When John returned to England after his defeat at Bouvines, he was weaker than he had ever been before. Victory and the recovery of a large portion of the Plantagenet lands might have justified his extortions, just as Richard I’s glorious achievements in Outremer and France had made good the expense of his crusading fund and king’s ransom. But John returned to England discredited. The only patch of territory in mainland France that remained loyal to the English Crown was Gascony and the area around Bordeaux, a pitiful rump of what had once been the sprawling duchy of Aquitaine. A beaten king, John returned to his realm a dangerously vulnerable figure.
Baronial disquiet, which had been bubbling up since 1212, now burst into the open. The feeling growing among a broad coalition of English barons was that John’s methods must somehow be constrained, that the king who had wielded his powers and prerogatives so mercilessly should now be brought under some sort of control. The unfathomable question was what sort of bell could be tied to the cat.
Two meetings between king and barons during the winter of 1214–1215 failed to resolve their differences. In January 1215 John met with about forty dissatisfied barons in London, where he stalled for enough time to write to Rome and place the case before his new feudal overlord, the pope. During the spring both sides wrote to Innocent III. The barons submitted demands that John should be made to obey the Charter of Liberties that had been issued by Henry I on his coronation in 1100. They proposed that the king should be forced to stand by his own coronation oath to observe good law and exercise justice and argued that demands for English barons to pay scutage or provide armed men to fight on the Continent were unfair and illegal. John’s papal envoys thought the king, as a reconciled son of Rome, ought not to be troubled by rebellions from his subjects, a position that was strengthened when John took the cross on March 4. As a crusader he was now explicitly protected from attack by fellow Christians.
That the barons chose to appeal to the spirit of Henry I’s charter was illuminating. The Charter of Liberties, which had been confirmed by Henry II in 1154, promised (among other things) that the king would not plunder Church property or charge outrageous fees for inheritances, marriages, and widows’ remarriages, nor would he abuse wardships or extend the royal forest. These were all requests that could fairly be directed at King John, but the choice of Henry I’s charter also demonstrated that the barons viewed their grievances as part of a grand scheme of Plantagenet government dating back more than a century. It was a reasonable position for the barons to take, but their arguments were ignored. Innocent appointed Archbishop Langton to mediate between king and barons and held legal hearings on the dispute in Rome. There, rather than attempt to arbitrate the dispute fairly, Innocent found wholly in favor of his vassal, the crusader king John. Innocent wrote to the English barons insisting that they should pay their scutage and cease making demands of the king. It was a blunt judgment that did nothing to address the serious political disquiet in England. The only possible outcome was civil war. On May 5, 1215, a group of rebels formally defied John, renouncing their homage and fealty, effectively rejecting him as king of England.
The barons who opposed him were led by the plotters of 1212: Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter, who styled himself by the magnificently pompous title of marshal of the army of God. De Vesci was the foremost of a group of northern barons including William de Mowbray, Richard de Percy, and Roger de Montbegon lord of Hornby in Lancashire. The northerners were a tight-knit group, bonded by marriage, kinship, and territorial proximity; all had personal cause to dislike John in particular and Plantagenet government in general. Around these rebel leaders was a band of magnates from East Anglia and the home counties, which included most prominently Richard de Clare earl of Hertford, and his son Gilbert, and Geoffrey de Mandeville earl of Essex and Gloucester. Other barons included Robert de Vere earl of Oxford, Henry de Bohun earl of Hereford, and William Marshal’s son, William the Younger. Plenty—in fact almost all—of the rebellious barons opposed John on grounds of self-interest, and some, like Fitzwalter, were simply unscrupulous and belligerent. But the rebels were also bound together by the germ of an ideology, a sense that the government was in need of fundamental reform.
