1215–1216
‘Know that, by the grace of God, a firm peace has been made between us and the barons and free men of our kingdom.’ So began the letters that John dispatched to his officials all over England on 19 June, the day the rebels had renewed their homage at Runnymede. The problem, as several chroniclers realized, was that the peace was nothing like as firm as the king’s writs pretended. Ralph of Coggeshall called it a ‘sort of’ peace (quasi pax) and the Crowland chronicler noted that it was incomplete. The barons were not so naive as to suppose that the struggle was over just because the king had issued Magna Carta. The charter, for all its later fame, was just a piece of parchment full of as yet unfulfilled promises. They had left London in order to negotiate, but they had by no means relinquished their grip on the capital. Nor were they going to do so, they made clear, until some of Magna Carta’s specific conditions had been satisfied.1
A separate document, probably drawn up just before the peace, laid down what John would have to do before London was surrendered. In the first place, he had to set up the system that had been agreed for Magna Carta’s enforcement, by making everyone in the kingdom swear to obey the twenty-five individuals mentioned in the charter’s security clause. These men, not named in the charter itself, had presumably been chosen by the time the peace was proclaimed. Their names are known from later lists, and include such familiar figures as Robert fitz Walter, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Saer de Quincy and Eustace de Vescy. Altogether there were seven earls, three sons of earls, fourteen barons and the mayor of London. Without exception they were drawn from the ranks of the king’s opponents.2
Secondly, John was required to ‘return all the things which the earls and barons and other free men seek’. While most of Magna Carta was aimed at limiting royal power in the future – reliefs were to be at fixed levels, consent was to be obtained for taxation – several of the charter’s latter clauses were concerned with correcting injustices that had been committed in the past. To a greater or lesser degree, all the king’s opponents had personal or material grievances against him. They had been deprived of lands and castles, forced to accept exorbitant fines, or obliged to hand over hostages and charters as guarantees of good behaviour. In Magna Carta John had promised to put all this right. Any unjust dispossessions committed by the king himself were to be restored ‘at once’, and so too any hostages or charters. Unjust fines were to be likewise remitted immediately, or else referred to the judgement of ‘the Twenty-Five’.3
In the short term, at least, John set about fulfilling these conditions. When the king wrote to his sheriffs, foresters and other officials on 19 June to announce the peace, he ordered them to administer the oath of obedience to the Twenty-Five, and informed them that twelve knights would soon be elected in each county to investigate ‘evil customs’, as provided in Magna Carta. These orders may have been issued in a somewhat dilatory fashion, and naturally the king did no more than the letter of his agreement required. He made no attempt to publicize the names of the Twenty-Five, and appears to have made scant effort to publish Magna Carta. Those copies of the charter that were drawn up in the days and weeks after it was first sealed appear to have been obtained largely at the initiative of the barons themselves or the archbishop of Canterbury. Only four of them survive today, but it may be that no more than thirteen official copies were ever produced.4
If John was dragging his feet in distributing Magna Carta, that was not the case when it came to correcting past wrongs. Both the king and the barons remained at Runnymede for several days after the peace had been agreed, and during that time many castles, lands, charters and hostages were restored. Robert fitz Walter re-obtained Hertford Castle, Richard de Clare received the town of Buckingham and John de Lacy secured the release of his brother, Roger. Altogether twelve of the committee of twenty-five received satisfaction on some old score or other, and many other barons obtained similar redress. At the same time John was seen to honour another promise he had made in Magna Carta when, on 23 June, he ordered the Flemish mercenaries he had brought to Dover to be sent home. As yet he appears to have taken no steps to dismiss from office any of the foreign sheriffs or constables mentioned by name in the charter, but he did remove his most unpopular alien adviser, Peter des Roches, from the post of justiciar, replacing him with the more acceptable Englishman, Hubert de Burgh.5
John was thus compliant with his obligations while he remained in the barons’ company at Runnymede. Clearly not every long-standing grievance could be dealt with at once, and for this reason the agreement regarding London had given the king until mid-August to make all the necessary amends. Around 23 June the meeting finally broke up with both sides agreeing to meet again in three weeks’ time to settle their outstanding differences.6
The suspicion must be, however, that John was complying with the barons at Runnymede only because he felt there was no other option. The chronicler Matthew Paris later painted a memorable picture of the king during the negotiations, publicly wearing a calm face and assuring everyone he was perfectly happy with the settlement, but privately raging like a madman, rolling his eyes and gnashing his teeth. Even if we reject this as a crude caricature, there can be little doubt that John had been dissimulating. After the meeting was over he headed west, first to Winchester then into Wiltshire, where he started to amass money and treasure in his castles at Marlborough and Devizes. On 2 July he ordered Geoffrey de Martigny, one of the foreigners proscribed in Magna Carta, to surrender Northampton Castle, but at the same time he instructed Geoffrey to come to his side with his knights and sergeants and all their equipment. The king may have been adhering to the letter of the charter but he was clearly ignoring its spirit.7
But if John was not respecting the peace agreement, neither were the barons. Suspicious of the king’s intentions, they too remained in arms after leaving Runnymede by arranging tournaments in different parts of the country. A tournament scheduled for Stamford on 6 July was postponed by a week and moved to Staines because the barons who had returned to London feared an attack on the capital was imminent. Other barons, meanwhile, had returned to their own parts and were ignoring the peace settlement altogether. In some cases they expelled and attacked the royal messengers who came to try to restore the normal business of local government. In the north they simply renewed hostilities, pretending that they had not been present when the peace was agreed and laying waste to the king’s woods and manors.8
