1202–1203
The news that John had captured Arthur, the Lusignans and hundreds of their supporters spread rapidly from Mirebeau in all directions, bringing joy to the king’s adherents and despair to his enemies. In Normandy those barons who had remained behind to resist the invasion of Philip Augustus were elated when the message arrived, and immediately sent it on to the French camp at Arques, where (as intended) it had the opposite effect. Ralph de Lusignan, hearing of the misfortune that had befallen his kinsmen, reportedly fell silent and had to have a lie-down in his tent. Philip became immensely angry, realizing that Arthur’s capture meant his own campaign must come to an end. At once he called off his assault on the castle at Arques, and in his fury ordered his siege engines be smashed to pieces.1
John meanwhile was already heading northwards towards Normandy, taking with him his horde of high-status captives. By 10 August 1202, nine days after Mirebeau, he was at Falaise, and the mighty stone donjon built by his ancestor Henry I, which now became Arthur’s prison. That same day he sent Hugh de Lusignan to Caen, another of Henry’s great towers, ordering its constable to clear out any other prisoners being held there, and giving strict instructions to admit no one without the approval of his trusted henchman, Hugh de Neville. Dozens of less important prisoners were distributed in other castles throughout the duchy, and dozens more were sent across the Channel to be kept in castles all over England: Bristol, Wallingford, Corfe, Nottingham, Colchester, Pickering, Sherborne, Southampton, Marlborough, Portchester, Norwich, Carlisle, Peveril, Bamburgh, Oxford, Northampton, Windsor and Devizes. John had captured so many of his enemies that there were scarcely enough strongholds to contain them.2
Even before the king had reached Falaise, however, concerns were being raised about the way these prisoners were being treated. Roger of Wendover reports that when they left Mirebeau they were not only shackled and chained, but placed in carts, ‘a new and unusual way of travelling’. Security was of course essential, but John, in the flush of his triumph, seems to have set out deliberately to humiliate his enemies, parading them through every town and village. ‘When the king arrived at Chinon,’ says The History of William Marshal, ‘he kept his prisoners in such a horrible manner and in such abject confinement that it seemed an indignity and a disgrace to all those with him who witnessed his cruelty.’3
One person in particular who was concerned about this treatment was William des Roches. William, it will be recalled, was the man who had brokered a peace between John and Arthur in the autumn of 1199, negotiating secretly with the king and successfully bringing in his nephew. That peace had proved extremely short-lived, because Arthur had fled on hearing that his uncle intended to keep him in prison.4 William, however, had stayed in the king’s camp and kept his position as seneschal of Anjou. He was, in the opinion of contemporaries, a fine knight. He was also, according to more than one source, the true author of the victory at Mirebeau, advising John on how to mount the attack and fighting valiantly when it was carried out, on the understanding that the king would be similarly guided by his advice when it came to exploiting the final outcome. With this understanding in mind he had approached John afterwards to discuss the fate of the prisoners. According to The History of William Marshal, he began by reminding the king of the events of 1199, when he had delivered Arthur on condition that they should all be friends.5
John responded, not unreasonably, that a lot had happened since 1199, saying ‘my nephew has done me much wrong’. But William persisted. In opposing his uncle, he suggested, Arthur had been the tool of others and had not been acting on his own account. If the king would let him take care of it, William was sure he could bring everything to a satisfactory conclusion. John, says the History, agreed to this, but then kept putting the matter off. William was asked to wait until they reached Chinon; at Chinon he was told to wait until Le Mans. By the time they arrived at Falaise, at which point Arthur was imprisoned in the castle, shackled with three sets of manacles, William must have concluded that he was being played for a fool, and that the king had no intention of heeding his advice or handing over his nephew. A few days later he left John’s court and returned to his own estates.6
The king soon realized that des Roches had departed and appointed others to take over his role as governor of Anjou.7 Given their reported exchanges, John may have anticipated this development and reckoned that it was a price worth paying to keep Arthur securely under lock and key. As far as the king was concerned, the only mistake he had made in 1199 was leaving his nephew unguarded. Clearly there was no way he was going to take that chance a second time.
