John remained married to Isabella for the rest of his reign, and it has sometimes been assumed from her relative absence from the historical record that the marriage must have been, if not strong, at least serene. This seems doubtful. The only direct evidence of discord is Gervase of Canterbury’s statement that John imprisoned her at Devizes in 1209, but even this has been disputed on the ground that the Latin word used to describe the alleged jailing (includitur) could mean house arrest or even ‘confinement’ before a birth. 131 And it is certainly true that Isabella attracted wild rumours and outlandish gossip, such as the absurd story that she was raped at Marlborough and her younger son murdered. 132 Yet it is clear that John continued his extramarital escapades, whether or not he was sexually besotted with Isabella. In 1204, when one of his mistresses wanted to go to bed with her husband instead, an angry John fined her 200 chickens for the privilege. There must be something in the story, for the wronged husband Hugh de Neville showed he had a grievance by appearing in rebellion later. 133 John’s taste for cruelty and semi-psychotic caprice also appears in his treatment of the first Isabella, his discarded wife. To keep Isabella of Angoulême in her place, he seems to have kept his first wife in a style as lavish as the queen’s and even on occasion forced the two women to be under the same roof, to provide him with some sick enjoyment.134 On the other hand, there is no such mystery about John’s marriage as attaches to the union of Richard and Berengaria. He and Isabella clearly enjoyed normal marital relations, and he sired five legitimate children on her in the years 1207-15. The real problem in the marriage seems to have been that John routinely demeaned and disparaged his wife by not allowing her the sorts of privileges enjoyed by Eleanor of Aquitaine or even Berengaria. The suspicion arises that John, always meanminded and avaricious, refused to pay her normal expenses once he had begotten a male heir.135
The official records certainly bear this out, for we see a marked difference in the way Isabella was treated. John played true to form by double-crossing his wife almost instantly. Having angered the Lusignans even more by promising the richest lordships in Poitou (those of Saintes and Niort) to Isabella as a wedding present, he then blatantly failed to make good on his promise. His method was to farm out the lordships nominally assigned to the queen to powerful local magnates and then pocket the rents himself.136 The contrast between Isabella’s position and that of Eleanor, who had real power and real ownership of her dower estates, could scarcely be clearer. Yet Isabella had an even more poignant financial grievance, relating to the so-called Queen’s Gold - monies traditionally paid to the royal consort from the taxes, levies and fines on transactions with Jews and other bankers.137 Whereas Eleanor of Aquitaine always received this income, neither Berengaria nor Isabella did, even though custom ordained that a king could waive a fine but never the taxable percentage of it due as Queen’s Gold.138 What is worse, it is likely that John did in fact levy the money but simply pocketed it himself or - another favourite scam - wrote it off against his personal debts. What is clear is that John kept Isabella in a lamentable state of financial subjection, dependent for everything on his handouts. She received no income from her dower lands or from the Queen’s Gold and did not even enjoy Angoulême in her own right. And whereas Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought a huge household of kinsfolk and clients to England, John prevented this is Isabella’s case, imposing his own placemen in her household and preventing her from bringing over fellow natives of Angoulême.139 It is not surprising that in her later years Isabella, who survived John by a full three decades, evinced no fond feelings whatever for her royal husband. John, though, made her a scapegoat for his own failings. It is a known characteristic of the authoritarian personality that such an individual can never acknowledge his own mistakes; errors must always be someone else’s fault or the result of a ‘conspiracy’. When John lost Normandy to Philip of France in the years immediately after his marriage, it was entirely predictable that he blamed his wife for an outcome that was purely the result of his own weakness. 140
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IT WAS SOME TIME before the backlash from the Lusignans manifested itself, so that John must sometimes have wondered if, against all the odds, he had got away with his latest double-cross. Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose political antennae were always much sharper, knew better. At 78 very tired after her latest political mission - a journey to Spain to fetch her grandchild Blanche of Castile for the marriage with Philip Augustus’s son - she retired to her favourite anchorage, the abbey of Fontevraud in Anjou. Seeing the way the wind was blowing, she identified Aimeri of Thouars as a key player in the dispute between the houses of Angoulême and Lusignan and invited him to Fontevraud. Aimeri’s past was chequered and he was the classical political trimmer: having originally supported John in the spring of 1199, he veered away later in the year into the camp of Arthur and Constance of Britanny, doubtless nudged in that direction by the fact that his brother Guy became Constance’s third husband then, but also virtually propelled thither by John’s inexplicable action in first making him seneschal of Anjou and Touraine and then rescinding the offer.1 In February 1201 Eleanor entertained Aimeri at the abbey, and extracted from him a solemn promise that he would remain faithful to John; Aimeri confirmed the pledge in writing to John, in a letter warning him of looming trouble on the continent.2 John seems to have paid no attention. The Lusignans seem to have been waiting to see if John was prepared to offer any compensation for the affront to their honour, but it was not the new king’s way to be gracious in victory. Even one of his defenders concludes ruefully that John liked ‘to kick a man when he was down’.3 He responded to Eleanor’s warning by sending his officials to take over La Marche, actually turning the knife in the wound.
