Richard & John: Kings at War (69 page)

The ambitious Reginald had a high opinion of his own abilities and decided to ‘bounce’ the Pope into proclaiming him archbishop. Once in Rome he told Innocent the monks had already elected him and sought his confirmation. Innocent was no more likely to be gulled by an opportunistic cleric than by John’s agents, so he ordered a cooling-off period while he examined the merits of the possible candidates. News of the contretemps was carried back to England by a relay of couriers. Hearing of the election of Reginald in defiance of his explicit wishes, the irate monarch stormed down to Canterbury to confront the recreant monks. An Angevin ruler in a rage was not a pretty sight, and everyone knew that the ‘Devil’s Brood’ was notoriously unpredictable in such a situation. The monks therefore disingenuously denied that they had elected Reginald and were forced to make good their words by ‘electing’ bishop Gray on 11 December; John rubbed in the monks’ humiliation by ostentatiously awarding Gray five hundred marks for the ‘necessary expenses’ of his investiture.
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The bishops took no part in any of this but were simply required by John to add their approval. All that was needed now for Gray to become archbishop of Canterbury was papal ratification; accordingly a second delegation of monks set off for Rome with the king’s consent to obtain it. But their arrival simply made matters worse for, faced with ‘inputs’ from three sectors, John, the bishops, and the cathedral chapter, Innocent was becoming both perplexed and alienated. Reginald, still clinging to his golden dream, told the Pope, plausibly enough, that the second delegation of monks were handpicked stooges who had been bullied and browbeaten by John and did not represent the true views of Canterbury Cathedral.
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There now seemed to be at least four viewpoints. John’s agents claimed that no election involving Reginald had ever been held; Reginald and his coterie of monks insisted that he was the true archbishop according to canon law and had been duly chosen in a genuinely free election, not the charade organised by John on 11 December; the second delegation of monks argued that Reginald had been elected but only provisionally, and that this was rescinded by 11 December; and meanwhile a bishop’s proctor had arrived representing the English dioceses and claiming that their voices too must be heard.
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Innocent tried to cut the Gordian knot by quashing the election of both pretenders (Gray and Reginald), ruling the bishops out of court and insisting that all Canterbury monks then in Rome should hold a new election under his own impartial auspices, to be held in December 1206. When this suffrage produced a tied result as between the supporters of John de Gray and Reginald, the Pope announced a compromise candidate, one who had his personal backing. This was Stephen Langton, cardinal priest of St Chrystogonus, a native of Lincolnshire in his late forties, with a distinguished academic record in Paris. At the Pope’s urging the monks proceeded to elect Langton unanimously.
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Innocent consecrated Stephen Langton at Viterbo on 17 July 1207, but Langton was unable to proceed to England as the furiously angry John declined to confirm his appointment. Ominously he remained for six years at the Cistercian abbey of Pontigny, Becket’s old refuge during the stand-off years with Henry II. To show his contempt for the Pope’s decision, John expelled all the monks of Canterbury (except for a handful of the aged and infirm) and seized the cathedral’s property, expropriating revenues of nearly £1,500 a year.
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John’s rage against organised religion extended even to his half-brother and one-time confidant Geoffrey, archbishop of York, long a thorn in John’s side for objecting to the king’s barefaced robbery of the Church. After excommunicating all collectors and payers of royal taxes on Church property, Geoffrey fled to the continent, where he died in 1212. With no incumbent archbishops in either Canterbury or York John had a clear field for his depredations. It has sometimes, absurdly, been claimed that John was conventionally pious, and some lame circumstantial evidence has been adduced, as for instance his acting as pallbearer at the funeral of St Hugh of Lincoln.
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More convincing is the evidence of Adam of Eynsham, the biographer of Hugh, who knew the true situation; he reports that John never took communion after he came of age, not even at his own coronation .
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The truth is that John made obeisance to the forms and myths of Christianity when it suited him and when he could extract a political or propaganda advantage. No true believer could have lived with the burden of Arthur’s murder on his conscience. John’s negative attitude towards organised religion was probably partly cerebral, the product of his reading, and partly derived from his meanness and avarice. Piety in a monarch meant generosity and almsgiving, and this was never John’s strong suit. John was supposedly devoted to St Hugh but, when his alleged hero was celebrating Mass at Fontevraud in 1200, John was observed to be reluctant to make the customary offering of twelve gold coins.
