If we except the case of the prisoners at Acre, most of the charges in the indictment against Richard, whether on political, administrative or military grounds, fail to convince. Although he was not the greatest general in the medieval era - that title clearly belongs either to Tamerlane or Genghiz Khan’s great commander, Subudei - he was almost certainly the greatest Western Christendom produced. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that he managed to avoid the head-on collisions with the papacy and the all-England primates that soured the reigns of both Henry II and John. If there is an equivalent of Henry’s Becket or John’s Stephen Langton in Richard’s reign, the only possible candidate is Hugh of Lincoln. Twenty years Richard’s senior, the only Carthusian monk who became a bishop in England, and famous for his pet swan, Hugh was notable for taking a Becket-like stance whenever he thought Richard was violating the Church’s rights. In 1197 at the Council of Oxford Hugh (wrongly in the opinion of most experts on feudalism) refused to provide knights for overseas service at a critical juncture of Richard’s struggle with Philip Augustus, on the grounds that none of his predecessors had ever made such a concession and he could therefore not commit his church to such a damaging precedent; the bishop of Salisbury joined him in this protest.32 In response Richard ordered the confiscation of the estates of the see of Lincoln. Hugh decided that the only solution was to go to Normandy to confront the king. He found Richard in his chapel at Château-Gaillard, hearing High Mass on the feast of St Augustine, with the two bishops of Durham and Ely at his side. According to his biographer, Hugh was encouraged to boldness by hearing the choir chant the words ‘Hail, renowned bishop of Christ’ when he reached the chapel steps. Adam of Eynsham takes up the story: ‘When the bishop greeted the king he did not reply, but frowned at him and after a little while turned his face away. The bishop said to him “Lord king, kiss me.” But Richard turned his head even further and looked the other way. Then the bishop firmly gripped the king’s tunic round his chest and shook it violently, saying again, “You owe me a kiss because I have come a long way to see you.” The king answered: “You deserve no kiss from me.” Hugh shook him more vigorously by the cloak, and said boldly: “I have every right to one,” adding, “kiss me.” After a while Richard, overcome by his courage and determination, kissed him with a smile.’33
After Mass Hugh and Richard discussed the reasons for the king’s anger. Hugh claimed he had never failed in duty to the king, and Richard rather weakly claimed that Hubert Walter had poisoned his mind against him (Hugh). Reiterating his stance, Hugh said: ‘Except for the honour of God and the salvation of my soul and yours, I have never till now opposed anything trivial which was to your advantage.’ Thoroughly won over, Richard sent Hugh presents and gave him a fine pike for his dinner. Pressing his advantage, Hugh next day moved into territory which a more cautious man would certainly have avoided. Describing Richard as ‘his parishioner’ he insisted on preaching to him about his sins. Richard blandly replied that his conscience was clear in everything except his hatred for his enemies. Hugh put it to him that he was not making a full confession, since it was widely known that Richard was unfaithful to Berengaria with other women (in view of the homosexual canard, it is most significant that Hugh does not accuse him of the sin of sodomy), and that he promoted men to high positions, and especially bishoprics because they were his personal favourites or because they gave him money. Richard listened attentively and respectfully, without any signs of the expected Angevin rage at such ‘impertinence’. The two men parted on good terms. Richard remitted the fines and confiscations he had levied on Lincoln (those on Salisbury remained, as Hugh’s colleague there had not had the wisdom to travel to Normandy).34
When Hugh had left, Richard told his courtiers: ‘If the other bishops were like him, no king or ruler would dare to raise up his head against them.’35 However, shortly afterwards Richard decided that he could not after all exempt the Lincoln canons from military service and that they should serve abroad in the ‘diplomatic service’ at their own expense and his own pleasure. This was a particular blow to Hugh, as he had handpicked his canons for their intellectual, moral and administrative qualities and regarded them as the apple of his eye. There was nothing for it but another trip to Normandy to plead in person once more. Perhaps Hugh need not have bothered, for already men feared his curses as the malediction of a truly holy man. It was said that Richard contemplated sending his fearsome mercenary captain Mercadier to seize the assets of Lincoln this time but that his counsellors, doubtless abetted by Mercadier himself, who did not relish the assignment, argued him out of it.36 There is no way of telling whether the second encounter between monarch and saint would have ended so happily, for Hugh was still on his way through France to see Richard when he heard of the king’s death. In spite of the danger from travelling through countryside riven by bandits and anarchy, Hugh insisted on completing the journey to Fontevraud. It was thus that he assisted at the funeral instead, comforted Berengaria and later, at John’s insistence, was one of the witnesses of the treaty of Le Goulet. Hugh explained to his followers that any other course of action would have been ungrateful, since, whenever they were together, Richard had always shown him the utmost kindness and respect.37
