On her way home Eleanor stopped to transact some diplomatic business at Rome, and she seems to have remained in Gaul until the beginning of the next year. Long before she returned to England there were evident tokens that when Richard had proposed to keep John out of it, he had for once been wiser than his mother. Early in the year John, profiting by the liberty which her intercession had procured him, came over to England and there set up his court in such semi-regal state as to make it a source of extreme irritation, if not of grave anxiety, to the chancellor.[1480] Eleanor’s departure thus left William of Longchamp face to face with a new and most formidable rival; while about the same time he saw his power threatened on another side. In March 1191 tidings came that Archbishop Baldwin had died at Acre in the foregoing November.[1481] If a new primate should be appointed, it was to be expected as a matter of course that the bishop of Ely would lose the legation; he could hope to retain it only by persuading Richard either to nominate him to the primacy, or to keep it vacant altogether. Richard’s notions of ecclesiastical propriety were however too strict to admit the latter alternative; from the former he would most likely be deterred by his father’s experiences with another chancellor; so, to the astonishment of everybody, he nominated for the see of Canterbury a Sicilian prelate, one of his fellow-crusaders, William archbishop of Monreale.[1482] Meanwhile John and the chancellor were quarrelling openly; popular sympathy, which William had alienated by his arrogance and his oppressions, was on the side of John; even the subordinate justiciars, who had stood by William in his struggle with Hugh of Durham,[1483] were turning against him now; from one and all complaints against him were showering in upon the king;[1484] till at the end of February Richard grew so bewildered and so uneasy that he decided upon sending the archbishop of Rouen to investigate the state of affairs in England and see what could be done to remedy it.[1485]

The archbishop of Rouen—Walter of Coutances—was a man of noble birth and stainless character who had been successively archdeacon of Oxford, treasurer of Rouen cathedral and vice-chancellor to Henry II.;[1486] in this last capacity he had for eight years done the whole work of head of the chancery for his nominal chief Ralf of Varneville,[1487] till Ralf was succeeded in 1182 by the king’s son Geoffrey, and next year the vice-chancellor was promoted to the see of Lincoln, which Geoffrey had resigned. A year later Walter was advanced to the primacy of Normandy.[1488] He was now with Richard, on his way to Holy Land, but commuted his vow to serve the king.[1489] He was a very quiet, unassuming person, and certainly not a vigorous statesman; but his integrity and disinterestedness were above question;[1490] and the position in which he was now placed was one in which even a Thomas Becket might well have been puzzled how to act. The only commission given him by Richard of which we know the date was issued on February 23;[1491] but it was not till April 2 that he was allowed to leave Messina;[1492] and during the interval Richard, in his reluctance to supersede the chancellor, seems to have been perpetually changing his mind and varying his instructions, some of which were sent direct to England and some intrusted to Walter, till by the time the archbishop started he was laden with a bundle of contradictory commissions, addressed to himself, to William and to the co-justiciars, and apparently accompanied by a verbal order to use one, all or none of them, wholly at his own discretion.[1493]

Before he reached England John and the chancellor were at open war. On Mid-Lent Sunday they met at Winchester to discuss the payment of John’s pensions from the Exchequer and the possession of certain castles within his territories.[1494] The discussion clearly ended in a quarrel; and this served as a signal for revolt against the unpopular minister. Gerard de Camville, sheriff of Lincolnshire by purchase from the king, was also constable of Lincoln castle in right of his wife Nicolaa de Haye. He was accused of harbouring robbers in the castle, and when summoned before the king’s justices he refused to appear, declaring that he had become John’s liegeman and was answerable only to him.[1495] At the opposite end of England Roger de Mortemer, the lord of Wigmore—successor to that Hugh de Mortemer who had defied Henry II. in 1156—was at the same moment found to be plotting treason with the Welsh. Against him the chancellor proceeded first, and his mere approach so alarmed Roger that he gave up his castle and submitted to banishment from the realm for three years.[1496] William then hurried to Lincoln; but before he could reach it Gerard and Nicolaa had had time to make their almost impregnable stronghold ready for a siege, and John had had time to gain possession of Nottingham and Tickhill[1497]—two castles which the king had retained in his own hands, while bestowing upon his brother the honours in which they stood. Nicolaa was in command at Lincoln, and was fully equal to the occasion; her husband was now with John, and John at once sent the chancellor a most insulting message, taunting him with the facility with which the two castles had been betrayed,[1498] and threatening that if the attempt upon Lincoln was not at once given up, he would come in person to avenge the wrongs of his liegeman.[1499] William saw that John was now too strong for him; he knew by this time that Pope Clement was dead,[1500] and his own legation consequently at an end; he must have known, too, of the mission of Walter of Rouen; he therefore, through some of his fellow-bishops,[1501] demanded a personal meeting with John, and proposed that all their differences should be submitted to arbitration. John burst into a fury at what he chose to call the impudence of this proposal,[1502] but he ended by accepting it, and on April 25 the meeting took place at Winchester. The case was decided by the bishops of London, Winchester and Bath, with eleven lay arbitrators chosen by them from each party. Their decision went wholly against the chancellor. He was permitted to claim the restitution of Nottingham and Tickhill, but only to put them in charge of two partizans of John; his right to appoint wardens to the other castles in dispute was nominally confirmed, but made practically dependent upon John’s dictation; he was compelled to reinstate Gerard de Camville, and moreover to promise that in case of Richard’s death he would do his utmost to secure the crown for John.[1503]

