At two-and-thirty years of age, John
became King of England. His pretty little nephew
Arthur had the best claim to the throne; but John
seized the treasure, and made fine promises to the
nobility, and got himself crowned at Westminster within
a few weeks after his brother Richard’s death.
I doubt whether the crown could possibly have been
put upon the head of a meaner coward, or a more detestable
villain, if England had been searched from end to
end to find him out.
The French King, Philip, refused to
acknowledge the right of John to his new dignity,
and declared in favour of Arthur. You must not
suppose that he had any generosity of feeling for
the fatherless boy; it merely suited his ambitious
schemes to oppose the King of England. So John
and the French King went to war about Arthur.
He was a handsome boy, at that time
only twelve years old. He was not born when
his father, Geoffrey, had his brains trampled out at
the tournament; and, besides the misfortune of never
having known a father’s guidance and protection,
he had the additional misfortune to have a foolish
mother (Constance by name), lately married to
her third husband. She took Arthur, upon John’s
accession, to the French King, who pretended to be
very much his friend, and who made him a Knight, and
promised him his daughter in marriage; but, who cared
so little about him in reality, that finding it his
interest to make peace with King John for a time, he
did so without the least consideration for the poor
little Prince, and heartlessly sacrificed all his
interests.
Young Arthur, for two years afterwards,
lived quietly; and in the course of that time his
mother died. But, the French King then finding
it his interest to quarrel with King John again, again
made Arthur his pretence, and invited the orphan boy
to court. ‘You know your rights, Prince,’
said the French King, ‘and you would like to
be a King. Is it not so?’ ‘Truly,’
said Prince Arthur, ‘I should greatly like to
be a King!’ ‘Then,’ said Philip,
’you shall have two hundred gentlemen who are
Knights of mine, and with them you shall go to win
back the provinces belonging to you, of which your
uncle, the usurping King of England, has taken possession.
I myself, meanwhile, will head a force against him
in Normandy.’ Poor Arthur was so flattered
and so grateful that he signed a treaty with the crafty
French King, agreeing to consider him his superior
Lord, and that the French King should keep for himself
whatever he could take from King John.
Now, King John was so bad in all ways,
and King Philip was so perfidious, that Arthur, between
the two, might as well have been a lamb between a
fox and a wolf. But, being so young, he was ardent
and flushed with hope; and, when the people of Brittany
(which was his inheritance) sent him five hundred
more knights and five thousand foot soldiers, he believed
his fortune was made. The people of Brittany
had been fond of him from his birth, and had requested
that he might be called Arthur, in remembrance of
that dimly-famous English Arthur, of whom I told you
early in this book, whom they believed to have been
the brave friend and companion of an old King of their
own. They had tales among them about a prophet
called Merlin (of the same old time), who had
foretold that their own King should be restored to
them after hundreds of years; and they believed that
the prophecy would be fulfilled in Arthur; that the
time would come when he would rule them with a crown
of Brittany upon his head; and when neither King of
France nor King of England would have any power over
them. When Arthur found himself riding in a glittering
suit of armour on a richly caparisoned horse, at the
head of his train of knights and soldiers, he began
to believe this too, and to consider old Merlin a
very superior prophet.
He did not know how could
he, being so innocent and inexperienced? that
his little army was a mere nothing against the power
of the King of England. The French King knew
it; but the poor boy’s fate was little to him,
so that the King of England was worried and distressed.
Therefore, King Philip went his way into Normandy
and Prince Arthur went his way towards Mirebeau, a
French town near Poictiers, both very well pleased.
Prince Arthur went to attack the town
of Mirebeau, because his grandmother Eleanor, who
has so often made her appearance in this history (and
who had always been his mother’s enemy), was
living there, and because his Knights said, ’Prince,
if you can take her prisoner, you will be able to
bring the King your uncle to terms!’ But she
was not to be easily taken. She was old enough
by this time eighty but she was
as full of stratagem as she was full of years and
wickedness. Receiving intelligence of young
Arthur’s approach, she shut herself up in a high
tower, and encouraged her soldiers to defend it like
men. Prince Arthur with his little army besieged
the high tower. King John, hearing how matters
stood, came up to the rescue, with his army.
So here was a strange family-party! The boy-Prince
besieging his grandmother, and his uncle besieging
him!
This position of affairs did not last
long. One summer night King John, by treachery,
got his men into the town, surprised Prince Arthur’s
force, took two hundred of his knights, and seized
the Prince himself in his bed. The Knights were
put in heavy irons, and driven away in open carts
drawn by bullocks, to various dungeons where they were
most inhumanly treated, and where some of them were
starved to death. Prince Arthur was sent to
the castle of Falaise.
