Such was the genesis of the peace treaty signed between Philip and John at the town of Le Goulet on the Seine on 22 May 1200. This treaty enshrined many of the articles earlier negotiated with Richard at Louviers in 1196, but with significant new additions which demonstrated the high price John had to pay to secure his succession against the claims of Arthur of Britanny.51 Philip recognised John as Richard’s lawful heir and endorsed his right to the Angevin empire, except that Arthur was to hold Britanny as John’s ‘man’. Disputes between Arthur and John were to be settled by John’s court, but John recognised Philip anew as his liege lord. The treaty was to be cemented by a marriage between John’s niece Blanche, daughter of Alfonso of Castile and Philip’s son Louis; this marriage actually did take place, the day after the peace of Le Goulet was signed.52 In return for these ‘concessions’, John allowed Philip to keep all his recent gains in Normandy, yielded ground in Berry, agreed to pay Philip 20,000 marks and, crucially, abandoned the alliance with Otto IV.53 It should be remembered that in January 1199, while Richard was still alive, it was Philip who had promised to abandon his German alliance with Philip of Swabia. Now the whole of Richard’s carefully assembled diplomatic network lay in ruins, with both his German and Flanders allies discarded or lost. Sceptical observers also noted that the terms negotiated by John were far inferior to those Henry II used to extract from his so-called overlord. Moreover, the 20,000 mark ‘relief ’ was also a humiliation. This was a soi-disant succession duty, payable by a vassal to a feudal lord, and it was the fact of the demand by Philip, and its payment by John, which were truly salient.54 Once again the contrast with Henry and Richard was clear, for they had always merely paid the ritual homage to the kings of France, but never a cash sum. Finally, John agreed that the counts of Boulogne and Flanders were properly vassals of the king of France, so that it was against international law for an Angevin monarch to try to seduce them from their feudal loyalties, as Richard had done. The much weaker kingdom of France had always tried to drain the Angevin empire of its power by setting father against sons and brother against brother, but many historians consider that in the treaty of Le Goulet, France for the very first time asserted itself as a de facto as well as de jure superior to the Angevins.55
Superficially, an era of peace seemed to have descended. Philip referred to the new king of the English as ‘our dearly beloved John’.56 John toured his continental dominions, from Caen in Normandy to St Sever in Gascony (June-August 1200), and visited Philip in Paris, where he was made much of. Philip appeared willing to accept the reality of a powerful neighbour on his doorstep, but those who knew the French fox were only too aware that he was merely awaiting the next family dispute, border quarrel or tussle over local sovereignty to show his teeth again. Only the truly naive could not have been suspicious about the many trips Philip made in the year 1200 to the sensitive marchlands of Normandy.57 Indeed many English chroniclers thought that John was a classic dupe for having concluded a treaty on terms so advantageous to France; Gervase of Canterbury dubbed him ‘John Softsword’, and the nickname stuck.58 Apologists for John, however, say that he had no real choices. The Angevin empire was geared for defence, not mobility and attack, as the system of castles in Normandy showed quite clearly.59 To counter the lightning martial probes Philip favoured and to get round the obstacles imposed on military action by feudal custom, Richard had been forced to introduce a standing army in all but name. This, plus his innovation of campaigning all year round, placed enormous strains on the exchequer, and provoked in his critics the familiar charge that he was a monomaniac or military fanatic.60 The truly costly item in the accounts was the hire of mercenaries, routiers and Brabantines. Richard’s heavy taxation had caused many rumblings, and even a rich realm like the Angevin empire could become overstretched if it had simultaneously to defend frontiers from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees. Critics of Richard said he simply borrowed money from international banks or Jewish moneylenders, then left it to underlings to work out how to make the repayments.61 There is no need to get snarled up in the heated debate about the exact state of the empire’s finances in 1199 - had Richard left his realm virtually bankrupt or was this simply ‘spin’ put on the situation by John’s propagandists (and his later admirers)?62 The fact is that John, rightly or wrongly, thought he could not afford protracted warfare against Philip, and this was the deep subtext of the treaty of Le Goulet.
