JOHN “SOFTSWORD”
1199–1206
Contempserunt etenim in eo malivoli quique juvenilem aetatem et
corporis parvitatem, et quia prudentia magis quam pugna pacem
optinebat ubique, “Johannem Mollegladium” eum malivoli detractores
et invidi derisores vocabant. Sed processu temporis ...
Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. pp. 92, 93 (a. 1200).
[Sidenote: 1199]
In Richard’s island realm there was never a moment’s question as to who
should succeed him on its throne. In English eyes one successor alone
was possible, no matter how undesirable he might be. The circumstances
of the case, however--the unexpectedness of the vacancy, the heir’s
absence from England, his past relations with the government and
the people there, and the existence of a rival claimant--presented
an opportunity for endeavouring to make a bargain with him such as
it was not often possible to make with a new sovereign. Accordingly
the English barons as a body, on hearing of Richard’s death, assumed
an attitude of independence. All of them set to work to fortify and
revictual their castles; some of them even began to attack and plunder
their neighbours, as if they deemed that there was to be again “no
king in the land”; and all the efforts of the justiciar, Geoffrey
Fitz-Peter, failed to restore order, till he was joined at the end of
April by Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal. The archbishop
excommunicated the evildoers,[262] and he and the Marshal conjointly
tendered to all the men of the kingdom, “citizens and burghers, earls,
barons, and free tenants,” an oath of liege homage and fealty to John.
The lesser freemen apparently took it without hesitation, but many of
the barons held back. These reluctant ones--chief among whom were the
earls of Clare, Huntingdon, Chester, Ferrars and Warwick, Roger de Lacy
and William de Mowbray--were summoned by the primate, the Marshal and
the justiciar to a meeting at Northampton. There they took the oath,
but only in return for a promise given by the three ministers that if
they did so, John “should render to each of them his rights.”[263]
None of these “rights” are specified; but the expression used by the
historian who records the claim distinctly implies that it was in each
case the claim of an individual to some particular thing to which he
considered himself personally entitled, something, it would seem, which
he had been unable to obtain from the late king, and which he was
therefore anxious to secure beforehand from the new one. In several
cases the grievance seems to have been that of an heir who had not
yet received investiture of a dignity to which he had become entitled
by inheritance some time before.[264] With this grievance the Marshal
and the justiciar could not fail to sympathize; for although they had
for some years past enjoyed the estates attached to the earldoms of
Striguil (or Pembroke) and Essex respectively, neither of them had yet
been invested as earl. Justly, therefore, was the promise which they
had made in John’s name redeemed first of all to them when he girded
them with the earl’s sword and belt on his coronation day.[265]
The chroniclers of the time speak of that day’s ceremony in a
matter-of-course way which implies that there was nothing remarkable
about it. “John,” says one, “was peaceably received by the great men
of all England, and was immediately crowned by Archbishop Hubert of
Canterbury at Westminster on Ascension Day, amid a great array of
the citizens.”[266] Sixteen prelates besides Hubert, ten earls and
“many barons” were present.[267] The coronation oath was administered
to John in almost the same words as it had been to Richard, and
with the same adjuration not to take it without a full purpose of
keeping it, to which John made the proper reply.[268] Of the other
details of the ceremony there is no description; only one incident at
its outset and one omission at its close are noted by contemporary
writers.[269] The first was merely a formal protest made by Bishop
Philip of Durham that the coronation ought not to take place in the
absence of his metropolitan, the archbishop of York.[270] The second
was an intentional and significant omission on the part of the newly
crowned king himself. It was customary for every Christian sovereign,
after the crown had been placed on his head, to seal the vows which he
had just made by receiving the Holy Communion. John, however, did not
communicate.[271]
Next day the new king received in person the homage of the barons.[272]
On this side of the sea, only Wales and Scotland remained to be
secured. Of Wales we hear nothing at the moment. Scotland had taken the
initiative immediately after Richard’s death; King William the Lion had
at once despatched a message to John, offering him his liege homage
and fealty, on condition that Northumberland and Cumberland should be
given back to the Scottish Crown. The English primate, Marshal and
justiciar, knowing the difficulties with which John was beset on the
other side of the Channel, probably feared that he might be tempted to
purchase William’s support at William’s own price; they intercepted the
messenger, and sent word to the Scot king, by his brother Earl David
of Huntingdon, that he must “wait patiently” till John should reach
England. John himself--to whom they apparently reported what they had
done--sent word to William that he would “satisfy him concerning all
his demands” on his arrival, if the Scot king would keep the peace till
then.[273] Immediately after his coronation John despatched two envoys
to summon William to his court and conduct him safely thither. After
they had started, there came to the English king three envoys from
Scotland with a repetition of William’s former message; but this time a
threat was added; if William’s terms were not accepted “he would regain
all that he was entitled to, if he could.” John answered quietly: “When
your lord, my very dear cousin, shall come to me, I will do to him
whatsoever is right concerning these things and other requests of his”;
and he bade the bishop of Durham go to meet the Scot king, “hoping the
latter would come according to his summons.”[274] He had himself left
London on the morrow of his crowning {May 28} to go on pilgrimage to
S. Albans;[275] he afterwards visited Canterbury and S. Edmunds,[276]
and thence went to Northampton, to keep Whitsuntide (June 6) and wait
for William.[277] He waited in vain; William only sent back the English
envoys, reiterated his demand for the two counties and his threat of
winning them by force, and added a further demand for an answer within
forty days. John meanwhile had lost patience with him, had given the
two counties in charge to a new sheriff, and started for the south
on his way back to Normandy. The Scot king’s messengers followed him
to the sea;[278] whether they overtook him is not clear; at any rate
nothing came of their mission, and on Sunday, June 20, John sailed
from Shoreham for Dieppe,[279] “taking with him a very great host from
England.”[280]
Within three days John and Philip met in conference at Gaillon. They
came to no agreement, and John “made up his mind to resist the French
king like a man, and to fight manfully for the peace of his country.”
It is clear that his preparations were well in train before the meeting
took place. Philip indeed made the first hostile movement by laying
siege to the castle of Gaillon; not only, however, was he driven away
by the troops who had come over with John,[281] but horse and foot
came flocking to the muster at Rouen, though it was fixed for June 24,
only four days after John’s landing. On that day he made a truce with
Philip to last till August 16,[282] thus gaining nearly two months
in which to mature his plans and increase his forces. He spent the
greater part of this time in a progress through eastern Normandy, and,
as the sequel showed, in negotiations with the counts of Flanders
and Boulogne. On August 10 he was again at Rouen.[283] On the 13th
Baldwin of Flanders came to him there “and became his man.”[284] On the
16th, when the truce expired, representatives of the two kings met in
conference between Gouleton and Boutavant; on the 18th Philip and John
met in person. Philip was asked “why he so hated the king of England,
who had never done him any harm?” He answered that John had occupied
Normandy and other lands without his leave, whereas he ought first to
have applied to his overlord for confirmation of his rights as heir,
and done homage to him. Now, Philip demanded of John the surrender of
the whole Vexin to the Crown of France, and that of Poitou, Anjou,
Touraine, and Maine to himself as overlord, that he might transfer them
to Arthur.[285]
The Vexin had been a bone of contention between France and Normandy
for nearly forty years, and its cession had been distinctly promised
by Richard to Philip in 1195. As for the Angevin heritage, John in
taking possession of it without waiting for investiture had only
followed the example of his predecessor. Richard had made pecuniary
amends to Philip for this irregular proceeding, which in feudal law
was punishable--theoretically--by forfeiture. In his demand that
John should resign the three Angevin counties, therefore, and in his
previous grant of their investiture to Arthur, Philip did not exceed
his legal rights. With regard to Poitou the case was more complicated.
