John Lackland. Kate Norgate
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