Thus when the two sides reconvened in Oxford in mid-July there was much ill will and mutual recrimination. The barons no doubt complained that John had not dismissed all of his foreign castellans, for two more were deprived of office in the course of the meeting. They must also have pushed for the settlement of outstanding grievances – William de Lanvallei, one of the Twenty-Five, regained custody of Colchester Castle – and probably also the release of prisoners. Among those attending this conference were Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and the other Welsh princes, who very likely received back those hostages who had not been executed on the king’s orders three years earlier.9
But not all the foreign castellans were dismissed, nor were all the grievances settled. John was no doubt determined to resist some of the more debatable claims being made against him, and moreover he had come to the meeting prepared to make demands of his own. Unable (or so he said) to attend on the first day, he had sent representatives to the barons ‘to do for you what we ought to do for you, and to receive from you what you ought to do for us’. One thing that the king probably demanded, bearing in mind the recent attacks, was a statement recognizing that his traditional rights in the forest were not being respected and must be observed. Another was that the barons should put their seals to a written statement spelling out the conditions of their homage, including their obligation to defend him, his heirs and the rights of his realm. This the barons refused, and John had their refusal recorded and witnessed by the bishops. The king seems to have used the Oxford conference not so much to settle disputes as to shore up his ideological position. According to one chronicler he contradicted the peace that had been agreed at Runnymede, and the barons departed in indignation.10
After this meeting both sides started actively to prepare for the renewal of war. Across the country the barons began fortifying their castles (in some cases castles they had only just recovered) and in the north the plunder of royal estates and forests continued. It seems highly unlikely that any of the northern barons had attended the Oxford council. On its last day, 23 July, John had written to the magnates of Yorkshire telling them to surrender all the castles, lands, prisoners and property they had seized both before and after the peace of 19 June, and warning them that if they failed to do so by 15 August he would distrain them harshly. As for the king himself, he now renewed his efforts to obtain military support from overseas, secretly dispatching envoys and recruiting agents to Poitou, Flanders and even to the count of Brittany. It was probably also at this point that he sent messengers to the pope seeking to have Magna Carta annulled.11
It was the pope’s intervention that delivered the fatal blow to the already fragile peace. As the well-informed Crowland chronicler explains, Stephen Langton and the other bishops, seeing that the country was sliding towards ruin, renewed their efforts to avert the crisis and persuaded both parties to agree to another round of arbitration. The plan was for John to come to Oxford and the barons to Brackley so that the bishops could mediate between the two camps. On the appointed day of 15 August, however, the barons gathered close to Oxford in great numbers, arrayed as if for battle, giving the king sufficient excuse to stay away. His envoys protested that he had done everything required of him according to the peace, but had received nothing in return except for ‘grave injuries and enormous damages’. They also produced letters newly arrived from Rome.12
These were not, of course, a response to the request for annulment that John had made only a few weeks earlier, but a reply to royal letters that had been sent at the end of May. Innocent knew nothing of Magna Carta; all he knew was that the barons had rejected his proposed formula for peace and risen up against their royal lord – a papal vassal and a sworn crusader. He accordingly denounced them as ‘worse than Saracens’ for trying to depose a king who was pledged to succour the Holy Land, and at the same time accused Langton and the other bishops of complicity in this crime on account of their failure to oppose it. ‘We excommunicate all such disturbers of the king and the kingdom of England’, the pope thundered, and strictly commanded the English bishops to enforce this sentence on pain of being suspended from office.13
This uncompromising mandate provoked an intense debate among those present at Oxford, with royalists like Peter des Roches (to whom the letter had been addressed) pressing for the sentence to be published immediately, and Langton and the other bishops arguing for the matter to be delayed to allow further consultation with the pope. In the meantime the archbishop and his suffragans wanted to speak with John himself, but the king seemed to be slipping beyond their reach. It was now rumoured that he intended to leave the country, and was preparing to put to sea. After three days of discussion it was decided that the barons and bishops would reconvene at Runnymede in one week’s time, with the hope that John could be brought back to the site and the spirit of their earlier agreement.14
But by the time the bishops reached him (probably at Wareham in Dorset) the king was already embarked and would not be deterred from departing. To judge from the confused and contradictory rumours about his voyage reported by Roger of Wendover, John appears to have been deliberately mysterious about his destination, and may perhaps have pretended that he was not intending to return. All he was prepared to do was send some of his own advisers back with the bishops. Around 22 August he set sail, leaving his opponents with no idea as to where he had gone.15
The bishops, no doubt highly bemused and frustrated, returned to Runnymede to rendezvous with the barons and report the king’s departure. John’s representatives protested to the meeting on his behalf that the collapse of the peace had not been his fault. The bishops, after much discussion, decided that they had no choice but to publish the pope’s sentence of excommunication, but did so without mentioning any names, merely repeating Innocent’s condemnation of ‘disturbers of the king and the kingdom’. According to the Crowland chronicler, many people chose to interpret this as a condemnation of John himself. He was the true disturber of the kingdom and for this reason had gone into exile.