On the one hand, it is certain that at some time between Richard’s
death and the middle of May 1200 Eleanor and John made an agreement in
legal form, whereby John granted his mother to have and to hold all the
days of her life, or during her pleasure, the whole of Poitou with all
its appurtenances, she having first ceded and surrendered it to him “as
her right heir,” received his homage for it, and made over to him the
rights of government throughout the county and the fealty and services
of its vassals.[286] On the other hand, at the end of June 1199 Eleanor
had met Philip at Tours, and he had allowed her to do him homage for
Poitou,[287] thus formally recognizing her as its lawful countess.
Whatever be the precise date of the first-mentioned transaction,
therefore, it seems that Eleanor, and Eleanor alone, was the person
legally answerable for Poitou to the king of France at this moment.
The English historian of the conference adds that Philip further made
of John “other demands which the king of England would in no wise
grant, nor was it right that he should grant them.” What these were
he does not state; but it seems that some of the French nobles were
of his opinion as to their character, for when the meeting broke up,
“such of the counts and barons of the realm of France as had been in
alliance with King Richard” came to John offered him their homage,
and made offensive and defensive alliance with him against their own
sovereign.[288] In the case of the count of Boulogne this alliance was
embodied in a written treaty, drawn up on the same day (August 18) at
“the castle on the Rock of Andely.”[289]
In September Philip recommenced hostilities with the seizure of
Conches.[290] John, who had continued hovering about eastern Normandy
until then, at once struck southward; from September 12 to 17 he was
at Bourg-le-Roi in Maine.[291] This movement of John’s apparently
drew Philip southward after him; the next place which the French
king attacked was the Cenomannian fortress of Ballon, held for John
by one of his father’s most devoted adherents, Geoffrey of Brullon.
The castle was taken, and Philip proceeded to raze it. William des
Roches, the constable of Britanny, protested against this as contrary
to the agreement between Arthur and the king. Philip retorted that
he should deal with his own conquests as he pleased, without regard
to Arthur.[292] On that very night--it must have been September
17--William des Roches went to Bourg-le-Roi,[293] begged for a private
interview with John, and undertook to make Arthur, Constance, and all
Anjou, Maine and Poitou submit to him “so that all should be good
friends together,” in return for an oath on John’s part that he would
“do with them according to his (William’s) counsel.”[294] A written
record of John’s promise to abide by the terms which William and
other “lawful knights” of Normandy and Britanny--whom William was to
choose--should arrange for peace between himself and his “very dear
nephew Arthur,” “for the honour and advantage of us both,” was drawn up
before witnesses on September 18 at Anvers-le-Hamon.[295]
It may have been to facilitate negotiations with the Bretons and
Angevins that John had proceeded so far as Anvers, which lies in
the south of Maine, close to the border of Anjou. We next find him
overtaking Philip at the siege of Lavardin. Philip hereupon withdrew
to Le Mans; but he had cut the ground from under his own feet; the
garrison of Le Mans was under the orders of William des Roches, who
had been appointed commandant there by Philip himself. John, too, was
following close behind; and when he appeared before the city, Philip
again beat a hasty retreat, while William des Roches brought Arthur
and Constance in person to make their peace with John, and then opened
the gates of Le Mans to the new allies. John, in anticipation of his
triumph, had already summoned Almeric, the viscount of Thouars, who
was acting as seneschal of Anjou and commandant of Chinon for Arthur,
to come and submit to him at Le Mans. On the very day of John’s entry
into the city, September 22, Almeric obeyed. Next day John proceeded
to Chinon, where he installed Roger de Lacy as castellan in Almeric’s
stead. With less than his usual caution, he let Arthur, Constance and
their friends, including Almeric, stay behind at Le Mans. Some one had
already suggested to Arthur a suspicion that his uncle intended to
make him a prisoner; as soon, therefore, as John was out of the way at
Chinon, the majority of the Bretons, with their young duke, his mother,
and the viscount of Thouars, returned on September 24 to their old
headquarters at Angers.[296] It was probably tidings of this which made
John hasten back from Chinon to Le Mans, where he was again September
27 to 30; after that nothing is known of his movements till October 6,
when he was at Saumur.[297] His appearance there is suggestive, for
Saumur was the key of the Angevin border towards Poitou on the south
and Touraine on the east. With Le Mans, Chinon and Saumur all in his
hands, he had only to secure a firm foothold in Aquitaine, and then he
might attack Anjou from three sides at once. But to attack it without
such a foothold, and with only the small force which he had brought
with him from Normandy,[298] would have been worse than useless. On
October 8, therefore, John was once more at Le Mans, and thence he fell
back upon Normandy.[299]
There was indeed another reason for his return. Cardinal Peter of
Capua, who had at the beginning of the year negotiated a truce between
Philip and Richard, was still at the French court. The truce had been
made for three years; Richard’s death had of course put an abrupt end
to it; but Peter was urgent that it should be renewed for its original
term between Philip and John. Such a proposal implied that John was
recognized at Rome as Richard’s lawful heir; it was therefore obviously
politic for John to cherish such a valuable alliance by falling in
with the cardinal’s endeavours after a pacification. Through Peter’s
mediation a truce was made at the end of October. Its term was fixed
for the ensuing S. Hilary’s Day;[300] but there was evidently a tacit
understanding that it was to be the forerunner of a more lasting
agreement.
