Good King John
IN late Victorian and Edwardian England King John's name was dirt. Stubbs and J. R. Green had settled his place as a bad man and a com- plete failure as king. In recent years he has been climbing steadily back, benefiting even more than Henry II from the shift of interest from political history to administration as seen in the. Pipe, Close, Patent and Liberate Rolls. Military historians have noted his energy and swiftness of movement, his close attention to the machinery of government and to judicial work has become evident, and Dr. Lane Poole, Lady Stenton, Mr. Joliffe and the late Sidney Painter have given him more than a few good marks. John, in fact, has staged a come-back, as the two biographies noted above show.
The prime difficulty facing the biographer of any king between William 1 and Edward I is the absence of statesmanship and design in the poli- tical history of the time. Monarchs and barons alike pursue individual and personal ends and the historian cannot isolate principles and ideas. In the first half of the twelfth century this diffi- culty is lightened by the presence of contem- porary chroniclers, biographers and letter-writers of real distinction, but for the reign of John no contemporary of the first rank is helpful, and the picturesque writers at St. Albans in the next generation have only helped to darken counsel. Consequently, the biographer of John has to deal with a mass of incidents, acts and records that contain no key to the purposes behind them and the links between them, while at the end of the reign he has to join the queue for Runny- mede, that stamping-ground of great historians.
Despite all these difficulties, Dr. Warren has produced a careful and scholarly book in which account is taken of all the available printed evi- dence. His judgments and criticisms are sensible, humane, crisp and generally convincing, and he can appreciate men of such varying types as John himself, William Marshal, Innocent III and Stephen Langton. Indeed, his sense of the impact of the more intellectual and sophisticated worlds of the Roman Curia and the Paris theologian upon the impetuous, unprincipled king and baronage is one of the chief interests of the later chapters. He is perhaps least successful with his accounts of warfare; the general reader might fail to appreciate why John lost Normandy or why Bouvines is generally recognised as one of the decisive battles of the Middle Ages. In general,
Du. Warren agrees with recent interpretations of the genesis of Magna Carta, and John appears as an energetic, tireless and able ruler who fails to attain real greatness through a lack of both audacity and sagacity, to say nothing of the
• higher qualities of a statesman and a human being. The picture, as the author himself admits, just misses falling into focus; there are blurs and blanks, but these will probably always remain. With all his admitted .ability, and when all legends have been ignored, John remains curiously unamiable. Dr. Warren lightens the heavy dough of his material with a clear mind and a successful use of colloquial phrases which give salt to his narrative. His book will appeal equally to scholars, students and those who read history for pleasure; the two first classes will find full references at the end of the book, as also a full translation of Magna Carta by Professor H. Rothwell.
Mr. Appleby's book, which appeared some months ago in America, is unlucky in having such a strong rival over the same course. He writes professedly for the general reader, but he also has worked through almost all the material, though he gives no footnotes. It is a measure both of his achievement and of the present state of equilibrium in the field of Johannine studies that on nine out of ten questions his judgments and authorities arc the same as Dr. Warren's. He differs, perhaps, in being a jump behind in the. literature: thus he makes more use of Wendover and Matthew Paris, follows McKechnie on Magpa Carta and does not show familiarity with a bunch of articles in the English Historical Re- view, Nevertheless those who read his book will have a very fair picture of King John.
DAVID KNOWLES
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