1212–1213
As usual it is Roger of Wendover who tells the best version of the story. John, he says, was sitting down to dinner in Nottingham Castle, enjoying the meal he had postponed in order to hang his Welsh hostages, when a letter arrived from the king of Scots, warning him that there were traitors in his midst. Shortly afterwards, before the meal was finished, another letter arrived, this time from his daughter Joan, the wife of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, with exactly the same message: if (in Wendover’s words) ‘the king persisted in the war which he had begun, he would either be slain by his own nobles, or delivered to his enemies for destruction’.1
Despite Wendover’s dramatic flourishes, there is no doubt that something very like this happened. At least five other chroniclers report that soon after John arrived at Nottingham, he became aware of a plot against his life. All of them were also convinced that one of the reasons was that the king had been deposed by the pope. This was not in fact the case: Innocent, although he had made threats to that effect the previous summer, had refrained from imposing such a drastic sentence. But as far back as 1207, even before the interdict had been imposed, he had told the barons that they ought not to obey John for fear of offending God, and by 1212 this idea was sufficiently appealing that some of them were willing to encourage the belief that letters of deposition had indeed been published.2
News of the intended treason spread everywhere. The Crowland chronicler had heard that the king was to be expelled and another chosen in his place. The annalist at Dunstable Priory asserts the barons had decided upon the French magnate, Simon de Montfort, famed for his crusading exploits in the Holy Land and southern France (and father of the namesake son who later defied Henry III). Evil rumours ran around the whole kingdom, wrote the annalist at Bury St Edmunds. The royal treasury at Bristol had been raided by foreigners. Marlborough Castle had been pillaged and burned. The queen, who was staying there, had been raped, and her younger son Richard (born in 1208) had been killed, along with all his teachers and guards. None of these reports was true, but the sense of chaos that summer was fanned by real events. Crowland says that from town to town people began blowing horns, raising the hue and cry for no apparent reason, and foretelling the coming of some greater calamity. On 12 July a terrible fire had ripped through London, the worst in its medieval history. Beginning on the south bank in Southwark, the flames leaped across the river, destroying London Bridge and eventually a large part of the city itself. Thousands are said to have perished. ‘The whole kingdom was disturbed’, says the Bury annalist. ‘Everyone was afraid, fearing the fury of the king.’3
John’s reaction to the news of the plot against him can be seen in his enrolled orders, which show that the substance of the chroniclers’ reports was correct. On 16 August, two days after his arrival at Nottingham, he cancelled his plan to invade Wales, instructing those earls and barons who had mustered at Chester to return to their own parts. Having assembled men and supplies on a scale that contemporaries described as unprecedented, in the end all he was able to do was command eighteen galleys to raid the coast of north Wales and inflict as much damage as possible. On the same day he issued orders for the security of his son and heir, the four-year-old Henry; no one was to see the boy unless they were bearing special letters from the king himself. John also attended to his own protection, sending letters to the mercenaries who had recently arrived in England from Flanders and Hainaut, urging them to come to him with all possible speed. ‘He began to suspect everyone,’ say the Crowland chronicler, ‘and would go nowhere unless armed or accompanied by a great force of armed men.’4
What John wanted to know above all else was the identities of the plotters. According to Wendover, he dispatched messengers to demand hostages from all those whom he suspected might be involved, and two of them responded by running. The first, Robert fitz Walter, was described by the Anonymous of Béthune as ‘one of the greatest men in England, and one of the most powerful’. It would in fact be fairer to describe him as a baron of the second rank, whose estates were mostly concentrated in Essex, though he did enjoy the unique distinction of having his own castle in London. A middle-aged man by 1212, fitz Walter had seemingly had little or no quarrel with John during the first decade of his reign. In 1203 he gained notoriety for surrendering Vaudreuil Castle in Normandy to the French without a fight, but the king had issued letters announcing that this had been done on his own orders. In 1206 he had fought alongside John in Poitou and in 1210 he had followed the king to Ireland. Thereafter, however, something had evidently gone badly wrong. The chroniclers offer at least three different explanations. Fitz Walter himself apparently put it about that John had seduced his daughter. The most one can say about this is that it was the kind of story that people were ready to believe. Wendover believed the rift had arisen after fitz Walter had quarrelled with the monks of Binham in Norfolk and placed their priory under siege, an outrageous act that had prompted the king to send troops against him. The Anonymous of Béthune reports that John threatened to hang fitz Walter’s son-in-law when the latter killed a man in an argument over lodgings at Marlborough Castle.5
