Part IV
10
As dawn broke on 11 April 1199, a new era began for William Marshal. Having chosen to serve and to support John, he threw his full weight behind the count’s claim to the English crown. That morning, Marshal’s most trusted household knight, John of Earley, was immediately dispatched to England to bring word of King Richard’s death to Marshal’s old ally, Geoffrey FitzPeter, now justiciar of the realm. Earley also must have informed Geoffrey of the choice made by Marshal and Archbishop Hubert Walter at Rouen, for together these three great men would now work to ensure that the kingdom of England passed to John.
Count John appears to have been in Normandy when he himself heard the news of Richard’s death, and though he evidently received some form of declaration of allegiance from William and Archbishop Walter, they are unlikely to have met in person. The count’s first thought was to rush south to Chinon, to claim the Angevin treasury; meanwhile, Marshal and the archbishop were sent across the Channel to prepare the ground for John’s arrival. The History dealt with this whole period in vague and brief terms, trying wherever possible to distance William from John’s cause, but it is clear from other contemporary evidence that Marshal played a leading role in securing the support of the English nobility.
Some, like the earl of Salisbury, William Longsword, were content to back John’s claim from the start. Longsword was John’s half-brother, being a bastard son of King Henry II. Born around 1167, William was some twenty years younger than Marshal, and in certain respects their careers were not dissimilar. As his nickname would imply, Longsword was a distinguished knight and had fought in Normandy through the late 1190s alongside Richard the Lionheart. He also achieved power through marriage. When the earl of Salisbury (Marshal’s cousin) died in 1196, his six-year-old daughter and heir, Ela of Salisbury, was betrothed to Longsword, and he duly assumed control of the prestigious Wiltshire lordship. In John’s reign, the new earl would serve alongside William Marshal as a leading military commander and become a close associate of the Marshal family.
Others were not so readily persuaded during the spring of 1199, and a number of barons even prepared their castles for war. Some may have been reluctant to back John because of his treachery in 1193 and 1194, but most were simply aware that there were gains to be made in the midst of a contested succession, and now wanted a guarantee of ample reward in return for supporting their endorsement. At a council convened at Northampton, William Marshal, Geoffrey FitzPeter and Hubert Walter stood surety for John’s intentions, pledging ‘their word’ that the magnates would receive ‘their due’. As a result, some of England’s greatest magnates, including Earl Richard of Clare, Ranulf, earl of Chester and David, brother of King William I of Scotland, ‘swore fealty and faithful service’ to John. Marshal had not acted as a ‘kingmaker’ in the full sense of the word, but he had certainly eased John’s path to power.
Towards the end of May, John was ready to cross to England, having been invested as duke of Normandy at Rouen in late April – receiving the ducal sword and a delicately wrought golden circlet, topped with a border of roses. But Marshal did not await John’s arrival; instead he crossed back to Normandy and was with John when he sailed to England from Dieppe on 25 May. This desperately solicitous attendance upon the man who would soon be king looks telling. Though no record of their dealings in this critical period survive, it is likely that Marshal applied the same wheedling pressure for reward, remarked upon by Henry II in 1188, to the new heir-apparent John – currying favour and bidding for preferment. It was certainly the case that William benefited from royal largesse in the first years of John’s reign.
THE BENEFITS OF LOYALTY
On 27 May 1199, John was crowned and anointed in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Hubert. Immediately after the ceremony, the king rewarded the three men who had helped to orchestrate his coronation. Hubert was appointed as royal chancellor, while Geoffrey and William underwent their own ritual, receiving the symbolic swords of office from John that marked them as earls – the highest title achievable among the English aristocracy, with historical roots stretching back to the Anglo-Saxon and Viking eras. Geoffrey FitzPeter thus became earl of Essex, while Marshal could now style himself ‘earl of Pembroke’. In recognition of their loyalty to the crown, both men were accorded the honour of serving John at the royal feast that evening.
William and Geoffrey had attained this eminence by following strikingly different paths: Marshal was the career soldier – the knight and commander who could prove his worth in war, yet navigate the world of politics; FitzPeter, the clerk and arch-courtier, was prized for his governmental efficiency and ability to nurture Angevin power and wealth. Geoffrey’s ascent reflected a broader, and deeply significant, trend – the increasing emphasis on administrative competence over martial prowess among the medieval English aristocracy. An earl’s sword may have been girded to Geoffrey’s side, but unlike William Marshal, he was no warrior. In times of conflict, when King John called upon FitzPeter, as earl of Essex, to uphold his ancient obligations to the crown – supplying knights for military service – Geoffrey would not lead his own war-band, but instead would pay a fixed fee into the royal coffers, which could then be used to hire troops. In the future, this increasingly popular system of payment (known as ‘scutage’) would have profound consequences, both for England and the institution of knighthood.
