Original subtitles

NARRATOR: A reign defined by failure.

- Bad King John was a man

driven by the nastiest

of psychological agenda.

NARRATOR: A king who ruled through fear.

- What is the job description of a king?

To protect the people, to protect the church,

to rule justly.

John failed on almost every one of those criteria.

NARRATOR: But was he really anymore bloodthirsty

than other medieval rulers?

- John was particularly unhinged.

- He turned his aristocracy into a problem.

NARRATOR: His crimes did shape history.

- The Magna Carta really is his biggest public apology,

and this is really a watershed moment.

- Magna Carta is an extraordinary document.

- (thunder claps)

NARRATOR: Murder, brutality, and a bloody downfall.

The life and times of one history's most lampooned monarchs.

Rulers come and go, but what legacy will the sands of time leave behind?

Bad King John, is he truly a Killer King?

- As foul as hell is,

it's made fouler by the presence of King John.

NARRATOR: For more than 800 years,

King John has been vilified as one of history's punchlines.

A weak, vindictive monarch.

A man ridiculed by his own people.

- And there's that wonderful line in one of the songs where they say,

"Too late to be known as John the First,

he's sure be known as John the Worst."

I think that's really sort of stuck with us.

The Bad King John's image, I think comes from him being

both a nasty person, a cruel person, just generally quite horrible.

NARRATOR: The establishment villain to Robin Hood's folk hero,

John was cast as the ultimate tyrant;

grasping, scheming, despised.

- And I will be King of England.

- He was a spiteful man, and he was a weak man.

And these are two of the human qualities

that people recognise across the ages.

So I'm not surprised that we get these depictions of John

as ridiculous, pathetic.

NARRATOR: Even his contemporaries saw him

as weak, inept and cruel.

- The entire nation is united against you.

The church, the commoners and the barons.

- In contemporary paintings of the time,

he does have that kind of look of being weak

and wily and constantly suspicious.

NARRATOR: But his crimes went far beyond

stealing from the rich and taxing the poor.

- John's body count, probably quite a lot higher

than a lot of other medieval kings.

John is definitely cruel, and I think these acts of cruelty,

such as, you know, starving prisoners to death,

allegedly starving a priest to death,

murdering the sons of nobles,

it's a way that he feels he can consolidate

his position as king.

NARRATOR: We can forget the fairytales of Robin Hood,

Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and the rest.

The real John wasn't just bad,

he truly was a Killer King.

But did his cruelty stem from a massive inferiority complex?

The fact that he and everyone else knew

he was never really supposed to be a King?

- (birds caw)

- (gentle music) - (birdsong)

- John is born to the most charismatic couple

of the mid-12th century.

That's Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry Plantagenet.

Two extraordinary individuals

who were politically successful, not just in England

and in the British Isles, but also in France.

- (birdsong)

NARRATOR: John is born a Plantagenet;

an Anglo-French dynasty forged in blood and conquest.

Eleanor of Aquitaine had once been Queen of France,

but after her marriage to King Louis VII was annulled,

she wed Henry II of England

creating one of the most powerful dynastic unions

in medieval Europe.

- In 1199, when John inherits the throne,

he inherits the Angevin Empire,

which is a huge powerhouse in Europe.

It actually encompasses

half of modern-day France, all of England,

parts of Wales and Ireland, and much of the British Isles really.

It's very wealthy, it holds a lot of power.

It also holds a lot of trade. So it's a huge inheritance.

It is the jewel in the crown, quite literally.

NARRATOR: The youngest of five sons,

John was never meant to rule.

- So as the youngest son,

John doesn't have sort of the same inheritance as his older brothers.

He's actually known as John Lackland and John Softsword,

because he doesn't rule over territories and he doesn't get

that administrative and that military experience

that his older siblings, like Richard, do have.

- John was part of a family who were charismatic,

who were revered for their beauty and their charm.

And here was John, this runt,

this ridiculed part of the family.

He was an embarrassment.

NARRATOR: In medieval Europe,

noble sons were groomed for power from childhood,

first as pages, learning courtly life and combat.

- What is striking to me about John

is that his brothers were all raised

as proper secular aristocrats.

They were taught to fight.

When they reached a certain age, they went on tournaments.

And that's what you did as an aristocratic young man.

You got on your horse, you got with your mates,

you went to a tournament. - (hoofbeats)

NARRATOR: By adolescence, they became squires,

directly assisting knights and honing their martial skills.

