The Plantagenets (28 page)

None of this was conceptually new. Previously, in 1187, Henry II had taken a quarter of the Jews’ chattels for a crusading fund. After Richard’s coronation, mobs whipped up by crusading fervour had burned and plundered London’s Jewry, leaving its inhabitants slaughtered in the street. But even by the standards of the day, John’s measures were harsh. He made heavy demands on individual Jews, and backed up the demands with horrible violence. In Bristol, one Jew refused the king’s demands. He was imprisoned and his jailers began smashing his molars out. According to Roger of Wendover: ‘the king ordered his agents to knock out one of [the Jew’s] cheek-teeth daily, until he paid ten thousand marks of silver … after they had for seven days knocked out a tooth a day with great agony to the Jew, and had begun the same operation on the eighth day, the Jew … gave the said sum to save his eighth tooth, even though he had already lost seven.’

This was a measure of the cruelty to which John could sink. The next year he began his most notorious vendetta of all: the hounding of the de Briouze family. This was a pursuit that united all of John’s instincts and policies: his thirst for wealth, his interest in establishing direct royal power over the Celtic fringe of Britain, and his fierce hostility towards some of his richest and greatest subjects.

William de Briouze was a baron of ancient Norman stock, whose royal links stretched back to the Conquest. His wife Matilda was also of noble lineage. Together, they built up the Briouze line into one of England’s greatest families, and established a power base in the Welsh Marches, where they shared an important role with men like William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, in keeping the native Welsh subdued and English power strong.

William had been near many of the important events of Richard and John’s reigns. He had served at Châlus during the campaign in
which the Lionheart was killed. He had been a near-constant companion to John during the early years of his reign. John had farmed out Welsh policy to William and men like him, granting them baronies in Wales and the Marches and encouraging them to expand their lands through military conquest. Briouze had been granted landed rights around Limerick in Ireland, and paid a handsome yearly fee for the right to pursue an inheritance there. The family also held property in Surrey, Hertfordshire and Devon and two valuable priories seized under the Interdict. Briouze’s second son had been appointed bishop of Hereford. The result was that after a decade of John’s reign, Briouze was a very significant baron, who had acquired vast tracts of land, and many wardships, castles and manors. He had also acquired secrets, and his closeness to the king in Normandy in 1203 meant that he was probably one of the few who knew what had really happened to Arthur of Brittany.

By 1208, John had started to see Briouze less as a valuable servant and powerful subject who had been well rewarded, and more as a potential troublemaker who was providing less than his financial due to the Crown. In the course of his career William had, like most other barons, run up huge debts to the Crown. He had accrued large feudal fines and fees in exchange for his titles and inheritances, amounting to well over £3,000, payable in instalments to the royal exchequer. In March 1208 John began calling in the debt in its entirety.

According to Roger of Wendover, John’s demands for repayment were accompanied by demands for hostages. When royal messengers were sent to collect them from the Briouze family home, William’s wife Matilda, ‘with the sauciness of a woman’, sent the royal messengers packing with the shrill cry that John had done away with Arthur and would most likely do the same for her sons. According to Wendover, Matilda shouted that the king had ‘basely murdered his nephew … whom he ought to have kept in honourable custody!’

This was, to say the least, impolitic and it earned the Briouze family John’s undying rancour. For the next three years he foreclosed on the family’s debts and began to remove them from office and positions. In a public letter later written to justify his actions, the king explained
to the realm that he was pursuing the family ‘according to the custom of England and the law of the exchequer’, but it was a campaign of sustained legalized malice. William de Briouze was sacked as bailiff of Glamorgan and replaced by a foreign mercenary John had brought back from the Continent. Castles at Hay, Brecon and Radnor were taken back into royal hands. On the pretext of recovering debt, John allowed mercenary soldiers to raid Briouze lands; he compounded the misery by sending the Briouzes a bill for the expense. The Briouzes attempted to retaliate by attacking the castles that the king had seized for them, but that simply put them further outside the law. John made life so dangerous for them that in early 1209 the family was obliged to flee across the Irish Sea, where they took refuge in Leinster with William Marshal.

