Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  William Marshal often sailed close to the wind when dealing with the Angevin monarchs and never more so than when dealing with John. So far from recalling knights from Ireland, he sent more over as reinforcements; secret messages had reached him from his followers in Ireland adamantly insisting that if they crossed the Irish Sea, Meiler would seize their lands. Marshal decided to present John with a fait accompli. He urged his men to an all-out effort, which turned out successfully when with the help of Hugh Lacy the Marshal faction defeated Meiler and took him prisoner.83 Meiler had already poisoned John’s mind against Marshal so John thought of a characteristic way to take revenge. One day at the end of January 1208, as John and Marshal were riding out of Guildford together, the king said he had just heard dramatic news from Ireland. Marshal immediately knew this was a lie, either because he knew John so well and could read his body language or, more likely, because he knew that the stormy Irish Sea was at its most tempestuous that winter, with alarmingly high wave heights reported, so that it was impossible for any courier to have crossed to England. John made up a story that Meiler had heavily defeated Marshal’s knights near Kilkenny, hoping to cast his too-mighty subject into despondency. The poker-faced Marshal simply replied: ‘Certainly, sire, it is a pity about the knights. They were after all your subjects, which makes the affair only more regrettable. ’84 But when John finally learned the truth and realised that Marshal had the whip hand in Ireland, he bowed to necessity and allowed him to depart for Ireland, this time in semi-disgrace. From April 1208, for five years, Marshal remained in Ireland while John’s fit of the sulks continued, finally bringing peace to Leinster where all John’s lieutenants had failed.85

  Meiler FitzHenry’s poison against Marshal, assiduously poured into the king’s ear, availed him nothing, but the similar dose of venom directed at de Braose finally worked. Gradually John came to feel that de Braose had abused his trust by unilateral conspiracy with the Lacys and the Welsh rebels. Disillusioned with de Braose, stuck with Marshal and exasperated with Meiler’s ineffectiveness, the pragmatic John made it clear that Marshal’s hegemony in Ireland had his blessing, confirmed Walter Lacy as lord of Meath (April 1208), and put in four royal commissioners over Meiler in Ireland; FitzHenry lingered on in this lame-duck capacity until John put him out of his misery at the end of 1209 by replacing him as justiciar with John Gray, bishop of Norwich.86 But Meiler’s shirt of Nessus had at least put paid to de Braose. No one has ever satisfactorily explained why John turned so viciously on his erstwhile favourite - though the sources tend to indicate that de Braose’s habitual and persistent financial dishonesty was at the root of it - but there was no mistaking the savage vindictiveness when he did so. John broke decisively with de Braose and ordered all his Welsh lands forfeit. The desperate de Braose tried to head off utter disgrace by promising he would pay his debts, offering castles as payment and pledging his grandson as hostage.87 But de Braose’s strong-minded wife Maud refused to hand over this hostage, saying publicly that John had murdered Arthur and could not be trusted with the custody of minors. Already furiously angry when this was reported to him, John virtually exploded when he heard that de Braose had surrendered the agreed castles and was now trying to retake them. He proclaimed him outlaw and foul traitor.88

  Although John had many motives for going to Ireland in 1210, undoubtedly the de Braose affair was one of the principal ones, especially when he learned that William Marshal was protecting him and that the Lacys had offered him asylum. In 1209 de Braose had fled to Wales and embarked there for Ireland. When he arrived in Wicklow, William Marshal entertained him hospitably for three weeks. John Gray protested vociferously that Marshal was harbouring a traitor, but Marshal replied in a rather sibylline way that he was compelled by feudal law to shelter his ‘lord’.89 It is not clear what Marshal meant by this, and the suspicion arises that he was merely twisting John’s tail to show the king the limits of his power, but it is just possible (though unverifiable) that Marshal held a fief in Wales that was technically in de Braose’s lordship; as has been remarked before, the complexities of feudal tenure made almost any form of hierarchy, however ludicrous, credible in terms of the overall system. Yet finally Marshal was faced by a direct order from Gray, in the king’s name, to give up the traitor, whereupon Marshal sent him on to safety with the Lacys and when they in turn were threatened, de Braose fled back to Wales on John’s promise of a meeting and a safe-conduct.90 At the meeting John told him the true villain was his wife, and they should go together to Ireland to sort it out. De Braose refused to budge from Wales, but John thought he would run Maud to earth in Ireland once and for all; while he was there, he would try to rationalise the confused situation that decades of faction-fighting had brought about.91

