Louis: The French Prince Who Invaded England (19 page)

Despite what must have been his satisfaction with his new engine of war, Louis did not rely on this alone. His troops were already blockading the landward side of the castle; now his ships, after unloading their cargo, secured the sea outside Dover so the castle was completely cut off from outside aid and could not be either reinforced or reprovisioned.

Louis’s first point of attack was the gatehouse and barbican to the north of the castle enclosure. As well as his stone-throwing machinery he also had his men build a wattle siege-tower (a device which put the besiegers on the same level as the defenders on the wall, meaning they could shoot arrows across at them; alternatively it could be filled with men and then moved closer to the wall, so the besiegers would not need to try and scale it by ladder, which left them open to attack or bombardment from above) and he also set men, under cover of a protective moveable device known as a ‘cat’, to undermine the walls. As had been demonstrated at Rochester the previous year, mining was an effective strategy, but it was a very slow process as the attackers were only able to use pickaxes and other hand tools against the gigantic stones and their foundations.

The siege was by no means one-sided. While Louis was directing these operations from the field north of the castle, the garrison made frequent sorties, charging out on horseback to kill and wound the attackers in hand-to-hand combat. Louis’s men repulsed them but were unable to inflict many casualties in return as the defenders could retreat back behind their walls. Those inside were also able to use their crossbowmen as snipers, picking off anyone foolish enough to bring himself into range without adequate protection. Louis, who had no doubt been told in his youth of the agonising end of Richard the Lionheart from blood poisoning following a wound inflicted by a crossbow at a siege, was not harmed, although he probably wore his mail armour almost permanently.

The weeks went by, and gradually men began to trickle away from Louis’s force. The count of Holland had taken the cross and now decided that the time was right for his pilgrimage to the Holy Land; some knights felt that their obligatory period of military service was up; some mercenaries thought they were not being paid enough; others were killed by the frequent sorties of the defenders. Committed to staying in one place, Louis for the first time began to lose the initiative in the war, and with it his temper. Roger of Wendover notes that he was ‘greatly enraged and swore he would not leave the place until the castle was taken and all the garrison hung’.

In the middle of August there was a breakthrough when Louis’s knights made a direct and bloody attack on the barbican which protected the main gate, and were able to capture it; the
History of the Dukes
tells us that Peter de Craon, who had defended the barbican so well for many weeks, was killed in the attack along with other men. However, although the besiegers were one step closer they were still confronted with the double-towered gatehouse; and, even if they could batter their way through that, the defenders could regroup further by taking refuge in the keep. A long campaign was still on the cards.

Additional good news reached Louis at Dover at about this time when he heard that King Alexander of Scotland had finally taken the town of Carlisle (although, in what was becoming a theme, the castle was still holding out), and that he was on his way south to do homage to Louis. Louis left the siege long enough to go and meet the young king at Canterbury, and then, in what may have been a pointed gesture to Hubert de Burgh and others, he had Alexander accompany him back to Dover to give homage in public for the lands he held in England. Roger of Wendover tells us that ‘Alexander … did homage to him for the right which he ought to hold from the king of the English.’ As with the charter we mentioned earlier, which demonstrated Louis’s conviction that he had the authority to grant lands in England, this event indicates that Louis believed himself entitled to receive this homage. The occasion no doubt also gave him further confidence: he already had much of the nobility of England on his side and might consider himself the
de facto
king, but this was the solemn recognition of his claimed status, in public, by a crowned monarch. And the situation certainly attested to Louis’s control over large parts of England: Alexander had been able to march with his men some 400 miles (640 km), all the way to the south coast, without encountering any resistance.

After the ceremony Alexander made his way back north, again managing to travel the length of the country without incident. Louis continued with the siege, and was heartened by further reinforcements from France: Peter de Dreux, who had left his obligations in Brittany in order to come to the aid of his cousin and companion, and Thomas, the young count of Perche. Perche was a rising star of the French nobility: he had succeeded to his title in 1202 at the age of seven after the death of his father, had fought for King Philip at Bouvines while still in his teens, and now at twenty-one was building a reputation for deeds of arms and chivalry. In an example of how inextricably the men on both sides of the conflict were linked, Perche was a kinsman of John’s most faithful supporter, William Marshal (his great-grandmother and Marshal’s mother were sisters); he also had a tenuous claim to the English throne himself as his maternal grandmother was John’s sister Matilda, but he supported Louis wholeheartedly.

Both nobles had brought knights and men with them, which would help the cause, but the news also came across the Channel that the new pope, Honorius, had confirmed Louis’s sentence of excommunication. It was a bitter blow, but Louis was by now in far too deep to back out from claiming the crown of England even if he had been so inclined. He would push on: once he had subdued the country, captured John and been crowned he would have the leisure to talk properly to the pope, not to mention the power to influence him.

In the meantime, as August turned into September, Dover still needed to be subdued. The miners had been continuing their slow and painstaking work, and now came the breakthrough: one of the towers of the gatehouse was brought crashing down, and Louis and his knights could charge into the breach.

This is what the knights had been waiting for. Trained since boyhood to engage in hand-to-hand combat, they detested having to kick their heels at a siege while miners and engineers held sway. Now they had the chance to throw themselves at the enemy in person, to take out their frustration at the long siege, to hack with their swords and their axes into armour and flesh. But the defenders were just as frustrated, just as fierce, and even more desperate – after all, had Louis not threatened to hang them all once the castle was taken? The normal policy at the time was that if a garrison surrendered they would be allowed to leave unharmed, but that if a castle had to be taken by storm then those inside were liable to be executed. After irritating Louis and thwarting his plans for so many weeks they were unlikely to be treated with clemency if defeated, so they fought back with all their might, filling the gap in the wall with men. Slowly but surely they repulsed the attack, holding the line, pushing the besiegers back and keeping them out long enough for running repairs to be made to the breach, which was shored up with timbers taken from buildings inside the compound. The barricade held. Dover still stood.

