He was some 12 inches (30 centimetres) shorter than Richard, and he may have suffered in implicit comparison with his brother and with his father. Certainly he grew up in a court filled with rivalries and suspicions of a more than usually bitter nature, with brother pitted against brother and brothers rising against their father. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gives the impression of being a wary and distrustful king. He went about armed and with a bodyguard.
He was not without humour, albeit often of a perverse kind. When he and his horse floundered in a marsh near Alnwick in Northumberland, he devised a suitable punishment for the men of that town who had not maintained the highway; he ordered that every newly created townsman should, on St Mark’s Day, pass through that slough on foot. The custom was still being observed in the early nineteenth century. When the pope placed the country under excommunication, the king ordered that the mistresses of all the priests should be held in captivity until their clerical lovers ransomed them. It was an interesting punishment. There is another intriguing memorial of his reign. Among the legal rolls, then being composed in unprecedented numbers, is one stating that ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville gives the lord king two hundred chickens that she may lie one night with her husband’. The import of this is unclear, but it may mean that the lady was one of the king’s paramours and that she was asking to return briefly to her marital bed. The three incidents reveal that side of medieval life where jocosity and cruelty are allied.
King John was capable of violent anger, like his Plantagenet antecedents. When some monks at Faversham occupied their church, to prevent him from installing the superior he had chosen for them, he ordered the entire monastery to be burned down; nobody obeyed him, and he relented. Monarchs, male and female, have always had bad tempers; it is an aspect of their power.
An element of cruelty, or of ruthlessness, is evident in the first years of his reign. Arthur of Brittany had fled to the court of the king of France in order to shield himself from his uncle’s far from avuncular intentions. In 1202, however, John found him. Both of them were on military campaign in France, fighting over the Angevin lands. The king of France had allotted them to Arthur, whereas John considered them to be his proper inheritance. Arthur, now fifteen, had been besieging his grandmother – Eleanor of Aquitaine – in the ancient castle of Mirebeau, near Poitiers in west-central France. The spectacle of grandson threatening grandmother throws further light on the behaviour of the Plantagenet family.
John, on receiving the news of the siege, marched with part of his army day and night; they covered 80 miles (130 kilometres) in forty-eight hours. Taken by surprise, Arthur and his forces were surrounded. The boy was delivered into the custody of John, and taken to a dungeon in Normandy; in an interview with his uncle, he was defiant. He demanded England, and all the lands bequeathed to him by Richard, apparently adding that he would not give him a moment’s peace until the end of his life. This was, perhaps, unwise. He was moved to a dungeon in Rouen, the capital of the duchy, and was never seen again.
The more picturesque accounts suggest that John, in a fit of Plantagenet fury, ran a sword through his nephew’s body and then dumped him into the river Seine. Or perhaps he hired an assassin. No one is quite clear. The evident fact, however, is that Arthur was dead within a few months. By the spring of 1203 it was widely believed that the king was instrumental in the murder of his nephew. This event has often been interpreted in the same light as the murder in the Tower of the two princes by their uncle, Richard III; but there is really no comparison. Pope Innocent III, for example, is reported as saying that Arthur was ‘captured at Mirebeau, a traitor to his lord and uncle to whom he had sworn homage and allegiance, and he could rightly be condemned without judgment to die even the most shameful of deaths’. A fifteen-year-old was considered to be an adult.
Although the death may have been a necessary and inevitable response by John, it helped to alienate his natural supporters in Normandy and elsewhere. Even more serious charges were levelled against him. He was severely criticized for his indolence or inactivity in the pursuit of war against the king of France. He was not acting like a king. One chronicler declared that he was sluggish, where his elder brother had proved himself to be vigorous and powerful. He became known as ‘John Softsword’. It was said that he had been enchanted by the sorcery of his wife, Isabella of Angoulême. It is more likely that he was infatuated by the power and majesty of kingship and refused to believe the worst. But the worst was happening. King Philip advanced further and further into Normandy, and the majority of John’s barons in that duchy defected to him. They no longer trusted the English king enough to remain loyal to him. There was soon very little left in France for John to defend. As the Angevin Empire collapsed around him, John sailed back to England. By June 1204 Philip had taken Normandy; all that remained of the duchy, in the possession of John, were the Channel Islands. Of the empire itself, only Gascony was preserved. It was the largest single blow to John during the whole of his reign.
The severance of England from Normandy, after 150 years of union, was at a later date deemed to be a natural and inevitable development by which France steadily became aware of its national identity. It heralded the rise of a national consciousness exploited by the Capetian kings. At the time, however, it was considered to be nothing less than a calamity for the king of England. He lost much of his income, from the taxation of Normandy and Anjou and Maine, and of course he forfeited a great deal of his prestige. Yet other consequences followed. The Anglo-Norman lords lost half of their identity. Once they had lost their lands in Normandy, it became clear that they would have to concentrate on those closer to what was now ‘home’. They steadily became more English. The Channel had become the border, as it had been in the tenth century, and King John began the construction of a proper navy to defend the English shores. The king no longer possessed Normandy, and as a result he paid more considered attention to England.
He kept the administrators from the last reign, knowing very well that the machinery of government depended upon them. It is from the beginning of the thirteenth century, for example, that we can trace the widespread use of written records as an instrument of state. Licences for imports and exports had to be drawn up; the regulations of trade had to be furnished in writing; a system of taxation had to be standardized; currency and credit had to be maintained in strict order. All this relied upon ink rather than upon custom or oral tradition. The various departments of the king’s court began the habit of creating archives. Letters began to be sent over the country, where before written communication had been confined to writs. Diaries of daily expenditure were kept and preserved. New and faster forms of handwriting developed, as monastic calligraphy gave way to what is known as ‘cursive’ script; the word comes from cursivus, the Latin for ‘flowing’. The world was going faster.
Wars, and preparations for wars, took their toll upon the nation’s wealth in the same period. King John still entertained hopes of winning back his Angevin Empire, but for that he needed money. He was perhaps no more exacting than his brother and his father, but he was more ingenious. He discovered new ways of extracting revenue, and in 1207 levied a thirteenth part on incomes and moveable property to be paid by all classes of people; it was the first move towards general taxation. The clamour of complaint, however, was so loud that he never repeated the exercise.
For ten years he travelled throughout his kingdom in search of money; he was restless; he was always in a hurry, generally staying in any one place for no more than two or three days. In 1205 he spent only twenty-four days in London and in Westminster. For the rest of the time he was on the road. He penetrated the far north at the end of a bitter winter; he fined York and Newcastle for not affording him an appropriately grand reception. He was looking for money everywhere. He was told, during a visit to Hexham in Northumberland, that Roman treasure was buried at Corbridge nearby; he ordered his men to dig for it, but nothing was unearthed.