CHAPTER III
JOHN “SOFTSWORD”
1199–1206
Contempserunt etenim in eo malivoli quique juvenilem aetatem et corporis parvitatem, et quia prudentia magis quam pugna pacem optinebat ubique, “Johannem Mollegladium” eum malivoli detractores et invidi derisores vocabant. Sed processu temporis ...
Gerv. Cant. vol. ii. pp. 92, 93 (a. 1200).
In Richard’s island realm there was never a moment’s question as to who should succeed him on its throne. In English eyes one successor alone was possible, no matter how undesirable he might be. The circumstances of the case, however—the unexpectedness of the vacancy, the heir’s absence from England, his past relations with the government and the people there, and the existence of a rival claimant—presented an opportunity for endeavouring to make a bargain with him such as it was not often possible to make with a new sovereign. Accordingly the English barons as a body, on hearing of Richard’s death, assumed an attitude of independence. All of them set to work to fortify and revictual their castles; some of them even began to attack and plunder their neighbours, as if they deemed that there was to be again “no king in the land”; and all the efforts of the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, failed to restore order, till he was joined at the end of April by Archbishop Hubert and William the Marshal. The archbishop excommunicated the evildoers,[262] and he and the Marshal conjointly tendered to all the men of the kingdom, “citizens and burghers, earls, barons, and free tenants,” an oath of liege homage and fealty to John. The lesser freemen apparently took it without hesitation, but many of the barons held back. These reluctant ones—chief among whom were the earls of Clare, Huntingdon, Chester, Ferrars and Warwick, Roger de Lacy and William de Mowbray—were summoned by the primate, the Marshal and the justiciar to a meeting at Northampton. There they took the oath, but only in return for a promise given by the three ministers that if they did so, John “should render to each of them his rights.”[263] None of these “rights” are specified; but the expression used by the historian who records the claim distinctly implies that it was in each case the claim of an individual to some particular thing to which he considered himself personally entitled, something, it would seem, which he had been unable to obtain from the late king, and which he was therefore anxious to secure beforehand from the new one. In several cases the grievance seems to have been that of an heir who had not yet received investiture of a dignity to which he had become entitled by inheritance some time before.[264] With this grievance the Marshal and the justiciar could not fail to sympathize; for although they had for some years past enjoyed the estates attached to the earldoms of Striguil (or Pembroke) and Essex respectively, neither of them had yet been invested as earl. Justly, therefore, was the promise which they had made in John’s name redeemed first of all to them when he girded them with the earl’s sword and belt on his coronation day.[265]
The chroniclers of the time speak of that day’s ceremony in a matter-of-course way which implies that there was nothing remarkable about it. “John,” says one, “was peaceably received by the great men of all England, and was immediately crowned by Archbishop Hubert of Canterbury at Westminster on Ascension Day, amid a great array of the citizens.”[266] Sixteen prelates besides Hubert, ten earls and “many barons” were present.[267] The coronation oath was administered to John in almost the same words as it had been to Richard, and with the same adjuration not to take it without a full purpose of keeping it, to which John made the proper reply.[268] Of the other details of the ceremony there is no description; only one incident at its outset and one omission at its close are noted by contemporary writers.[269] The first was merely a formal protest made by Bishop Philip of Durham that the coronation ought not to take place in the absence of his metropolitan, the archbishop of York.[270] The second was an intentional and significant omission on the part of the newly crowned king himself. It was customary for every Christian sovereign, after the crown had been placed on his head, to seal the vows which he had just made by receiving the Holy Communion. John, however, did not communicate.[271]
