At Windsor on 9 May he announced that the dispute would be settled by eight arbitrators, four chosen by each side. When the barons rejected this, he ordered the sheriffs to seize their goods, which was impossible. On the morning of Sunday 17 May, when most citizens were at Mass, the barons entered London, where they took the opportunity to rob and kill Jews. There was trouble elsewhere, rebels capturing and occupying Exeter. Negotiating a truce through Archbishop Langton, John played for time in which to assemble a really large army. Finally he accepted that he must give way if he was to avoid deposition.
The two sides met on 15 June at Runnymede meadow, between Staines and Windsor, a draft treaty having been agreed as a basis for negotiation. ‘Through the Archbishop of Canterbury’s mediation, and that of some of his fellow bishops and several barons, a species of peace was concluded’, says Ralph of Coggeshall with a certain understatement.36 What was agreed after nearly a week’s discussion was a reaffirmation of ancient law and custom applying to every freeman in England.
The real importance of the ‘Great Charter of the Liberties of England and of the Liberties of the Forest’ lies of course in the clause that no freeman can be imprisoned or dispossessed of his land or liberty, or outlawed or exiled or punished in any way, except by judgement of his peers or the law of the land. Translated into French in 1219 so that ordinary men could understand it, the Magna Carta was re-issued over 30 times – the last occasion being in 1423 – and, if many clauses have been repealed, is still on the statute books. As a twentieth century Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, famously put it, the charter is ‘the greatest constitutional documents of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.’
The charter covered a bewildering number of grievances. There were clauses on the freedom of the Church, death duties, feudal aids (scutage, wardships, dowries, taxes, fines and marriage of heirs), widths of cloth, measures of wine, fish traps, debts to Jews, London liberties, free passage for merchants in war time, releasing Scottish hostages, exiling foreign mercenaries and relaxing forest laws – poachers would no longer risk losing their private parts. The last clause provided for a committee of twenty-five barons, chosen by those present at Runnymede, who were to seize the king’s castles and lands if he failed to remedy all grievances listed within forty days.
Summoning John to settle a law case while he was ill, the twenty-five insisted he came in a litter, refusing to rise to their feet when he arrived. In any case, an investigation by another committee of twelve knights into the ‘evil customs’ of sheriffs, foresters and their officials (extorting money) made cooperation impossible – the king needed the revenue. Archbishop Langton did his best to reconcile the two sides but a letter from Pope Innocent released John from his oath, annulled the Charter as diabolical, and called Langton and the English bishops worse than Saracens for trying to depose an anointed king.
Civil war and death
Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris (who continued Roger’s chronicle) often exaggerate. Yet as monks of the great abbey of St Albans near the capital on the road north they met well-informed travellers and their accounts contain a basis of truth. Wendover may talk nonsense in claiming that after Runnymede John spent three months at sea as a pirate, but we can believe that he was in great agony of mind. Matthew adds that John imagined people saying behind his back, ‘Look at a king without a kingdom, a lord without land!’ While he smiled in public, in secret he ‘ground his teeth and rolled his eyes, grabbing sticks and straws from off the floor which he chewed or tore in shreds with his fingers’.37
Warning castellans of the royal castles (there were nearly 150) to be on the alert, he sent to Flanders for more mercenaries, as he had few troops beside his bodyguard – Wendover says that only seven English knights remained with him. He expected them to arrive at the end of September, but their fleet ran into a gale and their bodies were washed up all along the Norfolk coast. When he heard the news he seemed out of his mind.
Collecting a scratch force from his garrisons, in October John laid siege to Rochester Castle, defended by William of Aubigny (one of the twenty-five barons) that barred the way to London. Instead of marching to William’s relief, the barons occupying the capital spent their time ‘gambling at dice, drinking the very best wines, which were freely available, and indulging in all the other vices.’ The only action they took was to send envoys to Philip II’s son, Louis, offering him the throne since he had a claim to it through his wife Blanche of Castile, who was a granddaughter of Henry II.38
Eventually, foreign troops joined John (Poitevin and Gascon knights under Savaric de Mauléon who brought Flemish crossbowmen) and Rochester was starved into surrender at the end of November. The king was encouraged still more in mid-December by Pope Innocent excommunicating thirty barons for rebellion – the document reached England in February, to be read from pulpits throughout the country. No other baronial stronghold put up a fight and, in control of the south and the West Country, John occupied East Anglia and the north, the revolt’s real centres.
