The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (22 page)

Nevertheless with Richard present manoeuvres took on a new momentum. Superior management of siege engines beat down the Saracens’ resistance. Unlike the other European kings, Richard the Lionheart led from the front, exhibiting the personal valour that made his men worship him. He fought hand to hand and used his crossbow with perfect accuracy, picking Saracens off against the skyline. Under the Lionheart Acre was captured from Saladin.

But the first significant victory against the Muslims for fifty years only added to the tensions already troubling relations between the different national camps of the vast, sickly and bored European armies. The French and English kings quarrelled over their opposing candidates for the crown of Jerusalem. Morale was poor among the German soldiers, whose emperor had been drowned on the journey to Palestine. The Austrians had played little part in relieving Acre but were anxious to share in the glory of liberating it. They were especially annoyed, after they had hung Austrian flags over the citadel’s battlements, to find that English soldiers tore them down and threatened to throw the Austrians over the battlements if they put up any more. When their leader Duke Leopold complained to Richard, he did nothing to discipline his men: once again he was not concerned with diplomatic relations. Though the English king had fallen victim to the camp’s terrible shivering fever which had decimated the Christian army, he insisted on pushing on to Jerusalem. By August 1191 the short and dark Philip Augustus had had enough of standing in the charismatic Richard’s glorious shadow and decided that Coeur de Lion’s obsession with the Crusade made it the perfect moment to stir up trouble in England’s continental dominions. Pleading illness, he left abruptly for France.

Weak from camp fever, though in high spirits now that it was on the move again, the bedraggled army started tailing its painful way south along the coast before turning up to the rocky heights where stood Jerusalem. As they marched the Crusaders chanted their battle cry: ‘Help, help, help for the Holy Sepulchre!’ By the camp fires each night, one man would start the call and then it would spread throughout the tents, rousing the soldiers to forget their suffering and fulfil their mission to free the Holy Places.

At the Battle of Arsuf, exploiting his still formidable infantry and brilliant crossbowmen, Richard the Lionheart snatched victory from Saladin, who had never previously been defeated in the open field. This event sent waves of hope across Europe and raised Richard’s stock even higher among the men. But in the end, though the Lionheart twice led his troops within twelve miles of the Holy City, he was stymied by the failure of his supply lines and the exhaustion of his men. Saladin’s army remained largely unbroken.

Forced to retreat, because he had decided it would be madness to besiege Jerusalem, Richard achieved a treaty in 1192 whose terms Saladin would have granted to no one else–a mark of the great eastern warrior’s respect for his generalship. Christians were once again allowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre and to do business all over the city, and Joppa and its district became Christian. But when the courteous Saladin invited Richard to visit the Holy City himself, the king refused. He would not enter the city which God had not permitted him to deliver.

Although Richard had fought Saladin to a standstill over Jerusalem, the Third Crusade like its predecessor was a consummate failure. It did not achieve its immediate objective, which was to bring the Holy Places under Christian control; and in the course of it the previously allied French and English kings became the deadliest of enemies. On the other hand the social intercourse with the Arab world which the Crusades encouraged transformed western Christendom. In a great many respects the Arab culture was far in advance of the Christian. The transfer of superior technology from the west to the east which was to be such a feature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was then in the opposite direction. Western Europe benefited enormously from contact with scientific Arab medicine, which very slowly undermined the superstitious practices of the west. Arab science and mathematics introduced the zero and the decimal point, while the Arab use of spices showed the west how to preserve food. In European architecture the ogee or narrow twisting arch so characteristic of the thirteenth century was a direct transmission from Arab architecture.

With the end of the Third Crusade, Richard began to make his way back as fast as possible to England and to an empire threatened by the plots of his younger brother. Word had reached him that it was no longer safe to travel through France because of the French king’s hostility. He therefore had to take the long route north through Germany. At home John was making common cause with Philip Augustus. Just as Philip had drawn Richard into his schemes when he was the heir to the throne, the French king now offered John the spurned hand of his sister Princess Alice. In return his overlord proposed that John should have the English continental possessions, though this was hardly a straightforward proposition. In Richard’s absence the French king had been exhorting the barons of Normandy to become his liege men and throw off English rule.

England meanwhile was racked by sieges and rebellions led by John and the barons, who had found support in the country owing to the ever higher rate of taxation demanded to finance the Crusade. By 1191 the opposition was sufficiently powerful to bring about the justiciar Longchamp’s downfall. Fortunately, just at this moment one of Richard’s most trusted advisers, Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, arrived back from the Crusades to be appointed the new justiciar, as Richard had directed, before one of John’s men could take his place. Nevertheless, events seemed to be moving in John’s favour. For at the beginning of 1193, King Richard fell into the clutches of his envious fellow Crusader, the Duke of Austria, who then sold him on to the emperor Henry VI.

