Kate Norgate

[Rex] prudenter sane sibi et suis providens in hoc facto, licet id multis ignominiosum videretur, et enorme servitutis jugum. Cum enim res in arto esset, et undique timor vehemens, nulla erat via compendiosior imminens evadendi periculum, nec forsitan alia; quoniam ex quo se in protectione posuit apostolica, et regna sua beati Petri patrimonium fecit, non erat in orbe Romano princeps qui in sedis apostolicae injuriam vel illum infestare, vel illa invadere praesumeret.

W. Coventry, ii. 210.

1210–10

During John’s absence in Ireland, England had been disquieted by rumours of a threatened Welsh invasion. His ministers, however, faced the peril boldly; the justiciar, the treasurer (Bishop Peter of Winchester), and the earl of Chester marched into Wales with “a great host” and built three castles on Welsh soil,[700] and on the king’s return the Welsh “vanished,” as a chronicler says, into their mountains, “and the land kept silence before him.”[701] John, however, was in no mood, now that England, Scotland and Ireland were all at his feet, to be content with mere silence on the part of the Welsh princes, and especially of his own son-in-law, Llywelyn, who, having secured the hand of the king’s daughter and the mastery over the greater part of Wales, was now openly turning against the power by whose help he had risen. The case is frankly stated by a Welsh chronicler: “Llywelyn, son of Jorwerth, made cruel attacks upon the English; and on that account King John became enraged, and formed a design of entirely divesting Llywelyn of his dominion.”[702] The native rivals whom Llywelyn had forced into submission were always on the watch for a chance of flinging off the North-Welsh yoke; and when John assembled his host at Chester, seemingly in the third week of May 1211,[703] he was joined by most of the chieftains of the south.[704] At the tidings of his approach, “Llywelyn,” says the same chronicler, “moved with his forces into the middle of the country, and his property to the mountain of Eryri (Snowdon); and the forces of Mona, with their property, in the same manner. Then the king, with his army, came to the castle of Dyganwy. And there the army was in so great a want of provisions that an egg was sold for a penny halfpenny, and it was a delicious feast to them to get horseflesh; and on that account the king returned to England, after disgracefully losing many of his men and much property.”[705]

1211

Whatever military “disgrace” there may have been was speedily wiped out; John had only gone home to collect fresh supplies and larger forces.[706] Setting forth again from Whitchurch in July,[707] “the king”—again it is a Welsh chronicler who tells the story—“returned to Wales, his mind being more cruel and his army larger; and he built many[708] castles in Gwynedd. And he proceeded over the river Conway towards the mountain of Eryri, and incited some of his troops to burn Bangor. And there Robert, bishop of Bangor, was seized in his church, and was afterwards ransomed for two hundred hawks.” Llywelyn sent his wife to make terms for him with her father, and was received into the king’s peace on delivering up to him a large number of hostages, paying a heavy indemnity in cattle and horses, “and consigning also the midland district to the king for ever. And thereupon all the Welsh princes, except Rhys and Owain, the sons of Gruffydd, son of Rhys, made peace with the king; and the king returned victoriously, and with extreme joy, to England.”[709] Of course the peace was a hollow one, like every other peace with the Welsh; but for the moment John’s success was complete. “In Ireland, Scotland, and Wales there was no man who did not obey the nod of the king of England—a thing which, it is well known, had never happened to any of his forefathers; and he would have appeared happy indeed, and successful to the utmost of his desires, had he not been despoiled of his territories beyond the sea, and under the ban of the Church.”[710]

1210

To neither of these drawbacks was John altogether indifferent. He was only biding his time to make a great effort for the removal of the first; and although the second appeared, as yet, to have made no difference to his political position, he was not insensible to the dangers which it might involve. He was still playing with both primate and Pope. In the spring of 1210 he had made another feint of renewing negotiations with Stephen Langton, had sent him a safe-conduct for a conference to be held at Dover, and had actually gone thither (May 4), ostensibly for the purpose of meeting him. But the safe-conduct was irregular in form; and this circumstance, coupled with a warning from some English barons, made Stephen refuse to trust himself in John’s power.[711] The king vented his wrath by cutting down the woods on all the archbishop’s manors.[712] On his return from Ireland he dealt a heavy blow at the religious orders. Towards the end of October he called together in London the heads of all the religious houses in England, and compelled them to give him sums of money, of which the total is said to have amounted to one hundred thousand pounds.[713] The Cistercians, whom he had spared in the earlier days of the Interdict, had to bear the brunt of his exactions now; they “were forced to find him chariots with horses and men,”[714] or, as another writer explains it, their privileges were quashed, and they had to give the king forty thousand pounds;[715] moreover, their abbots were forbidden to attend the triennial chapter of the order at CÎteaux, “lest their piteous complaints should exasperate the whole world against such an oppressor.”[716]

1211

In June or July 1211[717] the cardinal subdeacon Pandulf, who was much in the Pope’s confidence, and a Templar named Durand came to England “that they might restore peace between the Crown and the clergy.”[718] They seem to have been sent at the king’s request. The terms of the commission which they had received from the Pope are known from a reissue of it two years later. They were to exhort John to make satisfaction “according to a form subscribed between ourself” (the Pope) “and his envoys.” If he would publicly take an oath of absolute obedience to the Pope’s mandates on all matters for which he was under excommunication, they were to give him absolution; and when they had obtained from him security for the reinstatement of the archbishop of Canterbury, they were to withdraw the interdict.[719] John met them on his return from Wales, at Northampton, on August 30,[720] and received them publicly in a great assembly of the barons. The details of the conference rest only upon the authority of two comparatively late monastic chronicles; but there is no reason for doubting the correctness of the main outlines of their story. The envoys called upon John to make satisfaction to the Church, restore the property which he had taken from her ministers, and receive Archbishop Stephen, the exiled bishops, their kinsfolk and their friends “fairly and in peace.” The king answered that they might make him swear to restore everything, and he would do whatever else they liked, “but if that fellow Stephen sets foot in my land, I will have him hanged.” A discussion followed as to the circumstances of Stephen’s election and the respective rights of Pope and King in such matters. John ended by offering to receive as archbishop any one whom the Pope might choose except Stephen, and to give Stephen another see if he would resign all claims upon Canterbury. Pandulf scornfully rejected this proposal. At last, in presence of the whole council, he pronounced to John’s face the papal sentence of excommunication, of which, he said, the publication had only been delayed till his own arrival in England and that of his colleagues; he absolved all John’s subjects from their allegiance, bade them be ready to join the ranks and obey the leader of any host which the Pope might send to England, and denounced not only John himself, but also all his posterity, as for ever incapacitated for the office of king. It is said that on this John bade the sheriffs and foresters who were present bring in whatever prisoners they had in their charge, and gave orders for the hanging of some and the blinding or mutilation of others, to show the papal envoys his own absolute power and his ruthlessness in the exercise of it; that among the prisoners was a clerk charged with forgery, whom he ordered to be hanged; that Pandulf wanted to excommunicate at once any one who should lay hands on this man, and went out of the hall to fetch a candle for the purpose, but that the king followed him and gave up the accused clerk “to his judgement”—which of course meant, to be set at liberty.[721] Whether or not the mock tragedy enacted between king and cardinal really ended in this strange fashion, the result of the conference was clearly the same as that of all previous diplomacy between Innocent III. and John: the Pope gained nothing and the king lost nothing. Pandulf and Durand went back to Rome accompanied by envoys from John;[722] an order was issued for the recall of the exiles, but it seems to have taken the form of a writ bidding all bishops and beneficed clergy return before next mid-summer, “on pain of losing their property.”[723] The excommunicate sovereign kept his Christmas feast at Windsor,[724] and found a new triumph awaiting him at the opening of the new year.