In the north he made his men set fire to towns and hedgerows as they marched, burning baronial manors and farms, torturing people of all classes until they paid a ransom. They ransacked towns and villages, hanging victims by their hands or roasting them. Markets and trading ceased, agriculture came to a standstill. Yet the king preferred money to revenge, extracting £1,000 from York, while rebels could purchase a pardon. By the spring of 1216 he had restored his authority across the whole country save London.
Invasion
The situation altered dramatically in May when Louis of France came with an army to claim the throne, landing on the Isle of Thanet. John made no attempt to intercept him. Leaving Dover Castle to be defended by Hubert de Burgh, he withdrew to Winchester, before establishing his headquarters in Dorset at Corfe Castle, which was almost impregnable. In August the sixteen-year-old Alexander II of Scots – whom John called ‘the little, sandy fox-cub’39 – took Carlisle and then marched to reinforce Louis, who was besieging Dover. Next month Alexander did homage to Louis at Canterbury, as King of England.
Louis quickly overran eastern England, where the only fortresses that held out for John were Dover, Lincoln and Windsor. Even so, the Cinque Ports supported him, while in Kent and Sussex there was guerrilla resistance in his favour, led by ‘Willikin of the Weald’, and on Whit Sunday 1216 Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, the papal legate, excommunicated Louis. But in June the Frenchman was welcomed by the Londoners as their King. John’s position looked desperate. Winchester, the ancient capital, fell next and Windsor was closely besieged. The Earl of Salisbury, his half-brother, went over to Louis, with the Earls of Albemarle, Arundel and Warren, who together mustered 430 knights. The king retreated westward, as far as Radnor in Wales, where he hired Welsh archers.
Nonetheless, a third of the baronage stayed loyal and in late summer the Earl of Salisbury rejoined him. The rebels’ relations with Louis were strained, since the French saw the war as a second Norman Conquest – in London a dying French nobleman warned that Louis had sworn to banish them after he won, for betraying their king. Taking Savaric de Mauléon as military adviser, in September John tried to relieve Windsor but, outnumbered, withdrew to ravage East Anglia. Chased off by the French, he went north to relieve Lincoln. Then he marched south, devastating Norfolk.
But after a feast at King’s Lynn, John contracted dysentery and realized he was seriously ill. (Revealingly, he granted a Briouze lady leave to found a religious house to pray for the souls of her kinswoman Matilda de Briouze and her son.) On 12 October he took a short cut across the Wellstream, part of the Wash, where he ‘lost all his carts, wagons and pack horses, with his money, plate and everything of value, because the land opened in the middle of the waters and whirlpools sucked them down, men and horses’. He was lucky to escape with his life.40 He spent the night after at Swinehead Abbey, stuffing himself with peaches and new cider that made his dysentery wo
rse. He struggled on to Newark in a litter of willow branches or clinging to a slow paced nag. Here, in the Bishop of Lincoln’s castle, he received the last sacraments, making a short will in which he asked to be buried in St Wulstan’s cathedral at Worcester and named William Marshal as his principal lay executor. The king died at midnight on 18 October, during a whirlwind.
Retrospect
If the Barnwell annalist thought John a great prince, no doubt, but hardly a lucky one, every other chronicler agreed with Matthew Paris that he was too bad even for Hell. He left England in chaos. Louis ruled London, Winchester and the home and eastern counties, the Welsh occupied Shrewsbury, the Scots held Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland and most barons remained in revolt. Whatever revisionists claim, a reign that saw the loss of Normandy and the Angevin patrimony, ending with civil war and foreign occupation, can scarcely be called a success.