Once they had renounced their homage, however, very little reform could take place without recourse to bloody warfare. On May 10 John wrote to the rebel barons stating that he “would not arrest or disseise them or their men nor would he go against them by force of arms except by the law of the land and by judgment of their peers in his court.” He made personal overtures to those whom he had dealt with particularly severely during the buildup to the Poitou campaign. He offered to submit to arbitration by a panel of eight barons, chaired by the pope himself. His terms were rejected, and on May 12 John ordered the confiscation of rebel lands. There was now no escaping the fact that England was, for the first time since 1173, at war with itself.
The third week of May saw a dash for London between the earl of Salisbury, who had been released from prison following the defeat at Bouvines, and a group of rebel barons, led by Fitzwalter. They raced through the dark of night to reach the capital, which was crucial to the symbolic and strategic control of England. London was an economic powerhouse, a city of culture and prosperity. Its great stone walls protected the city, with William the Conqueror’s Tower of London in the east and Baynard’s castle in the west. Its skyline prickled with scores of little church towers, like needles around the central spire belonging to the vast wooden-roofed cathedral of St. Paul’s, perched proudly on top of Ludgate Hill. London was a hub of trade and of political power. Holding the city had been essential to King Stephen’s survival against Matilda, and in the spring of 1215 it once again became the key to controlling England.
On May 17, a quiet Sunday morning, the rebels reached London, emerging as the sun was still drying the dew from the city’s rooftops. The bells in the church towers were clanging with their fat, metallic call to morning worship as the seven gates in the city walls were cranked open to allow forces hostile to the king of England into the capital. “The rich citizens were favourable to the barons,” wrote the chronicler Roger of Wendover, who lived and worked at St. Albans in Northamptonshire. “And the poor ones were afraid to murmur against them.” By the time Salisbury reached the city it was too late. Guards loyal to the barons manned the city gates. Inside the walls, scribes were compiling documents to be sent to all earls, barons, and knights thought still to be faithful to John, demanding that they abandon “a king who was perjured” and come over to the rebel side. With London, the rebel barons had their wedge. John’s hopes of crushing resistance to his rule were over.
Yet they could not be said to have won. John might have lost the confidence of a large swath of his barons, but he was still legitimately the king, backed by the pope. He could in theory still dispossess and outlaw his enemies. The rebels wished to reform government, not so as to depose or fundamentally hobble kingship but to bring it within what they regarded as reasonable bounds. They wanted to force the king to govern peacefully and fairly within the law, yet they were doing so by breaking the law. It was a situation of deep complexity for both sides. So, as the rebels camped in London, and John took his court upriver to Windsor, the roads and waterways between the two were well trodden by messengers from both sides, attempting to find a way in which the proud king could be cajoled into putting his seal to a document that answered some of his rebels’ demands.
After a month of wrangling, a solution emerged. Sometime between June 10 and 15, baronial envoys agreed with the king that a document now known as the Articles of the Barons could form the basis for a final negotiation of a peace. This list of forty-nine points set out what the barons hoped to achieve from King John. It concerned issues of justice and feudal precedent, such as the well-argued matters of how much should be charged for wardships, inheritances, and widows; scutage payments and the obligation to serve in armies outside the realm; and the extent of the royal forests. The articles formed an agreed schedule for detailed negotiation, and several more days of hard and detailed bargaining ensued. Eventually another document was agreed upon by June 18, when John’s chancery sent out writs commanding his officers in the shires to stop making war on his enemies. The following day, at Runnymede in Berkshire, barons started renewing their homage to John, who wore the regalia of Empress Matilda to emphasize the ancient status of his kingship. In return, John, his allies, and selected rebel barons swore oaths to obey the terms of an agreement that is among the most famous in English history, the Magna Carta.