1212

King William of Scotland, stricken in years and with no male heir save one young son, the child of his old age, was hard pressed by a party in his realm who rallied round a certain Cuthred MacWilliam, a descendant of the older line of Scottish kings which the house of Malcolm and Margaret had ousted from the succession. In despair of overcoming these rebels, William turned to England for succour, and early in 1212 “committed himself, his kingdom and his son to the care” of his English overlord.[725] Before Ash Wednesday (February 7) he had formally granted to John the right to dispose of young Alexander in marriage, “as his liegeman,” within six years from that date.[726] On Mid-Lent Sunday, March 4, the boy was knighted by John, “as the king held a festival in the Hospital of S. Bridget at Clerkenwell.”[727] Later in the year an English army marched to William’s aid. John himself probably led his troops as far as Hexham, where he was on June 27,[728] and then sent them on to Scotland with instructions which proved sufficient to secure the object of their expedition. They scoured the country till Cuthred fell into their power; and the struggle of the old Scottish royal house against the “modern kings” ended, for a time at least, with the hanging of its champion by English hands.[729]

1211

Meanwhile, John had never lost sight of his plans for a renewal of the war with France. The first need of course was money. It was probably in the hope of finding some additional sources of revenue which could be claimed for the Crown that on his return from Ireland he ordered an inquiry into all assizes of novel disseisin which had been held during his absence, and also into the right of presentation to, and actual tenancy of, all ecclesiastical benefices throughout the country.[730] An inquest into the services due from the knights and other tenants-in-chief in every shire was ordered in the same year or early in the next;[731] and an inquest concerning escheated honours and the services due from them was set on foot shortly afterwards.[732] In 1211 “the king of France seized all the English ships that touched his shores, and therefore”—says the Dunstable annalist—“the king of England seized many men of the Cinque Ports”;[733] a statement which we can only suppose to mean one of two things: either that John suspected some of the ships to have been willing prizes, or that he was dissatisfied with the way in which his sailors had executed, or failed to execute, some order which he had given for retaliation. In either case, however, it is clear that he made his displeasure a ground for further exactions from the leading men of the southern coast towns.

1197–1209

Of far greater moment than the desultory skirmishes between the sailors of England and France was the scheme of European coalition against Philip which John had been gradually building up during the past ten years. One of the most important elements in his political calculations throughout those years was the course of events in Germany. The death of the Emperor Henry VI. in September 1197 had been followed by a disputed election to the imperial crown, the late Emperor’s brother, Philip of Suabia, claiming it for himself against the candidate chosen by the majority of the electors, Otto of Saxony, a son of Duke Henry the Lion and Maud, daughter of Henry II. of England.[734] The Suabian prince was backed by his powerful family connexions, including the duke of Austria, son and successor of Richard Coeur-de-Lion’s old enemy Leopold. Otto’s youth had been passed in exile at the court of his Angevin grandfather, and he was a special favourite of his uncle Richard, who granted him first the earldom of York and afterwards the county of Poitou, and whose influence with some of the princes of the empire had had a share in procuring him their votes. It was, therefore, obvious policy for his rival and the king of France to make common cause against him and his kinsman of England. A treaty of alliance between the two Philips was signed on June 29, 1198.[735] In 1200 Otto sent his two brothers to demand for him from John a renewal of the investiture of York and of Poitou, and also—if we may believe Roger of Howden—two-thirds of Richard’s treasure and all his jewels, which he said Richard had bequeathed to him. His assertion was correct with regard to the jewels, but the other claims are so unreasonable that it is difficult to believe that they can have had any justification.[736] John, however, had an answer ready for all these demands. The envoys did not reach him till after the treaty of Gouleton (May 1200) was signed, and by that treaty he was pledged to give no help of any kind to Otto without the consent of the French king.[737] This excuse, indeed, was only temporary; in June 1201 the Pope recognized Otto as lawful emperor-elect;[738] and though John was at that very moment renewing his treaty with France, the uncle and nephew speedily drew together. Throughout the vicissitudes of the next six years John never lost sight of the community of their interests; he constantly showed his sense of it by letters and presents, by loans and gifts of money, and by grants of trading and other privileges in England to the German and Flemish cities which supported Otto,[739] as well as by undertaking the custody of at least one prisoner of importance who belonged to the party of Otto’s rival.[740] Otto, whose fortunes were gradually rising throughout these years, was so fully alive to the value of the English alliance that in May 1207 he came to London for a personal interview with John. It is said that on this occasion Otto promised to conquer the realm of France and make it over to his uncle, all except three cities, Paris, Etampes and OrlÉans, which Philip Augustus had once jestingly said he would bestow upon Otto himself if ever the latter became emperor. John gave his nephew six thousand marks,[741] and received from him the symbolical gift of a great golden crown.[742] As yet, indeed, Otto was only emperor-elect, and had the conquest of his own realms to complete ere he could attempt that of France. But his fortunes were steadily rising; his rival, Philip of Suabia, was slain in the following summer;[743] and on October 4, 1209, just at the moment of his uncle’s triumph over the English Church, he was crowned by the Pope at Rome.[744]

1210–1211

Within a year, however, Pope and Emperor had quarrelled, and Otto was excommunicated.[745] This was, of course, an additional bond of union between him and John. At the same time, a kinsman of both princes was setting the Pope and the French king alike at defiance. Count Raymond of Toulouse, the husband of John’s sister Joan, had from the outset favoured the heretics who for the last two years had kept southern Gaul in turmoil; in 1211 he openly allowed them to concentrate in his capital city, and headed their resistance to the forces which Innocent and Philip had sent against them under Simon de Montfort. Toulouse was besieged, but John and Otto kept their kinsman so well supplied with the means of defence and sustenance that the “crusaders” at last grew hopeless of taking it and raised the siege. Otto had answered the Pope’s excommunication by conquering Tuscia, Apulia and Calabria; whereupon Innocent published another sentence, deposing him from his imperial office and his German kingdom, and bidding the princes of the empire elect a new sovereign in his stead.

