John Lackland

by Kate Norgate

The king was then at Winchester; he had left Windsor on the night of the 25th.[1054] Illness—seemingly a severe attack of gout—had made him unable to move sooner, and the barons had taken advantage of his physical helplessness to heap upon him every insult in their power. One day the twenty-five required his presence to confirm a judgement in the Curia Regis; he was in bed, unable to set a foot to the ground, so he sent them word that they must come and deliver the judgement in his chamber, as he could not go to them. They “answered that they would not go, for it would be against their right; but if he could not walk, he must cause himself to be carried.” He did so, and when he was brought into their presence “they did not rise to meet him, for it was their saying that if they had risen, they should have done contrary to their right.”[1055] This scene probably occurred in connexion with one of the cases dealt with in the fifty-second article of the Charter, the cases of persons who were, or asserted that they were, deprived of their lands, castles, privileges or rights by an arbitrary act of John or of his predecessors, without judgement of their peers. Some of these cases, in which there was no doubt about the circumstances of the deprivation, were settled without delay, and immediate restitution was made to the claimants by the Crown.[1056] But there were others which required investigation. Such was the claim of the earl of Essex to the custody of the Tower of London.[1057] The chief justiciar of England had been recognized as entitled by virtue of his office to the custody of the Tower ever since the accession of Henry II.; but Henry’s mother, the Empress Maud, had granted it by charter to Geoffrey de Mandeville and his heirs;[1058] and it was now claimed as an hereditary right by the earl of Essex, as eldest son of the late justiciar Geoffrey Fitz-Peter by his marriage with Beatrice de Say, on whom the representation of the Mandeville family had devolved.[1059] This matter was too delicate and too important to be decided in haste; pending its decision, the Tower was temporarily placed in neutral hands, the hands of the archbishop of Canterbury,[1060] to whom Rochester castle was at the same time restored.[1061] Finally, John proposed that the other questions in dispute between himself and individual barons should all be determined at Westminster on July 16. This being agreed, the barons withdrew to London[1062] and the king to Winchester, whence at the beginning of July he proceeded into Wiltshire.[1063]

King and barons alike knew that the “peace” had been made only to be broken. The barons were the first to break it. Some of those “Northerners” from beyond the Humber by whom the strife had been originally begun had actually left Runnimead in the middle of the conference, and were now openly preparing for war, on the pretext that they “had not been present” at the settlement.[1064] Their southern allies were really doing the same; only they veiled their preparations under the guise of a tournament to be held, ostensibly in celebration of the peace, at Stamford on July 6. Robert Fitz-Walter and his companions, however, quickly discovered that if they wished to keep their hold upon London they must not venture far away from the city; they therefore postponed the tournament for a week, and transferred it from Stamford to Staines. The victor’s prize was to be “a bear, which a lady was going to send.”[1065] Meanwhile the new sheriffs—appointed since the peace, and specially charged to enforce its provisions—were meeting with a very rough reception in every shire where the “Northern” influence predominated. All over the country the barons were fortifying their castles; some were even building new ones.[1066] A more scrupulous king than John might well have deemed himself justified, under such circumstances, in doing what John did—following their example in preparing to fling the treaty to the winds and renew the war.

The meeting which had been appointed for July 15 was postponed till the 16th, and the place for it changed from Westminster to Oxford. On the 15th the king came up from Clarendon into Berkshire, and on his way from Newbury to Abingdon despatched a letter to the barons stating that he “could not” meet them in person at Oxford on the morrow, but that the archbishop of Dublin, the bishop of Winchester, Pandulf, the earls Marshal, Warren, and Arundel, and the justiciar, would be there in his stead, “to do to you what we ought to do to you, and to receive from you what you ought to do to us.”[1067] The archbishop of Dublin was no longer justiciar in Ireland; Geoffrey Marsh had been, on July 6, appointed to succeed him in that office.[1068] On the same day Walter de Lacy had been reinstated in all his Irish lands.[1069] Throughout the summer of this year John, busy as he was with English affairs, had found time to pay even more attention than usual to those of his Irish dominion. From May to July the Close and Charter Rolls are full of letters and writs relating to the Irish March; charters to towns, to religious houses, to individual barons, orders concerning military arrangements and other matters of local administration,[1070] all show such constant intervention and such personal interest on the king’s part as to convey an impression that he was specially endeavouring to win for himself the support of the nobles, clergy and people of the Irish March as a counterpoise to the hostility and disaffection which surrounded him in his English realm. It was, however, to the Continent that he mainly looked for aid. “After much reflection,” says Roger of Wendover, “he chose, like the Apostle Peter, to seek vengeance upon his enemies by means of two swords, that is, by a spiritual sword and a material one, so that if he could not triumph by the one, he might safely count upon doing so by the other.”[1071]