Any of these stories may be true, or perhaps none of them. What is more certain is that fitz Walter, in common with many others, had material grievances against the king involving land and money. He had a tenuous hereditary claim to Hertford Castle, and had enjoyed custody for a few years until 1209, at which point John had taken it away from him. Towards the end of the following year, he had been similarly deprived of some of his maternal inheritance. Whatever the precise nature of his grievances, they were enough for him to take a leading role in the conspiracy to end the king’s life. When John demanded hostages, fitz Walter gathered up his family and followers and fled across the Channel to France.6
The second fugitive, a northern baron named Eustace de Vescy, is even more of an enigma. Around forty years old in 1212, he had no discernible long-term grievances against the king, unless one credits the later story that John had seduced his wife. Like fitz Walter, he had served in Ireland, and acted on several occasions as an ambassador to the king of Scots. It was to Scotland that Vescy and his family fled when his treasonable intentions were discovered.7
Although fitz Walter and Vescy were the only baronial fugitives, they were clearly not the only barons involved in the plot. John’s own list of suspects included Richard de Umfraville, lord of Redesdale in Northumbria, who had agreed within days to hand over his castle at Prudhoe and four of his sons, on the understanding that he would lose them all, along with his own life, if the case against him was proved. Another suspect was Earl David of Huntingdon, who was compelled to surrender his second son and his castle at Fotheringhay. It was probably also at this moment that the king demanded castles, lands and hostages from Richard de Clare, earl of Hertford, Richard de Lucy of Egremont and Hugh de Balliol, lord of Barnard Castle.8
All of these men were in one way or another connected. Richard de Clare and Robert fitz Walter, for instance, were cousins. Even more striking are the ties of neighbourhood in northern England. Vescy, Umfraville and Balliol all held lands in Northumberland, while Lucy’s lands lay in Cumbria. There was also in several cases a strong connection with the king of Scots. Eustace de Vescy, now holed up north of the border, was married to one of William the Lion’s illegitimate daughters. Another suspect, Earl David of Huntingdon, was William’s younger brother. The Scottish king had, of course, long desired to be recognized as ruler of Northumberland, and had cultivated close links with its leading families. It is even possible that a similar connection might explain Robert fitz Walter’s involvement, for his best friend and brother-in-arms, Saer de Quincy, was William’s second cousin.9
Had the king of Scots been part of the conspiracy? It certainly seems convenient, in retrospect, that William should have demanded immediate military assistance in 1212 at precisely the moment John was preparing to depart for the Continent, and that a Welsh rising should have erupted while he was waiting on the Scottish border. That the Welsh had been in on the plot is beyond any doubt. Not only had Llywelyn been at John’s court at Easter 1212, where he could easily have made contact with the English malcontents; his letters prove that by this point the Welsh prince had also entered into a formal alliance with Philip Augustus. The involvement of the French king is hardly surprising, for he had previously been in contact with Hugh and Walter de Lacy, talking of uprisings and invasions, before John had crossed to Ireland and driven both brothers into exile. This may indeed point to a connection between the plotters of 1209 and those of 1212, for in exile in France the Lacys had struck up a close relationship with Simon de Montfort, named (as we have seen) as the man who was to be John’s replacement.10
The plot to topple John in 1212 was thus widespread and well co-ordinated. It stretched down to provincial knights such as Baldwin Tyrel, who jumped the gun and announced that the king had been killed on campaign in north Wales; such at any rate was the allegation later levelled against him. It infected the highest echelons of royal government, as shown by the senior Exchequer clerks who fled or suffered imprisonment on account of their complicity. One of them, Geoffrey of Norwich, was said to have read out a papal letter at the Exchequer, presumably a document advocating the king’s overthrow. His fate was certainly to die in a royal dungeon as a result, even if he was not crushed under a cope of lead as later legend claimed.11
