When Richard died in April 1199, the two men who would fight
to succeed him were actually together: John was staying with Arthur in Brittany
where news of Richard’s death reached them both. It is possible that uncle and
nephew had met to pool their grievances against Richard I and prepare the
ground for some kind of joint action against him; one source says that John and
Richard had quarrelled just before the latter’s death, and Richard can hardly
have been Arthur’s favourite uncle after the events of the previous few years. However,
they were transformed from potential conspirators to determined arch-rivals by
Richard’s demise. John immediately rode with a few companions to Chinon, where
the Angevin treasury was kept, and from there he made for Fontevraud where
Richard’s body had been taken for burial next to Henry II. Meanwhile, Constance
of Brittany was active on behalf of her twelve-year-old son. He was at Angers
where he was acclaimed count of Anjou on 18 April, and two days later he arrived
at Tours where he was invested formally with the title. From there Arthur and
Constance headed with an army to Le Mans, where they nearly cornered John on 20
April. And it was at Le Mans that Arthur met King Philip and performed homage
to him for Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Brittany. As for John, having just
managed to slip away from Le Mans in the nick of time, he made his way to
Normandy where he was installed as duke at Rouen. Then, following his
coronation at Westminster Abbey at the end of May, the war of the Angevin
succession could properly begin.
John was back in Normandy within a few weeks of his
coronation. His hold on the duchy was secure, despite the attack King Philip
had made across the Seine into Norman territory straight after Richard’s death.
Meanwhile Queen Eleanor remained in control of Aquitaine in the south, buying
support for her youngest son with lands and castles granted to the lords of
Poitou. One of these, Aimeri de Thouars, was appointed by John as seneschal of
Anjou in opposition to Arthur’s nominee, William des Roches. And it was Aimeri
who, in late May 1199, attacked Arthur at Tours, forcing King Philip to send
troops to his rescue. Despite such pressure on the frontiers of Anjou from the
Poitevin barons, however, and with his supporters controlling the strategically
vital stretches of road and the river Loire that connected Angers and Tours,
Arthur remained in a strong position and John needed to weaken him quickly.
Displaying the sort of political, diplomatic and military skills with which he
is not normally credited, John did this very successfully. In mid-August 1199
there was a meeting between John and Philip, who by now had Arthur in
protective custody. John expressed his willingness to do homage to Philip, but
the French king demanded Anjou, Maine and Touraine, as well as Poitou, for
Arthur along with some of Normandy for himself. This was clearly too much for
John to concede and the talks stalled; but at least he was parleying with
Philip whilst Arthur himself was excluded from the discussions. Moreover, by
this point, John could feel confident about rejecting Philip’s demands. Earlier
in August, John had managed to re-establish the alliances that Richard had made
with the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. This gave him even more security in
the north and Philip something to think about on his own frontiers, and it
freed John to concentrate on an advance into enemy territory. As John made his
move south in September, Philip felt obliged to follow. But this was not enough
to reassure William des Roches (indeed, Philip antagonised William when he
destroyed the castle of Ballon in Maine, where William claimed to have
authority), who decided that his best interests lay in negotiating a truce with
the English king. John was happy to grant William what he wanted, namely
confirmation of his position as seneschal of Anjou, even if this was at the
expense of the incumbent, Aimeri de Thouars. Arthur could not fight on without
William’s support and, if Arthur was prepared to lay down his arms, there was
no justification for Philip to carry on the struggle. At Le Mans on 22
September 1199, Arthur (no longer in Philip’s custody) and Constance made peace
with John.
