Richard & John: Kings at War (73 page)

John was almost too late. For a month or two the future of his kingdom seemed to hang in the balance, as wild talk of deposition, abdication and a new monarch swept the realm. Nothing better illustrated the twilight state of England than the prophecies of the gaunt, half-mad seer named Peter of Wakefield, who lived on bread and water. As we saw earlier, Peter prophesied that John would be gone by Ascension Day 1213, and he found ready listeners.
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Wandering all over the north country, Peter told his audience that it had been vouchsafed to him in a vision that only fourteen years were allotted to John, after which ‘one who is pleasing to God’ would ascend the throne; it was not clear whether John was to die a natural death, be murdered, exiled or forced to abdicate. Initially dimissed as no more than a crank and a nuisance, Peter of Wakefield eventually worried John so much that he had his sheriffs arrest him and bring him before him. Given a chance to recant, Peter refused and reiterated his message: ‘Know thou for sure that on the day which I have named thou shalt be king no longer; and if I be proved a liar, do with me as thou wilt.’
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John clapped him in a dungeon in Corfe, but this proved to be a bad mistake as Peter attained martyr’s status once he was imprisoned and his credibility was enhanced. This particular bubble burst only when the date of 23 May (Ascension Day) came and went. John held a day-long party to show his contempt for the prophecy and was of course vindicated.
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The lovers of the supernatural, baulked of their miracle, then claimed that the fourteenth anniversary of John’s coronation (27 May) was the date Peter really meant. When that too passed without mishap, the poor prophet was finally discredited. On 28 May Peter and his son were dragged at the horse’s tail all the way from Corfe to Wareham and there hanged.
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In this turbulent and uncertain maelstrom, when John did not know whom to trust, the support of William Marshal came as a godsend. Out of favour for six years, Marshal once more rescued the Angevin house he had served so loyally by getting twenty-six fellow barons in Ireland to renew their oaths to John and to swear to fight for him till death. In return he strongly advised John to make peace with the Pope.
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Although John blustered in reply about his royal prerogatives and the dignity of England faced with papal encroachment, Marshal’s words were just one more factor leading him towards rapprochement with Rome. Perhaps even more pressing was the rumour that Innocent III had declared him deposed and invited Philip to take over as king of England. By 1213 all kinds of different factors compelled John to endure the unendurable and to submit to the pontiff: baronial revolt and conspiracy, the policies of Otto IV in Germany, and most of all the factor of Philip Augustus lay behind the momentous volte-face of 1213.
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John knew that Philip was even then preparing an invasion of England. His advisers were divided between those who thought that he should remain in England and deal with this threat and those who thought that the best way to make Philip back off from his English design was to land in Poitou. For his part, Philip seems to have taken the old line that Rome must be defeated in Rome. This, or possibly simply an irrational hatred of the Angevins, lies behind the at first-sight puzzling decision to go for the difficult option (a hazardous seaborne landing on the English coast) rather than the easy one (an overland invasion of Aquitaine).
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Sustained by the effusive demonstrations of loyalty by Marshal and aware of the danger across the Channel, John for once demonstrated both sagacity and energy. Although he liked to poke fun at William Marshal with his intimates and accuse him of the most far-fetched acts of treason and treachery, in his heart John knew that William Marshal was the best friend the ‘Devil’s Brood’ had ever had. Accordingly in 1213 he recalled him to England and restored to him his two sons taken as hostages for his good behaviour some years before.
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Meanwhile he summoned to a rendezvous at Dover all available soldiers and archers, and ordered the fleet to convene at Portsmouth. Every single earl, baron, knight, freeman and sergeant was required to attend on pain of ‘culvertage’ and perpetual servitude. Not surprisingly, hosts of knights and ordinary soldiers converged on the southern ports; one annalist reported that ‘If they had been all of one heart and one mind for king and country, there was no prince under heaven against whom they could not have defended the realm of England.’
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That ‘if ’ conceals a multitude of sins; no one knew how many of the magnates would remain loyal if Philip landed and how many would immediately go over to his side. Even without this question-mark, John had his problems, for his commissariat was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of men arriving in Kent in answer to the minatory summons. In desperation the army’s marshals dispersed the host to other ports, to Faversham and even as far away as Ipswich, sending the lightly armed troops to these locations as a reserve and retaining the knights, archers and better-armed freemen.
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John realised that rapprochement with the Pope would not make Philip halt his military plans, that they were independent of the hitherto existing Franco-papal diplomatic alliance, but he hoped long-term to drive a wedge between the two most dangerous enemies he had encountered so far. As with John’s plans for the reconquest of Normandy, Philip’s project for the invasion of England was of long gestation. The French king thought of implementing it in 1209 but his preparations too had taken a long time to mature. But finally, at almost the precise moment John effected his reconciliation with the Pope, Philip was ready. At a council at Soissons in April 1213, in a classic of chicken counting before egg-hatching, he drew up detailed plans for relations between England and France when his son Louis was sitting on the English throne.
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He put to sea from Boulogne with his invasion fleet on 10 May 1213, and coasted up to Gravelines, where he began embarking his army on the 22nd. News of John’s submission to Innocent spiked his guns; he was reported furiously angry, but called off the invasion while he considered his next move.
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The propaganda advantage of invading England while claiming to be waging a holy war against an excommunicate king had now vanished, and meanwhile, by his alliance with the Flanders princes, John had turned his flank. Like Napoleon seven hundred years later, Philip decided to shelve the invasion of England and deal with his continental enemies first.
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At this stage it should be appreciated that, even after John’s reconciliation with Pope Innocent, Philip held most of the cards. In Aquitaine Simon de Montfort and his brutal crusaders were gradually turning the screws on the Albigensians, threatening John’s ally Raymond of Toulouse with utter ruin.
