by Ed West
He was also cruel and ruthless even compared to his contemporaries, which was a low bar. During John’s drunken rages, which were frequent, his face would go dark red and his eyes would blaze and his mouth foam. Most infamous, for some, was his execution of twenty-eight sons of Welsh princes who had rebelled against him, or the way he treated French prisoners of war ‘so vilely and in such evil distress that it seemed shameful and ugly to all those who witnessed this cruelty.’7 John also had the three sons of one baron killed, two of them after being castrated, and on another occasion had a seven-year-old boy hanged.
And he was—at least by modern-day standards—a pedophile.8
Still, John was tenderhearted about animals and doted over his pet falcon, Gibbun, who was fed doves, pork, and chicken once a week. So, good in everyone then.
He was also a spendthrift, at a time when most were struggling under huge taxes. John was obsessed with jewels: when he lost a necklace in 1202, a man called Berchal found it and so the king awarded him an annual income of twenty shillings. John even used to publicly wear the coronation regalia of his grandmother Matilda. The king’s entourage were so well dressed that even ‘his wife’s washerwoman wore rabbit fur, paid for from the royal Exchequer,’9 and he gave generous sick leave to his staff.10
To everyone else he was detestable, and during his seventeen-year reign John levied tax after tax to wage war in France, a conflict he lost disastrously. And after his final, humiliating military defeat in 1214, unrest burst into the open and a group of rebel barons defied the king, renouncing homage and fealty. They were led by Robert Fitzwalter, whose daughter the king had supposedly taken some sort of interest in (and not in a good way). What emerged was Magna Carta; a ‘failed peace treaty’11 at the time, but which over the following century would become a firmly established part of English law.
Things start off badly
Within weeks of Richard’s death, Arthur’s mother, Constance of Brittany, had raised an army with the barons of Anjou and Maine ready to fight. But John got to Rouen first and was therefore made Duke of Normandy and given golden roses as symbol of his power. Along the way, he took a brief detour and sacked the city of Le Mans as punishment for not supporting him. A month later on May 27, he was crowned at Westminster Abbey as King of England. There was a bad omen at John’s coronation in Rouen when he dropped the lance that was supposed to represent his office, while his cronies in the congregation sniggered. Also, his wife was not invited, which was not a good sign.
In order to secure the throne, John made what was regarded as a shameful peace treaty in May 1200, paying homage to Philip. The idea of homage was a formality, and the kings of France never asked the Angevins for any actual money in the past, as their supposed underlings were in reality as powerful as them. But at Le Goulet, John had agreed to pay tribute, a bad deal that earned him the nickname ‘Softsword.’ As part of the peace, John gave southern Normandy to the King of France in the hope he would leave him alone.12 The deal also stated that Philip’s son Louis was to marry one of John’s nieces in Spain, and so Eleanor of Aquitaine, now in her midseventies, set off across France to collect the girl, passing snow drifts in the Pyrenees during a thousand-mile trip.13
But John was soon in conflict with the French. The king had grown bored with his wife, Isabel of Gloucester, who was too closely related to him for marriage, and although Henry II had just ignored this problem, now that he had become king John decided he wanted another wife. In fact, poor Isabel was so obscure and ignored that Roger of Howden, the main court chronicler at the time, couldn’t even get her name right and kept on referring to her as Hawise, while others called her Joan or Eleanor.14
John chose Isabella of Angoulême, who apart from being a child and already engaged, was a perfect choice. The marriage between Isabella and Hugh ‘le Brun’ of Lusignan, Lord of La Marche, was supposed to bring peace to two warring provinces in western France, but not everyone was pleased by the prospect; once united, these two lands could present a threat to John’s empire, placed right in the middle of his French territory, so he wasn’t entirely thinking with his crotch when he spoiled their marriage. What exactly happened is unclear as testimony is colored by the fact that everyone hated John. According to one story, John first saw his second wife as she was being led to the church by her father—and, as overlord, stopped it and married her himself, which must have really spoiled the wedding; this sounds slightly like implausible propaganda.