1211–1212

John, “with such a comrade,” grew bolder than ever.[746] The common interest of the three excommunicate kinsmen obviously lay in crushing France, the ally of the Pope; and the moment seemed at hand for the fulfilment of John’s highest hopes. John and Raymond in the south, John and Otto in the north and east, might hem in Philip Augustus completely, if the princes of the border-land of France and Germany—Boulogne, Flanders, the Netherlands, Lorraine—could be so won over as to insure their co-operation in the plans of the uncle and nephew for the conquest and dismemberment of the French kingdom. To this end John’s utmost powers of diplomacy had been devoted for many years past; and in the case of most of these princes the end was now gained. In the autumn of 1211 Reginald of Boulogne, whose policy had long been wavering, quarrelled openly with Philip and took refuge with his kinsman the count of Bar;[747] in May 1212 he was in England, pledging his homage and his service to John. By the middle of August the counts of Bar, Limburg, Flanders and Louvain were all pledged to John’s side.[748] John himself was meanwhile preparing for an expedition to Gascony; on June 15 thirty-nine English towns were ordered to furnish contingents of men “ready to cross the sea with the king in his service when he should require them.”[749]

1212

A month later, however, the destination of his armament was changed. Just as his plans were ripe for an attack upon France, they were checked once more by the necessity of guarding his realm against the Welsh. Before the close of 1211 Llywelyn—provoked, as he declared, by “the many insults done to him by the men of the king”—had leagued himself with his former rivals in South Wales and taken “all the castles which John had made in Gwynedd, except Dyganwy and Rhuddlan.”[750] And this time the league was more likely to hold together than was usually the case with alliances formed by the Welsh princes either with their neighbours or with each other; for a new hope had dawned upon the Welsh people. The tidings of John’s excommunication and deposition by the Pope had penetrated into Wales; and in this matter the Welsh, although of all Christian nations probably the least amenable to ecclesiastical discipline and the least submissive to ecclesiastical authority, became full of zeal to do the utmost that in them lay towards carrying out the Papal sentence against their overlord and conqueror. “They with one consent,” says their own chronicler, “rose against the king, and bravely wrested from him the midland district which he had previously taken from Llywelyn.”[751] The version of the English chroniclers is that the Welsh invaded the English border, took some castles and beheaded their garrisons, carried off a mass of plunder, and then burned everything and slew every man that they could lay their hands on.[752]

It was clear that an end must be made of this Welsh trouble before John could venture across the Channel. He changed his plans with his usual promptitude. In July the king’s escheators throughout England were ordered to see that the escheats in their custody should furnish each a certain number of carpenters and other labourers provided with proper tools, and with money enough to carry them to Chester. Writs were also issued to Alan of Galloway bidding him send a thousand of his “best and bravest men,” to William the Marshal, Bishop John of Norwich, and others of the king’s liegemen in Ireland, and to the tenants by serjeanty throughout England, requiring their personal attendance; the place of muster for all alike being Chester, and the appointed date Sunday, August 19.[753] On August 16, however, the king sent out from Nottingham a notice that he was unable to be at Chester on the day fixed, and that the muster would not take place.[754] The orders which he issued next day indicate that he was contemplating a diversion by sea, part of the fleet being ordered to sail from Chester, coast along North Wales, and “do as much harm to the enemy as possible,” while another part was to assemble at Bristol.[755] He probably meant to await the result of these movements, as well as of some negotiations which he was carrying on with the South Welsh chieftains,[756] before deciding whether his main advance should be made by way of North or South Wales.

The host finally mustered at Nottingham in the second week of September.[757] The chivalry of England gathered {Sept. 9–15} round the king “in such array and in such numbers,” says a contemporary, “that no man of our day remembers the like.”[758] John’s first act on reaching the muster-place, “before he tasted food,” was to hang twenty-eight of the hostages whom he had taken from the Welsh in the previous year.[759] But “suddenly God brought his counsel to nought.”[760] As he sat at table there came to him a breathless messenger from the king of Scots, followed by one from the Princess Joan of Wales, John’s daughter and Llywelyn’s wife. Both messengers brought letters whose contents, they said, were weighty and secret. When the two letters were read, their purport proved to be almost identical. William and Joan alike warned the king that his barons were preparing to act upon the papal sentence which absolved them from their allegiance, and, if he persisted in leading them to war, either to turn and slay him themselves, or deliver him up to death at the hands of his Welsh enemies.[761] Such a warning, coming at the same instant from two such different quarters, was not to be lightly put aside. It was emphasized by the sudden disappearance of two barons, Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter, who at once secretly withdrew from the host.[762] John could hardly doubt the significance of their departure at such a moment. He dismissed his army and moved by slow stages back to London.[763]

The month which had elapsed between John’s order countermanding the muster at Chester and his return to Nottingham had been spent by him in a progress through the north;[764] and it was probably during this time that there came to his ears a prediction concerning him spoken by one Peter, variously described as “of Pontefract” or “of Wakefield.” This Peter was “a simple countryman,” who lived on bread and water, and was counted among the people for a prophet. He foretold that on the next Ascension Day John should cease to be king. Whether John was to die, or to be driven from the land, or to abdicate, Peter could not say; he only knew that it had been revealed to him in a vision that after the king had reigned prosperously for fourteen years, neither he nor his heirs should rule any more, “but one who is pleasing to God.”[765] John, on hearing of this prophecy, laughed it to scorn; but when Peter was found to be wandering all over the north country publishing his supposed vision wherever he went, some of the king’s friends deemed it prudent to take the prophet into custody.[766] He was brought before John himself, who asked for more explicit information as to his own impending fate. Peter only replied, “Know thou of a surety that on the day which I have named, thou shalt be king no more; and if I be proved a liar, do with me as thou wilt.” “According to thy word, so be it,” answered John; and he sent the man to be imprisoned at Corfe.[767] This precaution, however, defeated its own end; Peter’s captivity in a royal dungeon gave to him and his prophecy a new importance in popular estimation; his words were repeated far and wide, and believed “as if they had been spoken by a voice from Heaven.”[768] The dread which they are said to have inspired in the king himself[769] proves nothing as to whether, or how far, he shared the superstitious credulity of his people. Apart from all such questions, he had obviously a sufficient reason for alarm in the fact that the general acceptance of a political prophecy naturally tends to work its fulfilment.

Other influences were working in the same direction. Even without the special warnings which he had received at Nottingham, John must have been well aware that he had, as Roger of Wendover says, “almost as many enemies as he had barons.”[770] The question was only how soon their silent hate would break out in open defiance, and whether he could once more terrify or beguile them into submission before the smouldering embers of their discontent were kindled into a general conflagration by Innocent’s anathema and Peter’s prophecy. On reaching London he addressed to all those whose fidelity he suspected a new demand for hostages, “that he might prove who would and who would not obey his orders.” The response showed that he was even yet stronger than he himself had dared to believe. From many of these men he had already had hostages in his keeping for years; several of them had suffered in their family relations a far deeper injury at his hands; yet once again, at his bidding, they gave up to him sons, nephews, kinsmen, “as many as he would, not daring to resist his commands.”[771] Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitz-Walter alone refused all purgation, and fled, the one to Scotland, the other to France; their castles were seized, their lands confiscated, and themselves outlawed.[772] With his own servants and clerks the king dealt in yet more summary fashion; those among them whom he suspected were arrested and cast into prison.[773] Fresh humiliations were heaped upon the clergy. The Cistercians are said to have been mulcted of twenty-two thousand pounds in punishment for the help which they were supposed to have given to the enemies of Raymond of Toulouse;[774] and all the English clergy, both regular and secular, were forced to set their hands to a deed whereby they renounced all pecuniary claims against the king, and declared that all the money which he had had from them since his accession was a free and voluntary gift.[775] On the other hand, John was taking some pains to conciliate the people. He checked the severity of the Forest administration. He forbade the extortions practised by his officers on merchants and pilgrims. “Moreover, he is said to have showed mercy on widows, and done what in him lay to promote peace in temporal affairs.” Sternness and conciliation alike did their work. Again “the land kept silence”;[776] and it seems that the first sound which broke the silence was a declaration of the barons in favour of the king.