Next day the new king received in person the homage of the barons.[272] On this side of the sea, only Wales and Scotland remained to be secured. Of Wales we hear nothing at the moment. Scotland had taken the initiative immediately after Richard’s death; King William the Lion had at once despatched a message to John, offering him his liege homage and fealty, on condition that Northumberland and Cumberland should be given back to the Scottish Crown. The English primate, Marshal and justiciar, knowing the difficulties with which John was beset on the other side of the Channel, probably feared that he might be tempted to purchase William’s support at William’s own price; they intercepted the messenger, and sent word to the Scot king, by his brother Earl David of Huntingdon, that he must “wait patiently” till John should reach England. John himself—to whom they apparently reported what they had done—sent word to William that he would “satisfy him concerning all his demands” on his arrival, if the Scot king would keep the peace till then.[273] Immediately after his coronation John despatched two envoys to summon William to his court and conduct him safely thither. After they had started, there came to the English king three envoys from Scotland with a repetition of William’s former message; but this time a threat was added; if William’s terms were not accepted “he would regain all that he was entitled to, if he could.” John answered quietly: “When your lord, my very dear cousin, shall come to me, I will do to him whatsoever is right concerning these things and other requests of his”; and he bade the bishop of Durham go to meet the Scot king, “hoping the latter would come according to his summons.”[274] He had himself left London on the morrow of his crowning {May 28} to go on pilgrimage to S. Albans;[275] he afterwards visited Canterbury and S. Edmunds,[276] and thence went to Northampton, to keep Whitsuntide (June 6) and wait for William.[277] He waited in vain; William only sent back the English envoys, reiterated his demand for the two counties and his threat of winning them by force, and added a further demand for an answer within forty days. John meanwhile had lost patience with him, had given the two counties in charge to a new sheriff, and started for the south on his way back to Normandy. The Scot king’s messengers followed him to the sea;[278] whether they overtook him is not clear; at any rate nothing came of their mission, and on Sunday, June 20, John sailed from Shoreham for Dieppe,[279] “taking with him a very great host from England.”[280]
Within three days John and Philip met in conference at Gaillon. They came to no agreement, and John “made up his mind to resist the French king like a man, and to fight manfully for the peace of his country.” It is clear that his preparations were well in train before the meeting took place. Philip indeed made the first hostile movement by laying siege to the castle of Gaillon; not only, however, was he driven away by the troops who had come over with John,[281] but horse and foot came flocking to the muster at Rouen, though it was fixed for June 24, only four days after John’s landing. On that day he made a truce with Philip to last till August 16,[282] thus gaining nearly two months in which to mature his plans and increase his forces. He spent the greater part of this time in a progress through eastern Normandy, and, as the sequel showed, in negotiations with the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. On August 10 he was again at Rouen.[283] On the 13th Baldwin of Flanders came to him there “and became his man.”[284] On the 16th, when the truce expired, representatives of the two kings met in conference between Gouleton and Boutavant; on the 18th Philip and John met in person. Philip was asked “why he so hated the king of England, who had never done him any harm?” He answered that John had occupied Normandy and other lands without his leave, whereas he ought first to have applied to his overlord for confirmation of his rights as heir, and done homage to him. Now, Philip demanded of John the surrender of the whole Vexin to the Crown of France, and that of Poitou, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine to himself as overlord, that he might transfer them to Arthur.[285]
The Vexin had been a bone of contention between France and Normandy for nearly forty years, and its cession had been distinctly promised by Richard to Philip in 1195. As for the Angevin heritage, John in taking possession of it without waiting for investiture had only followed the example of his predecessor. Richard had made pecuniary amends to Philip for this irregular proceeding, which in feudal law was punishable—theoretically—by forfeiture. In his demand that John should resign the three Angevin counties, therefore, and in his previous grant of their investiture to Arthur, Philip did not exceed his legal rights. With regard to Poitou the case was more complicated. On the one hand, it is certain that at some time between Richard’s death and the middle of May 1200 Eleanor and John made an agreement in legal form, whereby John granted his mother to have and to hold all the days of her life, or during her pleasure, the whole of Poitou with all its appurtenances, she having first ceded and surrendered it to him “as her right heir,” received his homage for it, and made over to him the rights of government throughout the county and the fealty and services of its vassals.[286] On the other hand, at the end of June 1199 Eleanor had met Philip at Tours, and he had allowed her to do him homage for Poitou,[287] thus formally recognizing her as its lawful countess. Whatever be the precise date of the first-mentioned transaction, therefore, it seems that Eleanor, and Eleanor alone, was the person legally answerable for Poitou to the king of France at this moment.
