Kate Norgate

Contempserunt etenim in eo malivoli quique juvenilem aetatem et corporis parvitatem, et quia prudentia magis quam pugna pacem optinebat ubique, “Johannem Mollegladium” eum malivoli detractores et invidi derisores vocabant. Sed processu temporis ...

Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. pp. 92, 93 (a. 1200).

1199

In Richard’s island realm there was never a moment’s question as to who should succeed him on its throne. In English eyes one successor alone was possible, no matter how undesirable he might be. The circumstances of the case, however—the unexpectedness of the vacancy, the heir’s absence from England, his past relations with the government and the people there, and the existence of a rival claimant—presented an opportunity for endeavouring to make a bargain with him such as it was not often possible to make with a new sovereign. Accordingly the English barons as a body, on hearing of Richard’s death, assumed an attitude of independence. All of them set to work to fortify and revictual their castles; some of them even began to attack and plunder their neighbours, as if they deemed that there was to be again “no king in the land”; and all the efforts of the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, failed to restore order, till he was joined at the end of April by Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal. The archbishop excommunicated the evildoers,[262] and he and the Marshal conjointly tendered to all the men of the kingdom, “citizens and burghers, earls, barons, and free tenants,” an oath of liege homage and fealty to John. The lesser freemen apparently took it without hesitation, but many of the barons held back. These reluctant ones—chief among whom were the earls of Clare, Huntingdon, Chester, Ferrars and Warwick, Roger de Lacy and William de Mowbray—were summoned by the primate, the Marshal and the justiciar to a meeting at Northampton. There they took the oath, but only in return for a promise given by the three ministers that if they did so, John “should render to each of them his rights.”[263] None of these “rights” are specified; but the expression used by the historian who records the claim distinctly implies that it was in each case the claim of an individual to some particular thing to which he considered himself personally entitled, something, it would seem, which he had been unable to obtain from the late king, and which he was therefore anxious to secure beforehand from the new one. In several cases the grievance seems to have been that of an heir who had not yet received investiture of a dignity to which he had become entitled by inheritance some time before.[264] With this grievance the Marshal and the justiciar could not fail to sympathize; for although they had for some years past enjoyed the estates attached to the earldoms of Striguil (or Pembroke) and Essex respectively, neither of them had yet been invested as earl. Justly, therefore, was the promise which they had made in John’s name redeemed first of all to them when he girded them with the earl’s sword and belt on his coronation day.[265]

The chroniclers of the time speak of that day’s ceremony in a matter-of-course way which implies that there was nothing remarkable about it. “John,” says one, “was peaceably received by the great men of all England, and was immediately crowned by Archbishop Hubert of Canterbury at Westminster on Ascension Day, amid a great array of the citizens.”[266] Sixteen prelates besides Hubert, ten earls and “many barons” were present.[267] The coronation oath was administered to John in almost the same words as it had been to Richard, and with the same adjuration not to take it without a full purpose of keeping it, to which John made the proper reply.[268] Of the other details of the ceremony there is no description; only one incident at its outset and one omission at its close are noted by contemporary writers.[269] The first was merely a formal protest made by Bishop Philip of Durham that the coronation ought not to take place in the absence of his metropolitan, the archbishop of York.[270] The second was an intentional and significant omission on the part of the newly crowned king himself. It was customary for every Christian sovereign, after the crown had been placed on his head, to seal the vows which he had just made by receiving the Holy Communion. John, however, did not communicate.[271]

Next day the new king received in person the homage of the barons.[272] On this side of the sea, only Wales and Scotland remained to be secured. Of Wales we hear nothing at the moment. Scotland had taken the initiative immediately after Richard’s death; King William the Lion had at once despatched a message to John, offering him his liege homage and fealty, on condition that Northumberland and Cumberland should be given back to the Scottish Crown. The English primate, Marshal and justiciar, knowing the difficulties with which John was beset on the other side of the Channel, probably feared that he might be tempted to purchase William’s support at William’s own price; they intercepted the messenger, and sent word to the Scot king, by his brother Earl David of Huntingdon, that he must “wait patiently” till John should reach England. John himself—to whom they apparently reported what they had done—sent word to William that he would “satisfy him concerning all his demands” on his arrival, if the Scot king would keep the peace till then.[273] Immediately after his coronation John despatched two envoys to summon William to his court and conduct him safely thither. After they had started, there came to the English king three envoys from Scotland with a repetition of William’s former message; but this time a threat was added; if William’s terms were not accepted “he would regain all that he was entitled to, if he could.” John answered quietly: “When your lord, my very dear cousin, shall come to me, I will do to him whatsoever is right concerning these things and other requests of his”; and he bade the bishop of Durham go to meet the Scot king, “hoping the latter would come according to his summons.”[274] He had himself left London on the morrow of his crowning {May 28} to go on pilgrimage to S. Albans;[275] he afterwards visited Canterbury and S. Edmunds,[276] and thence went to Northampton, to keep Whitsuntide (June 6) and wait for William.[277] He waited in vain; William only sent back the English envoys, reiterated his demand for the two counties and his threat of winning them by force, and added a further demand for an answer within forty days. John meanwhile had lost patience with him, had given the two counties in charge to a new sheriff, and started for the south on his way back to Normandy. The Scot king’s messengers followed him to the sea;[278] whether they overtook him is not clear; at any rate nothing came of their mission, and on Sunday, June 20, John sailed from Shoreham for Dieppe,[279] “taking with him a very great host from England.”[280]

Within three days John and Philip met in conference at Gaillon. They came to no agreement, and John “made up his mind to resist the French king like a man, and to fight manfully for the peace of his country.” It is clear that his preparations were well in train before the meeting took place. Philip indeed made the first hostile movement by laying siege to the castle of Gaillon; not only, however, was he driven away by the troops who had come over with John,[281] but horse and foot came flocking to the muster at Rouen, though it was fixed for June 24, only four days after John’s landing. On that day he made a truce with Philip to last till August 16,[282] thus gaining nearly two months in which to mature his plans and increase his forces. He spent the greater part of this time in a progress through eastern Normandy, and, as the sequel showed, in negotiations with the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. On August 10 he was again at Rouen.[283] On the 13th Baldwin of Flanders came to him there “and became his man.”[284] On the 16th, when the truce expired, representatives of the two kings met in conference between Gouleton and Boutavant; on the 18th Philip and John met in person. Philip was asked “why he so hated the king of England, who had never done him any harm?” He answered that John had occupied Normandy and other lands without his leave, whereas he ought first to have applied to his overlord for confirmation of his rights as heir, and done homage to him. Now, Philip demanded of John the surrender of the whole Vexin to the Crown of France, and that of Poitou, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine to himself as overlord, that he might transfer them to Arthur.[285]

The Vexin had been a bone of contention between France and Normandy for nearly forty years, and its cession had been distinctly promised by Richard to Philip in 1195. As for the Angevin heritage, John in taking possession of it without waiting for investiture had only followed the example of his predecessor. Richard had made pecuniary amends to Philip for this irregular proceeding, which in feudal law was punishable—theoretically—by forfeiture. In his demand that John should resign the three Angevin counties, therefore, and in his previous grant of their investiture to Arthur, Philip did not exceed his legal rights. With regard to Poitou the case was more complicated. On the one hand, it is certain that at some time between Richard’s death and the middle of May 1200 Eleanor and John made an agreement in legal form, whereby John granted his mother to have and to hold all the days of her life, or during her pleasure, the whole of Poitou with all its appurtenances, she having first ceded and surrendered it to him “as her right heir,” received his homage for it, and made over to him the rights of government throughout the county and the fealty and services of its vassals.[286] On the other hand, at the end of June 1199 Eleanor had met Philip at Tours, and he had allowed her to do him homage for Poitou,[287] thus formally recognizing her as its lawful countess. Whatever be the precise date of the first-mentioned transaction, therefore, it seems that Eleanor, and Eleanor alone, was the person legally answerable for Poitou to the king of France at this moment.

