CHAPTER 5
We have completely remitted and pardoned to all any ill will, grudge and rancour that have arisen between us and our subjects.
Magna Carta, Clause 62
The turbulent family life of the royal dynasty into which John was born would be familiar to viewers of television soap operas. Love, hatred and the desire for wealth or power are commonplace emotions, capable of complicating the lives of all families. The greater the wealth and power at stake the more intense the love and hatred is apt to be. The political successes and failures of John’s parents, Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, of his brother Richard the Lionheart, and of John himself were all, to a greater or lesser extent, bound up with sex, love and sibling rivalry.
Sex, love and war were the three great themes of the songs and romances of the age, of the stories on which John would have been brought up. The fabliaux treated sex with exuberantly bawdy humour. In one story a peasant is granted four wishes; when he allows his wife to have the first one, she wishes for him to be equipped with ‘extra pricks’ all over his body. Noblemen and noblewomen liked to think they were capable of finer feelings than this, of fin amor, usually referred to today as ‘courtly love’.
The fashionable poetry of courtly love occasionally celebrated the joys and sufferings of platonic love, the kind of love that theologians envisaged in paradise when, as they put it, ‘genital contact held no greater thrill than the clasp of a hand’. But far more frequently authors such as Hue de Rotelande (Rhuddlan) or the brilliant poetess Marie de France – who dedicated her songs to King Henry II – examined the pleasures and torments of sexual love, and of love in marriage, not just in adultery. In Marie’s layMilun, the unnamed heroine falls in love with Milun and, because she expects to marry him, sleeps with him – indeed they have a child. It does not work out, she has to marry someone else, but they find ways of staying in touch, and years later, when her first husband dies, they are married ‘and lived happily ever after’. But it was not just writers of songs and romances who believed that there should be love in marriage. The English monk and chronicler Matthew Paris said that a married couple was joined by law, love and ‘the harmony of the bed’.
The medical science fashionable at the time taught that conception only occurred when male and female sperm coalesced, and that women produced sperm only as a result of pleasure. This was why, men said, prostitutes did not get pregnant. Christian theologians and moralists disapproved of anyone doing anything for the sake of pleasure, but it does not look as though their disapproval carried much weight, at any rate where sex was concerned. The earliest surviving records of archdeacons’ courts show that 90 per cent of the offences brought before them were sexual, mostly fornication. Thomas of Chobham, the author of a handbook for confessors (written around 1215), described fornication as ‘the vice of everyone and excused by many’. Gerald de Barri urged his readers not to listen to those who said that fornication, far from being a mortal sin, was only natural. But many did listen to those siren voices. Many couples lived in long-term non-marital relationships. Church synods urged fornicators to marry – or, if they would not, at least to pay a fine. Adultery was taken much more seriously. The recommended penance for adulterers was that they should be whipped naked through the streets. Thomas of Chobham allowed that a husband who found his wife in adultery had the right to castrate her lover, even in those cases where the lover was a clerk. On this matter both Church and royal courts were of one opinion.
But Daniel of Beccles would not have approved of such a violent response by the husband. In his view, women found it virtually impossible to resist any well-endowed male, so wives were almost bound to be unfaithful. ‘One sinful act with her lover’, he wrote, ‘will please a wife more than a hundred lawful times with her husband.’ Although he recognised the husband’s right in law to punish the adulterer, his advice to the civilised man was: pretend not to notice. ‘It is better to conceal your shame as a husband than disclose the evil that brings a blush to your cheek and grief to your heart.’ He advised husbands not to beat their wives. So far as he was concerned marriage was the relationship on which society was founded, and whatever your wife did, or however much you came to dislike her, you should put up with it.
Daniel also advised you on what to do if your lord’s wife made a pass at you. In his view it would end badly whether you accepted or spurned her advances. Your only hope was to pretend to be ill. And he pointed out that the stupidest thing you could possibly do was to tell your lord, out of loyalty to him, what his wife was up to. One of Henry II’s courtiers, Walter Map, tells a story similarly based on the male notion that female sexual appetites were boundless. In this case when the queen made a pass at one of her husband’s knights, he got out of this awkward spot by pretending to be gay. Which was fine – until the queen sent her serving-maid to test him out. The conventional male opinion that women were sexually voracious was doubtless the other side of the same coin as the equally conventional male opinion that when a woman said no she almost certainly meant yes.