The barons were naturally quite pleased with this outcome. ‘Not without pride’, says the Crowland chronicler, they returned to London and divided up amongst themselves those parts of the kingdom that seemed to be in their power. Robert fitz Walter was appointed to Northamptonshire, Geoffrey de Mandeville to Essex, John de Lacy to Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire and Saer de Quincy to Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire. As these and other appointments suggest, the barons controlled most of northern and eastern England. Each of them, says Crowland, undertook to do justice in his region and keep the peace. This arrangement, however, was only intended as a temporary measure. Their long-term plan, now that John was gone, was to choose a new lord in his place, and for this reason they sent letters to all the other magnates, announcing that John had been deposed, and summoning them to a council to elect a new king.16
Within a few days, however, the barons discovered their error. Around 28 August John landed at Sandwich in Kent. He had spent the previous week securing the ports of the south coast and rounding up ships to add to his fleet. Now at last he was ready to reveal his carefully concealed hand. By the start of September he had moved to Dover, where some of his foreign troops had already arrived, and where many more were expected to join him by the end of the month. Also with him were Peter des Roches and the papal nuncio Pandulf. On 5 September, acting on the pope’s earlier orders, they excommunicated the baronial leaders by name, along with the citizens of London. This amounted to a declaration of war.17
The news of the king’s return and the discovery of his true intentions forced the barons to act fast. Having taken counsel with their supporters they appealed for help to Philip Augustus, urging him to send his eldest son and heir, Louis, to be crowned as John’s replacement. Their plan, in other words, was the same as that proposed to Philip by the pope in 1213 – except that now, of course, it would have to proceed in the face of papal condemnation. Meanwhile, with Louis considering the offer and mustering his forces, the barons would have to buy themselves time by forestalling John’s advance on London. The key to doing so would be Rochester Castle.18
Rochester was one of the most formidable and important fortresses in Britain. Its great tower, soaring to a height of 125 feet, was the tallest in Europe. The castle’s importance lay in its location in the city of Rochester, situated on the road from London to Dover at the point where it crossed the wide tidal estuary of the River Medway. The Medway, as its name suggests, divided Kent in two from north to south. It was impossible for anyone to advance along this route if the castle was held against them. Since the fall of London in May both sides had recognized Rochester’s crucial strategic significance, but neither had been able to obtain possession of it. By an agreement dating back to the days of Henry I, the castle was controlled by the archbishops of Canterbury. John had already made two attempts, in May and in August, to persuade Langton to hand it over, but on both occasions the archbishop had declined, endeavouring to stay neutral, and unwilling to hand such an obvious military advantage to the king. By early September, however, Robert fitz Walter was afraid that John might try to force the matter, and decided to take pre-emptive action. Around the middle of the month, he left London with a force of knights, sergeants and crossbowmen, and entered Rochester with the consent of its keeper, Reginald of Cornhill.19
The king was predictably furious when he learned of this development a day or so later. On 17 September he ordered the seizure of fitz Walter’s lands, and sent Pandulf in pursuit of Langton, who was at that moment heading for Rome with the other English bishops for a general Church council. The nuncio caught up with the archbishop, either just before his departure or soon after he had crossed the Channel, and suspended him from office, citing Langton’s failure to excommunicate the rebels and his dishonourable conduct relating to Rochester. John, like several chroniclers, clearly suspected that the archbishop had been secretly involved in the castle’s surrender, and would later describe him on this score as ‘a notorious and barefaced traitor’.20
The news that his enemies had left London and occupied Rochester prompted the king to advance inland towards them. On 20 September he moved from Dover to Canterbury and began to fortify the cathedral city against attack. When he was informed, however, that fitz Walter’s forces were now just ten miles away at Ospringe, the prospect of an attack sent him scurrying back in the direction of the coast. To the derision of the Anonymous of Béthune, the rebels misread his flight as a hostile move and in turn withdrew to Rochester. Recovering his nerve, John retraced his steps to Canterbury and then advanced a further thirty-five miles westward, crossing the North Downs in order to arrive at the upper reaches of the Medway near Allington. It was probably at this point that he sent some of his forces up the river towards Rochester, intending that they should burn down the city’s bridge, thus cutting off those inside the castle from their friends in London. This was unsuccessful: fitz Walter and his troops managed to beat off the attack and extinguish the flames, killing many of the king’s men and forcing the remainder to flee.21
At the same time John received more bad news. A great storm that had raged across England on 26 September had destroyed several of the ships that had been transporting his Flemish troops across the Channel. Hundreds of their bodies were being washed up on the Suffolk coast. Nevertheless, some Flemish knights had avoided the disaster and found their way to him, and when the king returned to Canterbury on 5 October he discovered a great many more awaiting his arrival. Having taken their homages he ordered them to arms and set out at once towards Rochester, this time marching straight along the main road, determined on a direct assault.22