The English historian of the conference adds that Philip further made of John “other demands which the king of England would in no wise grant, nor was it right that he should grant them.” What these were he does not state; but it seems that some of the French nobles were of his opinion as to their character, for when the meeting broke up, “such of the counts and barons of the realm of France as had been in alliance with King Richard” came to John offered him their homage, and made offensive and defensive alliance with him against their own sovereign.[288] In the case of the count of Boulogne this alliance was embodied in a written treaty, drawn up on the same day (August 18) at “the castle on the Rock of Andely.”[289]

In September Philip recommenced hostilities with the seizure of Conches.[290] John, who had continued hovering about eastern Normandy until then, at once struck southward; from September 12 to 17 he was at Bourg-le-Roi in Maine.[291] This movement of John’s apparently drew Philip southward after him; the next place which the French king attacked was the Cenomannian fortress of Ballon, held for John by one of his father’s most devoted adherents, Geoffrey of Brullon. The castle was taken, and Philip proceeded to raze it. William des Roches, the constable of Britanny, protested against this as contrary to the agreement between Arthur and the king. Philip retorted that he should deal with his own conquests as he pleased, without regard to Arthur.[292] On that very night—it must have been September 17—William des Roches went to Bourg-le-Roi,[293] begged for a private interview with John, and undertook to make Arthur, Constance, and all Anjou, Maine and Poitou submit to him “so that all should be good friends together,” in return for an oath on John’s part that he would “do with them according to his (William’s) counsel.”[294] A written record of John’s promise to abide by the terms which William and other “lawful knights” of Normandy and Britanny—whom William was to choose—should arrange for peace between himself and his “very dear nephew Arthur,” “for the honour and advantage of us both,” was drawn up before witnesses on September 18 at Anvers-le-Hamon.[295]

It may have been to facilitate negotiations with the Bretons and Angevins that John had proceeded so far as Anvers, which lies in the south of Maine, close to the border of Anjou. We next find him overtaking Philip at the siege of Lavardin. Philip hereupon withdrew to Le Mans; but he had cut the ground from under his own feet; the garrison of Le Mans was under the orders of William des Roches, who had been appointed commandant there by Philip himself. John, too, was following close behind; and when he appeared before the city, Philip again beat a hasty retreat, while William des Roches brought Arthur and Constance in person to make their peace with John, and then opened the gates of Le Mans to the new allies. John, in anticipation of his triumph, had already summoned Almeric, the viscount of Thouars, who was acting as seneschal of Anjou and commandant of Chinon for Arthur, to come and submit to him at Le Mans. On the very day of John’s entry into the city, September 22, Almeric obeyed. Next day John proceeded to Chinon, where he installed Roger de Lacy as castellan in Almeric’s stead. With less than his usual caution, he let Arthur, Constance and their friends, including Almeric, stay behind at Le Mans. Some one had already suggested to Arthur a suspicion that his uncle intended to make him a prisoner; as soon, therefore, as John was out of the way at Chinon, the majority of the Bretons, with their young duke, his mother, and the viscount of Thouars, returned on September 24 to their old headquarters at Angers.[296] It was probably tidings of this which made John hasten back from Chinon to Le Mans, where he was again September 27 to 30; after that nothing is known of his movements till October 6, when he was at Saumur.[297] His appearance there is suggestive, for Saumur was the key of the Angevin border towards Poitou on the south and Touraine on the east. With Le Mans, Chinon and Saumur all in his hands, he had only to secure a firm foothold in Aquitaine, and then he might attack Anjou from three sides at once. But to attack it without such a foothold, and with only the small force which he had brought with him from Normandy,[298] would have been worse than useless. On October 8, therefore, John was once more at Le Mans, and thence he fell back upon Normandy.[299]

There was indeed another reason for his return. Cardinal Peter of Capua, who had at the beginning of the year negotiated a truce between Philip and Richard, was still at the French court. The truce had been made for three years; Richard’s death had of course put an abrupt end to it; but Peter was urgent that it should be renewed for its original term between Philip and John. Such a proposal implied that John was recognized at Rome as Richard’s lawful heir; it was therefore obviously politic for John to cherish such a valuable alliance by falling in with the cardinal’s endeavours after a pacification. Through Peter’s mediation a truce was made at the end of October. Its term was fixed for the ensuing S. Hilary’s Day;[300] but there was evidently a tacit understanding that it was to be the forerunner of a more lasting agreement.

1200

This truce set John free for a visit to Aquitaine. On November 8 he was at Niort, and in the beginning of December at Poitiers; by the middle of December he had returned to Normandy.[301] Meanwhile a question which had been pending for several years, as to the legality of Philip’s repudiation of his queen Ingebiorg and his subsequent union with Agnes of Merania, had been, in a council at Dijon on December 6, decided by Cardinal Peter against the king, and Peter had laid the royal domain of France under an interdict which was to take effect from January 15, 1200,[302] the second day after the expiration of the truce. With this prospect before his eyes, Philip dared not insult John as he had insulted him at their last meeting. It was with a very different proposal that he met him at the old trysting-place between Gaillon and Les Andelys. A project which had been mooted just twelve months before, for a family alliance to cement peace between the houses of France and Anjou, was now revived; it was proposed that Philip’s son Louis should marry John’s niece Blanche of Castille, and that John should furnish the bride with a dowry in Norman lands and English money.[303] The two kings “rushed into each other’s arms,” and renewed their truce till midsummer.[304]

While Eleanor went to Spain to fetch her granddaughter,[305] John seized his opportunity for a visit to England.[306] His first business there was to concert measures with the justiciar for raising the required sum of money. They decided that the taxes for the year should consist of a scutage of two marks on the knight’s fee and a payment of three shillings for “every working plough.”[307] John then went to York, where he had summoned the Scot king to meet him at the end of March. William, however, failed to appear.[308] During John’s stay at York a claim of exemption from the plough tax was laid before him by the heads of some of the great Cistercian houses in Yorkshire in behalf of their whole order; this led to a violent quarrel between them and the king, which was still unsettled when he returned to Normandy at the end of April.[309] Thither Blanche was brought to meet him, and on Ascension Day (May 18)[310] he and Philip, at a personal meeting on the border, made a definite treaty of peace. By that treaty Philip in so many words acknowledged John as “his brother Richard’s right heir,” and granted him, as such, the investiture of the whole Angevin dominions, with the exception of certain territories which John ceded to the crown of France. These were the Vexin, Auvergne, the greater part of the county of Evreux, and the lordships of Issoudun, GraÇay, and Bourges. To the cession of the Vexin and of the chief border castles of the county of Evreux, as well as to the resignation of the Angevin claim upon Auvergne, Richard had been pledged by his treaty with Philip in 1195; Issoudun and GraÇay had been restored to the English king by the same treaty, having been ceded by Richard to France in 1189.[311] Twenty thousand marks and the formal cession of all these territories—most, if not all, of which were already in Philip’s hands—was not too heavy a price to pay for the personal triumph and the political gain involved in Philip’s recognition of John as the lawful heir to Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine and Aquitaine, and also to the overlordship of Britanny; for not only was this last right distinctly conceded to him by Philip, but Arthur was then and there made to do homage to his uncle for his duchy[312] as soon as John himself had done homage to Philip for the whole continental heritage of the house of Anjou.[313] The marriage of Louis and Blanche took place four days later.[314]