The story of Richard’s captivity, his charm, his bravery, his carelessness–attempting to cross Austria in disguise, he forgot to remove his beautiful royal gloves–sparked a thousand legends. Most famous is the story of Blondel, his minstrel. For three months it seemed that the Lionheart had vanished into thin air. Warned by Philip Augustus, John had begun circulating the rumour that the great Crusader was dead. Blondel set out to search the whole of Europe for the friend whose death he refused to accept. In Aquitaine they had spent long hours together writing verses in celebration of the virtues of the Christian knight. According to legend, as Blondel walked through the mountains overlooking the Danube Plain he was by chance singing one of the troubadour ballads he and the king had composed together. To his astonishment, floating over the trees from where the forbidding castle of Durnstein loomed above him he heard a great bass voice singing the next verse.

Whether or not it was Blondel who brought the news of the king’s whereabouts back to England, the emperor Henry VI demanded the immense sum of 100,000 marks for his release–a formidable imposition on a country already reeling from taxes levied to pay for the Crusade. Nevertheless, under the leadership of the masterful Queen Eleanor, most of it would be found a year later, in 1194. Chalices and crucifixes in every church were melted down for their silver, while every freeman paid the colossal amount of one-quarter of his earnings to the government. The Cistercian monasteries pioneering the farming of sheep in Yorkshire were forced to yield up their entire takings from that year’s sheep sales.

There was no question of the ransom not being paid. Henry VI was threatening that, if it was not met, he would hand Richard over to the King of France, which would mean the end of the Angevin Empire. Much of that was anyway tottering under Philip Augustus’ incursions. His attempts to detach Normandy from England had been unsuccessful while Richard was free: as a Crusader, the Lionheart commanded a good deal of loyalty. But the minute Richard was captured the situation became more nebulous. Philip Augustus succeeded in overrunning the Vexin, which guarded the southern entrance to Normandy, and even got as far as its capital Rouen before being thrown back.

There was thus in 1193 a distinct window of opportunity for the two plotters. John was convinced that the moment to usurp the throne had come–Richard was still in captivity and, despite the harsh measures taken to raise the ransom, the English government had not yet completed the task. John now showed his hand. He crossed the Channel to meet Philip in Paris and did homage for England’s French possessions, and possibly for England too. Then he put into effect their joint plan. John mounted his own rebellion in England against his brother’s government, while the French king began stockpiling boats to invade across the Channel.

England was saved by the emperor’s fear of France’s ambitions. An alliance was arranged: in order to secure his freedom, Richard had to do homage for England to the emperor and hold it as the emperor’s fief. In practice this amounted to very little. Richard was released from this obligation on the emperor’s death and the ransom was never paid in its entirety. The important fact was that the empire and England were now allied against France, and it was in France that Richard spent the last five years of his life, attempting to regain the advantage from Philip Augustus.

With the news that Richard was returning, the French invasion of England and John’s rebellion collapsed. John received a brief note from the well-informed Philip that said succinctly, ‘Look to yourself, the Devil is loose’ shortly afterwards John left for Normandy. The takeover had never been a foregone conclusion. Queen Eleanor had shown courage and decision in rallying the English people to her eldest son and putting the country’s defences into a state of alert. English ships vigilantly patrolled the Channel. But no sooner had Richard returned to England than he left it, though not before raising more taxes and undergoing a second coronation ceremony to remind the people who was king. He never saw the country again.

In charge of the government the king left his efficient justiciar, Hubert Walter, whom he had also made Archbishop of Canterbury. The nephew of Ranulf Glanvill, Walter had been part of Henry II’s administration at the end of the great king’s life. Trained in the law, he was the perfect administrative instrument to devise higher taxes for the rising numbers of professional soldiers required for the French campaigns, for building defensive castles, and for paying the princes of the Low Countries and north Germany to remain allied to England against France. But a spirit of revolt was growing among the English, whose wealth in many cases had been seriously depleted by the king’s ransom. For the next four years England was groaning with the cost of the war to win back Angevin territory from France.

In 1198, the year before the Lionheart died, the barons were again provoked into revolt by a demand that they provide more soldiers for Richard under their feudal obligations. In question among the tenants-in-chief was how much service they were required to give the king by the feudal levy which had developed from the old fyrd. Defending their native land from attack was one thing, but endless foreign service seemed another. Moreover, they were being asked to provide more than forty days per year. They were joined by many more disinterested characters like the saintly churchman and administrator Bishop Hugh of Lincoln. Hugh of Lincoln protested at the strain these demands were imposing on the tenants of his own episcopal lands and refused to insist upon them. It was therefore a triumph for him when Hubert Walter was dismissed as justiciar and replaced by Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the Earl of Essex.

