1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (17 page)

The interdict meant that for six years there were no marriage services in church, but this did not prevent weddings taking place. The decrees of the Council of Westminster tell us how the Church would have liked marriages to be celebrated, but that is all. In fact the Church had already decided that what made a marriage valid in law was the freely given exchange of marriage vows between two people of age (that is, twelve or over) who were not within the prohibited degrees. Twelfth-century canon law defined the prohibited degrees of kinship as meaning that any couple who were within seven degrees, that is who shared great-great-great-great grandparents, could not enter into a valid marriage. However, this created an absurd situation in which virtually every marriage was vulnerable to the charge of incest. At the Lateran Council of 1215 Innocent III tackled the problem by reducing the number of prohibited degrees from seven to four. Much later, in 1537, the papacy reduced them again to two for South American Indians, then for blacks in 1897, and finally for the Roman Catholic population at large in 1917.

For a marriage to be valid it did not matter where the vows were exchanged. It did not have to be at the church door, though doubtless most people liked a traditional wedding. It could just as well have been in a garden, in a shop, in a tavern or in bed. No witnesses or public ceremony were necessary. The couple who freely exchanged vows did not need, though it was undoubtedly desirable, the consent of their parents, guardians or lords. The canon law of marriage – the lover’s charter, it has been called – remained the law in England until 1753, when Parliament decided that all marriages had to be performed by a clergyman and that no one under the age of twenty-one could marry without the consent of parents or guardians. After 1753 the young eloped across the border to Gretna Green where the old law remained in force. During the interdict perfectly valid marriages continued to be contracted, maybe even at the church door. It is just that there could be no wedding mass.

Indeed, in most ways church business went on as usual. It was just the regular celebration of mass that came to a standstill. Churchmen lamented what they saw as the people being cut off from the way to salvation. But there is no evidence that laymen saw it like this. The mass itself centred upon the consecration of bread and wine by the priest and the doctrine of transubstantiation meant that in the eucharist Christ’s body and blood were literally consumed. But there was no doctrine that produced more scepticism than this. Many had doubts. The reason Thomas Becket raced through mass, according to his friend and biographer Herbert of Bosham, was to minimise the sceptical thoughts that tended to trouble him at that point. This, of course, in Herbert’s eyes, was proof of just how important transubstantiation was: it was precisely at this moment that Lucifer chose to send his sharpest darts.

In any event the eucharist – the sacrament commemorating the Last Supper, in which bread and wine are consecrated and consumed – for all its theoretical importance, only rarely involved the laity. Priests who suggested that lay people should take communion three times a year, at Easter, Whitsun and Christmas, were unusually keen. At the Lateran Council in 1215 Pope Innocent III decreed that all adults should take communion at least once a year, at Easter – which suggests that many were in the habit of taking it less often. Evidently it was not hard to be deprived of so occasional a ritual. It looks as though during the six years of the interdict, priests continued to perform the services the laity valued, and stopped doing only those about which ordinary people cared little. One preacher, Alexander Ashby, complained that at what was supposed to be the most solemn moment of Mass, the hush as the priest prayed silently before consecrating the eucharist, a hubbub of gossip and joking commonly broke out among the congregation.

In many ways the interdict suited John well. He confiscated all the assets of the clergy on the grounds that since they weren’t doing their job they had no right to enjoy their endowments. In practice it would have been impossible for the government to take over the direct administration of so much property all at once, so he allowed the clergy to buy back the privilege of managing their own lands. He arrested and imprisoned the wives and mistresses kept by many, then released them back into the custody of their ‘husbands’, again in return for cash – and to the amusement of many who were diverted by the spectacle of theoretically celibate priests being willing to pay up so that they could continue sinning.

In 1209, when the pope saw that the interdict was having no effect, he excommunicated John. Excommunication, with a ritual extinction of lighted candles, was intended to be awesome, and certainly frightened some. John’s pious son, who became Henry III, would have been frightened – but John was indifferent; many of his friends and allies on the continent were themselves excommunicate. All the bishops except for Peter des Roches of Winchester left England in obedience to papal commands rather than have dealings with an excommunicate, but John could govern without them. ‘He neither feared God nor regarded man; it was as if he alone were mighty upon earth,’ wrote a Canterbury monk at the time. Negotiations between king and pope continued in a desultory fashion but were broken off in 1211. By this time, with no less than seven bishoprics and seventeen abbacies vacant, John’s profits from the English Church were so great that he preferred being excommunicate to reaching a settlement. In 1213 when a settlement was reached at last, he agreed to compensate the Church for the financial loss it had suffered. This was assessed at 100,000 marks (approximately £66,666). The English clergy – inevitably – said this was an underestimate, and in any case it excluded the king’s income from vacancies. In the event only about a third of the sum was ever paid, but from John’s point of view the interdict had been wonderfully lucrative.

So why did it end? Why did John finally give way and accept Langton as archbishop of Canterbury? It was because King Philip of France was massing troops and a fleet in north-east France in preparation for an invasion of England and John thought that if he submitted to the pope, then the pope would tell Philip not to invade. Having decided to give way, John did it in style. On 15 May 1213, near Dover and in the presence of a papal legate, he swore allegiance to Pope Innocent III, and promised to pay the papacy an annual tribute for England and Ireland:

These were more than mere words. The public ceremony of submission in the presence of most of the baronage of England was looked upon by many at the time – as well as by many more in the centuries since – as a humiliation. ‘To many it seemed an ignominious and monstrous yoke of servitude,’ wrote the well-informed Barnwell chronicler.

