The Conquering Family (46 page)

The time had passed for promises and threats, however. The barons were in the field in great strength, and it was clear that they meant to have their way. Realizing that he was not strong enough to oppose them, he temporized by making a number of absurd suggestions, as for instance that the matter be left to the Pope to decide as suzerain of England. The barons broke off negotiations. They elected Robert Fitz-Walter as their leader in the civil war which now seemed inevitable. After a defeat at Northampton, the barons marched on London and were received warmly by the citizens. This success convinced John that he would have to grant their terms. He sent word to them to meet him on June 15 at a field called Running-Mead on the Thames within close range of Windsor.

John had been in every respect an oppressive king, swayed only by his own desire and will, disregarding his coronation vows and the dictates of decency and statesmanship. All the kings from the time of the Conquest, however, had been ruthless and dictatorial. William Rufus and Richard had been worse in the demands they had made on their subjects. Why, then, did the nation remain quiescent under the others and burst into such fiery resentment over the actions of John?

There were two reasons. The first was that John inherited the resentment of a century, that he reaped where his predecessors had sown. The breaking point was reached when he came to the throne and proceeded to put his own diabolical ingenuity into the performance of familiar tyrannies.

The second reason was personal, the universal contempt in which he was held and the horror aroused by his cruelties. It was one thing for a great knight like Richard to toss aside his vows and make a travesty of government and justice, it was a vastly different matter when the prince, who had humbled England abroad and had made a personal enemy
nearly every day of his life, followed the same course. A hero will be forgiven much, a coward and rascal nothing. The silence with which the people accepted the tyrannical acts of Richard Coeur de Lion added, of course, to the prompt and violent resentment they showed to John Softsword.

That John faced a solidly organized baronage was the result largely of the personal hatreds he had stirred up among them. Two of the most active leaders were Eustace de Vescy and Robert Fitz-Walter, and history supplies stories to account for the deep enmity they showed.

Eustace de Vescy was lord of the great castle of Alnwick in Northumberland. He had been with Richard in Palestine and was a brave and honorable knight. His wife was a lovely young woman of high spirits, and it was inevitable that the roving eye of the King would rest on her with admiration. The fact that she was devoted to her husband and that no hint of scandal had ever attached to her name served to fan the flames of desire in the amorous King. Noticing that the husband wore a ring of unusual design which he had brought back from the East, the royal philanderer borrowed it on the pretext of having one made like it. He then sent the ring to the wife of De Vescy with a message purporting to come from her husband that she was to meet him that night at a certain house in London. From this point on the story might well have inspired a tale in the
Decameron
. The chatelaine of Alnwick was not taken in by anything as transparent as this. She went to her husband and told him what had happened. Eustace de Vescy realized what was back of it and decided to trick the King. He hired a lusty wench to play the part of his wife and, when the King came during the night and insinuated himself into the bed which he supposed was occupied by the lady of Alnwick, he did not find it empty.

Some time later Eustace de Vescy was at the royal supper table. John decided to enjoy his triumph in the usual manner. Combing his hands through his black beard and letting his dark eyes rove about the board with an amused gleam, he said to his guest, “Your lady is a delightful companion in the darkness of the night.”

A silence fell on the room. Men kept their eyes down out of pity for the husband whose shame was thus being publicly proclaimed. Eustace de Vescy was noted for the violence of his temper as well as for the warmth of his love for his wife. The Northern baron seemed quite self-possessed, however, and answered in an easy tone.

“What grounds have you for saying that, my lord?”

“Grounds of experience,” declared John with a loud laugh. “How else could I know?”

The baron allowed himself at this point the luxury of joining in the royal laughter.

“No, my lord,” he said. “It was not my wife. Sometimes, my lord, a harlot is encountered in quite unexpected places.”

John’s rage at this open flouting was so great that the lord of Alnwick had to flee the country. He remained in exile for several years and was frequently in contact with Stephen Langton at Pontigny. The making of peace with Rome gave him freedom to return, and back he came, to play an active part in the humbling of the King who had tried to dishonor him.

A different kind of story is told to account for the undying enmity of Robert Fitz-Walter. He was the owner of Castle Baynard on the Thames and the father of a beautiful daughter called Maud the Fair. John saw Maud the Fair and decided she must be added to his list of victims, willing or otherwise. The girl would not listen to his suit, however, and John resorted finally to force. He had her seized and lodged in the White Tower and there paid her assiduous court. When her father raised a storm, the royal troops seized Castle Baynard and Fitz-Walter was banished from the kingdom. In the meantime the ardor of the royal lover was being dashed by the most contemptuous of rebuffs. Finally he had his prisoner removed to the round turret on top of the keep, which was unheated and probably the most bleak habitation in the whole of England, hoping that the rigors of existence there would soften her will. Finding that she still repulsed him, he had an egg sent her which had been filled with poison. The girl ate the egg and died in great agony, alone in her dismal cell atop the Tower of London.

One may suspect the authenticity of the story about Eustace de Vescy and his wife and the willing trollop who played the trick on the King, but the story of Maud the Fair can be dismissed as untrue for good and sufficient reasons. Robert Fitz-Walter had a daughter named Matilda, but she was married when quite young to Geoffrey de Mandeville, the son of the head justiciar. The young husband got into trouble with the law over an accidental killing. When he was cited to appear on a charge of murder, his father-in-law declared that “he who dares to hang my daughter’s man will see two thousand laced helmets before his door!” The son-in-law was not hanged, but Robert Fitz-Walter drew on himself for his bold defiance an order of banishment. Later Maud the Fair died and John married off the widower to his own discarded wife, Avisa, and charged the bridegroom a fee of eighteen thousand marks for his services!

