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The truth of Longchamp’s assertion that John was “endeavouring to usurp the kingdom for himself” was soon made evident. Just before Christmas Philip Augustus of France came home from Acre. After a vain attempt to entrap the seneschal of Normandy into surrendering some of the border fortresses of the duchy to him, he opened negotiations for Richard’s damage in a more likely quarter; he invited John to come over and speak with him immediately, proposing to put him in possession of “all the lands of England and Normandy on this (i.e. the French) side of the sea,” on one condition, that he should marry the bride whom Richard had refused, Philip’s sister Adela.[178] To this condition John’s existing marriage was a bar, but not an insuperable one; it would be easy for him to divorce Isabel on the plea of consanguinity if he were so minded. He responded eagerly to Philip’s invitation, and was on the point of sailing from Southampton for France, when his plans were upset by his mother’s landing at Portsmouth on February 11.[179] The French king’s treachery had come to Eleanor’s knowledge, and she had hastened back to England to do what lay in her power for the protection of her elder son’s interests. The justiciars, who seem to have already had their suspicions of John’s loyalty, rallied round her at once. She was in fact the only person whose right to represent the absent king was treated by all parties as indisputable, although she had never held any formal commission as regent. She and the justiciars conjointly forbade John to leave the country, threatening that if he did so they would seize all his lands for the Crown.[180] For a while John hesitated, or affected to hesitate; he had indeed at least two other secret negotiations on hand beside that with France, and he was probably waiting to see which of the three most required his personal superintendence, or was likely to prove most profitable. Another proposition besides Philip’s had come to him from over sea: Longchamp had offered to give him five hundred pounds if he would get him reinstated as chief justiciar of England.[181] John cared very little who bore the title of justiciar, if he could secure the power for himself; his main object in England was to gain possession of the royal castles; with these in his hands, he could set any justiciar at defiance. The arrangement made in the previous July had been terminated by the chancellor’s fall, and the castles of Nottingham and Tickhill had therefore, in accordance with the last clause of the July agreement, been restored in October to John. The very rash project of placing all the royal castles under John’s control, said to have been mooted in London at the same time, had evidently not been carried into effect;[182] but John himself had never lost sight of it, and, as a chronicler says, “he did what he could” towards its realization. He began with two of the most important fortresses near the capital, Windsor and Wallingford. He dealt secretly with their commanding officers, so that they were delivered into his hands and filled with liegemen of his own.[183] This would be easy to manage in the case of Wallingford, which stood within an “honour” belonging to John himself. The custody of Windsor castle seems to have been, after the chancellor’s fall, entrusted for a time to the bishop of Durham, Hugh of Puiset,[184] a near kinsman of the royal house. In spite of the fact that Hugh was under sentence of excommunication from his metropolitan, Geoffrey of York, John had chosen to spend the Christmas of 1191 with him at Howden; thereby of course rendering himself, in Geoffrey’s estimation at least, ipso facto excommunicate likewise, till he made satisfaction for his offence.[185] Hugh of Durham had once hoped himself to supersede Longchamp as chief justiciar, and it is perhaps not too much to suspect that John may have so wrought upon the old bishop’s jealousy of Walter of Rouen as to induce him to connive at a proceeding on the part of his representatives at Windsor which would more than compensate his wily young cousin for the temporary ecclesiastical disgrace brought upon him by that otherwise unaccountable Christmas visit.
