Runnymede and Lincoln Fair: A Story of the Great Charter

“By my halidame, De Moreville,” said Fitzwalter, gravely, “I much marvel that a man so skilled in statecraft, and accounted so sage in camp and council as you are, can indulge in talk so perilous to our enterprise, encompassed as it is with dangers. Credit me that when the cession of the three northern counties to the King of Scots is bruited about, and the condition of his friendship becomes matter of public notoriety, that of itself will be sufficiently difficult to vindicate. Make not the aspect of affairs more repulsive to our best and most leal friends, the citizens of London, by defying their prejudices. Credit me, such a course, if persisted in, will ruin all, and leave us at the mercy of an adversary whose tender mercies are cruel. No more of it, I pray you, as you value all our lives and fortunes, and the welfare of the army of God and the Church.”

“Fitzwalter,” replied De Moreville, earnestly, “be not deceived. Much less easy is it than you think to startle the citizens of London, who care nothing for traditions or love of country. Behind that old Roman wall which you see to the east are men from every clime and of every race, mongrels almost to a man, who have no feeling, no motive in this quarrel, save their aversion to the monarchy and their dislike of the king. Be not deceived. Besides, as I am a Norman gentleman, I swear to you, on my faith, that I do not value their opinion or their support at the worth of a bezant.”

Fitzwalter started, and looked round as if fearing that any one might be within earshot.

“For the rest,” continued De Moreville, conclusively, “I have well considered what I have spoken, and am prepared to abide by it, let William Longsword or the Nevilles do their worst. We are Normans, and not Englishmen, as you well know – none better. You start. Yet a little while, and others will cry out loudly enough in the market-place what now I hardly dare to whisper; for clearly do I see, and confidently do I predict as if I had read it in the book of fate, that matters must be worse before they can be better. I have for some time only thought so; but I have known it ever since I learned that this cowardly yet bloodthirsty king has turned to bay.”

“May the saints in heaven shield this afflicted land,” said Fitzwalter, with a sigh, “and grant us a happy issue out of all our troubles!”

And they parted: Fitzwalter, in no enviable frame of mind, to enter his gilded barge, and go by water to Baynard’s Castle; De Moreville, his brain peopled with conflicting projects, to walk eastward to his hotel outside of Ludgate.

CHAPTER XXIII
TURNING TO BAY

IT soon appeared too clear to be doubted, even by the most incredulous, that the King of England was bent on having his revenge on the Anglo-Norman barons at all hazards and at all sacrifices, and that the feudal magnates who had confederated to humble their sovereign in the dust had too good grounds for the alarm with which the news of his preparations inspired them. Ere October (then known as the wine-month) drew to a close, and the vineyards and orchards yielded their annual crop – indeed, almost ere the corn was gathered from the fields into the garners and barnyards – the torch of war was lighted, and an army of mercenaries was let loose on “merry England.”

The knights despatched by John as early as the middle of June to raise fighting men on the Continent had executed their commission with a zeal and fidelity worthy of a better cause; and all the bravoes and cut-throats of Flanders, France, and Brabant, attracted by the hope of pay and plunder, came to the trysting-places on the coast as vultures to the carnage, headed by captains already notorious for cruel hearts and ruthless hands. Falco, and Manlem, and Soltim, and Godeschal, and Walter Buch, were men quite as odious – unless they are belied by chroniclers – as Hugh de Moreville had represented them to be. Falco was known as “without bowels,” Manlem as “the bloody,” Soltim as “the merciless,” Godeschal as “the iron-hearted,” and Walter Buch as “the murderer,” and none of them knew much more of humanity than the name and the form. All of them were not, however, destined to reach the land which was to be made over to their tender mercies. A large number, under the command of Walter Buch, were caught in a gale and wrecked and lost, as if even the elements had interfered between England and her king’s wrath. But the others weathered the storm and gradually reached the English coast; and early in October John found himself at the head of a force so formidable and so fierce that he intrusted the castle of Dover to the custody of Hubert de Burgh, a valiant warrior and a Norman noble of great note in his day, and led his hireling army towards Rochester.

