The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  If this was somehow supposed to temper the Bretons’ anger, it failed. They burned with rage at the idea that their scion had been murdered and swore retribution. As soon as the reaction became clear, Hubert tried to backtrack, revealing that Arthur was alive after all. But it was too late – the damage had been done, and the attacks against John were given a firm moral justification.

  Quite how it occurred to anyone involved in the treatment of Arthur that he would serve Plantagenet purposes better if he were blind, castrated or dead is uncertain. But these were not times that fostered logical thought in John’s mind. The king was almost frantic with worry. As Anjou fell to his enemies in January 1203, John had nearly lost Queen Isabella when rebels surrounded her at Chinon castle. She had to be rescued by a band of mercenaries.

  All around, allies were scuttling for cover. John was deserted by the count of Alençon, who abandoned him for Philip’s cause two days after dining with John. ‘Count Robert … behaved disgracefully, for after the King had … given him some of his wealth, and kissed him on the mouth, the very same day the count laid him low,’ wrote Marshal.

  As spring 1203 came, John was overrun. Philip and his allies held Brittany and dominated almost all of Anjou, Maine and Touraine. The freed Lusignans pressed John’s forces deep into Poitou, where his mother was now too frail to organize the defences. The French hammered relentlessly at the border fortresses of Normandy, a duchy in which it was said that no man could be trusted any longer to stay true to his word for even a week.

  The spirit of Mirebeau did not live long in John. He was paralysed by the enormity of the task and his own indecision. He still held Arthur, although more by luck than judgement. He had his throne in England and a reasonable grip on lower Aquitaine. But nothing else was certain. John could neither direct an effective resistance, nor inspire anyone else to do the same. All he could do was sit behind his ever-receding lines and hope for a miracle. None would be forthcoming.

  Lackland Undone

  It was Thursday 3 April 1203: the Thursday before Easter and a mournful time for all Christians. King John was drunk and angry. As he sat down to his dinner in Rouen, he was surrounded by invisible enemies and oppressed by dark thoughts. He trusted almost no one, and could not ride safely around his own duchy without fear of ambush or attack. All around him his enemies gathered. John was in the mood to lash out.

  Also in Rouen that night was Arthur of Brittany. Arthur, however, was not enjoying a debauched dinner. He had been transferred from Falaise after the debacle of his mutilation, and had languished in a dungeon in Rouen castle ever since. William de Briouze, an immensely powerful and wealthy nobleman whose estates stretched across the Welsh borders, had escorted the prisoner to his king. It was Briouze who had captured Arthur at Mirebeau. As a close ally of John, and knowing the mood of his king when he delivered up the young duke, he claimed that he would no longer answer for Arthur’s safety.

  Briouze’s fears were well founded. After dinner on Maundy Thursday, John’s drunkenness turned demonic. We will never know what precisely he was thinking. The best witness we have says he was possessed by the devil. Certainly he must have appeared a terrifying spectre to all who saw him as he made his way, drunk and violent, to Arthur’s cell. Although we cannot be totally certain of the facts of that terrible night, it is highly likely that John entered the prisoner’s cell and killed the young man with his own hands, before tying a heavy stone to his nephew’s lifeless body and throwing it into the river Seine, where it was later retrieved by a fisherman. The nuns of Notre-Dame-des-Prés afforded Arthur a Christian burial in secret, for fear of John’s wrath.

  If it was possible to visit greater sacrilege on the festival of Easter and the office of kingship, then no king of John’s family ever did. But John did not seem to feel much remorse. In fact, he seems to have taken comfort from his nephew’s death. He sent a letter to Eleanor of Aquitaine soon afterwards, with a cryptic message containing the words ‘the grace of God is even more with us now than [the messenger] can tell you’.