One day, while he was in prison at
that castle, mournfully thinking it strange that one
so young should be in so much trouble, and looking
out of the small window in the deep dark wall, at
the summer sky and the birds, the door was softly
opened, and he saw his uncle the King standing in
the shadow of the archway, looking very grim.
‘Arthur,’ said the King,
with his wicked eyes more on the stone floor than
on his nephew, ’will you not trust to the gentleness,
the friendship, and the truthfulness of your loving
uncle?’
‘I will tell my loving uncle
that,’ replied the boy, ’when he does me
right. Let him restore to me my kingdom of England,
and then come to me and ask the question.’
The King looked at him and went out.
‘Keep that boy close prisoner,’ said
he to the warden of the castle.
Then, the King took secret counsel
with the worst of his nobles how the Prince was to
be got rid of. Some said, ’Put out his
eyes and keep him in prison, as Robort of Normandy
was kept.’ Others said, ’Have him
stabbed.’ Others, ‘Have him hanged.’
Others, ‘Have him poisoned.’
King John, feeling that in any case,
whatever was done afterwards, it would be a satisfaction
to his mind to have those handsome eyes burnt out
that had looked at him so proudly while his own royal
eyes were blinking at the stone floor, sent certain
ruffians to Falaise to blind the boy with red-hot
irons. But Arthur so pathetically entreated them,
and shed such piteous tears, and so appealed to HUBERT
DE BOURG (or BURGH), the warden of the castle, who
had a love for him, and was an honourable, tender
man, that Hubert could not bear it. To his eternal
honour he prevented the torture from being performed,
and, at his own risk, sent the savages away.
The chafed and disappointed King bethought
himself of the stabbing suggestion next, and, with
his shuffling manner and his cruel face, proposed
it to one William de Bray. ’I am a gentleman
and not an executioner,’ said William de Bray,
and left the presence with disdain.
But it was not difficult for a King
to hire a murderer in those days. King John found
one for his money, and sent him down to the castle
of Falaise. ‘On what errand dost
thou come?’ said Hubert to this fellow.
‘To despatch young Arthur,’ he returned.
‘Go back to him who sent thee,’ answered
Hubert, ‘and say that I will do it!’
King John very well knowing that Hubert
would never do it, but that he courageously sent this
reply to save the Prince or gain time, despatched
messengers to convey the young prisoner to the castle
of Rouen.
Arthur was soon forced from the good
Hubert of whom he had never stood in greater
need than then carried away by night, and
lodged in his new prison: where, through his
grated window, he could hear the deep waters of the
river Seine, rippling against the stone wall below.
One dark night, as he lay sleeping,
dreaming perhaps of rescue by those unfortunate gentlemen
who were obscurely suffering and dying in his cause,
he was roused, and bidden by his jailer to come down
the staircase to the foot of the tower. He hurriedly
dressed himself and obeyed. When they came to
the bottom of the winding stairs, and the night air
from the river blew upon their faces, the jailer trod
upon his torch and put it out. Then, Arthur,
in the darkness, was hurriedly drawn into a solitary
boat. And in that boat, he found his uncle and
one other man.
He knelt to them, and prayed them
not to murder him. Deaf to his entreaties, they
stabbed him and sunk his body in the river with heavy
stones. When the spring-morning broke, the tower-door
was closed, the boat was gone, the river sparkled
on its way, and never more was any trace of the poor
boy beheld by mortal eyes.
The news of this atrocious murder
being spread in England, awakened a hatred of the
King (already odious for his many vices, and for his
having stolen away and married a noble lady while
his own wife was living) that never slept again through
his whole reign. In Brittany, the indignation
was intense. Arthur’s own sister ELEANOR
was in the power of John and shut up in a convent
at Bristol, but his half-sister ALICE was in Brittany.
The people chose her, and the murdered prince’s
father-in-law, the last husband of Constance, to represent
them; and carried their fiery complaints to King Philip.
King Philip summoned King John (as the holder of
territory in France) to come before him and defend
himself. King John refusing to appear, King
Philip declared him false, perjured, and guilty; and
again made war. In a little time, by conquering
the greater part of his French territory, King Philip
deprived him of one-third of his dominions.
And, through all the fighting that took place, King
John was always found, either to be eating and drinking,
like a gluttonous fool, when the danger was at a distance,
or to be running away, like a beaten cur, when it
was near.
You might suppose that when he was
losing his dominions at this rate, and when his own
nobles cared so little for him or his cause that they
plainly refused to follow his banner out of England,
he had enemies enough. But he made another enemy
of the Pope, which he did in this way.
