John, King of England

• 1. Introduction

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  John, King of England, was nicknamed John Lackland, or Jean sans Terre, because as the youngest son of Henry II he was not expected to inherit significant lands. He grew up to be around five feet five inches tall, with a barrel-chested body and dark red hair. He read books, gambled at backgammon, hunted with enthusiasm, and built up a collection of jewels and opulent clothes. He could be genial, witty and generous one moment, then jealous and prone to rage the next, biting and gnawing his fingers in anger. Yet this short, bookish prince ruled England from 1199 until his death in 1216. By the time he died of dysentery in eastern England in late 1216, he had lost the Duchy of Normandy and most of his French lands, watched the Angevin Empire collapse, and put his seal to a peace treaty that would outlast every battle he fought. How did a younger son with no expected inheritance end up on the throne? Why did contemporary chroniclers turn against him so completely? And how did the worst crisis of his reign produce one of the most famous documents in English history?

• 2. Lackland's Inheritance

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  Henry II once jokingly nicknamed his youngest son Lackland, and the joke nearly came true more than once. John was born in England around Christmastide in 1166 or 1167, the precise date still debated by historians. His father held Anjou, Normandy and England, and pressed a ducal claim over Brittany. His mother was Eleanor, the powerful duchess of Aquitaine and former wife of King Louis VII of France. Shortly after his birth, John was passed to a wet nurse, and Eleanor left for Poitiers, sending John and his sister Joan north to Fontevrault Abbey. The move may have been meant to steer her landless youngest son toward a future career in the church. Henry tried to find lands for John by reaching far afield. He betrothed the boy to Alais, daughter of Count Humbert III of Savoy, promising John a future inheritance of Savoy, Piedmont and Maurienne. Alais crossed the Alps to join Henry's court, but she died before the marriage, leaving the prince once again with nothing. Henry kept searching at the expense of others. In 1175 he appropriated the estates of the late Earl of Cornwall for John. The following year he disinherited the sisters of Isabella of Gloucester, against legal custom, and betrothed John to the now wealthy heiress. Then in 1177, at the Council of Oxford, Henry dismissed William FitzAldelm as Lord of Ireland and replaced him with the ten-year-old John. The boy who was supposed to inherit nothing was being handed pieces of other people's fortunes, one castle and county at a time.

• 3. The Favourite Son

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  In 1173, John's elder brothers, backed by Eleanor, rose against their father in a revolt that lasted from 1173 to 1174. Henry the Young King travelled to Paris and allied with Louis VII, and Eleanor encouraged Richard and Geoffrey to join him there. Henry II triumphed and was generous in the peace settlement at Montlouis, but only Eleanor was imprisoned for her role. John had spent the entire conflict at his father's side. From then on, most observers regarded John as Henry II's favourite child, even though he was furthest from the succession. The family kept tearing itself apart. Henry the Young King fought a short war against Richard in 1183, then died of dysentery at the end of the campaign. His death pushed John forward, and Henry made him Duke of Aquitaine in place of Richard. When Richard refused to surrender the duchy, Henry ordered John and Geoffrey to march south and take it by force; they attacked Poitiers, Richard struck back at Brittany, and the war ended in stalemate. Geoffrey died during a tournament in 1186, leaving a posthumous son named Arthur, which brought John slightly closer to the throne. By the summer of 1189, Richard and Philip II had fought Henry to defeat and forced him to promise Richard the succession. John, who had stayed loyal to his father, switched sides once it looked like Richard would win. Henry died shortly afterward, and the favourite son had abandoned him at the very end.