The physicians who believed that pleasure was necessary for conception were also inclined to take a frank view of sex – disconcertingly so in the eyes of those churchmen who put a high value on celibacy. The anonymous author of a work known as the Prose Salernitan Questions wrote that nothing natural could be shameful and that only hypocrites shied away from discussing sexual intercourse. It seems clear that he was writing in the west of England around 1200 since he mentions five English physicians, three of whom have been traced in early thirteenth-century Hereford documents; indeed one of them, Master Hugh de Mapenore, became bishop of Hereford in 1216.
It should be noted that there are some who have a big sexual appetite but who, being choleric, can do little. There are those, such as Master Hugh de Mapenore, who have little appetite but can perform energetically; others such as Master Reginald de Omine can do little and indeed have little appetite, others such as Master Philip Rufus of Cornwall have big appetites but can manage very little; others such as Master John Burgensis and especially Master William Chers have both a big appetite and an impressive performance.
Doctors also reckoned that regular sex was good for your health. Long absence meant that crusaders were thought to be risking their lives in more ways than one if they remained faithful to their wives while they were away. According to Ambroise, the poet-historian of the Third Crusade,
By famine and by malady
More than three thousand were struck down
At the siege of Acre and in the town.
But in pilgrims’ hearing I declare
A hundred thousand men died there
Because from women they abstained.
’Twas for God’s love that they restrained
Themselves. They had not perished thus
Had they not been abstemious.
John was born on Christmas Eve 1167 in the royal palace of Beaumont at Oxford. He was the youngest of eight, five boys, one of whom died young, and three girls, born to Henry and Eleanor in the first fifteen years of their marriage. His parents appear to have enjoyed the pleasure and harmony of their bed, and by this criterion at least their marriage had been a great success.
In a previous marriage lasting fourteen years, Eleanor had borne only two daughters. Her first husband, King Louis VII of France, had eventually decided that she was unlikely to bear the son he needed, and divorced her in 1152. For years before this the couple had been on bad terms. Eleanor was alleged to have had an eye for a handsome man, while Louis was deeply pious. He might have been influenced by those canon lawyers who taught that sex between spouses who had no affection for each other was a kind of adultery. In these circumstances it would not have been surprising that he should divorce Eleanor were it not for the fact that she was the heiress-duchess of Aquitaine. By divorcing her Louis risked losing a vast territory, roughly one-third of modern France, quite a high price to pay for a divorce.
In fact Louis VII belonged to the first generation of princes to face a new situation, one which created both great opportunities and awkward dilemmas. For the first time in European history women such as Eleanor, daughter of Duke William X of Aquitaine, were, if they had no brothers, inheriting counties, duchies and kingdoms. For this reason the twelfth century has been called the ‘century of heiresses’. Geoffrey of Anjou, known as ‘Plantagenet’, had married one such heiress, Matilda, King Henry I’s only surviving legitimate child, heiress to both England and Normandy. He had not got on at all well with Matilda, but chose to stay married to her. In previous centuries husbands had often repudiated their wives, but this was no longer an easy option for those who had married an heiress. When John was eight, Count Philip of Flanders, convinced that he had caught his wife in adultery, killed her alleged lover by hanging him upside down in a cess-pit. But his wife was the heiress to the rich county of Vermandois in north-eastern France, and he chose not to divorce her. By marrying Eleanor soon after her father died, Louis VII had enormously extended the territorial power of the king of France, but by 1152 the estrangement between him and Eleanor was so deep, and his desire for a son so great, that he chose divorce. Louis was not a ruthless man. He made no real effort to keep Eleanor under restraint either during or after the divorce proceedings. Eight weeks after the divorce she married Henry and transferred Aquitaine from her first husband to her second. This transformed the political shape of France overnight. Nominally Henry held his dominions in France as a subordinate of the king of France, but in reality he overshadowed him. Henry II was the most powerful king in Europe, richer even than the ruler of Germany, Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa.
The prevalent modern idea that marriage in the Middle Ages was just a matter of political expediency is nonsense. In a world dominated by dynasties the political consequences of sexual incompatibility and marriage breakdown could be devastating, as Louis discovered. Nearly all marriages were arranged on the basis of political calculation, but whether or not the couple remained married, and whether or not they had children, was at least as much a question of love and sex as it was of politics. Anyone who said that the association of love and marriage was merely an ecclesiastical or literary convention, an illusion which existed only in the dream world of poets or the spiritual world of theologians, was living in a dream world of their own, an illusory land of neat and tidy categories. The real world was much more complicated.
