PHILIP OF FRANCE WINS THE FRENCH DOMAINS OF THE ENGLISH KINGS
A.D. 1202-1204
KATE NORGATE
When Richard "the Lion-hearted" died in 1199, he left no son to follow him on the throne of England and to claim possession of the vast French fiefs of the Plantagenet family. These fiefs, which covered more than half of France and made their undisputed lord more powerful than the French King himself, became at once a source of strife.
John, nicknamed "Lackland," the youngest brother of Richard,
succeeded him in England and in Normandy without dispute.
But their little nephew Arthur was already Count of
Brittany; and the other French possessions of the
Plantagenets—Anjou, Maine, and Touraine—declared for
Arthur in preference to John.
At this time France was ruled by Philip Augustus, who ranks among the shrewdest and ablest of all her monarchs. Dreading the vast power of the Plantagenets, he naturally sought to divide their domains by upholding Arthur. This unhappy lad, only twelve years old, was made a mere pawn in the savage game of his elders. His tragic fate is powerfully depicted by Shakespeare in his King John.
After some fighting and several sharp political moves and countermoves, John and Philip came to terms, May 18, 1200, by which the French King conferred almost all of the disputed fiefs on John. Constant bickering, however, continued. John had to do homage for his fiefs, and his French vassals took every opportunity to appeal from him to Philip, as their overlord.
Finally, when the moment seemed propitious, Philip demanded
from his overgrown vassal certain Norman castles as a sort
of guarantee of good behavior. This led up to the war in
which the Plantagenets lost all
their French domains, and became lords only of England.
It was arranged that John and Philip should hold a conference 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. No agreement was arrived at. Finally, Philip cited John to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter, 1202, at the court of his overlord the King of France, to stand to its judgment, 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; 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.
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 28th passed, and both these promises remained unfulfilled. 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," 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. It is certain that after the date of this alleged sentence negotiations still went on; "great and excellent mediators" endeavored to arrange a pacification; 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; 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. 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.
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, he made himself master of Thillier, Lions, Longchamp, La Fertéen-Braye, Orgueil, Gournay, Mortemer, Aumale, and the town and county of Eu. John was throughout the same period flitting ceaselessly about within a short distance of all these places; but Philip never came up with him, and he never but once came up with Philip. On July 7, 1202, the French King laid siege to Radepont, some ten miles to the southeast of Rouen. John, who was at Bonport, let him alone for a week, and then suddenly appeared before the place, whereupon Philip immediately withdrew. John, however, made no attempt at pursuit. According to his wont, he let matters take their course till he saw a favorable opportunity for retaliation. At the end of the month the opportunity came.
At the conclusion of the treaty in May, 1200, Arthur, after doing homage to his uncle for Brittany, had been by him restored to the guardianship of the French King. The death of the boy's mother in September, 1201, 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, summoned his "beloved nephew Arthur" to come and "do right" to him at Argentan at the octave of Easter. 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. 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.
Toward 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 Brittany 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,[33] who was known to be there, 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 30th 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, 1202, before the besieged castle. The enemies had already taken the outer ward and thrown down all the gates save one, deeming their own valor a sufficient safeguard against John's expected attack. 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.
Philip was at that moment busy with the siege of Arques; on the receipt of these tidings he left it and turned southward, but he failed, or perhaps did not attempt, to intercept John, who, bringing his prisoners with him, made his way leisurely back to Falaise. There he imprisoned Arthur in the castle, and despatched his victorious troops against Arthur's duchy; they captured Dol and Fougères, and harried the country as far as Rennes. Philip, after ravaging Touraine, fired the city of Tours and took the citadel; immediately afterward 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.
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 17th. Guy of Limoges had risen in revolt again, but at the end of August or early in September he was captured. 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. It was almost equally a matter of course that as soon as they were free they began intriguing against John. 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 intrusted 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. 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 byways, his constant changes of plan. Moreover, besides the Aquitanian rebels, the Norman traitors, and the French enemy, there were the Breton partisans of Arthur to be reckoned with. These had now found a leader in William des Roches, who, when he saw that he could not prevail upon John to set Arthur at liberty, openly withdrew from the King's service and organized a league of the Breton nobles against him.
These Bretons, reinforced by some barons from Anjou and Maine, succeeded, on October 29, 1202, in gaining possession of Angers. 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, and while the intruders were harrying his ancestral counties with fire and sword, he kept Christmas with his Queen at Caen, "faring sumptuously every day, and prolonging his morning slumbers till dinner-time." It seems that shortly afterward 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 endeavor 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.
This incident may have suggested to John that it was time to take some decisive step toward 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. 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. John himself now attempted to deal with Arthur in another way. Being at Falaise at the end of January, 1203, he caused his nephew to be brought before him, and "addressed him with fair words, promising him great honors 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.
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. 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. 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 was 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. 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 Brittany were alive or not.[34] 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.
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,[35] it would be equally politic on John's part to let rumor 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, 1203, the French King attacked and took Saumur. 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 seige to Conches. 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—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, while John flitted restlessly up and down between Rouen and various places in the neighborhood, 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 the unvarying reply: "Let him alone! Some day I shall win back all that he is winning from me now."
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 toward him by Philip, and begged Innocent to interfere in his behalf. Thereupon Philip, in his turn, sent messengers and letters to the Pope, giving his own version of his relations with John, and endeavoring to justify his own conduct. On May 26th, 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.
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 26th, 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." John meanwhile had, on August 11th, 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. 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.
Château Gaillard was a fortress of far other importance than any of the castles which both parties had been so lightly winning, losing, and winning again, during the last ten years. It was the key of the Seine above Rouen, the bulwark raised by Richard Coeur de Lion to protect his favorite 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 development 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 southeastern corner of the second ward. 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. 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 neighbor 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 midstream 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.
These things seem to have been done toward 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. 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."[36]
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 coöperate 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 upstream, and his counsellors evidently shared his mistake till it was brought home to them by experience. The land forces achieved their march without hinderance, 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.
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 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 toward the end of September, 1203, to complete the blockade.
No second attempt to relieve it was possible. It may have been for the purpose of endeavoring 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, 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."
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, 1203. 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, 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 9th, and stayed there four days. 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 rumor 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." 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 28th, and even then he spent five days at Gonneville and one at Cherbourg before he finally took ship at Barfleur on December 5th, to land at Portsmouth next day.
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."
An English chronicler says that John "being unwilling"—or "unable"—"to succor the besieged, through fear of the treason of his men, went to England, leaving all the Normans in a great perturbation of fear." 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 succored by John within that time they would receive the French King as their lord; the rest stood passively looking on at the one real struggle of the war, the struggle for Château Gaillard.
At length, on March 6, 1204, the Saucy Castle fell. 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; 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.
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. 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.
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. 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 movables, 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.
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. Philip was about this time besieging Falaise; he won it, and went on in triumph to receive the surrender of Domfront, Séez, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Coutances, Barfleur, and Cherbourg. 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 Brittany; 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 Southwestern Normandy, while the French King at last set his face toward Rouen. He was not called upon to besiege it, nor even to threaten it with a siege. On June 1, 1204, 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 succored within thirty days. 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." It seemed to them best not even to wait for the expiration of the truce; Rouen surrendered on June 24th, and in a few days Arques and Verneuil followed its example.
Thus did Normandy forsake—as Anjou and Maine had already forsaken[37]—the heir of its ancient rulers for the King of the French.