The stalemate could not be allowed to go on forever. Force had not worked; starving the garrison out would take too long and Louis needed to be on the move. To stand still for too long, as he well knew, was to lose momentum. Louis agreed a truce with Hubert de Burgh, and his army withdrew from the siege on 14 October 1216.

* * *

While Louis had been stuck at Dover, Robert de Dreux and the count of Nevers were making little progress at Windsor. ‘They were there a long time,’ says the
History of the Dukes
, tersely, ‘without achieving much.’ Windsor was held by an experienced commander who had with him sixty knights, and Robert did not have anything like the power of the siege machinery which was being deployed at Dover, or the number of men which would be required to compensate for this and overrun the castle by sheer force of numbers. And, meanwhile, John was finally on the move.

Bolstered by the knowledge that Louis was still at Dover, John emerged from his safe ground in the west of England, leaving Cirencester on 2 September 1216 and reaching Reading four days later. He then moved to within striking distance of Windsor, but yet again he avoided a pitched battle: he sent forward his archers to loose their arrows on the besiegers and a small skirmish ensued, but no sooner had the besiegers readied themselves for a full-scale battle than John’s forces melted away, as he once more lived up (or down) to his nickname of ‘Softsword’. Instead of risking himself in an engagement John turned to a favourite tactic, ravaging and burning his way through lands held by the barons supporting Louis, extorting money on the way and reaching Cambridge on 16 September. The besiegers of Windsor, still making little headway, left the castle in order to follow John; it was harvest time so the damage he was doing to crops would have serious repercussions. Roger of Wendover notes that ‘the cruel destruction which he caused among the houses and crops of the said barons afforded a pitiable spectacle to all who saw it’, and Matthew Paris also deplores his actions:

Meanwhile, the lieutenants of Falkes [de Bréauté] who was the captain of all those abominable soldiers who were mercilessly plundering … having thrown many other citizens into chains, they either took them away or, having devised tortures for their minds, impoverished them to a state of starvation … everywhere there was misery and lamentation; everywhere was the sound of wailing.

The sound of wailing, the smell of burning, and the sight of hungry men, women and children followed John everywhere as he spent the rest of September ravaging Norfolk and Suffolk and heading towards Lincoln. Louis’s men could not catch him and force him into an engagement as he continued his technique of battle avoidance, preferring instead to deny his enemy economic resources by murdering the defenceless. Monasteries and abbeys were not safe from his men either; but as the clergy and people begged for deliverance from the cruelties of the man who had been their king, little did they know that their prayers were about to be answered.

In early October 1216 John laid waste to a great tract of land through Grimsby, Louth, Boston and Spalding before stopping at Lynn where he was well received and given lavish gifts; possibly in genuine welcome, or possibly as protection money to bribe him not to destroy the town. The citizens also hosted a feast for him and it was here that he first began to fall ill. Our sources vary on the exact cause – dysentery, food poisoning, or sickness caused by exhaustion or gluttony – but he managed to get himself back on the road on 11 October. He crossed the Wash, and it was somewhere during this crossing that his baggage train suffered some kind of accident resulting in the loss of his belongings. Roger of Wendover gives the most dramatic account:

He lost all his carts, waggons, and baggage horses, together with his money, costly vessels, and everything which he had a particular regard for; for the land opened in the middle of the water and caused whirlpools which sucked in everything, as well as men and horses, so that no-one escaped to tell the king of the misfortune. He himself narrowly escaped.

Roger is almost certainly exaggerating here, for if the situation had been as serious as he describes it would have been mentioned in more detail by other sources. The
History of William Marshal
mentions ‘terrible misfortune’, but only in relation to John’s illness; Ralph of Coggeshall writes more calmly that a mishap befell part of the baggage train when some packhorses were mired in quicksand ‘because they had hastily and incautiously set out before the tide had receded’, resulting in the loss of some household effects. He adds that some members of the household were also sucked in, but does not say how many or give any names.

It was a superstitious age. To the sick John, crippled by stomach pains, deserted by most of his barons, pursued by the stench of burning crops and houses, the loss of his belongings must have seemed the final sign that God had abandoned his cause. His kingdom was gone, his health was gone, his hope was gone. As he staggered his way to Swinesford Abbey and Sleaford, he felt his mortality: he wrote to the new pope asking him to protect his heir. By the time he reached Newark Castle on 18 October 1216 he could no longer sit in his saddle and was having to be carried on a litter. He made a hurried will: his desire to bequeath goods to ‘make satisfaction to God and Holy Church for the wrongs I have done them’ and to ‘distribute alms to the poor and to religious houses for the salvation of my soul’ was a ploy used by many dying kings who had done as they liked in life but now feared that their sins would catch up with them when they were face to face with the Almighty. Once the executors were named – among them the papal legate Guala, William Marshal the earl of Pembroke, Ranulf the earl of Chester and Falkes de Bréauté – John whispered his final confession to the hastily summoned abbot of Croxton, and gave himself over to the agonies in his stomach and the torments of his mind.

* * *

Louis had left Dover after the truce was agreed on 14 October; within days he was back in his stronghold of London, planning his next move. The quickest way for news to travel in 1216 was on horseback, a fast messenger aided by good conditions and changes of mount being able to make perhaps 40 miles (65 km) a day. A journey from Newark to London on muddy roads during the shortened autumn daylight hours would take three or four days, so it was likely to have been on or around 22 October that the momentous news reached Louis at the palace of Westminster: John was dead.