Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Three aspects of John particularly appeal to a modern sensibility. First, his love of books. He had a small library which he carried round with him on his restless travels and often swapped titles with the abbot of Reading; we hear of John’s interest in Pliny and in the history of England - not something one can ever imagine Richard bothering with.97 In an age when attention to personal hygiene did not rank as one of the human priorities, John was positively oriental in his liking for baths and cleanliness; the records show that between 29 January and 17 June 1209 he took eight baths at different places on his itinerary and even possessed a dressing gown.98 Yet what most intrigues the historian of the early twenty-first century is John’s alleged atheism. The circumstantial evidence for John’s status as unbeliever is strong - he did not attend Communion as an adult - and is explicitly declared by Matthew Paris.99 The counter-arguments designed to make out John as devout are unconvincing. True, he kept up outer show and paid lip-service to official religion, but for purely prudential reasons; John was far from a stupid man and realised that religion was a kind of social cement, in terms of which a sceptical king was in an exposed position. True, he occasionally made donations to religious foundations, but this was merely giving back with the left hand part of the vast sum he had extorted with the right. And would a true believer really have dug in for a long war of attrition with the papacy, as John did? Not even Henry II nor Richard, two men much more audacious and dauntless than John, went so far as this. It is interesting that the one man in English history to go farther down the anti-papal path than John did was Henry VIII, like John a despot who recognised no authority superior to his own will, and like him with a contemporary reputation as Europe’s new Nero. Professional historians determined to have John as a loyal son of the Church insist that we should be able to find documentary proof of his atheism, as if John would have been foolish enough to state in a charter or other official document that he did not believe in God. Desperate to find real evidence that John was a devout Christian, his apologists have sometimes tried to cancel out his atheism with his greed, alleging that he preyed on Church wealth out of cupidity, not ideology.100

  John’s apologists like to say that he was a man plagued by bad luck, but it was arrogance and stupidity rather than ill-fortune that characterised his next significant move after the treaty of Le Goulet. John decided to make a dynastic marriage that would cock a snook at Philip of France, but the initial problem was that he was already married. It will be recalled that in 1189 he married his cousin Isabella of Gloucester, related to him in the third degree of consanguinity. This meant that according to canon law the couple could not be legally married unless the Pope relaxed the ruling.101 Archbishop Baldwin clashed mightily with John by forbidding the pair to cohabit and summoning John to appear before his ecclesiastical court. John allowed no one who was not his feudal superior to ‘give him laws’, and contemptuously ignored the summons; Baldwin responded by laying an interdict on his lands. John outwitted the archbishop on that occasion by appealing to a papal legate who was visiting England, and got the interdict lifted, pending the Pope’s decision on granting a dispensation for the marriage. The papal legate made the would-be solomonic decision that John’s marriage was lawful until the Pope decreed otherwise. But Archbishop Baldwin died in the early stages of the appeal to Rome, and no one thereafter had the interest or the energy to pursue the matter. John and Isabella remained in marital limbo, their union neither declared null and void nor valid and indissoluble. This twilight state of affairs suited John very well, especially as he gained Isabella’s dowry and the earldom of Gloucester, but he had no special feeling for Isabella and even toyed with a marriage to Alice in 1191.102 Although John and Isabella were probably still cohabiting in 1196, they had no children. Possibly for this reason, or because his vaulting ambitions already directed his gaze to farther horizons, this was also the year John started taking soundings about an annulment. 103 The matter became more urgent when John became king in 1199, and at the end of that year he demanded that the bishops of Normandy declare the marriage void. The tame clerics complied, and their lead was followed by the even more influential trio of bishops in the south, those of Poitiers, Saintes and Bordeaux - with the Gascon primate the prime mover in John’s marital schemes.104 Pope Innocent III rightly took the view that all six diocesan lords were acting out of sycophancy and looked about for a way to bring John to heel. It required Isabella to appeal to the Vatican, but this was the one thing Isabella did not do, almost certainly because John had bought her off.105 This divorce by mutual consent irresistibly recalled John’s mother’s separation from Louis VII, especially as in both cases the royal personages initiating the divorce had hidden agendas of their own.

