Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (32 page)

Richard Coeur de Lion has gone down in history as the greatest of holy warriors. And he certainly cultivated an image as a romantic hero. Magnificent, brave and chivalric, he almost lived up to the myth he created. Another figure of legend, thanks to the tales of Robin Hood, was John. In the Angevin manner John was hungry for honour and power. Above all he wanted to be recognized as Richard’s heir. And the king knew it. When Richard left for the crusade he made John swear to keep out of England for three years.

He should have known better than to trust one of his siblings.

Within a year John was back in England, alarmed at news that his nephew Arthur of Brittany, Geoffrey’s son, had been accepted as heir by Richard and William de Longchamp. John took possession of royal castles at Nottingham and Tickhill. He then moved against Longchamp. First Longchamp was forced to accept John as heir. Then John moved to depose him as viceroy. He was poised to take over effective rule of England in Richard’s absence, which he no doubt hoped would be long or end tragically. But he had reckoned without the loyalty and political sense of the council, the Church and the nobility. They closed ranks against the young usurper. For there was a contingency plan already in place against John’s duplicity. Longchamp was replaced by Walter de Coutances – Richard’s nominee as justiciar. Clearly Henry II’s system of government was standing firm, even when the monarch was far away and the pretender close at hand.

John was still without the power he craved. To get it, he was prepared to do almost anything. In 1193, the king of France, Philip Augustus, lured John away from England with great promises. Together they plotted to seize Richard’s lands in France. John returned to England to raise allies and men. But again he had overreached himself. He lost many of the castles and lands he had taken in England, and, what was worse, gained a reputation as a traitor.

Richard, by contrast, had earned a reputation as the greatest of Christian kings for his deeds on the crusade. Then, on his return, he was captured by the Holy Roman Emperor and held captive. John and Philip Augustus saw another chance. The emperor demanded 100,000 marks in ransom for Richard: John and Philip Augustus offered to pay to keep him a prisoner!

This flagrant disloyalty was John’s undoing. The council of England launched an offensive against him, taking back the rest of the castles he had seized except his stronghold in Nottingham. When Richard returned he retook this as well, pacified England with remarkable speed, and immediately left for Normandy, which, thanks to John and Philip’s treachery, was in a much worse state. John, for his part, begged on his knees for Richard’s forgiveness. Foolishly, if generously, it was granted.

Richard was forced to spend the rest of his reign trying to recover his empire in France rather than return to crusading. England was hard pressed by tax to fund his wars. But it was given with good enough grace. For Richard’s wars were seen as just, whether they were against Saladin or France. He was popular with his subjects and admired by contemporaries as the very model of a good king.

Richard died in 1199, shot by a crossbow when he was putting down a rebellion in the Limousin. His body was buried at Fontevrault with his parents; his heart was buried at Rouen. It was appropriate, for as king Richard had spent just six months in total in England. He had left it well governed, however, and its reputation enhanced and his father’s empire in rude health. He would be a hard act to follow, especially as England had got used to its absentee king, and the more so because his heir was, incontestably, John. ‘My brother John’, Richard sneered, ‘is not man enough to conquer a country if there is anyone to offer even the feeblest resistance.’

III

There is no more contrary breed than professional historians. For John’s contemporaries and for most succeeding generations of historians, John was the opposite of his brother Richard and the very model of a bad king. But a new generation of historians has come along who argue that, on the contrary, John was ‘a good thing’, or at any rate a good administrator. He was unusually interested in the mechanics of government, which he pursued with an often obsessive interest. And his reign sees the start of the great parchment rolls which record the government’s correspondence and which form the foundations for the scholarly history of the Middle Ages.

But to praise John for being a royal filing clerk shows historians looking after their own with a vengeance. For John’s obsession for record-keeping was a sign not of strength, but of weakness. He was so keen on documentation because he was so mistrustful of his subjects, and his subjects in turn distrusted a king who was nit-picking and always eager to revive an old, outdated royal imposition or invent a new one.

