In England, although no movement in favour of Arthur is perceptible, there was some fear of civil strife, perhaps only of that disorder which was apt to break out on the death of the king, as it did indeed in this case, and many castles were put in order for defence. What disorder there was soon put down by the representatives of the king, whom John had appointed, and who took the fealty of the barons and towns to him. On the part of a considerable number of the barons--the names that are recorded are those of old historic families, Beaumont, Ferrers, Mowbray, De Lacy, the Earls of Clare and Chester--there was found to be opposition to taking the oath of fealty on the ground of injustice committed by the administration. Whether these complaints were personal to each baron, as the language has been taken to mean, or complaints of injustice in individual cases wrought by the general policy of the government, as the number of cases implies, it is hardly possible to say. The probability is that both explanations are true. Certainly the old baronage could easily find grounds enough of complaint in the const.i.tutional policy steadily followed by the government of the first two Angevin kings. The crisis was wisely handled by the three able men whom John had appointed to represent him. They called an a.s.sembly of the doubtful barons at Northampton and gave to each one a promise that he should have his right (jus suum). In return for these promises the oaths were taken, but the incident was as ominous of another kind of trouble as the dropping of the lance at Rouen.
We can hardly understand the reign of John unless we remember that at its very beginning men were learning to watch the legality of the king"s actions and to demand that he respect the limitations which the law placed on his arbitrary will.
On May 25, John landed in England, and on the 27th, Ascension day, he was crowned in Westminster by the Archbishop of Canterbury before a large a.s.sembly of barons and bishops. The coronation followed the regular order, and no dissenting voice made itself heard, though a rather unusual display of force seems to have been thought necessary. Two authorities, both years later and both untrustworthy, refer to a speech delivered during the ceremony by the archbishop, in which he emphasized the fact that the English crown was elective and not hereditary. Did not these authorities seem to be clearly independent of one another we should forthwith reject their testimony, but as it is we must admit some slight chance that such a speech was made. One of these accounts, in giving what purports to be the actual speech of Hubert Walter, though it must have been composed by the writer himself, states a reason for it which could not possibly have been entertained at the time.[64] The other gives as its reason the disputed succession, but makes the archbishop refer not to the right of Arthur, but to that of the queen of Castile, a reference which must also be untrue.[65] If such a speech was made, it had reference unquestionably to the case of Arthur, and it must be taken as a sign of the influence which this case certainly had on the development, in the minds of some at least, of something more like the modern understanding of the meaning of election, and as a prelude to the great movement which characterizes the thirteenth century, the rapid growth of ideas which may now without too great violence be called const.i.tutional. If such a speech was made we may be sure also that it was not made without the consent of John, and that it contained nothing displeasing to him. One of his first acts as king was to make Hubert Walter his chancellor, and apparently the first doc.u.ment issued by the new king and chancellor puts prominently forward John"s hereditary right, and states the share of clergy and people in his accession in peculiar and vague language.[66]
John had no mind to remain long in England, nor was there any reason why he should. The king of Scotland was making some trouble, demanding the cession of c.u.mberland and Northumberland, but it was possible to postpone for the present the decision of his claims. William Marshal was at last formally invested with the earldom of Pembroke and Geoffrey Fitz Peter with that of Ess.e.x. More important was a scutage, probably ordered at this time, of the unusual rate of two marks on the knight"s fee, twenty shillings having been the previous limit as men remembered it. By June 20 John"s business in England was done, and by July 1 he was again at Rouen to watch the course of events in the conflict still undecided. On that day a truce was made with Philip to last until the middle of August, and John began negotiations with the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne and with his nephew, Otto IV of Germany, in a search for allies, from whom he gained only promises. On the expiration of the truce Philip demanded the cession of the entire Vexin and the transfer to Arthur of Poitou, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine,--a demand which indicates his determination to go on with the war. For Poitou Philip had already received Eleanor"s homage, and she in turn invested John with it as her va.s.sal. In the beginning of the war which was now renewed Philip committed a serious error of policy, to which he was perhaps tempted by the steady drift of events in his favour since the death of Richard. Capturing the castle of Ballon in Maine he razed it to the ground. William des Roches, the leader of Arthur"s cause, at once objected since the castle should belong to his lord, and protested to the king that this was contrary to their agreement, but Philip haughtily replied that he should do as he pleased with his conquests in spite of Arthur. This was too early a declaration of intentions, and William immediately made terms with John, carrying over to him Arthur and his mother and the city of Le Mans. A slight study of John"s character ought to have shown to William that no dependence whatever could be placed on his promise in regard to a point which would seem to them both of the greatest importance. William took the risk, however, binding John by solemn oath that Arthur should be dealt with according to his counsel, a promise which was drawn up in formal charter.
On the very day of his arrival, it is said, Arthur was told of John"s intention to imprison him, and he fled away with his mother to Angers; but William des Roches remained for a time in John"s service.