The earl of Pembroke
William Marshal was now in his early fifties and remained a distinguished military figure. His recent promotion placed him in the uppermost ranks of England’s nobility – the grant of the earldom of Pembroke further enhanced his status and brought a major lordship in the far reaches of west Wales. The Clare dynasty (of Marshal’s wife Isabel) held a long-standing entitlement to this region, but it had been in royal hands since the 1150s. William took possession of his new lands in 1200, gaining direct control of a territory twice the size of Striguil with claims upon the neighbouring Welsh castles of Cardigan and Cilgerran. Marshal seems to have been understandably proud of his new position. Pembroke now became the centrepiece of his ever-expanding lordship – though Striguil continued to serve as an important Marshal residence – and William immediately began to use the title ‘earl of Pembroke’ in official documents.
Even so, Marshal did not adopt a new seal. Many men of similar eminence had elaborate seal-dies fashioned during this period to reflect their elevated standing in society. The wax seals that these great magnates of the realm appended to documents echoed those used by the king, were replete with symbols of authority and often bore a dynasty’s ‘coat of arms’. One of William’s peers, Robert FitzWalter (who inherited a major barony in Essex and London in 1198), commissioned a fabulously ornate, silver seal-die that showed him decked out in full armour, sword raised, astride a warhorse – and this is now on show in the British Museum. For all his ambition, William Marshal seems to have rejected such ostentatious displays of rank; for the remainder of his life, he retained the same small, simple seal that he had used as a household knight in the late 1180s. During the time of Henry the Young King, William had proudly proclaimed his promotion to the level of ‘knight-banneret’, sporting his own colours and war cry. Now, twenty years later, he seems to have acted with more caution. We can only speculate about what Marshal’s decision to keep his diminutive seal might indicate in respect to his character – perhaps it was born out of humility or disinterest in the trappings of power, or it may have reflected a conscious, and confident attempt at understatement.
The History of William Marshal made no direct acknowledgement of its hero’s appointment as earl of Pembroke, recording only that ‘many fine gifts were made’ after John’s coronation. This was a staggering omission given the importance of the earldom to William’s career. The History’s portrayal of John had always been guarded, but the text became increasingly evasive on the issue of Marshal’s dealings with the new monarch. The fact that William owed his greatest honour to King John’s patronage was excised; indeed, Pembroke itself was virtually written out of the History, being mentioned only once, and even then not in connection with Marshal.
William’s biographer tried to conceal it, but there is no doubt that Marshal was showered with favours in this period. In addition to the grant of Pembroke, he was reappointed sheriff of Gloucestershire, with the keeping of the royal castles of Gloucester and Bristol. Other members of the Marshal dynasty also basked in the glow of crown benefaction, with William’s ‘nephew’ John Marshal (the namesake and bastard son of his elder brother), receiving the guardianship of a Norfolk heiress, Aline of Rye. William himself was now, unquestionably, one of the most powerful and influential men in England. With Striguil, Pembroke and the longstanding claim to Leinster in Ireland, the new earl could begin to plot a glorious future for his dynasty – lifting the Marshal line to unimagined heights, achieving a form of immortality.
William may have seen little option but to support John’s claim in April 1199 – recognising that he was the only successor likely to be accepted in England, and potentially able to save Normandy. But Marshal had benefited richly nonetheless. There were many others who likewise pursued advantage in the period, some with far more predatory determination. One of the leading ‘sharks’ was Marshal’s northern neighbour in the Welsh Marches, William of Briouze – who had succeeded to his family’s lands in the early 1190s. He had been present at Châlus when Richard I died and later verified the Lionheart’s deathbed confirmation of John’s status as his heir. Under the new regime, Briouze enjoyed spectacular extensions to his lands in Wales and reclaimed his family’s rights to Limerick in Ireland, though most of these benefits came with the price of fixed ‘fines’ – monies owed to the crown – which left Briouze shouldering a mountain of debt. Like Marshal, Briouze rose high in John’s favour, and both were to be found in the monarch’s company almost constantly in the early years of the new century. But John would not prove to be an easy king to follow.
