ENGLAND UNDER KING JOHN, CALLED LACKLAND
At two-and-thirty years of age, John became King of England. His pretty
little nephew Arthur had the best claim to the throne; but John seized
the treasure, and made fine promises to the nobility, and got himself
crowned at Westminster within a few weeks after his brother Richard’s
death. I doubt whether the crown could possibly have been put upon the
head of a meaner coward, or a more detestable villain, if England had
been searched from end to end to find him out.
The French King, Philip, refused to acknowledge the right of John to
his new dignity, and declared in favour of Arthur. You must not suppose
that he had any generosity of feeling for the fatherless boy; it merely
suited his ambitious schemes to oppose the King of England. So John and
the French King went to war about Arthur.
He was a handsome boy, at that time only twelve years old. He was not
born when his father, Geoffrey, had his brains trampled out at the
tournament; and, besides the misfortune of never having known a
father’s guidance and protection, he had the additional misfortune to
have a foolish mother (Constance by name), lately married to her third
husband. She took Arthur, upon John’s accession, to the French King,
who pretended to be very much his friend, and who made him a Knight,
and promised him his daughter in marriage; but, who cared so little
about him in reality, that finding it his interest to make peace with
King John for a time, he did so without the least consideration for the
poor little Prince, and heartlessly sacrificed all his interests.
Young Arthur, for two years afterwards, lived quietly; and in the
course of that time his mother died. But, the French King then finding
it his interest to quarrel with King John again, again made Arthur his
pretence, and invited the orphan boy to court. ‘You know your rights,
Prince,’ said the French King, ‘and you would like to be a King. Is it
not so?’ ‘Truly,’ said Prince Arthur, ‘I should greatly like to be a
King!’ ‘Then,’ said Philip, ‘you shall have two hundred gentlemen who
are Knights of mine, and with them you shall go to win back the
provinces belonging to you, of which your uncle, the usurping King of
England, has taken possession. I myself, meanwhile, will head a force
against him in Normandy.’ Poor Arthur was so flattered and so grateful
that he signed a treaty with the crafty French King, agreeing to
consider him his superior Lord, and that the French King should keep
for himself whatever he could take from King John.
Now, King John was so bad in all ways, and King Philip was so
perfidious, that Arthur, between the two, might as well have been a
lamb between a fox and a wolf. But, being so young, he was ardent and
flushed with hope; and, when the people of Brittany (which was his
inheritance) sent him five hundred more knights and five thousand foot
soldiers, he believed his fortune was made. The people of Brittany had
been fond of him from his birth, and had requested that he might be
called Arthur, in remembrance of that dimly-famous English Arthur, of
whom I told you early in this book, whom they believed to have been the
brave friend and companion of an old King of their own. They had tales
among them about a prophet called Merlin (of the same old time), who
had foretold that their own King should be restored to them after
hundreds of years; and they believed that the prophecy would be
fulfilled in Arthur; that the time would come when he would rule them
with a crown of Brittany upon his head; and when neither King of France
nor King of England would have any power over them. When Arthur found
himself riding in a glittering suit of armour on a richly caparisoned
horse, at the head of his train of knights and soldiers, he began to
believe this too, and to consider old Merlin a very superior prophet.
He did not know—how could he, being so innocent and inexperienced?—that
his little army was a mere nothing against the power of the King of
England. The French King knew it; but the poor boy’s fate was little to
him, so that the King of England was worried and distressed. Therefore,
King Philip went his way into Normandy and Prince Arthur went his way
towards Mirebeau, a French town near Poictiers, both very well pleased.
Prince Arthur went to attack the town of Mirebeau, because his
grandmother Eleanor, who has so often made her appearance in this
history (and who had always been his mother’s enemy), was living there,
and because his Knights said, ‘Prince, if you can take her prisoner,
you will be able to bring the King your uncle to terms!’ But she was
not to be easily taken. She was old enough by this time—eighty—but she
was as full of stratagem as she was full of years and wickedness.
Receiving intelligence of young Arthur’s approach, she shut herself up
in a high tower, and encouraged her soldiers to defend it like men.
Prince Arthur with his little army besieged the high tower. King John,
hearing how matters stood, came up to the rescue, with _his_ army. So
here was a strange family-party! The boy-Prince besieging his
grandmother, and his uncle besieging him!
This position of affairs did not last long. One summer night King John,
by treachery, got his men into the town, surprised Prince Arthur’s
force, took two hundred of his knights, and seized the Prince himself
in his bed. The Knights were put in heavy irons, and driven away in
open carts drawn by bullocks, to various dungeons where they were most
inhumanly treated, and where some of them were starved to death. Prince
Arthur was sent to the castle of Falaise.