Some time between the summer of 1212 and the spring of 1213 two remarkable letters were written by John, the one to his chief justiciar in Ireland, Bishop John of Norwich, the other to Earl William the Marshal.[777] Both letters deal with the same subjects, and they were evidently despatched both at once. The king greatly commends the bishop’s discretion in the matter of “the oath of fealty lately sworn to us by our barons of Ireland, for the greater safety of ourself and our realm,” for which, he says, he is sending letters of thanks to them all. He expresses the warmest gratitude to William the Marshal, “as their spokesman in this matter, and also as the one from whose suggestion and sole desire we doubt not this thing took its rise, and to whom we are indebted for the ready disposition and devotion of all the rest.” He states further that he is sending to the bishop, the earl, and the other barons of the March “copies of the letters patent which our magnates of England have drawn up for us,” and he requests that the barons of Ireland will “set their seals to letters of similar tenour, and send them to us.” Lastly, he alludes to some advice which the Marshal and the other lay barons in Ireland “have sent to us about making peace with the Church,” and desires that they will “provide, by the common counsel of our faithful subjects in those parts, a form whereby peace may be made sure without injury to our liberties and rights,” and transmit it to him. “See you to it,” he adds to the justiciar, “that this be done.”[778]

We can hardly doubt that there is some connexion between these letters and another yet more remarkable document, whose date must lie between Pandulf’s visit in August 1211 and the spring of 1213. This is a manifesto addressed “to all faithful Christians” by “the whole of the magnates of Ireland,” with William the Marshal and Meiler Fitz-Henry at their head, expressing their “grief and astonishment” that the Pope should propose to absolve the subjects of the king of England from their allegiance, and declaring their approval of John’s political conduct and their determination to “live and die with their king.”[779] This manifesto may have been drawn up when the barons of the Irish March, at the Marshal’s suggestion, renewed their fealty to John; or it may have been their answer to John’s request that they would set their hands to and transmit to him letters patent similar to those which, he says, had been “made for him” by the magnates of England. There is, indeed, another possible alternative. On more than one occasion, and by more than one chronicler, John is charged with forging letters and other like documents. The letter ascribed to the magnates of Ireland and the letters—of which nothing is now known—sent to them by John as having been issued by the magnates of England may therefore have been both alike forgeries. There is, however, nothing to indicate that such was the case. If it was not, then it seems that the barons of England, who in the autumn of 1212 were believed to be on the verge of rebellion or something worse, were yet so weak, as well as so false, that John could force from them a collective declaration in writing which, whatever its precise import may have been, was evidently a declaration in his interest and for his advantage; and that in the same crisis the barons of the Irish March, acting under the guidance of the noblest and wisest man in their whole order, ranged themselves boldly on the side of John against all his enemies. The king, to whom for a moment ruin had seemed so near that he himself gave way to despair, was within a few months, perhaps even a few weeks, outwardly more than ever supreme.

On the other hand, those same loyal barons in Ireland who seem to have so emphatically declared their resolve to stand by the king in resistance to the papal sentence of deposition had yet urged upon him the importance of procuring a withdrawal of that sentence by endeavouring to make peace with the Church. Whether they did, according to John’s request, draft a form of proposals to be laid before the Pope, there is nothing to show; but it is certain that in November John despatched to Rome four envoys charged to offer his acceptance of the terms which Pandulf and Durand had proposed fifteen months before.[780]

1212–13

John, in fact, knew well how unsubstantial his apparent supremacy was, and how hollow were the foundations on which it rested. He knew that if he wished to prevent the fulfilment of Peter’s prophecy, he must now disarm once for all, and secure permanently for his own interest, some one at least of the various enemies, or groups of enemies, against whom he had been struggling for six years at such overwhelming odds. By the end of 1212 the signs of the times were beginning to point out who this one must be; by the early spring of 1213 there could no longer be any doubt on the point. The fortunes of war in Germany and in southern Gaul had shattered John’s hopes of crushing Innocent and Philip Augustus both at once. In Aquitaine Simon de Montfort and his “crusaders” were gradually winning their way against the Albigenses, and Raymond of Toulouse was practically ruined. In Germany the young King Frederic of Sicily had at the Pope’s instigation been elected to the empire in Otto’s stead. Otto sought to regain his footing in the country by marrying the daughter of his former rival, {August} Duke Philip of Suabia; but the bride died a few days after her marriage;[781] and in November (1212) the political league which Innocent was building up against Otto and John was completed by a treaty of alliance between Frederic and Philip Augustus.[782] Triumphant everywhere on the continent, Innocent resolved to make an end of matters with John. In the winter of 1212 Stephen Langton and the bishops of Ely and London carried to Rome in person their complaints against their sovereign, and their entreaties that such a state of things should be suffered to continue no longer. In January 1213 they returned to the French court accompanied by Pandulf, and bringing with them a letter from the Pope to the French king.[783] Innocent in this letter solemnly laid upon Philip, for his soul’s health, the task of expelling the English king from his realm, and bade him assume in John’s stead the sovereignty of England for himself and his heirs for ever.[784] It is said that the Pope wrote at the same time to the other sovereigns and princes of Europe, bidding them join under Philip’s leadership in a sort of crusade against John, and granting to all who should take part in this expedition the same privileges, temporal and spiritual, which were conferred on pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre.[785]

These letters and the papal decree for John’s deposition were publicly read to the French bishops, clergy and people in a council assembled for that purpose at Soissons on the Monday in Holy Week, April 8.[786] It was no new idea that the papal mandate suggested to Philip Augustus. For a whole year at least he had been contemplating the conquest of England and the establishment of his eldest son, Louis, upon its throne; in April 1212 Louis had already arranged the terms on which he would receive the homage of the English barons and the political relation in which he was to stand towards his father after his own coronation in England.[787] To Philip and Louis the Pope’s commission was merely the signal that their longed-for hour had come. “Then the king of the French, hearing and receiving the thing which he had long desired, girded himself up for the fight,” and bade all his men, on pain of “culvertage,” be ready to meet him at Rouen on April 21, the first Sunday after Easter;[788] and ships, victuals, arms and men were rapidly gathered together in answer to his call.[789]