A ‘CRUEL AND LECHEROUS’ KING
King John was thirty-one years old when he assumed the English crown in 1199. He had been judged handsome, though slightly built, in his younger days, but a dissolute appetite for fine wine and rich food meant that he tended to corpulence as the years passed. Measurements taken in the late eighteenth century, when John’s tomb was opened, showed that he was five-foot-six-and-a-half inches tall – around average for the time. In physical terms he may have seemed rather unimpressive when compared to Young King Henry and Richard the Lionheart, and in a real sense he had lived his life in the shadow of these elder and greater brothers. But now his time had come, just as a new century dawned.
John was one of England’s most notorious and controversial kings: reviled by many in the Middle Ages and often condemned by historians today; the first of his name to rule the realm, and the last. Though another two Richards and seven Henrys would follow in the centuries to come, John’s infamy was such that no other English monarch has ever borne his name. In the course of his turbulent reign, the great Angevin Empire forged by his father would be dismembered, the kingdom of England brought to its knees and the rival Capetian French left ascendant. These years of catastrophe would define the shape and course of William Marshal’s later life.
Some of John’s failings had been apparent even before his coronation. The betrayal of the Old King in 1189 and the attempted coup of 1193–4 proved that, like all of his brothers, he possessed a marked capacity for treachery, but in John this was fatally allied to a dearth of political judgement and an inclination to cruelty. Nonetheless, in the last years of the twelfth century he had shown some quality, loyally supporting Richard and acquiring a degree of skill in the art of war. Though he lacked the Lionheart’s creative genius and vision, John was at least capable of decisive action. Concerns about his character and competence lingered, but in 1199, there was every hope that the burden of kingship would bring greater maturity and purpose to his behaviour.
The character and failings of King John
John would prove to be a troubled and troublesome monarch. Not the near-demonic, villainous figure of legend perhaps, nor the indolent fool conjured up by chroniclers in the decades after his death – the man supposedly content to lie abed with his young wife while the French ransacked the realm; but a dangerous, unpredictable king, distrustful, petty and malicious. This was the deeply flawed individual that William Marshal now had to serve, attempting to navigate his capricious nature and survive his predations. Within a year of John’s coronation problems were already apparent, with the well-informed eyewitness, Ralph of Diss, declaring the new king’s actions to be ‘unworthy of the royal majesty’.
In some respects, John was not so dissimilar from his fêted forebears. He was born of a line of overbearing and exploitative monarchs. There had been a strong edge of tyranny and oppression to Old King Henry’s reign, while the Lionheart taxed his subjects relentlessly to fund his military campaigns. Richard had also shown a capacity for brutality and sexual violence. He executed and mutilated mercenaries in the early 1180s and was said, around the same time, to have molested the women of Aquitaine; during the Third Crusade, he put thousands of Muslim captives to the sword. But crucially, Henry II’s and Richard I’s military and political successes had silenced most critics, and their abuses of power were directed against groups who might be deemed ‘outsiders’, at least in the minds of the Angevin and Anglo-Norman elite.
By contrast, John quickly developed a reputation for mistreating his own nobles, stepping beyond the boundaries of socially acceptable behaviour and alienating the very families upon whom his power depended. As one of his followers would later admit, John was a ‘cruel and lecherous’ man. By 1200, Western European nobles had become increasingly intolerant of arbitrary or unnecessarily vicious punishment (at least when meted out among their own ranks), so John generally refrained from open execution. Instead, his preferred method of retribution involved incarcerating enemies and then slowly starving them to death. Stories of his licentious sexual indiscretion also abounded. Kings were expected to have mistresses, but not to pursue the wives and daughters of their own nobles. Rumour had it that John tried to bed the northern baron, Eustace de Vesci’s wife Margaret and, indeed, was only prevented from the act when a prostitute, dressed to resemble the noblewoman, was sent to his room. The king was also accused of attempting to force himself on Robert FitzWalter’s daughter, Matilda. For the moment at least, William Marshal and his family avoided such altercations, but the earl was now operating in a dangerous and unpredictable political environment – standing alongside a monarch who was condemned as an ‘enemy of nature’ by contemporaries.
King John’s most damaging character flaws were a marked inability to inspire confidence in others and his own profoundly suspicious nature. As the History of William Marshal observed: ‘He who trusts no one is distrusted by all the world.’ Royal records reveal the extent of John’s paranoia, offering a glimpse of the incredibly elaborate system of coded communication that he instituted. By this confusing scheme, certain royal orders were supposed to be deliberately ignored by crown officials, unless accompanied by a special covert sign – a process that was not aided by the fact that John sometimes forgot his own code. The king also had a worrying tendency to promote followers to positions of power, but then seek to strip them of their lands and titles when he decided they had become over-mighty. Where King Henry II had kept his courtiers hungry, John allowed them to feed, but then ripped away their rewards without cause or warning.
