Richard & John: Kings at War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20 - Richard and John, Conclusion

  Note

  Guide to Most Frequently Cited rim ry So rce

  Bibliograhy

  Index

  Copyright Page

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  France and the Jacobite Rising of 1745

  The Jacobite Army in England

  The Jacobites

  Invasion: From the Armada to Hitler

  Charles Edward Stuart

  Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England

  Stanley: The Making of an African Explorer

  Snow Upon the Desert: The Life of Sir Richard Burton

  From the Sierras to the Pampas: Richard Burton’s Travels in the Americas,

  1860-69

  Stanley: Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  Hearts of Darkness: The European Exploration of Africa

  Fitzroy Maclean

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  C.G. Jung

  Napoleon

  1066: The Year of the Three Battles

  Villa and Zapata

  Wagons West: The Epic Story of America’s Overland Trails

  1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World

  For Pauline

  Illustrations

  First section

  Reverse of the Royal Seal of Henry II (Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris, France, Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Henry VII at his coronation, miniature from Flores Historiarum, by Matthew Paris, Ms 6712 (A.6.89) fol.135v (© Chetham’s Library, Manchester, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Tomb of Eleanor of Aquitaine at Fontevraud Abbey (akg-images/Erich Lessing )

  The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII of France, and Louis departing by ship to go on the Second Crusade, from the Chronique de St Denis (TopFoto/HIP)

  Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter-in-law, Isabella of Angoulême, followed by Richard and John, being led into captivity by Henry II after their rebellion in 1173, 12th-13th century fresco, Chapelle de Sainte Radegonde, Chinon, France ( The Art Archive/Dagli Orti )

  Tomb of the Young King at Rouen Cathedral (TopFoto/Roger-Viollet)

  Bertran de Born (Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Ms Français 12473, f.160)

  Richard the Lionheart, painting by Merry Joseph Blondel (Chateau de Versailles, France, Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Frederick Barbarossa, from History of the Third Crusade by Robert de Saint Remy (TopFoto/HIP)

  Richard I and his sister, Joanna, Queen of Sicily, with Philip II of France, at Palermo in Sicily, 1190, during the Third Crusade, from History of the Crusades by William of Tyre (By permission of the British Library/Yates Thompson 12, f.188v)

  Saladin, illustration by Gustave Doré from Histoire des Croisades by J-F. Michaud, 1877, vol. I (akg-images)

  Portrait of Saladin, Arabic School (British Library, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Saladin’s troops ravaging the Holy Land, during the Third Crusade, from History of the Crusades by William of Tyre (By permission of the British Library/Yates Thompson 12, f.161)

  Saracen on horseback fighting in Sicily, fresco, late 13th century, Tour Ferrande, Pernes-les-Fontaines, France (The Art Archive/Dagli Orti)

  A kneeling crusader knight, from the Westminster Psalter (By permission of the British Library/Royal 2 A. XXII, f.220)

  Nureddin, Sultan of Damascus, in mail-coat and wearing an open helmet, flees on horseback pursued by two knights, Godfrey Martel and Hugh de Lusignan the Elder. From History of the Crusades by William of Tyre (By permission of the British Library/Yates Thompson 12, f.132)

  Krak des Chevaliers, Syria (The Art Archive/Dagli Orti )

  Embarkation of French crusaders in St Jean d’Acre and the English fleet destroying a ship of the Saracens, from Sebastian Mamerot, Les Passages d’outremer par les Français, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (akg-images)

  Siege of Acre, from Grandes Chroniques de France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Ms Français 2813, f.237)

  King Richard I and his army capture the city of Acre in July 1191, from Chroniques de France ou de Saint Denis, vol. 1 (By permission of the British Library/Royal 16 G. VI, f.352v)

  Surrender of the keys of Acre to Richard and Philip, from Grandes Chroniques de France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Ms Français 2813, f.238v)

  Richard the Lionheart massacres captives in reprisal, illustration by Gustave Doré from Bibliotheque des Croisades by J-F. Michaud, 1877 (Private Collection, Ken Welsh/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Ms illustration showing the massacre of the Saracen prisoners, from Les Passages d’outremer par les Français (Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Ms Français 5594, f.213)

  Chateau-Gaillard at Les Andelys in Haute Normandie, France (Guy Thouvenin/Robert Harding)

