John Softsword & Magna Carta

Robin Hood & Bad King John – A Child Bride & War with France – The Demise of Arthur of Brittany – The Collapse of the Angevin Empire – Conflict with Innocent III – Llewelyn the Great in Wales– The Battle of Bouvines – The Baron’s Rebellion – Magna Carta – The First Baron’s War – The Bloody Flux & A Surfeit of Peaches

King John of England is remembered as one of the worst—if not the worst—English monarch. School-kids throughout the western world can easily name John as such, largely due to his wickedness being immortalized in the tales of Robin Hood, a vagabond archer who stole from the rich and gave to the poor during the reign of King John. The Robin Hood Saga has not been passed down as a historical retelling of events but as a ballad and folktale; the earliest veiled references to Robin Hood appear nearly a generation after the death of John, and the “Rhymes of Robin Hood” weren’t compiled until 1377 (more than a century and a half after John’s death). Some historians believe Robin Hood, as an historical figure, actually lived during the reign of John’s grandson, Edward I; a monk around the year 1460 wrote, “Around [the reign of Edward I], according to popular opinion, a certain outlaw named Robin Hood, with his accomplices, infested Sherwood and other law-abiding areas of England with continuous robberies.” Because Edward I is beloved as one of England’s greatest kings, perhaps the immortalization of Robin Hood placed him further back in time to a king who (for good reason) has become synonymous with all things wretched.

Richard’s youngest brother John succeeded him to the throne in 1199. He seized the treasury at Chinon and was crowned on Ascension Day. Richard’s war with England would continue by proxy through his brother John, but John wasn’t made of the same mettle as his older brother and father: he would lose all that his family had gained. Of all the Plantagenet kings, John has the seediest reputation. His father, Henry II, had built the Angevin Empire; his brother Richard had won fame and renown not only in the Holy Land but also in France; but John, always a schemer, would run roughshod over England, be ousted from France, and fall out of accord first with the Pope and then with the English nobles. The high point of his reign came not from any accomplishment of his own but from the response of the English nobility to his disheartening actions: the Magna Carta. 

But is John’s reputation as the worst English king justified? A foretaste of his ability (or lack thereof) came when his father gave him governorship of Ireland in 1185: he remained in Ireland only a few months before he hurried back to England with his tail between his legs. His childish insolence had driven a wedge between him and the loyal Irish chieftains, and he failed to protect English settlers from hostile Irish clans. Ireland remained his domain, but he was an absent governor, preferring to wash his hands of those backwards people and live an outlandish, extravagant life in his father’s court—at least before joining Richard in rebellion against him. The forthcoming narrative of his reign will show his ineptitude through-and-through, but contemporaries give us a window into how the English people viewed him. One contemporary called him “a very bad man brim-full of evil qualities,” and others dubbed him “a mad-headed youth” and “nature’s enemy.” The majority of the English nobles turned against him not only because he treated them as slaves but also because he liked to force himself on their wives and daughters. He wasn’t known for chivalry: at one point he starved the wife and son of a former friend, another time he likely arranged the murder of his nephew and rival Arthur of Brittany, and a third time he ordered twenty-two captive knights to be hurled into a dungeon where they starved to death. Militarily he was more than incompetent, and he and Richard stood in sharp juxtaposition: whereas Richard would go down as “the Lionheart,” John would earn the nickname “Softsword” because, in the words of a contemporary, “[no] man may trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly.” A modern historian writes, “[There] was no part of his dominions in which John inspired personal devotion. Originally accepted as a political necessity, he soon came to be detested by the people as a tyrant and despised by the nobles for his cowardice and sloth… Astute in small matters, he had no breadth of view or foresight; his policy was continually warped by his passions or caprices; he flaunted vices of the most sordid kind with a cynical indifference to public opinion, and shocked an age which was far from tenderhearted by his ferocity to vanquished enemies. He treated his most respectable supporters with base ingratitude, reserved his favor for unscrupulous adventurers, and gave a free rein to the license of his mercenaries.” In spite of all this, however, John did have some admirable traits: he was cultured, well-traveled, and literature; he was more knowledgeable about England and her affairs than any other king since the Conquest; he shared his father’s interest in judicial and financial matters; he spearheaded advances in military organization and in the administration of justice; and though he fell out with most of his barons, not all abandoned him (many would take his side during the First Barons’ War). 