In any case, John seemed to be on an unstoppable roll. Immediately after Mirebeau he had dispatched some of his troops on a punitive raid into Brittany, where they had ravaged the countryside and reduced several towns to ashes; by the time of William des Roches’ desertion, the leading barons of Brittany were seeking safe conduct to come and negotiate. Meanwhile the king, having delivered his prisoners to Normandy, had returned south with similar hostile intent. In mid-August he burned down Le Mans as punishment for having earlier received his enemies. A few days later he pushed further south to Tours. Philip Augustus had installed a garrison there after his retreat from Normandy, and for a short time there was a violent struggle between these men and John’s forces, until eventually the latter triumphed. Again the city was put to the torch. At the start of September the king struck west along the Loire until he came to Angers, which was similarly assaulted and occupied. Around the same time he received news from Poitou that one of his few remaining enemies, the viscount of Limoges, had been captured. On every front his military successes were multiplying.8
Satisfied that his affairs in Anjou were prospering, in late September John returned to Normandy. His precise reasons for doing so are obscure, but his appearance at Verneuil suggests that he was attending to the defences on the duchy’s eastern frontier. Philip Augustus had taken many castles there in the course of his invasion during the summer, and although the French king had now withdrawn, there was as yet no talk of truce or peace.9
Towards the end of October, John discovered why. William des Roches and the nobles of Brittany, both angry over the continued detention of Arthur, had made common cause and were attacking the king’s towns and castles. They were joined by lots of other nobles in Anjou, Maine and Touraine, who had been equally incensed by his destruction of their principal cities during the summer. John left Normandy and hastened south again,10 but by the time he reached the Loire it was too late: des Roches and the Bretons had occupied Angers and the count of Amboise had taken Tours. Worse still for the king, he seems to have been unable to do anything to reverse these losses. For the first half of November he sat at Saumur and for the second half at Chinon. In the middle of the month he received the news that his favourite mercenary captain had been captured.11
It may have been at this juncture that John ordered the mutilation of Arthur. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, the king’s advisers, seeing the scale of the disturbances that the Bretons were causing, and realizing that no reliable peace could be made with them, recommended that he give the order for Arthur to be blinded and castrated, their notion being that this would render the young duke unable to govern, and thus induce his supporters to submit. The story is well known because it was later taken up by the Tudor chronicler Holinshed, and from there by Shakespeare, who made it the dramatic hinge of his play King John. Coggeshall is, however, the only contemporary source, and so needs to be regarded with some caution. He continues his account by explaining that John, provoked by the ceaseless attacks of his enemies into a furious rage, gave the hateful order, and sent three of his servants to Falaise to carry it out. Two of them fled rather than have to do so, but the third eventually came to the castle, which was being kept by the king’s chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh. When Hubert and his knights learned the nature of the newcomer’s business they were moved to pity for Arthur, who in turn became aware of what was intended. At first he broke down in tears, but then leapt up and grappled with the man who had been sent to maim him. The knights managed to pull them apart, and Hubert ordered that the unwelcome visitor be ejected.
Hubert, says Coggeshall, then made a bold decision. Realizing that the order, if carried out, would cause terrible damage to John’s reputation, he decided that Arthur would remain unharmed. The king, he was convinced, must have spoken in anger and would soon come to regret it. In the meantime, however, wishing to quell the rebellion of the Bretons, he pretended that the order had been obeyed, and let it be known that Arthur had died as a result of his injuries. Trumpets were blown in every castle and town to mark his passing, his clothes were donated to the local leper house, and it was announced that his body had been taken to the nearby abbey of St André for burial.
