It was Thursday 3 April 1203: the Thursday before Easter and a mournful time for all Christians. King John was drunk and angry. As he sat down to his dinner in Rouen, he was surrounded by invisible enemies and oppressed by dark thoughts. He trusted almost no one, and could not ride safely around his own duchy without fear of ambush or attack. All around him his enemies gathered. John was in the mood to lash out.
Also in Rouen that night was Arthur of Brittany. Arthur, however, was not enjoying a debauched dinner. He had been transferred from Falaise after the debacle of his mutilation, and had languished in a dungeon in Rouen castle ever since. William de Briouze, an immensely powerful and wealthy nobleman whose estates stretched across the Welsh borders, had escorted the prisoner to his king. It was Briouze who had captured Arthur at Mirebeau. As a close ally of John, and knowing the mood of his king when he delivered up the young duke, he claimed that he would no longer answer for Arthur’s safety.
Briouze’s fears were well founded. After dinner on Maundy Thursday, John’s drunkenness turned demonic. We will never know what precisely he was thinking. The best witness we have says he was possessed by the devil. Certainly he must have appeared a terrifying spectre to all who saw him as he made his way, drunk and violent, to Arthur’s cell. Although we cannot be totally certain of the facts of that terrible night, it is highly likely that John entered the prisoner’s cell and killed the young man with his own hands, before tying a heavy stone to his nephew’s lifeless body and throwing it into the river Seine, where it was later retrieved by a fisherman. The nuns of Notre-Dame-des-Prés afforded Arthur a Christian burial in secret, for fear of John’s wrath.
If it was possible to visit greater sacrilege on the festival of Easter and the office of kingship, then no king of John’s family ever did. But John did not seem to feel much remorse. In fact, he seems to have taken comfort from his nephew’s death. He sent a letter to Eleanor of Aquitaine soon afterwards, with a cryptic message containing the words ‘the grace of God is even more with us now than [the messenger] can tell you’.
But John was wrong. The grace of God was about to abandon him, with disastrous consequences. Normandy, Brittany and greater France had been swirling with rumours of Arthur’s fate for months. The news of his death would not become fully accepted at Philip’s court until 1204, but even while it was only a foul rumour, the duke’s murder placed John in an impossible position. In all subsequent negotiations with Philip II, the French king had a trump card. ‘No peace until you first produce Arthur,’ was the refrain. And now, even if he had wanted peace, John could do no such thing.
As summer 1203 unfolded, Philip took advantage of John’s perilous position – trapped in Normandy between Bretons and rebellious Poitevins in the south, while the French king’s own armies pushed at the Norman borders in the east. John continued to base himself in Rouen, and sallied back and forth between the eastern front and his main base. At neither was the news ever encouraging. Philip gambolled throughout Plantagenet territories as he pleased. When Philip visited the south he was able to take a boat all the way down the Loire – the artery through what should have been the Plantagenet trunk – in perfect safety.
In such a climate, Norman morale began simply to dissolve. Castles in the frontier ring capitulated as soon as Philip approached. John lost Conches, then Vaudreuil, with barely a whisper. The knights garrisoning the latter, disgracefully, did not even bother to mount a proper defence. The Norman defences were eroded with the ease of melting sandcastles. At the end of August, the French army rumbled towards the pearl in the collection: Château Gaillard.
Richard’s prized citadel was built to be unbreachable. But now Philip’s forces massed around the fortress, which towered on enormous cliffs, with the Seine sweeping round a bend below. They blockaded the river, hoping to starve the enemy into submission. One night at the end of summer in 1203, John attempted to break the blockade with a flotilla of supply boats and an accompanying commando force of mercenaries. Led by William Marshal, John’s men attacked in the warmth of the late summer night. But luck cruelly deserted John. As the rowers struggled with the current of the Seine, they lost step with the land army on the riverbank, and the massive invasion fleet was picked off in staggered waves by the French defenders, until the river ran red in the darkness.
This was the end of John’s serious attempts to save Château Gaillard, the symbol of defiance built by the last great duke of Normandy. The siege lasted until March 1204, but John did not try to break it again. Instead, he made a few violent but useless attempts to distract Philip on the Breton front, burning the town of Dol. But the overriding sense during the autumn of 1203 was of John’s grip on power unravelling. Gossip spread that he spent all his time in bed with his teenage wife, dismissing demands to raise himself for a proper defence of Norman independence with the insouciant words ‘Let be, let be, whatever he takes now I will one day recover.’ William Marshal watched bewildered as the king took to riding aimlessly about the countryside, simply disappearing from his court without a word and touring the back roads of his own duchy, for fear of meeting traitors on the highways.
When Christmas 1203 approached, John left Normandy for the last time. Despite having promised that he would stay in his duchy and fight on for a year, in early December he made private preparations to send his baggage train back to England. Before dawn on the morning of 5 December, he rode hard from Rouen to Bayeux via Caen. As he left Barfleur harbour, with his queen beside him, John passed the rock that had killed the drunken revellers aboard his great-uncle William the Aetheling’s White Shipin 1120. That tragedy had been the catalyst for more than half a century of Plantagenet dominance over France, from Rouen to Toulouse. Now, although John’s more sober crew steered clear of danger and pulled strongly towards Portsmouth, that window of mastery was closing. Behind him in Normandy, the few remaining loyalists fought on, hoping against hope to hold out against Philip’s relentless advance. John promised to return to their side, but he never did.
Of the vast dominions conquered by Henry II and defended by Richard I, a ragged core remained. Barring isolated castles and pockets of loyalists, King John had lost most of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine. He was the most despised man in Brittany. He retained nominal control in Poitou and the rest of Aquitaine only because of the residual loyalty that the nobles of the duchy felt towards his mother. To reconquer what had been lost from a resurgent, vastly enriched French empire under a king who had handsomely earned his nickname Philip Augustus was a task that would have daunted John’s father and brother at the height of their considerable powers. John was totally inadequate to it, and it was the best that he could do to flee the embers of his collapsed continental empire with his tail between his legs. It was a dismal way to go.