[Sidenote: 1200]
This truce set John free for a visit to Aquitaine. On November 8 he
was at Niort, and in the beginning of December at Poitiers; by the
middle of December he had returned to Normandy.[301] Meanwhile a
question which had been pending for several years, as to the legality
of Philip’s repudiation of his queen Ingebiorg and his subsequent union
with Agnes of Merania, had been, in a council at Dijon on December 6,
decided by Cardinal Peter against the king, and Peter had laid the
royal domain of France under an interdict which was to take effect
from January 15, 1200,[302] the second day after the expiration of the
truce. With this prospect before his eyes, Philip dared not insult
John as he had insulted him at their last meeting. It was with a very
different proposal that he met him at the old trysting-place between
Gaillon and Les Andelys. A project which had been mooted just twelve
months before, for a family alliance to cement peace between the houses
of France and Anjou, was now revived; it was proposed that Philip’s
son Louis should marry John’s niece Blanche of Castille, and that John
should furnish the bride with a dowry in Norman lands and English
money.[303] The two kings “rushed into each other’s arms,” and renewed
their truce till midsummer.[304]
While Eleanor went to Spain to fetch her granddaughter,[305] John
seized his opportunity for a visit to England.[306] His first business
there was to concert measures with the justiciar for raising the
required sum of money. They decided that the taxes for the year should
consist of a scutage of two marks on the knight’s fee and a payment
of three shillings for “every working plough.”[307] John then went to
York, where he had summoned the Scot king to meet him at the end of
March. William, however, failed to appear.[308] During John’s stay
at York a claim of exemption from the plough tax was laid before him
by the heads of some of the great Cistercian houses in Yorkshire in
behalf of their whole order; this led to a violent quarrel between
them and the king, which was still unsettled when he returned to
Normandy at the end of April.[309] Thither Blanche was brought to meet
him, and on Ascension Day (May 18)[310] he and Philip, at a personal
meeting on the border, made a definite treaty of peace. By that treaty
Philip in so many words acknowledged John as “his brother Richard’s
right heir,” and granted him, as such, the investiture of the whole
Angevin dominions, with the exception of certain territories which
John ceded to the crown of France. These were the Vexin, Auvergne, the
greater part of the county of Evreux, and the lordships of Issoudun,
Graçay, and Bourges. To the cession of the Vexin and of the chief
border castles of the county of Evreux, as well as to the resignation
of the Angevin claim upon Auvergne, Richard had been pledged by his
treaty with Philip in 1195; Issoudun and Graçay had been restored to
the English king by the same treaty, having been ceded by Richard to
France in 1189.[311] Twenty thousand marks and the formal cession of
all these territories--most, if not all, of which were already in
Philip’s hands--was not too heavy a price to pay for the personal
triumph and the political gain involved in Philip’s recognition of John
as the lawful heir to Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine and Aquitaine,
and also to the overlordship of Britanny; for not only was this last
right distinctly conceded to him by Philip, but Arthur was then and
there made to do homage to his uncle for his duchy[312] as soon as John
himself had done homage to Philip for the whole continental heritage of
the house of Anjou.[313] The marriage of Louis and Blanche took place
four days later.[314]
John now set out upon a sort of triumphal progress southward, to take
seisin of all his dominions. On June 18 he reached Angers, where he
stayed four days and took a hundred and fifty hostages as security for
the loyalty of the citizens.[315] At the end of June he was at Tours,
and early in July at Poitiers, whence he proceeded into Gascony; on the
14th he was welcomed at Bordeaux by the archbishop and the barons of
the land.[316] He immediately secured the help of the Gascon primate in
a scheme which he had been cherishing for some months past for getting
rid of the wife to whom he had been married for eleven years, Isabel
of Gloucester. The papal legate who in 1189 had revoked the sentence
passed by Archbishop Baldwin upon John and Isabel had done so on the
ground that, since John had appealed to Rome, his marriage must be
recognized as lawful, pending the result of the appeal. A decision
of the Pope on that appeal would of course have either annulled the
marriage or made it indissoluble; but it seems that no such decision
had ever been given, because the appeal had never been prosecuted. The
marriage was therefore still voidable. At the close of 1199 John called
upon the Norman bishops to declare it void, and they obeyed him.[317]
He now, it seems, laid the case before the archbishop of Bordeaux and
the bishop of Poitiers and Saintes; and their decision was in accord
with that of their Norman brethren.[318] On the bare question--which
was doubtless all that John put before them--whether a marriage between
cousins in the fourth degree was lawful without a dispensation, indeed,
no other decision was possible according to the letter of the canon
law. The Pope, however, when the matter came to his knowledge, seems
to have felt that in this particular case adhesion to the letter of
the law involved a violation of its spirit, and to have been extremely
angry with John’s episcopal tools as well as with John himself.[319]
He had, however, no ground for interfering in the matter except on an
appeal from Isabel; and Isabel did not appeal.[320] There is every
reason to think--and certainly no reason to wonder--that the removal of
the matrimonial yoke was as welcome to her as to John, and that their
divorce was in fact, like that of Louis VII. and Eleanor, a separation
by mutual consent.
John had already chosen another heiress to take Isabel’s place. One
of the most important, and also most troublesome, feudataries of the
duchy of Aquitaine was Ademar, count of Angoulême. It was in a quarrel
with him and his half-brother, the viscount of Limoges, that Richard
Cœur-de-Lion had met his death, which Richard’s son had avenged by
slaying the viscount.[321] The feud between the houses of Angoulême and
Limoges thus threatened to be a considerable hindrance to Richard’s
successor in his efforts to secure a hold upon his southern duchy.
How formidable Ademar and his nephew, the new viscount of Limoges,
had already made themselves is shown by the insertion in the treaty
between John and Philip of a special provision that John should
“receive their homage and grant them their rights.”[322] It is said
to have been Philip who counselled John to secure the fidelity of
Ademar of Angoulême in another way, by taking to wife Ademar’s only
child.[323] Philip’s motives for giving the advice, and John’s motives
for following it, are alike obscure. Nineteen years before, Richard, as
duke of Aquitaine, had vainly striven to wrest Angoulême from Ademar
in behalf of Matilda, the only child of Ademar’s late brother, Count
Vulgrin III. Matilda was now the wife of Hugh “the Brown” of Lusignan,
who in 1179 or 1180 had, in spite of King Henry, made himself master
of the county of La Marche, and whose personal importance in southern
Gaul was increased by the rank and fame which his brothers Geoffrey,
Guy and Almeric had won in the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus.
The dispute between Matilda and her uncle had been settled by the
betrothal of her son--another Hugh the Brown--to Ademar’s daughter and
heiress, Isabel.[324] A marriage between John and this little Isabel of
Angoulême, therefore, would be certain to provoke the bitter resentment
of the whole Lusignan family. On the other hand, it would provoke their
resentment against Isabel’s father as well as against her husband,
and thus destroy the chance of a coalition of Angoulême and La Marche
against their common overlord. It is not impossible that for John, who
gambled in politics as habitually as he did at the game of “tables,”
the very wantonness of the scheme and the hazards attendant upon it may
have only added to its attractions. But his subsequent conduct towards
the Lusignans suggests the idea that he may have had a deeper motive,
a deliberate purpose of goading them into some outrageous course of
action which might enable him to recover La Marche and ruin them
completely, or even drive them altogether out of the land.
