Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  The news of the fall of the ‘impregnable’ Château-Gaillard sent shock-waves across the Angevin empire; the reaction in Normandy was closer to panic. It now seemed distinctly possible that Rouen might fall before John could get his relieving army over the Channel. Efforts were switched to building up an enormous granary and storehouse of provisions in the Norman capital, so that it could not be starved out. Within its strong walls and triple fosse, John’s faithful lieutenant Peter de Preaux remained confident he could hold out until John’s new army crossed over from England, for there were already enough supplies to feed the garrison for a year and Rouen, unlike the other towns in Normandy, really did owe its wealth and prosperity to the special favours received from John; since its burghers had nowhere to go but down under any new dispensation, they were immune to the virus of turncoating sweeping across the duchy.56 John allowed himself to relax and lay plans for a huge counteroffensive, using Caen and the Cherbourg peninsula (hitherto unravaged by the war) as his launch-pads. Meanwhile John tried to exhaust all his diplomatic options, even forlornly sending to Germany to see if there remained any Rhineland lord who had not left on crusade. He placed many of his hopes on papal intervention, and fortuitously a papal legate was in England, charged with the very task of achieving a ceasefire between Angevins and Capetians. In the second week of April a high-powered delegation (including William Marshal, the archbishop of Canterbury, the earl of Leicester and the bishops of Norwich and Ely) accompanied the nuncio on a visit to Philip in Paris. Philip was affability itself but he would not be budged on his main demands: John must hand over Arthur and surrender all his continental claims.57 The insistence that Arthur’s sister Eleanor (whom John had, paradoxically, treated well) also be handed over must have struck a sour note, for John had just lost another Eleanor - his mother. She died at 80 on 1 April 1204, already foreseeing the loss of Normandy. Richard had always been her favourite son, but she had also performed for John tasks that went way beyond the call of either maternal or queenly duty.58

  Faced with the prospect of a gruelling siege of Rouen, Philip revealed his true intelligence. He simply turned away and left it to stew, instead concentrating on targets on the periphery of Normandy. He reasoned that if all the rest of Normandy were lost, it would be futile for Rouen to try to stand alone, an Angevin oasis amid a wilderness of enemies. He marched up the River Risle and took Argentan; the next objective, Falaise, birthplace of William the Conqueror, resisted half-heartedly for a week then capitulated. Caen then surrendered without a fight, and barons and nobles flocked in from all sides to worship the rising sun and pay their homage to the new conqueror. 59 Meanwhile in the west his Breton allies swept over Mont St Michel and Avranches; the Bretons and the French then converged and mopped up the Cherbourg peninsula.60 With most of Normandy in his hands, Philip then allowed himself a leisurely progress through Lisieux, bound for Rouen. The Rouenais were now surrounded and pondered their options; it was one thing to be the jewel in the Angevin crown and to receive all the trading and financial privileges that went with that status, but what happened if there was no longer an Angevin ruler to protect them? If they were to salvage anything from the wreck, the burghers had to look to their own salvation and make what terms they could with the new dispensation. Philip piled on the pressure by granting ‘most favoured’ status to towns already conquered, which raised the possibility that Rouen, once top of the heap, would soon be the bottom-most. Peter de Preaux, seeing how the minds of the civilians were working, sent frantic messages to John, saying that without the swift advent of a relieving army, he stood no chance.61 To save destruction from mangonels and the barbarities that would accompany a sack of the city, on 1 June 1204 de Preaux came to sensible terms with Philip: it was agreed that if John did not come to his aid in thirty days, his duties to his feudal lord would have been fully discharged and an honourable surrender could follow. Peter de Preaux wrote to John again, stressing the urgency of his situation. John sent back one of his cavalier messages, that everyone should do what ever seemed best. It was sauve qui peut. De Preaux saw no point in prolonging the misery and surrendered on 24 June, a week before the deadline.62 Philip spent August and September mopping up Angevin fortresses in the Loire, adding Niort, Tours, Amboise, Saumur, Poitiers, Loudun, Montreuil and Parthenay, plus the fortresses of Loches and Chinon, to his victorious tally.63 The entire duchy of Normandy, save only the Channel Islands, was lost to the English crown.

  Why did John lose Normandy so spectacularly, when his father and brother had easily held their own against the French? The proximate cause was the epidemic of treachery that beset him, with literally dozens of barons going over to Philip; one scholarly study lists thirty-eight names, while admitting that they are the tip of an iceberg.64 Many of the most important magnates changed allegiance once it became clear that John had murdered Arthur, including Count Amaury of Evreux, Hugh of Gournai, Peter of Meulan and Guy of Thouars. The contemporary chroniclers were quite clear in their own minds that John was unable to resist Philip’s incursions or relieve besieged castles because he could not trust his own Norman vassals.65 Treachery, then, had both an objective and subjective aspect: objectively, it robbed John of vital resources and fighting men, while subjectively it increased his tendency towards paranoia and left him paralysed, unable to take any firm decisions as he could never be certain who were the men he could truly rely on. The situation in Normandy in 1203-04 was overwhelmingly John’s own fault: he had no natural powers of leadership or charismatic personality, he could not enthuse men and make them work for greater purposes than immediate self-interest, and he had the aura of a loser - ‘John Softsword’ was a tag that did a lot of damage - in clear contrast to Richard, who always had the psychological advantage over his enemies of appearing to be invincible. John could be tough, ruthless and even cruel, but he could not inspire love, admiration or devotion, he was liable to panic when the going got tough, and his risk assessment was poor, doubtless heavily influenced by his ‘bipolar’ oscillation between hypertrophied optimism and black pessimism. William Marshal’s poet biographer put the issue very clearly: ‘The Normans were not asleep in the day of the Young King. Then they were grain but now they were chaff, for since the death of King Richard they have had no leadership.’66