The year 1199 closed with a truce preliminary to a treaty of peace which was finally concluded on May 18. Philip II was at the moment in no condition to push the war. He was engaged in a desperate struggle with Innocent III and needed to postpone for the time being every other conflict. Earlier in his reign on a political question he had defied a pope, and with success; but Innocent III was a different pope, and on the present question Philip was wrong. In 1193 he had repudiated his second wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, the day after the marriage, and later married Agnes of Meran whom he had hitherto refused to give up at the demand of the Church. At the close of 1199 France was placed under an interdict until the king should yield, and it was in this situation that the treaty with John was agreed to. Philip for the moment abandoned his attempt against the Angevin empire. John was recognized as rightful heir of the French fiefs, and his homage was accepted for them all, including Britanny, for which Arthur then did homage to John. These concessions were not secured, however, without some sacrifices on the English side.
John yielded to Philip all the conquests which had been made from Richard, and agreed to pay a relief of 20,000 marks for admission to his fiefs. The peace was to be sealed by the marriage of John"s niece, the future great queen and regent of France, Blanche of Castile, to Philip"s son Louis, and the county of Evreux was to be ceded as her dower. The aged but tireless Eleanor went to Spain to bring her granddaughter, and the marriage was celebrated four days after the signing of the treaty, Louis at the time being thirteen years old and Blanche twelve.
While his mother went to Spain for the young bride, John crossed to England to raise money for his relief. This was done by ordering a carucage at the rate of three shillings on the ploughland. The Cistercian order objected to paying the tax because of the general immunity which they enjoyed, and John in great anger commanded all the sheriffs to refuse them the protection of the courts and to let go free of punishment any who injured them, in effect to put them outside the law. This decree he afterwards modified at the request of Hubert Walter, but he refused an offer of a thousand marks for a confirmation of their charters and liberties, and returned to Normandy in the words quoted by the chronicler, "breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the servants of Christ."
John was now in a position where he should have used every effort to strengthen himself against the next move of Philip, which he should have known was inevitable, and where, if ever, he might hope to do so. Instead of that, by a blunder in morals, in which John"s greatest weakness lay, by an act of pa.s.sion and perfidy, he gave his antagonist a better excuse than he could have hoped for when he was at last ready to renew the war.
John had now been for more than ten years married to Isabel of Gloucester, and no children had been born of the marriage. In the situation of the Angevin house he may well have wished for a direct heir and have been ready to adopt the expedient common to sovereigns in such cases. At any rate about this time he procured from the Bishops of Normandy and Aquitaine a divorce, a formal annulling of the marriage on the ground of consanguinity, the question raised at the time of their marriage never, it would seem, having been settled by dispensation. Then he sent off an emba.s.sy to ask for a daughter of the king of Portugal. In the meantime he went on a progress through the French lands which had been secured to him by treaty with Philip, and met the beautiful Isabel, daughter of the Count of Angouleme, then twelve years of age, and determined to marry her out of hand. The fact that she was already betrothed to Hugh "the Brown," son and heir of his own va.s.sal the Count of La Marche, and that she was then living in the household of her intended father-in-law, made no more difference to him than his own emba.s.sy to Portugal. It seems possible indeed that it was in the very castle of the Count of La Marche that the plan was formed. Isabel"s father also did not hesitate in the choice of sons-in-law, and his daughter having been brought home, she was at once married to John. An act of this kind was a most flagrant violation of the feudal contract, nor was the moral blunder saved from being a political one by the fact that the injured house was that of the Lusignans, great barons and long turbulent and unruly va.s.sals of Aquitaine. John had given them now a legal right of appeal to his suzerain and a moral justification of rebellion.
After his marriage John went back to England for the coronation of his queen, which took place on October 8. At Lincoln he received the homage of William of Scotland and made peace with the Cistercians, and then went on a progress through the north as far as Carlisle. In the meantime, as was to be expected, hostilities had begun with the family of the Count of La Marche, and the king sent out a summons to the barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide prepared for service abroad. On receipt of this notice the earls held a meeting at Leicester and by agreement replied to the king that they would not go over sea with him unless he restored to them their rights. There is no evidence in the single account we have of this incident that the earls intended to deny their liability to service abroad. It is probable they intended to take their position on the more secure principle that services due to the suzerain who violated the rights of his va.s.sal were for the time being, at least, suspended. If this is so, the declaration of the earls is the first clear evidence we have that the barons of England were beginning to realize their legal right of resistance and to get sight of the great principle which was so soon to give birth to the const.i.tution. The result of the opposition to John"s summons we do not know, unless the statement which follows in the chronicle that the king was demanding the castles of the barons, and taking hostages if they retained them, was his answer to their demand. At any rate they appeared as required at Portsmouth ready for the campaign abroad, but John, instead of sending them over to France, took away the money which they had brought to spend in his service, and let them go home.