The term “Magna Carta” means, simply, “great charter.” Read today, the document of 1215 seems to reflect a difficult compromise: it was an agreement that neither side quite welcomed. On the one hand, it granted sweeping rights: “the English Church shall be free . . . the city of London is to have its ancient liberties.” On the other, it was full of highly exact statements of English custom: clauses laid out the specific conditions under which a scutage could be levied on the kingdom, where bridges should be built, and the laws concerning Jewish debts. It agreed on one hundred pounds as the fee for an earl’s or a baron’s inheritance, and one hundred shillings for a knight’s. On the matter of wardships, the king promised to take “no more than reasonable revenues, reasonable customary dues, and reasonable services,” although what was “reasonable” was undefined. It was promised that “a widow shall have her marriage portion and inheritance forthwith and without any difficulty after the death of her husband; nor shall she pay anything to have her dower” and also that “no widow shall be forced to marry so long as she wishes to live without a husband.” The king promised that “no scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom unless by common counsel . . . except for ransoming our person, for making our eldest son a knight and for once marrying our eldest daughter.”
Whereas many of the clauses in the charter were formal terms pertaining to specific policies pursued by John—whether with regard to raising armies, levying taxes, impeding merchants, or arguing with the Church—the most famous clauses aimed at a deeper elaboration of the rights of subjects to set out the limits of central government. Clause 39 reads: “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined . . . except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.” Clause 40 is more laconic: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” These clauses addressed the whole spirit of John’s reign and by extension the spirit of kingship itself. For the eleven years in which John had resided in England, his barons had tasted a form of tyranny. John had used his powers in an arbitrary, partisan, and exploitative fashion and had used the processes of law deliberately to weaken and menace his noble lords. He had broken the spirit of kingship as presented by Henry II back in 1153, when he traveled the country offering unity and legal process to all.
Defining the appropriate limits to the powers of a king—and, by extension, his government—was no easy task. Neither was ensuring, once it was defined, that the king stuck to its terms. The Magna Carta ended with a security clause, providing for a council of twenty-five named barons to make war on the king if he broke the terms of the agreement. This was nothing more than a contractual basis for civil war. Stating that a king should govern according to the law and making sure that he did so were, it turned out, quite separate matters. These questions would lie at the heart of every major disagreement between king and country for centuries to come. And in the fierce, tense atmosphere of 1215, finding an agreement was to prove impossible.
As a peace treaty—for this is what it was—the Magna Carta was an immediate failure. There was a brief moment of hope on June 19, when the homage and oaths were made, the twenty-five “security barons” were elected, and a substantial number of rebels agreed to the terms of the charter as the basis for peace. “The king satisfactorily restored justice everywhere, lifting the sieges which he had begun,” wrote Walter of Coventry. The production line began, and “a copy of the charter was circulated around the towns and villages and all who saw it agreed to it.” But not all the barons accepted the charter of liberties as drafted, and some chose at once to rebel. “Certain from across the [River] Humber went away and renewed hostilities,” the chronicler continued.
The Magna Carta sparked debate everywhere, and it was quite unacceptable to one man above all others: King John. In less than two months John secured an annulment of its terms from Innocent III, who wrote in a wonderfully bombastic dispatch that “we utterly reject and condemn this settlement and under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe it and that the barons and their associates should not require it to be observed: the charter . . . we declare to be null, and void of all validity forever.” The war resumed, and this time it escalated. Before the end of the year Philip II of France had declared John’s Crown forfeit, citing a “trial” in which John had been found guilty of killing Arthur of Brittany. Preparations were made for the French king and his son Prince Louis to invade England on the invitation of the barons and depose the tyrant king.
The French landed in Kent on May 14, 1216. Prince Louis found London waiting for him. “He was accepted with all alacrity and happiness, and they performed homage,” wrote Walter of Coventry. Ignoring a papal interdict and excommunication levied on him by the papal legate, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, Louis then advanced to Winchester, before heading back to the southeast to besiege Henry II’s massive gateway fortress at Dover.
As John moved about the country, attempting to lay siege to rebel towns and evade the enemies who wished to depose him, he grew desperate and disconsolate. Crossing the Wash in Lincolnshire that autumn, he misjudged the tide and lost much of his baggage train. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, “he lost . . . his portable chapel with his relics, and some of his packhorses with many household supplies. And many members of his entourage were submerged in the waters of the sea and sucked into the quicksand.”
