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The History of England From the Norman Conquest to the Death of John
Conflict With The Papacy
by Adams, George Burton
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The loss of the ancient possessions of the Norman dukes and the Angevin
counts marks the close of an epoch in the reign of John; but for the
history of England and for the personal history of the king the period is
more appropriately closed by the death of Archbishop Hubert Walter on
July 13, 1205, for the consequences which followed that event lead us
directly to the second period of the reign. Already at the accession of
John one of the two or three men of controlling influence on the course
of events, trained not merely in the school of Henry II, but by the
leading part he had played in the reign of Richard, there is no doubt
that he had kept a strong hand on the government of the opening years of
the new reign, and that his personality had been felt as a decided check
by the new king. We may believe also that as one who had been brought up
by Glanvill, the great jurist of Henry's time, and who had a large share
in carrying the constitutional beginnings of that time a further stage
forward, but who was himself a practical statesman rather than a lawyer,
he was one of the foremost teachers of that great lesson which England
was then learning, the lesson of law, of rights and responsibilities,
which was for the world at large a far more important result of the legal
reforms of the great Angevin monarch than anything in the field of
technical law. It is easy to believe that a later writer records at least
a genuine tradition of the feeling of John when he makes him exclaim on
hearing of the archbishop's death, "Now--for the first time am I king of
England." In truth practically shut up now for the first time to his
island kingdom, John was about to be plunged into that series of quarrels
and conflicts which fills the remainder of his life.
For the beginning of the conflict which gives its chief characteristic to
the second period of his reign, the conflict with the pope and the
Church, John is hardly to be blamed, at least not from the point of view
of a king of England. With the first scene of the drama he had nothing to
do; in the second he was doing no more than all his predecessors had done
with scarcely an instance of dispute since the Norman Conquest. There had
long been two questions concerning elections to the see of Canterbury
that troubled the minds of the clergy. The monks of the cathedral church
objected to the share which the bishops of the province had acquired in
the choice of their primate, and canonically they were probably right.
They also objected, and the bishops, though usually acting on the side of
the king, no doubt sympathized with them, to the virtual appointment of
the archbishop by the king. This objection, though felt by the clergy
since the day when Anselm had opened the way into England to the
principles of the Hildebrandine reformation, had never yet been given
decided expression in overt act or led to any serious struggle with the
sovereign; and it is clear that it would not have done so in this
instance if the papal throne had not been filled by Innocent III. That
great ecclesiastical statesman found in the political situation of more
than one country of Europe opportunities for the exercise of his decided
genius which enabled him to attain more nearly to the papacy of Gregory
VII's ideal than had been possible to any earlier pope, and none of his
triumphs was greater than that which he won from the opportunity offered
him in England.
On Archbishop Hubert's death a party of the monks of Canterbury
determined to be beforehand with the bishops and even with the king. They
secretly elected their subprior to the vacant see, and sent him off to
Rome to be confirmed before their action should be known, but the
personal vanity of their candidate betrayed the secret, and his boasting
that he was the elect of Canterbury was reported back from the continent
to England to the anger of the monks, who then sent a deputation to the
king and asked permission in the regular way to proceed to an election.
John gave consent, and suggested John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, as his
candidate, since he was "alone of all the prelates of England in
possession of his counsels." The bishop was elected by the chapter; both
bishops and monks were induced to withdraw the appeals they had made to
Rome on their respective rights, and, on December 11, the new archbishop
was enthroned and invested with the fiefs of Canterbury by the king. Of
course the pallium from the pope was still necessary, and steps were at
once taken to secure it. Innocent took plenty of time to consider the
situation and did not render his decision until the end of March, 1206,
declaring then against the king's candidate and ordering a deputation of
the monks to be sent him, duly commissioned to act for the whole chapter.
King and bishops were also told to be represented at the final decision.
