Runnymede and Lincoln Fair: A Story of the Great Charter

by John G. Edgar

Moreover, it was the reverse of flattering to Fitzwalter and De Vesci, and De Clare and De Roos, and the Bigods and Bohuns, to find that, after all, they had been fooled and humbled by a king whom they had not only disliked but despised; and wounded pride and vanity whispered constantly to each that it would be better to adopt any expedient likely to lead to their relief from the perplexity of the present, than trust to the course of events and the chapter of accidents. Nevertheless, it was not very easy to discover a ready and short way out of their multitudinous difficulties, and they spent many days in anxious debate and somewhat unmanly lamentations. Naturally enough, different opinions were expressed, and there was much variance; but nobody could refuse to admit that something must be done, and that quickly; and at length they arrived at a resolution which, to say the least of it, was unpatriotic, imprudent, and unfortunate.

At that period, Philip Augustus, no longer young, was still occupying himself with the projects which he had conceived in youth for rendering France the great monarchy of Europe, and of all men he was the likeliest to lend an attentive ear to any proposal for humbling the house of Plantagenet; and it happened that Louis, the son of Philip by his first wife, Isabel of Hainault, had, in 1200, espoused Blanche of Castile, daughter of King Alphonso, the conqueror of Muradel, by Eleanor, daughter of our second Henry. Louis, who was now in his twenty-ninth year, cannot be described as one of the great princes of the Capet line, though he rated himself very highly, owing to inheriting, through his mother, Isabel, the blood of Charlemagne; and chroniclers, wishing to be complimentary, have been content to call him “the son of an able father, and the father of an excellent son.” But the barons were not in a position to be very nice when in search of a puppet, and nobody, at all events, could deny that Louis of France, the heir of Hugh Capet and Charlemagne, was also the husband of Blanche of Castile, and that her mother was a princess of the blood royal of England; so the barons, in their perplexity, seem to have considered her claim to the crown of England quite good enough to serve their purpose, and to have believed that they could not do better, all things taken into account, than call her and her husband to the throne which her maternal grandsire had occupied. It is true that some dozen persons, male and female, actually stood before Blanche of Castile in the legal order of succession; but the barons were in no humour to make nice distinctions, or to be fastidious as to genealogies; and early in the year 1216, while King John was ravaging the North with his mercenaries, they actually despatched Fitzwalter and De Quency as ambassadors to invite Prince Louis, the heir of Philip Augustus, to land in England and take possession of the crown which, with a fine disregard of facts, they represented as his wife’s rightful inheritance.

To a man of ambition the prize was certainly tempting, and had there been no more serious obstacle to encounter on the way to it than John’s army of foreign hirelings, Philip Augustus would have urged his son to grasp at it resolutely, and to hold by it tenaciously. But Philip, who had fought side by side with the English in the Holy Land, and face to face with them in Normandy in the days of Cœur-de-Lion, understood what kind of people they were, and well knew that, whatever the Anglo-Norman barons and the citizens of London might say, the English as a nation would never submit to the rule of a foreigner, and that foreigner a French prince. Besides, he could not overlook the fact that John was under the especial protection of the pope; and he could not forget that, years before, when he suffered excommunication for marrying Agnes de Méranie, and vainly attempted to resist the power of Rome, he had learned to his severe experience how good a friend and how terrible a foe the pope could be to one of the sovereigns of Europe. It was no pleasant retrospect, but it was instructive.

Much more caution was, therefore, observed in the matter by the court of Paris than the barons had expected, or than they relished; but the invitation was by no means declined. On the contrary, Louis seems to have relished the prospect of reigning over England, and to have thought his royal sire somewhat too cautious. In any case, a little fleet of French ships reached the Thames in February, with several French knights on board, who brought assurances that, by Easter, Louis would be at Calais to embark for England, and that he only asked the barons to send him their sons or nephews as hostages for the fulfilment of their part of the covenant.

Probably the barons and the Londoners were not very well pleased with so much hesitation and delay. But they had gone too far to recede, and every day, while making their position more desperate, added to the aversion which the barons had always felt towards the king. Besides, the accounts which were given of the cruelties exercised by John in the North were such as could not fail to add greatly to his unpopularity, and every citizen who met his neighbour in the market-place, or gossiped with him across the street from the house-tops, had something horrible to relate of what was going on in York and Northumberland. One told how the king was in the habit, after lodging during the night in any house, of setting fire to it before he took his departure next morning; a second told how on such occasions he had not only set fire to the house, but ordered the host to be hanged at his own door-post; and a third told that in the royal army the king had a number of Jews, whom he made the instruments of his cruelties. Such stories, constantly repeated, and losing nothing in the telling, ere long made the king so odious that the citizens and populace of London began to regard the evil of calling in a foreign prince to make himself master of England as a very light evil indeed compared with that of living under a tyrant who set truth, and justice, and humanity at defiance; and they shouted loudly, “Come what may, we will not any longer have this man to reign over us.”

Meanwhile, at Poissy and in Paris, Prince Louis and his advisers were making out as good a claim for Blanche of Castile as circumstances would admit of their doing. It was, indeed, no easy matter. But what with reviving the recollection of John having been forfeited by the Great Council of England for rebellion against his brother, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and of his having been condemned by the peers of France for the murder of his nephew Arthur, and what with pronouncing his children disqualified to succeed, and overlooking the existence of Eleanor of Brittany and of Blanche’s own brother and her elder sister, they did make out a case which satisfied themselves, and which perhaps they deemed good enough for their confederates in England; and Philip Augustus, though hesitating, or pretending to hesitate, did not offer any opposition to his son’s preparations; though Gualo, the cardinal of St. Martin and papal legate, passing through France, visited Paris, and warned Prince Louis against embarking on an enterprise of which the holy see disapproved.

So far matters went smoothly, and the barons and citizens looked longingly for the arrival of Prince Louis, whom they daily became more eager to welcome as a deliverer. But their patience was put to a trial; and Easter passed, and May Day passed, and the “merry, merry month of May” was rapidly running its course, and still the French prince lingered.

CHAPTER XXV
THE VOWS OF THE HERON

A WEEK before May Day Hugh de Moreville reached Paris, and did all that he could, on the part of the Anglo-Norman barons, to hasten the preparations, and hurry the departure of Prince Louis. Matters, however, did not go so satisfactorily as he could have wished. Philip Augustus was grave and reluctant; Louis, like his paternal grandfather, was pompous, slow, and somewhat sluggish; and the only person whose ideas on the subject moved as rapidly as those of De Moreville was Blanche of Castile, who inherited energy and intellect that would have made her, if of the other sex, quite equal to the occasion. As it was, however, De Moreville found much difficulty in persuading Louis to take the ultimate step which might expose him to the censures of the Church; and, on the eve of a great banquet, he conceived the project of surprising the prince into one of the vows of chivalry considered too serious to be broken or treated with indifference.

Now among the vows of chivalry in fashion at that period the most solemn were known as “the vow of the peacock,” “the vow of the pheasant,” “the vow of the swans,” and “the vow of the cranes.” All these birds were esteemed noble; and the peacock was, in a particular manner, accounted proper food for the valiant and the amorous; and, when the vow was about to be made the bird was roasted, decked in its most beautiful feathers, and made its appearance on a basin of gold and silver, and was carried by ladies, magnificently dressed, to the assembled knights, who with all formality, made their vows over the bird in the presence of the company. But it was neither the vow of the peacock, nor the pheasant, nor the swans, nor the cranes, with which Hugh de Moreville was about to surprise the heir of France.