THE MATRON’S TALE
Nicola de la Haye and the Defence of England
AFTER HER HUSBAND died, it was Nicola de la Haye who held the castle for the king both in war and in peace. But when King John came to visit Lincoln in 1216, she went to meet him, leaving the castle by the eastern postern gate with its keys in her hand. She offered them to John, her lord, humbly protesting that she was an old woman, looking after the castle was hard work, and it caused her much anxiety. She could not do the job any longer, she went on, and anyway she had no right or claim to the position she held. John replied sweetly and softly, ‘My dear Nicola, it is my desire that you continue to keep the castle, until I order otherwise.’ England was in turmoil, civil war was shaking the kingdom, and John calmly put his trust in a woman to hold one of the most important castles in England. Reluctantly, perhaps, Nicola did as she was instructed until the king was dead, and long after that too.1
This story was the stuff of local legend. It was not recorded until nearly sixty years after it was supposed to have happened, when King John’s grandson, Edward I, carried out a great inquiry across England to investigate abuses in local government and the extent to which royal rights had been lost during another civil war, this time in the 1260s. This inquiry is known to historians as the Hundred Rolls, because evidence was given to the royal investigators by juries of local people from each hundred in each county, and that evidence was recorded on great parchment rolls. However, testimony was also given by juries from larger villages and towns, and one of those was the jury from Lincoln, which recounted the tale of Nicola de la Haye’s meeting with King John in 1216. How accurately the jurors recalled the details of the meeting is unclear. It provides a rare example of John being pleasant, but that doesn’t necessarily make it unreliable. In any event, by 1216, John and Nicola had experiences in common stretching back over twenty-five years; it is quite possible that they liked each other. Nicola died in 1230, so some of those Lincoln jurors from the 1270s may have known her in her final years; perhaps they had even heard this story from her own lips, or from someone who had been there with her. It is hard to believe, though, given what else is known about Nicola’s career, that she would ever have been so meek and submissive, even before a king, as the jurors’ account suggests, or that she would ever have thought of giving up any fight she was in because she was too old or too tired to keep going. Her tenacity and determination were shown clearly a year after John’s visit, in 1217, when the earl of Salisbury, who was the uncle of the new boy king, Henry III, tried to take Lincoln Castle from her. Nicola’s furious response was to make straight for the royal court where she reminded her audience of all the faithful service she had given to King John and his infant son, and she obtained an order restoring the castle to her. It remained in her custody until 1226 when she retired on her own terms.
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It is commonly said that England has resisted invasion successfully ever since 1066. This is not quite true. Henry IV, Henry VII and William III all overthrew a reigning monarch after arriving in England with an army. However, there have been unsuccessful attempts to invade too. Probably the most famous of these were in 1588 and 1940, two years which, in their own way, have done much to forge notions of, first, English and, later, British national identity. But another such failure, which arguably came closer than either the Spanish Armada or Operation Sea Lion to conquering England, is less well known. It took place in 1216–17, after the peace agreed at Runnymede in the summer of 1215 had collapsed, and when King John’s opponents at home had taken up arms against him and been joined by supporters from across the Channel led by the son of the French king. So when John came to Lincoln and commanded Nicola de la Haye to stay at her post, it was a time of grave peril for him, his dynasty and his kingdom. Exactly 150 years had passed since William of Normandy had landed at Pevensey Bay, and England was once again teetering on the edge of conquest by a French prince.