Two days later Walter of Rouen landed at Shoreham.[1504] He was evidently not wanted now to act as a check upon William of Longchamp; he might almost expect to be soon wanted as a check upon John; but meanwhile, he could only stand aside and watch the effect of the new arrangements. His passive attitude gave, however, an indirect support to the chancellor; after midsummer, therefore, the latter ventured to repudiate the concessions wrung from him at Winchester; he again advanced upon Lincoln, and formally deprived Gerard of the sheriffdom, which he conferred upon William de Stuteville.[1505] Once more the other bishops interposed, backed now by the Norman primate. Another assembly met at Winchester on July 28,[1506] and here a fresh settlement was made. Gerard was reinstated in the sheriffdom of Lincolnshire, pending his trial in the king’s court; William and John were both bound over to commit no more forcible disseizures; the disputed castles were to be again put in charge for the king, but through the medium of the archbishop of Rouen instead of the chancellor, and John was allowed no voice in the selection of the castellans, who were chosen by the assembly then and there. If the chancellor should infringe the agreement, or if the king should die, these castles were to be given up to John; but all reference to his claims upon the succession to the throne was carefully omitted.[1507] The contest almost seemed to have ended in a drawn battle. It was strictly a contest between individuals, involving no national or constitutional interests. The barons, as a body, clearly sided with John; but, just as clearly, they sided with him from loyal motives. The authority of the Crown was never called in question; the question was, who was fittest to represent and uphold it—the king’s chancellor, or his brother. Of treason, either to England or to Richard, there was not a thought, unless—as indeed is only too probable—it lurked in the mind of John himself.

A drawn battle, however, could not possibly be the end of a struggle between two such men as John of Mortain and William of Longchamp. In the autumn a new element was added to the strife by the return of Archbishop Geoffrey of York. For thirty-five years Geoffrey had been the eldest living child, if indeed he was not actually the first-born, of Henry Fitz-Empress;[1508] but of the vast Angevin heritage there fell to his share nothing, except the strong feelings and fiery temper which caused half the troubles of his life. As a child he had been brought up at court almost on equal terms with his half-brothers;[1509] he seems indeed to have been his father’s favourite, till he was supplanted by the little John. When he grew to manhood, however, Henry could see no way of providing for him except by forcing him into a career for which he had no vocation. At an early age he was put into deacon’s orders and made archdeacon of Lincoln;[1510] in 1173, when about twenty years of age, he was appointed to the bishopric of the same place.[1511] The Pope, however, demurred to the choice of a candidate disqualified alike by his youth and his birth; and when the former obstacle had been outlived and the latter might have been condoned, Geoffrey voluntarily renounced an office in which he would have been secure for life, but which he had never desired and for which he felt himself unfit,[1512] in order to become his father’s chancellor and constant companion during the last eight years of his life. It was Henry’s last regret that this son, the only one of his sons whose whole life had been an unbroken course of perfect filial obedience, had to be left with his future entirely at the mercy of his undutiful younger half-brother. Richard received him with a brotherly welcome;[1513] when, however, he nominated him to the see of York, he was indeed carrying out their father’s last wishes, but certainly not those of Geoffrey himself. Richard seems to have thought that he was held back by other motives than those of conscience or of preference for a secular life; he suspected him of cherishing designs upon the crown.[1514] It can only be said that Geoffrey, so far as appears, never did anything to justify the suspicion, but shewed on the contrary every disposition to act loyally towards both his brothers, if they would but have acted with equal loyalty towards him. As soon however as the tonsure had marked him irrevocably for a priestly life,[1515] Richard’s zeal for his promotion cooled. The bishop of Durham, who was striving to make his see independent of the metropolitan,[1516] and a strong party in the York chapter with whom Geoffrey had quarrelled on a point of ecclesiastical etiquette, easily won the king’s ear;[1517] it was not till the very eve of Richard’s departure from England that Geoffrey was able to buy his final confirmation both in the see of York and in the estates which his father had bequeathed to him in Anjou;[1518] and in March he was summoned over to Normandy and there, like John, made to take an oath of absence from England for three years.[1519]