When John became king in 1199, he inherited the largest dominion in Europe: he was lord over not only England but also vast swathes of Wales and Ireland and the whole western half of France. Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, and Aquitaine all belonged to him—but within a mere five years, he would lose almost all of it to the French king Philip II Augustus. The unraveling of his reign began when he was asked to mediate between the rival families of Lusignan and Angoulame; rather than mediating, John looked towards his own interests and married the Angoulame heiress Isabella. By union with her he had a strengthened claim to the Duchy of Normandy. Isabella of Angoulame was his second wife; his first marriage to Isabella of Gloucester had been dissolved under the pretense that she and John were too closely related. John was enamored with Isabella of Angoulame, and rumor had it that the morning after the wedding he didn’t rise from bed until well into the afternoon. That she was all of twelve years of age made his enrapture scandalous, but a more formidable scandal came from the fact that Isabella had been betrothed to the powerful Hugh de Lusignan. Rather than bringing harmony between the rival families, John stoked a fire that would blossom into war with France. Hugh de Lusignan would find an ally in Philip II, but his luck was helped by the French king’s support of John’s rival to the throne, Arthur of Brittany. Richard had named Arthur his heir, but he later named John in his place because Arthur had become imprisoned in France and so that John’s scheming would cool down with the promise of succession. In May 1200 Philip II recognized Arthur’s claim over John’s in the Treaty of Le Goulet, and the two joined forces against John and laid siege to his mother, the elderly Eleanor of Aquitaine, at her castle in Mirabeau.  

the murder of Arthur of Brittany

Eleanor penned a hurried message to her son, imploring him to come to her aid. She drew out negotiations with Arthur in order to buy time for John to appear. Her son didn’t disappoint: his arrival was so sudden that neither Arthur nor the embittered Hugh de Lusignan, who had joined forces with John’s rival, could stand against him. Both were captured by John’s men. Hugh de Lusignan would escape John’s clutches, but Arthur was too great a threat to release: John had him imprisoned at Falaise Castle in Normandy. Arthur was later transferred to Rouen, and in 1203 John attempted to make peace with him, promising to award him honors if he would break his alliance with Philip and recognize John’s claim. Arthur stood firm in his refusal and swore he would never give John peace. The English king ordered Arthur to be blinded and castrated, but Arthur’s custodian refused to carry out the grim deed. By late that year rumors began circulating that Arthur was dead, and Philip demanded to see him. Arthur never showed, and it turned out that he’d been dead for a while. John was blamed for Arthur’s death, and a contemporary alleged that “[after] King John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison in the castle of Rouen… When John was drunk and possessed by the devil, he slew [Arthur] with his own hand and tying a heavy stone to the body, cast it into the Seine.” Arthur’s sister Eleanor, known as the Fair Maid of Brittany, hardly fared better: she was imprisoned and would remain in chains for the rest of her life, dying in 1241 during the reign of John’s son Henry III.

Murder most foul may have rid John of the pesky Arthur, but Hugh de Lusignan remained at large; and with his greatest chip out of hand, it didn’t take much for Philip to intercede on Hugh’s behalf. Hugh petitioned the French king for help against John, and the Philip summoned John to the French court to answer for his actions in stealing Hugh’s bride-to-be. Because John held his French lands (the so-called “Angevin Empire”) in vassalage to the French king, he was required by feudal laws to submit to Philip’s judgment. When the English king shrugged his shoulders and made no appearance, Philip took full advantage of feudal law and declared those French territories John ruled in vassalage (everything except Gascony) to be forfeit. And then the French king, with the law behind him, invaded Normandy to forcefully bring it back into France’s fold. The impregnable Chateau Gaillard, Richard’s masterpiece, fell to Philip in 1203; and by 1206 John had lost control of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and large swathes of Poitou. John had no option but to retreat across the Channel with the Angevin Empire no more than a half-remembered dream. Eleanor of Aquitaine, still in France, had entered the Abbey of Fontevrault and took the veil; she had died on 1 April 1204 at 82 years of age after slipping into a coma “as one already dead to the world.” She was buried at Fontevrault beside the tombs of her late husband (whom she had despised) and her son Richard (whom she had adored). With John across the Channel and the French lands widely expanded under his rule, Philip couldn’t be happier; as for John, his popularity was plummeting, and he had quarrels to face closer to home: a falling out with the Pope and the restless Welsh prince known as Llewelyn the Great. 

