The Plantagenets (23 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
This was hardly an incontestable claim. The thirteenth century was dawning, but twelfth-century fogginess over the exact rules of royal inheritance still endured. Did the son of a king’s older brother (in Arthur’s case, this was Henry II’s third son Geoffrey) trump the claim of a king’s younger brother? Lawyers and writers disagreed. Customs varied across Europe and quite frequently the issue was still decided according to the personal suitability of the individuals concerned. Certainly Hubert Walter could not give an irrefutable defence of Arthur’s claim in the dead of that April night. But he gave Marshal one dire warning, based not on the law of succession, but on his assessment of John himself.
‘This much I can tell you,’ he said. ‘You will never come to regret anything you did as much as what you’re doing now.’
John did not inspire confidence. This was perhaps his defining characteristic. Neither princes nor bureaucrats were fully inclined to believe him or to believe in him, and frequently this was with good reason. John’s career to 1199 was pockmarked by ugly instances of treachery, frivolity and disaster, since his earliest, unwitting involvement in the dynastic politics of the Plantagenet family as ‘John Lackland’, his father’s coddled favourite, until his covetous behaviour during his brother’s long captivity. John’s behaviour during the latter years of Richard’s reign had been broadly good, but it did not take much to recall how appallingly he had acted while Richard was out of the country. John had rebelled against Richard’s appointed ministers, interfered with ecclesiastical appointments, connived at the destruction of the justiciar William Longchamp, encouraged an invasion from Scotland, spread the rumour that his brother was dead, entreated Philip II to help him to secure the English throne for himself, done homage to Philip for his brother’s continental lands, granted away to
Philip almost the whole duchy of Normandy, attempted to bribe the German emperor to keep his brother in prison, and almost single-handedly created the feeble state in which Richard had found the Plantagenet lands and borders on his eventual release from captivity.
And these were only the political facts. The personal perception was worse. Although John had been quiet and dutiful in his service to Richard following their reconciliation in 1195, he was still thought by many to be untrustworthy. Contemporary writers also commented on John’s unpleasant demeanour, which seemed dark in opposition to the brilliant glow of chivalry that emanated from his brother. Like Richard and Henry II, John was already known for his tough financial demands and fierce temper. Like Henry he was thought to be cruel, and he tended to make vicious threats against those who thwarted him. Unlike Henry and Richard, however, he was also weak, indecisive and unchivalrous. Several writers noted that John and his acolytes sniggered when they heard of others’ distress. He was deemed untrustworthy, suspicious, and advised by evil men. Very early in his career, he was thought by William of Newburgh to be ‘nature’s enemy’.
Amid all this hostility, in 1199 John could not be at all sure of a smooth accession. He was certain, however, that Philip II would support Arthur’s rival claim. John’s first action therefore was to seize the royal treasure at the castle of Chinon. He was right to do so, for as he rode on to visit his brother’s tomb at Fontevraud and pay his respects to his widow, the winds of opinion in the Plantagenet heartlands were billowing behind Arthur. On Easter Sunday, the barons of Anjou, Maine and Touraine – the beating heart of the empire created by Henry II – declared for the Breton, at a stroke cutting off Normandy from Poitou and the rest of Aquitaine. At Le Mans, his father’s dearest city, John was turned away by the garrison and nearly trapped by Philip and Arthur’s armies.
Only in Rouen, where the rules of ducal inheritance were more clearly in favour of a brother over a nephew, did John meet with something like a welcome. On 25 April he was invested as duke of Normandy with a crown of golden roses placed on his head. This, at
least, was a triumph – for to lose Normandy after all that had passed in the last five years would have been a sorry failure indeed.
