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1193

John’s obvious policy now was to keep still and let things remain as they were till there should come some definite tidings of Richard. For nine months all parties were quiescent. Then, on December 28, the Emperor wrote to Philip of France the news of Richard’s capture. If the messenger who brought the letter was “welcome above gold and topaze”[191] to Philip, no less welcome to John was the messenger whom Philip immediately despatched to carry the news to England. John hurried over to Normandy, where the seneschal and barons of the duchy met him with a request that he would join them in a council at Alençon to deliberate “touching the king’s affairs, and his release.” John’s answer was at least frank: “If ye will acknowledge me as your lord and swear me fealty, I will come with you and will be your defender against the king of France; but if not, I will not come.”[192] The Normans refused thus to betray their captive sovereign; whereupon John proceeded to the court of France. There an agreement was drawn up, to which the count swore in person and the French king by proxy, and which curiously illustrates their mutual distrust and their common dread of Richard. It provided that in the event of John’s succession, he should cede the Vexin to France, and should hold the rest of the Norman and Angevin dominions as his forefathers had held them, with the exception of the city of Tours and certain small underfiefs, concerning which special provisions were made, evidently with a view to securing the co-operation of their holders against Richard. On the other hand, John promised to accept no offer of peace from Richard without Philip’s consent, and Philip promised to make no peace with Richard unless the latter would accept certain conditions laid down in behalf of John. These conditions were that John should not be disseised of any lands which he held at the time of the treaty; that if summoned to trial by Richard, he should always be allowed to appear by proxy; and that he should not be held liable to personal service in Richard’s host. After sealing this document in Paris, in January 1193,[193] John hurried back to England and set to work secretly to stir up the Welsh and the Scots, hoping with their support to effect a junction with a body of Flemings who were to come over in a fleet prepared by Philip at Wissant.

The Scot king rejected John’s overtures; but a troop of Welsh were, as usual, ready to join in any rising against the king of England.[194] With these Welshmen, and “many foreigners” whom he had brought with him from France, John secured himself at Wallingford and Windsor. Then he proceeded to London, told the justiciars that Richard was dead, and bade them deliver up the kingdom and make its people swear fealty to himself. They refused; he withdrew in a rage, and both parties prepared for war.[195] The justiciars organized their forces so quickly and so well that when the French fleet arrived, just before Easter, it found the coast so strongly guarded that no landing was possible. John meanwhile had openly fortified his castles, and his Welshmen were ravaging the country between Kingston and Windsor when the justiciars laid siege to the latter fortress.[196] This siege, and that of Tickhill, which was undertaken by Archbishop Geoffrey of York and Bishop Hugh of Durham, were in progress when on April 20 Hubert Walter, the bishop of Salisbury, landed in England.[197] Hubert had come direct from the captive king, and it was now useless for John to pretend any longer that Richard was dead. On the other hand, Hubert knew the prospect of Richard’s release to be still so remote and so uncertain that he deemed it highly imprudent to push matters to extremity with John. He therefore, although both Windsor and Tickhill were on the verge of surrender, persuaded the justiciars to make a truce whose terms were on the whole favourable to the count of Mortain. The castles of Tickhill and Nottingham were left in John’s hands; those of Windsor, Wallingford and the Peak were surrendered by him, to be given over to the custody of Queen Eleanor and other persons named, on the express understanding that unless Richard should reach home in the meanwhile, they were to be restored to John at the expiration of the truce, which was fixed for Michaelmas, or, according to another account, All Saints’ Day.[198]

