by Dan Jones
In 1212 a new vision came to Peter. The king’s reign, he said, would end before the next anniversary of his coronation – Ascension Day in May 1213. According to Roger of Wendover, the hermit would exclaim: ‘a vision has revealed to me that the king shall not rule more than fourteen years, at the end of which time he will be replaced by someone more pleasing to God.’
In an age when superstition was rife and rumours could be powerful, Peter of Wakefield’s prophecy was a wild success. When it reached the king he laughed at the story. But as John brooded on it, he became alarmed. He had Peter of Wakefield arrested and dragged to court to explain himself. According to Wendover, the king questioned Peter personally, asking: ‘if he should die on that day, or how he would be deprived of the throne of the kingdom. The hermit replied: “Rest assured that on the aforesaid day you will not be king; and if I am proved to have told a lie, do what you will with me.”’
Needing no encouragement, John sent Peter to Corfe castle and put him into the custody of William d’Harcourt, ‘who loaded him with chains and kept him imprisoned to await the event of his prophecy’. But even with Peter in prison, Roger of Wendover records that his declaration spread far across England, ‘so that almost all who heard it put faith in his words as though his prediction had been declared from heaven’.
The year 1212 was supposed to be John’s moment of triumph. His expedition to Ireland had been a success: the most belligerent native kings kept in check by the many hostages taken and Anglicized lordships and bishoprics created. Success in Ireland had matched the extension of English royal mastery over the Welsh, and an aggressive programme of castle building had been initiated to secure the gains made in north Wales and throughout the Marches. John had achieved far more territorial advantage in Wales than either his father or his great-grandfather Henry I, and he had humiliated the native princes. To fortify still further his gains, he had expanded his hostage-taking programme, and the court had been swelled by young Welshmen taken as security against rebellion.
Against Scotland, John had also driven home the advantage gained in the Treaty of Norham of 1209. When the Scottish king, William the Lion, fell ill and began to suffer plots against his rule, John pressed the advantage. He granted his goodwill in exchange for hostages and promises of vast cash payments; he had knighted William’s twelve-year-old son and heir over dinner on Easter Sunday in 1212, and provided the boy with mercenaries to defeat and kill Guthred MacWilliam, a rival for the Scottish throne. The English Crown was pre-eminent over the British Isles.
Unsurprisingly, after five years of extraordinary success, John’s military confidence was returning. It was helped by the fact that he was now vastly rich. Even discounting the windfall revenues earned from Jews and the Interdict, John had managed to more than double his annual income since the loss of Normandy, so that it was regularly exceeding £50,000 a year. Although his reign had seen a period of rapid inflation, John was still richer in cash terms in 1212 than his brother Richard had been before departing on the Third Crusade, with as much as £200,000 in cash stockpiled in various English castles. Buoyed by success, John felt ready to take the fight for his duchy of Normandy back to Philip Augustus. He was rich enough realistically to contemplate reviving Richard’s successful foreign policy of bribing Philip’s neighbours into a grand anti-Capetian coalition. Diplomatic approaches were made to former allies such as his nephew, recently restored as the Emperor Otto IV, and Reinauld, count of Boulogne. Mountains of silver pennies were spent recruiting mercenaries and fitting out an army.
But as John’s preparations for an invasion of his former continental possessions moved onward in summer 1212, his apparently iron hold over his kingdom and its neighbours began to shake and crumble. It began in north Wales, where John’s castle building had provoked the remnants of the Welsh resistance to band together against his rule. Even as forty towns around England received their demands for men to serve on the Continent, John was suddenly faced with guerrilla attacks upon English Marcher castles from the woods and hills of inland Wales. English knights and soldiers were brutally beheaded and acrid smoke blew up from burning towns. The Welsh rebels slew and looted wherever they could, then melted back into the countryside.