But Richard was not really interested in the anger of the English. His campaign to push the French armies of Philip Augustus back into their own country was working, and he had regained most of his territories east of the Seine, as well as the Norman Vexin. To protect Normandy from further invasion by Philip Augustus, he built a great castle high on a cliff overlooking the Seine near the town of Les Andelys, whose noble ruins you can still see today. The frontier castle is another testament to the king’s outstanding engineering skills, and was built extremely swiftly, in just under a year. The king gazed at the finished building with immense pride and said, ‘Is this not a saucy babe that at twelve months can keep the King of France at bay?’ The French for saucy was
gaillard
, and it was known ever after as Château Gaillard.

For all Richard the Lionheart’s military genius, his violent temperament and natural inclination towards war sometimes led him into launching attacks on vassal barons in disputes that were not worth the cost of the campaign. In the course of one such escapade in April 1199 Richard I met his death. A vassal of his at Chalus, deep in the Limousin in the centre of the Aquitainian territory, had found an enormous silver treasure trove buried in the earth. When he refused to surrender it to Richard as his overlord, the king went to war against him. While he watched the siege on horseback, a bolt from a crossbow, that weapon he himself had made so famous, flew out from one of the castle’s slit windows and buried itself in his chest. Attempts to remove it by an incompetent surgeon were unsuccessful, and the wound became infected because of the king’s own impatient efforts to wrench it out. As the Lionheart lay dying, his men captured the castle, which had been defended by only seven knights and eight serving men. Generous as ever, Richard insisted on pardoning his assailant, though once he had died his men were not so magnanimous.

On his deathbed Richard the Lionheart called all his most important tenants-in-chief to him and made them swear allegiance to John, since he and Berengaria were childless. Richard’s nephew Arthur was his natural heir, as the son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey of Brittany. But the Norman and Angevin kings had kept up the tradition of the old English monarchy of choosing a more suitable heir as long as he had royal blood. With the support of his mother Queen Eleanor, by the end of May 1199 John had at last achieved his heart’s desire and been crowned King of England.

Until the late nineteenth century, John’s reputation was one of the lowest. His decadent personal habits and taste for cruelty, which was egregious even in a brutal age (he had an appetite for ordeals and executions), cast a long shadow. In addition, his quarrel with the papacy turned all monk chroniclers against him. As the curator of the once formidable Angevin Empire he was soon to be humiliated by the loss of Normandy and all his northern French possessions. England was left only with the Channel Islands as the last remnant of the Norman duchy, and Queen Eleanor’s country of Aquitaine.

In some ways John was in fact a better ruler of England than his brother. But personal habits aside, he lacked Richard’s glamour as a holy warrior in an age when war was dominant–indeed he had had a purely ecclesiastical education in the typical way of a younger son. Partly as a result of his unwarlike nature, he ended up spending the greater part of his life in England, the longest period of any Norman king since William the Conqueror. Like Henry II he became intimately concerned with every detail of English life, and having the Angevin passion for royal administration he was forever journeying through his new realm. He also shared his father’s fascination with justice, and was noted for exercising his right to hear the cases of the King’s Bench. Though myth paints him as the venomous foe of the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, in fact King John took care to make the forest laws of his forefathers less harsh. Aged thirty-three when he came to the throne, he had matured from the silly youth of fifteen years before who had pulled the Irish elders’ beards.

Even so, John was a tyrannical, greedy and lawless ruler. Like William Rufus he was unscrupulous when it came to other people’s property, and made permanent enemies of the Church and the barons by his constant scheming to appropriate their wealth. By the end of his reign so deep was the distrust he inspired that men said he kidnapped the heirs to great fortunes and murdered them.

Although John’s accession to the English throne had been painless, it was a different matter in France. In 1199 war broke out between the two countries when the French king Philip Augustus decided to recognize as head of the Angevin Empire the thirteen-year-old Arthur of Brittany, John’s nephew. This did not get Philip very far, and the following year he had to accept John’s homage in relation to his French possessions. But the war he desired in order to dismember his greatest rival on French territory soon broke out again. John, who had just repudiated his childless wife Isabella of Gloucester, hit on the idea of marrying Isabella of Angoulême, which brought her territory into his empire and provided access to Aquitaine. Unfortunately Isabella of Angoulême had been engaged to an unruly and well-connected Poitevin baron named Hugh de Lusignan who was affronted by the King of England’s seizure of what he believed to be his property. He soon found many other turbulent Poitevin barons who resented the erosion of their powers by John’s autocratic ways.