The Archbishop of Canterbury dying,
and the junior monks of that place wishing to get
the start of the senior monks in the appointment of
his successor, met together at midnight, secretly
elected a certain REGINALD, and sent him off to Rome
to get the Pope’s approval. The senior
monks and the King soon finding this out, and being
very angry about it, the junior monks gave way, and
all the monks together elected the Bishop of Norwich,
who was the King’s favourite. The Pope,
hearing the whole story, declared that neither election
would do for him, and that he elected STEPHEN
LANGTON. The monks submitting to the Pope, the
King turned them all out bodily, and banished them
as traitors. The Pope sent three bishops to
the King, to threaten him with an Interdict.
The King told the bishops that if any Interdict were
laid upon his kingdom, he would tear out the eyes
and cut off the noses of all the monks he could lay
hold of, and send them over to Rome in that undecorated
state as a present for their master. The bishops,
nevertheless, soon published the Interdict, and fled.
After it had lasted a year, the Pope
proceeded to his next step; which was Excommunication.
King John was declared excommunicated, with all the
usual ceremonies. The King was so incensed at
this, and was made so desperate by the disaffection
of his Barons and the hatred of his people, that it
is said he even privately sent ambassadors to the Turks
in Spain, offering to renounce his religion and hold
his kingdom of them if they would help him.
It is related that the ambassadors were admitted to
the presence of the Turkish Emir through long lines
of Moorish guards, and that they found the Emir with
his eyes seriously fixed on the pages of a large book,
from which he never once looked up. That they
gave him a letter from the King containing his proposals,
and were gravely dismissed. That presently the
Emir sent for one of them, and conjured him, by his
faith in his religion, to say what kind of man the
King of England truly was? That the ambassador,
thus pressed, replied that the King of England was
a false tyrant, against whom his own subjects would
soon rise. And that this was quite enough for
the Emir.
Money being, in his position, the
next best thing to men, King John spared no means
of getting it. He set on foot another oppressing
and torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite
in his way), and invented a new punishment for one
wealthy Jew of Bristol. Until such time as that
Jew should produce a certain large sum of money, the
King sentenced him to be imprisoned, and, every day,
to have one tooth violently wrenched out of his head beginning
with the double teeth. For seven days, the oppressed
man bore the daily pain and lost the daily tooth; but,
on the eighth, he paid the money. With the treasure
raised in such ways, the King made an expedition into
Ireland, where some English nobles had revolted.
It was one of the very few places from which he did
not run away; because no resistance was shown.
He made another expedition into Wales whence
he did run away in the end: but not before
he had got from the Welsh people, as hostages, twenty-seven
young men of the best families; every one of whom
he caused to be slain in the following year.
To Interdict and Excommunication,
the Pope now added his last sentence; Deposition.
He proclaimed John no longer King, absolved all his
subjects from their allegiance, and sent Stephen Langton
and others to the King of France to tell him that,
if he would invade England, he should be forgiven
all his sins at least, should be forgiven
them by the Pope, if that would do.
As there was nothing that King Philip
desired more than to invade England, he collected
a great army at Rouen, and a fleet of seventeen hundred
ships to bring them over. But the English people,
however bitterly they hated the King, were not a people
to suffer invasion quietly. They flocked to
Dover, where the English standard was, in such great
numbers to enrol themselves as defenders of their native
land, that there were not provisions for them, and
the King could only select and retain sixty thousand.
But, at this crisis, the Pope, who had his own reasons
for objecting to either King John or King Philip being
too powerful, interfered. He entrusted a legate,
whose name was PANDOLF, with the easy task of frightening
King John. He sent him to the English Camp,
from France, to terrify him with exaggerations of King
Philip’s power, and his own weakness in the
discontent of the English Barons and people.
Pandolf discharged his commission so well, that King
John, in a wretched panic, consented to acknowledge
Stephen Langton; to resign his kingdom ’to God,
Saint Peter, and Saint Paul’ which
meant the Pope; and to hold it, ever afterwards, by
the Pope’s leave, on payment of an annual sum
of money. To this shameful contract he publicly
bound himself in the church of the Knights Templars
at Dover: where he laid at the legate’s
feet a part of the tribute, which the legate haughtily
trampled upon. But they do say, that
this was merely a genteel flourish, and that he was
afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket it.
There was an unfortunate prophet,
the name of Peter, who had greatly increased King
John’s terrors by predicting that he would be
unknighted (which the King supposed to signify that
he would die) before the Feast of the Ascension should
be past. That was the day after this humiliation.
