John Lackland

by Kate Norgate

In September Philip recommenced hostilities with the seizure of Conches.[290] John, who had continued hovering about eastern Normandy until then, at once struck southward; from September 12 to 17 he was at Bourg-le-Roi in Maine.[291] This movement of John’s apparently drew Philip southward after him; the next place which the French king attacked was the Cenomannian fortress of Ballon, held for John by one of his father’s most devoted adherents, Geoffrey of Brullon. The castle was taken, and Philip proceeded to raze it. William des Roches, the constable of Britanny, protested against this as contrary to the agreement between Arthur and the king. Philip retorted that he should deal with his own conquests as he pleased, without regard to Arthur.[292] On that very night—it must have been September 17—William des Roches went to Bourg-le-Roi,[293] begged for a private interview with John, and undertook to make Arthur, Constance, and all Anjou, Maine and Poitou submit to him “so that all should be good friends together,” in return for an oath on John’s part that he would “do with them according to his (William’s) counsel.”[294] A written record of John’s promise to abide by the terms which William and other “lawful knights” of Normandy and Britanny—whom William was to choose—should arrange for peace between himself and his “very dear nephew Arthur,” “for the honour and advantage of us both,” was drawn up before witnesses on September 18 at Anvers-le-Hamon.[295]

It may have been to facilitate negotiations with the Bretons and Angevins that John had proceeded so far as Anvers, which lies in the south of Maine, close to the border of Anjou. We next find him overtaking Philip at the siege of Lavardin. Philip hereupon withdrew to Le Mans; but he had cut the ground from under his own feet; the garrison of Le Mans was under the orders of William des Roches, who had been appointed commandant there by Philip himself. John, too, was following close behind; and when he appeared before the city, Philip again beat a hasty retreat, while William des Roches brought Arthur and Constance in person to make their peace with John, and then opened the gates of Le Mans to the new allies. John, in anticipation of his triumph, had already summoned Almeric, the viscount of Thouars, who was acting as seneschal of Anjou and commandant of Chinon for Arthur, to come and submit to him at Le Mans. On the very day of John’s entry into the city, September 22, Almeric obeyed. Next day John proceeded to Chinon, where he installed Roger de Lacy as castellan in Almeric’s stead. With less than his usual caution, he let Arthur, Constance and their friends, including Almeric, stay behind at Le Mans. Some one had already suggested to Arthur a suspicion that his uncle intended to make him a prisoner; as soon, therefore, as John was out of the way at Chinon, the majority of the Bretons, with their young duke, his mother, and the viscount of Thouars, returned on September 24 to their old headquarters at Angers.[296] It was probably tidings of this which made John hasten back from Chinon to Le Mans, where he was again September 27 to 30; after that nothing is known of his movements till October 6, when he was at Saumur.[297] His appearance there is suggestive, for Saumur was the key of the Angevin border towards Poitou on the south and Touraine on the east. With Le Mans, Chinon and Saumur all in his hands, he had only to secure a firm foothold in Aquitaine, and then he might attack Anjou from three sides at once. But to attack it without such a foothold, and with only the small force which he had brought with him from Normandy,[298] would have been worse than useless. On October 8, therefore, John was once more at Le Mans, and thence he fell back upon Normandy.[299]

There was indeed another reason for his return. Cardinal Peter of Capua, who had at the beginning of the year negotiated a truce between Philip and Richard, was still at the French court. The truce had been made for three years; Richard’s death had of course put an abrupt end to it; but Peter was urgent that it should be renewed for its original term between Philip and John. Such a proposal implied that John was recognized at Rome as Richard’s lawful heir; it was therefore obviously politic for John to cherish such a valuable alliance by falling in with the cardinal’s endeavours after a pacification. Through Peter’s mediation a truce was made at the end of October. Its term was fixed for the ensuing S. Hilary’s Day;[300] but there was evidently a tacit understanding that it was to be the forerunner of a more lasting agreement.