John’s conflict with Pope Innocent III began in 1205, when John unwisely got himself involved in the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury. Innocent III supported a man named Stephen Langton, but John opposed Langton right out of the gate, going so far as to plunder the livelihoods of those who stood on the side of the papacy. The Pope didn’t like this, so he put England under interdict: this meant that no church services and sacred functions could be conducted. Babies couldn’t be baptized, couples couldn’t be married, and the dead couldn’t be buried in public ceremony. John took this as an opportunity, and he began raiding church revenues, acquiring more than 100,000 marks, and the Pope went a step further by excommunicating the English king in 1209. By 1213 the Pope decreed that John was no longer the legitimate king, and at this point John needed the Pope on his side: his restless barons were plotting against him, and whoever curried favor with the papacy—be it John or his nobles—would have the upper-hand in the blossoming conflict. John renounced his ways and made peace with the Pope, going so far as to agree to hold England as a fief of the papacy, to support Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, and to pay the Pope an annual tribute of 1000 marks (these payments were to be made for the next century and a half, carried on by John’s successors). Appeased, the Pope revoked the excommunication and lifted the interdict in 1214. John found himself in the papacy’s good graces just in time for the Baron’s Rebellion, but papal support wouldn’t save him from what was to come.

Llewelyn the Great

When John returned to England in the aftermath of losing his French possessions, he was knee-deep in conflict with Innocent III and scrapping together a plan-of-attack against France. Determined to taste vengeance against Philip by reclaiming all his lost territories, bringing the Angevin Empire to life like a phoenix from the ashes, John resorted to treating England like a cash cow much as his brother Richard had done—except John enacted measures far more exacting. These measures would form the backbone of baronial discontent, and between 1206 and 1214 John’s reign is marked by an increase in taxes, exacting feudal obligations, and stirring discontent among the upper echelons of English society. John’s only bright mark in this period was his expert handling of Llewelyn the Great, a Welsh prince who would be the first in a Welsh dynasty destined to trouble John’s successors. Historian Dan Jones notes that, in the eyes of the English, the Welsh were a “wild and quarrelsome people, by turns generous and musical, bold and barbarous, witty in their speech but fierce when they were met riding into battle, the men fighting barefoot with their mustaches grown long and their faces painted brightly.” Henry II noted that the Welsh were “so brave and untamed that, though unarmed themselves, they do not hesitate to do battle with fully armed opponents.” At the dawn of John’s reign, a Welsh prince named Llewelyn the Great of Gwynedd was rising to prominence in the west, and in 1205 John sought peace with this rising star by marrying him to his illegitimate fifteen-year-old daughter Joan. In return Llewelyn, a shrewd politician with far-reaching ambitions, pledged fealty to John for his Welsh territories. In 1208 Llewelyn brought the Welsh kingdom of Powys under his rule, and the next year he accompanied John on a campaign into Scotland. Llewelyn’s star continued to rise, and it wasn’t long before John felt threatened: if the Welsh prince became too powerful, he could overthrow John’s lordship over Wales and claim sovereignty over the Welsh kingdoms. 

When Llewelyn attacked the Earl of Chester in 1210, John put his weight behind the earl. The English king marched into Wales, where he received support from a number of Welsh princes who had been forced to submit to Llewelyn. John marched toward the Welsh town of Deganwy, and Llewelyn adopted guerilla tactics to harry John’s forces. Llewelyn’s forces retreated into the mountainous terrain and made sure to spirit away all the victuals in John’s path. Though John was able to take Deganwy Castle, he had planned on foraging for subsistence and faced starvation. He had no choice to return to England, but it was only three months before he tried his luck again, this time with a well-supplied army. He crossed the River Conway and encamped on the Menai Strait, which penetrated deep into the heartland of Llewelyn’s burgeoning Welsh Empire. Llewelyn, seeing that he had been outmaneuvered, sent his wife (and John’s daughter) to the English king to hammer out peace terms. John’s terms were humiliating, but Llewelyn had no choice but to accept them. North Wales (known as the Four Cantrefs) was annexed for England, and John established a trio of mercenary captains over the southern border. Llewelyn’s empire had shrunken down to a mere kingdom, but John’s casting-out of this rising star served to foster resentment among the lower Welsh princes. These lower princes hadn’t been fond of Llewelyn, but at least he was Welsh; now they were wholly under the toe of the English. Capitalizing on the growing discontentment, Llewelyn launched a revolt against John, and he even managed to garnish the support of Innocent III (who was, at that time, at odds with John). By 1212 Llewelyn had regained much of what he’d lost, and his revolt served the interests of Philip, for it delayed John’s planned invasion of France. Llewelyn forged an alliance with the French king, and then he aligned himself with the rebellious barons when they rose against John in 1215. As the restless barons confronted John at Runnymede, Llewelyn took full advantage of England’s internal turmoil and captured the town of Shrewsbury on the English-Welsh border. Over the next three years, as John wrestled with his barons, Llewelyn was able to extend his control deep into southern Wales. Though John had, at first, put Llewelyn in his place, by the end of John’s reign he had rose even higher in power and prestige. 