By feudal law, John should have denounced the Lusignans in his court before proceeding to despoil them, but a regard for legal niceties was never his strong point when his own interests and desires were concerned. The Lusignans therefore appealed over his head to the nominal feudal overlord Philip of France. Philip proceeded cautiously. He was not eager for another war with John at this time, while he was locked in conflict with the papacy over the bigamous marriage to Agnes of Meran, and his inclination was to pour oil on troubled waters. In a would-be solomonic judgement he tried to ‘part the combatants’, on the one hand telling the Lusignans to desist from their siege operations in Poitou, on the other inviting John to a conference and rolling out the red carpet for him.4 He went in person to meet John at the Normandy frontiers, where John had recently arrived from England, flushed with another of his perfidious triumphs. The king of England had just perfected a new financial scam. Having ordered his feudal army (not the mercenaries) to assemble at Portsmouth for a campaign in France, telling his lords to bring all their power and the money for campaigning expenses, he promptly dismissed the knights and their host, but first he relieved them of their expense money and proceeded to hire mercenaries. 5 John congratulated himself on taking a shortcut through the usual resistance to taxes and levies, but his actions were regarded by his own barons as shifty and underhand. He felt himself to be on a winning streak, and was flattered and gratified when an emollient Philip invited him to a state visit to Paris in June. On this occasion Philip Augustus once more laid it on with a trowel and appeared, if anything, over-accommodating, even vacating the royal palace so that John could be lodged there.6 He told his guest he would disregard the Lusignans’ appeal if John did his feudal duty and heard their case in his own court. Unfortunately, John was one of those personalities who regard compromise and statesmanship as weakness. He concluded that Philip must be hiding some weakness that prevented him from being ‘strong’ and resolved to solve the Lusignan problem in his own repressive way.
John so clearly felt he was the master of events in the summer of 1201 that he even displayed momentarily the flickering generous touch, intermittently in evidence, that his defenders always pounce on with gusto. He settled a generous widow’s dowry on Berengaria and, on the strength of this magnani
mity, started negotiations for an alliance with Sancho of Navarre.7 Feeling overconfident, he showed his true character next by the way he dealt with the Lusignans. They had asked for the exhaustive processes of feudal custom to be set in train; very well, he would show them there was pain as well as gain in making feudal appeals. Using the letter but not the spirit of feudal law, he invoked the procedure whereby trial by combat would decide an accusation of treason. He formally charged the Lusignans with long-standing treachery against the Angevin dynasty and offered to prove the truth of his words by a duel to the death with royal champions, issuing individual challenges to dozens of members of the Lusignan family. John then provided a list of his champions, from which it became clear that he had simply bought the services of all the premier duellists and specialists in man-to-man combat in Western Europe. The Lusignans quite rightly declined to play with such a rigged deck, and appealed once more to Philip, pointing out the incontestable fact that John was denying them justice and making a mockery of the very notion of trial by their peers.8 Credibility required that Philip acted, but he patiently exhausted the repertoire of peaceful conflict resolution. He secured a promise from John that a proper trial, not a travesty, would he held, but then John went back on his word by endless prevarication. He fixed a date for the trial and a venue, then switched both time and place. When Philip continued to press him, he fixed a definite date but then refused to offer the Lusignans a safe-conduct to attend their trial.9 Becoming more and more irritated, Philip told John that there was no way out of this maze: a feudal overlord like himself had to guarantee due process. To underline his seriousness, he insisted that John give him three castles as an earnest of his intentions. John responded to this by sending the archbishop of Canterbury to Paris with an entire rigmarole of specious verbiage and bad faith.10 By Easter 1202 Philip had had enough of the stalling and evasions. He ordered John to appear before a court of barons in Paris to answer a charge of default of justice. Not yet done with his logic-chopping, John replied that by ancient custom the duke of Normandy was obliged to attend a French court only if it met on the boundaries of France and Normandy. But Philip was fully the equal of such casuistry. He replied that he had summoned John, not in his capacity as duke of Normandy, but as duke of Aquitaine, count of Poitou and count of Anjou.11 Finally cornered, John made clear the contempt he had been disguising: he refused either to surrender the three castles or to attend the hearing in Paris. In feudal terms he was now a contumacious vassal.
When Philip’s barons met, they quickly confirmed that John was, in international law terms, an outlaw. The penalty for contumacity was forfeit of his fiefs of Aquitaine, Poitou and Anjou. Philip now had the perfect excuse he needed to complete the task he had long looked forward to: destruction of Angevin power outside England.12 Prince Arthur was already a key player in the drama, especially when the death of his mother Constance in September 1201 drove him ever deeper into Philip’s orbit. Philip knew which power levers to pull, summoned Arthur to do homage and promised him the hand of his daughter Mary. He also knighted Arthur and declared him John’s successor in all fiefs save Normandy, which he retained for his personal domain.13 The fact that Normandy had expressly not been included as a subject for the decision of the court, so as to checkmate John’s prevarications, nonetheless gave John the excuse he needed to present Philip’s actions as aggression. He launched into a propaganda offensive to portray himself as the injured party, particularly targeting religious houses. 14 Yet in all other ways he was on the defensive. Philip’s position improved immeasurably between 1201 and 1202. Under papal interdict for the bigamous marriage to Agnes, Philip was saved by Agnes’s fortuitous death in July 1201. Moreover, in 1201 he had been constrained by the presence in Europe of Richard’s old allies on his eastern flank, Baldwin of Flanders and the German princes, who could conceivably make common cause with John. By 1202 these powerful magnates had all departed on crusade. The Fourth Crusade, a notorious shambles that never even reached the Holy Land and ended with the disgraceful sack of Constantinople in 1204, took a raft of putative anti-Philip pieces off the diplomatic chessboard. Baldwin of Flanders fared even worse than Richard by becoming a short-lived emperor of Byzantium and then ending his days as a prisoner of the Bulgarians. Even those German princes who remained at home were no use to John, for they were sucked into the vicious faction fighting between the new Holy Roman Emperor Otto and his deadly rival Philip of Swabia.15
The war between John and Philip that now commenced was to be a disaster for the Angevins. No amount of special pleading, purporting to show that France was now richer and commanded more resources than the Angevin empire, can disguise the fact that the years 1202-04 show John simply outclassed by a better general and a more astute politician. Since Philip had no reason to feel jealous of John, as he had of Richard, or patronised and overawed, as he had been by Henry II, his personal feelings for John were probably warmer than for his predecessors, as evinced by the sumptuous reception in Paris in 1201; it may have helped that the two men were roughly the same age (Philip was a year senior), though critics are divided on the impact of kinship (John’s mother having been married to Philip’s father).16 Like John, Philip was quick-tempered; like John, Philip had his fair share of conflicts with the Church and the papacy; like him he was a bon vivant; like him he had turbulent relations with women and he was also something of a sexual oddity, though no stories of perversion sully the image of Philip. But there the similarities end. Philip may have been a cold fish, but he was never cruel as John was, and there was nothing ‘manic’ or bipolar about his steady, plodding, patient and focused march towards his political goals. 17 Alongside Richard he may have seemed cowardly and timid as a warrior, but he was more than a match for John. Above all, he had been tempered in the fire, annealed by exposure to Henry II and then Richard. He had spent an entire adult life contending with Angevin monarchs, and John was the third, and least considerable, of those he encountered. While John was playing the buffoon in Ireland in 1185, or indulging in petty intrigues while Richard was in the Holy Land, Philip had been learning his craft, pitting his wits against Henry II, Saladin and the Lionheart. While John was in obscurity during 1194-99, Philip, though on the back foot against Richard, was building up his strength and learning valuable political and military lessons. Already bald, Philip by now looked the part of an elder statesman, while the chroniclers still tended to view John as an immature playboy, a spoiled brat who had ascended to the purple through luck, essentially a child raised to man’s estate. 18
