England froze. The country was struck by a cruel winter in 1204–5 that suspended life and crushed hope. In London, the Thames filled with ice so thick that men and women crossed from the south bank to the north on foot. In the fields, the ground was so hard that it could not be ploughed until the end of March. Winter crops were destroyed by the cold, and vegetables were dug up by the starving people when they were little more than seedlings. Prices soared as famine racked the country. The cost of oats rose tenfold in a year. There was widespread misery, starvation and suffering. The superstitious word, recorded by Ralph of Coggeshall, was that God had punished King John by taking Normandy from him, and now the punishment was being extended to England.
John had been marooned in the kingdom for a year. It had not been an easy time. Although his court was characteristically gay and lively, amused by indulgent feasting and the chivalrous entertainments of the young men who were known as the king’s bachelors, no one could fail to notice the danger and hardship that lay all around. There was widespread panic about the security of the nation. Rumours sped around that England was about to be invaded from France. It was said that Philip Augustus had found a convenient excuse to attack in the form of claims held by the counts of Brabant and Boulogne to English lands that had been taken from them during Henry II’s reign. Philip’s appetite to crush the Plantagenets was thought to have no limits; John’s ability to lose his inheritance to know no end.
The invasion threat was taken seriously. At a great council held in January 1205, John ordered every man over the age of twelve to enter into a sworn pact to defend the realm and preserve the peace. Failure to take the oath was to be counted by local constables as an admission of treachery, and it was decreed that those who failed to act to defend the realm in the event of an invasion were to be punished by permanent disinheritance or perpetual slavery. In the freezing ports, no ships were allowed to leave without written permission from the king.
It is easy to understand why such fears took root. The collapse of the Plantagenet cause in France had been fast, dramatic and painful. The duchy of Normandy had not survived John’s departure and was now wholly Philip’s – subsumed into the French kingdom for the first time in living memory. Additionally, Anjou, Maine and Touraine were all but gone, save for a few islands of loyalty at the fortresses of Chinon and Loches, held by good men but surrounded by the French. The absent John’s name was blackened in all parts of the French kingdom, as word began to circulate freely that Arthur of Brittany was dead.
The situation was only a little better in Aquitaine. On 1 April 1204 Eleanor of Aquitaine had died. She had lived to the extraordinary age of eighty, passing her final years and dying moments at the abbey of Fontevraud, decrepit but defiant. To her last days, she continued to buttress her son against impossible odds in her duchy, granting land and privileges to loyalists and shoring up the Plantagenet cause even while living as a habited nun.
In accordance with the will she had made in 1202, Eleanor was buried beside her husband Henry II and her favourite son, Richard I, in the chapel at Fontevraud. Three members of the twelfth century’s most charismatic and influential family now lay at rest together, at far greater peace in death than they ever were in life. The effigy on Eleanor’s tomb still stands, as remarkable as the woman it immortalizes. It was made to capture her in the magnificent prime of her adult life, her eyes closed but a book open in her hands. It was – and still is – an image of high romance and great intellectual power.
The nuns of Fontevraud paid Eleanor their respects in an obituary in which she was thanked for opulent gifts that she had made to the abbey – of gold, silver, jewels and silk. The nuns also observed, somewhat obsequiously, that the queen had ‘brightened the world with the splendour of her royal progeny’. Given the careers of Henry the Young King, Geoffrey duke of Brittany and John king of England, this was not wholly believable. Yet Eleanor had been a magnificent queen whose influence had straddled three important reigns, and who had loved her sons even when they behaved unwisely.
Without his mother’s guiding hand, John was mired deeper than ever in Aquitaine. Already he had offended numerous Aquitanian barons by his marriage to Isabella of Angoulême and his clumsy management of the duchy’s delicate politics. No right-minded Poitevin lord would do homage to the English king as his mother’s successor, for fear of dispossession by the ascendant king of France. As soon as Eleanor’s death was known, many lords who had accepted her authority scrambled to make their peace with Philip. The French king advanced in triumph on Poitou – the county from which all of Aquitaine was ruled – during the summer of 1204. Simultaneously John’s brother-in-law Alfonso VIII of Castile invaded Gascony, in the south-west of Aquitaine, claiming that it was his by right of his wife – John’s elder sister Eleanor. Abandonment and invasion came from numerous angles all at once, as the last corner of the Plantagenet empire creaked and crumbled.
All this was dismaying for John. As winter’s death gripped England in the first months of 1205, it looked very much as if everything that his family had accumulated within the kingdom of France might soon be gone. It was clear that he had to make a stand. It was not enough simply to cower in England and defend the coast, and John must have realized that his public reputation, never particularly high, was at a nadir from which it might never recover if he did not act swiftly. Men like the Melrose chronicler were recording for posterity that he had ‘ignominiously lost his castles and lands across the sea’.