Rochester Castle – the stately ruins of which, hard by the Medway, still attest its ancient grandeur, and recall the days when it stood in feudal pride, guarded by moat, and rampart, and lofty battlements – was deemed a place of immense importance; and Robert Fitzwalter and his confederates had intrusted it to the keeping of William Albini, Earl of Arundel, a great noble whose family had long maintained feudal state at Castle Rising, in Norfolk, and whose ancestor had acquired Arundel with the hand of Adelicia of Louvaine, the young widow of Henry Beauclerc. Albini was a brave warrior, and quite equal to the duties of his post under ordinary circumstances; but the castle was without engines of war, and very slenderly furnished with provisions, when, about the middle of October, John, with his army of foreigners, appeared before the walls, and summoned the place to surrender.

No doubt William Albini was “some whit dismayed.” Perhaps, however, he expected some aid from the barons, who were with their fighting men in London. Accordingly, he prepared for resistance; and the barons, on hearing that John had left Dover, did march out of the city with some vague idea of relieving the imperilled garrison. On drawing near to the king’s army, however, they began to remember that the better part of valour was discretion, and after their vanguard was driven back they quickly retreated to the capital and took refuge behind the walls, leaving Albini to his fate.

Meanwhile, John laid siege to Rochester, and, impatient to proceed with his campaign before winter set in, hurried on the operations, and, by making promises to the besiegers and hurling threats at the besieged, did everything in his power to bring the business to a close. But, with all chances against him, Albini made an obstinate resistance, and weeks passed over without any clear advantage having been gained by the king. Even after his sappers had thrown down part of the outer wall, matters continued doubtful. Withdrawing into the keep, the garrison boldly resisted, and for a time kept the assailants at bay. At length, by means of a mine, one of the angles was shattered, and John urged his mercenaries to force their way through the breach. But this proved a more difficult matter than he expected. Every attempt to enter was so bravely repulsed, that the king, under the influence of rage and mortification, indulged in loud threats of vengeance. At length, on the last day of November, when his patience was well-nigh exhausted, famine, which had been for some time at work among the besieged, brought matters to a crisis, and William Albini and his garrison threw themselves on the royal mercy.

“Hang every man of them up!” cried John, who at that moment naturally thought with bitter wrath of the delay which they had caused him when time was so peculiarly valuable.

“Nay, sire,” said Sauvery de Manlem, the captain of mercenaries, “that were perilous policy, and would lead to retaliations on the baronial side too costly to be hazarded by men who hire out their swords for money.”

John listened, acknowledged that there was reason in Manlem’s words, and consented to spare life. Accordingly, Albini and his knights were sent as prisoners to the castles of Corfe and Nottingham; the other men belonging to the garrison were pressed into the royal service.

The loss of Rochester was felt to be a severe blow to the baronial cause; and the pope having meantime annulled the charter, as having been exacted from the king by force, John’s star was once more in the ascendant, and after making arrangements for the safe keeping of Rochester, and little guessing the circumstances under which the fortress was to change hands within the next six months, he marched from Kent to St. Albans, his mercenary forces spreading terror wherever they appeared. But it was towards the North that his eye and his thoughts were directed; for the chiefs of the houses of De Vesci, De Roos, De Vaux, Percy, Merley, Moubray, De Brus, and D’Estouteville were conspicuous among the confederate barons; and, moreover, Alexander, the young King of Scots, had not only allied himself with the feudal magnates, but raised his father’s banner, on which “the ruddy lion ramped in gold,” and at the head of an army crossed the Tweed to make good his title to the three Northern counties with which the barons had gifted him.

At St. Albans, accordingly, about the middle of December, John divided his forces into two armies: one he placed under William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, to keep the barons in check and maintain the royal authority in Hertford, Essex, Middlesex, and Cambridge; while at the head of the other he marched northward to avenge himself on the barons of the North and the King of Scots. With a craving for vengeance still gnawing at his heart, he passed the festival of Christmas at the castle of Nottingham, and then, still breathing threats, precipitated his troops on the North.

It was on the 2nd of January, 1216, when John entered Yorkshire with fire and sword. The snow lay thick on the ground; the streams were frozen; and the cold was intense; but the king, who but recently had been branded by his foes as a tyrant fit only to loll in luxury, and averse to war and fatigue, now appeared both hardy and energetic, and urged his bravoes up hill and down dale. It was a terrible expedition, and one long after remembered with horror. Fire and sword rapidly did their work in the hands of the mercenaries who composed the royal army; men were slaughtered; houses and stackyards given to the flames; and towns, castles, and abbeys ruthlessly destroyed. Beyond the Tyne the country fared almost worse. Morpeth, the seat of Roger de Merley, Alnwick, the seat of Eustace de Vesci, and Wark, one of the castles of Robert de Roos, were stormed and sacked; and John, crossing the Tweed at Berwick, prepared to inflict his vengeance on the King of Scots.