  Capture of Richard and his paying homage to Emperor Henry VI, from Petrus de Ebulo, ‘Liber ad honorem’, Augusti. Cod. 120 II, fol. 129 r, Burgerbibliothek, Bern (akg-images)

  Durnstein Castle in Austria (© Jack Sullivan/Alamy)

  Second section

  ‘The King! The King!’ illustration by Howard Davie from Robin Hood and his Life in the Merry Greenwood, told by Rose Yeatman Woolf, published by Raphael Tuck, 1910-20 (Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Statue of King Richard I, by Carlo Marochetti, outside the Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London (Mary Evans/Gerald Wilson)

  Calendar scene for August showing three men reaping, with a farmer directing them, from the Queen Mary Psalter (By permission of the British Library/Royal 2 B. VII, f.78v)

  Calendar page for July showing three men cutting down trees with axes and loading logs on to a cart, from the Anglo-Saxon Calendar (By permission of the British Library/Cotton Tiberius B. V, Part 1, f.6 )

  A man raising a club before three Jews, from Chronica Roffense by Matthew Paris (By permission of the British Library/Cotton Nero D. II, f.183v)

  Exchequer receipt roll headed by anti-Jewish drawings (The National Archives, Kew/ref. E401/1565)

  William Marshal unhorses a French knight (The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge/MS 016, f.85r)

  Seal of King John, 13th century (Centre Historique des Archives Nationales, Paris, France, Lauros/Giraudon/The Bridgeman Art Library)

  Portrait of King John (National Portrait Gallery, London)

  King John hunting a stag with hounds (By permission of the British Library/Cotton Claudius D. II, f.116 )

  King John with his dogs, from Chronicle of England by Peter de Langtoft (By permission of the British Library/Royal 20 A. II, f.8v)

  The sixteen-year-old Prince Arthur is murdered by his uncle, King John, at Rouen Castle, engraved by J. Rogers after W. Hamilton (Mary Evans Picture Library)

  King John pays homage to Philip of France, from Chroniques de France ou de Saint Denis, vol. 1 (By permission of the British Library/Royal 16 G. VI, f.362v)

  Battle of Bouvines, from Grandes Chroniques de France (Bibliothèque Nationale de France/Ms Français 2609, f.219v)

  Prince Louis o
f France crosses the Channel to invade England (The Master and Fellows of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge/Ms 016, f.46v)

  King John at Runnymede by Ernest Normand (Guildhall Library, City of London)

  The Magna Carta (By permission of the British Library/Cotton Augustus II.106 )

  King John loses his treasure in the Wash (Getty Images)

  MAPS

  The Angevin Empire at the death of Henry II 116

  The Mediterranean and Palestine, showing Richard’s journey during the Crusade 166

  The French campaigns 326

  The Angevin Empire after Bouvines 412

  John’s campaigns 1215-16 436

  Introduction

  I have always been fascinated by the personalities of Richard I and King John but, Shakespeare aside, knew little of them apart from the various filmic representations over the years. That Richard was a born-again warrior I realised from many celluloid extravaganzas and I still remember with amusement Virginia Mayo’s characterisation in King Richard and the Crusaders: ‘Fight, fight, fight. That’s all you think of, Dick Plantagenet!’ Although one critic described the sound effects for that movie as the sound of Sir Walter Scott turning in his grave, Scott himself had historians turning in their graves and has attracted two hundred years of academic contempt for his notions of Saxons and Normans still at each other’s throats in the 1190s - which did not stop Michael Curtiz and his producers annexing the idea for the famous The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. Since all these screen depictions showed Richard as the good guy and John as a creature of the night, I assumed this was a stereotype that could quickly be dispatched after some serious historical research. Imagine, then, my surprise, when my own sleuthing in ancient documents turned up what is in effect a reinforcement of the stereotype. But the honest historian must perforce go where the evidence leads him. If it has led me into areas which will not please the champions of King John, so be it. John’s defenders, it seems to me, work mainly by denying the reliability of the most famous chroniclers and questioning their good faith. In some quarters a rather curious bifurcation has arisen: charters, letters patent and pipe rolls good; Roger of Howden, Matthew Paris and Roger of Wendover bad. Like most types of revisionism, this ascetic approach generates as many absurdities as the previous and allegedly gullible vantage point. To those who say that chronicles are a poor source for medieval history, I reply that charters are an inadequate guide to human personality, and it is that with which I am principally concerned in this would-be dual biography. I hope my debt to all the fine scholars who have worked in this field is clear and is sufficiently acknowledged in the notes. But declaring an interest, I have to confess that the academic who has most influenced me is the great John Gillingham, a man whose wit, humour and humanity are as obvious as his erudition and scholarship. Needless to say, I am not attempting to co-opt him or anyone else into responsibility for any errors that have crept into the text. I also acknowledge the sterling assistance given me by Will Sulkin and Tony Whittome at Random House and my wife Pauline at home.