Events now took a confusing turn. At around the same time as
the meeting took place at Le Mans in September (it is not clear precisely
when), Constance of Brittany was married for the third time, this time to Guy
de Thouars, the younger brother of Aimeri. Her marriage to Ranulf of Chester
had ended (the reasons for this and the official grounds for any annulment are
not known) and Ranulf himself had remarried by the end of 1199. The new
marriage could be interpreted as an attempt by John to compensate Aimeri de
Thouars and his family for the loss of the seneschalship of Anjou. Alternatively,
however, it could have been an act of defiance by Aimeri and his disgruntled
kinsmen. And there are further signs that the peace deal did not end Constance
and Arthur’s distrust of John. According to Roger of Howden, immediately after
the terms were agreed, Arthur and Constance, along with Aimeri de Thouars and
many others, secretly left John’s court, having been informed that Arthur was
about to be arrested and imprisoned. King Philip now returned to the action and
Arthur was once more given his protection. He remained at the French court for
the next two years.
Whatever Constance and Arthur were doing late in 1199,
however, it was clear that the two main players in the ongoing political drama
were still the kings, John and Philip. Early in 1200 they met to discuss the
situation, and the terms they agreed were formally recorded in the Treaty of Le
Goulet in May. Philip accepted John as Richard’s heir in all the lands that
Richard and Henry II had held in France, except for the county of Evreux, the
whole Norman Vexin except Les Andelys, and the lordships of Issoudun, Graçay,
and Bourges in Berry, which Philip had seized after Richard’s death and still
held. John also had to agree to abandon his allies in Flanders and Boulogne,
pay Philip a relief of £13,333, and perform homage to the French king for his
continental possessions. As for Arthur, he was acknowledged by all parties as
the rightful heir to Brittany, but the ruler of Brittany was also confirmed as
the vassal of the duke of Normandy (not the king of France) and, as such, was
required to do homage to John for his duchy. Despite the concessions he had
made in it, the Treaty of Le Goulet was a victory for John and a defeat for
Arthur. Arthur’s claims to the Angevin succession had been decisively rejected
and even his status in Brittany was undermined by the newly precise definition
of his duchy’s relationship with Normandy. No wonder, then, that when Arthur
met the bishop of Lincoln in Paris a few weeks after the treaty was agreed, he
was unhappy and dejected: John and Philip, he might have felt, had feathered
their own nests at his expense. Constance, too, seems to have lost the appetite
for any further confrontation. She returned to Brittany and died there in
September 1201. For his part, Arthur divided his time between the French and
Breton courts, and he was invested as duke shortly after his mother’s death.
However, when John summoned him to Normandy to perform homage at Easter 1202,
Arthur refused. By then the quarrel between John and King Philip had begun
again and Arthur’s hopes had revived.
The new crisis was entirely of John’s making. His talent for
alienating people may have been hinted at after the Treaty of Le Goulet by his
treatment of Aimeri de Thouars and by his alleged plan to imprison Arthur.
These were relatively insignificant, however, compared with John’s inept and
provocative behaviour in the year or so after the treaty was signed, when he
bullied and victimised the Lusignans, one of the most important noble families
in Poitou. In the process, John laid the foundation for the collapse of his
continental empire and set the scene for Arthur’s death.
In 1189, John had married Isabella of Gloucester. She was
the daughter and heir of William, earl of Gloucester, and consequently one of
the richest heiresses in England (her estates included Bristol and the marcher
lordships of Glamorgan and Newport). John had been betrothed to her by Henry II
in 1176, and the king had pressurised Earl William into recognising John as the
heir to the Gloucester earldom at the same time. King Richard had then
sanctioned the match in 1189 as part of the package of concessions he had made
to John at the start of his reign in an effort to buy his good behaviour during
the impending crusade. Isabella played little if any part in John’s public life
over the next few years, and husband and wife were probably estranged as early
as 1193. Certainly, Isabella was not crowned with John in 1199, and she can
have had little to do with him in private either – for one thing, they had no
children. What is more, the legality of the marriage remained ambiguous. John
and Isabella were cousins, albeit relatively remote ones, but the matrimonial
law of the time led Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, on hearing that they were
married, to forbid them to cohabit. John had to seek the intervention of a
papal legate to overturn this sentence, but from the start the marriage
remained conveniently fragile in strictly legal terms. Given Isabella’s failure
to produce children, it is really no surprise that John looked to end their
marriage after he became king (his wife may have been just as relieved about
this as he was), and after certain formalities had been observed, and some
Norman and Aquitainian bishops had been persuaded to declare the marriage void,
John was once again a single man, albeit one still in control of his former
wife’s lands. Until 1214, by which time she was in her mid-fifties, Isabella
remained a royal ward!