Still more prompt and vigorous were John’s preparations for defence. He seems to have begun by ordering that all English ships should return to the ports to which they severally belonged not later than the first Sunday in Lent, March 3. On that day he despatched writs to the bailiffs of the seaport towns, bidding them make out a list of the vessels which they found in their respective ports capable of carrying six horses or more, and direct the captains and owners of all such vessels, in his name, to bring them to Portsmouth at Mid-Lent (March 21), “well manned with good and brave mariners, well armed, who shall go on our service at our expense.”[790] He next bade the sheriffs summon all earls, barons, knights, freemen and sergeants, whosoever they were and of whomsoever they held, who ought to have arms or could get them, and who had done him homage and fealty, to the intent that, “as they love us and themselves and all that is theirs, they be at Dover at the close of Easter next, well prepared with horses and arms and with all their might to defend our head, and their own heads, and the land of England. And let no man who can bear arms stay behind, on pain of culvertage and perpetual servitude; and let each man follow his own lord; and let those who have no land and can carry arms come thither to take our pay.” Each sheriff was to see that all sales of victuals and all markets within his sheriffdom “followed the host,” and that none were held elsewhere within his jurisdiction. He himself was to come to the muster “in force, with horses and arms,” and to bring his roll, whereby the king might be certified who had obeyed his summons and who had stayed behind.[791]

England responded as quickly and readily as France to the call of her king; the threat of “culvertage” seems to have acted upon the Englishmen of John’s day as the threat of being accounted “nithing” had acted upon their forefathers in the days of William Rufus and Henry I.; they came together at the appointed places—Dover, Faversham and Ipswich—in such crowds that in a few days, despite John’s precautions, the supply of food became insufficient, and the marshals of the host found it needful to dismiss the greater part of the light-armed troops, retaining only the knights, sergeants and better-armed freemen, with the cross-bowmen and archers. The picked body thus left, which was finally reviewed by the king on Barham Down, near Canterbury, {May 4–6} was still so numerous that a patriotic chronicler declares, “If they had been all of one heart and mind for king and country, there was no prince under heaven against whom they could not have defended the realm of England.”[792] How many of the barons in the host had come to it with the intention of going over to Philip as soon as he landed, it is useless to inquire; perhaps the only one whom we can with full confidence acquit of any such suspicion is William the Marshal.[793] The king’s plan, however, was that his fleet should intercept the invaders and “drown them in the sea before ever they could set foot on the land”; and as his ships were more numerous than Philip’s, the plan had a good chance of success.[794]

But the first check to Philip’s enterprise was to come from another quarter. Even if we could perceive no outward indication of the Pope’s motives in giving his commission to the French king, we should still find it hard to believe that so far-seeing a statesman as Innocent III. seriously contemplated with approval the prospect of a French conquest of England. At the moment, indeed, France was the most efficient political instrument of the Papacy; but it could scarcely be a part of the papal policy to give her such an overwhelming predominance as she would have acquired by the annexation of England to her crown. England, no less than France, had her place in the European political system, of which Innocent looked upon himself as the director and the guardian; and the extinction of England as an independent state would have destroyed the balance of powers which it was a special function of the Papacy to maintain with the utmost care, and whose preservation was of great importance to Innocent for carrying into effect his own political designs. There can hardly be a reasonable doubt that he made use of Philip’s ambition for a purpose of his own, a purpose which was really the direct opposite of that which Philip had in view—the purpose, not of crushing England, but of winning her back to the Roman alliance, and thus securing her as a counterpoise, in case of need, to the power of Philip himself.[795] In a word, Innocent and John had simultaneously recognized the fact that, in the interest of both alike, the time for their reconciliation had come.

John, as we have seen, had paved the way by offering, at the close of 1212, his acceptance of the terms proposed by the Pope in 1211. Innocent’s reply to this offer was written on February 27, 1213. Although, he said, he considered himself no longer bound by his own terms, since the king had rejected them, yet for the sake of peace he was willing to abide by the form of agreement thus again proposed, if before June 1 the king would, by an oath sworn in his presence by four barons, and by letters patent addressed to the archbishop of Canterbury and the other exiled bishops, promise to keep it faithfully and fulfil it effectually, “according to the expositions and explanations which we have thought good to be set forth for the removal of all scruple and doubt.” In May, when all England was expecting the attack of Philip Augustus, three of John’s messengers brought back from Rome this letter, together with a copy of the form originally committed to Pandulf and Durand, and the “expositions and explanations” of the arrangements now required on both sides to insure its execution.[796] All these documents seem to have been communicated to Pandulf in a private interview which he had with the Pope on the eve of his departure from Rome in January;[797] at any rate he was well aware of their contents and fully instructed how to act in consequence. Just as the French fleet was ready to sail, he in the Pope’s name forbade all further proceedings against England till he should have once more appealed to John and learned whether he would yet repent.[798] Close upon the return of the English envoys from Rome followed two Templars, who landed at Dover with a message from Pandulf to the king, requesting an interview. It took place at Dover on May 13. In presence of king and legate, the earls of Salisbury, Warren, and Ferrars and the count of Boulogne swore in John’s behalf the oath of security required by Innocent; and on the same day John published by letters patent the agreement concluded between himself and Pandulf in the form which the Pope had prescribed.[799]

Two days later—on Wednesday, May 15—king and legate met again, “with the great men of the realm,” in the house of the Knights Templars at Ewell, near Dover. There, by a charter attested by himself, the archbishop of Dublin, the chief justiciars of England and Ireland, seven earls (of whom the Marshal was one), and three barons, the king “granted and freely surrendered to God and His holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors,” the whole realm of England and “the whole realm of Ireland,” with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatary of God and the Roman Church. He swore fealty to the Pope for both realms in Pandulf’s presence, promised to perform liege homage to the Pope in person if he should ever have an opportunity of so doing, and pledged all his successors to a like engagement, besides undertaking to furnish the Roman see with a yearly sum of one thousand marks—seven hundred for England and three hundred for Ireland.[800]

