buildings. Such was John’s lust for slaughter and mayhem that even when his men were exhausted by the day’s burning, looting and raping, he sent out parties at night to fire all the hedges and villages within a ten-mile radius. Scorched-earth tactics hardly does justice to a mindless insistence that his army march along roads where every single thing should be uprooted, burnt and charred; he told his intimates that his heart leapt like a fawn when he saw the visible evidence of his revenge on enemies in the form of smoking stumps and gutted houses. All human beings his troops encountered were butchered or raped unless they were rich enough to pay massive ransoms.
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The reign of terror paid off. Rebel castellans lost their nerve and bolted rather than face such a horde of ravening dervishes. He spent Christmas at Nottingham, in the understated words of one chronicler, ‘not in the usual manner but as one on the warpath’.
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Rather than spreading yuletide peace and goodwill, John seemed determined that his men should live out the meaning of Tacitus’s description of the Romans: ‘they created a wilderness and called it peace’. On the feast of St Stephen (26 December) John evinced the Christmas spirit by serving notice on the garrison of William of Aubigny’s castle at Belvoir that if they did not surrender at once, their lord would be taken and starved to death. The garrison knew the king meant business and duly surrendered.
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