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Again, immediately after his coronation, John went to Bury St Edmunds, where the monks looked forward to some royal munificence. John donated merely a silken cloth which he had borrowed from the sacrist and never paid for; then at Mass on the day of his departure he left only twelve pence for all the hospitality he had enjoyed.
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Employing what E.P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, John’s modern-day defenders simply sweep aside all the evidence of John’s atheism and impiety in Matthew Paris, Adam of Eynsham and other chroniclers and boldly assert that an irreligious John ‘cannot’ have been the case.
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John’s quarrel with the Church, then, was not something reluctantly taken up as a result of miscalculations and ineptitude but a crusade he, at least initially, entered on with enthusiasm. Innocent patiently explained to John why he had chosen Stephen Langton and given him a cardinal’s hat, but all John could understand was that
he
had not got his way. Furiously and intemperately, with never a thought for the consequences, he fired off a blistering reply that Langton was quite unacceptable, on the grounds of his long residence in Paris and his French connections - ‘consorting with his enemies’, as John put it. Innocent was not accustomed to such insolence. He rebuked John as a headmaster might a cheeky schoolboy, pointing out that his letter was contumacious, impertinent and muddled: for one thing Langton’s reputation was second to none, and for another John himself had congratulated him on his cardinal’s hat (before he knew of his elevation to Canterbury) - the king, then, was being a humbug. Innocent also pointed out, justifiably, that he had given John every leeway, that he had waited an unconscionable time to hear from him, even though he was under no obligation to consult him on a matter wholly within papal prerogatives; John should realise that the Pope had already treated him above and beyond the levels of consideration normal in such matters, and he could scarcely expect that canon law should yield to the caprices of an earthly and therefore ephemeral ruler.
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Moreover, once a proper election had been held, as it had in Rome, not even the Pope had the authority to rescind it or declare its provisions void. John sulked and fumed, telling his intimates that he might not be able to depose a bishop but he could certainly ensure that the said bishop never managed to exercise his functions in England. To make the point pellucid, he decreed that anyone calling Langton archbishop was guilty of high treason.
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As early as August 1207 Innocent warned John (through the medium of the bishops of London, Ely and Worcester) that he might place England under an interdict if John did not admit Stephen Langton.
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John, an exponent
avant la lettre
of the alleged Stalinist ‘how many divisions has the Pope?’, took no notice. On Sunday 23 March 1208 Innocent made good the threat. The original document containing precise details of the scope of the interdict does not survive, but we know from the sequel, and indeed from
a priori
principles, that a papal interdict meant a suspension of all normal activities of the Church - what has been called a ‘general strike of the clergy’; Confession went into abeyance, the sacrament of Extreme Unction was denied to the dying, the dead did not receive Christian burial but were interred in woods and ditches, marriages were not solemnised in Church, and the baptism of infants had to be performed by parents under the time-honoured emergency rubric.
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For six years the faithful of England languished in metaphorical limbo (and the dead presumably in the actual one), deprived of one of the few solaces the ordinary peasant, labourer or journeyman could aspire to. Only certain arrogant and worldly sectors of the regular clergy, the Cistercians for example, defied the Pope and carried on as normal. The bishops of London, Ely, Worcester and Hereford left the country, joining Langton and Archbishop Geoffrey of York in continental exile. Very few pastors were left in the dioceses, since the sees of Lincoln, Chichester and Exeter were currently vacant, and the bishops of Durham and Coventry were on their deathbed. Of the higher clergy, only John de Gray, the cause of all the trouble, and Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, were openly defiant of the pontiff, while the bishops of Bath, Salisbury and Rochester kept a low profile, trimming and tergiversating, until Innocent’s excommunication of John in October 1209 finally brought them down off the fence.
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The interdict saw John and Innocent in a ferocious struggle for hearts and minds, with the English king employing all the resources of black propaganda and primitive spin-doctoring. John was initially successful in putting over his line that a tyrannical Pope had deliberately insulted him and bishop Gray, and put in his own nominee, a man who was little better than a spy for Philip Augustus.
