The Worst Medieval Monarchs

Preface

In the United States of America, frequent surveys are taken to rank the country’s presidents. Academic historians are questioned about the effectiveness of each president, judged on various criteria, with a league table summarising the combined findings. The ‘best’ president is normally found to be Abraham Lincoln, with George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt usually vying for second and third place, then Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson usually making up the top five. There is less consensus about the ‘worst’ president, although in recent years James Buchanan has tended to receive that dubious honour, with Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and Warren Harding (and lately Donald Trump) keeping him company at the bottom of the league.

The validity of this exercise is questionable. For all the careful methodology and criteria, it is exceptionally hard to compare George Washington, who began as leader of eleven eastern states in a pre-industrial age, with Barack Obama, presiding over a transcontinental nuclear empire. It is perhaps notable that the top five were all warriors, having either come to the presidency on the back of military success (Washington and Teddy Roosevelt) or presiding over some of the most significant wars in US history (Lincoln, Wilson and FDR). The passage of time can also have an impact, with Richard Nixon and George W. Bush viewed increasingly less negatively than in the immediate aftermath of their time in office.

It is also telling that these surveys of expert historians differ markedly from polls of the wider public. The likes of Washington and Lincoln are, of course, deeply embedded in United States culture and mythology, so can usually be found in the top ten of popular surveys. The general public, however, tend to opt for presidents they can remember, which gives John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan much greater prominence. Obscure, nineteenth-century nonentities like Millard Fillmore never have a hope. A 2011 Gallup poll, for example, had as the top five Reagan, Lincoln, Bill Clinton, JFK and Washington. Admittedly the sample size was small (only 1,015 adults), but it does show the role memory plays in these surveys. The high positions afforded Reagan and Clinton may also have reflected the ideological polarisation in US politics, people in 2011 looking back nostalgically to recent heroes of their parties.

Across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom, there is far less of an appetite for this kind of exercise. For British prime ministers, the few academic surveys that have been done tend to restrict themselves to the twentieth century onwards, or even the period after the Second World War. Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, David Lloyd George and Margaret Thatcher normally head the table, with the unfortunate Anthony Eden propping it up. Once again, successful war leaders dominate. No one seems to care much about the relative merits of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century figures like the marquess of Rockingham or Viscount Goderich, which makes the approach very different from that in the United States.

When it comes to the monarchy, such rankings are not even attempted. In part, that is because in a constitutional monarchy the sovereign excites far less popular passion than a president or prime minister, given that they are not typically responsible for the success or failure of an administration and its impact on everyday lives. There is also the issue of time, the impossibility of comparing the rule of William I in an age of motte-and-bailey castles with that of Elizabeth II in the space age. Finally, there is the problem that the further back in time one goes, the more monarchs there are in what is now Britain. The sovereign has only been king or queen of the United Kingdom since 1707 (and even the meaning of that changed in 1801 and again in 1922). Before that there were separate monarchs of England and Scotland (albeit the same person after 1603), and further back still those two countries were split into smaller kingdoms. How does one compare Æthelwulf, King of Wessex in the ninth century, with Victoria, queen-empress of a quarter of the globe in the nineteenth century?

Nevertheless, there is an interest in the various monarchs of the British past and their relative success. In the 2002 BBC show 100 Greatest Britons, the top hundred were chosen by popular poll. Their number included eleven sovereigns who ruled in all or part of what is now Great Britain: Elizabeth I (7th), Alfred the Great (14th), Victoria (18th), Elizabeth II (24th), Boudica (35th), Henry VIII (40th), Henry V (72nd), Robert Bruce (74th), Richard III (82nd), Henry II (90th) and Edward I (94th). With the possible exception of the last two, there must be a strong suspicion that these are mainly the most memorable of monarchs (for various reasons) in the twenty-first century. That the entirely legendary King Arthur ranked 51st on the list tends to reaffirm this view. Assessment of monarchs therefore seems to rely above all on their place in popular memory. Those in the list above either defined eras (Elizabethan, Victorian) or contributed in some way (usually militarily) to national mythologies. If the question of who was the best monarch in British history is unanswerable, the main candidates are usually fairly obvious. No one is likely to choose Henry VI of England or James V of Scotland. Assessments are generally rooted in the memory of the monarch’s significance in the national myth, rather than in detailed knowledge of their reign.