- John never had any of those experiences.

- Rather than receiving the military training

that we know his brothers received,

John was sent instead to a convent.

- Where he was to be brought up by the nuns of Fontevraud.

I wonder if the parents looked at John and thought,

"Actually, you're not robust enough.

It's not going to work for you to go through this military training."

NARRATOR: Raised by nuns rather than training in a warrior's household,

John's life would be forever shaped by the perception

that he lacked the warrior aura of his father and elder brother,

or the sharp intelligence and statesmanship of his mother.

- They didn't take him seriously in the way

that they took Richard seriously or in the way that they took

Henry Plantagenet seriously, or indeed the way

they took Eleanor of Aquitaine seriously.

I mean, it is like the runt of the litter, really, isn't he?

- I think he felt ridiculed.

It created within John

a narrative of being on a mission

to avenge that sense of being ridiculed

that drove him his entire life.

NARRATOR: John missed out on the essential lessons

of leadership, duty, loyalty,

and the chivalric code that defined noble rule.

- So, the chivalric code is sort of a way of behaving

and conducting yourself in the Middle Ages.

It's a code of behaviour, it's a way of presenting yourself to the world.

And it encompassed all aspects of life, you know, personal life,

public life, you know, family life.

NARRATOR: For kings, it was more than a moral code.

It was a ruler's measure of legitimacy.

- And it's certainly something that John falls down on.

He is not chivalric at all

on the battlefield or at court.

And I think, again, this is why he's criticised so heavily.

His brother, Richard the Lionheart, is known as a chivalric king.

He went often on successful crusades.

He was very much sort of painted in that way.

John is the complete opposite.

- It wasn't just that he wanted to get his own back.

It created a desire

to not just get back at people, but to humiliate others.

That's the driving motivation of John as an adult.

NARRATOR: Overlooked, unprepared, the runt of a dynasty.

And yet, against all odds,

in 1199, John was crowned king.

- The way that John succeeded to all those Plantagenet lands

was effectively to be the last brother standing.

All the sons were, by 1199, dead.

Henry the Young King died in 1183.

Geoffrey died in 1186.

Richard died in 1199.

- By the time John inherits the throne in 1199,

he's got a lot to live up to.

Henry II is a fantastic administrator.

He completely reforms justice.

He brings in a lot of judicial traditions that we still have today.

And, of course, his brother, the famous Richard I

or Richard the Lionheart,

very well known as a military leader.

Going on crusades, fighting for the church.

- Richard nominated John as his successor on his death bed,

but of course once Richard had died, other factors came into play.

We're not yet in a world where primogeniture

is the deciding factor.

NARRATOR: John's path to the throne was not automatic.

His claim rested on Richard's nomination,

but succession required more than just a royal decree.

It depended on securing the loyalty

of powerful nobles across the Plantagenet empire.

- Each bit of these territories make a decision

about which of the Plantagenets

it's going to throw its support behind

at the point that the old ruler dies

and we're in the business of trying to find an new ruler.

So there's a possibility for revolt.

NARRATOR: The Plantagenet Empire was cracking.

Brittany, Anjou, and Aquitaine were slipping from John's grasp

as they looked to someone else to be their ruler.

- There is some bad luck involved.

He's up against, you know, a much stronger French king,

but also because he's not got that experience

and he doesn't gain the trust of the nobilities,

particularly those based in the continent,

he doesn't have that support base.

- There was a succession dispute that went on.

NARRATOR: To hold onto power, he would have to fight.

And in the medieval world, that meant blood.

NARRATOR: In 1199, when John sought to inherit

the empire built by his father and brothers,

the Plantagenet lands seemed on the brink of collapse.

In England, he is crowned,

but in France, his lands, his titles,

and his right to rule are questioned.

Theres another contender.

- So Geoffrey left a son, Arthur,

who, if we were following strict rules of primogeniture,

would have been the successor to Richard in 1199.

So Anjou decided that

Arthur would be their next count

and indeed installed him as their next count.

Brittany decided that they wanted Arthur as well.

John did become Duke of Normandy.

He did become Duke of Aquitaine,

but he wasn't Count of Anjou,

and he certainly wasn't ruler in Brittany.

NARRATOR: Arthur of Brittany, the posthumous son

of John's elder brother Geoffrey, had the backing

of the French king, Philip Augustus, Philip II.