The extent to which Le Goulet has become a battleground for modern historians is little short of astonishing. One of John’s most prominent modern defenders has this to say: ‘The contrast with Richard’s gusty bravado and reckless resort to expensive adventures no doubt justified to small minds the epithet ‘Softsword’, but if John had tried a firm sword it would have shattered in his hands.’63 This follows the familiar pattern of the pro-John faction, which, on a purely a priori basis, dubs all chroniclers hostile to John ‘unreliable’ - a very good example of ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. Gervase of Canterbury’s famous (or notorious) judgement on John merely echoes what other chroniclers thought. Ralph of Diceto criticised the peace of Le Goulet severely, and especially the size of the dowry given to Blanche of Castile. Andreas of Marchiennes, another excellent source, said that in the Le Goulet treaty John made the entire war against Philip meaningless by giving to the French king the very things for which the campaign had been waged in the first place. Roger of Howden also took a ‘jaundiced though discreet’ view of the peace terms.64 So, although the most balanced interpretation of John’s actions at Le Goulet is in terms of his false perception of the differential resources available to both sides, there are grounds for interpreting his actions even more pessimistically, in terms of sheer cowardice or incompetence. Some say that John was shaken by the sudden death of Mercadier, his most able captain, at Bordeaux on 10 April 1200. Others, like Diceto, stress the sheer quantity of bad advice John received: ‘less than prudently’; ‘on the advice of evil men’; ‘in a manner unworthy of the royal majesty’ - these are some of the phrases Diceto predicates on John’s actions in 1200.65
But Le Goulet was not John’s only failure in the first year of his reign. He also showed the lack of a sure touch by his less than subtle treatment of two people Richard had dealt with tactfully and diplomatically. John decided to assert himself against his half-brother Geoffrey, who as archbishop of York seemed overmighty and arrogant. While Geoffrey was away in Rome, John kept back the rents from the archiepiscopal estates for his own use and then, on his return from Rome, summoned him to court to explain his high-handed actions.66 While his attitude to his half-brother (to whom he owed a moral debt for past services) may be regarded as merely petty, his dealings with William, king of Scotland, are more suggestive of bad-tempered incompetence. It appears that ‘William the Lion’ originally favoured Arthur for the succession and had even intrigued along these lines with William Longchamp.67 On Richard’s death, William offered fealty to John in return for the northern earldom for which he had petitioned Richard in vain. John detained William’s envoys at court and instead sent back one of his own, counselling patience. When the Scottish envoys pressed the matter immediately after John’s coronation in England, John replied by brusquely summoning William to meet him at Northampton.68 The Scottish king responded angrily, threatening that if the earldom was not handed over within forty days, he would invade England. John called William’s bluff, ignored him, went to France and returned to the issue only in March 1200 when he again summoned William to meet him, this time in York. Again the summons was refused, and it was only in October 1200, when John sent a seven-man embassy north of the border with letters patent, guaranteeing safe-conduct, that William finally came south, to Lincoln, to do homage. John got his way, postponed consideration of the northern counties indefinitely, and engendered a period of strained relations with Scotland.69
John’s first year as king had hardly been auspicious. It did not help that he had ascended the throne just before the year 1200, when the su
perstitious forecast an apocalypse, as they always did at a century’s end; this time the canard was that Antichrist had been born in Egypt and the world had entered the final days.70 Famine, dearth and pestilence stalked both France and England; crime was at epidemic levels throughout the Angevin empire, with the saintly bishop Hugh of Lincoln experiencing a succession of footpads, highwaymen and brigands on his 1199 journey to Aquitaine to see Richard.71 The laws of chivalry seemed in abeyance, both as a result of the Lionheart’s year-round campaigning and the new savagery: one half Brabantine atrocity, one half Philip’s Byzantine liking for blinding prisoners. John was distrusted by his fellow princes, despised by his barons and deeply unpopular with the common people. It was not just that he walked in the shadow of the great Richard; he was widely regarded as cruel, treacherous, cowardly and politically inept; had not Philip made him an international laughing-stock with the terms of Le Goulet? He had no charisma that would bind men to him, no track record of success in war, and he had a reputation for meanness withal, that contrasted markedly both with the perception of Richard as an openhanded king and the reality that he was lavish with money when it came to buying allies.72 The great lords who abandoned John in the winter of 1199 and set off on crusade were essentially saying three things: they would be more secure, richer and in every way better off in the Holy Land than in Western Europe while John was king; they could not be sure that he rather than Philip was going to win the struggle for power in greater France; and they regarded John as a morally unsavoury character, who had tried to harm his nephew and would doubtless do the same to them if given a chance; moreover, he was now in alliance with a wife-beater and anti-crusader in the form of Philip Augustus, which rather proved the point.73
