Blood Cries Afar (28 page)

The most radical and uncompromising clause of all is the last, 61. It is also by far the longest and aims to insure the preceding provisions. By this clause, the barons wish to present themselves as acting for ‘the community of the realm’ by establishing a council of 25 barons who will oversee the King’s adherence to the charter. That this council would be inherently anti-John was ensured by the rebels’ insistence that the members should be drawn from their own number. If they deemed a complaint against the King justifiable and if he did not address it satisfactorily within 40 days, this ultimate security clause gave them the power to organise the whole land to seize his lands, castles and possessions. The lack of any faith in John’s word and promises as monarch had been enshrined in a legally binding document. For some commentators, one King had been replaced by 25 kings. David Carpenter judges that ‘the restrictions placed by Magna Carta on the workings of kingship were unprecedented and profound’; Warren says that John ‘was virtually reduced to the role of executive officer of the law under the supervision of a baronial committee’; while Galbraith calls the last clause ‘the most fantastic surrender of any English king to his subjects.’
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When negotiating with the barons, John was all urbanity and reason; but Mathew Paris writes that when he withdrew from the talks he gave full expression to his humiliated outrage: ‘he gnashed his teeth, rolled his eyes, grabbed sticks and straws and gnawed them like a madman, or tore them into shreds with his fingers.’
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John did not actually sign the charter or perhaps even seal it himself, but he did agree to it. That he did so reflects partly his relative weakness at the time after the losses listed above, especially London; however, this was a relative weakness to his earlier position, as John was still the leading military force in the land. More typically, he was again putting off a decisive reckoning, confidently and correctly expecting the pope to declare the document null and void, agreed to under duress and altogether illegal. Almost ironically, a King whose reign was characterised by arbitrary law was appealing to legal justification of his own position. Again, John’s duplicity is revealed. As Holt says, ‘Throughout, even when he sealed Magna Carta, John had not the slightest intention of giving in or permanently abandoning the powers which the Angevin kings had come to enjoy.’
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John reluctantly acquiesced to the charter because he never intended to heed it. But in his acquiescence he paid the high personal price in abasing himself before his barons.

Not that the barons ever believed that John was going to turn over a new leaf and become the model of a constitutional monarch. They did not trust him before and they did not trust him now. Most protagonists on both sides realised that what had occurred at Runnymede was little more than a prolonged truce. Some of the barons themselves paid little attention to the charter and began plundering royal lands; others took recourse to this action because the King was dragging his feet in implementing the restitution of land, castles and property to them as the charter stipulated he should. Many southern barons planned gathering at a tournament in Stamford on 6 July to ‘celebrate the peace’; such meetings were well known to be mustering points for armies. They changed the venue and date to a week later back in Staines as they feared venturing too far from the capital. (Here, the Tower of London was placed under the supervision of Archbishop Langton.) For the barons involved, it allowed them practice in war games and strategies as well as giving them the excuse to bear arms. Neither side relaxed their guard after Magna Carta; rather, they prepared for the next round of the conflict. Elswehere, royal officials were given a hard time in performance of their duties and barons fortified their castles (including those recently received back from the King), and even built new ones.

John’s faith in his papal ally and overlord was rewarded in the technical sense, but not a practical one. In August, Innocent III annulled Magna Carta in the strongest terms, excommunicated 30 leading rebels and had Langton suspended. But the reality of the situation was dictated by raw power on the ground and not by spiritual vindication; the latter was useful but it was never going to be decisive. For all that John’s putative ‘masterstroke’ in submitting to the Papacy has been lauded for its Machiavellian and cynical creativeness, it did very little indeed in bringing him any worthwhile success in the ensuing conflict. John placed too much emphasis on papal support, but that did not mean he failed to make more practical preparations from overseas. While his castles were readied for immediate action, abroad troops were being raised in Aquitaine and Flanders, where the leading mercenary captain Hugh de Boves was active. He even tried to win Philip Augustus over by making extravagant promises, but as the Barnwell annalist so succinctly put it, ‘others had been to him beforehand’.
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The temperature rose precipitately in mid-August. The barons were refusing the charter condition for the return of London to the King by the 15th, and the King refused to meet the barons at a pre-arranged meeting in Oxford on the 16th, claiming that he had been badly treated and was in personal danger from them. Episcopal interventions for the Papacy failed to bring the sides any closer together, and the pope’s annulment of 24 August and the excommunications that followed shortly for their leaders and the whole of London served only to remind the barons that they had to rely on their own devices. There was no longer any middle ground: the choice was between war and submission. They chose war. Their talks with Prince Louis of France intensified.