Under such a capricious regime, William Marshal had to tread a cautious path. But the course of John’s troubled reign would also reveal the web of interdependence that connected the Angevin dynasty to its aristocracy. Medieval kings relied on their nobles to uphold royal authority throughout the realm, but that support was not unconditional. Crown monarchs had long been expected to rule with a firm, but generally fair hand; but there was an increasing sense that they also ought to adhere to the same chivalric notions of honour and justice implicit in ‘knightly’ conduct. Kings who were more minded towards tyrannical exploitation needed access to an ample supply of lands and honours with which to buy acquiescence. But unfortunately for John, his reign coincided with a period of grave contraction, not fresh conquest. Under these conditions, William Marshal’s well-attested reputation for unflinching loyalty would be put to the ultimate test.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE
John’s reign would be marred by a succession of crises, but not all of the blame for these calamities can be laid at his feet. At the moment of his accession, the new king faced challenges that would have tested the mettle of any ruler. From the beginning, John’s claim to power was contested outside of Normandy and England. In other areas of the Angevin realm, such as Anjou, Maine and Brittany – where the system of primogeniture predominated – Duke Arthur of Brittany’s claim (as the son of John’s elder brother) was upheld, in spite of the fact that he was still only twelve years old. Naturally, the Capetian King Philip Augustus was happy to encourage a damaging succession dispute among the Angevins and recognised that the young Breton might be easily manipulated. The French monarch thus declared his support for Arthur’s cause and duly received his homage for the Angevin lands on the Continent.
While John gained the support of the English and Norman aristocracy after Richard I’s death – thanks in part to William Marshal – elsewhere, many well-established servants of the crown, like Andrew of Chauvigny, sided with Duke Arthur. The most influential of these supporters was William des Roches, a skilled knight similar to William Marshal, who had prospered under King Richard. After the Third Crusade, des Roches had also fought alongside the Lionheart during the wars with Capetian France, earning the hand in marriage of Marguerite of Sablé, heiress to estates in Anjou and Maine. But in 1199, des Roches backed Arthur of Brittany’s claim and, in return, was appointed seneschal of Anjou, with control of Le Mans.
This schism among the Angevin aristocracy was inevitable, given the lack of clarity surrounding the succession in the late 1190s. Before the disaster at Châlus, Richard must have expected that he would have many years in which to finalise his choice of heir, and probably still hoped to produce a son of his own. Nonetheless, John initially made some progress towards a reconciliation. William des Roches began to question Philip Augustus’ underlying intentions in the autumn of 1199, when the French king invaded Angevin territory and laid waste to the fortress of Ballon. Des Roches protested that Philip had overstepped his authority, given that this region belonged to Duke Arthur, but the Capetian remained unrepentant. King John managed to exploit this estrangement, winning des Roches to his side (and confirmed the seneschal’s hereditary right to his office as part of the bargain). This was a major coup. Like William Marshal, des Roches had the power and influence to shift ‘public’ opinion in the Angevin heartlands. He duly delivered Le Mans into John’s hands and brokered a peace with young Arthur. When the boy and his mother, Constance of Brittany, travelled to Le Mans to discuss a settlement, John looked to be on the brink of reunifying the empire. Unfortunately, John’s unsavoury reputation cost him dearly. Almost as soon as he set foot in Le Mans, Arthur heard rumours that the king ‘intended to take him captive and throw him into prison’. That same night, the young duke and his mother fled, along with a number of Angevin nobles. The chance had been missed.
King John also had the misfortune to come to power just as his main rival, Philip Augustus, was reaching the height of his strength. After twenty years on the throne, the French king had grown in stature and experience. At thirty-four, he was only marginally older than John, but in real terms, he was already one of the elder statesmen of Western Europe. Contemporaries were only too aware of this shift, with the esteemed English prelate Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, declaring that ‘as the ox eats the grass down to its roots, so shall Philip of France entirely destroy this people’. Through Philip’s dutiful husbandry, the Capetian realm was enjoying a period of significant territorial growth, and the wealth of the French crown could at last match, even eclipse, that of the Angevins. In the early thirteenth century, Philip was able to amass a war chest of more than 85,000 marks; financial reserves that allowed him to win the arms race by recruiting large numbers of mercenaries and developing the most advanced siege weaponry. Richard I had found the Capetian king to be an implacable and determined enemy, but the Lionheart had been able to match, and usually exceed, Philip’s skills in the arts of war and diplomacy. John lacked this quality when he came to power and had little or no time to hone his abilities. In the years that followed, he would be outplayed by King Philip at almost every turn. As the History wistfully observed, the Capetian monarch ‘turned [John] upside down’. William Marshal was now following a king who was plainly incapable of matching his opponent.