The English historian of the conference adds that Philip further made of John “other demands which the king of England would in no wise grant, nor was it right that he should grant them.” What these were he does not state; but it seems that some of the French nobles were of his opinion as to their character, for when the meeting broke up, “such of the counts and barons of the realm of France as had been in alliance with King Richard” came to John offered him their homage, and made offensive and defensive alliance with him against their own sovereign.[288] In the case of the count of Boulogne this alliance was embodied in a written treaty, drawn up on the same day (August 18) at “the castle on the Rock of Andely.”[289]
In September Philip recommenced hostilities with the seizure of Conches.[290] John, who had continued hovering about eastern Normandy until then, at once struck southward; from September 12 to 17 he was at Bourg-le-Roi in Maine.[291] This movement of John’s apparently drew Philip southward after him; the next place which the French king attacked was the Cenomannian fortress of Ballon, held for John by one of his father’s most devoted adherents, Geoffrey of Brullon. The castle was taken, and Philip proceeded to raze it. William des Roches, the constable of Britanny, protested against this as contrary to the agreement between Arthur and the king. Philip retorted that he should deal with his own conquests as he pleased, without regard to Arthur.[292] On that very night—it must have been September 17—William des Roches went to Bourg-le-Roi,[293] begged for a private interview with John, and undertook to make Arthur, Constance, and all Anjou, Maine and Poitou submit to him “so that all should be good friends together,” in return for an oath on John’s part that he would “do with them according to his (William’s) counsel.”[294] A written record of John’s promise to abide by the terms which William and other “lawful knights” of Normandy and Britanny—whom William was to choose—should arrange for peace between himself and his “very dear nephew Arthur,” “for the honour and advantage of us both,” was drawn up before witnesses on September 18 at Anvers-le-Hamon.[295]
It may have been to facilitate negotiations with the Bretons and Angevins that John had proceeded so far as Anvers, which lies in the south of Maine, close to the border of Anjou. We next find him overtaking Philip at the siege of Lavardin. Philip hereupon withdrew to Le Mans; but he had cut the ground from under his own feet; the garrison of Le Mans was under the orders of William des Roches, who had been appointed commandant there by Philip himself. John, too, was following close behind; and when he appeared before the city, Philip again beat a hasty retreat, while William des Roches brought Arthur and Constance in person to make their peace with John, and then opened the gates of Le Mans to the new allies. John, in anticipation of his triumph, had already summoned Almeric, the viscount of Thouars, who was acting as seneschal of Anjou and commandant of Chinon for Arthur, to come and submit to him at Le Mans. On the very day of John’s entry into the city, September 22, Almeric obeyed. Next day John proceeded to Chinon, where he installed Roger de Lacy as castellan in Almeric’s stead. With less than his usual caution, he let Arthur, Constance and their friends, including Almeric, stay behind at Le Mans. Some one had already suggested to Arthur a suspicion that his uncle intended to make him a prisoner; as soon, therefore, as John was out of the way at Chinon, the majority of the Bretons, with their young duke, his mother, and the viscount of Thouars, returned on September 24 to their old headquarters at Angers.[296] It was probably tidings of this which made John hasten back from Chinon to Le Mans, where he was again September 27 to 30; after that nothing is known of his movements till October 6, when he was at Saumur.[297] His appearance there is suggestive, for Saumur was the key of the Angevin border towards Poitou on the south and Touraine on the east. With Le Mans, Chinon and Saumur all in his hands, he had only to secure a firm foothold in Aquitaine, and then he might attack Anjou from three sides at once. But to attack it without such a foothold, and with only the small force which he had brought with him from Normandy,[298] would have been worse than useless. On October 8, therefore, John was once more at Le Mans, and thence he fell back upon Normandy.[299]
There was indeed another reason for his return. Cardinal Peter of Capua, who had at the beginning of the year negotiated a truce between Philip and Richard, was still at the French court. The truce had been made for three years; Richard’s death had of course put an abrupt end to it; but Peter was urgent that it should be renewed for its original term between Philip and John. Such a proposal implied that John was recognized at Rome as Richard’s lawful heir; it was therefore obviously politic for John to cherish such a valuable alliance by falling in with the cardinal’s endeavours after a pacification. Through Peter’s mediation a truce was made at the end of October. Its term was fixed for the ensuing S. Hilary’s Day;[300] but there was evidently a tacit understanding that it was to be the forerunner of a more lasting agreement.
