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CHAPTER 1

RECLAIMING A SCARRED KINGDOM 1199–1219

The people of England could be thankful that Henry III was no Richard I or John, for neither of them had done the realm any good. Richard had spent nearly all of his ten years on the throne abroad, some of it as a captive following his crusade. His English subjects, whom he derided as timid, had to pay a fortune to obtain his release, and even then he went on warring and making them pay for it. He might have justified it all as self-defence, because King Philip II of France was determined to drive the English out of the Continental lordships they had accumulated under Richard and John's fabled parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Richard was laying siege to yet another castle when a crossbowman cut short his reign in 1199. The king was interred in Fontevrault Abbey next to his father, against whom he had rebelled to the end of the old man's life.

Leaving behind no legitimate children, Richard named John as his successor, but Philip threw his support behind Arthur, the son of John's deceased older brother Geoffrey. John had managed to secure the loyalty of his French provinces, and everything might have turned out well had he not met Isabella, the beautiful heiress of Angoulême. He was married at the time, to another Isabella, but she was older and they had no children, and because they were distant cousins, he had no trouble getting an annulment from her and making the new Isabella his wife.

It wasn't just for her youth and allure that John wanted her. Angoulême was in Poitou, smack between his other major provinces of Normandy and Gascony, and being the lord of that land in right of his wife would give him a firmer grip on whatever trouble the French might give him. It came quickly enough, because Isabella had been betrothed to Hugh (IX) Lusignan, another lord of Poitou. John not only dispossessed him of his intended, but intended to dispossess him of his land as well. Hugh appealed to Philip, who ordered John to appear before him to explain his conduct.

As the price for allowing John to ascend the throne in the first place, Philip had demanded and got £14,000, a deal that invited scorn back in England when it was remembered how Richard used military and diplomatic skill to keep Philip at bay. By paying up, John recognised Philip as his overlord and was therefore bound to obey his summons. When he didn't appear, Philip declared all his fiefs in France forfeit and gave them to Arthur. John was going to have to fight for them after all.

Everyone knew that he was no warrior like his brother, but he fooled them in a lightning strike that bagged the rebellious nobles of Poitou and his nephew Arthur. This victory put him in an extremely good position to cut a new, more favourable deal, but John's myriad flaws included an almost perverse arrogance and vindictiveness. He starved to death twenty-two of his captives at the castle of Corfe in Dorset and had Arthur disappear, probably murdered. Horrified by his cruelty, John's vassals in Normandy deserted him and he was forced to abandon the province in the face of a French invasion. By 1204, only Gascony and Poitou remained of his Continental possessions.

The loss of Normandy deprived John of a valuable source of income, making it hard for him to amass the fortune he would need to get it back and live large as was his custom. Inflation caused by poor harvests compounded the problem, but he got an unexpected windfall when the Archbishop of Canterbury died in 1205. The monks tried to choose one of their own as his replacement, but the king forced them to back his man. This caused the pope to step in with his own candidate, the learned Stephen Langton, but John was incensed that he would get no say in the appointment and refused to allow Langton even to enter England.

The pope was the equally contentious Innocent III, and in 1208, right around the time he was launching the Albigensian Crusade in the south of France, he placed England under interdict, meaning that Christian rites like mass and burial could not be performed, a very damning prospect in that pious age. John was content to call his bluff even after the pope upped the ante by excommunicating him. All the Church's revenue in England went to his treasury during the standoff, as much as £100,000.

In 1212, John was ready to invade France, but had to change plans unexpectedly when Wales revolted. He raged even more than usual, because in 1205 he had married his natural daughter Joan to Llywelyn, the self-proclaimed prince of the northern part of that land, to secure his allegiance. Before John could teach him a lesson, Joan informed her father of a baronial conspiracy to murder him. It was centred in the north of the country close to Scotland, which he had punished two years earlier when there were hints of an alliance with France. At that time John forced the Scots to pay him £7,000 and deliver up two princesses for his safekeeping. Holding hostages for compliance was a serious business with him, and in his fury against Wales, he had several of their children maimed and executed.

John moved north to break up the conspiracy and assess his standing with the barons. He knew they had every reason to want to get rid of him. His boundless energy enabled him to stay on the move and harass them to no end. He held their lands and titles for ransom and taxed them pitilessly to pay for his failures abroad. Some of his actions make amusing anecdotes, like his demand that one mistress pay him 200 chickens as the price for letting her spend one night with her husband. Others clearly do not, the most notorious being how he locked up and starved to death the wife and son of a nobleman after she made an off-hand remark implicating John in Arthur's murder.