5
The Aesthete – Henry III
A thriftless, shiftless king
Frederick Maitland1
An aesthete at bay
On 14 May 1264, after two warhorses had been killed under him, and reeling from sword and mace blows, Henry III staggered down from the battle on the Downs above Lewes to take refuge in the Black Monks’ priory. Simon de Montfort’s men surrounded it, shooting flaming arrows that set fire to the roof of its great church (bigger than Chichester Cathedral) until the king sent out an envoy to ask for terms. He then agreed to everything for which the rebels had asked, becoming a crowned figurehead; his son Edward was hostage for his behaviour.
Usually remembered only for his struggle with Simon, Henry is one of our most interesting kings, an aesthete (if the term can be used of a medieval man) who built on the grand scale, and even if it was no thanks to him he left the parliamentary system. Prouder than any previous post-Conquest ruler of being heir to the Anglo-Saxon kings, he was the most English monarch since 1066.
The boy king
Since the enemy occupied London and Winchester, the nine-year-old Henry was crowned at Gloucester, with a plain gold circlet. But by then, ten days after John’s death, Louis seemed more like a French conqueror than Magna Carta’s saviour, and many who had opposed John saw no reason why a small boy should lose his inheritance to a foreigner. His father’s will won papal support by urging compensation for the Church and help for the Holy Land.
On his deathbed the late king had begged his supporters to make William Marshal regent. ‘For God’s sake, beg the Marshal to forgive me’, John had told them. ‘I know he is truer than any other man and I beseech you to make him my son’s guardian and see he takes care of him – my son can never keep these lands without the Marshal’s help.’2 Reluctantly (he was nearly seventy) and only after a great deal of persuasion, William accepted, saying he felt as though he was sailing on a bottomless sea with no prospect of landfall, but, if need be, would find refuge in Ireland and take the boy there on his shoulders. His council included Hubert de Burgh, holding out at Dover, and Peter des Roches, who became the king’s tutor.
On hearing John was dead, Louis thought he had won. But the rebels were angered by his giving English estates to Frenchmen and by atrocities committed by his troops, whom the chroniclers call refuse and scum. William Marshal reissued Magna Carta with a new Charter of the Forest, demolishing the rebels’ platform, and during Louis’s absence in France in Lent 1217 the barons began to desert him. In May, while Louis was besieging Dover, William’s troops stormed Lincoln, killing or capturing half his army. Then a fleet bringing reinforcements from France was destroyed off Sandwich.
When King Philip, Louis’s father, heard William Marshal was in command, he said that his son had lost. In September Louis agreed to stop helping the English rebels and to give back the Channel Islands, the regency council paying him over £7,000 to go home. Rebel barons went unpunished. By the time William Marshal died in 1219, the old hero had restored some sort of law and order, and in 1221 Henry was crowned for a second time, at Westminster with the crown of St Edward. Yet the monarchy was still very weak and there was no guarantee Louis might not invade again. The Crown was heavily in debt, while the magnates had little respect for its authority.
The chief justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, governed England for more than a decade. A man on the make from the petty gentry who was turning himself into a magnate by acquiring castles and estates, he grew increasingly unpopular. Nevertheless, aided by Archbishop Langton and lawyers such as Henry de Bracton, he ensured the monarchy’s survival. In a full-scale campaign, he put an end to the Earl of Albemarle’s seizure of other men’s castles, while he checked the ravages of Falkes de Breauté (a Norman who had been King John’s favourite commander) by storming his stronghold at Bedford and hanging eighty of his men. For lack of money Hubert was unable to relieve La Rochelle when Louis VIII besieged it, and in consequence by autumn 1224 Gascony alone remained from the Angevin empire. Even so, Hubert stayed in power after Henry came of age in 1227, becoming Earl of Kent.