The pope's action postponed the settlement of the question for six
months, and the interval was spent by John in an effort to recover
something of his lost dominions, undertaken this time with some promise
of success because of active resistance to Philip in Poitou. On this
occasion no objection to the campaign was made by the barons, and with a
large English force John landed at La Rochelle on June 7. Encouraged by
his presence the insurrection spread through the greater part of Poitou
and brought it back into his possession. He even invaded Anjou and held
its capital for a time, and reached the borders of Maine, but these
conquests he could not retain after Philip took the field against him in
person; but on his side Philip did not think it wise to attempt the
recovery of Poitou. On October 26 a truce for two years was proclaimed,
each side to retain what it then possessed, but John formally abandoning
all rights north of the Loire during the period of the truce.
John did not return to England until near the middle of December, but
even at that date Innocent III had not decided the question of the
Canterbury election. On December 20 he declared against the claim of the
bishops and against the first secret election by the monks, and under his
influence the deputation from Canterbury elected an Englishman and
cardinal highly respected at Rome both for his character and for his
learning, Stephen of Langton. The representatives of the king at Rome
refused to agree to this election, and the pope himself wrote to John
urging him to accept the new archbishop, but taking care to make it clear
that the consent of the king was not essential, and indeed he did not
wait for it. After correspondence with John in which the king's anger and
his refusal to accept Langton were plainly expressed, on June 17, 1207,
he consecrated Stephen archbishop. John's answer was the confiscation of
the lands of the whole archbishopric, apparently those of the convent as
well as those of the archbishop, and the expulsion of the monks from the
country as traitors, while the trial in England of all appeals to the
pope was forbidden.
Before this violent proceeding against the Canterbury monks, the
financial necessities of John had led to an experiment in taxation which
embroiled him to almost the same extent with the northern province. Not
the only one, but the chief source of the troubles of John's reign after
the loss of Normandy, and the main cause of the revolution in which the
reign closed, is to be found in the financial situation of the king. The
normal expenses of government had been increasing rapidly in the last
half century. The growing amount and complexity of public and private
business, to be expected in a land long spared the ravages of war, which
showed itself in the remarkable development of judicial and
administrative machinery during the period, meant increased expenses in
many directions not to be met by the increased income from the new
machinery. The cost of the campaigns in France was undoubtedly great, and
the expense of those which the king desired to undertake was clearly
beyond the resources of the country, at least beyond the resources
available to him by existing methods of taxation. Nor was John a saving
and careful housekeeper who could make a small income go a long ways. The
complete breakdown of the ordinary feudal processes of raising revenue,
the necessity forced upon the king of discovering new sources of income,
the attempt within a single generation to impose on the country something
like the modern methods and regularity of taxation, these must be taken
into account as elements of decided importance in any final judgment we
may form of the struggles of John's reign and their constitutional
results. Down to this date a scutage had been imposed every year since
the king's accession, at the rate of two marks on the fee except on the
last occasion when the tax had been twenty shillings. Besides these there
had been demanded the carucage of 1200 and the seventh of personal
property of 1204, to say nothing of some extraordinary exactions. But
these taxes were slow in coming in; the machinery of collection was still
primitive, and the amount received in any year was far below what the tax
should have yielded.
At a great council held in London on January 8 the king asked the bishops
and abbots present to grant him a tax on the incomes of all beneficed
clergy. The demand has a decidedly modern sound. Precedents for taxation
of this sort had been made in various crusading levies, in the expedients
adopted for raising Richard's ransom, and in the seventh demanded by John
in 1204, which was exacted from at least a part of the clergy, but these
were all more or less exceptional cases, and there was no precedent for
such a tax as a means of meeting the ordinary expenses of the state. The
prelates refused their consent, and the matter was deferred to a second
great council to be held at Oxford a month later. This council was
attended by an unusually large number of ecclesiastics, and the king's
proposition, submitted to them again, was again refused. The council,
however, granted the thirteenth asked, to be collected of the incomes and
personal property of the laity. But John had no mind to give up his plan
because it had not been sanctioned by the prelates in general assembly,
and he proceeded, apparently by way of individual consent, doubtless
practically compulsory as usual, to collect the same tax from the whole
clergy, the Cistercians alone excepted. A tax of this kind whether of
laity or clergy was entirely non-feudal, foreign both in nature and
methods to the principles of feudalism, and a long step toward modern
taxation, but it was some time before the suggestion made by it was taken
up by the government as one of its ordinary resources. Archbishop
Geoffrey of York, the king's brother, who since the death of his father
seemed never to be happy unless in a quarrel with some one, took it upon
himself to oppose violently the taxation of his clergy, though he had
enforced the payment of a similar tax for Richard's ransom. Finding that
he could not prevent it he retired from the country, excommunicating the
despoilers of the church, and his lands were taken in hand by the king.