- So Prince Arthur of Brittany, as John's nephew,

was obviously a claimant to the English throne

and therefore a threat.

- Arthur was a member of the Plantagenet family,

but was brought up at the French court.

And the French court was a problem

because the ruler, Philip Augustus,

who had been ruling the kingdom since 1180,

was determined to undermine the Plantagenet dynasty.

He wanted to recapture those territories

that once belonged to the kings of France.

NARRATOR: From the outset, Arthur, Duke of Brittany, had been

raised as a political weapon.

His very birth was a statement of defiance.

- In naming Arthur "Arthur",

what his mother, Constance of Brittany, was doing

was plugging into Breton mythology,

that Arthur would be the person who'd come to rescue the Bretons.

The mythology about Arthur was strong

in late 12th-century England,

and indeed in Brittany.

And people really believed

in Arthur, in Merlin. The prophecies of Merlin were

an extremely important part of the thought world.

NARRATOR: From the start, he was groomed for power,

shaping him into a rallying figure

for those who opposed John's claim to the English throne.

- The mythical Arthur, the heroic Arthur,

brought up to be a great leader, believed in.

And even though he's only 13 years old,

he was everything that John was not, he had been given

everything that John had been not, in terms of

psychological, emotional support, belief.

So I think that, to John,

Arthur was his nemesis.

NARRATOR: The death of Richard the Lionheart

didn't settle the question of succession.

It turned the Plantagenet family into a battleground.

- Arthur and John were actually dining together

when they heard of Richard's death,

and that they sort of went their separate ways.

Then Arthur fled to the French king's court.

The two must have known that they would be rivals

for Richard's inheritances.

NARRATOR: The duchies of the Plantagenet Empire chose sides,

their allegiances split.

Many in Anjou, Maine, and Brittany declared for Arthur,

while John struggled to secure his rule.

Crucially, Arthur had the backing of the French king, Philip Augustus,

escalating a family dispute

into a broader struggle for power in France.

- There was effectively a civil war,

a family dispute, a succession dispute

between John and Arthur.

NARRATOR: For three years, Arthur's forces,

backed by Philip Augustus, laid siege to castles

across Anjou and Maine.

- He has one victorious battle at the start of his reign.

They go downhill pretty quickly.

He has a string of unsuccessful battles on the continent.

Some of it is bad luck, but a lot of it is just poor leadership.

- The French king was giving Arthur the resources

he needed to maintain

a military campaign against John.

Arthur couldn't be ignored because he had the support

of the Anjouans and a significant portion of the Bretons.

Arthur was capable of putting into the field

a military force,

which was a military force to be reckoned with.

- But it's John's failures that lead to that empire unravelling.

NARRATOR: John wasn't just losing land.

He was losing the support of his barons,

whose wealth and loyalty he needed to wage war.

His nobles had served kings before.

Great kings, strong kings,

just kings.

John was none of these things.

- He doesn't have much military experience.

He is known as John Softsword for a reason.

He hasn't sort of built up that leadership,

that military sort of prowess.

- John can't rise to the occasion.

He can't be the strong, powerful leader

because that is not who he is.

- As well as losing the land, he's also losing his power,

his support bases, he's losing income.

NARRATOR: John, not raised in the chivalric tradition,

repeatedly breaks the rules of war,

treating his enemies with cruelty and disdain,

rather than honour.

- John was not being magnanimous towards his opponents.

What he was doing was he was ill-treating them, mistreating them.

- (soldiers shouting) - (swords clashing)

- There were certain ways you were expected to behave

on the battlefield, and that included treating your prisoners,

particularly noble prisoners, with respect.

They were there to be bargained with, not there to be murdered.

- You weren't really aiming to kill your opponent.

What you were aiming to do, was to capture

your aristocratic opponent,

take his horse, take his armour,

then take a ransom, sell him back to his family.

All this would be done in an honourable way.

NARRATOR: John deployed brutal and unconventional tactics.

He seized noble hostages, women, children and knights,

using them as leverage, rather than respecting the customs of war.

He refused to ransom prisoners,

opting instead to starve them

or execute them outright.

- And I think these acts of cruelty, such as starving prisoners to death,

murdering the sons of nobles,

it's a way that he feels he can consolidate his position as king.

- There's nothing of honour or conviction

that drives this man.

