CHAPTER V
JOHN AND THE POPE
1210–1214
[Rex] prudenter sane sibi et suis providens in hoc facto, licet id multis ignominiosum videretur, et enorme servitutis jugum. Cum enim res in arto esset, et undique timor vehemens, nulla erat via compendiosior imminens evadendi periculum, nec forsitan alia; quoniam ex quo se in protectione posuit apostolica, et regna sua beati Petri patrimonium fecit, non erat in orbe Romano princeps qui in sedis apostolicae injuriam vel illum infestare, vel illa invadere praesumeret.
W. Coventry, ii. 210.
During John’s absence in Ireland, England had been disquieted by rumours of a threatened Welsh invasion. His ministers, however, faced the peril boldly; the justiciar, the treasurer (Bishop Peter of Winchester), and the earl of Chester marched into Wales with “a great host” and built three castles on Welsh soil,[700] and on the king’s return the Welsh “vanished,” as a chronicler says, into their mountains, “and the land kept silence before him.”[701] John, however, was in no mood, now that England, Scotland and Ireland were all at his feet, to be content with mere silence on the part of the Welsh princes, and especially of his own son-in-law, Llywelyn, who, having secured the hand of the king’s daughter and the mastery over the greater part of Wales, was now openly turning against the power by whose help he had risen. The case is frankly stated by a Welsh chronicler: “Llywelyn, son of Jorwerth, made cruel attacks upon the English; and on that account King John became enraged, and formed a design of entirely divesting Llywelyn of his dominion.”[702] The native rivals whom Llywelyn had forced into submission were always on the watch for a chance of flinging off the North-Welsh yoke; and when John assembled his host at Chester, seemingly in the third week of May 1211,[703] he was joined by most of the chieftains of the south.[704] At the tidings of his approach, “Llywelyn,” says the same chronicler, “moved with his forces into the middle of the country, and his property to the mountain of Eryri (Snowdon); and the forces of Mona, with their property, in the same manner. Then the king, with his army, came to the castle of Dyganwy. And there the army was in so great a want of provisions that an egg was sold for a penny halfpenny, and it was a delicious feast to them to get horseflesh; and on that account the king returned to England, after disgracefully losing many of his men and much property.”[705]
Whatever military “disgrace” there may have been was speedily wiped out; John had only gone home to collect fresh supplies and larger forces.[706] Setting forth again from Whitchurch in July,[707] “the king”—again it is a Welsh chronicler who tells the story—“returned to Wales, his mind being more cruel and his army larger; and he built many[708] castles in Gwynedd. And he proceeded over the river Conway towards the mountain of Eryri, and incited some of his troops to burn Bangor. And there Robert, bishop of Bangor, was seized in his church, and was afterwards ransomed for two hundred hawks.” Llywelyn sent his wife to make terms for him with her father, and was received into the king’s peace on delivering up to him a large number of hostages, paying a heavy indemnity in cattle and horses, “and consigning also the midland district to the king for ever. And thereupon all the Welsh princes, except Rhys and Owain, the sons of Gruffydd, son of Rhys, made peace with the king; and the king returned victoriously, and with extreme joy, to England.”[709] Of course the peace was a hollow one, like every other peace with the Welsh; but for the moment John’s success was complete. “In Ireland, Scotland, and Wales there was no man who did not obey the nod of the king of England—a thing which, it is well known, had never happened to any of his forefathers; and he would have appeared happy indeed, and successful to the utmost of his desires, had he not been despoiled of his territories beyond the sea, and under the ban of the Church.”[710]
To neither of these drawbacks was John altogether indifferent. He was only biding his time to make a great effort for the removal of the first; and although the second appeared, as yet, to have made no difference to his political position, he was not insensible to the dangers which it might involve. He was still playing with both primate and Pope. In the spring of 1210 he had made another feint of renewing negotiations with Stephen Langton, had sent him a safe-conduct for a conference to be held at Dover, and had actually gone thither (May 4), ostensibly for the purpose of meeting him. But the safe-conduct was irregular in form; and this circumstance, coupled with a warning from some English barons, made Stephen refuse to trust himself in John’s power.