  John’s defenders claim that Normandy was anyway slipping from the Angevin grasp by the time he came to the throne and that not even Richard could have arrested the process. This argument tends to be threefold, subdividing into what one might call political, cultural and structural aspects. The political proposition is that the dukes of Normandy, once they became kings of England after 1066, put England before Normandy, treated the duchy as an appanage of the kingdom, and took over modes of tyranny and despotism which were native to England but not to Normandy. In modern terms, we might say that the Angevin rulers had lost political legitimacy. The idea that the descendants of William the Conqueror had absorbed an allegedly Anglo-Saxon tendency towards authoritarianism, as it were by osmosis, seems a curious argument, but there was undoubtedly a widespread perception in Normandy that their rulers had become more dictatorial and had flouted many of the older Norman customs, mores and folkways. Gerald of Wales drew attention to the paradox that while they were simply dukes of Normandy, the rulers easily held their own against the French but, once they acquired the kingdom of England as well, with much greater resources, they performed far less impressively against the Capetian monarchs of France. Gerald thought that ordinary Normans had responded to the increase in despotism of their rulers by, as it were, working to rule and he put a new ‘spin’ on the hardy perennial, beloved of students of the Ancient World, that Persian slave levies could never defeat free Greeks. ‘How can they raise necks trodden down by the harshness of notorious tyrants to resist the arms and fierce courage of free Frenchmen?’67 Gerald topped up this political argument by a quite different, cultural, one. He correlated the rise of France under Philip Augustus with an artistic and intellectual renaissance based in P
aris, which was by now streets ahead of Rheims or Chartres as an academic and creative powerhouse. In modern terms we might say that the France of Philip Augustus, who was consciously presenting himself as the new Charlemagne, was becoming culturally ‘hegemonic’ in all francophone areas.68 Notions like legitimacy and hegemony, which have a peculiarly twentieth-century resonance, actually work perfectly well in explaining political change in the early thirteenth century.

  Yet the main argument purporting to show that the loss of Normandy should not be laid at the door of John personally is that Normandy was already becoming disaffected as early as the reign of Henry II, simply because Normans resented the continual warfare between Capetian and Angevin and the financial cost of this that they were called on to bear. Normandy was already in debt in 1194, because of the vast sums raised for the Crusade and then the ransom money paid to Germany for Richard’s release, with instalments of debts contracted for this purpose still being paid off in 1203-04. When sustained warfare began again in 1194 in Normandy, the financial exactions rose to meet its costs, but the duchy was having to run to stay in the same place, for the more revenue-yielding regions that fell to Philip Augustus’s conquest, the less the tax yield and the greater the consequent Norman expenditure on defence. Old taxes - scutage, tallage, carucage or the Norman equivalents thereof - were levied at higher rates while new taxes were introduced, on bailiwicks and towns especially. John compounded the problems by financial mismanagement, and when Philip Augustus’s military probes bit off larger and larger lumps of Normandy, the duchy managed to keep going only with the injection of funds from England.69 Normans had to endure hefty taxation as well as the horrors of war - rape, atrocity, looting, the murder of civilians and the sacking of towns - in a campaign that they increasingly thought could not be won. Everyone perceived the balance of power to be swinging in favour of Capetian France; that kingdom seemed to be almost visibly waxing while Normandy waned, and the days when a William the Conqueror could habitually defeat the king of France were long in the past. Since Philip Augustus was the rising power it made sense for both masters and men to come to terms with him and abandon John. John, on this view, was simply unlucky; neither his father nor his brother had to contend with a France with its present level of resources, and the intrinsic weakness of the Angevin empire, which had been there for fifty years for the really shrewd to discern, suddenly became apparent to everybody. John, in short, was the victim of historical inevitability.70