  But John was wrong. The grace of God was about to abandon him, with disastrous consequences. Normandy, Brittany and greater France had been swirling with rumours of Arthur’s fate for months. The news of his death would not become fully accepted at Philip’s court until 1204, but even while it was only a foul rumour, the duke’s murder placed John in an impossible position. In all subsequent negotiations with Philip II, the French king had a trump card. ‘No peace until you first produce Arthur,’ was the refrain. And now, even if he had wanted peace, John could do no such thing.

  As summer 1203 unfolded, Philip took advantage of John’s perilous position – trapped in Normandy between Bretons and rebellious Poitevins in the south, while the French king’s own armies pushed at the Norman borders in the east. John continued to base himself in Rouen, and sallied back and forth between the eastern front and his main base. At neither was the news ever encouraging. Philip gambolled throughout Plantagenet territories as he pleased. When Philip visited the south he was able to take a boat all the way down the Loire – the artery through what should have been the Plantagenet trunk – in perfect safety.

  In such a climate, Norman morale began simply to dissolve. Castles in the frontier ring capitulated as soon as Philip approached. John lost Conches, then Vaudreuil, with barely a whisper. The knights garrisoning the latter, disgracefully, did not even bother to mount a proper defence. The Norman defences were eroded with the ease of melting sandcastles. At the end of August, the French army rumbled towards the pearl in the collection: Château Gaillard.

  Richard’s prized citadel was built to be unbreachable. But now Philip’s forces massed around the fortress, which towered on enormous cliffs, with the Seine sweeping round a bend below. They blockaded the river, hoping to starve the enemy into submission. One night at the end of summer in 1203, John attempted to break the blockade with a flotilla of supply boats and an accompanying commando force of mercenaries. Led by William Marshal, John’s men attacked in the warmth of the late summer night. But luck cruelly deserted John. As the rowers struggled with the current of the Seine, they lost step with the land army on the riverbank, and the massive invasion fleet was picked off in staggered waves by the French defenders, until the river ran red in the darkness.

  This was the end of John’s serious attempts to save Château Gaillard, the symbol of defiance built by the last great duke of Normandy. The siege lasted until March 1204, but John did not try to break it again. Instead, he made a few violent but useless attempts to distract Philip on the Breton front, burning the town of Dol. But the overriding sense during the autumn of 1203 was of John’s grip on power unravelling. Gossip spread that he spent all his time in bed with his teenage wife, dismissing demands to raise himself for a proper defence of Norman independence with the insouciant words ‘Let be, let be, whatever he takes now I will one day recover.’ William Marshal watched bewildered as the king took to riding aimlessly about the countryside, simply disappearing from his court without a word and touring the back roads of his own duchy, for fear of meeting traitors on the highways.

  When Christmas 1203 approached, John left Normandy for the last time. Despite having promised that he would stay in his duchy and fight on for a year, in early December he made private preparations to send his baggage train back to England. Before dawn on the morning of 5 December, he rode hard from Rouen to Bayeux via Caen. As he left Barfleur harbour, with his queen beside him, John passed the rock that had killed the drunken revellers aboard his great-uncle William the Aetheling’s White Ship in 1120. That tragedy had been the catalyst for more than half a century of Plantagenet dominance over France, from Rouen to Toulouse. Now, although John’s more sober crew steered clear of danger and pulled strongly towards Portsmouth, that window of mastery was closing. Behind him in Normandy, the few remaining loyalists fought on, hoping against hope to hold out against Philip’s relentless advance. John promised to return to their side, but he never did.


  Of the vast dominions conquered by Henry II and defended by Richard I, a ragged core remained. Barring isolated castles and pockets of loyalists, King John had lost most of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine. He was the most despised man in Brittany. He retained nominal control in Poitou and the rest of Aquitaine only because of the residual loyalty that the nobles of the duchy felt towards his mother. To reconquer what had been lost from a resurgent, vastly enriched French empire under a king who had handsomely earned his nickname Philip Augustus was a task that would have daunted John’s father and brother at the height of their considerable powers. John was totally inadequate to it, and it was the best that he could do to flee the embers of his collapsed continental empire with his tail between his legs. It was a dismal way to go.