In the meantime Robert fitz Walter had returned to London, having handed Rochester over to another of the baronial leaders, William d’Albini. ‘A man bold in spirit and tried in war’, according to Roger of Wendover, Albini had been sent with a body of picked troops, variously estimated by the chroniclers to have been between 100 and 140 strong. They had apparently arrived at the castle on 11 October and been dismayed to discover it was ill-supplied with both weapons and provisions. There was little time to put this right, and they were able to add only what extra supplies they could find in the city. On 13 October John drew up his army outside the city walls and began his attack. Those manning the walls quickly realized that they could not hold them and fell back to the castle, chased through the streets by the king’s men who had broken in through the gates. ‘Many would gladly have fled back to London if they could’, smirked the Anonymous of Béthune. They could not because John’s troops had now made good on their earlier failure and destroyed the bridge across the Medway.23
Having cut off the defenders from any hope of relief, the king settled down to besiege them. To the disgust of Ralph of Coggeshall he allowed his men to occupy Rochester Cathedral, even to the extent of stabling their horses next to the high altar. Meanwhile in front of the castle his engineers erected five great stone-throwing machines and began to bombard the great tower day and night with missiles.24
Back in London, fitz Walter and the other barons were trying to round up enough troops to mount a relief operation. On 26 October, a fortnight into the siege, they set out in the direction of Rochester with an army of 700 knights. How they intended to cross the Medway is a mystery, but as it was they completed only half their journey. At Dartford they were warned that John’s forces had grown greatly in number, and that he was making ready to attack them. The king had indeed been receiving more foreign mercenaries who were swarming all over Kent to find supplies to sustain the siege. Disheartened by this news, the would-be relief force rode back to London, leaving Albini and his men to their fate.25
Despite the odds the garrison at Rochester refused to surrender as October turned into November. From the outset John had envisaged that he might have to resort to undermining the castle’s walls, and had ordered the smiths of Canterbury to work all hours to produce the necessary pickaxes. At some stage his men created a breach in the walls of the bailey, and forced the defenders to retreat into the great tower. The sappers then began to drive a mine under the tower itself. By 25 November it must have been nearing completion, as on that day the king demanded that Hubert de Burgh should quickly find him ‘forty pigs, the fattest and least good for eating, to start a fire under the tower’. Soon afterwards the pig fat was used to burn away the wooden props supporting the mine, and the tower was partially collapsed, leaving a gaping hole in its south-east angle. Astonishingly, Albini and his men continued to resist, using the cross-wall that divided the tower in two as a desperate last line of defence. Finally, however, their own strength failed them, for the castle’s meagre provisions had long since been exhausted, and the garrison had been reduced to eating the flesh of their own expensive warhorses. A day or so later, on 30 November, they surrendered, after enduring an assault that had lasted seven weeks. ‘Living memory does not recall’, said the Crowland chronicler, ‘a siege so fiercely pressed and so staunchly resisted.’26
Because of the numerous casualties on his own side, and the vast amount of money he had spent, John was in no mood to be merciful. In the days before the surrender Albini had sent out from the castle ‘those who seemed less warlike’, and the king had responded by cutting off their hands and feet. According to several chroniclers his intention after the fortress’s fall was to hang all the remaining members of the garrison. Eventually the nobles in his own camp dissuaded him from doing so, arguing that this would trigger the revenge killing of any royalists who in future might fall into rebel hands. John contented himself with hanging just one of the defenders, a crossbowman who had been raised from boyhood in the royal household. The rest he sent to be imprisoned in various royal castles. William d’Albini was sent to Corfe.27
For the remaining barons this was a crushing blow. On hearing the news, says the Crowland chronicler, they were struck with panic, and either gathered in London or hid themselves in religious houses. After the fall of Rochester, one of the greatest castles in the kingdom, ‘few were willing to trust in fortifications’. Their only remaining hope was that Louis would come swiftly to their rescue, but that still seemed to be a distant prospect. During the siege two of the rebel earls, Saer de Quincy and Henry de Bohun, had crossed to France to try to hasten his arrival, and in response Louis had dispatched 140 knights to England. This, however, was too small a force to make any meaningful difference, and after landing in Suffolk all they had done was join the barons in London. As for Louis himself, he was not expected to arrive in England before the middle of January.28
John, meanwhile, was ready to go on the rampage. From Rochester he made his way west to Winchester, then north to St Albans, where he held a council of war. As the St Albans chronicler Roger of Wendover explains, he decided with his military advisers to divide his forces in two. Half of them would remain in the south under the command of his half-brother, the earl of Salisbury, partly to keep the barons penned up in London, and partly to ravage the lands of the rebels in East Anglia. The other half would accompany the king, who was setting out to punish his enemies in the north.29
As well as wishing to revenge himself on the northern barons, John also wanted to vent his fury against the new king of Scots. The elderly William the Lion had died the previous December, having ruled Scotland for almost half a century, and had been succeeded by his son, Alexander, now sixteen years of age. Alexander had been quick to side with the English rebels in the hope of reversing the humiliations that had been inflicted on his father, and of making good his long-standing claim to Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland. The barons had been happy to oblige him on this score, and at some point in the autumn the council of twenty-five had ruled that these northern counties should be handed over. In October the new Scottish king had come south to take possession of his prize by laying siege to the border castle at Norham. On 22 October the Northumbrian rebels had done homage to him, and Eustace de Vescy had invested him with Northumbria using a special ceremonial staff.30