  Naturally there is much merit in this ‘structural’ argument but there has been in recent years a tendency to push it too far. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the Angevins and Capetians can be debated, if inconclusively, but the logic of historical process cannot explain or excuse the contingent actions John took in Normandy, unless we accept the quasi-Marxist argument that the ‘privatisation’ of John’s realm was happening because feudal relations in general were already weakening and being replaced by a money economy. On this view, there might well be a correlation between the rise of a cash nexus and the rise of John’s personal retainers, the ‘knights bachelor’, and his consequent detachment and alienation from his barons.71 But it is very difficult to see how any overarching historical process can excuse or mitigate John’s egregious stupidity in farming out large sections of Norman administration to his mercenary captains. It is true that Richard had introduced the practice in exceptional circumstances, but John made it the norm throughout his francophone empire. The idea of an administrative cadre being headed by bloodthirsty buccaneers in itself suggests why Normandy was lost; Philip may have used mercenaries but he never made them senior civil servants. Among John’s appointments were Martin Algais as seneschal of Gascony, Gérard of Athée as seneschal of Touraine and Brandin in the same office in La Marche.72 John openly declared about Algais: ‘Know that the service of Martin Algais we esteem more highly than the service of any other person.’73 The most controversial of all such appointments was that of Lupescar aka Louvrecaire (‘The Wolf’) to a Norman bailiwick. The most rapacious of all John’s profit-obsessed mercenary captains, Lupescar alienated great swathes of Norman society by his barefaced rapacity. The abbess of Caen was reduced to paying John protection money to ensure that Lupescar did not despoil the abbey’s estates further, after he had siphoned off vast chunks of the estate as his own personal rents.74 The lupine depredations of Lupescar became a black legend in Normandy, to the point where William Marshal’s biographer recorded the following judgement: ‘Do you know why King John was unable to keep the love of his people? It was because Lupescar mistreated them and plundered them as if he were in enemy territory.’75 Things reached the pass where John had to bind his Norman barons with an oath that they would defend and protect the hated Lupescar in return for his own pledge to rein him in; left to themselves, the barons would gladly have killed The Wolf.76

  It is difficult to overstate the reign of terror unleashed throughout the Angevin empire when John foolishly let these mercenary captains off the leash. The routiers swarmed over the land like locusts, preying on all and sundry without distinction of rank: neither churches nor monasteries nor even large towns were safe from their depredations.77 It was fortunate for John that the mercenary leaders never made common cause, or they might have posed the threat to his kingship that the Praetorian Guard did to the Roman emperors. Too greedy, self-centred and blinkered to cooperate, these thugs led atomic existences, each in his sphere of influence with his band of desperadoes. Their non-parochial ambitions were largely directed at each other: Richard’s favourite routier captain Mercadier was assassinated in the streets of Bordeaux by a henchman of Brandin, and one is tempted to see this murder of Richard’s right-hand man by one of John’s minions as a kind of transference of sibling wishes from younger to elder brother.78 A weak ruler, John never kept an iron grip on these unruly elements, as Richard always had. Mercadier summed up thus his service for Richard: ‘I fought for him loyally and strenuously, never opposed his will, was prompt in obedience to his commands, and because of this service I gained his esteem and was placed in command of his army.’79 But in John’s reign the routier captains were not just subject to only the most nominal suzerainty from the centre, but they demanded, and received, all kinds of special privileges and perquisites: special protection for their booty which was almost sacrilegious in the quasi-sacramental status it gave to ill-gotten goods; the right to keep and ransom their own prisoners; the right to govern their castles and estates according to their own lights rather than in accordance with local laws and customs.80 Whereas Richard had valued Mercadier because of his military talent, John liked the company of routier captains like Martin Algais precisely because they were cruel and nihilistic and shared his contempt for religion and the normal feudal regulations that bound a liege lord to his vassals; John wanted all the rights of an overlord but none of the duties. It is hard not to be pleased that the biter was often bit; the detestable Lupescar, a psychotic thug with no redeeming graces, repaid the multiple benefits he had received from John by deserting him and surrendering Falaise to Philip in 1204.81

  Nonetheless, John’s apologists both ancient and modern, have always clung to the consoling argument that Normandy was already effectively lost to the Angevins before John ever ascended the throne, though naturally they disagree on the reasons.82 For some, the rot had already set in during the reign of Henry II; for others, Richard is the villain, for having allegedly impoverished Normandy.83 But the most influential argument is that, in ways largely unexplained, Philip Augustus became much more powerful financially than the Angevin empire in the decade of the 1190s. The best research, however, fairly conclusively establishes that Capetian resources had not overtaken those of the Plantagenets by 1202-03; it is conceded that Philip’s revenues had increased but not by nearly enough to provide a decisive advantage over John. As the historian V.D. Moss points out: ‘King John was almost certainly extracting more revenue from Normandy than King Henry II did in 1180.’84 The more ingenious
defenders of John therefore concede that Philip had no significant advantage in economic and financial resources overall, but that he was able to employ the principle of concentration of force: he was able to deploy his energies much more effectively in the war zone of Normandy, which was geographically contiguous to the kingdom of France; clearly no Angevin ruler could harness all the wealth of Aquitaine and England purely to defend Normandy.85 Moreover, once Normandy was lost and its resources started accruing to France, Philip’s local superiority became even more pronounced, making the prospect of a campaign of reconquest chimerical. Yet even the concentration of force argument relies heavily on the hidden premise that Richard really had bled Normandy dry, and this too has been effectively contested. The allegation rests on economic naivety. As the most careful student of the loss of Normandy has shown, vast sums of money from England and the king’s creditors were spent in Normandy, so that if anywhere was being bled dry it was England. And taxation and war-spending lavished on projects like Château-Gaillard were not a one-way drain on Normandy’s resources, since the extra employment and income thus generated in turn stimulated the Norman economy.86