Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  John’s response to the excommunication was to lift the mulcting of the Church up another notch. From phoney ‘fines’ and ‘fees’ he moved to outright plunder, seizing ecclesiastical plate and melting it down. He also ran a neat line in extortion, for instance blackmailing the monks of Montacute that he would reinstate the prior they had just deposed unless they paid the ‘consideration’ of sixty marks.51 It has been estimated that the sums paid into the exchequer from Church sources rose from only £400 in 1209, before the excommunication, to £24,000 in 1211.52 Ecclesiastical friend and foe were swept alike into John’s ravening maw. Even after the excommunication, two Cistercian monks stayed loyally in attendance on the king, one of them, the abbot of Bindon, acting as his almoner.53 But this did not help the wider Cistercian movement, which seemed to have suffered more grievously than the rest of the regular clergy; more than 15 per cent of the revenue extorted by John from the Church came from the Cistercians, and many of their monasteries were dissolved, with the monks seeking refuge with other orders.54 John acted particularly ruthlessly towards the clergy who fled after the decree of excommunication, expropriating their property without compensation and expelling proxy prelates appointed to their benefices by the exiles. In two especially vindictive acts, the woods of the archbishop of Canterbury were sold, and the bishop of London’s castle at Stortford destroyed.55 Defenders of John like to say that ‘only’ £11,000 a year was extracted from the Church over six years, in addition to the income from vacant sees and abbeys which would have been taken by the Crown in normal circumstances, and that this sum must be set in a context where the total annual income of the English Church was some £80,000.56 Another common defence is that when the great abbeys were allowed to manage their own property on payment of a fine, they were allowed to keep back very generous sums for their own subsistence when returning the accounts to the king’s officers.57

  But - very appropriately in this instance - not by bread alone . . . Religious life suffered badly, to the point where by the end of 1211 only one bishop was left in England.58 Once John de Gray was sent to Ireland to be justiciar (February 1208) and the other bishops fled after the decree of excommunication, there remained only Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. The irony about des Roches was that he had himself been the centre of a disputed election in 1205; on that occasion when the hostile parties held a fresh election under the Pope’s eyes, he emerged as the unanimous choice.59 It was a poor return for the lavish privileges Innocent III had showered on him that des Roches should have emerged as the most disloyal divine of all in the eyes of the Vatican. Beyond the absence of the Church’s princes was the paucity of religious life at the grass roots. Some attempt was made to keep up the tempo of devotion, with sermons being preached in churchyards, and Innocent made some concessions to a liturgically challenged faithful by allowing monks to celebrate Mass once a week behind locked doors; in 1212 he even allowed the dying to receive the viaticum60 But the ordinary parishioners were denied the sacraments, church weddings and burials in consecrated ground. What was worrying for the Church was that nobody seemed to mind; if this continued, religion might cease to exert its grip altogether. Increasingly, the common people murmured and wondered why they had to pay church tithes if the Church was doing nothing for them. 61 The Vatican meanwhile grew increasingly concerned at the behaviour of priests who, having no work to do, spent their time in brothels and taverns or dallied with the world in business or money-making; having let the genie out of the bottle with the interdict and the excommunication, it might not be so easy to get it back in again.62 For John there were hidden worries too. If he could shrug off the authority of the Pope and Holy Mother Church with no other moral authority than his will and his say-so, might it not occur to the toiling masses that there was then no reason why they should not jettison a purely instrumental and pragmatic ruler as well? This was doubtless the reason why John tacked in and out of hatred and contempt for the Church and upholding its moral authority as a necessary corollary to his own. One story has it that John encountered a sheriff ’s officer in charge of a handcuffed prisoner and learned that the man had slain a priest on the highway. ‘Loose him and let him go,’ said John, ‘he has slain one of my enemies.’63 That was John in irreligious, atheistic mood. But the cunning self-serving John was the one who issued orders that anyone speaking evil against the clergy should be hanged from the nearest oak tree.64