By the spring of 1200, John had already decided on a new wife.
On 24 August he married Isabelle, the daughter of Adhemar, count of Angoulême,
one of the most important, and most troublesome, barons of Aquitaine. In
October the newlyweds returned to England, and on 8 October they were crowned
together at Westminster Abbey. The speed of these events is striking.
Contemporary chroniclers were quick to suggest that John was bewitched by
Isabelle’s beauty and simply had to make her his regardless of the
consequences. Roger of Wendover later described how, rather than fight Philip
II who was overrunning his ancestral territories at the end of 1203, John
preferred to stay in bed with his queen until dinner time.10 But Isabelle was
only twelve at the most in 1200 and may have been younger still, and such
allegations tell us more about the writer’s desire to moralise and provide a
scurrilous context for John’s political failures than anything else. In
reality, there were hard-headed and perfectly sound political reasons for the
match. Count Adhemar was fiercely proud and independently minded. As counts of
Angoulême, he and his predecessors had traditionally performed homage for their
lands to the king of France and not to the duke of Aquitaine. Richard, as duke,
had had considerable trouble keeping Adhemar in line, and he had actually
received the fatal wound to his shoulder during yet another phase of his
ongoing quarrel with the count. Nevertheless, Adhemar’s lands were in the heart
of the duchy, where the roads connecting Poitou and Gascony met, and they were
strategically vital. John’s decision to marry Isabelle, therefore, was
calculated in part to bring Adhemar and his family more comfortably into the
Angevin fold and to stabilise central Aquitaine: she was her father’s only
surviving heir, and her husband would be the next count of Angoulême. The
marriage also served another plainly political purpose. When she married John,
Isabelle was already betrothed to another man, Hugh le Brun, lord of Lusignan.
The Lusignans were Count Adhemar’s neighbours and controlled the county of La
Marche. If Hugh and Isabelle had been married, their families’ lands would
together have extended across most of central Aquitaine. Such a concentration
of territorial power would have jeopardised the duke’s overall control, and so
John’s marriage to Isabelle was also designed to stop the Angoulême–Lusignan
alliance in its tracks.
Of course, John’s approach was risky. The Lusignans would
not take kindly to losing their alliance with Angoulême. John should have tried
to buy them off, with money, land or another attractive marriage. But he didn’t
do anything like that. Indeed, his provocative conduct suggests that he planned
to goad the family into doing something that would allow him to ruin them
completely. Either this, or John miscalculated badly and turned a difficult but
manageable diplomatic situation into a catastrophically disastrous one. Hugh de
Lusignan’s younger brother, Ralph, was also count of Eu in Normandy through
marriage – his castle of Driencourt was seized on John’s orders. Then, in March
1201, John instructed his officials to attack Ralph’s lands after Easter and
‘do him all the harm they could’; and a few days after this, in a clear
challenge to the Lusignans’ control of the county, he summoned all the leading
men of La Marche to confirm their allegiance to him. Ralph and Hugh responded
promptly: the former, who, along with Hugh, had pledged his loyalty to John as
recently as January 1200, formally renounced it, whilst his brother began
raiding into Poitou. The Lusignans pursued other remedies too. Most
importantly, they appealed about John’s behaviour to King Philip, in his
capacity as overlord of the duke of Aquitaine. John, meanwhile, was in England
preparing an army. In June 1201 he landed in Normandy.
