The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  When des Roches clashed with the French king over a castle in Maine, a convenient rift was opened. Des Roches met John in Le Mans to formalize his change of allegiance. He brought with him a brilliant tribute: his two most important comrades, Arthur of Brittany and his mother Constance, ready to make their peace. In theory this should have removed Philip’s reason to fight. But it relied on John being able to make peace with his nephew. He could not. Constance and Arthur approached John’s court with more trepidation than des Roches. They simply did not trust him to do right by them. On 22 September they went through the formalities of official submission. But as night fell, they absconded, and fled back to Philip’s court.

  This, then, was the situation when John and Philip met on their borders in January 1200. Arthur had submitted to John, but was in Philip’s hands, a latent threat. Furthermore, many of John’s allies were abandoning him for Innocent III’s fourth crusade. The counts of Flanders, Blois and Perche, and the marquis of Montferrat, all announced during a tournament in Champagne in November 1199 that they were taking the Cross. Baldwin of Flanders had doubled the insult by subsequently negotiating peace with Philip, removing John’s ability to fight on two fronts in Normandy.

  It was enough to convince John that peace was preferable rather than attempting to push Philip too hard. Thus, five months after their January embrace, in May 1200 the Treaty of Le Goulet made a supposedly permanent peace between the kings.

  Looking back on the Treaty of Le Goulet, the chronicler Gervase of Canterbury remembered public opinion about it, overheard from the chatter and gossip of pilgrims and traders. John’s detractors, Gervase remembered, nicknamed him ‘Softsword’. Gervase himself disagreed, thinking that war weariness and financial exhaustion made peace prudent. But there was no doubt that John’s concessions to Philip at the very outset of his reign struck some as ill advised. Even as the treaty was sealed, one northern French writer, Andreas of Marchiennes, looked with contempt on John’s ‘sluggish’ pursuit of a war that Richard had fought with manly vigour. Andreas considered that at Le Goulet, John had signed away his right to the castles for which ‘the whole war had been fought’.

  The peace terms were skewed heavily towards France. Philip agreed to recognize John as lord for most of the continental lands held by his brother and father. He agreed that Arthur should do homage to John as a vassal. But he refused to concede to John important border regions. Most importantly, the whole of the Norman Vexin, with the exception of Richard’s massive fortress and town at Les Andelys, was to remain French. So too was Evreux, another vital border county between France and Normandy. Further south, in Berry, John granted away Issoudun, Graçay and Bourges. These may have felt like small sacrifices to John, but as Richard and Henry II had realized, it was from such small sacrifices that greater troubles arose.

  Perhaps even more significant than John’s abandonment of the border-country scraps was his realignment of his feudal position in relation to Philip. Since 1156, when Henry II first did homage to Louis VII, the Plantagenet kings had accepted that in theory they held their continental lands from the French Crown. But this had remained, broadly, a formality. John turned it into feudal reality. In return for Philip’s acknowledgement of his rights, John agreed to pay 20,000 marks as a succession duty. This was a vitally important concession – for it pushed the theoretical feudal relationship further into the realms of the real.

  Furthermore, Philip also littered the Treaty of Le Goulet with instructions appropriate to a more imperious lord–vassal relationship. John received Arthur’s homage with the caveat that he should not infringe on his new vassal’s prerogatives. He was forced to renounce his alliances with Flanders and Boulogne – not just as a gesture of peace, but as a recognition that they were first and foremost Capetian vassals, and loyal to the French Crown before the English. Only Aquitaine – still technically held by John as his mother’s heir – was excluded from the treaty.

  There were many good reasons for John to have conceded so much at Le Goulet. His brother had subjected his realm to some of the most severe financial demands in its history. How long would heavy taxes, demands for baronial aids, and oppressive treatment of the Church be sustainable? How many more Châteaux Gaillards would be required to keep the French king out of the Vexin – essentially a small strip of land with more strategic than economic importance? How long could England bankroll the mercenaries necessary to keep Normandy on a permanent defensive footing? How could John hope to keep alive his late brother’s system of alliances, when all around him his potential friends were disappearing on crusade? Was it not far simpler to make peace with Philip than to struggle wastefully against him?