The events that took place at Lincoln during the next eighteen months were crucial to the eventual fate of that invasion. And that a woman was at the heart of everything that happened makes them more remarkable still. Nicola’s tale provides an almost unique example from this period of a woman carrying out what were universally perceived as a man’s traditional duties. Other women performed military roles at this time: both Joan of Sicily and Matilda de Briouze did so, as has been seen. But their experiences were singular and exceptional, untypical of their lives more generally. Nicola, by contrast, was heavily involved throughout her adult life at the highest levels of politics, government and society, where she successfully combined the roles of landholder, royal official and military leader. And she did so, what is more, at a time of acute national danger. Contemporaries struggled to find the language to describe her, so unaccustomed were they to what she did: for one she was a ‘noble woman’ who behaved ‘manfully’.2 But this story is not just about the way Nicola successfully challenged conventional views of femininity. Nor was this short period just about resolute defence and derring-do. Because this invasion was defeated politically as well as militarily. Of course, the English armies had their conventional arms and they used them well, not least in the streets of Lincoln itself. But they developed and deployed another weapon with great skill, too, namely Magna Carta. This was a new kind of propaganda war, a war ‘for hearts and minds’, as modern commentators might say. To undermine his opponents, John’s heir, his young son Henry III, was promoted to his people in a new and extraordinary way. The charter was used by the embattled English government to promise a fresh and hopeful start; royal rule, yes, but not arbitrary or fickle like John’s had been. There would be clear limits to what a king could do in the future as well as defined norms of royal conduct and behaviour. It was during these months that the charter so grudgingly given by King John, which had looked irrelevant and even meaningless in the summer of 1215, was revived by his successor’s regime, took its place at the heart of English politics and government, and became a permanent feature of the constitutional landscape. And as this happened, a new relationship between ruler and ruled began to take shape.
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In 1215, Magna Carta was a failure. More than that, it seemed, it was a failure without a future. But whilst the charter had certainly not brought peace to England, this was probably inevitable. King John was never going to do what his more moderate opponents wanted and stick to the letter of his promises. He made some concessions and dealt with a few grievances in the weeks after Runnymede. But these were only gestures and the king had also written secretly to the pope asking for the charter to be annulled. Eventually, in the autumn, Innocent III’s response was made public in England: the settlement forced upon the king in June was ‘not only shameful and base but also illegal and unjust’. The pope condemned it outright and threatened to excommunicate anyone who tried to put its terms into practice.3 Meanwhile, there were still plenty of hard-line rebels in England in the summer of 1215 who thought the charter had not been radical enough in its attempt to restrict the king’s power. They were determined to get rid of him whatever he did. Like the Treaty of Versailles seven centuries later, Magna Carta was a compromise that satisfied no one and which only led to war.
By September 1215, King John was on the Kent coast waiting for his mercenaries to arrive from Flanders. Meanwhile his opponents had marched on the archbishop of Canterbury’s great castle at Rochester in the hope of taking it and cutting off John’s approach to London, which was still in rebel hands. The keeper of the castle, Reginald of Cornhill, until this time a loyal servant of the royal regime, offered no resistance and Rochester surrendered meekly. John was forced to besiege the castle himself and only took it back after a determined and intensive seven-week effort. ‘Living memory does not recall a siege so fiercely pressed or so staunchly resisted,’ claimed the anonymous thirteenth-century monk known as the Barnwell chronicler.4 Meanwhile, the rebel leaders based in London knew that they needed help. Their cause was strongest in the northern and eastern parts of England, but even within those areas the king’s supporters controlled dozens of castles. John’s mercenaries were now arriving in large numbers from Flanders, too, and the rebels desperately needed an army of their own. To find one, they looked across the English Channel; more specifically, they offered the crown to Louis, the son of Philip II, if he would come to England and help depose John. King Philip, concerned not to antagonise the pope, distanced himself from the rebel cause, but Louis was keener to consider the appeal and he sent a contingent of his knights to London in November 1215. Unless and until Louis himself arrived in England with a sizeable army, however, the military initiative would remain with John.
This was clearly demonstrated between December 1215 and March 1216 when John and his army undertook an expedition first to the north of his kingdom and then back to the south. By the middle of January he was at Berwick having seen off attempts by Alexander, king of Scots, to take advantage of the unrest in England and stake a claim to Northumbria. But by the middle of March he was at Colchester receiving the surrender of the rebel garrison there. This was an impressively dominant, albeit largely unopposed, demonstration of military force, and whilst John refilled his treasure chests with the money his terrified subjects offered him not to devastate their lands, his mercenaries took the chance to feed off the countryside as they intimidated and in some cases butchered the opposition they met. By the spring of 1216, John had reasserted his control over the north and east of England and only London still held out against him. It was at this point, however, with John seemingly on the point of winning the war, that Prince Louis decided to invade England.
