Heedless of the storm which this marriage was sure to raise in Aquitaine, John in the first days of October carried his child-queen with him to England, and on the 8th was crowned with her at Westminster.[2004] His first business in England was to renew his persecution of the Cistercians;[2005] the next was to arrange a meeting with the king of Scots. This took place in November at Lincoln, where John, defying the tradition which his father had carefully observed, ventured to present himself in regal state within the cathedral church.[2006] The two kings held their colloquy on a hill outside the city; William performed his long-deferred homage,[2007] although his renewed demand for the restitution of the northern shires was again put off till Whitsuntide.[2008] Next day the king of England helped with his own hands to carry the body of the holy bishop Hugh to its last resting-place in the minster which he had himself rebuilt.[2009] Some haunting remembrance of Hugh’s saintlike face, as he had seen it in London only a few weeks before the good bishop’s death,[2010] may have combined with a sense that the White Monks were still too great a power in the land to be defied with impunity, and moved John on the following Sunday to make full amends to the Cistercian abbots, promising to seal his repentance by founding a house of their order[2011]—a promise which he redeemed by the foundation of Beaulieu abbey, in the New Forest.[2012] After keeping Christmas at Guildford[2013] he came back again to Lincoln, and quarrelled with the canons about the election of a new bishop.[2014] He thence went northward, accompanied by his queen, through Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland and Cumberland, taking fines everywhere for offences against the forest-law. At Mid-Lent he was at York,[2015] and on Easter-day he and Isabel wore their crowns at Canterbury.[2016] A few days later, rumours of disturbances in Normandy and in Poitou paused him to issue orders for the earls and barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide, ready with horses and ships to accompany him over sea. The earls however held a meeting at Leicester, and thence by common consent made answer to the king that they would not go with him “unless he gave them back their rights.” It is clear that they already looked upon personal service beyond sea as no longer binding upon them without their own consent, specially given for a special occasion. John retorted by demanding the surrender of their castles, beginning with William of Aubigny’s castle of Beauvoir, which William was only suffered to retain on giving his son as a hostage.[2017] This threat brought the barons to Portsmouth on the appointed day; but the quarrel ended in a compromise. After despatching his chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, with a hundred knights, to act as keeper of the Welsh marches, and sending William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy, each with a hundred mercenaries, to resist the enemies in Normandy, John took from the remainder of the host a scutage in commutation of their services, and bade them return to their own homes.[2018] On Whit-Monday the queen crossed to Normandy, and shortly afterwards her husband followed.[2019]

After a friendly meeting near the Isle of Andelys,[2020] Philip invited John to Paris, where he entertained him with the highest honours, vacating his own palace for the reception of his guest, and loading him with costly gifts.[2021] From Paris John went to meet his sister-in-law, Richard’s queen Berengaria, at Chinon,[2022] where he seems to have chiefly spent the rest of the summer. He came back to Normandy in the autumn,[2023] and the Christmas feast at Argentan[2024] passed over in peace; but trouble was fast gathering on all sides. Philip was at last free of his ecclesiastical difficulties, for Agnes of Merania was dead, and he had taken back his wife.[2025] John was now in his turn to pay the penalty for his unwarrantable divorce and his lawless second marriage. As if he had not already done enough to alienate the powerful house of Lusignan by stealing the plighted bride of its head,[2026] he had now seized the castle of Driencourt, which belonged to a brother of Hugh the Brown, while its owner was absent in England on business for the king himself;[2027] and he had further insulted the barons of Poitou by summoning them to clear themselves in his court from a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself, by ordeal of battle with picked champions from England and Normandy. They scorned the summons,[2028] and appealed to the king of France, John’s overlord as well as theirs, to bring John to justice for their wrongs.[2029] On March 25 Philip met John at Gouleton,[2030] and peremptorily bade him give up to Arthur all his French fiefs, besides sundry other things, all of which John refused.[2031] Hereupon Philip sent, through some of the great French nobles,[2032] a citation to John, as duke of Aquitaine, to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter at the court of his lord the king of France, to stand to its judgement, to answer to his lord for his misdoings, and to undergo the sentence of his peers.[2033] John made no attempt to deny Philip’s jurisdiction; but he declared that, as duke of Normandy, he was not bound to obey the French king’s citation to any spot other than the traditional trysting-place on the border. Philip replied that his summons was addressed to the duke of Aquitaine, not to the duke of Normandy, and that his rights over the former were not to be annulled by the accidental union of the two dignities in one person.[2034] John at length yielded so far as to promise that on the appointed day he would present himself before the court in Paris, and would give up to Philip the two castles of Tillières and Boutavant as security for his abiding by the settlement then to be made. The day however came and went without either the surrender of the forts or the appearance of John.[2035] The court of the French peers condemned him by default, and sentenced him to be deprived of all his lands.[2036]

Philip at once marched upon Normandy to execute the sentence by force of arms. He began by taking Boutavant[2037] and Tillières;[2038] thence he marched straight up northward by Lions,[2039] Longchamp, La Ferté-en-Bray,[2040] Orgueil and Mortemer,[2041] to Eu;[2042] all these places fell into his hands. Thus master of almost the whole Norman border from the Seine to the sea, he turned back to lay siege on July 8 to Radepont on the Andelle, scarcely more than ten miles from Rouen. Dislodged at the end of a week by John,[2043] he again withdrew to the border. The castle of Aumale and the rest of its county were soon in his hands.[2044] Hugh of Gournay alone, the worthy bearer of a name which for generations had been almost a synonym for loyalty to the Norman ducal house, still held out in his impregnable castle; Philip however, by breaking down the embankment which kept in the waters of a reservoir communicating with the river and the moat, let loose upon the castle a flood which undermined its walls and almost swept it away, thus compelling its defenders to make their escape and take shelter as best they could in the neighbouring forest.[2045] At Gournay Philip bestowed upon Arthur the hand of his infant daughter Mary,[2046] the honour of knighthood,[2047] and the investiture of all the Angevin dominions except the duchy of Normandy,[2048] which he evidently intended to conquer for himself and keep by right of conquest.

