Unhappily, the English sullied their victory by sacking Lincoln. Not content with seizing the baggage and valuable goods of the French nobles and the rebel barons, which they found piled up in waggons in some of the streets, they “despoiled the whole city, even to the uttermost farthing”; and on the strength of Gualo’s exhortation to treat the canons of the cathedral chapter as excommunicate (owing to their having been throughout the war in opposition to the King), they plundered every church, breaking open chests and presses and carrying off plate, jewels, vestments, and money; the precentor of the cathedral lost eleven thousand marks. Many women fled from the city with their children and household goods, and sought to escape in boats, but through their overcrowding and ignorance of rowing all the little vessels capsized, the occupants were drowned, and the goods became the prize of anyone who fished them up from the bottom of the river.[226] All these things were done after the Marshal had left the city. As soon as the fight was over he and the other leaders held a council to consider what they should do next. Some were for marching on London, some for trying to dislodge Louis from Dover. As they could not agree, the Marshal with his usual practical good sense bade them all go home and place their respective prisoners in safety, and meet him again, with the Legate, on a day which he named, at Chertsey,[227] or, according to another account, at Oxford.[228] He then, without stopping even to eat, hurried with his tidings of victory to the King and the Legate at Nottingham. Thither, next morning {Trinity Sunday, 21 May}, came news of another gain to the royal cause; the garrison of Mountsorel, whose constable, Henry de Braybroke, had gone with Saer de Quincy to Lincoln, had fled and left the castle deserted.[229] The Earl of Salisbury appears to have been sent to secure it for the King; two days later {23 May} an order was issued to him from Lincoln, in the King’s name, to deliver it to Earl Ranulf of Chester,[230] who forthwith razed it to the ground.[231]
On Thursday, 25th May,[232] the news of the Fair of Lincoln reached Louis in his camp before Dover. He took counsel with his friends; and they all agreed that he must raise the siege, concentrate in London, and send to France for reinforcements. Unwillingly he caused his trebuchet to be taken down, and prepared to withdraw, but determined to stay over Sunday 28th, “to see whether he would get any news.” On the Sunday “it was very clear at sea, and looking towards Calais they saw many ships with their sails set, whereof they rejoiced greatly.” Next day {29 May} the ships “came sailing over the sea right merrily, to the number of full six score.” The English, when they saw them, hoisted their sails and put to sea; the French set off in chase, but finding they could not catch them put about again and made straight for Dover. The English then put about likewise, overtook the hindermost ships of the French fleet, and captured eight of them; the rest got safe into the harbour, and were met by Louis on the beach. To his great disappointment and rage, however, he found that, except one large vessel in which were eighteen knights, they brought nothing but sailors, merchants, and men-at-arms. Next day {30 May} he sent them all back again, with two messengers charged with letters to his father. Then he set fire to “all the ships which were ashore before the haven,” and betook himself to Canterbury and thence to London, where he arrived on Thursday, 1st June.[233]
The Royalists meanwhile had advanced by way of Windsor and Staines to Chertsey;[234] thence they made secret overtures to some of the leading citizens of London for the surrender of the city. Tempted on the one hand by the promise of a confirmation of its liberties “under the King’s seal,” and terrified on the other hand by the fate of Lincoln, London was clearly beginning to waver; and Louis, on discovering these secret negotiations, could only secure himself in the city by closing all its gates save one and insisting upon a renewal of homage from the citizens to himself.[235] At the beginning of June the Archbishop of Tyre, who had come to Europe to preach a crusade, arrived in England from France, accompanied by the abbots of Citeaux, Clairvaux, and Pontigny, and endeavoured to reconcile the contending parties.[236] Several parleys were held,[237] and a draft treaty was actually prepared[238] and seems to have been discussed between four of Louis’s counsellors and four of Henry’s, who met, accompanied by twenty knights of each party, between Brentford and Hounslow,[239] on 13th June. But the meeting proved useless because Louis insisted upon including in the peace four clerks whose conduct had been, alike in an ecclesiastical and a political point of view, so outrageous that the Legate absolutely refused to admit them to any terms without previously consulting the Pope.[240] The unsuccessful mediators returned to France at the end of the month.[241]
