On Midsummer-day he made a truce with Philip for three weeks.[1976] At its expiration the two kings held a personal meeting; John’s occupation of his brother’s territories without previous investiture from and homage to Philip was complained of by the latter as an unpardonable wrong; and John was required to expiate it by the cession of the whole Vexin to Philip in absolute ownership, and of Poitou and the three Angevin counties for the benefit of Arthur. This John refused.[1977] His fortunes were not yet so desperate as to compel him to such humiliation. He had already secured the alliance of Flanders;[1978] his nephew Otto, now fully acknowledged by the Pope as Emperor-elect, was urging him to war with France and promising him the aid of the imperial forces;[1979] and his refusal of submission to Philip was at once followed by offers of homage and mutual alliance from all those French feudataries who had been in league with Richard against their own sovereign.[1980] The war began in September, with the taking of Conches by the French king; this was followed by the capture of Ballon. Philip, however, chose to celebrate these first successes by levelling Ballon to the ground. As the castle stood upon Cenomannian soil, it ought, according to the theory proclaimed by Philip himself, to have been handed over by him to Arthur; Arthur’s seneschal William des Roches therefore remonstrated against its demolition as an injury done to his young lord. Philip retorted that “he would not for Arthur’s sake stay from dealing as he pleased with his own acquisitions.” The consequence was a momentary desertion of all his Breton allies. William des Roches not only surrendered to John the city of Le Mans, which Philip and Arthur had intrusted to him as governor, but contrived to get the boy-duke of Britanny out of Philip’s custody and bring him to his uncle, who received him into seeming favour and peace.[1981] That very day, however, a warning reached Arthur of the fate to which he was already doomed by John; and on the following night he fled away to Angers with his mother and a number of their friends. Among the latter was the viscount Almeric of Thouars, who had just been compelled to resign into John’s hands the office of seneschal of Anjou and the custody of the fortress of Chinon, which he held in Arthur’s name; and it seems to have been shortly afterwards that Constance, apparently casting off Ralf of Chester without even an attempt at divorce, went through a ceremony of marriage with Almeric’s brother Guy.[1982]

The year’s warfare again ended in a truce, made in October to last till S. Hilary’s day.[1983] Its author was that Cardinal Peter of Capua[1984] who had negotiated the last truce between Philip and Richard, and who now found another occupation in punishing the matrimonial sins of the French king:—Philip having sent away his queen Ingebiorg of Denmark immediately after his marriage with her in 1193, and three years later taken as his wife another princess, Agnes of Merania.[1985] At a Church council at Dijon on December 6, 1199, the legate passed a sentence of interdict upon the whole royal domain, to be publicly proclaimed on the twentieth day after Christmas[1986]—the very day on which Philip’s truce with John would expire. It was no doubt the prospect of this new trouble which moved Philip, when he met John in conference between Gaillon and Les Andelys,[1987] to accept terms far more favourable to the English king than those which he had offered six months before. As a pledge of future peace and amity between the two kings, Philip’s son Louis was to marry John’s niece Blanche, a daughter of his sister Eleanor and her husband King Alfonso of Castille; John was to bestow upon the bride, by way of dowry, the city and county of Evreux and all those Norman castles which had been in Philip’s possession on the day of Richard’s death; he was also to give Philip thirty thousand marks of silver, and to swear that he would give no help to Otto for the vindication of his claim to the Empire. The formal execution of the treaty was deferred till the octave of midsummer; and while the aged queen-mother Eleanor went to fetch her granddaughter from Spain, John at the end of February took advantage of the respite to make a hurried visit to England,[1988] for the purpose of raising the thirty thousand marks which he had promised to Philip. This was done by means of a carucage or aid of three shillings on every ploughland.[1989] As a scutage of a most unusual amount—two marks on the knight’s fee—had already been levied since John’s accession, this new impost was a sore burthen upon the country. The abbots of some of the great Cistercian houses in Yorkshire withstood it as an unheard-of infringement of their rights, to which they could not assent without the permission of a general chapter of their order. John in a fury bade the sheriffs put all the White Monks outside the protection of the law. The remonstrances of the primate compelled him to revoke this command; but he rejected all offers of compromise on the part of the monks, and “breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord” went over sea again at the end of April.