  This is another way of saying that John had perforce to weigh short-term gains against long-term implications. In the short-term the quarrel with Innocent had made him rich and his coffers were overflowing; the ordinary taxpayer had meanwhile been relieved of the heavy financial burden of the expeditions to Scotland, Wales and Ireland in 1210-12. This was what led contemporary chroniclers to say that John was both happy and successful, going about with whistling insouciance, devoting himself to hunting and other pleasures: ‘he haunted woods and streams, and greatly did he delight in the pleasure of them’.65 Yet in the long term his sights were set on the recovery of Normandy, and he was aware that he could scarcely fight Philip Augustus with force of arms while he was waging a bitter battle of wills with the Pope, especially as that enabled Philip to portray himself as the protector of Christianity, civilisation and spiritual values. That was why John never entirely suspended negotiations with the Vatican, and envoys continued to travel back and forth from Rome.66 In the summer of 1211 he allowed a papal legate, Pandulph, to enter England and argue the Pope’s case before a royal council at Northampton. Pandulph’s terms for an end to the interdict/excommunication were that John should finally accept Stephen Langton, reinstate the exiled bishops and clergy and restore their confiscated property. John summarily rejected these terms.67 But a year later events at home and abroad had weakened his position to the point where he sent a fresh embassy to Rome under the abbot of Beaulieu to accept on his behalf the terms refused the year before. Innocent decided to make John sweat and at first said that the offer of 1211 was no longer on the table; since John had turned down the terms then, it was his fault that peace had not been restored; moreover, since then, John had committed fresh outrages against the Church and shown himself unworthy of generosity. Nevertheless, Innocent concluded, ‘so that we may overcome evil with good’ he was prepared to stretch a point and allow John to sign up to the 1211 deal, provided it was ratified in a watertight way. Moreover, in addition to receiving back the exiled prelates, John must show his good faith by readmitting Robert FitzWalter and Eustace Vesci, the exiled leaders of the disgruntled barons with a full pardon; as a first instalment on the peace plan, John would also be required to pay over £8,000.68

  John’s embassy narrowly averted the next stage in the Pope’s campaign against John, which was to declare him formally deposed as king and his subjects released from any allegiance. Innocent was prompted to this apocalyptic course by exactly the same developments that led John to accept the Pope’s terms: on the one hand Philip Augustus was at last preparing his long-threatened invasion of England, and on the other John’s barons had finally lost patience with him and were beginning to break rank. Stephen Langton had actually left Rome with Innocent’s bulls declaring John deposed, which he intended to publish in France, but was overtaken on the road by Pandulph, who explained the changed situation.69 John was to be given until June 1213 to ratify the terms agreed with the Pope by his envoy, failing which Langton was to promulgate the bulls. This time, however, John was not stalling and really intended to submit. To ensure no eleventh-hour contretemps - perhaps he did not entirely trust Langton’s discretion - Innocent sent his legate Nicholas of Tusculum to recover the papal bulls from the archbishop and burn them.70 Nevertheless, Innocent remained deeply suspicious of John and laid contingency plans in case he reneged. He wrote to Langton as follows: ‘It often happens that a ruthless foe, finding himself cornered, treacherously pretends peace and after the peace attempts treachery, in order to outwit by guile those he could not by force. Wishing, therefore, with careful pre
caution to guard against such treacheries, by the authority of this letter we grant you this power: if King John should violate the peace that has been restored between him and the English Church, then (unless after due warning he makes amends to you) you will, after consultation with the Pope, reduce him and his kingdom, by apostolic authority, to the state of excommunication and interdict that they were in before the restoration of peace.’71

