The darkness of a spring night was settling in on Saturday 10 April 1199. Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, was in Rouen, preparing himself for bed. The next day was Palm Sunday, the celebration of Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem. It would have been a contemplative night for Walter. He was England’s primate, a hero of the Holy Land, and a man who had come close to the city of Jerusalem himself.
It was late when a visitor was announced. William Marshal had arrived from his lodgings. He wanted urgently to see Walter. It was a visit that the archbishop had been dreading for days.
The two men were party to secret information. They, along with a tiny handful of trusted Plantagenet servants, knew that King Richard had been badly injured at Châlus-Chabrol. They had been waiting for news of his condition, hoping against the worst, but preparing for it too. Walter knew that for Marshal to visit in person at such an hour could not bode well. Marshal’s biography records the words they exchanged that evening.
‘Come now,’ said Walter as Marshal approached. ‘Give me your news!’ But his face must have betrayed extreme misgiving.
‘I can tell you it’s not good, my dear lord,’ said Marshal.
King Richard was dead. It was disastrous news for both men. As news leaked across the Continent of the shock death of the 41-year-old king, the political map of Europe would begin rapidly to change. So much of the Plantagenet resurgence of the late 1190s was owed directly to Richard’s personality, his leadership and his mastery over Philip II of France. Richard had dragged the Plantagenet cause from disarray into triumph. His burning mission, to fight until Philip was put out of every quarter of Plantagenet France, was the cornerstone of his kingship, and the thread that bound all those who followed him. The truce between the houses of Plantagenet and Capet was as much a personal settlement between the two kings as a political settlement between two great powers. With Richard gone, all this was thrown into jeopardy.
Or, as Archbishop Walter put it that night, as he sat with William Marshal to chew over the consequences of the dramatic news: ‘All prowess is extinguished.’
The two men talked together as the night grew late. Richard’s death made no sense. Had he been punished for greed? For lust? Was God angry? It was impossible to know. Walter and Marshal could only now consider the options for the future.
Richard had died without legitimate children, having been virtually estranged from his wife Berengaria for several years at the time of his death. He had made no clear provision for the succession during his lifetime. No son had been born to be crowned junior king. No daughter lived to be married to a suitable heir. Everything ran by Richard’s command. Unlike his father, Richard had inherited the Plantagenet lands en masse. It looked more now like one large imperial patrimony than it had in the 1180s, when Aquitaine, Anjou and the Anglo-Norman realm might have been split up between different claimants.
It had long been realized – since 1190 and Richard’s crusading days – that if this Plantagenet empire was going to be inherited by one man, then there were two possible candidates: his brother John and Arthur of Brittany, his twelve-year-old nephew, who was learning to govern his duchy under the guidance of his mother, Constance. Early in his kingship, Richard had favoured Arthur as heir, but on his death-bed he had named John as his successor.
Marshal, who saw himself as a feudal statesman of indissoluble loyalty to the Plantagenets, argued in favour of the older man. Walter disagreed. Speaking against Arthur’s candidacy, Marshal told Walter that Arthur lacked good advice. He called him ‘unapproachable and overbearing’. ‘If we call him to our side, he will do us harm and damage,’ said Marshal. ‘He does not like those in our realm. My advice is that he should never be king. Instead, consider the claim of John: he seems to be the nearest in line to claim the land of his father as well as that of his brother.’
This was hardly an incontestable claim. The thirteenth century was dawning, but twelfth-century fogginess over the exact rules of royal inheritance still endured. Did the son of a king’s older brother (in Arthur’s case, this was Henry II’s third son Geoffrey) trump the claim of a king’s younger brother? Lawyers and writers disagreed. Customs varied across Europe and quite frequently the issue was still decided according to the personal suitability of the individuals concerned. Certainly Hubert Walter could not give an irrefutable defence of Arthur’s claim in the dead of that April night. But he gave Marshal one dire warning, based not on the law of succession, but on his assessment of John himself.
‘This much I can tell you,’ he said. ‘You will never come to regret anything you did as much as what you’re doing now.’