Contemporary chroniclers and observers were virtually unanimous in finding John an unprepossessing monarch. Aged 32 when he ascended the throne, he always evinced remarkably consistent character traits, few of them, unfortunately, very appealing. He cut a poor figure physically, being no more than 5ft 5ins tall.74 Contemporaries thought him a poor general and even a cowardly one, though modern historians have not usually been willing to share that view.75 But not even modern revisionism can shake the universal consensus that John was a deeply unpleasant individual: cruel, miserly, extortionate, duplicitous, treacherous, mendacious, suspicious, secretive, paranoid and lecherous. There can be no serious doubts about his cruelty, for even if we discount the many accounts from hostile witnesses, there are simply too many well attested instances of barbarous behaviour that cannot be argued away. Men were hanged by the thumbs and the hands, roasted on gridirons and tripods, and prisoners were blinded with salt and vinegar. Roger of Wendover tells the story of one Geoffrey of Norwich who was thrown into jail and then weighted down with a cloak made of lead or iron, so heavy that the unfortunate man quickly expired.76 Even more repulsive was John’s treatment of Maud of Saint-Valéry, wife of William de Braose, at one time John’s chief henchman in Ireland. When John finally broke with de Braose, he captured Maud and her son and (in 1210) starved them to death in a dungeon at Windsor Castle.77 John had no compunction about mistreating or murdering women and children, and the comment of the historian Nicholas Vincent hits the nail on the head: ‘The chivalric code of honour was never much more than a light veneer, a superficial application of courtesy and civilization to what was, underneath, a far grimmer and more violent reality. At the court of King John the veneer appears to have worn perilously thin.’78 John indeed always liked to starve people to death, and he visited the same fate on forty knights captured at Mirebeau. Modern defenders of John, unable to deny his cruelty, try to deal with it by ahistorical and anachronistic attenuation, principally through what has been termed the argument ad Hitlerum; that is to say, they insinuate the idea that his atrocities were small beer alongside those of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, conveniently ignoring that John lacked both the technology and the political culture for mass killing; there is simply no way of telling how a particular individual temperament would react in an entirely different milieu, but the circumstantial pointers are scarcely favourable.79 That there was a morbid side to John’s cruelty seems clear from his Nero-like delight in bloodshed in the arena - in John’s case in the judicial combats that he would often defer to a time and place of his convenience, so as not to miss any nuance of the gory spectacle.80
It is almost a stereotype of the despotic personality that cruelty goes hand in hand with extreme suspicion and paranoia, and the paradigm certainly worked out in John’s case. He liked to exact an oath from his staff that they would report immediately any comment made about him, especially if it was negative.81 Treacherous himself, he expected treachery in others. There are those who cannot afford to trust because they cannot afford to fail, but such a defence is scarcely possible for a man who had inherited the Angevin empire and was therefore, by definition, already a success. In John’s case pathology rather than circumstance provides the answer. Unpredictable, quick-tempered, capricious, a nurser of grudges and a brooder over ancient wrongs, John liked to lull his victims into thinking themselves secure in the king’s affection before making lightning strikes that compassed their downfall. His action at Evreux, when he pretended to be on Philip’s side, gulled his way inside the citadel, but then slew the men of the garrison and paraded their heads on poles, is typical of the man.82 John’s defenders are once again on shaky ground, and they usually attempt to palliate his worst excesses by tracing them to an unhappy childhood and then blaming that on Eleanor of Aquitaine. Yet even his most zealous modern defenders tend to give up when faced with the catalogue of his two-faced crimes. One of them finds John ‘secretive and suspicious, over-sensitive to the merest flicker of opposition’, while another agrees on his ‘inability to manage his magnates . . . his suspicion of them contributing to their distrust of him’. Kate Norgate, John’s first modern biographer, went further and spoke of his ‘almost superhuman wickedness’.83 The combination of cruelty, suspicion and paranoia receives its most eloquent testimony in the story of his treatment of Peter of Wakefield in 1213. Peter, a harmless crank regarded by fellow rustics as a prophet, made the mistake of prophesying that John would no longer be king by Ascension Day. John imprisoned Peter at Corfe until the due date had passed, then dragged him ‘at the horse’s tail’ to Wareham, where he was hanged. John then meted out the same fate to Peter’s son just in case he shared his father’s views.84