One day, while he was in prison at that castle, mournfully thinking it
strange that one so young should be in so much trouble, and looking out
of the small window in the deep dark wall, at the summer sky and the
birds, the door was softly opened, and he saw his uncle the King
standing in the shadow of the archway, looking very grim.
‘Arthur,’ said the King, with his wicked eyes more on the stone floor
than on his nephew, ‘will you not trust to the gentleness, the
friendship, and the truthfulness of your loving uncle?’
‘I will tell my loving uncle that,’ replied the boy, ‘when he does me
right. Let him restore to me my kingdom of England, and then come to me
and ask the question.’
The King looked at him and went out. ‘Keep that boy close prisoner,’
said he to the warden of the castle.
Then, the King took secret counsel with the worst of his nobles how the
Prince was to be got rid of. Some said, ‘Put out his eyes and keep him
in prison, as Robort of Normandy was kept.’ Others said, ‘Have him
stabbed.’ Others, ‘Have him hanged.’ Others, ‘Have him poisoned.’
King John, feeling that in any case, whatever was done afterwards, it
would be a satisfaction to his mind to have those handsome eyes burnt
out that had looked at him so proudly while his own royal eyes were
blinking at the stone floor, sent certain ruffians to Falaise to blind
the boy with red-hot irons. But Arthur so pathetically entreated them,
and shed such piteous tears, and so appealed to Hubert de Bourg (or
Burgh), the warden of the castle, who had a love for him, and was an
honourable, tender man, that Hubert could not bear it. To his eternal
honour he prevented the torture from being performed, and, at his own
risk, sent the savages away.
The chafed and disappointed King bethought himself of the stabbing
suggestion next, and, with his shuffling manner and his cruel face,
proposed it to one William de Bray. ‘I am a gentleman and not an
executioner,’ said William de Bray, and left the presence with disdain.
But it was not difficult for a King to hire a murderer in those days.
King John found one for his money, and sent him down to the castle of
Falaise. ‘On what errand dost thou come?’ said Hubert to this fellow.
‘To despatch young Arthur,’ he returned. ‘Go back to him who sent
thee,’ answered Hubert, ‘and say that I will do it!’
King John very well knowing that Hubert would never do it, but that he
courageously sent this reply to save the Prince or gain time,
despatched messengers to convey the young prisoner to the castle of
Rouen.
Arthur was soon forced from the good Hubert—of whom he had never stood
in greater need than then—carried away by night, and lodged in his new
prison: where, through his grated window, he could hear the deep waters
of the river Seine, rippling against the stone wall below.
One dark night, as he lay sleeping, dreaming perhaps of rescue by those
unfortunate gentlemen who were obscurely suffering and dying in his
cause, he was roused, and bidden by his jailer to come down the
staircase to the foot of the tower. He hurriedly dressed himself and
obeyed. When they came to the bottom of the winding stairs, and the
night air from the river blew upon their faces, the jailer trod upon
his torch and put it out. Then, Arthur, in the darkness, was hurriedly
drawn into a solitary boat. And in that boat, he found his uncle and
one other man.
He knelt to them, and prayed them not to murder him. Deaf to his
entreaties, they stabbed him and sunk his body in the river with heavy
stones. When the spring-morning broke, the tower-door was closed, the
boat was gone, the river sparkled on its way, and never more was any
trace of the poor boy beheld by mortal eyes.
The news of this atrocious murder being spread in England, awakened a
hatred of the King (already odious for his many vices, and for his
having stolen away and married a noble lady while his own wife was
living) that never slept again through his whole reign. In Brittany,
the indignation was intense. Arthur’s own sister Eleanor was in the
power of John and shut up in a convent at Bristol, but his half-sister
Alice was in Brittany. The people chose her, and the murdered prince’s
father-in-law, the last husband of Constance, to represent them; and
carried their fiery complaints to King Philip. King Philip summoned
King John (as the holder of territory in France) to come before him and
defend himself. King John refusing to appear, King Philip declared him
false, perjured, and guilty; and again made war. In a little time, by
conquering the greater part of his French territory, King Philip
deprived him of one-third of his dominions. And, through all the
fighting that took place, King John was always found, either to be
eating and drinking, like a gluttonous fool, when the danger was at a
distance, or to be running away, like a beaten cur, when it was near.
