1215 and All That

by Ed West

  John was a bad king, but the charter was aimed at the dynasty as a whole. Ralph of Coggeshall, writing soon after, said Magna Carta was to end ‘the evil customs which the father and brother of the king had created to the detriment of the Church and kingdom, along with those abuses which the king had added.’

  The charter was agreed upon, and on June 15 it was engrossed, the medieval term for the drawing up of legal documents; John would not have actually signed it, although nineteenth-century drawings in children’s history books always show the king doing so, often with, a stern-looking baron pointing at a piece of paper as if to say ‘sign here, pal.’ Some forty copies were made—the 3,500-word document of the ‘Greater Charter’ taking eight hours to write—and distributed across the country.

  A deadline was therefore set for August 15 for the conditions on both sides to be fulfilled, at which point the rebels would hand over London. Naturally, John never went through with his promises, and probably didn’t have the slightest intention of ever doing so.

  John double-crosses the barons, obviously

  John put off sacking his continental henchmen, as demanded, while the barons refused to hand over the Tower of London, and so the country slid into war. Among those who joined the rebels, opening up Marlborough Castle to them, was John’s sidekick Hugh de Neville, who’d presumably had enough of the king and his great japes. Afterwards, John claimed that the treaty was made under duress, and so not binding. Just as he hoped, the Church refused to recognize Magna Carta because of Canon Law, and on August 24, Pope Innocent excommunicated thirty barons for rebellion, as well as the entire population of London, calling the charter shameful and unjust, and saying it ‘dishonors the Apostolic See, injures the king’s rights and shames the English nation’ declaring it ‘null and void.’ Innocent III said the rebel barons were ‘worse than Saracens.’

  The news of the excommunications arrived in England on September 17 and the king ordered the seizing of rebel lands, the most important being Rochester Castle, the key to control of London, which with a tower 125 feet in height was at the time the tallest building in Europe.

  The castle had been given to Stephen Langton as part of the peace treaty, but soon afterwards the rebels had turned up. The king now told Archbishop Langton to hand it over, but Langton replied in the language of Magna Carta, demanding the proper judgment before his peers. John wasn’t interested in any of that by now and began to besiege the castle on October 13, officially starting the civil war known as the First Barons War.

  Langton, a neutral figure who was mistrusted by both king and barons, refused to publish the Pope’s excommunications and was therefore suspended. He left the country, having tried and failed to bring the two sides to their senses.

  John now ordered forty pigs to be sent to Rochester Castle, ‘the sort least good for eating,’ and had a tunnel dug underneath one of its towers; he then had all the pig fat poured in the tunnel and set it alight. At this point, John wasn’t acting very reasonably—again, think Alan Rickman in Prince of Thieves. It must have been quite an event; the garrison defending the castle were starving by now and reduced to eating their mangy horses. The first thing they would have noticed was the scent of wood smoke mixed with bacon—then the castle’s towers came down as the huge fat-fire did its work.

  But while the castle was being defended by just one nobleman, William of Aubigny (a former favorite of John), the barons in London couldn’t be bothered to come to his aid, instead spending their time ‘gambling at dice, drinking the best wines, which were freely available, and indulging in all the other vices.’4 Rochester was starved into surrender in November; John wanted the entire garrison put to death but was persuaded otherwise by one of his lieutenants.

  It’s true to say that while John was acting like a pantomime villain, the barons weren’t great people either. After Magna Carta was agreed upon, they had made further demands, including the replacement of des Roches, while John had, in fairness, already begun restoring lands, as per Clause 52, including those of Fitzwalter and de Vesci who was allowed to run his dogs in the forest of Northumberland ‘as he ought to have this and is accustomed.’ As one historian describes: ‘Once in power [the barons] revealed the pettiness and arrogance common in men placed in positions beyond their capacity or their deserts. They broke faith at once by refusing to fulfill their promises to the king.’5

  The rebels now wrote to King Philip of France calling for his help, and his twenty-eight-year-old son Prince Louis duly invaded, claiming the throne through his wife Blanche, Henry II’s granddaughter. For a while, a French army actually occupied London, while John controlled only the southwest of England. De Vesci was on his way to do homage to Louis when he was killed with an arrow shot through his brain. Alongside him that day was King Alexander II of Scotland, who now joined the rebels, invading Northumberland, ‘the debatable lands’ as these border regions were known in medieval times because they changed hands so often.

