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Transcriber’s Note


Words in italics are marked with _underscores_.

Words in small capitals are shown in UPPER CASE.

Sidenotes showing the year have been moved to the start of paragraphs,
and kept only when they change. For some long paragraphs a range of
dates is shown.

Other sidenotes give the actual date of an event. These have been moved
next to the description of the date, and are shown in parentheses, e.g.
{30 May}. Others, which merely repeat a date, have been removed.

Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of chapters.

All references to footnote numbers (i.e. page and note number) have
been changed to the footnote numbers used here.

The keys of the maps are shown in the descriptions of the
illustrations, additions by the transcriber are shown in pararenthes.

Some formatting and punctuation in citations, sidenotes and the index
have been standardized.

Variant spelling, inconsistent hyphenation and inconsistent spelling
of people’s names are retained, however a few palpable printing errors
have been corrected.

The errata list is in the note at the end of the book.




JOHN LACKLAND




[Illustration: MacMillan and Co.’s monogram]




  JOHN LACKLAND

  BY
  KATE NORGATE

  _WITH MAPS_

  London
  MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
  NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  1902

  _All rights reserved_




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I
                                                  PAGE
  JOHN LACKLAND, 1167–1189                           1


  CHAPTER II

  JOHN COUNT OF MORTAIN, 1189–1199                  24


  CHAPTER III

  JOHN “SOFTSWORD,” 1199–1206                       64


  CHAPTER IV

  KING JOHN, 1206–1210                             118


  CHAPTER V

  JOHN AND THE POPE, 1210–1214                     157


  CHAPTER VI

  JOHN AND THE BARONS, 1214–1215                   210


  CHAPTER VII

  JOHN LACKLAND, 1215–1216                         247


  NOTE I

  JOHN AND THE DE BRAOSES                          287


  NOTE II

  EUSTACE DE VESCI AND ROBERT FITZ-WALTER          289


  INDEX                                            295




LIST OF MAPS


    I. IRELAND ACCORDING TO THE TREATY OF 1175         _To face page_ 12

   II. IRELAND ACCORDING TO HENRY’S DISTRIBUTION,  1177      ”        14

  III. IRELAND, A.D. 1185                                    ”        17

   IV. ENGLAND, A.D. 1190                                    ”        27

    V. IRELAND, A.D. 1210                                    ”       151




“The closer study of John’s history clears away the charges of sloth
and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his
fall. The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king
who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a
struggle of despair against English freedom was no weak and indolent
voluptuary but the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.”

              JOHN RICHARD GREEN.




CHAPTER I

JOHN LACKLAND

1167–1189

               .... Johan sanz Terre,
    Por qui il[1] ot tant noise e guere.

              _Estoire de la Guerre Sainte_, vv. 101, 102.


[Sidenote: 1167]

The fifth son, the eighth and last child, of Henry II. of England and
Eleanor of Aquitaine was born at Oxford, in the “King’s manor”--that
is, the palace of Beaumont--on Christmas Eve 1167.[2] Of their six
other surviving children, the three younger were daughters; the last of
these, Joanna, was then two years old. The eldest living son, Henry,
was nearly thirteen; Richard was ten, and Geoffrey nine. The boy Henry
had, when an infant, been acknowledged by the barons of England as
heir to the crown,[3] and in 1160 had done homage to Louis of France
for the duchy of Normandy.[4] In 1162 preparations had been made for
his crowning in England, and he had again received the homage of the
barons,[5] to which that of the Welsh princes and the Scot king was
added in 1163.[6] Eleanor’s duchy of Aquitaine had been destined for
her second surviving son, Richard, as early as 1159,[7] when he was
not yet two years old. In the summer of 1166 the king had secured
Britanny for Geoffrey by betrothing him to its heiress.[8] The whole
Angevin dominions, with one exception, were thus, in design at least,
partitioned among John’s brothers before John himself was born. The
exception was, indeed, an important one; in the contemporary accounts
of Henry’s plans during this period for the distribution of his
territories, there is no mention of Anjou and its dependency Touraine.
The reason, however, is obvious. Anjou was the cradle of his race, the
very heart and centre of his dominion, the one portion of it which he
had inherited from his forefathers in unbroken male descent, by a right
which had been always undisputed and indisputable. The destiny of Anjou
was therefore as yet unspecified, not because Henry was reserving it
for a possible younger son, but because its devolution to his eldest
son, as head of the Angevin house after him, was in his mind a matter
of course. It was in fact Henry himself who gave to his new-born child
the name which has clung to him ever since--“Johans Sanz Terre,” John
Lackland.[9]