When the next morning came, and the King, who had
been trembling all night, found himself alive and
safe, he ordered the prophet and his son
too to be dragged through the streets at
the tails of horses, and then hanged, for having frightened
him.
As King John had now submitted, the
Pope, to King Philip’s great astonishment, took
him under his protection, and informed King Philip
that he found he could not give him leave to invade
England. The angry Philip resolved to do it
without his leave but he gained nothing and lost much;
for, the English, commanded by the Earl of Salisbury,
went over, in five hundred ships, to the French coast,
before the French fleet had sailed away from it, and
utterly defeated the whole.
The Pope then took off his three sentences,
one after another, and empowered Stephen Langton publicly
to receive King John into the favour of the Church
again, and to ask him to dinner. The King, who
hated Langton with all his might and main and
with reason too, for he was a great and a good man,
with whom such a King could have no sympathy pretended
to cry and to be very grateful. There
was a little difficulty about settling how much the
King should pay as a recompense to the clergy for
the losses he had caused them; but, the end of it was,
that the superior clergy got a good deal, and the inferior
clergy got little or nothing which has
also happened since King John’s time, I believe.
When all these matters were arranged,
the King in his triumph became more fierce, and false,
and insolent to all around him than he had ever been.
An alliance of sovereigns against King Philip, gave
him an opportunity of landing an army in France; with
which he even took a town! But, on the French
King’s gaining a great victory, he ran away,
of course, and made a truce for five years.
And now the time approached when he
was to be still further humbled, and made to feel,
if he could feel anything, what a wretched creature
he was. Of all men in the world, Stephen Langton
seemed raised up by Heaven to oppose and subdue him.
When he ruthlessly burnt and destroyed the property
of his own subjects, because their Lords, the Barons,
would not serve him abroad, Stephen Langton fearlessly
reproved and threatened him. When he swore to
restore the laws of King Edward, or the laws of King
Henry the First, Stephen Langton knew his falsehood,
and pursued him through all his evasions. When
the Barons met at the abbey of Saint Edmund’s-Bury,
to consider their wrongs and the King’s oppressions,
Stephen Langton roused them by his fervid words to
demand a solemn charter of rights and liberties from
their perjured master, and to swear, one by one, on
the High Altar, that they would have it, or would wage
war against him to the death. When the King
hid himself in London from the Barons, and was at
last obliged to receive them, they told him roundly
they would not believe him unless Stephen Langton became
a surety that he would keep his word. When he
took the Cross to invest himself with some interest,
and belong to something that was received with favour,
Stephen Langton was still immovable. When he
appealed to the Pope, and the Pope wrote to Stephen
Langton in behalf of his new favourite, Stephen Langton
was deaf, even to the Pope himself, and saw before
him nothing but the welfare of England and the crimes
of the English King.
At Easter-time, the Barons assembled
at Stamford, in Lincolnshire, in proud array, and,
marching near to Oxford where the King was, delivered
into the hands of Stephen Langton and two others, a
list of grievances. ‘And these,’
they said, ’he must redress, or we will do it
for ourselves!’ When Stephen Langton told the
King as much, and read the list to him, he went half
mad with rage. But that did him no more good
than his afterwards trying to pacify the Barons with
lies. They called themselves and their followers,
‘The army of God and the Holy Church.’
Marching through the country, with the people thronging
to them everywhere (except at Northampton, where they
failed in an attack upon the castle), they at last
triumphantly set up their banner in London itself,
whither the whole land, tired of the tyrant, seemed
to flock to join them. Seven knights alone,
of all the knights in England, remained with the King;
who, reduced to this strait, at last sent the Earl
of Pembroke to the Barons to say that he approved
of everything, and would meet them to sign their charter
when they would. ‘Then,’ said the
Barons, ’let the day be the fifteenth of June,
and the place, Runny-Mead.’
On Monday, the fifteenth of June,
one thousand two hundred and fourteen, the King came
from Windsor Castle, and the Barons came from the town
of Staines, and they met on Runny-Mead, which is still
a pleasant meadow by the Thames, where rushes grow
in the clear water of the winding river, and its banks
are green with grass and trees. On the side of
the Barons, came the General of their army, ROBERT
FITZ-WALTER, and a great concourse of the nobility
of England. With the King, came, in all, some
four-and-twenty persons of any note, most of whom
despised him, and were merely his advisers in form.