  John, in response, arrived in Berwick in January 1216, burning down the city when he could not get hold of the Scottish king, and apparently saying he would ‘run the little sandy fox-cub to earth.’ He headed back and by March he controlled most of southern and eastern England.

  Along the way, the king didn’t make any friends. Roger of Wendover (admittedly one of John’s enemies) reported: ‘Sword in hand they ransacked towns, houses, cemeteries, churches. Even priests at the altar were seized, tortured and robbed. Knights and others were hung up by their feet and legs or by their hands, fingers and thumbs, salt and vinegar were thrown in their eyes; others were roasted over burning coals and then dropped into cold water.’

  Over the winter of 1215–1216, John’s men went on the rampage, ‘running about with drawn swords and open knives,’ ransacking and robbing. John was torturing captives, while the royalist army was described as ‘the limbs of the devil’ and likened to a plague of locusts who ‘ravaged the whole country with fire and sword.’ The king had always surrounded himself with villainous sidekicks, but the characters of his final years were the worst, among them his military commander Faulkes of Breaute, called the ‘scourge of the earth’ and a ‘most evil robber.’

  With the winter of 1216 approaching it looked like the king had the upper hand, militarily, even though two-thirds of England’s aristocracy had formally renounced him. His half brother William Longspree even joined the rebels in May 1216, and only Marshal, with his ‘I was only obeying orders’ mind-set of unswerving devotion to authority, remained loyal to the end.

  John had succeeded in recapturing much of southern England when he got dysentery in King’s Lynn, and then while trying to get to safer territory in Nottinghamshire he lost the crown jewels in the Wash. When he arrived in Newark, he treated the potentially fatal illness with nature’s best medicine: booze. Drink yourself through it, as they say. The king’s ‘pernicious gluttony’ led him, as Wendover said, to ‘surfeit himself with peaches and drinking new cider, which greatly increased and aggravated the fever.’

  The king passed away at midnight during a whirlwind, finally killed by his gluttony ‘for he could never fill his belly full enough to satisfy him.’6 Ralph of Coggeshall, a Cistercian, and so probably somewhat hostile, recorded that when John died, townspeople saw ‘many horrible and fantastic visions . . . the tenor of which we will forgo describing here,’ but the gist of Ralph’s message was that these were the horrors and torments John was suffering in hell.*

  In perhaps his only kind gesture, and aware that now was not a good time to be making enemies, John had allowed the sister of Matilda de Briouze to found a religious house to pray for the Lady of Hay and her son. In a letter on October 15, days before his death, John had written to the Pope suggesting ‘He who punishes beyond deserts and rewards beyond deserts, will look on us with the eye of his mercy, and deem us worthy to be placed in the number of the elect.’ As Magna Carta historian David Carpenter put it: ‘some hope, one might think.’

  John died unloved
, and as the monk Matthew Paris famously put it: ‘Hell herself felt defiled by his admission.’ He was buried at Worcester Cathedral, although the actual whereabouts of his body soon became a mystery, and everyone assumed it was lost until his coffin was discovered in 1797. The corpse was partly putrefied, and ‘a vast quantity of the dry skins of maggots were dispersed over the body.’ Rather than a crown on his head, as was the norm for medieval kings, they found a monk’s cowl, the thinking being it had been placed there to aid his journey to heaven—which was probably a bit on the optimistic side.

  Much of his body was stolen by souvenir hunters, although his thumb bone was recovered, and the composer Edward Elgar bought his sandals and stockings and donated them to the cathedral, where they remain today.7

  John’s rule had been a miserable failure. He had made the crucial mistake of alienating the powerful; he was fond of poking fun at any pomposity, which could make him almost seem like a decent man-of-the-people type, if you can overlook the numerous murders. And his personal habits, though strange to his fellows, would make him far more suited to the twenty-first century. He was the first king since classical times to sport a dressing gown, and he shocked court society by regularly taking baths, sometimes once a month, when many people took as many in a lifetime; although most historians are now doubtful of contemporary accounts of him spending the whole morning in bed reading.8 The one good thing he did do was found a city on the River Mersey in 1207 called Liverpool, so inadvertently we can thank him for the Beatles.