For security in the rest of Richard’s dominions, John relied on trusted agents to rally support behind him. The redoubtable Eleanor, now seventy-five years old, led the movement to secure her son as heir in Aquitaine. She had despaired of John’s behaviour in the early 1190s but was ultimately loyal to her children. The wife of two kings, she would do all in her power to see to it that she was the mother of three. Now she commanded an army under the famous mercenary captain Mercadier, harrying forces loyal to Arthur of Brittany and helping to secure John’s succession in the face of stern opposition. In England, meanwhile, Marshal turned his belief in John’s legitimacy into action. He sent envoys to convince the English barons to take an oath of fealty: it should be obvious to those who had interests on both sides of the Channel that John, already invested as duke of Normandy, was a better choice to safeguard their positions. So with the support of Hubert Walter and Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the justiciar, John was accepted as king. But as Marshal, so ardent a supporter in that first night’s conversation, later recalled: ‘Neither the Gascons nor the men of Limousin, the men of Poitou or Anjou, or the Bretons agreed to it at all, for they had no love for his overlordship.’
The old king of France met the new king of England on the border between their lands. There were only two years between them in age, but they were separated by a world of experience. It was mid-January 1200. John, aged thirty-two, had been a king for eight months, Philip II, although only thirty-four, for just short of twenty years. Christmas had passed, and a truce that had been arranged to discourage warfare during the season of Nativity had held. Now came the first meeting between the two kings since John’s accession. They talked for a long time about the truce they were making. During their conversation, they embraced warmly. It must have felt to John as though he was being pulled into the warm fold of kingship.
In contrast, Philip must have known that here, at last, was a Plantagenet rival whom he could hope to dominate. His experience with John ran deep. They had gone to war beside and against one another already – but never on equal terms. During their long history together, John had always been the child, the younger brother, the supplicant, Philip the king and the judge.
It is not too fanciful to assume that Philip despised John. The English king’s behaviour during Richard’s imprisonment had been nothing short of craven. The deals he had been ready to make to feel the weight of a crown on his head had suggested that John hankered for power, but had a stunted idea of what power truly meant. This was a man who would blink first in a negotiation, and who would allow his prerogatives to be chipped away without a serious fight.
John had been crowned king by Hubert Walter at Westminster Abbey on Ascension Day, 25 May 1199. To accompany him the king had brought a few friends over from the Continent. There was little time afforded for a magnificent ceremony, as had been the case in the past. The new king had been showered with gifts and reverence, but the whole thing smacked of a necessary formality, rather than a pageant to be revelled in. John could not, nor wished to, stay very long in his new kingdom. The anointing and the great ceremony were mere precursors to the defence of Normandy, Anjou and the soft points of his new dominions’ borders.
Within a fortnight of his coronation, John had embarked again for the Continent. The situation in Normandy was already urgent and he needed allies. Philip backed Arthur of Brittany as a rival claimant to John, and Anjou, Maine and Touraine were all under attack from the combined French-Breton forces. The middle swathe of the Plantagenet territories, which joined the duchy of Normandy with that of Aquitaine, risked being overrun.
Having disembarked at Dieppe, John had renewed the alliances Richard had so carefully cultivated with the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. In autumn 1199, he marched against Philip in Anjou. Here, John managed to achieve a great coup. William des Roches – the most powerful baron in the county, who was leading the rebellion there on behalf of Arthur’s claim – suddenly switched sides. Messages of support for the new English king had filtered through from both the Emperor Otto IV and from Pope Innocent III, and it seemed to des Roches that the tide was going out on Philip.
When des Roches clashed with the French king over a castle in Maine, a convenient rift was opened. Des Roches met John in Le Mans to formalize his change of allegiance. He brought with him a brilliant tribute: his two most important comrades, Arthur of Brittany and his mother Constance, ready to make their peace. In theory this should have removed Philip’s reason to fight. But it relied on John being able to make peace with his nephew. He could not. Constance and Arthur approached John’s court with more trepidation than des Roches. They simply did not trust him to do right by
them. On 22 September they went through the formalities of official submission. But as night fell, they absconded, and fled back to Philip’s court.
This, then, was the situation when John and Philip met on their borders in January 1200. Arthur had submitted to John, but was in Philip’s hands, a latent threat. Furthermore, many of John’s allies were abandoning him for Innocent III’s fourth crusade. The counts of Flanders, Blois and Perche, and the marquis of Montferrat, all announced during a tournament in Champagne in November 1199 that they were taking the Cross. Baldwin of Flanders had doubled the insult by subsequently negotiating peace with Philip, removing John’s ability to fight on two fronts in Normandy.