• 4. Brother's Keeper

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  When Richard became king in September 1189, he was already determined to join the Third Crusade, and he needed John quiet while he was away. He made John Count of Mortain, married him to Isabella of Gloucester, and granted him lands across Lancaster, Cornwall, Derby, Devon, Dorset, Nottingham and Somerset. To limit the danger, Richard kept royal control of the key castles in those counties and named his four-year-old nephew Arthur as his heir. In return, John promised to stay out of England for three years. That promise did not hold. Eleanor persuaded Richard to let John into England, and the political situation quickly soured. Richard had left authority in the hands of William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, alongside Bishop Hugh de Puiset, and Longchamp made himself unpopular with the nobility and clergy. John exploited that resentment, setting up his own royal court with its own justiciar and chancellor, posing as an alternative regent. By October 1191, Longchamp was isolated in the Tower of London while John controlled the city. Then the news arrived that changed everything. Richard had been captured near Christmas 1192 by Duke Leopold V of Austria, handed to Emperor Henry VI, and held for ransom. John went to Paris, allied with Philip, and agreed to set aside Isabella of Gloucester to marry Philip's sister Alys. Fighting broke out in England, but John's position was weak. When Richard returned in early 1194, John's forces surrendered. Richard found his brother in Normandy, dismissed him as a child of twenty-seven who had been led astray by evil counsellors, and forgave him, stripping his lands except Ireland. John spent the rest of the reign serving Richard on the continent, even leading a raiding party within fifty miles of Paris and capturing the Bishop of Beauvais.

• 5. Collapse In France

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  After Richard's death on the 6th of April 1199, two claimants stood for the Angevin throne: John, the sole surviving son of Henry II, and young Arthur of Brittany, son of John's elder brother Geoffrey. Norman law favoured John; Angevin law favoured Arthur; medieval law gave little guidance. John won the backing of the English and Norman nobility and was crowned at Westminster Abbey, while Arthur drew the Breton, Maine and Anjou nobles and the support of Philip II. The early years brought a fragile peace. In the May 1200 Treaty of Le Goulet, Philip recognised John as Richard's rightful heir to the French possessions, and John accepted Philip as his legitimate feudal overlord. Some English chroniclers sneered at the bargain, giving him the title John Softsword in contrast to his more aggressive brother. The peace lasted barely two years. In August 1200, John married Isabella of Angoulême, a girl of twelve or fourteen who was already engaged to Hugh IX of Lusignan. The Angoumois lands gave John a vital route between Poitou and Gascony, but he treated Hugh with contempt rather than offering compensation. The Lusignans appealed to Philip, who summoned John to court in Paris in 1202, then declared him in breach of his feudal duties and reassigned his French lands to Arthur. War returned, and at first John triumphed. He swung his mercenary army south to rescue his mother Eleanor at Mirebeau Castle, surprising Arthur and capturing the entire rebel leadership. Then he threw the victory away. He ignored his powerful ally William de Roches and kept the prisoners in such bad conditions that twenty-two of them died. The regional nobility, bound by kinship to the dead men, found this unacceptable, and they deserted to Philip. Arthur himself was imprisoned at Falaise, then moved to Rouen, where modern historians believe John had him murdered. The annals of Margam Abbey claim John, while drunk, slew Arthur with his own hand and threw the weighted body into the Seine. In March 1204, Château Gaillard fell. John's mother Eleanor died the following month. By August, Philip had taken Normandy and pushed south into Anjou and Poitou, leaving John only the Duchy of Aquitaine on the continent.

• 6. The King As Lawgiver

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  John inherited a sophisticated administration in England, with a Chancery for records, a Treasury and Exchequer for money, and judges sent around the kingdom to deliver justice. He was active in every aspect of government and stayed in England far longer than his predecessors, making his rule unusually personal, even in long-ignored regions like the north. The administration of justice mattered to him most of all. Building on processes introduced under Henry II, such as novel disseisin and mort d'ancestor, he gave the royal courts a larger role in local cases. He increased the professionalism of local sergeants and bailiffs and extended the system of coroners first introduced by Hubert Walter in 1194, creating a new class of borough coroners. The historian Lewis Warren credits him with discharging his royal duty of providing justice with a zeal and a tirelessness to which the English common law is greatly indebted. The same energy had a colder side. John may have valued the legal system as much for its fees as for its fairness, and it applied only to free men. Free tenants welcomed a more reliable system that could bypass the barons, but the barons themselves resented being subject to arbitrary and frequently vindictive royal justice. The reforms that delighted ordinary tenants helped set powerful men against him.