He is all about the childish resentment

he still harbours, and he was motivated

by a personal, vindictive,

vengeful mission

that sought to humiliate anyone and everyone

purely so that he could feel better

about the rejection and disrespect he had experienced as a child.

NARRATOR: Unsurprisingly, this did not inspire loyalty

amongst the English nobles.

- The stealing of the wives of the barons,

all the acts that totally reject

the social structures of the time

are him almost like a sulky child. It's almost...

They have an almost tantrum-like quality to it.

He was never respected. He was never accepted.

And now here he is, not just rejecting those codes

that rejected him, but actually flouting them,

actually showing that he is king and he can do what he wants,

whatever the formal codes

and the chivalric rules and principles.

NARRATOR: For later chroniclers of King John by the 1220s,

a theme soon emerges. Despite his exulted position,

he just wasn't very good at winning friends and influencing people.

- One of the things that comes out very clearly

from this text from the 1220s is very much

a sense that John...

couldn't relate well or properly

to his aristocracy. They didn't take him seriously.

- He knew that he was disrespected, he knew that he was disliked,

but there's a big difference between knowing that intellectually

and really taking that on board emotionally.

He's gaffe-prone. He doesn't understand other people

because all he's focussed on actually

is getting them to like him, desperation to get them

to like him, to respect him.

He's not actually very good at understanding other people

and other people's feelings.

- There's this extraordinary moment when John is travelling

through the countryside.

And he stops at a castle at Alencon,

which is controlled by a man called Robert of Saye.

And he stays there for a few days, he dines with Robert,

and then he goes on his way.

And he gets a few miles down the road,

and Robert of Saye then hands his castle over

to the French king.

He basically commits treason against John.

John hears about this and is utterly shocked.

- The fact that the personal, direct face-to-face contact with King John

caused him to be instantly disliked, doesn't surprise me.

This was a man who had a hatred of people.

NARRATOR: By 1202, John's world was collapsing.

His aging mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine,

one of his last true allies, had retreated

to the fortified castle of Mirabeau in Anjou.

Now over 80 years old, she was still fighting

to hold together what remained of the Plantagenet Empire.

- John's mother was rallying support for John.

Arthur obviously knew this.

And so he laid siege to the castle at Mirabeau.

He was laying siege to his grandmother's castle,

planning to take her captive.

John heard about this, gathered up his forces,

rushed southwards,

and managed to catch Arthur unawares.

- (soldiers screaming) - And in that July of 1202

between the castle and his soldiers,

he managed to capture Arthur.

The situation looked like it was going to turn in John's favour.

- Prince Arthur's capture really is a turning point.

NARRATOR: 16-year-old Arthur was captured on 1st August 1202,

and imprisoned in the Chateau de Falaise in Normandy.

John finally had control of his greatest threat.

But capturing a prince was one thing.

Deciding what to do with him was quite another.

- What then happened

is what really turned people against John,

because John then mishandled what he did.

- (thunder clapping) - (rainfall)

- No one source

is absolutely clear what happened.

John began to see the existence of Arthur as a major problem.

So, John and Arthur met one another at Falaise Castle

and words were exchanged between them.

John confronted Arthur.

John begged Arthur to come on side, to be a Plantagenet.

- This must have been intolerable for John.

That he finds himself

in the position where he has to go to Arthur,

his nephew, to beg him to persuade the people

of the duchies who are supporting this boy

to persuade them to support him.

- And Arthur refused point blank to do a deal with John.

- For this pompous, proud man

that John would have become on the throne,

this would have been very difficult.

- It's very clear

that the king's sort of immediate advisory group

gathered in Normandy, some of them travelled from England,

and the decision was made at that point

that they're going to get rid of Arthur.

NARRATOR: Arthur is 16, and he is of royal blood.

- We know that Arthur was got rid of.

Almost certainly on the 1st of April, 1203.

- Chronicles do recount that Arthur was strangled,

and his body was thrown in the River Seine.

- A rather scurrilous rumour going around was that John,

in a fit of drunken rage, murdered Arthur.

- But it was definitely advantageous to John to get rid of him,

so that's certainly the motive.

He certainly has the power networks and the reach

to get to Prince Arthur, the connections.

It's just whether or not he was the one

that actually ordered that murder.

- But I'm not surprised that people speculated about this.

People knew the rancid, putrefied,

underlying character of John.

And they knew the power in his hands.

John was capable of doing anything.