But what was true and shocking, or at least noteworthy, was her youth, because of which Hugh de Lusignan had postponed the wedding. Isabella was very young, perhaps only twelve but maybe even younger (her parents were first recorded as married in 1191 and her first child did not arrive until 1207), while John was in his thirties. However, the Benedictine monk Matthew Paris didn’t think her entirely blameless, stating that ‘she should have been named Jezebel rather than Isabel’ because she had enticed the monarch, which to modern ears doesn’t present Matthew in an entirely sympathetic light.
Some people were rather upset about all this; John had agreed to marry a Portuguese princess so they weren’t too happy about him characteristically going back on his word. In fact, John had sent envoys off to arrange the marriage in Portugal only for his representatives to return home to find he had married someone else.
Although some historians say the marriage was rather a good move politically, and reasonable, it’s agreed that not compensating the Lusignans was outrageous. Instead, when there was discontent in Poitou over this rather inconsiderate behavior, John ordered his officials to harry the Lusignans and ‘do them all the harm they could’ (as a general rule of thumb when picturing events just imagine John as Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves).
As for his first wife, she had brought most of south Wales as a dowry, which John simply kept.
The Lusignans appealed to King Philip, who was overlord to John as well as Hugh. In terms of sexual morality, the French king was at the other end of the spectrum to his Angevin rival, and was certainly not impressed by John’s behavior. In 1193, as part of his ill-conceived Viking revival invasion, Philip had married a Danish princess called Ingeberg who was said to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy, but after one night together he decided he wanted to divorce her. Why, we’ll never know. The Pope denied his request, but the king still refused to have marital relations with her—for the next sixteen years. Only when Philip needed the pontiff’s support for an invasion of England did he agree to do the deed; the royal bedding led to joyous national celebration and street parties. Ingeberg must have felt just brilliant about all this.
Philip now chose to punish John, who promised to attend a hearing on April 28, 1202, and to hand over two castles as security; obviously he had no intention of doing either. In the meantime, John seized the lands of leading lords in Poitou, charged them with treason, and then suggested it should be resolved with trial by battle, with him using professional champions (he was obviously not going to fight himself); they refused and looked to the king of France for help.
When John failed to appear at the hearing, Philip declared him a ‘contumacious vassal’ who had forfeited Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou. Philip also knighted Arthur, who in July 1202 did homage to him for Henry II’s lands. Now French soldiers invaded Normandy, while Lusignan and the other Poitevin barons were joined by Prince Arthur who now—bizarrely—besieged his own grandmother Eleanor at Mirebeau Castle, outside Poitiers.
John turned up and took the rebels captive, and although Arthur initially escaped, one of John’s loyal sidekicks, William des Roches, eventually caught him. The outspoken adolescent, who by all accounts sounded as awful as the rest of the family, demanded he be made King of England although by now he was hardly in a position to ask for much.
When he came to the throne, John had sworn to agree that he, his lieutenant William des Roches, and Arthur ‘would all be good friends,’ all of this ‘firmly promised . . . in good faith.�
�� However, although the victory at Mirebeau had been the work of des Roches, John soon alienated him and—‘puffed up with pride which daily grew and that so blurred his vision that he could not see reason’—behaved in a way that ‘he lost the affection of the barons of the land.’15 Worst of all was John’s appalling treatment of the prisoners there who were kept in chains at the prisons, which led des Roches to abandon John and join Philip that year.
John then invited his nephew around for talks in his castle; things obviously got out of hand and Arthur’s body was seen floating in the Seine a couple of days later. He might have jumped out of a tower, or John may have crushed Arthur’s head with a stone after flying off the handle when the young lad had denounced his ‘usurpation.’ Either way, it wasn’t a good week for him. There were also rumors in England that Arthur had been blinded and castrated, or at least John had ordered the mutilation, which had been disobeyed, or that his underlings had carried out a cold-blooded execution; English opinion was horrified by John’s treatment of a relation who was barely an adult.