  PART III

  Age of Opposition

  (1204–1263)

  When a bad man has the advantage,

  cruelty and outrage are the consequences

  – WILLIAM MARSHAL

  Salvaging the Wreck

  England froze. The country was struck by a cruel winter in 1204–5 that suspended life and crushed hope. In London, the Thames filled with ice so thick that men and women crossed from the south bank to the north on foot. In the fields, the ground was so hard that it could not be ploughed until the end of March. Winter crops were destroyed by the cold, and vegetables were dug up by the starving people when they were little more than seedlings. Prices soared as famine racked the country. The cost of oats rose tenfold in a year. There was widespread misery, starvation and suffering. The superstitious word, recorded by Ralph of Coggeshall, was that God had punished King John by taking Normandy from him, and now the punishment was being extended to England.

  John had been marooned in the kingdom for a year. It had not been an easy time. Although his court was characteristically gay and lively, amused by indulgent feasting and the chivalrous entertainments of the young men who were known as the king’s bachelors, no one could fail to notice the danger and hardship that lay all around. There was widespread panic about the security of the nation. Rumours sped around that England was about to be invaded from France. It was said that Philip Augustus had found a convenient excuse to attack in the form of claims held by the counts of Brabant and Boulogne to English lands that had been taken from them during Henry II’s reign. Philip’s appetite to crush the Plantagenets was thought to have no limits; John’s ability to lose his inheritance to know no end.

  The invasion threat was taken seriously. At a great council held in January 1205, John ordered every man over the age of twelve to enter into a sworn pact to defend the realm and preserve the peace. Failure to take the oath was to be counted by local constables as an admission of treachery, and it was decreed that those who failed to act to defend the realm in the event of an invasion were to be punished by permanent disinheritance or perpetual slavery. In the freezing ports, no ships were allowed to leave without written permission from the king.

  It is easy to understand why such fears took root. The collapse of the Plantagenet cause in France had been fast, dramatic and painful. The duchy of Normandy had not survived John’s departure and was now wholly Philip’s – subsumed into the French kingdom for the first time in living memory. Additionally, Anjou, Maine and Touraine were all but gone, save for a few islands of loyalty at the fortresses of Chinon and Loches, held by good men but surrounded by the French. The absent John’s name was blackened in all parts of the French kingdom, as word began to circulate freely that Arthur of Brittany was dead.

  The situation was only a little better in Aquitaine. On 1 April 1204 Eleanor of Aquitaine had died. She had lived to the extraordinary age of eighty, passing her final years and dying moments at the abbey of Fontevraud, decrepit but defiant. To her last days, she continued to buttress her son against impossible odds in her duchy, granting land and privileges to loyalists and shoring up the Plantagenet cause even while living as a habited nun.

  In accordance with the will she had made in 1202, Eleanor was buried beside her husband Henry II and her favourite son, Richard I, in the chapel at Fontevraud. Three members of the twelfth century’s most charismatic and influential family now lay at rest together, at far greater peace in death than they ever were in life. The effigy on Eleanor’s tomb still stands, as remarkable as the woman it immortalizes. It was made to capture her in the magnificent prime of her adult life, her eyes closed but a book open in her hands. It was – and still is – an image of high romance and great intellectual power.

  The nuns of Fontevraud paid Eleanor their respects in an obituary in which she was thanked for opulent gifts that she had made to the abbey – of gold, silver, jewels and silk. The nuns also observed, somewhat obsequiously, that the queen had ‘brightened the world with the splendour of her royal progeny’. Given the careers of Henry the Young King, Geoffrey duke of Brittany and John king of England, this was not wholly believable. Yet Eleanor had been a magnificent queen whose influence had straddled three important reigns, and who had loved her sons even when they behaved unwisely.

