The barons gained some tidings of his proceedings, and were on their guard. Robert Fitzwalter wrote letters appointing the tournament to be held, not at Stamford, but on Hounslow Heath, summoning the knights to it with their arms and horses, and promising, as the prize of the tournay, a she-bear, which the young lady of a castle had sent them.
To what brave knight the she-bear was awarded, history says not; for in the midst came the tidings that the Pope had been greatly enraged, had annulled the Charter as prejudicial to the power of the Church, and had commanded the Archbishop of Canterbury to dissolve all leagues among the vassals under pain of excommunication. The barons, having the Archbishop on their side, thought little of the thunders of the Pope; but John was emboldened to come forth, offer a conference at Oxford, which he did not attend, and then go to Dover to receive the free-companions, who flocked from all quarters.
The barons sent Stephen Langton to Rome to plead their cause, and found themselves obliged to take up arms. William de Albini, one of the twenty-five sureties, was sent to possess himself of the Castle of Rochester; but before he could bring in sufficient stores, he was invested by John, with Savary de Mauléon, called the Bloody, and a band of free-companions, whose noms de guerre were equally truculent—namely, the Merciless, the Murderer, the Iron-hearted. One of the archers within the walls bent his bow at the King’s breast, and said to the castellane, “Shall I deliver you from yonder mortal foe?” “No; hold thy hand,” said Albini; “strike not the evil beast; shouldst thou fail, thy doom would be certain.” “Then, betide what God will, I hold my hand!” said the archer.
For two months these brave men held out, but by St. Andrew’s Day they had eaten all their horses, and the walls were battered down, so that Albini was forced to surrender. John was for hanging the whole garrison, but Mauléon said, “Sir, the war is not over; the chances are beyond reckoning. If we begin by hanging your barons, your barons may end by hanging us.” So Albini and the nobles were spared, but the archers and men-at-arms were hung in halters to every tree in the forest.
Meanwhile, the Archbishop had failed at Rome, and partly by his own fault, for he had tried to make his brother Simon, a man generally detested, Archbishop of York, and thus had given Innocent good reason for again interfering. He was placed under sentence of suspension; the barons, beginning with Fitzwalter, were excommunicated as rebels against a Church vassal and Crusader, and termed as wicked as Saracens; and the city of London was laid under an interdict.
The Londoners boldly declared that the Pope had no power to meddle in their case, kept their churches open, and celebrated their Christmas as usual; but beyond their walls it was less easy to be secure.
John now had two great armies of foreigners, and had been joined by several of the barons’ party; and he marched with one of them for the North, where young King Alexander of Scotland had laid siege to Norham, and had received the homage of the neighboring nobility.
As John advanced, the barons burnt their houses and corn before him, while he and his marauders ruined all they approached; he every morning, with his own hands, set fire to his night’s lodgings, and in eight days five principal towns were consumed, and the course of his army was like the bed of a torrent.
Vowing he would unkennel the young fox, as he called Alexander, on account of his red hair, John sent his troops into Scotland, where they laid the whole country waste up to Edinburgh, and then, returning, reduced the castles and ravaged the lands of the barons in Yorkshire, and the same dreadful atrocities were perpetrated by his other army in the south of England, till the country people called the free-companions by no other name than Satan’s Guards, and the Devil’s Servants.
The barons had no stronghold left them but London, and saw their rank, their families, and estates, at the mercy of the remorseless tyrant and his savage banditti, backed by the support of their spiritual superiors. In this condition they deemed all ties between them and their sovereign dissolved, and, as their last resource, resolved to offer the crown to Louis, the son of Philippe Auguste, and the husband of Blanche of Castile, the marriage made to separate France from the cause of Arthur. It was a step which even their extremity could not justify, passing over, as it did, the rights of the captive Pearl of Brittany, of John’s own innocent children, and of those of his eldest sister. But men have seldom been harder pressed than were these barons; and they were further tempted by the hope that all the mercenaries who were French subjects might be detached from the enemy by seeing their own prince’s standard unfurled against him.