The fact that such highly spiced anecdotes were told in the chronicles of the day and were generally accepted and believed is an indication of the reputation the King had achieved for himself. He may not have tried to seduce the pretty chatelaine of Alnwick in just this way (but he tried, we can be sure of that!), and it is certain that he did not poison the fair Maud in the turret on the keep, but it is abundantly clear that no woman of the court was free from his attentions and that he did not hesitate to
dishonor his most powerful subjects when a wife or daughter filled his eye. The hatreds engendered in this way provided embittered leaders for the forces of discontent.

While John was thus disturbing the felicity of the most influential men in the kingdom, he was having trouble with his own lovely wife. After seven years of childless marriage, the beautiful Isabella presented the King with a son on October 12, 1207. The boy was named Henry and he was to live a long life and earn for himself a front place among the worst of kings. Another son followed who was called Richard and became the richest man in the world and was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Three daughters were then born in rather quick succession, the eldest being christened Joan. This little princess was promptly betrothed to Isabella’s jilted lover, Hugh of Lusignan! The match never came to anything for a very unusual reason which will be explained in its proper place. Joan, who was beautiful and angelic in character, was married instead at the tender age of eleven to King Alexander of Scotland to patch up a quarrel with that monarch. Because of this the lovely little Queen was called thereafter Joan Makepeace.

Such a steady succession of children should have been proof of domestic felicity in the royal family, but there seems instead to have been a rift which increased with the years. Isabella’s reason for marrying John had been ambition. She had never loved him and she was such a sparkling beauty that every man looked at her with admiration. This provided all the ingredients for trouble, and it is perhaps not surprising that the Queen’s eye began to develop a roving tendency also. It is recorded that John became convinced of an affair she was carrying on with a man of the court and that he adopted a characteristic way of having his revenge. One day the Queen found the body of her lover dangling at the head of her bed, the cords of the rich hangings knotted about his neck, his face black and swollen, his tongue protruding from his mouth.

At one stage she was placed in restraint as Eleanor had been. It was, however, for a short period only. John never seems to have recovered from his infatuation for his Queen, who was called the Helen of the Middle Ages.

It will be seen that the private life of the King was not of a kind to win back any of the favor which the infamy of his public career had lost. Hatred and contempt for this man who ruled over them led the barons inevitably to the field which has come down in history as Runnymede.

History supplies no report of the weather which prevailed along the Thames on Monday, June 15, 1215, but a beneficent Providence would
not have provided anything but a day of bright sunshine for this momentous occasion. Let us assume, then, that the sky was bright and clear, the sun so brilliantly warm that the gray of the water was shot through with gold, and that the wide meadow along the river was lushly green with patches and dots of yellow.

But if the day was bright, there was nothing but blackness in the soul of John. For a month he had been at Windsor, following a visit to London, where he had found the citizens a unit in refusing to back him in his struggle with the barons. He had been trying to discover a way out of his difficulties but without success. How had it happened that after his surrender to the Pope, a brilliant right-about-face which had brought him the support of the Pontiff, his fortunes had dipped so suddenly? He could not understand it. When the interdict was raised, it had seemed to him that the domestic situation was well in hand. He had felt safe in dealing arbitrarily with the barons, who were a quarrelsome lot and incapable, seemingly, of continuing long in one camp or fighting together in one cause. But some malign influence had held them together, after all, and thus had brought him to his present desperate pass. Well he knew who had wielded that influence, the insistent, meddling cardinal at Canterbury. Langton should never have been allowed to come back to England.

On his arrival at Windsor it had been crammed with his supporters. They had filled the First King’s House and the Marshal’s Tower and even the huge round Norman keep. Their iron heels had resounded in Beauclerc’s Passage which ran under the King’s House, and they had crowded the jousting grounds between conferences with a willingness for combat which they did not show in the King’s cause. Gradually their number had decreased. It was nothing new for John to watch his support dwindle, but each desertion this time had thrown him into a deep and sullen dismay. When the day came that only seven knights remained at Windsor, he gave in and sent word to the Army of God and Holy Church, as the barons called themselves, that he would meet them again.

Runnymede, to give it the modern spelling, was an extensive meadow on the south bank of the Thames near Staines where Oxford Street crossed the river. Here the barons had chosen to camp. Its selection had been deliberate, for this sometimes marshy stretch of land had been used by the Druids for ceremonial purposes and later by the Anglo-Saxons for speech-motes. Opposite it was a wooded island of some size, now called Charter Island.

On the appointed morning and at the time set, John rode out from Windsor and proceeded to a position on the north bank opposite the island. His pride was galled by the smallness of the train which followed him. Stephen Langton was at his right hand as surety for his appearance. The King would have been happy without
him!
On the other side rode
Pandulfo, whose seat in the saddle was as bad as most clerks’ and who jounced and groaned at the rapid pace set by the King. Behind the papal agent was Amaury, Grand Master of the Templars. William Marshal, whose stout old heart made it impossible for him to desert a king to whom he had sworn fealty, rode behind. His presence was a comfort, and yet it had seemed to the King that Pembroke wore a worried frown as they set out. There had been no doubt of the uncertain mood of the usually loyal half brother, William Long-Espée. The Six lioncels of Salisbury flapped proudly in the breeze, but under them the hero of the sea battle at Dam wore a doubtful scowl, as though he did not like the way things were going. Beside the son of the Fair Rosamonde rode a cousin of the King, the Earl of Warenne. There were, farther back, a few bishops and a few knights.