King John: Worst Medieval Monarch?

Nothing good is ever said about King John, a strong contender for the title of Worst Medieval King of England. Was the King who signed Magna Carta - albeit reluctantly - really as bad as history paints him? Matt Lewis sets out to put the record straight with David Carpenter, Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. The audio editor and producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Related episodes: Henry III vs. Simon de Montfort > https://podfollow.com/gone-medieval/episode/1e2700f54cfeb6f040135f1c1ac74702db4f3f4e/view Magna Carta > https://podfollow.com/gone-medieval/episode/866c1cfeb9980ee4c06b1b16c866d356cbd20370/view 1217: The Year that Forged England > https://podfollow.com/gone-medieval/episode/29d7b6e0c8af5182c8fd0b5fe382c9a1f9f6f4c9/view Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone. And I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh. Anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade-in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.

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• 2:06Matt Lewis?

  Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

• 2:49Matt Lewis?

  What can I say about the subject of today's episode? At the moment, probably nothing good. Maybe that'll change, though. King John is a strong contender for the unwanted title of worst medieval king of England. If that qualified him for the world championships, I reckon he'd place pretty well there, too. John is someone we haven't dedicated an episode of Gone Medieval to yet. Well, like all bad smells, we can't ignore him forever. Today's guest is the wonderful David Carpenter, Professor of Medieval History at King's College London, who is also the author of a two-volume biography of John's son, Henry III, amongst his other publications. Welcome back to Gone Medieval, David.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  Thank you for asking, mate. Thank you.

• 3:33Matt Lewis?

  I feel like we've kind of lodged here to talk about one of the worst things that anyone could possibly talk about in medieval history, which might be a little bit mean.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  John's got that reputation, but I think it's a far more nuanced picture than that. And one has to think through the thickness, the blur of his later reputation, to try and get back to the primary sources of the time, which give a far more mixed picture than the picture of popular legend. He was a very able king, I think.

• 4:01Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we'll see how much we can convince people that he doesn't deserve entirely his bad reputation.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 4:07Matt Lewis?

  But I wondered if we could start off with just a little bit of background for anyone who doesn't know who John is. Who are his parents? When is he born?

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Right, John is the youngest son of the king Henry II, famous for the murder of Becket, and his glamorous and highly intelligent wife Eleanor of Aquitaine. And sometimes suggested that he was, quote, "the spare". He'd got three elder brothers, he was very much in their shadow, one of course, Richard the Lionheart, who followed Henry II as king. And John was fobbed off, even in his own time, he was called John Sinair Terra, without land, John Lachland, because his father had only provided him with the Lordship of Ireland, which John didn't like going to, and was rather contemptuous about the native kings there.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  He grew up very much in the shadow of his father and his brother. In the end, he rebelled against his father, right at the end of Henry II's reign. And there's famous Victorian pictures of Henry II lying on his deathbed, groaning as he hears this final blow of the desertion of John. Then, when Richard was away on crusade and in captivity, John rebelled against Richard. In the end, they were reconciled and the rebellion was snuffed out. So he came to the throne in 1199 with already a mixed reputation, a reputation for treachery, deceit and rebellion. Perhaps a bit unfair, because both his elder brothers, Richard and Henry,

• 5:41Speaker 04

  who was the young king who pre-deceased his father, they'd all rebelled against their father too. So John might well have thought that I'm merely doing what my elder brothers have done. And why should I attain this reputation for treachery? They jolly well deserve it too.

• 5:56Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, just following in the family tradition of rebelling against fathers. Is there any truth, do you think, to the notion that we quite often see reported that John was in some way Henry's favourite child?

• 6:09Speaker 04

  There is something in that, yes, but I think that's a slightly mixed picture. Initially, of course, Sinner Terra, Lordship of Ireland. But there is an indication that in the 1180s, after the death of the eldest son, who Henry had misguidedly had crowned, Henry the Young King, and with the disobedience of Richard, that Henry was thinking of actually making John his heir. And that was what prompted Richard's final rebellion against his father. He certainly wanted to get Richard out of Accra Taine and give it to John. So there is some reason for thinking that perhaps because John was younger and initially more obedient than the others, that Henry was fonder of him and thought he would be more loyal to him than the others.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  But of course, that was proved wrong at the end.

