History of England 1-6

And then there was one. John, the youngest of the sons of Henry II, had survived. He is one of the most interesting kings in English history, primarily because of his infamous reputation. He rivals Richard III in being considered the most ‘evil’ of the nation’s kings. In truth John and Richard were no more vicious or cunning than many other more lauded sovereigns; they were perhaps unfortunate, however, in the chroniclers who chose to write about them. The two monastic chroniclers of John’s reign, successively Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, were uniformly hostile. Shakespeare of course, more than any other, defined the image of John to posterity; his were wholly dramatic, but wildly exaggerated, versions of the events to be related here. Enter King John, breathing stage fire.

The early life of John has already been glimpsed, disloyal to his father and to his brothers. Yet he was still a Plantagenet, and the sacred blood of the family mattered. Henry II appointed him to be ‘Lord of Ireland’, but he proved himself to be unequal to the task; his youthful pride and folly alienated him from the native leaders of that country. He was given manors and castles all over the Angevin Empire, and he was in charge of the administration of six English counties that paid their taxes directly to his own exchequer. In Richard I’s absence he created a court of his own, in England and in Normandy, which the more devious or ambitious magnates attended. He was the rising son.

Yet he was not the only claimant to the throne. Richard I had nominated Arthur of Brittany as his successor, as we have seen, and the twelve-year-old nephew was a real threat to John’s inheritance. The barons of Anjou, one element of the Angevin Empire, already supported the boy. Aquitaine was in the balance. The English and Norman magnates, cautiously and suspiciously, supported John. Although he could not be considered English, he was at least more English than the Breton Arthur. On hearing of his brother’s death John hurried to Normandy, therefore, where he was consecrated duke in the cathedral of Rouen; then he sailed to England where he was crowned king at Westminster in the spring of 1199. It had taken him just a month to assert his power.

He was some 12 inches (30 centimetres) shorter than Richard, and he may have suffered in implicit comparison with his brother and with his father. Certainly he grew up in a court filled with rivalries and suspicions of a more than usually bitter nature, with brother pitted against brother and brothers rising against their father. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gives the impression of being a wary and distrustful king. He went about armed and with a bodyguard.

He was not without humour, albeit often of a perverse kind. When he and his horse floundered in a marsh near Alnwick in Northumberland, he devised a suitable punishment for the men of that town who had not maintained the highway; he ordered that every newly created townsman should, on St Mark’s Day, pass through that slough on foot. The custom was still being observed in the early nineteenth century. When the pope placed the country under excommunication, the king ordered that the mistresses of all the priests should be held in captivity until their clerical lovers ransomed them. It was an interesting punishment. There is another intriguing memorial of his reign. Among the legal rolls, then being composed in unprecedented numbers, is one stating that ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville gives the lord king two hundred chickens that she may lie one night with her husband’. The import of this is unclear, but it may mean that the lady was one of the king’s paramours and that she was asking to return briefly to her marital bed. The three incidents reveal that side of medieval life where jocosity and cruelty are allied.

King John was capable of violent anger, like his Plantagenet antecedents. When some monks at Faversham occupied their church, to prevent him from installing the superior he had chosen for them, he ordered the entire monastery to be burned down; nobody obeyed him, and he relented. Monarchs, male and female, have always had bad tempers; it is an aspect of their power.

An element of cruelty, or of ruthlessness, is evident in the first years of his reign. Arthur of Brittany had fled to the court of the king of France in order to shield himself from his uncle’s far from avuncular intentions. In 1202, however, John found him. Both of them were on military campaign in France, fighting over the Angevin lands. The king of France had allotted them to Arthur, whereas John considered them to be his proper inheritance. Arthur, now fifteen, had been besieging his grandmother – Eleanor of Aquitaine – in the ancient castle of Mirebeau, near Poitiers in west-central France. The spectacle of grandson threatening grandmother throws further light on the behaviour of the Plantagenet family.