The immediate object of the justiciars and the queen-mother in making this truce was to gain John’s co-operation in their measures for raising the king’s ransom. Considering how large a portion of the kingdom was held by John in what may almost be called absolute property, it is obvious that a refusal on his part to bear his share of the burden would make a serious difference in the result of their efforts. It appears that John undertook to raise from his own territories a certain sum for his brother’s ransom, that he confirmed this undertaking by an oath, and that he put it on record in writing.[199] He had, however, taken no steps towards its execution when at the beginning of July a warning reached him from Philip Augustus—“Take care of yourself, for the devil is loosed!”—which meant that the terms of Richard’s release had been finally agreed upon between Richard and the Emperor on June 29. John immediately hurried over to France, to shelter himself under Philip’s wing against the coming storm, as was thought in England;[200] more probably to keep a watch upon Philip and take care that he should not break his promises as to the conditions of peace with Richard. The two allies could have no confidence in each other, and they seem to have been both almost ridiculously afraid of the captive Lion-heart. He, however, was at the moment equally afraid of them, and not without good reason. Three months before he had complained bitterly to the first messengers from England who reached him in his prison of the treachery and ingratitude of John. “Yet,” he added, “my brother is not a man to win lands for himself by force, if there be any one who will oppose him with another force, however slight.”[201] The words were true; and no less true was the implication underlying the words. Of John as an open enemy Richard could afford to be contemptuous; of John’s capacity for underhand mischief, especially in conjunction with Philip, he was in such fear that no sooner was his treaty with the Emperor signed than he despatched his chancellor and three other envoys to France with orders to make with the French king “a peace of some sort.”[202] The envoys executed their commission literally, by accepting in Richard’s name the terms which were dictated to them by Philip with John at his side. These included the cession by Richard to Philip of the places taken by the French king during his late campaign in Normandy; the ratification of the arrangements made by Philip and John for certain of their partisans; and the payment to Philip of twenty thousand marks, for which four castles were given to him in pledge. “Touching Count John,” the treaty ran, “thus shall it be: If the men of the king of England can prove in the court of the king of France that the same John has sworn, and given a written promise, to furnish money for the English king’s ransom, he, John, shall be held bound to pay it; and he shall hold all his lands, on both sides of the sea, as freely as he held them before his brother the king of England set out on his journey over sea; only he shall be free from the oath which he then swore of not setting foot in England; and of this the English king shall give him security by himself, and by the barons and prelates of his realm, and by the king of France. If, however, Count John shall choose to deny that those letters are his, or that he swore to do that thing, the English king’s men shall prove sufficiently, by fitting witnesses, in the French king’s court, that he did swear to procure money for the English king’s ransom. And if it shall be proved, as hath been said, that he did swear to do this, or if he shall fail to meet the charge, the king of France shall not concern himself with Count John, if he should choose to accept peace for his lands aforesaid.”[203]

1193–1194

This treaty was drawn up at Nantes on July 9.[204] John at once returned to Normandy and there took an oath of liege homage to his brother; whereupon Richard ordered all the castles of John’s honours to be restored to him, on both sides of the sea. “But the keepers thereof would not give up any castle to him” on the strength of this order.[205] John in a rage went back to France, and Philip immediately gave him the custody of two Norman castles, Driencourt and Arques, which by the recent treaty had been intrusted to the archbishop of Reims in pledge for the twenty thousand marks promised to Philip by Richard.[206] At Christmas the two allies made a last desperate effort to prevent the “devil” from being “loosed.” They offered the Emperor three alternatives: either Philip would give him fifty thousand marks, and John would give him thirty thousand, if he would keep Richard prisoner until the following Michaelmas (1194); or the two between them would pay him a thousand pounds a month so long as he kept Richard in captivity; or Philip would give him a hundred thousand marks and John fifty thousand, if he would either detain Richard for another twelvemonth, or deliver him up into their hands. “Behold how they loved him!” says a contemporary writer.[207] A hundred and fifty thousand marks was the ransom which had been agreed upon between Henry VI. and Richard, and the one question which troubled Henry was whether he had a better chance of actually getting that sum from Richard or from his enemies. He unblushingly stated this fact to Richard himself, and on February 2, 1194, showed him the letters of Philip and John. Richard appealed to the German princes who had witnessed his treaty with Henry, and by promises of liberal revenues to be granted to them from England induced them to take his part and insist upon Henry’s fulfilling his agreement. On February 4 the English king was set at liberty, and a joint letter from the Emperor and the nobles of his realm was despatched to Philip and John, bidding them restore to Richard all that they had taken from him during his captivity, and threatening that if they failed to do so, the writers would do their utmost to compel them.[208]