In some ways, however, the question of their success becomes more relevant in the pre-modern era, when monarchs were genuinely ‘in charge’ and actually ruling rather than merely reigning. Four of the top hundred in the 2002 poll were medieval monarchs and although Richard III is a controversial inclusion, most academics would probably see Henry II, Edward I and Henry V as among the most successful kings of the Middle Ages. Henry II is credited with responsibility for establishing the common law, Edward I both with legal reform and for the conquest of Wales, Henry V with the greatest successes of the Hundred Years’ War against France. There are problems and nuances in all these cases, but that is how they are popularly remembered. Throw in Edward III and maybe (depending on who you ask) Richard I, and there is the pantheon of England’s ‘best’ medieval kings.

How about the other end of the performance table? Perhaps wisely, the BBC has never done an equivalent ‘100 Worst Britons’, but there are definitely monarchs who are remembered as failures or worse. Unlike US presidents, where those ranked worst are generally the ones people cannot remember, ‘bad’ monarchs have left a much greater impression on English/ British consciousness. King John and Magna Carta, and Charles I being separated from his head, are well-known parts of the national story. There is a general sense of their ‘badness’, even if nothing is known of the details. Whether monarchs can be easily divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, any more than British premiers or US presidents, is a legitimate question; the differing contexts and circumstances always prevent too easy a comparison. Yet we live in an age when there is a popular desire for such clear-cut categories, where lists of best, worst, most evil and so on abound in television programmes made to fill ever more channels. Whatever the legitimacy of the question, we cannot avoid the fact that people do divide leaders (and many other people and things) into such categories. While the relative positions can change over the years, once someone acquires a negative reputation in such exercises, it can be very hard to shift.

This book looks at a small group of those who have acquired enduringly negative reputations. Taking the five ‘worst’ English kings of the Middle Ages, it examines how their reputations were acquired and shaped, and whether they are deserved. The selection is, of course, no exact science. Every king chosen here would find some defenders, even if only one (Richard III) would seriously polarise opinion. More contentious are those omitted, although some aspect of almost every king’s reign would probably merit inclusion. The only serious additional contender is Henry VI, who was indeed a disastrous king, but he spent so much of his two reigns as a minor, mentally unbalanced, or under the control of others that he is enormously problematic. Since the focus is on worst kings rather than worst reigns, Henry is overlooked in favour of those who actively exercised their kingship and in various ways brought about their own unhappy demise. This is not an exercise in rehabilitation or special pleading; all five monarchs featured were demonstrably failures in different degrees. It is instead an examination of why they came to be viewed as failures and how they were cast as the lasting villains of the medieval story.

Introduction

Eighteen men sat on the English throne between the Battles of Hastings (1066) and Bosworth (1485). None was an unqualified success. Even those who have generally had a good posthumous reputation encountered crises and opposition at times. Medieval kingship was a difficult art and no one could always get it right, especially during a long reign. Yet some kings were less successful than others. Of the eighteen who wore the medieval crown, five have traditionally been seen as particular failures. Whether fairly or not, Stephen, John, Edward II, Richard II and Richard III have been judged as the worst monarchs of the Middle Ages.

