The Plantagenets (26 page)

To effect his plans, John ordered the largest military mobilization since Richard had embarked on crusade. At its heart was a massive expansion of royal sea power. Richard had been the first Plantagenet king to amass a significant English naval force, mobilizing large numbers of boats in 1190, subsequently building another seventy vessels to patrol the Seine in 1196, and founding Portsmouth as the great naval town to link England with Normandy. John now carried the policy forward. Forty-five warships had been built to patrol England’s coasts in 1203–4, but to expand the naval force any faster required different means. In 1205, therefore, John simply seized all the shipping that his constables deemed convertible for war. Even if a vessel was only large enough to carry a few horses, it was appropriated from its owner and amassed for the nascent royal navy.

To fill the warships, there was a drive to muster men and materiel. Thousands upon thousands of horseshoes, nails, crossbow bolts and arrowheads were struck. Pig carcasses were salted and great sides of venison rumbled on carts down to the coast. The national coinage was recommissioned. New silver pennies flooded the country, stamped with John’s image. Everyone handling one in receipt of payment for a service rendered to the war effort would have looked upon their king’s face: his hair curling about his ears, his beard cropped short, and his eyes, even in the simple minted likeness, bulging out at the holder, daring them to defy him.

Many of these coins were used to recruit mercenary soldiers: sailors and men-at-arms who were transported to the coast as midsummer approached. Perhaps a quarter of a year’s revenue was pumped into military preparation, funding the vast human cargo that was loaded onto the great ships that floated in the Solent. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, it was the largest English army ever assembled, and the greatest collection of ships in a single English port.

Here, at last, John was acting with some purpose. If England was busy, however, it was not entirely united. Although John proved he could assemble a vast army, he was hamstrung by the changing mood of the English barons. John’s invasion preparations may have resembled a crusade muster, but the cause did not move hearts with quite the same fervour.

John’s ambition to conquer Normandy was not universally convincing to his barons. When Normandy was threatened in earlier years there was a clear interest among the English magnates in supporting the king. Henry II had been careful to pursue the Norman habit of keeping his barons’ cross-Channel estates intact. He had retained the political integrity of the Anglo-Norman realm and made sure that the great lords remained truly Anglo-Norman – with interests and lands that spanned both territories and gave them a self-interest in assisting the king to keep them together and defend from external threats.

John’s loss of Normandy, however, profoundly changed an Anglo-Norman status quo that had existed for nearly 150 years. Forced to decide whether they wished to keep their lands in England or in Normandy, most barons made a choice in 1204 and threw in with one king or the other. They ceased almost overnight to become Anglo-Normans; and pledged their allegiance either as English subjects or French. The Channel became a divide, rather than a causeway between kingdom and duchy. A few great lords, like William Marshal, came to private arrangements with both kings for the security of their lands in either kingdom. They were in an equally ambiguous position: some had done homage to Philip for their Norman lands, and John for their English. It was impossible to go to war with either lord without betraying their promise to the other.

So when John arrived in Portsmouth to inspect his marvellous fleet in 1205, he found his English barons unwilling to come with him and fight. There was a furious argument at Porchester castle between John and Marshal. The king accused Marshal of acting treasonably in coming to terms with Philip Augustus; Marshal gave a grand speech in which he presented himself as betrayed by the king, and warned his
fellow barons that the king planned to disinherit him, and ‘will do [the same] to all of you once he becomes powerful enough’.

Even if the rest of the barons had been prepared to trust in John’s character as a general, they now were deeply unswayed by the prospect of fighting either for Norman lands in which they had no interest, or against a lord (in Philip) whose wrath was potentially as great as John’s. As the mood turned sharply against setting out for the French coast, Marshal and Hubert Walter begged the king not to cross the Channel. Walter listed some practical reasons: Philip was massively more wealthy and militarily stronger; John had precious few safe-houses on the Continent and was relying on an alliance with Poitevins, who were a naturally treacherous race; the king should not leave England undefended when Philip’s nobles had designs on invasion themselves; and England had no heir should John meet his end on the battlefield.