1194

Before this letter could have reached its destination, John sent to England a confidential clerk, Adam of S. Edmund’s, with secret letters, ordering that all the castles which he held there should be made ready for defence against the king. This man, having reached London without hindrance, foolishly presented himself on February 9 at the house of the new archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter. The archbishop invited him to dinner, an unexpected honour by which Adam’s head was so completely turned that he boasted openly at table of his master’s hopes of political advancement. Hubert listened without remark, and thinking that to arrest the babbler on the spot would be a breach of hospitality, suffered him to depart after dinner; but the mayor of London—warned no doubt by the archbishop himself or by one of the other guests—seized Adam on his way back to his lodging, took possession of his papers, and sent them to Hubert, who on the following day laid them before a council of bishops and barons. The council unanimously decreed that John should be disseised of all his lands in England, and that his castles should be reduced by force; the bishops excommunicated him and all his adherents. Then the old bishop of Durham set off to renew the siege of Tickhill; the earls of Chester, Huntingdon and Ferrars laid siege to the castle of Nottingham; Archbishop Hubert himself undertook that of Marlborough, which he won in a few days; and Lancaster was given up to him by his brother Theobald. On March 13 Richard arrived in England. His arrival was speedily followed by the surrender of Tickhill. On the 25th he appeared before Nottingham; on the 28th he was once again master of its castle, and of all England.[209]

At Nottingham Richard held a council, on the second day of which (March 31) he “prayed that justice should be done him”[210] on John and on John’s chief abettor, Bishop Hugh of Chester. The council cited both delinquents to appear for trial within forty days, and decreed that if they failed to do so, or to “stand to right,” Hugh should be liable to a double sentence—from the bishops as a bishop, and from the laity as a sheriff,[211]—and John should be accounted to have “forfeited all claims to the kingdom,”[212] or, as a later annalist explains, should be “deprived and disinherited not only of all the lands which he held in the realm, but also of all honours which he hoped or expected to have from the Crown of England.”[213] Neither in person nor by proxy did John answer the citation. At the end of the forty days three earls set out for the court of France “to convict him of treason there”; but of their proceedings, too, he took no notice. The forty days had expired on May 10; on the 12th Richard sailed for Normandy.[214] Landing at Barfleur, he went to Caen and thence turned southward to relieve Verneuil, which Philip was besieging. On the way he halted at Lisieux, where he took up his quarters with the archdeacon, John of Alençon, who had been his vice-chancellor.[215] He soon noticed that his host was uneasy and agitated, and at once guessed the cause. “Why do you look so troubled? You have seen my brother John; deny it not! Let him fear nought, but come to me straightway. He is my brother, and should have no fears of me; if he has played the fool, I will never reproach him with his folly. Those who contrived this mischief shall reap their due reward; but of that no more at present.” Joyfully John of Alençon carried the tidings to his namesake of Mortain: “Come forward boldly! You are in luck’s way. The king is simple and pitiful, and kinder to you than you would have been to him. Your masters have advised you ill; it is meet they should be punished according to their deserts. Come! the king awaits you.” In spite of these assurances, it was “with much fear” that Count John approached his brother and threw himself at his feet. Richard raised him with a brotherly kiss, saying: “Think no more of it, John! You are but a child, and were left to ill guardians. Evil were their thoughts who counselled you amiss. Rise, go and eat. John,” he added, turning to their host, “what can he have for dinner?” At that moment a salmon was brought in, as a present for the king. As the chronicler remarks, “it did not come amiss”; Richard immediately ordered it to be cooked for his brother.[216]