This truce set John free for a visit to Aquitaine. On November 8 he was at Niort, and in the beginning of December at Poitiers; by the middle of December he had returned to Normandy.[301] Meanwhile a question which had been pending for several years, as to the legality of Philip’s repudiation of his queen Ingebiorg and his subsequent union with Agnes of Merania, had been, in a council at Dijon on December 6, decided by Cardinal Peter against the king, and Peter had laid the royal domain of France under an interdict which was to take effect from January 15, 1200,[302] the second day after the expiration of the truce. With this prospect before his eyes, Philip dared not insult John as he had insulted him at their last meeting. It was with a very different proposal that he met him at the old trysting-place between Gaillon and Les Andelys. A project which had been mooted just twelve months before, for a family alliance to cement peace between the houses of France and Anjou, was now revived; it was proposed that Philip’s son Louis should marry John’s niece Blanche of Castille, and that John should furnish the bride with a dowry in Norman lands and English money.[303] The two kings “rushed into each other’s arms,” and renewed their truce till midsummer.[304]
While Eleanor went to Spain to fetch her granddaughter,[305] John seized his opportunity for a visit to England.[306] His first business there was to concert measures with the justiciar for raising the required sum of money. They decided that the taxes for the year should consist of a scutage of two marks on the knight’s fee and a payment of three shillings for “every working plough.”[307] John then went to York, where he had summoned the Scot king to meet him at the end of March. William, however, failed to appear.[308] During John’s stay at York a claim of exemption from the plough tax was laid before him by the heads of some of the great Cistercian houses in Yorkshire in behalf of their whole order; this led to a violent quarrel between them and the king, which was still unsettled when he returned to Normandy at the end of April.[309] Thither Blanche was brought to meet him, and on Ascension Day (May 18)[310] he and Philip, at a personal meeting on the border, made a definite treaty of peace. By that treaty Philip in so many words acknowledged John as “his brother Richard’s right heir,” and granted him, as such, the investiture of the whole Angevin dominions, with the exception of certain territories which John ceded to the crown of France. These were the Vexin, Auvergne, the greater part of the county of Evreux, and the lordships of Issoudun, Graçay, and Bourges. To the cession of the Vexin and of the chief border castles of the county of Evreux, as well as to the resignation of the Angevin claim upon Auvergne, Richard had been pledged by his treaty with Philip in 1195; Issoudun and Graçay had been restored to the English king by the same treaty, having been ceded by Richard to France in 1189.[311] Twenty thousand marks and the formal cession of all these territories—most, if not all, of which were already in Philip’s hands—was not too heavy a price to pay for the personal triumph and the political gain involved in Philip’s recognition of John as the lawful heir to Normandy, Maine, Anjou, Touraine and Aquitaine, and also to the overlordship of Britanny; for not only was this last right distinctly conceded to him by Philip, but Arthur was then and there made to do homage to his uncle for his duchy[312] as soon as John himself had done homage to Philip for the whole continental heritage of the house of Anjou.[313] The marriage of Louis and Blanche took place four days later.[314]