It amounted to a mass mutiny, in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable. The whole invasion force at Portsmouth was now useless, for without the barons who were to provide leadership and their own private resources, there was no hope of retaking Normandy. John was beside himself with rage. The king put to sea for a couple of days, sailing up and down the coast in the fruitless hope that he might shame or persuade the barons into changing their minds. It was to no avail. Salisbury’s expedition from Dartmouth successfully crossed the Channel to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle, but for the most part all the preparations of 1205 had come to nothing. Across the Channel Philip went about his business, going merrily into territories that his father could only have dreamed of visiting. The fall of Chinon and Loches in the summer meant that the whole of Touraine was now in French hands. It had been another disastrous year.

A Stay-at-Home King

Even if it would scarcely have been possible to repeat the fiascos of 1204 and 1205, it is still to John’s credit that in 1206 he experienced an upturn in his fortunes. Instead of being cowed by the failure of his Norman invasion, John adjusted his sights. He spent the winter of 1205 sending chests of treasure to various potential allies across the Channel, and the spring of 1206 touring the north of England attempting to personally charm the barons of Yorkshire, Cumberland, Cheshire and Lancashire into supporting his military endeavours. In April 1206 another large expedition set off from England, this time aiming for the site of Salisbury’s 1205 mission: Poitou. John was at the head of it, and he was supported far more strongly by the barons he had either bribed or coaxed into following him. Arriving in La Rochelle in June, he led an army around the lower coastal regions of France, recovering parts of Aquitaine. He regained the Saintonge, strengthened his hand in his wife’s county of Angoulême, and reversed the gains that Alfonso VIII had made in Gascony. Towards the end of summer, the king allied himself with a powerful Poitevin baron, Aimery de Thouars, and marched north towards Anjou. Here they received word that Philip II – who had preferred to assure himself that Normandy was secure rather than concerning himself about Aquitaine – was raising an army of his own. Not willing to let a whole summer’s gains be undone by defeat, John backed away, and in October 1206 agreed a two-year truce with Philip.

It had been a moderately successful campaign. Still, though, the fact remained that the Plantagenet dominions ruled over by John
amounted to England, the Channel Islands and a reduced coastal rump of Aquitaine – a mere slice of the great territories he had inherited. He was a king of England who, unlike the two monarchs he succeeded, would be forced to remain in his kingdom. As John learned to rule England, the realm discovered what it meant to have a characteristically restless, aggressive Plantagenet king permanently in its midst.

They found him a busy overlord. John wanted to know his kingdom intimately, and he was always on the move. This was not entirely novel, for itinerant travel was a matter of kingly necessity and very few areas of the English countryside could accommodate a king and his vast court for long. But even by royal standards, John was a restless traveller. He rarely stayed anywhere for more than a few days. He picked his way from royal castles and hunting lodges, to palaces and manors, resting awhile before moving immediately on.

The sight of John on the move would not have been wildly different from that of his father. John cared more for luxury, finery and display than Henry II had. He took regular baths in an age where this was not the general fashion, and the bachelors of his household were given to displays of courtly ostentation. Yet fundamentally the king’s household on progress was still a cavalcade of carts and packhorses, stretching out for hundreds of yards as the court rumbled through the countryside. Everything was portable: finely dressed servants carried bed linen and precious plate, heavy pouches of coin, the valuable books John enjoyed reading, and well-guarded caches of precious jewels. John’s chapel could be unpacked by the roadside, as could his dining room. The great snaking caravan train moved twenty or so miles every day, churning up muddy roads and drawing open-mouthed spectators as John called on visitors and enjoyed their generous hospitality.

John’s royal progress was a magnificent spectacle. And while its presence would have lain heavy on the shoulders of the Englishman who had to bear the burden of royal hospitality, the approach of the royal court also came with some advantages. For under John the court was not simply a travelling circus. It was also a judicial circuit.