John now set out upon a sort of triumphal progress southward, to take seisin of all his dominions. On June 18 he reached Angers, where he stayed four days and took a hundred and fifty hostages as security for the loyalty of the citizens.[315] At the end of June he was at Tours, and early in July at Poitiers, whence he proceeded into Gascony; on the 14th he was welcomed at Bordeaux by the archbishop and the barons of the land.[316] He immediately secured the help of the Gascon primate in a scheme which he had been cherishing for some months past for getting rid of the wife to whom he had been married for eleven years, Isabel of Gloucester. The papal legate who in 1189 had revoked the sentence passed by Archbishop Baldwin upon John and Isabel had done so on the ground that, since John had appealed to Rome, his marriage must be recognized as lawful, pending the result of the appeal. A decision of the Pope on that appeal would of course have either annulled the marriage or made it indissoluble; but it seems that no such decision had ever been given, because the appeal had never been prosecuted. The marriage was therefore still voidable. At the close of 1199 John called upon the Norman bishops to declare it void, and they obeyed him.[317] He now, it seems, laid the case before the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishop of Poitiers and Saintes; and their decision was in accord with that of their Norman brethren.[318] On the bare question—which was doubtless all that John put before them—whether a marriage between cousins in the fourth degree was lawful without a dispensation, indeed, no other decision was possible according to the letter of the canon law. The Pope, however, when the matter came to his knowledge, seems to have felt that in this particular case adhesion to the letter of the law involved a violation of its spirit, and to have been extremely angry with John’s episcopal tools as well as with John himself.[319] He had, however, no ground for interfering in the matter except on an appeal from Isabel; and Isabel did not appeal.[320] There is every reason to think—and certainly no reason to wonder—that the removal of the matrimonial yoke was as welcome to her as to John, and that their divorce was in fact, like that of Louis VII. and Eleanor, a separation by mutual consent.

John had already chosen another heiress to take Isabel’s place. One of the most important, and also most troublesome, feudataries of the duchy of Aquitaine was Ademar, count of AngoulÊme. It was in a quarrel with him and his half-brother, the viscount of Limoges, that Richard Coeur-de-Lion had met his death, which Richard’s son had avenged by slaying the viscount.[321] The feud between the houses of AngoulÊme and Limoges thus threatened to be a considerable hindrance to Richard’s successor in his efforts to secure a hold upon his southern duchy. How formidable Ademar and his nephew, the new viscount of Limoges, had already made themselves is shown by the insertion in the treaty between John and Philip of a special provision that John should “receive their homage and grant them their rights.”[322] It is said to have been Philip who counselled John to secure the fidelity of Ademar of AngoulÊme in another way, by taking to wife Ademar’s only child.[323] Philip’s motives for giving the advice, and John’s motives for following it, are alike obscure. Nineteen years before, Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, had vainly striven to wrest AngoulÊme from Ademar in behalf of Matilda, the only child of Ademar’s late brother, Count Vulgrin III. Matilda was now the wife of Hugh “the Brown” of Lusignan, who in 1179 or 1180 had, in spite of King Henry, made himself master of the county of La Marche, and whose personal importance in southern Gaul was increased by the rank and fame which his brothers Geoffrey, Guy and Almeric had won in the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus. The dispute between Matilda and her uncle had been settled by the betrothal of her son—another Hugh the Brown—to Ademar’s daughter and heiress, Isabel.[324] A marriage between John and this little Isabel of AngoulÊme, therefore, would be certain to provoke the bitter resentment of the whole Lusignan family. On the other hand, it would provoke their resentment against Isabel’s father as well as against her husband, and thus destroy the chance of a coalition of AngoulÊme and La Marche against their common overlord. It is not impossible that for John, who gambled in politics as habitually as he did at the game of “tables,” the very wantonness of the scheme and the hazards attendant upon it may have only added to its attractions. But his subsequent conduct towards the Lusignans suggests the idea that he may have had a deeper motive, a deliberate purpose of goading them into some outrageous course of action which might enable him to recover La Marche and ruin them completely, or even drive them altogether out of the land.

On his way to Poitou John issued from Chinon, on June 25, a summons to Ademar of AngoulÊme and Guy of Limoges to come and perform their homage on July 5 at Lusignan,[325] the ancestral home of Hugh the Brown. There Hugh and Matilda were bringing up their intended daughter-in-law in company with her boy bridegroom, and there John was no doubt, at the moment, sure of a welcome, for Hugh and his brother Ralf had become his liegemen at Caen on January 28.[326] Thus, in all likelihood, it was under Hugh’s very roof, and as sharers in his hospitality, that the king of England and the count of AngoulÊme laid their plot for robbing Hugh’s son of his plighted bride and his promised heritage. John indeed, as soon as his divorce was ratified by the southern bishops, despatched, or gave out that he had despatched, an embassy to Portugal with instructions to ask for the hand of a daughter of the Portuguese king;[327] but their mission was a mere blind to divert suspicion till Ademar should have succeeded in getting his child back into his own hands. The poor little betrothed—she was only about twelve years old[328]—was literally stolen by her father,[329] and carried off by him to his capital city. There her royal suitor met them, and on August 24 the marriage ceremony was performed by the archbishop of Bordeaux.[330] The newly married couple immediately afterwards set out for the north; at the beginning of October they went to England, and on the 8th they were crowned together at Westminster.[331]

1200–1201

Six weeks later the king of Scots made his submission. Summoned to meet his overlord at Lincoln on November 21, William the Lion this time did not venture to disobey the summons; both kings reached Lincoln on the appointed day. Next morning John, in defiance of an old tradition which forbade a king to appear in regal state within the walls of Lincoln, went to the minster and offered a golden chalice at the altar of S. John the Baptist. Thence he proceeded to his colloquy with William “on the top of the steep hill” outside the city. There, amid a group of prelates and barons, and “in the sight of all the people,” William performed his homage, and swore on Archbishop Hubert’s cross that he would be faithful to John against all men, “saving his own right.” Then, and not till then, did he venture again to demand, “as his right and heritage,” the disputed counties. A long discussion ended in an adjournment of the question till the next Whitsuntide; which of course meant that it was to be put off indefinitely. On the morrow (November 23) the king of Scots set out on his homeward journey, while the king of England helped with his own hands to carry to its last resting-place in Lincoln minster the body of the only man among his father’s old friends for whom he seems to have felt a real liking, though he turned a deaf ear to his counsels—S. Hugh, who had died in London a week before.[332] Soon after Christmas John was at Lincoln again, quarrelling with the canons about the election of Hugh’s successor.[333] He and his young queen afterwards made a progress through the north, almost up to the Scottish border,[334] and back through Cumberland to York, which they reached at Mid-Lent (March 1, 1201). At Easter (March 25) they “wore their crowns” at Canterbury.[335]

