1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (18 page)

In the next few weeks the coalition that had seemed so powerful began to crumble. The count of Flanders led a large group of nobles who now decided that they would go on crusade rather than be drawn into a war as John’s ally. Soon only Otto IV was still prepared to support him. With the resources of England at his disposal, John at least remained strong enough to persuade Philip, in the treaty of Le Goulet, sealed in January 1200, to withdraw his support for Arthur – but only by surrendering strategically vital territories, including Evreux, and the alliance with Otto. This was a high price to pay for peace and the resolution of the succession dispute in Anjou. As early as the first year of his reign John’s reputation for unreliability had cost him dear. From now on if he were to rule his possessions in peace he depended upon the trustworthiness and benevolence of the king of France – who had learned to despise him. It is significant that Philip’s first action on hearing of Richard’s death had been to send an army to reoccupy Evreux, the town in which John had massacred French soldiers a few years earlier. Two years later he invaded again, and this time he did not call a halt until he had occupied Normandy, Anjou and Poitou.

Most contemporaries believed that the seeds of this disaster lay in John’s decision to marry Isabella of Angoulême. On John’s accession to the throne he persuaded some bishops to dissolve his marriage to Isabel of Gloucester, and sent an embassy to Portugal to negotiate for the hand of a Portuguese princess. On 24 August 1200, however, and before his envoys had returned, he married the daughter and heiress to Audemar, count of Angoulême. This came as a surprise to many – and above all to Isabella’s then fiancé, one of the most powerful lords of Poitou, Hugh de Lusignan. In view of the great strategic importance of the semi-autonomous county of Angoulême there was much to be said, from John’s point of view, for a marriage to Count Audemar’s daughter. Suitably compensated, the Lusignan family might have been reconciled to their loss of Angoulême, but John had not the slightest intention of placating them. His scornful treatment of their pleas for justice led them to appeal for help to King Philip, who was delighted to seize the opportunity.

Did John simply make a disastrous political calculation? Or had sexual desire come into his sudden decision to marry Isabella? Some chroniclers believed that John had been captivated by her beauty. She cannot have been more than fifteen, and was more likely twelve or less: the well-informed chronicler Roger of Howden tells us that Hugh de Lusignan had postponed his wedding to Isabella because she was not yet sexually mature. But in August 1200 John would not wait, even though this meant placing his envoys to Portugal in an embarrassing and potentially dangerous position.

King Philip summoned John to appear before his court – not, of course, as king of England, but as duke of Normandy and Aquitaine – to answer the charges brought by the Lusignans. His refusal to attend eventually resulted, in April 1202, in Philip pronouncing the confiscation of all the lands he held in France. Philip offered Poitou, Anjou, Maine and Touraine to Arthur and arranged for him to marry his daughter Mary. While Philip and the count of Boulogne advanced into eastern Normandy, Arthur and the Lusignans trapped Eleanor of Aquitaine at Mirebeau in Poitou.

John was at Le Mans when he heard the news. Le Mans and Mirebeau were over eighty miles apart – but John covered the distance in forty-eight hours. Arthur and his followers were enjoying a relaxed breakfast – pigeons were on the menu that day – confident that Eleanor could not hold out for much longer and that her son was still far away, when their quiet meal was interrupted by John’s sudden arrival. Arthur and more than two hundred barons and knights were taken prisoner. On 1 August 1202 John had defeated his enemies more emphatically than ever his father or brother had been able to do. ‘God be praised for our happy success,’ he wrote, in exultation. But his greatest military victory led rapidly to his greatest political mistake.

His triumph had been possible only with the help of two of the most powerful barons of Anjou, Aimeri of Thouars and William des Roches, yet he denied them any voice in deciding what should be done with the prisoners. Worse still, he treated all his prisoners badly. According to
The History of William the Marshal
, ‘He kept his prisoners so vilely and in such evil distress that it seemed shameful and ugly to all those who were with him and who witnessed this cruelty.’ Since there was hardly a noble family in Poitou who did not have a kinsman or friend among the knights taken at Mirebeau, John offended a whole province. Within a month Aimeri of Thouars and William des Roches had switched sides. As in September 1199, the reminder of what John was capable of had led to a swift change of heart. In October 1202 Aimeri and William captured Angers, the chief city of Anjou. In January 1203 John withdrew into Normandy leaving Philip to sail, unchallenged, down the Loire and take possession of Anjou, Maine and Touraine.

Soon John’s reputation came under further attack as rumours spread about the fate of his nephew, Arthur of Brittany. What happened to Arthur cannot be known with certainty, but almost certainly he was murdered on John’s orders. Some believed that John himself carried out the murder when drunk. If he did have Arthur killed, he committed a heinous crime by the chivalrous political standards of his day, and even if he did not, the fact that it was alleged that he had and that he could not or would not dispel these rumours undermined his defence of Normandy.

John stayed in the duchy throughout most of 1203 and great barrel-loads of English silver were sent across the Channel to him. But it did little good. Few trusted him and in return he trusted almost no one.
The History of William the Marshal
portrays an obsessively suspicious king desperate to ensure that no one knew in advance where he was going next:

Unable to trust his barons, the only people he half-trusted were those who depended upon him for their pay, the bands of mercenaries commanded by professional soldiers such as Girard d’Athée and Louvrecaire. But it was not enough to have professional forces at his disposal; to defend Normandy he needed the support of the Norman political nation, and that he did not have. Indeed, his reliance on mercenaries only made things worse. ‘Why’, asked the author of the
History of William the Marshal
, ‘was John unable to keep the love of his people? It was because Louvrecaire maltreated them and pillaged them as though he were in enemy country.’