Everywhere he went, John thought of justice. His tutor as a young man had been Henry II’s chief justice and one of the leading legal thinkers of his age, Ranulf Glanvill. As a result, John was deeply interested in the role of a king as supreme judge. He engaged with the law and sat in legal judgement with unprecedented zeal. He took a close personal interest in the smallest, meanest cases. And his law was much in demand. He travelled with professional justices in tow, and sat with them as they heard the cases that were waiting in the localities for the king’s law to arrive and decide them.

We have some extraordinary images of John’s court touching the lives of ordinary people in the early thirteenth century. The beneficiaries of his judicial intervention were many and varied. He gave reprieve to a little boy who had accidentally killed a friend by throwing a stone. He dismissed a case against a mentally deficient man who had confessed to a crime of which he was clearly innocent. He threw himself into the minutiae of cases that touched in only the slightest degree on his royal prerogative or interest. He was concerned for the plight of the poor.

All of this was highly unusual, and marked a significant departure from the behaviour of previous English kings. Henry II had been a great legalist, but he was interested primarily in devolving the judicial aspects of English kingship during his long absences. Richard, simply by virtue of the fact that he spent almost no time in England during his reign, had followed suit. By contrast, King John was fascinated by the great machine of Plantagenet law and government. He was a hands-on king – closely involved in day-today governance and keen to intervene in person wherever he could, from disputes between the great barons to stone-throwing between boys.

Of course, John could not run government and the legal system single-handed. Hubert Walter, the archbishop of Canterbury and veteran administrative servant, had died from a septic carbuncle on his back in July 1205, and John had – according to several chroniclers – declared: ‘Now for the first time I am king of England!’ With Walter gone, the king gathered around him a new set of advisers and officials. Some were brought over from the lost continental
territories. Men like Peter des Roches, Peter de Maulay, Falkes de Bréauté and Girard d’Athée were noticeable for their foreign names and manners, which reminded Englishmen that their king was not a native prince, even if he was now restricted to the realm. But there was not a wholesale takeover of government by foreigners. English-born men retained high posts, including the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the treasurer William of Ely and the chief forester Hugh Neville.

After 1206 the overriding aim for all of those men, and for John, too, was simple. They needed to raise money. In order to regain what had been lost in France, John was going to require vast sums of cash, both to fund his own armies of mercenaries and to pay a network of continental allies to oppose Philip. It promised to be a more expensive task for John than it had been for any of his ancestors.

Both Henry II and Richard I had had an advantage in fighting their wars against the Capetian Crown: both were generally defending their lands, rather than conquering them afresh. The cost of manning Richard I’s defensive lines along the Seine and paying his allies in Germany and Flanders might have been punitive, but they were borne in part by Normandy and the rest of the Plantagenet dominions, rather than being subsidized wholly by England. This was a luxury John did not have. Any hope of the youngest Plantagenet regaining his inheritance had thus to rely primarily on his English revenues.

John set about the task of exploiting those English revenues with a vigour that was evident to all. The hostile chronicler Roger of Wendover spread stories that John was a tight-fisted man who gave lousy tips to those who helped him. This was largely slanderous, but it demonstrated the popular view that the king was a miser obsessed with scraping every penny from his subjects. For indeed, there were piles of pennies to scrape. Even after the exactions of Richard’s reign, England was a source of considerable potential wealth. As John travelled England he would have seen everywhere the signs of its prosperity. The early thirteenth century was a period of booming development in trade and industry, as well as monetary inflation originating in
European silver from newly discovered mines, which had been flooding the country with coin since the 1180s.

In 1207 John made his first serious move to tap this wealth. He levied a thirteenth – a tax of one shilling in every mark – on the whole country’s movables. It raised an astonishing amount of money for the royal coffers: £57,425, or more than two years’ revenue. There had been a steady series of experiments with this sort of tax on goods, revenues, lands and property during the previous two decades, but the thirteenth was an extraordinary success, which emphasized both the wealth that existed in England and the Crown’s ability to tap into it through a well-organized system of royal administration. Although John did not know or plan it, the thirteenth was to form the model for the subsidy – the tax model on which all the regular income of medieval and Tudor England would be based.