1201

Meanwhile, open hostilities had begun between John and the Lusignans; and so far as can be made out from the scanty evidence available, it seems to have been John who began them. A French historian of the time asserts that the castle of Driencourt in Normandy, which belonged to Ralf of Lusignan as count of Eu in right of his wife, was seized by John’s orders while Ralf was in John’s service in England.[336] It is certain that John, on March 6, 1201, issued letters patent to Hugh of Bailleul and Thomas of St. Valery authorizing them to attack Ralf’s territories at the close of Easter and “do him all the harm they could,” and promising that they should never be compelled to make good any damage which they might inflict upon him; while on the same day one William “de Kaev” was despatched on a mission to the inhabitants of Driencourt and of the whole county of Eu to make arrangements for mutual security between them and the king, without reference to their count.[337] Two days later John summoned all his faithful barons, knights, clerks, burghers, and other tenants of the county of La Marche “to come to his service, and do to him what they had been wont to do to his predecessors.”[338] In other words, he claimed the direct ownership of the county, to which his father had indeed been entitled by purchase from the late Count Adelbert and by the homage of its tenants, but of which Henry had never been able and Richard had never even tried to take possession, and which Hugh of Lusignan had now held for more than twenty years. If their oath of liege homage to John had hitherto restrained Hugh and Ralf from giving vent to their anger at John’s marriage, it restrained them no longer now. They at once laid a complaint against John, for unjust aggression and spoliation, before the king of France as lord paramount of Aquitaine.[339] Ralf formally renounced his allegiance to John,[340] and Hugh, with all the forces that he could muster, invaded Poitou, where, as usual, he found plenty of allies ready to join him.[341] The most important of the Poitevin barons, indeed, Almeric of Thouars, was won over to John’s side by the diplomacy of Eleanor; but the danger appeared so great that both Eleanor and Almeric besought John to come over and deal with it in person as soon as he possibly could; and at the end of April the count of AngoulÊme and John’s other friends in the south proposed sending Almeric to confer with John in England.[342]

John meanwhile was summoning the earls and barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide (May 13), ready with horses and arms to accompany him over sea. The earls held a meeting at Leicester, and thence unanimously sent him word that they would not go with him “unless he gave them back their rights. For the king, following ill counsel, was demanding their castles of them; and beginning with William of Aubigny, he demanded of him the castle of Belvoir. William satisfied him by giving him his son as a hostage, and thus kept his castle.”[343] Notwithstanding their protest, the barons brought their forces to Portsmouth on the appointed day, equipped for a campaign, and each man provided with the money needful to cover his expenses during the usual term of service in a feudal host. This, and nothing more, was precisely what John wanted them to do: “He took from some of them the money which they would have spent in his service, and let them return home.”[344] The ready money which he thus obtained was a more useful and safer weapon for his purpose than the host itself would have been, and no pretext was left for the discussion of inconvenient questions. The king immediately despatched William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy, each at the head of a hundred mercenaries, “to check the assaults of his enemies on the borders of Normandy.” At the same time he appointed his chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh, warden of the Welsh marches, with another hundred soldiers under his command, and sent the bishop of Chester to William the Lion with a request that the term fixed for answering his demands might be extended to Michaelmas.[345] Having taken these precautions to secure England from attack, John again crossed the sea; on June 2 he was at Bonneville.[346]

At the announcement of John’s intention to return, Philip had either compelled or persuaded the Lusignans to suspend hostilities in Poitou.[347] A period of negotiation followed; Philip remonstrating with John about his conduct towards the Lusignans, and urging him to make them restitution; John, in his turn, remonstrating with Philip for his constant aggressions and his interference with the internal affairs of John’s duchies. Several personal interviews seem to have taken place between the kings;[348] before the end of June the treaty of Ascension-tide 1200 was confirmed; and on the last day of that month John, by Philip’s invitation, went to Paris, and was there lodged and entertained for several days in the royal palace, which Philip vacated for his convenience.[349]

This temporary pacification was effected by a promise on John’s part that the quarrel between him and the Lusignans should be tried and settled fairly in his court as duke of Aquitaine.[350] Towards the end of July he went to Chinon; there he spent the greater part of the next six weeks,[351] and it was probably there that he summoned the Lusignans to the promised trial. But meanwhile the Lusignans had discovered that the trial which he designed was something wholly different from that which Philip had demanded on their behalf. John, before he left England, had determined to appeal “the barons of Poitou”—that is, no doubt, the Lusignans and their friends—on a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself, and challenge them to ordeal of battle with a number of champions specially chosen for the purpose. This project was perfectly legal; the ordeal of battle, though it was beginning to be discountenanced by public opinion under the influence of the Church, was still recognized as a lawful method of deciding upon a charge of treason. But a simultaneous challenge to so large a number of men, and men, too, of such high rank and personal distinction as the Lusignans and their allies, was a startling innovation upon feudal tradition and practice, and unwarranted by historical precedent. Moreover, there was in the scheme another feature which would make it doubly offensive to the barons concerned. The champions against whom they were called upon to prove their loyalty are described as “picked men, practised in the art of duelling, whom the king had hired and brought with him from his dominions on both sides of the sea.”[352] That is, they were professional champions—men who made a business of hiring themselves out to fight the battles of any one who either could not or would not fight in his own person, but who could afford to pay for an efficient substitute. Such hired champions, of course, in every case represented the person who hired them; in the present case they would have represented the king; yet nobles like the Lusignans, two of whose brothers had been, no less than John himself, crowned and anointed sovereigns, could not but feel it an intolerable insult to be challenged, even in a king’s name, by creatures such as these. The accused barons all alike refused to come to John’s court, “saying that they would answer to no one save to their peers.”[353] It seems that on a fresh remonstrance from Philip, John again consented, or pretended to consent, to a trial such as they demanded; but he was very unwilling to fix a day; and when he did fix one, he refused to give the defendants a safe conduct, without which, of course, they would not stir from their homes.[354]

Again Philip intervened, and again John promised redress. This time apparently Philip deemed it advisable to require security for the fulfilment of the promise. The security which he asked for, however, was more than John could reasonably be expected to give; it seems to have been nothing less than three of the most important castles in Normandy—those of Falaise, Arques, and “Andely,” that is, ChÂteau-Gaillard. In December John summoned Archbishop Hubert over from England, and sent him to “make his excuses” to the French king;[355] and Hubert so far succeeded that after Christmas John was able to venture into Aquitaine. Early in February 1202 he met the king of Navarre at AngoulÊme, and made with him a treaty of close offensive and defensive alliance.[356]

