John Lackland

by Kate Norgate

Other influences were working in the same direction. Even without the special warnings which he had received at Nottingham, John must have been well aware that he had, as Roger of Wendover says, “almost as many enemies as he had barons.”[770] The question was only how soon their silent hate would break out in open defiance, and whether he could once more terrify or beguile them into submission before the smouldering embers of their discontent were kindled into a general conflagration by Innocent’s anathema and Peter’s prophecy. On reaching London he addressed to all those whose fidelity he suspected a new demand for hostages, “that he might prove who would and who would not obey his orders.” The response showed that he was even yet stronger than he himself had dared to believe. From many of these men he had already had hostages in his keeping for years; several of them had suffered in their family relations a far deeper injury at his hands; yet once again, at his bidding, they gave up to him sons, nephews, kinsmen, “as many as he would, not daring to resist his commands.”[771] Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitz-Walter alone refused all purgation, and fled, the one to Scotland, the other to France; their castles were seized, their lands confiscated, and themselves outlawed.[772] With his own servants and clerks the king dealt in yet more summary fashion; those among them whom he suspected were arrested and cast into prison.[773] Fresh humiliations were heaped upon the clergy. The Cistercians are said to have been mulcted of twenty-two thousand pounds in punishment for the help which they were supposed to have given to the enemies of Raymond of Toulouse;[774] and all the English clergy, both regular and secular, were forced to set their hands to a deed whereby they renounced all pecuniary claims against the king, and declared that all the money which he had had from them since his accession was a free and voluntary gift.[775] On the other hand, John was taking some pains to conciliate the people. He checked the severity of the Forest administration. He forbade the extortions practised by his officers on merchants and pilgrims. “Moreover, he is said to have showed mercy on widows, and done what in him lay to promote peace in temporal affairs.” Sternness and conciliation alike did their work. Again “the land kept silence”;[776] and it seems that the first sound which broke the silence was a declaration of the barons in favour of the king.

Some time between the summer of 1212 and the spring of 1213 two remarkable letters were written by John, the one to his chief justiciar in Ireland, Bishop John of Norwich, the other to Earl William the Marshal.[777] Both letters deal with the same subjects, and they were evidently despatched both at once. The king greatly commends the bishop’s discretion in the matter of “the oath of fealty lately sworn to us by our barons of Ireland, for the greater safety of ourself and our realm,” for which, he says, he is sending letters of thanks to them all. He expresses the warmest gratitude to William the Marshal, “as their spokesman in this matter, and also as the one from whose suggestion and sole desire we doubt not this thing took its rise, and to whom we are indebted for the ready disposition and devotion of all the rest.” He states further that he is sending to the bishop, the earl, and the other barons of the March “copies of the letters patent which our magnates of England have drawn up for us,” and he requests that the barons of Ireland will “set their seals to letters of similar tenour, and send them to us.” Lastly, he alludes to some advice which the Marshal and the other lay barons in Ireland “have sent to us about making peace with the Church,” and desires that they will “provide, by the common counsel of our faithful subjects in those parts, a form whereby peace may be made sure without injury to our liberties and rights,” and transmit it to him. “See you to it,” he adds to the justiciar, “that this be done.”[778]

We can hardly doubt that there is some connexion between these letters and another yet more remarkable document, whose date must lie between Pandulf’s visit in August 1211 and the spring of 1213. This is a manifesto addressed “to all faithful Christians” by “the whole of the magnates of Ireland,” with William the Marshal and Meiler Fitz-Henry at their head, expressing their “grief and astonishment” that the Pope should propose to absolve the subjects of the king of England from their allegiance, and declaring their approval of John’s political conduct and their determination to “live and die with their king.”[779] This manifesto may have been drawn up when the barons of the Irish March, at the Marshal’s suggestion, renewed their fealty to John; or it may have been their answer to John’s request that they would set their hands to and transmit to him letters patent similar to those which, he says, had been “made for him” by the magnates of England. There is, indeed, another possible alternative. On more than one occasion, and by more than one chronicler, John is charged with forging letters and other like documents. The letter ascribed to the magnates of Ireland and the letters—of which nothing is now known—sent to them by John as having been issued by the magnates of England may therefore have been both alike forgeries. There is, however, nothing to indicate that such was the case. If it was not, then it seems that the barons of England, who in the autumn of 1212 were believed to be on the verge of rebellion or something worse, were yet so weak, as well as so false, that John could force from them a collective declaration in writing which, whatever its precise import may have been, was evidently a declaration in his interest and for his advantage; and that in the same crisis the barons of the Irish March, acting under the guidance of the noblest and wisest man in their whole order, ranged themselves boldly on the side of John against all his enemies. The king, to whom for a moment ruin had seemed so near that he himself gave way to despair, was within a few months, perhaps even a few weeks, outwardly more than ever supreme.