Although John tried to organise the defence, he did so from a safe distance, never prepared to go where the fighting was. In December 1203 he sailed to England, leaving Normandy to its fate. The strategically vital castle of Château-Gaillard surrendered in March 1204; Rouen, the capital of the duchy, followed suit in June. When, on 31 March 1204, Eleanor of Aquitaine died in her early eighties, the lords and prelates of Poitou rushed to Philip’s court to pay homage to him. The king of Castile sent in an army to overrun Gascony. In the south-west of France it was as if John did not exist. He talked about returning to Normandy, but in fact during the first six months of 1204 he sent very little money and did nothing effective. Who could feel confidence in such a king, or wish to risk life and limb for a man so patently reluctant to risk his own? As a contemporary troubadour put it,

Despite the one stunning success at Mirebeau, his overall military record in those years earned him a new nickname: Softsword. He was believed to be capable of murdering his nephew, but not of committing himself to the defence of his ancestral possessions. And so he lost them.

One explanation offered by contemporaries for John’s feeble defence of Normandy in 1203 cited his relationship with his wife. According to Roger of Wendover, at Christmas 1202 John made no preparations for the coming struggle, despite the desperate military situation on the Norman frontier, but preferred to enjoy sumptuous feasts with his queen, then stay in bed until lunch-time. When the king of France’s armies invaded Normandy in 1203, John took no counter-measures but stayed in Rouen with his queen, acting as though he were bewitched. According to the well-informed author of the
Histoire des ducs de Normandie
, when the French captured John’s strongholds, he ‘acted as though he did not care, and devoted himself to the pleasures of hunting, falconry and to the queen whom he greatly loved’. Even so, the same author believed John could not resist teasing her with references to the gossip that it was his marriage that lay at the root of his political misfortunes: “You see, lady, what I have lost for your sake!” To which she retorted, “And for you I have lost the best knight in the world.” In all she bore John five children between 1207 and 1215. After his death, Isabella returned to Angoulême, and in 1220, now about thirty, she married again. This time she chose her own husband: Hugh de Lusignan, the son of the Hugh to whom she had been betrothed twenty years earlier.

In 1205 John made an effort to restore his authority. He assembled a large fleet at Portsmouth, but the English barons refused to sail with him, forcing him to cancel the expedition, which showed just how low his reputation had sunk. He did better in 1206, managing in June to take a fleet to La Rochelle. Philip had moved to defend Normandy when he heard John was preparing to sail, and this gave John a free hand to consolidate his hold on Angoulême – Isabella’s father had died in 1202, so the county was now hers – and drive the last Castilian troops out of Gascony. In September 1206 he marched north to ford the Loire and ravage Anjou. But as soon as news came that Philip was advancing towards him with an army, John beat a hasty retreat. In October the two kings agreed on a truce based on the status quo. Something had been salvaged from the wreck of empire, but the territories John had recovered – Gascony and the south-west of Poitou – were ones in which Philip had shown no interest. From now on Normandy and the Loire Valley, the heartlands of the Plantagenet empire, remained firmly under the control of the kings of France.

The loss of these dominions was a disaster for John. He had come to the throne in 1199 as ruler of the most powerful state in Europe. For almost two hundred years England had been just one country within a wider empire: first a part of Cnut’s North Sea empire; then, after 1066, a part of the cross-Channel empire established by William of Normandy; and from 1154 onwards a part of Henry II’s still wider empire. John had inherited vast dominions that stretched from Ireland and the Scottish border in the north to Gascony and the Pyrenees in the south. Hence the opening words of Magna Carta, and the opening words of all charters issued by King John: ‘John, by the grace of God, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, Count of Anjou.’

But by 1215 this list of titles had a hollow ring. Although he still claimed to be the rightful ruler of Normandy and Anjou he had lost them. Although he still claimed to be duke of Aquitaine, he had lost much of the duchy. In the history of English kingship the losses of 1203–4 marked an important turning-point. Until then Henry II, Richard and John had been French princes, who also ruled, and occasionally visited, England. After 1204 the centre of gravity shifted. John and his descendants became kings of England, who occasionally visited Gascony. For this reason many English historians in more recent centuries have looked upon the defeats of 1203–4 as a ‘Good Thing’. To influential authors, such as Thomas Macaulay, the French possessions were an encumbrance that endangered the sound development of a truly English state and culture:

It was, as the Victorian historian William Stubbs put it, ‘the fortunate incapacity of John’ that enabled England ‘to cut herself free from Normandy’. (Ironically for French historians too, 1203–4 has been regarded as a ‘Good Thing’: authors such as Michelet saw Henry and his sons as rulers of an ‘English empire’, as Englishmen who had to be driven out of France. This kind of language is often found in guidebooks for tourists in France even today.)

What really mattered in the eyes of historians like Macaulay and Stubbs were events that took place in England: the murder of Thomas Becket, the making of English Common Law, Magna Carta. But no one should think that John and his advisers breathed a sigh of relief and thanked God that they could now concentrate on the ‘real business’ of a king of England. On the contrary, John became an English king of England only by defeat and against his will. In his own time 1204 represented a catastrophic loss of reputation. His attempt ten years later to restore his reputation led directly to the making of Magna Carta.