On his first approach the citizens had manned their walls and “made a great show of defending themselves”; but “when they saw he was preparing to assault them they broke into a rout, left the battlements, and fled on all sides. Then his men entered through the gates, and began to chase them through the town to the bridge so vigorously that they drove all the knights by force into the castle; of whom”—sarcastically adds the Flemish soldier of fortune who tells the tale—“many would gladly have fled to London if they could.”[1108] But they could not, the bridge being now gone. The whole party thus gathered in the castle numbered about ninety-five knights and forty-five men-at-arms.[1109] The castle when given to William of Aubigny and his followers was destitute of provisions; they had had no time to procure any, save what little they could get in the town;[1110] and they saw before them an imminent prospect of starvation. John pressed the siege vigorously; on the day after its commencement he ordered “all the smiths in Canterbury” to devote their whole time, “day and night,” to making pickaxes, which were to be sent to him at Rochester as fast as they were made.[1111] His forces increased daily till they became “such a multitude that they struck fear and horror into all who beheld them.”[1112] They ravaged all over Kent, and wrought havoc in Rochester, stabling their horses in the cathedral and committing every kind of sacrilege in the holy places.[1113]
At all this the barons in London looked on in helpless consternation. They had plighted a solemn oath to William of Aubigny, when he undertook the expedition to Rochester, that if the king besieged him there they would succour him without fail.[1114] A fortnight passed before they made any movement to redeem their promise; then, on October 26, some seven hundred knights[1115] set out under the command of Robert Fitz-Walter; but they got no farther than Dartford. One chronicler says they “retreated before the breath of a very soft south wind as if beaten back by swords”;[1116] another, that they turned back in dismay on hearing how numerous were the forces of the king;[1117] a third, that they were misled on this point by an exaggerated account given them by a Templar sent to meet them for that purpose by John himself.[1118] In any case, they returned to London, and having taken care to provide themselves with ample stores, they sat down to “play at the fatal dice and drink the best wine, according to each man’s taste, and do it is needless to say what besides,”[1119] till S. Andrew’s Day. By that time they expected important reinforcements; and they reckoned that the besieged could hold out till then.[1120]
William of Aubigny and his comrades did hold out, but at desperate odds. Every possible mode of attack—mining, battery, assault—was tried in turn upon the fortress. Five great slinging engines were plied incessantly, day and night, against its walls. The garrison, already short of food, and expecting no mercy from the king if they surrendered, were minded to sell their lives dearly; they fought like heroes; “nor,” says the Barnwell annalist, “does living memory recall any siege so urgently carried on and so manfully resisted.”[1121] A strange contrivance at last shattered the mighty keep. On November 25 John ordered the justiciar to send him with all possible speed “forty bacon-pigs of the fattest, and of those which are least good for eating, to be put to set fire to the stuff that we have got together under the tower.”[1122] Of the results of the blaze thus kindled a token remains to this day, in the round tower which at the south-west angle of the keep contrasts so markedly with the square towers at the other corners, and which replaces the original square one thus destroyed by John. Even after its fall the garrison fought on until their last morsel of food was gone; then at last they surrendered on S. Andrew’s Day.[1123] The king set up a gallows in front of the army and declared he would hang them all; but he yielded to Savaric de Mauléon’s warning that if he hanged brave knights such as these, the barons would surely do the like to any friends of his who might fall into their hands, and that in view of such a prospect no man would remain in his service.[1124] On this he contented himself with sending the knights to prison, leaving the men-at-arms to ransom themselves as best they could, and hanging only a few cross-bowmen.[1125]
Three times since the siege began the barons in London, or some of them, had opened negotiations with the king. On October 17 Richard of Argentan and others had a safe-conduct “to treat with us for peace between ourself and our barons”;[1126] on October 22 Roger de Jarpeville and Robert de Coleville had a safe-conduct till the 27th to treat with the king concerning peace between him and “the barons who may come with the Master of the Temple and the Prior of the Hospital”;[1127] and on November 9 a safe-conduct till the 12th was given to Earl Richard of Clare, Robert Fitz-Walter, Geoffrey de Say, and the mayor and two, three or four citizens of London, that they might go and speak with the bishop of Winchester, the earls of Warenne and Arundel, and Hubert de Burgh, “to treat of peace between ourself and our barons.”[1128] On the side of the barons these overtures were nothing but a cloak for the cowardice and incapacity which kept them from taking any active steps for the relief of their besieged comrades. They were all the while pushing on negotiations for bringing in a foreign power to aid them in their selfish scheme of revolution.
