John of England

John "Lackland"
King of England; Lord of Ireland (more...)
John from the Historia Anglorum
John from the Historia Anglorum'
Reign 6 April 1199 – 18/19 October 1216
Predecessor Richard I "the Lionheart"
Successor Henry III "of Winchester"
Spouse

Consort		 Isabel, Countess of Gloucester
m. 1189; ann. 1199
Isabella of Angoulême
m. 1200; wid. 1216
Issue Henry III "of Winchester"
Richard, Earl of Cornwall
Joan, Queen of Scots
Isabella, Holy Roman Empress
Eleanor, Countess of Leicester
Titles and styles
The King
The Earl of Gloucester and Cornwall
The Earl of Cornwall
John Plantagenet
Royal house House of Plantagenet
Father Henry II "Curtmantle"
Mother Eleanor of Aquitaine
Born 24 December 1166(1166-12-24)
Beaumont Palace, Oxford
Died 18/19 October 1216 (aged 49)
Newark Castle, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire
Burial Worcester Cathedral

John (24 December 1166 – 19 October 1216[1]) reigned as King of England from 6 April 1199, until his death. He succeeded to the throne as the younger brother of King Richard I (known in later times as "Richard the Lionheart"). John acquired the nicknames of "Lackland" (French: Sans Terre) for his lack of an inheritance as the youngest son and for his loss of territory to France, and of "Soft-sword" for his alleged military ineptitude.[2] He was a Plantagenet or Angevin king.

Apart from entering popular legend as the enemy of Robin Hood, he is also known for when he acquiesced to the nobility and signed Magna Carta, a document limiting his power which is popularly thought as an early first step in the evolution of modern democracy.

Contents

Early life

While John was his father's favourite son, as the youngest he could expect no inheritance. His family life was tumultuous, as his older brothers all became involved in rebellions against Henry. His mother, Eleanor, was imprisoned by Henry in 1173, when John was a small boy.

As a child, John was betrothed to Alys (pronounced 'Alice'), daughter and heiress of Humbert III of Savoy. It was hoped that by this marriage the Angevin dynasty would extend its influence beyond the Alps, because John was promised the inheritance of Savoy, the Piemonte, Maurienne, and the other possessions of Count Humbert. King Henry promised his young son castles in Normandy which had been previously promised to his brother Geoffrey, which was for some time a bone of contention between King Henry and his son Geoffrey. Alice made the trip over the Alps and joined Henry's court, but she died before being married.

Gerald of Wales relates that King Henry had a curious painting in a chamber of Winchester Castle, depicting an eagle being attacked by three of its chicks, while a fourth chick crouched, waiting for its chance to strike. When asked the meaning of this picture, King Henry said:

The four young ones of the eagle are my four sons, who will not cease persecuting me even unto death. And the youngest, whom I now embrace with such tender affection, will someday afflict me more grievously and perilously than all the others.

Before his accession, John had already acquired a reputation for treachery, having conspired sometimes with and sometimes against his elder brothers, Henry, Richard and Geoffrey. In 1184, John and Richard both claimed that they were the rightful heir to Aquitaine, one of many unfriendly encounters between the two. In 1185, John became the ruler of Ireland, whose people grew to despise him, causing John to leave after only eight months.

Richard's absence

During Richard's absence on the Third Crusade from 1190 to 1194, John attempted to overthrow William Longchamp, the Bishop of Ely and Richard's designated justiciar. This was one of the events that inspired later writers to cast John as the villain in their reworking of the legend of Robin Hood.

John was more popular than Longchamp in London, and in October 1191 the leading citizens of the city opened the gates to him while Longchamp was confined in the tower. John promised the city the right to govern itself as a commune in return for recognition as Richard's heir presumptive.[3] While returning from the Crusade, Richard was captured by Leopold V, Duke of Austria, and imprisoned by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor. John is said to have sent a letter to Henry asking him to keep Richard away from England for as long as possible, but Richard's supporters paid a ransom for his release because they thought that John would make a terrible king. On his return to England in 1194, Richard forgave John and named him as his heir.