For any other man of six-and-twenty, to be thus forgiven—even though it were by a brother who was ten years older, and a king—expressly on the ground that he was a child, not responsible for his actions, would surely have been a humiliation almost more bitter than any punishment. Nor did John escape altogether unpunished. Richard’s forgiveness was strictly personal; the decree of the council of Nottingham was carried into effect with regard to all John’s English and Norman lands;[217] and for the next eighteen months he was, save for his lordship of Ireland, once more in fact as well as in name “John Lackland.” He was thus wholly dependent on Richard’s goodwill, and it was obviously politic for him to throw himself into Richard’s service with the utmost energy and zeal. Philip withdrew from Verneuil at the tidings of Richard’s approach, May 28.[218] After securing the place the English king divided his forces; with part of them he himself went to besiege Beaumont-le-Roger; the other part he entrusted to John for the recovery of Evreux,[219] which had been taken by Philip in February.[220] Of the manner in which John accomplished this mission there are at least two versions. One writer states that John “laid siege to Evreux, and it was taken next day.”[221] Another says that its garrison were surprised and slain by a body of Normans;[222] while a third explains the surprise as having been effected by means which are perhaps only too characteristic of John. The city of Evreux, says William the Breton, had been made over to John by Philip. John contrived that his reconciliation with his brother should remain unknown to the French troops who had been left there. He now returned to the city and invited these Frenchmen to a banquet, at which he suddenly brought in a troop of “armed Englishmen” who massacred the unsuspecting guests. His success, however, was only partial and shortlived; for he was still unable to gain possession of the castle;[223] and he had no sooner quitted the place than Philip returned, drove out the Norman troops, and destroyed the town.[224] Shortly afterwards Richard set off on a campaign in the south, leaving John in Normandy. About the middle of June Philip again threatened Rouen, taking and razing Fontaines, a castle only four miles from the city. On this John, the earl of Leicester, and “many other barons” held a meeting at Rouen to consider what should be done; “but because they had no one to whom they could adhere as to the king himself,” and their forces were no match for Philip’s, they decided upon a policy of inaction.[225] This decision was probably dictated by their experience of Philip’s ways. He, in fact, made no further attempt upon the Norman capital, but soon afterwards proceeded southward against Richard, only to meet with an ignominious defeat at Fréteval. On hearing of this, John and the earl of Arundel laid siege to Vaudreuil; Philip, however, marched up from Bourges and relieved it.[226] John’s next military undertaking, the siege of Brezolles, met with no better success.[227] Still he had done the best he could for his brother’s interest, and thereby also for his own. Accordingly, next year Richard “laid aside all his anger and ill-will towards his brother John,” and restored to him a portion of his forfeited possessions. It was indeed only a small portion, consisting of the county of Mortain and the honours of Gloucester and Eye “in their entirety, but without their castles.” To this was added, as some compensation for the other lands which he had lost, a yearly pension of £8000 Angevin.[228]

1196–1198

This arrangement seems to have taken effect from Michaelmas 1195.[229] It gave John once more an honourable and independent maintenance, but left him without territorial power. His only chance of regaining this in Richard’s lifetime was to earn it by loyalty to Richard. For the next three years, therefore, he kept quiet; nothing is heard of him save an occasional notice of his presence in Normandy, either in his brother’s company or acting for his brother’s interest. When Philip seized Nonancourt in 1196, John retaliated by seizing Gamaches.[230] On May 19 in the same year he and Mercadier, the leader of Richard’s foreign mercenaries, made a plundering expedition into the French king’s territories as far as Beauvais, where they captured the bishop, who had long been one of Richard’s most determined enemies; they then went on to the bishop’s castle of Milli, took it by assault, razed it, and returned to Normandy in triumph to present their captive to Richard.[231] On October 16, 1197, when the king and the archbishop of Rouen made their agreement for the building of a castle at Andely—the famous Château-Gaillard—it was ratified in a separate charter by John; an unusual proceeding, which has been thought to imply that he was now again acknowledged as his brother’s destined heir.[232] In 1198 Philip made another attack upon Normandy and burned Evreux and seven other towns. John fired a ninth, Neubourg; Philip, seeing the flames and supposing them to have been kindled by his own men, sent a body of troops to bid them go no farther, on which John fell upon the troops and captured eighteen knights and a crowd of men-at-arms.[233]