All sides could smell war in the air, coming with the change of season in September. John placed his family in the secure royal stronghold of Corfe Castle. He meanwhile sailed at the end of the month to the impressive fortress that is Dover Castle where he awaited Hugh de Boves and his army from the continent: Poitevins, Flemings, Brabantines and Gascons were all expected. From here he could also check any potential threat from France and restrict access to London from the east. Rochester Castle was to play an important role in this strategy. Sporadic military operations broke out, a stuttering start to renewed hostilities. Rebel forces besieged Oxford while some of the London garrison headed eastwards to Ospring in Kent to block any potential advance on the capital by John. The king, hearing of their advance while at Canterbury, retreated hastily to Dover; the barons, no less fearful, made for Rochester. The Anonymous of Béthune sarcastically comments that thus both sides were vanquished without a blow being struck. John suffered a major setback on 26 September when Hugh de Boves’s large contingent of reinforcements were drowned in a channel storm; countless bodies, including that of the leader, were swept up onto the beaches of the south coast. Much treasure and coinage, so necessary for the payment of the royal mercenaries, went down with the ships. The survivors struggled into Dover.

On 2 October, John instructed his brother, Earl William of Salisbury, to visit ten royal castles and form a field army from their garrisons, while his leading mercenary captain, Falkes de Bréauté, was sent on 4 October to take command of the midlands and the west. Along with William Marshal, John relied heavily on these two commanders to lead military operations. William, illegitimate son of Henry II and the Earl of Salisbury, was an intelligent and capable soldier with long experience in serving John: commander of the royal fleet, he had led the naval victory at Damme and fought bravely at Bouvines where he had been captured and ransomed. Warren says that he ‘was the only one of the greater barons with whom John was on terms of back-slapping intimacy’.
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John would often send him casks of wine and help him out with his gambling losses (he was a card partner of the King). John felt comfortable with his half-brother, a blood relation whose illegitimacy rendered him, in theory at least, less of a threat. Falkes de Bréauté played a central military role throughout the conflict. A veteran mercenary leader, capable of raising large, professional forces for service in his master’s armies, Falkes raised himself to a position of significant political power and influence. The bastard son of a Norman knight, he was perhaps John’s most loyal commander; it was a relationship not built on respect but on the surer foundations of money and reward. He accumulated important castles in the southern midlands from Oxford to the borders of East Anglia and a favourable marriage to a rich widow. He also accumulated a reputation for brutality when Sheriff of Glamorgan (one of several shrievalties) a characteristic which seems to have marked his youth; his first name is reputed to derive from a scythe with which he had slain a knight. His contemporary reputation and popularity was low: a bastard foreigner who had worked his way up to be a favourite of the King, his ruthless plundering of abbeys served only to ensure that the monastic writers gave him a terrible obituary for posterity. He will be a regular companion in our story of the war.
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The focus of the struggle was, for the time being at least, in the south-east corner of England. With the rebel leadership moving tentatively eastwards from London, and John in Dover with his surviving reinforcements from the continent. With both sided poised to engage each other bloodily and dramatically at Rochester, it is perhaps an opportune moment to assess the state of play. The King held the better hand with a number of ‘powerful advantages’.
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Turner points out how the loyal barons,such as William Marshal and Ranulf of Chester, were the only ones who could put major feudal forces into the field. This was not always entirely reassuring for John, though, who held deep suspicions of both men. At the same time the Marcher lords had to consider the irruptions of the Welsh under Llewelyn and other princes, and therefore had to look west as well as east. Royalists had to look north, too: like, the Welsh, the Scots also entered into alliance with the rebels, providing important military assets to them that cannot be overlooked. Royalist earls such as those of Warenne (Surrey) and Arundel (Sussex) owned important castles not just in the south and East Anglia, but also in the north. John’s royal coffers never seemed to empty to the point where he would fail to employ mercenaries in strength; the machinery of royal government, though creaking under the pressures of war, together with control of the countryside ensured that the influx of funds to the royal cause continued to a considerable degree. The military organisation of the realm also meant that the King could afford the engineers and costly equipment and machinery necessary for siege warfare.