The spiritual weapon was the first to be actually drawn; but even before its first stroke fell, swords of the other kind were making ready for the king’s service. Emissaries from him were soon busy in “all the neighbouring lands beyond the sea,” gathering troops by promises of rich pay and ample endowments in English land, to be confirmed by charters if the recipients desired it.[1072] The chancellor, Richard Marsh, was thus raising troops in Aquitaine {August};[1073] Hugh de Boves was doing the like in Flanders. Those whom they enlisted were to be ready to come to the king at Dover by Michaelmas Day.[1074] John was also seeking allies in France. On August 12 he wrote to Count Peter of Britanny, offering him a grant of the honour of Richmond if he would come “with all speed, and with all the knights he could bring,” ready for service against the insurgents in England.[1075] He is even said to have tried hard, “by enormous promises,” to gain help from Philip Augustus; but in this quarter “others had been beforehand with him,” says the chronicler significantly.[1076] It was not without a cause that the barons at Runnimead had refused to write themselves John’s liegemen.

Within the realm, the royal castles were being revictualled and made ready to stand a siege at any moment.[1077] As yet no further attempt had been made upon any of them; but in the north the barons, or their followers and partizans, had begun to lay waste the royal manors and overrun the forests, cutting down and selling the timber, and killing the deer. Again the archbishop and bishops came forward as peacemakers, and it was arranged that the king should meet them on August 16 at Oxford, while the barons should assemble at Brackley, there to await the result of the churchmen’s mediation. When the day arrived, however, the king was still in Wiltshire, and excused his absence on the ground that he had been so ill-treated since the conclusion of the peace, and moreover at the last conference the barons had come together in such menacing array, that he deemed it neither safe nor prudent to risk himself in their midst; an excuse which was practically justified by the action of the barons themselves, who, instead of waiting at Brackley as they had agreed to do, came “with a numerous following” to meet the bishops at Oxford.[1078]

The bishops had now received from Rome a communication which made their position, or at least that of the Primate, an exceedingly anxious and painful one. In consequence, it seems, of John’s letter of May 29 Innocent had issued a commission to the bishop of Winchester, the abbot of Reading and Pandulf, whereby he declared excommunicate all “disturbers of the king and kingdom of England, with their accomplices and abettors,” laid their lands under interdict, and ordered the archbishop and his episcopal brethren, on pain of suspension from their office, to cause this excommunication to be published throughout the realm every Sunday and holiday till the offenders should have made satisfaction to the king and returned to their obedience.[1079] Ill-fitted as the barons had proved to be for the great work in which Langton had sought to enlist them, the cause of England’s freedom was yet too closely bound up with theirs for him to be willing to launch at them such a sentence as this, and he had sympathized too keenly with his country’s misery under a former interdict not to recoil from the prospect of another. The barons, on the other hand, had been heedless of interdict and excommunication so long as their material interests coincided with those of the king against the Church; but the matter would wear a different aspect in their eyes now that the situation was reversed and their one hope was in the aid of the Church against the king. The Pope’s mandate was shown to them and the bishops in conference at Oxford; after three days’ deliberation {Aug. 16–18} the bishops agreed to delay the publication of the sentence till they had seen the king again and made one more effort to bring him to a colloquy in London or at Staines. It was rumoured that he had gone to the coast with the intention of quitting England altogether; and the bishops are said to have followed him to Portsmouth, and there found that he was actually on shipboard. He came ashore again {Aug. 23–24?}, however, to speak with them; but he absolutely refused to hold any more personal conferences with the barons. The bishops returned to meet the barons at Staines on August 26, accompanied by envoys from the king, who were charged with a protest, to be delivered in his name in the hearing of the whole assembly, that “it was not his fault if the peace was not carried out according to the agreement.” After long deliberation the papal sentence was proclaimed, but with a tacit understanding that it was to be, for the present at least, a dead letter, on the ground that as no names were mentioned in it, the phrase “disturbers of the king and kingdom” need not be applied to any person or group of persons in particular, but might be interpreted by every man as he pleased. The more violent partizans immediately applied it to the king himself, since in their eyes he was the chief troubler of the land, and therefore also his own worst enemy.[1080]

