1215 and All That by Ed West

Author:Ed West
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781510719927
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Not as Bad as

Hitler or Stalin

John has gone down in history as a ‘bad king,’ but unlike his showy brother, at least he bothered to visit England, he treated the poor no worse than the privileged (equally badly), and as a borderline atheist it is not surprising that he got a bad press from the Church. On the other hand, he did beat his nephew to death in a drunken rage, so nobody’s perfect.

Pretty much every notion in history goes through some sort of revisionism, and the more you read into the past the more you realize there are two sides to the story and everything is a blur. Even in John’s case there was an attempt to do this in recent years, but it didn’t get very far; all the evidence suggests that he was in every way a terrible, terrible man. He was ‘clever, insatiably grasping and implacably narcissistic,’1 according to one modern historian, while Gerald of Wales called John ‘a tyrannous whelp’ and William of Newburgh said he was ‘nature’s enemy.’ Even one of John’s own generals conceded that he was ‘a very bad man, cruel and lecherous,’ and he was on his payroll.2 The kindest word comes from twentieth-century historian R. V. Turner, who wrote that ‘compared with Hitler and Stalin . . . John seems quite tame’—not exactly a ringing endorsement. Another historian of that period, Osbert Lancaster said of him that ‘his sole redeeming feature seems to have been that like so many celebrated criminals, he was invariably kind to his mother.’

Eleanor was forty-five when she brought John into the world, by which time his next youngest sibling was already nine, and while his mother had doted over Richard, she largely ignored John, who seems to be a classic example of the old adage that if you are treated as a child, you behave like one. But Eleanor could hardly be blamed for this, since she had been imprisoned by her husband when John was just six, which probably didn’t help his development into a well-rounded human being.

Like his brother, John was a boisterous young boy, and in one charming episode he was having a game of chess, which in those days was played with very heavy pieces (the game had been brought over from the Arab world by the Normans) when he lost his temper and smashed his opponent over the head with the board.3 This was no different from the behavior of any other members of his family, but John was both violent and a coward.

Already as a youngster he gave the impression of being wrong in the head; in 1185, when John had visited Ireland as its new teenaged despot, he immediately got off to a bad start by making fun of the locals’ dress sense and pulling the red beards of Irish kings who came to show him their fealty, a trick that he found immensely amusing; them less so. Having treated the Irish with ‘levity and contempt,’ he

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