Headed by de Lusignan they appealed to Philip Augustus as John’s overlord to right the wrongs being done to them by the King of England. This gave Philip his final chance to break up the Angevin Empire and he took it. John refused to answer the charges brought against him in the French king’s court, and in 1202 the court declared that he had forfeited all his lands in French territory. To ensure that the message was clear, Philip Augustus then recognized the fifteen-year-old Arthur of Brittany as the ruler of Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Aquitaine. With French armies Arthur invaded those territories himself, while Philip went into Normandy, his real objective, as capturing the duchy would give him control of the north coast–the natural hinterland for his capital of Paris.

At this point there occurred the event which blackened John’s name through history. Following his nephew to Poitou, where Arthur was besieging his grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine with the help of the Poitevin barons, John defeated him in battle–to everyone’s surprise, for Richard’s low opinion of John’s military capabilities was universal. He then imprisoned his nephew in his castle at Falaise, before moving him to Rouen, the capital of Normandy. By 1203 Arthur was dead, almost certainly murdered. Contemporaries believed that it was John himself who had performed the deed, by night and in disguise, probably in one of his famous Angevin rages.

Whatever the truth about Arthur’s death, it was of no benefit to his uncle John. Philip’s forces swiftly overran Anjou, Touraine and Maine, while Brittany came over to France out of anger about Arthur’s murder. By 1204 Normandy too belonged to the French crown. Theoretically, of all the English possessions the duchy was the most difficult for France to seize. It had a long connection to England, and the pro-English feeling was greatly strengthened by the trading links between the two countries. What was more, many of its barons were Anglo-Normans who held property on both sides of the Channel. It had magnificent defences against France, the greatest of which was Richard’s Château Gaillard. But the barons were very disaffected, and Philip Augustus was a better strategist than John, who tended to procrastinate and stayed in England when he should have been fighting in Normandy. Although Château Gaillard held out for six months until early March, John had really abandoned Normandy long before that. When his mother Eleanor died the following month, the last feelings of Norman loyalty towards the English crown evaporated. By Midsummer Day 1204 all the great possessions in northern France that King John had inherited from William the Conqueror and Geoffrey of Anjou were lost.

The loss of Normandy was an event of central importance for England. Although it was viewed as a disaster at the time, it forced the great Anglo-Norman barons to choose whether their loyalties were to England or to Normandy, for they could no longer hold land in both. The Norman Conquest was superseded by the renewed development of the English as a nation and a unified state under an exclusively English king. No longer linked by the Angevin Empire, the Duchy of Aquitaine, which was all that remained of the English crown’s French possessions, became in effect an independent English colony.

A permanent English navy to guard the Channel became a matter of pressing importance, as it had not been since 1066. Until 1204 much of the coast facing southern England belonged to friendly Normandy, so most of the ordinary business of guarding the coast in peacetime could be handled by the towns known as the Cinque Ports–Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich (Winchelsea and Rye became
six et sept
later). By a longstanding arrangement, in exchange for freedom from taxes and the right to tax within their own walls, they were legally required to provide fifty-seven ships for use by themselves and the king. But after the loss of Normandy these measures were supplemented partly by impressment and partly by the turning over to the royal government of any merchant ships captured in the Channel.

If the king now had a reputation for being unlucky, after his quarrel with the papacy he was believed to be cursed. In 1205 Hubert Walter, who had remained Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Although technically it was the right of the monks of the Cathedral Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral to elect the head of the Church in England, it had been generally accepted since William the Conqueror that the king would play a large part in the choice. Unfortunately the monks behaved foolishly. They secretly elected their undistinguished sub-prior Reginald without the king’s permission and sent him to Rome to receive the
pallium
from Pope Innocent III. But, though Reginald had been warned not to boast about his new position until the pope had confirmed it, the sub-prior, being both indiscreet and vain, insisted on travelling very slowly in tremendous pomp towards Rome as befitted his new dignity, attended by priests and outriders. As a result, the king soon found out what was going on and despatched his own royal candidate to Rome instead, the Bishop of Norwich, who was equally unworthy of this great office.

Neither of these choices satisfied the great pope of the middle ages, Innocent III. He insisted that the monks’ chapter elect Cardinal Stephen Langton, a distinguished English theologian living in Rome, and he then invested him as Archbishop of Canterbury. But John did not take this lying down, and refused to allow the new archbishop into the country. There was some justification for this: in all the battles between the papacy and the English kings no pope had ever dared to appoint the head of the English Church against England’s wishes. Nevertheless, John’s stand derived less from principle than from his desire to have his own creature running the Church who would help milk the tantalizingly wealthy Church lands. A stalemate ensued, since the pope for his part would not recognize the Bishop of Norwich. It was broken by Innocent III putting the whole country under an interdict. All religious services were forbidden.