1199

The alliance of Richard and John had now lasted too long for Philip’s satisfaction, and early in 1199 he set himself to break it. He began by making a truce with Richard. Then, when the Lion-heart, thinking himself safe for the moment in Normandy, was on his way to Poitou, “that sower of discord, the king of France, sent him word that his brother John, the count of Mortain, had given himself to him (Philip); and he offered to show him John’s own letter proving the fact. O marvel! The king of England believed the king of France, and took to hating his brother John, insomuch that he caused him to be disseised of his lands on both sides of the sea. And when John asked the reason of this wrath and hatred, he was told what the king of France had sent word to his brother about him. Thereupon the count of Mortain sent two knights to represent him at the French king’s court, and they offered to prove him innocent of this charge, or to defend him as the court should direct. But there was found no one in that court, neither the king nor any other man, who would receive the offered proof or defence. And thenceforth the king of England was on more familiar terms with his brother John, and less ready to believe what was told him by the king of France.”[234] This story does not necessarily show either that Philip’s accusation of John was false, or that it was true. Philip may have invented it with the hope of driving John to throw himself again into his arms; but it is perhaps more likely that the two were in collusion, and that the scene in the French Curia Regis was a piece of acting on both sides. However this might be, by about the middle of March John had again left his brother “because he kept him so short of money, and on account of some disputes which had arisen between them.”[235] Suddenly, at the end of the month, the question of the Angevin succession was brought to a crisis by a cross-bowman who, at the siege of Châlus, on March 26, gave Richard his death-wound. That question had haunted Richard throughout his reign; his wishes respecting its solution had wavered more than once; now that it had to be faced, however, he faced it in what was, after all, the wisest as well as the most generous way. In the presence of as many of his subjects as could be gathered hastily round him, he devised all his realms to John, gave orders that on his own death John should be put in possession of all the royal castles and three-fourths of the royal treasure, and made the assembly swear fealty to John as his successor.[236]

Richard died on April 6.[237] On the 3rd there had been delivered at Rouen a letter from him appointing William the Marshal commandant of the castle and keeper of the treasure which it contained. On the 10th—the eve of Palm Sunday—the news of the king’s death came, late at night, just as the Marshal was going to bed. He dressed again in haste and went to the palace of the archbishop, who marvelled what could have brought him at such an hour, and when told, was, like William himself, overwhelmed with grief and consternation. What troubled them both was the thought of the future. William went straight to the point. “My lord, we must hasten to choose some one whom we may make king.” “I think and believe,” answered Archbishop Walter, “that according to right, we ought to make Arthur king.” “To my thinking,” said the Marshal, “that would be bad. Arthur is counselled by traitors; he is haughty and proud; and if we set him over us he will seek evil against us, for he loves not the people of this land. He shall not come here yet, by my advice. Look rather at Count John; my conscience and my knowledge point him out to me as the nearest heir to the land which was his father’s and his brother’s.” “Marshal, is this really your desire?” “Yea, my lord; for it is reason. Unquestionably, a son has a nearer claim to his father’s land than a grandson; it is right that he should have it.” “So be it, then,” said the archbishop; “but mark my words, Marshal; of nothing that ever you did in your life have you so much cause to repent as you will have of what you are now doing.” “I thank you,” answered William; “nevertheless, I deem that thus it should be.”[238]

In the conversation thus reported by the Marshal’s confidential squire there are several noticeable points. The divergent views enunciated by the two speakers as to the respective legal claims of Arthur and of John illustrate the still uncertain condition of the rules of hereditary succession. It is, however, plain that the legal aspect of the case was but a minor matter in the eyes of both primate and Marshal. For them the important question was not which of Richard’s two possible heirs had the best legal right to his heritage, but which of the two was likely to make the least unsatisfactory sovereign. The outlook was in any case a gloomy one; the only choice was a choice of evils. Of the two evils, it was natural that Walter should regard John as the worst, if he thought of personal character alone. Every one knew by this time what John was; the most impartial of contemporary historians had already summed up his character in two words—“Nature’s enemy,” a monster.[239] What Arthur might become was as yet uncertain; the duke of Britanny was but twelve years old. Yet even at that age, the “haughtiness and pride” ascribed to him by the Marshal are by no means unlikely to have shown themselves in a child whose father, Geoffrey, had been the evil genius of John’s early life, and whose mother had for years set her second husband Earl Ralf of Chester, her brother-in-law King Richard, and her supreme overlord King Philip, all alike at defiance. Not so much in Arthur’s character, however, as in his circumstances, lay the main ground of the Marshal’s objection to him as a sovereign. From his cradle Arthur had been trained in hostility to the political system at the head of which the Norman primate now proposed to place him. His very name had been given him by his mother and her people in defiance of his grandfather King Henry, as a badge of Breton independence and insubordination to the rule of the Angevin and Norman house. From the hour of Henry’s death in 1189, if not even from that of her son’s birth in 1187, Constance of Britanny had governed her duchy and trained its infant heir as seemed good to herself and her people, till in 1196 she was at last entrapped and imprisoned in Normandy; and then the result of her capture was that her boy fell into the keeping of another guardian not a whit less “traitorous,” from the Norman or Angevin point of view, than the patriotic Bretons who had surrounded him hitherto—the king of the French, at whose court he was kept for some time, sharing the education of Philip’s own son. To confer the sovereignty of the Angevin dominions upon the boy Arthur would thus have been practically to lay it at the feet of Philip Augustus. The only chance of preserving the integrity of the Angevin empire was to put a man at its head, and a man to whom the maintenance of that integrity would be a matter of personal interest as well as of family pride. It was the consciousness of this that had made Richard abandon his momentary scheme of designating Arthur as his heir, and revert finally to John; and it was the same consciousness which made William the Marshal, with his eyes fully open to John’s character, hold fast, in the teeth of the primate’s warning, to his conviction that “thus it should be.”

