King John: Damned by his Peers

Attempts to rehabilitate ‘Bad’ King John always come up against a major stumbling block: the verdicts of his contemporaries.


There will be no getting away from King John in 2015, the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. Huge celebrations are planned, not only in the UK but across the globe as the Great Charter is lauded as the foundation document of liberties and rights. While there are debates about Magna Carta’s importance, these are nothing compared with the historical disputes over the monarch himself: bad King John or misunderstood, unfairly maligned King John?

A revisionist movement to rehabilitate John gained pace in 1949 with the publication in the US of The Reign of King John by Sidney Painter. On this side of the Atlantic, W.L. Warren spearheaded the revisionism, as exemplified in his 1957 History Today article What was wrong with King John? This was no crude attempt to create a stir: Warren was far too consummate an historian for that. Much as I disagree with many of his arguments mitigating the worst criticisms of John, I still urge my students to read his biography of the king as their starting point. The lucid elegance of his prose remains a joy.

Warren’s article was an attempt to get to the truth behind ‘the monarch who has left a reputation for evil second only to Richard III’s’. Warren apportions much blame to John’s contemporary monastic chroniclers and their stories of his ‘disgusting duplicity, merciless inhumanity, paralysing extortion and licentious indulgence’. He attributes John’s shocking reputation to one source in particular: ‘All the really memorable stories of John’s perfidy, ingratitude, bestial cruelty and hysterical recklessness can be traced back to the chronicle of Roger Wendover, a 13th-century monk of St Albans’. Warren built on V.H. Galbraith’s earlier study of Wendover to warn other historians against his inherent unreliability.



http://www.historytoday.com/sean-mcglynn/king-john-damned-his-peers

He was so bad that the Scottish King Robert III (r. 1390 - 1406) changed his name.  His original name was John.

Sir Walter Scott wrote:"The eldest son of Robert II was originally called John. But it was a popular remark, that the Kings named John, both of France and England, had been unfortunate...
---Sir Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather.