Richard & John: Kings at War (84 page)

At this point in the campaign something went wrong with John’s thinking, and there is a mystery here which no historian has ever satisfactorily cleared up. John’s strategy in making the lightning march east is clear enough, and seems eminently sound: had he caught Alexander of Scotland on the way home and crushed him, Louis at Dover might well have thrown in the towel. But suddenly we learn that the double agent Nevers is escorting Alexander north; that there is a rendezvous between the Scots and Gilbert de Gant’s army at Lincoln; and that John is in the throes of some kind of brainstorm.
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Matthew Paris tells a superficially wild story about John spending time gutting abbeys and monasteries in Oundle, Peterborough and Crowland, torching cornfields with his own hand, and berating Savaric de Mauléon for accepting money from monks instead of slaughtering them and burning their church.
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There is much that is obscure here, and the only solid ground is that John reached Lincoln on 28 September to find that Alexander and the Scottish host had already slipped past him and were in Yorkshire. Whether in response to this bad news or simply as continuation of the king’s madness, John set his troops to a mini-version of his scorched earth policy of the previous winter. His actions now were pure terrorism not linked to any strategic or tactical imperative. As wheat fields went up in smoke and the newly garnered harvests were wantonly destroyed, John seemed to be doing his best to match his legend as an evil king.
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But when he appeared in Lynn (King’s Lynn) on 9 October, he appeared to be once more a rational monarch. Relations between Lynn and John had always been good - he had sold the burghers privileges and made a lot of money from them over the years - and all attested that he was well satisfied with the lavish feasts the citizens laid on for him and their further contributions to his war chest.
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The news from the south was good too. Despite throwing everything he had at Dover Castle, Louis had failed to make any impression. Hubert de Burgh’s complement of 140 knights and more than a thousand men-at-arms were easily abreast of anything the French could bring against them. Louis swore that he would hang every last defender from the walls and even managed by a superhuman effort to capture one of the towers, but was as far away as ever from cracking the inner defences. Meanwhile there was more and more desertion from Louis’s army, and resistance to the French in Kent stiffened daily.
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It was at Lynn that the pendulum then swung back against John once more. First came news that Innocent III, the king’s most steadfast champion had died, opening the possibility that a successor might be elected who was more favourable to the barons. Then came word from Hubert de Burgh in Dover that the garrison could no longer hold out and asking John’s permission to conclude a truce with the French. Wearily John gave his assent.
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But then, even while he tucked into the sumptuous repasts provided by the burghers of Lynn, he fell violently ill with dysentery. Instead of trying to get over the illness by rest, John insisted on pressing on farther inland, and on 11 October he set off on the road to Wisbech ‘like a swiftly advancing storm’.
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His route then lay north-west and it was while his army was crossing the mouth of the River Wellstream (near the River Welland), which empties into the Wash, that probably the best-known incident in his reign (after Runnymede) occurred. Part of his baggage train was swallowed by quicksands on the morning of 12 October. That much is certain. Ralph, abbot of Coggleshall, relates: ‘He lost his chapel and its relics and some of his packhorses with divers household effects at the Wellstream, and many members of his household were submerged in the waters of the sea, and sucked into the quicksand there, because they had set out incautiously and hastily before the tide had receded.’
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But the exact circumstances of the disaster, its location and magnitude remain a subject of impassioned debate. One can readily see that the entire issue is problematical, for Coggleshall’s account is by far the most reliable one extant and yet it is itself confused. If you are drowned by the sea, you cannot at the same time be sucked down by quicksands. Yet the other main chroniclers of this event - Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris - simply compound the confusion. Wendover lurches into absurdity by a simultaneous assertion that not a single foot soldier got away to bring the news to the king
and
that John barely escaped with his life.
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Some authorities try to make sense of the disaster in the Wash by claiming that what overwhelmed John’s baggage train was not quicksands but a tidal bore, though this is a mere ‘educated guess’ with no sanction in the sources.
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Both Wendover and Matthew Paris portray a major disaster. The leading horses and pack animals get bogged down in the quicksands, but the vanguard cannot back up out of the danger for the rest of the train keep pressing them forward, so that more and more men and animals get sucked into the vortex.
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The first question then is: was the ‘disaster in the Wash’ a major debacle, as depicted by Paris and Wendover, or a more limited affair, as narrated by Coggleshall? This in turn hinges on where the fiasco was supposed to have taken place and on this too there is no agreement, with some authorities opting for the route across the estuary from Cross Keys to Long Sutton, others plumping for a narrow 40-yard stretch between Walsokes and Wisbech, and a third version preferring the area between Walpole and Tydd Gote.
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The change in the shape of the coastline in the last eight hundred years makes the location very hard to determine. And then there is another problem. Was John with the baggage train when the accident/disaster happened, or had he already split his forces? The fact that he reached Swineshead on the evening of 12 October argues powerfully against his presence with the stricken baggage train. It has therefore been hypothesised that the imbroglio with the baggage train happened very early in the day, possibly because John gave orders that he wanted the baggage with him in Lincolnshire that night, that the commanders of the train did not wait long enough for the tide to go out, but that they sustained only significant damage rather than outright disaster. Faced with a surplus of baggage over pack animals, John might then have decided to send the surplus baggage to Lincolnshire by sea, only to discover that the necessary seamen were all in Wisbech, to which place he hastened to expedite matters.