John set out for the north, said Wendover, ‘intending to destroy everything that came in his way with fire and sword’. From St Albans he advanced rapidly to Nottingham, where he spent Christmas, in Crowland’s words, ‘not in the usual manner, but as one on the warpath’. Most of his army were Flemish mercenaries, and the king encouraged them to every excess, not only the destruction of his enemies’ homes and the seizure of their goods, but also burning towns and setting fire to hedgerows. People of every rank and condition, says Wendover, were imprisoned and tortured until they paid heavy ransoms; one of the reasons John had embarked on this campaign was to enrich himself and his followers at his enemies’ expense. Passing close to William d’Albini’s castle at Belvoir, he persuaded its garrison to surrender by threatening to starve their lord to death if they refused. At Pontefract at the start of January he similarly induced John de Lacy to submit, along with another member of the Twenty-Five, Roger de Montbegon. Two days later he occupied York, where the terrified citizens offered £1,000 to be spared the depredations of his troops.31
Others fled in the face of his wrath. The barons of Yorkshire rode to Scotland and sought the protection of Alexander, doing homage to him in the chapter house of Melrose Abbey on 11 January 1216. The chronicler there records how these men had burnt their own estates and barns as they departed so as to deny any sustenance to John’s army. According to the Anonymous of Béthune, the king had been ready to call a halt to his advance at Durham, but decided to continue when he learned that the king of Scots had burned Newcastle upon Tyne. Vowing to ‘run the sandy little fox-cub into his earth’, John marched all the way to the Scottish border, taking Berwick in mid-January and torturing its inhabitants for money. He then advanced into Scotland itself, burning the towns of Haddington and Dunbar and pillaging the abbey at Coldingham. After a week of destruction he left for England, setting fire to Berwick as he departed, reportedly putting the torch to his lodgings with his own hand.32
In southern England the other half of the king’s army had been wreaking similar havoc. Ralph of Coggeshall, well placed to comment, describes how Poitevin mercenaries had harried their way through Essex, laying siege to Geoffrey de Mandeville’s castle at Pleshey on Christmas Eve and stealing the horses from Coggeshall Abbey on New Year’s Day. Across the whole of East Anglia they had ravaged the lands of the barons, stolen the valuables from churches and tortured people to get at their money. The barons themselves, meanwhile, had remained for the most part in London. The return of Saer de Quincy from France in early January, bringing with him forty-one ships full of French soldiers, must have boosted the rebels’ morale, and at the end of the month they advanced into Essex to raise the siege of Colchester. But there was still no sign of Louis, who now let it be known that his coming was postponed until Easter. The presence of French knights in London also proved to be something of a double-edged sword when one of them accidentally killed Geoffrey de Mandeville in a tournament towards the end of February.33
By this point, says Ralph of Coggeshall, the king had been away in the north for so long that rumours of his death began to circulate. In March, however, John reappeared in the south, ready to prove that such reports had been greatly exaggerated. After reuniting the two halves of his army he marched them through East Anglia, targeting the homes of his enemies that were still holding out. The earl of Norfolk’s mighty castle at Framlingham was surrendered by its garrison without a fight. Colchester, restored to William de Lanvallei the previous summer, resisted for only a few days, provoking accusations of treachery against the French knights who had been left to defend it. Castle Hedingham, the principal seat of the earl of Oxford, fell after the shortest of sieges, and the earl himself decided to seek the king’s mercy. By the end of the month the eastern counties were completely subdued. At Hedingham, says Coggeshall, John distributed the spoils of the campaign among his mercenaries, so as to secure their services for an immediate attack on London.34
The rebels in London were still determined to resist. When they became aware of the king’s intention, says Coggeshall, they opened all the gates to the city, ready to ride out and confront him if he came within ten leagues. John did in fact come within this distance, pausing at Enfield, twelve miles north of London, on the last day of March. But when some of his troops approached more closely, the barons launched a surprise attack, seriously wounding the Poitevin commander Savaric de Mauléon and killing many others. Around the same moment, the Londoners successfully beat off the ships that the king had sent up the Thames to blockade the city, capturing their mercenary crews or leaving them to drown. The result was that John withdrew to a safer distance, reaching Reading by 5 April.35
The truth was he had left it too late. The time to have attacked London had been in December, immediately after the fall of Rochester, when the barons’ morale was at its lowest. Instead, John had taken the easier option of conducting a harrying campaign against his enemies. There were perhaps sound economic reasons for this decision. It had cost him a fortune to keep his mercenary army static for seven weeks before the walls of Rochester; by allowing them to plunder northern and eastern England he had relieved some of this financial pressure. But strategically it had been a mistake. In the meantime several contingents of French troops had been able to reach London and the resolve of the rebels had grown stronger. For all the suffering and destruction the king had caused, the results of his ravaging had been more illusory than real. Many castles had been surrendered but most of the rebels had held out and gone into hiding. As soon as John had returned south they resumed their resistance. Alexander of Scotland attacked Carlisle at the end of February and in March the Northerners laid siege to York.36