One chronicler asserts that as long ago as the year 1210 some of the barons had contemplated driving John from his throne and setting up as king in his stead a man who, though born on foreign soil and engaged throughout his whole life in the service of foreign powers, had yet a claim to rank as one of themselves, and certainly not as the least distinguished among them—Simon, count of Montfort and titular earl of Leicester.[1129] To modern eyes the cruelties of the war against the Albigenses, in which Simon was the leader of the “crusading” host, have somewhat obscured the nobler aspects of a character which was not without a heroic side. It was indeed by a strange instinct that—if the Dunstable annalist’s tale be true—the chiefs of the English revolutionary party fixed their hopes for a moment on the father of that other Simon de Montfort, at that time still but a boy, who was one day to seal with his blood the work of England’s deliverance which they professed to have at heart, but which in their narrow and short-sighted selfishness they were alike unworthy and incapable of achieving. The instinct was at any rate a loftier one than that which guided them in their choice of a rival to John five years later. The scheme put forth by the group of barons in London in the summer of 1215 for electing a new king “by the common consent of the whole realm” of course came to nothing; the magnates would have none of it, and the northern barons who had separated from the other malcontents before the sealing of the Charter had, as will be seen later, made an independent choice of their own. The mad little faction in London, headed now by Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville, acted by themselves and for themselves alone when they “chose for their lord” the eldest son of the king of France, “begging and praying him that he would come with a mighty arm to pluck them out of the hand of this tyrant.”[1130]
Only one English chronicler gives or even pretends to give any hint of the grounds on which this choice was, either really or nominally, based. In no English writer of the time do we find any indication that the connexion of Louis of France with the reigning royal house of England, through his marriage with John’s sister’s daughter, had, or was supposed to have, anything to do with it. The claim to the English crown which Louis afterwards put forth on this ground seems to have been an idea of purely French origin, which not only had never suggested itself to any English mind, but, when it was suggested, failed to meet with general recognition even among Louis’s partizans in England. The intricate rules of succession, and especially of female succession, which it pre-supposed were as yet, when applied to the Crown at least, completely strange to English statesmen. Moreover, it is by no means clear that the barons who offered the Crown to Louis had any real intention of transferring it to him and his heirs for ever. Roger of Wendover tells us that “after hesitating for some time whom they should choose, they at length agreed upon this, that they would set over themselves Louis, the son of King Philip of France, and raise him up to be king of England. Their reason was that if through the agency of Louis and his father King John could be deprived of the host of foreign soldiers who surrounded him, most of whom were subjects of Louis[1131] or Philip, he, being without support from either side of the sea, would be left alone and unable to fight.”[1132] In other words, they wanted Louis as a tool wherewith to crush John; and to gain him for their tool they offered him the bribe of the crown, thinking that when their immediate purpose should be accomplished it would be time enough to consider whether the annexation of England to France would or would not really profit them better than to break faith with their new lord as they had broken it with their old one.
The first direct overtures of the barons to Louis seem to have been made before the outbreak of hostilities, in September or October 1215;[1133] and these overtures were renewed at some time after the commencement of the siege of Rochester, when the earls of Winchester and Hereford went over with a message from their comrades in London to Louis, that “if he would pack up his clothes and come, they would give him the kingdom and make him their lord.”[1134] These envoys were at once confronted by Philip with a letter which he had just received, purporting to come from the same barons and informing him that his son’s intervention was no longer needed, as peace had been made between them and their own sovereign. The earl of Winchester offered to pledge his head that the letter was forged by John.[1135] The French king accepted this assurance; but he was too wary to commit himself hastily to a scheme so full of perils and difficulties as that which the earls so lightly proposed, and he merely gave it a negative countenance by standing altogether aloof from their negotiations with his son. Louis promised that he would at once send to England as many knights as he could get, and would himself follow them at Easter. He then called his own vassals together at Hesdin, and at the end of November some hundred and forty of his knights with their followers—in all about seven thousand men—landed at the mouth of the Orwell[1136] and made their way to London, “where they were very well received and led a sumptuous life; only they were there in great discomfort because they ran short of wine and had only beer to drink, to which they were not accustomed. Thus they remained all the winter.”[1137]
John spent the winter in other fashion. On November 28—two days before the surrender of Rochester—Tonbridge castle, which belonged to the rebel earl of Clare, had surrendered to Robert de Béthune, one of John’s Flemish allies, and on the same day the castle of Bedford yielded to Falkes de Bréauté. In each case the garrison had sent to their lord for help, and in each case no help had been given them.[1138] John left Rochester on December 6, marched through Essex and Surrey into Hampshire, and thence proceeded to Windsor.[1139] On the 20th he held a council at S. Albans.[1140] Two of his envoys had recently come back from Rome with a papal confirmation of the suspension of Archbishop Stephen.[1141] This was read to the convent assembled in the chapter-house, and committed to them for transmission to all cathedral and conventual churches throughout England. The king then retired with his counsellors into the cloister “to arrange how he might confound the magnates of England who were his enemies, and how he might find pay for the foreigners who were fighting under him.” He decided upon dividing his host into two bodies; one was placed under the command of Earl William of Salisbury, assisted by Falkes de Bréauté, Savaric de Mauléon, William Brewer, and a Brabantine captain known as Walter Buck, with orders to check the irruptions of the barons who were in London; of the other the king himself took the command, “intending to go through the northern provinces of England, and destroy with fire and sword everything that came in his way.”[1142]
That same night {Dec. 20} John, with his division, moved on to Dunstable; before daybreak on the morrow he set out for Northampton, and by Christmas he was at Nottingham.[1143] All along his route he sent out parties in every direction to burn the houses of the hostile barons and seize their cattle and their goods; every obstacle that stood in his path was destroyed; and as if the day were not long enough to satiate his love of destruction, he would send men out at night to fire the hedges and the villages along his line of march, that he might rejoice his eyes with the damage done to his enemies; while the other question which had occupied his deliberations at S. Albans, the remuneration of his followers, was solved with the produce of the rapine in which they were not merely indulged but encouraged. Every human being, of whatever rank, sex or age, who crossed the path of this terrible host was seized, tortured, and put to heavy ransom. The constables of the baronial castles dared not trust to the protection of their walls; at the report of the king’s approach they fled, leaving their fortresses to be occupied by him and his troops.[1144] Thus, “not in the usual manner, but as one on the war-path,” he kept Christmas at Nottingham.[1145] On the following day {Dec. 26} he moved on to Langar, and thence, next morning, {Dec. 27} despatched a notice to the garrison of William of Aubigny’s castle of Belvoir that if they did not surrender at once, their lord should be starved to death. To this threat they yielded.[1146]