Lotsa gay people married, especially back then. And as I understand it, Richard I wanted to give his sister Joanna to Saladin’s brother.
Strict sexuality is very modern. Traditionally the upper class had a responsibility to marry and produce heirs. Whether a man fancied other men or women if he was royalty or nobility he was going to marry in an arranged marriage and he was going to buck up and at least try to sire children. If he liked men then he’d have side action discretely or openly depending on the culture. A few historical figures who were potentially gay may have opted for essentially abstaining from sex instead. Frederick the Great was married but famously lived apart from his wife, visiting her for one day each year he wasn’t campaigning. He may have had a male lover as Crown Prince but there are no clear indications he was sexually active at all as King.
Oops. Robert III (1337-1406) was christened John but refused to rule with the same name as the earlier King, John Toom Tabard (1249? - 1314). I’ve gotten in the habit of adding dates to a person’s name when there’s possible ambiguity. I noticed the possible ambiguity in my earlier phrasing and almost added such dates for clarity, but didn’t want to seem pedantic. :smack:
(Instead I changed the wording slightly … too slightly as it turned out. 
)
I’ll stipulate that most English remember neither John Toom Tabard nor Robert III. One Englishman, speaking of King James of the Two Numbers called him “I of Scots, VI of England, or was it the other way around.” :rolleyes:
I’m not sure many Scots know who John Toom Tabard / Empty Shirt was either - I’ve only ever heard him being referred to as John Balliol.
My earlier thread on this topic: BritDopers: Why is King John so reviled?
We’ll presume James II was meant, as he was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution”. It wasn’t so much because of poor governance on his part, as because of rabid anti-Catholic sentiment. He had converted to Catholicism, which was accepted because he had no heir. When one was born, all hell broke loose as people then feared the establishment of a Catholic dynasty on the throne. “James III” was how his son (“The Old Pretender”) was styled and recognized by the Jacobites.
Richard III probably didn’t deserve a lot of his reputation. Shakespeare did a hatchet job on him, which probably pleased Elizabeth no end.
George IV and Edward VIII were pretty bad, but note that we’re now talking about a later era where Parliament had gained enough control to limit the damage that could be done by an incompetent monarch.
John lost, it is as simple as that.
Despite personality flaws a-plenty he was a fairly capable ruler, both militarily and administratively competent. He was hardly any more venal than any of his contemporaries ( a low bar, as all medieval kings were always scrabbling for cash due to structural issues with royal finances ). He was in no ways despised by his immediate descendants - his grandson Edward I’s eldest born son was named John and would have succeeded to the throne if he hadn’t died at age five. Other royal John’s included John, Lord Beaufort ( third son of his other grandson Edmund ) and John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall ( second son of his great-grandson Edward II and heir for a period of time to his elder brother Edward III ).
Nope, he just lost and lost big as detailed by earlier posters. Also I agree he was contrasted with Richard I* who even in his day was lionized as a paragon of kings ( and Richard sort of was, in both the good and bad sense of that phrase ). But he came close to winning the whole enchilada in the Bouvines campaign and had that happened there almost certainly would have been no baron’s revolt and no Magna Carta. And John would be remembered as a king that suffered some vicissitudes, but in the end came out on top.
Instead he is history’s goat, reenforced in countless films and TV shows. Either a scheming smoothie as played by Claude Rains in The Adventures of Robin Hood, a bumbling idiot in either movie version ( or plays ) of The Lion in Winter or a bumbling, scheming, smoothie idiot in Disney’s animated Robin Hood ;). Poor, poor John. He deserves better and should be recognized as the competent scumbag that he truly was :D.
- Despite their contretemps, Richard seems to have been fond of his little brother John to his dieing day. He forgave John his intrigues and brushed it off as John having been badly advised. John thereafter served Richard loyally and capably until Richard’s death and Richard designated him his heir on his deathbed**, bypassing the elder line of his brother Geoffrey.
** Probably. Eleanor was witness and she always favored her various son’s interests and backed John over Arthur. Still it seems in character for Richard.
