1208
Thus for the next eight years the vast diocese of York was practically without a chief pastor and the province without a metropolitan, while the temporalities of the see were in the hand of the king. As for Canterbury, John had answered the Pope’s request that he would ratify the election of Stephen Langton by a flat refusal to accept as primate a man of whom he declared that he “knew nothing, save that he had dwelt much among his enemies”;[535] and when on June 17 Stephen was consecrated by Innocent,[536] the king seized the estates of the Canterbury chapter, drove the monks into exile,[537] and proclaimed that any one who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy.[538] In August Innocent bade the bishops of London, Ely and Worcester threaten the king, if he continued obstinate, with an interdict upon his realm, and hinted that this might be followed by a papal excommunication of John himself.[539] Negotiations went on throughout the winter, but without result,[540] and on Passion Sunday, March 23, or Monday, March 24, 1208, the interdict was proclaimed.[541] It seems that notice of the intended date of its publication was given about a week before, and that the king at first answered this notice by ordering all the property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be confiscated on Monday, March 24; but that he immediately afterwards decided to anticipate, instead of returning, the blow, and caused the confiscation to be begun at once.[542] For him the opportunity was a golden one. The interdict enabled him to put the whole body of the clergy in a dilemma from which there was no escape. They held their property—thus he evidently argued—on condition of performing certain functions: if they ceased from those functions, their property was forfeit, just as that of a layman was forfeit if he withheld the service with which it was charged. The logical consequence in either case—from John’s point of view—was confiscation; difficult and dangerous to enforce on a wide scale against laymen, but easy and safe when the victims were clergy. The barons made no objection to a proceeding which would fill the king’s coffers without drawing a single penny from their own; the chief justiciar himself, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, earl of Essex, had no scruple in acting as custos for the Crown of all the Church property on his own estates, which were scattered through thirty-one counties, and also of the revenues and goods of the Templars throughout all England.[543] The spoliation was indeed effected with a brutal violence which would have been impossible had there been any strong feeling against it among the influential classes of the laity,[544] and which so far outran the intentions of the king that on April 11 he issued a proclamation ordering that any man caught doing or even speaking evil to a monk or a clerk, “contrary to our peace,” should be hanged upon the nearest oak.[545] The clergy, like the Jews, were to be ill-treated by no one save the king himself. Many of them made a compromise with their spoiler; within a very few weeks five bishops, three cathedral chapters, the prior of the Hospitallers, and the heads of fourteen important monasteries, besides sundry individual priests, undertook to farm their own benefices and other property for the king.[546] The Cistercians, asserting that the privileges of their order exempted them from interdict, ceased from performing the offices of religion for a few days only, and then resumed them as usual;[547] whereupon their possessions, which had been seized like those of the other orders, were restored to them on April 4.[548]
1209
At the same time John despatched an envoy to Rome proposing terms on which he professed himself willing to let Stephen take possession of his see; and he contrived to spin out the negotiations for six months before Innocent discovered that the terms offered were merely a device for wasting time, and that the king had never intended to fulfil them.[549] On January 12, 1209, the Pope informed the bishops of London, Ely and Worcester that he had written to John a letter of which he sent them a copy, and bade them excommunicate the king if he did not repent within three months after its receipt.[550] John upon this began a fresh series of negotiations, which kept the three bishops—who had apparently gone over sea immediately after publishing the interdict—flitting to and fro between the continent and England, without any result, for nine more months. In October they finally withdrew, but without publishing the excommunication; and by the end of the year all possibility of its publication in England had vanished, for every English bishop had fled save two, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, and John de Grey, bishop of Norwich, both of whom were creatures of the king; John de Grey, moreover, was now justiciar in Ireland, and the Poitevin Peter des Roches was thus left sole representative of the episcopal order in England.[551]
1208–09
It was John’s hour of triumph, not over the clergy alone, but over all his subjects and vassals within the four seas of Britain. The action of the Pope and the inaction of the barons had opened a way for him to make himself “King of England” in his own sense of the words. To all outward seeming his whole time, since his return from the continent, had been devoted to mere amusement and self-indulgence. He “haunted woods and streams, and greatly did he delight in the pleasure of them.”[552] When he was not thus chasing the beasts of the forest, his yet more relentless pursuit of other prey was making havoc of the domestic peace, and rousing against him the deadly hatred, of some of the greatest of his barons.[553] But their hatred was futile; they were paralyzed partly by their own mutual jealousies, which the king was continually stirring up,[554] partly by the consequence of their selfish shortsightedness with regard to his persecution of the clergy. The interdict had placed one whole estate of the realm at John’s mercy; and the laity, having failed at the critical moment to make common cause with their clerical brethren, now found themselves in their turn without a support against his tyranny. His consciousness of power broke out in the strangest freaks of wantonness; in causing the Michaelmas session of the Exchequer to be held at Northampton instead of London, “out of hatred to the Londoners”;[555] in forbidding the capture of birds all over England;[556] in ordering that throughout the Forest districts the hedges should be fired and the ditches made by the people to protect their fields should be levelled, “so that, while men starved, the beasts might fatten upon the crops and fruits.”[557] It showed itself too in acts of graver political significance. A series of orders to the bailiffs of the coast towns for the equipment and mustering of their ships and the seizure of foreign vessels, issued in the spring and summer of 1208, indicates that John was then either meditating another expedition over sea, or, more probably, expecting an attack from thence. The muster, originally fixed for Trinity Sunday, was postponed to S. Matthew’s day,[558] and the end of the matter was that John, finding he had no immediate need for the services of the fleet, “took occasion”—no doubt on pretext of some deficiency in the contingent due from them—“to oppress the mariners of the Cinque Ports with great and heavy affliction. Some he hanged; some he killed with the sword; many were imprisoned and loaded with irons”; the rest fled into exile, and it was only by giving him fines and hostages that they appeased his wrath and bought his leave to return to their homes.