I always think the sign of a truly fine cathedral is if, on entering, you trip over a step or the edge of a stone plinth. Not because they’re dangerously positioned, but because your eyes are inexorably drawn upwards by mighty columns that rise to a glorious vaulted roof. It’s as though your body wants to be about 40 feet higher than it actually is, and your mind forgets to look out for your feet.
I know the explanation that religious folk give for this phenomenon. But for me, it’s a tribute to human art and engineering. At Worcester Cathedral, two lines of elegant columns point skyward, and then urge our neck muscles to stretch to their utmost as we follow the criss-cross ceiling of stone ribs dwindling into the distance. What I do concede is that the faith of those who were inspired to plan and build such an architectural masterpiece must have been extraordinary.
Although much of the structure we can admire in Worcester Cathedral today was completed in the centuries after King John’s death, the present-day impressive dimensions of the building – 67 feet high, and 425 feet long – were the same in October 1216 on the day that the armed escort of John’s mercenary troops arrived here, bearing his body. Their journey from Newark where the king had died would not have been a stately progress. Civil war still raged. Baronial armies were on the move. There was need for haste. As the burial party entered the west door, the impact on the eyes and the minds of the military escort would have been even greater than on ours today. That’s partly because religious faith was universal and unquestioned, and also because buildings of such massive magnificence had the power to stun by their very rarity.
This morning, as I eventually let my gaze descend from on high, it’s my ears that take over. I’m suddenly aware of a hubbub of rapid, excited chattering as if from hundreds of children. And that’s what it is. They’re all ages, from about 5 to 15, in the middle of the nave, and seem to be bunched into classes, though the mixed swathes of blue, orange and green suggest uniforms from lots of different schools. Their teachers are shouting to make themselves heard.
Standing at the back near the door are two men, retirement age, both in buttoned blazers, sober ties, cavalry twill slacks, polished brown shoes. Each has a green sash slung from one shoulder, so I know they’re official. I go and ask where I can find King John’s tomb. The taller one offers to show me, and quick-marches off on a side route, moving temporary barriers, stepping over red velvet ropes, to skirt the mob of kids. ‘It’s a special school visits day,’ he explains over his shoulder as I trot to keep up with him. ‘And we’ve got a couple of pilgrimages thrown in, as well as the usual guided tours. Mind that step. We’ll go round the back.’
I’d imagined that John, not being the most popular monarch in ecclesiastical circles, would have been banished to the crypt down some gloomy stairs, or at best relegated to the far side of the furthest side chapel. But suddenly, we find ourselves right in front of the high altar. And there in the very middle of the chancel at the foot of the sacred steps, in the most honoured position that any mortal could have in any cathedral, stands the marbled resting place of the man of whom the Victorian historian J.R. Green said, ‘Hell itself was defiled by the fouler presence of King John.’
When I express surprise, my guide says, ‘Well, he was a king, and kings got their authority from God.’
On the other side of John’s 5-foot-high tomb, a woman who’s in charge of some 10-year-olds turns to us and snaps, ‘Would you keep your voices down. Please!’ The guide adjusts his sash, gives me a covert blimey-who-does-she-think-she-is look, then says, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ and is off.
I go and read a small notice nearby. It sums up King John for us:
His tyranny led to the barons enforcing his signature of Magna Carta in 1215. His repudiation of the Charter provoked a civil war which was still in progress when he died at Newark.
No mention of the Pope declaring it null and void, nor of the rebellious barons ignoring the Charter and taking up arms, never mind the technical detail that he didn’t sign it, but sealed it. The myth lives on.
The woman who doesn’t like loud voices leads her brood away and is replaced by another, more smiley teacher – white jacket, shoulder bag and specs – with a dozen and a half of what look like 7-year-olds, in blue sweaters and ties with grey shorts or skirts. I ask her if she’d mind my sitting in on her chat. She beams and says, ‘No, of course, please do.’
The children are sitting on oak benches 10 feet from the King John monument. There’s a space at the end of the second row next to the teaching assistant, so that’s where I perch. The teacher points to the stone figure lying on its back on top of the tomb, feet towards the altar, and asks, ‘Do we know what sort of person this is?’