The actual transfer of these two castles to John probably did not take place till after a council held at Windsor by the queen-mother and the justiciars, towards the end of February or beginning of March. This council was followed by another at Oxford. After Mid-Lent (March 12) a third council was called, to meet this time in London, and for the express purpose of “speaking with Count John about his seizure of the castles.”[186] John, however, had taken care that another matter should come up for discussion first. He had answered Longchamp’s proposal by bidding him come over and try his luck. Thus the first piece of business with which the council had to deal was a demand from the chancellor, who had just landed at Dover, for a trial in the Curia Regis of the charges on which he had been deposed. Eleanor inclined to grant the demand. One contemporary says that Longchamp had bribed her. In any case she probably knew, or suspected, that Longchamp now had John at his back; she certainly knew in what regard he was held by Richard; and she urged, with considerable reason, that his deprivation must be displeasing to the king, if it were not justified by process of law. The justiciars and the barons, however, represented the chancellor’s misdoings in such glaring colours that she was reduced to silence.[187] But she was evidently not willing to join the justiciars in driving William out of the country; and in the face of her reluctance the justiciars dared not act without John. He was at Wallingford, “laughing at their conventicles.” Messenger after messenger was sent to him with respectful entreaties that he would come to the council and lend it his aid in dealing with the chancellor. He took the matter very composedly, letting them all go on begging and praying till they had humbled themselves enough to satisfy him and he had got his final answer ready for every contingency; then he went to London. The council, originally summoned to remonstrate with him for his misconduct, now practically surrendered itself wholly to his guidance. Of the castles not a word was said; the one subject of discussion was the chancellor. All were agreed in desiring his expulsion, if only the count would declare himself of the same mind. The count told them his mind with unexpected plainness. “This chancellor will neither fear the threats nor beg the favour of any one of you, nor of all of you put together, if he can but get me for his friend. Within the next seven days he is going to give me seven hundred pounds, if I meddle not between him and you. You see that I want money; I have said enough for wise men to understand”—and therewith he left them.[188] The justiciars saw that unless they could outbid the chancellor, their own fate was sealed. As a last resource, “it was agreed that they should give him or lend him some money, but not of their own; all fell upon the treasury of the absent king.” John’s greed was satisfied by a gift, or a loan, out of the exchequer; when this was safe in his hands, he gave the justiciars his written sanction to their intended proceedings against the chancellor;[189] they ordered William to quit the country, and he had no choice but to obey. They had, however, purchased his expulsion at a ruinous cost to themselves; its real price was of course not the few hundreds of which they had robbed the exchequer for John’s benefit, but their own independence. John had outwitted them completely, and they had practically confessed themselves to be at his mercy. Before the council broke up, every member of it, including the queen-mother, took another oath of fealty “against all men” to the king “and to his heir”—in other words, to John himself.[190]
1193
John’s obvious policy now was to keep still and let things remain as they were till there should come some definite tidings of Richard. For nine months all parties were quiescent. Then, on December 28, the Emperor wrote to Philip of France the news of Richard’s capture. If the messenger who brought the letter was “welcome above gold and topaze”[191] to Philip, no less welcome to John was the messenger whom Philip immediately despatched to carry the news to England. John hurried over to Normandy, where the seneschal and barons of the duchy met him with a request that he would join them in a council at Alençon to deliberate “touching the king’s affairs, and his release.” John’s answer was at least frank: “If ye will acknowledge me as your lord and swear me fealty, I will come with you and will be your defender against the king of France; but if not, I will not come.”[192] The Normans refused thus to betray their captive sovereign; whereupon John proceeded to the court of France. There an agreement was drawn up, to which the count swore in person and the French king by proxy, and which curiously illustrates their mutual distrust and their common dread of Richard. It provided that in the event of John’s succession, he should cede the Vexin to France, and should hold the rest of the Norman and Angevin dominions as his forefathers had held them, with the exception of the city of Tours and certain small underfiefs, concerning which special provisions were made, evidently with a view to securing the co-operation of their holders against Richard. On the other hand, John promised to accept no offer of peace from Richard without Philip’s consent, and Philip promised to make no peace with Richard unless the latter would accept certain conditions laid down in behalf of John. These conditions were that John should not be disseised of any lands which he held at the time of the treaty; that if summoned to trial by Richard, he should always be allowed to appear by proxy; and that he should not be held liable to personal service in Richard’s host. After sealing this document in Paris, in January 1193,[193] John hurried back to England and set to work secretly to stir up the Welsh and the Scots, hoping with their support to effect a junction with a body of Flemings who were to come over in a fleet prepared by Philip at Wissant.