The rebels were fighting more fiercely than ever because at last the arrival of Louis seemed to be imminent. Although he did not appear at Easter as promised, by that date (10 April) the extent of his military preparations on the opposite side of the Channel must have been obvious. At some point after Easter John responded by sending an embassy to Philip Augustus, headed by William Marshal and Peter des Roches, entreating the French king to prevent his son from sailing and reminding him of their five-year truce. Around the same time Philip and Louis were being warned of the dire spiritual consequences of attacking England by the papal legate, Guala Bicchieri, dispatched to the French court by Innocent III in an effort to save his crusade. Both these representations were rejected. John’s ambassadors were simply turned away without a hearing. Guala by contrast was treated to a long justification of Louis’ claim, and told bluntly that the papal overlordship of England was pretended. John had compromised his right to wear the English crown, the French maintained, by his treachery towards his brother Richard and his murder of his nephew, Arthur.37
While these futile attempts at diplomacy were taking place, John was preparing for the worst and trying to muster the strength to resist yet another invasion threat. It would, of course, be difficult to assemble the kind of huge land army he had summoned for the same purpose in 1213, since half his subjects were now at war with him. On 12 April, still at Reading, he made a desperate and wholly unsuccessful attempt to woo the men whose lands he had been plundering just a few weeks earlier, offering to make peace with Eustace de Vescy and others without financial penalty, assuring them ‘what we desire from our barons is not so much their money as their good and faithful service’. Recognizing that this offer might not generate any results, John looked more hopefully towards his naval resources. Two days later he sent letters to more than twenty coastal towns, commanding them to send every possible ship, crewed with the best mariners, to the mouth of the Thames as quickly as possible. His plan, explains Coggeshall, was to engage Louis’ forces in a battle at sea and defeat them before they landed.38
According to the Anonymous of Béthune, it was a plan that had a good chance of succeeding, for Louis’ ships were mostly small ones which would have been unable to defend themselves against John’s much larger vessels. In the last week of April the king returned to Kent, and from the start of May he based himself on the coast at Folkestone, waiting for the first sighting of any French sails. At some point in the following fortnight his fleet moved to Dover, ready to repel the invaders massing on the other side of the Channel at Calais, Gravelines and Wissant. Some ships were sent to try to burn the French fleet while it was still anchored in these ports, in the hope of replicating the successful raid on Zwin in 1213. But this time the fortunes of war were reversed. On the night of 18 May a terrible storm blew up in the Channel and destroyed John’s ships, overturning them or smashing them into each other, and scattering those that did not sink far and wide along the south coast. Any hope of repelling Louis at sea was lost.39
Louis quickly realized this was his chance and set sail at once, so soon that he almost fell foul of the same bad weather, which dispersed his ships and drove them in the wrong direction. On the morning of 21 May he landed at Stonar near Sandwich with only a small portion of his followers. John, who had gone inland to Canterbury to prepare for the reception of the papal legate, was quickly informed of the landing, but preferred to wait for Guala’s arrival before he responded. It was not until the next day that the king arrived at Sandwich, just in time to see the remainder of Louis’ fleet sailing into view. He immediately decided to risk all and fight them on the beaches: trumpets were sounded and his troops lined up ready for battle.40
But, with equal suddenness, John then changed his mind. His army was largely composed of foreigners who were serving him only for money; some of them had friends and relatives among the enemy force that was about to disembark. What if, in the thick of the fighting, they decided to switch sides? Such apparently was the fear of William Marshal, who, according to the Dunstable annalist, advised the king to retire. Other chroniclers, by contrast, blamed the decision on John’s cowardice. The Anonymous of Béthune describes how the king rode off from Sandwich in secret, and had retreated a league in the direction of Dover before his troops realized he had deserted them. Despairing of his craven conduct, some of them nevertheless followed him as he withdrew along the south coast towards Winchester. Others felt that this was the final straw, and left his service for good.41
John’s sudden departure allowed Louis to sweep all before him. With a force of knights that the Anonymous estimated to be 1,200 strong, he quickly secured Sandwich and then advanced to Canterbury, causing the citizens to submit and the papal legate to flee. He then marched to Rochester, taking back the crippled castle from its royalist garrison on the last day of May. On 2 June he entered London in triumph, to the general joy of its inhabitants, and was led into St Paul’s Cathedral in a celebratory procession. On the following day he received the homage of Robert fitz Walter and the other rebel barons, assuring them that in return he would restore their ‘good laws and lost inheritances’.42
Three days after his triumphant entry into London, Louis set out towards Winchester in pursuit of John. As he advanced the castles at Reigate, Guildford and Farnham submitted with little or no resistance, and by 14 June his army was drawing near to Winchester’s walls. John was no longer within them, having fled further west as soon as he learned of Louis’ approach. The city had been left in the hands of Savaric de Mauléon, who burned much of it down in a misguided attempt to frustrate the French advance, before deciding to retire to join the king. Winchester’s defence was left to the garrisons of its two castles, which Louis pounded with his siege engines for ten days, until Savaric returned with the licence for them to surrender.43
