Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (26 page)

One of the chroniclers of this crusade remarks that Richard became known as ‘the Lion’ because he never pardoned an offence. He was quick to anger and he could be ferocious. If monarchs are judged on the criterion of military prowess alone, however, Richard I would qualify as one of the greatest kings of England. He did not manage to recapture Jerusalem, but the legend of Richard in the Holy Land endured for long after his death. It was said that, for hundreds of years, Turkish mothers would quieten recalcitrant children by threatening them with ‘Malik Ric’ or ‘King Richard’.

When he was not in front of an army, however, he was not so fortunate. On his way back from the crusade, at the beginning of winter, he found the seaways blocked. So he decided to return by land, disguised as a pilgrim, through the territories of his enemies and rivals. It is clear that he was being watched, or that his presence was eagerly awaited. At the end of 1192 he was arrested by officers working for Duke Leopold of Austria.

The English king was a prize to be savoured. He was despatched to a castle on a rocky slope overlooking the Danube; he languished here while the important parties of Europe haggled over his fate. The duke of Austria sold him on to his overlord, Henry
VI, the king of Germany, while Philip of France proceeded to derive as much advantage from the situation as he could. He summoned Richard’s brother, John, to the French court. The two men came to an agreement. John would swear fealty to the French king, and in exchange Philip would support John’s usurpation of the throne. John came back to England and declared that his brother was dead. No one believed him.

John was thrown back on the defensive. The clerics whom Richard had left in authority, principally the bishop of Salisbury, raised an army and confined him to the area of two of his largest castles. The bishops were the true lords of government. Then there came news that the king of Germany was ready to release the English king for the sum of 70,000 marks. The amount was later raised to 150,000 marks. He was not dead; he had arisen to demand a large sum from his subjects. In order to pay for his ransom the authorities imposed a tax of 25 per cent on all income and moveable property; gold and plate were taken from the churches, and the annual income of the Cistercian wool crop was appropriated. The country was indeed being fleeced.

The king of France and John offered a larger sum to Henry VI, simply to keep Richard in custody, but after much negotiation the offer was finally rejected. That does not, however, minimize the perfidy of John in seeking to prolong his brother’s imprisonment. In February 1194, after the ransom had been paid to the king of Germany, Richard was released. The king of France sent a message to John. ‘Look to yourself. The devil is loose.’ The devil landed at Sandwich, a month after his liberation. It is said that a local lord, holding a castle in favour of John, died in fright at the news. It is an indication of the period itself that a handful of people, most of whom were related, controlled the destinies of many countries. A family feud could cost thousands of lives.

Richard had not been unduly alarmed by his brother’s rebellion. He is reported to have said, while still held in captivity, that ‘John is not the man to conquer a country if there is a single person prepared to resist his attempt’. In this he was proved to be right. And, on his return, he showed himself to be remarkably magnanimous to his sibling. John had remained in Normandy, fearful of returning to England, and when the king himself sailed across the
Channel John paid obeisance to him in tears. ‘You are a child,’ Richard told him. ‘You have had bad companions.’ He knew well enough that John might himself one day assume the throne, and did not wish to alienate him entirely. He had in any case taken the precaution of proclaiming his nephew, Arthur of Brittany (son of his brother, Geoffrey, killed at the Parisian tournament), as his heir; but who knew better than he the vicissitudes of fortune? Richard himself had married while on his way to the Holy Land, but had no children. It has often been assumed, on no evidence at all, that like other martial heroes he was homosexual.

The king performed a solemn ritual of ‘crown-wearing’ in Winchester Cathedral after his return from imprisonment. It was a way of impressing his subjects with the undiminished majesty of his sovereignty. He did not stay in England for very long. Less than two months later he crossed the Channel in order to reclaim the territories of Normandy that had been conquered by the king of France and to reduce to obedience some rebellious lords of Aquitaine. His sojourn in prison, from which it was always possible that he would not escape alive, had encouraged revolt. He stayed in France for the next five years, burning towns and besieging castles, subduing the surrounding country with sword and flame. His demands upon his English subjects, for money and for men, were prodigious; the country, according to a contemporary writer, was reduced to poverty from sea to sea.