A dozen hands shoot up. She chooses a girl in the front row whose answer I can’t hear, but the teacher repeats it for the benefit of the rest of us. ‘Yes, it’s a king. How do we know?’
This time she picks a boy in the second row, who again speaks in a coy whisper.
‘Right, Jonathan, he’s wearing a crown. And where do you think he’s king of?’
‘…’ Unintelligible front-row girl.
‘No, Louise, towns don’t have kings and queens. What can we see on the side?’ She points to a red shield.
‘…’
‘Yes, lions. That’s right, three lions. And where today do we see three lions? The boys ought to know this.’
‘…’
‘That’s it, Joseph, on an England football shirt. So he’s King of England.’
All these children, without exception, are on the edge of their seats, attentive to every word their teacher says and so eager with their raised hands that it makes you feel proud to be a human being.
‘Do you notice that his feet aren’t crossed?’ continues the teacher. ‘That means he wasn’t killed in battle. And they’re resting on a lion, which shows he was important. Less important people had a dog at their feet. So, what’s this king’s name?’
‘…’
‘No, he wasn’t King Charles. Do you remember Robin Hood? Who was the king in Robin Hood? Annabelle?’
‘…’
‘Yes, good. It’s a statue of King John. A lot of people have called him a tyrant because he took lots of money from his subjects. Who knows what a tyrant is?’
‘…’
‘Ooh, well done, Joanna. Yes, a wicked king. But John probably wasn’t as bad as all that. He was quite a religious man. He liked to worship in this cathedral. People are often not all bad or all good, are they? And that’s the same with kings. I think we could say that King John wasn’t a nice man, but he wasn’t an especially wicked one either.’
Time for their next stop on the tour. I thank the teacher for letting me listen, and she turns with a smile and says, ‘Did I do all right about King John?’
‘Oh yes, brilliant,’ I say, wondering who she thinks I am. I’m about to add that she did a lot better than the cathedral’s own small notice, but she and her class are off before I can get the words out.
The top of King John’s sarcophagus is shoulder high, so to see the face and the whole figure properly I’ll have to raise myself up a few inches on the base of its plinth. I’m nervous about doing this. I can imagine the guide saying that if everyone did it, the stone would wear away. But I decide to risk it, and if I get caught, I’ll just have to apologise and step down.
No one seems to mind, so I’m free to have a good look.
The stone effigy of John has been carved to show his left hand gripping the hilt of a sword. Its blade is unsheathed, which is highly unusual because there was a convention in the thirteenth century that swords – whether real in the grip of a warrior or stone on a tomb effigy – should not be battle-ready within God’s house. Historians have debated why it was that John’s sword here at Worcester broke the rule. One theory is that once the Interdict had ended and the king had pledged allegiance to the Pope at Temple Ewell he became in effect a soldier of Christ, and so the unsheathed weapon here on his tomb showed he was ready to defend the Church. This brings us to an irony in the way King John has been regarded down the centuries. He wasn’t always seen as a wicked failure. In Tudor times he was resurrected (literally) as a model king, whose six-year opposition to the Pope was seen as a precursor of Henry VIII’s own battle with Rome during the Reformation. So in 1529, John’s remains were dug up – carefully – in order that the original lower tomb could be raised up to its present height as better befitted the last resting place of a Tudor hero who had fought against papal tyranny. Once the new sarcophagus was in place with John’s bones inside it, the original stone effigy I’m looking at now was put back in place.
His right, non-sword-holding hand is gripping what looks like a small tube, perhaps a phylactery, the container for a finger bone or some other small relic of his favourite saint. The surface of his figure from his crown to the lion at his feet is a shiny dark brown. The marble from which it’s made was brought from Purbeck in Dorset, 140 miles to the south. Originally it would have been painted in bright colours and encrusted with gold, silver and precious jewels – emeralds from north Africa, amethysts from Germany, and opals and garnets from eastern Europe. You can still see the pitted holes in the cuffs of his sleeve and in the collar of his gown where they would have been embedded. There’s no record of who stole these jewels or when.