One English chronicler says that John, in performing this homage, acted “according to what had been decreed at Rome.”[801] Another, not less generally accurate and well informed, says that John “added it of his own accord” to the agreement already completed.[802] On the whole, it is probable that this latter account of the matter is the correct one, at least thus far, that the scheme originated not at Rome, but in England. Not much weight can indeed be attached to the king’s own assertion, made in the charter of homage itself, that the act was a voluntary one, which he had done by way of penance and humiliation for his offences, “not urged by force nor compelled by fear, but of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons”;[803] nor is the accuracy of this version of the transaction proved by the fact that Innocent accepted it without remark in his reply to John’s letters on the subject,[804] and that no extant document emanating from the court of Rome contains the slightest indication that the Pope had ever demanded or suggested any proceeding of the kind. There is, however, no perceptible reason why Innocent should have required of John a penance of so extraordinary a character, nor why, if he did require it, either he or his royal penitent should make a secret of his having done so. On the other hand, John had a very cogent reason for “adding something of his own” to the agreement between himself and Innocent. If he was to give up all for which he had been fighting—and fighting successfully—against the Pope and the Church for the last six years, he must make quite sure of gaining such an advantage as would be worth the sacrifice. Mere release from excommunication and interdict was certainly, in his eyes, not worth any sacrifice at all. To change the Pope from an enemy into a political friend was worth it, but—from John’s point of view—only if the friendship could be made something much more close and indissoluble than the ordinary official relation between the Pope and every Christian sovereign. He must bind the Pope to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the Papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it. For a sovereign of John’s character no additional sacrifice would be involved in the device which he actually employed for this purpose. To outward personal humiliation of any kind John was absolutely indifferent, when there was any advantage to be gained by undergoing it. To any humiliation which the Crown or the nation might suffer in his person, he was indifferent under all circumstances. His plighted faith he had never had a moment’s hesitation in breaking, whether it were sworn to his father, his brother, his allies, or his people, and which he would break with equal facility when sworn to the supreme Pontiff; moreover, he took the precaution of inserting in his charter a saving clause which he could easily have interpreted, had occasion ever arisen, so as to reduce the whole transaction to a mere empty form.[805] There seems, in short, to be good reason for believing that John’s homage to the Pope was offered without any pressure from Rome, and on grounds of deliberate policy.[806]

How far the credit or discredit—whichever it be—of that policy belongs to John is, however, a question not easily solved. Two years later, the English barons seem to have claimed the credit for themselves. We are told that they besought the Pope, “as he was lord of England,” to take their part against John, “since he well knew that they had at his command boldly opposed the king in behalf of the Church’s liberty, and that the king had granted an annual revenue to Rome, and bestowed other honours on the Pope and the Roman Church, not of his own accord, but only out of fear and under compulsion from them.”[807]

This, if correctly reported, is a distinct assertion by the malcontent barons that they had deliberately chosen to set up the Pope as temporal overlord of their country, and that it was pressure from them which had compelled John to do him homage as such. The truth probably lies half-way between this version and that of the king. Whether the “common counsel of the barons” was given spontaneously to John and accepted by him, or whether it was merely a response to a proposal which he had laid before them, there can be little doubt that each party adopted the scheme in the hope of turning it to account against the other party. That on the side of the barons this hope proved utterly delusive, while on the side of John it was completely realized, simply shows once more how far less than a match was the collective sagacity of the barons for the single-handed dexterity of the king.

It was not till many years later that a great historian, who was also a vehement partisan, denounced John’s homage to the Pope as “a thing to be detested for all time.”[808] The Barnwell annalist, writing at the time of the event, tells us indeed that “to many it seemed ignominious, and a heavy yoke of servitude.” But the action of all parties at the moment was a practical acknowledgement of their consciousness that, as the same annalist says, John “by this act provided prudently both for himself and for his people; for matters were in such a strait, and so great was the fear on all sides, that there was no more ready way of evading the imminent peril—perhaps no other way at all. For when once he had put himself under Apostolical protection, and made his realms a part of the patrimony of S. Peter, there was not in the Roman world a sovereign who durst attack him, or invade them; inasmuch as Pope Innocent was universally held in awe above all his predecessors for many years past.”[809]

John had, in fact, at one stroke cut the ground from under the feet of all his enemies both at home and abroad. The people resumed their ordinary attitude of loyalty on Pandulf’s assurance that it was once more, and more than ever, sanctioned by the Church. The traitor barons found themselves without a cloak for their treason, and were reduced to send out letters patent repudiating all connexion with the French king.[810] Philip found himself without an ally, and without an excuse for his enterprise. The believers in Peter of Wakefield, indeed, still looked forward with a vague expectation to Ascension Day {May 23}. But the king himself could meet its dawn without fear. He had ordered his royal tent to be set up in a large open field, and caused his heralds to proclaim a general invitation to all who were within reach, to come and spend the festival day in stately festivities with him. “And a right joyous day it was, the king taking his pleasure and making merry with the bishops and nobles who had come together at his call.”[811] Still Peter’s disciples were not convinced; some of them took up the idea that the prediction might refer not to the ecclesiastical but to the civil anniversary of John’s coronation, May 27, which in 1213 was four days after Ascension Day. This anniversary, however, passed over likewise without any mishap. Then the wise and the foolish alike began to see that John had prevented a literal fulfilment of the prophecy by lending himself to a figurative one. He had “ceased to be king” by laying his crown at the feet of Pandulf, to take it back again on conditions which unquestionably helped to fix it, for the time at least, more securely than ever on his brow. The scapegoat of all parties was the unlucky prophet himself. Next day he and his son, who had been imprisoned with him, were tied each to a horse’s tail, dragged thus from Corfe to Wareham, and there hanged.[812]

Pandulf meanwhile had returned to France, and commanded Philip, on pain of the Pope’s displeasure, to lay aside all thoughts of invading England and go home in peace. Philip at first indignantly refused to abandon a scheme which, he said, he had planned at the Pope’s instigation, and for which he had already spent more than sixty thousand pounds.[813] But he dared not go on in the teeth of the papal prohibition; so he turned his wrath upon the one great feudatary of his realm who had refused to take part in the projected invasion, Count Ferrand of Flanders. Ordering his fleet to sail round as quickly as possible to Swine, the king dashed into Flanders at the head of all his forces. Ferrand besought help of John, with whom he was already in alliance; and John at once despatched five hundred ships, carrying a large body of horse and foot under the command of his half-brother Earl William of Salisbury and the counts of Holland and Boulogne.[814] They sailed on Tuesday, May 28, intending to land at Swine and march across the country to join Ferrand; but a contrary wind delayed them so that they did not reach Swine till Thursday, the 30th; and then, to their amazement, they found the harbour occupied by the French fleet, which, however, they soon discovered to be unguarded save by a few seamen, all the troops having gone ashore to ravage the neighbourhood. Salisbury at once ordered an attack; the French sailors were speedily overcome; three hundred ships laden with provisions were set drifting towards England, a hundred more were rifled of their contents and then set on fire. “Never came so much wealth into England since King Arthur went to conquer it,” says a contemporary poet.[815] Next day Count Ferrand came to meet his allies, and renewed his league with John.[816] On the Saturday—Whitsun Eve—the earls disembarked their troops and advanced to attack the French at Dam. The overwhelming numbers of the enemy, who were headed by King Philip himself, compelled them to retreat. Salisbury, however, not only escaped to his ships, but brought all his prizes safe to England;[817] while Philip was so mad with rage at the disaster to his fleet that he ordered the remnant of it to be burnt.[818] So far as England was concerned, his expedition was at an end.