From the time of John"s landing in Normandy, about June 1, 1201, until the same time the next year, he was occupied with negotiating rather than with fighting. Philip was not yet ready to take part himself in the war, but he kept a careful watch of events and made John constantly aware that he was not overlooking his conduct toward his va.s.sals. Several interviews were held between the kings of a not unfriendly character; the treaty of the previous year was confirmed, and John was invited to Paris by Philip and entertained in the royal palace. It was at first proposed that the case between John and the Lusignans should be tried in his own court as Count of Poitou, but he insisted upon such conditions that the trial was refused. Meanwhile Philip"s affairs were rapidly becoming settled and he was able to take up again his plans of conquest. The death of Agnes of Meran made possible a reconciliation with the Church, and the death of the Count of Champagne added the revenues of that great barony to his own through his wardship of the heir. In the spring of 1202 he was ready for action. The barons of Poitou had already lodged an appeal with him as overlord against the illegal acts of John. This gave him a legal opportunity without violating any existing treaty. After an interview with John on March 25, which left things as they were, a formal summons was issued citing John to appear before Philip"s court and answer to any charges against him. He neither came nor properly excused himself, though he tried to avoid the difficulty. He alleged that as Duke of Normandy he could not be summoned to Paris for trial, and was answered that he had not been summoned as Duke of Normandy but as Count of Poitou. He demanded a safe conduct and was told that he could have one for his coming, but that his return would depend on the sentence of the court. He said that the king of England could not submit to such a trial, and was answered that the king of France could not lose his rights over a va.s.sal because he happened to have acquired another dignity. Finally, John"s legal rights of delay and excuse being exhausted, the court decreed that he should be deprived of all the fiefs which he held of France on the ground of failure of service. All the steps of this action from its beginning to its ending seem to have been perfectly regular, John being tried, of course, not on the appeal of the barons of Poitou which had led to the king"s action, but for his refusal to obey the summons, and the severe sentence with which it closed was that which the law provided, though it was not often enforced in its extreme form, and probably would not have been in this case if John had been willing to submit.[67]
The sentence of his court Philip gladly accepted, and invaded Normandy about June 1, capturing place after place with almost no opposition from John. Arthur, now sixteen years old, he knighted, gave him the invest.i.ture of all the Angevin fiefs except Normandy, and betrothed him to his own daughter Mary. On August 1 occurred an event which promised at first a great success for John, but proved in its consequences a main cause of his failure, and led to the act of infamy by which he has ever since been most familiarly known. Arthur, hearing that his grandmother Eleanor was at the castle of Mirebeau in Poitou with a small force, laid siege to the castle to capture her as John"s chief helper, and quickly carried the outer works. Eleanor had managed, however, to send off a messenger to her son at Le Mans, and John, calling on the fierce energy he at times displayed, covered the hundred miles between them in a day and a night, surprised the besiegers by his sudden attack, and captured their whole force. To England he wrote saying that the favour of G.o.d had worked with him wonderfully, and a man more likely to receive the favour of G.o.d might well think so. Besides Arthur, he captured Hugh of Lusignan the younger and his uncle Geoffrey, king Richard"s faithful supporter in the Holy Land, with many of the revolted barons and, as he reported with probable exaggeration, two hundred knights and more. Philip, who was besieging Arques, on hearing the news, retired hastily to his own land and in revenge made a raid on Tours, which in his a.s.sault and John"s recapture was almost totally destroyed by fire. The prisoners and booty were safely conveyed to Normandy, and Arthur was imprisoned at Falaise.
Instantly anxiety began to be felt by the friends of Arthur as to his fate. William des Roches, who was still in the service of John, went to the king with barons from Britanny and asked that his prisoner be given up to them. Notwithstanding the written promise and oath which John had given to follow the counsel of William in his treatment of Arthur, he refused this request. William left the king"s presence to go into rebellion, and was joined by many of the barons of Britanny; at the end of October they got possession of Angers. It was a much more serious matter that during the autumn and winter extensive disaffection and even open treason began to show themselves among the barons of Normandy. What disposition should be made of Arthur was, no doubt, a subject of much debate in the king"s mind, and very likely with his counsellors, during the months that followed the capture. John"s lack of insight was on the moral side, not at all on the intellectual, and he no doubt saw clearly that so long as Arthur lived he never could be safe from the designs of Philip. On the other hand he probably did not believe that Philip would seriously attempt the unusual step of enforcing in full the sentence of the court against him, and underestimated both the danger of treason and the moral effect of the death of Arthur. What the fate of the young Count of Britanny really was no one has ever known. The most accurate statement of what we do know is that of an English chronicler[68] who says that he was removed from Falaise to Rouen by John"s order and that not long after he suddenly disappeared, and we may add that this disappearance must have been about the Easter of 1203. Many different stories were in circulation at the time or soon after, accounting for his death as natural, or accidental, or a murder, some of them in abundant detail, but in none of these can we have any confidence. The only detail of the history which seems historically probable is one we find in an especially trustworthy chronicler, which represents John as first intending to render Arthur incapable of ruling by mutilation and sending men to Falaise to carry out this plan.[69] It was not done, though Arthur"s custodian, Hubert de Burgh, thought it best to give out the report that it had been, and that the young man had died in consequence. The report roused such a storm of anger among the Bretons that Hubert speedily judged it necessary to try to quiet it by evidence that Arthur was still alive, and John is said not to have been angry that his orders had been disobeyed. It is certain, however, that he learned no wisdom from the result of this experiment, and that Arthur finally died either by his order or by his hand.
