![]() ![]() With their tyrannical ruler over a barrel, his subjects demanded reform. He returned to England that autumn with his treasury empty and his dreams of re-conquest in tatters. John, true to form, shied away from battle when challenged by French forces, and his allies in the north were defeated in a decisive clash with Philip Augustus. ![]() When the king finally launched his long-planned continental campaign in 1214, it was a disaster. John’s reign saw the greatest financial exploitation of England since the Norman Conquest.īut it was all for nothing. The lands of the Church were seized, and the Jews were imprisoned and tortured until they agreed to pay up. Royal justices imposed exorbitant fines for trifling offences. Nobles were charged gargantuan sums to inherit their lands. Taxes were suddenly demanded on an almost annual basis. To raise the massive armies and fleets this enterprise would require, he wrung unprecedented sums of money from England. King John’s loss of his continental inheritance was deeply shameful, and he was determined to win it back. “No man may trust him,” sang the troubadour poet Bertran de Born, “for his heart is soft and cowardly.” Contemporaries put this down to a lack of boldness on John’s part, calling him “Soft-sword”, and he did indeed lack the necessary martial skill that his brother Richard had possessed in spades. Yet within five years, he had lost almost all these continental territories to Philip Augustus. At the start of his reign in 1199, he inherited the greatest dominion in Europe - not just England and large parts of Wales and Ireland, but also the whole western half of France: Normandy, Brittany, Anjou and Aquitaine. John might have got away with such nefarious acts had he not also been politically incompetent. In 1203 he arranged the murder of his own nephew and rival for power, Arthur of Brittany. Another time he starved to death the wife and son of his former friend, William de Briouze. On one occasion, for example, he ordered 22 captive knights to be taken to Corfe Castle in Dorset and starved to death. In a chivalrous age, when aristocrats spared their enemies, capturing them rather than killing them, John preferred to do away with people by grisly means. He was also lecherous: several nobles are reported to have taken up arms against him because he had forced himself on their wives and daughters. In the first place, he was treacherous: when his older brother, Richard the Lionheart, was away on crusade, John attempted to seize the throne by plotting with the king of France, Philip Augustus, prompting contemporaries to damn him as “a mad-headed youth” and “nature’s enemy”. John’s offences are almost too numerous to list. “A very bad man,” in the words of one contemporary chronicler, “brim-full of evil qualities.” Despite occasional attempts to rehabilitate him, his reputation among academics remains extremely poor. The answer to this is an emphatic “No!” John was one of the worst kings – arguably the worst king – ever to sit on England’s throne. How was it, then, that the bad king left us something so remarkably good in Magna Carta? Is it the case, some historians have asked, that we have King John all wrong? That he was actually not as bad as legend makes out? One academic recently described him on Radio 4 as “an absolute rotter” another, less constrained, has summed him up as “a s-”. But they are aware that it was a “good thing” – a significant step in the direction of the liberties we enjoy today.Īt the same time, most people think of John himself as a “bad king”, not least because he crops up as the villain in the tales of Robin Hood. Most people are understandably a little hazy about the charter’s contents (it runs to 63 clauses and over 4,000 words). ![]() Tomorrow, you can hardly have failed to notice, marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, the document famously issued by King John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. ![]() JKing John: the most evil monarch in Britain’s history Home » Articles » King John: the most evil monarch in Britain’s history ![]()
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