• 6:56Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think I can never work out whether there's anything in the idea of a favourite son or simply the last one to betray his father. So John becomes the only one up until the last minute who hasn't turned against Henry. And is it too much to extrapolate the idea of a favourite son from that? Because all he really is, is the last one to rebel.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's very well put, Matt, that he's more controllable and thus one thinks he might be the favourite son. But I think it's very hard to deduce the personal relationships between Henry and his sons. We've just got the record, we haven't got personal letters and things like that. We just haven't got the source material. We have actually later for John, who can in his letters sometimes be shown to express real affection for his servants.

• 7:42Matt Lewis?

  You mentioned that John became Lord of Ireland and that he also wasn't particularly fond of going to Ireland. How does that manifest itself? And what does John's time in Ireland tell us about him as a young man?

• 7:55Speaker 04

  It shows one characteristic, which comes up again and again in the reign, and which was deeply resented by some people. And that was the way he could mock people. And he particularly mocked one of the native kings for riding bareback on his horse. And also their hairstyle and everything like that. Not a very sensible thing to do when you're trying to. Conciliate the native nobility. Later on, the same characteristic comes out. He mocked his half brother Geoffrey, who was Archbishop of York. When Geoffrey flung himself at John's feet in order to beg for pardon for some offence.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  And John mocked him too. He mocked William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke in the 1200s, when William Marshall refused to go on John's 1206 expedition. And all the other John's supporters went off with John. And then only a very small number of people stayed with William Marshall. This is all in an open air field episode. John laughs at the marshal. Ha, very few people are standing beside you, aren't they? That kind of thing. There is a different side. John could also behave extremely well towards people, a very complex character like that.

• 9:11Matt Lewis?

  There is also talk in the sources, if I'm right, of him sort of pulling the beards out of the Irish when he's over there. So you get that sense of a kind of immature, cruel streak almost.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, that kind of conduct too, yes. And you can just see him giggling with his entourage as he did it. There's another good example of that. When he was invested with the ducal staff of Normandy at Rouen at the very start of the reign, he managed to drop it. And all of course, his entourage laughed and laughed. But of course, it was not the sort of thing which really is appropriate to happen in a ceremony like that. And of course, later on seemed to foreshadow the loss of Normandy. So I think there was a sniggering, giggling, particularly with the people closest to him, who are often of course not great nobles. But people he could control, a bit like his father could control him. He liked to be surrounded by people whom he could control.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  And they were often people of much lesser status than him. They were his creatures.

• 10:12Matt Lewis?

  And when John begins to turn against Richard, so when his brother Richard becomes king and is famously, you know, away on crusade, captured on his way back home, John will begin to scheme against Richard. How serious do you think that scheming was? Was John really aiming to depose Richard at that point?

• 10:29Speaker 04

  It was in cahoots with Philip Augustus, and they spread the rumour that Richard was dead. To be fair to John here, again, Richard had provoked him. Richard had done two stupid things, and here I differ from Richard apologists. On the one hand, he'd given John great power in England, because he'd made him, what the chronicler William of Newburgh says, made him a pet truck. In other words, about a third of the English counties had been placed under John's control at the start of Richard's reign 1189, and they disappear entirely from the financial accounts. All the revenue goes to John. It's as though the whole England has been split up between John and Richard. So he'd given

• 11:07Speaker 04

  John great power, and then he provokes him in the treaty Messina, making Arthur the heir. So John is now feeling, well, I've been cut out of the succession by my brother. So not very surprising that John started to discontent, and then in the end, straightforwardly make an alliance with Philip Augustus and rebel against his brother. Of course, they spread the rumour that Richard was dead. Maybe John believed it, but this is out-and-out rebellion against his brother, but to some extent understandable. Richard, I think, behaved very stupidly. But then the thing about Richard is, he always regarded John with contempt,

• 11:49Speaker 04

  my kid brother. And that's why Richard forgave him so easily. Richard once famously said, he's not the man to stir up a successful rebellion. Must have been very infuriating for John to be treated like that. But then Richard believed in his star, a person of supreme self-confidence. And of course, with his military talents and personality, maybe that was justified. It led to his death, of course, when he didn't shield himself properly from that arrow.

• 12:18Matt Lewis?