NARRATOR: John's nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, was dead,

and John believed he'd won. His greatest rival,

the boy who haunted his throne, had disappeared.

John and his court believe he truly is

an unrivalled king of the castle.

- Of course, what they don't realise is

the problem isn't Arthur of Brittany, it's John.

That would take an amount of self-reflection

that John was not capable of applying.

The rumour that Arthur was dead

became rife within days of the events.

People began to lose faith in John

as their ruler.

- This was a period where it was quite common

to sort of bump off rival claimants to the throne,

difficult members of the family.

But Prince Arthur was still a young person.

He's still sort of developing, he's still a minor,

and in a position of trust as an uncle,

I think this was seen as quite abhorrent.

NARRATOR: John had underestimated the impact of his crime.

- The way that John miscalculated

is that he forgot that sort of rule of politics,

which is, you've got to tell the story.

The person who was controlling the narrative very rapidly afterwards

was the French king, Philip Augustus.

NARRATOR: Philip II of France seized the opportunity.

Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine,

lands that had been held by John's ancestors for generations,

began turning against him.

- And then over the course of the next six months,

the French king managed to mop up

John's continental territories.

By the summer of 1204,

John had effectively lost contact with this continental lands.

- We see the loss of Normandy, which is a key stronghold

for England on the continent.

That's the first piece of the puzzle to go.

That starts to unravel in 1204.

He loses Poitou and Anjou in pretty quick succession.

And then disastrously his mother, the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine,

who obviously brought the territory, the Duchy of Aquitaine,

into the Anjou Empire, she dies.

So we lose that really important, strong influence on the continent.

We see the Angevin Empire basically start to disintegrate.

- For the remainder of his life,

he spent his energies

trying to recapture those lost patrimonial lands.

NARRATOR: Even as he flees across the English Channel,

John attempts to rally his vassals.

But they had seen enough.

- I think one of the key issues is that John

repeatedly tries to build back his power base.

He tries to go on these military campaigns,

and they cost a lot of money.

NARRATOR: This is where the legend of an avaricious,

cruel, tyrannical King John emerges.

- Your Majesty. - Arise.

And if you bear more complaints from the peasantry,

we are in no mood to hear them.

NARRATOR: John turned his full attention to England.

He needed money, soldiers, and unquestioning loyalty

to reclaim his lost empire.

- We shall collect our taxes in this land as often as we choose,

and raise them as high as we like.

NARRATOR: But the English barons had no interest in funding John's wars.

They'd seen him fall in France

and they didn't believe he could win.

- He was milching England for resources.

We have an indication of the sorts of amounts of money

that he was storing in his castle treasuries,

in order to make it possible for him to fund

his intended campaign.

- He is raising taxes. He's calling in personal debts.

He's charging huge fees to his barons for things like inheritance,

in order to fund these military campaigns

that are unsuccessful, and that really, really rankles.

- Why does he continue to pursue these hopeless battles?

Psychologically speaking,

this is the only way he's ever had any respect.

So he is going to cling onto it

for as long as he possibly can.

Without the throne, John would be a nonentity.

He would be insignificant. - (soldiers shouting)

NARRATOR: And when his authority wasn't enough,

John resorted to pure terror to get what he wanted.

- He exploits the Royal Forest and imposes

incredibly harsh penalties for anyone who's caught hunting in them.

You know, you can be mutilated and branded.

You could lose an eye if you were caught

hunting deer in the Royal Forest.

It's a particularly harsh punishment for a relatively small crime.

I think it allows this sort of cruel and vindictive streak to play out.

NARRATOR: John's rule in England was increasingly defined by cruelty.

- He turned his aristocracy into a problem.

Rather than being allies,

he began to rule them with an iron hand,

or an iron rod, I should say.

As well as getting large amounts of money out of them,

he ruled in a way that people thought was arbitrary.

- The throne affords him a power he wouldn't otherwise have.

So he's going to cling to it even when it's clearly...

clearly not the right way forward.

NARRATOR: John was desperate to keep control,

even to the point of terrorising members of the clergy.

- He was also accused of murdering a priest.

According to one chronicler, Roger of Wendover,

he puts a cloak of lead on him and he is left to starve to death.

- He's spectacularly good

at knowing how to demean people, humiliate people,

the type of suffering which will cause the maximum humiliation.

- In 1212, it's alleged that John murdered

28 sons of the Welsh nobility

in order to keep control over Prince Llywelyn.