John at once resolved that the fleet and the host which had been gathered for the defence of England should be used for an attack upon France. His plan was, while strengthening Ferrand’s hands so as to keep Philip busy in Flanders, himself to land with an army in Poitou, and thus place the French kingdom between two fires. At the end of June he reassembled his forces at Porchester, and again despatched William of Salisbury to Flanders with further reinforcements and large sums of money. The magnates, however, refused to accompany the king over sea till he was absolved from excommunication.[819] Their excuse was transparently false; his public absolution was indeed committed to Archbishop Stephen, and therefore deferred till Stephen’s arrival in England; but Pandulf had, in the Pope’s name, declared him reconciled to the Church. It could only be from political motives that men who had without protest marched with the excommunicate king against Scotland, Ireland and Wales, and gathered year after year at his festival banquets, now suddenly became more punctilious about a matter of ecclesiastical discipline than Innocent III. himself. It was, however, no moment for quarrelling with them openly; and their excuse, such as it was, soon ceased to exist.

King and legate had been rapidly pushing on the arrangements for the return of the exiles;[820] and in June or July Archbishop Stephen and four of the bishops landed at Dover.[821] On S. Margaret’s Day, Saturday, July 20, they were received by the king at Winchester.[822] He seems to have gone forth to meet them on the crest of the hill which lies to the east of the city.[823] He threw himself at the primate’s feet, bidding him welcome, and with tears imploring his mercy; “and the prelates and all the rest, when they saw this, could not refrain from weeping.” The procession made its way to the Old Minster and entered the chapter-house; the king swore on the Gospels “that he would cherish, defend and maintain the holy Church and her ordained ministers; that he would restore the good laws of his forefathers, especially S. Edward’s, rendering to all men their rights; and that before the next Easter he would make full restitution of all property which had been taken away in connexion with the Interdict.” This oath he seems to have repeated publicly at the door of the church; Stephen then formally absolved him, led him into the church, and celebrated mass in his presence, accepting his offering and giving him the kiss of peace; “and there was great joy among the people.”[824]

Having at last made up his mind to a formal reconciliation with both Pope and primate, John showed no signs of a wish to evade any part of its terms. During the past three months order after order had been issued in his name for carrying into effect the provisions of his agreement with Pandulf. The outlawry of the clergy had been revoked at once, on May 15, and this revocation was repeated on June 13.[825] Two laymen—Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitz-Walter—who had gone into exile, not in company with any of the bishops nor for their sake, but on independent grounds, in the autumn of 1212, had been specially mentioned by name in John’s agreement with the Pope, and promised reinstatement in their lands and in the king’s favour. Safe-conducts were issued to these two barons on May 27, and orders for the restitution of their property on July 17, 19, and 21.[826] For the bishops something more than mere restitution was required; they, or the Pope and Pandulf for them, claimed indemnification as well; and the terms of the indemnity were difficult to decide. John seems to have proposed that they should be decided by a kind of general inquest; on the day {July 21} after his absolution he bade all the sheriffs in England cause a deputation of four men and the reeve from each township to be at S. Albans on August 4, “that through them and his other ministers he might ascertain the truth concerning the damages suffered by the several bishops, and what had been taken from them, and how much was due to each.” Whether such an inquisition was actually held does not appear; but early in August the justiciar and the bishop of Winchester met the primate, the other bishops and the magnates in a great council at S. Albans; there, in the king’s name, peace was proclaimed to all; the observance of King Henry’s laws and the disuse of evil customs were strictly enjoined; and the sheriffs, foresters, and other officers of the Crown were warned, “as they valued their limbs and their lives,” to commit no more extortions and wrongs, “as they had been wont to do.”[827]

John meanwhile had returned to the coast of Dorset, where the host had apparently been ordered to reassemble, with the intention of sailing for Poitou. In view of his own expected absence from England, he is said to have committed the government to the justiciar and the bishop of Winchester, bidding them “order all its affairs with the advice of the archbishop of Canterbury.”[828] The king’s departure, however, now met with a new series of checks. First the knights came to him in a body and protested that the months which had elapsed since they assembled for defence against the French had consumed all their money, so that they could not possibly follow him any farther unless he would pay their expenses. This he refused to do.[829] The barons of the north were the next recalcitrants; when called upon to accompany him over sea, they “with one mind and determination refused, asserting that according to the tenure of their lands they were not bound to him in this; besides that they were already too much worn out and impoverished by expeditions within the realm.”[830] The angry king embarked with his household on August 5 or 6, and sailed to Jersey; but finding that no one followed him thither he soon came back,[831] in a mighty rage, “cursing the day and hour when he had consented to the peace, and declaring that he had been deceived, and made a gazing-stock for nothing.”[832] His mercenaries and foreign auxiliaries were still a formidable host; and with these he set out for the north, “to bring back the rebels to their obedience.”[833] He seems to have landed at Corfe on August 9; he began his northward march from Winchester on the 16th, reached Wallingford on the 25th, and Northampton on the 28th.[834] On the 25th Archbishop Stephen was in London, presiding over a great council in S. Paul’s Cathedral.[835] Thence he hurried away in pursuit of the king; he overtook him at Northampton, and remonstrated vigorously against John’s plans of vengeance upon the northern barons, telling him he would bring contempt upon the oath which he had sworn before his absolution if he made war upon any man without a legal sentence. John “with a great clamour” declared that he would not put off the business of his realm for the archbishop, who had no concern with matters of lay jurisdiction; and early next morning he set out, “in a furious temper,” for Nottingham. The archbishop followed him, and threatened that unless the project were at once given up he would excommunicate every man, save the king himself, who should take part in any military expedition so long as the interdict continued in force; nor could John shake him off till he had appointed a day for the accused barons to come and stand their trial in his court.[836]

Characteristically, John behaved as if unconscious of defeat. He carried out his progress through the north in peaceable instead of warlike guise, and did not return to London till the end of September.[837] His arrival there was timed to coincide with that of the papal legate who came as the specially appointed minister of England’s restoration to the communion of the Church, and whose authority would for the time supersede that of the primate. On September 27 Cardinal Nicolas of Tusculum landed in England.[838] On the 30th he met the king, bishops and barons at a council in London, to discuss plans for a pecuniary settlement between the Crown and the clergy. John offered the bishops one hundred thousand marks down, with security for the payment before next Easter of any damages in excess of that sum which might be discovered on further investigation. The legate urged the bishops to accept this offer; but they preferred to accept nothing till they had prepared their own estimate and could demand the sum total at once; and the king readily consented to the delay. Three days had been spent in the discussion. On the fourth day, October 3, the council reassembled in S. Paul’s. At the foot of the high altar, in the sight of clergy and people, the ceremony which John and Pandulf had gone through at Ewell was repeated by John and Nicolas. John resigned his crown into the legate’s hands, received it back from him, and swore fealty to him as the Pope’s representative; and the charter of homage and tribute, which had been temporarily sealed with wax and delivered to Pandulf, was sealed with gold and finally made over to Nicolas, “for the benefit of the Pope and the Roman Church.”[839]