During this desperate journeying John contracted dysentery, and throughout October he grew gradually weaker. By the middle of the month he was being carried on a litter. When his party reached Newark in Nottinghamshire, he was attended by the abbot of Croxton, who was a doctor. It was to no avail: John died on October 19, 1216, his country invaded and his royal authority utterly diminished. His body was not taken to Fontevraud, where his mother, father, and brother were buried. Rather, he was buried at Worcester Cathedral, near the altar of St. Wulfstan, the eleventh-century Saxon bishop who had been canonized earlier in John’s reign. For the first Plantagenet to have spent more time in England than out of it to be buried in an ancient Anglo-Saxon city was perhaps fitting.
To writers like Walter of Coventry, the problems of John’s reign were obvious. “John was indeed a great prince but scarcely a happy one,” he wrote. “Like Marius, he experienced the ups and downs of fortune. He was munificent and liberal to outsiders, but a plunderer of his people, trusting strangers rather than his subjects. . . . [H]e was eventually deserted by his own men and in the end, little mourned.” William Marshal was more poetic. As John sank into his final illness, he wrote, he was racked with pain. “Death, that great harrier, that wicked harsh creature, took him under her control and never let him go until he died.” It was an appropriate way for England’s most remorseless king to end his life.
John’s reputation is as one of the worst kings in English history, a diabolical murderer who brought tyranny and constitutional crisis to his realm. The legends of Robin Hood began to circulate in their earliest forms toward the end of his reign, stories in which a hero who has been dispossessed and badly treated by the king’s corrupt agents takes his bloody revenge on his enemies. The subject of badly wielded authority lay at their heart. John’s name has over the years been associated with the worst evil of these stories, and he has been written off as a monster, a failure, and a devil. But was anything he did truly more grotesque than some of the deeds perpetrated by his much-lauded brother Richard or his father? Probably they were not, yet John’s reputation suffered far more than theirs.
In the most sympathetic analysis, John’s greatest crime was to have been king as fortune’s wheel rolled downward. He had all of his family’s most ruthless instincts allied with none of their good fortune. He presided weakly over the loss of Normandy, and once the duchy was lost he twice failed to win it back. He did not inspire men to great deeds with the force of his personality, yet it is fair to wonder if Henry II or even Richard might have regained Normandy from the position that John occupied in 1204. It is easy to see why he trod the path he did between 1207 and 1211, and aside from his paranoid pursuit of personal vendettas it is hard to see what any other king in his position would have done differently. For four deceptive years John was master not only of his kingdom but of the English Church, England’s Celtic neighbors, and a powerful system of justice and government that offered some protection for the lesser men of the kingdom against their lords, even if it was turned mercilessly toward the needs of the Crown. He failed to realize in good time what problems he was making for himself by dealing with his barons not as partners but as creditors, whom he could treat with cruelty and disdain.
As it was, a disastrous civil war, capped by a French invasion, was John’s immediate legacy to his family. In 1215 the Magna Carta was nothing more than a failed peace treaty. John was not to know—any more than the barons who negotiated its terms with him would have done—that his name and the myth of the document sealed at Runnymede would be bound together in English history forever. Yet this, in the long run, was the case. The Magna Carta would be reissued time and again in the years immediately following John’s death, and interpreting this intricate document on the limits of the powers of a king would be at the heart of every constitutional battle that was fought during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. As Henry III struggled to regain the rights and territories that his father had lost, the great charter gradually came to define the terms of engagement between king and community. When it was reissued in 1225, the Magna Carta was nailed to church doors and displayed in town squares across England, gaining legendary status as a document whose spirit stood for the duty of English kings to govern within the laws they made. That, in a strange way, was John’s legacy. Perhaps the most ruthless legalist ever to reign as English king would have appreciated the irony.