Great Tales From English History (18 page)

AD 1215

B
EFORE HE DIED, HENRY II, THE FATHER OF
Richard the Lionheart, commissioned a painting that showed an eagle being pecked to death by its young.

‘Those are my sons,’ Henry would say.

The painting hung in his palace at Winchester, and showed one of the eaglets poised on its father’s neck, waiting for the moment to peck out its eyes. That particularly vicious nestling was John, explained the old king - ‘the youngest of them, whom I now embrace with so much affection’ - and he predicted that his favourite son would one day betray him.

So it proved. Henry had four adult sons (two of whom, Henry the Younger and Geoffrey, would predecease their father), and he worried that the youngest had no inheritance. He nicknamed the boy ‘Jean sans Terre’ - John Lackland - and the fond father provoked a series of bitter family battles by trying to pare off bits of the other brothers’ inheritances to give to John. In the Middle Ages a royal family battle could be just that. In 1189 the furious Richard led an army against his ailing father so as to compel him to hand over his birthright. As he marched across France his forces were swelled by many who calculated that the old man had become a lost cause and that they had nothing to lose by rallying to the Lionheart.

‘Woe, woe,’ Henry muttered, ‘on a vanquished king!’

Just a few days from death, Henry II was compelled to surrender, asking only that he be told the names of those who had switched sides to support Richard. The old man was shown the list - and John’s name was at the head of it.

Having betrayed one member of the family, John then set about betraying another. If Richard is the Prince Charming of English history, John is the pantomime villain. No sooner had Richard left on crusade for the Holy Land in 1189, than John started plotting to steal England from him. When the news came through of Richard’s capture and imprisonment in Germany, he conspired with King Philip II of France to keep Richard in jail.

‘Look to yourself,’ Philip warned John when he discovered their plot had failed, ‘the devil is loosed!’

It was a measure of the Lionheart’s chivalry that he forgave his younger brother when he arrived back in England and John pleaded for mercy.

‘Think no more of it, John,’ he said. ‘You are only a child’ - and the King took the twenty-seven-year-old child off for a feast of freshly caught salmon.

John succeeded Richard in 1199 when the Lionheart died without legitimate offspring, and for most people their experience of the new reign was no different from the old. Nobles, townspeople, farmers - all were taxed and taxed again as John went about campaigning in an effort to hold together the extensive family lands in France. But while Richard’s military adventures had yielded romantic glory, John had little to show but defeat.
Mollegladium
(Softsword) became his Latin nickname according to the monkish chroniclers, who paint a disapproving picture of an idle and luxury-loving king, gloating over his jewels and spending long hours in bed.

As churchmen they were biased witnesses, since much of John’s reign was dominated by long-running conflict with the Church. In 1205 a dispute arose over the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and John refused to accept the Pope’s candidate. His Holiness responded with an interdiction on the whole of England - a general ‘lock-out’ by the clergy. Churches were closed, the bells tied up and silenced. For six years the clergy held no services in church, refusing to perform baptisms, weddings or funerals. You might get the priest to come to your home privately to bless your baby or your son’s marriage, and masses with sermons were still held once a week. But these had to take place outside the shuttered churches, in the often damp and chilly churchyard. The priest might also attend deathbeds to administer the last sacraments, but after that the people had to bury their loved ones in ditches or woodlands, making do with their own improvised prayers.

If religion is the opium of the people, Britain went without its fix for six years. People were in fear for their immortal souls. Without being fully welcomed into the Church, they believed, their children could be possessed by devils; without proper burial they might not get to heaven. For a faith-based society, the years of the interdiction were a grievous and demoralising time. In the Holy Land the English had recently been numbered among God’s heroes. Now they were cast out among the goats.

In 1209 John was singled out personally by the Pope for excommunication - a total rejection by the Church, even worse than interdiction, and a badge of shame that condemned him to hellfire and damnation. Every bishop but one left the country, and in the end John caved in. He accepted the Pope’s candidate as Archbishop of Canterbury and the interdiction was lifted in mid-1214. But when England suffered military disaster that summer, the humiliation could not help seeming like the judgement of God. John had already lost control of Normandy to the King of France, and the French victory at Bouvines on 27 July 1214 made the loss final.

Softsword had something of the snake about him. It was not unusual for a medieval king simply to eliminate rivals, as John had done early in his reign when he imprisoned the son of his late brother Geoffrey - Arthur, who was never to be seen again. But when John later heard that a noblewoman had been gossiping about Arthur’s disappearance, he had the culprit jailed with one of her sons and left them both to starve to death. The King gave the impression that he did not know how to play fair, that he would not hesitate to ride roughshod over anyone who crossed him. This, combined with his military failure, the church interdiction and his unrelenting tax demands, set the stage for the momentous and historic events of 1215.