  The tempting answer to all of these questions lay in the agreement John sealed with an embrace in January 1200 and a treaty in May. Just as he had shown in 1193–4, John had the appetite for power, but not for a fight. Thus, in the first five months of the thirteenth century, John granted away a position that had taken his brother, father and grandfather almost 100 years to establish. It would be easy to dismiss the pilgrim wags overheard by Gervase of Canterbury who laughed at John Softsword: they knew not the troubles of a king. But how much greater trouble lay ahead would soon be clear, and much of it was rooted in the concessions made at Le Goulet.

  Triumph and Catastrophe

  On 29 July 1202, a large party of knights rode noisily up to the walls of Mirebeau castle. There were more than 250 of them: a substantial force, with an intimidating purpose. They had come to capture Eleanor of Aquitaine.

  The old queen was seventy-eight – old enough, she might have reasoned, not to be troubled by the depridations of enemy armies. But below her, among the heavy, riveted helmets, chain-mail armour, crossbows, swords and lances, she could pick out a familiar face: that of her sixteen-year-old grandson, Arthur of Brittany. Another Plantagenet male wished to place Eleanor in captivity. The adventures of her life were not over yet.

  Arthur’s reasons for wishing to capture his grandmother were simple: she was a valuable prisoner in the war for Plantagenet succession, which he continued to wage against his uncle John.

  Elsewhere among the besiegers was Hugh de Lusignan. Hugh had reason to hate the Plantagenets with a passion. Two years previously, King John had swept abruptly into Angoulême – the county that neighboured Hugh’s – and stolen Hugh’s young bride Isabella of Angoulême from under his nose. Since then, John had done all in his power to provoke and disrespect the Lusignan family – to remind them that he had now sided with their rival counts of Angoulême, and to jeer at their inferiority. Not only had he taken the girl from them, he had taken countless opportunities in the two years since his marriage to put the Lusignans in their place: humiliating them with violence against their men and castles in counties as far apart as La Marche and Eu, and summoning them to his feudal court to demand, unsuccessfully, that they fight a judicial duel against his royal champions.

  With his highhanded treatment of the Lusignans, John had driven them into the willing arms of Philip II. The French king’s historical nickname, ‘Augustus’, finally became recognizable in the first two years of the thirteenth century, during which he amassed a large, powerful army. By the spring of 1202 he was confident in turning it against the Plantagenets. Using the feudal superiority advanced in the Treaty of Le Goulet, Philip had declared John forfeit of all his continental possessions. He paired the Lusignans up with Arthur, whom he now knighted, betrothed to his young daughter Marie, and acknowledged as duke of Brittany and Aquitaine, and count of Anjou and Maine. Then he sent the Lusignans and his new protégé off to attack John’s lands in Anjou.

  Eleanor, even from her sickbed, tracked political developments with alarm. She had realized early that she was a target for her grandson’s new friends. Danger and politics would not abandon the dowager queen as easily as she wished to abandon them. And sure enough, they had come for her at Fontevraud, her lavish monastic retirement home. She had been there for a year or so, recuperating since com
pleting the final diplomatic mission of her career – a long journey to northern Spain, where she had selected from her grandchildren by her daughter Eleanor a wife for Philip II’s son Louis: Princess Blanche of Castile. When she had heard of the approach of Arthur and Hugh de Lusignan’s forces in advance, she fled Fontevraud for Poitiers. Mirebeau was as far as she had travelled before they had converged upon her. The one hope she could hold out now, as hostile knights stalked outside the castle walls, was that rescue might come from the north. As Eleanor fled through the Plantagenet countryside, she had found time to compose an urgent note to John, who was in Normandy, organizing the defence of his frontier castles from Philip’s armies, raiding across the Vexin. It would take a miracle if he were to reach her before the defences of the castle fell; but miracles were all that Eleanor had.

  As his mother prayed in Mirebeau, John was busy in Le Mans. He was biding his time as he assembled a mercenary army using recruiting officers in England. Through the summer, his army of paid cutthroats had been swelling. Now, in late July, it was sufficient to the task of taking on Philip in the north and Arthur and the Lusignans in the south. He received Eleanor’s letter in Le Mans. Suddenly, John was seized by the spirit of his Plantagenet blood.