Some of these abuses he inherited from Richard, who had made no secret that he viewed England only as a cash cow. One chronicler noted how 'everything was for sale, counties, sheriffdoms, castles and manors'. Both brothers sold the king's justice, and the fees they set for inheritances and wardships were arbitrary and excessive. Not all the money was expected to be paid. The whole point was to keep the barons in debt to the crown and therefore in their place.

The way John saw it, they had it coming. They had refused to sail with him when he first aimed to retrieve Normandy in 1206, rightly, he suspected, because some of his leading men held lands on the Continent and were worried that Philip would confiscate them if they supported his efforts. In an increasingly paranoid state, John began inviting foreigners into his administration, not just because he could trust them, but knew they had no qualms about doing dirty work in a strange land.

The plot against his life was reinforced by a hermit's prediction that he would die soon. Sufficiently worried, John promised some reforms as a way of thwarting dissent and getting the barons to sail with him to France, but his invasion was further delayed when a papal nuncio named Pandulf arrived to inform him that Philip was going to invade him, with Innocent's blessing no less. The king cracked under all these pressures and accepted not only the pope's authority over Church appointees, but over his kingdom as well. He declared that England and Ireland were henceforth fiefs of Rome, owing £700 a year in tribute.

Since John now came under papal protection, Pandulf ordered the French to stand down. Philip was not of a mind to comply after spending £60,000 on preparations, but his ally the Count of Flanders was, so Philip attacked him instead. John came to the count's aid with a battalion led by his half-brother William Longespee, the Earl of Salisbury. When Longespee chanced upon the entire French fleet unprotected at harbour in Damme in May 1213, he put it to the torch.

Emboldened by this turn of events, John launched his invasion and landed at La Rochelle in early 1214. With a war chest of £130,000, he planned to split the French by striking from the south while a consortium of allies moved in from the north. He was initially successful in winning over Hugh Lusignan and other local barons, but they deserted him as an army under Philip's son Louis approached. Philip himself routed the northern allies at the battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214, definitively settling any chance of Normandy returning to England.

John lamented that since becoming a vassal of Rome, nothing had gone right for him. His barons would say that about his entire reign, but they never had one leader to unite them in opposition. That changed with the arrival of the new Archbishop of Canterbury. Stephen Langton saw right through the supposedly humbled king and his new friendship with the papacy. John was not only weaselling out of making full restitution to the Church, but was planning to continue his repressive ways. Chronicler Roger of Wendover reports that at an assembly of prelates and barons held at St Paul's Cathedral on 25 August 1213, Langton took a few of them aside to show them what appeared to be an ancient charter.

It was the coronation oath of John's great-grandfather Henry I. When in 1100 this youngest son of William the Conqueror moved to secure the crown, he promised to stop the oppressions of his brother William Rufus, who had just been killed in a suspicious hunting accident. That first Henry promised to respect the rights of the barons and clergy and implored them to do the same to their own subjects. In his embellished account, Wendover has Langton suggest that the barons might want to use this document as the basis for getting John to mend his tyrannical ways.

Nothing would have come of it had John returned from the Continent sufficiently chastened by his defeat. Instead he tried to impose another tax, and that was it. Just after Christmas of 1214, a group of barons approached the king in 'gay military array' to demand that he confirm the liberties contained in the oath of his forebear. When John was later informed of the specifics, Wendover has him asking, 'Why did they not ask for my kingdom as well?' The only oath he was interested in was that of the barons' loyalty to him. As negotiations faltered, his opponents assembled an army and won the backing of the mayor of London. John realised he would have to sue for peace. He met them at Runnymede, a meadow close to the Thames, and hammered out the details of a new charter of liberties.

Magna Carta, as it became known, started off as twelve general concessions of the king to the rule of law, even those laws derived from custom. The final document had sixty-three articles meant to anticipate and resolve future disputes between the crown and subjects. Some of the clauses are so fundamental for protecting the rights of individuals that they remain on the books today, like number 40: 'To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.' To make sure the king observed this and the other articles, a security clause was added at the end empowering twenty-five barons to use force if necessary to ensure his compliance.