At this stage King Philip was keen to broker a peaceful
settlement between the two sides. He persuaded the Lusignans to suspend their
military activity, and he met John several times on the Norman frontier. John
then went to Paris in June where he was entertained for the best part of a week
in the royal palace, and he eventually agreed to hear the Lusignans’ grievances
in his court as duke of Aquitaine. This might have worked to resolve the
situation, if John’s conception of such a hearing had fitted with that of the
Lusignans. They, of course, expected respectful treatment and justice; John, by
contrast, was determined to humiliate them. Far from offering them a fair
hearing when he summoned them to his court, he demanded that they should appear
to answer charges of treason and prove their innocence through the ordeal of
battle, in other words by fighting against trained duellists, hand-picked by
John. Not surprisingly, the Lusignans refused to come to John’s court: there
was every chance that they might lose any fight but, more importantly, they
thought the method of trial John proposed demeaning and beneath their status.
In other words, John was insulting them on several different levels at once and
they felt compelled to appeal once more to King Philip. The French king at
first persuaded John to agree to hold an appropriate trial, but when John
finally fixed a day for it he refused to give the Lusignans safe conduct.
Without this, once again they refused to attend. Over the next few months the
process dragged on inconclusively, with John prevaricating at every
opportunity. In the end, Philip’s patience ran out and he summoned John to
attend his own court in Paris at the end of April 1202 and answer for his
conduct. It almost goes without saying that John failed to appear at the
appointed place and time. As a result he was condemned by Philip and the
assembled barons of his court as a disobedient vassal and his lands of Anjou,
Aquitaine and Poitou were declared forfeit to the French Crown.
Arthur had rejoined the French court shortly after Easter
1202, almost as if in preparation for what was to follow. His importance was
obvious to both sides. On 27 March, John had summoned his ‘beloved nephew
Arthur’ to meet him at Argentan about fifteen miles south of Falaise in central
Normandy a week after Easter, but the young prince had already decided that his
best hopes lay with King Philip. Before the end of April, Arthur was betrothed
to Philip’s six-year-old daughter, Marie, and following the sentence of
forfeiture pronounced against John, he accompanied the French king’s army on
campaign in Normandy. At Gournay in July, Arthur was knighted by Philip and
performed homage to him for all of John’s confiscated lands. Near the end of
July, while he concentrated on weakening the Norman frontier, Philip sent
Arthur with a force of 200 French knights to join Hugh de Lusignan in an attack
on Poitou. Arthur was keen to wait for the reinforcements he had called on from
Brittany before committing himself to serious action, but his French and
Poitevin allies pushed for an immediate attack on the castle of Mirebeau where
Arthur’s grandmother, Queen Eleanor, had taken refuge on hearing of their
approach. Eleanor was old and increasingly frail, but she was still crucial to
her son John’s hopes of holding on to Anjou and Aquitaine. Her connections and
standing counted for much, and if she could be captured, the main prop holding
up John’s support in the south would be removed. Eleanor, however, learnt of
the proposed attack in time to send a letter to John urging him to come to her
rescue. He was already on his way south when a messenger met him with Eleanor’s
news at Le Mans. In a remarkable forced march, John then covered the eighty
miles and more between Le Mans and Mirebeau in forty-eight hours and arrived
before the castle on 1 August. By then, Arthur and the Poitevins had already
taken the outer ward and broken down all the gates except one. Eleanor was
trapped in the keep. But when John’s forces arrived, the attackers were taken
by surprise and chaotically rushed out of the castle to meet him. John’s men,
with his seneschal of Anjou, William des Roches, prominent at the head of his
troops, drove the besiegers back into the castle and soon the whole of the
French and Poitevin army had been either killed or captured. Amongst those
taken prisoner were Hugh and Geoffrey de Lusignan. According to one account, so
unexpected was John’s attack on Mirebeau that Geoffrey was still eating his
breakfast of pigeons when he was seized. The most important prize, however, was
Arthur of Brittany.
John was triumphant. His victory at Mirebeau was as decisive
and as total as any that his illustrious crusading brother had ever achieved.