Even in his day, by medieval standards,

he wasn't doing the things that were expected of him.

There's also the stories of his wife's lovers being murdered,

allegedly strangled on her bed, which is, you know, really...

quite the statement to make on John's part.

- He knows humiliation. He recognises humiliation.

He knows how to turn the tables and impart

the most spiteful of acts of...

of violence against other people.

NARRATOR: Few stories sent greater shockwaves through John's court

than that of William de Braose, 4th Lord of Bramber and his family;

a stark warning of what happened to those who lost the king's favour.

Everyone would have known, and everyone would have feared it.

- He takes hostage Maud, the wife of William de Braose,

who owes him large sums of money.

- Now, William de Braose was one of John's right-hand men.

He was the sort of man who lacked the squeamishness one needed

in order to carry out the king's wishes.

- And is wife has been making comments suggesting that John

was somehow involved in the death of Prince Arthur of Brittany.

- So what John does, over a period of about four years,

he systematically destroys William de Braose.

So that in the end, William de Braose escapes to France.

NARRATOR: With William out of his reach,

John arrests his wife and son.

- He actually starves them both to death.

It's related later that Maud was so desperate, she was so starving,

that she eats the flesh of the cheek of her son

to try and survive this terrible ordeal.

- People looked at that and they thought,

"Well, if he can do that to William de Braose,

he can do that to us, too."

NARRATOR: Not content with warring against France

and alienating his own nobles,

John then turned his defiance toward the church,

picking a battle not just with his kingdom,

but with the Holy See itself.

- The English Kings and the church have a tumultuous history.

So, it's really important to state that from the beginning.

And I think John inherits some of these problems.

There's still tension between the pope, who is based in Rome

and him as sort of, you know, the ruler of England.

Particularly the issue that causes the most

sort of debate, discussion is

who has the supreme power to appoint bishops in England.

John obviously feels that as king of England, it should be his role.

The pope, as head of the church, feels that

it's really his right to do that.

NARRATOR: At stake, everything that was important to John.

Power and money.

- Now, the reason that bishoprics are so contentious is because

if they're left vacant, the king could collect the revenue.

- You can almost feel King John stamping his foot.

Anything and anybody who carries

the respect and the conviction and the honour

that John just can't,

he will react arbitrarily against.

NARRATOR: 1208. The situation had reached a breaking point.

- The pope then made a decision

to use his spiritual power against John's subjects.

And so what he did was he placed an interdict on England in 1208.

And in doing that, he deprived John's subjects

of their spiritual support.

He denied his subjects the possibility of salvation,

and so condemned them to eternal damnation.

That's a proper crime.

Not a crime as you and I would understand it.

But if you live in a world where you are taught

that you have to take the sacraments

in order to guarantee your salvation in the next world,

because your current world is pretty grotty anyway,

it's going to be better if you are saved.

NARRATOR: For six years, England was spiritually abandoned

by the Church of Rome.

- You can't go and listen to mass in your local church,

they can't even ring the church bells.

You can't hear the last rites, you can't be buried

in consecrated ground, you can't be baptised.

- We know it caused incredible

psychological suffering to his people.

It took away their sense of being protected,

guided, at peace, of going to Heaven.

And at this time, that would have meant everything to the people.

And he willingly and arbitrarily denies his people this

because of this almost sulky decision

to not support the choice of archbishop.

- So it really is a turning point.

It's arguably one of his biggest crimes

in the eyes of his subjects and the eyes of contemporaries.

- He pushed large sections of his aristocracy

to the point where they were prepared

to think about overthrowing them.

- They start rebelling against John. - (dramatic music)

- And in the end, John was forced to concede the terms of Magna Carta.

- The Magna Carta really is his biggest public apology.

- The Magna Carta, which essentially represents a demotion for John.

It's everything which would have triggered every resentment,

every piece of fury within him, his worst nightmare.

- (wind whistling) - (eerie choral music)

NARRATOR: On June 15th, 1215,

John met the rebelling barons at Runnymede

in a water meadow on the bank of the River Thames.

John signed a document

that would change the course of English History.

- Magna Carta is an extraordinary document.

It attempts to limit the power of the king

by a written constitution.

And that's not happened in an English context ever before.

So it's a stunning document, but it does come out, particularly,

of John's misuse of royal rule.

And fundamentally, what they do is

they change the hierarchy of English kingship.