Reign

Dispute with Arthur

When Richard died, John did not gain immediate universal recognition as king. Some regarded his young nephew, Arthur of Brittany, the son of John's late brother Geoffrey, as the rightful heir. Arthur fought his uncle for the throne, with the support of King Philip II of France. The conflict between Arthur and King John had fatal consequences. By the May 1200 Treaty of Le Goulet, Philip recognised John over Arthur, and the two came to terms regarding John's vassalage for Normandy and the Angevin territories. However, the peace was ephemeral.

The war upset the barons of Poitou enough for them to seek redress from the King of France, who was King John's feudal overlord with respect to certain territories on the Continent. In 1202, John was summoned to the French court to answer the charges one of which was his marriage to Isobel of Angouleme who was already engaged to Guy de Lusignan. John was called to Phillip's court after the Lusignans pleaded for his help. John refused, and, under feudal law, because of his failure of service to his lord, the French King claimed the lands and territories ruled by King John as Count of Poitou, declaring all John's French territories except Gascony in the southwest forfeit. The French promptly invaded Normandy; King Philip II invested Arthur with all those fiefs King John once held (except for Normandy) and betrothed him to his daughter Marie.

Needing to supply a war across the English Channel, in 1203 John ordered all shipyards (including inland places such as Gloucester) in England to provide at least one ship, with places such as the newly-built Portsmouth being responsible for several. He made Portsmouth the new home of the navy. (The Anglo-Saxon kings, such as Edward the Confessor, had royal harbours constructed on the south coast at Sandwich, and most importantly, Hastings.) By the end of 1204, he had 45 large galleys available to him, and from then on an average of four new ones every year. He also created an Admiralty of four admirals, responsible for various parts of the new navy. During John's reign, major improvements were made in ship design, including the addition of sails and removable forecastles. He also created the first big transport ships, called buisses. John is sometimes credited with the founding of the modern Royal Navy. What is known about this navy comes from the Pipe Rolls, since these achievements are ignored by the chroniclers and early historians.

In the hope of avoiding trouble in England and Wales while he was away fighting to recover his French lands, in 1205, John formed an alliance by marrying off his illegitimate daughter, Joan, to the Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great.

As part of the war, Arthur attempted to kidnap his own grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, at Mirebeau, but was defeated and captured by John's forces. Arthur was imprisoned first at Falaise and then at Rouen. No one is certain what happened to Arthur after that. According to the Margam Annals, on 3 April 1203:

After King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time in the castle of Rouen... when [John] was drunk he slew [Arthur] with his own hand and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine.

However, Hubert de Burgh, the officer commanding the Rouen fortress, claimed to have delivered Arthur around Easter 1203 to agents of the King sent to castrate him and that Arthur had died of shock. Hubert later retracted his statement and claimed Arthur still lived, but no one saw Arthur alive again, and the supposition that he was murdered caused Brittany, and later Normandy, to rebel against King John.

Besides Arthur, John also captured his niece, Eleanor, Fair Maid of Brittany. Eleanor remained a prisoner the rest of her life (which ended in 1241); through deeds such as these, John acquired a reputation for ruthlessness.

Dealings with Bordeaux

In 1203, John exempted the citizens and merchants of Bordeaux from the Grande Coutume, which was the principal tax on their exports. In exchange, the regions of Bordeaux, Bayonne and Dax pledged support against the French Crown. The unblocked ports gave Gascon merchants open access to the English wine market for the first time. The following year, John granted the same exemptions to La Rochelle and Poitou.[4]

Dispute with the Pope

Pope Innocent III and King John had a disagreement about who would become Archbishop of Canterbury which lasted from 1205 until 1213.