It is of some interest that in all the contemporary discussion of this case no one ever suggested that John was personally incapable of such a violation of his oath or of such a murder with his own hand. He is of all kings the one for whose character no man, of his own age or later, has ever had a good word. Historians have been found to speak highly of his intellectual or military abilities, but words have been exhausted to describe the meanness of his moral nature and his utter depravity. Fully as wicked as William Rufus, the worst of his predecessors, he makes on the reader of contemporary narratives the impression of a man far less apt to be swept off his feet by pa.s.sion, of a cooler and more deliberate, of a meaner and smaller, a less respectable or pardonable lover of vice and worker of crimes. The case of Arthur exhibits one of his deepest traits, his utter falsity, the impossibility of binding him, his readiness to betray any interest or any man or woman, whenever tempted to it. The judgment of history on John has been one of terrible severity, but the unanimous opinion of contemporaries and posterity is not likely to be wrong, and the failure of personal knowledge and of later study to find redeeming features a.s.sures us of their absence. As to the murder of Arthur, it was a useless crime even if judged from the point of view of a Borgian policy merely, one from which John had in any case little to gain and of which his chief enemy was sure to reap the greatest advantage.
Soon after Easter Philip again took the field, still ignorant of the fate of Arthur, as official acts show him to have been some months later.
Place after place fell into his hands with no serious check and no active opposition on the part of John, some opening their gates on his approach, and none offering an obstinate resistance. The listless conduct of John during the loss of Normandy is not easy to explain. The only suggestion of explanation in the contemporary historians is that of the general prevalence of treason in the duchy, which made it impossible for the king to know whom to trust and difficult to organize a sufficient defence to the advance of Philip, and undoubtedly this factor in the case should receive more emphasis than it has usually been given. Other kings had had to contend with extensive treason on the part of the Norman barons, but never in quite the same circ.u.mstances and probably never of quite the same spirit. Treason now was a different thing from that of mere feudal barons in their alliance with Louis VII in the reign of Henry I. It might be still feudal in form, but its immediate and permanent results were likely to be very different. It was no temporary defection to be overcome by some stroke of policy or by the next turn of the wheel. It was joining the cause of Philip Augustus and the France which he had done so much already to create; it was being absorbed in the expansion of a great nation to which the duchy naturally belonged, and coming under the influence of rapidly forming ideals of nationality, possibly even induced by them more or less consciously felt. This may have been treason in form, but in real truth it was a natural and inevitable current, and from it there was no return. John may have felt something of this.
Its spirit may have been in the atmosphere, and its effect would be paralyzing. Still we find it impossible to believe that Henry I in the same circ.u.mstances would have done no more than John did to stem the tide.
He seemed careless and inert. He showed none of the energy of action or clearness of mind which he sometimes exhibits. Men came to him with the news of Philip"s repeated successes, and he said, "Let him go on, I shall recover one day everything he is taking now"; though what he was depending on for this result never appears. Perhaps he recognized the truth of what, according to one account, William Marshal told him to his face, that he had made too many enemies by his personal conduct,[70]
and so he did not dare to trust any one; but we are tempted after all explanation to believe there was in the case something of that moral breakdown in dangerous crises which at times comes to men of John"s character.
By the end of August Philip was ready for the siege of the Chateau-Gaillard, Richard"s great fortress, the key to Rouen and so to the duchy. John seems to have made one attempt soon after to raise the siege, but with no very large forces, and the effort failed; it may even have led to the capture of the fort on the island in the river and the town of Les Andelys by the French. Philip then drew his lines round the main fortress and settled down to a long blockade. The castle was commanded by Roger de Lacy, a baron faithful to John, and one who could be trusted not to give up his charge so long as any further defence was possible. He was well furnished with supplies, but as the siege went on he found himself obliged, following a practice not infrequent in the middle ages, to turn out of the castle, to starve between the lines, some hundreds of useless mouths of the inhabitants of Les Andelys, who had sought refuge there on the capture of the town by the French. Philip finally allowed them to pa.s.s his lines. Chateau-Gaillard was at last taken not by the blockade, but by a series of a.s.saults extending through about two weeks and closing with the capture of the third or inner ward and keep on March 6, 1204, an instance of the fact of which the history of medieval times contains abundant proof, that the siege appliances of the age were sufficient for the taking of the strongest fortress unless it were in a situation inaccessible to them. In the meantime John, seeing the hopelessness of defending Normandy with the resources left him there, and even, it is said, fearing treasonable designs against his person, had quitted the duchy in what proved to be a final abandonment and crossed to England on December 5. He landed with no good feeling towards the English barons whom he accused of leaving him at the mercy of his enemies, and he ordered at once a tax of one-seventh of the personal property of clergy and laymen alike. This was followed by a scutage at the rate of two marks on the knight"s fee, determined on at a great council held at Oxford early in January. But, notwithstanding these taxes and other ways of raising money, John seems to have been embarra.s.sed in his measures of defence by a lack of funds, while Philip was furnished with plenty to reinforce the victories of his arms with purchased support where necessary, and to attract John"s mercenaries into his service.