This was not supposed to be the way of things. The rebellion in Wales was the first serious challenge to John’s authority since 1205. Its scale was such that he was forced to abandon his continental plans and muster his army at Chester to deal with the border threat. In August, to relieve his frustration, he hanged twenty-eight Welsh hostages from the town gibbet in Nottingham. But the situation was worse than he thought. William Marshal recorded how, even as the last feeble kicks of the dying men shook the scaffold, letters arrived in Nottingham warning that ‘if the king persisted with the war which he had begun he would either be slain by his own nobles or delivered to his enemies for destruction’. Some of John’s barons, it seemed, wished him murdered and a new king elected in his place. John had frequently acted as though he were implicitly under attack; now he had good reason to believe he really was.
The prime suspects in the plot to kill the king were Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter. De Vesci had been active in royal service since the Lionheart’s day, and John had used him as an agent in negotiations with the Scots, since he had extensive landholdings in Northumberland and Yorkshire, and knew the wild border country better than most. His grievance with John was obscure, but an almost certainly scurrilous tale was spread that the king had attempted to seduce de Vesci’s wife. De Vesci was more likely typical of a set of northern barons who were particularly opposed to John’s methods in harnessing England’s wealth to fund his continental aims. As soon as it was clear that the plot had been uncovered, de Vesci fled over the border to take refuge in Scotland.
Fitzwalter, by contrast, was a powerful figure in north Essex and the city of London. He claimed – probably spuriously – to be aggrieved towards John because the king had attempted forcefully to seduce his eldest daughter, though it is likely that his grievances ran deeper than that and fed into the patchwork of private disgruntlements and quasi-constitutional disquiet that was beginning to be shared by the English barons at large against John’s aggressive style of kingship. When John learned of the plot, Fitzwalter escaped to France. Only one unlucky plotter, an exchequer official called Geoffrey of Norwich, fell into the hands of the king. Unsurprisingly he died in prison.
The plot uncovered at Nottingham unleashed in John a renewed fear of attack. The letters he had discovered indicated that John not only had cause to fear his external enemies – Innocent III, Philip II, the rebellious Celts – but he was also now confirmed in his suspicions that treachery abounded among his own barons. Victory turned quickly to distrust and dismay. Within a month of learning of the plot, he had disbanded his Welsh army altogether and was on his way back to London, accompanied by his mercenaries. The royal castles across the north, from where John suspected most of the plotters to have come, were put on armed standby. Long trains of royal soldiers and munitions ploughed up the roads north during the autumn of 1212 as John put the upper half of his kingdom on a civil war footing. Ever on his guard, he sent letters to each of his barons demanding that they deliver him a hostage for their good behaviour. From summer 1212 on, the chroniclers recorded, John took an armed bodyguard everywhere he went.
How had relations between John and his barons reached a nadir? The simplest explanation is that England was suffering a sense of weary overfamiliarity with an ever-present king. The realm had known John at greater length and more intimately than any other Plantagenet monarch, and many of his barons found his energetic personal rule difficult to adjust to. He was unlikeable and cruel, and his pursuit of the Briouzes had scandalized aristocratic values and opinion. But cruelty was no cause for rebellion. Henry II and Richard I had been equally cruel, and their reputations and political security never suffered the same damage as John’s. Henry II hanged Welsh hostages by the score; Richard had slain men in cold blood a
t every end of Christendom.
John’s problems were exacerbated by his swollen paranoia. He was so sly and secretive that he developed a complex code – so complex, indeed, that John himself sometimes forgot it – that he used when sending out orders that he wished not to be carried out. His suspicious and paranoid treatment of men like William Marshal and the Briouzes inspired no confidence in other barons. He was under no obligation to be friends with his barons, but to treat them with kisses and patronage before starving their wives and sons to death smacked of a dangerous, unpredictable madness. If John could not treat his favourites well, what chance stood those outside the royal confidence?
There was more to the problem than weaknesses in the king’s character. A rift between the Crown and the English barons had been growing since Henry II’s reforms, the origins of which lay in the whole Plantagenet system. There was not just a problem with John. There were serious questions to be settled about the nature of royal government in its entirety.
