The first great naval victory in English history was won against the French fleet on 30 May 1213. Two days earlier 500 ships had put out to sea under the command of John’s half-brother, William de Longespée, earl of Salisbury. After crossing the Channel, and raiding his way up the Norman coast, Salisbury had reached the Flemish coast and sailed into the Zwyn – a tidal inlet that provided the sea route to the great coastal trading cities of Damme and Sluys.
The ships bristled with arms and men, English knights and foreign mercenaries paid for with the vast stores of English coin John had amassed since 1204. As they sailed up the Zwyn towards Damme they met with an extraordinary sight: a vast array of French ships, some beached, some bobbing in the harbour and all waiting to be filled with a force to invade England. There were reckoned to be 1,700 ships, fully kitted out and ready for war. The harbour creaked with menace.
This was Philip’s invasion fleet. For months it had been rumoured that Pope Innocent III, stung by John’s continued insouciance in the face of Interdict and excommunication, had declared the king deposed, and Philip had readied himself to execute the sentence. (In fact papers of deposition had been prepared in Rome but were never published.) Philip had begun to consider England as a possible appanage for his son Louis, and had spent months preparing his invasion fleet. The evidence of his deadly intent now lay before Salisbury’s eyes.
The English commander wasted no time. English units piled at once into the harbour, attacking the poorly defended French fleet, cutting adrift hundreds of ships loaded with corn, wine, flour, meat and vital parts of the French military arsenal. Other English soldiers ran ashore and raided beached ships for their valuable supplies, before setting fire to the timber frames. Black smoke shot up into the air as pitch blazed in the water.
Although Philip was not present in the town for the attack, he arrived soon afterwards at a scene of scorched catastrophe. ‘It was a very bitter thing for the King of France to see his ships at sea burning and belching forth smoke, as if the very sea were on fire,’ wrote William Marshal. ‘King Philip, out of his mind with rage and in a black mood, had the remaining ships in his navy burned to cinders in a fit of rage and depression.’ It was a brave and vital victory in John’s name, and it not only staved off deposition in the short term, but destroyed the French threat to the English coast for several years to come.
The irony was that Salisbury’s destruction of a French fleet designed to carry out a papal sentence of deposition was done with the full backing of Innocent III. Before he launched his naval attack on France, John had bowed to the tide of pressure that was mounting on him and – in an attempt to reduce his list of enemies and weaken Philip’s cause – decided to make peace with Rome. Among those who counselled him to do so was Marshal, brought back from disfavour in Ireland. A legate, Pandulph Masca, had been sent from the pope to negotiate terms, and it was with Pandulph that John had met in Dover just days before Salisbury’s fleet set sail.
There, in the presence of England’s barons, assembled as part of John’s massive war effort, the king had sealed a charter giving over his kingdoms of England and Ireland in feudal vassalage to the pope. At a stroke, England had been transformed from a chilly outcast on the edges of Christendom into a papal fief, along with other European kingdoms including Sicily, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal and Aragon. ‘The kingdom is become a royal priesthood and the priesthood a kingdom of priests,’ wrote Innocent, when he heard the news. And John had apparently been duly rewarded by his return to the Holy See with the awesome victory at Damme.
Reconciliation with Rome was a process, however, and not an event. Six weeks after Damme, on 20 July, John stood on Morn Hill, outside Winchester, and looked down on the splendid city below. His fine robes, of colourful silk and satin, shone in the summer sun, as did those of his courtiers and their thoroughbred horses. Winchester was alive with colour and activity as Stephen Langton, an archbishop of Canterbury at last allowed to tend his flock, made his way in a great ecclesiastical procession across the Sussex Downs and into the ancient city. Minutes later, John and Langton took part in a public ceremony of reconciliation, complete with tears, incense and kisses of peace, and promises by John that he would love and uphold the Church.
John had paid handsomely for this reconciliation, both in the fines he was suffered to pay to the pope and the fall in income he accepted when he gave up his exploitation of vacant ecclesiastical posts. But the prodigal son had returned and John’s reward was that he was now much in favour at Rome. This, combined with Philip II’s loss of his navy, encouraged John to throw everything into another attempt at regaining his continental possessions.
John began to plan a massive invasion, scheduled to land in Poitou and push north during the spring and summer of 1214. Clearly, it was vital that he convinced his barons to go with him. But the northern barons, led by Eustace de Vesci, now back in England and uneasily reconciled with the king, refused to serve, claiming they could not afford to do so. Faced with baronial intransigence for a second time in his reign, John flew into a predictable rage; but this time, unlike in 1205, he would not be deterred from his ambition. He spent autumn 1213 preparing the ground for an invasion under what he described in a letter to his sometime Poitevin ally Aimery de Thouars as ‘an unbelievably large force’.