But – unsurprisingly – the news that Arthur had been killed failed to calm the Bretons, who raged with even greater fury than before, ‘swearing that they would never stop fighting the king of England, who had dared to commit such a horrible crime against their lord, his own nephew’. And so, explains Coggeshall, after a fortnight or so, it was decided to proclaim that Arthur was in fact still alive and unharmed.12
Such is Coggeshall’s story. If there is nothing in the way of contemporary evidence to corroborate it, nor is there anything to contradict it. Certain points of detail, such as the mention of the abbey of St André, suggest it was unlikely to simply have been invented by a chronicler in Essex. The original source, it has been suggested, may well have been Hubert de Burgh himself, since he is the person who emerges in the most positive light.13
Is the story, in general terms, credible? On the one hand, many people in the Middle Ages suffered such acts of mutilation. In England, as we’ve seen, you could lose your eyes and genitals for taking a deer in the royal Forest. Such punishments, however, were almost never applied to people of high status. Since the early eleventh century in France, and since the Norman Conquest in England, it had been morally and politically unacceptable for one nobleman to kill another who was at his mercy. Knights might die in battle, but usually their armour protected them until the fighting was over, and at that point the victors would take their defeated opponents prisoner. Sometimes they would release them in return for a ransom; other times they might detain them indefinitely. What they would not do was kill or maim them. Even kings with ferocious reputations respected this taboo. William the Conqueror, responsible for the deaths of countless thousands of ordinary Englishmen, ordered the execution of only one English earl, and suffered some opprobrium as a result. His son, Henry I, was scarcely less brutal. As well as ordering the mass castration of his moneyers, he is said to have disposed of a burgess of Rouen by throwing him off the top of a castle tower. Yet when Henry captured his elder brother and rival, Robert Curthose, he had no option other than to keep him captive, and Robert remained incarcerated until his death almost thirty years later.14
Detaining prisoners indefinitely was not a problem, provided you held the whip hand. A powerful ruler could be confident that a subject who surrendered a hostage would remain obedient simply in the hope of one day obtaining the hostage’s release. John’s difficulty in 1202 was that, in spite of his triumph at Mirebeau, his enemies were still very powerful. When the Bretons realized, as William des Roches had done, that John had no intention of releasing Arthur, they simply resumed their war against him. John had foreseen this possibility during the brief period of negotiations in August, when he had warned the Bretons ‘not to do anything whereby evil may befall us or our nephew, Arthur’. His enemies had decided to take the risk that he was bluffing. It is not difficult to imagine how the king, enraged at their invasion of Anjou, yet powerless to contest it, might have decided to prove them wrong.15
The renewed rebellion of the Bretons may therefore have prompted John into ordering Arthur’s mutilation, which may in turn have prompted Hubert de Burgh to announce that the duke was dead. If something of this kind did happen, however, it is clear, as Coggeshall says, that it failed to bring the Bretons to heel. In early December the king withdrew to Normandy, leaving Tours and Angers in the hands of his enemies.16
What is certain is that the renewed rebellion of the Bretons prompted John to take a gamble in completely the opposite direction. Much like the followers of Arthur, the followers of Hugh and Geoffrey de Lusignan had been seeking to intercede on behalf of their imprisoned masters since August. At that time, with his affairs going well, John had probably been disinclined to listen to them, but by the autumn his deteriorating fortunes had led him to negotiate in earnest. On 6 November he had given orders for Hugh de Lusignan to be released from his strict custody at Caen and brought to him at Saumur, heavily guarded, for talks with his brother, Ralph. Conditions of release must have been discussed, and by 23 December – at which point the king was in Caen to celebrate Christmas – castles had been surrendered to him and he was ready to receive their men as hostages. By the middle of January, the hostages must have been delivered, for at that point both Hugh and Geoffrey de Lusignan were freed.17
As the precautions imply, this was clearly a very risky move. John and the Lusignans had been bitter enemies ever since his decision to steal Hugh’s fiancée and marry her himself. But since the capture of Arthur at Mirebeau, and because of his determination never to release him, John had made new enemies among the barons of Anjou, particularly William des Roches. He could not afford to be at war with so many men at once. The detention of Arthur, which ought to have ended the threat of his succession once and for all, was clearly paramount. It therefore followed that, in order to maintain a hard line with Arthur’s supporters, the king would have to show leniency to the Lusignans. By granting them their freedom, and holding out the prospect that their recently surrendered castles and hostages might one day be restored, he hoped to be able to guarantee their faithful service. Once they were back in Poitou, they could attack his enemies in Anjou from the south, while he simultaneously advanced from Normandy in the north, and between them they would crush those who still entertained the hope that Arthur might one day be freed. The king’s writs show that he was planning to advance from Argentan, close to Normandy’s southern border, at the start of February.18
But before this happened, his plans suffered a massive setback. In mid-January John was in the vicinity of Argentan when he heard that his queen was in danger. Isabella was apparently at Chinon, in the midst of the king’s enemies, much as his mother had been at Mirebeau six months earlier.19 As on that occasion John set out immediately with a large army of knights and mercenaries, hoping to avert a disastrous capture. He had not even travelled as far as Le Mans, however, when the next hammer blow fell. Count Robert of Alençon, a Norman nobleman with whom he had dined earlier that same day, had defected. The town of Alençon, which the king had left just a few miles to his rear, had been occupied by French forces.