John's kingship is: God, king, law.

And what Magna Carta demands

is that the hierarchy is turned,

so it becomes: God, law, king.

King has to rule according to the law.

- We can only imagine John's reaction

to this decision to demote him.

This is everything he both fears and yet expects as well,

so the impact on John would have been enormous.

NARRATOR: Barely weeks after sealing Magna Carta, John renounced it.

For the nobility of England, this final betrayal

pushes them to do the unthinkable.

- A group of the barons decided that they were going to invite

the son of the French king, a man called Louis,

to come and take England for himself.

So they made the decision that John was not going to change,

and what they needed to do was to unseat him.

So Louis made preparations for the invasion,

and in the May of 1216,

he arrived in England.

NARRATOR: For the first time since William the Conqueror,

the French Army landed on English soil.

Within weeks, London fell. Dover was under siege.

Winchester, one of the most important cities in England,

was in enemy hands.

- Large parts of the Midlands were all in the hands

of the rebels or the French king.

The North was in the hands of rebels.

Parts of western England were in the hands of rebels.

NARRATOR: With vast parts of England under French control,

the great Plantagenet Empire was teetering on the brink of collapse.

John retreats west,

moving between the few fortresses still loyal to him.

As the French approach,

John's military household begins to desert him.

- Fundamentally, the kingdom was lost.

He recognised the kingdom was lost, so we have a letter of his

which he wrote to the then pope, Honorius III.

He says, "We despair.

We despair for ourselves. We despair for our kingdom.

Can you please ensure

that my sons enter into their inheritances?"

He thought he'd lost everything.

NARRATOR: His kingdom in chaos, his reputation in tatters,

John does the only thing he can

to save any part of the empire that he'd inherited.

He dies.

- John dies in 1216.

He dies from dysentery, so, sort of, you know, a particularly grim end

for him and not a nice way to go.

- Ironically, it's his death

that actually saves England.

- If he'd been able to rule for much longer,

things could have been left in a much worse state.

- So he'd lost his matrimony,

his patrimony, and he'd lost the Kingdom of England.

You wouldn't like that on your CV as a king, would you?

"I was given all this stuff, and I lost it.

In fact, I almost brought my dynasty to its knees.

In fact, when I died, I probably thought

I'd brought the dynasty to its knees."

- (birds cawing)

NARRATOR: The chroniclers wasted no time in writing John's obituary.

- Quite quickly after his death,

we do see very negative accounts in the chronicles.

So even in sort of 1230, 1240, 1250,

when John's son, Henry III, is on the throne

we do see these very negative accounts.

So the character attacks do start early on.

- The almost tragic irony is that John,

who spent his life trying to live up to

the reputation of his family as these enormous,

charismatic, triumphant royal figures

actually dies and has, for a millennia,

been ridiculed for being the exact opposite.

- In Matthew Paris's chronicle, which he's writing in about 1250,

he actually says, "As foul as hell is,

it's made fouler by the presence of King John."

So this really is an indication of how little he is respected

as a ruler within quite recent memory.

NARRATOR: But with the passage of time

and the benefit of historical perspective,

is the nickname "Bad King John" justified?

- The "Bad King John" image, I think, comes from him being

both a nasty person, a cruel person,

just generally quite horrible, but also

being really bad at kingship.

Because the things that medieval people wanted,

a pious ruler, a good warrior, someone who's fair with justice,

well, he wasn't any of those things. So, he's bad, really, in all senses.

It's very hard to redeem him in any way, if I'm honest.

- What is the job description of a king?

You agree that you're going to uphold certain principles,

and one of them is to protect the people.

One of them is to protect the church.

And one of them is to rule justly.

Why did John then subsequently have a bad reputation?

Well, because he catastrophically failed

to do what the king was supposed to do.

NARRATOR: Did he kill? Repeatedly.

Was he cruel? Undoubtedly.

But John's greatest crime?

He truly was a bad king.

- Was he mad or bad? I think a bit of both.

I think there's certainly some kind of personality traits

that aren't great in John, but I also think

he was a really rubbish king. He was not a good king,

he has very few redeeming features, and I think it's quite hard

to sort of see the positives in his reign.

- Bad King John may not have had the body count of other kings,

but he was a man driven

by the nastiest of psychological agenda.

He was driven by a mission to humiliate

and cause suffering.

And for me, there's no closer

definition of evil than that.

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