John, however, when once roused, could act with all the vigour and promptitude of his race. On July 30, as he was approaching Le Mans, he received tidings of his mother’s danger; on August 1 he suddenly appeared before Mirebeau.[2061] The town was already lost, all the gates of the castle save one were broken down, and Eleanor had been driven to take refuge in the keep; the besiegers, thinking their triumph assured, were surprised and overpowered by John’s troops, and were slain or captured to a man, the Lusignans and Arthur himself being among the prisoners.[2062] Philip, who was busy with the siege of Arques, left it and hurried southward on hearing of this disaster;[2063] John however at once put an end to his hopes of rescuing Arthur by sending the boy to prison at Falaise;[2064] and Philip, after taking and burning Tours,[2065] withdrew into his own domains.[2066] John in his turn then marched upon Tours, and vented his wrath at its capture by completing its destruction.[2067] Shortly afterwards he had the good luck to make prisoner another disaffected Aquitanian noble, the viscount of Limoges.[2068] It was however growing evident that he would soon have nothing but his own resources to depend upon. His allies were falling away; the counts of Flanders, Blois and Perche and several of the other malcontent French barons had taken the cross and abandoned the field of western politics to seek their fortunes in the East;[2069] he had quarrelled with Otto of Germany;[2070] William des Roches, after pleading in vain for Arthur’s release, was organizing a league of the Breton nobles which some of the Norman border-chiefs were quite ready to join, and by the end of October the party thus formed was strong enough to seize Angers and establish its head-quarters there.[2071] It was probably the knowledge of all this which in the beginning of 1203 made John transfer his captive nephew from the castle of Falaise to that of Rouen.[2072] Sinister rumours of Arthur’s fate were already in circulation, telling how John had sent a ruffian to blind him at Falaise, how the soldiers who kept him had frustrated the design, and how their commandant, John’s chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, had endeavoured to satisfy the king by giving out that Arthur had died of wounds and grief and ordering funeral services in his memory, till the threats of the infuriated Bretons drove him to confess the fraud for the sake of John’s own safety.[2073] How or when Arthur really died has never yet been clearly proved. We only know that at Easter 1203 all France was ringing with the tidings of his death, and that after that date he was never seen alive. In his uncle’s interest an attempt was made to suggest that he had either pined to death in his prison, or been drowned in endeavouring to escape across the Seine;[2074] but the general belief, which John’s after-conduct tends strongly to confirm, was that he had been stabbed and then flung into the river by the orders, if not actually by the hands, of John himself.[2075]

The fire which had been smouldering throughout the winter in Britanny now burst into a blaze. The barons and prelates of the duchy, it is said, held a meeting at Vannes, and thence sent to the king of France, as overlord alike of Arthur and of John, their demand for a judicial inquisition before the peers of the realm—that is, before the supreme feudal court of France—into John’s dealings with their captive duke.[2076] A citation was accordingly sent to John, as duke of Normandy, either to present Arthur alive,[2077] or to come and stand his trial before the French king’s court on a charge of murder. John neither appeared nor sent any defence; the court pronounced him worthy of death, and sentenced him and his heirs to forfeiture of all the lands and honours which he held of the Crown of France.[2078] The trial seems to have been held shortly after Easter. The legal force of the sentence need not be discussed here.[2079] Its moral justice can hardly be disputed, so far as John himself is concerned; and Philip’s action did little more than precipitate the consequences which must sooner or later have naturally resulted from John’s own deed. John in committing a great crime had committed an almost greater blunder. Arthur’s death left him indeed without a rival in his own house. It left him sole survivor, in the male line, alike of the Angevin and Cenomannian counts and of the ducal house of Normandy. Even in the female line there was no one who could be set up against him as representative of either race. Eleanor of Britanny, the only remaining child of his brother Geoffrey, was a prisoner in her uncle’s keeping. The sons of his sister Matilda had cast in their lot with their father’s country and severed all ties with their mother’s people; the children of his sister Eleanor were still more complete strangers to the political interests of northern Gaul, and the only one of them who was known there at all was known only as the wife of the heir to the French crown. But these very facts set John face to face with a more dangerous rival than any of the ambitious kinsmen with whom the two Williams or the two Henrys had had to contend. They drove his disaffected subjects to choose between submission to him and submission to Philip Augustus. The barons of Anjou, of Maine, of Britanny or of Normandy had no longer any chance of freeing themselves from the yoke of the king from over-sea who had become a stranger to them all alike, save by accepting in its stead the yoke of the king with whom they had grown familiar through years of political and personal intercourse, and whom, in theory at least, even their own rulers had always acknowledged as their superior. Anjou, Maine and Britanny had all resolved upon Richard’s death that they would not have John to rule over them; Normandy was now fast coming to the same determination. Under the existing circumstances it would cost them little or no sacrifice to accept their titular overlord as their real and immediate sovereign. So long as Arthur lived, Philip had been compelled to veil his ambition under a shew of zeal for Arthur’s rights; now he could fling aside the veil, and present himself almost in the character of a deliverer. If the barons did not actually hail him as such, they were at any rate for the most part not unwilling to leave to him the responsibility of accomplishing their deliverance, and to accept it quietly from his hands.

