Kate Norgate

“ Earls, barons, bishops, abbots, joined the funeral train as it passed from Caversham to London; and with every imaginable token of honour and reverence from clerks and107 laymen alike, the Marshal was laid to rest, as he had desired, in the church of the Knights of the Temple; Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury taking the chief part in the burial service and paying the last honours to the man whom he too, as he stood by the open grave, declared to have been “the best knight of all the world that has lived in our time.” ”

“ It is thus impossible to determine precisely how much of the credit of the policy which freed England from her invaders and restored peace and order to the distracted country and the ruined administration is due to the Marshal himself, and how much to his colleagues, Gualo, Hubert, Peter des Roches, and the other ministers of the late King. A large share of credit must in any case belong to them for a steady, faithful, and intelligent co-operation without which the Marshal obviously could not have carried on either war or government at all. ”

“ When fully certified of John’s death, Louis invited Hubert to a parley and addressed him thus: “Your lord, King John, is dead; it is useless for you to hold this castle longer against me, seeing you have no succour; surrender the castle and come into my fealty, and I will enrich you with great honours and you shall be great among my counsellors.” “If my lord be dead,” Hubert is reported to have answered, “he has sons and daughters who ought to succeed him; as to surrendering the castle, I would fain speak with my comrades of the garrison.” ”

“ I will take counsel with my son and my people, and provide some one to undertake the business; and may God guide our counsels aright!”
Next morning he called his son, his wife, his nephew John, and his most trusted advisers, and told them his project: that the King “should be committed to God and the Pope, and to the Legate.” “For in no land are the folk of so many different minds as in England; and if I committed him to one, the others, you may be sure, would be envious.” “If the land be not defended by the Pope at the present juncture, then I know not who should defend it.” ”

“ And if a losing game could thus turn to your praise, how much greater will be your joy when you get the better of the adversary, as, please God, you may! Then all men will say that never man of any race won such honour upon earth. Is it not worth the winning?” “By God’s sword!” swore the aged hero, “your counsel is true and good, and goes so straight to my heart that if all the world should forsake the King, save myself, know you what I would do? ”

“ You have undertaken a business from which there is no drawing back. But so long as you hold to it, I tell you that the worst that may come can only bring you honour. Suppose that all your adherents should join Louis, and surrender all the castles to him, so that you could find no shelter anywhere in England;—that you had to quit the country, and that Louis pursued you till you fled to Ireland;—still that would be great honour! ”

“ Shortly after the middle of September, 1215, he seems to have gone to Rome on a mission from John, who wrote to the Pope that “although Master Pandulf is most useful to us in England, inasmuch as he labours faithfully and devotedly for the honour of the Roman Church and of ourself and our whole realm, yet we send him to your Holiness because we can trust no one else to explain the state of ourself and our realm so well as he can do it.” ”

“ Part of the enemies were sieging Lincoln Castle, but only a part; Louis was elsewhere, and “those who accompanied him had got themselves foolishly into a tangle.” [157] Here, then, was an opportunity not to be lightly thrown away. “For God’s sake, let us stake everything upon it! Remember that if we gain the victory, we shall increase our honour, and preserve for ourselves and our posterity the freedom which these men seek to take from us. We will keep it. God wills us to defend it! Therefore every man must bestir himself to the utmost of his power, for the thing cannot be done else. ”

“ On him, as Earl of Striguil, the security of the Welsh March chiefly depended; as heir of his mother, Isabel of Leinster, he was the mightiest baron of the English March in Ireland; and as heir to the lands which had belonged to his parents in Normandy, he could at any moment put himself in touch with Philip of France. In private life he seems to have been a man of high character; and since his return to allegiance, with his friend Salisbury, in 1217, he had, like Salisbury, acted as a valiant, useful, and faithful adherent of the King. ”