Four were obvious failures by one clear standard: they lost their thrones. John died in the middle of a civil war he was losing, Edward II and Richard II were both deposed, and Richard III was killed in battle. Stephen alone died peacefully in his bed, but only after almost two decades of civil war, leaving his throne to his opponent. Holding onto the crown, being accepted as rightful king and passing on the throne to a son were critical for a medieval monarch. All five failed, albeit in different degrees and for different reasons. Interestingly, none of the five were expected to be king at the time of their births, but that cannot explain their failures. Edward II and Richard II became heirs as young children, when their older brothers died. Stephen and John took advantage of unclear laws of succession. Only Richard III unambiguously usurped the throne. Yet legitimate heirs, opportunists and usurpers alike could lose their crowns through bad kingship.

That raises an obvious question: how do we determine what good and bad kingship was? Society’s standards and values change over time, so historians of the twenty-first century are not judging a king in the same way as one of his medieval contemporaries. If we talk of these five as the ‘worst’ monarchs of the Middle Ages, we have to understand how they acquired that reputation and how opinions have fluctuated across the centuries. We need to know what contemporary expectations of a king were and how contemporary writers judged whether or not a particular king had met those expectations.

There is a popular myth, grounded in half-remembered stories of Henry VIII beheading anyone he fancied (especially his wives) and filtered through memories of the absolutist European monarchies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that medieval kings were all powerful. The Hollywood and Disney version of medieval monarchy turns kings into caricatures of the Queen of Hearts, able to scream ‘off with his head’ and be instantly obeyed. The reality, in England as in most European monarchies, was very different. Yes, kings were powerful, but as the old adage goes, great power brought great responsibility. Kingship was contractual. The king was given the power to rule, seen as chosen for that role by God himself, but he had a duty to his subjects. He had to undertake his office in accordance with their expectations and the more general expectations of what a king was. If we judge a king a failure, we need to be clear about the standards we are judging him against.

Expectations of Medieval Kings

In medieval thought, the realm was often likened to a body (hence the term ‘body politic’). Most often in this analogy, the king was the head, the most crucial part of the body which directs the rest. A headless body, after all, is not viable. Although originating with Plato, the body metaphor in Christian Europe drew on the New Testament version, specifically chapter 12 of the first letter to the Corinthians, which nuances the picture. St Paul observed that the body relied on its many parts working together and that ‘the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable’. The king, as head of the body politic, needed the other parts in order to exist as head of a functioning state. Kings did not exist in isolation, nor could they simply ignore the rest of the body. From this basic model derived many of the theoretical expectations which underpinned medieval kingship.¹

Mirrors and Manuals

One of the most influential political thinkers of the Middle Ages was the twelfth-century Englishman John of Salisbury, who became Bishop of Chartres in France. His Policraticus drew, naturally enough, on the Bible, but also on Roman law and ancient writers. One of its most important features was an explanation of the duties and responsibilities of kings. Since a king’s power came from God, John explained, his subjects had an obligation to obey him. However, the king had a corresponding obligation to his subjects to rule in accordance with the law. A king who did not do this and who failed to rule according to divine law was a tyrant. Tyrants, as far as John was concerned, could and should be killed once all alternatives had failed.²

The later Middle Ages thus had a working definition of tyranny, but it was problematic. Originally, the term ‘tyrant’ had been fairly neutral in the Greek world, although had assumed ever more negative connotations. By the time John wrote, a king who was a tyrant was effectively a despot ruling contrary to (divine) law and not meeting his obligations to his subjects. In reality, there was often little agreement about when that point was reached. It is notable that when Edward II and Richard II were deposed, the official records carefully avoided calling them tyrants. Explicit accusations of tyranny against medieval English kings are rare and typically date from after a king’s disgrace and death. John of Salisbury’s ideas may seem clear and tidy, but confronted with the messy reality of political life, medieval writers were hesitant about applying them, something modern commentators sometimes overlook. Tyranny was usually in the eye of the beholder.