  It must be frustrating for Eleanor of Aquitaine, their mother is still alive at this point, and I imagine if their father was as well, he would have been tearing his hair out, that John ends up falling into that trap that all of his brothers do of being played by the Capetian kings, because I think this is very much Philip driving a wedge between John and Richard again, isn't it?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, Philip masterminded that and was the great gainer from the rebellion of 1193, 1194, partly through the deals he made with John, but partly through military force. He made fundamental inroads at the Norman frontier, and in particular, he took the great castle of Gisor. Now, if you've ever been to Gisor, you know how very terrible that was for the defence of Angevin Normandy. It's an amazing motte with a state-of-the-art keep on the top, built by Henry II. Henry II knew how important it was, because it guards the whole frontier of the Epte. Now, Philip Augustus actually took it by treachery of the Castellan, who presumably thought Richard's

• 13:21Speaker 04

  cause was over, and Richard never got it back. And so the whole of the Norman frontier along the Epte, between the Capetian lands and the Angevin lands, was fatally broached during the period of John's rebellion. And to be fair to John, of course, that did make Normandy so much harder to defend. Richard never got it back, and that was why he had to build Chateau-Guyard, because although Chateau-Guyard was a base for finally recovering the Gisor and the rest, base for advance, as well as a bastion for defence, nonetheless, Gisor was never recovered. And so John's inherited a much worse situation than Richard's inherited in 1189.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  And it's very important to remember when one thinks about John's failure to defend Normandy.

• 14:11Matt Lewis?

  I was going to say, what do the early years of his reign look like? Because we tend to think of his reign being dominated by the later years, the 1210s in particular. When he becomes king, is there any sense of promise? Does he start by doing a good job?

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there absolutely is. And it's fascinating to look at the account of the early years of John, given by the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, who is the abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Coggeshall in Essex. Because Coggeshall finishes his account of the early years of John almost straight away. He's writing it about 1201, 1202, with no knowledge of the disasters which are going to come. And it's full of praise of John. The main reason for praise is the peace with France, the peace with Lugolae, which Coggeshall thinks is going to end this hugely costly, highly expensive war.

• 15:06Speaker 04

  And I think others thought John is behaving very sensibly in making peace with France. Because Coggeshall goes on and on about the terrible financial exactions of Richard to sustain the war. So now we've got peace and there's the hope of stability and much lower financial demands. The other thing Coggeshall praised was John's settlement of his quarrel with the Cistercian Order. Because John did quarrel with the Cistercians early in the reign, and then Chaitak made peace with them, threw himself at the feet of the abbot's asking for pardon. And Coggeshall, in an extraordinary passage, said, here is a king whose shoulder is touched by the hand of God. So this is the early picture of John, the picture you get of him right at the start

• 15:51Speaker 04

  of the reign, in the admittedly written later, in view of later events, but the picture in The Wonderful Life of Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, which has got some graphic images of John right at the start of the reign, when Bishop Hugh, who's Bishop of Lincoln, meets John at Fontivaro, just after Richard's death. And in an extraordinary episode, so Bishop Hugh gives John this lecture about what good kingship would be, and they're standing under that last judgment at Fontivaro, over the entrance. Points up to John and says, look, be very careful. Don't be one of those kings being dragged down into the jaws of hell. And what does John do? He goes over to the other side, said, don't worry at all, don't worry.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  I'm going to be one of those kings going up happily, being received by angels into heaven. But John behaves completely correctly in those circumstances. Admittedly, there are other things in the life of Bishop Hugh, which show him acting ungraciously. In the same period, he tells Bishop Hugh to hurry up with his sermon so he can go and have his breakfast. Because obviously before mass, you're not supposed to eat. But John could behave well, and just if you stop the clock in 1201, that sort of time. I think you would have thought John's got off to a really good start in both policy, legule, but also in terms of personal behaviour. We're getting here a different picture of the king.

• 17:16Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting to see it unfiltered by knowledge of his later events. Someone actually writing and ending their story with John as the promise of a good future.

• 17:26Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 17:27Matt Lewis?

  Almost.

• 17:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, Cogashaw, of course, later completely changed his mind. But what's so valuable is that his chronicle is written in phases. So he finishes the account of the start of the reign almost straight away.

• 17:39Matt Lewis?

  And given then that we've just seen John say, I'm not going to be one of those terrible kings that gets in trouble with the church. I'm going to be one of those great kings that will be whisked up to heaven. How is it that a few years into John's reign, we start to see the wheels fall off his relationship with the church? And England begin to fall under papal sanctions?