  Without his mother’s guiding hand, John was mired deeper than ever in Aquitaine. Already he had offended numerous Aquitanian barons by his marriage to Isabella of Angoulême and his clumsy management of the duchy’s delicate politics. No right-minded Poitevin lord would do homage to the English king as his mother’s successor, for fear of dispossession by the ascendant king of France. As soon as Eleanor’s death was known, many lords who had accepted her authority scrambled to make their peace with Philip. The French king advanced in triumph on Poitou – the county from which all of Aquitaine was ruled – during the summer of 1204. Simultaneously John’s brother-in-law Alfonso VIII of Castile invaded Gascony, in the south-west of Aquitaine, claiming that it was his by right of his wife – John’s elder sister Eleanor. Abandonment and invasion came from numerous angles all at once, as the last corner of the Plantagenet empire creaked and crumbled.

  All this was dismaying for John. As winter’s death gripped England in the first months of 1205, it looked very much as if everything that his family had accumulated within the kingdom of France might soon be gone. It was clear that he had to make a stand. It was not enough simply to cower in England and defend the coast, and John must have realized that his public reputation, never particularly high, was at a nadir from which it might never recover if he did not act swiftly. Men like the Melrose chronicler were recording for posterity that he had ‘ignominiously lost his castles and lands across the sea’.

  So in the summer of 1205, as invasion fears began to subside, John began preparing for a huge assault on France, directed from two points of attack. A fleet from Portsmouth would beach on the Norman coast and reconquer the duchy from the west. A second expedition from Dartmouth was to undertake a simultaneous advance on Poitou. This force would be commanded by John’s illegitimate brother, William Longespée, earl of Salisbury – a man of about the same age as John, of high military reputation and experience, and a good friend of the king, with whom he passed many happy hours at the gaming table.

  To effect his plans, John ordered the largest military mobilization since Richard had embarked on crusade. At its heart was a massive expansion of royal sea power. Richard had been the first Plantagenet king to amass a significant English naval force, mobilizing large numbers of boats in 1190, subsequently building another seventy vessels to patrol the Seine in 1196, and founding Portsmouth as the great naval town to link England with Normandy. John now carried the policy forward. Forty-five warships had been built to patrol England’s coasts in 1203–4, but to expand the naval force any faster required different means. In 1205, therefore, John simply seized all the shipping that his constables deemed convertible for war. Even if a vessel was only large enough to carry a few horses, it was appropriated from its owner and amassed for the nascent royal navy.

  To fill the warships, there was a drive to muster men and materiel. Thousands upon thousands of horseshoes, nails, crossbow bolts and arrowheads were struck
. Pig carcasses were salted and great sides of venison rumbled on carts down to the coast. The national coinage was recommissioned. New silver pennies flooded the country, stamped with John’s image. Everyone handling one in receipt of payment for a service rendered to the war effort would have looked upon their king’s face: his hair curling about his ears, his beard cropped short, and his eyes, even in the simple minted likeness, bulging out at the holder, daring them to defy him.

  Many of these coins were used to recruit mercenary soldiers: sailors and men-at-arms who were transported to the coast as midsummer approached. Perhaps a quarter of a year’s revenue was pumped into military preparation, funding the vast human cargo that was loaded onto the great ships that floated in the Solent. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, it was the largest English army ever assembled, and the greatest collection of ships in a single English port.

  Here, at last, John was acting with some purpose. If England was busy, however, it was not entirely united. Although John proved he could assemble a vast army, he was hamstrung by the changing mood of the English barons. John’s invasion preparations may have resembled a crusade muster, but the cause did not move hearts with quite the same fervour.

  John’s ambition to conquer Normandy was not universally convincing to his barons. When Normandy was threatened in earlier years there was a clear interest among the English magnates in supporting the king. Henry II had been careful to pursue the Norman habit of keeping his barons’ cross-Channel estates intact. He had retained the political integrity of the Anglo-Norman realm and made sure that the great lords remained truly Anglo-Norman – with interests and lands that spanned both territories and gave them a self-interest in assisting the king to keep them together and defend from external threats.