After the fall of Chateau-Gaillard events drew rapidly to a close. John tried the experiment of an emba.s.sy headed by Hubert Walter and William Marshal to see if a peace could be arranged, but Philip naturally set his terms so high that nothing was to be lost by going on with the war, however disastrous it might prove. He demanded the release of Arthur, or, if he were not living, of his sister Eleanor, with the cession to either of them of the whole continental possessions of the Angevins. In the interview Philip made known the policy that he proposed to follow in regard to the English barons who had possessions in Normandy, for he offered to guarantee to William Marshal and his colleague, the Earl of Leicester, their Norman lands if they would do him homage. Philip"s wisdom in dealing with his conquests, leaving untouched the possessions and rights of those who submitted, rewarding with gifts and office those who proved faithful, made easy the incorporation of these new territories in the royal domain. By the end of May nearly all the duchy was in the hands of the French, the chief towns making hardly a show of resistance, but opening their gates readily on the offer of favourable terms. For Rouen, which was reserved to the last, the question was a more serious one, bound as it was to England by commercial interests and likely to suffer injury if the connexion were broken. Philip granted the city a truce of thirty days on the understanding that it should be surrendered if the English did not raise the siege within that time. The messengers sent to the king in England returned with no promise of help, and on June 24 Philip entered the capital of Normandy.
With the loss of Normandy nothing remained to John but his mother"s inheritance, and against this Philip next turned. Queen Eleanor, eighty-two years of age, had closed her marvellous career on April 1, and no question of her rights stood in the way of the absorption of all Aquitaine in France. The conquest of Touraine and Poitou was almost as easy as that of Normandy, except the castles of Chinon and Loches which held out for a year, and the cities of Niort, Thouars, and La Roch.e.l.le.
But beyond the bounds of the county of Poitou Philip made no progress. In Gascony proper where feudal independence of the old type still survived the barons had no difficulty in perceiving that Philip Augustus was much less the sort of king they wished than the distant sovereign of England.
No local movement in his favour or national sympathy prepared the way for an easy conquest, nor was any serious attempt at invasion made. Most of the inheritance of Eleanor remained to her son, though not through any effort of his, and the French advance stopped at the capture of the castles of Loches and Chinon in the summer of 1205. John had not remained in inactivity in England all this time, however, without some impatience?
but efforts to raise sufficient money for any considerable undertaking or to carry abroad the feudal levies of the country had all failed. At the end of May, 1205, he did collect at Portchester what is described as a very great fleet and a splendid army to cross to the continent, but Hubert Walter and William Marshal, supported by others of the barons, opposed the expedition so vigorously and with so many arguments that the king finally yielded to their opposition though with great reluctance.
The great duchy founded three hundred years before on the colonization of the Northmen, always one of the mightiest of the feudal states of France, all the dominions which the counts of Anjou had struggled to bring together through so many generations, the disputed claims on Maine and Britanny recognized now for a long time as going with Normandy, a part even of the splendid possessions of the dukes of Aquitaine;--all these in little more than two years Philip had transferred from the possession of the king of England to his own, and all except Britanny to the royal domain. If we consider the resources with which he began to reign, we must p.r.o.nounce it an achievement equalled by few kings. For the king of England it was a corresponding loss in prestige and brilliancy of position. John has been made to bear the responsibility of this disaster, and morally with justice; but it must not be forgotten that, as the modern nations were beginning to take shape and to become conscious of themselves, the connexion with England would be felt to be unnatural, and that it was certain to be broken. For England the loss of these possessions was no disaster; it was indeed as great a blessing as to France. The chief gain was that it cut off many diverting interests from the barons of England, just at a time when they were learning to be jealous of their rights at home and were about to enter upon a struggle with the king to compel him to regard the law in his government of the country, a struggle which determined the whole future history of the nation.
[63] See Walter of Coventry, ii. 196.
[64] Matth. Paris, ii. 455.
[65] Rymer, Foedera, i. 140.
[66] Rymer, Foedera, i. 75.
[67] But see Guilhiermoz, Bibliotheque de l"Ecole des Chartes, lx.
(1899), 45-85, whose argument is, however, not convincing.
[68] Roger of Wendover, iii. 170.
[69] Ralph of Coggeshall, 139-141.
[70] L"Histoire de Guillaume la Marechal, ll. 12737-12741.
CHAPTER XX
CONFLICT WITH THE PAPACY
The loss of the ancient possessions of the Norman dukes and the Angevin counts marks the close of an epoch in the reign of John; but for the history of England and for the personal history of the king the period is more appropriately closed by the death of Archbishop Hubert Walter on July 13, 1205, for the consequences which followed that event lead us directly to the second period of the reign. Already at the accession of John one of the two or three men of controlling influence on the course of events, trained not merely in the school of Henry II, but by the leading part he had played in the reign of Richard, there is no doubt that he had kept a strong hand on the government of the opening years of the new reign, and that his personality had been felt as a decided check by the new king. We may believe also that as one who had been brought up by Glanvill, the great jurist of Henry"s time, and who had a large share in carrying the const.i.tutional beginnings of that time a further stage forward, but who was himself a practical statesman rather than a lawyer, he was one of the foremost teachers of that great lesson which England was then learning, the lesson of law, of rights and responsibilities, which was for the world at large a far more important result of the legal reforms of the great Angevin monarch than anything in the field of technical law. It is easy to believe that a later writer records at least a genuine tradition of the feeling of John when he makes him exclaim on hearing of the archbishop"s death, "Now--for the first time am I king of England." In truth practically shut up now for the first time to his island kingdom, John was about to be plunged into that series of quarrels and conflicts which fills the remainder of his life.