“Now,” said he to his captains, as he found himself beyond the Marches, “we must unkennel this young red fox.”

The captains of the royal army offered no objection; and while John burned Roxburgh – a royal burgh and castle at the junction of the Teviot and the Tweed – the mercenaries pursued the King of Scots to the gates of Edinburgh, and, during their return, deliberately burned Haddington, Dunbar, Berwick, and the fair abbey of Coldingham, associated with the legend of St. Ebba and her nuns. Nothing, indeed, was spared; and John, having intrusted the government of the country between the Tees and the Tweed to Hugh Baliol and Philip de Ullecotes, with knights and men-at-arms sufficient to defend it, returned southward with such satisfaction as he could derive from the reflection that he had taken revenge on his baronial foes, and included in his vengeance many thousands who had not given him the slightest cause of offence.

But whatever may have been his feelings on the subject – and it is impossible to suppose that he had not his hours of compunction – John was destined, ere long, to find that his revenge had been dearly purchased. Scarcely had he returned to the South with blood on his hands, and the execrations of two countries ringing in his ears, when he received tidings which made his heart sink within him.

It was when the winter had passed, and the spring had come and gone, that messengers brought to John, who was then at Dover, intelligence that his baronial foes, driven to desperation, had taken a step which was likely to detach his mercenary soldiers from his standard, and leave him almost alone and face to face with an exasperated nation. It was a terrible contingency, and one on which the king, in pursuing his schemes of vengeance, had not calculated. But there was no mistake about the news; and John trembled as he foresaw how that, as soon as it spread among his mercenaries, the army which, while ministering to his vengeance, had made him odious to the nation on whose support he might otherwise have counted in case of the worst, would melt as surely as had melted the winter’s snow through which he had urged on that army to devastation and carnage.

CHAPTER XXIV
A DESPERATE EXPEDIENT

IT was the Christmas of 1215; and the barons, cooped up in London, and not daring to venture beyond the walls, were almost in despair, and listened with unavailing regret to reports of the devastation wrought by the royal army on its march northward, and with dread to the sound of the spiritual artillery which Pope Innocent directed against them. However, they, as well as the citizens, celebrated Christmas with unusual festivity, and appeared anxious to show the king and his partisans that they were not to be cast down by adversity, and to convince the pope and the legate that they did not tremble before the thunders of Rome.

Nevertheless, Robert Fitzwalter and his confederates were sadly disheartened by all that was taking place, and in mortal terror of what might take place in London, if John turned his face towards the capital; and Falco, and Manlem, and Soltim, and Godeschal had an opportunity of stabling their steeds at Baynard’s Castle and the Tower, and quartering their men among the worthy citizens who had proved such good friends in the day of need to “the army of God and of the Church.”

Moreover, it was the reverse of flattering to Fitzwalter and De Vesci, and De Clare and De Roos, and the Bigods and Bohuns, to find that, after all, they had been fooled and humbled by a king whom they had not only disliked but despised; and wounded pride and vanity whispered constantly to each that it would be better to adopt any expedient likely to lead to their relief from the perplexity of the present, than trust to the course of events and the chapter of accidents. Nevertheless, it was not very easy to discover a ready and short way out of their multitudinous difficulties, and they spent many days in anxious debate and somewhat unmanly lamentations. Naturally enough, different opinions were expressed, and there was much variance; but nobody could refuse to admit that something must be done, and that quickly; and at length they arrived at a resolution which, to say the least of it, was unpatriotic, imprudent, and unfortunate.

