Richard & John: Kings at War (82 page)

The whirlwind of terror and destruction continued north, through Newark, Doncaster, Pontefract, York, Northallerton, Durham and Newcastle. Only occasionally did John rein in his brutal mercenaries, as when he cut off the hand of a man who had seized a cow in the church-yard - it was not the cow he was concerned with but possible ecclesiastical, and papal, repercussions.
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The Church aside, only huge payments in the form of taxes or ransoms could ward off the Flemings and Brabantines posing as the wrath of God. The towns of York and Beverley bought John off for £1,000 and the holders of large houses had to pay anything between 80-150 marks for the privilege of not having their manors burned down around their ears. Minor knights could usually buy freedom from atrocity for anything between ten and a hundred marks, provided they threw in a couple of palfreys as a sweetener.
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As he neared Newcastle, John focused on Alexander of Scotland, who had tried to set his seal on the baronial grant of Northumberland by a vain siege of Norham Castle. John determined to punish him and told his followers: ‘By God’s teeth we shall run the little sandy fox-cub to his earth.’ An alternative, and perhaps more plausible version is that he vowed ‘to run the red fox out of his lairs’.
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January 1216 saw the first invasion of Scotland since 1072 and the first by an English army since 1097. On the 11th of the month John reached Alnwick, then took and burned Berwick on the 15th, making sure that his routiers tortured the inhabitants before butchering them. The madness of King John was surely proven by his insistence on personally setting a torch to the house in which he lodged overnight.
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He then took and burned Roxburgh, Dunbar and Haddington, but he dared not stay more than ten days in Scotland because of the reports of fresh dangers in England, so turned back before reaching Edinburgh. The dauntless Alexander thereupon reinvaded England in February and laid siege (unsuccessfully) to Carlisle.
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At the end of January John turned south again, cutting a swathe of destruction through a different stretch of countryside. The journey south followed the same pattern of rapine, fire, atrocity, scorched earth, cruelty and barbarism. A rapid march took him through Newcastle and Durham to Barnard Castle by 30 January, after which he swung east to the North Sea and, passing through Skelton, paused to catch breath at Scarborough (12-14 February). He then swung west to York, south to Pontefract and east again in a loop to reach Lincoln, where there was an extended, four-day stopover (23-27 February). Having chastised the north, it was now his intention to ravage that other heartland of the rebels, in East Anglia and Essex. He was at Fotheringhay at the end of February, and from there launched his locusts on Norfolk and Suffolk.
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A vanguard went ahead while John had another pause at Bedford (29 February - 3 March). After rampaging and ravishing through Bury St Edmunds, his hordes came to rest outside the castle of Roger of Bigod at Framlingham, which collapsed before him as all the other rebel strongholds had done.
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Swinging down through Ipswich, he laid siege to Colchester on 4 March. Although the garrison here had been stiffened by some of the French troops who had finally levered themselves out of the stews and gambling dens of London, it proved no more capable than other defenders; surrender was immediately agreed on condition the French troops were allowed to march out free, leaving their English comrades to languish in prison until ransomed. When the French reached London, their alleged perfidy in agreeing to such self-satisfying terms caused a sensation. The barons called them traitor, arrested them and even contemplated a mass execution, until someone pointed out that that was a sure way to deter Louis and Philip Augustus from coming to England. It was decided to hold them to await Philip’s pleasure.
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On 25 March John proceeded to Hedingham, seat of Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford. This too surrendered and de Vere, an important rebel leader, came to beg the king’s mercy and renew his oath of fealty. His submission was a clear sign that the barons were losing heart. Soon other important magnates were joining the queue to make submission. The earl of Clare and his son were the next in a series of defections from the rebel ranks, and very shortly members of the inner circle like Robert de Ros, Peter de Bruis and the egregious Eustace de Vesci were trying to discover what terms they could make.
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A string of safe-conducts signed by the king showed how clearly the rebels had been cowed by John’s lightning campaign of terror. The Gadarene rush of one-time fire-eaters to compose their peace with John threatened to become a mass panic. John played his hand cleverly. Those who returned to their allegiance found that it was a simple matter to regain their confiscated lands. Indeed, by March the claims for recovery of expropriated manors were so numerous that the Chancery devised a common-form writ to deal with them.