The first significant move came with the Treaty of Le Goulet, agreed between John and Philip on 22 May 1200. On the face of it, this two-year truce favoured the Angevins. By its terms, John was recognised as Richard I’s rightful heir, and Arthur was required to pay him homage for Brittany. The question of the succession appeared settled. But the French king had learnt in 1194 that John had a tendency to make shortsighted concessions, and he now exploited that weakness. The price he extracted through the Treaty of Le Goulet was emasculating. First, and most importantly, Philip asserted his feudal rights over the Angevin realm when John agreed to pay homage to the Capetian monarch for all of his Continental French lands. Henry II and Richard had both performed similar submissions, but their subservience had always been symbolic. Philip cannily drove home the harder reality of John’s subordinate status by requiring him to pay 20,000 marks as the fee for succeeding to these lands. Such a demand would have been unthinkable in the past, yet John acquiesced, reinforcing the powerful sense that the French king was indeed his overlord; and if John owed his power to the Capetians – as the terms of Le Goulet implied – any ‘misbehaviour’ on his part in France might legally be punished.
Alongside this reassertion of Capetian royal rights, Philip negotiated three additional stipulations that, by increments, undermined John’s position. Territory in the Norman Vexin and the region around Évreux was conceded, leaving Normandy dangerously exposed to future aggression. John also agreed to sever the valuable alliance with Flanders that William Marshal had helped to engineer in 1197 (and the king later broke with Boulogne in a similar fashion), thus shifting the balance of power in northern France back in Philip’s favour. The treaty was sealed by a final condition: a new marriage alliance between the French king’s son and heir-apparent, Louis, who was then twelve, and John’s eleven-year-old niece, Blanche of Castile (the daughter of his sister Eleanor, who had married into the Castilian dynasty thirty years earlier). This union promised to further strengthen Capetian claims to Angevin territory and would come to have deep significance in the latter stages of William Marshal’s career.
Through this complex array of provisions, King Philip subtly outmanoeuvred his rival, carefully preparing the ground for the more open and decisive confrontation to come. John seems to have been largely oblivious to these dangers, but the Treaty of Le Goulet marked an important turning point. Chroniclers later recognised its significance and began to mark John with a humiliating new nickname. As a young man, without territory of his own, he had been known as ‘Lackland’. Now he was branded with another moniker – the ultimate put-down for the Lionheart’s little brother – John ‘Softsword’.
An uneasy peace held in the wake of Le Goulet, but steps were soon being taken to prepare Normandy for the onset of war. William Marshal’s lordship of Longueville lay in the far north-eastern reaches of the duchy, and he assumed a broader responsibility for this area of Upper Normandy in the early thirteenth century. This region, to the west of Dieppe and the River Béthune, effectively constituted the duchy’s second line of defence, lying some twenty miles back from the main frontier of the River Bresle. Marshal held two small castles at Longueville and Meleurs, but the main stone fortress protecting the Béthune valley was at Arques (just south of Dieppe). In the early spring of 1201, Marshal sent Jordan of Sauqueville – a recently recruited member of his military retinue – to oversee the strengthening of Arques’ already formidable battlements. Then in May, William himself crossed over to Normandy with a force of 100 knights, furnished by the king. By this stage, an invasion of Normandy was looming, because King John had been lured into making another significant diplomatic blunder.
The allure of Isabella of Angoulême
In the first years of his reign, John benefited from the support and guidance of his elderly mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Before Richard I’s death, she had been living in semi-reclusion at Fontevraud Abbey, but the succession crisis brought her back on to the political stage and, despite being in her mid-seventies, she had retained much of her vigour and mental acuity. It was Eleanor who helped to enforce John’s authority in Aquitaine in 1199, and then deftly secured the support of the Lusignan dynasty by granting them the disputed county of La Marche in early 1200. She even found the energy to cross the Pyrenees and fetch her young granddaughter, Blanche of Castile, from Spain, so as to seal the terms of Le Goulet – though she had been unable to prevent John from agreeing to such damaging concessions. Understandably exhausted by this grand excursion, and suffering from illness, Eleanor returned to Fontevraud to rest and recover.