[Sidenote: 1169]

Two years later the scheme of partition was fully developed, and now
Anjou was explicitly included in it. At Epiphany 1169 Louis of France
granted to the younger Henry the investiture of Anjou and Maine, on
the understanding that the boy was to hold these fiefs, as well as
Normandy, in his own person, directly of the French crown. Richard was
invested, on the same terms, with the county of Poitou and the duchy
of Aquitaine. Britanny was granted to young Henry, to be holden by his
brother Geoffrey of him as mesne lord, under the king of France as
overlord.[10] The one fragment of the continental dominions of the
Angevin house which the king of England formally reserved to himself
was Touraine; his homage for it was due to a prince of inferior rank,
the count of Blois, and his paternal pride chose rather to perform that
homage himself than to suffer it to be performed by any of his sons.[11]

[Sidenote: 1170]

All these arrangements were as yet merely prospective. Henry had no
intention of abdicating, nor of depriving Eleanor of her rights as
duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou, nor even of dispossessing
the reigning duke of Britanny. His purpose was simply to insure that,
were he himself unexpectedly to become disabled or die, there should be
no fair pretext for fighting over his inheritance or defrauding any of
his sons of their shares, but that they should be bound to each other,
and their overlord Louis bound to each and all of them, by such legal
ties as none of the parties could lightly venture to set at defiance.
In June 1170 the scheme was completed by the coronation of the younger
Henry at Westminster. Two months later the elder king fell sick at
La Motte-de-Ger, near Domfront. Believing his end to be at hand, he
confirmed the partition of January 1169, and solemnly bequeathed the
one son who had no share in it--John--to the guardianship of his eldest
brother, “the young king,” “that he might advance him and maintain
him.”[12] One contemporary historian adds: “And he (the king) gave
to his youngest son John the county of Mortain.”[13] The meaning of
this probably is that Henry expressed a wish, or made a suggestion,
that his successor should provide for John by investing him with
Mortain.[14] From the days of the Conqueror downwards, this Norman
county had always been held by some junior member of the Norman ducal
house. Henry I. had granted it to his favourite nephew, Stephen; it
had passed to Stephen’s son William, and afterwards to his daughter
Mary; in 1168, Mary’s husband, Count Matthew of Boulogne, had ceded it
to Henry II., on condition that a heavy sum charged upon its revenues
should be paid annually to his two daughters.[15] Its actual value,
therefore, was now very small; and Henry on his recovery seems to have
abandoned, for the time at least, his project of bestowing it on John.
A year later his diplomacy had wrought out a scheme for providing John
with a far more splendid, as well as more valuable, endowment than
Mortain, by betrothing him to the presumptive heiress of Maurienne.

[Sidenote: 1171–1172]

A proposal for this marriage was made by Count Humbert of Maurienne
and accepted by Henry in 1171.[16] Humbert was then a widower for the
third time, and had only two daughters. The marriage contract, which
was signed at the close of 1172,[17] provided that if he should yet
have a son, that son should inherit scarcely anything but the little
county of Maurienne itself, which was only a small and comparatively
unimportant part of Humbert’s dominions, stretching as they did along
both sides of the Alps and including all the passes between Gaul,
Germany and Italy. Except Maurienne, and a very trifling portion of
land reserved as a dowry for his younger daughter, all Humbert’s
territories--Rossillon-en-Bugey, the county of Belley, the valley of
Novalesia, Chambéry and its dependencies, Aix, Aspremont, Rochetta,
Mont-Major, and La Chambre on the western side of the Alps; and on
their eastern side, Turin, Cavaur, Colegno, with the homage and
service of the count of Canavesia, and that which the viscount of
Aosta owed for Châtillon, and also Humbert’s claims on the county of
Grenoble--were devised absolutely and unconditionally to John and his
bride, and were, if Henry so willed, to be secured to them immediately
by the homage of all Humbert’s subjects in those regions to the little
bridegroom; while if Humbert should die without a son, Maurienne itself
was to be added to John’s inheritance. The price stipulated for all
this was five thousand marks, of which one thousand were paid over at
once by Henry to Humbert.[18] It was not till the infant bride had been
actually delivered over to her intended father-in-law, who was to bring
her up in company with her betrothed till