Whilst John had been on his three-month trek around the kingdom, Louis had been sending reinforcements to London. On 21 May 1216 the prince himself landed at Thanet with 1,200 knights, only days after the fleet John had gathered to resist the invasion had been destroyed by storms. Louis tried hard to justify his attempt to seize power. He made a claim to the throne through his wife, Blanche, Henry II’s granddaughter. He also argued that John had never been the rightful king of England, since he had been judged a traitor by Richard I’s court in the 1190s. And even if John had succeeded Richard legally in 1199, he had been condemned by the French court and effectively deposed after murdering Arthur of Brittany. More important than any of these theories, though, was the fact that Louis had been invited by the rebellious English barons to take power; for them, Louis was not John (for one thing the French prince had a reputation for piety, chastity and loyalty, in stark contrast to his adversary), and that was enough. And with Louis’ arrival in England, the course of the civil war changed dramatically. Suddenly John was vulnerable again as his opponents, who had been forced to submit to him earlier in the year, found in Louis a renewed focus for their resistance. Influential men, the earls of Arundel, Surrey and York, for example, came out into the open and sided with Louis, as did John’s own half-brother, William, earl of Salisbury. John fought on, of course, and retained influential support of his own: William Marshal and Earl Ranulf of Chester were still loyal, the crucial stronghold of Dover was held for John by his justiciar Hubert de Burgh, and John’s men in the north of England were standing firm against the ever-opportunistic king of Scots.
England was divided and, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the summer of 1216 the war had reached stalemate. John had decided not to challenge the invaders head on. Instead he withdrew to the west of his kingdom and left his men to defend their strongpoints as best they could. The strategy worked and Louis failed to fulfil his early promise of a quick victory. What is more, although the prince attracted a considerable amount of support after his arrival in England (London was still in rebel hands and perhaps two-thirds of the English barons were on Louis’ side by this point), that support was fragile. There are indications that tension had been quick to grow between his French supporters, eager for English lands, and the English rebels who, of course, wanted to keep and extend theirs. The earls of Salisbury and York abandoned Louis and returned to John, and ‘day by day’, in the words of the Dunstable annalist, ‘the adherents of the Frenchmen dwindled’.5 This was John’s chance, and he acted decisively. The king left his base in the Cotswolds in mid-September 1216 and headed east. His objective was Lincoln Castle, a royalist bastion under rebel siege. Holding the line there was the castellan, Nicola de la Haye.
For a woman to be in charge of any castle at all, let alone an old woman and a castle that was perhaps the most important strategic and military site in eastern England, was certainly extraordinary. But then Nicola de la Haye was an extraordinary woman. She was the eldest of the three daughters of Richard de la Haye who, like his father before him, had been appointed castellan of Lincoln by royal grant. When Richard died in about 1169, he left no sons to succeed him, so his lands were divided between Nicola and her sisters as co-heiresses. For her part, Nicola inherited the barony of Brattleby just to the north of Lincoln, but she also inherited a claim to be castellan of Lincoln itself. So if she was not a particularly wealthy heiress, her unusual inheritance gave any husband she might have a means to establish or extend his power and influence within Lincolnshire and in royal service. Her first marriage, to a man called William Fitz Erneis, cannot have lasted long. He was dead by the end of the 1170s, and unfortunately next to nothing is known about him or his life with Nicola, except that they had a daughter, Matilda. We can only speculate, too, about how old Nicola was when she became a widow, but she was probably about thirty by the time of her second marriage, which had taken place by 1185. Nicola’s new husband, Gerard de Canville, was well connected and ambitious. His father had been a loyal supporter of King Stephen, but he then served Henry II until his death in 1176 when his eldest son, Gerard, succeeded him in most of his lands. Gerard himself was also known at the court of Henry II where he appeared, regularly if not frequently, as a witness to the king’s charters in the 1170s and 1180s. His younger brother, Richard, was later a commander of Richard I’s crusading fleet in 1190; he was appointed governor of Cyprus in 1191 but died that year during the siege of Acre. Royal connections such as these probably led to Gerard’s marriage to Nicola, and in August 1189 the couple travelled all the way to Normandy for a royal charter confirming their inheritance in both England and Normandy from the new king, Richard I. This grant, which cost the couple just over £450, included Lincoln Castle as it had been held by Nicola’s father and grandfather, and the shrievalty of the county of Lincoln was probably also included in the grant.6