The result was tax, tax and more tax. But money on its own was not enough. John was no mighty warrior like his father Henry II. Nor a charismatic leader of men like his brother Richard. Still worse, there was an unfortunate streak of mistrustfulness, even paranoia, in his character. He had been easily manipulated in his abortive rebellions. Now the manipulator had turned into his tormentor. Philip Augustus, his former fellow conspirator, was that rare thing at this time, a capable king of France. Defeated by Richard, he now saw his chance against John.

Thanks to his reputation for treachery and cruelty John found it impossible to keep together Richard’s allies on the Continent. Added to that he was a poor commander and diplomat. He failed to halt Philip’s advances and his high-handed manner stirred up rebellions in his own lands. Norman barons swapped sides and John could not persuade English magnates to follow him in a war of conquest. Once nicknamed ‘Lackland’, he was now known as ‘John Swordsoft’.

By 1204 John had been shorn of a third of his territories, including his ancestral lands of Normandy, Brittany and Anjou. For the first time since the Norman Conquest the king of England was that and little more.

Deprived of empire, he turned his gaze on what was left – England. From 1206 he began sucking the country dry. Taxes reached unprecedented levels. The Jews were persecuted. The barons were squeezed hard and those who fell into debt to the crown were deprived of land and hounded into exile. The wealth of the nation, exacted by increasingly arbitrary means, was hoarded in royal castles. The sums were enormous (some 200,000 marks); so was the resentment.

Next John decided to follow in his father’s footsteps by striking at the power of the Church. But, once again, he had the misfortune to encounter one of the greatest medieval popes: Pope Innocent III.

The struggle began as a dispute about the appointment of the archbishop of Canterbury. But it quickly escalated as both sides wheeled in their heaviest weapons. Innocent III laid England under an ‘interdict’; this was a sort of clerical general strike, in which the clergy refused to say mass, marry couples or bury corpses. In retaliation, John resorted to one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite weapons against the unions and confiscated all the property of the Church. Who would win? The clerical strikers or the royal strike-breaker?

Pope Innocent was a formidable politician. And he turned real weapons as well as spiritual ones against the king of England. For he not only excommunicated John but also declared him deposed and invited Philip Augustus, John’s other great enemy, to launch a crusade and seize the throne of England for himself.

Under simultaneous threat by his two most dangerous enemies, John had to buy one off. The price he was prepared to pay was astonishing – it was England itself. On 15 May 1213 King John received the pope’s representative at Dover Castle. At the meeting John agreed to everything that the pope demanded: to do penance for his offences against the Church; to accept the pope’s choice as archbishop of Canterbury; and to pay compensation for all that he had seized from the Church. But the king also went much further and, in a dramatic move, issued a charter in which he acknowledged the pope as his overlord and promised to pay a large annual cash tribute.

John had handed ultimate authority over the kingdom of England to the pope and had agreed to pay him a yearly fee to lease it back. John had saved his neck. But at what cost? He was humiliated at home and abroad, as a king and as a man.

There was now only one way for John to re-establish his authority: to reconquer his lost lands in France. It was an expedition long in the planning. All that cash which had been wrung from his people and coerced from his barons had been amassed for one purpose. John was playing a desperate game for the highest of stakes. If the dice rolled in his favour and he won a great victory in France all would be well. But once again his luck failed.

On 27 July 1214 the English and French armies met at Bouvines in Flanders. At first the English seemed victorious and Philip himself was thrown from his horse. But the French struck back and overwhelmed the English. Paris rejoiced, but in England John faced mutiny. He had blown his vast wealth – England’s wealth. Without it he could not bully and bludgeon his subjects. Instead, he was at their mercy.

The barons sank their own differences and presented a united front against the king. Never again, they decided, would a king be able to behave as John had done. And they backed up their demands with the threat of overwhelming force. The part of honest broker between the king and the barons was played by Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury. He professed to be neutral but in fact he inclined to the barons and secretly helped them structure their demands. In January 1215 the king met his barons in London. They agreed to reconvene in Northampton in April, where John would reply to their demands. But, as ever, he thought he had a trick up his sleeve. He rushed over foreign mercenaries and persuaded the pope to condemn the rebels. So it was no surprise when he did not turn up in Northampton.