For a whole week John sat tight at Nottingham Castle, presumably awaiting the arrival of his foreign mercenaries with some anxiety. He then moved to the royal manor of Kingshaugh, also in Nottinghamshire, where he remained for a further five days. By the end of this period he had learned the identities of the plotters and drawn the obvious conclusion that the epicentre of disaffection lay in the north. As early as 20 August he had committed Northumberland to the joint custody of Philip of Oldcotes, a trusted soldier-administrator, and William de Warenne, the earl of Surrey, who first had to satisfy the king he had not been privy to the conspiracy. By 26 August these men had taken control of Eustace de Vescy’s castle at Alnwick and garrisoned it with their own troops. Feeling slightly more secure, John set out for the north in person towards the end of the month, travelling as far as Durham by 3 September. Since those directly implicated in the plot had already fled, the purpose of this expedition was presumably to demonstrate to his remaining northern subjects that he was not to be easily cowed. As well as spending heavily on the foreign knights in his train, he also invested in the security of his northern castles. By the end of September, over £1,300 had been spent improving the defences at Durham, Norham, Scarborough, Bamburgh and Newcastle.12
It may have been on this excursion that the king encountered a man variously known as Peter of Wakefield or Peter of Pontefract. (John was at Pontefract on 29 and 30 August.) Peter was, according to chronicle reports, a hermit or ascetic blessed with the gift of prophecy, who had foretold that on Ascension Day the following year, the fourteenth anniversary of his coronation, John’s rule would come to an end and the crown would pass to another. In the fevered climate of 1212 this idea had attained a wide circulation, and Peter found himself hauled before the king and invited to elaborate. According to Wendover all he was able to do was repeat his original prophecy. A later tradition, however, says that he urged the king to repent of his sins, and implies that he may even have spoken of Matilda de Briouze and Arthur. Either way Peter ended up being carted off for imprisonment in Corfe Castle to await the outcome of his prediction, with the inevitable result that more people than ever came to hear of his words and wonder whether they might prove to be true.13
That John should react to a conspiracy against him by cracking down on his opponents and ramping up his defences is, of course, entirely predictable. More surprising, perhaps, is that at the same time he started to conciliate, and began to address the roots of the disaffection that had driven men to imagine the end of his reign. At last the realization dawned that his government had been too harsh; that since his return from Ireland in 1210, if not since his return from Poitou in 1206, he had been pushing too hard, demanding too much, and offending too many. On 18 August, just two days after uncovering the plot, he wrote to all his sheriffs, telling them to proclaim that anyone who owed Jewish debts should come before him to have them relaxed. That this was his first reaction suggests that the king’s abuse of Jewish credit must have been perceived as one of the main causes of contention. A month later, after his expedition to the north, he turned his attention to the royal forest, appointing two officials, not previously associated with such matters, to investigate the running of all the forests north of the River Trent. This reportedly led to recent forest exactions being abolished, and foresters being required to swear that future exactions would be kept at customary levels. ‘The king began to have more consideration for his people’, remarked the Crowland chronicler, noting these changes in policy, and praising the inquiry into the forest in particular as ‘a deed of great and laudable memory’.14
As well as addressing general concerns, John felt the need to conciliate specific individuals. Relations with William Marshal had not been easy since the earl had sworn allegiance to Philip Augustus for his Norman estates; they had sunk to an all-time low after he had given shelter to the fugitive William de Briouze. By trimming his sails and abandoning his friends before the king’s arrival in Ireland, the Marshal had avoided disinheritance, but had been compelled to surrender castles and hostages. Some of these hostages had been released after he served in the Welsh campaign of 1211, but not his eldest son. When the plot of 1212 was uncovered, John’s first instinct had been to suspect that the Marshal must be involved, and he warned his naval commander at Chester to beware of attacks emanating from the earl’s lands.15
William had, in fact, stayed loyal: at the time of the crisis he was helping the justiciar of Ireland suppress a native Irish revolt. When news of the plot reached him, the earl quickly realized that it was an opportunity to rebuild relations with the king. He persuaded the other barons of Ireland to swear a new oath of loyalty, and wrote to John offering to come to England and lend his support. The king was delighted, and sent back a long letter of thanks. He did not at present require William to come to England, and would rather he remained in Ireland to help the justiciar. Casually introducing the subject of the earl’s son, as if he were being fostered at court rather than held hostage, he suggested that the boy should be handed over to one of the Marshal’s men. Certainly William should not believe the rumour that John had been planning to send the boy to Poitou; he never had any intention of doing such a thing. (This was precisely what the king had done in the case of the tenants of Robert fitz Walter and Eustace de Vescy after their lords’ flight.)16
