King John’s troubles began in 1199 when his father died and he ascended the English throne. Eight years earlier Father Richard had made his son Arthur his heir and successor…to the delight of his mother Constance. But between 1191 and 1199 Richard the Lionheart changed his mind and rewrote his will in favour of his brother John.
We have to suspect Henry II’s wife Eleonor as the prime mover in this. She was the mother of Richard and John and the grandmother of Arthur. John was 32 when Richard died and Arthur was 16…although Shakespeare portrays him as 10…so perhaps Eleonor and Richard reasoned that the kingdom needed a man and not a boy in the hot seat.
Hollinshed implies that The Lady Constance would have ruled in Arthur’s stead and also remarks that John established himself in England ‘thanks to the work of Eleonor’. So there was unlikely to be much love lost between the two fine ladies. Nonetheless with feuding women meddling in the affairs of state, the English Court must have been a place to avoid. And of course altering a king’s will plays havoc with the betting in the City of London. Yet John seemed to have been up to the job. Hollinshed presents King John as a political fixer par excellence…howbeit a failed one. But then all political careers end in failure so there is nothing remarkable about that.
Nowadays disrupting markets by changing a King’s Will would fall foul of the London Stock Exchange’s rules of disclosure and attract the attention of the Serious Fraud Squad. But though Shakespeare’s knowledge of people and power is second to none he had a blind spot when it came to understanding the ways of The Money Power. For an understanding of this we need to go to Shakespeare’s sources...and in particular to the financially astute Hollinshed…for a feel for the wheeling and dealing of the English and French aristocrats and their London backers.
Receiving early warning of changes to a King’s Will is akin to getting transcripts from bugging monthly meetings of the Federal Reserve Board. Doubtless the London merchants had their own Watergate teams in place monitoring shifts in moneylender fortunes. But Shakespeare misses the significance of the £30 000 King John agrees to pay the French King as part of his deal with Arthur. It is there in Hollinshed but went beneath Shakespeare’s radar because The Bard had only a layman’s understanding of money and hence no place for such snippets of information in his power framework. Hollinshed on the other hand realised that money was central to the problems of John’s reign.
Hollinshed sets out his history chronologically dating his entries like a diary. So we know that in 1200 King John ‘now resting from wars with foreign enemies began to make war with his subjects purses at home emptying them by taxes and tallages to fill his coffers’. John also ‘dealt severely with the white monks’. By 1204 John has ‘gathered huge sums in subsidies’. Hollinshed is showing the way things are headed in order to explain the background to the confrontation with the barons at Runnymede in 1215.
Hollinshed portrays John as a skilled political operator juggling his credit cards while robbing Peter to pay Paul. The impression Hollinshed gives is of a politician weaving and bobbing between rival power factions playing one off against the other…a deal here, a deal there…as the bills pile up. In 1213 for instance Hollinshed notes that the peace with France didn’t work because King Philip’s backers had counted on getting back the £60 000 owed them by the French King from the seizure of the estates of the English Catholic Barons who they planned to denounce as traitors.
The Church too is destined to play a key role in the unfolding drama ‘for neither were the bishops, abbots, nor any other ecclesiastical persons exempted by means whereof he ran first into the hatred of the clergy’. John’s problems with The Church start to appear in 1208 when he refuses The Pope’s appointment of Simon Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury. Until them the abbeys and churches are tax points ripe for looting. Yet seven years later The Barons complain that John had made them ‘subject to Rome’. The Vatican was playing its own game with European Courts.
Shakespeare portrays the wielders of state power as no different to lesser mortals…wracked by similar personal dilemmas and subject to the same individual choices. In fact Shakespeare invented the Personalisation of the Politics of Large States. The Elizabethans of Shakespeare’s day stood at a crossroads. Size was central to their situation. Behind them lay the personal politics of small Village States. Ahead lay the impersonal bureaucratic politics of totalitarian states with increasing scale and pace leading politics into unknown territory. To right and left were the roads not taken. Hollinshed has a better grasp of this than Shakespeare and understands that it is no longer what governments do but what they are. Shakespeare saw governments as controlled by individuals. He was wrong.
For the Elizabethans the parallels were between Good Queen Bess and King John. But the parallels run true even today. The contortions that Washington demanded of Sadam Hussein or the Shah of Iran are those The Vatican demanded of John and Elizabeth. In modern times David Kelly unwittingly replayed the part of Count Melun with his timely deathbed revelation of a French conspiracy. Courts and governments are brands and the shifting fortunes of their firms at the whim of The Money Power move financial markets. Plus ça change plus c’est le même chose.