Gerard’s record of royal service was not unblemished, however. Whilst his brother was on crusade with Richard I, back in England Gerard became entangled in the dispute between the king’s chancellor, Bishop William de Longchamp of Ely, and the king’s brother, John. Longchamp was supposed to have accompanied Richard on crusade, but in April 1190 the king sent him back to England to take charge of the royal government. In June he was also named papal legate for England by Pope Clement III. Longchamp was neither slow nor reluctant to assert his authority. He presided over ecclesiastical councils at Gloucester in August and at Westminster in October 1190. And he excluded the bishop of Durham, Hugh du Puiset, whom Richard had appointed justiciar for the north of England, from any role in central government. By the end of the year he had launched an expedition against Rhys ap Gruffudd, the most powerful prince in south Wales. Along the way he made a concerted effort to raise as much money as possible for the king whilst managing to make two of his brothers sheriffs. All of this activity caused resentment amongst the members of the established English baronage. Perceived by them as a low-born foreign upstart, Longchamp’s financial exactions, his preference for officials of his own, and the extravagance of his entourage were bound to provoke. His high-handed manner only made things worse and he became an obvious target for the ambitions of the king’s brother, John, count of Mortain. John was keen to expand his authority over the kingdom whilst Richard was away and he was adept at exploiting the baronial opposition to Longchamp’s authoritarian rule.
One of the barons who took John’s side in this quarrel was Gerard de Canville, by this time, of course, sheriff of Lincolnshire and, through his wife Nicola, keeper of Lincoln Castle. The chronicler Richard of Devizes picks up the story after Gerard (‘a factious man, prodigal of his allegiance’, Richard called him) had repudiated Longchamp’s authority and performed homage to John.7 The conflict turned on the custody of castles. Whoever controlled the most important of these would almost certainly win out. On hearing of Gerard’s desertion, Longchamp dismissed him as sheriff and ordered the surrender of Lincoln Castle. Undeterred, Gerard and John set out together to besiege the castle at Nottingham and the one at Tickhill in south Yorkshire. Both were vital strategic points on the north-south route through England and both surrendered, Richard of Devizes says, ‘solely through fear’. As for the castle at Lincoln, crucial in its own way to the control of eastern England, it was left under the command of Nicola de la Haye. According to our chronicler, Gerard’s faith in his wife’s abilities was justified. ‘Putting aside all her womanly instincts,’ Richard admiringly records, ‘she defended the castle like a man.’ And this was no easy task. Longchamp himself brought troops, many of whom were professional mercenaries, up to the walls of Lincoln and laid siege to it for over a month. But the garrison under Nicola’s leadership never surrendered, and the siege was only lifted when John and Longchamp were persuaded to negotiate a truce. One of the terms agreed in July 1191 was that Gerard de Canville should be allowed to remain in possession of Lincoln Castle.
Nicola and Gerard had been rewarded for their loyalty to John, and Gerard remained his committed supporter in 1193 when John tried to seize power in England after Richard’s capture on his way home from crusade. But such success was short-lived. When Richard I finally returned to England in 1194, he was quick to punish those who had sided with John in his absence. Gerard lost the custody of Lincoln Castle and his position as sheriff of Lincolnshire. He also had to offer the enormous sum, just over £1,330, in order to keep his lands and, as the royal records put it, the king’s ‘goodwill’. As for Nicola, she made her own offer to the king of £200 to safeguard her right to arrange her daughter’s marriage to anyone except an enemy of the king.8 She and Gerard were now effectively on probation; suspect, perhaps even traitorous, in the eyes of the royal government. The rest of Richard’s reign must have been difficult for them, deprived as they were of their accustomed status and influence. If nothing else, they had lost their splendid castle. John did not forget his old friend, though. When he became king in 1199, Gerard was reappointed as custodian of Lincoln Castle, and he also became sheriff of Lincolnshire once again. This time he held the post until 1205. In 1208 he re-surfaces in the records working hard for the king supervising the administration of the revenues of the diocese of Lincoln during the interdict, and in 1208–9 he served as a royal justice in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire.