On his way to Poitou John issued from Chinon, on June 25, a summons to
Ademar of Angoulême and Guy of Limoges to come and perform their homage
on July 5 at Lusignan,[325] the ancestral home of Hugh the Brown. There
Hugh and Matilda were bringing up their intended daughter-in-law in
company with her boy bridegroom, and there John was no doubt, at the
moment, sure of a welcome, for Hugh and his brother Ralf had become his
liegemen at Caen on January 28.[326] Thus, in all likelihood, it was
under Hugh’s very roof, and as sharers in his hospitality, that the
king of England and the count of Angoulême laid their plot for robbing
Hugh’s son of his plighted bride and his promised heritage. John
indeed, as soon as his divorce was ratified by the southern bishops,
despatched, or gave out that he had despatched, an embassy to Portugal
with instructions to ask for the hand of a daughter of the Portuguese
king;[327] but their mission was a mere blind to divert suspicion
till Ademar should have succeeded in getting his child back into his
own hands. The poor little betrothed--she was only about twelve years
old[328]--was literally stolen by her father,[329] and carried off
by him to his capital city. There her royal suitor met them, and on
August 24 the marriage ceremony was performed by the archbishop of
Bordeaux.[330] The newly married couple immediately afterwards set out
for the north; at the beginning of October they went to England, and on
the 8th they were crowned together at Westminster.[331]
[Sidenote: 1200–1201]
Six weeks later the king of Scots made his submission. Summoned to meet
his overlord at Lincoln on November 21, William the Lion this time
did not venture to disobey the summons; both kings reached Lincoln on
the appointed day. Next morning John, in defiance of an old tradition
which forbade a king to appear in regal state within the walls of
Lincoln, went to the minster and offered a golden chalice at the altar
of S. John the Baptist. Thence he proceeded to his colloquy with
William “on the top of the steep hill” outside the city. There, amid
a group of prelates and barons, and “in the sight of all the people,”
William performed his homage, and swore on Archbishop Hubert’s cross
that he would be faithful to John against all men, “saving his own
right.” Then, and not till then, did he venture again to demand, “as
his right and heritage,” the disputed counties. A long discussion
ended in an adjournment of the question till the next Whitsuntide;
which of course meant that it was to be put off indefinitely. On
the morrow (November 23) the king of Scots set out on his homeward
journey, while the king of England helped with his own hands to carry
to its last resting-place in Lincoln minster the body of the only man
among his father’s old friends for whom he seems to have felt a real
liking, though he turned a deaf ear to his counsels--S. Hugh, who had
died in London a week before.[332] Soon after Christmas John was at
Lincoln again, quarrelling with the canons about the election of Hugh’s
successor.[333] He and his young queen afterwards made a progress
through the north, almost up to the Scottish border,[334] and back
through Cumberland to York, which they reached at Mid-Lent (March 1,
1201). At Easter (March 25) they “wore their crowns” at Canterbury.[335]
[Sidenote: 1201]
Meanwhile, open hostilities had begun between John and the Lusignans;
and so far as can be made out from the scanty evidence available, it
seems to have been John who began them. A French historian of the time
asserts that the castle of Driencourt in Normandy, which belonged
to Ralf of Lusignan as count of Eu in right of his wife, was seized
by John’s orders while Ralf was in John’s service in England.[336]
It is certain that John, on March 6, 1201, issued letters patent to
Hugh of Bailleul and Thomas of St. Valery authorizing them to attack
Ralf’s territories at the close of Easter and “do him all the harm they
could,” and promising that they should never be compelled to make good
any damage which they might inflict upon him; while on the same day
one William “de Kaev” was despatched on a mission to the inhabitants
of Driencourt and of the whole county of Eu to make arrangements for
mutual security between them and the king, without reference to their
count.[337] Two days later John summoned all his faithful barons,
knights, clerks, burghers, and other tenants of the county of La Marche
“to come to his service, and do to him what they had been wont to
do to his predecessors.”[338] In other words, he claimed the direct
ownership of the county, to which his father had indeed been entitled
by purchase from the late Count Adelbert and by the homage of its
tenants, but of which Henry had never been able and Richard had never
even tried to take possession, and which Hugh of Lusignan had now held
for more than twenty years. If their oath of liege homage to John had
hitherto restrained Hugh and Ralf from giving vent to their anger at
John’s marriage, it restrained them no longer now. They at once laid a
complaint against John, for unjust aggression and spoliation, before
the king of France as lord paramount of Aquitaine.[339] Ralf formally
renounced his allegiance to John,[340] and Hugh, with all the forces
that he could muster, invaded Poitou, where, as usual, he found plenty
of allies ready to join him.[341] The most important of the Poitevin
barons, indeed, Almeric of Thouars, was won over to John’s side by
the diplomacy of Eleanor; but the danger appeared so great that both
Eleanor and Almeric besought John to come over and deal with it in
person as soon as he possibly could; and at the end of April the count
of Angoulême and John’s other friends in the south proposed sending
Almeric to confer with John in England.[342]
John meanwhile was summoning the earls and barons of England to meet
him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide (May 13), ready with horses and arms
to accompany him over sea. The earls held a meeting at Leicester,
and thence unanimously sent him word that they would not go with him
“unless he gave them back their rights. For the king, following ill
counsel, was demanding their castles of them; and beginning with
William of Aubigny, he demanded of him the castle of Belvoir. William
satisfied him by giving him his son as a hostage, and thus kept his
castle.”[343] Notwithstanding their protest, the barons brought their
forces to Portsmouth on the appointed day, equipped for a campaign, and
each man provided with the money needful to cover his expenses during
the usual term of service in a feudal host. This, and nothing more, was
precisely what John wanted them to do: “He took from some of them the
money which they would have spent in his service, and let them return
home.”[344] The ready money which he thus obtained was a more useful
and safer weapon for his purpose than the host itself would have been,
and no pretext was left for the discussion of inconvenient questions.
The king immediately despatched William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy,
each at the head of a hundred mercenaries, “to check the assaults of
his enemies on the borders of Normandy.” At the same time he appointed
his chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh, warden of the Welsh marches, with
another hundred soldiers under his command, and sent the bishop of
Chester to William the Lion with a request that the term fixed for
answering his demands might be extended to Michaelmas.[345] Having
taken these precautions to secure England from attack, John again
crossed the sea; on June 2 he was at Bonneville.[346]
At the announcement of John’s intention to return, Philip had either
compelled or persuaded the Lusignans to suspend hostilities in
Poitou.[347] A period of negotiation followed; Philip remonstrating
with John about his conduct towards the Lusignans, and urging him to
make them restitution; John, in his turn, remonstrating with Philip
for his constant aggressions and his interference with the internal
affairs of John’s duchies. Several personal interviews seem to have
taken place between the kings;[348] before the end of June the treaty
of Ascension-tide 1200 was confirmed; and on the last day of that month
John, by Philip’s invitation, went to Paris, and was there lodged and
entertained for several days in the royal palace, which Philip vacated
for his convenience.[349]
This temporary pacification was effected by a promise on John’s part
that the quarrel between him and the Lusignans should be tried and
settled fairly in his court as duke of Aquitaine.[350] Towards the
end of July he went to Chinon; there he spent the greater part of
the next six weeks,[351] and it was probably there that he summoned
the Lusignans to the promised trial. But meanwhile the Lusignans had
discovered that the trial which he designed was something wholly
different from that which Philip had demanded on their behalf.
John, before he left England, had determined to appeal “the barons
of Poitou”--that is, no doubt, the Lusignans and their friends--on
a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself,
and challenge them to ordeal of battle with a number of champions
specially chosen for the purpose. This project was perfectly legal;
the ordeal of battle, though it was beginning to be discountenanced
by public opinion under the influence of the Church, was still
recognized as a lawful method of deciding upon a charge of treason.
But a simultaneous challenge to so large a number of men, and men,
too, of such high rank and personal distinction as the Lusignans
and their allies, was a startling innovation upon feudal tradition
and practice, and unwarranted by historical precedent. Moreover,
there was in the scheme another feature which would make it doubly
offensive to the barons concerned. The champions against whom they
were called upon to prove their loyalty are described as “picked men,
practised in the art of duelling, whom the king had hired and brought
with him from his dominions on both sides of the sea.”[352] That is,
they were professional champions--men who made a business of hiring
themselves out to fight the battles of any one who either could not
or would not fight in his own person, but who could afford to pay for
an efficient substitute. Such hired champions, of course, in every
case represented the person who hired them; in the present case they
would have represented the king; yet nobles like the Lusignans, two
of whose brothers had been, no less than John himself, crowned and
anointed sovereigns, could not but feel it an intolerable insult to
be challenged, even in a king’s name, by creatures such as these. The
accused barons all alike refused to come to John’s court, “saying that
they would answer to no one save to their peers.”[353] It seems that on
a fresh remonstrance from Philip, John again consented, or pretended to
consent, to a trial such as they demanded; but he was very unwilling to
fix a day; and when he did fix one, he refused to give the defendants a
safe conduct, without which, of course, they would not stir from their
homes.[354]
[Sidenote: 1201–1202]
Again Philip intervened, and again John promised redress. This time
apparently Philip deemed it advisable to require security for the
fulfilment of the promise. The security which he asked for, however,
was more than John could reasonably be expected to give; it seems
to have been nothing less than three of the most important castles
in Normandy--those of Falaise, Arques, and “Andely,” that is,
Château-Gaillard. In December John summoned Archbishop Hubert over from
England, and sent him to “make his excuses” to the French king;[355]
and Hubert so far succeeded that after Christmas John was able to
venture into Aquitaine. Early in February 1202 he met the king of
Navarre at Angoulême, and made with him a treaty of close offensive and
defensive alliance.[356]
It was arranged that John and Philip should hold a
conference--seemingly on March 25--at Boutavant. John, it appears,
kept, or at least was ready to keep, the appointment; but Philip either
was or pretended to be afraid of venturing into Norman territory, and
would not advance beyond Gouleton. Thither John came across the river
to meet him.[357] No agreement was arrived at. Finally, Philip cited
John to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter,[358] at the court of
his overlord the king of France, to stand to its judgement, to answer
to his lord for his misdoings, and undergo the sentence of his peers.