It was King John’s bad luck that in Philip II he had to face a king of France who was a devious politician, ruthlessly determined to overthrow the Plantagenet empire and take revenge for the humiliations that his father, Louis VII, had suffered at Henry II’s hands. But even so single-minded a ruler as Philip allowed his sexual problems to jeopardise his political ambitions. On 15 August 1193 he married Ingeborg, daughter of the king of Denmark. According to one French bishop, in beauty she was the equal of Helen of Troy. Next morning, however, Philip tried to return his wife to the custody of the Danish envoys who had escorted her to France. They refused to take her back. Philip and Ingeborg then fought a furious and prolonged legal battle over what had – or had not – happened during the one night they had spent together. Pope Innocent III told the king it would not be enough to give her the public status of a queen: he must also sleep with her, for ‘nothing could be more honourable or more holy’. Not until 1213, when Philip was planning to invade England and wanted to be sure that God would favour the enterprise, did he at last do the decent thing. According to his court historian, the news caused great joy throughout France. But for twenty years Philip’s political and diplomatic standing had been undermined by his attempt to secure a divorce that was recognised not just within his own kingdom – that was relatively easy – but also by the other ruling families of Europe.
Compared with how little we know about other families of the time, we are amazingly well informed about the family life of the Plantagenets. Young John must have learned early just how complicated family life could be. He was only five when, in 1173, his eldest brother Henry rebelled against their father. Young Henry found a willing ally in Louis VII of France, who was still smarting over the loss of Aquitaine. Astonishingly, Eleanor decided to join the revolt. She sent her next two sons, Richard and Geoffrey, aged fifteen and fourteen respectively, to join their brother at the court of her ex-husband in order to fight a war against her present husband. Why she did this is unknown and unknowable. We cannot see into her heart, and do not know whether she was jealous of a mistress or mistresses that Henry may by now have taken, or whether she was politically frustrated, or whether it was a combination of sex and politics. What is certain is that she was angry. Sons, often frustrated by having to wait too long – as they saw it – before being allowed a share of their father’s power, often rebelled. Henry understood this and was prepared to offer them terms. In his commentary on the revolt of 1173–4, the learned dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diss, searched back through history, and found more than thirty examples of rebellious sons. But for a wife to rebel against her husband was extraordinary. Ralph of Diss did not call a single case to mind. Eleanor must have been very angry indeed.
The revolt of Eleanor and her sons triggered a greater war, since it was inevitable that rival rulers would seize the opportunity to cut Henry II down to size. The kings of France and Scotland, the counts of Flanders, Boulogne and Blois all joined in, and so did many nobles from Poitou, Normandy and England. Fortunately for Henry II, the war had hardly begun when his men captured Eleanor; allegedly she was wearing men’s clothes. When the rebellion was over, he pardoned his three older sons and restored them to their former positions. Eleanor, however, he kept in custody or under close surveillance, mostly in Winchester, for the rest of his life.
In the war of 1173–4 all of Henry’s sons – apart from John who was too young to be actively involved – were on the same side. But after that the quarrels between them became notorious. At stake was the family inheritance. When their father died, how was it to be divided up? Henry had not put together an empire that was intended to survive his death. He had built up a family firm, and was going to divide it between his sons. It had already been arranged that his eldest son, Henry, should inherit England, Normandy and Anjou, that Richard would have Aquitaine, and Geoffrey Brittany. Kings, of course, were also expected to provide for their daughters. If they did not wish to become abbesses – and it was not as easy now to push an unwilling girl into a nunnery as it once had been – they would be given in marriage, usually with a cash dowry, to a neighbouring prince. Thereafter the costs of supporting them were borne by their husband’s family. In 1168 Henry married his eldest daughter Matilda to the richest of all German dukes, Henry the Lion, duke of Bavaria and Saxony. Eleanor was given to King Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1170; and Joanna to William II, king of Sicily, in 1177. At this stage only John was unprovided for. For this reason his father nicknamed him ‘Sans Terre’, Lackland.