Meanwhile, Nicola remained in the shadows. There are occasional references to her in the royal financial records, usually concerning the debt she had contracted in 1194 to keep control of her daughter’s marriage. In 1200 she renegotiated the amount with King John, but in 1201 she still owed £40 and one palfrey.9 She had two sons with Gerard too, Richard, who married in 1200, and Thomas. But it was not until after her husband’s death that Nicola began to play a prominent part of her own in public life once again. Gerard de Canville died shortly before January 1215, when his eldest son succeeded to his lands. But as an unmarried widow, no longer legally subordinated to a husband who could exercise her rights during their marriage, Nicola was now able to take personal control of the inheritance she had received from her father over forty-five years ago. Part of this, of course, was the position of castellan of Lincoln.
Perhaps because he remembered how successful Nicola had been on his behalf in defending Lincoln Castle in 1191, John was happy to have her there at another particularly difficult time. The king’s continental plans had been destroyed on the battlefield at Bouvines in July 1214, and by early 1215 baronial opposition was growing. London fell to the rebels in May and Magna Carta was forced out of the king in June. By early 1216, the civil war was raging and control of Lincolnshire was crucial if John’s cause was to hold up in eastern England. He went to Lincoln twice in 1216, in February and September, and it was on one of these occasions, so the story goes, that he rejected Nicola’s offer to resign her position as castellan. She had already proved her worth by the time of John’s second visit. During August 1216 the city had been attacked by a force under Gilbert de Gant, who had been recognised as earl of Lincoln by Prince Louis. Gilbert took the city but he failed to capture the castle and Nicola was able to buy a truce. One writer, the anonymous Barnwell chronicler, wrote in admiring and complimentary terms about the ‘matrona’ called Nicola, who kept Lincoln Castle out of rebel hands.10 The use of this Latin word to describe her reflected Nicola’s age, certainly, but it suggests much more than this too, with its connotations of maturity, wisdom and experience.
John still had need of Nicola’s loyal and effective service and, as if to make this clear, on 18 October 1216, only hours before his death that very night, he appointed her sheriff of Lincolnshire alongside another loyalist, Philip Mark.11 This was unprecedented: there is no record of a woman serving as the sheriff of any English county before Nicola. Even in peaceful times, as the king’s chief official in the shire, the sheriff had a range of onerous fiscal, judicial and military duties to perform. In wartime, however, the sheriffs’ importance was enhanced significantly, and it was their job to control their counties and keep them pacified and loyal. The sheriff was expected to exercise huge influence over the leading figures and families of the shire, and Nicola’s appointment was a striking testament to her standing in the county, and to John’s faith in her abilities. What is more, her gender was clearly no bar to her doing the job. To be sure, she was not the only sheriff of Lincolnshire named on John’s deathbed, but Philip Mark was already sheriff of the neighbouring county of Nottinghamshire and presumably he had to spend time there. In fact, there is little to suggest that he played much of a role in Lincolnshire affairs after his appointment, and in January 1217 another man, Geoffrey de Serland, was appointed to serve as sheriff of Lincolnshire, but this time expressly ‘under our beloved lady Nicola de la Haye’.12
There is no reason to think that Nicola’s appointment was simply an empty gesture or that she was just a figurehead. At a time of national crisis, she was the woman the king and his successors relied on to keep this vital part of eastern England in line, and by early 1217 she was exerting her authority as sheriff by supervising the transfer of hostages and confiscating the lands of local rebels. But England remained at war and Nicola’s principal duty was still military. By now, of course, King John was dead, and the resistance to Prince Louis was being carried on in the name of the new king, John’s nine-year-old son, Henry III, by a regency government led by the papal legate, Guala, and William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. The situation looked bleak. At the end of 1216, Louis controlled London and nearly all of the eastern half of England; the rulers of Scotland and north Wales were his allies and, within England itself, two-thirds of the greatest barons were on his side. Nevertheless, the ecclesiastical establishment backed Henry III (no English bishop supported Louis, so he could not have had himself crowned even if he wanted to!), in western England the young king’s support was also solid and, even in rebel territory, there were pockets of staunch loyalist resistance. At Dover, Corfe, Newark and Newcastle, and at other strongholds across the kingdom, not least at Nottingham under Philip Mark and at Lincoln under Nicola de la Haye, the king’s adherents were dug in, well supplied, and ready for a long war. Louis knew, as did the Barnwell chronicler, that ‘the royal castles were many and well-fortified’.13 What is more, Henry III’s greatest asset was that he was not his father. It would be hard for those rebels with personal grievances against John to make the same criticisms of his infant son, especially if there now appeared to be a realistic prospect of those grievances being addressed. So when Guala and the Marshal issued a revised version of Magna Carta in November 1216 in the name of the new king, it was designed to weaken and fracture the opposition by holding out to them the promise of a new approach to government.14
