King John: our favourite bad guy?

Yes, I admit it, I haven't blogged for a long time. Too many distractions, good and bad, plus the realisation that nobody reads your blog except you! However, some books, etc. deserve to be recorded and so I have vowed to blog on.

King John is a rousing subject to restart with. We all know him from Robin Hood, and probably not much else. The celebration of 800 years of the Magna Carta in 2015 led to a rash of books about him, and this one by Marc Morris is possibly the most readable (although confusingly it tells his story non-chronologically: I rebelled and read the chapters in the "right" order).

What did I learn from this book? Well, I think I already knew that Robin Hood did not exist, or, if he did, he was nothing to do with King John. But I didn't know that when John was born, England was part of a sizeable Empire, the Angevin Empire, that stretched from the Spanish Border to the Scottish border and across from Limousin in central France to at least part of Ireland. If John and his successors had been decent rulers England could still own a significant part of the European mainland. Would we still be hotly demanding Brexit in that case? But sadly John wasn't a decent ruler, he was a tyrant who alienated just about everyone. So while Robin Hood is fiction, John did try to usurp his brother, Richard the Lionheart, while the latter was away fighting the good fight (as they saw it in those days) in the Holy Land. It seems also, even allowing for the hostility to him of many of the writers on whose records we depend to judge John, that he treated almost everybody dreadfully, lied to friend and foe alike, starved even the most distinguished of his captured opponents to death, allowed foreign mercenaries to pillage his own country, seduced the wives of his barons, extorted money from every class in society including the church, angered the Pope sufficiently to excommunicate him, failed so comprehensively in war and diplomacy to lose virtually all his continental lands and even London, and, of course, provoked his subjects to revolt and force him to sign the Magna Carta.

If John wasn't all bad, then it is hard to find his saving grace. Indeed it was more a matter of luck than judgment that he didn't concede England ass a whole to the French: they successfully invaded and just failed to consolidate their position before John died and his son Henry, mentored by the powerful and effective William Marshal (one of the family!), was swiftly installed as his successor. Otherwise we would have had a king called Louis, can you imagine it, our history might have been very different (and Nigel Farage would now be in the Tower of London, maybe?).

The Magna Carta is an undeniably impressive document. It was not the first charter restricting the powers of the king but, to my knowledge, it was the first imposed on a king by a revolt led by barons but supported by all levels of society and setting out rights for all. John, of course, tried to ignore it as soon as he had signed it but by then the power base had shifted and his opponents were usually in the driving seat. Then to cap it all, he lost the royal treasure in the Wash and eventually had to be buried without a crown. I know George III lost "the American colonies" and went mad, but John is surely way out in front as our worst king.

Final thought: these were cruel times. John was criticised for starving to death opponents, male and female, because they were from his class, lords and ladies of the feudal system. But for ordinary people there was no expectation of mercy, e.g. poachers of royal deer who were caught could expect to have their eyes cut out and their testicles cut off: what kind of life could you lead after that punishment? Possibly a fate worse than death?