The citation was addressed to John as count of Anjou and Poitou and
duke of Aquitaine;[359] the Norman duchy was not mentioned in it. This
omission was clearly intentional; when John answered the citation by
reminding Philip that he was duke of Normandy, and as such, in virtue
of ancient agreement between the kings and the dukes, not bound to go
to any meeting with the king of France save on the borders of their
respective territories, Philip retorted that he had summoned not the
duke of Normandy but the duke of Aquitaine, and that his rights over
the latter were not to be annulled by the accidental union of the
two dignities in one person.[360] John then promised that he would
appear before the court in Paris on the appointed day, and give up
to Philip two small castles, Thillier and Boutavant, as security
for his submitting to its decision. April 28 passed, and both these
promises remained unfulfilled.[361] One English writer asserts that
thereupon “the assembled court of the king of France adjudged the king
of England to be deprived of all his land which he and his forefathers
had hitherto held of the king of France”;[362] but there is reason to
think that this statement is erroneous, and derived from a false report
put forth by Philip Augustus for political purposes two or three years
later.[363] It is certain that after the date of this alleged sentence,
negotiations still went on; “great and excellent mediators” endeavoured
to arrange a pacification;[364] and Philip himself, according to his
own account, had another interview with John, at which he used all
his powers of persuasion to bring him to submission, but in vain.
Then the French king, by the advice of his barons, formally “defied”
his rebellious vassal;[365] in a sudden burst of wrath he ordered the
archbishop of Canterbury--evidently one of the mediators just referred
to--out of his territories, and dashing after him with such forces
as he had at hand, began hostilities by a raid upon Boutavant, which
he captured and burned.[366] Even after this, if we may trust his
own report, he sent four knights to John to make a final attempt at
reconciliation; but John would not see them.[367]
The war which followed was characteristic of both kings alike. Philip’s
attack took the form not of a regular invasion, but of a series of
raids upon eastern Normandy, whereby in the course of the next three
months[368] he made himself master of Thillier, Lions, Longchamp,
La Ferté-en-Braye, Orgueil, Gournay, Mortemer, Aumale and the town
and county of Eu.[369] John was throughout the same period flitting
ceaselessly about within a short distance of all these places;[370]
but Philip never came up with him, and he never but once came up
with Philip. On July 7 the French king laid siege to Radepont, some
ten miles to the south-east of Rouen. John, who was at Bonport, let
him alone for a week, and then suddenly appeared before the place,
whereupon Philip immediately withdrew.[371] John, however, made no
attempt at pursuit. According to his wont, he let matters take their
course till he saw a favourable opportunity for retaliation. At the end
of the month the opportunity came.
[Sidenote: 1202]
At the conclusion of the treaty of Gouleton in May 1200 Arthur, after
doing homage to his uncle for Britanny, had been by him restored to the
guardianship of the French king.[372] The death of the boy’s mother
in September 1201[373] left him more than ever exposed to Philip’s
influence; and it was no doubt as a measure of precaution, in view
of the approaching strife between the kings, that John on March 27,
1202--two days after his meeting with Philip at Gouleton--summoned
his “beloved nephew Arthur” to come and “do right” to him at Argentan
at the octave of Easter.[374] The summons probably met with no more
obedience than did Philip’s summons to John; and before the end of
April Philip had bound Arthur securely to his side by promising him the
hand of his infant daughter Mary.[375] This promise was ratified by a
formal betrothal at Gournay, after the capture of that place by the
French; at the same time Philip made Arthur a knight, and gave him the
investiture of all the Angevin dominions except Normandy.[376] Towards
the end of July Philip despatched Arthur, with a force of two hundred
French knights, to join the Lusignans in an attack on Poitou. The
barons of Britanny and of Berry had been summoned to meet him at Tours;
but the only allies who did meet him there were three of the Lusignans
and Savaric de Mauléon, with some three hundred knights. Overruling the
caution of the boy duke, who wished to wait for reinforcements from
his own duchy, the impetuous southerners urged an immediate attack
upon Mirebeau, their object being to capture Queen Eleanor, who was
known to be there,[377] and whom they rightly regarded as the mainstay
of John’s power in Aquitaine. Eleanor, however, became aware of their
project in time to despatch a letter to her son, begging him to come
to her rescue. He was already moving southward when her courier met
him on July 30 as he was approaching Le Mans. By marching day and
night he and his troops covered the whole distance between Le Mans
and Mirebeau--eighty miles at the least--in forty-eight hours, and
appeared on August 1 before the besieged castle.[378] The enemies had
already taken the outer ward and thrown down all the gates save one,
deeming their own valour a sufficient safeguard against John’s expected
attack.[379] So great was their self-confidence that they even marched
out to meet him. Like most of those who at one time or another fought
against John, they underrated the latent capacities of their adversary.
They were driven back into the castle, hotly pursued by his troops, who
under the guidance of William des Roches forced their way in after the
fugitives, and were in a short time masters of the place. The whole of
the French and Poitevin forces were either slain or captured; and among
the prisoners were the three Lusignans, and Arthur.[380]
Philip was at that moment busy with the siege of Arques; on the
receipt of these tidings he left it and turned southward,[381] but he
failed, or perhaps did not attempt, to intercept John, who, bringing
his prisoners with him, made his way leisurely back to Falaise.[382]
There he imprisoned Arthur in the castle,[383] and despatched his
victorious troops against Arthur’s duchy; they captured Dol and
Fougères, and harried the country as far as Rennes.[384] Philip, after
ravaging Touraine, fired the city of Tours and took the citadel;
immediately afterwards he withdrew to his own territories, as by that
time John was again at Chinon. As soon as Philip was gone, John in his
turn entered Tours and wrested the citadel from the French garrison
left there by his rival; but his success was won at the cost of another
conflagration which, an English chronicler declares, was never forgiven
him by the citizens and the barons of Touraine.[385]
For the moment, however, he was in luck. In Aquitaine he seemed in a
fair way to carry all before him without striking a blow. Angoulême
had passed into his hands by the death of his father-in-law on June
17.[386] Guy of Limoges had risen in revolt again, but at the end of
August or early in September he was captured.[387] The Lusignans,
from their prison at Caen, made overtures for peace, and by dint of
protestations and promises succeeded ere long in regaining their
liberty, of course on the usual conditions of surrendering their
castles and giving hostages for their loyalty.[388] It was almost
equally a matter of course that as soon as they were free they began
intriguing against John.[389] But the chronic intrigues of the south
were in reality, as John himself seems to have discovered, a far less
serious danger than the disaffection in his northern dominions. This
last evil was undoubtedly, so far as Normandy was concerned, owing in
great measure to John’s own fault. He had entrusted the defence of
the Norman duchy to his mercenaries under the command of a Provençal
captain whose real name is unknown, who seems to have adopted for
himself the nickname of “Lou Pescaire,” “The Fisherman”--which the
Normans apparently corrupted into “Louvrekaire”--and who habitually
treated his employer’s peaceable subjects in a fashion in which other
commanders would have shrunk from treating avowed enemies.[390] Side
by side with the discontent thus caused among the people there was
a rapid growth of treason among the Norman barons;--treason fraught
with far greater peril than the treason of the nobles of Aquitaine,
because it was more persistent and more definite in its aim; because it
was at once less visible and tangible and more deeply rooted; because
it spread in silence and wrought in darkness; and because, while no
southern rebel ever really fought for anything but his own hand, the
northern traitors were in close concert with Philip Augustus. John
knew not whom to trust; he could, in fact, trust no one; and herein
lay the explanation of his restless movements, his unaccountable
wanderings, his habit of journeying through bye-ways, his constant
changes of plan.[391] Moreover, besides the Aquitanian rebels, the
Norman traitors, and the French enemy, there were the Breton partizans
of Arthur to be reckoned with. These had now found a leader in William
des Roches, who, when he saw that he could not prevail upon John to
set Arthur at liberty, openly withdrew from the king’s service, and
organized a league of the Breton nobles against him.