John was now ordered by Philip to come to Paris to explain Arthur’s disappearance. He refused. King John then managed to lose the whole of Normandy in spectacular fashion, running away after Philip had taken his major fortress, whereas his brother would have dug in and produced something suitably spectacular, perhaps while sticking his hand down a lion’s throat. In March 1204, after months of siege during which John refused to lift a finger, Richard’s great Norman castle of Chateau Gaillard fell to the French, after being bravely defended by Roger de Lacy. The invaders had taken it after sneaking in through the latrines, so we must hope they were well rewarded, although Philip once said of his own men invading Normandy that they were like ‘toilet rags’ to be ‘used and disposed of down the latrine when one had had one’s use of them.’16 At the time, John was far away, busy ‘giving orders for his horses and hounds and falcons to be dispatched to Normandy in preparation for his coming’ so that he could hunt when he finally bothered to arrive.17
John had an army as large as his rival’s, but he still miraculously lost. One reason was that since he basically had no money left and didn’t want to pay them, John had allowed his Angevin mercenaries to treat Normandy like conquered territory and plunder it at will, breaking all the rules of feudalism, not to mention basic common sense. Not surprisingly, the Normans weren’t desperately keen to fight for him, and when in August 1204 he lost Normandy altogether the French soldiers were welcomed. ‘King John lost the love of his people here in Normandy,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘because that wolf Lupescar [the most hated of the mercenary captains] treated them as though he were in enemy territory.’
To make matters worse at home, many of his French henchmen came over to England with him, and he rewarded them with great jobs. Some of them were basically murderers (one, Peter de Maulay, had supposedly killed Arthur) but were given estates in the kingdom. De Maulay got a castle in Dorset and a marriage that brought him the whole of Doncaster. This was one more source of resentment, and would become one of the issues at stake in Magna Carta, with five of the clauses dealing with these ‘alien knights.’
The capture of Normandy, which increased the French crown’s income by 70 percent,18 would help make France the supreme European power for hundreds of years.* After Philip’s victory, only Gascony—the southern portion of Aquitaine—was left of the Crown’s French possessions, and English-born Norman barons now had a dilemma: were they English or French? Philip was first to issue an order confiscating the lands of Normans who stayed in England and John followed soon after. Although many aristocrats lost possessions, it was much worse for their tenants who faced the uncertainty of a new lord who may well have been hostile to their old one, and to them.
Most Anglo-Norman aristocrats grew up in England and were cared for by English nannies and servants, and by the third generation most were marrying English or part-English girls. The barons may have spoken French for official business, but many now conversed in English at home, and all were fluent by the 1170s. Meanwhile, their version of French had become detached from that which was spoken in Paris and had become a subject of mockery. English people were already back then known for speaking French badly, even when French was for many of them their first language; ‘Marlborough French’ was, according to Walter Map, so called because in that town ‘there is a spring of which they say that whoever tastes it speaks bad French.’
Had it not been for John’s disastrous rule, then England might have stayed attached to a continental, French-speaking empire. And without a large empire, John was now forced to spend all his time in England micromanaging things; as Abbot Ralph of the Cistercian House of Coggeshall in Essex was to note, ‘this king governed indefatigably.’ In fact, by most accounts he was an effective administrator, if one could overlook the torture, murder, and rape.
John also fell out with Marshal, who alone refused to give up his land in Normandy and did homage to the French king for it. John was obviously angry about this, but Marshal was the only person who could get away with it. Afterwards, they were on bad terms, and later John had his fifteen-year-old son William taken into his care, basically as a hostage.
In 1205, John threatened the French king that he was going to invade with an ‘unbelievably large’ force, and so he raised an invasion force at Portsmouth on the south coast, but it ended up a comical disaster. Having arranged a huge fleet, John confronted Marshal for having sworn homage to Philip. Marshal offered to do trial by combat with anyone who would call him a traitor in front of all the assembled ‘barons and bachelors,’ but there was an awkward silence as no one would challenge him to a fight.