One favour that John asked in return was that the Marshal and his fellow magnates in Ireland should draft and seal a letter, like the one recently drawn up by their counterparts in England – John helpfully enclosed a copy. This document, the text of which survives, was the king’s propaganda fightback against the rumours that he had been deposed. The magnates who sealed it spoke of their ‘heartfelt grief and astonishment’ at recent reports that the pope was proposing to absolve them from their fealty to the king. John, they maintained, had simply stood up for his rights and dignity regarding the Church of Canterbury, and after delivering a short history lesson on this subject, declared that they were willing ‘to live and die with the king’, adhering to him faithfully as their liege lord.17
This was fighting talk, but it was intended to quell the stories about deposition rather than further antagonize the pope. When it came to his struggle with the Church, John was actually preparing for his greatest climbdown of all. In his recent letters William Marshal had recommended making peace with Innocent, and the king had written back inviting the earl and others to suggest a suitable formula. The events of the summer, the threats to himself and his family, and perhaps even the prophecy that his reign was shortly to end, had all spooked the king into submission. In November a fresh embassy was dispatched to Rome, carrying the message that John was ready to accept the terms proposed the previous year.18
John’s propaganda offensive and his efforts to make his government more palatable apparently had little effect on his popularity that autumn. When he kept Christmas at Westminster, says Roger of Wendover, it was in the company of only a few knights. And so, at the start of 1213, the conciliation continued. Immediately in the new year the king set out once again towards the north of England. His progress was much more leisurely than it had been the previous summer, for this time he came not to present a martial face to his northern subjects but to lend them a sympathetic ear. The witness lists to his charters show that he was attended by many northern magnates, who evidently complained about the oppressiveness of their sheriffs. On 30 January, when he was at Fenwick in Northumberland, the king removed his notoriously harsh chief forester, Hugh de Neville, from the sheriffdom of Cumbria, and replaced him with Robert de Ros, a local lord, and the brother-in-law of Eustace de Vescy. Four weeks later, when he was back in southern England, the king similarly replaced the sheriffs of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire with local men, declaring in letters to the inhabitants of those counties that he had been moved by their complaints of extortion, and had appointed a four-man commission to investigate all the excesses that had been committed since his return from Ireland. Although these concessions were clearly focused on the north, the chroniclers suggest that this review of sheriffs was generally applied. One measure which was certainly carried out across the whole kingdom was the abolition of increments above the county farm, introduced by Richard and extended by John. The new sheriffs appointed in 1213 thus had to exact less money than their oppressive predecessors.19
The reason for this new round of appeasement was to prepare for the relaunch of the continental campaign, cancelled the previous year because of the Welsh uprising. In spite of all his other worries, John remained firmly wedded to his grand plan of reconquest, so long in preparation, and of leading an army to Poitou to carve up France with his allies. As early as November 1212 he had given orders for ships to be seized for a muster on 25 March. On 28 January, at Bamburgh Castle, the furthest limit of his northern tour, he had written to Emperor Otto, promising to send him 9,000 marks and saying how much he was looking forward to receiving the counts of Holland and Boulogne in England, once he had made sure that the north was secure. By the end of February, the king clearly felt that this objective had been accomplished. Wales, too, was as secure as he could make it. Llywelyn was firmly entrenched in the north, but in south Wales the king’s lieutenants had succeeded in regaining the upper hand. On 25 February, the same day he sent his letters of appeasement to the people of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, John almost certainly issued the military summons for the coming campaign. A week later, back in London, he ordered every ship capable of carrying six or more horses to assemble at Portsmouth by 24 March, ‘well manned with good and brave mariners, well armed, to go on our service and at our expense’.20