[711] The king vented his wrath by cutting down the woods on all the archbishop’s manors.[712] On his return from Ireland he dealt a heavy blow at the religious orders. Towards the end of October he called together in London the heads of all the religious houses in England, and compelled them to give him sums of money, of which the total is said to have amounted to one hundred thousand pounds.[713] The Cistercians, whom he had spared in the earlier days of the Interdict, had to bear the brunt of his exactions now; they “were forced to find him chariots with horses and men,”[714] or, as another writer explains it, their privileges were quashed, and they had to give the king forty thousand pounds;[715] moreover, their abbots were forbidden to attend the triennial chapter of the order at Cîteaux, “lest their piteous complaints should exasperate the whole world against such an oppressor.”[716]
In June or July 1211[717] the cardinal subdeacon Pandulf, who was much in the Pope’s confidence, and a Templar named Durand came to England “that they might restore peace between the Crown and the clergy.”[718] They seem to have been sent at the king’s request. The terms of the commission which they had received from the Pope are known from a reissue of it two years later. They were to exhort John to make satisfaction “according to a form subscribed between ourself” (the Pope) “and his envoys.” If he would publicly take an oath of absolute obedience to the Pope’s mandates on all matters for which he was under excommunication, they were to give him absolution; and when they had obtained from him security for the reinstatement of the archbishop of Canterbury, they were to withdraw the interdict.[719] John met them on his return from Wales, at Northampton, on August 30,[720] and received them publicly in a great assembly of the barons. The details of the conference rest only upon the authority of two comparatively late monastic chronicles; but there is no reason for doubting the correctness of the main outlines of their story. The envoys called upon John to make satisfaction to the Church, restore the property which he had taken from her ministers, and receive Archbishop Stephen, the exiled bishops, their kinsfolk and their friends “fairly and in peace.” The king answered that they might make him swear to restore everything, and he would do whatever else they liked, “but if that fellow Stephen sets foot in my land, I will have him hanged.” A discussion followed as to the circumstances of Stephen’s election and the respective rights of Pope and King in such matters. John ended by offering to receive as archbishop any one whom the Pope might choose except Stephen, and to give Stephen another see if he would resign all claims upon Canterbury. Pandulf scornfully rejected this proposal. At last, in presence of the whole council, he pronounced to John’s face the papal sentence of excommunication, of which, he said, the publication had only been delayed till his own arrival in England and that of his colleagues; he absolved all John’s subjects from their allegiance, bade them be ready to join the ranks and obey the leader of any host which the Pope might send to England, and denounced not only John himself, but also all his posterity, as for ever incapacitated for the office of king. It is said that on this John bade the sheriffs and foresters who were present bring in whatever prisoners they had in their charge, and gave orders for the hanging of some and the blinding or mutilation of others, to show the papal envoys his own absolute power and his ruthlessness in the exercise of it; that among the prisoners was a clerk charged with forgery, whom he ordered to be hanged; that Pandulf wanted to excommunicate at once any one who should lay hands on this man, and went out of the hall to fetch a candle for the purpose, but that the king followed him and gave up the accused clerk “to his judgement”—which of course meant, to be set at liberty.[721] Whether or not the mock tragedy enacted between king and cardinal really ended in this strange fashion, the result of the conference was clearly the same as that of all previous diplomacy between Innocent III. and John: the Pope gained nothing and the king lost nothing. Pandulf and Durand went back to Rome accompanied by envoys from John;[722] an order was issued for the recall of the exiles, but it seems to have taken the form of a writ bidding all bishops and beneficed clergy return before next mid-summer, “on pain of losing their property.”[723] The excommunicate sovereign kept his Christmas feast at Windsor,[724] and found a new triumph awaiting him at the opening of the new year.