The tomb was opened up again, this time by curious historians, in 1797. The king’s skeleton was intact. On one side of him lay a sword, the bones of his left arm lay across his breast, and the bones of his feet were erect. His teeth apparently were in perfect condition. His remains had been draped in a robe made of damask, which showed little sign of decay, and its original crimson colour could still just be made out. It was calculated that John was 5 feet 7 inches tall, which would have made him about average in the thirteenth century. His skull was covered by a monk’s cowl. This led his detractors at the time to suggest that John had been slippery to the last, and had requested the cowl to help him sneak past St Peter at the gates of heaven in the guise of a holy man. A less fanciful explanation is that the head was covered in this way during the tomb-raising exercise in 1529.
The marble features of John here on his tomb are the closest we can get to an accurate picture of his face. It was sculpted around 1231, fifteen years after his death, and there’s a reasonable chance that the craftsman responsible had himself seen John several times – assuming, that is, that he was a local man. The king liked hunting around Worcester and seems to have formed a special attachment to the memory of St Wulfstan, the eleventh-century bishop here. Wulfstan was declared a saint in 1203, and this apparently made the king feel close to him. Typically of John, however, his relations with the place were inconsistent. He spent two or three Christmases in Worcester and gave money to help repair the cathedral after a fire. But he also fined the monks for supporting the Pope during the Interdict, and hit the townspeople in the pocket for siding with the rebellious barons. One way or another though, the king was seen a good deal around Worcester.
The marble of the royal face itself has been slightly damaged. At some stage in the past eight centuries, someone has knocked the end off his nose and chipped the front of his lips, most likely a zealous seventeenth-century parliamentarian opposed to all things kingly. But despite that, we can get a clear impression of what John might have looked like. He had high cheek bones, a small downturned mouth, a high forehead and relatively flat – rather than sunken – eye sockets. The ends of his moustache were carefully groomed into little downward curls. His short beard was tucked under his chin. And what’s most noticeable – something that’s appeared in every painting of him ever since – is his neat, wavy, long hair reaching down to his shoulders.
Can we read anything about his character in this face? John’s detractors might say it shows him as vain, mean-spirited and suspicious. His supporters could claim he looks to be fastidious about his appearance, proud – as a king should be – with the expression of someone who makes cool judgements about those around him. But all this is probably just about as accurate as the Victorians thinking they could tell whether someone was a criminal by feeling the bumps on their head.
If there’s one thing our account of John’s life has shown, it is that he was full of contradictions. Ignore one set of his qualities and you can easily convict him of being a tyrannous demon; ignore the other side and he gets off as a strong ruler who was a victim of circumstance.
The only near contemporary image we have of King John’s features, on his tomb in Worcester Cathedral.
So, first the case for the prosecution:
1. He was maliciously disloyal. He took up arms against his own father, Henry II, and then later, when his brother Richard the Lionheart became king, against him too.
2. He was violent, hot-tempered and vindictive. He is said to have murdered Prince Arthur, his nephew, with his own hands in a drunken rage. And when Matilda de Briouze accused him publicly of that murder, he starved her and her son to death in prison.
3. He was suspicious to the point of paranoia. He regarded those who should have been his right-hand men – i.e. the mighty barons of his realm – as potential enemies. Instead he relied on foreign, low-born mercenary soldiers, who were without land or title and so were in his power.
4. He was grasping and greedy. He ignored traditional feudal obligations and demanded ever heavier taxes from the great families of England to support his military adventures. And he used and abused the machinery of royal government as a means of taxing, fining and milking his subjects dry.
5. He was cowardly. He caved in to the French king as soon as he came to the throne, which earned him the nickname ‘Softsword’, and he lost Normandy, which had been associated with the crown of England since the Norman Conquest. He failed to win it back.
6. He was irreligious. He persecuted the Church, stole its lands and treasures, and was excommunicated as a result.
7. In short, he abused his power to set up a regime of extortion and terror. He was a tyrant. And Magna Carta, however narrow and local in its detail, struck a blow against such despotism.
