Bad reputation
John: An Evil King?
by Nicholas Vincent Allen Lane, 144 pages, £14.99
The latest in the attractive Penguin Monarchs series, this little book offers an account of England’s most notoriously terrible king. Vincent tackles this reputation head-on, describing a historical tradition that forever associates John with Magna Carta: his reign’s most important achievement, coming from his greatest failure and humiliation.
Our picture of John’s military, governmental, and personal shortcomings has been shaped by hindsight: lionising the treaty made at Runnymede in 1215 as the foundation of legal liberties and justice against tyranny, brought about by John’s inadequacies as both a king and human being. This is problematic constitutional history (not least because of the relative unimportance of the 1215 version of the charter, revoked within weeks). Yet the dark caricature survives, given flesh in the popular imagination by the legends of Robin Hood. Vincent seems to be preparing us for a dramatic rehabilitation of ‘Bad King John’ – but alas not. Vituperative criticism of John began before he was even crowned, and the ultimate verdict has never changed: he was a terrible king, largely because he was a terrible person. Having to content himself with that, Vincent asks: was John unlucky, or was he “inherently evil”?
He gives a straightforward, efficient account of John’s family, youth, and reign, occasionally reflecting that vices pardoned in John’s contemporaries were not forgiven of him. But as the evidence for John’s awfulness mounts up – dishonesty, disloyalty, greed, rapacity, vicious cruelty, vindictiveness, ineptitude and cowardice – the question about luck or evil fades into the background. Vincent can no more avoid the gravitational pull of Runnymede than his predecessors: John was an unforgivably bad king, and his rebellious barons inadvertently changed English kingship for good in their desperate attempts to counter his tyrannies.
Laura Ashe, professor of medieval literature at the University of Oxford