If Richard ultimately passes all the tests except that posed by the prisoners at Acre, John by contrast fails almost all those that can be legitimately set. As a ruler he lost Normandy through incompetence, became involved in a quite unnecessary conflict with the Pope, which ended in abject surrender, taxed his subjects to the point where they rebelled, bringing on a two-year civil war, and ended by losing his Crown jewels in the Wash. As a tyrant he murdered the young Arthur, by all laws of succession the true heir to the throne, murdered William de Braose’s family, executed twenty-eight Welsh hostages, brutally dispatched an eccentric hermit and his son, and was frequently prevented from further atrocities by the advice of his counsellors and even, incredibly, by his bloodthirsty mercenary captains. In the light of all this, it is unbelievable that he has had such a good press from modern historians, some of whom seem determined to prove that black is white in their protestation that John was a decent monarch. Although John ducked every significant military encounter, especially pitched battles, and was a percentage player as commander where Richard had been inspirational, we are still told that he was a competent military planner and strategist.38 He is often praised for his inspired military vision when attempting to relieve Château-Gaillard in 1203, but surely the crucial point is that John’s grand conception turned out to be a disastrous failure. Military talent does not consist in merely having bright ideas on paper, but in being able to think through every last detail of the planning necessary to bring them to fruition. This was precisely the quality Richard had in abundance; the irony is that because he had it and therefore did not attempt quixotic schemes, he has been criticised for caution and conservatism. A little more caution and conservatism, as opposed to bipolar bouts of lethargy and extreme, goalless, energy would have done John a lot of good during the campaign for Normandy.
The litany of John’s military failures is tedious: the failed strategy in Europe before Bouvines; the inability to prevent the French landing in 1216; the failure to march on London in 1215 during the civil war; the inability to pacify Ireland, where the best research establishes that John wholly failed, despite the efforts of his supporters to ‘talk up’ his achievements. 39 Modern historians dismiss Roger of Howden as unreliable, and it is true that all the most barbed criticism of John as commander occurs in Howden, though it is from Gervase of Canterbury that John derived his devastating nickname Softsword.40 But it is not so easy to dismiss the far less sensational evidence in the monastic annals (Barnwell, Margam, etc) which tells essentially the same story: here John is actually accused of being frightened to face Philip Augustus in battle, and of having made no real effort to prevent the conquest of Normandy.41 As a student of John has remarked: ‘John’s good military reputation is largely a modern interpretation.’
42 Some of the modern judgements seem truly astonishing. Professor Ralph Turner writes: ‘many who tangled with John . . . underrated his capability and found themselves quickly defeated’.43 One would like to know who exactly these ‘many’ were. Far more accurate, down-to-earth and trenchant is this assessment from John Gillingham, commenting on the unopposed French landings in 1215-16: ‘This time it was on the beaches of England that John chose not to fight.’44
The more one examines John’s good press among modern historians, the more bizarre it seems. One writer praises John’s ‘thoughtful kindness’ to Arthur’s sister Elinor, which was obvious compensation by a guilty murderer. The same writer blames Richard’s taxes for all John’s troubles, as if Richard had somehow come back to life and ordered a virtually annual scutage, and speaks of the barons’ ‘irresponsible behaviour’ in opposing John’s excesses.45 Even more amazing is the defence of John mounted by the historian Maurice Ashley. Those who accuse John of being ‘cruel, lascivious and superstitious’ are accused of ‘censuring . . . with true Victorian moral approbation’.46 It is unclear why cruelty and superstition should be disapproved of only by Victorians, but this author seems to have a ‘Victorian complex’. Elsewhere he inveighs against those who are ‘inclined to measure men long dead by Victorian ethical standards’. Again, it is unclear whether it is ‘men long dead’ or ‘Victorian ethical standards’ that constitute the problem. Ashley rounds of his tour-de-force of pro-John apologia by describing his catastrophic blundering in Ireland in 1185 as ‘like a non-swimmer being tipped into a pool’.47 Truly, granted enough extenuating circumstances, anyone can be exonerated of anything. John has never lacked his champions, who will blame all his woes on Henry II, Richard, Innocent III, the barons, Philip Augustus - the list is potentially endless. We must remember that not even Shakespeare was proof against propagandist nonsense when it came to John. The Bard absurdly makes John a defender of English liberty against the papacy - a worthy forerunner of Henry VIII and the Tudors, that dynasty to which Shakespeare was forced to truckle:
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Now these her princes are come home again,
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them. Nought shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true.48
There are only four arguments for the rehabilitation of John that command any respect, but even they turn out in the end to be inadequate. The first is simply that John was extremely unlucky, that the roll of the dice consistently went against him. He was unfortunate in that his reign was a roll-call of failures, contrasting so strikingly with the glittering successes achieved by Henry II and the martial glory won by Richard. He left his kingdom in chaos after two years of civil war and, by his opposition to Magna Carta, which was absorbed into the political system by his son, came to seem no more than a mindless despot. Most of all, he fell foul of the Church. All the medieval chroniclers were monks or churchmen, and John’s hostility to the Church was requited with a uniformly hostile portrayal in the medieval sources. Some historians think it enough merely to state the hostility of churchmen to John, as if that in itself constitutes a refutation of their opinions. But nothing substantial, except John’s commitment to archives and record-keeping - in itself bound to commend him warmly to professional historians - has emerged to alter the picture. We should remember that it is not enough to establish a famous chronicler’s parti pris, like that of Matthew Paris towards John. Tacitus and Suetonius were notoriously hostile to the Julio-Claudian emperors, yet historical research has not thrown up anything that substantially alters our perception of Tiberius, Caligula, Nero and Domitian. Part of the problem is that the kinds of materials professional historians relish are ‘value-neutral’; just as modern research can establish that Nero debased the Roman currency, but this tells us nothing about his personality, so John’s administrative reforms cannot establish that he was a ‘good king’.
