The return of the English embassy was followed by a letter from the commandant of Rouen—John’s “trusty and well-beloved” Peter of Préaux—informing the English king that “all the castles and towns from Bayeux to Anet” had promised Philip that they would surrender to him as soon as he was master of Rouen, an event which, Peter plainly hinted, was not likely to be long delayed.[441] This information about the western towns was probably incorrect, for it was on western Normandy that Philip made his next attack. John meanwhile had in January imposed a scutage of two marks and a half per shield throughout England, and, in addition, a tax of a seventh of moveables, which, though it fell upon all classes alike, the clergy included, he is said to have demanded expressly on the ground of the barons’ desertion of him in Normandy.[442] The hire of a mercenary force was of course the object to which the proceeds of both these taxes were destined; but they took time to collect, and John soon fell back upon a readier, though less trustworthy, resource, and summoned the feudal host of England to meet him at Portsmouth, seemingly in the first week of May. It gathered, however, so slowly that he was obliged to give up the expedition.[443] Philip was about this time besieging Falaise;[444] he won it, and went on in triumph to receive the surrender of Domfront, Séez, Lisieux, Caen, Bayeux, Coutances, Barfleur, and Cherbourg.[445] He was then joined by John’s late ally, the count of Boulogne, as well as by Guy of Thouars, the widower of Constance of Britanny; and these two, their forces swelled by a troop of mercenaries who had transferred their services from John to Philip after the surrender of Falaise, completed the conquest of south-western Normandy,[446] while the French king at last set his face towards Rouen. He was not called upon to besiege it, nor even to threaten it with a siege. On June 1 Peter de Préaux made in his own name, and in the names of the commandants of Arques and Verneuil, a truce with Philip, promising that these two fortresses and Rouen should surrender if not succoured within thirty days.[447] The three castellans sent notice of this arrangement to John, who, powerless and penniless as he was, scornfully bade them “look for no help from him, but do whatsoever seemed to them best.”[448] It seemed to them best not even to wait for the expiration of the truce; Rouen surrendered on June 24,[449] and in a few days Arques and Verneuil followed its example.[450]
Thus did Normandy forsake—as Anjou and Maine had already forsaken—the heir of its ancient rulers for the king of the French. Philip’s next undertaking, the conquest of Aquitaine, was likely to be considerably facilitated by the fact that there was no longer a third person who could claim to stand between him and his rival as lawful lady of the land; for Eleanor had died on April 1.[451] In the middle of August Philip marched upon Poitou. Robert of Turnham, John’s seneschal there, did what he could for its defence; but he was powerless against the indifference of the people and the active hostility of the Lusignans and William des Roches;[452] and in a few weeks the whole county, except La Rochelle, Niort, and Thouars, had submitted to the French king.[453] There, however, Philip’s progress ended. He could not touch the county of Angoulême, for it belonged not to John, but to John’s wife; while his very successes turned Gascony against him, for the Gascons were quick to perceive how much greater would be their chances of practical independence under a king who would henceforth be parted from them by the whole width of the Bay of Biscay, than under one whose territories now stretched without a break from the Channel to their own border. Nor had John failed to recognize that in this quarter lay his best hope—at the moment indeed his only hope—of checking Philip’s advance. He at once devoted twenty-eight thousand marks of the treasure which he was gathering in England to the hire of thirty thousand soldiers, who were to be enrolled for his service in Gascony by one Moreve, a brother of the archbishop of Bordeaux, in readiness to join the forces of the king himself whenever he should land on their coast.[454] From Poitiers, therefore, Philip returned to his own dominions, and no further military movement on either side was made throughout the winter.