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Admittedly, all is hypothesis piled on supposition. But the most likely course of events is that quicksands claimed some of the baggage train but not all, that the occurrence was more accident than disaster, and that John did indeed split his forces, even though this was risky in territory that was far from staunchly royalist. What, then, of the extent of losses? Did John really lose his crown and his treasure in the Wash? We know from royal inventories that the baggage train was carrying the coronation regalia and a huge collection of precious objects - gold and silver goblets, jewelled belts, candelabra, pendants, robes.
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The fact that these objects were missing when sought for the coronation of Henry III in 1220 creates the inference that they did indeed vanish into the Wash. Some sceptics, however, say that only the royal regalia and some other artefacts were lost, and that most of the jewels were stolen in the confusion surrounding John’s death.
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The loss of valuables would have had a peculiarly piercing impact on John, already suffering from dysentery as he was. He was reported as oscillating between rage and grief at Swineshead Abbey but the third of misfortune’s legendary trios was lying in wait for him that night; whether to assuage his grief or simply through his habitual gluttony, he managed to overeat when supping on a collation of peaches and new cider - an incredible dietary choice for one suffering from dysentery.
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On 14 October he could barely sit in the saddle, and the whole journey to Sleaford was agony. Urged to rest, he would have none of it, and insisted on pressing on to Newark. But on the 16th he finally had to admit defeat: having ridden just three miles, he dismounted from his horse panting and groaning, and ordered his followers to make a litter on which he could be carried. There were no decent artisans or carpenters to hand, so his household knights struggled to make a crude cradle of willows which they chopped down at the roadside; their inexpert weaving was topped off with the addition of a horse blanket. Moreover, the so-called litter had no cushions or straw to relieve its hardness. The unrelieved pressure on the king’s back would have been painful enough but in addition, lacking carriage-horses, his men slung the cradle between some skittish destriers.
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Soon the jolting and bumping was making John cry out in agony; to relieve him the foot soldiers took it in turns to carry him shoulder-high, like African bearers in the era of Victorian exploration. The king’s cries of pain and rage made for very slow going. It may be that now for the first time was uttered the prophetic rhyme, said to have been composed by a French seer in the time of Henry II, which so appealed to Matthew Paris: ‘Henry the fairest shall die at Martel; Richard the Poitevin shall die in the Limousin; John shall die a landless king, in a litter.’
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Alas for Paris’s neat formulations, John avoided the fate thus portended; making a slight recovery, he was able to ride the last few miles to Newark on an ‘ambling nag’. But there, in the bishop of Lincoln’s castle, he collapsed and took to his bed. It is possible that he then suffered at least one heart attack, but the paucity of records and the crudity of medieval medical diagnosis makes certainty on the cause of death impossible. The abbot of Croxton, who had a reputation as a doctor and healer, was sent for but could do little except offer words of spiritual comfort and persuade John to confess and take the last sacraments.
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He named his son Henry as his heir and extracted an oath of fealty to him from the assembled lords. Then he appointed William Marshal as regent and guardian of his two sons (the younger, Richard, was at Corfe Castle). He also dictated a brief will, expressing ritual remorse for his sins but
not
, contrary to the legend, forgiving the barons. He also asked to be buried in the Church of the Blessed Virgin at St Wulfstan in Worcester.
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Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of 19 October 1216, John died; perhaps appropriately a strong gale howled outside. The abbot of Croxton took away the king’s heart and intestines and had the body hastily embalmed.
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Little sorrow was in evidence around the deathbed. A monk named John of Savigny, who came to Newark at daybreak to mount vigil over the body and say Mass for the king’s soul, testified that the sole interest of John’s household seemed to be to make away with as much loot as they could before some official arrived to seal the royal chambers.
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John’s corpse was then richly caparisoned, and a company of his mercenaries in full armour escorted it on the long journey from Newark to Worcester. There they laid it before the altar of St Wulfstan.

The death of John ‘stilled war’s raging storm’, as Wendover put it,
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in the sense that the barons had no compelling reason to oppose the coronation of his nine-year-old son Henry. The real loser by the king’s death was Prince Louis, as one by one the English rebels gradually drifted back into a grudging fealty to his son and the new regime headed by William Marshal. Louis found himself deserted on all sides, particularly by the clergy, and his claims to the throne widely regarded as nugatory.
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The crucial turning point was a meeting of magnates at Bristol on 11 November, when Magna Carta was reissued in the young king’s name. A few of the more radical clauses of the Charter were omitted or held in abeyance, but its essential spirit remained.
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Louis’s only chance now was to achieve some striking success that would win over the still large number of fence-sitting waverers. Any chance of this disappeared when William Marshal decided to take vigorous steps to expel the French invaders. Lincoln Castle still held out, and in May Marshal and a strong army burst through the French lines to relieve it; in a short but bloody battle Louis’s knights were routed and his infantrymen cut down ‘like pigs’ in the streets of Lincoln.
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The defeat at Lincoln on 20 May 1217 effectively ended Louis’s hopes, and the
coup de grâce
came shortly afterwards when a second invasion fleet under the infamous Eustace the Monk was heavily defeated at sea by Hubert de Burgh and Richard of Chilham; Eustace was taken and beheaded and his corpse dragged through the streets of Canterbury.
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Louis promptly ended the siege of Dover and entered peace talks with William Marshal. He managed to avoid humiliation in the Treaty of Lambeth and secretly received 10,000 marks compensation for abandoning his claim to the English throne. Louis returned to France, campaigned in the Cathar region of Toulouse,
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and survived to be a shortlived king of France (1223-26) after the death of his father. But John, by his opportune death, ensured that
his
son, Henry III, would succeed to become one of the longest-reigning of all English monarchs (1216-72). Truly it could be said of John that nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.