The expulsion of the monks of Canterbury was a declaration of war against
the Church and the pope, and the Church was far more powerful, more
closely organized, and more nearly actuated by a single ideal, than in
the case of any earlier conflict between Church and State in England, and
the pope was Innocent III, head of the world in his own conception of his
position and very nearly so in reality. There was no chance that a
declaration of war would pass unanswered, but the pope did not act
without deliberation. On the news of what the king had done he wrote to
the Bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester, directing them to try to
persuade John to give way, and if he obstinately continued his course, to
proclaim an interdict. This letter was written on August 27, but the
interdict was not actually put into force until March 24,1208,
negotiations going on all the winter, and John displaying, as he did
throughout the whole conflict, considerable ability in securing delay and
in keeping opponents occupied with proposals which he probably never
intended to carry out. At last a date was set on which the interdict
would be proclaimed if the king had not yielded by that time, and he was
given an opportunity of striking the first blow which he did not neglect.
He ordered the immediate confiscation of the property of all the clergy
who should obey the interdict.
The struggle which follows exhibits, as nothing else could do so well,
the tremendous power of the Norman feudal monarchy, the absolute hold
which it had on state and nation even on the verge of its fall. John had
not ruled during these eight years in such a way as to strengthen his
personal position. He had been a tyrant; he had disregarded the rights of
batons as well as of clergy; he had given to many private reasons of
hatred; he had lost rather than won respect by the way in which he had
defended his inheritance in France his present cause, if looked at from
the point of view of Church and nation and not from that of the royal
prerogative alone, was a bad one. The interdict was a much dreaded
penalty, suspending some of the most desired offices of religion, and,
while not certainly dooming all the dying to be lost in the world to
come, at least rendering their state to the pious mind somewhat doubtful;
and, though the effect of the spiritual terrors of the Church had been a
little weakened by their frequent use on slight occasions, the age was
still far distant when they could be disregarded. We should expect John
to prove as weak in the war with Innocent as he had in that with Philip,
and at such a test to find his power crumbling without recovery. What we
really find is a successful resistance kept up for years, almost without
expressed opposition, a great body of the clergy reconciling themselves
to the situation as best they could; a period during which the affairs of
the state seem to go on as if nothing were out of order, the period of
John's greatest tyranny, of almost unbridled power. And when he was
forced to yield at last, it was to a foreign attack, to a foreign attack
combined, it is true, with an opposition at home which had been long
accumulating, but no one can say how long this opposition might have gone
on accumulating before it would have grown strong enough to check the
king of itself.
The interdict seems to have been generally observed by the clergy. The
Cistercians at first declared that they were not bound to respect it, but
they were after a time forced by the pope to conform. Baptism and extreme
unction were allowed; marriages might be celebrated at the church door;
but no masses were publicly said, and all the ordinary course of the
sacraments was intermitted; the dead were buried in unconsecrated ground,
and the churches were closed except to those who wished to make
offerings. Nearly all the bishops went into exile. Two only remained in
the end, both devoted more to the king than to the Church; John de Grey,
Bishop of Norwich, employed during most of the time in secular business
in Ireland, and Peter des Roches, appointed Bishop of Winchester in 1205,
destined to play a leading part against the growing liberties of the
nation in the next reign, and now, as a chronicler says, occupied less
with defending the Church than in administering the king's affairs. The
general confiscation of Church property must have relieved greatly the
financial distress of the king, and during the years when these lands
were administered as part of the royal domains, we hear less of attempts
at national taxation. John did not stop with confiscation of the goods of
the clergy. Their exemption from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts
of the state was suspended, and they were even in some cases denied the
protection of the laws. It is said that once there came to the king on
the borders of Wales officers of one of the sheriffs, leading a robber
with his hands bound behind his back, who had robbed and killed a priest,
and they asked the king what should be done with him. "He has killed
one of my enemies. Loose him and let him go," ordered John. After the
interdict had been followed by the excommunication of the king, Geoffrey,
Archdeacon of Norwich, urged upon his associates at the exchequer that it
was not safe for those who were in orders to remain in the service of an
excommunicate king, and left the court without permission and went home.