  Farnham, Surrey, 2006

  1

  IF WE JUDGE ONLY by reputation and mythology, Richard I was the greatest king of England in the Middle Ages and his brother John the very worst. The good brother/bad brother dichotomy is a staple of most myths, as old as Cain and Abel. And it is surely significant that Shakespeare saw dramatic potential in the flawed John Lackland, whereas Richard, a creature of epics, did not serve his purpose.1 Richard was supposed to be a second King Arthur, although the Dean of St Paul’s, Ralph Diceto, who chronicled his reign, established to his own satisfaction that the Saxon Cerdic (traditionally one of the historical Arthur’s enemies) was his ancestor. Shakespeare too never dealt with the greatest of all English stories - King Arthur and the Round Table - for its saga-like dimensions could not be accommodated in five acts. Richard and Arthur, it seems, were both too stubborn and irreducible even for Shakespeare. Richard I, Coeur de Lion, has always had a magnetic hold on the imagination for he seemed to be Arthur redivivus: the once and future king really had returned and, as foretold, had carried the Cross to Jerusalem.2 Yet even if we discount myth and legend, the historical Richard still has the power to astonish. He did, after all, start his life with certain gifts. He was lucky, for third sons born to royal dynasties rarely attained the purple. And he probably had the most impressive parentage of all English monarchs. Despite the voluntarists and the existentialists, it remains a fact that every human being is far more determined by parentage than we usually allow ourselves to admit. But this is a necessary explanation for Richard and not a sufficient one. John had the same parents but was a totally different individual. Here we almost confront a nature/nurture paradigm, for John’s education, socialisation and general formation were entirely different from his brother’s. Apart from the obvious factors of differential innate individual human psychology, we must look to environment, milieu and culture. In this respect Richard’s relationship with his mother and his upbringing in Aquitaine are the factors that most clearly differentiate him from John.

  The man known to history and legend as Richard the Lionheart became king of England in 1189, just over one hundred years after the death of William the Conqueror. At the same time he assumed the titles of Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. To understand the implications of this tripartite title, we have to go back in time, to 1100, the year William the Conqueror’s son William Rufus was mysteriously killed in the New Forest. Henry, the youngest and only English-born son of the Conqueror then seized the royal treasure and was elected king in the only manner accepted as legitimate in Anglo-Saxon times: by the Witan. Henry I next quickly moved to defeat his brother Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, but his easy victory (Robert was kept in jail for twenty-eight years after the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106) brought him into collision with King Louis VI of France, and almost constant warfare marked the next twenty years. When Henry’s only legitimate son William was drowned at sea in 1120 in the White Ship disaster, Henry named his widowed daughter Matilda (previously married to Emperor Henry V of Germany) as his successor. In 1128 she was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of the count of Anjou. From this union came Henry, later to be the second English king of that name, and Richard’s father.3

  Henry I’s death in 1135 plunged England into civil war. Stephen, son of Henry I’s sister Adela, seized the throne despite a previous oath of fealty to Matilda. Six years of anarchy and devastation followed, though some scholars think that the chaos and disruption were exaggerated in early propagandist accounts. Stephen seemed conclusively defeated in 1141, but the triumphant Matilda alienated London with her harsh taxation and personal greed. The so-called ‘Lady of the English’ was never crowned, for a rebellion overthrew her and placed Stephen back in the saddle. On her return to France, in 1148 Matilda renounced her own ambitions, made over her claims to her son and threw all her energies into securing the throne for the young Henry. In 1150 the 17-year-old became Duke of Normandy and the following year, when his father died, he added Count of Anjou to his titles. In January 1153 he landed in England to claim the throne. When Stephen’s son Eustace died, the 57-year-old Stephen, an old man by the standards of the time, gave up the struggle and acknowledged Henry as his successor, dying soon afterwards. 4 Crowned king in 1154, Henry II founded the Plantagenet or Angevin dynasty of English kings and ruled a domain that stretched from the Scottish borders to the Pyrenees - the inaptly named Angevin empire.