Meanwhile Falkes de Bréauté had taken Lynn.[242] On 23rd June the sheriffs were ordered to publish the Charter in their shires and see that it was put in execution.[243] The King and his council then withdrew to Gloucester;[244] and it was probably during their temporary absence from the neighbourhood of London that Louis sent the Viscount of Melun and Eustace de Neville on a plundering raid into East Anglia, whence they returned laden with the spoils of the famous abbey of S. Edmund.[245]
This raid was evidently a desperate expedient for obtaining supplies. Cooped up in London, Louis and his men were in need of everything; and Philip Augustus shewed no inclination to send them help of any kind.[246] Months before, if we may believe the Marshal’s biographer, the French King, when he heard that John was dead, his son crowned, and the Marshal in charge of the realm, had declared that further effort was useless. “We shall take nothing in England now; that brave man’s good sense will defend the land—Louis has lost it. Mark my words! When the Marshal takes the matter in hand, we are undone.”[247] As Philip had from the outset refused to countenance his son’s enterprise openly, so now he connived at, rather than assisted, the efforts of his daughter-in-law, Blanche of Castille, to collect money and troops for Louis.[248] Blanche scoured the country in her husband’s behalf, pleading his cause so energetically that a contemporary says, “if those whom she enlisted had all gone to England in arms, they might have conquered the whole kingdom.”[249] The force which her efforts finally brought together at Calais numbered, however, only about a hundred—or at the utmost three hundred—knights.[250] Several times, while they lay encamped on the shore, some English ships sailed up to the harbour and discharged arrows at them; and once, at least, a great fight took place, in which the English were signally worsted. Another night the French actually crossed the Channel and anchored off Dover, intending to sail thence round to the mouth of the Thames; but in the morning, as they were about to set forth, a storm overtook them and drove them back panic-stricken to the coast of Flanders.[251]
On 4th July the King’s guardians issued from Gloucester a summons for a council to be held at Oxford on the 15th. It seems not to have actually met till a week later; and on 26th or 27th July the King and the Marshal returned to Gloucester, after issuing (22nd July) a summons for another assembly to be held at Oxford on 6th August.[252] The royal forces were increasing more and more. Two great nobles had joined them since Louis’s return to England—the Earl of Warren before 22nd June, and the Earl of Arundel before 14th July[253]—and nearly one hundred and fifty rebels submitted between the end of May and the beginning of August.[254] When the host re-assembled at Oxford[255] all was ready for the final struggle. From Oxford they moved to Reading, and thence to Farnham;[256] there, it seems, the leaders separated, the Legate and the King going northward again with one part towards London, while another part under the Earl Marshal and the justiciar made for the Kentish coast to prepare for its defence against the expected French fleet.
From Dover the Marshal summoned the men of the Cinque Ports to arm and assemble their ships at Sandwich. The aged warrior was eager to go forth in person and encounter the French at sea, but his men would not suffer it; he must stay on shore, they said, “for if it chanced that he were slain or captured, who then would defend the land?”[257] On S. Bartholomew’s eve {Wed., 23 Aug.} he, with the Earl of Warren, King John’s elder son Richard,[258] Philip d’Aubigné, and a host of other “good knights,” lay encamped near Canterbury. They “slept little,” for they all knew that the morrow might prove a day almost as momentous as that of Senlac. At early dawn {24 Aug.} they marched to Sandwich. The day broke clear and bright, with a “soft and pleasant” wind which soon brought into view the armament coming from Calais.[259] It consisted of some eighty vessels of various sizes;[260] ten of them were large ships of war, fully armed,[261] of which four were filled with knights and six with men-at-arms; the smaller vessels carried accoutrements and other goods.[262] Among the knights were some of the noblest and bravest men of France;[263] those of highest rank and fame, thirty-six in number, together with the treasure which Blanche was sending to her husband, were in the ship of Eustace the Monk, who seems to have been in command of the whole fleet.[264] The vessels were making for the mouth of the Thames,[265] and as they swept round Thanet in close array as if ready for a fight, Eustace’s ship leading,[266] their number and character could be plainly distinguished by the Royalists drawn up on the shore, as well as by the sailors who manned the English ships in Sandwich harbour.[267]