Philip began the war in his usual unimaginative way, concentrating on the Seine valley and laying siege to the frontier fortresses of Normandy. It was left to Arthur and the Poitevins to display flamboyance by a thrust into the Loire valley, but their energy alarmed Eleanor of Aquitaine, who feared they meant to capture her, so she sent urgent messages to John in Le Mans, pleading for rescue. Fortunately John was in the energetic phase of his bipolar cycle, and he responded with unwonted rapidity and imagination. Taking his army of mercenaries on a forced march of eighty miles in forty-eight hours, he achieved total surprise as he fell upon the enemy unawares. Arthur had urged caution and the need to wait for reinforcements, but the Lusignans argued that if they captured Eleanor of Aquitaine, John’s position in the entire south would collapse.19 With Eleanor now trapped in the keep of Mirebeau castle, Arthur and the Lusignans were complacent, leisurely preparing the coup de grâce against the citadel. A force one thousand strong, including Arthur’s 200 knights, had no answer when John and his ally William des Roches (seneschal of Anjou and John’s right-hand man in the south) swept in on them in the early hours of 1 August. Panic overtook the bleary-eyed or still somnolent men; and Geoffrey de Lusignan was actually breakfasting off roast pigeons when he was taken by John’s men. Completely surrounded, the entire enemy force was caught in John’s net; no one of any significance escaped.20 It was probably John’s finest victory, the more unexpected for being out of character with his usual marti
al achievements, and the only time he showed the Lionheart’s elan in the field. It was the greatest success for English arms until Crécy, and Philip was momentarily stunned. John permitted himself some public boasting about his exploit, while William Marshal went out of his way to send taunting messages to his old enemy the Lusignans.21 Philip broke off his campaigning in Normandy and headed south to see if he could retrieve anything from the disaster but he was too late. John made a slow and triumphant progress back to Normandy, exhibiting his heavily manacled prisoners to the people of the towns through which they passed as if they were part of a freak show. The prize catch was Arthur, and he and Geoffrey de Lusignan were imprisoned at Falaise. The Lusignan patriarch Hugh was lodged in a dungeon at Caen, while the non-ransomable prisoners were shipped over to England and held in Corfe castle and other Dorset strongholds. The disaster of Mirebeau might have led anyone less determined than Philip Augustus to sue for peace immediate ly.22
By the autumn of 1202 John was in a dominant position, but if ever there was a time when the moral prevailed over the material it was now. The aftermath of Mirebeau was a test of character that Richard would not have failed, but John managed to do so, evincing distinct self-destructive tendencies withal. He began by alienating William des Roches, the real brains behind the triumph at Mirebeau. Des Roches had given his best advice and employed his best strategy and tactics on the clear understanding that he would decide Arthur’s fate if the young prince was captured.23 John agreed, but then, predictably, went back on his word once he had Arthur in his power. This was fatuous folly. True, des Roches was ambitious, but his ambition could easily have been contained by granting him local hegemony in the Loire valley. The despotic John construed des Roches’s reasonable demands concerning Arthur as ‘giving him laws’ and cast about for ways to take the strut out of his over-mighty vassal. The removal of Arthur to Falaise was a slap in the face to des Roches, and could not have been read in any other way by anyone who was not a milksop. The result was predictable. Des Roches at once abandoned John and persuaded Aimeri de Thouars (previously won over at great cost by Eleanor of Aquitaine) to go with him.24 The upshot was that John faced continuing warfare in northern Poitou with formidable enemies, when by a scintilla of statesmanship he could have concentrated all his military resources against Philip Augustus in the Seine valley. Trying to paper over the disastrous cracks he himself had caused to appear in his anti-Philip alliance, he did an about-face and tried to curry favour with the Lusignans - the exact thing he should have done two years earlier. Magnanimously he released them from jail on their oath that they would remain loyal - he took pledges and castles as security - but once the birds had flown the coop, they made plain their contempt for John by joining des Roches and Aimeri of Thouars.25 William Marshal was stupefied at John’s naivety and folly in allowing the anti-Angevin party in central France to emerge from the debris of Mirebeau even stronger than before. But it is sometimes observed that treacherous personalities can never quite imagine that anyone else could ever be quite as perfidious. Maybe it was thus with John. It is even more likely that, once he realised his error, he gave short shrift to the less useful prisoners. The story of an attempted mass break-out by twenty-five prisoners at Corfe, which ended with their being surrounded and then starved to death, has more than a whiff of ‘shot while trying to escape’ about it.26
Richard & John: Kings at War Page 42