‘Alas! Alack!’ cried John, according to The History of William Marshal. ‘What a cruel act of treachery! Robert has greatly wronged me!’ The chronicler’s account of his anger is borne out by the official record: months later, the king was dating his charters with the phrase ‘the year when Count Robert betrayed us’. With a French garrison now cutting off his retreat, John was suddenly afraid to go further forward, fearing that his enemies would attack him on the road to Chinon. As it was, the situation was partially retrieved by the heroism of one of his knights, Peter de Préaux, who managed to reach Isabella at Chinon and deliver her safely to Le Mans. From there the king and his army managed to return to Normandy, avoiding Alençon by taking a circuitous route.20
The revolt of the count of Alençon was not quite the total disaster it could have been, in that neither Isabella nor John himself was captured. It did, however, spell the end for the king’s plan of a combined offensive with the Lusignans against his enemies in Anjou. Alençon lies on the Norman frontier, controlling the main route south, and Count Robert had probably been expected to play a leading role in the campaign, to judge from The History of William Marshal’s comment that he had been given money by the king just days before his defection.21
With his military options shrinking fast, John made for Falaise, where Arthur was still being held. According to Roger of Wendover, the occasion for this visit was another volte-face in strategy. The king, says the chronicler, ordered his nephew to be brought into his presence and spoke to him kindly, promising him many honours if he would abandon Philip Augustus and recognize John, his uncle, as his lord. In other words, late in the day, Arthur was being offered the sort of deal advocated by William des Roches the previous summer – leniency in return for loyalty – evidently in the hope that, if he accepted, it would persuade des Roches, the Bretons and their increasing numerous followers to stand down.
But it was too late. Arthur, says Wendover, replied to his uncle’s offer with indignation and threats. (Perhaps not surprising, if Coggeshall’s story of the earlier attempt to mutilate him is true.) Whatever honours John had proposed were not enough; he, Arthur, was the rightful heir to the whole Angevin Empire, and unless his uncle resigned it all to him, he would never enjoy a moment’s peace. At these words, the chronicler continues, the king was very troubled, and commanded that his nephew should be taken to Rouen and confined in the castle there. John’s writs confirm that he did indeed make directly for Rouen at this point.22
They also attest to the terrible nature of his anger. On 30 January, the day after his arrival at Falaise, and presumably after his reported exchanges with Arthur, the king sent letters to Hugh de Neville, who until recently had been guarding Hugh de Lusignan at Caen. Neville was ordered to cross the Channel to England, taking with him two other prisoners from Mirebeau, Warin de Craon and Maurice de Basuen, who were to be deposited in Corfe Castle. Five days later, after he had reached Rouen, John dispatched a barrage of writs to England, directed to the constables of eighteen castles, requiring them to send a further twenty-two named individuals to the same place, ignoring all previous orders about their custody. Finally, he wrote to the constable of Corfe ‘that he should do what Thomas, clerk of our Chamber, and Hugh de Neville will tell him on the king’s behalf concerning the prisoners that have been delivered to him’. The content of these orders, which could not be committed to writing, is revealed in a single line in the annals of Margam Abbey in south Wales: ‘twenty-two of the noblest and strongest in arms were starved to death in Corfe Castle, so that not one of them escaped’.23
To kill men by starvation was clearly a cruel and unusual punishment; records of similar incidents are rare. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, Richard I had condemned one of the men who had supported John’s rebellion against him to such a fate, after the man in question had tried to frustrate Richard’s release from prison, and professed his unshakeable devotion to John’s cause.24 John’s action in 1203 was clearly on a far greater scale, and seemingly provoked by the defiant rejection of his overtures to Arthur. The men John sent to Corfe, to judge from their surnames, were from Brittany and Anjou, so the king’s intention, if it had any political dimension at all, was presumably to demonstrate to Arthur’s supporters in those provinces the dreadful price of their continued disloyalty.