It was arranged that John and Philip should hold a conference—seemingly on March 25—at Boutavant. John, it appears, kept, or at least was ready to keep, the appointment; but Philip either was or pretended to be afraid of venturing into Norman territory, and would not advance beyond Gouleton. Thither John came across the river to meet him.[357] No agreement was arrived at. Finally, Philip cited John to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter,[358] at the court of his overlord the king of France, to stand to its judgement, to answer to his lord for his misdoings, and undergo the sentence of his peers. The citation was addressed to John as count of Anjou and Poitou and duke of Aquitaine;[359] the Norman duchy was not mentioned in it. This omission was clearly intentional; when John answered the citation by reminding Philip that he was duke of Normandy, and as such, in virtue of ancient agreement between the kings and the dukes, not bound to go to any meeting with the king of France save on the borders of their respective territories, Philip retorted that he had summoned not the duke of Normandy but the duke of Aquitaine, and that his rights over the latter were not to be annulled by the accidental union of the two dignities in one person.[360] John then promised that he would appear before the court in Paris on the appointed day, and give up to Philip two small castles, Thillier and Boutavant, as security for his submitting to its decision. April 28 passed, and both these promises remained unfulfilled.[361] One English writer asserts that thereupon “the assembled court of the king of France adjudged the king of England to be deprived of all his land which he and his forefathers had hitherto held of the king of France”;[362] but there is reason to think that this statement is erroneous, and derived from a false report put forth by Philip Augustus for political purposes two or three years later.[363] It is certain that after the date of this alleged sentence, negotiations still went on; “great and excellent mediators” endeavoured to arrange a pacification;[364] and Philip himself, according to his own account, had another interview with John, at which he used all his powers of persuasion to bring him to submission, but in vain. Then the French king, by the advice of his barons, formally “defied” his rebellious vassal;[365] in a sudden burst of wrath he ordered the archbishop of Canterbury—evidently one of the mediators just referred to—out of his territories, and dashing after him with such forces as he had at hand, began hostilities by a raid upon Boutavant, which he captured and burned.[366] Even after this, if we may trust his own report, he sent four knights to John to make a final attempt at reconciliation; but John would not see them.[367]

The war which followed was characteristic of both kings alike. Philip’s attack took the form not of a regular invasion, but of a series of raids upon eastern Normandy, whereby in the course of the next three months[368] he made himself master of Thillier, Lions, Longchamp, La FertÉ-en-Braye, Orgueil, Gournay, Mortemer, Aumale and the town and county of Eu.[369] John was throughout the same period flitting ceaselessly about within a short distance of all these places;[370] but Philip never came up with him, and he never but once came up with Philip. On July 7 the French king laid siege to Radepont, some ten miles to the south-east of Rouen. John, who was at Bonport, let him alone for a week, and then suddenly appeared before the place, whereupon Philip immediately withdrew.[371] John, however, made no attempt at pursuit. According to his wont, he let matters take their course till he saw a favourable opportunity for retaliation. At the end of the month the opportunity came.

At the conclusion of the treaty of Gouleton in May 1200 Arthur, after doing homage to his uncle for Britanny, had been by him restored to the guardianship of the French king.[372] The death of the boy’s mother in September 1201[373] left him more than ever exposed to Philip’s influence; and it was no doubt as a measure of precaution, in view of the approaching strife between the kings, that John on March 27, 1202—two days after his meeting with Philip at Gouleton—summoned his “beloved nephew Arthur” to come and “do right” to him at Argentan at the octave of Easter.[374] The summons probably met with no more obedience than did Philip’s summons to John; and before the end of April Philip had bound Arthur securely to his side by promising him the hand of his infant daughter Mary.[375] This promise was ratified by a formal betrothal at Gournay, after the capture of that place by the French; at the same time Philip made Arthur a knight, and gave him the investiture of all the Angevin dominions except Normandy.[376] Towards the end of July Philip despatched Arthur, with a force of two hundred French knights, to join the Lusignans in an attack on Poitou. The barons of Britanny and of Berry had been summoned to meet him at Tours; but the only allies who did meet him there were three of the Lusignans and Savaric de MaulÉon, with some three hundred knights. Overruling the caution of the boy duke, who wished to wait for reinforcements from his own duchy, the impetuous southerners urged an immediate attack upon Mirebeau, their object being to capture Queen Eleanor, who was known to be there,[377] and whom they rightly regarded as the mainstay of John’s power in Aquitaine. Eleanor, however, became aware of their project in time to despatch a letter to her son, begging him to come to her rescue. He was already moving southward when her courier met him on July 30 as he was approaching Le Mans. By marching day and night he and his troops covered the whole distance between Le Mans and Mirebeau—eighty miles at the least—in forty-eight hours, and appeared on August 1 before the besieged castle.[378] The enemies had already taken the outer ward and thrown down all the gates save one, deeming their own valour a sufficient safeguard against John’s expected attack.[379] So great was their self-confidence that they even marched out to meet him. Like most of those who at one time or another fought against John, they underrated the latent capacities of their adversary. They were driven back into the castle, hotly pursued by his troops, who under the guidance of William des Roches forced their way in after the fugitives, and were in a short time masters of the place. The whole of the French and Poitevin forces were either slain or captured; and among the prisoners were the three Lusignans, and Arthur.[380]

Philip was at that moment busy with the siege of Arques; on the receipt of these tidings he left it and turned southward,[381] but he failed, or perhaps did not attempt, to intercept John, who, bringing his prisoners with him, made his way leisurely back to Falaise.[382] There he imprisoned Arthur in the castle,[383] and despatched his victorious troops against Arthur’s duchy; they captured Dol and FougÈres, and harried the country as far as Rennes.[384] Philip, after ravaging Touraine, fired the city of Tours and took the citadel; immediately afterwards he withdrew to his own territories, as by that time John was again at Chinon. As soon as Philip was gone, John in his turn entered Tours and wrested the citadel from the French garrison left there by his rival; but his success was won at the cost of another conflagration which, an English chronicler declares, was never forgiven him by the citizens and the barons of Touraine.[385]

For the moment, however, he was in luck. In Aquitaine he seemed in a fair way to carry all before him without striking a blow. AngoulÊme had passed into his hands by the death of his father-in-law on June 17.[386] Guy of Limoges had risen in revolt again, but at the end of August or early in September he was captured.[387] The Lusignans, from their prison at Caen, made overtures for peace, and by dint of protestations and promises succeeded ere long in regaining their liberty, of course on the usual conditions of surrendering their castles and giving hostages for their loyalty.[388] It was almost equally a matter of course that as soon as they were free they began intriguing against John.[389] But the chronic intrigues of the south were in reality, as John himself seems to have discovered, a far less serious danger than the disaffection in his northern dominions. This last evil was undoubtedly, so far as Normandy was concerned, owing in great measure to John’s own fault. He had entrusted the defence of the Norman duchy to his mercenaries under the command of a ProvenÇal captain whose real name is unknown, who seems to have adopted for himself the nickname of “Lou Pescaire,” “The Fisherman”—which the Normans apparently corrupted into “Louvrekaire”—and who habitually treated his employer’s peaceable subjects in a fashion in which other commanders would have shrunk from treating avowed enemies.[390] Side by side with the discontent thus caused among the people there was a rapid growth of treason among the Norman barons;—treason fraught with far greater peril than the treason of the nobles of Aquitaine, because it was more persistent and more definite in its aim; because it was at once less visible and tangible and more deeply rooted; because it spread in silence and wrought in darkness; and because, while no southern rebel ever really fought for anything but his own hand, the northern traitors were in close concert with Philip Augustus. John knew not whom to trust; he could, in fact, trust no one; and herein lay the explanation of his restless movements, his unaccountable wanderings, his habit of journeying through bye-ways, his constant changes of plan.[391] Moreover, besides the Aquitanian rebels, the Norman traitors, and the French enemy, there were the Breton partizans of Arthur to be reckoned with. These had now found a leader in William des Roches, who, when he saw that he could not prevail upon John to set Arthur at liberty, openly withdrew from the king’s service, and organized a league of the Breton nobles against him.