At that period, Philip Augustus, no longer young, was still occupying himself with the projects which he had conceived in youth for rendering France the great monarchy of Europe, and of all men he was the likeliest to lend an attentive ear to any proposal for humbling the house of Plantagenet; and it happened that Louis, the son of Philip by his first wife, Isabel of Hainault, had, in 1200, espoused Blanche of Castile, daughter of King Alphonso, the conqueror of Muradel, by Eleanor, daughter of our second Henry. Louis, who was now in his twenty-ninth year, cannot be described as one of the great princes of the Capet line, though he rated himself very highly, owing to inheriting, through his mother, Isabel, the blood of Charlemagne; and chroniclers, wishing to be complimentary, have been content to call him “the son of an able father, and the father of an excellent son.” But the barons were not in a position to be very nice when in search of a puppet, and nobody, at all events, could deny that Louis of France, the heir of Hugh Capet and Charlemagne, was also the husband of Blanche of Castile, and that her mother was a princess of the blood royal of England; so the barons, in their perplexity, seem to have considered her claim to the crown of England quite good enough to serve their purpose, and to have believed that they could not do better, all things taken into account, than call her and her husband to the throne which her maternal grandsire had occupied. It is true that some dozen persons, male and female, actually stood before Blanche of Castile in the legal order of succession; but the barons were in no humour to make nice distinctions, or to be fastidious as to genealogies; and early in the year 1216, while King John was ravaging the North with his mercenaries, they actually despatched Fitzwalter and De Quency as ambassadors to invite Prince Louis, the heir of Philip Augustus, to land in England and take possession of the crown which, with a fine disregard of facts, they represented as his wife’s rightful inheritance.

To a man of ambition the prize was certainly tempting, and had there been no more serious obstacle to encounter on the way to it than John’s army of foreign hirelings, Philip Augustus would have urged his son to grasp at it resolutely, and to hold by it tenaciously. But Philip, who had fought side by side with the English in the Holy Land, and face to face with them in Normandy in the days of Cœur-de-Lion, understood what kind of people they were, and well knew that, whatever the Anglo-Norman barons and the citizens of London might say, the English as a nation would never submit to the rule of a foreigner, and that foreigner a French prince. Besides, he could not overlook the fact that John was under the especial protection of the pope; and he could not forget that, years before, when he suffered excommunication for marrying Agnes de Méranie, and vainly attempted to resist the power of Rome, he had learned to his severe experience how good a friend and how terrible a foe the pope could be to one of the sovereigns of Europe. It was no pleasant retrospect, but it was instructive.

Much more caution was, therefore, observed in the matter by the court of Paris than the barons had expected, or than they relished; but the invitation was by no means declined. On the contrary, Louis seems to have relished the prospect of reigning over England, and to have thought his royal sire somewhat too cautious. In any case, a little fleet of French ships reached the Thames in February, with several French knights on board, who brought assurances that, by Easter, Louis would be at Calais to embark for England, and that he only asked the barons to send him their sons or nephews as hostages for the fulfilment of their part of the covenant.

Probably the barons and the Londoners were not very well pleased with so much hesitation and delay. But they had gone too far to recede, and every day, while making their position more desperate, added to the aversion which the barons had always felt towards the king. Besides, the accounts which were given of the cruelties exercised by John in the North were such as could not fail to add greatly to his unpopularity, and every citizen who met his neighbour in the market-place, or gossiped with him across the street from the house-tops, had something horrible to relate of what was going on in York and Northumberland. One told how the king was in the habit, after lodging during the night in any house, of setting fire to it before he took his departure next morning; a second told how on such occasions he had not only set fire to the house, but ordered the host to be hanged at his own door-post; and a third told that in the royal army the king had a number of Jews, whom he made the instruments of his cruelties. Such stories, constantly repeated, and losing nothing in the telling, ere long made the king so odious that the citizens and populace of London began to regard the evil of calling in a foreign prince to make himself master of England as a very light evil indeed compared with that of living under a tyrant who set truth, and justice, and humanity at defiance; and they shouted loudly, “Come what may, we will not any longer have this man to reign over us.”

Meanwhile, at Poissy and in Paris, Prince Louis and his advisers were making out as good a claim for Blanche of Castile as circumstances would admit of their doing. It was, indeed, no easy matter. But what with reviving the recollection of John having been forfeited by the Great Council of England for rebellion against his brother, Richard Cœur-de-Lion, and of his having been condemned by the peers of France for the murder of his nephew Arthur, and what with pronouncing his children disqualified to succeed, and overlooking the existence of Eleanor of Brittany and of Blanche’s own brother and her elder sister, they did make out a case which satisfied themselves, and which perhaps they deemed good enough for their confederates in England; and Philip Augustus, though hesitating, or pretending to hesitate, did not offer any opposition to his son’s preparations; though Gualo, the cardinal of St. Martin and papal legate, passing through France, visited Paris, and warned Prince Louis against embarking on an enterprise of which the holy see disapproved.

So far matters went smoothly, and the barons and citizens looked longingly for the arrival of Prince Louis, whom they daily became more eager to welcome as a deliverer. But their patience was put to a trial; and Easter passed, and May Day passed, and the “merry, merry month of May” was rapidly running its course, and still the French prince lingered.