[559] The barons were again required to renew their homage; the demand was made literally at the sword’s point—for John’s lavish hospitality and largesse[560] filled his court with mercenaries who were quite ready to enforce his will in such a matter—and they were compelled either to submit to it, or to give their sons and kinsmen as hostages for their fidelity.[561] The king seemed indeed, as Matthew Paris says, to be courting the hatred of every class of his subjects.[562] But hate him as much as they might, they feared him yet more than they hated him; and “burdensome” as he was “to both rich and poor,”[563] when he summoned all the free tenants throughout the realm, of whatever condition, who were above the age of twelve years, to swear fealty in person to him and his infant heir in the autumn of 1209, rich and poor alike durst not do otherwise than obey him.[564]
1209
This ceremony took place at Marlborough in September,[565] just before the final rupture of the negotiations with Langton and the bishops. A few weeks earlier John had received the submission of the king of Scots. Twice or thrice in the last two years a visit of William the Lion to the English court had been projected.[566] It took place at length in the middle of April 1209 at Bolton, whence John and William proceeded together to Norham for a conference.[567] The shelter given in Scotland to some of the bishops and other persons who fled from John’s persecution in connection with the interdict[568] supplied the English king with a pretext for demanding, once for all, security for William’s loyalty. He bade him surrender either three castles on the border or his only son as a hostage. William refused to do either.[569] John, on returning to the south, summoned his host, and in July set out to take the three castles by force. The papal excommunication was hanging over his head, and its publication was hourly expected; his troops shrank alike from his leadership and from an encounter with the Scot king, who was considered “eminent for his piety,” the champion of the Church and the favourite of Heaven, while they, being under interdict, were virtually outcasts from the Christian fold. A dexterous renewal of negotiations with Innocent and Stephen, however, staved off the excommunication and prevented the threatened desertion of the English troops;[570] and on August 4 John was at Norham[571] at the head of a great host ready to do battle with the Scots. On hearing this, William “greatly feared his attack, knowing him to be given to every kind of cruelty; so he came to meet him and offered to treat for peace; but the king of the English flew into a rage and insulted him bitterly, reproaching him with having received his (John’s) fugitives and public enemies into his realm, and lent them countenance and help against him.” At last some “friends of both realms” arranged terms which pacified John and which William dared not refuse. He sent his son {Aug. 7}, not indeed as a hostage, but to do homage to the English king “for the aforesaid castles and other lands which he held”;[572] he undertook to pay John by instalments within the next two years fifteen thousand marks “to have his goodwill”; he gave hostages for the fulfilment of this undertaking; and he surrendered his two daughters to be kept in John’s custody as his wards and married at his pleasure.[573] According to Gervase of Canterbury, one of these ladies was to be married to John’s son;[574] one of his many illegitimate sons must be meant, for though John had now two sons by his queen, the elder of them was not yet two years old, while the younger of William’s daughters was thirteen at the least.[575] All that William obtained in return for these concessions was the freedom of the port of Berwick, and leave to pull down a castle which the bishop of Durham had built over against it.[576] Of his claim upon Cumberland and Westmorland nothing further was ever heard.
1199–1209
Two months later, Wales followed Scotland’s example. Over Wales, indeed, John’s triumph was won without the trouble even of a military demonstration on his part. The anarchy of Wales had been growing worse and worse ever since the death of Henry II. Its danger for England lay mainly in the opportunities which it afforded to any of the English barons of the border who might be treasonably inclined, for making alliances with one or other of the warring Welsh princes, and thus securing for themselves a support which might enable them to set at defiance the authority of the English crown. John himself had held the position of a border baron for ten years, as earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan, and had used it for his own private ends as unscrupulously as any of his neighbours.[577] The familiarity with Welsh politics which he had thus acquired stood him in good stead when he became king. At his accession, a struggle which had been going on for two years between three rival claimants to the succession in South Wales, Griffith and Maelgwyn, sons of the late prince Rees ap Griffith, and Gwenwynwyn, son of Owen Cyveiliog, prince of Powys, had just ended in the triumph of Griffith, who, by the help of a force supplied to him by the English government, overcame both his rivals at the close of 1198. On Griffith’s death in 1200 Gwenwynwyn for a moment regained the ascendency in South Wales; but he found a new and formidable rival in the prince of North Wales, Llywelyn ap Jorwerth, who in a few years succeeded in reducing most of the South Welsh princes to dependence on himself.[578] Throughout these years John, amid all his political and military occupations on the continent, watched every vicissitude of the struggle in Wales, kept up constant relations with both parties, and balanced the one against the other[579] with a mingled unscrupulousness and dexterity for which even the Welshmen were scarcely a match, and which at last brought them all alike to his feet. In July 1202 Llywelyn promised to do homage to the English king as soon as the latter should return from over sea;[580] before October 15, 1204, he was betrothed to John’s illegitimate daughter Joan,[581] and in 1206 she became his wife.[582] In 1208 his rival Gwenwynwyn was in an English prison, whence he obtained his release by doing homage to John at Shrewsbury on October 8.[583] Llywelyn’s promised visit to the English court seems to have not yet taken place; but a year later, on the king’s return from the north, there befell, say the chroniclers, “what had never been heard of in times past: all the Welsh nobles”—that is, evidently, the princes of both North and South Wales—“came to him and did him homage,” not on the border, but in the heart of his own realm, at Woodstock,[584] on October 18 or 19, 1209.[585]