King William of Scotland, stricken in years and with no male heir save one young son, the child of his old age, was hard pressed by a party in his realm who rallied round a certain Cuthred MacWilliam, a descendant of the older line of Scottish kings which the house of Malcolm and Margaret had ousted from the succession. In despair of overcoming these rebels, William turned to England for succour, and early in 1212 “committed himself, his kingdom and his son to the care” of his English overlord.[725] Before Ash Wednesday (February 7) he had formally granted to John the right to dispose of young Alexander in marriage, “as his liegeman,” within six years from that date.[726] On Mid-Lent Sunday, March 4, the boy was knighted by John, “as the king held a festival in the Hospital of S. Bridget at Clerkenwell.”[727] Later in the year an English army marched to William’s aid. John himself probably led his troops as far as Hexham, where he was on June 27,[728] and then sent them on to Scotland with instructions which proved sufficient to secure the object of their expedition. They scoured the country till Cuthred fell into their power; and the struggle of the old Scottish royal house against the “modern kings” ended, for a time at least, with the hanging of its champion by English hands.[729]
Meanwhile, John had never lost sight of his plans for a renewal of the war with France. The first need of course was money. It was probably in the hope of finding some additional sources of revenue which could be claimed for the Crown that on his return from Ireland he ordered an inquiry into all assizes of novel disseisin which had been held during his absence, and also into the right of presentation to, and actual tenancy of, all ecclesiastical benefices throughout the country.[730] An inquest into the services due from the knights and other tenants-in-chief in every shire was ordered in the same year or early in the next;[731] and an inquest concerning escheated honours and the services due from them was set on foot shortly afterwards.[732] In 1211 “the king of France seized all the English ships that touched his shores, and therefore”—says the Dunstable annalist—“the king of England seized many men of the Cinque Ports”;[733] a statement which we can only suppose to mean one of two things: either that John suspected some of the ships to have been willing prizes, or that he was dissatisfied with the way in which his sailors had executed, or failed to execute, some order which he had given for retaliation. In either case, however, it is clear that he made his displeasure a ground for further exactions from the leading men of the southern coast towns.
Of far greater moment than the desultory skirmishes between the sailors of England and France was the scheme of European coalition against Philip which John had been gradually building up during the past ten years. One of the most important elements in his political calculations throughout those years was the course of events in Germany. The death of the Emperor Henry VI. in September 1197 had been followed by a disputed election to the imperial crown, the late Emperor’s brother, Philip of Suabia, claiming it for himself against the candidate chosen by the majority of the electors, Otto of Saxony, a son of Duke Henry the Lion and Maud, daughter of Henry II. of England.[734] The Suabian prince was backed by his powerful family connexions, including the duke of Austria, son and successor of Richard Cœur-de-Lion’s old enemy Leopold. Otto’s youth had been passed in exile at the court of his Angevin grandfather, and he was a special favourite of his uncle Richard, who granted him first the earldom of York and afterwards the county of Poitou, and whose influence with some of the princes of the empire had had a share in procuring him their votes. It was, therefore, obvious policy for his rival and the king of France to make common cause against him and his kinsman of England. A treaty of alliance between the two Philips was signed on June 29, 1198.[735] In 1200 Otto sent his two brothers to demand for him from John a renewal of the investiture of York and of Poitou, and also—if we may believe Roger of Howden—two-thirds of Richard’s treasure and all his jewels, which he said Richard had bequeathed to him. His assertion was correct with regard to the jewels, but the other claims are so unreasonable that it is difficult to believe that they can have had any justification.[736] John, however, had an answer ready for all these demands. The envoys did not reach him till after the treaty of Gouleton (May 1200) was signed, and by that treaty he was pledged to give no help of any kind to Otto without the consent of the French king.[737] This excuse, indeed, was only temporary; in June 1201 the Pope recognized Otto as lawful emperor-elect;[738] and though John was at that very moment renewing his treaty with France, the uncle and nephew speedily drew together. Throughout the vicissitudes of the next six years John never lost sight of the community of their interests; he constantly showed his sense of it by letters and presents, by loans and gifts of money, and by grants of trading and other privileges in England to the German and Flemish cities which supported Otto,[739] as well as by undertaking the custody of at least one prisoner of importance who belonged to the party of Otto’s rival.[740] Otto, whose fortunes were gradually rising throughout these years, was so fully alive to the value of the English alliance that in May 1207 he came to London for a personal interview with John. It is said that on this occasion Otto promised to conquer the realm of France and make it over to his uncle, all except three cities, Paris, Etampes and Orléans, which Philip Augustus had once jestingly said he would bestow upon Otto himself if ever the latter became emperor. John gave his nephew six thousand marks,[741] and received from him the symbolical gift of a great golden crown.[742] As yet, indeed, Otto was only emperor-elect, and had the conquest of his own realms to complete ere he could attempt that of France. But his fortunes were steadily rising; his rival, Philip of Suabia, was slain in the following summer;[743] and on October 4, 1209, just at the moment of his uncle’s triumph over the English Church, he was crowned by the Pope at Rome.[744]