In fact, John was only nine when his father betrothed him to Isabel, one of the three daughters of Earl William of Gloucester. He was too young to marry without a special dispensation from the pope. Canon law set the minimum age for marriage at fourteen for boys and twelve for girls, but betrothals between children too young to marry were common, and they rarely led to marriage. John’s brother Richard was betrothed first to a daughter of the count of Barcelona, then to Alice, daughter of Louis VII by his second wife, but he married neither. As political circumstances changed, so new betrothals were arranged. In 1183 – when John was fifteen – it was rumoured that King Henry was thinking of arranging a marriage between Alice and John. Gossip said much more than this. Alice had been in Henry II’s custody since 1169. For years both the pope and the king of France had been pressing him either to marry her to Richard at once or return her to the court of France. He never did. When he died in 1189 Alice was still in his custody, as she had been for twenty years. Henry’s steadfast refusal to hand her over naturally gave rise to scandal. After his death the evidence that the king had seduced the young woman entrusted to his custody compelled her brother Philip Augustus to release Richard from the engagement. From then on Philip would not rest until he had brought down the family who had dishonoured his sister.
After Eleanor’s rebellion, if not before, Henry II had a number of mistresses, most famously Rosamund Clifford. Even so, and despite the political difficulties it would inevitably cause, Henry had been unable to resist the temptation to seduce the young French princess in his care. The rumour that he planned to marry off his mistress to his youngest son reinforced the impression that the old king was thinking of an entirely new division of his empire. This exciting or alarming prospect set his sons quarrelling between themselves and sparked off new rebellions against their father, first by Henry and Geoffrey, then by Richard.
These civil wars within the family were not intended as wars to the death. On the contrary, the brothers only intended to bring pressure on their father to give them what they believed was their due. As the eldest son, Henry endured the permanent frustration of living in his father’s shadow. That he had actually been crowned king of England during his father’s lifetime did not help – if anything, it made things worse because it highlighted the contrast between his rank and his powerlessness. No king of England had carried through the coronation of his own heir before, and after the failure of Henry II’s misguided experiment, none would in the future. Geoffrey joined his brother in rebellion because he wanted real control over Brittany – the duchy to whose heiress he had been married. After the deaths of his two older brothers Richard wanted his father to acknowledge him publicly as his heir, which Henry very publicly refused to do – predictably adding fuel to the rumours that he was planning a bright future for his youngest son.
In the event every one of the Plantagenet feuds of the 1180s ended with the death of one of the family. The rebellion of 1183, during which Henry II came close to being killed by an arrow, ended abruptly when his eldest son fell ill and died – to his father’s intense grief. Geoffrey died suddenly in Paris in 1186 and was buried in Notre Dame. The war of 1189 ended with the defeat of the sick and exhausted Henry II by the combined forces of Richard and Philip Augustus. On 6 July, just a few days after his capitulation, the old king died. Many blamed Richard and John for their father’s death. It was reported that when Richard inspected his father’s body, blood flowed from the corpse’s nostrils as a sign that the dead man recognised his murderer. Many thought that Henry had died because he had received the appalling news that John had deserted him. John had remained loyal to his father throughout the family feuds of the previous six years, but when he calculated that the old king’s cause was lost he changed sides. Henry died in despair, cursing the day he had been born. In his long reign he had made many enemies, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Bretons, the king of France, the pope, even his own archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, but none of these had been able to overcome him. What, in the end, brought him down was his own family.
Eventually John did marry Isabel of Gloucester – at his brother’s insistence. After Richard came to the throne he had no intention of marrying Alice, but he didn’t want John to marry her either. The archbishop of Canterbury prohibited the wedding on the grounds that John and Isabel were too closely related – he was a great-grandson and she a great-granddaughter of Henry I – but it went ahead anyway. John appealed against the archbishop’s ban and the papal legate in England recognised his marriage as lawful pending the outcome of an appeal to Rome. Since John did not actually pursue the appeal, his marriage remained conveniently both legal and voidable. No doubt John preferred it that way. It is even possible that he never slept with Isabel. The new king of England was determined to go on crusade; if he were to die, John could expect to inherit the throne, and would then want a wife of higher status than an earl’s daughter. Sex with Isabel would complicate an attempt to get the ‘marriage’ annulled. In any case for a king’s son there was plenty of sex on offer elsewhere. John had at least seven illegitimate children, most probably born before he became king.