  Beset by multitudinous problems, John was in Kent waiting nervously for the return of his envoys. One of them, Brother William of Ouen crossed the Channel to confer with John, then recrossed to confirm to Stephen Langton that the king had ratified.72 Finally Pandulph came over for the formal treaty signing and met John at Dover on 13 May. The king reiterated his acceptance of the deal negotiated in Rome, and three of his barons (the earls of Salisbury, Warenne and Ferrers) plus the count of Boulogne stood as guarantors of his good faith.73 Two days later, at the house of the Templars at Ewell near Dover, John pulled a rabbit out of the hat. He issued a charter making England and Ireland feudal fiefs of the Holy See, with himself as the Pope’s vassal. Technically, he resigned the kingdoms of England and Ireland to Innocent and received them back under the bond of fealty and homage, on a pledge to pay 1,000 marks a year to the Holy See, 700 for England and 300 for Ireland. This charter was witnessed by John de Gray, by Geoffrey Peter, the justiciar, the count of Boulogne, and the earls of Salisbury, Pembroke, Surrey, Winchester, Arundel and Derby as well as three members of his own household.74 It was then ratified in St Paul’s Cathedral on 3 October in a solemn ceremony in the presence of Nicholas, cardinal-archbishop of Tusculum and sealed with a golden bull. John’s formal release from excommunication was, however, delayed until the following July when Langton finally returned. The interdict took even longer to be rescinded because John, typically, haggled about the reparations due to the English Church. Once in England, Langton set up a commission to assess the clergy’s losses, which took time, and there were many disputes, principally arising from the fact that John had bullied monasteries into giving him quittances for what he had taken from them.75 Yet in Innocent’s eyes, in the euphoria of victory, all this was mere detail. He was delighted with the unexpected turn of events which so enhanced the prestige of the Apostolic See, and sent off a fulsome letter to John, praising him for having known how to turn evil into good.76

  John was lucky in that Innocent did not extract the last pound of flesh. Bowled over by John’s submission, the Pope swung from over-suspicion of the English king to over-trust, and wrote to him with a warmth and enthusiasm he seldom evinced to others. In sending Nicholas of Tusculum as his personal representative, he described the legate as ‘an angel of salvation and peace’.77 He gave Nicholas secret instructions to go easy on John in the matter of reparations, so Nicholas cut through the acrimony over what John actually owed to churches and monasteries by compounding the debt at the round figure of 100,000 marks, over the angry protests of the English clergy that John was getting away with financial murder and that the true debt was at least half as much again. So unswayed was Nicholas by these remonstrations that he actually allowed John to pay the 100,000 marks in instalments: he was to make a down-payment of 40,000 and pay the rest off at 12,000 a year. When the interdict was lifted, Nicholas allowed John to get away with a down-payment of just 13,000.78 But if the clergy thought John had gulled the Pope and his representatives, many thought Innocent had humiliated the English nation and its king. John was overcompensating for his former excesses, and many who had previously criticised him for dragging England into an unnecessary conflict with the papacy now attacked him for having sold out the true interests of England.79 Interestingly, many of the critics were themselves churchmen, and even Stephen Langton thought John had gone too far in allowing papal power to extend to England; he particularly resented Nicholas of Tusculum’s high hand in making appointments to vacant sees and benefices which he saw as his own prerogative.80

  The high point of John’s new entente with the Pope came on 20 July 1213 in a solemn ceremony at Winchester Cathedral when John welcomed as archbishop the man he had vowed would never occupy that office. Stephen Langton for his part formally absolved the king of excommunication. John then swore on the Gospels that he would defend the Church at all times and revive the good laws of former times, and especially the codes of Edward the Confessor; moreover that he would abolish all bad laws and hear all issues in his courts with justice as the ruling principle, guaranteeing human rights to all men.81 By thus appearing as the patron condescending to a suppliant, Langton regained some of the prestige lost to Nicholas of Tusculum. Innocent had given Nicholas plenipotentiary powers which the legate had exercised injudiciously and with some want of tact. It particularly incensed the ultramontane clergy, who had been steadfastly loyal to the papacy, that Nicholas, with the Pope’s blessing, rewarded the trimmers, apostates and royal lickspittles, so that those who had lacked the courage and integrity to break with John now received the glittering prizes: among those so despised were William Cornhill, who became bishop of Lichfield, and Walter Gray who was appointed to the archbishopric of York, left vacant by Geoffrey. John’s half-brother was never recalled from exile, as might have been expected.82 The most scandalous case of papal betrayal of his faithful occurred at Durham. Here the chapter assumed from John’s submission that it could now exercise the ancient canonical right to elect a new bishop, and chose the saintly Richard Poor, dean of Salisbury. Yet, with Nicholas’s connivance, John imposed his old henchman John de Gray, lately justiciar of Ireland.83 Once again Innocent seemed to be letting the king get away with the ecclesiastical equivalent of daylight robbery. Innocent evidently considered that raison d’état and his new Concordat with John meant far more than justice, meritocracy or canon law. Langton hit back by dragging his feet, seemingly in no hurry to restore England to full Christian status; it was only pressure from Nicholas that finally got the interdict rescinded in July 1214. With stunning predictability, the reparations immediately began to dry up. A further 6,000 marks was paid in August-November 1214, but thereafter John ‘forgot’ about the balance, pleading the pressure of other concerns.84