Royal government and justice had been massively and systematically extended as England was rebuilt from the ashes of the civil war between Stephen and Matilda. Now it was visible everywhere. In the mid-twelfth century, one in five English castles had been in royal hands. Thanks to half a century and more of castle building and confiscations, by 1212 nearly half of England’s castles flew the royal standard above their keep. The massive expansion of the common law and royal involvement in judging even the humblest cases – which reached an apogee under John – had also penetrated royal power down into the shires, at the expense of baronial power in almost all areas but for a few, such as the palatinate of Chester, where the royal writ did not run.
Royal officials were drawn increasingly from the ranks of low-bred men and aliens with much-needed professional skills. These men were seen to be accumulating significant power in areas that had in recent memory been subject to baronial control. Under John, no senior household official or great officer of state was drawn from the ranks of the barons. From the outside these officials looked like an ill-born clique. Furthermore, the increased use of mercenaries in the royal armies reduced the role of the baron in mustering the feudal host and weakened the sense that royal military expeditions were joint ventures between king and the upper ranks of the military caste.
For the most part, all this brought great advantage to ordinary English freemen. Government under John continued in the Plantagenet vein, becoming more professional. People could protect their property and dispose of it as they chose by using the royal law. They could challenge their social superiors before the royal courts. They were sold a brilliant and quasi-divine image of kingship as handed down from God – at Christmas in 1207, for example, John invested heavily in the glorious pageantry of kingship, wearing his grandmother Matilda’s imperial crown and holding a sceptre and golden rod, dressed in purple silk decorated with gold embroidery. When compared with the fractured kingdom of the civil war, divided between warring barons and rival monarchs, the England of the Plantagenets looked – and was – united and strong.
The main losers under this system of government were the barons. This group of 160 or so men and their families had lost the most territory when England and Normandy were wrenched apart in 1205. They dealt most often with John in person, and their experience of government was therefore most coloured by his caprice, cruelty and financial esurience. For these men, kingship was both a system and a personal relationship. Thus its operation relied on the political goodwill of a single man. As Henry II’s justiciar, Richard FitzNigel, wrote: ‘To some, the king does full justice for nothing, in consideration of their past services or out of mere goodness of heart; but to others … he will not give way either for love or money.’ With a king of John’s nature, this inherent contradiction in kingship was dramatically magnified. Barons found their power eroded from below by the advance of royal law and justice into their personal jurisdictions; but they were attacked from above when John chose to deal inconsistently and arbitrarily with them.
John, with his legalist’s mind and lofty view of his position, saw little contradiction between his role at the head of an ever-growing government of process and systems, and his feudal position as master of his barons, whom he could dispossess and punish using the might of his courts entirely as he chose. This personal means of governing his barons allowed him to squeeze them financially, via his right as their lord to seize their property and impose massive fines on them for feudal customs or transgressions. He saw it as his right to settle arguments and legal cases between individual barons, or between barons and himself, by personal judgement, taking informal counsel with his close advisers, or else through the exchequer, where John himself determined the outcome of the case. This, to John, was the privilege of kingship. And indeed, none of it was novel in conception – merely in scale. This was not a view that it was easy for his barons to embrace.
This, then, was the situation at the end of 1212. John was still desperate to launch his reconquest of Normandy, and had begun to commit himself financially to the foreign alliances that were necessary to see it through. Unfortunately, he was pursuing his aims against a background of growing discontent at home. It would require heroic degrees, of leadership, skill and luck to reclaim the lost Plantagenet lands without pushing the increasingly disgruntled English political community into full revolt. Unbeknown to the king, he had all but exhausted his good fortune. The stars were turning against King John.
To Bouvines
The first great naval victory in English history was won against the French fleet on 30 May 1213. Two days earlier 500 ships had put out to sea under the command of John’s half-brother, William de Longespée, earl of Salisbury. After crossing the Channel, and raiding his way up the Norman coast, Salisbury had reached the Flemish coast and sailed into the Zwyn – a tidal inlet that provided the sea route to the great coastal trading cities of Damme and Sluys.
