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 had been revoked by Innocent.[1999] Instead however of restoring to Avice the vast heritage which had been settled upon her at her betrothal, he gave her county of Gloucester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]

Philip at once marched upon Normandy to execute the sentence by force of arms. He began by taking Boutavant[2037] and Tillières;[2038] thence he marched straight up northward by Lions,[2039] Longchamp, La Ferté-en-Bray,[2040] Orgueil and Mortemer,[2041] to Eu;[2042] all these places fell into his hands. Thus master of almost the whole Norman border from the Seine to the sea, he turned back to lay siege on July 8 to Radepont on the Andelle, scarcely more than ten miles from Rouen. Dislodged at the end of a week by John,[2043] he again withdrew to the border. The castle of Aumale and the rest of its county were soon in his hands.[2044] Hugh of Gournay alone, the worthy bearer of a name which for generations had been almost a synonym for loyalty to the Norman ducal house, still held out in his impregnable castle; Philip however, by breaking down the embankment which kept in the waters of a reservoir communicating with the river and the moat, let loose upon the castle a flood which undermined its walls and almost swept it away, thus compelling its defenders to make their escape and take shelter as best they could in the neighbouring forest.[2045] At Gournay Philip bestowed upon Arthur the hand of his infant daughter Mary,[2046] the honour of knighthood,[2047] and the investiture of all the Angevin dominions except the duchy of Normandy,[2048] which he evidently intended to conquer for himself and keep by right of conquest.

What John had been doing all this time it is difficult to understand. Between the middle of May and the end of June he had shifted his quarters incessantly, moving through the whole length of eastern Normandy, from Arques to Le Mans; throughout July he was chiefly in the neighbourhood of Rouen;[2049] but, except in the one expedition to Radepont, he seems to have made no attempt to check the progress of his enemies. After the knighting of Arthur at Gournay, however, he tried to make a diversion by sending a body of troops into Britanny. With their duchess dead[2050] and their young duke absent, the Bretons were in no condition for defence; Dol and Fougères were taken by John’s soldiers, and the whole country ravaged as far as Rennes.[2051] This attack stung Arthur into an attempt at independent action which led to his ruin. He and Philip divided their forces; while the French king led the bulk of his army northward to the siege of Arques,[2052] Arthur with two hundred knights[2053] moved southward to Tours,[2054] sending forward a summons to the men of his own duchy and those of Berry to meet him there for an expedition into Poitou.[2055] At Tours he was met by the disaffected Aquitanian chiefs:—the injured bridegroom young Hugh of La Marche, and two of his uncles, Ralf of Issoudun the dispossessed count of Eu, and Geoffrey of Lusignan, the inveterate fighter who had taken a leading part in every Aquitanian rising throughout the last twenty-two years of Henry’s reign, who after being Richard’s bitterest foe at home had been one of his best supporters in Palestine, and who had come back, it seems, to join in one more fight against his successor. The three kinsmen, however, brought together a force of only seventy-five knights; to which a Gascon baron, Savaric of Mauléon, added thirty more, and seventy men-at-arms.[2056] Arthur, mere boy of fifteen though he was, had enough of the hereditary Angevin wariness to shrink from attempting to act with such a small force, and in accordance with Philip’s instructions proposed to wait for his expected allies.[2057] But the Poitevins would brook no delay; and a temptation now offered itself which was irresistible alike to them and to their young leader. On her return from Castille with her granddaughter Blanche in the spring of 1200, Queen Eleanor, worn out with age and fatigue, had withdrawn to the abbey of Fontevraud,[2058] where she apparently remained throughout the next two years. The rising troubles of her duchy, however, seem to have brought her forth from her retirement once more, and she was now in the castle of Mirebeau, on the border of Anjou and Poitou. All John’s enemies knew that his mother was, in every sense, his best friend. She was at once his most devoted ally and his most sagacious counsellor, at least in all continental affairs; moreover, in strict feudal law, she was still duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, a right untouched by the forfeiture of John; and she therefore had it in her power to make that forfeiture null and void south of the Loire, so long as she lived to assert her claims for John’s benefit.[2059] To capture Eleanor would be to bring John to his knees; and with this hope Arthur and his little band laid siege to Mirebeau.[2060]