1200

This truce set John free for a visit to Aquitaine. On November 8 he was at Niort, and in the beginning of December at Poitiers; by the middle of December he had returned to Normandy.[301] Meanwhile a question which had been pending for several years, as to the legality of Philip’s repudiation of his queen Ingebiorg and his subsequent union with Agnes of Merania, had been, in a council at Dijon on December 6, decided by Cardinal Peter against the king, and Peter had laid the royal domain of France under an interdict which was to take effect from January 15, 1200,[302] the second day after the expiration of the truce. With this prospect before his eyes, Philip dared not insult John as he had insulted him at their last meeting. It was with a very different proposal that he met him at the old trysting-place between Gaillon and Les Andelys. A project which had been mooted just twelve months before, for a family alliance to cement peace between the houses of France and Anjou, was now revived; it was proposed that Philip’s son Louis should marry John’s niece Blanche of Castille, and that John should furnish the bride with a dowry in Norman lands and English money.[303] The two kings “rushed into each other’s arms,” and renewed their truce till midsummer.[304]

While Eleanor went to Spain to fetch her granddaughter,[305] John seized his opportunity for a visit to England.[306] His first business there was to concert measures with the justiciar for raising the required sum of money. They decided that the taxes for the year should consist of a scutage of two marks on the knight’s fee and a payment of three shillings for “every working plough.”[307] John then went to York, where he had summoned the Scot king to meet him at the end of March. William, however, failed to appear.[308] During John’s stay at York a claim of exemption from the plough tax was laid before him by the heads of some of the great Cistercian houses in Yorkshire in behalf of their whole order; this led to a violent quarrel between them and the king, which was still unsettled when he returned to Normandy at the end of April.[309] Thither Blanche was brought to meet him, and on Ascension Day (May 18)[310] he and Philip, at a personal meeting on the border, made a definite treaty of peace. By that treaty Philip in so many words acknowledged John as “his brother Richard’s right heir,” and granted him, as such, the investiture of the whole Angevin dominions, with the exception of certain territories which John ceded to the crown of France. These were the Vexin, Auvergne, the greater part of the county of Evreux, and the lordships of Issoudun, Graçay, and Bourges. To the cession of the Vexin and of the chief border castles of the county of Evreux, as well as to the resignation of the Angevin claim upon Auvergne, Richard had been pledged by his treaty with Philip in 1195; Issoudun and Graçay had been restored to the English king by the same treaty, having been ceded by Richard to France in 1189.[311] Twenty thousand marks and the formal cession of all these territories—most, if not all, of which were already in Philip’s hands—was not too heavy a price to pay for the personal triumph and the political gain involved in Philip’s recognition of John as the lawful heir to Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine and Aquitaine, and also to the overlordship of Britanny; for not only was this last right distinctly conceded to him by Philip, but Arthur was then and there made to do homage to his uncle for his duchy[312] as soon as John himself had done homage to Philip for the whole continental heritage of the house of Anjou.[313] The marriage of Louis and Blanche took place four days later.[314]

John now set out upon a sort of triumphal progress southward, to take seisin of all his dominions. On June 18 he reached Angers, where he stayed four days and took a hundred and fifty hostages as security for the loyalty of the citizens.[315] At the end of June he was at Tours, and early in July at Poitiers, whence he proceeded into Gascony; on the 14th he was welcomed at Bordeaux by the archbishop and the barons of the land.[316] He immediately secured the help of the Gascon primate in a scheme which he had been cherishing for some months past for getting rid of the wife to whom he had been married for eleven years, Isabel of Gloucester. The papal legate who in 1189 had revoked the sentence passed by Archbishop Baldwin upon John and Isabel had done so on the ground that, since John had appealed to Rome, his marriage must be recognized as lawful, pending the result of the appeal. A decision of the Pope on that appeal would of course have either annulled the marriage or made it indissoluble; but it seems that no such decision had ever been given, because the appeal had never been prosecuted. The marriage was therefore still voidable. At the close of 1199 John called upon the Norman bishops to declare it void, and they obeyed him.[317] He now, it seems, laid the case before the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishop of Poitiers and Saintes; and their decision was in accord with that of their Norman brethren.[318] On the bare question—which was doubtless all that John put before them—whether a marriage between cousins in the fourth degree was lawful without a dispensation, indeed, no other decision was possible according to the letter of the canon law. The Pope, however, when the matter came to his knowledge, seems to have felt that in this particular case adhesion to the letter of the law involved a violation of its spirit, and to have been extremely angry with John’s episcopal tools as well as with John himself.[319] He had, however, no ground for interfering in the matter except on an appeal from Isabel; and Isabel did not appeal.[320] There is every reason to think—and certainly no reason to wonder—that the removal of the matrimonial yoke was as welcome to her as to John, and that their divorce was in fact, like that of Louis VII. and Eleanor, a separation by mutual consent.