We have looked at two aspects of the “interwar years” (that time between John’s first and second wars in France): John’s falling-out with Pope Innocent III and his running conflict with Llewelyn the Great. A third aspect is his evolving conflict with the English nobles. At the turn of the 13th century, there were around 200 English barons, 20 of whom were earls. When John returned from France after losing the Angevin Empire, he was determined to win it back—but to do so required money for armies, supplies, and fleets to transport them across the Channel and to guard the coast against French raiders. The loss of his French territories wasn’t just a blow to his prestige but also to his pocketbook; those lands had pulled loads of money into the treasury, but now he had to make do with scant revenues in England. Like his brother before him, he treated England as a cash cow, but in a far more extreme manner. He seized Church lands and took their money as his own; he imprisoned Jews and tortured them for their money; he raised the taxes; married off heiresses to the highest bidder; sold off wardships; exploited his feudal rights to the extreme by demanding money from his barons rather than military service; charged his nobles exorbitant sums to inherit their lands; made new claims on military services and scutage; and instructed the sheriffs and justices to exact outrageous fines for the most trivial offenses, in effect extorting money from his lowest subjects. He perpetuated the greatest financial exploitation of England since the Norman Conquest, and the barons chafed against him. He kept the restless nobles at bay, and in 1214 he was ready to launch his second invasion of France. 

The Battle of Bouvines

John had pieced together an international coalition to fight on his side. The biggest players of this coalition were John himself and Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor. A handful of disaffected French counts allied with John. They planned a pincer attack on Philip’s seat in Paris: John would invade western France, stir up rebellions in Aquitaine and Anjou, and then march east against the capital; Otto IV and the rebellious French vassals would assault Paris from the north. It didn’t take long for the plan to fall apart. Once John crossed the Channel, French forces moved to intercept him; John, unwilling to face the French in a pitched battle, made it his priority to avoid confrontation rather than to accomplish his goals in Aquitaine and Anjou. His avoidance measures failed on 2 July 1214 when he was defeated at La Roche-aux-Moines. The forces of his northern coalition—with Otto IV at the head—were steamrolling towards Paris, but with John knocked out of action Philip could march to meet them. The two forces met on 27 July in a marshy plain between Bouvines and Tournai in Flanders. The cavalry on the French right and left wings duked it out with their counterparts and carried the field; on the French left wing the Earl of Salisbury was captured, and on the right Count Ferdinand of Flanders was forced to kneel prisoner. Otto’s infantry pressed forward against Philip’s knights, and though they met mettle-for-mettle, the victorious French cavalry on the wings were able to encircle the imperial forces, cordoning them off into a zone of bloodletting. Bishops unhorsed fought with maces and clubs, since the Church had ruled that men of God shouldn’t spill blood (by killing with blunt force trauma rather than edged weapons, the bishops figured they could wage war without falling out of God’s favor). The medieval chronicler William the Breton captures the nightmare of Bouvines, pitying the naïve horses rather than the mean-spirited men:

“Lances are shattering, swords and daggers hit each other, combatants split each other’s heads with their two-sided axes, and their lowered swords plunge in the bowels of the horses… You could see horses here and there lying in the meadow and letting out their last breath; others, wounded in the stomach, were vomiting their entrails while others were lying down with their hocks severed; still others wandered here and there without their masters and freely offered themselves to whomever wanted to be transported by them; there was scarcely a spot where one did not find corpses or dying horses stretched out.”