ETA: Oh and my vote for least capable king would probably go to Edward II.
Tamerlane is completely correct. John really was quite capable. He was an excellent bureaucrat, and took a personal interest in the nuts-and-bolts of rule. His greatest failing was bad luck. He faced off against Philip Augustus in France. Few monarchs in history in any European country would have been able to get the better of him.
It doesn’t help that the two leading contemporary chroniclers of John’s reign, Matthew Paris and Roger Wendover, were monks. John had a very problematic relationship with the church, so it should probably come as no surprise that monks would hate him as well.
He came out as a loser, and nobody likes losers. The Magna Carta is made to look more significant than it was by painting John as the loser who was forced to sign.
*" He rides to where the barges lie in readiness, and the great Barons step forth from their ranks to meet him. He greets them with a smile and laugh, and pleasant honeyed words, as though it were some feast in his honour to which he had been invited. But as he rises to dismount, he casts one hurried glance from his own French mercenaries drawn up in the rear to the grim ranks of the Barons’ men that hem him in.
Is it too late? One fierce blow at the unsuspecting horseman at his side, one cry to his French troops, one desperate charge upon the unready lines before him, and these rebellious Barons might rue the day they dared to thwart his plans! A bolder hand might have turned the game even at that point. Had it been a Richard there! the cup of liberty might have been dashed from England’s lips, and the taste of freedom held back for a hundred years.
But the heart of King John sinks before the stern faces of the English fighting men, and the arm of King John drops back on to his rein, and he dismounts and takes his seat in the foremost barge. And the Barons follow in, with each mailed hand upon the sword-hilt, and the word is given to let go.
Slowly the heavy, bright-decked barges leave the shore of Runnymede. Slowly against the swift current they work their ponderous way, till, with a low grumble, they grate against the bank of the little island that from this day will bear the name of Magna Carta Island. And King John has stepped upon the shore, and we wait in breathless silence till a great shout cleaves the air, and the great cornerstone in England’s temple of liberty has, now we know, been firmly laid. "*
John defied the Pope, and so could expect some approval from a Protestant audience, but as he was ultimately forced to yield the result is scarcely satisfactory.
Yeah, I meant James II, sorry. That’s what I get for posting right before I go to sleep.
I googled ‘England’s worst king’ last night and the top contenders were Charles I and Stephen.
One of the most commonly-known and repeated Plantagenet ‘facts’ is that King John was such a wretched king that it was decreed (by who?) that no English king would ever again be called by the name of John. I suspect most of the people confidently reporting this ‘fact’ couldn’t name one reason King John was a terrible monarch (they might have some vague memory he liked to wail “Mother always liked you best!” while tugging on his ear and sucking his thumb). Well, I’m here, once and for all, to bury that damn ‘fact’ in the six feet of horseshit it so richly deserves.
There’s no reason to believe that for the last 800-some-odd years the English/British royal family has been carefully avoiding the name John; even the most cursory investigation reveals quite the opposite. There were plenty of opportunities for England to get a John II, but it just wasn’t fated to happen.
Edward I, who may I remind you was John’s grandson, named his firstborn son John in 1266. He had every reason to expect John to succeed him as king, but the child died in 1271.
Likewise, Edward II named his secondborn son John. It was by no means outside the realm of possibility that Edward III could’ve died before the Black Prince was born, leaving John of Eltham to become king.
Edward III’s fourth son was John of Gaunt. In turn, John of Gaunt named two of his sons John (one by Blanche of Lancaster, one by Katherine Swynford).
Henry IV’s fourth son was John of Bedford.
The name enjoyed considerable favor in the main branch of the Plantagenet family almost until the arrival of the Tudors. Nothing in this suggests that King John’s descendants were ashamed of their ancestor or reluctant to use his name. Other names gained in popularity, but you might as well ask why there haven’t been more Humphreys or Thomases; neither was nearly so popular as John. For that matter, George V bestowed the name upon his son, the unfortunately epileptic Prince John, who died in 1919.
