Richard & John: Kings at War (87 page)

The litany of John’s military failures is tedious: the failed strategy in Europe before Bouvines; the inability to prevent the French landing in 1216; the failure to march on London in 1215 during the civil war; the inability to pacify Ireland, where the best research establishes that John wholly failed, despite the efforts of his supporters to ‘talk up’ his achievements.
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Modern historians dismiss Roger of Howden as unreliable, and it is true that all the most barbed criticism of John as commander occurs in Howden, though it is from Gervase of Canterbury that John derived his devastating nickname Softsword.
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But it is not so easy to dismiss the far less sensational evidence in the monastic annals (Barnwell, Margam, etc) which tells essentially the same story: here John is actually accused of being frightened to face Philip Augustus in battle, and of having made no real effort to prevent the conquest of Normandy.
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As a student of John has remarked: ‘John’s good military reputation is largely a modern interpretation.’
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Some of the modern judgements seem truly astonishing. Professor Ralph Turner writes: ‘many who tangled with John . . . underrated his capability and found themselves quickly defeated’.
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One would like to know who exactly these ‘many’ were. Far more accurate, down-to-earth and trenchant is this assessment from John Gillingham, commenting on the unopposed French landings in 1215-16: ‘This time it was on the beaches of England that John chose not to fight.’
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The more one examines John’s good press among modern historians, the more bizarre it seems. One writer praises John’s ‘thoughtful kindness’ to Arthur’s sister Elinor, which was obvious compensation by a guilty murderer. The same writer blames Richard’s taxes for all John’s troubles, as if Richard had somehow come back to life and ordered a virtually annual scutage, and speaks of the barons’ ‘irresponsible behaviour’ in opposing John’s excesses.
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Even more amazing is the defence of John mounted by the historian Maurice Ashley. Those who accuse John of being ‘cruel, lascivious and superstitious’ are accused of ‘censuring . . . with true Victorian moral approbation’.
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It is unclear why cruelty and superstition should be disapproved of only by Victorians, but this author seems to have a ‘Victorian complex’. Elsewhere he inveighs against those who are ‘inclined to measure men long dead by Victorian ethical standards’. Again, it is unclear whether it is ‘men long dead’ or ‘Victorian ethical standards’ that constitute the problem. Ashley rounds of his tour-de-force of pro-John apologia by describing his catastrophic blundering in Ireland in 1185 as ‘like a non-swimmer being tipped into a pool’.
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Truly, granted enough extenuating circumstances, anyone can be exonerated of anything. John has never lacked his champions, who will blame all his woes on Henry II, Richard, Innocent III, the barons, Philip Augustus - the list is potentially endless. We must remember that not even Shakespeare was proof against propagandist nonsense when it came to John. The Bard absurdly makes John a defender of English liberty against the papacy - a worthy forerunner of Henry VIII and the Tudors, that dynasty to which Shakespeare was forced to truckle:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true
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There are only four arguments for the rehabilitation of John that command any respect, but even they turn out in the end to be inadequate. The first is simply that John was extremely unlucky, that the roll of the dice consistently went against him. He was unfortunate in that his reign was a roll-call of failures, contrasting so strikingly with the glittering successes achieved by Henry II and the martial glory won by Richard. He left his kingdom in chaos after two years of civil war and, by his opposition to Magna Carta, which was absorbed into the political system by his son, came to seem no more than a mindless despot. Most of all, he fell foul of the Church. All the medieval chroniclers were monks or churchmen, and John’s hostility to the Church was requited with a uniformly hostile portrayal in the medieval sources. Some historians think it enough merely to state the hostility of churchmen to John, as if that in itself constitutes a refutation of their opinions. But nothing substantial, except John’s commitment to archives and record-keeping - in itself bound to commend him warmly to professional historians - has emerged to alter the picture. We should remember that it is not enough to establish a famous chronicler’s parti pris, like that of Matthew Paris towards John. Tacitus and Suetonius were notoriously hostile to the Julio-Claudian emperors, yet historical research has not thrown up anything that substantially alters our perception of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian. Part of the problem is that the kinds of materials professional historians relish are ‘value-neutral’; just as modern research can establish that Nero debased the Roman currency, but this tells us nothing about his personality, so John’s administrative reforms cannot establish that he was a ‘good king’.

The second line of defence for John is to assert that, even if he was cruel and despotic, he was small beer alongside modern dictators or even the tyrants of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Here is Professor Turner again: ‘Compared to Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, he seems quite tame.’
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Yes, and also alongside Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The simple truth is that John lacked both the technology and the political culture to be a mass murderer. John’s control over England was episodic and that over the greater Angevin empire practically non-existent. Modern dictators depend on electronic communications, mass media and advanced infrastructure in roads and railways to impose their bloody will; such things were simply not available to John. And in Western Europe c. 1000-1300 there was no political culture that would legitimate state violence on the grand scale. It has long been noted that in this period, unlike the later Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the penalties even for major rebellion were slight. Earl Waltheof (executed 1075) and William of Eu (blinded and castrated in 1095) are almost the only examples of the high-born losing life or limb as the result of rebellion.
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Nor were there the post-battlefield slaughters that disgraced the Wars of the Roses. Although John, both in temperament and in his conflict with the Church, adumbrated Henry VIII, he was utterly unlike the Tudor ogre in not operating within a culture that sanctioned killing on whim; in Henry’s reign, by contrast, he was able to murder or execute 150,000 people out of a total population of 2.7 million, though admittedly, even within the context of early sixteenth-century Europe, an era that produced Cortes, Pizarro, Aguirre and Cesare Borgia, Henry VIII was regarded by contemporaries as an egregious tyrant, a modern Nero.

