King John:  Treachery And Tyranny In Medieval England:  The Road To Magna Carta, by Marc Morris

King John is one of those rulers that it is easy to hate.  To be sure, there are people who really appreciate that tax-grabbing absolutism, but those are the kind of people who are also easy to hate.  What this book does well is put the widespread dislike of King John both at the time and throughout history into a context that demonstrates why it is that people hated and disrespected King John at the time and why they continue to do so.  In doing so, the author manages to compile quite a lot of well-supported reasons why King John was and is so reviled–he was a terrible bully but also a coward when anyone stood up to him.  He was cruel and vicious but also unable to inspire people by courage or love or anything other than fear, and he had a great gift of alienating people to a high degree.  Even those people who served King John largely loyally, like William Marshal, were highly inclined to downplay this fact for the sake of their own reputations and often endangered themselves in principled opposition to him and his failed policies, which nearly destroyed the Angevin empire in France.

This particular book of about 300 pages in length is divided into fourteen chapters with other materials.  The book begins with acknowledgements, a note on money, a list of illustrations, and maps and a family tree for the period.  After that the author begins the book in 1203 with King John’s realm under attack by the King of France (1), before going back to the foundations of the Angevin empire and how it was built over the course of the 12th century (2).  Sadly, King John and his forces were unable to rally and lost almost all of his French domains in 1204 and 1205 (3), reminding everyone of the weakness and treachery that King John showed during the first half of his brother’s reign (4).  Despite massive losses, King John was able to preserve some of his territory and dignity in 1205 and 1206 (5), after which the author jumps back to the period of John’s greatest success at the end of his brother’s reign and the early part of his own reign (6).  The author looks at the hostility between King John and Pope Innocent III (7) as well as the deed of shame when John killed his cousin (8), and struggled to deal with the enemies within among the high nobility, who he treated with rapacious brutality (9).  At this point the author discusses the last part of John’s reign in sequential order, looking at John’s expression of his tyrannical will from 1210-1212 (10), the trouble that was caused by the hermit’s prophecy in 1213 (11), the loss of Bouviens and its crushing result for John’s efforts to recover his French empire (12), the failed efforts to make peace with the barons at Runnymede (13), and finally, the end of his life spent in conflict over the fate of England (14), at which point John mercifully dies and William Marshal is able to recover England for his young son Henry III.  The book then closes with a translation of the Magna Carta, abbreviations, notes, a bibliography, and an index.

The failures of King John indicate what sort of behaviors a medieval king could take in order to alienate the political population of his country.  Indeed, a great deal of his behaviors could be part of a guide on how to lose friends and alienate people–squeeze others ruthlessly for cash, by a great deal of dishonest means, including fining people for the privilege of being forced to marry one’s ex wife, stealing a child bride who is engaged to someone else because of her attractiveness only to continually treat her like a child long after she has come to adulthood, engage in continual attempts to regain one’s lost territory while lacking in any sort of bravery and courage in those efforts, and manage to inflame rebellion in one’s relatives, friends, neighbors, as well as subjects, to the point where one is left to die unmourned and on the run from a multitude of enemies.  Had King John been brave and not so much of a “soft sword,” he might have been such a historical disaster that no king has ever been named after him in the rest of English history, but at least England and her settler colonies got the Magna Carta out of John’s disastrous reign so that liberty could be preserved for future generations.