This week has been a busy one for Bad English Anniversaries. On Tuesday, it was the 948th birthday of the Battle of Hastings; today is the 998th of the Battle of Ashdown, where Edmund Ironside was roundly trounced by Danish reconquest forces led by Cnut the Great; and tomorrow marks the death in 1216 of King John. The first two of these may have been respectively the last and first nails in the coffin of Anglo-Saxon England, but the third may be seen as a Good Thing.
Now John, characterised by Sellar and Yeatman as An Awful King and ‘the first memorable wicked uncle’, may be most famous as a thumb-sucking runt of a lion, but the shadow he casts over pop culture is miles longer than that. When 1066 and All That appeared in full in 1930, the primary school mythology of English history was ingeniously layered upon itself to give this image of the king:
When John came to the throne he lost his temper and flung himself on the floor, foaming at the mouth and biting the rushes. He was thus a Bad King. Indeed, he had begun badly as a Bad Prince, having attempted to answer the Irish Question(*) by pulling the beards of the aged Irish chiefs, which was a Bad Thing and the wrong answer. […] John finally demonstrated his utter incompetence by losing the Crown and all his clothes in the wash and then dying of a surfeit of peaches and no cider; thus his awful reign came to an end.
(*)N.B. The Irish Question at this time consisted of: (1) Some Norman Barons, who lived in a Pail (near Dublin), (2) The natives and Irish Chieftains, who were beyond the Pail, living in bogs, beards, etc. (Chs 19 & 20)
John’s reign, from 1199 to his death, was a catalogue of disasters, and the later years comprised the alienation of many vassals leading to outright war with his barons, the loss of Normandy, a four-year period of excommunication, and the famous loss of the crown jewels. Even the Magna Carta, held up as a foundation stone of democracy, ‘a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)’, was a bruising embarrassment to the king. While he may not have been quite the omnishambles Matthew Paris alleged in his Chronica Maiora, he was hardly Employee of the Month.
Sellar and Yeatman’s classic aside, John is a stalwart of popular representations of the period: in Shakespeare’s King John, he is a stubborn but not wholly unsympathetic ruler, while in A.A. Milne’s delightful poem ‘King John’s Christmas’, he is a spoilt and lonely man who hasn’t had a Christmas present in years, anxiously awaiting Father Christmas and a big, red, india-rubber ball. But from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820) onwards, John’s connection to the Robin Hood legend settles him as a thorough baddy.
A Bad Thing.
Scott’s John is a profligate, paranoid tyrant, traits maintained in the Douglas Fairbanks film Robin Hood over a century later. The John of the Errol Flynn era doesn’t deviate much from these tropes, and cements the unhistorical scheme, suggested by Scott, of John as the Arch-Norman oppressor of the decent, hearty Saxons. Further cinematic depictions reinforce these ideas. In Disney’s 1973 beat-inspired offering, the stunted Prince John rides around England in a carriage with solid gold hubcaps, sucking his thumb as his flunkey Sir Hiss hypnotises him into naptime. His unpopularity, raucously expressed in the song ‘The Phoney King of England’, upsets him into trebling the tax rate, and his sentencing to hard labour is pure justice.
In many depictions in cinema and television, the sense of John’s injustice is magnified by comparison to his bluffer, manlier brother Richard: when the Lionheart, ever based on but never played by Brian Blessed, is still alive, a viewer can hope for his quick return from the Crusades, and the inevitable showdown with his dastardly sibling. John is the effete sociopath to Richard’s tight-head prop, the Scar to his Mufasa. Whenever Richard is alive, John’s tyranny, though intense, is numbered in its days. Depictions of his kingship are rare – Ridley Scott’s 2010 mudfest is a notable exception – no doubt because we love to hope.
My two favourite Johns fall at different ends of the comedy spectrum. The first, Nigel Terry’s maladjusted teenager in The Lion in Winter (1968), is teased and bullied by his older brothers – clever Geoffrey and masochistic Richard – and retorts with such Wildean lines as ‘You turd!’ and ‘You’re a stinker and you stink!’ The knowledge that this boy will become king is deeply unsettling, both to us and to King Henry, a marvellous Peter O’Toole. The second is Richard Lewis’s mole-plagued prince from Mel Brooks’s 1993 spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights. Ridiculed by the heartthrob Robin of Loxley (Cary Elwes), John’s only allies are the sexually frustrated Latrine and the Sheriff of Rottingham, a latter-day Mrs Malaprop; while he does little but lose his rag, in his fastidiousness he is the perfect foil to Patrick Stewart’s forward, honey-voiced Richard.
He is an excellent villain, and such is his place in the English literary consciousness that a villain he will undoubtedly remain. The death of the historical figure didn’t lessen England’s problems: he was succeeded by his nine-year-old son Henry, whose 56-year reign was plagued by economic mismanagement, disastrous foreign policy and a full-scale rebellion. But it would be over 250 years before an English monarch would sneer as cruelly, scheme as ruthlessly or twist his moustaches with such torsion. So here’s to John, the Nogbad of the English.
noon auctoritee 