An Angevin autocrat
The story of King John is a story of failure - he was the last of the Angevin kings, the one who failed to hold onto his territory in western France, lost his crown and many valuables in the mud of East Anglia, drove his subjects to impose the Magna Carta, and almost lost the Kingdom of England. It is the tragedy of a flawed genius, crippled by his own inheritance.
By contrast, his brother Richard has been seen by his contemporaries, and by later historians, as a superstar - his nickname, the 'Lionheart', says it all.
The popular image of John is of a classically bad king: a scheming, untrustworthy coward consumed by greed, whose rapaciousness drove his subjects to impose their will upon him. His acts of apparent cruelty are well documented. He hanged 28 hostages, sons of rebel Welsh chieftains in 1212 and starved to death William de Braose's wife and son in a royal prison.
'He was the archetypical Angevin: the autocratic ruler of a vast territory.'
Attempts to rehabilitate him have highlighted his administrative genius and his unstinting personal attention to his kingdom, but this view involves a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of kingship in the Middle Ages.
To understand John, we must forget 21st-century concepts of 'good' governance, and stop seeing him as a solely English king. He was the archetypical Angevin, the autocratic ruler of a vast territory. Yet these were the traits that were most responsible for his eventual failure.
Published: 2001-07-01
Bookmark with:
What are these?