John had already chosen another heiress to take Isabel’s place. One of the most important, and also most troublesome, feudataries of the duchy of Aquitaine was Ademar, count of Angoulême. It was in a quarrel with him and his half-brother, the viscount of Limoges, that Richard Cœur-de-Lion had met his death, which Richard’s son had avenged by slaying the viscount.[321] The feud between the houses of Angoulême and Limoges thus threatened to be a considerable hindrance to Richard’s successor in his efforts to secure a hold upon his southern duchy. How formidable Ademar and his nephew, the new viscount of Limoges, had already made themselves is shown by the insertion in the treaty between John and Philip of a special provision that John should “receive their homage and grant them their rights.”[322] It is said to have been Philip who counselled John to secure the fidelity of Ademar of Angoulême in another way, by taking to wife Ademar’s only child.[323] Philip’s motives for giving the advice, and John’s motives for following it, are alike obscure. Nineteen 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 late 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 the county of La Marche, 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 Jerusalem and Cyprus. The dispute between Matilda and her uncle had been settled by the betrothal of her son—another Hugh the Brown—to Ademar’s daughter and heiress, Isabel.[324] A marriage between John and this little Isabel of Angoulême, therefore, would be certain to provoke the bitter resentment of the whole Lusignan family. On the other hand, it would provoke their resentment against Isabel’s father as well as against her husband, and thus destroy the chance of a coalition of Angoulême and La Marche against their common overlord. It is not impossible that for John, who gambled in politics as habitually as he did at the game of “tables,” the very wantonness of the scheme and the hazards attendant upon it may have only added to its attractions. But his subsequent conduct towards the Lusignans suggests the idea that he may have had a deeper motive, a deliberate purpose of goading them into some outrageous course of action which might enable him to recover La Marche and ruin them completely, or even drive them altogether out of the land.

On his way to Poitou John issued from Chinon, on June 25, a summons to Ademar of Angoulême and Guy of Limoges to come and perform their homage on July 5 at Lusignan,[325] the ancestral home of Hugh the Brown. There Hugh and Matilda were bringing up their intended daughter-in-law in company with her boy bridegroom, and there John was no doubt, at the moment, sure of a welcome, for Hugh and his brother Ralf had become his liegemen at Caen on January 28.[326] Thus, in all likelihood, it was under Hugh’s very roof, and as sharers in his hospitality, that the king of England and the count of Angoulême laid their plot for robbing Hugh’s son of his plighted bride and his promised heritage. John indeed, as soon as his divorce was ratified by the southern bishops, despatched, or gave out that he had despatched, an embassy to Portugal with instructions to ask for the hand of a daughter of the Portuguese king;[327] but their mission was a mere blind to divert suspicion till Ademar should have succeeded in getting his child back into his own hands. The poor little betrothed—she was only about twelve years old[328]—was literally stolen by her father,[329] and carried off by him to his capital city. There her royal suitor met them, and on August 24 the marriage ceremony was performed by the archbishop of Bordeaux.[330] The newly married couple immediately afterwards set out for the north; at the beginning of October they went to England, and on the 8th they were crowned together at Westminster.[331]

1200–1201