The response was astonishing. John’s opponents renounced their loyalty to the king. London opened its gates to them. Civil war seemed inevitable. But in June the king capitulated. On the 15th the two sides met in a field near Windsor known as Runnymead. The barons, who had come fully armed, presented their demands and King John reluctantly, and already in bad faith, granted what they wished. The agreement became known as the ‘Magna Carta’, the Great Charter. But in fact it was only the most famous and ambitious of a succession of attempts – stretching back through the coronation oath of Henry I and the memories of Anglo-Saxon England – to define the rights and duties of king and people.

The original Magna Carta sealed by John himself has long since vanished. After all, the king had no desire to preserve the record of his own humiliation. But copies were distributed to each county, of which four survive today. Nowadays the fame of Magna Carta rests on clauses like this: ‘no free man shall be seized or imprisoned or stripped of his goods or possessions save by lawful judgement of his peers or equals or by the law of the land’. Or this: ‘to no one shall I sell or deny or delay justice’. Provisions like these are, or have become, what we call basic human rights and echoes of them survive in the statute book and in the universal declaration of human rights. But they come a very long way down the document. At the top are the provisions that really concern the authors of the charter – the bishops and barons. The first clause states: ‘the Church in England shall be free’. That is, free from royal interference. While the second clause limits the king’s rights to exact death duties or fines from barons when their lands were handed over to their heirs.

Magna Carta quickly became and remained a touchstone of liberties throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. It also had very sharp contemporary teeth because one clause permitted the barons to use force if necessary to bring John into line if he showed any backsliding from Magna Carta. It seemed a total defeat. But John had one last card up his sleeve. Immediately he appealed to his new overlord the pope to have the charter annulled on the grounds that he had been coerced into agreeing to it. Innocent agreed and Magna Carta was promptly declared null and void.

The barons were outraged at the king’s faithlessness and open war broke out. For the barons it was no longer a question of restraining John but of dethroning him. They even turned to the national enemy and invited Louis, son of the French king, to take the English throne. Louis invaded and by the autumn of 1216 had seized much of the south-east of England, including London itself. Would England be divided, or would there be the first violent change of dynasty since 1066?

Suddenly, at this point King John died on the night of 18 October 1216, unmourned and unloved. ‘Foul as it is,’ one contemporary wrote, ‘Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John.’

His heir was his son Henry, only nine years old.

The child’s cause looked hopeless. But with John safely out of the way the prospect of a French succession lost its attraction for an important group of the barons and bishops. They decided that the young Henry should be brought to Gloucester and crowned as quickly as possible. On the morning of 28 October 1216 the impromptu coronation took place.

The boy, who was a grave, handsome, golden-haired child, was brought to Gloucester Cathedral. He wore a specially made set of little royal robes. First he took the customary coronation oath; then he paid homage to the pope’s representative, the legate; finally, and with all the traditional ceremonies, he was anointed and crowned, though the crown was in fact one of his mother’s tiaras or hair ornaments. Bearing in mind the circumstances, it was inevitable that Henry’s coronation was something of a makeshift affair. But it was a real one nonetheless. It had imbued him with the mystical, even magical, authority of kingship and he never forgot the fact. Now it was up to him – or rather his regents – to persuade the country to accept him as king.

Their first moves were not military but propagandistic. For already there was something called public opinion and the regents appealed to it by issuing a letter in the king’s name. This letter neatly turned Henry’s most obvious drawback – his age – into an advantage by arguing that his youth meant that he had no part in the sins of his father: ‘we hear that a quarrel arose between our father and certain nobles of our kingdom, whether with justification or not we do not know. We wish to remove it forever since it has nothing to do with us.’ Next, Henry’s regents made a major political concession. They reissued Magna Carta, but removed the clauses authorizing the use of force against the king. At a stroke the charter was rescued from oblivion and the cause of civil war removed. The French abandoned their claim to England and Henry was universally recognized as king. For the remainder of his minority, the spirit of Magna Carta was adhered to. Demands for tax were accompanied by reconfirmations of the charter to reassure the barons that there would be no return to arbitrary government. This made it harder to raise cash, and it subjected the crown to the opinions of the great landowners. But it was a case of needs must.