1205
In the middle of January 1205 John called the bishops and barons of England to a council in London.[455] His nominal reason for so doing was that he feared Philip might attempt an invasion of England, and desired to concert measures for its defence; but it is clear that what he really dreaded and sought to guard against was not invasion, but treason. The precautions which he induced the council to support him in taking against the imaginary danger were, if insufficient to save him from the real one, at least as good a safeguard as could be contrived against it at the moment. The oath of fealty to the king was taken anew by all present, and afterwards re-administered throughout the country. “It was also decreed that, for the general defence of the realm and for the preservation of peace, a commune should be made throughout the kingdom, and that all men, from the greatest to the least, who were over twelve years of age, should swear to keep it firmly.” The ordinance to which they swore established constables in every shire; and in every hundred, city, and group of lesser townships, subordinate constables who were to lead the men of their respective “communes” to the muster whenever they were summoned by the chief constables, whose orders these local levies were to obey “for the defence of the realm and the preservation of peace against foreigners or against any other disturbers of the same”; and whosoever should neglect the summons was to be held guilty of high treason.[456] At the beginning of February John issued letters patent to the bailiffs of the east and south coast, giving orders that no ship or boat should be allowed to issue from or pass by the harbours under their jurisdiction, unless by special licence from him.[457] Besides the obvious purpose of hindering treasonable communications with his enemies on the continent, this order had probably another object; the vessels thus detained were most likely appropriated to the king’s service and made to form part of a fleet which he was gathering from various quarters[458] throughout the next two months. The want of confidence between king and barons was openly revealed in a council at Oxford, March 27 to 29; the barons made oath to John “that they would render him due obedience,” but John was first “compelled to swear that he would by their counsel maintain the rights of the kingdom inviolate, to the utmost of his power.”[459] On Palm Sunday, April 3, John issued letters patent from Winchester, ordering that in all the shires of England every nine knights should “find” a tenth, and that the knights thus provided should come to meet him in London three weeks after Easter (that is, on May 1), “ready to go in his service where he should bid them, and to be in his service in defence of the realm as much as might be needful.”[460] The muster seems, however, to have been postponed, possibly to await the result of an attempt which the king had been making in the field of diplomacy, under somewhat peculiar circumstances.
Of all John’s ministers, the one whom he most disliked and mistrusted was the one whose constitutional position made him absolutely irremoveable from the royal counsels—the archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter. That John’s suspicions of Hubert’s loyalty were unjust there can be no doubt; but there are not wanting indications that Hubert, whose temper was extremely masterful, and who for the six years preceding John’s accession to the throne had governed England for Richard practically at his own sole discretion, was inclined to press his views of policy upon Richard’s younger brother in a fashion more dictatorial than deferential, and to magnify his own office as chief adviser of the Crown, and his personal capabilities as a statesman and a diplomatist, with more emphasis than tact. Hubert had on several occasions tried to act as mediator between John and Philip, and his mediation had failed. In Lent 1205 John, while pushing on his military preparations in England, resolved to set on foot a new diplomatic negotiation with France which seems to have had a twofold object—first, to keep Philip occupied so as to hinder him, at least for a short time, from proceeding against the few fortresses north of the Dordogne which still held out for their Angevin lord;[461] and secondly, to make game of the archbishop of Canterbury. This latter object was to be attained by keeping the project a secret from Hubert, and carrying on the negotiations not only without his assistance or advice, but even without his knowledge. The envoys whom John selected for this mission were his vice-chancellor, Hugh of Wells, and Earl William the Marshal. Apparently it was given out that their journey to France was on business of their own; an assertion which in the Marshal’s case was true, though not the whole truth. When John had communicated to them his private instructions, William spoke: “Now, sire, listen to me. I am not sure of obtaining peace; and you see that my term of truce for my Norman land is nearly expired. Unless I do homage for it to the French king, I shall lose it; for I see no hope of recovering it otherwise. What am I to do?” “Save it for my service by doing the homage,” answered John. “I know you are too loyal to withdraw your heart’s homage from me, come what may, and that the more you possess to serve me with, the better will be your service.”[462] He seems to have given—though scarcely with equal willingness—a like permission to some of his other vassals who were in the same plight as the Marshal,[463] and who may perhaps have been allowed to accompany the latter partly for the sake of still further obscuring the main object of his mission.
The Marshal and the vice-chancellor found the French king at Compiègne, and communicated to him their errand from John. Philip seemed disposed to entertain John’s proposals—we are not told what they were—and promised to give them an answer a week later at Anet.[464] Meanwhile he reminded the Marshal that the time of their “covenant” was nearly up, adding, “You may find it the worse for you if you do not at once do me homage.” The Marshal assented and performed the homage then and there, apparently regarding it as a mere form necessary for the redemption of his plighted word, but destined to be rendered void by the peace which he trusted to conclude between the two sovereigns in a few days. By this time, however, Archbishop Hubert had discovered the fact of the secret negotiations, and was extremely wroth that the king should have “plotted such a plot” without consulting him. He therefore sent a certain Ralf of Ardenne to tell the count of Boulogne that the two English envoys had no power to conclude a treaty. Boulogne at once communicated this information to Philip, and when the meeting at Anet took place, the taunt was flung in the Marshal’s face, and the negotiations were broken off. Ralf of Ardenne had already hurried back to England and told John that the Marshal had done homage and fealty to the French king and made alliance with the latter against his own sovereign. When the unlucky envoys came home, they met with a sorry greeting. John at once charged the Marshal with having, “against him and for his damage,” sworn allegiance to his enemy of France. The Marshal denied the charge, and asserted that he had done only what John had given him leave to do. On this John, in his rage, practically denied his own words, and declared that “his barons and his men” should judge between him and the Marshal—a judgement which William retorted that he was quite ready to face.[465]
The fleet and the host were finally summoned to assemble at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide.[466] The land forces had probably received some increase by means of an order issued by the king on April 15 that, “for the good of his mother’s soul,” all prisoners, except those charged with treason, should be set at liberty.[467] No doubt every prisoner capable of bearing arms was, as he issued from confinement, made to take the oath of allegiance and enrolled for military service under the constable of his district. On the Tuesday in Whitsun week (May 31) John arrived at Porchester; there he stayed ten days, on the last five of which he made daily excursions to Portsmouth,[468] probably to watch the gathering of the fleet in its harbour.