These Bretons, reinforced by some barons from Anjou and Maine, succeeded on October 29 in gaining possession of Angers.[392] It may have been to watch for an opportunity of dislodging them that John, who was then at Le Mans, went to spend a fortnight at Saumur and another at Chinon. Early in December, however, he fell back upon Normandy,[393] and while the intruders were harrying his ancestral counties with fire and sword,[394] he kept Christmas with his queen at Caen, “faring sumptuously every day, and prolonging his morning slumbers till dinner-time.”[395] It seems that shortly afterwards the queen returned to Chinon, and that in the middle of January 1203 the enemies at Angers were discovered to be planning an attempt to capture her there. John hurried to Le Mans, only stopping at AlenÇon to dine with Count Robert and endeavour to secure his suspected loyalty by confirming him in all his possessions. No sooner had they parted, however, than Robert rode off to the French court, did homage to Philip, and admitted a French garrison into AlenÇon. While John, thus placed between two fires, was hesitating whether to go on or to go back, Peter des PrÉaux succeeded in getting the queen out of Chinon and bringing her to her husband at Le Mans; thence they managed to make their way back in safety to Falaise.[396]

This incident may have suggested to John that it was time to take some decisive step towards getting rid of Arthur’s claims. According to one English chronicler, some of the king’s counsellors had already been urging this matter upon him for some time past. They pointed out that so long as Arthur lived, and was neither physically nor legally incapacitated for ruling, the Bretons would never be quiet, and no lasting peace with France would be possible; and they therefore suggested to the king a horrible scheme for rendering Arthur incapable of being any longer a source of danger. The increasing boldness of the Bretons at last provoked John into consenting to this project, and he despatched three of his servants to Falaise to put out the eyes of the captive. Two of these men chose to leave the king’s service rather than obey him; the third went to Falaise as he was bidden, but found it impossible to fulfil his errand; Arthur’s struggles were backed by the very soldiers who guarded him, and the fear of a mutiny drove their commander, Hubert de Burgh, to prevent the execution of an order which he felt that the king would soon have cause to regret. He gave out, however, that the order had been fulfilled, and that Arthur had died in consequence. The effect of this announcement proved at once the wisdom of Hubert and the folly of those to whose counsel John had yielded. The fury of the Bretons became boundless; they vowed never to leave a moment’s peace to the tyrant who had committed such a ghastly crime upon their duke, his own nephew; and Hubert soon found it necessary, for John’s own sake, to confess his fraud and demonstrate to friends and foes alike that Arthur was still alive and uninjured.[397] John himself now attempted to deal with Arthur in another way. Being at Falaise at the end of January 1203,[398] he caused his nephew to be brought before him, and “addressed him with fair words, promising him great honours if he would forsake the king of France and cleave faithfully to his uncle and rightful lord.” Arthur, however, rejected these overtures with scorn, vowing that there should be no peace unless the whole Angevin dominions, including England, were surrendered to him as Richard’s lawful heir. John retorted by transferring his prisoner from Falaise to Rouen and confining him, more strictly than ever, in the citadel.[399]

Thenceforth Arthur disappears from history. What was his end no one knows. The chronicle of the abbey of Margan in South Wales, a chronicle of which the only known manuscript ends with the year 1232, and of which the portion dealing with the early years of John’s reign was not compiled in its present form till after 1221 at earliest, asserts that on Maunday Thursday (April 3) 1203, John, “after dinner, being drunk and possessed by the devil,” slew his nephew with his own hand and tied a great stone to the body, which he flung into the Seine; that a fisherman’s net brought it up again, and that, being recognized, it was buried secretly, “for fear of the tyrant,” in the church of Notre-Dame-des-PrÉs, near Rouen.[400] William the Breton, in his poem on Philip Augustus, completed about 1216, relates in detail, but without date, how John took Arthur out alone with him by night in a boat on the Seine, plunged a sword into his body, rowed along for three miles with the corpse, and then threw it overboard.[401] Neither of these writers gives any authority for his story. The earliest authority of precisely ascertained date to which we can trace the assertion that Arthur was murdered is a document put forth by a personage whose word, on any subject whatever, is as worthless as the word of John himself—King Philip Augustus of France. In 1216—about the time when his Breton historiographer’s poem was completed—Philip affected to regard it as a notorious fact that John had, either in person or by another’s hand, murdered his nephew. But Philip at the same time went on to assert that John had been summoned to trial before the supreme court of France, and by it condemned to forfeiture of all his dominions, on that same charge of murder; and this latter assertion is almost certainly false.[402] Seven months after the date assigned by the Margan annalist to Arthur’s death—in October 1203—Philip owned himself ignorant whether the duke of Britanny were alive or not.[403] Clearly, therefore, it was not as the avenger of Arthur’s murder that Philip took the field at the end of April. On the other hand, Philip had never made the slightest attempt to obtain Arthur’s release; early in 1203, if not before, he was almost openly laying his plans in anticipation of Arthur’s permanent effacement from politics.[404] The interests of the French king were in fact no less concerned in Arthur’s imprisonment, and more concerned in his death, than were the interests of John himself. John’s one remaining chance of holding Philip and the Bretons in check was to keep them in uncertainty whether Arthur were alive or dead, in order to prevent the Bretons from adopting any decided policy, and hamper the French king in his dealings with them and with the Angevin and Poitevin rebels by compelling him to base his alliance with them on conditions avowedly liable to be annulled at any moment by Arthur’s reappearance on the political scene. If, therefore, Arthur—as is most probable—was now really dead, whether he had indeed perished a victim of one of those fits of ungovernable fury in which (and in which alone) the Angevin counts sometimes added blunder to crime, or whether he had died a natural death from sickness in prison, or by a fall in attempting to escape,[405] it would be equally politic on John’s part to let rumour do its worst rather than suffer any gleam of light to penetrate the mystery which shrouded the captive’s fate.

John’s chance, however, was a desperate one. A fortnight after Easter {April 20} the French king attacked and took Saumur.[406] Moving southward, he was joined by some Poitevins and Bretons, with whose help he captured sundry castles in Aquitaine. Thence he went back to the Norman border, to be welcomed at AlenÇon by its count, and to lay siege to Conches.[407] John, who was then at Falaise, sent William the Marshal to Conches, to beg that Philip would “have pity on him and make peace.” Philip refused; John hurried back to Rouen, to find both city and castle in flames[408]—whether kindled by accident or by treachery there is nothing to show. Conches was taken; Vaudreuil was betrayed; the few other castles in the county of Evreux which had not already passed, either by cession, conquest, or treason, into Philip’s hands shared the like fate,[409] while John flitted restlessly up and down between Rouen and various places in the neighbourhood,[410] but made no direct effort to check the progress of the invader. Messenger after messenger came to him with the same story: “The king of France is in your land as an enemy; he is taking your castles; he is binding your seneschals to their horses’ tails and dragging them shamefully to prison; he is dealing with your goods at his own pleasure.” John heard them all with an unmoved countenance, and dismissed them all with one unvarying reply: “Let him alone! Some day I shall win back all that he is winning from me now.”[411]