It was now approaching the end of June, and John was at Corfe Castle, experiencing what must have been one of the lowest points in his life. His kingdom had been invaded, and almost all of the south-east had fallen to his foes. His capital had been occupied, along with the great cathedral cities of Canterbury and Winchester. Elsewhere across the country, all his recent gains were being undone as the rebels took heart from Louis’ arrival. At the start of June, before abandoning Winchester, the king had dispatched a flurry of writs to his commanders in the Midlands and the north, telling them to hold their castles if they could, and if not to destroy them. Such desperate orders must have seemed to herald the beginning of the end. By this stage almost a third of his household knights had defected, and while Louis had been besieging Winchester, says Coggeshall, ‘almost all the earls and barons came to him there, who had previously supported John’. The earls of Surrey and Arundel were prominent among the deserters, but the most devastating loss was surely the earl of Salisbury, the king’s half-brother, who seems to have been one of the few men to whom John was genuinely close. It was later said that Salisbury bore a grudge because the king had seduced his countess, but the timing of his departure suggests that the truth was rather more prosaic. John’s closest supporters were leaving him because his cause appeared to be lost.44
Having taken Winchester, however, Louis decided to abandon his pursuit. Rather than pushing on into Dorset to besiege John at Corfe, he led his army south-east to take the royal castle at Portchester, then struck north to attempt the same at Odiham. Why he acted in this way is unclear. The Anonymous of Béthune reveals that there were already tensions emerging between the newly arrived French nobles, who were hungry for reward in the form of lands and castles, and the English barons, who naturally felt that their own claims were superior. A more likely reason is that Louis realized that John would probably keep retreating and giving him the slip, and decided it would make better sense to tighten his grip on the territory he had already taken. In his dash to take London and Winchester he had bypassed several castles which were still defiantly holding out for the king. Odiham, despite being a relatively small fortress with a garrison of just thirteen men, resisted for a whole week, to the admiration of those besieging it. After its fall Louis returned to London, where he determined to tackle two far more prestigious targets. One division of his army was sent up the Thames to besiege Windsor. The remainder followed Louis back through Kent in the direction of the mighty castle at Dover.45
During all this time John had remained at Corfe, conveniently near to the coast in case Louis should change his mind, waiting to see how events would unfold. Eventually, once the French army had returned to London, the king emerged from his foxhole and headed north, moving swiftly to Bristol and Gloucester, before stopping at Hereford, where he remained during the last days of July. As this itinerary suggests, his hopes were now pinned on the west – and not just the west of England. Of his remaining supporters, the two greatest were William Marshal and Ranulf of Chester, both of whom had extensive lands in the March of Wales and, in the Marshal’s case, in Ireland as well. John accordingly spent the next three weeks travelling up and down the Welsh border, visiting Shrewsbury, Whitchurch and Worcester, and shoring up what he thought would be his last line of defence. Letters issued on 19 August show that this is where he anticipated Louis or his forces would strike next.46
Louis was in fact at this point about as far from the Welsh border as he could possibly be, having spent the same three-week period outside the walls of Dover Castle, fruitlessly trying to force his way in. The mighty fortress, rebuilt by Henry II on a scale to rival the Tower of London and extensively added to by John himself, was being held by the redoubtable Hubert de Burgh with a sizeable royalist garrison. Like his father at Château Gaillard, Louis had established huge siege works around the castle, ‘erecting buildings around it’, in the words of the Dunstable annalist, ‘as if he were establishing a town’. He had also deployed his fleet to make sure the castle was cut off from the sea, and brought out his heaviest artillery. But despite this massive effort, and the relentless pounding of his siege engines, the defenders remained resolute, and meanwhile the waiting was taking its toll on his own army. Some of Louis’ followers had already left for home even before the siege had started; now they began to desert in droves, said the Anonymous of Béthune, ‘so that the host dwindled remarkably’. As well as having to contend with the hardship of the siege, the French forces in Kent and Sussex found themselves being constantly harassed and killed by a band of English bowmen based in the great forest of the Weald. Led by a former royal bailiff called William of Kensham (or ‘Willikin of the Weald’ as he became known), these prototype Robin Hoods were so successful that the king wrote to thank them for their efforts.47
Realizing that his opponent was being usefully detained in Kent, John decided to go on the offensive. At the start of September he rounded up his remaining forces and advanced down the valley of the Thames, apparently with the intention of raising the siege of Windsor. The French forces that had been sent to take the castle had enjoyed no more success than their colleagues at Dover, and were almost grateful for the distraction. The king himself came only as close as Sonning, seventeen miles to the west, but sent some of the Welsh archers he had recruited during the previous month to shoot into the enemy camp at night. When the French responded by readying themselves for battle, John took off at speed towards East Anglia. If, as some have suggested, this was a feigned flight, intended to draw off the besiegers, it was certainly a convincing one: the king and his army covered the hundred miles between Sonning and Cambridge in just three days.48