Despite the apparent strength of Louis’ position at the end of 1216, the onus was on him to act quickly if he was to retain his advantage. This was easier said than done, and although he managed to tighten his hold on East Anglia and besiege a few royal castles, by January 1217 he was forced to agree to a three-month truce. The fact was that he needed more troops and he had to return to France to raise them. Whilst he was away, his support within England began to show signs of strain and in March the Marshal’s eldest son, also called William, and Henry III’s uncle, the earl of Salisbury, deserted his cause and returned to the royalist side. Numbers of lesser men defected, too, unsure whether Louis would ever return. Before the prince left, though, he had travelled to Lincoln. By February 1217 the city had been taken once more by Gilbert de Gant. But when Louis arrived there, according to a chronicler who was with the French army during the war, he found the castle still firmly under Nicola de la Haye’s control and ‘she kept the guard very loyally’.15 The siege continued after Louis’ departure; if anything it intensified as reinforcements arrived to strengthen the attack. One English chronicler, as has been seen, was keen to record the progress of the siege ‘in which a noble woman, by the name of Nicola, manfully defended herself’, whilst another also applauded her for behaving ‘manfully’.16 The use of such language is certainly striking: clearly, no greater compliment could be paid to a woman than to say she was acting like a man! In the end, recognising the significance of the events unfolding at Lincoln, the royal government ordered its supporters to gather at Newark in Nottinghamshire in May. They would march east from there to relieve the siege. Half of Louis’ army, and the prince himself, who had returned to England at the end of April, were still besieging Dover. If the royalists could defeat the other half at Lincoln, they might well deal a mortal blow to Louis’ cause in England.
The royal army took shape at Newark on 17–18 May. It takes about half an hour today to drive the eighteen miles or so from Newark to Lincoln along the A46. In 1217 it was a tolerable day’s march for a force made up, according to the biographer of William Marshal, of 405 knights and 317 crossbowmen (he makes no mention of the infantry), and by the early morning of 20 May the regent’s troops were drawn up along the north-western wall of the city.17 The Marshal’s plan appears initially to have depended on Louis’ supporters, under the command of the count of Perche, leaving the safety of the city in order to fight on the open plain outside the walls. There was no guarantee of success even if this happened: the Marshal’s biographer estimated that there were 611 French knights and about a thousand infantry at Lincoln, ‘not counting the English with them’.18 But, and more pertinently, the Anglo-French army was safe and secure where it was, and there was no compelling reason why it should venture out and risk all in a pitched battle. It made military sense to reject the royalist challenge, and the count of Perche decided to keep his troops where they were until Louis himself arrived with reinforcements. The pressure was now on the Marshal to come up with a different strategy before this happened and he must have been grateful indeed for the intelligence he received at this point from the bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches. At great personal risk, Bishop Peter had managed to get into the castle through an entrance that formed part of the western wall of the city, and from there onto the city streets. There he had discovered a disused, blocked-up gate further along the western wall of the city to the north of the castle. He was sure it could be opened and used as the royalists’ point of entry. The Marshal’s biographer describes how, during his daring mission, Peter met Nicola in one of the towers of the castle and reassured her that the siege would shortly be raised. She was reportedly ‘full of joy’ to see him and hear the news.19 Meanwhile the Anglo-French army had to be distracted whilst work to unblock the gate got under way. So the earl of Chester threw himself and his troops at the city’s north gate whilst a second royalist force entered the castle and took up its positions. As the royalist crossbowmen began to fire down into the city from the castle ramparts, the foot soldiers burst out of the castle’s main entrance and into the surrounding streets. The castle and cathedral at Lincoln face each other across a gap of about 200 yards and the first hand-to-hand fighting of the battle must have taken place here. But it soon moved down the steep hill connecting the upper and lower parts of the city, and the confused Anglo-French army, having been forced to pull back, lost any chance of responding to what was happening at the now unblocked western gate to the north of the castle. It had been opened easily and the royalist troops were now pouring through. So keen was the seventy-year-old Marshal to take the lead that he would have rushed his horse into the city without his helmet on had his squire not pulled him back. But once properly armoured, he charged deep into the mêlée (‘over a distance greater than three spears’ length’, his biographer claimed) outside the cathedral.20 There the count of Perche was fatally wounded when a spear went through his visor. Nevertheless, before he fell from his horse, he was able to aim three great blows at the Marshal and dent the helmet that the regent had almost left behind.