Loyalty to John was becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. Even within Normandy, disaffection was starting to spread. Few men, it is true, had followed the count of Alençon into revolt, and he in any case was a frontier lord whose family ties linked him to Arthur’s supporters in Maine and Anjou.25 But, at the same time, few men were rallying to their duke to help him defend his remaining territories. There were, no doubt, longterm reasons for this reluctance. No one in Normandy could have forgotten John’s attempt to usurp Richard’s place ten years earlier, and how he had refused to help defend the duchy against Philip Augustus. But there were also more immediate reasons for the king’s unpopularity. As his vassals and allies in other regions had deserted him, John had become increasingly reliant on mercenaries, even to the extent of appointing such men to positions of public authority. On 4 December 1202, the day he had departed from Chinon and abandoned Anjou for Normandy, he had appointed one of his most notorious mercenary captains, Martin Algais, as seneschal of Gascony. Another mercenary captain of equal notoriety named Louvrecaire accompanied the king north, and was given safe conduct to bring his plunder into Normandy. When John withdrew to Rouen at the start of February, Louvrecaire and his routiers remained in Falaise, from where they proceeded to terrorize the interior of the duchy, living off the land like an army of occupation. Twenty-five years later, a letter written by a burgess of Caen recalled how these men ‘violated the wives of knights and laymen, and carried off their goods … if they came across a man, they stole his horse or seized his plough, and said he should look to the king for compensation’. The peaceful, well-governed heartlands of Normandy, previously untouched by war, had been given over to freebooters.26
For all of February and most of March, John remained in Rouen or its immediate neighbourhood. Despised by his own subjects, he distrusted them in turn, and became increasingly reluctant to travel even within Normandy. On the few occasions when he did venture out of the capital, he went accompanied by a mercenary band, and moved along minor roads taking roundabout routes, always suspecting that around the next bend an ambush might be waiting. ‘A man who does not know whom he has to fear’, commented The History of William Marshal, ‘is bound to fear everybody.’27
Every day, says the History, the king saw his duchy getting worse as the result of war, and the list of defections grew. By the middle of February, he had heard the worst from Poitou: the Lusignans, despite their promises, their hostages and their surrendered castles, were once again in rebellion. In March, leading rebels from Poitou, Maine, Anjou and Brittany travelled to Paris to swear allegiance to Philip Augustus, who was evidently preparing the ground for a major assault. Among the list of names we find both Geoffrey de Lusignan and William des Roches, who had fought on opposite sides at Mirebeau just eight months earlier. It is a remarkable testament to John’s political ineptitude that he had driven these former enemies to unite against him in such a short space of time.28
It was during these dark and desperate days that Arthur was finally killed. The manner in which he met his end is shrouded in mystery, for few chroniclers knew anything in the way of details. Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, for instance, who would surely have relished telling a story that blackened John’s reputation, could report very little. Wendover says simply that Arthur disappeared after he was taken to Rouen. He adds, however, that later a rumour ran around all of France that John had killed him with his own hand. That was indeed the story told by the French chronicler William the Breton, who relates how the king had taken his nephew out alone one night in a boat on the Seine, run him through with a sword and thrown the body into the river.29
The one other place that this story occurs is in the chronicle kept at Margam Abbey. According to its anonymous author, John killed his nephew ‘after dinner on the Thursday before Easter, when he was drunk and possessed by the Devil’. Afterwards he tied a heavy stone to the body and dumped it into the Seine, where it was later found by a fisherman, and taken secretly for burial in a nearby priory.30
The existence of two similar stories, in which the king personally kills Arthur and dumps his body into the river, recorded by writers living so far apart, might lead us to assume that they were independent, and that therefore their content is broadly true. In fact, the two stories almost certainly originate from a single source: William de Briouze.
William de Briouze was one of John’s greatest subjects, a magnate whose pedigree stretched back as far as the Norman Conquest and beyond. His ancestral estates were at Briouze in Normandy, but the bulk of his fortune lay in England and Wales. His lands in Wales explain why he features so prominently in the annals of Margam, for the abbey lay within his lordship. Towards the end of his life Briouze ended up in France at the court of Philip Augustus, thus explaining how he came to the attention of William the Breton.31
Briouze had been a close associate of Richard I, but he became even closer to John. Present at the time of Richard’s death at Châlus in 1199, he was, according to the Margam annals, the key figure in persuading the rest of the old king’s followers to support John as his successor. John was certainly very generous to Briouze at the start of his reign, rewarding him richly with lands in England, Wales and Ireland, and Briouze in consequence stuck close to his new master: down to 1203 no layman witnessed more royal charters. Briouze had been with John at Mirebeau and had been personally responsible for capturing Arthur. He was still in the king’s company the following Easter, when Arthur is said to have died. In short, if anyone was well placed to know the truth about what happened to Arthur, it was William de Briouze.32