John of Salisbury’s work shared features in common with a genre known as Mirrors for Princes. These were manuals or guidebooks advising rulers or their heirs how to rule wisely and correctly. There are numerous examples from across Europe from Antiquity onwards, some of which were aimed at rulers in general, others of which were targeted at particular individuals. One influential text, for example, was Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principium (On the Rule of Princes), written in the later thirteenth century for Philip IV of France. Notable English texts include those written by William of Pagula for Edward III and by Thomas Hoccleve for the future Henry V.³

All these ‘mirrors’ drew on a mixture of Biblical and classical examples, but ones aimed at specific individuals also made use of the relevant context, along with local examples and historical warnings. Although these were idealised pictures, reflecting the views of particular authors, they demonstrate that there was a clear theoretical understanding of how a king should perform his role and the responsibilities he had to his subjects. A sovereign entrusted with rule by God was expected to heed both divine law and the warnings of history.

Coronations and Promises

Subjects’ expectations of their rulers can also be found in their coronation oaths.⁴ A coronation was the essential ceremony which made a king a king. Until the thirteenth century, the new king’s reign began on the day he was crowned. While the rules of succession remained unclear, acting quickly and persuading an archbishop to crown him was a means of securing the throne: Henry I, Stephen and John all became king in this way. This changed when Henry III died in November 1272, as his heir was on Crusade in the Holy Land. Edward I was proclaimed king a few days after his father’s death, but not crowned until August 1274. From then on, reigns began immediately upon the death of the previous king. As it became accepted that the crown passed to the reigning king’s eldest son, the pressure for a swift coronation receded. Seven months elapsed between Edward II’s accession in July 1307 and his coronation in February 1308, although the later medieval gap was typically considerably less than this. Before 1066, the place of coronations varied. However, Edward the Confessor (crowned at Winchester) poured considerable resources into Westminster Abbey, where he was buried. Seeking association with the Confessor, both Harold II and William I were crowned in that abbey. Thereafter, Westminster became the accepted coronation Church.

As it was a religious ceremony in a Church, coronations usually took place on a Sunday, unless they happened on a major Christian festival, as was the case for William the Conqueror (Christmas Day) and John (Ascension Day). It is important to recognise the overtly Christian nature of a coronation, for kingship was held to be a divinely-instituted office. The act of anointing the sovereign with holy oil was a conscious echo of a practice found in the Old Testament.⁵ Biblical precedents had a major role in the ceremony, as a reminder of the sacred nature of kingship. A king was believed to be set apart by God through his anointing, something reinforced by the various regalia (such as the crown, orb and sceptre) with which he was invested. As God’s anointed, the king had a right to expect the loyalty and service of those he had appointed to rule.

However, that did not give a king unlimited power or allow him to do anything he wished. Precisely because he held a sacred office, the anointed king had a responsibility to those from whom he had been set apart. He was meant to be a Christian ruler, overseeing his people wisely like King Solomon in the Old Testament. For this reason, he had obligations which were laid out in the coronation oath. In his oath, the king swore to do three things: maintain the peace of Church and realm; administer justice; and rule fairly and mercifully. Additionally, four twelfth-century kings issued ‘coronation charters’ setting out their commitment to just rule and promising to reform the bad practices of their predecessors. In 1308, when Edward II was crowned, an additional clause was added to the oath in which the king promised to uphold the laws chosen by the people.

These were the sacred promises kings made and the theoretical standards to which they were held. Of course, interpretation varied widely. Maintaining peace, for example, mattered only domestically; disturbing peace outside England was perfectly acceptable if done in the name of a good war of conquest. No medieval king could claim to have met these standards all the time. A monarch could survive occasional transgressions, but consistently falling to keep his oath placed him in trouble.