On that great day, and in that great company, the
King signed MAGNA CHARTA the great charter
of England by which he pledged himself
to maintain the Church in its rights; to relieve the
Barons of oppressive obligations as vassals of the
Crown of which the Barons, in their turn,
pledged themselves to relieve their vassals,
the people; to respect the liberties of London and
all other cities and boroughs; to protect foreign
merchants who came to England; to imprison no man
without a fair trial; and to sell, delay, or deny justice
to none. As the Barons knew his falsehood well,
they further required, as their securities, that he
should send out of his kingdom all his foreign troops;
that for two months they should hold possession of
the city of London, and Stephen Langton of the Tower;
and that five-and-twenty of their body, chosen by
themselves, should be a lawful committee to watch
the keeping of the charter, and to make war upon him
if he broke it.
All this he was obliged to yield.
He signed the charter with a smile, and, if he could
have looked agreeable, would have done so, as he departed
from the splendid assembly. When he got home
to Windsor Castle, he was quite a madman in his helpless
fury. And he broke the charter immediately afterwards.
He sent abroad for foreign soldiers,
and sent to the Pope for help, and plotted to take
London by surprise, while the Barons should be holding
a great tournament at Stamford, which they had agreed
to hold there as a celebration of the charter.
The Barons, however, found him out and put it off.
Then, when the Barons desired to see him and tax him
with his treachery, he made numbers of appointments
with them, and kept none, and shifted from place to
place, and was constantly sneaking and skulking about.
At last he appeared at Dover, to join his foreign
soldiers, of whom numbers came into his pay; and with
them he besieged and took Rochester Castle, which
was occupied by knights and soldiers of the Barons.
He would have hanged them every one; but the leader
of the foreign soldiers, fearful of what the English
people might afterwards do to him, interfered to save
the knights; therefore the King was fain to satisfy
his vengeance with the death of all the common men.
Then, he sent the Earl of Salisbury, with one portion
of his army, to ravage the eastern part of his own
dominions, while he carried fire and slaughter into
the northern part; torturing, plundering, killing,
and inflicting every possible cruelty upon the people;
and, every morning, setting a worthy example to his
men by setting fire, with his own monster-hands, to
the house where he had slept last night. Nor
was this all; for the Pope, coming to the aid of his
precious friend, laid the kingdom under an Interdict
again, because the people took part with the Barons.
It did not much matter, for the people had grown
so used to it now, that they had begun to think nothing
about it. It occurred to them perhaps
to Stephen Langton too that they could
keep their churches open, and ring their bells, without
the Pope’s permission as well as with it.
So, they tried the experiment and found
that it succeeded perfectly.
It being now impossible to bear the
country, as a wilderness of cruelty, or longer to
hold any terms with such a forsworn outlaw of a King,
the Barons sent to Louis, son of the French monarch,
to offer him the English crown. Caring as little
for the Pope’s excommunication of him if he
accepted the offer, as it is possible his father may
have cared for the Pope’s forgiveness of his
sins, he landed at Sandwich (King John immediately
running away from Dover, where he happened to be),
and went on to London. The Scottish King, with
whom many of the Northern English Lords had taken
refuge; numbers of the foreign soldiers, numbers of
the Barons, and numbers of the people went over to
him every day; King John, the while, continually
running away in all directions.
The career of Louis was checked however,
by the suspicions of the Barons, founded on the dying
declaration of a French Lord, that when the kingdom
was conquered he was sworn to banish them as traitors,
and to give their estates to some of his own Nobles.
Rather than suffer this, some of the Barons hesitated:
others even went over to King John.
It seemed to be the turning-point
of King John’s fortunes, for, in his savage
and murderous course, he had now taken some towns and
met with some successes. But, happily for England
and humanity, his death was near. Crossing a
dangerous quicksand, called the Wash, not very far
from Wisbeach, the tide came up and nearly drowned
his army. He and his soldiers escaped; but,
looking back from the shore when he was safe, he saw
the roaring water sweep down in a torrent, overturn
the waggons, horses, and men, that carried his treasure,
and engulf them in a raging whirlpool from which nothing
could be delivered.
Cursing, and swearing, and gnawing
his fingers, he went on to Swinestead Abbey, where
the monks set before him quantities of pears, and peaches,
and new cider some say poison too, but there
is very little reason to suppose so of
which he ate and drank in an immoderate and beastly
way. All night he lay ill of a burning fever,
and haunted with horrible fears. Next day, they
put him in a horse-litter, and carried him to Sleaford
Castle, where he passed another night of pain and horror.
Next day, they carried him, with greater difficulty
than on the day before, to the castle of Newark upon
Trent; and there, on the eighteenth of October, in
the forty-ninth year of his age, and the seventeenth
of his vile reign, was an end of this miserable brute.