When Archbishop of Canterbury Hubert Walter died on 13 July 1205, John became involved in a dispute with Pope Innocent III. The Canterbury Cathedral chapter claimed the sole right to elect Hubert's successor and favoured Reginald, a candidate out of their midst. However, both the English bishops and the king had an interest in the choice of successor to this powerful office. The king wanted John de Gray, one of his own men, so he could influence the church more.[5] When their dispute could not be settled, the Chapter secretly elected one of their members as Archbishop. A second election imposed by John resulted in another nominee. When they both appeared in Rome, Innocent disavowed both elections, and his candidate, Stephen Langton, was elected over the objections of John's observers. John was supported in his position by the English barons and many of the English bishops and refused to accept Langton.

John expelled the Chapter in July 1207, to which the Pope reacted by imposing the interdict on the kingdom. John immediately retaliated by seizure of church property for failure to provide feudal service. The Pope, realizing that too long a period without church services could lead to loss of faith, gave permission for some churches to hold Mass behind closed doors in 1209. In 1212, they allowed last rites to the dying. While the interdict was a burden to many, it did not result in rebellion against John.

In November 1209 John was excommunicated, and in February 1213, Innocent threatened stronger measures unless John submitted. The papal terms for submission were accepted in the presence of the papal legate Pandulph in May 1213 (according to Matthew Paris, at the Templar Church at Dover);[6] in addition, John offered to surrender the Kingdom of England to God and the Saints Peter and Paul for a feudal service of 1,000 marks annually, 700 for England and 300 for Ireland.[7] With this submission, formalised in the Bulla Aurea (Golden Bull), John gained the valuable support of his papal overlord in his new dispute with the English barons.

Dispute with the barons

Having successfully put down the Welsh Uprising of 1211 and settling his dispute with the papacy, John turned his attentions back to his overseas interests. The European wars culminated in defeat at the Battle of Bouvines (1214), which forced the king to accept an unfavourable peace with France.

This finally turned the barons against him (some had already rebelled against him after he was excommunicated), and he met their leaders at Runnymede, near London on 15 June 1215 to seal the Great Charter, called in Latin Magna Carta. Because he had signed under duress, however, John received approval from his overlord the Pope to break his word as soon as hostilities had ceased, provoking the First Barons' War and an invited French invasion by Prince Louis of France (whom the majority of the English barons had invited to replace John on the throne). John travelled around the country to oppose the rebel forces, including a personal two month siege of the rebel-held Rochester Castle.

Death

John's tomb effigy

Retreating from the French invasion, John took a safe route around the marshy area of the Wash to avoid the rebel held area of East Anglia. His slow baggage train (including the Crown Jewels), however, took a direct route across it and was lost to the unexpected incoming tide. This dealt John a terrible blow, which affected his health and state of mind. Succumbing to dysentery and moving from place to place, he stayed one night at Sleaford Castle before dying on 18 October (or possibly 19 October) 1216, at Newark Castle (then in Lincolnshire, now on Nottinghamshire's border with that county). Numerous, possibly fictitious, accounts circulated soon after his death that he had been killed by poisoned ale, poisoned plums or a "surfeit of peaches".

He was buried in Worcester Cathedral in the city of Worcester.

His nine-year-old son succeeded him and became King Henry III of England (1216–72), and although Louis continued to claim the English throne, the barons switched their allegiance to the new king, forcing Louis to give up his claim and sign the Treaty of Lambeth in 1217.

Legacy

King John's tomb

King John's reign has been traditionally characterised as one of the most disastrous in English history: it began with defeats—he lost Normandy to Philip Augustus of France in his first five years on the throne—and ended with England torn by civil war and himself on the verge of being forced out of power. In 1213, he made England a papal fief to resolve a conflict with the Roman Catholic Church, and his rebellious barons forced him to sign Magna Carta in 1215, the act for which he is best remembered.

As far as the administration of his kingdom went, John functioned as an efficient ruler, but he lost approval of the English barons by taxing them in ways that were outside those traditionally allowed by feudal overlords. The tax known as scutage, payment made instead of providing knights (as required by feudal law), became particularly unpopular. John was a very fair-minded and well informed king, however, often acting as a judge in the Royal Courts, and his justice was much sought after. Also, John's employment of an able Chancellor and certain clerks resulted in the first proper set of records—the Pipe Rolls.