John was disgusted by what had indeed turned out to be the barons asking for his kingdom, but he sealed the charter on 15 June 1215 as a way of buying time. His patron Innocent III was as big an autocrat as he was and would surely agree that this was no way to treat a king. Sure enough, reforms were well underway when the pope issued a bull annulling the charter. He was within his rights from a legal standpoint, inasmuch as England was now his fief, but he made it clear to the barons that what bothered him was the way they had gone about it. Using coercion against one's lord was never a good thing. By September, the barons realised that John's rule was beyond remedy. They raised an army, installed their own administrators, and looked around for someone else to be their king.

They settled on Philip's 29-year-old heir Louis, who justified his claim to the throne through his wife Blanche of Castile, the daughter of John's older sister. Louis was pious and austere, nothing like the foppish and clownish John, but what really worked in his favour was the men and money available to him in France. John knew better than most that nobody puts an invasion force together just like that and aimed to destroy the barons before Louis was ready. Leaving them to cower in London, he ravaged their lands in unspeakable fashion, terrorising their people who, after all, were his subjects as well.

In May 1216, Louis landed with 1,200 knights, and it was John's turn now to run scared. He was deserted on all sides, including by his half-brother William Longespee, who had only recently done much of the ravaging for him. Louis marched into London in triumph and made great gains in the east, but couldn't take Dover. While he hammered away there, John sped north to reinforce his base of operations. Perhaps his greatest defeat of the war occurred when the baggage train carrying his treasure and jewels near the coast was washed away by the fast-rising tide. Losing his crown was no longer a metaphor or even a threat but the real thing. By then he was sick with dysentery anyway and could go no further after reaching Newark. He wrote to the pope that he was dying and begged him to secure the succession for his family. He died in the early hours of 19 October 1216 as a storm lashed overhead.

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If the civil war was all about John, his removal from the scene did nothing to end it. As far as Louis was concerned, the throne was his, and the sooner they all got on with it the better. The rebel barons would have jettisoned him then and there if they could have. Besides not being a very pleasant person to work with, Louis had let it be known that he considered anyone who rebelled against their king to be traitors, and he was ready to give their lands to his French supporters. But they couldn't just go back to the English side, either. They had their honour to think of, and many of them had personal quarrels with the loyalist barons. All they could do was sit and wait for events to play out.

The loyalists themselves wasted no time. John had named his eldest son Henry as heir, and it was urgent to crown him as soon as possible. Normally this was done at Westminster Abbey by the hand of the Archbishop of Canterbury, but Louis held London and Stephen Langton was being held in Rome. He had gone there to explain why he had not excommunicated the rebel barons as ordered by Pope Innocent and found himself forbidden to return to England until peace had been established. The pope had sent a legate named Guala Bicchieri to France to stop the invasion, and when Louis sailed in spite of his efforts, Guala followed him across the Channel, determined to punish him and the rebels for their disobedience. Dressed in red robes atop a white horse, this Italian cardinal turned the ouster of the French prince into a crusade.

Guala was named as one of John's thirteen executors and his authority was supreme, but he lacked the prestige of the other major executor, William Marshal, the Earl of Pembroke. Marshal was another baron who had been treated shabbily by John, but played it safe by allowing his son William II to do the rebelling for the family. He was universally lauded as the greatest knight with, by his own reckoning, some 500 victories in tournaments. There was no question that he should lead the regency council to govern the realm in the interim. But he was an old man now, tired of all the strife of recent years, and whatever energy he had left to restore order in the country would depend in part on his impression of young Henry.

The boy was at Devizes Castle, where John had put him for his safety after the war broke out. When Isabella learned of her husband's death, she left her residence at Exeter to bring Henry to the executors at Gloucester. Devizes was 45 miles to the south, so Marshal and his men rode out to meet them halfway, on a plain near Malmesbury.

Henry had only just turned 9 years old. He was by all accounts a fine-looking lad, and his first words to Marshal, spoken from the horse he rode on together with his retainer Ralf of Saint-Samson, indicated that he understood the gravity of the situation.

'Welcome, sir. I commit myself to God and to you. May God give you grace to guard over us well.'

Even if he had been trained to say that by his mother, the old man was clearly moved.

'Sire, on my soul I will do everything to serve you in good faith as long as I have the strength.'

At that point it all became too much for the boy and he burst into tears. Far from being taken aback, Marshal and the other hardened men in his train began to shed tears themselves. On solemn occasions John had always been apt to clown around and say something embarrassing. No one could ever tell if he was serious or not. It was one of the many ways he kept them on edge throughout his reign. Now that he was dead, they could all let their emotions out. It was little wonder that so many barons, both loyalists and rebels, left on crusade after hostilities ceased. They needed a holiday.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Henry III"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Darren Baker.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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