John hearing this sent William Talbot after him with a band of soldiers,
who arrested the archdeacon, and loaded him with chains, and threw him
into prison. There shortly after by the command of the king he was
pressed to death. It was by acts like these, of which other instances are
on record, that John terrorized the country and held it quiet under his
tyranny.
Even the greatest barons were subjected to arbitrary acts of power of the
same kind. On the slightest occasion of suspicion the king demanded their
sons or other relatives, or their vassals, as hostages, a measure which
had been in occasional use before, but which John carried to an extreme.
The great earl marshal himself, who, if we may trust his biographer, was
never afraid to do what he thought honour demanded, and was always able
to defend himself in the king's presence with such vigorous argument that
nothing could be done with him, was obliged to give over to the king's
keeping first his eldest and then his second son. The case of William de
Braóse is that most commonly cited. He had been a devoted supporter of
John and had performed many valuable services in his interest, especially
at the time of the coronation. For these he had received many marks of
royal favour, and was rapidly becoming both in property and in family
alliances one of the greatest barons of the land. About the time of the
proclamation of the interdict a change took place in his fortunes. For
some reason he lost the favour of the king and fell instead under his
active enmity. According to a formal statement of the case, which John
thought well to put forth afterwards, he had failed to pay large sums
which he had promised in return for the grants that had been made him;
and the records support the accusation.71 According to Roger of
Wendover the king had a personal cause of anger. On a demand of
hostages from her husband, the wife of William had rashly declared to
the officers that her sons should never be delivered to the king because
he had basely murdered his nephew Arthur, whom he was under obligation
to guard honourably, and it is impossible to believe that it was merely
delay in paying money that excited the fierce persecution that followed.
William with his family took refuge in Ireland, where he was received by
William Marshal and the Lacies, but John pursued him thither, and he was
again obliged to fly. His wife and son, attempting to escape to Scotland,
were seized in Galloway by a local baron and delivered to John, who
caused them to be starved to death in prison.
It may seem strange at the present day that the absolutism of the king
did not bring about a widespread rebellion earlier than it did. One of
the chief causes of his strength is to be found in the bands of mercenary
soldiers which he maintained, ready to do any bidding at a moment's
notice, under the command of men who were entirely his creatures, like
Gerald of Athies, a peasant of Touraine, who with some of his fellows was
thought worthy of mention by name in the Great Charter. The cost of
keeping these bands devoted to his service was no doubt one of the large
expenses of the reign. Another fact of greater permanent interest that
helped to keep up the king's power is the lack of unity among the barons,
of any feeling of a common cause, but rather the existence of jealousies,
and open conflicts even, which made it impossible to bring them together
in united action in their own defence. The fact is of especial importance
because it was the crushing tyranny of John that first gave rise to the
feeling of corporate unity in the baronage, and the growth of this
feeling is one of the great facts of the thirteenth century.
At the beginning of 1209 Innocent III had threatened the immediate
excommunication of John, but the king had known how to keep him, and the
bishops who represented him in the negotiations, occupied with one
proposition of compromise after another until almost the close of the
year. The summer was employed in settling affairs with Scotland, which
down to this time had not been put into form satisfactory to either king.
A meeting at the end of April led to no result, but in August, after
armies of the two countries had faced each other on the borders, a treaty
was agreed upon. William the Lion was not then in a condition to insist
strongly on his own terms, and the treaty was much in favour of John. The
king of Scotland promised to pay 15,000 marks, and gave over two of his
daughters to John to be given in marriage by him. In a later treaty
John was granted the same right with respect to Alexander, the heir of
Scotland, arrangements that look very much like a recognition of the
king of England as the overlord of Scotland. In Wales also quarrels among
the native chieftains enabled John to increase his influence in the still
unconquered districts. In November the long-deferred excommunication fell
upon the unrepentant king, but it could not be published in England.