In dynastic politics the accidents of birth and death were crucial, and were themselves often the result of passion – or its absence. While on crusade Richard married Berengaria, a daughter of the king of Navarre, but the marriage turned out badly. They spent little time together and had no children. In the second half of the twentieth century it became fashionable to say that Richard was gay, and this is still widely believed, although it derives entirely from an anachronistic reading of the evidence. The well-informed English chronicler Roger of Howden reported that in 1187 Richard and King Philip of France shared a bed, but it was common for people of the same sex to do this then. It was an expression of trust not of sexual desire. It was common then, too, for men to kiss or hold hands, but these were political gestures of friendship or of peace, not erotic passion. It is a mistake to assume that an act that had one symbolic meaning eight hundred years ago carries the same message today. Richard was accused by rebels against his authority as duke of Aquitaine of ‘carrying off his subjects’ wives, daughters and kinswomen by force and then, when he had sated his own lusts on them, handing them on for his soldiers to enjoy’. He had an illegitimate son called Philip on whom he bestowed the lordship of Cognac. If he was bisexual, as is also suggested today, it was clearly a well-kept secret. His enemies – and he had plenty, particularly at the French court – accused him of many things, of murder, of disloyalty to the king of France, of betraying Christendom in making peace with Islam, but they never accused him of what they saw as ‘unnatural vice’. Since, however, he and Berengaria evidently did not enjoy the ‘harmony of the bed’, he still had no legitimate children when he was unexpectedly killed in April 1199. It was this that finally brought John, the runt of the Plantagenet litter, to the throne.
Richard, it was generally thought, had treated his younger brother with remarkable generosity – far too generously, said many. In England, in addition to the Gloucester inheritance, he was given control of the counties of Derby, Nottingham, Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset, and in Normandy the county of Mortain. As soon as John heard that Richard had been taken prisoner in Germany while on his way back from crusade, he betrayed him. In January 1193 he made an alliance with Philip of France, promising to hand over to him strategic fortresses along the Norman border, and agreeing to ditch Isabel and marry Philip’s sister Alice – this would surely have been a marriage of political expediency. But Alice was held by the counsellors, headed by his mother, Eleanor, who were governing in Richard’s name and they were certainly not going to release her to marry a traitor. So nothing came of John’s scheme to marry his father’s ex-mistress. By January 1194 Philip had given John control of three major Norman frontier fortresses, Arques, Drincourt and Evreux, and in return had received John’s promise that he would cede the whole of eastern Normandy to him. To offer to surrender lands that had been held by his ancestors for nearly three hundred years was a staggering betrayal, not just of his own crusader brother but of the whole dynasty.
No sooner had Richard been released than John changed sides again. Indeed, he did this so quickly and quietly that he was able to go to Evreux and have its French garrison killed while they still thought he was their commanding officer. He had now betrayed the king of France too. Treachery was a matter of deception and timing. It was one thing to oppose your father openly, and even – as Richard had done – to take up arms against him. It was quite another to pretend to be loyal but switch allegiance precisely at that moment when your support was most needed. John’s record of treachery between 1189 and 1194 was such that William of Newburgh called him ‘nature’s enemy’. After 1194 he seems to have worked hard to recover his brother’s trust and by 1197 he was regarded as heir presumptive to all of Richard’s dominions. When a wound from a crossbow bolt turned gangrenous, Richard named John as his successor.
When John became king he divorced the childless Isabel and married Isabella of Angoulême, in August 1200. His new queen was young; she looked about twelve, observed one chronicler. Their first child, Henry, was not born until 1207, and hence was still far too young to play a political role in 1215. Had there been an active heir to the throne in 1215, those who opposed John would have turned to him; there would have been no Magna Carta.
In other ways too family politics played its part in the making of Magna Carta. It was believed that the two fiercest of John’s baronial enemies, Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter, had personal reasons for taking up arms against him – even, John thought, trying to assassinate him. Eustace was angered by John’s attempt to seduce his wife, Margaret, daughter of King William of Scotland. According to later gossip, the de Vesci honour was only saved by the device of placing a suitably disguised prostitute in the king’s bed in place of Margaret. Robert FitzWalter announced far and wide that the king had attempted to rape his daughter. A monk of Waverley Abbey accused John of violating the wives and daughters of his barons. According to the author of the Histoire des ducs de Normandie, who was in the service of one of John’s commanders, the king was ‘a very bad man, cruel and lecherous’.
There was nothing unusual about a king having mistresses, including aristocratic mistresses; most of them did. Indeed, William of Newburgh said that for a young king to remain celibate was a greater miracle than raising someone from the dead. But John’s assaults on unwilling women of high status, the wives and daughters of his barons, was quite another matter. Whether true or not, as hostile propaganda these accusations of sexual harassment helped to establish the image of him as an immoral and bullying king who was unable to keep his desires under control.