But if the king had been busy during the winter, so too had his enemies. In the autumn of 1212 Stephen Langton and the other exiled English bishops had travelled from France to Rome to lay their complaints about him before the pope. Innocent was sufficiently appalled by their account of the sufferings of the English clergy that he finally drew up letters declaring that John was deposed and committed them to Langton’s keeping. Probably he was unaware of the king’s change of heart, for the envoys dispatched from England in mid-November are unlikely to have reached Rome before Christmas, and Langton was reportedly back in France by January. Armed with his new letters, the archbishop approached Philip Augustus, who enthusiastically embraced the idea of leading a crusade to topple his English rival. By March, if not before, he was assembling the necessary ships for a cross-Channel invasion.21
News of these developments appears to have reached John around the time of his intended departure for Poitou and caused him to prevaricate. On 23 March, the day before his fleet was due to assemble, he suddenly issued orders to the keepers of all ports, telling them not to send their ships to Portsmouth. Two days later, he cancelled this cancellation, and told them to disregard his previous order: the muster at Portsmouth was back on. It was also apparent that the threat of invasion was not his only problem. On 24 March itself, the king issued fresh writs of military summons to his knights and barons, suggesting that once again many of them had failed to turn out.22
In the days that followed John’s movements started to become frantic. At the end of March he hurried from Hampshire to London to seal an alliance with the count of Holland, who agreed to provide military support against a French invasion. By 4 April he was back at Portsmouth, but four days later he tore off again, this time to Rochester in Kent, perhaps to await the arrival of another foreign ally. It was almost certainly at Rochester on 14 April – Easter Sunday – that he finally accepted that he would have to abandon his plan to attack France and instead switch to a defensive campaign. By this stage he must have heard about the great council that Philip Augustus had held at Soissons six days earlier, in which the French king had made public his invasion plan, which involved installing his son Louis as England’s new ruler. The French host had been ordered to assemble at Rouen on 21 April.23
This intelligence prompted John to take desperate measures. From Rochester on 14 April he dispatched extraordinary writs to his sheriffs, ordering them to assemble every ounce of available manpower – not just earls, barons and knights, but also all freemen, and even serfs: anyone, to quote the words of the writ, ‘whomever they be, or by whatever tenure they hold, who ought to bear arms, or can procure them’. As they loved their king, themselves and their property, they were to come to Dover ‘to defend our person, their persons, and the land of England’. None was to remain at home on pain of being branded a coward and condemned to perpetual servitude. The landed were to come with horses and arms, the landless to receive weapons and wages from the king. All markets were to be cancelled, and all merchants were to bring their wares to keep the army supplied. Everyone was to be at Dover by 21 April, to match the date of the French muster. It was perhaps the greatest mark of John’s desperation that he hoped to raise his whole kingdom in arms at less than one week’s notice.24
As these writs flew to the sheriffs, the king sped back to Hampshire, partly to round up those troops who had assembled at Winchester a month earlier in expectation of crossing to Poitou, but also to pay a flying visit to his fleet at Portsmouth. According to Roger of Wendover, John’s ships were more numerous than Philip’s, and in this he saw his best hope of thwarting the invasion, by engaging his enemies at sea, and drowning them before they landed. It was probably at this moment that he sent the fleet to raid the north French coast, where over the next few days they scored some notable victories, capturing and destroying ships in the mouth of the Seine, and attacking the towns of Fécamp and Dieppe, before returning to the Sussex port of Winchelsea. John himself was at Winchelsea in the final days of April, presumably to congratulate his captains on their success.25
From Sussex the king returned to Kent to discover the results of his emergency call to arms. The actual location of the muster was Barham Down, a hill between Dover and Canterbury; when John reached Canterbury on 4 May, he must have realized that his rallying cry had been almost too successful. A vast multitude had assembled, so great that it was impossible to keep it supplied. Those who had turned up without weapons were simply sent back home. Some of those who did have the necessary swords and shields were dispersed to other locations around the south-east coast – Wendover mentions Faversham and Ipswich. The rest remained with the king at Barham to await the feared attack. They included most of the earls and barons of England, as well as a force of 500 knights brought from Ireland by the justiciar, John de Gray. William Marshal had also crossed the Irish Sea in response to the crisis, and Ranulf of Chester had abandoned his struggle against Llywelyn to be present. But despite the high turnout, the mood was anxious and uncertain. Philip, it was said, had raised an army of 15,000 men. ‘The heart of the people was wavering,’ says the Crowland chronicler, ‘as if men’s courage had been dried up by fear and anticipation of the enemy whom they believed to be arriving on the next tide.’ Many remembered with terror the words of Peter of Wakefield, who had warned that John would not rule beyond the coming feast of Ascension on 23 May.26