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Even more seriously Otto IV was beginning to look like a liability. John’s obstinacy in his struggle with the papacy had led Innocent to look for ways of subverting his friends and allies, and he found the perfect answer in the young prince Frederick Hohenstaufen, the future Frederick II of Germany. On 5 December 1212 Frederick was elected king of Germany in Frankfurt and crowned thus in opposition to Otto.
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In vain did Otto try to use the dead Philip of Swabia for his dynastic purposes by marrying the late duke’s daughter; she died a few days after the marriage. The really significant development at the beginning of 1213 was the treaty of alliance signed between Frederick and Philip Augustus, which increased the personal rancour Otto had always felt towards the French king. In the welter of diplomatic manoeuvrings and
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tergiversation and duplicity, we should not forget the influence of raw human emotions in this arena. Otto always hated Philip Augustus viscerally. In the spring of 1212 he wept with rage in front of witnesses when the subject of Philip was raised, and this was far from the only occasion when his fury towards France was made manifest.
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Renaud Dammartin, the architect of the Flanders alliance and John’s henchman, also alienated many by his attitudes. Looked at askance by some of John’s courtiers and cordially loathed by the French because he lived openly with a courtesan, Renaud was in many ways a man after John’s own heart. He laid elaborate plans for sharing out the domains of defeated France and had his own scheme, modelled on John’s seizures, for dissolving French monasteries and expropriating Church wealth. He and John shared an atheistical outlook and a contempt for priests, whom Renaud denounced for ‘their useless lives whose sole occupation is to devote themselves to Bacchus and Venus and to fill their stomachs’.
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Faced with Philip’s increasing power, John decided, wisely, to use his newly constructed navy as his first line of offensive tactics. As Roger of Wendover reported: ‘The king decided to engage his enemies at sea, to drown them before they landed, for he had a more powerful fleet than the French king, and it was there that he thought his greatest hope of resisting the enemy lay.’
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While John mobilised his army on Barham Down, between Canterbury and Dover, he unleashed his navy from Portsmouth for damaging raids on the French coast. One amphibious operation ended with the gutting of Dieppe and the taking of a number of prisoners; in others French shipping was badly mauled in the Seine ports and at Fécamp.
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When Philip Augustus swept into Flanders with his invading army, Count Ferrand appealed to John, whose response was prompt, though, typically, he spoiled the effect of his generosity by chiding the counts of Boulogne and Holland for tardiness: ‘Had you sent to us sooner, we would have sent you greater help’
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- presumably a reference to the men he had demobilised because of the pressure on commissariat. Ferrand’s envoy arrived on 25 May 1213, John called a conference that night at Ewell, and by the 28th a large fleet of 500 ships commanded by the earl of Salisbury, with 700 knights and a large body of mercenaries, cleared from the English coast. Battling offshore winds, the fleet fetched the Flemish coast on 30 May and began to thread its way up the estuary of the River Zwyn.
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Suddenly at the harbour of Damme, then the port of Bruges, a few miles inland but connected to the Zwyn by a narrow channel, they found the entire French fleet anchored unawares, complacent in Philip Augustus’s early and easy Flanders triumphs. No fewer than 1,700 vessels lay at anchor, laden with arms, materiel and provisions; even more amazingly, there were few defenders, since most of the French knights and heavy infantry were elsewhere, at the siege of Ghent or simply bent on the routine plunder and rapine of medieval warfare.
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The French were sitting ducks, and the English mariners, mercenaries and knights swept in for the kill. Those French sailors who had the ill-fortune to be standing guard over the ships were butchered, and most of the ships were burnt, disabled or taken in tow; those who managed to escape could not reach the open sea and were later gutted on the direct orders of Philip Augustus.
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It was about as overwhelming as any naval victory of the era could well be, but it bred overconfidence. When Ferrand arrived next day to treat with Salisbury, the English knights disembarked to harry the French in the town of Damme, but ran into Philip’s advancing army, received a severe check and were lucky to escape back to the ships before annihilation.
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But Salisbury had ended the threat of invasion and stymied Philip’s offensive in Flanders; he took his prizes back across the Channel in triumph, able to report to John that the new royal navy had acquitted itself brilliantly in its first major test. The plunder brought back to England created a sensation: ‘never had so much treasure come into England since the days of King Arthur’ was one vainglorious verdict.
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Perhaps as nemesis for such hubris Salisbury himself was shipwrecked on the coast of Northumberland, but survived.
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In a state of euphoria John now hoped to catch Philip Augustus between two fires, pincered from Flanders and Poitou. Once again it was his barons who scuppered his plans. They came forward with a variety of excuses as to why they could not follow the king to Poitou. The first was that they could not follow him while he was still excommunicate (Langton had not yet arrived to release him from the anathema).
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Then they claimed they could not go on any expeditions as they were broke, having spent all their money preparing to resist the French invasion; it followed that they could go to Poitou only if John paid their expenses. Finally, the northern barons tired of prevarication, threw off the mask of punctiliousness and revealed their hand: not only were they exhausted, they said, after John’s relentless campaigning in the Celtic fringes but they were anyway not bound by their feudal oaths to serve abroad and would not do so.
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In a bizarre example of repetition compulsion, John responded by replaying the events of 1205. He put to sea in a fury before he had properly thought through what he was doing, cruised as far as Jersey, then realised the futility of what he was doing and put back into port. His initial fury having hardened into a cold anger, he proceeded to make preparations for a northern campaign to rival William the Conqueror’s famous ‘harrying of the north’ in 1068; he fully intended to let his mercenaries off the leash once he reached the territories of the contumacious barons.
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