Philip II won the Battle of Bouvines, and Otto IV managed to escape despite his army being rendered ragged. For the second time John fled defeated to England with his treasury depleted and dreams shattered. Had John been victorious on the Continent, perhaps the unhappy barons would’ve gotten into line; but with defeat, John returned to barons more willing than ever to find justice “western style”. It wasn’t long before they demanded certain reforms; so radical and liberal were these reforms that John purportedly retorted, “Why, amongst these unjust demands, did not the barons ask for my kingdom also? Their demands are vain and visionary, and are unsupported by any plea of reason whatsoever.” He swore that he wouldn’t grant them their demands, for to do so would be (in his mind) to submit to them as a slave. The barons demanded that the king meet them for a conference at Northampton to settle their disputes, and when John failed to show for ten days after the appointed date, a group of nobles renounced their fealty on the tournament field at Brackley. The date was 5 May 1215, and it marked the beginning of the Baron’s Rebellion: by abandoning their oaths, they set themselves free to make war against the king. To show that they were serious, the barons left the tournament field, marched twenty miles to the nearest royal castle (Baynard’s Castle), and put it under siege. When John received news of the rebellion, he instructed his sheriffs to “take in our possession our enemies’ lands…” He hoped to quell the revolt, but it became all too real when the barons seized London. With his capital in chains, John had no choice to negotiate. On 19 June 1215 he and his loyal supporters met with the rebellious barons at a place 23 miles west of London. It was called  Runnymede, and in prato quod vocatur Ronimed (“in the meadow that is called Runnymede”) a new era in western history was launched.

modern day Runnymede

The name “Runnymede” derived from three Old English words: run, eg, and maed; altogether they referred to a meadow surrounded by marshes that served as a place of council—literally, “a wetland on which a king might take advice.” Runnymede—a lush meadow cut through and watered by the Thames—had been used since ancient times as a spot for meetings concerning the peace of kingdoms. Here John and his barons would forge the “Magna Carta” (or the Great Charter, so-called because it was written on a huge piece of parchment), a document that limited royal power, ensured feudal rights, and restated English law. In form it resembled the coronation oaths of kings used since Henry I, but it went far beyond such oaths. The Magna Carta was the first formal document decreeing that the monarch, like his people, was under the rule of law, and that individual rights were so sacred that they shouldn’t be violated by the king—thus one could argue it was England’s first constitution. Though originally written in straight prose Latin absent any breaks (and numbering around 4000 words), now Magna Carta is studied as a series of 63 clauses, all of which, according to Dan Jones, “form a critique of almost every aspect of Plantagenet kingship in general and the rule of John in particular.” Magna Carta dealt with a hodgepodge of issues: reliefs for inheritance; the treatment of debtors to the Crown; levels of scutage, feudal aid, and rents; widows’ rights; limits to the Crown’s use of writs; policies regarding debts owed to Jewish moneylenders; and matters as trivial as weights and measures, fish traps along the Thames and Medway rivers, and even procedures for funding the rebuilding of bridges. Magna Carta confirmed Church liberty (whilst adding some clauses that the papacy found disturbing), spelled out the feudal obligations of nobles, and placed the Crown under an oligarchic committee. Furthermore, King John was to expel foreign mercenaries from England and to oust a number of his hated foreign advisors. Jones notes that “[these] rights and obligations were conceived in part as a return to some semi-imaginary ‘ancient’ law code that had governed a better, older England, which lay in the historical memory somewhere between the days of the last Saxon king, Edward the Confessor, and the more recent times of John’s great-grandfather, Henry I.” 