John now set out upon a sort of triumphal progress southward, to take seisin of all his dominions. On June 18 he reached Angers, where he stayed four days and took a hundred and fifty hostages as security for the loyalty of the citizens.[315] At the end of June he was at Tours, and early in July at Poitiers, whence he proceeded into Gascony; on the 14th he was welcomed at Bordeaux by the archbishop and the barons of the land.[316] He immediately secured the help of the Gascon primate in a scheme which he had been cherishing for some months past for getting rid of the wife to whom he had been married for eleven years, Isabel of Gloucester. The papal legate who in 1189 had revoked the sentence passed by Archbishop Baldwin upon John and Isabel had done so on the ground that, since John had appealed to Rome, his marriage must be recognized as lawful, pending the result of the appeal. A decision of the Pope on that appeal would of course have either annulled the marriage or made it indissoluble; but it seems that no such decision had ever been given, because the appeal had never been prosecuted. The marriage was therefore still voidable. At the close of 1199 John called upon the Norman bishops to declare it void, and they obeyed him.[317] He now, it seems, laid the case before the archbishop of Bordeaux and the bishop of Poitiers and Saintes; and their decision was in accord with that of their Norman brethren.[318] On the bare question—which was doubtless all that John put before them—whether a marriage between cousins in the fourth degree was lawful without a dispensation, indeed, no other decision was possible according to the letter of the canon law. The Pope, however, when the matter came to his knowledge, seems to have felt that in this particular case adhesion to the letter of the law involved a violation of its spirit, and to have been extremely angry with John’s episcopal tools as well as with John himself.[319] He had, however, no ground for interfering in the matter except on an appeal from Isabel; and Isabel did not appeal.[320] There is every reason to think—and certainly no reason to wonder—that the removal of the matrimonial yoke was as welcome to her as to John, and that their divorce was in fact, like that of Louis VII. and Eleanor, a separation by mutual consent.
John had already chosen another heiress to take Isabel’s place. One of the most important, and also most troublesome, feudataries of the duchy of Aquitaine was Ademar, count of Angoulême. It was in a quarrel with him and his half-brother, the viscount of Limoges, that Richard Cœur-de-Lion had met his death, which Richard’s son had avenged by slaying the viscount.[321] The feud between the houses of Angoulême and Limoges thus threatened to be a considerable hindrance to Richard’s successor in his efforts to secure a hold upon his southern duchy. How formidable Ademar and his nephew, the new viscount of Limoges, had already made themselves is shown by the insertion in the treaty between John and Philip of a special provision that John should “receive their homage and grant them their rights.”[322] It is said to have been Philip who counselled John to secure the fidelity of Ademar of Angoulême in another way, by taking to wife Ademar’s only child.[323] Philip’s motives for giving the advice, and John’s motives for following it, are alike obscure. Nineteen years before, Richard, as duke of Aquitaine, had vainly striven to wrest Angoulême from Ademar in behalf of Matilda, the only child of Ademar’s late brother, Count Vulgrin III. Matilda was now the wife of Hugh “the Brown” of Lusignan, who in 1179 or 1180 had, in spite of King Henry, made himself master of the county of La Marche, and whose personal importance in southern Gaul was increased by the rank and fame which his brothers Geoffrey, Guy and Almeric had won in the kingdoms of Jerusalem and Cyprus. The dispute between Matilda and her uncle had been settled by the betrothal of her son—another Hugh the Brown—to Ademar’s daughter and heiress, Isabel.[324] A marriage between John and this little Isabel of Angoulême, therefore, would be certain to provoke the bitter resentment of the whole Lusignan family. On the other hand, it would provoke their resentment against Isabel’s father as well as against her husband, and thus destroy the chance of a coalition of Angoulême and La Marche against their common overlord. It is not impossible that for John, who gambled in politics as habitually as he did at the game of “tables,” the very wantonness of the scheme and the hazards attendant upon it may have only added to its attractions. But his subsequent conduct towards the Lusignans suggests the idea that he may have had a deeper motive, a deliberate purpose of goading them into some outrageous course of action which might enable him to recover La Marche and ruin them completely, or even drive them altogether out of the land.