John had decided to head east for two reasons. Firstly, as Coggeshall explains, he had come to lay waste, once again, to the lands of the rebels. Soon after Louis’ arrival in London, Robert fitz Walter and the other barons had marched into East Anglia to recover their estates and castles that the king had seized during the spring. John now moved swiftly from Cambridge to the border of Suffolk and Essex, visiting the earl of Oxford’s castle at Hedingham and the earl of Hertford’s castle at Clare, burning and destroying everywhere he went. His second reason for coming east was to try to apprehend the young king of Scots. In the course of the previous month Alexander had travelled from Cumbria to Kent to do homage to Louis, and John was apparently hopeful of intercepting him on his return journey.49
Shortly into his harrying campaign, however, the king discovered that the French army that had been besieging Windsor had indeed been pursuing him, and was about to descend on Cambridge. Forced once more to flee, he tore off towards the north, not resting until he had reached the border with Lincolnshire.50 Burning the barns of religious houses, and even the crops still standing unharvested in the fields, he advanced towards Lincoln, where he succeeded in driving off the rebels who were besieging the city’s castle, and pursued them into the inaccessible region known as the Isle of Axholme. But in so doing he seems to have missed his opportunity to intercept Alexander, who slipped past him and returned safely to Scotland. John moved back south along the Lincolnshire coast, burning all the while. ‘Never had there been a time’, lamented the local Crowland chronicler, ‘when there had been such fires in the land.’51
Precisely what John’s next move would have been is uncertain. The rebels who had been pursuing him had given up the chase after his flight from Cambridge and gone to join Louis, who was still besieging Dover. Although the king was heading south, he appears to have been planning a northern campaign. On 9 October he left Lincolnshire and went to King’s Lynn in Norfolk, then one of the most prosperous ports in England, to arrange for supplies to be sent to several of his northern castles.52
At that point, however, John fell ill. Ralph of Coggeshall claims it was dysentery, and assumed it was caused by an excessive intake of food and drink; Roger of Wendover famously but unreliably describes a dish of peaches and new cider. More likely a body wracked by exhaustion was to blame: for the previous four weeks the forty-nine-year-old king had been travelling at a relentless pace, often riding more than thirty miles in the space of a single day.53
Two days after arriving at King’s Lynn, despite his illness, he set out again, heading back in the direction of Lincolnshire. Still in a hurry, he decided to save time by taking a short cut across the great tidal estuary of the Wash, at the point where the River Wellstream merged with the sea. Disaster struck when parts of his baggage train, both men and packhorses, were sucked down into the treacherous sands. According to Coggeshall, the king lost all the precious items of his chapel, including his collection of holy relics. He may even have lost his crown and other regalia, since they do not figure in later royal inventories.54
Wracked with grief on account of this loss, John struggled to Swineshead Priory in Lincolnshire, then after two more days pushed on to the bishop of Lincoln’s castle at Sleaford. There he was met by messengers from Dover with even worse news. Louis had undermined and partially collapsed the castle’s main entrance. Hubert de Burgh and his men had prevented the French army storming the breach, but they could not hold out for much longer. A truce had been agreed to allow the defenders to seek the king’s help, or else his permission to surrender.55
This news, says Coggeshall, caused John such distress that it brought on the return of his illness. An attempt to alleviate his condition by bleeding him seems to have made no difference, and on 15 October he wrote to the pope, describing how he was suffering from ‘a grave and incurable infirmity’. The pope in question was not the formidable Innocent III, whose pontificate had done so much to shape the king’s reign. Innocent had died on 16 July, to be replaced by Honorius III. John now addressed the new pontiff ‘on bended knee’, and committed his kingdom to the Church’s protection, without which he could see no hope of saving the succession for his heirs.56
Having composed this letter, the king continued with his desperate journey. Too ill to ride, he was carried in a litter from Sleaford a further twenty miles west to Newark, another castle confiscated from the bishop of Lincoln. It was probably there that he dictated his last will and testament, the original copy of which still survives. John began by assigning the administration of his affairs to thirteen of his faithful servants, including William Marshal, Ranulf of Chester, Peter des Roches and the papal legate, Guala. These men were to make amends to the Church for the damages and injuries he had inflicted, and to arrange for aid to be sent to the Holy Land. They were to help his sons obtain and defend their inheritance, and to ensure that his other faithful servants were rewarded. Lastly, they were to distribute money to religious houses and to the poor for the salvation of his soul.57
Had the imminent prospect of death and the danger to his soul brought any repentance? Eight days earlier, after the first onset of his illness at King’s Lynn, John had given permission to Margaret, wife of Walter de Lacy, to found a religious house in Herefordshire in memory of her father, William de Briouze, her mother Matilda and her brother William.58
On the night of 18 October, a great gale howled through the town of Newark, with such intensity that the citizens feared that their houses would be destroyed. The abbot of Croxton must have been grateful to be safe within the walls of the castle. He had been summoned to the king’s bedside because of his medical expertise, but by this point his patient was beyond saving. Instead he heard the dying man’s confession, and administered the last rites.59