In her absence, John suddenly decided to take a new wife. His union with Isabella of Gloucester had been annulled on the grounds of consanguinity soon after his coronation, and he now alighted upon the daughter of Audemar, count of Angoulême, as a suitable bride. This girl, Isabella of Angoulême, was perhaps twelve years old (and possibly as young as eight), and though some suggested that John was driven to marry her by a ‘mad infatuation’, he was perhaps equally attracted by the prospect of confirming Angoulême’s support, a step that would secure the region between Poitiers and Bordeaux. So it was that the couple were duly wed on 24 August 1200. At first glance this appeared to be a rather shrewd political match, but there was an underlying problem. Isabella had already been betrothed to Hugh of Lusignan (Geoffrey of Lusignan’s nephew), and he now went into open rebellion. William Marshal was with the king at this point, but it is not clear whether he offered any counsel on the issue of the marriage. However, according to two well-informed contemporaries, John decided to wed Isabella ‘on the advice of his lord, Philip, king of France’, so it may well be that the Capetian monarch had deliberately primed a trap for his enemy and then watched contentedly as it snapped shut.
After John’s and Isabella’s wedding, Hugh of Lusignan protested vehemently at the grave offence caused to his honour, arguing that his binding betrothal had been illegally overturned. Ultimately, he brought his grievance to the Capetian royal court in Paris, and not surprisingly, Philip Augustus offered Hugh a sympathetic ear. Whether by devious design or simple fortune, Philip now had the perfect excuse to move against his Angevin opponent. After John’s submission in the Treaty of Le Goulet, the French king had every right to summon his Angevin vassal to answer the Lusignans’ charges. John wriggled, evaded and ultimately refused to appear in the Capetian court. This left King Philip free to formally declare the confiscation of John’s Continental lands in April 1202. The Capetian monarch later knighted Arthur of Brittany (who was now fifteen) with his own hand, and accepted his oath of homage for all of the Angevin lands; the sole exception being Normandy, which Philip now claimed as a crown possession. The French king had been gifted a legal cause to drive John out of France.
The crisis of 1202
Philip Augustus launched an immediate invasion of eastern Normandy, alongside Baldwin of Flanders. Together, they quickly pushed over the first line of defence in the Eu valley, taking the fortresses of Eu and Aumale, and marched on to seize Neufchâtel. A more sustained siege of Gournay followed, but that too fell in July. Upper Normandy was thus on the brink of collapse when Philip turned north to assault the major royal castle of Arques, in the territory guarded by William Marshal and the earl of Salisbury, William Longsword.
Marshal had been hard at work bolstering the stronghold’s defences: financial records show that in the middle weeks of June alone, he spent 1,600 Angevin pounds (drawn from the crown treasury) on improving its fortifications and strengthening its garrison. This level of frantic expenditure gives a clear sense of the alarm now felt throughout eastern Normandy. William Marshal seems to have recognised that he was likely to be badly outnumbered in the conflict ahead. When the Capetians marched on Arques, around 20 July, the fortress itself was left under the command of King John’s castellan, William Mortimer, while Marshal and Longsword pulled back west. Together, they held a sizeable mobile force in the field, and launched a succession of skirmishing attacks against the French forces investing Arques. This was a sound strategy, but ranged against the full force of Philip Augustus’ army, their cause still looked hopeless.
Then in early August, news of an extraordinary Angevin victory reached Upper Normandy. While King Philip attacked in the north, Duke Arthur of Brittany had opened up a second front to the south, invading Anjou with an army of Breton knights and other supporters, including Andrew of Chauvigny. The aged Queen Eleanor had been trying to maintain a grip over the region, but soon found herself besieged in the castle of Mirebeau. When King John heard of this attack, he took decisive action – prosecuting a lightning-quick forced march south from Le Mans, alongside nobles such as William des Roches and William of Briouze. Together they covered eighty miles in just two days, and fell on Arthur of Brittany’s unsuspecting troops at dawn on 1 August 1202. Briouze captured the young duke, and another 252 knights were taken prisoner. Eleanor was saved and Mirebeau secured; it was the greatest triumph of John’s reign.
The king immediately dispatched a messenger north to inform William Marshal of this success. Philip Augustus also heard the tidings from Mirebeau and broke off his siege of Arques, fearing that John would now be able to pour an overwhelming concentration of forces into Upper Normandy. The Capetians had still made important gains along the eastern frontier, but the duchy had been saved. The History described, in gleeful terms, how Marshal and Longsword withdrew with their troops to Rouen and enjoyed a lavish feast of celebration that included no small quantity of fine wine.