There were no bishops left in the country who were acting in the
interests of the pope, and John took care that there should be no means
of making any proclamation of the sentence in his kingdom. The
excommunication was formally published in France, and news of it passed
over to England, but no attention was paid to it there. For the
individual, excommunication was a more dreaded penalty than the
interdict. The interdict might compel a king to yield by the public fear
and indignation which it would create, but an excommunication cut him off
as a man completely from the Church and all its mercies, cast him out of
the community of Christians, and involved in the same awful fate all who
continued to support him, or, indeed, to associate with him in any way.
Even more than the interdict, the excommunication reveals the terrible
strength of the king. When the time came for holding the Christmas court
of 1209, the fact that it had been pronounced was generally known, but it
made no difference in the attendance. All the barons are said to have
been present and to have associated with the king as usual, though there
must have been many of them who trembled at the audacity of the act, and
who would have withdrawn entirely from him if they had dared. On his
return from the north John had demanded and obtained a renewal of homage
from all the free tenants of the country. The men of Wales had even been
compelled to go to Woodstock to render it. It is quite possible that this
demand had been made in view of the excommunication that was coming; the
homage must certainly have been rendered by many who knew that the
sentence was hanging over the king's head.
The year 1210 is marked by an expedition of John with an army to Ireland.
Not only were William de Braóse and his wife to be punished, but the
Lacies had been for some time altogether too independent, and the conduct
of William Marshal was not satisfactory. The undertaking occasioned the
first instance of direct taxation since the lands of the Church had been
taken in hand, a scutage, which in this case at least would have a
warrant in strict feudal law. The clergy also were compelled to pay a
special and heavy tax, and the Jews throughout the kingdom--perhaps an
act of piety on the part of the king to atone somewhat for his treatment
of the Church--were arrested and thrown into prison and forced to part
with large sums of money. It was on this occasion that the often-quoted
incident occurred of the Jew of Bristol who endured all ordinary tortures
to save his money, or that in his charge, until the king ordered a tooth
to be drawn each day so long as he remained obstinate. As the eighth was
about to be pulled, "tardily perceiving," as the chronicler remarks,
"what was useful," he gave up and promised the 10,000 marks demanded.
John landed in Ireland about June 20, and traversed with his army all that
part of the country which was occupied by Anglo-Norman settlers without
finding any serious opposition. William Marshal entertained his host for
two days with all loyalty. The Lacies and William de Braóse's family fled
before him from one place to another and finally escaped out of the island
to Scotland. Carrickfergus, in which Hugh de Lacy had thought to stand a
siege, resisted for a few days, and then surrendered. At Dublin the native
kings of various districts, said by Roger of Wendover to have been more
than twenty in number, including the successor of Roderick, king of
Connaught, who had inherited a greatly reduced power, came in and did
homage and swore fealty to John. At the same time, we are told, the king
introduced into the island the laws and administrative system of England,
and appointed sheriffs.72 John's march through the island and the
measures of government which he adopted have been thought to mark an
advance in the subjection of Ireland to English rule, and to form one of
the few permanent contributions to English history devised by the king. On
his departure Bishop John de Grey was left as justiciar, and toward the
end of August John landed in England to go on with the work of exacting
money from the clergy and the Jews that he had begun before he left the
country.
The two years which followed John's return from Ireland, from August,
1210 to August 1212, form the period of his highest power. No attempt at
resistance to his will anywhere disturbed the peace of England. Llewelyn,
Prince of north Wales, husband of John's natural daughter Joanna,
involved in border warfare with the Earl of Chester, was not willing to
yield to the authority of the king, but two expeditions against him in
1211 forced him to make complete submission. A contemporary annalist
remarks with truth that none of John's predecessors exercised so great an
authority over Scotland, Wales, or Ireland as he, and we may add that
none exercised a greater over England. The kingdom was almost in a state
of blockade, and not only was unauthorized entrance into the country
forbidden, but departure from it as well, except as the king desired.