Within a year, however, Pope and Emperor had quarrelled, and Otto was excommunicated.[745] This was, of course, an additional bond of union between him and John. At the same time, a kinsman of both princes was setting the Pope and the French king alike at defiance. Count Raymond of Toulouse, the husband of John’s sister Joan, had from the outset favoured the heretics who for the last two years had kept southern Gaul in turmoil; in 1211 he openly allowed them to concentrate in his capital city, and headed their resistance to the forces which Innocent and Philip had sent against them under Simon de Montfort. Toulouse was besieged, but John and Otto kept their kinsman so well supplied with the means of defence and sustenance that the “crusaders” at last grew hopeless of taking it and raised the siege. Otto had answered the Pope’s excommunication by conquering Tuscia, Apulia and Calabria; whereupon Innocent published another sentence, deposing him from his imperial office and his German kingdom, and bidding the princes of the empire elect a new sovereign in his stead.
John, “with such a comrade,” grew bolder than ever.[746] The common interest of the three excommunicate kinsmen obviously lay in crushing France, the ally of the Pope; and the moment seemed at hand for the fulfilment of John’s highest hopes. John and Raymond in the south, John and Otto in the north and east, might hem in Philip Augustus completely, if the princes of the border-land of France and Germany—Boulogne, Flanders, the Netherlands, Lorraine—could be so won over as to insure their co-operation in the plans of the uncle and nephew for the conquest and dismemberment of the French kingdom. To this end John’s utmost powers of diplomacy had been devoted for many years past; and in the case of most of these princes the end was now gained. In the autumn of 1211 Reginald of Boulogne, whose policy had long been wavering, quarrelled openly with Philip and took refuge with his kinsman the count of Bar;[747] in May 1212 he was in England, pledging his homage and his service to John. By the middle of August the counts of Bar, Limburg, Flanders and Louvain were all pledged to John’s side.[748] John himself was meanwhile preparing for an expedition to Gascony; on June 15 thirty-nine English towns were ordered to furnish contingents of men “ready to cross the sea with the king in his service when he should require them.”[749]
A month later, however, the destination of his armament was changed. Just as his plans were ripe for an attack upon France, they were checked once more by the necessity of guarding his realm against the Welsh. Before the close of 1211 Llywelyn—provoked, as he declared, by “the many insults done to him by the men of the king”—had leagued himself with his former rivals in South Wales and taken “all the castles which John had made in Gwynedd, except Dyganwy and Rhuddlan.”[750] And this time the league was more likely to hold together than was usually the case with alliances formed by the Welsh princes either with their neighbours or with each other; for a new hope had dawned upon the Welsh people. The tidings of John’s excommunication and deposition by the Pope had penetrated into Wales; and in this matter the Welsh, although of all Christian nations probably the least amenable to ecclesiastical discipline and the least submissive to ecclesiastical authority, became full of zeal to do the utmost that in them lay towards carrying out the Papal sentence against their overlord and conqueror. “They with one consent,” says their own chronicler, “rose against the king, and bravely wrested from him the midland district which he had previously taken from Llywelyn.”[751] The version of the English chroniclers is that the Welsh invaded the English border, took some castles and beheaded their garrisons, carried off a mass of plunder, and then burned everything and slew every man that they could lay their hands on.[752]
It was clear that an end must be made of this Welsh trouble before John could venture across the Channel. He changed his plans with his usual promptitude. In July the king’s escheators throughout England were ordered to see that the escheats in their custody should furnish each a certain number of carpenters and other labourers provided with proper tools, and with money enough to carry them to Chester. Writs were also issued to Alan of Galloway bidding him send a thousand of his “best and bravest men,” to William the Marshal, Bishop John of Norwich, and others of the king’s liegemen in Ireland, and to the tenants by serjeanty throughout England, requiring their personal attendance; the place of muster for all alike being Chester, and the appointed date Sunday, August 19.[753] On August 16, however, the king sent out from Nottingham a notice that he was unable to be at Chester on the day fixed, and that the muster would not take place.[754] The orders which he issued next day indicate that he was contemplating a diversion by sea, part of the fleet being ordered to sail from Chester, coast along North Wales, and “do as much harm to the enemy as possible,” while another part was to assemble at Bristol.[755] He probably meant to await the result of these movements, as well as of some negotiations which he was carrying on with the South Welsh chieftains,[756] before deciding whether his main advance should be made by way of North or South Wales.