The man
Stockily built and 5 ft 6 in tall, Henry III had long, thick, yellow hair cut just below the ear, a beard and a moustache, with a drooping eyelid that hid half his left eye. We know exactly what he looked like from the effigy on his tomb in Westminster Abbey; its fine, handsome features are based on his death mask. He was quiet voiced with a stammer, gentle in manner except when angry. His sharp intelligence was unbalanced by too much imagination and sensitivity, by bouts of ill health and nervous attacks. He had a naïve streak which, combined with a sardonic sense of humour, could give unintentional offence. Not a strong character, he fell under the spell of foreign favourites, who were disliked by everyone else.
‘Accomplished, refined, liberal, magnificent; rash rather than brave, impulsive and ambitious, pious and, in an ordinary sense, virtuous, he was utterly devoid of all elements of greatness’, wrote Stubbs. ‘Unlike his father, who was incapable of receiving any impression, Henry was so susceptible of impressions that none of them could last long; John’s heart was of millstone, Henry’s of wax.’3
Yet he had unusual gifts. His lasting memorial is Westminster Abbey if his palace next door and apartments at the Tower have gone. Clarendon, too, went long ago, but excavation gives us some idea of how he rebuilt the woodland palace in the new Gothic style until it covered more than 8 acres. Using stone from Caen, his masons erected halls and chambers lit by stained glass – its earliest domestic use in England – and warmed by fireplaces, with walls, ceilings and wainscots painted in bright colours. There were gilded stone carvings over the fireplaces and doorways, and tiled pavements with lions and griffins. Henry’s bedroom had frescoes of the four Evangelists, while there was a carving of the twelve months over the hearth in the queen’s. The two chapels, one for the king, the other for the queen, were especially magnificent. There was a ‘great garden’, together with herb gardens, covered alleys bordered by flower beds, and stabling for 120 horses. He also made extensive additions at Winchester, Marlborough and Windsor, turning them into palaces as well as castles.
Henry resembled his father in his sudden (if rarer and milder) rages, on one occasion throwing a jester into the Thames for an unfortunate joke. Yet he was good natured, constantly giving presents to his household and alms to the poor: 5,000 paupers were fed in Westminster Hall on Edward the Confessor’s day, while in his palaces were frescoes of the parable of Dives and Lazarus with the motto ‘He who does not give what he cherishes shall not obtain his desire’. Henry grew devoted to his wife and family – and did not take mistresses. ‘The “simplicity” so often mentioned by Matthew Paris and others was a kind of innocence which remained with him throughout his life and explains a curiously attractive quality.’4
Born at Winchester, the ancient capital and brought up in England, Henry was obsessed with his Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Choosing the Confessor for his patron saint, he named his eldest son after him and his second after the East Anglian martyr king, St Edmund. Genuinely devout, he made many pilgrimages to th
e Marian shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk, and endowed over thirty friaries. When Louis said that he often heard a sermon instead of going to Mass, Henry replied that he preferred to see a friend rather than hear someone talk about him.
Still an Angevin
At the same time, Henry III saw himself as an Angevin, mistakenly believing that Prince Louis had promised to persuade Philip II to return the lost Plantagenet lands, and that the old Marshal had missed a real chance of recovering them by failing to capture Louis in 1216–17. Unfortunately, the Capetians now ruled all France, while the Lusignan family who controlled Poitou were their loyal subjects.
Henry’s obsession with the lost lands was fostered by his tutor from Touraine, Peter des Roches. Peter hoped to set him against Hubert de Burgh, whose policy was peace at all costs – with the barons, with Scots, Welsh and French. When in 1229 Hubert told the king not to invade across the Channel, Henry was so angry that he half drew his sword and called him a traitor. Ignoring Hubert’s warnings, in 1230 he led an expedition to Brittany, where he was welcomed by its count, Peter of Dreux, a dissatisfied Capetian. ‘The king stayed in the city of Nantes for most of the time, doing nothing but spend money’ was what Roger of Wendover heard. ‘Since Hubert, the king’s justiciar, did not want them to wage war, his earls and barons entertained each other over and over again in a true English way, eating and drinking as if keeping Christmas.’5 In despair, Henry led a meaningless promenade militaire down to Bordeaux, before returning to England.
The Demon's Brood Page 8