During these two years John's relations with the Church troubled him but
little. Negotiations were kept up as before, but they led to nothing. On
his return from the Welsh campaign the king met representatives of the
pope at Northampton, one of whom was the Roman subdeacon Pandulf, whom
John met later in a different mood. We have no entirely trustworthy
account of the interview, but it was found impossible to agree upon the
terms of any treaty which would bring the conflict to an end. The pope
demanded a promise of complete obedience from John on all the questions
that had caused the trouble, and restoration to the clergy of all their
confiscated revenues, and to one or both of these demands the king
refused to yield. Now it is that we begin to hear of threats of further
sentences to be issued by the pope against John, or actually issued,
releasing his subjects from their allegiance and declaring the king
incapable of ruling, but if any step of that kind was taken, it had for
the present no effect. The Christmas feast was kept as usual at Windsor,
and in Lent of the next year John knighted young Alexander of Scotland,
whose father had sent him to London to be married as his liege lord might
please, though "without disparagement."
In the spring of 1212 John seems to have felt himself strong enough to
take up seriously a plan for the recovery of the lands which he had lost
in France. The idea he had had in mind for some years was the formation of
a great coalition against Philip Augustus by combining various enemies of
his or of the pope's. In May the Count of Boulogne, who was in trouble
with the king of France, came to London and did homage to John. Otto IV,
the Guelfic emperor and John's nephew, was now in as desperate conflict
with the papacy as if he were a Ghibelline, and Innocent was supporting
against him the young Hohenstaufen Frederick, son of Henry VI and
Constance of Sicily. Otto therefore was ready to promise help to any one
from whom he could hope for aid in return, or to take part in any
enterprise from which a change of the general situation might be expected.
Ferdinand of Portugal, just become Count of Flanders by marriage with
Jeanne, the heiress of the crusading Count Baldwin, the emperor Baldwin of
the new Latin empire, had at the moment of his accession been made the
victim of Philip Augustus's ceaseless policy of absorbing the great fiefs
in the crown, and had lost the two cities of Aire and St. Omer. He was
ready to listen to John's solicitations, and after some hesitation and
delay joined the alliance, as did also most of the princes on the
north-east between France and Germany. John laboured long and hard with
much skill and final success, at a combination which would isolate the
king of France and make it possible to attack him with overwhelming force
at once from the north and the south. With a view, in all probability, to
calling out the largest military force possible in the event of a war with
France, John at this time ordered a new survey to be taken of the service
due from the various fiefs in England. The inquest was made by juries of
the hundreds, after a method very similar to that lately employed in the
carucage of 1198, and earlier in the Domesday survey by William the
Conqueror, though it was under the direction of the sheriffs, not of
special commissioners. The interesting returns to this inquiry have been
preserved to us only in part.73 If John hoped to be able to attack his
enemy abroad in the course of the year 1212, he was disappointed in the
end. His combination of allies he was not able to complete. A new revolt
of the Welsh occupied his attention towards the end of the summer and led
him to hang twenty-eight boys, hostages whom they had given him the year
before. Worst of all, evidence now began to flow in to the king from
various quarters of a serious disaffection among the barons of the kingdom
and of a growing spirit of rebellion, even, it was said, of an intention
to deprive him of the crown. We are told that on the eve of his expedition
against the Welsh a warning came to him from the king of Scotland that he
was surrounded by treason, and another from his daughter in Wales to the
same effect. Whatever the source of his information, John was evidently
convinced--very likely he needed but little to convince him--of a danger
which he must have been always suspecting. At any rate he did not venture
to trust himself to his army in the field, but sent home the levies and
carefully guarded himself for a time. Then he called for new declarations
of loyalty and for hostages from the barons; and two of them, Eustace de
Vescy and Robert Fitz Walter, fled from the country, the king outlawing
them and seizing their property. About the same time a good deal of public
interest was excited by a hermit of Yorkshire, Peter of Pontefract, who
was thought able to foretell the future, and who declared that John would
not be king on next Ascension day, the anniversary of his coronation. It
was probably John's knowledge of the disposition of the barons, and
possibly the hope of extorting some information from him, that led him,
rather unwisely, to order the arrest of the hermit, and to question him as
to the way in which he should lose the crown. Peter could only tell him
that the event was sure, and that if it did not occur, the king might do
with him what he pleased. John took him at his word, held him in prison,
and hanged him when the day had safely passed.
