Richard & John: Kings at War (88 page)

Yet even if the Angevin empire was, long-term, doomed to destruction, none of the above arguments compel us to accept that the process had to occur in the reign of John. Again and again, one is forced back onto the sheer personal inadequacy of Henry II’s lastborn. John, indeed, sometimes seems a kind of avatar of the seven deadly sins, a man who almost possessed all the moral blemishes at one time. As for sloth, we have had occasion enough to note his bipolar intervals of indolence and paralysis; even Warren talks of his ‘biting his nails’, and no one has explained his lethargy during the latter stages of the loss of Normandy in 1204-05 convincingly on any other basis. All the chronicles are full of stories about John’s volcanic rage - often the product of frustration when a clever, cunning and ingenious man (like John) is not quite clever enough, fails to think through all the implications of a given policy, or overrates his own intellectual capacity. Rage and paranoia are often close cousins, so it is no surprise to find John almost pathologically suspicious of everyone: ‘treacherous himself, he was always on the lookout for treachery in others’ is one recent, and valid, judgement.
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No one could ever be certain of retaining his favour, and even faithful and blameless royal servants such as Hubert de Burgh, Brian de Lisle, John Fitzhugh, William de Comhill and Peter de Paulay were in disgrace at various times during his reign.
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He was forever demanding hostages and castles from his barons as pledges of good faith and loyal behaviour. The ultimate in absurdity occurred when he took hostages from his own mercenary captains, even though their livelihoods depended entirely on his whim.
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Even the administrative innovation of the chancery rolls, that has evoked paeans from historians who see John as, albeit unwittingly, the historian’s friend, was probably ‘conceived by a suspicious minded monarch who wanted to keep close supervision of the operations of his government’.
⁶⁶

Pride was one of the defining characteristics of John: ‘the central features of John’s character were his pride, ambition and jealousy . . . the loss (of Normandy) was a cruel blow to John’s pride’.
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John’s gluttony is also copiously attested to; it was his gourmandising at Lynn that brought on his final, fatal illness. His lechery is confirmed by his illegitimate children: Joan, Geoffrey, John, Henry, Oliver, Richard and Osbert Giffard. One of the most reliable of contemporary chronicles describes him as ‘too covetous of pretty ladies’.
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His lustfulness was one of the factors that alienated the barons, who objected to having their wives and daughters play the role of odalisques in John’s informal harem. Both Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter, two of the ringleaders in the 1215 revolt, had grievances on this score but John, typically, thought he was the wronged party because of their objections and is said to have hated de Vesci because of his trick in substituting a prostitute instead of his own wife in John’s bed.
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Another notorious incident, where John put his own sexual desires ahead of
raison d’etat
, came after Bouvines when John had William of Salisbury imprisoned because he lusted after his wife.
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As for the deadly sin of covetousness, greed was the main motive for most of the actions he took during the long conflict with Rome, just as it was with Henry VIII in his similar dispute three hundred years later. Apart from depriving England of Christian worship for seven years, he pillaged Church wealth, expelled bishops, Cistercians and Cluniacs who opposed him, and even banned music in churches if the localities would not disgorge the required amount of loot quickly enough. The entire saga of opposition to Innocent III, originally triggered by John’s false pride and egomania and falsely presented as a struggle against papal oppression, was simply an excuse for a gigantic looting session.
⁷¹

As for envy, the entire story of John’s relations with Richard breathes a spirit of envy for his more talented elder brother. It may even be that envy of Richard’s international reputation, and the fact that he bestrode the known world like a colossus, was the reason John hankered intermittently after more exotic forays that might rival Richard in the Holy Land; might this explain, for example, John’s little-known desire to establish diplomatic relations with Muslim Spain and North Africa?
⁷²
Envy’s brother (or twin?) is jealousy, and of this John had a full measure: ‘his almost frantic jealousy was a real weakness . . . while other motives than jealousy had a part in his quarrels with William Marshal and William de Braose, that emotion alone seems to have produced his dislike of Hubert Walter and Geoffrey Fitzpeter’.
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John was not just jealous of some men with wealth and power; he hated them all. This pathological view of the world had the severe political disadvantage that John could never divide and rule, or play off one great baron against another; as with Nero and the Roman people, he wished the barons had just one head which he could chop off. In addition to the seven deadly sins, we can add an eighth: wanton cruelty. It has been impossible in a life of John to avoid the egregious cases of Arthur, the de Braose family, the Welsh hostages or Peter the Hermit and his son, but I have purposely not dwelt on the many other instances of John’s vicious behaviour. He also murdered in prison Geoffrey de Norwich, the justiciar of the Jews and Honorius, archdeacon of Norwich, ostensibly because he owed the king money but probably really because he had failed in a mission to persuade Innocent III to accept John’s choice as archbishop of Canterbury.
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He took Evreux by pretending to be Philip Augustus, slew the garrison treacherously and then displayed their heads on poles. He starved to death forty knights captured at Mirebeau. John encouraged his armies to behave brutally and gave them a free hand to commit atrocities: hanging men by the thumbs, roasting them on tripods and gridirons, rubbing salt and vinegar in men’s eyes.
⁷⁵
Almost certainly he killed a large number of children and other hostages, though the chroniclers’ accounts of these are countered by modern historians, absurdly demanding to see the evidence in the Rolls or other official archives.