[1990] As France had been suffering the miseries of an interdict ever since January,[1991] Philip was now growing eager for peace. He therefore met John at Gouleton, between Vernon and Les Andelys, on May 22, and there a treaty was signed. Its solid advantages were wholly on the side of John. In addition to the concessions made in January, he did indeed resign in favour of Blanche and her bridegroom his claims upon the fiefs of Berry; but the thirty thousand marks due to Philip were reduced to twenty thousand; Arthur was acknowledged as owing homage to his uncle for Britanny; and John was formally recognized by the French king as rightful heir to all the dominions of his father and his elder brother.[1992] On the morrow Louis and Blanche were married, by the archbishop of Bordeaux, and on Norman soil, in consequence of the interdict in France;[1993] and on the same day, at Vernon, John received in Philip’s presence Arthur’s homage for Britanny,[1994] Philip having already accepted that of John for the whole continental dominions of the house of Anjou.[1995]

The next six weeks were spent by John in a triumphant progress southward, through Le Mans, Angers, Chinon, Tours and Loches, into Aquitaine, where he remained until the end of August.[1996] While there, he received the homage of his brother-in-law Count Raymond of Toulouse for the dower-lands of Jane,[1997] who had died in the preceding autumn.[1998] Of all these successes, however, John went far to cast away the fruit by a desecration of the marriage-bond almost as shameless and quite as impolitic as that which had brought upon Philip the wrath of Rome. He persuaded the Aquitanian and Norman bishops to annul his marriage with his cousin Avice of Gloucester, apparently by making them believe that the dispensation granted by Clement III. had been revoked by Innocent.[1999] Instead however of restoring to Avice the vast heritage which had been settled upon her at her betrothal, he gave her county of Gloucester to her sister’s husband Count Almeric of Evreux as compensation for the loss of his Norman honour,[2000] and apparently kept the remainder of her estates in his own hands. These proceedings were enough to excite the ill-will of a powerful section of the English baronage. John’s next step was a direct challenge to the most active, turbulent and troublesome house in all Aquitaine. He gave out that he desired to wed a daughter of the king of Portugal, and despatched an honourable company of ambassadors, headed by the bishop of Lisieux, to sue for her hand; after these envoys had started, however, and without a word of notice to them, he suddenly married the daughter of Count Ademar of Angoulême.[2001] Twenty-nine years before, Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, had vainly striven to wrest Angoulême from Ademar in behalf of Matilda, the only child of Ademar’s brother Count Vulgrin III. Matilda was now the wife of Hugh “the Brown” of Lusignan, who in 1179 or 1180 had in spite of King Henry made himself master of La Marche,[2002] and whose personal importance in southern Gaul was increased by the rank and fame which his brothers Geoffrey, Guy and Almeric had won in the kingdoms of Palestine and Cyprus. His son by Matilda—another Hugh the Brown—had through Richard’s good offices been betrothed in boyhood to his infant cousin Isabel, Ademar’s only child; the little girl was educated with her future husband, and it was hoped that in due time their marriage would heal the family feud and unite the lands of Angoulême and La Marche without possibility of further dissension. No sooner however did Count Ademar discover that a king wished to marry his daughter than he took her away from her bridegroom; and at the end of August she was married to John at Angoulême by the archbishop of Bordeaux.[2003]

Heedless of the storm which this marriage was sure to raise in Aquitaine, John in the first days of October carried his child-queen with him to England, and on the 8th was crowned with her at Westminster.[2004] His first business in England was to renew his persecution of the Cistercians;[2005] the next was to arrange a meeting with the king of Scots. This took place in November at Lincoln, where John, defying the tradition which his father had carefully observed, ventured to present himself in regal state within the cathedral church.[2006] The two kings held their colloquy on a hill outside the city; William performed his long-deferred homage,[2007] although his renewed demand for the restitution of the northern shires was again put off till Whitsuntide.[2008] Next day the king of England helped with his own hands to carry the body of the holy bishop Hugh to its last resting-place in the minster which he had himself rebuilt.