By that 23d of May, however, a great change had taken place in the formal
standing of John among the sovereigns of the world, a change which many
believed fulfilled the prediction of Peter, and one which affected the
history of England for many generations. As the year 1212 drew to its
close, John was not merely learning his own weakness in England, but he
was forced by the course of events abroad to recognize the terrible
strength of the papacy and the small chance that even a strong king could
have of winning a victory over it.74 His nephew Otto IV had been obliged
to retire, almost defeated, before the enthusiasm which the young
Frederick of Hohenstaufen had aroused in his adventurous expedition to
recover the crown of Germany. Raymond of Toulouse, John's brother-in-law,
had been overwhelmed and almost despoiled of his possessions in an attempt
to protect his subjects in their right to believe what seemed to them the
truth. For the moment the vigorous action which John had taken after the
warnings received on the eve of the Welsh campaign had put an end to the
disposition to revolt, and had left him again all powerful. He had even
been able to extort from the clergy formal letters stating that the sums
he had forced them to pay were voluntarily granted him. But he had been
made to understand on how weak a foundation his power rested. He must
have known that Philip Augustus had for some time been considering the
possibility of an invasion of England, whether invited by the barons to
undertake it or not, and he could hardly fail to dread the results to
himself of such a step after the lesson he had learned in Normandy of the
consequences of treason. The situation at home and abroad forced upon him
the conclusion that he must soon come to terms with the papacy, and in
November he sent representatives to Rome to signify that he would agree to
the proposals he had rejected when made by Pandulf early in the previous
year.75 Even in this case John may be suspected, as so often before, of
making a proposition which he did not intend to carry out, or at least of
trying to gain time, for it was found that the embassy could not make a
formally binding agreement; and it is clear that Innocent III, while ready
to go on with the negotiations and hoping to carry them to success, was
now convinced that he must bring to bear on John the only kind of pressure
to which he would yield.
There is reason to believe that after his reconciliation with the king
of England Innocent III had all the letters in which he had threatened
John with the severest penalties collected so far as possible and
destroyed.76 It is uncertain, however, whether before the end of 1212
he had gone so far as to depose the king and to absolve his subjects
from their allegiance, though this is asserted by English chroniclers.
But there is no good ground to doubt that in January, 1213, he took
this step, and authorized the king of France to invade England and
deprive John of his kingdom. Philip needed no urging. He collected a
numerous fleet, we are told, of 1500 vessels, and a large army. In
the first week of April he held a great council at Soissons, and the
enterprise was determined on by the barons and bishops of France. At
the same council arrangements were made to define the legal relations
to France of the kingdom to be conquered, The king of England was to be
Philip's son, Louis, who could advance some show of right through his
wife, John's niece, Blanche of Castile but during his father's lifetime
he was to make no pretension to any part of France, a provision which
would leave the duchy of Aquitaine in Philip's hands, as Normandy was.
Louis was to require an oath of his new subjects that they would
undertake nothing against France, and he was to leave to his father the
disposal of the person of John and of his private possessions. Of the
relationship between the two countries when Louis should succeed to the
crown of France, nothing was said. Preparations were so far advanced
that it was expected that the army would embark before the end of May.
In the meantime John was taking measures for a vigorous defence. Orders
were sent out for all ships capable of carrying at least six horses to
assemble at Portsmouth by the middle of Lent. The feudal levies and all
men able to bear arms were called out for April 21. The summons was
obeyed by such numbers that they could not be fed, and all but the best
armed were sent home, while the main force was collected on Barham Down,
between Canterbury and Dover, with outposts at the threatened ports. John
has been thought by some to have had a special interest in the
development of the fleet; at any rate he knew how to employ here the
defensive manoeuvre which has been more than once of avail to England,
and he sent out a naval force to capture and destroy the enemy's ships in
the mouth of the Seine and at Fécamp, and to take and burn the town of
Dieppe. It was his plan also to defend the country with the fleet rather
than with the army, and to attack and destroy the hostile armament on its
way across the channel. To contemporaries the preparations seemed
entirely sufficient to defend the country, not merely against France, but
against any enemy whatever, provided only the hearts of all had been
devoted to the king.