  But history can be a funny thing; as Winston Churchill put it in The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, ‘When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labors of virtuous sovereigns; for it was through the union of many forces against him that the most famous milestone of our rights and freedom was in fact set up.’

  ____________

  * This was a bit of a theme: Osbert fitzHervey, one of John’s cronies, was pictured by Ralph in hell being ‘forced to swallow and then regurgitate burning coins.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Parliament

  Had John not died when he did, it’s likely that Magna Carta would have gone down as just another empty promise kings are forced to make from time to time. But as it was, his son Henry was just nine years old and had to contend with a Frenchman running around calling himself king. To win back the barons, the new regime was therefore forced to make permanent concessions.

  Before he died, John had appointed William Marshal as regent, and now seventy he led the battle against the invaders and promised to carry the boy king ‘on his shoulders’ from island to island if need be, an emotional scene in which the child was apparently in tears. King Henry III was crowned by a small group of courtiers in Gloucester, but London was controlled by the rebels and the French, and throughout history whoever controls London controls England. To cap John’s loser legacy, Henry III was crowned with his mother’s bracelet as his father had lost or perhaps sold the crown, like a deadbeat dad. And to make matters worse, Henry’s coronation banquet was disturbed by news that Marshal’s nearby castle of Goodrich was under attack.

  Louis controlled over half the kingdom and had, in May 1216, received a triumphant welcome in the capital. However, the friendliness wouldn’t last and the French soon became unpopular; they had brought with them a supply of their national drink, but since then had ‘done nothing except drink all the wine in the city and then complain about the ale.’1

  In desperation, the guardians of the new monarch therefore reissued the charter at Bristol in November 1216. Some bits were removed, such as the Security Clause, and the part about the king’s aliens, but the rest of it was authorized by the Crown, giving the document much greater authenticity. It was signed by Marshal and the papal legate Guala Bicchieri. At this point, many of the aristocrats opposed to John, among them the younger William Marshal, pledged loyalty to his son, and these reversi, or returners, helped to save the royal family.

  And at Lincoln in May 1217, Crown forces beat the French, the loyalists led by the geriatric but still enthusiastic Marshal, now fighting alongside his son. Before the battle, Marshal gave a rousing patriotic speech, telling everyone they had a ‘chance to free our land,’ to seek ‘eternal glory’ in victory, and feel no fear as they would soon be ‘in paradise.’ He concluded: ‘God knows who are his loyal servants, of that I am completely certain’ while the French would be sent ‘down to hell.’

  Henry’s army then won a naval battle off the coast of Kent, even though Louis’s ships were reinforced by a French fleet led by Eustace the Monk, an adventurer turned pirate who was also the subject of a popular romantic-ish poem. Eustace Busquet was the son of a nobleman who had left the Church to become a sword for hire and had worked for King John before changing sides. Now on August 24, 1217, at the Battle of Sandwich, came the conclusive confrontation; Marshal was on the front line during the encounter, in which four thousand were killed, with pots of lime powder thrown on to enemy decks. Eustace was found cowering below decks, dragged into the light, and beheaded.

  Afterwards Louis went into negotiations. Seeing how his predecessor went out, he could not have been that desperate to do the job, because the ruling regents in London simply bribed him to leave with 10,000 marks, or a quarter of the country’s annual revenue, to where he ‘departed to besiege smaller castles,’ as Roger of Wendover sarcastically put it. He still got to be King of France when he was older, though.

  From a position of strength, the government reissued the charter once again in November 1217, alongside another charter, one that dealt with the forests. To distinguish between the two, the former became known as the Great Charter, or Magna Carta. Peter des Roches, John’s old buddy and the villain of the piece, tried to overturn Magna Carta for the next twenty years but the genie was out of the bottle.