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The process was accelerated because John’s southern detachment had not been idle while the king was harrying the north, but had overrun the whole of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Hertfordshire and even Middlesex, confining the barons even more closely in London.
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John had every reason to feel complacent about what he had achieved through war crimes. He was now amply supplied with money, more than enough to keep his brutal mercenaries happy, and, just to make sure there was no temptation to desert, he topped up their pay and perquisites with further lavish bonuses. Next John announced that his victorious army would march on London.
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But he had tarried too long in the north. Facing mortal peril, the barons had at last secured the massive reinforcements from France they had been hoping for.

The previous arrival of 7,000 French troops ought to have been the fillip the barons needed to galvanise them into decisive action, but a weary defeatism and lassitude seems to have overcome them during the winter of 1215-16, to the point where they convinced themselves that only the appearance of Philip Augustus or his son in England would suffice to overthrow John. Around Christmas there was another embassy to France, this time headed by the two top-ranking magnates, Saer de Quincy and Robert Fitzwalter. The duo entreated Louis to come at once to England to be crowned but did not explain how that could be done when Stephen Langton was still in Rome - even if he could be persuaded openly to defy Innocent III in this matter. Philip Augustus cut through the nonsense by asking for further security - more particularly twenty-four hostages for the barons’ good faith.
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So desperate were the rebels for French help that they agreed, and the hostages were conveyed to Paris by two further baronial envoys, the earls of Hereford and Gloucester. Evidently Philip Augustus and Louis then asked for action from the barons before making the crossing, and to encourage them dispatched another large force of infantry and crossbowmen headed by three hundred knights. This second expedition sailed up the Thames and joined their compatriots in London on or around 7 January 1216; Louis meanwhile took an oath that he would follow with a third force in about two weeks’ time.
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He was, however, reliable only in his unreliability. Although a third body of troops reached London from France at the end of February, Louis was not with them, only a letter from him claiming that he would be ready ‘with God’s grace’ to cross from Calais on Easter Sunday, 10 April.
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The unconscionable delays to Louis’s crossing seem to have been caused mainly by Philip Augustus’s apprehension about the Pope’s likely reaction and the need to find an argument that would justify French intervention. Certainly Innocent’s support for John seemed stronger than ever. On 4 November 1215 he had reiterated the suspension of Stephen Langton and on 16 December, fresh from his triumphs at the Fourth Lateran Council, returned to the ideological fray in England by confirming his excommunication of the barons, this time explicitly naming thirty-one ringleaders.
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He also placed the city of London under interdict and sent two commissioners to execute the mandate; they arrived in England at the end of February 1216. They soon managed to promulgate Innocent’s decrees everywhere in the realm except London. There the clergy, barons and people were at one in vehemently rejecting it, both on the grounds that Innocent had been gulled by mendacious disinformation and that the internal politics of England were no affair of his anyway.
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Although the barons’ stance was disingenuous - a year earlier they had boasted about how they had made John submit to the Pope and explicitly recognised the pontiff as the temporal ruler of England - there is no doubt that Innocent’s intervention was counterproductive; paradoxically it raised morale in London and stiffened the resolve of the rebels. John soon had an unpleasant taste of the new spirit. Having emulated William the Conqueror in so many ways recently, he decided to ape Harold Godwinson also, by sleeping at Harold’s beloved sanctuary at Waltham Abbey, little more than twenty miles from London. This was open provocation, and when Savaric de Mauléon ventured even closer to London with the intention of blockading the Thames, he and his comrades were badly mauled and made their escape only after heavy losses.
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As so often after a reverse, John retired to the West Country to lick his wounds, swinging in a great arc through Enfield, Berkhamstead and Windsor before coming to rest in Hampshire (early April 1216).

Everything now hinged on French policy. John was very much alive to this dimension and sent a further embassy to Philip Augustus headed by William Marshal asking the king to forbid his son’s proposed expedition, stressing his friendliness and the fact that he was still issuing safe-conducts to French merchants. There was something frenzied and desperate about John’s diplomacy at this juncture, for he even sent a personal letter to Prince Louis, promising to put right any hurt, injury or insult he had inadvertently done him. He also rather foolishly tried to appeal above Philip Augustus’s head to the guardians of the truce he had signed with Philip, asking for their good offices.