John assents to Magna Carta

While the majority of Magna Carta’s clauses have no bearing on today’s world, a number of middle clauses mark Magna Carta as “Year Zero” for western democracy: these clauses state that “A free man shall not be imprisoned, exiled, deprived of his property or otherwise destroyed simply because it is the king’s will…” and that “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned… except by lawful judgment of his peers.” Not only did the king have to abide by the rule of law when dealing with his subjects, another clause declared that he couldn’t enact arbitrary taxes, and any new taxes needed the consent of the barons. Though these clauses have come down the centuries as the bedrock for western democracy—Magna Carta would play a firm role in the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, would become the constitutional “first principle” of the unruly 13 American colonies, and would be echoed in the first draft of the U.S. Constitution and drawn upon in the U.S. Bill of Rights—it should be noted that democracy as we know it was nowhere on the radar for the recalcitrant barons. The “free men” to whom Magna Carta refers comprised somewhere between 10-20 percent of England’s adult population; Magna Carta didn’t protect the lower echelons of feudal society, the serfs and villeins, and was geared towards defining and protecting the technicalities of feudal law. Hovering over Magna Carta were two great ideas: first, that the nobles had the right to see themselves as a community with collective rights; and second, that the king had two roles: not only was he tasked with making the law, he also had to obey it. The barons attached a security clause to the document: if King John decided to “transgress against any of the articles of peace,” a group of 25 elected barons were entitled to “distress us in all ways possible, by taking castles, land and possessions and in any other ways they can… saving our person and the persons of our queen and children.” In short, the security clause licensed civil war if John turned his back on Magna Carta—and after consenting to the document at Runnymede, with his hands tied behind his back, that is precisely what John did. And the Baron’s Rebellion became The First Baron’s War. 

It was only two months after consenting to Magna Carta that John claimed he had done so under duress. He revoked Magna Carta and appealed to the Pope for help. Now that England and the papacy were reconciled, the Pope declared Magna Carta “shameful and demeaning… illegal and unjust.” The Pope feared that the Charter would “incur the anger of Almighty God and St. Peter and St. Paul His apostles.” He saw the Magna Carta as nothing less than the work of Satan: “Although our well beloved son in Christ, John illustrious king of the English, grievously offended God and the Church… the king at length returned to his senses… But the enemy of the human race [i.e. the Devil], who always hates good impulses, by his cunning wiles stirred up the barons of England so that, with a wicked inconstancy, the men who supported him when injuring the Church rebelled against him when he turned away from his sin.” The Pope’s denunciations didn’t deter the rebellious barons, and civil war engulfed England: towns and castles were besieged, men were slaughtered, and John wreaked havoc on northern England and the Scottish border. The contemporary Roger of Wendover speaks of King John’s part in the conflict:

“[King John] spread his troops abroad, burnt the houses and buildings of the barons, robbing them of their goods and castles, and thus destroying everything that came in his way, he gave a miserable spectacle to all who beheld it. And if the day did not satisfy the malice of the king for the destruction of property, he ordered his incendiaries to set fire to the bridges and towns on his march, that he might refresh his sight with the damage done to his enemies, and by robbery might support the wicked agents of his iniquity. All the inhabitants of every condition and rank who did not take refuge in a church-yard, were made prisoners, and, after being tortured, were compelled to pay a heavy ransom. The castellans who were in charge of the fortresses of the barons, when they heard of the king’s approach, left their castles untenanted and fled to places of secrecy, leaving their provisions and various stores as booty for their approaching enemies; the king placed his own followers in these empty castles, and in this manner marched with his wicked followers to Nottingham.”

The civil war turned in favor of the barons when they played their Ace: an alliance with France. The Dauphin (or heir to the French throne) Louis of France (later Louis VIII) crossed the Channel and marched to the aid of the barons. To avoid a pitched battle with the French in rebel-held East Anglia, John fled through a series of marshes. His timing was misplaced, and the incoming tide engulfed his baggage train; thus he lost his treasure, along with the crown jewels he’d inherited from his grandmother, Empress Matilda, who herself had engaged in a fruitless civil war. To make matters worse, he came out of the marshes with the bloody flux and had to be carried on a litter to Newark Castle. The dysentery was too much for him, and after comforting himself with a “surfeit of peaches,” he died on the stormy night of 18 October 1216. John would be the first Plantagenet king buried in England: as his resting place he chose Worcester Cathedral and was laid to rest beside the shrine of his favorite saint, the Saxon St. Wulfstan. Matthew Paris captured the popular sentiment when news of John’s death spread: “Foul as it is, Hell itself is defiled by the presence of John.” John’s death didn’t bring immediate peace to England—the civil war raged on. But a happy ending was made for Hugh de Lusignan: John’s widow, Isabella of Angouleme, was freed from John’s side and married her old flame Hugh. 

The two of them had a large family and lived happily ever after. 

Hugh de Lusignan, it seems, won after all.