The Anglo-French army had been completely surprised by the sudden boldness of the royalist attack. The Marshal and his men had secured the upper part of the city and when their opponents’ attempt to regroup and fight their way back up the hill towards the castle failed, the battle was effectively over. Those supporters of Louis who did not manage to escape through the southern gate at the river end of the city were captured and held for ransom later. The earls of Winchester, Hereford and Hertford were taken along with numerous other high-profile partisans of the French prince, including Nicola’s long-time rival Gilbert de Gant. Her unshakeable defence of Lincoln Castle had lasted well over a year and it was vital to the outcome of the battle and for the future of England. Without access to the castle and, through it, to the city, it is hard to see how the Marshal’s army could have forced a victory. The regent would have been left stranded outside Lincoln and, if Louis had moved quickly, he might have been able to crush the life out of the Henrician cause against the walls of the city. The Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217 did not at one stroke end Prince Louis’ campaign in England. However, later events were to show how it had turned the tide of the war decisively against him. The young Henry III, who was at Nottingham when he heard about the victory, owed Nicola a great debt. So did William Marshal, who had staked England’s political destiny on success at Lincoln. It is no wonder that William’s biographer referred to Nicola as ‘that worthy lady (may God protect her in body and soul!)’.21
Louis was still at Dover when news was brought to him on 25 May of the disastrous events at Lincoln. He promptly lifted the siege he had been conducting since July of the previous year, made for London and sued for peace. Three weeks later, the outlines of a workable agreement were in place: Louis would release his English supporters from their oaths of loyalty to him and they would be allowed to recover the lands they had held at the beginning of the war; he would return the lands he had seized; prisoners on both sides would be released. Unfortunately, however, the negotiations foundered on points of detail and, once they had stalled, Louis’ supporters began to submit to the regency government in large numbers. Between May 1217 and the middle of August, over 150 men formally abandoned his cause, and Louis’ attempt to conquer England finally came to an end on 24 August when the ships carrying his reinforcements from France were routed just off Sandwich by an English fleet under the command of Hubert de Burgh, the defender of Dover Castle. This was a remarkable victory by all accounts, as the French fleet was far larger than the English one. But the decisive moment came when the French flagship was seized. Its captain was Eustace the Monk, whose career up until this point had been colourful to say the least. Before taking his monastic vows, he is reputed to have studied black magic in Spain. Later, his career in the cloister presumably having proved unsatisfying, he became an outlaw in the forests near Boulogne, only then to take up piracy, preying on shipping in the English Channel. He was employed occasionally by King John as a kind of privateer in his struggle with Philip II, but in 1212 he switched sides to serve the French king. He commanded the fleet that brought Louis to England in 1216, but his luck ran out a year later. Weighted down with a great missile-launching trebuchet, thirty-six knights, their retinues and their horses, as well as treasure, his ship was low in the water, slow, and an easy target. Quickly surrounded, it was boarded after the English threw pots of powdered lime down on to its deck from high up in the rigging of one of their own ships that had drawn up alongside. Blinded and confused, Eustace’s men could do nothing to prevent their attackers coming aboard. Eustace himself was eventually found hiding deep below in the bilges. He tried to buy his freedom with an offer of £6,667, but the English sailors, many of whom had suffered at Eustace’s piratical hands in the past, only gave him one choice: would he have his head cut off on the side of the ship or on the great trebuchet which he was carrying to England?