• 7. The Price Of Everything

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  John needed enormous sums to fund his campaigns to reclaim Normandy, and he squeezed every source he could find. The Angevin kings drew income from their personal lands, from their feudal rights, and from taxation, but the royal demesne had been shrinking since the Norman Conquest, and Richard's sale of royal properties in 1189 made matters worse. So John intensified everything until contemporaries called him avaricious, miserly, extortionate and moneyminded. The numbers tell the story. He levied scutage, the cash payment that replaced feudal military service, eleven times in his seventeen years as king, matching the total of the three previous reigns combined, often when no campaign was underway. He charged crushing relief payments when estates were inherited, taxed the Jews of England so heavily that the tallage of 1210 extracted forty-four thousand pounds, and created a new tax on income and movable goods in 1207 that produced sixty thousand pounds. He even sold the charter for the planned town of Liverpool. Money was also a weapon. Debts owed by favoured supporters might be forgiven, while debts owed by enemies were enforced without mercy. The most infamous case was William de Braose, 4th Lord of Bramber, who refused to pay a demand of forty thousand marks. John imprisoned de Braose's wife Maud and one of their sons, who both died in captivity, while de Braose himself died in exile in 1211 and his grandsons stayed in prison until 1218. This was royal anger, the Angevin tradition of ira et malevolentia, turned into a financial machine that could cripple a vassal completely.

• 8. War With Rome

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  When Archbishop of Canterbury Hubert Walter died on the 13th of July 1205, John fell into a dispute with Pope Innocent III that would lead to his excommunication. John wanted his own supporter, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, as the new archbishop, but the Canterbury chapter claimed the right to elect, and the bishops of the province claimed it too. The matter went to Rome, where Innocent rejected every candidate and consecrated his own choice, Stephen Langton, in June 1207. John was incensed at what he saw as a violation of his customary right to influence the election. He barred Langton from England and seized the lands of the archbishopric. In March 1208, Innocent placed an interdict on England, halting religious services except baptisms for the young and confessions for the dying. John treated it as the equivalent of a papal declaration of war. He seized the lands of clergymen who would not conduct services, arrested the concubines that many clerics kept and released them only for fines, and accrued large sums from vacant sees and abbeys. One 1213 estimate put the church's losses at one hundred thousand marks, roughly fourteen percent of its annual English income flowing to the King. Innocent excommunicated John in November 1209, but the King barely flinched, since two of his close allies had already suffered the same punishment. What finally moved him was fear of a French invasion. In May 1213, at the Templar Church at Dover, John accepted the papal terms in the presence of the legate Pandulf Verraccio. He surrendered the Kingdom of England to the papacy for an annual feudal service of one thousand marks, a deal formalised in the Golden Bull. The humiliation paid off, because Innocent became a firm supporter of John for the rest of his reign and turned at once against Philip.

  In 1214 John launched his final campaign to retake Normandy, backed by Emperor Otto IV, Renaud of Boulogne and Ferdinand of Flanders, with papal favour and substantial funds behind him. When he left for Poitou in February, many barons refused service, and mercenary knights filled the gaps. The plan was to split Philip's forces, with John pushing north-east from Poitou while his allies marched south-west from Flanders. The first part went well; John retook the county of Anjou by the end of June. Then it fell apart. At the castle of Roche-au-Moine, the local Angevin nobles refused to advance with John, and he retreated to La Rochelle. Shortly afterward, Philip won the hard-fought Battle of Bouvines against Otto and John's other allies, ending all hope of recovering Normandy. John returned Anjou to Philip, paid compensation, and arrived back in England in October to face the consequences. The historian James Holt describes the path to civil war as direct, short and unavoidable after Bouvines. Many of the disaffected barons came from the north of England, a faction contemporaries called the Northerners, men who had no stake in the French war but owed John large sums of money; one description calls the revolt a rebellion of the king's debtors. John held a council in London in January 1215 to discuss reforms and sponsored talks in Oxford that spring, appearing to play for time until Innocent could send explicit papal support. In 1215, John and the barons agreed to Magna Carta as a peace treaty, a document later considered a foundational milestone in English and British constitutional history. Neither side complied with its terms, and civil war erupted, with the barons aided by Philip's son Louis. John died of dysentery in eastern England in late 1216, amid the fighting, and the following year supporters of his son Henry III defeated Louis and the rebel barons. The treaty he never honoured outlived the war he could not win.