But John was quite right in his anticipation of the pope’s response. Innocent was delighted. He ordered the king of France not to invade the dominions of so obedient a son of Holy Church. And, indeed, there was no French invasion of England in 1213. Which is why many historians have described John’s submission to the pope as a Machiavellian masterstroke of policy. But Philip’s plan for an invasion of England required that he first of all deal with John’s ally, the count of Flanders. He went ahead with this, but his invasion hopes were dashed by an English fleet that destroyed and looted his own fleet as it lay at Damme, the port of Bruges. Rather than risk seeing more of his ships fall into English hands, he burned those that remained and called off the invasion. It was this naval action, not the pope, that saved England in the summer of 1213. What the story of interdict and invasion shows is that the pope could command his clergy – they obeyed the interdict – but that he had no power in secular politics. When Stalin asked his famous question: ‘How many battalions does the pope have?’ he knew the answer. Kings such as Philip of France knew it too, and even John would discover it in 1215 and 1216 as, first, his barons rebelled against him, then French troops invaded his kingdom, both in defiance of papal prohibition.

John, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitane, Count of Anjou
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n Ascension Day 1199 John, under a canopy held by four barons, was led in procession into Westminster Abbey. On his knees before the high altar he swore, as his brother had ten years earlier, a triple coronation oath: to observe peace, honour and reverence towards God and the Church all the days of his life; to do good justice and equity to the people entrusted to his care; to keep good laws and destroy any bad laws and evil customs that had been introduced into the land. He was then undressed down to his underpants and shirt, his chest bared. The archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, anointed him with consecrated oil – known as chrism – on head, chest and hands. (Until Victoria all subsequent monarchs were anointed in this way. She was anointed only on head and hands.) To protect the sacred oil on his head and keep it there for the next seven days, John wore a coif held in place by straps tied under his chin. When his coffin was opened in 1797 the antiquaries who inspected his remains were puzzled to find him wearing what they took to be a monk’s cowl; more likely he was buried wearing his coronation ‘coif of unction’. It was the act of anointing that conferred upon the new ruler the divine sanction for his kingship, and it was this, rather than the crowning, which lay at the heart of the coronation service.

Next John was dressed in the royal robes and handed the sword of justice by the archbishop. He was then led back to the high altar where the archbishop adjured him not to receive the crown unless he truly intended to keep the oaths he had sworn. John replied that, with God’s help, he intended to observe them all. Then the archbishop crowned him. The crown was so heavy that the king could wear it only with two earls helping to take the weight. Finally the archbishop gave him the sceptre and the virge, a rod of office, and John mounted the throne. He sat there while Mass was celebrated. When it came to the offertory the bishops led him again to the high altar, on which he placed one mark of the purest gold, then returned him to his throne. Mass over, still wearing the crown and carrying the sceptre and the virge, he processed back to the palace for the coronation banquet. For that he was permitted to wear a lighter crown and robes. Twenty-one fat oxen had been purchased in Worcestershire and driven to Westminster in time for the banquet.

King Philip of France invaded Normandy the moment he heard that Richard I was dead. The leading barons of Anjou had rejected John and declared in favour of his nephew Arthur, the posthumously born son of Duke Geoffrey of Brittany. After some hesitations the barons of Normandy and England decided to follow Richard’s recommendation, and his mother’s urging, and recognise John as their ruler. The one plausible alternative, Arthur, was still only twelve. But after the way in which John had betrayed his father, his brother and his allies, it is hard to see how anyone could have welcomed his accession or trusted him. While he rushed from Normandy to England to be anointed and crowned king, he left his affairs on the continent in the capable hands of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine (the older she got the more influential she became). She had helped secure Richard’s release from his German captivity; now she helped her youngest son to the throne. John was in a hurry: he had landed on the Sussex coast on 25 May and his coronation took place just two days later, on the twenty-seventh.

Once back in Normandy at the head of a large army drawn from English resources, John held the upper hand. His strongest card lay in the network of alliances built up by Richard’s diplomacy and which remained intact. In August 1199 at an assembly at Rouen, no fewer than fifteen French counts, headed by Flanders and Boulogne, pledged their support for John. Richard’s influence and financial help had secured the throne of Germany for his nephew Otto of Brunswick, and Otto too was ready to support him against Philip of France.

Arthur drew the obvious conclusion: his bid for power beyond the borders of Brittany was going nowhere, so in September he and his mother, Constance, met John at Le Mans and submitted to him. No sooner had they done this than they changed their minds. During the night they slipped out of Le Mans and fled to Philip’s court. Someone had warned them that John was planning to seize them and throw them into prison. Since they had been welcomed by him and were now protected by the ‘peace of the king’s court’, it would have been a gross breach of accepted political convention for him to arrest them – yet they evidently believed the near incredible. What could have led them to believe John capable of such deceit? Presumably someone had reminded them of his record of treachery. And whatever he had or had not planned in September 1199, the sudden night flight of Arthur and Constance from Le Mans must have reminded everyone of his past and reactivated fears that had lain dormant.