  It was during the tour of his French dominions in the summer of 1200 that John took his fateful decision to remarry. While staying with Hugh the Brown (Hugh Le Brun) at his ancestral seat of Lusignan in early July, John summoned Ademar of Angoulême and Guy of Limoges to pay homage to him.106 At this stage John seemed determined to stick with the Angevin-Lusignan alliance that Richard had pioneered. It will be recalled that the Lusignans, lords of lower Poitou and doughty crusaders, had waged a forty-year war with Henry II and Richard, which came to an end only when Richard struck up a notable friendship with Hugh of Lusignan in the Holy Land. Hugh had even visited Richard during his captivity in Germany, and in return Richard had elevated the Lusignans at the expense of their territorial rivals, the Angoulême family, headed by Ademar.107 South of Poitiers the Angevin empire had a shaky existence, with scattered Plantagenet garrisons and outposts vying for hegemony with the local feudal aristocracy who held the real power on the ground. The Angevin rulers had total control only along a narrow coastal strip running from La Rochelle through Oléron and Saintes to Bordeaux. The phantom nature of much ‘imperial’ control in the south was the origin of the tedious and wearisome wars (in 1167-69, 1173-74, 1176, 1178-79, 1183, 1188, 1194) waged by Henry II and Richard in the south. 108 Simplifying, one can even say that the reigns of Henry and Richard centred on two main themes: the never-ending war in the south and the struggle against the kings of France for the Vexin in Normandy. An Angevin ruler, lacking the military force to impose proper centralised control, had to play divide-and-rule in the south, encouraging the lords of Angoulême and Lusignan to struggle between themselves for the much coveted rich county of La Marche (an Angevin possession since 1177), to which they both laid claim. Alarmed by the chaotic and rapidly changing scene following the sudden death of Richard, Hugh of Lusignan realised that John would not necessarily feel bound by the purely personal ties of friendship that had united him and Richard. Taking matters into his own hands, in January 1200 Hugh actually kidnapped Eleanor of Aquitaine and released her only when John made a solemn promise to assign La Marche to him and reject the claims of Ademar of Angoulême.109

  Hugh of Lusignan can have feared nothing from the meeting of John and Ademar, for the count of Angoulême had recently added to his de facto independent status (in feudal theory he was supposed to be a vassal of the dukes of Aquitaine but had always enjoyed semi-autonomous status) by the de jure stance of accepting King Philip of France not the duke of Aquitaine (John) as his overlord.110 But Ademar brought an intriguing, secret proposition from Philip which the devious John listened to eagerly. Philip suggested that the way forward was for John to marry Ademar’s only daughter Isabella, as this dynastic match would solve both John’s problems in the south and the complications of overlapping homage and feudal duties owed by the count of Angoulême.111 There was an obvious problem straightaway, which was that Isabella was already engaged to Hugh of Lusignan himself. But Ademar was not pleased with the prospect of this wedding, which he saw as a patronising sop from Hugh because the Lusignans were already nine-tenths of the way towards winning the struggle for La Marche. John was no fool and he saw immediately what Philip’s game was: to alienate the Lusignans from the Angevins once more. Yet the alternative was potentially an even wor
se prospect. If the Lusignans and Ademar of Angoulême made common cause and Lusignan, La Marche and Angoulême all became one bloc, the new alliance would control the valley of the Charente between Poitou and Gascony, dominate the crossroads of central France and occupy all the Roman roads south, especially from Poitiers to Bordeaux; Aquitaine, in short would be cut off from the rest of the Angevin dominions with its survival as part of the empire in serious doubt. 112 The alienation of the Lusignans was therefore a gamble John would have to take, and perhaps it appealed to the gambling side of him. Others have speculated that John always hated the Lusignans, associated them with Richard, deeply resented their kidnapping of his mother, and saw a chance to destroy them once and for all.113 There was certainly something defiant and deliberately confrontational about the way John planned his elaborate double-cross.

  There was yet another twist in the complex skein John was now weaving. At Le Goulet John had told Philip he was thinking of taking a wife, and had sent envoys to the court of Portugal. His thinking was obvious: Richard had done very well politically out of his marriage to Berengaria, but the changed situation in Spain now (with Castile, Aragon and Navarre at war) made a Spanish marriage much less attractive. But a Portuguese union held some of the advantages of Richard’s brilliant diplomacy in 1198, potentially menacing Philip in regions where he thought himself secure. To Lisbon, then, his envoys sped in the early summer of 1200, before the fateful meeting between John and Ademar. The negotiations reached an advanced stage, with an exchange of ambassadors. 114 Suddenly everything changed: the Portuguese marriage was off, and John was to marry Isabella of Angoulême. The about-face was so rapid that John’s emissaries, still bargaining earnestly in Lisbon, were left out on a limb.115 Historians have struggled to make sense of the rapid sequence of events. Some accuse John of having had the Angoulême match in mind even while parleying with Philip at Le Goulet, and see the embassy sent to Lisbon as a blind, designed to hoodwink the French king.116 But this makes no sense if it was Philip himself who suggested the match with Isabella. The overwhelming likelihood is that John was serious in his quest for a Portuguese bride and abandoned it only when he faced potential disaster in the form of the Lusignan-La Marche-Angoulême axis, at which point he abruptly changed tack and married Isabella. There was clearly something rushed about the entire episode. On 5 July John was holding preliminary talks with Ademar of Angoulême; on 24 August he married his daughter in Bordeaux.117 At the beginning of October the newly-weds crossed to England, where they were crowned together at Westminster on the 8th. Isabella accompanied her husband to the meeting with the Scottish king at Lincoln, then, in the new year to the Scottish border, returning via Cumberland and York to a ‘second coronation’ at Canterbury at Easter (25 March 1201).118