The counterargument for the defence runs like this:
1. Yes, he rebelled against his father, but he did so in alliance with his brother Richard and urged on by his mother, Queen Eleanor. There was nothing unusual about armed conflict between members of the Angevin royal family.
2. He certainly had a violent temper. In this respect he was little different from his brother and his father. His murder of Arthur – never proved – would be a dreadful crime in another age. But such acts were not unknown among the ruling classes in the thirteenth century. Remember Robert Fitzwalter’s son-in-law slaying a servant in a fit of rage, and it was John on that occasion who tried to bring the culprit to justice. What’s more, even the Pope defended John, being quoted as saying, ‘Arthur was no innocent victim. He was a traitor … and could rightly be condemned without judgement to die even the most shameful of deaths.’
3. It’s true that John didn’t trust many of the barons. But can you blame him? The worst of them were no better than self-serving thugs who would stab a king in the back if they thought it would bring them an earldom. And so he had to rely on mercenaries because they were loyal paid employees.
4. Because they could not be trusted, he needed the barons to meet their obligations in cash rather than with a few knights who would pack their bags and go home once their allotted days of military service were up. And this was at a time when warfare was getting more expensive. As for the idea that he abused the machinery of royal government, the truth is that he was an energetic administrator and turned the judicial system created by his father into a powerful tool, which brought a fairer system of justice to many of his subjects. Of course the barons didn’t like that because it deprived them of the tools of power as well cash from fines which would otherwise have flowed into their own coffers.
5. There’s no doubt that John was not an outstanding military leader like his brother Richard. But he wasn’t without his successes, for instance in his decisive action at Mirebeau to rescue his mother. he also built a navy that won the first redoubtable English victory at sea since before the Norman Conquest.
6. He gave money to religious foundations, to Worcester Priory, for instance. During the Interdict, when John admittedly confiscated a great deal of Church land, the barons had the Pope’s backing – the perfect excuse, in fact – to rebel and overthrow John. They didn’t do so because they were reluctant to undermine their control over the Church in their own territories. In the end, it was of course the Pope who overturned Magna Carta.
7. In summary, the case for the defence is that John was simply trying to professionalise government, the administration of justice and the military. He was sometimes overly aggressive in this. So it was inevitable that his actions should bring him into conflict with the barons whose semi-independence and near-equality with the monarch had been guaranteed by the old feudal system. So Magna Carta didn’t herald a new age of freedom. It was a trumpet call for a last desperate charge in support of an old cause that was dying on its feet.
Which of these opposing views of John is closer to the truth? To some extent, both are right.
John was certainly a violent man. But it’s right to point out that he was no worse than many of his contemporaries. It was an age when summary justice often meant having a limb chopped off or being burned alive. As the twentieth-century historian J. C. Holt has pointed out, ‘John was harsh and cruel, certainly, but a king was more likely to suffer disaster through kindness than through cruelty.’
His best points were that he was industrious and ingenious. He seems to have genuinely enjoyed taking part in the administration of justice, for instance, and would often sit on the bench with his judges. To quote the historian W.L. Warren, John ‘possessed the high administrative ability of a great ruler’. This was bound to bring him into conflict with the barons. The more active that royal officials became, the more they dealt directly with knights and those just below the barons in the pecking order, which of course undermined the barons’ own authority.
John could be generous. For example, he made sure his first wife never lacked for anything. As for his religious faith, it was fairly conventional for that time. After his coronation he went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury, and later, at the height of the Interdict, he borrowed some spiritual books from the Bishop of Reading. A mobile chapel always travelled with him.
It’s too much to say that he was the victim of circumstance. But it is true that there were factors against him that were beyond his control. The anarchy that had allowed the balance of power to swing in the barons’ favour during Stephen’s reign had been reversed largely by the efficient administrative system introduced by Henry II. Richard had used it to raise huge amounts of cash for his overseas adventures. So the barons were already unsettled by the time John came to the throne. And it was a time of monetary inflation, an economic factor unrecognised at the turn of the thirteenth century. So John put the same amount of energy that Richard had devoted to soldiering into improving and extending the reach of the justice system and of his taxation officials. And of course, once Normandy was lost to the French crown, John had less territory from which to raise cash, so a greater burden fell on England.