This was only the beginning of the pope’s campaign to use all the weapons at his disposal to bring the King of England to heel. Although the interdict meant very little to the irreligious John, it was a catastrophe for ordinary people. Churches were closed. Weddings could not be celebrated. The dead were buried in unconsecrated ground to the great distress of the population. Only the first and last rites of baptism and extreme unction (the sacrament of the dying), out of fear for the soul, were permitted. Church bells, which in days without clocks marked the passing hours, were eerily silent as if in reproach.

But the impatient king, unmoved by what to everyone else seemed a curse, used the interdict as an opportunity to seize the property of the wealthy abbeys and bishoprics. When in 1209 the pope went further and excommunicated the king himself, John appropriated the lands of England’s archbishoprics. With the income from these estates the king raised large armies of mercenaries and settled any quarrels he had with the Scots, Welsh and Irish to his satisfaction. He made Llywelyn Prince of Gwynedd submit to him; then, crossing to Ireland, he divided the east into counties on English lines and reduced their barons to order.

John had not understood quite what a formidable enemy he had made. In 1212, incensed by the King of England’s behaviour, Pope Innocent decided to use the final and most potent weapon in his repertoire. For some time the Curia at Rome had claimed that, if a ruler of a Christian country failed to obey the pope, the rest of the princes of Christendom might depose him. Innocent now issued the threat of deposition against John and entrusted the mission to his greatest ally, King Philip Augustus. It was a task the French king was more than happy to take on.

At the news that Philip was preparing an invasion, King John performed a remarkable about-turn. He could not run the risk of an invasion which might lose him the throne: he was unpopular among ordinary people because of the interdict and the English barons were discontented after the loss of their Norman lands. Though the king sent messages to the pope that he would accept his nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop, with Philip Augustus’ forces at his back, Innocent could make the King of England accept sterner terms. Not only was Stephen Langton to be Archbishop of Canterbury, but all the priests John had expelled because they had obeyed the interdict and refused to say Mass should be allowed to return to England. Most important of all, John was to yield up the crown of England into the hands of the papal legate, Pandulf. In return for swearing to be the pope’s vassal he would receive the crown back but would rule England as a fief of the papacy. England was to pay a thousand marks a year to Rome for this privilege.

John agreed to all this. At least it meant that England was free from the threat of invasion. John had not given up all thought of wresting back his old patrimony of Anjou as well as Poitou. With his nephew the new Holy Roman Emperor Otto, who had himself been deposed by the pope, he continued with a confederacy of northern European princes to attack the French king. But the attempt foundered on John’s military irresolution or, as it seemed at the time, his cowardliness. He retreated south from a battle for Anjou with Philip’s son Louis that he might have won, while the confederacy’s armies with an English contingent were heavily defeated by Philip himself, at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214.

The Battle of Bouvines was final confirmation that the Angevin Empire was lost forever to England: henceforth the French monarchy would become one of the four great powers of western Europe. It also marked a turning point in John’s domestic fortunes. Humiliated once again, he now had to return home and face the demands of the baronage and the Church. In his absence abroad they had united under the inspiring leadership of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. At his suggestion, they insisted that John issue a new charter of the laws of England like that of Henry I to restore confidence in the increasingly tyrannical crown. When the king refused, the barons mustered for war–with Langton’s active support.

Two thousand of them, and the soldiers and knights holding land from them, gathered at Stamford in Lincolnshire and began moving south. The vast array of armed men and horses was composed of all the groups in England which previously had had nothing in common–the northern and southern barons, the marcher lords, the civil service or official nobility created by Henry II and the tenants-in-chief. Once London had been captured by the rebels, John realized that he would have to give in to their demands in order to fight another day. On 15 June 1215 on the long, low plain of Runnymede near Windsor, on an island in the middle of the Thames, King John reluctantly fixed his seal to the remarkable document known to history as Magna Carta, or the Great Charter.

In many ways Magna Carta is a document of its time. It was a restatement of the existing rights and laws which the English had enjoyed since charters issued under Henry I and II, but it also reflected the grievances of the barons and the erosion of their rights under the Angevin kings. Magna Carta contained their demands for a greater share of power. At the same time, it contained many clauses which have a timeless appeal. Addressed ‘to all freemen of the realm and their heirs for ever’, it may be seen as a document addressed to all classes. As such, it is generally considered to represent the beginning of English liberties.