  It was always remarked of Henry II – usually by his astonished and exasperated enemies – that he was capable of popping up like a jack-in-the-box wherever and whenever he was least expected, no matter where in his empire it might be. It was this superhuman ability to flog himself and his armies at speed across the vast Plantagenet territories that had lain at the heart of his success. Now John summoned up the spirit of his father. He travelled the eighty miles that separated Le Mans from Mirebeau in less than forty-eight hours, a punishing pace even for lightly armed men to keep.

  They arrived at Mirebeau on the evening on 31 July to find that Poitevins had already forced their way into the walled town. Clearly they expected an assault from John, because they had blocked up all but one of the town’s gates with great mounds of earth. ‘Securely they awaited the king’s arrival, confident in their multitude of proven knights and serjeants,’ wrote Ralph of Coggeshall. But their confidence was misplaced.

  As John raced from Le Mans, he collected William des Roches, the nobleman who had defected to his side from Arthur’s camp in 1200. Des Roches struck a deal with the king. As seneschal of Anjou, he knew Mirebeau well. He agreed to lead the attack on the town and castle on the understanding that if Arthur was captured, des Roches would have a guiding voice in his treatment. It was a deal John was happy to make. As they camped before the earthed-up walls of the town, des Roches planned an attack for daybreak.

  At dawn, inside the town, Hugh de Lusignan’s brother Geoffrey was enjoying a breakfast of roasted pigeons. The vicious assault on the one working gate to the city therefore took him by surprise. His men surrounded the castle, but John’s men surrounded the town, and before long they had battered down the gate. Heavy street-fighting ensued, led by the indomitable des Roches, who lost three horses from under him as he led charge after charge against the town gates. Seeing the strength and unusual vigour of their opponents, and in an attempt to escape des Roches’s ferocious attacks, the rebels fled for the safety of the castle. But they were unable to hold out. John’s forces under his seneschal completed a stunning rout, and Eleanor was freed from the castle to receive the news that Arthur, Hugh and Geoffrey Lusignan ‘and 252 of the worthiest knights’ had been captured.

  It was the most complete and stunning victory won by forces under an English king since Richard had relieved Jaffa in 1192. At a stroke, John had decapitated the Lusignan resistance in Aquitaine and captured Arthur, the most troublesome weapon Philip had to use against him. John was careful to rub it into the noses of everyone he passed slowly on his way back to Normandy. His illustrious prisoners were paraded, heavily manacled, as a public warning of the consequences of rebellion. Arthur and Geoffrey Lusignan were taken to Falaise; Hugh de Lusignan was kept in solitary confinement in Caen, under heavy guard. Many of the rest of the prisoners were shipped under tight guard to English strongholds such as Corfe castle, the bleak fortress that loomed over the Purbeck hills in Dorset. Their imprisonment would be miserable and lonely.

  Arthur’s incarceration was especially grim. Falaise was the birthplace of William the Conqueror. The castle was part of the ancient heart of Normandy, closely connected with the duchy’s former capital in Caen: a busy town overlooked by a large Norman castle with a square keep. Behind the castle walls, the sixteen-year-old Arthur was kept in ghastly conditions.

  Medieval imprisonment generally accorded with the status of the prisoner. The well-bred could expect less punitive conditions than the poor and indigent. But for all who fell into them, John’s prisons were bleak, dangerous and lonely. According to William Marshal, a connoisseur of the rules of war and chivalry, John ‘kept his prisoners in such a horrible manner and such abject confinement that it seemed an indignity and a disgrace to all those with him who witnessed his cruelty’.

  Arthur’s captivity under John would become one of the most notorious political imprisonments of the thirteenth century. Arthur was a high-grade feudal pawn. With John still childless he was heir presumptive to the English throne, and he rivalled John himself as heir to the Plantagenet continental domains. He came from the wild, Celtic fringe of mainland France, an area that had claimed to be the birthplace of the legendary King Arthur, after whom the young duke was named.