It was by diplomacy that John hoped to parry the attack which he knew he could not repel by force. Early in the year he had complained to the Pope of the long course of insult and aggression pursued towards him by Philip, and begged Innocent to interfere in his behalf.[412] Thereupon Philip, in his turn, sent messengers and letters to the Pope, giving his own version of his relations with John, and endeavouring to justify his own conduct.[413] On May 26 Innocent announced to both kings that he was about to despatch the abbots of Casamario, Trois-Fontaines and Dun as commissioners to arbitrate upon the matters in dispute between them.[414] These envoys seem to have been delayed on their journey; and when they reached France they, for some time, found it impossible to ascertain whether Philip would or would not accept their arbitration. When at last he met them in council at Mantes on August 26, he told them bluntly that he “was not bound to take his orders from the Apostolic See as to his rights over a fief and a vassal of his own, and that the matter in dispute between the two kings was no business of the Pope’s.”[415] John meanwhile had, on August 11, suddenly quitted his passive attitude and laid siege to AlenÇon; but he retired on Philip’s approach four days later. An attempt which he made to regain Brezolles was equally ineffectual.[416] Philip, on the other hand, was now resolved to bring the war to a crisis. It was probably straight from the council at Mantes that he marched to the siege of ChÂteau-Gaillard.[417]

ChÂteau-Gaillard was a fortress of far other importance than any of the castles which both parties had been so lightly winning, losing and winning again, during the last ten years. It was the key of the Seine above Rouen, the bulwark raised by Richard Coeur de Lion to protect his favourite city against attack from France. Not till the fortifications which commanded the river at Les Andelys were either destroyed or in his own hands could Philip hope to win the Norman capital. And those fortifications were of no common order. Their builder was the greatest, as he was the last, of the “great builders” of Anjou; and his “fair castle on the Rock of Andelys” was at once the supreme outcome of their architectural genius, and the earliest and most perfect example in Europe of the new developement which the Crusaders’ study of the mighty works of Byzantine or even earlier conquerors, quickened and illuminated as it was by the exigencies of their own struggle with the Infidels, had given to the science of military architecture in the East. During the past year John had added to his brother’s castle a chapel with an undercroft, placed at the south-eastern corner of the second ward.[418] The fortress which nature and art had combined to make impregnable was well stocked with supplies of every kind; moreover, it was one of the few places in Normandy which Philip had no hope of winning, and John no fear of losing, through treason on the part of its commandant. Roger de Lacy, to whom John had given it in charge, was an English baron who had no stake in Normandy, and whose personal interest was therefore bound up with that of the English king; he was also a man of high character and dauntless courage.[419] Nothing short of a siege of the most determined kind would avail against the “Saucy Castle”; and on that siege Philip now concentrated all his forces and all his skill. As the right bank of the Seine at that point was entirely commanded by the castle and its neighbour fortification, the walled town—also built by Richard—known as the New or Lesser Andely, while the river itself was doubly barred by a stockade across its bed, close under the foot of the Rock, and by a strong tower on an island in mid-stream just below the town, he was obliged to encamp in the meadows on the opposite shore. The stockade, however, was soon broken down by the daring of a few young Frenchmen; and the waterway being thus cleared for the transport of materials, he was enabled to construct below the island a pontoon, by means of which he could throw a portion of his troops across the river to form the siege of the New Andely, place the island garrison between two fires, and at once keep open his own communications and cut off those of the besieged with both sides of the river alike.[420]

These things seem to have been done towards the end of August. On the 27th and 28th of that month John was at Montfort, a castle some five and twenty miles from Rouen, held by one of his few faithful barons, Hugh of Gournay. On the 30th, if not the 29th, he and all his available forces were back at Rouen, ready to attempt on that very night the relief of Les Andelys.[421] The king’s plan was a masterpiece of ingenuity; and the fact that the elaborate preparations needed for its execution were made so rapidly and so secretly as to escape detection by an enemy so close at hand goes far to show how mistaken are the charges of sloth and incapacity which, even in his own day, men brought against “John Softsword.”[422] He had arranged that a force of three hundred knights, three thousand mounted men-at-arms, and four thousand foot, under the command of William the Marshal, with a band of mercenaries under Lou Pescaire, should march by night from Rouen along the left bank of the Seine and fall, under cover of darkness, upon the portion of the French army which still lay on that side of the river. Meanwhile, seventy transport vessels which had been built by Richard to serve either for sea or river traffic, and as many more boats as could be collected, were to be laden with provisions for the distressed garrison of the island fort, and convoyed up the stream by a flotilla of small warships manned by “pirates” under a chief named Alan and carrying, besides their own daring and reckless crews, a force of three thousand Flemings. Two hundred strokes of the oar, John reckoned, would bring these ships to the French pontoon; they must break it if they could; if not, they could at least co-operate with the Marshal and Lou Pescaire in cutting off the northern division of the French host from its comrades and supplies on the left bank, and throw into the island fort provisions which would enable it to hold out till John himself should come to its rescue.

One error brought the scheme to ruin—an error neither of strategy nor of conduct, but of scientific knowledge. John had miscalculated the time at which, on that night, the Seine would be navigable up-stream; and his counsellors evidently shared his mistake till it was brought home to them by experience. The land forces achieved their march without hindrance, and at the appointed hour, shortly before daybreak, fell upon the French camp with such a sudden and furious onslaught that the whole of its occupants fled across the pontoon, which broke under their weight. But the fleet, which had been intended to arrive at the same time, was unable to make way against the tide, and before it could reach its destination the French had rallied on the northern bank, repaired the pontoon, recrossed it in full force, and routed John’s troops. The ships, when they at last came up, thus found themselves unsupported in their turn, and though they made a gallant fight they were beaten back with heavy loss. In the flush of victory one young Frenchman contrived to set fire to the island fort; it surrendered, and the whole population of the New Andely fled in a panic to ChÂteau-Gaillard, leaving their town to be occupied by Philip.[423] The Saucy Castle itself still remained to be won. Knowing, however, that for this nothing was likely to avail but a blockade, which was now practically formed on two sides by his occupation of the island fort and the Lesser Andely, Philip on the very next day[424] set off to make another attempt on Radepont, whence he had been driven away by John a year before. This time John made no effort to dislodge him. It was not worth while; the one thing that mattered now was ChÂteau-Gaillard. Thither Philip, after receiving the surrender of Radepont, returned towards the end of September to complete the blockade.[425]

No second attempt to relieve it was possible. It may have been for the purpose of endeavouring to collect fresh troops from the western districts, which were as yet untouched by the war, that John about this time visited his old county of Mortain, and even went as far as Dol,[426] which his soldiers had taken in the previous year. But his military resources in Normandy were exhausted. The Marshal bluntly advised him to give up the struggle. “Sire,” said William, “you have not enough friends; if you provoke your enemies to fight, you will diminish your own force; and when a man provokes his enemies, it is but just if they make him rue it.” “Whoso is afraid, let him flee!” answered John. “I myself will not flee for a year; and if indeed it came to fleeing, I should not think of saving myself otherwise than you would, wheresoever you might be.” “I know that well, sire,” replied William; “but you, who are wise and mighty and of high lineage, and whose work it is to govern us all, have not been careful to avoid irritating people. If you had, it would have been better for us all. Methinks I speak not without reason.”[427] The king, “as if a sword had struck him to the heart,” spoke not a word, but rushed to his chamber; next morning he was nowhere to be found; he had gone away in a boat, almost alone, and it was only at Bonneville that his followers rejoined him. This was apparently at the beginning of October.[428] For two months more he lingered in the duchy, where his position was growing more hopeless day by day. At the end of October, or early in November, he took the decisive step of dismantling Pont-de-l’Arche, Moulineaux, and Montfort,[429] three castles which, next to ChÂteau-Gaillard, would be of the greatest value to the French for an advance upon Rouen. To Rouen itself he returned once more on November 9, and stayed there four days.[430] On the 12th he set out for Bonneville, accompanied by the queen, and telling his friends that he intended to go to England to seek counsel and aid from his barons and people there, and would soon return. In reality his departure from the capital was caused by a rumour which had reached him of a conspiracy among the Norman barons to deliver him up to Philip Augustus. At Bonneville, therefore, he lodged not in the town but in the castle, and only for a few hours; the Marshal and one or two others alone were warned of his intention to set forth again before daybreak, and the little party had got a start of seven leagues on the road to Caen before their absence was discovered by the rest of the suite, of whom “some went after them, and the more part went back.”[431] Still John was reluctant to leave Normandy; he went south to Domfront and west to Vire before he again returned to the coast at Barfleur on November 28; and even then he spent five days at Gonneville and one at Cherbourg before he finally took ship at Barfleur on December 5, to land at Portsmouth next day.[432]