  However, the war between the king and the barons did not end there, and it would be another fifty years before the conflict was resolved. The new king’s long reign—not beaten until the insane George III in 1816—would serve as a continuation of the struggle between Crown and nobles, called the Second Barons’ War. This would end with a final settlement at the end of the century in which the barons notionally lost (their leader had his testicles cut off and hung around his nose which suggests he certainly didn’t triumph) but in a sense they won by establishing Magna Carta and a new innovation of Henry III’s reign, the Parliament.

  In contrast to his atheistic father, the new king went to Mass five times a day and was so holy that when he visited Paris, the King of France got so fed up waiting for him to arrive he banned priests from going near him in case he’d insist on yet another Mass. Whereas John was a monster, Henry was a somewhat gentle figure who loved religion and art and did much to enrich the culture of the country. He was, however, somewhat witless, scared of thunder, and droopy eyed and, most importantly, hopeless with money.

  A jester once compared Henry to Christ. Flattered, the king asked why, and was told ‘Because Our Lord was as wise at the moment of His conception as when He was thirty years old; so likewise our king is as wise now as when he was a little child.’ But at least he wasn’t as bad as his father, who would have had the jester’s eyes and tongue pulled out. Contemporaries described him as simplex, simple, and he was also astoundingly lazy.

  Henry III was strongly influenced by the flowering of what is now called ‘Gothic’ medieval culture, centered on Paris, although the word Gothic was only applied much later. Henry built many churches and cathedrals that stand today, most notably Westminster Abbey (the original had become dilapidated over the years) and Canterbury Cathedral. Henry developed an obsession with the Abbey’s original patron, Edward the Confessor, and had an enormous portrait of the former king painted in his bedroom. He even named his eldest son Edward.

  As well as great cathedrals, Henry III’s reign also saw the first zoo in London, at the Tower, where a l
eopard donated by the Holy Roman Emperor lived with a polar bear and a presumably rather nervous porcupine. This was the first such royal menagerie to be open to the public, the entrance fee being a dog or cat for the lion to eat.2 In 1255, the king of France presented an elephant to Henry to add to this collection, and it was fed on beef and wine, although unfortunately two years later it drank itself to death.3

  Alas, Marshal died in 1219, ending a life that became the embodiment of chivalry; in fact, most of the clichés about medieval knighthood come from Marshal’s biography, which turned up in a jumble sale in the nineteenth century quite by chance, the most recent being the film A Knight’s Tale, which features stories from his life. One of Marshal’s last acts was to distribute his eighty fine scarlet robes to his men, the sort of largesse that was expected of a good lord; this was despite a priest telling him to sell them ‘to deliver you from your sins’ (i.e., give to the Church), to which Marshal replied ‘Hold your tongue you wretch, I have had enough of your advice.’ Of Marshal’s five sons, all died quite young of hideous deaths; Richard was killed by his own vassals during one of the numerous aristocratic squabbles in Ireland, while another, Gilbert, was fatally wounded in a tournament.

  Marshal’s loss was felt keenly by the crown, and his two successors as regent had left the treasury in a desperate situation by the time the king assumed control. Henry’s government was always broke, and this led it to make repeated concessions to the barons. In 1225, King Louis of France threatened to invade English Gascony, and in needing money to fight wars abroad and buy back castles at home, the Crown issued what would become the definitive Magna Carta, with Archbishop Stephen Langdon witnessing it once again; he had gotten his job back after both king and Pope died in 1216.

  The barons were fearful of losing their hard-won privileges, and a crisis arose again in 1234 after the king had tried to revoke previous charters. In total, during his long reign, Henry III promised on at least a dozen occasions to uphold Magna Carta. This 1237 Magna Carta was witnessed by des Roches and Marshal’s sons. By 1250, it was being proclaimed not just in Latin but in Norman French and in English; official letters sent out in 1255 in three languages confirmed it. (This also influenced the Normans, who demanded similar rights; in March 1315, Louis X of France gave them a ‘Charte aux normands,’ after a tax revolt.)