You might suppose that when he was losing his dominions at this rate,
and when his own nobles cared so little for him or his cause that they
plainly refused to follow his banner out of England, he had enemies
enough. But he made another enemy of the Pope, which he did in this
way.
The Archbishop of Canterbury dying, and the junior monks of that place
wishing to get the start of the senior monks in the appointment of his
successor, met together at midnight, secretly elected a certain
Reginald, and sent him off to Rome to get the Pope’s approval. The
senior monks and the King soon finding this out, and being very angry
about it, the junior monks gave way, and all the monks together elected
the Bishop of Norwich, who was the King’s favourite. The Pope, hearing
the whole story, declared that neither election would do for him, and
that _he_ elected Stephen Langton. The monks submitting to the Pope,
the King turned them all out bodily, and banished them as traitors. The
Pope sent three bishops to the King, to threaten him with an Interdict.
The King told the bishops that if any Interdict were laid upon his
kingdom, he would tear out the eyes and cut off the noses of all the
monks he could lay hold of, and send them over to Rome in that
undecorated state as a present for their master. The bishops,
nevertheless, soon published the Interdict, and fled.
After it had lasted a year, the Pope proceeded to his next step; which
was Excommunication. King John was declared excommunicated, with all
the usual ceremonies. The King was so incensed at this, and was made so
desperate by the disaffection of his Barons and the hatred of his
people, that it is said he even privately sent ambassadors to the Turks
in Spain, offering to renounce his religion and hold his kingdom of
them if they would help him. It is related that the ambassadors were
admitted to the presence of the Turkish Emir through long lines of
Moorish guards, and that they found the Emir with his eyes seriously
fixed on the pages of a large book, from which he never once looked up.
That they gave him a letter from the King containing his proposals, and
were gravely dismissed. That presently the Emir sent for one of them,
and conjured him, by his faith in his religion, to say what kind of man
the King of England truly was? That the ambassador, thus pressed,
replied that the King of England was a false tyrant, against whom his
own subjects would soon rise. And that this was quite enough for the
Emir.
Money being, in his position, the next best thing to men, King John
spared no means of getting it. He set on foot another oppressing and
torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite in his way), and
invented a new punishment for one wealthy Jew of Bristol. Until such
time as that Jew should produce a certain large sum of money, the King
sentenced him to be imprisoned, and, every day, to have one tooth
violently wrenched out of his head—beginning with the double teeth. For
seven days, the oppressed man bore the daily pain and lost the daily
tooth; but, on the eighth, he paid the money. With the treasure raised
in such ways, the King made an expedition into Ireland, where some
English nobles had revolted. It was one of the very few places from
which he did not run away; because no resistance was shown. He made
another expedition into Wales—whence he _did_ run away in the end: but
not before he had got from the Welsh people, as hostages, twenty-seven
young men of the best families; every one of whom he caused to be slain
in the following year.
To Interdict and Excommunication, the Pope now added his last sentence;
Deposition. He proclaimed John no longer King, absolved all his
subjects from their allegiance, and sent Stephen Langton and others to
the King of France to tell him that, if he would invade England, he
should be forgiven all his sins—at least, should be forgiven them by
the Pope, if that would do.
As there was nothing that King Philip desired more than to invade
England, he collected a great army at Rouen, and a fleet of seventeen
hundred ships to bring them over. But the English people, however
bitterly they hated the King, were not a people to suffer invasion
quietly. They flocked to Dover, where the English standard was, in such
great numbers to enrol themselves as defenders of their native land,
that there were not provisions for them, and the King could only select
and retain sixty thousand. But, at this crisis, the Pope, who had his
own reasons for objecting to either King John or King Philip being too
powerful, interfered. He entrusted a legate, whose name was Pandolf,
with the easy task of frightening King John. He sent him to the English
Camp, from France, to terrify him with exaggerations of King Philip’s
power, and his own weakness in the discontent of the English Barons and
people. Pandolf discharged his commission so well, that King John, in a
wretched panic, consented to acknowledge Stephen Langton; to resign his
kingdom ‘to God, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul’—which meant the Pope; and
to hold it, ever afterwards, by the Pope’s leave, on payment of an
annual sum of money. To this shameful contract he publicly bound
himself in the church of the Knights Templars at Dover: where he laid
at the legate’s feet a part of the tribute, which the legate haughtily
trampled upon. But they _do_ say, that this was merely a genteel
flourish, and that he was afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket it.