John, after his last parting from his brother, had made a characteristic political venture; he had sought to make friends with his boy-rival. It was in Britanny, at Arthur’s court, that he received the news of Richard’s death. He set off at once for Chinon; money was his first need, and the Angevin treasury was there. When he reached the place, on the Wednesday before Easter,[240] April 14—three days after Richard’s burial at Fontevraud—the castle and the treasure which it contained were at once given up to him by the commandant, Robert of Turnham, the seneschal of Anjou.[241] The officers of the late king’s household had hurried to meet his chosen heir, and now came to John demanding of him a solemn oath that he would carry into effect Richard’s last wishes, and maintain the customs of the Angevin lands. He took the oath, and they then acknowledged him as their lord in Richard’s stead.[242]

The most venerated of English bishops then living, Hugh of Lincoln, had officiated at Richard’s funeral and was still at Fontevraud. John sent an urgent request for his presence at Chinon, welcomed him there with a great show of attachment, and proposed that they should travel to England together. This Hugh declined, but he consented to accompany John for a few days on his journey northward. They set out at once for Saumur, and stopped at Fontevraud to visit the tombs of Henry and Richard. When John knocked at the choir-door for admittance, however, he was told that the abbess was away, and no visitor might enter without her leave. He then asked Hugh to communicate to the sisters, in his name, a promise of benefactions to their house, and a request for their prayers. “You know,” said Hugh, “that I detest all falsehood; I will utter no promises in your name unless I am assured that they will be fulfilled.” John swore that he would more than fulfil them; and the bishop did what he had been asked to do. As they left the church, John drew forth an amulet which hung round his neck and showed it to his companion, saying it had been given to one of his forefathers with a promise from Heaven that whosoever of his race had it in his possession should never lose the fulness of his ancestral dominion. Hugh bade him trust “not in that stone but in the Chief Corner Stone”; and turning round as they came out of the porch, over which was sculptured a representation of the Last Judgement, he led him towards the group on the left of the Judge, and besought him to take heed of the perils attending the responsibility of a ruler during his brief time upon earth. John dragged his monitor across to the other group, saying, “You should rather show me these, whose good example I purpose to follow!” During the three days of his journey in Hugh’s company, indeed, his affectation of piety and humility was so exaggerated that it seems to have rather quickened than allayed Hugh’s distrust of his good intentions.[243] On Easter Day the mask was suddenly dropped. Bishop and count spent the festival (April 18) at Beaufort,[244] probably as the guests of Richard’s widow, Berengaria. John was said to have never communicated since he had been of an age to please himself in such matters; and now all Hugh’s persuasions failed to bring him to the Holy Table. He did, however, attend the high mass on Easter Day, and at the offertory came up to Hugh—who was officiating—with some money in his hand; but instead of presenting the coins he stood looking at them and playing with them till Hugh asked him, “Why do you stand staring thus?” “I am staring at these gold pieces, and thinking that a few days ago, if I had had them, I should have put them not into your hands, but rather into my own purse; however, take them now.” The indignant bishop, “blushing vehemently in John’s stead,” drew back and bade him “throw into the bason what he held, and begone.” John obeyed. Hugh then followed up his rebuke with a sermon on the characters of a good and of a bad prince, and the future reward of each. John, liking neither the matter of the sermon nor its length, thrice attempted to cut it short by a message that he wanted his dinner; Hugh only preached the longer and the more pointedly, and took his leave of John on the following day.[245]