For the beginning of the conflict which gives its chief characteristic to the second period of his reign, the conflict with the pope and the Church, John is hardly to be blamed, at least not from the point of view of a king of England. With the first scene of the drama he had nothing to do; in the second he was doing no more than all his predecessors had done with scarcely an instance of dispute since the Norman Conquest. There had long been two questions concerning elections to the see of Canterbury that troubled the minds of the clergy. The monks of the cathedral church objected to the share which the bishops of the province had acquired in the choice of their primate, and canonically they were probably right.
They also objected, and the bishops, though usually acting on the side of the king, no doubt sympathized with them, to the virtual appointment of the archbishop by the king. This objection, though felt by the clergy since the day when Anselm had opened the way into England to the principles of the Hildebrandine reformation, had never yet been given decided expression in overt act or led to any serious struggle with the sovereign; and it is clear that it would not have done so in this instance if the papal throne had not been filled by Innocent III. That great ecclesiastical statesman found in the political situation of more than one country of Europe opportunities for the exercise of his decided genius which enabled him to attain more nearly to the papacy of Gregory VII"s ideal than had been possible to any earlier pope, and none of his triumphs was greater than that which he won from the opportunity offered him in England.
On Archbishop Hubert"s death a party of the monks of Canterbury determined to be beforehand with the bishops and even with the king. They secretly elected their subprior to the vacant see, and sent him off to Rome to be confirmed before their action should be known, but the personal vanity of their candidate betrayed the secret, and his boasting that he was the elect of Canterbury was reported back from the continent to England to the anger of the monks, who then sent a deputation to the king and asked permission in the regular way to proceed to an election.
John gave consent, and suggested John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, as his candidate, since he was "alone of all the prelates of England in possession of his counsels." The bishop was elected by the chapter; both bishops and monks were induced to withdraw the appeals they had made to Rome on their respective rights, and, on December 11, the new archbishop was enthroned and invested with the fiefs of Canterbury by the king. Of course the pallium from the pope was still necessary, and steps were at once taken to secure it. Innocent took plenty of time to consider the situation and did not render his decision until the end of March, 1206, declaring then against the king"s candidate and ordering a deputation of the monks to be sent him, duly commissioned to act for the whole chapter.
King and bishops were also told to be represented at the final decision.
The pope"s action postponed the settlement of the question for six months, and the interval was spent by John in an effort to recover something of his lost dominions, undertaken this time with some promise of success because of active resistance to Philip in Poitou. On this occasion no objection to the campaign was made by the barons, and with a large English force John landed at La Roch.e.l.le on June 7. Encouraged by his presence the insurrection spread through the greater part of Poitou and brought it back into his possession. He even invaded Anjou and held its capital for a time, and reached the borders of Maine, but these conquests he could not retain after Philip took the field against him in person; but on his side Philip did not think it wise to attempt the recovery of Poitou. On October 26 a truce for two years was proclaimed, each side to retain what it then possessed, but John formally abandoning all rights north of the Loire during the period of the truce.
John did not return to England until near the middle of December, but even at that date Innocent III had not decided the question of the Canterbury election. On December 20 he declared against the claim of the bishops and against the first secret election by the monks, and under his influence the deputation from Canterbury elected an Englishman and cardinal highly respected at Rome both for his character and for his learning, Stephen of Langton. The representatives of the king at Rome refused to agree to this election, and the pope himself wrote to John urging him to accept the new archbishop, but taking care to make it clear that the consent of the king was not essential, and indeed he did not wait for it. After correspondence with John in which the king"s anger and his refusal to accept Langton were plainly expressed, on June 17, 1207, he consecrated Stephen archbishop. John"s answer was the confiscation of the lands of the whole archbishopric, apparently those of the convent as well as those of the archbishop, and the expulsion of the monks from the country as traitors, while the trial in England of all appeals to the pope was forbidden.