It was enough to convince John that peace was preferable rather than attempting to push Philip too hard. Thus, five months after their January embrace, in May 1200 the Treaty of Le Goulet made a supposedly permanent peace between the kings.
Looking back on the Treaty of Le Goulet, the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury remembered public opinion about it, overheard from the chatter and gossip of pilgrims and traders. John’s detractors, Gervase remembered, nicknamed him ‘Softsword’. Gervase himself disagreed, thinking that war weariness and financial exhaustion made peace prudent. But there was no doubt that John’s concessions to Philip at the very outset of his reign struck some as ill advised. Even as the treaty was sealed, one northern French writer, Andreas of Marchiennes, looked with contempt on John’s ‘sluggish’ pursuit of a war that Richard had fought with manly vigour. Andreas considered that at Le Goulet, John had signed away his right to the castles for which ‘the whole war had been fought’.
The peace terms were skewed heavily towards France. Philip agreed to recognize John as lord for most of the continental lands held by his brother and father. He agreed that Arthur should do homage to John as a vassal. But he refused to concede to John important border regions. Most importantly, the whole of the Norman Vexin, with the exception of Richard’s massive fortress and town at Les Andelys, was
to remain French. So too was Evreux, another vital border county between France and Normandy. Further south, in Berry, John granted away Issoudun, Graçay and Bourges. These may have felt like small sacrifices to John, but as Richard and Henry II had realized, it was from such small sacrifices that greater troubles arose.
Perhaps even more significant than John’s abandonment of the border-country scraps was his realignment of his feudal position in relation to Philip. Since 1156, when Henry II first did homage to Louis VII, the Plantagenet kings had accepted that in theory they held their continental lands from the French Crown. But this had remained, broadly, a formality. John turned it into feudal reality. In return for Philip’s acknowledgement of his rights, John agreed to pay 20,000 marks as a succession duty. This was a vitally important concession – for it pushed the theoretical feudal relationship further into the realms of the real.
Furthermore, Philip also littered the Treaty of Le Goulet with instructions appropriate to a more imperious lord–vassal relationship. John received Arthur’s homage with the caveat that he should not infringe on his new vassal’s prerogatives. He was forced to renounce his alliances with Flanders and Boulogne – not just as a gesture of peace, but as a recognition that they were first and foremost Capetian vassals, and loyal to the French Crown before the English. Only Aquitaine – still technically held by John as his mother’s heir – was excluded from the treaty.
There were many good reasons for John to have conceded so much at Le Goulet. His brother had subjected his realm to some of the most severe financial demands in its history. How long would heavy taxes, demands for baronial aids, and oppressive treatment of the Church be sustainable? How many more Châteaux Gaillards would be required to keep the French king out of the Vexin – essentially a small strip of land with more strategic than economic importance? How long could England bankroll the mercenaries necessary to keep Normandy on a permanent defensive footing? How could John hope to keep alive his late brother’s system of alliances, when all around him his potential friends were disappearing on crusade? Was it not far
simpler to make peace with Philip than to struggle wastefully against him?
The tempting answer to all of these questions lay in the agreement John sealed with an embrace in January 1200 and a treaty in May. Just as he had shown in 1193–4, John had the appetite for power, but not for a fight. Thus, in the first five months of the thirteenth century, John granted away a position that had taken his brother, father and grandfather almost 100 years to establish. It would be easy to dismiss the pilgrim wags overheard by Gervase of Canterbury who laughed at John Softsword: they knew not the troubles of a king. But how much greater trouble lay ahead would soon be clear, and much of it was rooted in the concessions made at Le Goulet.
On 29 July 1202, a large party of knights rode noisily up to the walls of Mirebeau castle. There were more than 250 of them: a substantial force, with an intimidating purpose. They had come to capture Eleanor of Aquitaine.