John was also a pathological liar, systematically duplicitous, treacherous, serpentine and unscrupulous ‘beyond the limits allowed by the ethics of his day’.
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He invented a system of countersigns to be attached to official orders, so that the recipients would know to disobey them. This system was used particularly in connection with freeing prisoners or transferring the command of a castle. A double-crosser himself, John feared that he might be double-crossed, so devised his symbolism of secret signs and tokens to make sure there could be no identity fraud or other imposture. On one occasion he issued standing instructions that a certain prisoner was never to be freed unless the instructions for the release arrived in the hands of Thomas de Burgh. But never was the adage that you need a phenomenal memory to be a good liar better borne out than in John’s case. Like squirrels who forget where they have buried their nuts, John often forgot what his secret signs and passwords were. When Guy de Lusignan was taken prisoner at Mirebeau, John left instructions that he was not to speak to anyone unless the person was accompanied by three named members of the royal house. Chaos then ensued when John himself forgot who the three named persons were. There were other similar cases, all illustrating the principle that John’s level of duplicity approached genuine mental illness.
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He solemnly approved Magna Carta even while he was writing to the Pope to get him to declare it invalid. He forged letters to confuse his enemies, wrong-foot his advisers and to give himself ‘deniability’.
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Even though in the feudal era a safe-conduct was supposed to be a sacred guarantee, nobody trusted those issued by John. When Stephen Langton and his fellow prelates prepared to return from exile, they did so only after the king’s safe-conduct was confirmed by a large number of the leading magnates and prelates.

A final case study may perhaps be allowed, revealing that Richard really did have some of the lineaments of a good king, while John was incorrigible. One of the great disfiguring events of Richard’s reign - though not one for which he personally can be blamed, as he had already left the country - was the great antisemitic pogrom of 1190, where the great defender of the Jews was the saintly St Hugh of Lincoln.
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On his return to England in 1194 Richard reformed the system of moneylending in such a way as to protect the Jews, to make sure that no one could murder a Jewish creditor and destroy the evidence of debt, a favourite option before that date. Only six or seven places were permitted to exist as ‘Jewish’ banks, and the promissory notes were held not just by the moneylender but by a troika of Jews, Christians and royal officials, who kept copies in a triple-locked chest, to which each custodian had one of the three keys.
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In 1200 John changed the system and appointed three men as custodians or justices of the Jews; all three were royal nominees, and they were the men who judged disputes arising from Jewish moneylending and debts. John had realised that the Jewish transactions were a lucrative business and wanted all the proceeds for himself. He bent his energies and his considerable ingenuity to squeezing the maximum possible revenue from the Jews. First he issued a royal charter on Jewish affairs; this cost the Jews 4,000 marks and it protected them from the ravages of unscrupulous Christians, but said nothing about the case when they might be victims of an unscrupulous king.
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John did not want the Jews molested not because he had any affection or respect for them, but because he regarded them as a cash-cow; his essentially contemptuous attitude comes through in a reprimand issued to the mayor and magnates of London in 1203 when he heard that Jews were being harassed there: ‘If we give our peace to a dog, it ought to be preserved inviolate.’
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That John had absolutely no regard for the Jews became clear in 1210 when he levied another of his ‘tallages’ against them; some scholars think he had already visited one of these crippling taxes on them in 1205, presumably to show what he thought of the ‘dogs’ to whom he had given the king’s peace.
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This time the sums he aimed to extract were enormous; the annalists all agree that he demanded 66,000 marks from them, or two-thirds the amount asked for the ransom of Richard in 1193-94.
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Faced with ruin and catastrophe, the Jews at first tried to avoid payment, but John came down hard on them, imprisoning the non-payers and then torturing them. Some modern historians have affected to disbelieve the worst stories of torture, like the one that John ordered a tooth extracted daily from one recalcitrant usurer until he disgorged the tallage money but, as a judicious observer has put it: ‘While the stories of the tortures used to persuade the Jews to contribute adequately to the tallage of 1211 may well be exaggerated, it is hard to believe that they are purely imaginative.’
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Although the parentage of the Devil’s Brood was particularly distinguished for a medieval dynasty, only one of them emerges with much credit from the historical record. The Young King was a posturing wastrel, in many ways a psychological inadequate, while Geoffrey seems pure cunning and malevolence, a totally negative personality. John was a more intellectual form of Geoffrey, with a good mind and some intellectual interests which he used almost entirely for selfish or depraved ends. For all his faults, Richard did at least try to live out the true meaning of a medieval knight. If we ‘cash’ the Devil’s Brood in terms of the Arthurian knights, Geoffrey is the Mordred of the piece, John the Kay and the Young King the Lamorack. Richard, if not Lancelot, is certainly Sir Percival.

Note

CHAPTER 1

1
Olivier de Laborderie, ‘Du souvenir à la réincarnation: image de Richard Coeur de Lion dans la Vie et Mort du Roi Jean de William Shakespeare’, in Janet L. Nelson,
Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth
(1992), pp.141-65.

2
John Gillingham,
Richard I
(1999), pp.1, 3.

3
See W.L. Warren,
Henry II
(1973).

4
See R.H.C. Davis,
King Stephen, 1135-1154
(1967).

5
Walter Map,
De Nugis Curialium
, ed. M.R. James (1914), pp.237-42.

6
Ibid.

7
Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales),
Opera
, eds J.S. Brewer, J.F. Dimock & G.F. Warner, 8 vols (RS 1891) - hereinafter Gerald of Wales - v. pp.302-06; J.C. Robertson, ed.,
Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury
, 7 vols (RS 1885), vii. p.570.

8
Peter of Blois,
Petri Blesensis Archidiaconi Opera Omnia
, ed. J.A. Giles, 4 vols (Oxford, 1847), i. p.193.

9
Walter Map, op. cit. ibid.; cf. R. Anstruther, ed.,
Radulphi Negri Chronica
(1851), p.169.

10
Peter of Blois to the Archbishop of Palermo, c. 1177 in J.P. Migne, ed.,
Patrologia Latina
(1864), vol. 207, pp.48-49 (letter 14).