  Much of what we know about the personality and character of Henry II comes from Walter Map, a clerk at Henry’s court, also Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral; from Peter of Blois, his secretary; and from Gerald of Wales, for many years a member of his court. Although Map is not always impeccable as a historical source - his taste for levity makes him accept any old scurrilous or apocryphal story as gospel - there is no reason to think that his physical portrait of Henry is inaccurate. A redhead who wore his hair short, Henry appeared more leonine than his famous lionhearted son.
Of medium height, with ruddy, freckled complexion, Henry had a large head and grey, implacable eyes which were said to glow red or become bloodshot when he was angry. Stocky, broadchested, with strong and massively developed arms, Henry was a charismatic personality, whose magnetism seemed concentrated in the ferocious-looking face and eyes; Map said there was something about the man that made you want to stare at him over and over again.5 His voice was harsh and guttural, liable to crack and produce falsetto notes. In modern terms he would be called a ‘fitness freak’, for he was obsessed with keeping his weight down by constant exercise and even fasting; observers said that this was a wise precaution since he had a natural tendency to obesity. In a hard-drinking and gourmandising age Henry was notable for his abstemious attitude to food and drink.6

  Henry was not a believer in the king as star, dressed in sumptuous raiment, with a dazzling entourage of flunkies and hangers-on. He cultivated a more popular persona, wearing functional, hunting or casual clothes, albeit of the finest material; he was often seen with needle and thread, mending a torn tunic. He refused to wear gloves, except when hawking, so that his calloused and horny hands suggested a son of toil rather than a monarch. As a hunter he was a perfect Nimrod, particularly delighting in the exploits of birds of prey and in riding down stags with hounds.7 Primarily a man of action, he was also intelligent, articulate and literate - unusual traits in twelfth-century rulers; he had been tutored by the top scholars of his day both in England and France. With a retentive memory, genuine academic curiosity and a thirst for learning, Henry possessed what passed in his day for encyclopedic knowledge, and this made him self-confident, intellectually audacious and combative in debate. Something of an intellectual by the standards of his day, he liked to retire to his private apartments with a book and was well read for a layman. ‘With the king of England,’ said Peter of Blois, his one-time secretary, ‘it is school every day, constant conversation with the best scholars and discussion of intellectual problems.’8 His memory was not just attuned to learning and linguistic attainments - his Latin was reputedly excellent and he had a smattering of other tongues - but was used to manipulate men and events, for he could recall names and faces at a moment’s notice. Superficially he was a model of courtesy, charm and politeness, affable, sober, modest, generous and stoical. Hardworking, energetic and indefatigable, he rose before dawn and spent his days campaigning or hunting. It was not unusual for him to ride five times the distance of his courtiers or to go for long walks on his quick-striding muscular, bowed legs, sometimes trekking so far that his feet were cracked, sore and blistered. At court he seldom sat but bounded around, and paced about, wearing his followers out by his refusal to sit down. Disdaining regular hours, he was a notorious ‘night owl’ who liked to keep his courtiers awake into the small hours of the morning. He liked to conduct political business while doing something else, polishing a spear, perhaps, or adjusting a bow. Almost unbelievably impatient, he bolted his food, and could never be still for an instant. At Mass he fidgeted, pulled at his courtiers’ sleeves, whispered jokes and scribbled notes or doodled as if he were a naughty boy. The single word that sums up Henry is restlessness. As Walter Map put it: ‘He was impatient of repose and did not hesitate to disturb almost half Christendom.’ Peter of Blois expressed it another way after vainly following his master’s tracks through Normandy and Aquitaine: ‘Solomon says that there are three things difficult to be found, and a fourth hardly to be discovered: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a ship in the sea; the way of a serpent on the ground; and the way of a man in his youth. I can add a fifth: the way of a king in England.’9 Modern observers might diagnose a form of depression or even attention deficit syndrome.