Medieval historian C. Warren Hollister called John an "enigmatic figure":

...talented in some respects, good at administrative detail, but suspicious, unscrupulous, and mistrusted. He was compared in a recent scholarly article, perhaps unfairly, with Richard Nixon. His crisis-prone career was sabotaged repeatedly by the halfheartedness with which his vassals supported him—and the energy with which some of them opposed him.

Winston Churchill summarised the legacy of John's reign: "When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns".[8]

In 2006, he was selected by the BBC History Magazine as the 13th century's worst Briton.[9]

Depictions in fiction

King John as shown in Cassell's History of England (1902)

These reflect the overwhelming view of his reputation:

Marriage and issue

In 1189, John was married to Isabel of Gloucester, daughter and heiress of William Fitz Robert, 2nd Earl of Gloucester (she is given several alternative names by history, including Avisa, Hawise, Joan, and Eleanor). They had no children, and John had their marriage annulled on the grounds of consanguinity, some time before or shortly after his accession to the throne, which took place on 6 April 1199, and she was never acknowledged as queen. (She then married Geoffrey de Mandeville as her second husband and Hubert de Burgh as her third).

John remarried, on 24 August 1200, Isabella of Angoulême, who was twenty years his junior. She was the daughter of Aymer Taillefer, Count of Angouleme. John had kidnapped her from her fiancé, Hugh X of Lusignan.

Isabella bore five children:

John is given a great taste for lechery by the chroniclers of his age, and even allowing some embellishment, he did have many illegitimate children. Matthew Paris accuses him of being envious of many of his barons and kinsfolk, and seducing their more attractive daughters and sisters. Roger of Wendover describes an incident that occurred when John became enamoured of Margaret, the wife of Eustace de Vesci and an illegitimate daughter of King William I of Scotland. Eustace substituted a prostitute in her place when the king came to Margaret's bed in the dark of night; the next morning, when John boasted to Vesci of how good his wife was in bed, Vesci confessed and fled.

John had the following illegitimate children:

By an unknown mistress (or mistresses) John fathered:

(The surname of FitzRoy is Norman-French for son of the king.)

Ancestors

John's ancestors in three generations
John of England Father:
Henry II of England		 Paternal Grandfather:
Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou		 Paternal Great-grandfather:
Fulk of Jerusalem
Paternal Great-grandmother:
Eremburge of La Flèche
Paternal Grandmother:
Empress Matilda		 Paternal Great-grandfather:
Henry I of England
Paternal Great-grandmother:
Matilda of Scotland
Mother:
Eleanor of Aquitaine		 Maternal Grandfather:
William X of Aquitaine		 Maternal Great-grandfather:
William IX of Aquitaine
Maternal Great-grandmother:
Philippa of Toulouse
Maternal Grandmother:
Aenor de Châtellerault		 Maternal Great-grandfather:
Viscount Aumary Châttellerault
Maternal Great-grandmother:
Dangereuse de L'Isle Bouchard

Alleged illiteracy

For a long time, schoolchildren have been told that King John had to approve Magna Carta by attaching his seal to it because he could not sign it, lacking the ability to read or write. This textbook inaccuracy ignored the fact that King John had a large library he treasured until the end of his life. Whether the original authors of these errors knew better and oversimplified because they wrote for children, or whether they had been misinformed themselves, is unknown. As a result of these writings, generations of adults remembered mainly two things about "wicked King John," both of them wrong (the other being his supposed association with Robin Hood).

King John did actually sign the draft of the Charter that the negotiating parties hammered out in the tent on Charter Island at Runnymede on 15 June–18 June 1215, but it took the clerks and scribes working in the royal offices some time after everyone went home to prepare the final copies, which they then sealed and delivered to the appropriate officials. In those days, legal documents were made official by seals, not by signatures. When William the Conqueror (and his wife) signed the Accord of Winchester (Image) in 1072, for example, they and all the bishops signed with crosses, as illiterate people would later do, but they did so in accordance with current legal practice, not because the bishops could not write their own names.