Wait a minute. Before we get all the “he wasn’t that bad” arguments, (too late, we already did), I’m putting up the more popular view.
First off, John sucked. The man was a nasty, selfish son-of-a-gun and nobody liked him. The common people despised him, because he was greedier than a hungry lion; wherever he went somehow all the money wound up in his pocket. The nobles hated him for much the same reason, and also because he was a backstabbing treacherous lying snake. He simply could never be trusted to keep his word. Worse yet, he was only a wannabe Machiavelli: contemptuous of everyone else, and not ashamed to let them know it. He never formed a stable base of power outside his own coterie, because noone could trust him with anything.
This is not to say he was stupid. On the contrary, he was brilliant and extremely intelligent, strong-willed, and capable of bold and direct action. But he was such a jerk that everything he touched turned to trash. Richard was not brilliant except when he was interested (not very often). Richard, for all his faults, left England stronger even with his ransom. John, for all his virtues, left it weaker.
Likewise, while England faced a significant threat in the form of Phillip of France, it was hardly inevitable that the English would lose their continental posessions. Frankly (ba-dum-kssh!), John lost because his lords in France ultimately would rather bow to Phillip than John. And it’s no accident that the Magna Carta was signed in John’s reign: for all his scheming, he was ultimately a weak monarch… precisely because of his scheming.
And let’s not pretend even that was anything to be proud of. His poor handling of the Canterbury affair demonstrates political tone-deafness. He quite possibly could have persuaded the Pope to support his candidate, but his insistance on bullying actively pushed Innocent III into a corner he could not back down from. After that, John stupidly doubled-down by assailing the entire English clergy. he was only able to turn this around at a dear price, and the changing political situation. As it was, he nearly got himself embroiled in a new war with France that did not bode well for John - it’s very unclear if any English magnates would have come to his defence, or like the continental lords would have preferred a distant French king.
In short, he not exactly wht you’d call even a good, but under-appreciated, king. He was a born loser, not because he lacked ability but because he lacked character.
John sucked his thumb; his chief adviser was a snake; he hoarded gold coins compulsively. Worst of all, he didn’t even have a mane. What kind of lion doesn’t have a mane? A lioness, that’s what kind. “King” John my ass. He was a phony king of England.
A POX on that phony king of England!
Well…yes :). I generally agree with almost all of your post except your disagreement that “he wasn’t that bad.” Compared to the demonization he has received down through the ages IMHO he really wasn’t that bad. But that doesn’t mean he was that good, either.
It’s really not a matter of straight dichotomy between bad vs. good. Well, not exactly anyway. If you equate bad king with failed king, John = bad. And if you equate bad king with asshole king, John = bad. He truly was a miserable little shit. But if you equate bad with incapable king, John wasn’t that bad. And that’s the mistaken impression worth correcting.
In terms of actual ability, John had it all over other English monarchs like Edward II or Richard III or even his own long-reigning son Henry III. For that reason I can’t rate him as the worst king in English history as per the OP. And the thing is that he has been slandered with all sorts of charges and implications that simply aren’t true. John has been cast as stupid, a coward, militarily incompetent, venal and of shitty character. The first three charges are really completely false. The latter two are essentially accurate, but again true of his contemporaries as well. Philip II was as slippery as an eel dipped in liquid teflon, Richard I was a vainglorious asshole and both were greedy and extortionate.
I agree that the loss of the Angevin empire was not a foregone conclusion. As noted John came within a hair of winning the whole thing back and Richard for whatever it is worth seems to have been winning militarily at the time of his death ( his generalship was Richard’s one unassailable strength ). John was at a real disadvantage going into that conflict and suffered some bad luck, but you’re right that he made plenty of wrongheaded decisions and must shoulder the blame for them.
So it’s not that I’d slot John in with the good kings. At the end of the day he was a loser, like you said. But he wasn’t stupid, incompetent or a coward as he has so often been portrayed, nor was he the worst king to ever sit on the English throne IMO.