On his way to Poitou John issued from Chinon, on June 25, a summons to Ademar of Angoulême and Guy of Limoges to come and perform their homage on July 5 at Lusignan,[325] the ancestral home of Hugh the Brown. There Hugh and Matilda were bringing up their intended daughter-in-law in company with her boy bridegroom, and there John was no doubt, at the moment, sure of a welcome, for Hugh and his brother Ralf had become his liegemen at Caen on January 28.[326] Thus, in all likelihood, it was under Hugh’s very roof, and as sharers in his hospitality, that the king of England and the count of Angoulême laid their plot for robbing Hugh’s son of his plighted bride and his promised heritage. John indeed, as soon as his divorce was ratified by the southern bishops, despatched, or gave out that he had despatched, an embassy to Portugal with instructions to ask for the hand of a daughter of the Portuguese king;[327] but their mission was a mere blind to divert suspicion till Ademar should have succeeded in getting his child back into his own hands. The poor little betrothed—she was only about twelve years old[328]—was literally stolen by her father,[329] and carried off by him to his capital city. There her royal suitor met them, and on August 24 the marriage ceremony was performed by the archbishop of Bordeaux.[330] The newly married couple immediately afterwards set out for the north; at the beginning of October they went to England, and on the 8th they were crowned together at Westminster.[331]
Six weeks later the king of Scots made his submission. Summoned to meet his overlord at Lincoln on November 21, William the Lion this time did not venture to disobey the summons; both kings reached Lincoln on the appointed day. Next morning John, in defiance of an old tradition which forbade a king to appear in regal state within the walls of Lincoln, went to the minster and offered a golden chalice at the altar of S. John the Baptist. Thence he proceeded to his colloquy with William “on the top of the steep hill” outside the city. There, amid a group of prelates and barons, and “in the sight of all the people,” William performed his homage, and swore on Archbishop Hubert’s cross that he would be faithful to John against all men, “saving his own right.” Then, and not till then, did he venture again to demand, “as his right and heritage,” the disputed counties. A long discussion ended in an adjournment of the question till the next Whitsuntide; which of course meant that it was to be put off indefinitely. On the morrow (November 23) the king of Scots set out on his homeward journey, while the king of England helped with his own hands to carry to its last resting-place in Lincoln minster the body of the only man among his father’s old friends for whom he seems to have felt a real liking, though he turned a deaf ear to his counsels—S. Hugh, who had died in London a week before.[332] Soon after Christmas John was at Lincoln again, quarrelling with the canons about the election of Hugh’s successor.[333] He and his young queen afterwards made a progress through the north, almost up to the Scottish border,[334] and back through Cumberland to York, which they reached at Mid-Lent (March 1, 1201). At Easter (March 25) they “wore their crowns” at Canterbury.[335]
Meanwhile, open hostilities had begun between John and the Lusignans; and so far as can be made out from the scanty evidence available, it seems to have been John who began them. A French historian of the time asserts that the castle of Driencourt in Normandy, which belonged to Ralf of Lusignan as count of Eu in right of his wife, was seized by John’s orders while Ralf was in John’s service in England.[336] It is certain that John, on March 6, 1201, issued letters patent to Hugh of Bailleul and Thomas of St. Valery authorizing them to attack Ralf’s territories at the close of Easter and “do him all the harm they could,” and promising that they should never be compelled to make good any damage which they might inflict upon him; while on the same day one William “de Kaev” was despatched on a mission to the inhabitants of Driencourt and of the whole county of Eu to make arrangements for mutual security between them and the king, without reference to their count.[337] Two days later John summoned all his faithful barons, knights, clerks, burghers, and other tenants of the county of La Marche “to come to his service, and do to him what they had been wont to do to his predecessors.”[338] In other words, he claimed the direct ownership of the county, to which his father had indeed been entitled by purchase from the late Count Adelbert and by the homage of its tenants, but of which Henry had never been able and Richard had never even tried to take possession, and which Hugh of Lusignan had now held for more than twenty years. If their oath of liege homage to John had hitherto restrained Hugh and Ralf from giving vent to their anger at John’s marriage, it restrained them no longer now. They at once laid a complaint against John, for unjust aggression and spoliation, before the king of France as lord paramount of Aquitaine.[339] Ralf formally renounced his allegiance to John,[340] and Hugh, with all the forces that he could muster, invaded Poitou, where, as usual, he found plenty of allies ready to join him.[341] The most important of the Poitevin barons, indeed, Almeric of Thouars, was won over to John’s side by the diplomacy of Eleanor; but the danger appeared so great that both Eleanor and Almeric besought John to come over and deal with it in person as soon as he possibly could; and at the end of April the count of Angoulême and John’s other friends in the south proposed sending Almeric to confer with John in England.[342]