The Scot king rejected John’s overtures; but a troop of Welsh were, as usual, ready to join in any rising against the king of England.[194] With these Welshmen, and “many foreigners” whom he had brought with him from France, John secured himself at Wallingford and Windsor. Then he proceeded to London, told the justiciars that Richard was dead, and bade them deliver up the kingdom and make its people swear fealty to himself. They refused; he withdrew in a rage, and both parties prepared for war.[195] The justiciars organized their forces so quickly and so well that when the French fleet arrived, just before Easter, it found the coast so strongly guarded that no landing was possible. John meanwhile had openly fortified his castles, and his Welshmen were ravaging the country between Kingston and Windsor when the justiciars laid siege to the latter fortress.[196] This siege, and that of Tickhill, which was undertaken by Archbishop Geoffrey of York and Bishop Hugh of Durham, were in progress when on April 20 Hubert Walter, the bishop of Salisbury, landed in England.[197] Hubert had come direct from the captive king, and it was now useless for John to pretend any longer that Richard was dead. On the other hand, Hubert knew the prospect of Richard’s release to be still so remote and so uncertain that he deemed it highly imprudent to push matters to extremity with John. He therefore, although both Windsor and Tickhill were on the verge of surrender, persuaded the justiciars to make a truce whose terms were on the whole favourable to the count of Mortain. The castles of Tickhill and Nottingham were left in John’s hands; those of Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak were surrendered by him, to be given over to the custody of Queen Eleanor and other persons named, on the express understanding that unless Richard should reach home in the meanwhile, they were to be restored to John at the expiration of the truce, which was fixed for Michaelmas, or, according to another account, All Saints’ Day.[198]
The immediate object of the justiciars and the queen-mother in making this truce was to gain John’s co-operation in their measures for raising the king’s ransom. Considering how large a portion of the kingdom was held by John in what may almost be called absolute property, it is obvious that a refusal on his part to bear his share of the burden would make a serious difference in the result of their efforts. It appears that John undertook to raise from his own territories a certain sum for his brother’s ransom, that he confirmed this undertaking by an oath, and that he put it on record in writing.[199] He had, however, taken no steps towards its execution when at the beginning of July a warning reached him from Philip Augustus—“Take care of yourself, for the devil is loosed!”—which meant that the terms of Richard’s release had been finally agreed upon between Richard and the Emperor on June 29. John immediately hurried over to France, to shelter himself under Philip’s wing against the coming storm, as was thought in England;[200] more probably to keep a watch upon Philip and take care that he should not break his promises as to the conditions of peace with Richard. The two allies could have no confidence in each other, and they seem to have been both almost ridiculously afraid of the captive Lion-heart. He, however, was at the moment equally afraid of them, and not without good reason. Three months before he had complained bitterly to the first messengers from England who reached him in his prison of the treachery and ingratitude of John. “Yet,” he added, “my brother is not a man to win lands for himself by force, if there be any one who will oppose him with another force, however slight.”[201] The words were true; and no less true was the implication underlying the words. Of John as an open enemy Richard could afford to be contemptuous; of John’s capacity for underhand mischief, especially in conjunction with Philip, he was in such fear that no sooner was his treaty with the Emperor signed than he despatched his chancellor and three other envoys to France with orders to make with the French king “a peace of some sort.”[202] The envoys executed their commission literally, by accepting in Richard’s name the terms which were dictated to them by Philip with John at his side. These included the cession by Richard to Philip of the places taken by the French king during his late campaign in Normandy; the ratification of the arrangements made by Philip and John for certain of their partisans; and the payment to Philip of twenty thousand marks, for which four castles were given to him in pledge. “Touching Count John,” the treaty ran, “thus shall it be: If the men of the king of England can prove in the court of the king of France that the same John has sworn, and given a written promise, to furnish money for the English king’s ransom, he, John, shall be held bound to pay it; and he shall hold all his lands, on both sides of the sea, as freely as he held them before his brother the king of England set out on his journey over sea; only he shall be free from the oath which he then swore of not setting foot in England; and of this the English king shall give him security by himself, and by the barons and prelates of his realm, and by the king of France. If, however, Count John shall choose to deny that those letters are his, or that he swore to do that thing, the English king’s men shall prove sufficiently, by fitting witnesses, in the French king’s court, that he did swear to procure money for the English king’s ransom. And if it shall be proved, as hath been said, that he did swear to do this, or if he shall fail to meet the charge, the king of France shall not concern himself with Count John, if he should choose to accept peace for his lands aforesaid.”[203]
1193–1194
This treaty was drawn up at Nantes on July 9.[204] John at once returned to Normandy and there took an oath of liege homage to his brother; whereupon Richard ordered all the castles of John’s honours to be restored to him, on both sides of the sea. “But the keepers thereof would not give up any castle to him” on the strength of this order.[205] John in a rage went back to France, and Philip immediately gave him the custody of two Norman castles, Driencourt and Arques, which by the recent treaty had been intrusted to the archbishop of Reims in pledge for the twenty thousand marks promised to Philip by Richard.[206] At Christmas the two allies made a last desperate effort to prevent the “devil” from being “loosed.” They offered the Emperor three alternatives: either Philip would give him fifty thousand marks, and John would give him thirty thousand, if he would keep Richard prisoner until the following Michaelmas (1194); or the two between them would pay him a thousand pounds a month so long as he kept Richard in captivity; or Philip would give him a hundred thousand marks and John fifty thousand, if he would either detain Richard for another twelvemonth, or deliver him up into their hands. “Behold how they loved him!” says a contemporary writer.[207] A hundred and fifty thousand marks was the ransom which had been agreed upon between Henry VI. and Richard, and the one question which troubled Henry was whether he had a better chance of actually getting that sum from Richard or from his enemies. He unblushingly stated this fact to Richard himself, and on February 2, 1194, showed him the letters of Philip and John. Richard appealed to the German princes who had witnessed his treaty with Henry, and by promises of liberal revenues to be granted to them from England induced them to take his part and insist upon Henry’s fulfilling his agreement. On February 4 the English king was set at liberty, and a joint letter from the Emperor and the nobles of his realm was despatched to Philip and John, bidding them restore to Richard all that they had taken from him during his captivity, and threatening that if they failed to do so, the writers would do their utmost to compel them.[208]
1194