Marshal was the earl of Pembroke, but he and John had never really been able to work with one another. Since his quarrel with John in 1205, Marshal had been out of favour with the king, and he was now one of a number of exiles from John’s court who, by the end of 1209, were living in Ireland. Marshal welcomed the Briouzes with all his chivalrous kindness, and others followed the example. There was widespread sympathy for Briouze on the island, and his family was sheltered by various of the great lords there, who attempted to keep him safe until peace could be made with the king in England.

John, however, was not in peaceable mood. He had no desire to be brought to an accommodation with the Briouze family. Rather, the fact that they had successfully become refugees from his law focused his mind on subjecting Ireland to stricter control by the English Crown. He would not tolerate the existence of a haven for dissenting bishops (many had fled to Ireland during the Interdict) and persecuted barons, and in the summer of 1210 he began to muster an invasion, amassing hundreds of ships at Pembroke.

News of the massive invasion fleet spread quickly across the Irish Sea. Some of the exiled barons made their peace before John arrived. William Marshal wrote that he ‘well understood what the King’s designs were, that is that his sole aim was to find an opportunity to do him harm, and without cause’. He crossed to England and submitted.

Marshal then accompanied John on his campaign in Ireland. The campaign pursued two main strategies. ‘He made and ordained English laws and customs, appointing sheriffs and other agents to govern the people of that kingdom according to English laws … After this the king proceeded in great force, and took several of the fortresses of his enemies.’ During a fearsome military progress that lasted little more than two months, John destroyed most of his enemies in Ireland and reduced the opposition to a rump.

The Briouzes were understandably terrified. Left with nowhere to hide in Ireland, Matilda and her eldest son fled from Ulster to Scotland. Yet there was no respite from John’s power. In August 1209 the king had marched a large army to the Scottish borders and imposed the humiliating Treaty of Norham on the ageing King William the Lion. Scotland was no longer a bastion of resistance. Matilda and her son were captured and handed over to the English king. William de Briouze, meanwhile, escaped to France and lived out the rest of his years as an outlaw – albeit one who now shared the full story of Arthur’s death with the horrified French court.

It was a measure of the Briouzes’ extreme fear of what fate would befall them in John’s hands that when she was captured Matilda offered the king the outlandish sum of 40,000 marks to ransom herself and escape royal custody. Yet John was not interested, for once, in promises of vast wealth – it was obvious in any case that Matilda did not have 40,000 marks to give him. She and her son were sent either to Windsor or to Corfe castle. They would not survive the year.

One of the Briouzes’ greatest crimes was knowledge. As a family they held the secret of Arthur’s death, and it was no surprise that they were terrified of meeting the same fate as the young Breton. Their concerns were well grounded. Matilda and her son never emerged from their imprisonment. Before the end of 1210 they had been starved to death in jail. It was said that when the dead bodies of mother and son were found, they were still huddled together against their cell wall. Matilda’s son bore tooth-marks on his body. Mad with starvation, his mother had tried to eat him.

This, then, was what happened to those who crossed King John. By the end of 1210 he had unambiguously stamped his might across virtually everyone in England. Silent church bells signified a godless realm under an excommunicate king. Toothless Jews and barons’ dead wives bore testament to John’s financial ruthlessness – a ruthlessness which had swelled the royal treasury with so much wealth that a national coin shortage was developing. In Scotland and Ireland there was awestruck respect for the might of the English Crown. In 1211, John would lead two massive armies into Wales against the dominant Prince Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, otherwise known as Llywelyn the Great. After a series of decisive victories, John imposed territorial losses and humiliating terms of peace on the Welsh. In Britain, if not in France, John appeared to be the mightiest of all the Plantagenets. As Walter of Coventry wrote: ‘in Ireland, Scotland and Wales there was no man who did not obey the nod of the king of England – a thing which, it is well known, had never happened to any of his forefathers.’ Unfortunately for John, the same fate that had abandoned his predecessors was about to desert him, too.