Philip took the field as soon as the forfeiture was proclaimed. Within a fortnight after Easter he had taken Saumur[2080] and entered Aquitaine; there he seems to have spent some weeks in taking sundry castles, with the help of the Bretons and the malcontent Poitevin nobles.[2081] One great Norman baron, the viscount of Beaumont, had already openly joined the league against John;[2082] and as Philip turned northward again, the count of Alençon formally placed himself and all his lands at the disposal of the French king.[2083] Thus secure of a strong foothold on the southern frontier of Normandy, and already by his last year’s conquests master of its north-eastern border from Eu to Gisors, Philip set himself to win the intervening territory—the remnant of the viscounty of Evreux. One by one its castles—Conches,[2084] Vaudreuil[2085] and many others—fell into his hands. Messenger after messenger came to John as he sat idle in his palace at Rouen,[2086] all charged with the same story: “The king of France is in your land as an enemy, he is taking your castles, he is binding your seneschals to their horses’ tails and leading them shamefully to prison, and he is dealing with your goods according to his own will and pleasure.” “Let him alone,” John answered them all alike; “I shall win back some day all that he is taking from me now.” The barons who still clave to him grew exasperated as they watched his unmoved face and heard his unvarying reply; some of them began to attribute his indifference to the effects of magic; all, finding it impossible to break the spell, turned away from him in despair. One by one they took their leave and withdrew to their homes, either passively to await the end, or actively to join Philip. Even Hugh of Gournay, who had held out so bravely and so faithfully a year ago, now voluntarily gave up his castle of Montfort.[2087] Not till near the middle of August did John make any warlike movement; then he suddenly laid siege to Alençon; but at Philip’s approach he fled in a panic;[2088] an attempt to regain Brezolles ended in like manner,[2089] and John relapsed into his former inactivity. That the conqueror did not march straight to the capture of Rouen, that he in fact made no further progress towards it for six whole months, was owing not to John but to his predecessor. Richard’s favourite capital was safe, so long as it was sheltered behind the group of fortifications crowned by his “saucy castle” on the Rock of Andely.

Upon the winning of Château-Gaillard, therefore, Philip now concentrated all his energies and all his skill. There was no hope of voluntary surrender here; John had given the fortress in charge to Roger de Lacy the constable of Chester, an English baron who had no stake in Normandy, whose private interests were therefore bound up with those of the English king, and who was moreover a man of dauntless courage and high military capacity.[2090] The place was only to be won by a regular siege. Crossing the Seine higher up, perhaps at Vernon, Philip led his troops along its left bank, and encamped in the peninsula formed by the bend of the river just opposite Les Andelys. The garrison of the fort in the Isle of Andely no sooner beheld his approach than they destroyed the bridge between the island and the left bank. Philip was thus deprived of the means not only of reaching them, but also of opening communications with the opposite shore; for this could only be done with safety at some point below Château-Gaillard, and the transport of the materials needful for the construction of a bridge or pontoon was barred by the stockade which crossed the river-bed directly under the foot of the castle-rock. The daring of a few young Frenchmen, however, soon cleared this obstacle away. While the king brought up his engines close to the water’s edge and kept the garrison of the island-fort occupied with the exchange of a constant fire of missiles, a youth named Gaubert of Mantes with a few bold comrades plunged into the water, each with an axe in his hand, and, regardless of the stones and arrows which kept falling upon them from both sides, hewed at the stockade till they had made a breach wide enough for boats to pass through in safety. A number of the broad flat-bottomed barges used for transport were then hastily collected from the neighbouring riverside towns, and moored side by side across the stream; these served as the foundation of a wooden bridge, which was further supported with stakes and strengthened with towers, and by means of which Philip himself, with the larger part of his host, crossed the river to form a new encampment under the walls of the Lesser Andely. The garrison of the Isle were thus placed between two fires;[2091] and the whole Vexin was laid open as a foraging-ground for the besieging army, while the occupants of the Lesser Andely and of Château-Gaillard itself found their communications and their supplies cut off on all sides.[2092]

John was now again hovering about at a safe distance in the neighbourhood.[2093] To the peril of Château-Gaillard his fatuous indifference was at last beginning to yield. A year ago he had shewn some appreciation of his brother’s work, by making an addition to the buildings in the second ward;[2094] and he had shewn his sense of the military importance of the place yet more significantly, by appointing Roger de Lacy as its commander. He now gathered up all his remaining forces—still, it seems, a formidable array[2095]—with the apparent intention of dislodging the French from Les Andelys. As Philip’s biographer remarks, however, John feared and hated the light; he resolved, according to his wont, upon a night attack; and even that attack he did not lead in person.[2096] He intrusted its command indeed to a far braver man than himself, but a man who was better fitted for action in the light of day than for such deeds of darkness as John delighted in. William the Marshal, the favourite comrade-in-arms of the younger King Henry, the faithful friend and servant of the elder one even unto death, the honoured minister of Richard, still clave to the last survivor of the house which he had loved so long and so well. To him John confided his plan for the relief of Les Andelys. The marshal was to lead a force of three hundred knights, three thousand mounted serving-men and four thousand foot, with a band of mercenaries under a chief called Lupicar,[2097] along the left bank of the Seine, and to fall under cover of darkness upon the French camp in the peninsula. Meanwhile seventy transport-vessels, constructed by Richard to serve either for sea or river-traffic, and as many more as could be collected, were to be laden with provisions for the besieged garrison of the Isle, and convoyed up the river by a flotilla of small war-ships, manned by pirates[2098] under a chief named Alan, and carrying, besides their own daring and reckless crews, a force of three thousand Flemings. Two hundred strokes of the oar, John reckoned, would bring these ships to the French pontoon; they must break it if they could; if not, they could at least co-operate with the land-forces under the Marshal in cutting off the northern division of the French army from its comrades and supplies on the left bank, and throw into the island-fort provisions enough to save it from the necessity of surrender till John himself should come to its relief.