So in the summer of 1205, as invasion fears began to subside, John began preparing for a huge assault on France, directed from two points of attack. A fleet from Portsmouth would beach on the Norman coast and reconquer the duchy from the west. A second expedition from Dartmouth was to undertake a simultaneous advance on Poitou. This force would be commanded by John’s illegitimate brother, William Longespée, earl of Salisbury – a man of about the same age as John, of high military reputation and experience, and a good friend of the king, with whom he passed many happy hours at the gaming table.
To effect his plans, John ordered the largest military mobilization since Richard had embarked on crusade. At its heart was a massive expansion of royal sea power. Richard had been the first Plantagenet king to amass a significant English naval force, mobilizing large numbers of boats in 1190, subsequently building another seventy vessels to patrol the Seine in 1196, and founding Portsmouth as the great naval town to link England with Normandy. John now carried the policy forward. Forty-five warships had been built to patrol England’s coasts in 1203–4, but to expand the naval force any faster required different means. In 1205, therefore, John simply seized all the shipping that his constables deemed convertible for war. Even if a vessel was only large enough to carry a few horses, it was appropriated from its owner and amassed for the nascent royal navy.
To fill the warships, there was a drive to muster men and materiel. Thousands upon thousands of horseshoes, nails, crossbow bolts and arrowheads were struck. Pig carcasses were salted and great sides of venison rumbled on carts down to the coast. The national coinage was recommissioned. New silver pennies flooded the country, stamped with John’s image. Everyone handling one in receipt of payment for a service rendered to the war effort would have looked upon their king’s face: his hair curling about his ears, his beard cropped short, and his eyes, even in the simple minted likeness, bulging out at the holder, daring them to defy him.
Many of these coins were used to recruit mercenary soldiers: sailors and men-at-arms who were transported to the coast as midsummer approached. Perhaps a quarter of a year’s revenue was pumped into military preparation, funding the vast human cargo that was loaded onto the great ships that floated in the Solent. According to Ralph of Coggeshall, it was the largest English army ever assembled, and the greatest collection of ships in a single English port.
Here, at last, John was acting with some purpose. If England was busy, however, it was not entirely united. Although John proved he could assemble a vast army, he was hamstrung by the changing mood of the English barons. John’s invasion preparations may have resembled a crusade muster, but the cause did not move hearts with quite the same fervour.
John’s ambition to conquer Normandy was not universally convincing to his barons. When Normandy was threatened in earlier years there was a clear interest among the English magnates in supporting the king. Henry II had been careful to pursue the Norman habit of keeping his barons’ cross-Channel estates intact. He had retained the political integrity of the Anglo-Norman realm and made sure that the great lords remained truly Anglo-Norman – with interests and lands that spanned both territories and gave them a self-interest in assisting the king to keep them together and defend from external threats.
John’s loss of Normandy, however, profoundly changed an Anglo-Norman status quo that had existed for nearly 150 years. Forced to decide whether they wished to keep their lands in England or in Normandy, most barons made a choice in 1204 and threw in with one king or the other. They ceased almost overnight to become Anglo-Normans; and pledged their allegiance either as English subjects or French. The Channel became a divide, rather than a causeway between kingdom and duchy. A few great lords, like William Marshal, came to private arrangements with both kings for the security of their lands in either kingdom. They were in an equally ambiguous position: some had done homage to Philip for their Norman lands, and John for their English. It was impossible to go to war with either lord without betraying their promise to the other.
So when John arrived in Portsmouth to inspect his marvellous fleet in 1205, he found his English barons unwilling to come with him and fight. There was a furious argument at Porchester castle between John and Marshal. The king accused Marshal of acting treasonably in coming to terms with Philip Augustus; Marshal gave a grand speech in which he presented himself as betrayed by the king, and warned his fellow barons that the king planned to disinherit him, and ‘will do [the same] to all of you once he becomes powerful enough’.
Even if the rest of the barons had been prepared to trust in John’s character as a general, they now were deeply unswayed by the prospect of fighting either for Norman lands in which they had no interest, or against a lord (in Philip) whose wrath was potentially as great as John’s. As the mood turned sharply against setting out for the French coast, Marshal and Hubert Walter begged the king not to cross the Channel. Walter listed some practical reasons: Philip was massively more wealthy and militarily stronger; John had precious few safe-houses on the Continent and was relying on an alliance with Poitevins, who were a naturally treacherous race; the king should not leave England undefended when Philip’s nobles had designs on invasion themselves; and England had no heir should John meet his end on the battlefield.
It amounted to a mass mutiny, in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable. The whole invasion force at Portsmouth was now useless, for without the barons who were to provide leadership and their own private resources, there was no hope of retaking Normandy. John was beside himself with rage. The king put to sea for a couple of days, sailing up and down the coast in the fruitless hope that he might shame or persuade the barons into changing their minds. It was to no avail. Salisbury’s expedition from Dartmouth successfully crossed the Channel to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle, but for the most part all the preparations of 1205 had come to nothing. Across the Channel Philip went about his business, going merrily into territories that his father could only have dreamed of visiting. The fall of Chinon and Loches in the summer meant that the whole of Touraine was now in French hands. It had been another disastrous year.