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This being the 800th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, it is not surprising that there should be two new biographies of King John; not surprising either that one should be billed as ‘The Making of a Tyrant’, the other as a story of ‘Treachery’ and ‘Tyranny’. King John has long been regarded as the worst English king: cruel, deceitful, avaricious, untrustworthy, incapable and cowardly. For some of us he remains indelibly the despicable younger brother of Richard the Lionheart, as so memorably portrayed by Claude Rains in the irresistible swashbuckling Errol Flynn movie The Adventures of Robin Hood. It doesn’t matter that John had no connection with the outlaws of Sherwood Forest, and that the popular association with them derives from Walter Scott’s bestseller Ivanhoe. This is John as we recognise him — an out-and-out dastardly but chicken-hearted villain.

John has had few defenders. This thought came to me as I watched the somewhat camp ceremony with which the body of Richard III was reburied after its discovery beneath that car park in Leicester. Richard, Shakespeare’s finest villain, presumed murderer of the little princes in the Tower, has a society (patron, the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester) devoted to proving that he was a victim of Tudor propaganda, and in reality an all-round good chap. No such body exists to speak up for King John. Nobody goes to great lengths to prove him innocent of the murder of his nephew Arthur of Brittany. The popular opinion is still that of the 13th-century chronicler Matthew Paris, who thought hell too good for such a horrible person.

It is true that academic historians have long sought to redress the balance of opinion. The great 19th-century medievalist Bishop Stubbs remarked on John’s administrative ability and thought him unlucky in his enemies.