• 17:57Speaker 04

  Two disastrous things, I think, blotted John's early reputation. So that by 1204, five, before the quarrel with the church, things were looking very different. The first was what should have been John's greatest triumph. And that was Arthur, of course, is in rebellion against him, still making a case to be Duke of Normandy, if not King of England. And John manages to capture him at Mirabeau. And it was one of the occasions where John acted very fast, went to Mirabeau with a force and has a triumph. Captures not merely Arthur, but all Arthur's allies, particularly the Lucignan family. What goes wrong is the murder of Arthur. Arthur is taken off to Falaise, Rouen and disappears.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  And most people thought rightly, although John never held up his hat and said I murdered him, most people at the time thought John has murdered him, and I think is completely true. And there are all different accounts of it. One of the best was that John murdered him in a drunken rage personally. And that clearly is way outside the conventions of the age. This isn't an age when you're these sorts of things are expected to happen. Look at Henry the First, who kept his brother Robert in captivity for virtually the whole of life after he'd been captured at Tintin Bray in 1106, but doesn't kill him. Henry

• 19:22Speaker 04

  the Second had forgiven his sons for their rebellion. For John to actually murder his nephew, I think was a terrible blight on his personality. The other, of course, event which indeed was connected with the murder of Arthur was the loss of Normandy. That is the real watershed in the reign. And in 1204, Philip Augustus invades Normandy. And here, John seems totally unlike Richard, not at a loss how to defend it militarily. And so the loss of Normandy is a complete watershed in the reign. It blasts John's reputation. It's a humiliating thing for the Anglo Norman elite. And then, of course,

• 20:07Speaker 04

  it leads into all the financial exactions of the second half of the reign, designed to recover Normandy. But I think we need to remember that the defence of Normandy, as I said before, was harder because the frontier along the Ette had already been breached by the loss of Gisso. There's a big debate about whether John could have done better. I'm sure he could have done far better. It's inconceivable to think of Normandy being lost as it was lost under Richard the Lionheart. But nonetheless, I think John could have done far better than he did there. And that showed a sort of weakness, a lack of military skill, a temerity too, a loss of nerve, I think, at the last moment. He wasn't even

• 20:47Speaker 04

  in Normandy when Philip Augustus conquered it. So all this by 1204 is a king who is seen to be a failure and who is also seen to be a murderer and also seen to be very cruel. I think this is another thing which had come out also in that his treatment of some of the prisoners captured at Mirabeau.

• 21:12Speaker 04

  Was considered cruel. There were stories that they were being starved to death in the vaults at Corf Castle or at Windsor. And again, this is outside the chivalric conventions of the age, in that this isn't an age when the great nobles are executed for political crimes. It's not an age when they're actually killed very much in battle. For John to behave like this seemed, as I say, very different from the behaviour of his father, and indeed of the Lionheart, and was putting him outside the sort of spectrum of how a king ought to behave.

• 21:48Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's incredible. And I guess it's a psychological edge to his way of dealing with them as well, that he's willing to put them under this psychological threat of, you know, if you don't do what I want, there will be a worse punishment to come.

• 22:00Speaker 04

  One amazing letter of John on the treatment of prisoners from Mirabeau, which does take you very close to him, I think, to perhaps the sort of suspicious, fearful side of him, but also the way in which he could put pressure, perhaps brutal pressure, on great nobles. And this is an extraordinary letter in which he's dealing with one of the great nobles taken at Mirabeau called Geoffrey de Lusignan. He's now a prisoner at Falaise. So John first of all sets up very elaborate precautions so that no one can get in to see Geoffrey without John's permission. The whole point of the letter is to say, look,

• 22:43Speaker 04

  I'm offering Geoffrey this deal. And if he agrees this deal, what happens? The fetters can be taken off him. And then he can be moved to another chamber, which is obviously meant to be a more comfortable chamber, but it's also a chamber with a threat, because John says, put him in the chamber where the ring chains are. And these are obviously chains hanging down from the wall. He doesn't say put Geoffrey in the ring chains, but the threat is clearly Geoffrey's sitting in this chamber, he'll see these chains on the wall. And if he steps out of line, doesn't accept the deal, he may well have his hands put up in. These rings, it shows the brutal threats which John could issue even to one of really

• 23:27Speaker 04

  great noble Geoffrey de Luce. He's been fettered, he could be put in ring chains. I think that does take us quite close to John's sort of manipulation, threats, suspicion, fear, all in one letter. Extraordinary letter, which you do feel you're getting really close to him from a letter like that.

• 23:57Matt Lewis?

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• 24:41Matt Lewis?

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• 25:25Matt Lewis?

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• 25:30Speaker 01

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• 26:04Speaker 02

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• 26:34Speaker 03

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• 27:00Matt Lewis?

  And so we seem to have seen then John's early promise evaporate quite quickly and the wheels begin to come off.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:08Matt Lewis?

  And we will then see his relationship with the church start to fall apart too. How does he end up with this huge rift with the Pope?

• 27:16Speaker 04

  I've got a lot of sympathy with John here, and I'm not sure that Henry II or Richard Larnhart would have acted differently. So Hubert Walter is the Archbishop of Canterbury, but he's been just the kind of Archbishop of Canterbury that Henry II and indeed Richard liked, because he's absolutely ready to double up as Justiceier and Chancellor. So he's both running the country. And Archbishop of Canterbury, just what Henry the Second wanted from Becket and didn't get. So Hubert Walter dies, and clearly John very reasonably wants a successor who's going to be the same. And it's not just cynicism, it brings together church and state in a

• 27:58Speaker 04

  sort of harmony. So John had the very man, which was one of his closest servants, who John de Grey, who was Bishop of Norwich. And so he wants the Canterbury monks to elect him. Some of them did, and some of them didn't. And so the dispute was referred to the Pope, Pope Innocent, who low and behold, simply appoints without asking John, someone totally different, which was Stephen Langton. Now Stephen Langton was an Englishman, but he had spent many years in Paris, the capital of John's greatest enemy, as one of the great academics, intellectuals of the age. So he was Englishman, and of course, John didn't know that. University professors didn't sail into John's orbit very often, and he didn't

• 28:43Speaker 04

  know this one. Bloody hell, I think John was absolutely right to say, really, no, sorry, no, you've ignored all the convention that the King of the English had to say in this very important position. You foisted Stephen Langton, who I don't know and may well be treacherous on me. I'm not going to allow that. Of course, it all goes from there. John stands firm, and first of all, England is placed under an interdict, and then John is excommunicated. And it's a testament, I think, to the strength of English royal government, that he's able to sustain that position until 1212, 1213, when it wasn't in the end, indeed,

• 29:24Speaker 04

  the threat of the interdict and excommunication, which got him to cave in. It was the threat of French invasion. So I've got a lot of sympathy with John there, and I'm not sure it would have been that different under Henry and Richard.

• 29:39Speaker 04

  Later on, Kings of England just did come to accept that they might have Archbishop of Canterbury appointed by the Pope, who they were not their favourite candidate. So there's a paradigm shift. I mean, the only qualification is whether the diplomacy of Richard the Lionheart would have been better, whether he would have handled it with more facility. And I know that has been suggested, but I can imagine Henry II absolutely getting furious at this degree of interference. But of course, it does blast his reputation with the Church, not, I think, with great nobles so much. In the secular account of the reign, there's a wonderful chronicle written for a great noble, Robert of Bayt, in that there's

• 30:22Speaker 04

  very little there about the interdict, very little about the interdict in the history of William Marshall. I don't think it affected great nobles, but obviously it blasted John's reputation with the Church. In the end, of course, John, by brilliant footwork, brings the Pope back on his side. So the Pope was on his side at the time of Magna Carta. The lasting damage to John by that, by the quarrel with the Church, in terms of the final rebellion, I don't think was very great.

• 30:48Matt Lewis?

  And during all of this crisis too, John is focusing on a bit of foreign policy. So he's quite keen to win back all of those Angevin lands that he's lost. Getting the revenue that should have gone to the Church means he's building this really effective war chest. What should we make of his efforts to regain the lost territory? How much blame, for example, should we give him for the loss at the Battle of Bouvin, given that he wasn't even there?

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Here again, I think John acted effectively. And of course, one of the great alliances which he wants to restore and does is with the Count of Flanders. And there's a fascinating account of that and the negotiations leading to this successful alliance with the Count of Flanders in this chronicle written for the Anglo Flemish noble, Robert of Baytoun. And it shows John acting just right. So the Count of Flanders arrives in England and Robert of Baytoun, who's his sort of envoy with John, says to John, The Count of Flanders had arrived, you need to meet him. And John first of all laughs and said, "Ha, you Flemings think you're very important, don't you?" And Robert of

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Betune says, "Yes, we are very important and the count is vital to you." And John then laughs and gets on his horse and gallops so fast to Dover that his entourage can't keep up. Goes into the presence of the Count of Flanders, greets him, welcomes him in the appropriate way, invites him to a meal and so on. And the alliance is secured. That is another example of how difficult it is to assess John, or how nuanced it is. He is acting completely properly and sensibly. In the end, of course, he does build up this great continental alliance with Otto, the Emperor, with the Count of Flanders. And one might well have thought