  The political implications of John’s entente with Rome were spectacular since, once the king had deferred to Innocent and accepted him as overlord, he simply could do no wrong in the pontiff ’s eyes; Innocent thereafter connived at the most flagrant despotism on John’s part. The diplomatic revolution this entailed was akin to Richard’s reversal of alliances in the late 1190s but perhaps even more striking, for here now was Innocent allied to the man he had recently excommunicated, who in turn was allied to the Pope’s bitterest enemy, the excommunicate German pretender Otto, while ranged against them were the Pope’s erstwhile allies Philip Augustus and Frederick of Hohenstaufen.85 The implications of all this would become dramatically manifest in 1214. Meanwhile the period of bitter enmity between Innocent and John, followed by the close bonding subsequent to the lifting of the excommunication, had more immediate implications for another important group: the English barons. Relations between the Angevin kings and their barons had always been brittle - this was, after all, one of the deep undercurrents of the Young King’s rebellion against Henry II in 1173-7486 - but it may be that by their constant wars, and the opportunities thus held out for enrichment, Henry and Richard warded off the worst of the baronial backlash. The loss of Normandy and John’s ceaseless quest for more money brought the struggle between king and barons back to centre-stage. Whereas under Richard the levy of scutage or shield-money had been occasional and intermittent, John converted it into a virtual annual tax.87

  In the struggle of king versus barons, the monarch held nearly all the cards. Henry II had specialised in increasing the Crown’s executive power, using ad hoc agents instead of the barons and extending the scope of royal courts while taking as many castles as possible into the regal orbit, where they could be controlled by loyal castellans. While not neglecting any of these methods, John’s preference was f
or the financial scam, especially the vagueness surrounding succession duties (that early form of inheritance tax) due from an heir succeeding to a barony. As the official guide to these taxes put it: ‘there is no fixed amount which the heir must pay to the king; he must make what terms he can’.88 John liked to set these ‘reliefs’ at a very high level, forcing the new fief-holder into a permanent cycle of indebtedness. The going rate was supposed to be £100, but John increased the ‘norm’ to six hundred marks. And since the amount taxed was entirely at the whim of the king, John liked to punish anyone who had displeased him by levying an enormous amount: sums of 7,000 and even 10,000 marks (one-tenth the ransom for Richard in Germany) were recorded.89 Since the average baronial income was around £200 a year, any extraordinary rate of relief plunged the unfortunate baron into lifelong debt-bondage. The only hope was that, in return for excessive sycophancy or sterling military service, John might remit the debt or at least part of it, but in general he preferred to keep the barons under his thumb rather than allow them the freedom which debt liquidation would bring.90 And he would certainly have regarded all modern notions of insolvency or bankruptcy with contempt: if you could not pay the debt, you forfeited your lands.91 It was not even possible to escape the royal tentacles by borrowing and transferring the debt to a less grasping creditor. The only way out was to use Jewish moneylenders, since lending money at interest was forbidden to Christians under medieval canon law. But, quite apart from the consideration that one was still subsidising John, who allowed the Jews to operate on the sole condition that he could raid their funds whenever he felt like it by the system of ‘tallages’, the law ordained that the king was every Jew’s heir, so that when a moneylender died the monarch inherited all his cash, property, promissory notes and IOUs. To escape from John’s coils via Jewish credit, therefore, ran the risk that one could pay out a fortune in interest and still end up back at the start as the king’s debtor.92