John was avaricious, miserly, extortionate and moneyminded. Like Philip Augustus, he preyed particularly on the Church, exhibiting clear signs of insensate greed and cupidity. Some go so far as to say that his notorious quarrel with the papacy was ultimately actuated by his lust for abbey lands and monastic wealth, rather than personal or political ideology.85 He begrudged money spent on anything other than his personal pleasures, though as a hedonist he could be lavish and profligate. He liked to live high on the hog and measured his own magnificence by a groaning board, such as the one provided for the Christmas feast in 1206 at Winchester, where 20 oxen, 100 pigs, 100 sheep and 1,500 chickens were roasted, and 1,500 eggs consumed.86 He liked to spend on gorgeous raiment and gold-trimmed robes and, like many epicureans, was fascinated by jewellery, of which he kept a vast collection; whenever he saw someone with a precious stone he desired, he tended to fine the person and stipulate that the fine had to be paid in the form of the coveted jewellery. He also liked to spend money on gaming and betting, though he was a very poor gambler.87 Yet most of his money was spent on his mistresses, for John was a notoriously unfaithful husband and ran a veritable harem of lemans, concubines and grandes horizontales. Occasionally the names of the mistresses surface in the official records, especially the financial ones. Thus we can identify Clementia and Suzanne, the widow Hawize, countess of Aumale, and a fair unknown to whom in 1212 he sent a chaplet of roses from the justiciar’s garden.88 The names of his known bastards were Joan, daughter of Clementia, Geoffrey and Richard (both of whom had military careers), Oliver and Osbert; Oliver and Rich
ard were born to ‘noblewomen who had scandalous liaisons with John’; and there were certainly others, whose names escaped the official records.89 Some say that lechery was not unusual in a medieval king, and five not a particularly high tally of natural children, especially when set alongside someone like Henry I, who sired at least twenty-one illegitimate offspring. But this defence ignores two crucial factors. There are hints in the sources that John’s sexual tastes ran to perversion, possibly sado-masochistic. And John sacrificed political aims and the well-being of his empire to his personal lusts, in that he alienated his barons by pursuing their wives and daughters.90 As the historian Nicholas Vincent has well said: ‘A king who dallied with the wives and daughters of his leading barons was likely to excite far more bitter resentment than a king who confined his extra-marital entertainments to low-born courtesans.’91
Another pronounced characteristic of John was restlessness - a quality that was inevitably traced to his father. He became irritated and even angry with priests who said Mass slowly or waffled through sermons, on one occasion sending a servant to tell the preacher in the pulpit that he was bored and wanted his dinner.92 John also resembled Henry II in his peripatetic court and the speed with which it moved around the realm. The triumphal progress through France in June-August 1200 shows a man dedicated to haste - and this would have had his opponents in the Church nodding their heads, as John perfectly exemplified the old patristic formula that all haste was the work of the devil (omnis festinatio ex diabolo est). Starting at Caen, he took in Falaise, Le Mans, Chinon and Loches in under two weeks. On 18 June he was in Angers, at the end of June in Tours, at the beginning of July in Poitiers, on the 14th in Bordeaux, then to St Sever in Gascony, and finally on a zigzag course back north, through Agen, Périgeux, Angoulême and Poitiers (again) before returning to Angers at the end of August.93 Yet these bursts of frenetic energy alternated with periods of indolence, such as the famous occasion in 1203 when, according to Roger of Wendover, John stayed in bed until midday and spent the rest of the day feasting and carousing even while Philip Augustus overran Normandy.94 The lazy workaholic is not an unknown phenomenon, and indeed interpreting John is a bit like biblical exegesis in that virtually any proposition can be sustained by picking out certain tendentious passages in the writings of the chroniclers. One historian gave up and concluded: ‘Almost any epithet might appropriately be applied to him in one or other of his many and versatile moods.’95 Yet when all allowances for the bias of hostile witnesses have been made, what remains is a clear indication of manic-depressive behaviour, bipolar affective disorder, cyclothymia - a diagnosis which would also account for the violent mood swings and tempestuous rages.96
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