Part 44

“Give up your false pretentions,” said John, “to crowns you will never wear. Am I not your uncle? I will give you a share of my inheritance as your lord, and grant you my friendship.”

“Better the hatred of the King of France!” exclaimed the high-spirited boy; “he has not broken his faith, and with a noble knight there is always a resource in generosity.”

“Folly to trust him!” sneered John. “French kings are the born enemies of Plantagenets.”

“Philippe has placed the crown on my brow--he was my godfather in chivalry--he has granted me his daughter,” said Arthur.

“And you will never marry her, fair nephew! My towers are strong; none here resist my will.”

The boy burst out proudly: “Neither towers nor swords shall make me cowardly enough to deny the right I hold from my father and from God. He was your elder brother, now before the Saviour of men. England, Touraine, Anjou, Guienne, are mine in his right, and Brittany through my mother. Never will I renounce them, but by death.”

“So be it, fair nephew,” were John’s words, and with them he left his captive alone, to dwell on the horrors thus implied.

Soon after, John secretly sent a party of men into Arthur’s dungeon, with orders to put out his eyes. The youth caught up a wooden bench, and defended himself with it, calling so loudly for help as to bring to the spot the excellent governor of the castle, Hubert de Burgh, who had been in ignorance of their horrible design. He sent away the assassins, and, as the only means of saving the poor prince, he caused the chapel bell to be tolled, and let it be supposed that he had perished under their hands. All the world believed it, and Brittany and Normandy began to rise, to call the murderer to account. Hubert thought he was doing a service in divulging the safety of the prisoner, but the effect was, that John transferred the poor boy to Rouen, and to the keeping of William Bruce.

He was an old man, and dreaded the iniquity that he saw would soon be practised; and, coming to the King, gave up his charge in these words: “I know not what Fate intends for your nephew, whom I have hitherto faithfully kept. I give him up to you, in full health, and sound in limb; but I will guard him no longer; I must return to my own affairs.”

John’s eyes flashed fury; but the baron retired to his own fiefs, which he put in a state of defence. A few days after, John and his wicked squire, Pierre de Maulac, left the court, giving notice that he was going to Cherbourg, and, after wandering for three days in the woods of Moulineau, came late at night in a little boat to the foot of the tower where Arthur was confined. Horses were ready there, and he sent Maulac to bring him his nephew.

“Fair nephew,” said he, “come and see the day you have so long desired. I will make you free as air: you shall even have a kingdom to govern.”

Arthur began to ask explanations, but John cut him short, telling him there would be time for questions and thanks; and Maulac helped him to his horse, for he was so much weakened by his imprisonment that he could hardly mount. They rode on, Arthur in front, till they came to a spot where the river flowed beneath a precipitous bank. It was John’s chosen spot; and he spurred his horse against his nephew’s, striking him down with his sword. The poor boy cried aloud for mercy, promising to yield all he required.

“All is mine henceforth,” said John, “and here is the kingdom I promised you.”

Then striking him again, by the help of Maulac he dragged him to the edge of the rock, and threw him headlong into the Seine, whose waters closed over the brave young Plantagenet, in his eighteenth year, ending all the hopes of the Bretons. The deed of darkness was guessed at, though it was long before its manner became known; and John himself marked out its consummation by causing himself to be publicly crowned over again, and by rewarding his partner in the crime with the hand of the heiress of Mulgrave. His mother, Queen Eleanor, is said to have died of grief at the horror he had perpetrated. She had retired, after the siege of Mirabeau, to the convent of Fontevraud, where she assumed the veil, and now shared the same fate as her husband, King Henry--like him, dying broken-hearted for the crimes of their son. She was buried beside him and her beloved Coeur de Lion.

The Bretons mourned and raged at the loss of their young duke. His sister Eleanor was wasting her youth and loveliness in a prison, which she only left, after her oppressor’s death, to become a nun at Ambresbury; and they therefore proclaimed as their duchess her little half-sister, Alix de Thouars, who was, at four years old, presented to the States in her father’s arms, and shortly after married to an efficient protector, Pierre de Dreux, called, from his quarrels with the clergy, Mauclerc.

Never had the enemy of the Plantagenets been so well served as by King John. Such was the indignation and grief of the whole French noblesse, that, when Pope Innocent III sent out a legate to mediate between the two kings, the barons bound themselves by a charter, “to second their lord, King Philippe, in his war against King John, notwithstanding the will of the Pope, exhorting him to contrive it without being dismayed by vain words, and agreeing to give him all assistance, and enter into no treaty with the Pope save with his consent.”