It is doubtful how far the troops were aware of the king’s real purpose in calling them together. The whole country was in a state of excitement, hourly expecting an invasion. It was reported that the duke of Louvain, in return for the French king’s good offices in recovering for him from the count of Boulogne the share of the revenues of the latter county to which he was entitled in right of his wife, had done homage to Philip, and that the duke and the count had sworn in Philip’s presence to be ready, each at the other’s call, to proceed to England with all their forces and reclaim from John at the sword’s point the English lands of which their wives—the grand-daughters of King Stephen and Maud of Boulogne—had been disinherited by Henry II.; whereupon Philip had sworn that he himself would follow them with his host within a month after their landing in England.[469] John, in calling his people to arms, seems to have purposely expressed the object of the armament in general terms—“for the defence of the realm”—“for the king’s service”[470]; terms which did not necessarily imply that he wanted his men to do anything more than stand on the defensive, ready to meet the expected invasion. He probably suspected that had he at the outset demanded more than this, he would have met with a flat refusal in certain quarters; and the issue proved the suspicion to be correct. The rank and file of the host, indeed, were ready and willing not only for defence but for defiance, eager to carry the war into the enemy’s country before the enemy could set foot in their own. To them John, at this stage of his career, was still the “king of the English,” who had lost his continental possessions through the wiles of his foreign enemies and the disloyalty of his “French” subjects, and whom they, his faithful Englishmen, would gladly help to win those possessions back again. The heads of the baronage, however, and some at least of the innermost circle of the royal councillors, were of another mind. Those of the greater barons who had deserted or betrayed him in Normandy probably saw, or thought they saw, the possibility of serving two masters, one for their continental lands and the other for their English lands, and of profiting by this division of service to make themselves practically independent of both masters alike. This, indeed, was not a motive which could sway such a noble soul as William the Marshal; nor could it influence Hubert Walter, to whom the continuance or the severance of the connexion between England and the rest of the Angevin dominions made, either as an individual or as archbishop, no difference at all. Yet when the critical moment came, these two men, who a few weeks before had been in political as well as personal opposition to each other, forgot their rivalry and united all their influence to defeat the king’s project of an expedition over sea.
On one of those days of waiting at Porchester, while the host was gradually assembling, John, seated on the shore, with his court around him, called the Marshal to his presence and renewed his demand for “judgement” on the question of William’s alleged treason. William quietly repeated his former answer, that he had only acted upon the king’s own orders. “I deny it,” again said John. “You will gain nothing in the end; but I will bide my time; and meanwhile I will have you come with me to Poitou and fight for the recovery of my heritage against the king of France, to whom you have done homage.” The Marshal remonstrated; he could not fight against a man to whom he had done homage. On this John declared his treason to be manifest, and appealed to the judgement of the barons present. William faced them boldly, pointed to his own forehead, and said: “Sirs, look at me, for, by my faith! I am this day an example for you all. You hear what the king says; and what he proposes to do to me, that, and more also, will he do to every one of you, if he can get the upper hand.” The enraged king at these words called for instant judgement upon the speaker; but the barons “looked at each other and drew back.” “By God’s teeth!” swore John, “I see plainly that not one of my barons is with me in this; I must take counsel with my bachelors about this matter which is beginning to look so ugly”; and he withdrew to another place. The barons seemingly followed him, as did the “bachelors,” and the Marshal was left alone, save for two personal followers of his own. The bachelors as a body, when John appealed to them, gave it as their opinion that there could be no essoign for failing to serve the king on such an occasion as the present; but one of them, named Baldwin, added that there was in the whole assembly no man worthy to judge such a good knight as the Marshal, nor bold enough to undertake the proof (by ordeal of battle) of the charge brought against him by the king; and Baldwin’s remark “was pleasing to many.” Finding that neither baron nor knight would challenge the Marshal for him, John ended the scene by going to dinner; and after some further ineffectual endeavours to obtain a champion he let the matter drop, and began once more to treat the Marshal with civility, if not cordiality.[471]