Counsel and Consent

That the king did not have unlimited power is shown most clearly by the fact that he was required to seek advice from his leading subjects, including their agreement to taxation and other matters. Medieval England was not, of course, a democracy. The king’s ‘natural’ advisors were the nobility and he was expected to listen to their views and spread his patronage widely among them. Relying on too narrow a group, concentrating rewards in too few hands, led to accusations of favouritism, and royal favourites were not popular. They were even more unpopular if they were foreign or viewed as lowly men raised above their station. Trouble arose when a particularly powerful lord or a significant group of nobles felt alienated. Evil counsellors were an occupational hazard for a medieval monarch, but the charge was levelled most against kings who failed to be attentive to the nobility as a whole. English kings were not omnipotent, but were expected to listen to and work with their nobility in governing the realm. The wisest realised this and cooperated with the nobility in a common cause. The more foolish concentrated too much in the hands of certain favourites and usually suffered the consequences.

Additionally, the question of subjects’ consent was complicated by the fact that the king of England did not merely rule over the territory now recognised as England.⁶ The Scottish border remained fluid until Berwick-upon-Tweed was finally settled in England in 1482. Various medieval English kings claimed overlordship over Scotland, some more forcefully and successfully than others. Until Calais was lost in the mid-sixteenth century, the English sovereign also ruled over parts of modern France. Sometimes these parts were extensive and greater than the lands under the direct control of the king of France. From Edward III to George III, the English/British monarch actually used the title ‘King of France’, although only Henry VI was ever crowned as such and even he failed to make his title a reality. English control of areas of Wales gave way to a complete conquest under Edward I at the end of the thirteenth century. From Henry II’s reign, Ireland was claimed by the kings of England, although the land under effective English control there varied widely. The Channel Islands and the Isle of Man also had direct and complex relationships with the English crown. As a result, the king had to take account of customs and procedures for advice in other areas where he ruled, which could at times create tensions with his English subjects. Balancing these competing expectations was not easy.

Anglo-Saxon kings had had councils of their leading nobles and churchmen (both bishops and abbots), a practice which continued throughout the Middle Ages. These were the king’s inner circle who advised him and helped him with key decisions. From the thirteenth century, these councils met alongside or in addition to parliament, another body of which the king now had to take heed.⁷ The membership of parliament was highly fluid in its first century or so, but by the end of the fourteenth century had coalesced into a House of Lords (comprising all bishops, the abbots of major monasteries, and all nobles summoned personally) and a House of Commons (with two representatives from each county and a variable list of towns, plus representatives of the lower clergy). The House of Lords remained the more important in this period, but crucially, it became established that taxation could not be granted without the consent of the representatives in the Commons. The king was meant to live from his own means, taxation granted only to support extraordinary expenditure such as a war to defend the realm.

Parliament confronted a king with the concerns of his subjects. Even in times of domestic harmony, people sought justice and reform from their king. While this could be done through the courts, the king was the fount of justice and from Anglo-Saxon times his personal verdict was often pursued by those with the means to do so. From the thirteenth century the concerns of individuals and the wider community are reflected in the petitions presented to the king in parliament. These are a reminder of the continuing pressure on a medieval king to balance the competing needs and desires of his subjects. Into the middle part of the fourteenth century, these were most frequently private petitions, submitted by an individual or small group seeking redress for some complaint. While private petitions continued to be presented, from the reign of Edward III (1327–77) common petitions became much more significant than before. These contained either a single petition or a list of grievances agreed by the members of what became the House of Commons. Usually they touched on matters of national or regional significance. In addition, the clergy, who were part of parliament but also had separate assemblies called convocations, would occasionally submit their own list of complaints known as gravamina. A wise king saw the importance of addressing these petitions and seeking to provide justice in parliament.⁸

Obviously these petitions covered a wide range of subjects, but there are recurrent themes throughout the later Middle Ages. One is dissatisfaction about corrupt or inadequate royal officials, such as sheriffs and judges. Part of the king’s duty for administering justice was ensuring that his representatives acted fairly, but complaints that they did not were ubiquitous. Extravagance or corruption in the royal household was often criticised. Another common complaint was about taxation. Kings were meant to raise taxes only in time of need, such as to prosecute a war against a foreign threat. Periods of heavy, repeated taxation (such as during the opening phase of the Hundred Years’ War in the 1330s) brought vociferous complaints, especially when the money seemed to be squandered. Subjects had a clear sense of how a king should perform and were quick to let him know when they felt he was not meeting his obligations. From the mid-fourteenth century, there was a clear trade-off between parliament accepting its duty to grant necessary taxes if the king accepted his responsibility to provide justice. The wise king worked with parliament to ensure that both his and his subjects’ needs were met. Successful kings worked with parliament, not in opposition to it. Counsel and consent were integral to successful kingship.