Whether or not he told the truth is another matter. The striking thing about William the Breton’s account is the extent to which it exonerates Briouze and makes him a voice of concern for Arthur’s welfare. In this version of the story, once they had arrived in Rouen, Briouze declares that he will be responsible for Arthur no longer, hands him over to John safe and sound, and then retires to his own estates. But this last part, at least, is demonstrably not true. From his witnessing of royal documents we can see that Briouze was present in Rouen the whole time.33
Since Briouze was clearly lying about his absence, there is no good reason to believe his claim that the king personally did away with his nephew when no one else was looking. It is more likely that the decision to kill Arthur was taken by John in consultation with his closest advisers, just as we are told had been the case when the earlier order had been given to mutilate him. One of those advisers was evidently William de Briouze. Other men who were with the king at this moment, revealed in the administrative sources, included his half-brother William Longsword, and Reginald of Cornhill, later to become the scourge of the monks of Canterbury. One person in particular who stands out from the list of names is Geoffrey fitz Peter, the justiciar of England, who suddenly appears in John’s presence just before the time of Arthur’s murder and then disappears soon afterwards. Geoffrey’s duties as justiciar (in effect, the king’s regent) ordinarily detained him in England; only on one previous occasion had he crossed the Channel to consult with John. His fleeting appearance in Rouen at Easter 1203 suggests he had been summoned there to approve some especially important piece of business.34
If the decision to end Arthur’s life was taken in committee, who actually killed him, if not King John? A century later, when everybody involved was long dead, a Yorkshire chronicler called Walter of Guisborough named the murderer as Peter de Maulay. This testimony has been previously dismissed as too late to be trustworthy, but Maulay, who lived until 1241, later became a leading baron in Yorkshire, and his principal castle at Mulgrave lay not far from Guisborough Priory. He was certainly in John’s employ by the spring of 1203, and rose rapidly in the king’s service thereafter. In the absence of any other evidence, he would seem to be the likeliest culprit.35
Who killed Arthur cannot be said with absolute certainty. That he was dead by the middle of April 1203 is amply clear. On 16 April John sent a messenger to several of his leading supporters: Hubert de Burgh, now serving as constable of Chinon; Martin Algais, the mercenary seneschal of Gascony; the seneschals of Anjou and Poitou; the archbishop of Bordeaux; and even his elderly mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. All these people were instructed to give credence to what the messenger, John de Valerant, would tell them about the king’s affairs, which were suddenly prospering. ‘By the grace of God,’ says the king, ‘things are going better for us than he can tell you.’ The letter was witnessed by William de Briouze.36
In fact, as all of his southern officials could have told him, it was already the beginning of the end. Even as these letters were being drafted, Philip Augustus and his allies were invading Anjou. In mid-April the French king sailed along the Loire and seized the castle at Saumur. William des Roches and the Bretons were already advancing from the west; by the end of the month they had taken Le Mans. John’s rickety administration in the region collapsed completely, cutting him off from his officials further south.37 Philip immediately swung his army north to begin seizing castles in eastern Normandy, finding in several cases that their disillusioned keepers were ready to surrender them without a fight. By the end of the summer he was drawing up his siege engines outside the walls of Château Gaillard.
To a large extent, therefore, the death of Arthur made no difference to the loss of the Angevin Empire. It was not known about in France or Brittany when the French king and his allies unleashed what was to be their final assault in the spring of 1203, and so cannot have been a trigger for war. Of course, once that war was under way, and rumours of Arthur’s murder began to circulate, they no doubt added to the resolve of John’s enemies. By the autumn of 1203 Philip clearly suspected that the disturbing stories he was hearing might be true: in a charter issued that October he referred to Arthur ‘if he still lives’. By the spring of 1204, once Château Gaillard had fallen, he was convinced that they were fact. When John’s envoys approached him in April in a desperate attempt to forestall his advance, he told them they could have peace only if Arthur was handed over to him alive. ‘He was absolutely furious about Arthur’s death’, says Ralph of Coggeshall, and there is even some evidence to suggest the French king may have passed sentence against John in absentia in his court. But this was simply to add justification to a process that was inevitable and almost complete. A few weeks later and Normandy was conquered.38
If Arthur’s fate ultimately made little difference to the loss of the empire, it nevertheless made a crucial difference to King John. In doing away with his nephew, John had broken one of society’s fundamental taboos, with dire consequences for his reputation. The decision may have been taken in committee, behind closed doors, and the deed itself done in secret. But inevitably, once Arthur had disappeared, the rumours about him began to spread, and information leaked out. In the end, everyone must have heard what had happened to him, but if they were wise they did not speak of it. Those who were obliged to hand over hostages to the king after 1203 must have done so with trepidation, knowing what extremes he was capable of. That was apparently why, five years later, the wife of William de Briouze refused to surrender her sons to his agents. Her mistake was to say publicly what had hitherto only been whispered in private.