In the last summer of his life the king was visited by Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, who had come to the grand castle of Château-Gaillard in Normandy to seek an audience; he wished to plead for the return of the confiscated estates of his see. He found Richard in the chapel, attending Mass, seated on his royal throne with the bishops of Durham and Ely standing on each side. Hugh greeted the king, but Richard turned his face away. ‘Lord king, kiss me,’ Hugh said. Richard still looked away. Then the bishop took hold of the king’s tunic. ‘You owe me a kiss,’ he said, ‘because I have come a long way to see you.’ ‘You deserve no kiss from me,’ the king replied. The bishop shook the king’s cloak. ‘I have every right to one. Kiss me.’ Then Richard, with a smile, concurred. He said later that ‘if the other bishops were like him, no king or ruler would dare raise his hand against them’.

Another sign of restlessness and upheaval became evident as a result of the king’s exactions. The citizens of London believed that they were being unfairly and even perniciously taxed, and their complaints were taken up by William Fitz-Osbert or William the Beard. He grew his hair and beard long in token of his Saxon ancestry. He was styled the ‘advocate of the people’, and at St Paul’s Cross argued that the rich should bear the burden of war finance. 52,000 Londoners were said to have supported him, but the authorities in the city hunted him down. He killed the officer sent to arrest him and fled to sanctuary in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, where after four days a providential fire forced him out. He was stabbed by the son of the officer whom he had killed but, while wounded, he was arrested and dragged at the tail of a horse to the gallows at Tyburn. His associates then proclaimed him to be a martyr and the chain that bound him to the gallows was the source of miraculous cures. The gallows itself was venerated, and so great was the press of people taking the bloody earth from the spot where he had died that a large pit was created.

Richard I never did come back to the land he ruled but did not love. He died from a gangrenous wound while fighting in Limousin, and on his deathbed he decreed that his heart should be interred in the cathedral at Rouen and that his body should be lowered into the tomb of his father within the abbey church of Fontevrault. So much for England.

And then there was one. John, the youngest of the sons of Henry II, had survived. He is one of the most interesting kings in English history, primarily because of his infamous reputation. He rivals Richard III in being considered the most ‘evil’ of the nation’s kings. In truth John and Richard were no more vicious or cunning than many other more lauded sovereigns; they were perhaps unfortunate, however, in the chroniclers who chose to write about them. The two monastic chroniclers of John’s reign, successively Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, were uniformly hostile. Shakespeare of course, more than any other, defined the image of John to posterity; his were wholly dramatic, but wildly exaggerated, versions
of the events to be related here. Enter King John, breathing stage fire.

The early life of John has already been glimpsed, disloyal to his father and to his brothers. Yet he was still a Plantagenet, and the sacred blood of the family mattered. Henry II appointed him to be ‘Lord of Ireland’, but he proved himself to be unequal to the task; his youthful pride and folly alienated him from the native leaders of that country. He was given manors and castles all over the Angevin Empire, and he was in charge of the administration of six English counties that paid their taxes directly to his own exchequer. In Richard I’s absence he created a court of his own, in England and in Normandy, which the more devious or ambitious magnates attended. He was the rising son.

Yet he was not the only claimant to the throne. Richard I had nominated Arthur of Brittany as his successor, as we have seen, and the twelve-year-old nephew was a real threat to John’s inheritance. The barons of Anjou, one element of the Angevin Empire, already supported the boy. Aquitaine was in the balance. The English and Norman magnates, cautiously and suspiciously, supported John. Although he could not be considered English, he was at least more English than the Breton Arthur. On hearing of his brother’s death John hurried to Normandy, therefore, where he was consecrated duke in the cathedral of Rouen; then he sailed to England where he was crowned king at Westminster in the spring of 1199. It had taken him just a month to assert his power.

He was some 12 inches (30 centimetres) shorter than Richard, and he may have suffered in implicit comparison with his brother and with his father. Certainly he grew up in a court filled with rivalries and suspicions of a more than usually bitter nature, with brother pitted against brother and brothers rising against their father. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gives the impression of being a wary and distrustful king. He went about armed and with a bodyguard.