  And so John returned to the land from which he had retreated so ignominiously twenty-five years before. Elaborate preparations were made, with an impressive commissariat, drawing supplies from the four corners of the kingdom, from Sussex, Devon, Somerset, Lancashire and Yorkshire. The large number of knights and Flemish mercenaries the king took with him suggests not so much that he feared heavy fighting as that he was planning a dress rehearsal of future campaigns against Philip Augustus. In June 1210 he crossed from Pembroke to Waterford, then proceeded via Newbridge and Thomastown to Kilkenny, where he and his army were entertained by William Marshal.92 On 28 June he reached Dublin, intending to advance into Meath to chastise the Lacys for having sheltered de Braose. Some of the Meath barons came to him to intercede for their lord, but John was in no mood for compromise. He dispossessed Walter Lacy, who was immediately inclined to bend the knee, but his brother put up initially stiff resistance in the mountains of Mourne until John’s army made its numerical superiority felt. Evidently relishing the campaigning, John seized Carlingford Castle, then threw his army across Carlingford Lough on a bridge of boats, outflanking the enemy; John himself, travelling by sea, surprised and took the castle of Dundrum. Hugh Lacy and Maud de Braose fled to Ulster and, when pursued, to Galloway (Scotland).93 Lacy left a fighting remnant behind at Carrickfergus at the entrance to Belfast Lough, but the garrison took one look at John’s formidable siege preparations and surrendered. Preening himself on his triumph, John lolled at Carrickfergus from 19-28 July.94

  The inclination of the native Irish princes was at first to do homage to John. Cathal Crovderg joined his host and marched north with him. At Carrickfergus a northern Irish prince, Aed Meith Ua Neill, came to John to enquire what would be the terms if he consented to vassalage. John raised the issue of hostages that always so bedevilled his negotiations with would-be vassals. Ua Neill went away to think about this, but shortly sent word that he was not prepared to send hostages.95 John then made the same demands of Cathal Crovderg. On the pretence of consulting his council, Crovderg returned to Connacht, telling John he would be returning in a fortnight with his son and heir, Aed. But Cathal was advised by his wife that it was not safe to deliver their beloved son into John’s mercies; evidently the story of Arthur was known all over Europe by now. When Crovderg accordingly returned without his son, John flew into one of his rages and arrested four of Crovderg’s officers whom he took to England with him as the replacement hostages.96 John then moved down to Dublin, where a week’s leisurely stay (18-24 August) brought his Irish expedition to an end. While in Dublin John had another meeting with William Marshal and could not resist bringing up once more the subject of de Braose and Marshal’s having harboured a traitor. Marshal replied that if anyone was prepared to make this charge publicly, he must prove it in combat.97 Not surprisingly, as on previous such occasions, there were no takers. John contented himself by ‘humiliating’ Marshal, insisting that he take hostages for his future good behaviour.

  On paper John’s 1210 expedition to Ireland was a great triumph. Meath, Ulster and Limerick were all forfeit to the Crown, he had put his rebellious barons in their place, snubbed Marshal and reinforced the authority of the justiciar John Gray.98 His one clear and incontestable succ
ess was the destruction of the de Braose sept. Even while he was in Ireland, John’s lieutenants captured Maud de Braose and her son in Scotland. Maud offered the surrender of all her husband’s lands and a fine of 40,000 marks but, when John accepted, compounded her folly by repudiating this and driving the king to a fresh diapason of anger.99 Threatened with dire punishments, Maud next offered to honour her original agreement and to pay a further 10,000 marks indemnity for having reneged. John agreed, on condition she remained in custody until the full amount was paid. John had another face-to-face encounter with de Braose himself in England, and the disgraced favourite reiterated and confirmed Maud’s terms. But the day before he was due to pay the first instalment, he fled. John with calculated cruelty asked Maud what she intended to do next; she broke down and admitted she could not pay. While her husband was outlawed, the luckless Maud and her son were starved to death in a dungeon at Windsor.100 As has been well said, this was ‘one of the grimmest examples of the king’s merciless love of cruelty’.101 John always made a great play of his interest in justice, but he could hardly temper it with mercy, as he did not know the meaning of the word.