• 32:41Speaker 04

  that with more luck, that would have resulted in 1214 in a total defeat of Philip Augustus and the recovery of Normandy. And don't forget, of course, how is he able to do this? And again, this extraordinary testimony shows John's efficiency and his hands-on driving forth the financial affairs of the kingdom. He has become very rich. And by 1213, 1214, he's probably got a treasure of about £130,000. When you think that's about three or four times the annual revenue, it's a gigantic sum of money which he's been put together. And he does, with the help of that money, get this great continental alliance together

• 33:22Speaker 04

  in the north. And then, of course, in 1214, he invades in the south. It was a very sensible strategy. And of course, it all disastrously ended at the Battle of Bouvin. It did all turn on that one battle. If it had gone the other way, and Philip Augustus had been captured, rather than John's own captain, William Longspay of Salisbury, the whole history of 13th century Europe might have been different.

• 33:51Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And following on from Bouvin, the crisis really does build quickly for John, doesn't it? How much of that invasion of England by France and ultimately the imposition of Magna Carta on John, should we lay entirely at John's feet? Were there other factors at play that might excuse him a little bit?

• 34:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is of course a favourite topic for undergraduate essays. Is it the Angevin system of government as a whole? How far is John's personality and policies to blame? And as so often, but not always, I think it's one has to weigh these things up. By 1199, there were already deep resentment in England about the nature of Angevin government. Richard's actions, so to sustain his position in Normandy and pay the ransom, 1194, 1199. So Coggeshort, writing 1199, says, no king, however long he reigned, had taken so much money from the kingdom as Richard did, 1194, 9. And then in the sort of ultimate backhanded compliment, he says, in view of Richard's

• 34:54Speaker 04

  earlier good deeds, God actually decided to kill him off so that he wouldn't become even worse and have to spend a longer time in purgatory. I think there was also deep resentment against some of the arbitrary nature of Angevin government. I recently did a study of Richard and Henry's treatment of the Earls of Arundel, and it's extraordinary the way both those kings simply set at nought charters granting them the honour of Arundel in hereditary right. It was completely lawless treatment and also took huge sums of money from them for what the Earls must have thought they were entitled to already. So by 1199, there's also already a great deal of resentment.

• 35:35Speaker 04

  I think another important factor too, is that the one area which everybody liked about Angevin kingship, well not everyone, but free men, knights particularly, was the developments of the common law, these new legal procedures. It's one thing Magna Carta says, yes, please, let's have more of them, let's make them more available. But they of course taught that you should not act in an arbitrary fashion. What the jury had to decide, has someone been deprived of property unlawfully and without judgment? So that principle is being told to the kingdom by the king, and in the end, the kingdom turns around and says, well, you must obey your own rules. You've told us we can't deprive people of property unlawfully in that judgment, but you're doing it all.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  So all these things are building up. But on the other hand, it gets ever so much worse under John. I think I've written somewhere, under Richard, the pips squeaked. Under John, they screamed, because clearly he triples his revenue between twelve oh four, twelve fourteen. And then, of course, the other factor is John's personality. John Gillingham famously said on one occasion that John is a shit. And that's certainly how he was regarded by a lot of the great nobles, not just by churchmen. This chronicle written for Robert of Baytoun is so interesting because on the one hand, yes, it shows John acting very well in the episode of the Count of Flanders.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  And on other occasions as well, John could act really well in an appropriate fashion, sensible, calculating. And yet, on the other hand, this chronicle also pervades all these rumours and stories about John, the murder of Matilda de Brayose. A terribly graphic account of that, which must be what lots of great barons believe, because this is written for a great baron. He was a bad man. He was cruel. He was deceitful. He loved to set discord between his nobles. That's there, and it does show what people thought of him. So although if you're with John, he can be welcoming, charming even.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  You always thought as he put his arm around your shoulder, he was about to stab you in the back. It doesn't explain the detail of Magna Carta, but it explains why there was the rebellion. I think the hatred and loathing of John personally, distrust of him is a hugely important factor. And that wouldn't have operated in the same way under Henry or Richard. You might fear Richard. You might think he was abrasive, tyrannical even, but God, you jolly well respected him. This is his great warrior, a crusader, everything like that. I think a rebellion in the same way under Richard was almost inconceivable. I could imagine under Richard, demands being put to him, especially if he'd gone on ruling.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  He couldn't make peace with France. His own financial exactions increased. You could imagine under Richard, a series of demands, not so different for Magna Carta, but it's difficult to envisage a rebellion in quite the same way against him personally.