Most of his enemies had been dealt with at a single stroke, and King Philip was
now left isolated and without allies. After a fruitless trek southwards from
Normandy to assess the situation the French king retired to his own lands after
furiously burning the city of Tours on the way. Meanwhile, John made his way
back north with his prisoners. Most of them, including Arthur’s sister Eleanor,
were sent to England and imprisoned in castles, most notably Corfe in Dorset.
The most important prisoners remained in Normandy, however: Hugh de Lusignan
was locked up at Caen, whilst Geoffrey and Arthur were taken to Falaise.
Everything seemed to be going John’s way. Nevertheless, his dominant position
was not deeply rooted and a sensible politician would have taken care to
nurture it. John simply took it for granted. Most significantly, he soon lost
the support of William des Roches. William had been instrumental in John’s
seizure of power in 1199 and at Mirebeau itself. His continued support was
crucial if John wanted to focus on protecting Normandy without having to worry
about his southern territories, and the English king’s failure to appreciate
William’s importance is startling. William had supported John at Mirebeau when
the latter had agreed to follow his advice concerning Arthur; he abandoned him
when John took Arthur to Normandy, clearly signalling that William’s opinions
counted for nothing after all. Having deserted John, William took his neighbour
Aimeri de Thouars with him and was prepared to fight to retain his hold over
Anjou and Touraine (in October they captured Angers), thus introducing an
unwelcome element of instability into the heart of John’s territories.
It is not clear what William wanted John to do with Arthur,
and it may be that, at this stage, the king had little idea of his own how to
handle his nephew. According to one account, he was first swayed by a group of
his advisers, who told him that Arthur had to be dealt with once and for all.
There was justification for this. Arthur was John’s sworn vassal (the Treaty of
Le Goulet had established this in 1200); he had rebelled against him and could
expect to be punished, even with death. He was only fifteen or sixteen, but he
was no innocent victim. However, the nature of the penalty they recommended was
savage: if Arthur were blinded and castrated, they argued, he would not be fit
to rule, if he survived at all. The Bretons would lose their figurehead and end
their uprising. The chronicler who reports this story says that John consented
to the plan and sent two men to Falaise to carry it out. However, Arthur’s
gaoler there, Hubert de Burgh, baulked when he was told of the idea of
mutilating his prisoner and refused to allow it. But he was prepared to
announce that Arthur was dead in the hope that this would knock the wind out of
the Bretons’ sails. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, it had the opposite
effect. The Bretons swore not to rest until they had avenged themselves on
John, and Hubert was forced hastily to announce that Arthur was alive and
unharmed. The damage had been done, though. Arthur may still have been alive,
but this was not certain and the conspiracy theories about his murder developed
quickly.
This account of what happened at Falaise may or may not be
true, but its description of indecisive floundering at the top of John’s
government has an air of credibility about it. To be sure, Arthur was a problem
and something had to be done. But with a botched plot to kill him followed by a
botched attempt to fabricate his death, it is hard to imagine that he could
have been more incompetently handled. Another story, though, suggests that John
tried a different approach. According to the monk Roger of Wendover, who wrote
his account of these events at the abbey of St Alban’s in the 1220s or 1230s,
whilst John was at Falaise at the end of January 1203, he summoned Arthur to
appear before him and tried to flatter him into submission. Addressing him
‘with fair words’, Wendover alleged, Arthur was promised great rewards if he
agreed to pledge his loyalty to John and desert King Philip. But Arthur
scornfully dismissed John’s proposal and went even further: he was Richard’s
lawful heir, he claimed defiantly, and there would be no peace unless all the
Angevin dominions, including England, were surrendered to him. Needless to say,
John was never going to respond to such an ultimatum other than furiously, and
soon after this exchange is alleged to have taken place, Arthur was taken to
Rouen and never seen again. Wendover’s account was not written until two or
three decades after John’s death, it is not corroborated elsewhere, and he
gives no authority for it. Indeed, this is not the only episode from John’s
reign for which Wendover is the only evidence and his reliability has often
been questioned. John was certainly at Falaise in January 1203, but this does
not mean that Wendover was describing real events. More likely this is an
account of what Wendover thought should have happened in the circumstances. He
is highly critical of John throughout his account of the reign and may have
used this fictitious encounter as a device to highlight John’s careless disregard
for honour and loyalty and Arthur’s stirring but doomed sense of duty. To this
extent, he would have seen it as a legitimate fabrication.