John’s real problem was the way he set about his task of ruling. He was wilful and capricious. You didn’t know where you were with him. You didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. So, on top of the problems he inherited, he himself made matters worse.
What drove him? Fear. Fear for his personal security and that of his throne. It made him a control freak. He was obsessed with finding ways to manipulate those who showed signs of independence or just got too big for their boots. This was an age when loyalty to a king was partly a feudal obligation, but was also partly a personal relationship. Put simply, John was no good at this second part. He didn’t have the easy manner of a diplomat who could cajole those around him into supporting him. Nor did he possess the heroic reputation of a Henry V or a Richard the Lionheart, which would command the full respect due to a king. So instead, John resorted to the crude methods of a gangland boss. Bribery and extortion were his tools. He tried to buy loyalty and security by heaping land and honours on those of his barons who promised to support him. At other times, he extracted loyalty by means of threats. The barons often had to give up their children to him as hostages, aware of the terrible fate that would befall their offspring if they themselves didn’t behave. Sometimes, as with William de Briouze, he used both methods at different times on the same person, rewarding the man generously one year, then stripping him bare and crushing him underfoot like an insect the next. Such callous unpredictability was a warning to all – including the mightiest in the land – to be careful to keep the king’s goodwill.
The same worries about security were behind his preference for paid foreign mercenary soldiers over powerful barons, whose independence threatened him. He promoted men like Falkes de Breauté and Gerard d’Athée, who were employees entirely dependent on him. For the barons, of course, this was political heresy. They claimed the ancient right to be at the king’s right hand, and seeing themselves replaced by these jumped-up foreign nobodies was an insult to their ancient aristocratic dignity. So when John rewarded his mercenaries with real landed power, it was the last straw. As we have seen, for the barons one of the most attractive elements of Magna Carta was the way it stripped out these new foreigners – and their relatives too.
So was John a tyrant? We have to be careful here not to apply the standards of the twenty-first century. In pure political terms, for us today a tyrant is one who has seized absolute power – trampling on the will of the people – and who then abuses that power for his (or her) own advantage. It’s a term which is particularly appropriate in the twenty-first-century western world, where authority is held to stem from the people and is properly held for their benefit. Thirteenth-century England was a very different place. On a spectrum which has absolute monarchy – subject to no restraint – at one end, and constitutional monarchy – entirely subject to parliament – at the other, medieval English kings were somewhere in between. On the one hand, their authority was God-given. On the other hand, they were part of a feudal system and had obligations towards those beneath them in the hierarchy. It was a confusing set-up. John lurched between the two ends: One moment, arbitrary, crushing the de Briouze family; the next, dealing out fair and just decisions in the royal law court. And his character fitted with this confused theory of political extremes. The renowned twentieth-century historian A.L. Poole said of John that ‘he was cruel and ruthless, violent and passionate, greedy and self-indulgent, genial and repellent, arbitrary and judicious, clever and capable, original and inquisitive. He is made up of inconsistencies.’
Judged by the standards of his day, John was not an irredeemably evil king. He just stepped over too many lines that defined how a monarch should behave, in particular towards his tenants-in-chief, the barons and towards the Church. Magna Carta tries to define those lines John had strayed over.
But we should leave the final verdict on John to the barons themselves. Not only the verdict they delivered with the Great Charter, but also the opinion of him reflected in their actions. Or rather, their inaction. Why – we have to ask – if their king really was such a despot as his detractors have claimed, did it take sixteen years before just one in four of them took up arms and rebelled against him?
Our primary school teacher in Worcester Cathedral got it right: ‘King John wasn’t a nice man, but he wasn’t an especially wicked one, either.’
So how did it come about that John has been painted as the devil incarnate? The answer is that he failed to do what all modern politicians strive to do: get the press on their side. The journalists of the thirteenth century had it in for him. We shall meet them on our next stop. They created an image of King John which persisted well into the twentieth century and is often still seen in the popular opinion of him today.