The second line of defence for John is to assert that, even if he was cruel and despotic, he was small beer alongside modern dictators or even the tyrants of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Here is Professor Turner again: ‘Compared to Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot, he seems quite tame.’49 Yes, and also alongside Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. The simple truth is that John lacked both the technology and the political culture to be a mass murderer. John’s control over England was episodic and that over the greater Angevin empire practically non-existent. Modern dictators depend on electronic communications, mass media and advanced infrastructure in roads and railways to impose their bloody will; such things were simply not available to John. And in Western Europe c. 1000-1300 there was no political culture that would legitimate state violence on the grand scale. It has long been noted that in this period, unlike the later Middle Ages or the Renaissance, the penalties even for major rebellion were slight. Earl Waltheof (executed 1075) and William of Eu (blinded and castrated in 1095) are almost the only examples of the high-born losing life or limb as the result of rebellion.50 Nor were there the post-battlefield slaughters that disgraced the Wars of the Roses. Although John, both in temperament and in his conflict with the Church, adumbrated Henry VIII, he was utterly unlike the Tudor ogre in not operating within a culture that sanctioned killing on whim; in Henry’s reign, by contrast, he was able to murder or execute 150,000 people out of a total population of 2.7 million, though admittedly, even within the context of early sixteenth-century Europe, an era that produced Cortes, Pizarro, Aguirre and Cesare Borgia, Henry VIII was regarded by contemporaries as an egregious tyrant, a modern Nero.
The third option for John’s supporters is to allege that he inherited from Henry and Richard most of the problems that dragged him down; he was thus like Charles I, who inherited a baneful legacy from the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I and ended up paying the penalty that should have been the Virgin Queen’s. Or, to use another analogy, that he was like Lyndon Johnson inheriting the mess John F. Kennedy had made in Vietnam and taking all the blame for it; in light of the comparison sometimes made, with Richard and John featuring as Kennedy and Nixon in 1960, it is more than just interesting to read Professor Turner’s comment that John had personality flaws similar to those of Nixon and LBJ.51 John, then, according to this argument, personally carried the can for problems that were endemic to the entire Angevin empire. Certainly it was true that when John demanded the surrender of castles, when he imposed financial penalties or exacted charters of fealty as guarantees of his vassals’ good behaviour, he was doing only what his predecessors did and what Philip Augustus did on the continent. And it was also true that Magna Carta was aimed not just at John personally, but at the entire imperial Angevin system, as the monastic chroniclers acknowledged.52 But, although a necessary explanation for the Great Charter, the pre-existing Great Charter is not a sufficient one. Abbot Coggleshall explicitly made the point that, in addition to the grievances inherited from previous Angevin rulers, John had added abuses of his own.53
Richard’s financial exactions, it is claimed, had drained England and left John without the financial resources to combat Philip Augustus in Normandy. But the thesis that John lagged behind Philip in wealth and resources is highly questionable (see above, pp.319) The defeat in Normandy was not a function of historical inevitability in the guise of economics, but was grounded simply in John’s deficiencies as a commander and his failings as a man. He could not inspire the Normans, he alienated them with the free hand he gave his mercenary captains, at key moments he flinched from essential head-on encounters with the French. So far from having inherited an intractable problem from Richard, John squandered what his brother had built up. It is simply inconceivable that Normandy could have fallen to Philip Augustus had Richard lived; his energy, his charisma, his military genius would all have been enough to see the French off.54 John’s flight from La
Roche-au-Moine was something that would never have occurred under Richard. This is something even John’s most stalwart defenders concede. Here is Professor Warren:
Richard & John: Kings at War Page 65