John meanwhile was summoning the earls and barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide (May 13), ready with horses and arms to accompany him over sea. The earls held a meeting at Leicester, and thence unanimously sent him word that they would not go with him “unless he gave them back their rights. For the king, following ill counsel, was demanding their castles of them; and beginning with William of Aubigny, he demanded of him the castle of Belvoir. William satisfied him by giving him his son as a hostage, and thus kept his castle.”[343] Notwithstanding their protest, the barons brought their forces to Portsmouth on the appointed day, equipped for a campaign, and each man provided with the money needful to cover his expenses during the usual term of service in a feudal host. This, and nothing more, was precisely what John wanted them to do: “He took from some of them the money which they would have spent in his service, and let them return home.”[344] The ready money which he thus obtained was a more useful and safer weapon for his purpose than the host itself would have been, and no pretext was left for the discussion of inconvenient questions. The king immediately despatched William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy, each at the head of a hundred mercenaries, “to check the assaults of his enemies on the borders of Normandy.” At the same time he appointed his chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh, warden of the Welsh marches, with another hundred soldiers under his command, and sent the bishop of Chester to William the Lion with a request that the term fixed for answering his demands might be extended to Michaelmas.[345] Having taken these precautions to secure England from attack, John again crossed the sea; on June 2 he was at Bonneville.[346]
At the announcement of John’s intention to return, Philip had either compelled or persuaded the Lusignans to suspend hostilities in Poitou.[347] A period of negotiation followed; Philip remonstrating with John about his conduct towards the Lusignans, and urging him to make them restitution; John, in his turn, remonstrating with Philip for his constant aggressions and his interference with the internal affairs of John’s duchies. Several personal interviews seem to have taken place between the kings;[348] before the end of June the treaty of Ascension-tide 1200 was confirmed; and on the last day of that month John, by Philip’s invitation, went to Paris, and was there lodged and entertained for several days in the royal palace, which Philip vacated for his convenience.[349]
This temporary pacification was effected by a promise on John’s part that the quarrel between him and the Lusignans should be tried and settled fairly in his court as duke of Aquitaine.[350] Towards the end of July he went to Chinon; there he spent the greater part of the next six weeks,[351] and it was probably there that he summoned the Lusignans to the promised trial. But meanwhile the Lusignans had discovered that the trial which he designed was something wholly different from that which Philip had demanded on their behalf. John, before he left England, had determined to appeal “the barons of Poitou”—that is, no doubt, the Lusignans and their friends—on a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself, and challenge them to ordeal of battle with a number of champions specially chosen for the purpose. This project was perfectly legal; the ordeal of battle, though it was beginning to be discountenanced by public opinion under the influence of the Church, was still recognized as a lawful method of deciding upon a charge of treason. But a simultaneous challenge to so large a number of men, and men, too, of such high rank and personal distinction as the Lusignans and their allies, was a startling innovation upon feudal tradition and practice, and unwarranted by historical precedent. Moreover, there was in the scheme another feature which would make it doubly offensive to the barons concerned. The champions against whom they were called upon to prove their loyalty are described as “picked men, practised in the art of duelling, whom the king had hired and brought with him from his dominions on both sides of the sea.”[352] That is, they were professional champions—men who made a business of hiring themselves out to fight the battles of any one who either could not or would not fight in his own person, but who could afford to pay for an efficient substitute. Such hired champions, of course, in every case represented the person who hired them; in the present case they would have represented the king; yet nobles like the Lusignans, two of whose brothers had been, no less than John himself, crowned and anointed sovereigns, could not but feel it an intolerable insult to be challenged, even in a king’s name, by creatures such as these. The accused barons all alike refused to come to John’s court, “saying that they would answer to no one save to their peers.”[353] It seems that on a fresh remonstrance from Philip, John again consented, or pretended to consent, to a trial such as they demanded; but he was very unwilling to fix a day; and when he did fix one, he refused to give the defendants a safe conduct, without which, of course, they would not stir from their homes.[354]