“ It is Stephen, not Hubert, who is the arch-enemy in the eyes of Falkes—the relentless persecutor of Falkes himself, the persistent sower of discord and plotter of mischief in the realm; one passage relating to him in the Querimonia reads almost like a paraphrase of the accusation said by the Dunstable annalist to have been flung, in a moment of fury, by Hubert at Peter des Roches (above, p. 207) . The animus displayed by Falkes against Stephen is in fact so violent that we instinctively feel his narrative is not to be trusted in details where the Archbishop is concerned. ”

“ But within the castle, when darkness fell, the old Earl once more called around him “his sure council”—three faithful friends; his nephew John Marshal, his squire John of Earley, and Ralph Musard [26] —with whom he had already had an anxious consultation on the preceding night, after the first informal offer of the regency. [27] Now, setting his back against a wall, he began: “Give me your counsel! for, by my faith, I have embarked on a wide sea where, cast about as one may, neither bottom nor shore can be found, and it is a marvel if a man come safely into port. ”

“ It was Falkes who was set to keep the King’s uncle from intruding into a royal castle of which he was not the lawful custodian. It was Falkes whom Hubert de Burgh employed to overawe the riotous citizens of London and to rid him of their dangerous leader. In their hearts, however, Hubert and Falkes were rivals, urged to secret mutual jealousy by a characteristic which, unlike as they were in other respects, was common to them both; when once they had risen to power and authority, neither of them was inclined to brook an equal. ”

“ William took counsel with the other Royalists; “and there were some who spoke rightly bravely, though they had kept away from the coast in the hour of need.” These men said: “We do not want to conciliate Louis. The only parley we want is a siege of London.” But the valiant men who had been in the fight were wiser; they besought the Marshal to get the French out of the country “and not to let lack of money be a hindrance, for they would help him to the utmost of their power, with their hearts and bodies and possessions.” He therefore agreed to go and parley with Louis. ”

“ Above all, there was no renewal of two provisions of the highest importance: that no scutage or aid should be imposed except by the common consent of the realm, unless it were for the King’s ransom, the knighting of his eldest son, or the marriage of his eldest daughter, and of “reasonable” amount, and that for the assessment of an aid or scutage on occasions other than those named, the common council should be summoned in a certain manner and for a fixed day, and the matter should proceed according to the counsel of those who answered the summons. ”

“ The barons of England were to swear to Henry that they would enter into no confederation or undertaking against him or his heirs, with Louis or with any other person. Louis was to take his corporal oath, and his men with him, and such of them as the King’s council should choose were also to pledge themselves individually by charters, that they would keep this peace firmly and faithfully; and Louis was to do his utmost to obtain confirmation of it from the Pope. ”

“ The owner was bound to allow his castle to be garrisoned by the King’s own men at the King’s will; to surrender it into the King’s hand if required; and not to make any addition to its fortifications without the King’s licence. Against the enforcement of these royal rights the owners of castles had struggled, with varying success, under Henry II, Richard, and John. The civil war, and the new conditions under which the powers of the Crown had to be exercised during the minority of John’s successor, had intensified their jealousy of all restriction upon their tenure of their fortresses ”

“ The possession of these castles placed the whole of eastern England under his uninterrupted sway, and removed all serious obstacles, except one, to his communications with his allies in the north. That one obstacle was the castle of Lincoln, which under the command of a woman had hitherto resisted every assailant. Louis appears to have made a circuit of his new possessions—no doubt placing a garrison in each of them—and then proceeded to Lincoln, hoping that his personal presence and the isolation in which she was now placed might tempt or frighten Dame Nicolaa into a betrayal of her trust. ”

“ On 21st March the King wrote again, expressing his astonishment that Falkes had not made the expected delivery, and bidding him make it to Walter at once; “for,” wrote the King, “we are certain that that castle is the head of the Earl of Devon’s honour in Devonshire, and for that reason your wife neither can nor ought to have it in dower. If, however, she has less than she ought to have in dower of the land of her former husband, we will make up what is due to her according to the custom of our realm; but if she has more than she should have, we will have it measured according to justice.” ”