But whether this confrontation ever took place or not,
Arthur did indeed disappear at around this time and the truth about what
happened to him will never be known. That he was dead by the end of 1203,
however, seems almost certain. He may have died a natural death after falling
ill in prison; there is another suggestion that he was killed after falling
during an attempt to escape. But there is also good reason to believe that John
was personally involved in Arthur’s death. According to one account, written in
about 1216, after trying unsuccessfully to get someone else to kill Arthur for
him, John decided to take care of the matter himself. He took Arthur out alone
in a boat with him on the river Seine. There the king killed his nephew with a
sword, rowed three miles further with the body at his feet, and then threw it
overboard. The writer William the Breton does not say when this happened, and
it is included in his great poem celebrating the achievements of Philip II. So
it is right to treat his version of events with caution. Never-theless, a
second source goes some way to confirming the outline of what William said. It
was indeed at Rouen, after dinner on Maundy Thursday (3 April) 1203, ‘when he
was drunk and possessed by the devil’, that John killed Arthur with his own
hands. He then weighted down the corpse with a heavy stone and threw it into
the Seine. It was later caught up in a fisherman’s net, recognised and buried
secretly (‘for fear of the tyrant’, the source says) in the church of Notre
Dame du Pré near Rouen. There is some correspondence between these two accounts
(rivers and boats, as well as John’s central role, feature promin-ently in
both), which may lend them a little more credibility. In addition, John was
certainly at Rouen on 3 April. But the second account has more to recommend it
than this. It was written at the Cistercian abbey of Margam in south Wales,
probably some time in the 1220s. But the information it contains could have
been given to the monks much earlier than this by one of the monastery’s most
important patrons, William de Briouze. There will be more about the Briouze
family in the next chapter. It is enough to say here that William was ideally
placed to know what had happened to Arthur and to tell the tale later to the
monks of Margam. William was the man who had actually captured Arthur at
Mirebeau. At the time of the alleged murder he was still one of John’s
favourites and he was almost certainly with the king at Rouen at Easter 1203.
He was just the sort of man to know the details of a scandal involving the
king.
If the Margam chronicle’s account of Arthur’s murder is to
be believed, Good Friday 1203 at Rouen would have been significantly more
sombre than usual. The king had slain his own nephew in a drunken rage and ugly
rumours must have been circulating amongst the whispering courtiers, too
fearful of John to voice them openly. The disasters that befell John in the
following months may well have been seen as just punishment for his crime by
those who knew anything about it. In truth, however, John was already in
serious political and military difficulties before Arthur’s disappearance. By
the spring of 1203 he was facing problems all along the Norman frontier, from
King Philip in the east, the leading lords of Maine and Anjou to the south, and
from the Bretons in the west. John’s victory at Mirebeau was still fresh in the
memory, but he had failed to make the most of it. William des Roches had
deserted John shortly after the battle and where he led others soon followed.
In January 1203, Count Robert of Sées, who until this point had been solidly
loyal to John, surrendered his castle of Alençon to the French, not principally
in support of Arthur or Philip, but because he had no appetite for fighting
against his southern neighbours. Then, in March, William des Roches, along with
other leading magnates from the Loire provinces, formalised their positions and
performed homage to King Philip in Paris. It was the loyalty of lords like
this, with their lands close to the Norman border, that was crucial in this
struggle. Without their support, there was a serious risk that John’s
continental lands would be divided in two, that Normandy would be cut off from
Aquitaine, and that the duchy itself would be unable to withstand the threats
from its other neighbours.