Beginning of the End

Peter of Wakefield was a Yorkshire hermit. He was famous in the north of England as a simpleton who ate a staple diet of bread and water, but who could predict the future. It was said that Christ had appeared to him three times: twice at York and once at Pontefract. The Saviour had taken the form of a child, held in the hands of a priest, who had said to Peter: ‘Peace, peace, peace’ and instructed him on the way to live a more virtuous life.

In 1212 a new vision came to Peter. The king’s reign, he said, would end before the next anniversary of his coronation – Ascension Day in May 1213. According to Roger of Wendover, the hermit would exclaim: ‘a vision has revealed to me that the king shall not rule more than fourteen years, at the end of which time he will be replaced by someone more pleasing to God.’

In an age when superstition was rife and rumours could be powerful, Peter of Wakefield’s prophecy was a wild success. When it reached the king he laughed at the story. But as John brooded on it, he became alarmed. He had Peter of Wakefield arrested and dragged to court to explain himself. According to Wendover, the king questioned Peter personally, asking: ‘if he should die on that day, or how he would be deprived of the throne of the kingdom. The hermit replied: “Rest assured that on the aforesaid day you will not be king; and if I am proved to have told a lie, do what you will with me.”’

Needing no encouragement, John sent Peter to Corfe castle and put him into the custody of William d’Harcourt, ‘who loaded him with chains and kept him imprisoned to await the event of his prophecy’.
But even with Peter in prison, Roger of Wendover records that his declaration spread far across England, ‘so that almost all who heard it put faith in his words as though his prediction had been declared from heaven’.

The year 1212 was supposed to be John’s moment of triumph. His expedition to Ireland had been a success: the most belligerent native kings kept in check by the many hostages taken and Anglicized lordships and bishoprics created. Success in Ireland had matched the extension of English royal mastery over the Welsh, and an aggressive programme of castle building had been initiated to secure the gains made in north Wales and throughout the Marches. John had achieved far more territorial advantage in Wales than either his father or his great-grandfather Henry I, and he had humiliated the native princes. To fortify still further his gains, he had expanded his hostage-taking programme, and the court had been swelled by young Welshmen taken as security against rebellion.

Against Scotland, John had also driven home the advantage gained in the Treaty of Norham of 1209. When the Scottish king, William the Lion, fell ill and began to suffer plots against his rule, John pressed the advantage. He granted his goodwill in exchange for hostages and promises of vast cash payments; he had knighted William’s twelve-year-old son and heir over dinner on Easter Sunday in 1212, and provided the boy with mercenaries to defeat and kill Guthred MacWilliam, a rival for the Scottish throne. The English Crown was pre-eminent over the British Isles.

Unsurprisingly, after five years of extraordinary success, John’s military confidence was returning. It was helped by the fact that he was now vastly rich. Even discounting the windfall revenues earned from Jews and the Interdict, John had managed to more than double his annual income since the loss of Normandy, so that it was regularly exceeding £50,000 a year. Although his reign had seen a period of rapid inflation, John was still richer in cash terms in 1212 than his brother Richard had been before departing on the Third Crusade, with as much as £200,000 in cash stockpiled in various English castles. Buoyed by success, John felt ready to take the fight for his duchy of
Normandy back to Philip Augustus. He was rich enough realistically to contemplate reviving Richard’s successful foreign policy of bribing Philip’s neighbours into a grand anti-Capetian coalition. Diplomatic approaches were made to former allies such as his nephew, recently restored as the Emperor Otto IV, and Reinauld, count of Boulogne. Mountains of silver pennies were spent recruiting mercenaries and fitting out an army.

But as John’s preparations for an invasion of his former continental possessions moved onward in summer 1212, his apparently iron hold over his kingdom and its neighbours began to shake and crumble. It began in north Wales, where John’s castle building had provoked the remnants of the Welsh resistance to band together against his rule. Even as forty towns around England received their demands for men to serve on the Continent, John was suddenly faced with guerrilla attacks upon English Marcher castles from the woods and hills of inland Wales. English knights and soldiers were brutally beheaded and acrid smoke blew up from burning towns. The Welsh rebels slew and looted wherever they could, then melted back into the countryside.