[Sidenote: 1202–1203]
These Bretons, reinforced by some barons from Anjou and Maine,
succeeded on October 29 in gaining possession of Angers.[392] It may
have been to watch for an opportunity of dislodging them that John, who
was then at Le Mans, went to spend a fortnight at Saumur and another at
Chinon. Early in December, however, he fell back upon Normandy,[393]
and while the intruders were harrying his ancestral counties with fire
and sword,[394] he kept Christmas with his queen at Caen, “faring
sumptuously every day, and prolonging his morning slumbers till
dinner-time.”[395] It seems that shortly afterwards the queen returned
to Chinon, and that in the middle of January 1203 the enemies at Angers
were discovered to be planning an attempt to capture her there. John
hurried to Le Mans, only stopping at Alençon to dine with Count Robert
and endeavour to secure his suspected loyalty by confirming him in all
his possessions. No sooner had they parted, however, than Robert rode
off to the French court, did homage to Philip, and admitted a French
garrison into Alençon. While John, thus placed between two fires, was
hesitating whether to go on or to go back, Peter des Préaux succeeded
in getting the queen out of Chinon and bringing her to her husband
at Le Mans; thence they managed to make their way back in safety to
Falaise.[396]
[Sidenote: 1203]
This incident may have suggested to John that it was time to take
some decisive step towards getting rid of Arthur’s claims. According
to one English chronicler, some of the king’s counsellors had already
been urging this matter upon him for some time past. They pointed out
that so long as Arthur lived, and was neither physically nor legally
incapacitated for ruling, the Bretons would never be quiet, and no
lasting peace with France would be possible; and they therefore
suggested to the king a horrible scheme for rendering Arthur incapable
of being any longer a source of danger. The increasing boldness of the
Bretons at last provoked John into consenting to this project, and he
despatched three of his servants to Falaise to put out the eyes of the
captive. Two of these men chose to leave the king’s service rather
than obey him; the third went to Falaise as he was bidden, but found
it impossible to fulfil his errand; Arthur’s struggles were backed by
the very soldiers who guarded him, and the fear of a mutiny drove their
commander, Hubert de Burgh, to prevent the execution of an order which
he felt that the king would soon have cause to regret. He gave out,
however, that the order had been fulfilled, and that Arthur had died in
consequence. The effect of this announcement proved at once the wisdom
of Hubert and the folly of those to whose counsel John had yielded.
The fury of the Bretons became boundless; they vowed never to leave a
moment’s peace to the tyrant who had committed such a ghastly crime
upon their duke, his own nephew; and Hubert soon found it necessary,
for John’s own sake, to confess his fraud and demonstrate to friends
and foes alike that Arthur was still alive and uninjured.[397] John
himself now attempted to deal with Arthur in another way. Being at
Falaise at the end of January 1203,[398] he caused his nephew to be
brought before him, and “addressed him with fair words, promising
him great honours if he would forsake the king of France and cleave
faithfully to his uncle and rightful lord.” Arthur, however, rejected
these overtures with scorn, vowing that there should be no peace unless
the whole Angevin dominions, including England, were surrendered to him
as Richard’s lawful heir. John retorted by transferring his prisoner
from Falaise to Rouen and confining him, more strictly than ever, in
the citadel.[399]
Thenceforth Arthur disappears from history. What was his end no one
knows. The chronicle of the abbey of Margan in South Wales, a chronicle
of which the only known manuscript ends with the year 1232, and of
which the portion dealing with the early years of John’s reign was not
compiled in its present form till after 1221 at earliest, asserts that
on Maunday Thursday (April 3) 1203, John, “after dinner, being drunk
and possessed by the devil,” slew his nephew with his own hand and
tied a great stone to the body, which he flung into the Seine; that
a fisherman’s net brought it up again, and that, being recognized,
it was buried secretly, “for fear of the tyrant,” in the church of
Notre-Dame-des-Prés, near Rouen.[400] William the Breton, in his poem
on Philip Augustus, completed about 1216, relates in detail, but
without date, how John took Arthur out alone with him by night in a
boat on the Seine, plunged a sword into his body, rowed along for three
miles with the corpse, and then threw it overboard.[401] Neither of
these writers gives any authority for his story. The earliest authority
of precisely ascertained date to which we can trace the assertion
that Arthur was murdered is a document put forth by a personage whose
word, on any subject whatever, is as worthless as the word of John
himself--King Philip Augustus of France. In 1216--about the time when
his Breton historiographer’s poem was completed--Philip affected to
regard it as a notorious fact that John had, either in person or by
another’s hand, murdered his nephew. But Philip at the same time
went on to assert that John had been summoned to trial before the
supreme court of France, and by it condemned to forfeiture of all his
dominions, on that same charge of murder; and this latter assertion is
almost certainly false.[402] Seven months after the date assigned by
the Margan annalist to Arthur’s death--in October 1203--Philip owned
himself ignorant whether the duke of Britanny were alive or not.[403]
Clearly, therefore, it was not as the avenger of Arthur’s murder that
Philip took the field at the end of April. On the other hand, Philip
had never made the slightest attempt to obtain Arthur’s release; early
in 1203, if not before, he was almost openly laying his plans in
anticipation of Arthur’s permanent effacement from politics.[404] The
interests of the French king were in fact no less concerned in Arthur’s
imprisonment, and more concerned in his death, than were the interests
of John himself. John’s one remaining chance of holding Philip and
the Bretons in check was to keep them in uncertainty whether Arthur
were alive or dead, in order to prevent the Bretons from adopting any
decided policy, and hamper the French king in his dealings with them
and with the Angevin and Poitevin rebels by compelling him to base his
alliance with them on conditions avowedly liable to be annulled at any
moment by Arthur’s reappearance on the political scene. If, therefore,
Arthur--as is most probable--was now really dead, whether he had indeed
perished a victim of one of those fits of ungovernable fury in which
(and in which alone) the Angevin counts sometimes added blunder to
crime, or whether he had died a natural death from sickness in prison,
or by a fall in attempting to escape,[405] it would be equally politic
on John’s part to let rumour do its worst rather than suffer any gleam
of light to penetrate the mystery which shrouded the captive’s fate.