There was an unfortunate prophet, the name of Peter, who had greatly
increased King John’s terrors by predicting that he would be unknighted
(which the King supposed to signify that he would die) before the Feast
of the Ascension should be past. That was the day after this
humiliation. When the next morning came, and the King, who had been
trembling all night, found himself alive and safe, he ordered the
prophet—and his son too—to be dragged through the streets at the tails
of horses, and then hanged, for having frightened him.
As King John had now submitted, the Pope, to King Philip’s great
astonishment, took him under his protection, and informed King Philip
that he found he could not give him leave to invade England. The angry
Philip resolved to do it without his leave but he gained nothing and
lost much; for, the English, commanded by the Earl of Salisbury, went
over, in five hundred ships, to the French coast, before the French
fleet had sailed away from it, and utterly defeated the whole.
The Pope then took off his three sentences, one after another, and
empowered Stephen Langton publicly to receive King John into the favour
of the Church again, and to ask him to dinner. The King, who hated
Langton with all his might and main—and with reason too, for he was a
great and a good man, with whom such a King could have no
sympathy—pretended to cry and to be _very_ grateful. There was a little
difficulty about settling how much the King should pay as a recompense
to the clergy for the losses he had caused them; but, the end of it
was, that the superior clergy got a good deal, and the inferior clergy
got little or nothing—which has also happened since King John’s time, I
believe.
When all these matters were arranged, the King in his triumph became
more fierce, and false, and insolent to all around him than he had ever
been. An alliance of sovereigns against King Philip, gave him an
opportunity of landing an army in France; with which he even took a
town! But, on the French King’s gaining a great victory, he ran away,
of course, and made a truce for five years.
And now the time approached when he was to be still further humbled,
and made to feel, if he could feel anything, what a wretched creature
he was. Of all men in the world, Stephen Langton seemed raised up by
Heaven to oppose and subdue him. When he ruthlessly burnt and destroyed
the property of his own subjects, because their Lords, the Barons,
would not serve him abroad, Stephen Langton fearlessly reproved and
threatened him. When he swore to restore the laws of King Edward, or
the laws of King Henry the First, Stephen Langton knew his falsehood,
and pursued him through all his evasions. When the Barons met at the
abbey of Saint Edmund’s-Bury, to consider their wrongs and the King’s
oppressions, Stephen Langton roused them by his fervid words to demand
a solemn charter of rights and liberties from their perjured master,
and to swear, one by one, on the High Altar, that they would have it,
or would wage war against him to the death. When the King hid himself
in London from the Barons, and was at last obliged to receive them,
they told him roundly they would not believe him unless Stephen Langton
became a surety that he would keep his word. When he took the Cross to
invest himself with some interest, and belong to something that was
received with favour, Stephen Langton was still immovable. When he
appealed to the Pope, and the Pope wrote to Stephen Langton in behalf
of his new favourite, Stephen Langton was deaf, even to the Pope
himself, and saw before him nothing but the welfare of England and the
crimes of the English King.
At Easter-time, the Barons assembled at Stamford, in Lincolnshire, in
proud array, and, marching near to Oxford where the King was, delivered
into the hands of Stephen Langton and two others, a list of grievances.
‘And these,’ they said, ‘he must redress, or we will do it for
ourselves!’ When Stephen Langton told the King as much, and read the
list to him, he went half mad with rage. But that did him no more good
than his afterwards trying to pacify the Barons with lies. They called
themselves and their followers, ‘The army of God and the Holy Church.’
Marching through the country, with the people thronging to them
everywhere (except at Northampton, where they failed in an attack upon
the castle), they at last triumphantly set up their banner in London
itself, whither the whole land, tired of the tyrant, seemed to flock to
join them. Seven knights alone, of all the knights in England, remained
with the King; who, reduced to this strait, at last sent the Earl of
Pembroke to the Barons to say that he approved of everything, and would
meet them to sign their charter when they would. ‘Then,’ said the
Barons, ‘let the day be the fifteenth of June, and the place,
Runny-Mead.’
On Monday, the fifteenth of June, one thousand two hundred and
fourteen, the King came from Windsor Castle, and the Barons came from
the town of Staines, and they met on Runny-Mead, which is still a
pleasant meadow by the Thames, where rushes grow in the clear water of
the winding river, and its banks are green with grass and trees. On the
side of the Barons, came the General of their army, Robert Fitz-Walter,
and a great concourse of the nobility of England. With the King, came,
in all, some four-and-twenty persons of any note, most of whom despised
him, and were merely his advisers in form. On that great day, and in
that great company, the King signed Magna Charta—the great charter of
England—by which he pledged himself to maintain the Church in its
rights; to relieve the Barons of oppressive obligations as vassals of
the Crown—of which the Barons, in their turn, pledged themselves to
relieve _their_ vassals, the people; to respect the liberties of London
and all other cities and boroughs; to protect foreign merchants who
came to England; to imprison no man without a fair trial; and to sell,
delay, or deny justice to none. As the Barons knew his falsehood well,
they further required, as their securities, that he should send out of
his kingdom all his foreign troops; that for two months they should
hold possession of the city of London, and Stephen Langton of the
Tower; and that five-and-twenty of their body, chosen by themselves,
should be a lawful committee to watch the keeping of the charter, and
to make war upon him if he broke it.