He was not without humour, albeit often of a perverse kind. When he and his horse floundered in a marsh near Alnwick in Northumberland, he devised a suitable punishment for the men of that town who had not maintained the highway; he ordered that
every newly created townsman should, on St Mark’s Day, pass through that slough on foot. The custom was still being observed in the early nineteenth century. When the pope placed the country under excommunication, the king ordered that the mistresses of all the priests should be held in captivity until their clerical lovers ransomed them. It was an interesting punishment. There is another intriguing memorial of his reign. Among the legal rolls, then being composed in unprecedented numbers, is one stating that ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville gives the lord king two hundred chickens that she may lie one night with her husband’. The import of this is unclear, but it may mean that the lady was one of the king’s paramours and that she was asking to return briefly to her marital bed. The three incidents reveal that side of medieval life where jocosity and cruelty are allied.

King John was capable of violent anger, like his Plantagenet antecedents. When some monks at Faversham occupied their church, to prevent him from installing the superior he had chosen for them, he ordered the entire monastery to be burned down; nobody obeyed him, and he relented. Monarchs, male and female, have always had bad tempers; it is an aspect of their power.

An element of cruelty, or of ruthlessness, is evident in the first years of his reign. Arthur of Brittany had fled to the court of the king of France in order to shield himself from his uncle’s far from avuncular intentions. In 1202, however, John found him. Both of them were on military campaign in France, fighting over the Angevin lands. The king of France had allotted them to Arthur, whereas John considered them to be his proper inheritance. Arthur, now fifteen, had been besieging his grandmother – Eleanor of Aquitaine – in the ancient castle of Mirebeau, near Poitiers in west-central France. The spectacle of grandson threatening grandmother throws further light on the behaviour of the Plantagenet family.

John, on receiving the news of the siege, marched with part of his army day and night; they covered 80 miles (130 kilometres) in forty-eight hours. Taken by surprise, Arthur and his forces were surrounded. The boy was delivered into the custody of John, and taken to a dungeon in Normandy; in an interview with his uncle, he was defiant. He demanded England, and all the lands bequeathed to him by Richard, apparently adding that he would
not give him a moment’s peace until the end of his life. This was, perhaps, unwise. He was moved to a dungeon in Rouen, the capital of the duchy, and was never seen again.

The more picturesque accounts suggest that John, in a fit of Plantagenet fury, ran a sword through his nephew’s body and then dumped him into the river Seine. Or perhaps he hired an assassin. No one is quite clear. The evident fact, however, is that Arthur was dead within a few months. By the spring of 1203 it was widely believed that the king was instrumental in the murder of his nephew. This event has often been interpreted in the same light as the murder in the Tower of the two princes by their uncle, Richard III; but there is really no comparison. Pope Innocent III, for example, is reported as saying that Arthur was ‘captured at Mirebeau, a traitor to his lord and uncle to whom he had sworn homage and allegiance, and he could rightly be condemned without judgment to die even the most shameful of deaths’. A fifteen-year-old was considered to be an adult.

Although the death may have been a necessary and inevitable response by John, it helped to alienate his natural supporters in Normandy and elsewhere. Even more serious charges were levelled against him. He was severely criticized for his indolence or inactivity in the pursuit of war against the king of France. He was not acting like a king. One chronicler declared that he was sluggish, where his elder brother had proved himself to be vigorous and powerful. He became known as ‘John Softsword’. It was said that he had been enchanted by the sorcery of his wife, Isabella of Angoulême. It is more likely that he was infatuated by the power and majesty of kingship and refused to believe the worst. But the worst was happening. King Philip advanced further and further into Normandy, and the majority of John’s barons in that duchy defected to him. They no longer trusted the English king enough to remain loyal to him. There was soon very little left in France for John to defend. As the Angevin Empire collapsed around him, John sailed back to England. By June 1204 Philip had taken Normandy; all that remained of the duchy, in the possession of John, were the Channel Islands. Of the empire itself, only Gascony was preserved. It was the largest single blow to John during the whole of his reign.