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But it was all in vain, for Philip Augustus had by now decided to give his son the go-ahead, and all that remained was the task of ideological rationalisation. At a grand council of the French barons at Melun in April, Philip Augustus secured their approval for a descent on England; thereafter they bent their collective minds to a justification of the project. This was the very moment when the new papal legate to England, bearing important letters from Innocent, arrived at Melun on his way from Rome to the Channel.
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On 25 April Cardinal Guala Bicchieri met Philip Augustus and presented him with Innocent’s epistles, requiring him to forbid his son to invade England, to change his entire policy and to protect and assist John as a vassal of Holy Mother Church. The French king gave the request short shrift. In a published letter, he made the following trenchant points: the realm of England never was, was not now and never would be, St Peter’s patrimony; John on the other hand was guilty of treason against his brother Richard and had been condemned for it by Richard’s court, and for this reason, as much as by his foul murder of Arthur, the true heir to the throne, he had forfeited all his kingly claims. This declaration, when read out in the full conclave, was rousingly cheered by the French barons.
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Next day there was a second meeting. Philip Augustus swept in, ignoring Guala, and Louis then entered, openly scowling at the legate. The cardinal formally requested Louis not to go to England and begged his father to forbid him. Philip then invited Louis to speak. One of his knights, acting as his advocate, rose to his feet and presented the prince’s case. This was simply that John was no true king, being both the murderer of Arthur and a ruler who had been repudiated by his barons. As for the Pope’s alleged role as temporal ruler of England, this was a unilateral action by John, done without the consent of his barons and thus against all precedent and the norms of England’s ancient constitution. John’s unconstitutional actions amounted in law to de facto resignation, which meant the English throne was vacant; and now finally the English barons had invited Louis to be king, as was their right, his title being established by his wife Blanche, granddaughter of Henry II, whose mother, the queen of Castile, was the sole survivor of the English king’s siblings .
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Moreover, there was no point in Guala’s asking Philip Augustus to forbid him to pursue this claim, for Philip was liege lord in France, but Louis’s wife’s rights in England were outside his jurisdiction. This ingenious and specious case was no more than casuistry, and one of John’s defenders rightly calls it ‘a barrage of fictions and half-truths’.
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Nonetheless, the flustered cardinal, obviously no expert in the finer dialectics of feudal law, was unable to refute it on the spot. He evaded this issue by switching the argument to the other issue of crusade, pointing out that John should be left unmolested until he had fulfilled his crusader’s vow. Louis’s advocate replied that the war between John and Louis predated John’s bogus ‘taking of the Cross’, so that consideration was irrelevant.

Guala’s inability to rebut John’s counsel convinced any wavering French barons that the Pope really had no case. Unable to make any headway, Guala finally lost patience and threatened excommunication to both Philip and Louis if they went ahead with the English expedition.
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Louis then asked his father if he had any just cause for impeding the prosecution of his rightful claim. Philip made no answer, indicating that he had no objection. Guala, convinced that further argument was useless, simply bowed his head and asked the king for a safe-conduct to England. Philip replied contemptuously: ‘I will glady give you a safe-conduct through my realm, but if you fall into the hands of my soldiers who are guarding the coast, don’t blame me if you come to harm.’
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At this obvious threat Guala finally lost his temper and stormed out. Louis then sent envoys to Rome to prolong the farce, presenting a case to the Pope they knew would fail but thereby playing for time. Surprisingly, some scholars still believe that Philip and Louis were not colluding. One biographer of Philip Augustus says that when Louis told his father he had no jurisdiction over England, ‘this sounds more like a petulant son than one in conspiracy with his father’.
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Others think that, while Philip wanted to defeat John, he had genuine reservations both about Louis’s venture and the wisdom of alienating the Pope.
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Much controversy has centred on the actions of the countess of Champagne and her son who, when asked to contribute to the costs of the expedition, flatly refused to do so, on the grounds that they could not fight against a king recognised as a crusader by the Pope. The upshot was that a group of French knights then forced her to contribute. Philip Augustus’s supporters say this kind of duress was not typical behaviour by the king and that the ruffianly Louis alone was responsible.
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But surely it is obvious that Philip Augustus and his son were engaged in an elaborate charade, a ‘dumb show’; Philip could claim, within the letter if not the spirit of things, that he had not explicitly authorised his son to invade England.