All this he was obliged to yield. He signed the charter with a smile,
and, if he could have looked agreeable, would have done so, as he
departed from the splendid assembly. When he got home to Windsor
Castle, he was quite a madman in his helpless fury. And he broke the
charter immediately afterwards.
He sent abroad for foreign soldiers, and sent to the Pope for help, and
plotted to take London by surprise, while the Barons should be holding
a great tournament at Stamford, which they had agreed to hold there as
a celebration of the charter. The Barons, however, found him out and
put it off. Then, when the Barons desired to see him and tax him with
his treachery, he made numbers of appointments with them, and kept
none, and shifted from place to place, and was constantly sneaking and
skulking about. At last he appeared at Dover, to join his foreign
soldiers, of whom numbers came into his pay; and with them he besieged
and took Rochester Castle, which was occupied by knights and soldiers
of the Barons. He would have hanged them every one; but the leader of
the foreign soldiers, fearful of what the English people might
afterwards do to him, interfered to save the knights; therefore the
King was fain to satisfy his vengeance with the death of all the common
men. Then, he sent the Earl of Salisbury, with one portion of his army,
to ravage the eastern part of his own dominions, while he carried fire
and slaughter into the northern part; torturing, plundering, killing,
and inflicting every possible cruelty upon the people; and, every
morning, setting a worthy example to his men by setting fire, with his
own monster-hands, to the house where he had slept last night. Nor was
this all; for the Pope, coming to the aid of his precious friend, laid
the kingdom under an Interdict again, because the people took part with
the Barons. It did not much matter, for the people had grown so used to
it now, that they had begun to think nothing about it. It occurred to
them—perhaps to Stephen Langton too—that they could keep their churches
open, and ring their bells, without the Pope’s permission as well as
with it. So, they tried the experiment—and found that it succeeded
perfectly.
It being now impossible to bear the country, as a wilderness of
cruelty, or longer to hold any terms with such a forsworn outlaw of a
King, the Barons sent to Louis, son of the French monarch, to offer him
the English crown. Caring as little for the Pope’s excommunication of
him if he accepted the offer, as it is possible his father may have
cared for the Pope’s forgiveness of his sins, he landed at Sandwich
(King John immediately running away from Dover, where he happened to
be), and went on to London. The Scottish King, with whom many of the
Northern English Lords had taken refuge, numbers of the foreign
soldiers, numbers of the Barons, and numbers of the people went over to
him every day;—King John, the while, continually running away in all
directions.
The career of Louis was checked however, by the suspicions of the
Barons, founded on the dying declaration of a French Lord, that when
the kingdom was conquered he was sworn to banish them as traitors, and
to give their estates to some of his own Nobles. Rather than suffer
this, some of the Barons hesitated: others even went over to King John.
It seemed to be the turning-point of King John’s fortunes, for, in his
savage and murderous course, he had now taken some towns and met with
some successes. But, happily for England and humanity, his death was
near. Crossing a dangerous quicksand, called the Wash, not very far
from Wisbeach, the tide came up and nearly drowned his army. He and his
soldiers escaped; but, looking back from the shore when he was safe, he
saw the roaring water sweep down in a torrent, overturn the waggons,
horses, and men, that carried his treasure, and engulf them in a raging
whirlpool from which nothing could be delivered.
Cursing, and swearing, and gnawing his fingers, he went on to
Swinestead Abbey, where the monks set before him quantities of pears,
and peaches, and new cider—some say poison too, but there is very
little reason to suppose so—of which he ate and drank in an immoderate
and beastly way. All night he lay ill of a burning fever, and haunted
with horrible fears. Next day, they put him in a horse-litter, and
carried him to Sleaford Castle, where he passed another night of pain
and horror. Next day, they carried him, with greater difficulty than on
the day before, to the castle of Newark upon Trent; and there, on the
eighteenth of October, in the forty-ninth year of his age, and the
seventeenth of his vile reign, was an end of this miserable brute.