Then the fleet mutinied and refused to join John on an invasion of France, and so in a huff he sailed around the Isle of Wight until he calmed down, leaving everyone to think he had left for a suicide mission in France.
Drink!
John was a very bad man, but one of the upsides of his paranoia was that the atmosphere of suspicion it created led to a huge increase in the number of legal documents. One mysterious record of the time shows a pipe roll from 1210 concerning a baron, that: ‘Robert de Vaux owes five of the best horses so that the King should shut his mouth about the wife of Henry Pinel.’ Charming man, the king. Another states that the ‘wife of Hugh de Neville offers the king 200 chickens so that she may lie one night with her husband.’ It either suggested that the king’s duties were taking Hugh away from his wife or that the king was forcing himself on her. Or that she was his mistress and this was a joke at Hugh’s expense.
Hugh de Neville had been one of Richard’s comrades in Palestine and had grown friendly with John, becoming a gambling and drinking pal. John eventually placed his wife at the de Neville’s home, Marlborough Castle, even though his first wife happened to also be living there. It must have been fantastically awkward. John spent a week at Marlborough for Christmas 1204, during which two tuns of wine—1,900 liters—were consumed.
John surrounded himself with cronies in his mold, men who were as financially ravenous as him, and de Neville fitted the bill; as chief forester, he was in charge of one-third of all land in the realm, and would force prisoners to sign and seal documents agreeing to awful punishments if they disobeyed him. Likewise, his royal chancellor, former Bishop of Durham Richard Marsh, who like John was drunk most of the time, would force monasteries to issue blank charters, sealed already so that the king could make any demand he wished to, the medieval equivalent of a blank check.
John’s reputation for cruelty and sexual wrongdoing is well established, including his habit of forcing himself on the wives and daughters of noblemen. The most serious accusation involved the wife of Eustace de Vesci, serious because de Vesci was the most powerful baron in the far north of England, and would become John’s nemesis. The son of a Norman landholder, husband of the King of Scotland’s bastard daughter, and Richard’s old companion in war, de Vesci accused John of raping his wife, and when John came to visit his home th
e story goes that a prostitute was put in his spouse’s bed just in case John came in at night—which he did.
Despite this, John could also be quite jealous. The chief guardian of the queen was a man called ‘Terry the German,’ who sounds like some ludicrous East End villain from a British gangster film. In 1207, the king wrote to Terry from France, stating: ‘Know that we are well and unharmed, and . . . we shall shortly be coming to your parts, and we shall be thinking of you like a hawk. And although we may have been absent for ten years, when we come to you it shall seem to us as if we had been away no more than three days. Take care of the thing entrusted to you, letting us know frequently how it fares.’ The ‘thing’ or ‘it’ was John’s wife, and the letter was probably an unsubtle warning to anyone thinking of getting too close to the queen that something unspeakably bad would happen to them as a result. John had half a dozen or so illegitimate children by various mistresses, but this wasn’t especially scandalous by the standards of the age, and was positively restrained compared to his father. Terry the German was later in November 1214 ordered to take Isabella to Gloucester and ‘keep her there in the chamber in which our daughter Joan was born.’
Still, despite all these faults, John had a great sense of humor. In 1212, the king made his courtiers sign a document stating that should one Peter de Maulay cause the king offense, the Earl of Cornwall’s son would be whipped and the Earl of Salisbury’s hawks would all be confiscated. This was considered very funny by the king, and was typical of his dry wit.
However, John’s temper was notorious, and could inflame in seconds and disappear just as quickly. Richard of Devizes described his mood as ‘wrath cut furrows across his forehead; his burning eyes shot sparks; rage darkened the ruddy color of his face.’ Closely related to his cruelty and violence was John’s massive drinking problem. As a basic rule, everyone in medieval Europe was drunk most of the time, with the typical English peasant consuming on average eight pints of beer per day.19 There was often no clean water to drink in cities, and it was not until the seventeenth century that coffee and tea brought alternatives to slowly getting off one’s face all day long. Besides which, few people had jobs that required intellect and sobriety and life was pretty awful when sober.