The host finally mustered at Nottingham in the second week of September.[757] The chivalry of England gathered {Sept. 9–15} round the king “in such array and in such numbers,” says a contemporary, “that no man of our day remembers the like.”[758] John’s first act on reaching the muster-place, “before he tasted food,” was to hang twenty-eight of the hostages whom he had taken from the Welsh in the previous year.[759] But “suddenly God brought his counsel to nought.”[760] As he sat at table there came to him a breathless messenger from the king of Scots, followed by one from the Princess Joan of Wales, John’s daughter and Llywelyn’s wife. Both messengers brought letters whose contents, they said, were weighty and secret. When the two letters were read, their purport proved to be almost identical. William and Joan alike warned the king that his barons were preparing to act upon the papal sentence which absolved them from their allegiance, and, if he persisted in leading them to war, either to turn and slay him themselves, or deliver him up to death at the hands of his Welsh enemies.[761] Such a warning, coming at the same instant from two such different quarters, was not to be lightly put aside. It was emphasized by the sudden disappearance of two barons, Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter, who at once secretly withdrew from the host.[762] John could hardly doubt the significance of their departure at such a moment. He dismissed his army and moved by slow stages back to London.[763]
The month which had elapsed between John’s order countermanding the muster at Chester and his return to Nottingham had been spent by him in a progress through the north;[764] and it was probably during this time that there came to his ears a prediction concerning him spoken by one Peter, variously described as “of Pontefract” or “of Wakefield.” This Peter was “a simple countryman,” who lived on bread and water, and was counted among the people for a prophet. He foretold that on the next Ascension Day John should cease to be king. Whether John was to die, or to be driven from the land, or to abdicate, Peter could not say; he only knew that it had been revealed to him in a vision that after the king had reigned prosperously for fourteen years, neither he nor his heirs should rule any more, “but one who is pleasing to God.”[765] John, on hearing of this prophecy, laughed it to scorn; but when Peter was found to be wandering all over the north country publishing his supposed vision wherever he went, some of the king’s friends deemed it prudent to take the prophet into custody.[766] He was brought before John himself, who asked for more explicit information as to his own impending fate. Peter only replied, “Know thou of a surety that on the day which I have named, thou shalt be king no more; and if I be proved a liar, do with me as thou wilt.” “According to thy word, so be it,” answered John; and he sent the man to be imprisoned at Corfe.[767] This precaution, however, defeated its own end; Peter’s captivity in a royal dungeon gave to him and his prophecy a new importance in popular estimation; his words were repeated far and wide, and believed “as if they had been spoken by a voice from Heaven.”[768] The dread which they are said to have inspired in the king himself[769] proves nothing as to whether, or how far, he shared the superstitious credulity of his people. Apart from all such questions, he had obviously a sufficient reason for alarm in the fact that the general acceptance of a political prophecy naturally tends to work its fulfilment.