On that day John discovered that he was in a situation of imminent peril. While he had been travelling from the Breton border to Chinon and thence back to Beaufort, Philip had mastered the whole county of Evreux and overrun Maine as far as Le Mans; and a Breton force, with Constance and Arthur at its head, had marched straight upon Angers[246] and won it without striking a blow. City and castle were surrendered at once by Thomas of Furnes, a nephew of the seneschal Robert of Turnham;[247] and on Easter Day a great assembly of barons of Anjou, Touraine and Maine, as well as of Britanny, gave in their adhesion to Arthur as their liege lord and Richard’s lawful heir.[248] The forces thus gathered in the Angevin capital, from which Beaufort was only fifteen miles distant, must have been more than sufficient to overwhelm John, whose suite was evidently a very small one. His only chance was to make for Normandy with all possible speed. Hurrying away from Beaufort on Easter Monday, he reached Le Mans the same night; its citizens received him coldly, its garrison refused to support him, and it was only by slipping away before daybreak on Tuesday that he escaped being caught between two fires. On that very morning {April 20} the Bretons and their new allies entered Le Mans in triumph,[249] and they were soon met there by the French king, to whom Arthur did homage for the counties of Anjou, Touraine and Maine.[250]

Meanwhile, however, John had made his way to Rouen, and there he was safe. Richard on his death-bed had declared that the people of Rouen were the most loyal of all his subjects; they proved their loyalty to his memory by rallying round the successor whom he had chosen for himself, and all Normandy followed their example. “By the election of the nobles and the acclamation of the citizens,”[251] John was proclaimed duke of the Normans, and invested with the symbols of his dukedom in the metropolitan church on Low Sunday, April 25.[252] The ducal crown—a circlet of gold, with gold roses round the top—was placed on his head by Archbishop Walter, and the new-made duke swore before the clergy and people, on the holy Gospels and the relics of saints, that he would maintain inviolate the rights of the Church, do justice, establish good laws, and put down evil customs.[253] The archbishop then girded him with the sword of justice, and presented him with the lance which held among the insignia of a Norman duke the place that belongs to the sceptre among those of a king. A group of John’s familiar friends stood close behind him, audibly mocking at the solemn rites. He chose the moment when the lance was put into his hands to turn round and join in their mockery; and, as he turned, the lance slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground.[254]

In after years it was only natural that this incident should be recalled as an omen.[255] The indecent levity which had caused the mishap was in itself ominous enough. Still, however, the Marshal and the Norman and English primates—for Hubert of Canterbury, too, was at Rouen, and fully in accord with the policy of William and Walter—clave to their forlorn hope and persevered in their thankless task. In obedience to John’s orders, Hubert and William now returned to England to assist the justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, in securing the realm for him.[256] John himself turned southward again to try whether it were possible, now that he had the strength of Normandy at his back, to win the Angevin lands before he went over sea. No sooner had the French and the Bretons withdrawn from Anjou than it was overrun with fire and sword by Richard’s mercenaries, acting under the orders of their captain Mercadier and of Queen Eleanor, who had enlisted them in John’s interests as soon as they had had time to march up from Châlus to the Angevin border. John despatched a body of troops to join them, while he proceeded in person to Le Mans. There he wreaked his vengeance to the full. City and castle fell into his hands; he razed the castle, pulled down the city walls, destroyed the houses capable of defence, and flung the chief citizens into captivity.[257] But the danger in his rear was still too great to allow of his advance farther south. To throw the whole forces of Normandy upon the Angevin lands would have been to leave Normandy itself open to attack from two sides at once, and expose himself to have his own retreat cut off by a new junction between Philip and the Bretons. He could only venture to open negotiations with the barons of Anjou and of Aquitaine, endeavour to win them over by fair words and promises,[258] and then leave his interests in the south to the care of his mother. Accompanied only by a few personal friends,[259] he went back through Normandy to the sea; on May 25 he landed at Shoreham;[260] on the 26th he reached London, and on the 27th—Ascension Day—he was crowned at Westminster.[261]