Before this violent proceeding against the Canterbury monks, the financial necessities of John had led to an experiment in taxation which embroiled him to almost the same extent with the northern province. Not the only one, but the chief source of the troubles of John"s reign after the loss of Normandy, and the main cause of the revolution in which the reign closed, is to be found in the financial situation of the king. The normal expenses of government had been increasing rapidly in the last half century. The growing amount and complexity of public and private business, to be expected in a land long spared the ravages of war, which showed itself in the remarkable development of judicial and administrative machinery during the period, meant increased expenses in many directions not to be met by the increased income from the new machinery. The cost of the campaigns in France was undoubtedly great, and the expense of those which the king desired to undertake was clearly beyond the resources of the country, at least beyond the resources available to him by existing methods of taxation. Nor was John a saving and careful housekeeper who could make a small income go a long ways. The complete breakdown of the ordinary feudal processes of raising revenue, the necessity forced upon the king of discovering new sources of income, the attempt within a single generation to impose on the country something like the modern methods and regularity of taxation, these must be taken into account as elements of decided importance in any final judgment we may form of the struggles of John"s reign and their const.i.tutional results. Down to this date a scutage had been imposed every year since the king"s accession, at the rate of two marks on the fee except on the last occasion when the tax had been twenty shillings. Besides these there had been demanded the carucage of 1200 and the seventh of personal property of 1204, to say nothing of some extraordinary exactions. But these taxes were slow in coming in; the machinery of collection was still primitive, and the amount received in any year was far below what the tax should have yielded.
At a great council held in London on January 8 the king asked the bishops and abbots present to grant him a tax on the incomes of all beneficed clergy. The demand has a decidedly modern sound. Precedents for taxation of this sort had been made in various crusading levies, in the expedients adopted for raising Richard"s ransom, and in the seventh demanded by John in 1204, which was exacted from at least a part of the clergy, but these were all more or less exceptional cases, and there was no precedent for such a tax as a means of meeting the ordinary expenses of the state. The prelates refused their consent, and the matter was deferred to a second great council to be held at Oxford a month later. This council was attended by an unusually large number of ecclesiastics, and the king"s proposition, submitted to them again, was again refused. The council, however, granted the thirteenth asked, to be collected of the incomes and personal property of the laity. But John had no mind to give up his plan because it had not been sanctioned by the prelates in general a.s.sembly, and he proceeded, apparently by way of individual consent, doubtless practically compulsory as usual, to collect the same tax from the whole clergy, the Cistercians alone excepted. A tax of this kind whether of laity or clergy was entirely non-feudal, foreign both in nature and methods to the principles of feudalism, and a long step toward modern taxation, but it was some time before the suggestion made by it was taken up by the government as one of its ordinary resources. Archbishop Geoffrey of York, the king"s brother, who since the death of his father seemed never to be happy unless in a quarrel with some one, took it upon himself to oppose violently the taxation of his clergy, though he had enforced the payment of a similar tax for Richard"s ransom. Finding that he could not prevent it he retired from the country, excommunicating the despoilers of the church, and his lands were taken in hand by the king.
The expulsion of the monks of Canterbury was a declaration of war against the Church and the pope, and the Church was far more powerful, more closely organized, and more nearly actuated by a single ideal, than in the case of any earlier conflict between Church and State in England, and the pope was Innocent III, head of the world in his own conception of his position and very nearly so in reality. There was no chance that a declaration of war would pa.s.s unanswered, but the pope did not act without deliberation. On the news of what the king had done he wrote to the Bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester, directing them to try to persuade John to give way, and if he obstinately continued his course, to proclaim an interdict. This letter was written on August 27, but the interdict was not actually put into force until March 24,1208, negotiations going on all the winter, and John displaying, as he did throughout the whole conflict, considerable ability in securing delay and in keeping opponents occupied with proposals which he probably never intended to carry out. At last a date was set on which the interdict would be proclaimed if the king had not yielded by that time, and he was given an opportunity of striking the first blow which he did not neglect.
He ordered the immediate confiscation of the property of all the clergy who should obey the interdict.
The struggle which follows exhibits, as nothing else could do so well, the tremendous power of the Norman feudal monarchy, the absolute hold which it had on state and nation even on the verge of its fall. John had not ruled during these eight years in such a way as to strengthen his personal position. He had been a tyrant; he had disregarded the rights of batons as well as of clergy; he had given to many private reasons of hatred; he had lost rather than won respect by the way in which he had defended his inheritance in France his present cause, if looked at from the point of view of Church and nation and not from that of the royal prerogative alone, was a bad one. The interdict was a much dreaded penalty, suspending some of the most desired offices of religion, and, while not certainly dooming all the dying to be lost in the world to come, at least rendering their state to the pious mind somewhat doubtful; and, though the effect of the spiritual terrors of the Church had been a little weakened by their frequent use on slight occasions, the age was still far distant when they could be disregarded. We should expect John to prove as weak in the war with Innocent as he had in that with Philip, and at such a test to find his power crumbling without recovery. What we really find is a successful resistance kept up for years, almost without expressed opposition, a great body of the clergy reconciling themselves to the situation as best they could; a period during which the affairs of the state seem to go on as if nothing were out of order, the period of John"s greatest tyranny, of almost unbridled power. And when he was forced to yield at last, it was to a foreign attack, to a foreign attack combined, it is true, with an opposition at home which had been long acc.u.mulating, but no one can say how long this opposition might have gone on acc.u.mulating before it would have grown strong enough to check the king of itself.