  Almost everything about John’s union with Isabella has invited controversy: his motives; the murky circumstances of the engagement; the status of the marriage in canon law; the balancing of competing political goals; the personality of the new queen; and the reason for the excessive wrath of the Lusignans.119 Some historians have alleged that concupiscence marched together with raison d’état - in a word, that John lusted after his young bride - but there are substantial difficulties with this notion, as will shortly appear. Politically, John alienated the Lusignans, but he must have known this would happen and he may anyway have regarded them as unreliable allies. In any case, many of his advisers endorsed his decision to break with the Lusignans - William Marshal for one, who loathed them for the murder of his uncle earl Patrick and their humiliation of him when they took him prisoner in those far-off days.120 Moreover, for a brief period after the marriage, John was at last able to bring Angoulême under effective Angevin control. By the normal rules of expediency and self-interest the marriage made sense, for Isabella’s kinship links bound her and John to most of the ruling families of Christendom; her mother was a member of the Courtenay family - a crusading sept - and was descended from the kings of France. 121 Isabella herself was, like most medieval queens, a plaything and puppet of powerful males - her father and her husband - but she was every bit as controversial as her own wedding. She had a difficult role to play - and if she was as young as some scholars allege - an impossible one, not least in that she was merely the third queen of England to come onto the stage, with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Berengaria already ensconced as dowagers.122

  Oddly enough, it turns out that Lusignan rage and canon law are organically connected in the case of Isabella. Naturally, the Lusignans were angry that John had double-crossed them and snatched Isabella as a bride from under their very noses, particularly since Hugh of Lusignan may have initially condoned the release of Isabella from her betrothal with him on the understanding that John would grant him clear title to the country of La Marche - an expectation John predictably confounded, thus adding a second double-cross to his initial breach of all known feudal custom. In his usual way, he then stoked up the anger of his enemies by gratuitously promising his wife the lordships of Saintes and Niort, two of the richest in Poitou and thus a natural magnet for the Lusignans.123 Yet there was an ‘overplus’ in Lusignan anger that suggests some other factor may have been at work, and the probability is that it was John’s utterly ruthless lack of squeamishness or regard for the proprieties that so disgusted them. John had not just exhibited a kind of Angevin repetition compulsion by having major problems with his wife, as Henry and Richard had done; he managed to go one better by having problems with both wives. Whereas degrees of consanguinity vitiated the earlier match with Isabella of Gloucester, with Isabella of Angoulême the obstacle to happiness was that canon law laid down a clear age of consent for sexual congress, namely twelve for girls.124 The suspicion arises that Isabella may have been under the age of consent when John married her, but certainty on this point is difficult, for the chroniclers estimate her age as anywhere between nine and fifteen, with twelve being the favoured option. Henry II’s daughter Eleanor had been married to the king of Castile at eight, but the marriage was not consummated until she was fifteen. What enraged the Lusignans was that John had been prepared to marry an under-age girl, where count Hugh had shown more sensitivity towards her. Since it is hinted in many dark corners that John’s sexual tastes ran to perversion, it seems that paedophilia may possibly be added to his many crimes. At the very least he was a cradle-snatcher.125

  From the Lusignan point of view, John had added perversion to treachery and double-cross. Roger of Howden relates that Isabella was betrothed to Hugh of Lusignan in Richard’s lifetime, and that the Lionheart approved of the match. Marriage vows were exchanged by proxy, according to the medieval verba de presenti formula, whereby it was accepted that a couple was legally married, but the marriage had not yet been consummated.126 Hugh of Lusignan did not wish to consummate until his bride was legally of age, which provided John with a legal loophole but he did not bother to obtain a divorce on these grounds for Isabella but rushed into the marriage as if possessed. The haste of the marriage has led even sober scholars to speculate that he was besotted with Isabella, but if she was not even twelve, John’s passion seems abnormal, to say the least. Nicholas Vincent has argued that, since she did not give birth to her first child until October 1207, she may indeed have been around nine years old at the time of her wedding.127 This would make Matthew Paris’s story of John’s lust for his wife in 1203, which kept him in bed when he should have been in the field waging war against the French, even more disturbing - if true.128 Once again historical interpretation is vitiated by lack of hard evidence; the charitable (for John) version might be to assume that Coggleshall’s estimate that Isabella was twelve in 1200 is the correct one, which would make John’s lust for her at fifteen more natural. The fact that Isabella did not conceive until around Christmas 1206 does not necessarily mean that sexual relations between her and John had only just begun. But the consensus seems to be that, once launched on sexual life, Isabella enjoyed it. Matthew Paris, always a hostile witness to both John and Isabella,
said that the queen was a shrewish, adulterous, incestuous woman who practised the black arts - ‘more Jezabel than Isabella’ was his famous description. 129 Although Paris’s view of Isabella is usually dismissed as nonsense, both in her particular case and because all medieval royals were routinely described as lecherous and dissipated, there may be fire behind the smoke. Nicholas Vincent has pointed out that she had several kinsmen in England who could have been her lovers, and the main suspect was her French half-brother Peter de Joigny.130