On the other hand, those same loyal barons in Ireland who seem to have so emphatically declared their resolve to stand by the king in resistance to the papal sentence of deposition had yet urged upon him the importance of procuring a withdrawal of that sentence by endeavouring to make peace with the Church. Whether they did, according to John’s request, draft a form of proposals to be laid before the Pope, there is nothing to show; but it is certain that in November John despatched to Rome four envoys charged to offer his acceptance of the terms which Pandulf and Durand had proposed fifteen months before.[780]

1212–13

John, in fact, knew well how unsubstantial his apparent supremacy was, and how hollow were the foundations on which it rested. He knew that if he wished to prevent the fulfilment of Peter’s prophecy, he must now disarm once for all, and secure permanently for his own interest, some one at least of the various enemies, or groups of enemies, against whom he had been struggling for six years at such overwhelming odds. By the end of 1212 the signs of the times were beginning to point out who this one must be; by the early spring of 1213 there could no longer be any doubt on the point. The fortunes of war in Germany and in southern Gaul had shattered John’s hopes of crushing Innocent and Philip Augustus both at once. In Aquitaine Simon de Montfort and his “crusaders” were gradually winning their way against the Albigenses, and Raymond of Toulouse was practically ruined. In Germany the young King Frederic of Sicily had at the Pope’s instigation been elected to the empire in Otto’s stead. Otto sought to regain his footing in the country by marrying the daughter of his former rival, {August} Duke Philip of Suabia; but the bride died a few days after her marriage;[781] and in November (1212) the political league which Innocent was building up against Otto and John was completed by a treaty of alliance between Frederic and Philip Augustus.[782] Triumphant everywhere on the continent, Innocent resolved to make an end of matters with John. In the winter of 1212 Stephen Langton and the bishops of Ely and London carried to Rome in person their complaints against their sovereign, and their entreaties that such a state of things should be suffered to continue no longer. In January 1213 they returned to the French court accompanied by Pandulf, and bringing with them a letter from the Pope to the French king.[783] Innocent in this letter solemnly laid upon Philip, for his soul’s health, the task of expelling the English king from his realm, and bade him assume in John’s stead the sovereignty of England for himself and his heirs for ever.[784] It is said that the Pope wrote at the same time to the other sovereigns and princes of Europe, bidding them join under Philip’s leadership in a sort of crusade against John, and granting to all who should take part in this expedition the same privileges, temporal and spiritual, which were conferred on pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre.[785]

These letters and the papal decree for John’s deposition were publicly read to the French bishops, clergy and people in a council assembled for that purpose at Soissons on the Monday in Holy Week, April 8.[786] It was no new idea that the papal mandate suggested to Philip Augustus. For a whole year at least he had been contemplating the conquest of England and the establishment of his eldest son, Louis, upon its throne; in April 1212 Louis had already arranged the terms on which he would receive the homage of the English barons and the political relation in which he was to stand towards his father after his own coronation in England.[787] To Philip and Louis the Pope’s commission was merely the signal that their longed-for hour had come. “Then the king of the French, hearing and receiving the thing which he had long desired, girded himself up for the fight,” and bade all his men, on pain of “culvertage,” be ready to meet him at Rouen on April 21, the first Sunday after Easter;[788] and ships, victuals, arms and men were rapidly gathered together in answer to his call.[789]

1213

Still more prompt and vigorous were John’s preparations for defence. He seems to have begun by ordering that all English ships should return to the ports to which they severally belonged not later than the first Sunday in Lent, March 3. On that day he despatched writs to the bailiffs of the seaport towns, bidding them make out a list of the vessels which they found in their respective ports capable of carrying six horses or more, and direct the captains and owners of all such vessels, in his name, to bring them to Portsmouth at Mid-Lent (March 21), “well manned with good and brave mariners, well armed, who shall go on our service at our expense.”[790] He next bade the sheriffs summon all earls, barons, knights, freemen and sergeants, whosoever they were and of whomsoever they held, who ought to have arms or could get them, and who had done him homage and fealty, to the intent that, “as they love us and themselves and all that is theirs, they be at Dover at the close of Easter next, well prepared with horses and arms and with all their might to defend our head, and their own heads, and the land of England. And let no man who can bear arms stay behind, on pain of culvertage and perpetual servitude; and let each man follow his own lord; and let those who have no land and can carry arms come thither to take our pay.” Each sheriff was to see that all sales of victuals and all markets within his sheriffdom “followed the host,” and that none were held elsewhere within his jurisdiction. He himself was to come to the muster “in force, with horses and arms,” and to bring his roll, whereby the king might be certified who had obeyed his summons and who had stayed behind.[791]

England responded as quickly and readily as France to the call of her king; the threat of “culvertage” seems to have acted upon the Englishmen of John’s day as the threat of being accounted “nithing” had acted upon their forefathers in the days of William Rufus and Henry I.; they came together at the appointed places—Dover, Faversham and Ipswich—in such crowds that in a few days, despite John’s precautions, the supply of food became insufficient, and the marshals of the host found it needful to dismiss the greater part of the light-armed troops, retaining only the knights, sergeants and better-armed freemen, with the cross-bowmen and archers. The picked body thus left, which was finally reviewed by the king on Barham Down, near Canterbury, {May 4–6} was still so numerous that a patriotic chronicler declares, “If they had been all of one heart and mind for king and country, there was no prince under heaven against whom they could not have defended the realm of England.”[792] How many of the barons in the host had come to it with the intention of going over to Philip as soon as he landed, it is useless to inquire; perhaps the only one whom we can with full confidence acquit of any such suspicion is William the Marshal.[793] The king’s plan, however, was that his fleet should intercept the invaders and “drown them in the sea before ever they could set foot on the land”; and as his ships were more numerous than Philip’s, the plan had a good chance of success.[794]