John’s chance, however, was a desperate one. A fortnight after Easter
{April 20} the French king attacked and took Saumur.[406] Moving
southward, he was joined by some Poitevins and Bretons, with whose
help he captured sundry castles in Aquitaine. Thence he went back to
the Norman border, to be welcomed at Alençon by its count, and to lay
siege to Conches.[407] John, who was then at Falaise, sent William
the Marshal to Conches, to beg that Philip would “have pity on him
and make peace.” Philip refused; John hurried back to Rouen, to find
both city and castle in flames[408]--whether kindled by accident or by
treachery there is nothing to show. Conches was taken; Vaudreuil was
betrayed; the few other castles in the county of Evreux which had not
already passed, either by cession, conquest, or treason, into Philip’s
hands shared the like fate,[409] while John flitted restlessly up and
down between Rouen and various places in the neighbourhood,[410] but
made no direct effort to check the progress of the invader. Messenger
after messenger came to him with the same story: “The king of France
is in your land as an enemy; he is taking your castles; he is binding
your seneschals to their horses’ tails and dragging them shamefully to
prison; he is dealing with your goods at his own pleasure.” John heard
them all with an unmoved countenance, and dismissed them all with one
unvarying reply: “Let him alone! Some day I shall win back all that he
is winning from me now.”[411]
It was by diplomacy that John hoped to parry the attack which he knew
he could not repel by force. Early in the year he had complained to
the Pope of the long course of insult and aggression pursued towards
him by Philip, and begged Innocent to interfere in his behalf.[412]
Thereupon Philip, in his turn, sent messengers and letters to the Pope,
giving his own version of his relations with John, and endeavouring
to justify his own conduct.[413] On May 26 Innocent announced to
both kings that he was about to despatch the abbots of Casamario,
Trois-Fontaines and Dun as commissioners to arbitrate upon the matters
in dispute between them.[414] These envoys seem to have been delayed
on their journey; and when they reached France they, for some time,
found it impossible to ascertain whether Philip would or would not
accept their arbitration. When at last he met them in council at Mantes
on August 26, he told them bluntly that he “was not bound to take his
orders from the Apostolic See as to his rights over a fief and a vassal
of his own, and that the matter in dispute between the two kings was
no business of the Pope’s.”[415] John meanwhile had, on August 11,
suddenly quitted his passive attitude and laid siege to Alençon; but he
retired on Philip’s approach four days later. An attempt which he made
to regain Brezolles was equally ineffectual.[416] Philip, on the other
hand, was now resolved to bring the war to a crisis. It was probably
straight from the council at Mantes that he marched to the siege of
Château-Gaillard.[417]
Château-Gaillard was a fortress of far other importance than any of
the castles which both parties had been so lightly winning, losing and
winning again, during the last ten years. It was the key of the Seine
above Rouen, the bulwark raised by Richard Cœur de Lion to protect his
favourite city against attack from France. Not till the fortifications
which commanded the river at Les Andelys were either destroyed or in
his own hands could Philip hope to win the Norman capital. And those
fortifications were of no common order. Their builder was the greatest,
as he was the last, of the “great builders” of Anjou; and his “fair
castle on the Rock of Andelys” was at once the supreme outcome of
their architectural genius, and the earliest and most perfect example
in Europe of the new developement which the Crusaders’ study of the
mighty works of Byzantine or even earlier conquerors, quickened and
illuminated as it was by the exigencies of their own struggle with
the Infidels, had given to the science of military architecture in
the East. During the past year John had added to his brother’s castle
a chapel with an undercroft, placed at the south-eastern corner of
the second ward.[418] The fortress which nature and art had combined
to make impregnable was well stocked with supplies of every kind;
moreover, it was one of the few places in Normandy which Philip had no
hope of winning, and John no fear of losing, through treason on the
part of its commandant. Roger de Lacy, to whom John had given it in
charge, was an English baron who had no stake in Normandy, and whose
personal interest was therefore bound up with that of the English king;
he was also a man of high character and dauntless courage.[419] Nothing
short of a siege of the most determined kind would avail against the
“Saucy Castle”; and on that siege Philip now concentrated all his
forces and all his skill. As the right bank of the Seine at that point
was entirely commanded by the castle and its neighbour fortification,
the walled town--also built by Richard--known as the New or Lesser
Andely, while the river itself was doubly barred by a stockade across
its bed, close under the foot of the Rock, and by a strong tower on
an island in mid-stream just below the town, he was obliged to encamp
in the meadows on the opposite shore. The stockade, however, was soon
broken down by the daring of a few young Frenchmen; and the waterway
being thus cleared for the transport of materials, he was enabled to
construct below the island a pontoon, by means of which he could throw
a portion of his troops across the river to form the siege of the New
Andely, place the island garrison between two fires, and at once keep
open his own communications and cut off those of the besieged with both
sides of the river alike.[420]
These things seem to have been done towards the end of August. On
the 27th and 28th of that month John was at Montfort, a castle some
five and twenty miles from Rouen, held by one of his few faithful
barons, Hugh of Gournay. On the 30th, if not the 29th, he and all his
available forces were back at Rouen, ready to attempt on that very
night the relief of Les Andelys.[421] The king’s plan was a masterpiece
of ingenuity; and the fact that the elaborate preparations needed
for its execution were made so rapidly and so secretly as to escape
detection by an enemy so close at hand goes far to show how mistaken
are the charges of sloth and incapacity which, even in his own day, men
brought against “John Softsword.”[422] He had arranged that a force of
three hundred knights, three thousand mounted men-at-arms, and four
thousand foot, under the command of William the Marshal, with a band of
mercenaries under Lou Pescaire, should march by night from Rouen along
the left bank of the Seine and fall, under cover of darkness, upon the
portion of the French army which still lay on that side of the river.
Meanwhile, seventy transport vessels which had been built by Richard
to serve either for sea or river traffic, and as many more boats as
could be collected, were to be laden with provisions for the distressed
garrison of the island fort, and convoyed up the stream by a flotilla
of small warships manned by “pirates” under a chief named Alan and
carrying, besides their own daring and reckless crews, a force of three
thousand Flemings. Two hundred strokes of the oar, John reckoned, would
bring these ships to the French pontoon; they must break it if they
could; if not, they could at least co-operate with the Marshal and Lou
Pescaire in cutting off the northern division of the French host from
its comrades and supplies on the left bank, and throw into the island
fort provisions which would enable it to hold out till John himself
should come to its rescue.
One error brought the scheme to ruin--an error neither of strategy nor
of conduct, but of scientific knowledge. John had miscalculated the
time at which, on that night, the Seine would be navigable up-stream;
and his counsellors evidently shared his mistake till it was brought
home to them by experience. The land forces achieved their march
without hindrance, and at the appointed hour, shortly before daybreak,
fell upon the French camp with such a sudden and furious onslaught
that the whole of its occupants fled across the pontoon, which broke
under their weight. But the fleet, which had been intended to arrive
at the same time, was unable to make way against the tide, and before
it could reach its destination the French had rallied on the northern
bank, repaired the pontoon, recrossed it in full force, and routed
John’s troops. The ships, when they at last came up, thus found
themselves unsupported in their turn, and though they made a gallant
fight they were beaten back with heavy loss. In the flush of victory
one young Frenchman contrived to set fire to the island fort; it
surrendered, and the whole population of the New Andely fled in a panic
to Château-Gaillard, leaving their town to be occupied by Philip.[423]
The Saucy Castle itself still remained to be won. Knowing, however,
that for this nothing was likely to avail but a blockade, which was now
practically formed on two sides by his occupation of the island fort
and the Lesser Andely, Philip on the very next day[424] set off to make
another attempt on Radepont, whence he had been driven away by John
a year before. This time John made no effort to dislodge him. It was
not worth while; the one thing that mattered now was Château-Gaillard.