It was probably before he left Rouen that he addressed a letter to the commandant of ChÂteau-Gaillard in these terms: “We thank you for your good and faithful service, and desire that, as much as in you lies, you will persevere in the fidelity and homage which you owe to us; that you may receive a worthy meed of praise from God and from ourself, and from all who know your faithfulness. If however—which God forbid!—you should find yourself in such straits that you can hold out no longer, then do whatsoever our trusty and well-beloved Peter of PrÉaux, William of Mortimer, and Hugh of Howels our clerk, shall bid you in our name.”[433] An English chronicler says that John “being unwilling”—or “unable”—“to succour the besieged, through fear of the treason of his men, went to England, leaving all the Normans in a great perturbation of fear.”[434] It is hard to see what they feared, unless it were John’s possible vengeance, at some future time, for their universal readiness to welcome his rival. Not one town manned its walls, not one baron mustered his tenants and garrisoned his castles, to withstand the invader. Some, as soon as John was out of the country, openly made a truce with Philip for a year, on the understanding that if not succoured by John within that time, they would receive the French king as their lord;[435] the rest stood passively looking on at the one real struggle of the war, the struggle for ChÂteau-Gaillard.

At length, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle fell.[436] Its fall opened the way for a French advance upon Rouen; but before taking this further step Philip deemed it politic to let the Pope’s envoy, the abbot of Casamario, complete his mission by going to speak with John. The abbot was received at a great council in London at the end of March;[437] the result was his return to France early in April, in company with the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of Norwich and Ely, and the earls of Pembroke and Leicester, all charged with a commission “to sound the French king, and treat with him about terms of peace.” On the French king’s side the negotiation was a mere form; to whatever conditions the envoys proposed, he always found some objection; and his own demands were such as John’s representatives dared not attempt to lay before their sovereign—Arthur’s restoration, or, if he were dead, the surrender of his sister Eleanor, and the cession to Philip, as her suzerain and guardian, of the whole continental dominions of the Angevin house.[438] Finally, Philip dropped the mask altogether, and made a direct offer, not to John, but to John’s Norman subjects, including the two lay ambassadors. All those, he said, who within a year and a day would come to him and do him homage for their lands should receive confirmation of their tenure from him. Hereupon the two English earls, after consulting together, gave him five hundred marks each, on the express understanding that he was to leave them unmolested in the enjoyment of their Norman lands for a twelvemonth and a day, and that at the expiration of that time they would come and do homage for those lands to him, if John had not meanwhile regained possession of the duchy.[439] Neither William the Marshal nor his colleague had any thought of betraying or deserting John; as the Marshal’s biographer says, they “did not wish to be false”; and when they reached England they seem to have frankly told John what they had done, and to have received no blame for it.[440]

The return of the English embassy was followed by a letter from the commandant of Rouen—John’s “trusty and well-beloved” Peter of PrÉaux—informing the English king that “all the castles and towns from Bayeux to Anet” had promised Philip that they would surrender to him as soon as he was master of Rouen, an event which, Peter plainly hinted, was not likely to be long delayed.[441] This information about the western towns was probably incorrect, for it was on western Normandy that Philip made his next attack. John meanwhile had in January imposed a scutage of two marks and a half per shield throughout England, and, in addition, a tax of a seventh of moveables, which, though it fell upon all classes alike, the clergy included, he is said to have demanded expressly on the ground of the barons’ desertion of him in Normandy.[442] The hire of a mercenary force was of course the object to which the proceeds of both these taxes were destined; but they took time to collect, and John soon fell back upon a readier, though less trustworthy, resource, and summoned the feudal host of England to meet him at Portsmouth, seemingly in the first week of May. It gathered, however, so slowly that he was obliged to give up the expedition.[443] Philip was about this time besieging Falaise;[444] he won it, and went on in triumph to receive the surrender of Domfront, SÉez, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Coutances, Barfleur, and Cherbourg.[445] He was then joined by John’s late ally, the count of Boulogne, as well as by Guy of Thouars, the widower of Constance of Britanny; and these two, their forces swelled by a troop of mercenaries who had transferred their services from John to Philip after the surrender of Falaise, completed the conquest of south-western Normandy,[446] while the French king at last set his face towards Rouen. He was not called upon to besiege it, nor even to threaten it with a siege. On June 1 Peter de PrÉaux made in his own name, and in the names of the commandants of Arques and Verneuil, a truce with Philip, promising that these two fortresses and Rouen should surrender if not succoured within thirty days.[447] The three castellans sent notice of this arrangement to John, who, powerless and penniless as he was, scornfully bade them “look for no help from him, but do whatsoever seemed to them best.”[448] It seemed to them best not even to wait for the expiration of the truce; Rouen surrendered on June 24,[449] and in a few days Arques and Verneuil followed its example.[450]

Thus did Normandy forsake—as Anjou and Maine had already forsaken—the heir of its ancient rulers for the king of the French. Philip’s next undertaking, the conquest of Aquitaine, was likely to be considerably facilitated by the fact that there was no longer a third person who could claim to stand between him and his rival as lawful lady of the land; for Eleanor had died on April 1.[451] In the middle of August Philip marched upon Poitou. Robert of Turnham, John’s seneschal there, did what he could for its defence; but he was powerless against the indifference of the people and the active hostility of the Lusignans and William des Roches;[452] and in a few weeks the whole county, except La Rochelle, Niort, and Thouars, had submitted to the French king.[453] There, however, Philip’s progress ended. He could not touch the county of AngoulÊme, for it belonged not to John, but to John’s wife; while his very successes turned Gascony against him, for the Gascons were quick to perceive how much greater would be their chances of practical independence under a king who would henceforth be parted from them by the whole width of the Bay of Biscay, than under one whose territories now stretched without a break from the Channel to their own border. Nor had John failed to recognize that in this quarter lay his best hope—at the moment indeed his only hope—of checking Philip’s advance. He at once devoted twenty-eight thousand marks of the treasure which he was gathering in England to the hire of thirty thousand soldiers, who were to be enrolled for his service in Gascony by one Moreve, a brother of the archbishop of Bordeaux, in readiness to join the forces of the king himself whenever he should land on their coast.[454] From Poitiers, therefore, Philip returned to his own dominions, and no further military movement on either side was made throughout the winter.