The role of castles and town was crucial in medieval warfare, but in this one especially.
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Of 209 castles identified as being directly involved in the struggles, 72 were royal and, significantly, fourteen were episcopal; Rochester was the one remaining episcopal castle not under John’s control. Diplomatically, the Church and Papacy were on the King’s side, even if John considered Archbishop Langton a bare-faced traitor. The only leading ecclesiastic on the rebel side was Giles de Braose, Bishop of Hereford. The military strength this support afforded the royal cause came not just in castles but also in knightly quotas. By September 1215, all the royal castles except Hertford, Bedford, Carlisle and Colchester, and possibly York and Rockingham, were firmly in John’s command, with garrisons captained by steadfast loyalists. Of the 123 baronial castles involved, 51 were owned by loyal barons; 7 held by neutral barons were in John’s hands; and 12 rebel castles were under the supervision of royal constables. This left the rebel barons with only 53 castles: they were outnumbered three-to-one on this most telling of military assessments. The royal castles were also more impressive: perhaps fewer than half the rebel castles were constructed in stone, with only some 20 being tellingly redoubtable, compared to about 50 of the royal castles.

The loyal barons also held not just more but better castles.
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That the stronger barons tended to remain loyal also meant greater manpower resources. They could impose scutage on their own vassals and employ professional soldiers to match those in the service of the Marcher lords. These combined with John’s mercenaries to form a fighting force of considerable experience. By comparison, relatively few baronial knights could be termed veterans; of the leadership, only Saer de Quincy, William d’Albini, Roger de Crecy, Robert de Ros, William de Mowbray and Robert Fitzwalter were tried and tested campaigners. At this stage it was, as one historian has called it, ‘a war of professionals against amateurs’.
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No wonder the rebels looked abroad for powerful allies.

In Prince Louis, they found one. Channels of communication had long been open in one capacity or the other with the Capetian court. Philip Augustus might have sent surreptitious help, but, given the situation with the Church and, to a lesser extent, his post-Bouvines truce with John, he could not be seen to do so overtly. His son, however, offered an alternative strategy. The King could make a show of disapproval of the Prince’s involvement in the war, while tacitly encouraging it. It is even possible that he directed the rebel leadership to his son. Given the seriousness of the situation described above, the rebels called directly on Louis to assist them in September; having broken allegiance with their own king, they sought a new one. Louis, restless, ambitious and war-like, responded positively. A fig leaf of justification was required to warrant Louis’s newly discovered claim for the English throne. He proffered two. The first was a hereditary one through his wife, Blanche of Castile, granddaughter of Henry II; as far as successionary claims went, this was a blatant case of queue-jumping. The other was due to a putative, but unverified, condemnation of John in the French court following the murder of Arthur of Brittany; this was entirely disingenuous: as we have seen in Philip’s pseudo-feudal justification for expropriating Normandy from John, the Capetians, unlike the Papacy, had no overlordship of England. Both claims were hopeful and unrealistic and given purely for form’s sake. The barons had their
jus ad bellum
, and now Louis could pretend that he had his.