Thither Philip, after receiving the surrender of Radepont, returned
towards the end of September to complete the blockade.[425]
No second attempt to relieve it was possible. It may have been for
the purpose of endeavouring to collect fresh troops from the western
districts, which were as yet untouched by the war, that John about
this time visited his old county of Mortain, and even went as far as
Dol,[426] which his soldiers had taken in the previous year. But his
military resources in Normandy were exhausted. The Marshal bluntly
advised him to give up the struggle. “Sire,” said William, “you have
not enough friends; if you provoke your enemies to fight, you will
diminish your own force; and when a man provokes his enemies, it is
but just if they make him rue it.” “Whoso is afraid, let him flee!”
answered John. “I myself will not flee for a year; and if indeed it
came to fleeing, I should not think of saving myself otherwise than you
would, wheresoever you might be.” “I know that well, sire,” replied
William; “but you, who are wise and mighty and of high lineage, and
whose work it is to govern us all, have not been careful to avoid
irritating people. If you had, it would have been better for us all.
Methinks I speak not without reason.”[427] The king, “as if a sword had
struck him to the heart,” spoke not a word, but rushed to his chamber;
next morning he was nowhere to be found; he had gone away in a boat,
almost alone, and it was only at Bonneville that his followers rejoined
him. This was apparently at the beginning of October.[428] For two
months more he lingered in the duchy, where his position was growing
more hopeless day by day. At the end of October, or early in November,
he took the decisive step of dismantling Pont-de-l’Arche, Moulineaux,
and Montfort,[429] three castles which, next to Château-Gaillard, would
be of the greatest value to the French for an advance upon Rouen. To
Rouen itself he returned once more on November 9, and stayed there
four days.[430] On the 12th he set out for Bonneville, accompanied by
the queen, and telling his friends that he intended to go to England
to seek counsel and aid from his barons and people there, and would
soon return. In reality his departure from the capital was caused by a
rumour which had reached him of a conspiracy among the Norman barons
to deliver him up to Philip Augustus. At Bonneville, therefore, he
lodged not in the town but in the castle, and only for a few hours; the
Marshal and one or two others alone were warned of his intention to set
forth again before daybreak, and the little party had got a start of
seven leagues on the road to Caen before their absence was discovered
by the rest of the suite, of whom “some went after them, and the more
part went back.”[431] Still John was reluctant to leave Normandy; he
went south to Domfront and west to Vire before he again returned to the
coast at Barfleur on November 28; and even then he spent five days at
Gonneville and one at Cherbourg before he finally took ship at Barfleur
on December 5, to land at Portsmouth next day.[432]
It was probably before he left Rouen that he addressed a letter to the
commandant of Château-Gaillard in these terms: “We thank you for your
good and faithful service, and desire that, as much as in you lies, you
will persevere in the fidelity and homage which you owe to us; that
you may receive a worthy meed of praise from God and from ourself, and
from all who know your faithfulness. If however--which God forbid!--you
should find yourself in such straits that you can hold out no longer,
then do whatsoever our trusty and well-beloved Peter of Préaux, William
of Mortimer, and Hugh of Howels our clerk, shall bid you in our
name.”[433] An English chronicler says that John “being unwilling”--or
“unable”--“to succour the besieged, through fear of the treason of his
men, went to England, leaving all the Normans in a great perturbation
of fear.”[434] It is hard to see what they feared, unless it were
John’s possible vengeance, at some future time, for their universal
readiness to welcome his rival. Not one town manned its walls, not one
baron mustered his tenants and garrisoned his castles, to withstand
the invader. Some, as soon as John was out of the country, openly
made a truce with Philip for a year, on the understanding that if not
succoured by John within that time, they would receive the French king
as their lord;[435] the rest stood passively looking on at the one real
struggle of the war, the struggle for Château-Gaillard.
[Sidenote: 1204]
At length, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle fell.[436] Its fall
opened the way for a French advance upon Rouen; but before taking
this further step Philip deemed it politic to let the Pope’s envoy,
the abbot of Casamario, complete his mission by going to speak with
John. The abbot was received at a great council in London at the end
of March;[437] the result was his return to France early in April,
in company with the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of Norwich
and Ely, and the earls of Pembroke and Leicester, all charged with a
commission “to sound the French king, and treat with him about terms
of peace.” On the French king’s side the negotiation was a mere form;
to whatever conditions the envoys proposed, he always found some
objection; and his own demands were such as John’s representatives
dared not attempt to lay before their sovereign--Arthur’s restoration,
or, if he were dead, the surrender of his sister Eleanor, and the
cession to Philip, as her suzerain and guardian, of the whole
continental dominions of the Angevin house.[438] Finally, Philip
dropped the mask altogether, and made a direct offer, not to John,
but to John’s Norman subjects, including the two lay ambassadors. All
those, he said, who within a year and a day would come to him and do
him homage for their lands should receive confirmation of their tenure
from him. Hereupon the two English earls, after consulting together,
gave him five hundred marks each, on the express understanding that he
was to leave them unmolested in the enjoyment of their Norman lands
for a twelvemonth and a day, and that at the expiration of that time
they would come and do homage for those lands to him, if John had not
meanwhile regained possession of the duchy.[439] Neither William the
Marshal nor his colleague had any thought of betraying or deserting
John; as the Marshal’s biographer says, they “did not wish to be
false”; and when they reached England they seem to have frankly told
John what they had done, and to have received no blame for it.[440]
The return of the English embassy was followed by a letter from
the commandant of Rouen--John’s “trusty and well-beloved” Peter of
Préaux--informing the English king that “all the castles and towns from
Bayeux to Anet” had promised Philip that they would surrender to him as
soon as he was master of Rouen, an event which, Peter plainly hinted,
was not likely to be long delayed.[441] This information about the
western towns was probably incorrect, for it was on western Normandy
that Philip made his next attack. John meanwhile had in January imposed
a scutage of two marks and a half per shield throughout England,
and, in addition, a tax of a seventh of moveables, which, though it
fell upon all classes alike, the clergy included, he is said to have
demanded expressly on the ground of the barons’ desertion of him in
Normandy.[442] The hire of a mercenary force was of course the object
to which the proceeds of both these taxes were destined; but they took
time to collect, and John soon fell back upon a readier, though less
trustworthy, resource, and summoned the feudal host of England to meet
him at Portsmouth, seemingly in the first week of May. It gathered,
however, so slowly that he was obliged to give up the expedition.[443]
Philip was about this time besieging Falaise;[444] he won it, and went
on in triumph to receive the surrender of Domfront, Séez, Lisieux,
Caen, Bayeux, Coutances, Barfleur, and Cherbourg.[445] He was then
joined by John’s late ally, the count of Boulogne, as well as by Guy
of Thouars, the widower of Constance of Britanny; and these two, their
forces swelled by a troop of mercenaries who had transferred their
services from John to Philip after the surrender of Falaise, completed
the conquest of south-western Normandy,[446] while the French king at
last set his face towards Rouen. He was not called upon to besiege
it, nor even to threaten it with a siege. On June 1 Peter de Préaux
made in his own name, and in the names of the commandants of Arques
and Verneuil, a truce with Philip, promising that these two fortresses
and Rouen should surrender if not succoured within thirty days.[447]
The three castellans sent notice of this arrangement to John, who,
powerless and penniless as he was, scornfully bade them “look for no
help from him, but do whatsoever seemed to them best.”[448] It seemed
to them best not even to wait for the expiration of the truce; Rouen
surrendered on June 24,[449] and in a few days Arques and Verneuil
followed its example.[450]