The third option for John’s supporters is to allege that he inherited from Henry and Richard most of the problems that dragged him down; he was thus like Charles I, who inherited a baneful legacy from the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I and ended up paying the penalty that should have been the Virgin Queen’s. Or, to use another analogy, that he was like Lyndon Johnson inheriting the mess John F. Kennedy had made in Vietnam and taking all the blame for it; in light of the comparison sometimes made, with Richard and John featuring as Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, it is more than just interesting to read Professor Turner’s comment that John had personality flaws similar to those of Nixon and LBJ.
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John, then, according to this argument, personally carried the can for problems that were endemic to the entire Angevin empire. Certainly it was true that when John demanded the surrender of castles, when he imposed financial penalties or exacted charters of fealty as guarantees of his vassals’ good behaviour, he was doing only what his predecessors did and what Philip Augustus did on the continent. And it was also true that Magna Carta was aimed not just at John personally, but at the entire imperial Angevin system, as the monastic chroniclers acknowledged.
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But, although a necessary explanation for the Great Charter, the pre-existing Great Charter is not a sufficient one. Abbot Coggleshall explicitly made the point that, in addition to the grievances inherited from previous Angevin rulers, John had added abuses of his own.
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Richard’s financial exactions, it is claimed, had drained England and left John without the financial resources to combat Philip Augustus in Normandy. But the thesis that John lagged behind Philip in wealth and resources is highly questionable (see above, pp.319) The defeat in Normandy was not a function of historical inevitability in the guise of economics, but was grounded simply in John’s deficiencies as a commander and his failings as a man. He could not inspire the Normans, he alienated them with the free hand he gave his mercenary captains, at key moments he flinched from essential head-on encounters with the French. So far from having inherited an intractable problem from Richard, John squandered what his brother had built up. It is simply inconceivable that Normandy could have fallen to Philip Augustus had Richard lived; his energy, his charisma, his military genius would all have been enough to see the French off.
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John’s flight from La Roche-au-Moine was something that would never have occurred under Richard. This is something even John’s most stalwart defenders concede. Here is Professor Warren:

If Richard had lived for another five years . . . there would have been one notable difference in the course of the campaign. The king himself would have been in the heights above Les Andelys as dawn broke, to give the signal for the combined attack on the French camp; however ready the Normans were to surrender, Philip would not have been able to march up the valley of the Orne to Caen without fear of a sudden assault by Richard and his household cavalry; and even when all else had gone, Richard would have been urging the citizens of Rouen to arms, and parrying the first assault with blows from his great sword. John stayed in England biting his nails.
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The final entry in the dossier for John’s defence is the most plausible. This states that the Angevin empire was an unwieldy, disparate hotchpotch of elements, in no sense a true empire, doomed to implode and, as such, one of the clearest of all victims of historical inevitability;
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it was just John’s bad fortune that the process of coming apart at the seams happened in his reign rather than that of Henry II. To use the jargon of contemporary sociologists, one might say that the Angevin ‘empire’ was hegemonic, not territorial; in other words, it was not centrally directed but was a domain of overlapping spheres in most of which indirect rule was practised. On this model, the centre was Anjou, based at Loches and Chinon, and the periphery was Aquitaine, Normandy and England; there was also a third zone where control was contested with others, as in the extreme south with the counts of Toulouse.
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Given that ‘hegemonic’ or indirect rule, rather than centralisation (impossible in this era because of the lack of technology) was the norm, and the Angevins never tried to mould their diverse lands into a monolithic union, the whole system was peculiarly vulnerable to break-up. Starting in Henry II’s reign, the entire ramshackle structure came under severe threat from Capetian France. Long-term, it is considered that the French held all the cards, but exactly why this was is disputed. Some say Louis’s non-interventionism was considered more attractive in the francophone territories than Henry II’s authoritarian and dirigiste approach, that Henry leaned more on Roman and Carolingian models of government instead of feudal realities.
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This thesis, however, sits uneasily alongside the idea of the Angevin empire as a ramshackle entity and the known fact that Henry conceived his dominions as a federation, not an empire.
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Others say the Angevins had no unifying myth, ideology or common culture to bind their empire together, whereas France was always able to promote the attractive notion of a geographical and linguistic unity; the cult of King Arthur is sometimes interpreted as the Angevins attempt to plug this cultural gap, creating a myth to counter the French one.
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It is surely significant that England and Gascony, the only two Angevin territories not formally subject to the French crown, were the only two to survive after 1204. Still others say that from about 1150 the Capetians started to become dissatisfied with a vague system of overlordship and wanted a clear feudal pyramid, which in turn made them more aggressive and expansionist.
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What is clear is that it was vital from about 1170 that Henry II and his sons should not fall out, given the scale of the threat from France. This of course is precisely what they proceeded to do. Historians who love ‘dialectical’ processes are fond, too, of pointing out the myriad ‘contradictions’ in the Angevin empire: between the Mediterranean culture of Aquitaine and the Frankish culture of the north; between Normandy and England as rivals in the Anglo-Norman realm, with Normans increasingly thinking that Angevin rule benefited England rather than them; and between the necessity for Henry to think coherently and imperially and his own preference for thinking of the separate parts of his domain as territories he could divide and give to his sons.
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On a much smaller scale and to a lesser extent, Henry’s ‘solution’ to the problem of empire - dividing it among his sons - was much like that adopted by Genghiz Khan with the Mongol empire fifty years later - and with similarly unhappy results.