King Philip still had to take his chance, though. In April
1203, with the support of the Loire lords secured, he was able to sail
unopposed down that great river into the heart of Anjou and take possession of
Saumur in person. But the biggest prize, as ever, was Normandy, and Philip
resumed his attack there as soon as he had returned from Anjou. When the castle
of Vaudreuil surrendered to the French without a fight in June, John tried to
convince his critics that the garrison had laid down its arms on his orders and
that this was some kind of tactical retreat. In reality, his power in Normandy
was crumbling. In the heart of the duchy, away from the unstable frontier
regions, support for John and his family had always been strong, but there was
now widespread discontent at the actions of John’s mercenary troops, who were
mistreating the local people and behaving, it was claimed, as if they were at
war with them. The ties of loyalty were being stretched to breaking point and
Philip was giving a good impression to the waverers of being a credible
alternative lord. But there was still work to do. Gaining control of the river
Seine was essential to Philip’s strategy, but barring his path to Rouen was the
greatest of all the frontier castles, Château Gaillard. Built at enormous
expense by Richard I on steep cliffs overlooking a huge bend in the Seine, the
castle was reportedly impregnable. In addition, it was commanded by an English
baron of unimpeachable loyalty and no little courage, Roger de Lacy. Undaunted,
Philip began his siege in August 1203. This gave John a breathing space, which
he used to attack his enemies in Brittany. Guy de Thouars, Arthur’s stepfather,
remained loyal to John until September 1203, and whilst that was the case the
Breton-Norman frontier was kept relatively pacified. When Guy deserted,
however, John’s response was to raid into Brittany and sack Dol. Such activity
did little to improve John’s position and only antagonised the Bretons even
more.
In December 1203, John travelled back to England to raise
fresh funds to continue the war, but before he could return to Normandy, on 6
March 1204, the garrison of Château Gaillard surrendered. The defenders had
bravely and staunchly withstood a five-month siege, and perhaps could have
lasted out longer. But there were flaws in the castle’s much-vaunted design,
which became apparent as the siege went on and which the determined besiegers
were eventually able to exploit. The way to Rouen was now open, but before he
approached the city Philip wanted to make sure that it was isolated and cut off
from any Norman reinforcements. So in May he headed west into central Normandy
and in three weeks took Argentan, Falaise and Caen. He was met there by the
Bretons, who had taken Mont St Michel and Avranches on their way, and the
advance across country to Rouen began. After arriving outside the city at the
start of June, Philip agreed to give the citizens thirty days to wait for help
from their lord. But John did nothing in response to the urgent messages he was
sent and the city gates were opened to Philip on 24 June.
Stranded in England, John could only wait for news of
Rouen’s inevitable capitulation. Normandy was lost, along with Anjou, Maine and
Touraine. And in Aquitaine the tide had turned against John too. His mother,
Queen Eleanor, had died on 31 March 1204, and the lords of Poitou who had been loyal
to her were not prepared to put their faith in the son who had shown his true
colours in his attack on the Lusignans in 1200. Having said that, there were
many barons further south who also had their misgivings about King Philip, and
although he visited Poitiers in August 1204, the rest of Aquitaine did not open
its doors to him. Nevertheless, this was of no immediate comfort to John. In
less than two years since the triumph at Mirebeau his continental empire had
been comprehensively dismantled. This is what Arthur had wanted, of course, but
he did not live to see his hopes fulfilled. And with his sister Eleanor still
held captive by John, it was Arthur’s half-sister Alix (the daughter of Guy de
Thouars and Constance of Brittany) who was eventually acknowledged by the
Breton nobility as the rightful heiress to the duchy. A new phase of Breton
history now began: they had seen off the Angevins but would soon have to defend
themselves once again, this time against the expansionist ambitions of the
kings of France. Meanwhile, in England, a smarting king was already planning
his counterattack.