While preparations were being made in France for an invasion of England
under the commission of the pope, Innocent was going on with the effort
to bring John to his terms by negotiation. The messengers whom the king
had sent to Rome returned bringing no modification of the papal demands.
At the same time Pandulf, the pope's representative, empowered to make a
formal agreement, came on as far as Calais and sent over two Templars to
England to obtain permission for an interview with John, while he held
back the French fleet to learn the result. The answer of John to
Pandulf's messengers would be his answer to the pope and also his
defiance of Philip. There can be no doubt what his answer would have been
if he had had entire confidence in his army, nor what it would have been
if Philip's fleet had not been ready. He yielded only because there was
no other way out of the situation into which he had brought himself, and
he made his submission complete enough to insure his escape. He sent for
Pandulf, and on May 13 met him at Dover and accepted his terms. Four of
his chief barons, as the pope required, the Earl of Salisbury, the Count
of Boulogne, and the Earls Warenne and Ferrers, swore on the king's soul
that he would keep the agreement, and John issued letters patent formally
declaring what he had promised. Stephen Langton was to be accepted as
Archbishop of Canterbury, and all the exiled bishops, monks, and laymen
were to be reinstated, and full compensation made them for their
financial losses. Two days later John went very much further than this:
at the house of the Templars near Dover in the presence of the barons he
surrendered the kingdom to the pope, confirming the act by a charter
witnessed by two bishops and eleven barons, and received it back to be
held as a fief, doing homage to Pandulf as the representative of the
pope, and promising for himself and his heirs the annual payment of 700
marks for England and 300 for Ireland in lieu of feudal service.
Whether this extraordinary act was demanded by Innocent or suggested by
John, the evidence does not permit us to say. The balance of
probabilities, however, inclines strongly to the opinion that it was a
voluntary act of the king's. There is nothing in the papal documents to
indicate any such demand, and it is hardly possible that the pope could
have believed that he could carry the matter so far. On the other hand,
John was able to see clearly that nothing else would save him. He had
every reason to be sure that no ordinary reconciliation with the papacy
would check the invasion of Philip or prevent the treason of the barons.
If England were made a possession of the pope, the whole situation would
take on a different aspect. Not only would all Europe think Innocent
justified in adopting the most extreme measures for the defence of his
vassal, but also the most peculiar circumstances only would justify Philip
in going on with his attack, and without him disaffection at home was
powerless. We should be particularly careful not to judge this act of
John's by the sentiment of a later time. There was nothing that seemed
degrading to that age about becoming a vassal. Every member of the
aristocracy of Europe and almost every king was a vassal. A man passed
from the classes that were looked down upon, the peasantry and the
bourgeoisie, into the nobility by becoming a vassal. The English kings had
been vassals since feudalism had existed in England, though not for the
kingdom, and only a few years before Richard had made even that a fief of
the empire. There is no evidence that John's right to take this step was
questioned by any one, or that there was any general condemnation of it at
that time. One writer a few years later says that the act seemed to many
"ignominious," but he records in the same sentence his own judgment that
John was "very prudently providing for himself and his by the deed."77
Even in the rebellion against John that closed his reign no objection was
made to the relationship with the papacy, nor was the king's right to act
as he did denied, though his action was alleged by his enemies to be
illegal because it did not have the consent of the barons. John's charter
of concession, however, expressly affirms this consent, and the barons on
one occasion seem to have confirmed the assertion.78
Footnotes
[71] See J.H. Round's article on William in Dict. Nat. Biogr., vi. 229.
[72] See C.L. Falkiner in Proc. Royal Irish Acad., xxiv. c. pt. 4 (1903).
[73] See Round, Commune of London, 261-277.
[74] Ralph of Coggeshall, 164-165.
[75] Walter of Coventry, ii, lviii. n. 4.
[76] Innocent III, Epp. xvi. 133. (Rymer, Foedera, i. 116.)
[77] Walter of Coventry, ii. 210.
[78] Rymer, Foedera, i. 120.
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