Henry II had at first intended that John would receive an education to go into the Church, which would have meant Henry did not have to give him any land. In 1171, however, Henry began negotiations to betroth John to the daughter of Count Humbert III of Savoy (who had no son yet and so wanted a son-in-law.) After that, talk of making John a cleric ceased. John's parents had both received a good education — Henry spoke some half dozen languages, and Eleanor had attended lectures at what would soon become the University of Paris — in addition to what they had learned of law and government, religion, and literature. John himself had received one of the best educations of any king of England. Some of the books the records show he read included: De Sacramentis Christianae Fidei by Hugh of St. Victor, Sentences by Peter Lombard, The Treatise of Origen, and a history of England—potentially Wace's Roman de Brut, based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.

Notes

  1. ↑ Some sources indicate he died on 18 October
  2. ↑ "King John was not a Good Man". Icons of England. Retrieved on 2006-11-13.
  3. ↑ Stephen Inwood, A History of London, London: Macmillan, 1998, p.58.
  4. ↑ Hugh Johnson, Vintage: The Story of Wine p.142. Simon and Schuster 1989
  5. ↑ Haines, Roy Martin (2004). Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: John de Gray. Oxford University Press. 
  6. ↑ Knights Templar Church at English Heritage website
  7. ↑ See Christopher Harper-Bull's essay "John and the Church of Rome" in S. D. Church's King John, New Interpretations, p. 307.
  8. ↑ Humes, James C. (1994). The Wit & Wisdom of Winston Churchill: p.155
  9. ↑ BBC

References

External links

John of England
House of Plantagenet
Born: 1166 24 December Died: 1216 19 October
Regnal titles
Preceded by
Richard I		 King of England
1199–1216		 Succeeded by
Henry III¹
French nobility
Preceded by
Richard I		 Duke of Aquitaine
1199–1216		 Succeeded by
Henry III¹
Duke of Normandy
1199–1204		 Succeeded by
Philip II of France²
Count of Maine
1199–1203
Peerage of Ireland
New title
Conquest of Ireland³
 Lord of Ireland
1185–1216		 Succeeded by
Henry III
Notes and references
1. Louis VIII of France was proclaimed king after the First Barons' War but was never crowned. Having been accepted as king by the barons4 as well as by Alexander II of Scotland5, there is a good case for acknowledging Louis as King of England, though he gave up his claim in 1217 with the Treaty of Lambeth.
2. The County of Maine and the Duchy of Normandy were annexed by the Kingdom of France — and permanently lost to the Kingdom of England — in 1203 and 1204, respectively.
3. The Lordship of Ireland nominally took over the island, with Papal approval (see the Papal bull Laudabiliter), from the High Kings of Ireland, the title being lost by Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair in the late 12th century. The English retained only nominal overlordship of Ireland (see The Pale) until the Tudor re-conquest of Ireland in the 16th century.
4. Carpenter, David, The Struggle for Mastery, The Penguin History of Britain 1066–1284 page 300: “Louis, eldest son of the king of France, to whom the rebels had offered the throne, held London and the allegiance of nineteen of the twenty-seven greatest barons.”
5. ibid in The Struggle for Mastery, page 299: “…Carlisle was surrendered to Alexander who then came south to do homage to Louis for the Northern Counties.”
Family information
Geoffrey V of Anjou
House of Anjou
 Henry II
 John of England
Matilda of England
House of Normandy
William X of Aquitaine
House of Poitiers
 Eleanor
Duchess Regnant of Aquitaine
Aenor de Châtellerault
House of Châtellerault
Notes and references
1. Tompsett, Brian, Directory of Royal Genealogical Data (Hull, UK: University of Hull, 2005).
2. Ross, Kelley L., The Proceedings of the Friesian School (Los Angeles, US: Los Angeles Valley College, 2007).
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