• 38:55Speaker 02

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• 39:27Speaker 05

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• 40:26Matt Lewis?

  One of the outcomes of all of this problem with the French invasion, the barons rebelling, is that John settles his quarrel with the Church in quite a novel and unusual way.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, this was, again, John's brilliance. This is amazing footwork. He first of all decides, because of the threat in French invasion, that he needs to settle with the Church. And of course, John also took the cross and became a crusader. So the Pope says, from a son of iniquity, he has become a sort of favorite son of the Church. And throughout 1215, Innocent is on John's side and is quite prepared to quash Magna Carta for him. So from that point of view, John's footwork there was absolutely brilliant.

• 41:08Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's striking how Mirabeau, on odd occasions, you do see him doing something that's verging on brilliant. It's his lack of ability at other times that really seems to hold him back. He could be really good, but he could make horrible mistakes.

• 41:22Speaker 04

  On the one hand, you find him very highly hands-on, micromanagement, but also acting just as a good king ought to act. But there was some sort of devil in him, I think, which he liked to mock. And of course, the womanizing, which the Baytoun Chronicle mentions, he shamed the high men of his land for lusting after their wives and daughters. And some of those stories seem to have some kind of truth in them. Those sorts of accusations, they were never made against Richard the Lionheart, a little bit perhaps against Henry the Second. But that was another aspect of him.

• 42:00Matt Lewis?

  And so when we get to that famous scene at Runnymede in 1215, why does John allow himself to be forced to seal Magna Carta? Even if he didn't mean to abide by it, why does he allow himself to get into that position?

• 42:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. The answer to that is that there is this very large rebellion against him. And after the fall of London in May 1215, John can't see any way of defeating his opponents. So what he thought was, look, I'll make peace and I'll agree to their terms. But that was a clever thing to do in a way for two reasons. First of all, he's agreeing terms without actually having been defeated in the field. His own army is still in place. He's still in charge of all his castles, the counties and so on. In some ways, he's making peace

• 42:55Speaker 04

  from a position of strength, which he's not losing. Now, you might say he's losing it because of all the restrictions placed on him in the Charter. But there, John was very clever too. Because his view was, yes, as a gracious king, I am making these concessions. They'll all now go home and there'll be peace. Of course, they'll never get around to actually enforcing them. So I think it's wrong to think that John actually was going to renege on the charter straight away. His calculation was that rebel barons would never actually manage to enforce it. And also that probably while everyone knew that he'd granted the charter, no one would know what was in it.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  Because actually getting copies of the charter out of John was like drawing teeth. I mean, he was very resistant to actually having it circulated. And he'd also done one very clever thing in that, of course, the most radical and revolutionary part of the charter was the security clause, when twenty five barons were appointed in order to basically force the king to keep it. And they were empowered with a commune of all the land to seize John's lands and castles if he tried to break it. But John had managed to keep the names of the twenty five barons out of the charter. So how does the security clause work? If you think the charter's being broken, you have to go to the twenty five and complain.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  But no one from the charter knew who the twenty five were. And that was thanks to John's brilliant footwork in issuing the charter before the barons had time to choose the twenty five. It was a supreme piece of skill. So when John leaves Rannymead, he's very hopeful that there'll be peace and people will know a gracious king has granted these liberties. But no one will know what's in the charter and it's never been enforced. Now, of course, there, he proved totally wrong because the barons got their act together and they started to enforce the charter to the letter and beyond. And also they humiliated him. Again, there's this amazing account in, again, this Beethoven Chronicle

• 45:08Speaker 04

  of the twenty five barons at work in John's presence. So twenty five say, we're going to issue a judgment and we want you present, John, when we judge it. Probably of judgment to return lands to some which John had taken away unlawfully. And so John says, look, I'm in a lot of pain. I've got gout and I'm in bed. Will you come to me and make your judgment by presence? So they said, no, that's beneath our dignity. We're not coming to see you. And so John has to be carried on a litter into their presence. And then they refuse to stand up when he's brought in. And so they're humiliating John. They're basically saying our status is just as high as yours. It was probably just after this that John said that enough's enough.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  And he gets the Pope to quash the Charter. So, I mean, that, again, one has some sympathy with John. I think that obviously it's fault on both sides. John didn't want the Charter obeyed. The barons are enforcing it beyond the letter in a humiliating way. The only person who was really struggled in an even-handed way to maintain the Magna Carta peace was Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who I think in a very noble way did genuinely try and give something to one side, give something to the other and try and hold the balance between them. But it just couldn't be done.