In order to pay for that force and to flex his muscles over the recalcitrant barons, John’s financial exactions reached new heights. His exploitation of his feudal dues and the profits of justice mounted wildly in the months before the invasion. He levied scutage – a tax substituting cash payments for the barons’ feudal obligation to provide knights to serve in the king’s army – at three marks per knight’s fee, the heaviest rate ever recorded. The reliefs and fees on feudal incidents became astonishingly high. William Fitz Alan was charged 10,000 marks for succession to the Fitz Alan barony. John de Lacy paid 7,000 marks for the honour of Pontefract. Widows were being charged up to £1,000 to keep their dowries and not be forcibly married. The greatest sale of all was the offering of 20,000 marks from Geoffrey Mandeville, who paid the sum for the hand in marriage of John’s first wife, Isabel of Gloucester. And these were not notional debts: Geoffrey was expected to pay for his queenly bride in four instalments over a mere nine months.
The cash raised did not lie idle. John’s money began flooding the Continent and he established a coalition centred on the support of his nephew, the Emperor Otto IV. The counts of Holland, Boulogne and Flanders joined the resistance to Philip in north-west Europe. The plan was to trap him in a pincer movement between two forces: the first, under Salisbury, would attack Philip from Flanders, the second, under John, would move up from Poitou to strike at the French from the south. Thus, in February 1214, John sailed from Portsmouth for La Rochelle, in a galley laden with precious gemstones and riches in silver and gold and carrying numerous English nobles, as well as Queen Isabella and John’s five-year-old second son Prince Richard. This was no whimsical campaign. It was to be the glorious recapture of John’s birthright.
The campaign started well. Throughout the spring, John employed a combination of diplomacy and siegecraft to secure Poitou and its environs. Peace was made with the troublesome Lusignan family, who had been so slighted back in 1202 when John had whisked his queen, Isabella of Angoulême, out from under their noses: to bring them back to favour a marriage was arranged between John’s daughter Joan (born in 1210) and Hugh de Lusignan’s son and heir. In early June, with Poitou successfully secured, John moved on to Brittany, taking Nantes by siege. Angers, in the heart of Anjou, swiftly opened its gates. With Philip reluctant to join battle, John was showing that the spirit of Plantagenet bellicosity lived on.
Then, disaster struck. John was besieging the castle of la Rocheaux-Moines in the company of some of his Poitevin barons when he heard that Philip’s 26-year-old son Prince Louis was approaching at the head of an army. John decided that the moment was ripe for a pitched battle. Yet his allies suddenly lost faith. The Poitevin barons who had accompanied him for months fulfilled their reputation for inconstancy. They simply upped and ran, refusing to risk battle with the house of Capet. With a speed that belied the painstaking and expensive diplomacy with which John had built his coalition, the southern alliance melted away. Instead of fighting Prince Louis, John could only retreat before his advance and take cover back where his expedition had begun, in La Rochelle.
Despite the humiliation of retreat in the south, John could still hope that the northern allies in his pincer movement would show their mettle. While he waited in La Rochelle, on 27 July the northern coalition assembled under Emperor Otto IV’s fluttering banner of the dragon and golden eagle, and made ready for the destruction of the French king on a plain near the village of Bouvines.
The army that took to the field against Philip at the battle of Bouvines was a typical medieval affair – loud, violent and disorganized. Each leader had his own men and his own standard, and such grand strategy as existed was fairly rudimentary. Cavalry charges were the main weapon used by either side. At times the battle would have resembled the melee of the tournament field, but with added intent. Men humped heavy lances and pounds of chainmail, which could suffocate its wearer to death if he fell awkwardly in the churned mud of the field. Bloodcurdling screams and the sickening crunch of piercing heavy metal into human and horse flesh, grunts of effort and the thick gurgling breath of the dying would have raged all around, as close hand-to-hand fighting left the plain at Bouvines gouged and bloodstained.
The English troops present rallied around the earl of Salisbury’s blue banners with yellow lions rampant emblazoned upon them. They fought bravely on the right flank. The leaders from both sides were at the centre: both Otto IV and Philip were unhorsed during the fighting. The battle raged for three long hours – first in favour of the imperial troops and then, as the fighting wore on, tipping towards the French.
And it was the French who were victorious in the end. Their cavalry charges, led by some of the finest knights in Europe, gradually overwhelmed the coalition forces. Otto and Philip led their knights in a melee, which was settled decisively in the French favour. Otto was protected manfully by a group of Saxon knights, yet eventually he had no choice but to flee the battlefield, narrowly escaping capture as he galloped. Elsewhere on the field, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne and the earl of Salisbury were less fortunate. They were all taken prisoner and escorted back to Paris, where the citizens and students of the university danced and sang in the streets for a week to celebrate the famous victory their king had won.
Far away in La Rochelle there was no dancing. Only despair greeted the news that the coalition had given their all and lost. John had invested everything in the campaign of 1214, and he had been beaten, let down by the men at his back and his allies on a distant battlefield. He was forced to sign a five-year truce with Philip Augustus in the autumn, at a price that was rumoured to be 60,000 marks. Financially, the hoarder king was ruined. He had spent all he had on war preparations, and had cut off his main source of fast cash by reconciliation with the Church. His military reputation, which had soared in the years of mastery over Britain, was trampled back where it had been for most of his younger days: into the mud. Everything John had worked for since 1205 had ended in disappointment, abandonment and betrayal. After Bouvines, John the commander was all but finished.