Still the interdict could not be raised till the settlement between the Crown and the bishops was completed; and another meeting for this purpose was appointed to take place at Reading on November 3. To this meeting all the interested parties came, except the king,[840] who was at Wallingford, where it seems he had appointed the northern barons to appear before his court on All Saints’ Day. The legate was there too, and through his mediation the barons were reconciled to the king and admitted to the kiss of peace.[841] As John did not show himself at Reading, the bishops went to Wallingford in their turn. By that time John had moved on to Woodstock; but he seems to have returned to Wallingford to meet them for a few hours on November 5,[842] and repeated his former proposals. These, however, “seemed little to those who had had their castles razed, their houses levelled with the ground, and their woods cut down”; so that it was decided to refer the matter to the arbitration of four barons. But this arbitration never took place. “All the parties concerned in the matter of the interdict” came together again at Reading on December 6,[843] and each of the injured persons brought forth a schedule of the amount of his losses and damages; the legate, however, supported the king in his refusal to pay the whole sum at once; and after three days’ deliberation no one received anything at all, except the archbishop and the five bishops who had been in exile beyond the sea, to whom John on December 12 ordered the payment of fifteen thousand marks.[844] At last it seems to have been agreed that the damages should be investigated by two sets of commissioners acting together, one set appointed by the king, the other by the primate, and that the sum to be paid by the Crown should be fixed—doubtless on the report of these commissioners—by the Pope; and this scheme was carried out in the following year.[845]

Other questions had arisen in connexion with the settlement between Church and king. There were no less than six vacant sees and thirteen vacant abbeys,[846] all, of course, in the king’s hands. In July 1213 John issued orders for filling these vacancies in the manner which had been customary under Henry II.; the several chapters were bidden to send delegates, by whom an election was to be made in the king’s presence, wherever he might chance to be.[847] This arrangement implied a tacit understanding that the delegates were to elect a candidate designated by the king. The bishops seized their opportunity to protest against this practice and claim for the churches their canonical right of free election, subject only to the royal assent, signified by the grant of the regalia. The legate seems to have been, passively at least, on the side of the Crown; but John was anxious to avoid any fresh quarrel with the primate, and he therefore allowed the elections to be left in abeyance till Nicolas should receive instructions about the matter from the Pope. These came at last in a somewhat ambiguous form. Innocent bade Nicolas cause the vacant sees and abbeys to be filled with men “not only distinguished for their good life and learning, but also faithful to the king and useful as helpers and advisers for the welfare of the realm, and appointed by means of canonical election or postulation, the king’s assent being sought thereunto.”[848] It was obviously possible to interpret this letter as sanctioning, by implication at least, the claims of the Crown; and Nicolas was quite willing thus to interpret it in John’s favour. John, however, knew that no such interpretation would ever be accepted by Langton; and with Langton he had no mind to quarrel at that moment, even though he might have the legate on his own side. He did indeed issue on January 2, 1214, orders for the election of a bishop to Worcester and an abbot to Eynsham, “according to the customs of the realm”;[849] but he seems to have immediately afterwards made an arrangement with the archbishop which satisfied the latter for the time being. On the 12th John signified to Stephen his acceptance of “the form known to us concerning the making of elections, saving our right in all things”; he abandoned his claim to have the elections held only in his own presence, and delegated the power of giving them the royal assent to the ministers who were to have the charge of the realm during his absence beyond the sea; and he closed his letter to the archbishop with the words: “Be assured that there is no controversy between us.”[850] On the 26th he wrote again to Stephen, requesting him to confirm the election of the vice-chancellor, Walter de Gray, to the see of Worcester, and issued orders for elections to five bishoprics and three great abbeys.[851]

What made both John and Stephen anxious for an agreement on this point was the king’s approaching departure for the Continent. Soon after Stephen’s arrival in England John had made up his mind that his expedition to Poitou must be postponed till the spring,[852] and in August (1213) he fixed February 2, 1214, as its approximate date.[853] Throughout the autumn and winter the fleet was preparing at Portsmouth under the superintendence of William de Wrotham, archdeacon of Taunton.[854] Arrangements were also in progress for securing the tranquillity of the realm during the king’s absence. On June 3 John—according to his own account at Pandulf’s desire—had made a truce with the Welsh to last till August 1.[855] By August 25 he had enlisted the aid of the newly arrived primate as a peacemaker between the English realm and these troublesome neighbours; the wardens of the Marches were authorized to agree to a prolongation of the truce till November 1, on the understanding that at its expiration the archbishop of Canterbury would negotiate with the Welsh on the king’s behalf.[856] Of these negotiations there is no further record; but they seem to have resulted in keeping the Welsh in check for some months at least.

In Ireland and in England John had to provide himself with new vicegerents. In July Bishop John of Norwich resigned the justiciarship of the Irish March to go to Rome on a mission for the king; the archbishop of Dublin was appointed justiciar in his stead.[857] On October 14 the office of chief justiciar of England was vacated by the death of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter,[858] who had held it ever since 1198, when he was appointed to it by Richard on the resignation of Hubert Walter. It is impossible to regard Geoffrey as a patriot; had he been one, he could scarcely have held the reins of government under John for fourteen years without coming into open conflict with his master. He was, however, a man of much weight in the land by reason of his noble birth, his great wealth, and his knowledge of law, and also because he was connected by kindred, affinity or friendship with all the great baronial houses. Such a man was necessarily somewhat of a check upon the self-will of John. The king’s personal feeling towards his minister found a characteristic expression when he heard of Geoffrey’s death: “When he gets to hell,” laughed John, “he may greet Archbishop Hubert, whom he is sure to meet there!”[859] So long as the king was himself in England he could do without any justiciar at all; and accordingly no successor was appointed to Geoffrey for more than three months. John was, however, too cautious to venture upon any glaring abuse of his newly acquired freedom of action[860] at a moment when it was of the utmost importance for him to conciliate all parties and all classes by every means in his power. The one recorded incident of this period of John’s personal government, indeed, looks almost like a dim foreshadowing of one of the most weighty innovations which were to be made by the constitutional reformers of the latter part of the century.

It seems that at the end of October or early in November the tenants by knight-service were ordered to meet the king at Oxford on November 15. On November 7 John sent letters to the sheriffs bidding each one of them cause the knights within his shire to appear as previously directed, with their arms, the barons also in person but without arms, “and”—so ran the writ—“that thou cause to come thither at the same time four discreet men of the shire, to speak with us concerning the affairs of our realm.”[861] This writ is the earliest known instance of an attempt to call into council on “the affairs of the realm” representatives of the freemen of the shire, as distinguished from the tenants-in-chivalry. Representatives in the strict sense of the word, indeed, they were not; the writ says nothing of how they were to be chosen, and there can be little doubt that they would be selected by the sheriff. Still, the fact remains that—so far as extant evidence goes—John Lackland seems to have been the first English statesman who proposed to give some place, however subordinate, in the great council of the realm to laymen who were neither barons nor knights, but simple freemen. His motive is plain; he was seeking to win the support of the yeomen as a counterpoise to the hostility of the barons. Unluckily we know nothing of the results of his experiment, and cannot even be sure that it was actually tried; for though the king was certainly at Oxford in that year on November 15 and the two following days,[862] no mention occurs, in either chronicle or record, of any council holden there at that date.