The uncrowning indignity

Har dee har har. Exactly 800 years ago, on October 12 1216, Bad King John lost the crown jewels in the wash. Yuck yuck yuck.

Have I gone off my rocker? Very possibly. But the preceding paragraph is not evidence of it. This story, which every schoolchild once did know and giggle at back when they regularly taught anything interesting or useful in school, depends upon there being a river estuary in southeastern England called “the Wash”, where four rivers including the “Greater Ouse”, a very British name, flow into the North Sea.

As part of his campaign to undo Magna Carta and slay his enemies John had brought his army into Lincolnshire and crossed south into Norfolk before falling ill and heading north again. He rode back the long way round but sent his cumbersome baggage train by a more direct but risky route, only traversable at low tide, and the sea came whooshing in and engulfed it.

Now in fairness to John it’s not clear what exactly was lost; apparently it didn’t include the ancient crown supposedly belonging to Edward the Confessor that the wretched Oliver Cromwell later characteristically had melted down. And I suppose such a misfortune could have happened to anyone. He wasn’t personally leading the wagons when they got Washed away. But it did happen to John, and it was the sort of thing that happened to him, and if his enemies exaggerated the extent of the catastrophe, he certainly had made enough of them, and sufficient resentment and distrust among the populace, to make such exaggerations effective. And to give some credibility to the rumour that John had actually pawned some of his state treasures in Norfolk and faked their loss. It’s the sort of thing he would do even if in this case he did not, perhaps because he was too ill to scheme at that point; he died unlamented if not actually poisoned just a week later.

John was a brutal, cunning man. But he also had a lead touch, a gift for using his considerable talents to get himself into worse messes than most people could manage. And his combination of ruthlessness, recklessness, instability and unwillingness to heed prudent counsel that drove his subjects into the revolt that forced Magna Carta on him was on display in a minor way in his rushing about seeking revenge in deteriorating health and suffering this embarrassing setback.

He lost the crown jewels in the wash. Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah. What a looooooser.

It happened todayJohn Robson
Wish I'd said that - October 12, 2016

“Rudolf, the mad alchemist king of Bohemia, spent most of his life trying to turn base metals into gold. Even he had a sane moment, though, when he asked his famulus: ‘Tell me, if we succeed, will gold still be worth anything?’ It’s a question diploma factories rarely ask.”

George Jonas in National Post May 7, 2015

Famous quotesJohn Robson
Yet another rebuke to a king

Scene from the Battle of Bannockburn in the Holkham Bible, 1327–35 (Wikipedia) You’re not really supposed to remember all the details, are you? In Josephine Tey’s excellent The Daughter of Time the protagonist reflects at one point that things like Alfred and the Cakes, Canute and the Tides (the real story where he “rebuked his courtiers on the shore”), Nelson on the Victory were what people remembered from history “when tonnage and poundage, and ship money, and Laud’s Liturgy, and the Rye House Plot, and the Triennial Acts, and all the long muddle of schism and shindy, treaty and treason, had faded from their consciousness.” And the Ordinances of 1311 weren’t even on that list.

So let’s just fess up here. I’ve been writing and filming on liberty, on Magna Carta and all that, on our Constitution, and I hadn’t even heard of them. But in a strange and not totally self-serving way it proves my point.

You see, they were a set of rules imposed on the feckless King Edward II on October 11, 1311 to make him smarten up, be less arbitrary and be less spendthrift. And the reason it’s hard to keep track of it all is that so much of this happens in English and then British and then Anglosphere history, as opposed to its glaring absence elsewhere.

In this case the hapless Edward, soon to lose the pivotal battle of Bannockburn further disgracing himself and strengthening Parliament, was obliged to accept a restatement and reimposition of the Provisions of Oxford and of Westminster imposed on his hapless grandfather Henry III. But with an added twist, a new concern with reforming chaotic fiscal procedures and in particular redirecting revenues from the king’s personal control to the “exchequer” or Ministry of Finance in embryo. (Called the exchequer from the use of a checkered cloth to do the sums, a far less quaint and irrational procedure than it sounds once you realize they were working with Roman numerals… which is itself admittedly both quaint and irrational now that I come to write it down.)

In short, more formal procedure subject to scrutiny, less arbitrary authority. Again. And again. And again. Kings come and go (including in Edward’s case being deposed in 1327 with the enthusiastic support of his own wife for being both tyrannical and ineffective although I suppose if you’re going to have the former it’s better to have the latter). So indeed do dynasties. But popular control of the executive branch just keeps getting stronger regardless of the vicissitudes of politics, civil wars and temporary setbacks.

Uh, at least into our own day. Still some work to do there. So while we don’t have to memorize every dang Provision and Ordinance, we should remember why there were so many of them: the restless desire of the ambitious to secure unchecked power, and the unwavering determination of the people not to let them.

It happened todayJohn Robson