  However, as so often with John, a short-term triumph masked long-term failure and showed the king once again indulging his taste for papering over a problem rather than solving it. On John’s departure relations between the justiciar and the native princes immediately soured, as instanced by the orders to Gray to build no less than four castles in and around Connacht. Gray also organised a two-pronged invasion of Connacht, from Meath and Leinster in the north and from Munster in the south, as further punishment for Cathal Crovderg’s failure to hand over his son and heir as hostage.102 But Crovderg and his wife were right, for John as all-devouring Moloch of wards and hostages soon manifested itself once more. To save his kingdom from annihilation, Crovderg finally handed over a younger son as hostage, but the boy was cast into a dungeon in England and died there some years later.103 Ua Neill was also punished for his ‘contumacity’ but Gray’s Ulster campaign of 1212, ambitiously planned as an amphibious operation, finally bogged down in failure. The idea of John’s 1210 expedition to Ireland as a glittering triumph must therefore be considerably modified. In terms of chastising his Anglo-Norman barons and settling accounts with de Braose the enterprise had been a success, but as a long-life conciliation of Ireland, with native princes accepting John’s overall suzerainty, it was a failure. Some claim that the great revolt in Wales under Llewellyn torpedoed John’s plans in Ireland. 104 The only thing certain is that it was almost another two hundred years before an English king took an expedition to Ireland: the doomed Richard II. Ireland survived John’s attempts to master it and remained as a thorn in England’s side for the rest of the Middle Ages.

  15

  JOHN WAS LIKE HIS father in his incessant journeyings. Partly a function of his personal restlessness, partly an aspect of his control-freakery but also partly a necessity of medieval kingship, his rovings took him to all parts of England. One scholar has linked John’s peripatetic lifestyle to the exigencies of a primitive economy: ‘in the days when rents were tendered in kind it was often simpler to go to eat them where they were produced than to transport the food itself ’.1 John had no central residence like Louis XIV’s Versailles or Queen Victoria’s Balmoral, but simply a set of favourite castles, like those at Windsor, Winchester, Nottingham and Marlborough. In London he had apartments at the Tower and a palace at Westminster, but at any of the sixty-plus royal castles in the realm it was a case of ‘watch and wait for you know not the hour when the master cometh’. John had a number of fortified residences which fell short of the status of palaces, such as those at Freemantle in Hampshire, Clarendon in Wiltshire, Feckenham in Worcestershire, Brill in Buckinghamshire, Geddington in Northamptonshire, Clipston and Kinghaugh in Nottinghamshire, but he also had stopover hunting lodges, the medieval equivalent of motels.2 He was almost constantly on the move: he visited Winchester sixty times during his reign and Clarendon over forty. Probably John’s favourite county was Dorset. He was a frequent visitor to Dorchester and Cranborne Chase, and had hunting lodges at Corfe, Bere Regis and Powerstock Common.3 He rarely stayed more than two or three nights in any one location. An inventory of his travels in 1207 finds him at Geddington on 3 March, on the fourth at Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, on the fifth at Southoe and on the sixth at Huntingdon. On 7 March he was in Cambridge, on the 9th at Newport, Essex and on the 10th at Bardfield in Essex. After two days spent in Hallingbury (Essex), he arrived in London where, after two days at Lambeth, he moved on to Farnham in Surrey (15-16 March). He was at Freemantle in Hampshire for three days, at Winchester from 20-22nd March, followed by three days at Clarendon and then a further three at Cranborne in Dorset. He was at the Powerstock hunting lodge in west Dorset on 29-20 March, and ended the month’s peregrinations at Exeter.4 Much the same picture emerges from a detailed study of other years. Here is one three-week period from 1209: 10 May, Bristol; 13-14 May, Bath; 16-18 May, Marlborough; 20-22 May, Winchester; 22-23 May, Southampton; 24 May, Portchester; 27 May, Aldingbourne (Sussex); 28-29 May, Knepp.5