At the eleventh hour the Marshal’s plan of campaign all but broke down. The English fleet was ready; but it comprised only eighteen, or at the utmost twenty-two, ships of any size, with some smaller ones to the number of about twenty more;[268] and the sight of the enemy’s superior fleet struck such terror into the sailors that they lost their heads completely, left their ships with the sails all hoisted, and took refuge in their little boats.[269] Once more the Marshal appealed to them as only he could appeal. Again he offered to go with them; but again his own men forbade it.[270] Then by a characteristic exhortation he shamed the mariners out of their fears. “God has given us one victory over the French on land. Now they are coming again, to claim the country against Him. But He has power to help the good on sea as well as on shore,[271] and He will help His own. You have the advantage in the game; you will conquer the enemies of God!”[272] The impressionable sailors caught a new spirit from the landsmen who, fresh from their victory over superior numbers at Lincoln, were fearless of the risk of another encounter at similar odds.[273] One ship was quickly filled with the Marshal’s own followers, under his nephew John;[274] Richard the King’s son went on board another with a company of knights;[275] a third was occupied by Earl Warren’s men, the Earl himself remaining on shore with the Marshal;[276] Philip d’Aubigné probably commanded a contingent from the Channel Isles. Hubert de Burgh seems to have joined the muster by sea, coming from Dover in “a fine ship” of his own,[277] and to have taken the supreme command.
The skill and energy of the English sailors quickly atoned for their momentary panic. Though wind and tide were both against them,[278] they came up in the rear of the French fleet just as it reached the mouth of the estuary. For a moment the leading English ship—that of Hubert—seemed about to close with the enemy; then it suddenly shot forward, as if the commander’s purpose were not to give battle, but to avoid it.[279] On seeing this, the French shifted their sails, and with insulting cries of “La hart! la hart!”—a call with which huntsmen were wont to urge their hounds after the quarry—turned round to the attack, their line still headed by the ship of Eustace the Monk.[280] This was probably the largest and most formidable vessel of the French fleet; but it was overloaded; it carried, besides its freight of men and treasure, some valuable horses for Louis, and a trebuchet; and in consequence, it lay so deep in the water that the waves almost overflowed its deck. Sir Richard the King’s son laid his ship alongside it at once; Earl Warren’s men quickly brought up their ship on its other side. This latter ship was only a cog, or fishing vessel; but being light it stood high above the water, and its occupants were thus able to cast down potfuls of lime and stones on their adversaries’ heads, with blinding if not deadly effect.[281] Meanwhile the armed galleys of the English fleet, few though they were in number, were doing fatal execution on some of the other French ships, piercing them with their iron beaks and sinking them. Now, too, the French had the wind in their teeth, and it carried into their faces clouds of quicklime thrown up into the air by the English. Moreover, Philip d’Aubigné had with him a company of crossbowmen whose arrows wrought havoc among the enemy.[282] At length a man-at-arms from Guernsey, Reginald Payne, leaped from the deck of the cog to that of Eustace’s ship with such an impetus that in alighting he knocked down a French knight, William des Barres; in another moment he had prostrated a second foeman of rank and disabled a third; amid the confusion thus created all the fighting men on the cog followed him, and Eustace’s ship was captured with all on board.[283] On seeing this the remaining French ships took to flight. The victors chased them all the way back to Calais.[284] Only fifteen vessels—the largest in the fleet except that of Eustace—reached the harbour; of the lesser ones many were taken[285] and the rest sunk.[286] The slaughter was frightful; only thirty-two men, all of high rank and renown, were retained as prisoners on the ship which had belonged to Eustace, and even these were with difficulty saved by the English knights from the fury of the men-at-arms and sailors whose valour had won that great prize.[287] On every other captured vessel only a man or two were left alive; the rest were slain and “flung to the fishes for food.”[288]