Louis learned of his forces’ defeat in the Channel two days later, on 26 August 1217. With the Marshal about to begin his blockade of London, the prince had no choice but to make as good a peace deal as he could. In September, first at a meeting on an island in the Thames near Kingston, and then at a larger assembly at Lambeth, Louis renounced his claim to the English throne whilst managing to retain for his lay supporters that provision from the June negotiations which allowed them to keep the lands they had held before the war. On 23 September he sailed back to France. Six weeks later the government of King Henry III issued Magna Carta once again, bringing it a step closer to its final and definitive form. And it was from this point, too, that it started being referred to as ‘Magna’ Carta, to distinguish it from a second, smaller, document issued in 1217, which dealt exclusively with the law of the royal forest.22 In 1215 the charter had caused war and taken England into a chaotic and uncertain future; in 1217 it announced that war was over and that Henry III was the undisputed king. During these two turbulent years, its life as the cornerstone of the English constitution had begun.
And what of Nicola de la Haye? Despite all her efforts on behalf of the ruling dynasty, her own struggles were not yet at an end, and she had to fight hard to keep her position after the civil war. In doing so she showed once again all the toughness that had characterised her career so far. Only four days after the Battle of Lincoln, on 24 May 1217, she was removed from her post of sheriff of Lincolnshire and replaced by Henry III’s uncle, the earl of Salisbury. For good measure, the earl seized Lincoln Castle as well, and it was this outrage that prompted Nicola to travel to the royal court to get her castle back. Salisbury was ordered to return to her the castle, the city and the county; but even this victory was fleeting. In December 1217, Nicola was ordered to stand down as sheriff once again in favour of the earl, although she kept control of Lincoln and its castle.
Salisbury’s hostility towards Nicola requires some explaining. After Nicola’s husband Gerard de Canville had died in 1215, their son Richard was left as his heir. But Richard died early in 1217, leaving a daughter, Idonea, to inherit both the Canville lands and probably, in due course, Nicola’s estates and offices too. Now it just so happened that Idonea was betrothed to the son of the earl of Salisbury. When it had been arranged prior to Gerard de Canville’s death, this marriage was clearly prestigious and a sign of the esteem in which Nicola’s family was held at court. However, with Gerard and Richard dead, only Nicola stood in the way of a significant transfer of assets and wealth into the hands of Salisbury’s family. Salisbury claimed that he had a right to take control of Idonea’s inheritance because his son (her fiancé) was still a minor; but, whatever the merits of this argument, his attitude towards Nicola after 1217 suggests that he was trying to force the issue. Earl William was no ordinary rival either. He had sided with Prince Louis after the latter had landed in England in 1216, but later in the war he had returned to the royalist side. After that he had played a conspicuous role in the royalist victory at Lincoln (it was probably as a reward for his actions there that he was made sheriff of Lincolnshire), in the sea battle off Sandwich, and in the negotiations at Lambeth that brought Louis’ invasion to an end. After 1217, in other words, he was one of the most powerful men in the kingdom and not to be challenged lightly. Nicola refused to be intimidated, though, even in 1219 when the earl went so far as to attack her in Lincoln Castle, and force her to defend her walls once again. In the end a royal army came to her relief and in August the earl was ordered in stern terms to respect ‘our beloved and faithful Nicola de la Haye’.23 But this only prompted him to change tactics. Early in 1220 news reached the king that the earl had been trying to get into Lincoln Castle again, this time by offering his son and nephew as hostages. This approach failed too, and for the next six years Nicola held the castle with little incident. It may be no coincidence that she finally gave up its custody only in June 1226, three months after Salisbury’s death. Her last battle had been won, and Nicola retired to her estates. She died peacefully at her manor of Swaton in southern Lincolnshire in 1230.