  Both his status and his closeness in blood to John ought to have afforded him a certain degree of protection when he fell into his uncle’s hands. Knowing his value to Philip, Arthur must have calculated that John could not do him any serious harm without suffering severe consequences. He might be imprisoned for a long time, and at political cost to his duchy, but eventually, surely, Philip would buy or break him out of John’s custody.

  But John’s was not a rational or a chivalrous sort of king. Despite the success at Mirebeau, from late 1202 John was growing ever more obsessed by the idea of treachery lurking in all corners. Yet he also seemed puffed up by his new-found dominance over his enemies. ‘The king’s pride and arrogance increased,’ wrote Marshal. ‘They so blurred his vision that he could not see reason.’

  We do not know how much access Arthur had to news of John’s actions during the early months of his captivity. But if any word slipped through into his prison, he would have known that as he festered at John’s displeasure, the whole of Normandy was rotting around him, riven with treason and discontent. Everywhere, it was suddenly remembered that Normans and Angevins were supposed to be enemies. The loyalty that Richard had inspired by his personal leadership was ebbing fast towards the French Crown and support for John’s rule was crumbling.

  Even though Arthur was literally walled off from the world, the effects of his imprisonment permeated out into it. Grumblings grew around the duchy that John was behaving unchivalrously in his treatment of his captives. Certainly he was behaving badly towards his allies. In September 1202 William des Roches, who had led the storming of Mirebeau on John’s explicit promise of influence over Arthur’s fate, was cut out. ‘The king … never kept his agreement with the lord des Roches,’ wrote Marshal. ‘[And] as a consequence of this ill-treatment des Roches later crossed over to the King of France’s side. The King made a major blunder in not trusting him.’

  Losing the support of William des Roches was a bad mistake. And it was made worse when des Roches took another valuable ally from John’s side: Aimery de Thouars. Aimery’s support had been won and lost several times, and his influence was only barely kept by the determined agency of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Aimery and des Roches were not natural allies, but John somehow contrived to unite two enemies in common opposition to him, and together the two men began raiding Anjou. A month after they abandoned the English king, they led the capture of Angers itself.

  They would not be the last to leave John’s side. He clung on in Anjou until December 1202, but it was impossi
ble to resist the surge of rebellious defections to Philip’s cause. Piece by piece, Anjou was wrenched from John’s hands, until all that was left of the Plantagenet heartland was a handful of castles.

  As Anjou teetered on the brink, Aquitaine too sank into rebellion. Early in 1203, John released from prison the Lusignans whom he had captured at Mirebeau. He hoped that if he offered them the hand of friendship he had so haughtily failed to extend two years previously, they would rally to his cause in northern Aquitaine. They did not. As he released them from prison John took plenty of hostages and fine promises of good behaviour, but on their release they immediately rebelled against his rule. John, unlike Richard, was not a native in the south. He had neither the feel for its ways nor the long experience that was necessary to keep the duchy in order, and its most powerful residents neither feared nor trusted him.

  By the end of 1203, John’s worries were multiplying beyond control. ‘He saw his marches and land getting worse by the day as a result of war, and Frenchmen who had no love for him and pillaged his land … with the connivance of the turncoats who had gone over to their side,’ wrote Marshal. When he retreated to Normandy in December, John’s attempts to increase the power of his castles by garrisoning them with mercenaries only alienated the local population, as the same mercenaries plundered local towns and monasteries for supplies and riches.

  The more John leaked friends, the crueller his rule became. When twenty-five prisoners tried to break out of Corfe prison in England, they were surrounded and had their food supply cut off. Almost all of them starved to death rather than yield to the king. John was far away from Corfe at the time, but the atrocity was nonetheless done in his name.

  The cruelty extended to Arthur of Brittany. Early in 1203 John sent instructions to the royal servant Hubert de Burgh, who was serving as Arthur’s jailer, demanding that he should blind and castrate his prisoner. Fortunately for Arthur, de Burgh felt a pang of conscience and could not carry out the grisly sentence on the sixteen-year-old, who pleaded for pity. Unfortunately for John, de Burgh – fearful at having disobeyed the king’s instructions – then leaked word that Arthur was dead of natural causes.