  All these residences had to be kept in a state of good repair, and each had a keeper paid at anything from the rate of a penny a day for the least significant to the £10 a year paid at Westminster or the £15 paid at Woodstock. When John was in the territory of special favourites like Peter des Roches, the bishop of Winchester, who had a magnificent pile at Farnham, he liked to stay there.6 But it is clear that John spent much of his reign on the road, accompanied by a veritable travelling circus of horsemen, wagons, carts and pack animals, bearing wardrobes, bedding, treasure chests, documents and charters and even a urinal and bathtub. Since his household knights numbered around one hundred, it is clear (and verified by other evidence) that not all his knights accompanied him at any one time, and speculation has grown that there must have been some kind of duty roster.7 Some officials must have been present from the very nature of their duties, as for example the Seneschal, the Chamberlain, the Marshal of Bodyguards, the Clerk in charge of household expenses, the Butler (in charge of food) and his assistants such as the Master Dispenser of the Bread and the Master Dispenser of the Larder, plus a host of servants to wait at table or work in the kitchens encountered en route, the royal bedmaker, the royal laundress, the master tailor, the king’s bathman, and so on. We can infer numbers from the more than 150 Christmas presents distributed by the king to his staff, and the lesser perquisites given to a host of hangers-on.8 The itinerant caravan or cavalcade had to be constantly resupplied with ready cash brought from London by a senior official under a cavalry escort; since silver pennies were the only currency recognised as tender in all normal transactions (the marks and pounds of the world of taxation and subsidies were units of account rather than media of exchange), such posses travelled slowly with heavily-laden sacks. One of John’s innovations was to try to simplify this cumbersome system by collecting money in the various localities and giving the debtors a chit for presentation at the London exchequer. Soon the idea was expanded into that of having money dumps (cash caches, so to speak) in the provinces, so that ‘area treasuries’ evolved, as at Nottingham and Rochester and, above all, in John’s beloved West Country, at Bristol, Devizes, Marlborough, Salisbury, Exeter and Corfe.9

  Since to maintain formation in this wagon train would mean going at the pace of the slowest member - and the pace of the baggage cart was very slow indeed - John often rode ahead of the main body of his travelling court and went hunting at the stopover location, giving the baggage time to catch up. Even though specially-bred heavy horses pulled the carts - since it had been found they could go half as fast again as oxen - they could not achieve much more than two and a half miles per hour even on the best surfaces. Consequently, the absolute maximum the king’s travelling court could achieve in a day was fifteen miles, though the daily average was usually less than half that when stopovers are taken into account. It is an extraordinary fact about English history tha
t, until the coming of the turnpikes in the eighteenth century, successive rulers still largely relied on the old Roman roads - Watling Street, Ermine Street, the Foss Way and the Icknield Way - which were wide enough for two wagons to pass each other or for sixteen armoured knights to ride abreast.10 When the king’s mobile court left these main roads, the rate of progress slowed to a crawl, for thereafter the ‘roads’ were no more than tracks between one village and another. Although medieval kings baulked at actually emulating the Romans by starting a proper road-building programme, they came down very hard on any one foolhardy enough to dig up or otherwise tamper with the old Roman roads, as we know from Henry II’s reign.11 Local communities were under standing orders to make good any pitting or holes in the surface made by excessive traffic. John frequently suffered from the inadequate infrastructure. In 1212 a boat had to be hired to carry the royal baggage across the Thames as London Bridge was broken down; and in the same year carts carrying John some of his favourite wines from Southampton to the north were delayed at Nottingham because the Trent was in spate.12 This highlighted the principal difficulty about land transport: although rulers could struggle on with antiquated roads so as to avoid capital investment (truly there is nothing new under the sun), the real problem was bridges. Here John did make an effort: hundreds of new structures were built and old wooden bridges replaced with stone ones. So important was the bridge-building programme that Clause 23 of Magna Carta was devoted to it.13