The ships bristled with arms and men, English knights and foreign mercenaries paid for with the vast stores of English coin John had amassed since 1204. As they sailed up the Zwyn towards Damme they met with an extraordinary sight: a vast array of French ships, some beached, some bobbing in the harbour and all waiting to be filled with a force to invade England. There were reckoned to be 1,700 ships, fully kitted out and ready for war. The harbour creaked with menace.
This was Philip’s invasion fleet. For months it had been rumoured that Pope Innocent III, stung by John’s continued insouciance in the face of Interdict and excommunication, had declared the king deposed, and Philip had readied himself to execute the sentence. (In fact papers of deposition had been prepared in Rome but were never published.) Philip had begun to consider England as a possible appanage for his son Louis, and had spent months preparing his invasion fleet. The evidence of his deadly intent now lay before Salisbury’s eyes.
The English commander wasted no time. English units piled at once into the harbour, attacking the poorly defended French fleet, cutting adrift hundreds of ships loaded with corn, wine, flour, meat and vital parts of the French military arsenal. Other English soldiers ran ashore and raided beached ships for their valuable supplies, before setting fire to the timber frames. Black smoke shot up into the air as pitch blazed in the water.
Although Philip was not present in the town for the attack, he arrived soon afterwards at a scene of scorched catastrophe. ‘It was a very bitter thing for the King of France to see his ships at sea burning and belching forth smoke, as if the very sea were on fire,’ wrote William Marshal. ‘King Philip, out of his mind with rage and in a black mood, had the remaining ships in his navy burned to cinders in a fit of rage and depression.’ It was a brave and vital victory in John’s name, and it not only staved off deposition in the short term, but destroyed the French threat to the English coast for several years to come.
The irony was that Salisbury’s destruction of a French fleet designed to carry out a papal sentence of deposition was done with the full backing of Innocent III.
Before he launched his naval attack on France, John had bowed to the tide of pressure that was mounting on him and – in an attempt to reduce his list of enemies and weaken Philip’s cause – decided to make peace with Rome. Among those who counselled him to do so was Marshal, brought back from disfavour in Ireland. A legate, Pandulph Masca, had been sent from the pope to negotiate terms, and it was with Pandulph that John had met in Dover just days before Salisbury’s fleet set sail.
There, in the presence of England’s barons, assembled as part of John’s massive war effort, the king had sealed a charter giving over his kingdoms of England and Ireland in feudal vassalage to the pope. At a stroke, England had been transformed from a chilly outcast on the edges of Christendom into a papal fief, along with other European kingdoms including Sicily, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Aragon. ‘The kingdom is become a royal priesthood and the priesthood a kingdom of priests,’ wrote Innocent, when he heard the news. And John had apparently been duly rewarded by his return to the Holy See with the awesome victory at Damme.
Reconciliation with Rome was a process, however, and not an event. Six weeks after Damme, on 20 July, John stood on Morn Hill, outside Winchester, and looked down on the splendid city below. His fine robes, of colourful silk and satin, shone in the summer sun, as did those of his courtiers and their thoroughbred horses. Winchester was alive with colour and activity as Stephen Langton, an archbishop of Canterbury at last allowed to tend his flock, made his way in a great ecclesiastical procession across the Sussex Downs and into the ancient city. Minutes later, John and Langton took part in a public ceremony of reconciliation, complete with tears, incense and kisses of peace, and promises by John that he would love and uphold the Church.
John had paid handsomely for this reconciliation, both in the fines he was suffered to pay to the pope and the fall in income he accepted when he gave up his exploitation of vacant ecclesiastical posts. But the prodigal son had returned and John’s reward was that he was now much in favour at Rome. This, combined with Philip II’s loss of his navy, encouraged John to throw everything into another attempt at regaining his continental possessions.