It seemed that King John had regained the initiative. His mother, Eleanor, had been left drained by the effort of holding Mirebeau, and now went into permanent retirement in Fontevraud Abbey. But in all other respects, John’s position had been transformed. He had affirmed his military competence; he now held more than 250 valuable hostages, each of whom could be ransomed either for money or strategic advantage; and he had his rival Arthur of Brittany in captivity. If John took the right steps, moving with shrewd caution, the fortunes of the Angevin Empire might be restored. At this moment, perhaps more than any other, he had a chance to steer his reign back on to a steady course.
As it was, the king squandered this crucial opportunity, and a dreadful corner was turned in his career, from which there would be no return. Even as William Marshal rejoiced in Normandy, John began to mistreat the hundreds of captives taken at Mirebeau. Under normal circumstances, these nobles would have been kept in confinement, but treated with respect and allowed to live in relative comfort, while the terms of their release were negotiated. In 1202, the vast majority of John’s prisoners – including Arthur of Brittany – simply disappeared. Many were sent to castles in Normandy and southern England, and starved to death. Andrew of Chauvigny’s exact fate is uncertain, but he was dead by 1203.
The king’s merciless behaviour caused a serious scandal. The History recorded that John treated his captives ‘so vilely and in such evil distress that it seemed shameful and ugly to all those who were with him and who saw this cruelty’. William des Roches had been a friend, and even kinsman, to scores of the knights seized at Mirebeau, and a former supporter of young Duke Arthur. At first, des Roches entreated the king to observe the normal conventions, and report on prisoners’ whereabouts and well-being, but his requests met with a stony silence. The king seems to have assumed that he could flout accepted custom with impunity, but he was mistaken. As one chronicler noted, his ‘pride and arrogance . . . so blurred his vision that he could not see reason’.
William des Roches was so disgusted by John’s behaviour that he abandoned him – transferring his allegiance to Philip of France – and the leading nobles in the Angevin heartlands soon followed suit. Through late 1202 and early 1203, the thin veneer of support that John had enjoyed in the south shattered, and he rapidly lost control of Maine, Anjou and Touraine. Even in Normandy, nobles began to question the king’s judgement and reconsider their positions. In January 1203, the lord of Alençon (on the southern border with Maine) declared for the Capetians; many others would follow. William Marshal’s biographer loathed King John, but he also despised turncoats, and he now likened these renegade Norman nobles to stinking pieces of rotten fruit, infecting all around them. For now, Marshal remained loyal and returned to defend Upper Normandy, but the crisis had barely begun.
The fate of Arthur
After his capture at Mirebeau, Duke Arthur of Brittany – John’s fifteen-year-old nephew – was held in confinement in Normandy. He seems to have been taken first to the castle of Falaise (in the centre of the duchy), and probably remained there at least until early 1203. The king appears to have been unsure of how to deal with this young prisoner, the rival claimant to the English crown and wider Angevin realm. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the wise choice would have been either to commit Arthur to lifelong imprisonment in England, but afford him a relatively comfortable existence, or to use him as a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations with Philip Augustus over the fate of Normandy. But John’s suspicious nature trumped reason. He did not trust his servants to hold the duke in indefinite captivity, and he seems to have doubted his own ability to secure advantageous terms from the Capetians.
According to the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, unnamed ‘counsellors’ initially advised the king to have Arthur blinded and castrated, ‘thus rendering him incapable of rule’. Three men were sent to Falaise ‘to perform this detestable act’, but John’s chamberlain, Hubert of Burgh, intervened at the last moment to save the duke, ‘having regard for the king’s honesty and reputation’. Through the early months of 1203, the questions being asked about Arthur’s treatment became increasingly voluble, and dark rumours began to circulate. At some point before the start of April, he seems to have been moved to the citadel at Rouen, probably by William of Briouze, who would later claim that he could ‘no longer answer’ for Arthur’s safety once he had been delivered into custody.
The duke’s exact fate from this point forward remains a mystery. Two contemporary accounts, seemingly based on the oral testimony of Briouze, indicated that, on 3 April, John confronted his prisoner in a drunken rage, and ‘possessed by the Devil’, proceeded to crush his skull with a rock. Arthur’s body was weighted down and thrown into the Seine, only to be later found by a fisherman, and discreetly buried at the nearby priory of Notre-Dame-des-Pré. The king may have committed this act of murder, with Briouze as an eyewitness; or it could be that Briouze did the terrible deed himself, following John’s orders, and only later sought to transfer the blame. The truth will never be known, but Duke Arthur of Brittany was not seen again.
