King John
England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
No English king has suffered a worse press than King John: Bad King John, the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood, Magna Carta - but how to disentangle myth and truth?
John was the youngest of the five sons of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who, on the death of his brother Richard the Lionheart in 1199, took possession of a vast - and vastly wealthy - inheritance. But by his death in 1215, he had squandered it all, and come close to losing his English kingdom, too. Stephen Church vividly recounts exactly how John contrived to lose so much, so quickly and in doing so, tells the story of Magna Carta, which, eight hundred years later, is still one of the cornerstones of Western democracy. Vivid and authoritative, King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant is history at its visceral best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Medieval historian Church (The Household Knights of King John), a noted scholar of the reign of King John, traces the steps and missteps that led to the defeat of the king and the creation of the Magna Carta. Church begins in John's childhood, looking for potential roots of the failures in judgment that caused his downfall. John's role during the reign of his brother, Richard the Lionheart, receives meticulous treatment, and Church vividly describes the machinations, intrigue, and duplicity of court life surrounding the young count. In Church's view, John's worst fault was that he was "a man all too willing to play at brinkmanship, but who ultimately lacked the fine judgment to know when he had gone too far." This trait revealed itself many times, especially in John's demand for uncustomary tithes and his alienation of his English subjects, who refused to support his foreign wars. John was also unfortunate in that his opponents were strong, especially King Phillip II of France, who took over much of John's French territory, and Pope Innocent III, the most powerful of the medieval popes, with whom John refused to compromise. Church dramatically relates the tragic twists of the king's fall in this story of power gone awry, with echoes that resonate in the present.