What John had been doing all this time it is difficult to understand. Between the middle of May and the end of June he had shifted his quarters incessantly, moving through the whole length of eastern Normandy, from Arques to Le Mans; throughout July he was chiefly in the neighbourhood of Rouen;[2049] but, except in the one expedition to Radepont, he seems to have made no attempt to check the progress of his enemies. After the knighting of Arthur at Gournay, however, he tried to make a diversion by sending a body of troops into Britanny. With their duchess dead[2050] and their young duke absent, the Bretons were in no condition for defence; Dol and Fougères were taken by John’s soldiers, and the whole country ravaged as far as Rennes.[2051] This attack stung Arthur into an attempt at independent action which led to his ruin. He and Philip divided their forces; while the French king led the bulk of his army northward to the siege of Arques,[2052] Arthur with two hundred knights[2053] moved southward to Tours,[2054] sending forward a summons to the men of his own duchy and those of Berry to meet him there for an expedition into Poitou.[2055] At Tours he was met by the disaffected Aquitanian chiefs:—the injured bridegroom young Hugh of La Marche, and two of his uncles, Ralf of Issoudun the dispossessed count of Eu, and Geoffrey of Lusignan, the inveterate fighter who had taken a leading part in every Aquitanian rising throughout the last twenty-two years of Henry’s reign, who after being Richard’s bitterest foe at home had been one of his best supporters in Palestine, and who had come back, it seems, to join in one more fight against his successor. The three kinsmen, however, brought together a force of only seventy-five knights; to which a Gascon baron, Savaric of Mauléon, added thirty more, and seventy men-at-arms.[2056] Arthur, mere boy of fifteen though he was, had enough of the hereditary Angevin wariness to shrink from attempting to act with such a small force, and in accordance with Philip’s instructions proposed to wait for his expected allies.[2057] But the Poitevins would brook no delay; and a temptation now offered itself which was irresistible alike to them and to their young leader. On her return from Castille with her granddaughter Blanche in the spring of 1200, Queen Eleanor, worn out with age and fatigue, had withdrawn to the abbey of Fontevraud,[2058] where she apparently remained throughout the next two years. The rising troubles of her duchy, however, seem to have brought her forth from her retirement once more, and she was now in the castle of Mirebeau, on the border of Anjou and Poitou. All John’s enemies knew that his mother was, in every sense, his best friend. She was at once his most devoted ally and his most sagacious counsellor, at least in all continental affairs; moreover, in strict feudal law, she was still duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, a right untouched by the forfeiture of John; and she therefore had it in her power to make that forfeiture null and void south of the Loire, so long as she lived to assert her claims for John’s benefit.[2059] To capture Eleanor would be to bring John to his knees; and with this hope Arthur and his little band laid siege to Mirebeau.[2060]

John, however, when once roused, could act with all the vigour and promptitude of his race. On July 30, as he was approaching Le Mans, he received tidings of his mother’s danger; on August 1 he suddenly appeared before Mirebeau.[2061] The town was already lost, all the gates of the castle save one were broken down, and Eleanor had been driven to take refuge in the keep; the besiegers, thinking their triumph assured, were surprised and overpowered by John’s troops, and were slain or captured to a man, the Lusignans and Arthur himself being among the prisoners.[2062] Philip, who was busy with the siege of Arques, left it and hurried southward on hearing of this disaster;[2063] John however at once put an end to his hopes of rescuing Arthur by sending the boy to prison at Falaise;[2064] and Philip, after taking and burning Tours,[2065] withdrew into his own domains.[2066] John in his turn then marched upon Tours, and vented his wrath at its capture by completing its destruction.[2067] Shortly afterwards he had the good luck to make prisoner another disaffected Aquitanian noble, the viscount of Limoges.[2068] It was however growing evident that he would soon have nothing but his own resources to depend upon. His allies were falling away; the counts of Flanders, Blois and Perche and several of the other malcontent French barons had taken the cross and abandoned the field of western politics to seek their fortunes in the East;[2069] he had quarrelled with Otto of Germany;[2070] William des Roches, after pleading in vain for Arthur’s release, was organizing a league of the Breton nobles which some of the Norman border-chiefs were quite ready to join, and by the end of October the party thus formed was strong enough to seize Angers and establish its head-quarters there.[2071] It was probably the knowledge of all this which in the beginning of 1203 made John transfer his captive nephew from the castle of Falaise to that of Rouen.[2072] Sinister rumours of Arthur’s fate were already in circulation, telling how John had sent a ruffian to blind him at Falaise, how the soldiers who kept him had frustrated the design, and how their commandant, John’s chamberlain Hubert de Burgh, had endeavoured to satisfy the king by giving out that Arthur had died of wounds and grief and ordering funeral services in his memory, till the threats of the infuriated Bretons drove him to confess the fraud for the sake of John’s own safety.[2073] How or when Arthur really died has never yet been clearly proved. We only know that at Easter 1203 all France was ringing with the tidings of his death, and that after that date he was never seen alive. In his uncle’s interest an attempt was made to suggest that he had either pined to death in his prison, or been drowned in endeavouring to escape across the Seine;[2074] but the general belief, which John’s after-conduct tends strongly to confirm, was that he had been stabbed and then flung into the river by the orders, if not actually by the hands, of John himself.[2075]