William of Briouze certainly appears to have been complicit in Arthur’s disappearance, and was evidently told to remain silent on the matter. In the years that followed, John continued to promote Briouze’s interests and add to his lands, keeping him close to the crown. But William was carrying a dangerous secret – one that would ultimately lead to his ruin. The king would also be haunted by the rumours surrounding Arthur’s death for the remainder of his reign, with accusations of treachery and foul play multiplying. He had handed his enemies a significant advantage. From this point forward, Philip Augustus was able to respond to any overtures towards diplomacy with the damaging demand that John must produce Duke Arthur – alive and well – before any talks could begin. TheHistory remained silent on this whole episode, but given the course of later events, it is possible that William Marshal eventually came to know the truth of the matter.
The loss of Normandy
By the early summer of 1203, a mounting number of nobles were defecting to the Capetian cause. All the hopes of renewal briefly entertained after Mirebeau had been dashed, and to many it seemed that the battle for Normandy was already a lost cause. Nonetheless, a defence was mounted. Longsword was sent to hold the western frontier against the Bretons, while William Marshal joined King John in patrolling the duchy’s central and eastern reaches, ahead of an expected French offensive.
When the final blows came, they were shockingly effective. Philip Augustus launched a massive incursion from the region around Évreux in June, marching on Vaudreuil in the Seine valley–the fortress standing guard over the western approaches to Rouen. The castle was under the command of Robert FitzWalter, but its garrison surrendered to the French without offering any resistance. This gave Philip control of the left bank of the Seine, and critically, a position downstream from Les Andelys and the great stronghold of Château Gaillard. The Capetians were now in a position to hamper any attempts to resupply Richard the Lionheart’s famous military complex.
King Philip began to tighten the noose in August, laying siege to Gaillard and Les Andelys, along with his renowned military commander William des Barres. Here at least, the Angevin troops put up a hard-fought stand, with Gaillard’s garrison led by the formidable Roger of Lacy. King John and William Marshal began to plan an offensive of their own in September, hoping to break the French siege. This disastrous operation was not recorded in the History, and was only described in detail by a single Breton account. The plan called for a coordinated attack, with Marshal leading a land-based force (alongside John’s mercenary commander Lupescar), linking up with a second body of troops that had sailed up the Seine, thereby enveloping Philip’s army. Unfortunately, the French hold on Vaudreuil made it difficult to navigate the river in daylight, so the assault was timed for the early hours, just before dawn. It proved to be a depressing shambles. The sailors transporting the water-borne contingent misjudged the strength of the Seine’s currents, and their ships failed to arrive as planned. Isolated and outnumbered, Marshal’s division was badly mauled by William des Barres’ men, and soon driven off, and when the second force finally arrived on the river it was quickly decimated. It was one of the most humiliating reversals of William Marshal’s military career.
The failure to relieve Les Andelys and Gaillard delivered a crushing blow to Angevin morale. King John’s position in Normandy was now collapsing at a desperate rate. Sections of Upper Normandy around Arques and Marshal’s own estate at Longueville still held, but elsewhere losses were mounting. According to the History, William Marshal was sent on an embassy to discuss terms of truce with King Philip Augustus, but this was not mentioned in any other source and, in any case, met with no success. The Capetian knew full well that he was closing in on overall victory, so ‘there was no question of peace’. John’s deepening paranoia also left him increasingly fearful of treachery. He began to suspect that his own Norman vassals would take him prisoner and hand him over to the French and, according to one contemporary, refused to make any further attempt to save Château Gaillard, ‘through fear of treason of his men’.
With the approach of winter, John decided to return to England. The official line was that he was leaving ‘to seek advice and help from his barons [and would] then make a speedy return’, but according to the History, his decision to take Queen Isabella with him from Rouen meant that many ‘feared his stay would be a long one’. The great ducal city was left under the guardianship of William Marshal’s old associate, Peter of Préaux. By this point, Les Andelys had fallen to the French, but Gaillard remained under Roger of Lacy’s command, holding out against a close siege. Outside of a few remaining outposts, such as Arques in Upper Normandy and Verneuil on the southern frontier, the duchy had been overrun. On 5 December 1203, John set sail from Cherbourg with Marshal at his side. William’s biographer afforded this voyage only the briefest mention, but the atmosphere on board must have been desperately sombre, for the king’s departure was a tacit admission that Normandy was now lost.