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Appeals to custom and tradition rightly stressed that it was unheard of for popes to intervene in the appointment of bishops, but John’s propagandists neglected to mention that this was only because of the high-handedness of the Angevins, faced with weak or short-lived popes. John cleverly played on the theme that he was being persecuted, when the only people actually being persecuted were those, like the monks of Canterbury and Langton himself, who had had the courage to stand by the Pope. John also used his favourite stratagem when he could not get the result he wanted by main force: he stalled, played for time and went through a dishonest charade of talks and negotiations. He invited Langton’s brother Simon to come to Winchester for discussions, and sent his own envoy, the abbot of Beaulieu, to Rome to try to snarl the Pope up in casuistry. Even one of his most prominent modern defenders admits: ‘John was merely trying to gain time: he offered concessions and then slithered out of them.’
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He made mendacious public announcements to the effect that Simon Langton had told him the only terms the Pope could agree to were unconditional surrender; ‘he said he could do nothing for us unless we put ourselves completely at his mercy.’
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Every time the Pope thought he was on the brink of an agreement, John would insist on adding the words ‘saving only his royal rights and liberties’ to the protocol, thus taking away with the right hand what he had appeared to give with his left, and returning the situation to the Becket-Henry II stalemate over the Constitutions of Clarendon.
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Innocent did his best to combat this tide of mendacity, while suffering from the obvious disadvantage that he could make almost no inroads in England, for any pro-papal communications rendered the utterer liable to the penalties for high treason. He tried to appeal to John’s barons, stopping short of an actual incitement to rebellion but urging them ‘Do not fear displeasing him temporarily in the name of justice.’
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But the barons had their own agenda as far as John was concerned and did not intend to get caught up in what was to them an irrelevant quarrel. Innocent grew increasingly frustrated and bewildered. When he laid interdicts on Laon in 1198, on France in 1199 and Normandy in 1203, they had proved remarkably successful. Philip Augustus caved in after just a few months of the interdict pronounced when he defied the Pope over his marriage.
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What was wrong with England?

John was confident he could ride out any turbulence from the interdict and in many ways actually welcomed it, since it gave him the excuse he otherwise lacked to expropriate Church property and grow richer - always a consideration in the brain of this most moneyminded of kings. As soon as the clergy downed tools in obedience to the interdict, John sent his officers to seize their property in the king’s name. The efficient administration of Hubert Walter and John de Gray gave John the ability to confiscate clerical property with ease; sheriffs were appointed as administrators of the forfeited estates and lorded it in abbeys, bishoprics and parishes.
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Having wielded the big stick, he then spoke softly and offered compromise: the clergy could have their property back on payment of appropriate fines and provided they made themselves personally responsible for paying future revenues to the king. Only a machiavellian like John could think of impounding property, getting the owners to pay for the ‘privilege’ of having it administered by royal officers, having them pay fines to retrieve their position and then, in many cases, agreeing to remit a portion of the retrieved revenues to the king as ‘thanks’ for his magnanimity. This was John’s way of avoiding tangling up his civil servants in long-term administration of church lands and benefices, while still retaining the money so mouth-wateringly offered by the original seizures.
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He got many takers for his barefaced scam and made huge sums of money from the fines; the abbot of St Albans, for example, paid 600 marks to regain his property, while the abbot of Peterborough recovered control of the abbey’s estates but had to pay an ongoing sum of £600 per annum to acknowledge the king’s ‘generosity’.
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By 1213 it was estimated that John had made more than 100,000 marks (the crippling sum levied for Richard’s ransom in 1194) from the interdict,
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which to him was big business.
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As a fraudster John had few medieval rivals, and only modern ‘privatisations’ can compare for barefaced audacity. In this, as in so many ways, John anticipated Henry VIII. His hatred of organised religion also surfaces in his scheme for fining clergy for failing to keep their vows of celibacy. The Middle Ages were notorious for unchaste priests, with some parochial houses more akin to crèches or bordellos than abodes of God.
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John noted with glee that Henry I had fined clergy for disobeying the Church’s decrees on celibacy and then sold them licences to marry, thus making two lots of money from self-contradictory transactions.
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John finessed this by ordering his officials to seize all priestly mistresses, concubines and courtesans, allowing them to be released only on payment of a ransom; his low estimate of human nature proved correct when the clergy flocked in to bail their women out.
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