In January of that year, a group of disgruntled barons who had gathered for the Christmas court called for the restoration of their ‘ancient and accustomed liberties’. They seem to have been thinking of the sort of contract promising better behaviour on the part of the monarch that Ethelred the Unready had struck with his nobles and bishops in 1014. These ideas had been repeated by William the Conqueror’s two sons, William Rufus and Henry I, when, in 1087 and 1100 respectively, they were canvassing for support after their throne-grabbing gallops to Winchester. It was Henry’s coronation charter that now provided John’s critics with a model.

In the spring of 1215 the barons decided to act. Assembling at Stamford in Lincolnshire, they started marching south, gathering support along the way. On 17 May sympathisers welcomed them to London, and their occupation of the city seems to have persuaded John to come to terms. After some preliminary discussions, the two sides met in the middle of June to negotiate on the banks of the Thames near Windsor in a meadow named Runnymede - literally, the ‘soggy meadow’ - and the result of several days’ hard bargaining was the famous Magna Carta and a rather optimistic declaration of peace.

History has romanticised the Great Charter as the far-reaching document that established the people’s liberties, when in many respects its purpose was scarcely grander than to protect the rights of the rich warrior landowners who were fed up with being so heavily taxed. The barons were certainly not fighting for the rights of the often downtrodden labourers, the serfs and villeins who worked on their estates (‘serf’ from the Latin word
servus
- ‘slave’ or ‘servant’; ‘villein’ from
villa
- the country house that owned them). But, willy-nilly, the rights for which the barons fought had a universal application.

‘No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way . . .’ read clause 39, ‘except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.’ Here was a call for fair play and justice that would resonate in later years - and the following clause backed it up: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’

Other clauses regulated feudal landholding and inheritance, guaranteed towns their freedoms, and gave merchants the right of free travel. A start was made on reforming the hated laws that protected the royal hunting forests (see pp. 112-13), and a serious attempt was made to check abuses of power by local officials. Clause 35 set up the first countrywide system of standardised weights and measures - a bonus to trade and to all consumers.

All through the last days of June 1215, the clerks at Runnymede scribbled away furiously, making copies of the charter to be taken and read out in every shire of the land. Magna Carta was the first written document limiting the powers of the king to be backed up by practical enforcement. A watchdog council of twenty-five barons was set up to make sure the king obeyed the charter, and a commission of twelve knights in each county was charged to look into local abuses of the law.

It was the watchdog council that proved the snag. John refused to accept that a non-royal body should infringe his sacred power, while several of the twenty-five barons started to throw their new-found weight around. By the autumn, England was engulfed in civil war. The following spring Philip II of France sent an army under his son Louis to help the barons - if the English could invade France, why not vice versa? - and John spent the last months of his reign tramping the country in a vain attempt to quell the rebellion.

The final scene was staged that October in the misty wetlands of East Anglia, where the royal baggage train struggled to cross the four-and-a-half-mile estuary of the Nene River (then known as the Wellstream) near Wisbech on the Wash. Misjudging the tide, the King’s horses, wagons and riders were caught by the incoming waters. Jewels, gold and silver goblets, flagons, candelabra - even John’s crown and coronation regalia - all were swallowed up by the sucking eddies of the Wash. The lost jewels of King John remain undiscovered treasure trove to this day.

The King himself was already sick with dysentery. After weeks of camp-fire food, he had overeaten when entertained by the townsfolk of Lynn and, according to one chronicler, his idea of a cure was to consume quantities of peaches and fresh-brewed cider. It was one delicacy too many. Borne to the nearby town of Newark on a stretcher of branches cut from Fen willows, John Lackland breathed his last on 18 October 1216.

Furious over the indignities of the interdiction, caused by John’s refusal to do his Christian duty as they saw it, the monkish chroniclers of the time had no doubt which way his soul was headed. Hell was a foul place, wrote one, but it would now be rendered still more foul by the presence of King John. Disapproving of such moralistic judgements, ‘value-free’ modern historians have pointed to the growth of royal record-keeping during John’s reign as evidence of how efficient his government administration was - as if bureaucratic efficiency was not one of our own modern gods.

But John’s painstaking record-keeping has certainly provided us with some interesting insights into his life. The detailed inventory of what he lost in the watery East Anglian wastes included pieces of glass, which seem to have been portable windowpanes ready to be cut and fitted into the castles he visited. John was clearly a man who loved his comforts. We read in his accounts of William his bathman, paid a halfpenny a day for his services, with a few extra pence as a tip when he actually prepared a bath. The record shows us that John was unusually clean for his time - he took a bath every three weeks - while an entry describing ‘an over-tunic for when his Lordship the King gets up in the night’ reveals a further claim to distinction. John was England’s first king to be recorded as owning a dressing-gown.

AD 1225