[2009] Some haunting remembrance of Hugh’s saintlike face, as he had seen it in London only a few weeks before the good bishop’s death,[2010] may have combined with a sense that the White Monks were still too great a power in the land to be defied with impunity, and moved John on the following Sunday to make full amends to the Cistercian abbots, promising to seal his repentance by founding a house of their order[2011]—a promise which he redeemed by the foundation of Beaulieu abbey, in the New Forest.[2012] After keeping Christmas at Guildford[2013] he came back again to Lincoln, and quarrelled with the canons about the election of a new bishop.[2014] He thence went northward, accompanied by his queen, through Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland and Cumberland, taking fines everywhere for offences against the forest-law. At Mid-Lent he was at York,[2015] and on Easter-day he and Isabel wore their crowns at Canterbury.[2016] A few days later, rumours of disturbances in Normandy and in Poitou paused him to issue orders for the earls and barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide, ready with horses and ships to accompany him over sea. The earls however held a meeting at Leicester, and thence by common consent made answer to the king that they would not go with him “unless he gave them back their rights.” It is clear that they already looked upon personal service beyond sea as no longer binding upon them without their own consent, specially given for a special occasion. John retorted by demanding the surrender of their castles, beginning with William of Aubigny’s castle of Beauvoir, which William was only suffered to retain on giving his son as a hostage.[2017] This threat brought the barons to Portsmouth on the appointed day; but the quarrel ended in a compromise. After despatching his chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, with a hundred knights, to act as keeper of the Welsh marches, and sending William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy, each with a hundred mercenaries, to resist the enemies in Normandy, John took from the remainder of the host a scutage in commutation of their services, and bade them return to their own homes.[2018] On Whit-Monday the queen crossed to Normandy, and shortly afterwards her husband followed.[2019]

After a friendly meeting near the Isle of Andelys,[2020] Philip invited John to Paris, where he entertained him with the highest honours, vacating his own palace for the reception of his guest, and loading him with costly gifts.[2021] From Paris John went to meet his sister-in-law, Richard’s queen Berengaria, at Chinon,[2022] where he seems to have chiefly spent the rest of the summer. He came back to Normandy in the autumn,[2023] and the Christmas feast at Argentan[2024] passed over in peace; but trouble was fast gathering on all sides. Philip was at last free of his ecclesiastical difficulties, for Agnes of Merania was dead, and he had taken back his wife.[2025] John was now in his turn to pay the penalty for his unwarrantable divorce and his lawless second marriage. As if he had not already done enough to alienate the powerful house of Lusignan by stealing the plighted bride of its head,[2026] he had now seized the castle of Driencourt, which belonged to a brother of Hugh the Brown, while its owner was absent in England on business for the king himself;[2027] and he had further insulted the barons of Poitou by summoning them to clear themselves in his court from a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself, by ordeal of battle with picked champions from England and Normandy. They scorned the summons,[2028] and appealed to the king of France, John’s overlord as well as theirs, to bring John to justice for their wrongs.[2029] On March 25 Philip met John at Gouleton,[2030] and peremptorily bade him give up to Arthur all his French fiefs, besides sundry other things, all of which John refused.[2031] Hereupon Philip sent, through some of the great French nobles,[2032] a citation to John, as duke of Aquitaine, to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter at the court of his lord the king of France, to stand to its judgement, to answer to his lord for his misdoings, and to undergo the sentence of his peers.[2033] John made no attempt to deny Philip’s jurisdiction; but he declared that, as duke of Normandy, he was not bound to obey the French king’s citation to any spot other than the traditional trysting-place on the border. Philip replied that his summons was addressed to the duke of Aquitaine, not to the duke of Normandy, and that his rights over the former were not to be annulled by the accidental union of the two dignities in one person.[2034] John at length yielded so far as to promise that on the appointed day he would present himself before the court in Paris, and would give up to Philip the two castles of Tillières and Boutavant as security for his abiding by the settlement then to be made. The day however came and went without either the surrender of the forts or the appearance of John.[2035] The court of the French peers condemned him by default, and sentenced him to be deprived of all his lands.[2036]