Protests and Depositions

Precisely because the king was God’s anointed, the political community often shied away from the extreme step of removing an unsatisfactory ruler. Not until 1327 was a monarch deposed for inadequacy, with a second occasion following fairly swiftly in 1399. The depositions of Edward II and Richard II were the culmination of lengthy processes in which they had repeatedly fallen out with leading nobles and shown themselves unfit to rule. The most comprehensive critique of royal failings is found in the formal records of these depositions. By their nature, these are atypical because they seek to justify the momentous step of removing a king. While containing much information on how the two had failed to meet expectations, most kings faced less thorough dissection of their kingship.⁹

Short of this, there were times when the usual processes were deemed insufficient and strong opposition was aroused. Instead of removing the king, at least at first, opponents often sought major reform. Sometimes they produced written protests outlining their demands. On other occasions, we have the text of the reforms as agreed between the king and his opponents, such as Magna Carta (1215), the Provisions of Oxford (1258) and the Ordinances (1311). Such ‘agreements’ were essentially forced on a king who had little alternative; it is notable that all three of these examples were later repudiated by the same monarchs who conceded them. Nevertheless, we can glean important information about the concerns of the king’s leading subjects from these texts. They tell us much about how they thought a king was failing in his office and what they felt needed to be done about this.

Although several of these documents have come to be seen as significant landmarks in English history, it is important to remember that they were very much a response to particular circumstances. They were not an immortal, theoretical statement of liberties. Some of the demands in them are very specific, even vindictive, such as the banishment of named men in Magna Carta or Piers Gaveston in the Ordinances. Nevertheless, they do reveal some of the other expectations medieval subjects had of their king. Most crucially, many opposition movements raised the issue of advice and advisors. Criticising the king directly was often avoided; instead, his choice of advisors would often be attacked.

Many people, at least among the landed and politically active, thus had a clear sense of what kingship entailed. A king was expected to maintain the peace and protect his subjects from foreign attack (hence the heavy criticisms of Edward II when he failed to deal with Scottish raids in the northern counties). He was meant to listen to his advisors, not rely on too narrow a circle or those deemed unfit to advise, and provide remedy and justice. In return, he could expect loyalty, service and taxes when necessary to undertake his core duties. English kingship was contractual and if a king failed to fulfil his obligations, people did not suffer in silence. They knew what a king was for and what he should do. A king had to fulfil his side of the bargain if he wanted loyal subjects and a peaceful realm.

Judging a King: Medieval Chronicles

We are not only reliant on theoretical views and official documents when assessing how a king was viewed. The most influential contemporary verdicts on medieval kings are found in the chronicles of the time.¹⁰ Although these are invaluable for historians, who use them extensively, they represent the views of a limited group rather than the population at large. Until the fifteenth century, the majority of these were written by monks, with most others by secular (non-monastic) clergy, so obviously tended to have a clerical perspective. Most are in Latin and some in Anglo-Norman French, with English more common towards the end of the Middle Ages. Unlike the modern mass media, chronicles would not have influenced large numbers of people, given how many people were illiterate and how few copies of these works existed in accessible locations. The audience for most chronicles was intentionally limited to the writer’s monastery or a close circle; only a handful were copied and distributed widely. Nevertheless, they were not secret documents, with evidence of certain kings sending to monasteries for chronicles to consult for historical information, as Edward I did when trying to assert his claim over Scotland in the 1290s. It is likely that most monasteries would have kept a chronicle and what we