Finding his nobles in this disposition, Philippe ventured on an unprecedented step, namely, that of summoning the King of England, as his vassal for Normandy and Anjou, to answer for the crime done on the person of his nephew, before his peers, namely, the other great crown vassals and barons holding fiefs directly from the King.

John did not deny the competence of the court of peers, and sent Hubert de Burgh, and Eustace, Bishop of Ely, to declare that he would willingly appear, provided a safe-conduct was sent to him. Philippe declared that he certainly might come in safety; but when they asked if he guaranteed his security, supposing he was condemned, he replied, “By all the saints of France, no! That must be decided by the peers.” The bishop declared that a crowned head could not be tried for murder; the English barons would not permit it. “What is that to me?” said Philippe. “The Dukes of Normandy have certainly conquered England; but because a vassal augments his domain, is the suzerain to lose his rights?”

Two months were allowed for John’s appearance in person; and on the appointed day the assembly was held in the Louvre: the nobles in ermine robes, and the heralds paraded the public places, calling on King John to appear and answer for his felony; then, as no reply was made, judgment was pronounced that his fiefs of Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou, were forfeited to the Crown, Guienne alone being excepted, as its heiress, his mother, was not at that time dead.

The execution followed upon the sentence: Philippe instantly marched into Normandy, and seized upon towns, his flatterers said, as if he caught them in a net. Chateau Gaillard, however, held out for more than a year, and Philippe was forced to blockade it. It had been fortified to perfection by Richard, who termed it his beautiful Castle on the Rock, and pertinaciously defended by Roger de Lacy. All the non-combatants were driven out; but the French would not allow them to pass through their lines, and they lived miserably among the rocks, trying to satisfy their hunger with the refuse of the camp. One wretched man was found gnawing a piece of the leg of a dog, and when some compassionate French tried to take it from him, he resisted, declaring he would not part with it till he was satisfied with bread. They fed him, but he could hardly masticate, though swallowing his food ravenously.

One tower was at last overthrown, and another was gained by a bold “varlet,” named Bogis, who was lifted on the shoulders of his comrades, till he could climb in at an undefended window, where he drew up sixty more with ropes. They burnt down the doors, and entered the castle, where only one hundred and fifty knights remained alive. Keeping them at bay, Bogis lowered the drawbridge, and admitted the rest of the army; the remains of the garrison retreated into the keep, still resolved not to surrender, though battering-rams, catapults, and every engine of war was brought to bear on them. A huge piece of wall fell down, still there was no surrender; but with night, all resistance ceased, and the French, entering in the morning, found every one of the garrison lying dead in the dust and ruins, all their wounds in the face and breast--not one behind, “to the great honor and praise of chivalry,” said their assailants, who rejoiced in their valor.

Only one feeble attempt had been made by John to succor these noble and constant men, though no further distant than Rouen, where he was feasting with his new queen. All his reply to messages of Philippe’s advance was, “Let him alone; I will regain more in a day than he can take in a year.”

Chinon was taken after a gallant defence, and in it Hubert de Burgh, for whom John seems to have had an unusual regard. For a moment it grieved him, and he awoke from his festivities to say to his queen:

“There, dame, do you hear what I have lost for your sake?”

“Sire,” said Isabella, who had learnt by this time at how dear a price she had purchased her crown, “on my part, I lost the best knight in the world for your sake!”

“By the faith I owe you, in ten years’ time we shall have no corner safe from the King of France and his power!”

“Certes! sir,” she answered, “I believe you are very desirous of being a king checkmated in a corner.”

She seems to have taken every occasion of showing her contempt for the mean-spirited wretch to whom she had given her hand: but at present her treatment only incited the King’s ardor of affection: he formed more schemes of pleasure for her, and turned a deaf ear to all complaints from his deserted subjects, until Falaise had surrendered, Mont St. Michael was burnt, and Rouen itself was threatened. Then he took flight, and returned to England, where he made his Norman war a pretext for taxes; but when the Rouennais citizens, who still had a love for the line of Rollo, came to tell him that they must surrender in thirty days unless they were succored, he would not interrupt his game at chess to listen to them; and, when it was finished, only said, “Do as you can: I have no aid to give you.”