Other influences were working in the same direction. Even without the special warnings which he had received at Nottingham, John must have been well aware that he had, as Roger of Wendover says, “almost as many enemies as he had barons.”[770] The question was only how soon their silent hate would break out in open defiance, and whether he could once more terrify or beguile them into submission before the smouldering embers of their discontent were kindled into a general conflagration by Innocent’s anathema and Peter’s prophecy. On reaching London he addressed to all those whose fidelity he suspected a new demand for hostages, “that he might prove who would and who would not obey his orders.” The response showed that he was even yet stronger than he himself had dared to believe. From many of these men he had already had hostages in his keeping for years; several of them had suffered in their family relations a far deeper injury at his hands; yet once again, at his bidding, they gave up to him sons, nephews, kinsmen, “as many as he would, not daring to resist his commands.”[771] Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitz-Walter alone refused all purgation, and fled, the one to Scotland, the other to France; their castles were seized, their lands confiscated, and themselves outlawed.[772] With his own servants and clerks the king dealt in yet more summary fashion; those among them whom he suspected were arrested and cast into prison.[773] Fresh humiliations were heaped upon the clergy. The Cistercians are said to have been mulcted of twenty-two thousand pounds in punishment for the help which they were supposed to have given to the enemies of Raymond of Toulouse;[774] and all the English clergy, both regular and secular, were forced to set their hands to a deed whereby they renounced all pecuniary claims against the king, and declared that all the money which he had had from them since his accession was a free and voluntary gift.[775] On the other hand, John was taking some pains to conciliate the people. He checked the severity of the Forest administration. He forbade the extortions practised by his officers on merchants and pilgrims. “Moreover, he is said to have showed mercy on widows, and done what in him lay to promote peace in temporal affairs.” Sternness and conciliation alike did their work. Again “the land kept silence”;[776] and it seems that the first sound which broke the silence was a declaration of the barons in favour of the king.
Some time between the summer of 1212 and the spring of 1213 two remarkable letters were written by John, the one to his chief justiciar in Ireland, Bishop John of Norwich, the other to Earl William the Marshal.[777] Both letters deal with the same subjects, and they were evidently despatched both at once. The king greatly commends the bishop’s discretion in the matter of “the oath of fealty lately sworn to us by our barons of Ireland, for the greater safety of ourself and our realm,” for which, he says, he is sending letters of thanks to them all. He expresses the warmest gratitude to William the Marshal, “as their spokesman in this matter, and also as the one from whose suggestion and sole desire we doubt not this thing took its rise, and to whom we are indebted for the ready disposition and devotion of all the rest.” He states further that he is sending to the bishop, the earl, and the other barons of the March “copies of the letters patent which our magnates of England have drawn up for us,” and he requests that the barons of Ireland will “set their seals to letters of similar tenour, and send them to us.” Lastly, he alludes to some advice which the Marshal and the other lay barons in Ireland “have sent to us about making peace with the Church,” and desires that they will “provide, by the common counsel of our faithful subjects in those parts, a form whereby peace may be made sure without injury to our liberties and rights,” and transmit it to him. “See you to it,” he adds to the justiciar, “that this be done.”[778]
We can hardly doubt that there is some connexion between these letters and another yet more remarkable document, whose date must lie between Pandulf’s visit in August 1211 and the spring of 1213. This is a manifesto addressed “to all faithful Christians” by “the whole of the magnates of Ireland,” with William the Marshal and Meiler Fitz-Henry at their head, expressing their “grief and astonishment” that the Pope should propose to absolve the subjects of the king of England from their allegiance, and declaring their approval of John’s political conduct and their determination to “live and die with their king.”[779] This manifesto may have been drawn up when the barons of the Irish March, at the Marshal’s suggestion, renewed their fealty to John; or it may have been their answer to John’s request that they would set their hands to and transmit to him letters patent similar to those which, he says, had been “made for him” by the magnates of England. There is, indeed, another possible alternative. On more than one occasion, and by more than one chronicler, John is charged with forging letters and other like documents. The letter ascribed to the magnates of Ireland and the letters—of which nothing is now known—sent to them by John as having been issued by the magnates of England may therefore have been both alike forgeries. There is, however, nothing to indicate that such was the case. If it was not, then it seems that the barons of England, who in the autumn of 1212 were believed to be on the verge of rebellion or something worse, were yet so weak, as well as so false, that John could force from them a collective declaration in writing which, whatever its precise import may have been, was evidently a declaration in his interest and for his advantage; and that in the same crisis the barons of the Irish March, acting under the guidance of the noblest and wisest man in their whole order, ranged themselves boldly on the side of John against all his enemies. The king, to whom for a moment ruin had seemed so near that he himself gave way to despair, was within a few months, perhaps even a few weeks, outwardly more than ever supreme.