• 46:29Matt Lewis?

  We know then that John will get caught up in this French invasion, the rebellion of his barons, tearing around his country, he will fall ill and pass away. What would you say is the kind of immediate impact of John's death?

• 46:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, it basically saved the dynasty and it saved the monarchy because, of course, he leaves a nine-year-old son, Henry the Third, and the small group of ecclesiastics and nobles who remain loyal to him and carry on his government, headed by William Marshall Earl of Pembroke and the Papal Legate Guala. They've realised that the only future is a complete change of policy. One of the most amazing shifts of policy in English history, which still live with the consequences, the huge impact on the future. Because what they did almost straight away was issue a new version

• 47:26Speaker 04

  of Magna Carta. It's not called Magna Carta yet, but that's what they do. And I think that, and also the fact that, of course, John's malevolent personality has been removed and you've got a nine-year-old innocent son, changed the situation. Now, it didn't lead to any immediate desertions to the young king. And Louis, I think, was a very upright, remarkable person who was able to still retain the loyalty of the English barons in rebellion. But what happened was that at the very decisive Battle of Lincoln in May 1217, when William Marshall defeated the Anglo-French forces and the great majority

• 48:10Speaker 04

  of the English barons were there at the Battle of Lincoln, the English barons in rebellion did not fight very hard. None of them were killed. They all seemed to have struck token blows and then surrendered. And of course, they surrender, I think, because they feel their cause is won. John has gone, young innocent king, and above all, they know a Magna Carta is going to be, or in some form, is going to be accepted. And of course, the terms which ended the war, another version of Magna Carta, this time with a forest charter, was issued. So the impact of John's death was, to save the dynasty, Louis is defeated,

• 48:53Speaker 04

  goes back to France, abandons his claims, and the impact is Magna Carta. If John had continued, it's difficult to know what would have happened on that front.

• 49:03Matt Lewis?

  I think it's quite a sad indictment of John that the best we can say about him is that he died early enough not to have left too much of a crisis behind him, that it was still salvageable.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  You're right. John's death doesn't bring an end to the war, but it prepares the way for the victory of his son and the survival of the dynasty. It prepares the way for Magna Carta. Yes, John's death was a very good thing. It's an extraordinary unsuccessful reign, isn't it? When you think that he begins as Lord of Ireland, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, Duke of Aquitaine. By the end of the reign, he's lost. Half of England, Ireland is the only place where rebellion against him has no footing. He's lost Normandy, he's lost Anjou, he's lost part of Poitou. And he's had to concede, although he reneges on it, fundamental restrictions on the operations of royal government.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  I mean, it is extraordinary. And of course, where he actually was after his death, there were all signs of lurid tales of his sufferings in purgatory. But at least he was in purgatory, rather than actually already in hell.

• 50:13Matt Lewis?

  It's been absolutely fascinating to try and get to know John a little bit better. I think I've always viewed his real fatal character flaw. I mean, he had so many flaws, but I think I've always viewed the fatal one as his unpredictability, that nobody quite knew what John was going to do. And that's not a great position for a king to be in, for your nobles to be nervous and frightened. As you said, when you come over and reach an arm around, is he going to put an arm around your shoulder or stick a knife in your back? But it's been interesting to get a slightly more nuanced view of John and an understanding of why some of those things happened. And also a sense that there was some promise there that was never quite realised.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  I think he was a very clever, highly intelligent person who was thinking around all the angles all the time. He knew how to use patronage, makes William Marshall a Pembroke at the start of the reign. He knows about the carrot and the stick. But there was, as I said before, just this devil in him, in which the mocking, the tampering with the wives and daughters of barons, the cruelty, all those things bring him down in the end.

• 51:21Matt Lewis?

  Well, thank you so much for joining us and I'm very much looking forward to speaking to you soon about Magna Carta two. So thank you for joining us, David.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  So am I, Matt.

• 51:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's always a pleasure.

• 51:32Matt Lewis?

  You can grab both volumes of David's magisterial biography of John's son, Henry III, right now, wherever you get your books from. If you've enjoyed this episode, you might like to hear more from David in his previous episodes on Henry III and on Magna Carta. For more of the crisis around the French invasion at this time, there's a great episode with Kath Hanley on her book, 1217. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

• 52:14Matt Lewis?

  You can listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.

• 52:38Speaker 02

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• 53:08Speaker 01

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