The interdict seems to have been generally observed by the clergy. The Cistercians at first declared that they were not bound to respect it, but they were after a time forced by the pope to conform. Baptism and extreme unction were allowed; marriages might be celebrated at the church door; but no ma.s.ses were publicly said, and all the ordinary course of the sacraments was intermitted; the dead were buried in unconsecrated ground, and the churches were closed except to those who wished to make offerings. Nearly all the bishops went into exile. Two only remained in the end, both devoted more to the king than to the Church; John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, employed during most of the time in secular business in Ireland, and Peter des Roches, appointed Bishop of Winchester in 1205, destined to play a leading part against the growing liberties of the nation in the next reign, and now, as a chronicler says, occupied less with defending the Church than in administering the king"s affairs. The general confiscation of Church property must have relieved greatly the financial distress of the king, and during the years when these lands were administered as part of the royal domains, we hear less of attempts at national taxation. John did not stop with confiscation of the goods of the clergy. Their exemption from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts of the state was suspended, and they were even in some cases denied the protection of the laws. It is said that once there came to the king on the borders of Wales officers of one of the sheriffs, leading a robber with his hands bound behind his back, who had robbed and killed a priest, and they asked the king what should be done with him. "He has killed one of my enemies. Loose him and let him go," ordered John. After the interdict had been followed by the excommunication of the king, Geoffrey, Archdeacon of Norwich, urged upon his a.s.sociates at the exchequer that it was not safe for those who were in orders to remain in the service of an excommunicate king, and left the court without permission and went home.
John hearing this sent William Talbot after him with a band of soldiers, who arrested the archdeacon, and loaded him with chains, and threw him into prison. There shortly after by the command of the king he was pressed to death. It was by acts like these, of which other instances are on record, that John terrorized the country and held it quiet under his tyranny.
Even the greatest barons were subjected to arbitrary acts of power of the same kind. On the slightest occasion of suspicion the king demanded their sons or other relatives, or their va.s.sals, as hostages, a measure which had been in occasional use before, but which John carried to an extreme.
The great earl marshal himself, who, if we may trust his biographer, was never afraid to do what he thought honour demanded, and was always able to defend himself in the king"s presence with such vigorous argument that nothing could be done with him, was obliged to give over to the king"s keeping first his eldest and then his second son. The case of William de Braose is that most commonly cited. He had been a devoted supporter of John and had performed many valuable services in his interest, especially at the time of the coronation. For these he had received many marks of royal favour, and was rapidly becoming both in property and in family alliances one of the greatest barons of the land. About the time of the proclamation of the interdict a change took place in his fortunes. For some reason he lost the favour of the king and fell instead under his active enmity. According to a formal statement of the case, which John thought well to put forth afterwards, he had failed to pay large sums which he had promised in return for the grants that had been made him; and the records support the accusation.[71] According to Roger of Wendover the king had a personal cause of anger. On a demand of hostages from her husband, the wife of William had rashly declared to the officers that her sons should never be delivered to the king because he had basely murdered his nephew Arthur, whom he was under obligation to guard honourably, and it is impossible to believe that it was merely delay in paying money that excited the fierce persecution that followed.
William with his family took refuge in Ireland, where he was received by William Marshal and the Lacies, but John pursued him thither, and he was again obliged to fly. His wife and son, attempting to escape to Scotland, were seized in Galloway by a local baron and delivered to John, who caused them to be starved to death in prison.
It may seem strange at the present day that the absolutism of the king did not bring about a widespread rebellion earlier than it did. One of the chief causes of his strength is to be found in the bands of mercenary soldiers which he maintained, ready to do any bidding at a moment"s notice, under the command of men who were entirely his creatures, like Gerald of Athies, a peasant of Touraine, who with some of his fellows was thought worthy of mention by name in the Great Charter. The cost of keeping these bands devoted to his service was no doubt one of the large expenses of the reign. Another fact of greater permanent interest that helped to keep up the king"s power is the lack of unity among the barons, of any feeling of a common cause, but rather the existence of jealousies, and open conflicts even, which made it impossible to bring them together in united action in their own defence. The fact is of especial importance because it was the crushing tyranny of John that first gave rise to the feeling of corporate unity in the baronage, and the growth of this feeling is one of the great facts of the thirteenth century.
At the beginning of 1209 Innocent III had threatened the immediate excommunication of John, but the king had known how to keep him, and the bishops who represented him in the negotiations, occupied with one proposition of compromise after another until almost the close of the year. The summer was employed in settling affairs with Scotland, which down to this time had not been put into form satisfactory to either king.
A meeting at the end of April led to no result, but in August, after armies of the two countries had faced each other on the borders, a treaty was agreed upon. William the Lion was not then in a condition to insist strongly on his own terms, and the treaty was much in favour of John. The king of Scotland promised to pay 15,000 marks, and gave over two of his daughters to John to be given in marriage by him. In a later treaty John was granted the same right with respect to Alexander, the heir of Scotland, arrangements that look very much like a recognition of the king of England as the overlord of Scotland. In Wales also quarrels among the native chieftains enabled John to increase his influence in the still unconquered districts. In November the long-deferred excommunication fell upon the unrepentant king, but it could not be published in England.