On the other hand, those same loyal barons in Ireland who seem to have so emphatically declared their resolve to stand by the king in resistance to the papal sentence of deposition had yet urged upon him the importance of procuring a withdrawal of that sentence by endeavouring to make peace with the Church. Whether they did, according to John’s request, draft a form of proposals to be laid before the Pope, there is nothing to show; but it is certain that in November John despatched to Rome four envoys charged to offer his acceptance of the terms which Pandulf and Durand had proposed fifteen months before.[780]
John, in fact, knew well how unsubstantial his apparent supremacy was, and how hollow were the foundations on which it rested. He knew that if he wished to prevent the fulfilment of Peter’s prophecy, he must now disarm once for all, and secure permanently for his own interest, some one at least of the various enemies, or groups of enemies, against whom he had been struggling for six years at such overwhelming odds. By the end of 1212 the signs of the times were beginning to point out who this one must be; by the early spring of 1213 there could no longer be any doubt on the point. The fortunes of war in Germany and in southern Gaul had shattered John’s hopes of crushing Innocent and Philip Augustus both at once. In Aquitaine Simon de Montfort and his “crusaders” were gradually winning their way against the Albigenses, and Raymond of Toulouse was practically ruined. In Germany the young King Frederic of Sicily had at the Pope’s instigation been elected to the empire in Otto’s stead. Otto sought to regain his footing in the country by marrying the daughter of his former rival, {August} Duke Philip of Suabia; but the bride died a few days after her marriage;[781] and in November (1212) the political league which Innocent was building up against Otto and John was completed by a treaty of alliance between Frederic and Philip Augustus.[782] Triumphant everywhere on the continent, Innocent resolved to make an end of matters with John. In the winter of 1212 Stephen Langton and the bishops of Ely and London carried to Rome in person their complaints against their sovereign, and their entreaties that such a state of things should be suffered to continue no longer. In January 1213 they returned to the French court accompanied by Pandulf, and bringing with them a letter from the Pope to the French king.[783] Innocent in this letter solemnly laid upon Philip, for his soul’s health, the task of expelling the English king from his realm, and bade him assume in John’s stead the sovereignty of England for himself and his heirs for ever.[784] It is said that the Pope wrote at the same time to the other sovereigns and princes of Europe, bidding them join under Philip’s leadership in a sort of crusade against John, and granting to all who should take part in this expedition the same privileges, temporal and spiritual, which were conferred on pilgrims to the Holy Sepulchre.[785]
These letters and the papal decree for John’s deposition were publicly read to the French bishops, clergy and people in a council assembled for that purpose at Soissons on the Monday in Holy Week, April 8.[786] It was no new idea that the papal mandate suggested to Philip Augustus. For a whole year at least he had been contemplating the conquest of England and the establishment of his eldest son, Louis, upon its throne; in April 1212 Louis had already arranged the terms on which he would receive the homage of the English barons and the political relation in which he was to stand towards his father after his own coronation in England.[787] To Philip and Louis the Pope’s commission was merely the signal that their longed-for hour had come. “Then the king of the French, hearing and receiving the thing which he had long desired, girded himself up for the fight,” and bade all his men, on pain of “culvertage,” be ready to meet him at Rouen on April 21, the first Sunday after Easter;[788] and ships, victuals, arms and men were rapidly gathered together in answer to his call.[789]