John did not inspire confidence. This was perhaps his defining characteristic. Neither princes nor bureaucrats were fully inclined to believe him or to believe in him, and frequently this was with good reason. John’s career to 1199 was pockmarked by ugly instances of treachery, frivolity and disaster, since his earliest, unwitting involvement in the dynastic politics of the Plantagenet family as ‘John Lackland’, his father’s coddled favourite, until his covetous behaviour during his brother’s long captivity. John’s behaviour during the latter years of Richard’s reign had been broadly good, but it did not take much to recall how appallingly he had acted while Richard was out of the country. John had rebelled against Richard’s appointed ministers, interfered with ecclesiastical appointments, connived at the destruction of the justiciar William Longchamp, encouraged an invasion from Scotland, spread the rumour that his brother was dead, entreated Philip II to help him to secure the English throne for himself, done homage to Philip for his brother’s continental lands, granted away to Philip almost the whole duchy of Normandy, attempted to bribe the German emperor to keep his brother in prison, and almost single-handedly created the feeble state in which Richard had found the Plantagenet lands and borders on his eventual release from captivity.
And these were only the political facts. The personal perception was worse. Although John had been quiet and dutiful in his service to Richard following their reconciliation in 1195, he was still thought by many to be untrustworthy. Contemporary writers also commented on John’s unpleasant demeanour, which seemed dark in opposition to the brilliant glow of chivalry that emanated from his brother. Like Richard and Henry II, John was already known for his tough financial demands and fierce temper. Like Henry he was thought to be cruel, and he tended to make vicious threats against those who thwarted him. Unlike Henry and Richard, however, he was also weak, indecisive and unchivalrous. Several writers noted that John and his acolytes sniggered when they heard of others’ distress. He was deemed untrustworthy, suspicious, and advised by evil men. Very early in his career, he was thought by William of Newburgh to be ‘nature’s enemy’.
Amid all this hostility, in 1199 John could not be at all sure of a smooth accession. He was certain, however, that Philip II would support Arthur’s rival claim. John’s first action therefore was to seize the royal treasure at the castle of Chinon. He was right to do so, for as he rode on to visit his brother’s tomb at Fontevraud and pay his respects to his widow, the winds of opinion in the Plantagenet heartlands were billowing behind Arthur. On Easter Sunday, the barons of Anjou, Maine and Touraine – the beating heart of the empire created by Henry II – declared for the Breton, at a stroke cutting off Normandy from Poitou and the rest of Aquitaine. At Le Mans, his father’s dearest city, John was turned away by the garrison and nearly trapped by Philip and Arthur’s armies.
Only in Rouen, where the rules of ducal inheritance were more clearly in favour of a brother over a nephew, did John meet with something like a welcome. On 25 April he was invested as duke of Normandy with a crown of golden roses placed on his head. This, at least, was a triumph – for to lose Normandy after all that had passed in the last five years would have been a sorry failure indeed.
For security in the rest of Richard’s dominions, John relied on trusted agents to rally support behind him. The redoubtable Eleanor, now seventy-five years old, led the movement to secure her son as heir in Aquitaine. She had despaired of John’s behaviour in the early 1190s but was ultimately loyal to her children. The wife of two kings, she would do all in her power to see to it that she was the mother of three. Now she commanded an army under the famous mercenary captain Mercadier, harrying forces loyal to Arthur of Brittany and helping to secure John’s succession in the face of stern opposition. In England, meanwhile, Marshal turned his belief in John’s legitimacy into action. He sent envoys to convince the English barons to take an oath of fealty: it should be obvious to those who had interests on both sides of the Channel that John, already invested as duke of Normandy, was a better choice to safeguard their positions. So with the support of Hubert Walter and Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the justiciar, John was accepted as king. But as Marshal, so ardent a supporter in that first night’s conversation, later recalled: ‘Neither the Gascons nor the men of Limousin, the men of Poitou or Anjou, or the Bretons agreed to it at all, for they had no love for his overlordship.’