“ Between these northern fortresses and London, however, lay a tract of hostile country. The Thames Valley was blocked by Windsor and Oxford; two of John’s foreign followers, Engelard d’Athée (or de Cigogné) and Andrew de Chanceaux, were in command of Windsor; while the castles of Oxford, Buckingham, Hertford, Bedford, Cambridge, and Northampton, and the whole of the six shires in which they stood, were under the charge of the most devoted and energetic, as well as the most ruthless, of John’s soldiers from over sea, Falkes de Bréauté. ”

“ On 11th November, 12221222, the Earl Marshal was informed by letter patent that “as the castle of Caerleon with its appurtenances, which is in your hand, ought to be held of us in chief, it is provided by our common council that that castle shall be delivered into our hand; and therefore we strictly command that you, without delay or excuse, surrender that castle with its appurtenances to us, and afterwards we will cause full justice to be done in our court to you and to any others who may have aught to say about it.” ”

“ This day we bear the burden of arms to defend our fame, and for ourselves and our dear ones, our wives and children, and to keep our land in safety, and to win great honour, and for the peace of Holy Church, which these men have wronged and ill-used, and to gain remission and pardon of all our sins. ”

“ Wardship in chivalry, on the other hand, would until little more than three years before Henry’s accession have supplied no analogy at all; for the King and kingdom of England had no overlord upon earth before John’s homage to the Pope in May, 1213. By virtue of that homage England became a fief of the Roman see, and consequently on John’s death the wardship of his youthful heir and his distracted realm vested legally in Pope Honorius III. It might therefore have been expected that the regency would be at once assumed by the Pope’s representative in England, the Legate Gualo. ”

“ Louis and Henry were each to send a copy of the peace to King Alexander of Scotland, and he, if he wished to be included in it, was to restore all castles, lands, and prisoners, taken by him during the war. Louis was to send a copy, on the same conditions, to Llywelyn and the other Welsh princes. Louis was to quit-claim to all the barons and men of England all homage, fealty, confederations, and alliances, and never henceforth to make, on account of this war, any confederation which might at any time cause damage to the English King. ”

“ Under a sovereign of full age the Justiciar was the King’s lieutenant; it was on him that the supreme powers and functions of government temporarily devolved when the King himself was absent from the realm. It followed almost of necessity that when there ceased to be a person specially set apart to exercise those powers and functions for a King under age, they fell into the Justiciar’s hands. This result of Pandulf’s resignation could not be altogether pleasing to some, at least, of the other members of the Council, or of the magnates outside the Council. ”

“ In all likelihood Peter’s discovery of this possible entrance had really been made as he passed the outer side of the gate on his way to the castle, and the purpose of his daring venture was to learn whether its inner side was penetrable and unguarded. He found that it was so, and having made his way back safely to his friends, gave orders for the gate to be cleared out. His comrades of the host came to meet him joyously, “every man in the ranks singing as if the victory were already won” ”

“ It was not the first time, nor was it to be the last, that the Welsh fled before Hubert de Burgh. He now led the King and the host from Hereford to Leominster and Shrewsbury, and thence, on the last day of September, to Montgomery, [899] passing through Llywelyn’s lands and driving the flocks and herds before them as they went, to serve for the sustenance of the troops. The castle of Montgomery, originally built by one of the most famous of the followers of William the Conqueror, had been more than once destroyed by the Welsh. ”

“ The King’s quasi-majority afforded an obvious occasion for such a request. The Great Charter had been twice renewed in his name, but at a time when he was too young to understand the responsibilities to which it pledged him. Now that he was recognized as “a man in wisdom and understanding,” personally answerable for “the disposition of his realm,” he might fairly be asked to grant a new confirmation of the Charter, which those who asked for it doubtless hoped would be an end of all strife. It was only natural that on this matter Stephen de Langton should be spokesman ”