After placing his queen and his eldest son in safety in Corfe castle,[1081] John had taken ship, seemingly about August 24, at Southampton or Portsmouth, and sailed round the coast to Sandwich, where he appears to have landed on the 28th.[1082] The barons in London, if we may believe the report of the chroniclers, were foolish enough to imagine that he would never land again at all.[1083] They were now taking upon themselves, in all those counties where their power was strong enough, to supersede both the sheriffs and the justices and usurp their functions, parcelling out the country among members of their own body, each of whom was to act as the chief judicial and administrative authority in the district committed to him.[1084] In their premature triumph they were even beginning to talk of choosing a new sovereign, and of calling the whole baronage of England to a council for that purpose, “since this ought to be done by the common consent of the whole realm.”[1085] Early in September, however, the revolutionists awoke from their dreams to find that the king was safe in Dover castle, surrounded by a little band of foreign soldiers who had already joined him there, and awaiting the coming of the host which was gathering for him beyond the sea.[1086] The three executors of the papal mandate were meanwhile insisting that now, at any rate, the barons had unquestionably fallen under its terms, by endeavouring to expel the king from his realm; and they excommunicated by name several of the revolutionary leaders, together with the citizens of London, whom they placed under interdict. These sentences, however, were disregarded, on the plea that they were barred by a previous appeal to the general council[1087] which was to be held at Rome on All Saints’ Day, and which most of the English bishops were preparing to attend. Archbishop Stephen was about to set forth, in the middle of September, when two of the papal commissioners—Pandulf and Bishop Peter of Winchester—went to him in person and insisted that he should enforce the publication of the Pope’s sentence throughout his own diocese on all the appointed days, and order his suffragans to do the same. Stephen answered that he would take no further steps in the matter till he had spoken of it with the Pope himself, since he believed the sentence to be grounded on a misunderstanding of the facts of the case. On this Pandulf and Peter denounced him as disobedient to the Pope’s mandate, and, in accordance with its terms, suspended him from his office.[1088]

Stephen accepted his suspension without protest. He was indeed so grievously disappointed at the turn which affairs in England had taken, and so hopeless of doing any further good there, that he had almost determined not only to resign his see, but to retire altogether from the world and bury himself in a hermitage or a Carthusian cell.[1089] Several of the bishops visited the king before they went over sea;[1090] we are not told whether Stephen did so; but he certainly had the king’s permission for his journey to Rome, for on September 10 John by letters patent took under his protection all the archbishop’s men, goods, lands and other possessions, and forbade his own men to do them any injury.[1091] On the 13th the king wrote again to the Pope, asking for his counsel and aid, and complaining that “whereas before we subjected our land to you as overlord, our barons were obedient to us, now they have risen up violently against us, specially on account, as they publicly declare, of that very thing.” This letter was carried by the archbishops of Bordeaux and Dublin and seven other envoys.[1092] Pandulf—now bishop-elect of Norwich—seems to have gone to Rome about the same time, charged with another letter to the Pope.[1093] But before any of these travellers had set out on their way the Pope had drawn his sword again; and this time the sword was a two-handed one. It was the sword of the temporal overlord of England, as well as of the spiritual head of Christendom.

The sixty-first article of the Charter enacted, as we have seen, that if the king should procure “from any one” a revocation or cassation of that document, such revocation should be accounted void. The only person, however, from whom such a thing could possibly be sought was of course the Pope; and in so far as the Pope was concerned, the clause was itself in feudal law null and void from the beginning, owing to the action of the barons before the Charter was drawn up or thought of. Whatever may have been their real share in the surrender of the kingdom to the Pope in May 1213, they had at any rate in February 1215, if we may believe William Mauclerc (and there is no reason for disbelieving him), put on record their full concurrence in that transaction after it was accomplished, and even taken voluntarily upon themselves the whole responsibility both for its accomplishment and for its initiation.[1094] Thereby they had deprived themselves of whatever legal pretexts they might otherwise have had for repudiating its consequences; and foremost of those consequences was the fact that the Pope was now legally the supreme arbiter of political affairs in England, by a right which had been given to him by the joint action of the king and the barons, and against which no later reservation made between those two parties themselves (such as the sixty-first article of the Charter) was of any force in feudal law. The framers of the Charter seem to have been conscious of this;[1095] John, indeed, had pointedly reminded them of it before he consented to the Charter, telling the barons, in answer to their demands, that nothing in the government and constitution of England ought to be, or lawfully could be, altered without the knowledge and sanction of the Pope, now that he was overlord of the realm; and he had publicly appealed to the Pope, as overlord, against them and all their doings. As soon as the Charter was sealed, he had despatched envoys to Rome to prosecute his appeal, and to lay before Innocent a statement of his case, together with such extracts from the Charter as were most likely to influence the Pope in his favour. The result was that on August 24—two days before the papal denunciation of the “disturbers of the realm” was published by the English bishops at Staines—Innocent as temporal overlord of England quashed the Charter, and as Pope forbade its observance by either king or people, on pain of excommunication.[1096]