It was at this point, with the nation waiting nervously on the brink, that the king’s envoys returned from Rome, bearing a letter from the pope. Innocent, after expending many words upbraiding the king for his deficiencies, indicated that he was prepared to accept the peace terms that had been drafted in 1211 – but only if the king had ratified them by 1 June.27
John rushed to grasp this offer of salvation. His envoys had travelled home in the company of the papal legate, Pandulf, who had stopped at Wissant on the French coast to await the king’s reaction. For several days in early May messengers shuttled to and fro across the Channel in an effort to convince him that this time John really was in earnest. At last, on 13 May, Pandulf arrived in Dover, where he was immediately presented with royal letters accepting the terms of peace. Three English earls and the count of Boulogne swore on the king’s soul that he would abide by them.28
This would have been enough to satisfy the conditions laid down by Innocent, but John had decided to go much further. Two days later, in the house of the Templars at Ewell near Dover, in the presence of the legate and a crowd of English magnates, he ceremoniously resigned his crown, and with it the kingdoms of England and Ireland, declaring that he wanted to receive them back as a vassal of the pope. This was, he explained, a spontaneous act, performed of his own free will, to atone for his sins and those of his ancestors, which would bind him and his successors forever. As a token of this obligation, he promised that he and his heirs would pay the papacy 1,000 marks a year.29
Some contemporaries were aghast at this surrender of sovereignty to a foreign power. ‘To many,’ said the Crowland chronicler, ‘it seemed ignominious, and a monstrous yoke of servitude.’ But Crowland himself considered that the king had acted wisely: he had been in a very tight spot, and there was probably no other way of evading the impending danger. Now that England was a papal fief, that chronicler was confident that no Christian prince would dare attack it. As soon as John had performed his homage, Pandulf hurried back across the Channel to break the news to Philip Augustus, who was told to stand down his forces on pain of being excommunicated himself.30
Having turned the tables on his enemies, John was in the mood to celebrate – and to prove once and for all that the prophecy about the end of his reign had been wrong. On Ascension Day he caused his tent to be set up in a field at Ewell, and proclaimed that everyone was welcome to spend the day with him. ‘And a right joyous day it was,’ says Crowland, ‘the king taking his pleasure and making merry with the bishops and nobles who had come together at his call.’ No doubt to the disappointment of his critics, John failed to choke on any chicken bones, and was still very much alive four days later, on the actual anniversary of his coronation. Those who had believed the predictions of Peter of Wakefield were left looking rather foolish. The following day, on the king’s orders, Peter himself was removed from his prison at Corfe, dragged by horses to nearby Wareham and hanged. For good measure his son was hanged with him.31
Philip Augustus, meanwhile, had been predictably enraged to learn that papal backing for his projected invasion had been withdrawn at the last minute, and had decided to vent his anger and offset his losses by attacking his northern neighbour, the count of Flanders, who had refused to participate in the expedition. The count, Ferrand, having been non-committal for a long time, suddenly found he wanted to join John’s alliance, and sent messengers to England in the hope of obtaining urgent military assistance. John received them on 25 May, two days after his party. On 28 May the English fleet, captained by his brother, the earl of Salisbury, and Renaud, count of Boulogne, set sail in the direction of Flanders, carrying 700 knights and numerous infantry.
Their plan was to land at the Flemish port of Zwin and march inland to link arms with Count Ferrand, but on arrival they discovered, to their surprise, the entire French fleet lying in anchor – 1,700 ships, laden with weapons and provisions, and almost completely unattended. Philip and his army were off foraging and besieging the town of Ghent, and had left their ships guarded by only a few sailors. In a short space of time the English forces had plundered and burned a hundred vessels, and sent a further 300 drifting back in the direction of England. It was a signal victory, on a scale that made the raids of the previous month look trivial by comparison, and which at a stroke removed any possibility of a French assault on England. Salisbury returned home a hero, laden with booty. ‘Never before’, said The History of William Marshal, ‘had so much treasure come from France to England since the time of King Arthur.’32