To return to Isabella. The troubles with which King John had involved himself by the murder of the young Duke of Bretagne, seemed destined never to end. All Aquitaine had been in a state of revolt since the decease of his mother and the captivity of Count Hugh, and his queen finally persuaded him to trust to the magnanimity of her lover, for the peace of his dominions in France.
De Lusignan left England in 1206, and by his discretion and valor, soon restored the revolted provinces to the sway of the line of Plantagenet. The intolerance of the king next aroused the animosity of the English barons, and to prevent a popular outbreak, he demanded their sons as hostages, under the plausible pretext of requiring the services of the youthful lords as pages for his queen, and companions of his infant son, Henry.
The Lady de Braose, when her children were demanded, imprudently replied, “I will not surrender my boys to a king who murdered his own nephew.” The unfortunate words were repeated to the malicious monarch, and measures for vengeance immediately instituted.
The Lord de Braose, with his wife and five innocent little ones, were confined in Windsor castle and starved to death.
While the husband of Isabella was thus alienating from himself the affections of his subjects, he had the temerity to dare the colossal power of Rome. A dispute arose as in the days of his father, concerning the incumbent of the see of Canterbury. The pope had commanded the monks to choose Cardinal Langton for their primate, without the ceremony of a writ from the king. They complied, and John sent one of his knights to expel them from the convent and take possession of their revenues.
The affair went on with admonitions from the spiritual father, and defiant retorts from the refractory king, till Innocent III. laid an interdict upon the realm. This terrible mandate at once covered the whole nation with the garb and the gloom of mourning. The priests with pious reverence stripped the altars of their ornaments, collected the crosses and relics, took down the images and statues of saints and apostles, and laying them upon the ground carefully covered them from the eyes of the profane.
No matin chime awoke the pious to their devotions, no vesper bell summoned the youths and maidens to unite in the evening hymn; no joyous peal invited the happy throng to the nuptial ceremony, no solemn toll gathered the sorrowing multitudes to the burial service. The bridegroom took the hand of his bride and whispered his vows with boding fear, standing in the churchyard, surrounded by the silent witnesses, whose very presence was a terror. The father relinquished the dead body of his child to unhallowed hands, that made for it an obscure and unconsecrated grave by the wayside; the tender infant was not presented at the font for baptism, but received the holy rite in the privacy of the monkish cell, and the dying man partook of the last sacrament under circumstances that rendered still more terrible the approach of death.
Men neglected their usual avocations, feeling that the curse of God rested upon them; children relinquished their amusements, subdued by the mysterious fear that pervaded all ranks of society.
But the tyrant John and his thoughtless queen felt no sympathy with the afflictions of their people, no reverence for the ordinances of religion. They made no concessions, they manifested no signs of repentance. Each was engaged in the pursuit of pleasure, without regard to the other’s feelings, or the laws of God. If the fickle and wounded affections of Isabella wandered from her lord to some noble knight, who compassionated her wrongs, her crime was made known only by the terrible vengeance which her malignant husband inflicted upon her supposed lover; nor was she aware that the suspicions of the king had been awakened till retiring to her apartment at night, she beheld with horror the dead body of the nobleman, suspended above her couch, the bloodshot eyes fixed upon her with a ghastly stare, and the pale lips opened as if assaying to whisper in her ear the secret of the dark tragedy. From this haunted chamber she was not suffered to depart for long weary years. But though John thus manifested his righteous horror of his wife’s dereliction from the path of rectitude, he was himself unscrupulous in the perpetration of any species of iniquity. Parsimonious and cruel to his beautiful queen, he lavished upon his own person every extravagant indulgence; without honesty or honor. He was a bad son, a bad subject, a bad husband, a bad father, and a bad sovereign. The record of his thoughts is a disgrace to human nature, the record of his deeds, a recapitulation of crimes.