Runnymede and Lincoln Fair: A Story of the Great Charter

It was, however, a perilous step to take, and the prelates, nobles, and knights gasped and stared at the idea of a boy of ten occupying a throne that was menaced by royal and feudal warriors who had hosts of fighting men at their backs, nearly every English county at their feet, and the King of Scots and the Prince of Wales as their humble servants.

But it was a step which Pembroke did not fear to take. His brave heart did not fail him in the day of trial, and he was ready to do all, dare all, and risk all, rather than witness the realisation of the vision which his patriot soul abhorred – the vision of a French prince enthroned at Westminster, and lording it over England with the insolence of a conqueror.

Well was it for England that there was one man at that terrible crisis who had the capacity to think and the courage to act.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CORONATION OF THE BOY HENRY

AMONG the provincial cities of England at the opening of the thirteenth century, Gloucester was accounted one of the strongest, fairest, and most stoutly loyal. It had long, indeed, been of importance, and boasted of historical associations which connected it with the ancient world. Occupied by the Romans, sacked by the sea-kings, and known to fame as the scene of the memorable single combat between Edmund Ironside and Canute the Great – the crown of England being the stake – and a favourite residence of Edward the Confessor, its importance as a barrier against the Welsh had been recognised by William the Conqueror, who selected its castle as his winter palace, and strongly fortified the city on the north and south with strong gates and stone walls, surmounted by frowning battlements. The town consisted of four streets forming a cross, and named Northgate and Southgate, Eastgate and Westgate, and boasted of a royal castle, with a chase or park, and a grand Gothic abbey, with lofty tower and oriel window, surrounded by its fish-ponds, or “vivaries,” and physic garden, and vineyards, and all “the means and appliances” for making monastic life comfortable and pleasant. The strength and wealth of the place were such that while England was ringing with arms and the shouts of “Montjoie St. Denis!” Queen Isabel and her son Henry had remained within its walls in thorough security; and while towns had been besieged and fortresses taken, Gloucester had neither been taken nor besieged up to the hour when King John died, in misery, at Newark-on-the-Trent.

It was Friday, the 28th of October, 1216, the Feast of St. Simon and St. Jude, and Gloucester presented a scene of considerable excitement, though the weather was the reverse of exhilarating. Not a glimpse was there of the “merry sunshine, which makes the heart so gay.” The sky was obscured with a drizzling mist; gloom hung over the whole city; the Severn, swollen with recent rain, threatened to overflow its sedgy banks; the orchards and woodlands around were soddened with wet; and the deer in the king’s park crouched together, sought shelter under the dripping branches of the trees, looking for all the world as if they had some instinctive dread of a return of the flood of Deucalion —

“Piscium cum summâ genus hæsit ulmo,
Nota quæ sedes fuerat columbis,
Et superjecto pavidæ natarunt
Æquore damæ.”

Nevertheless Gloucester was excited. Men with white crosses on their breasts strode hither and thither, gossiping citizens ventured forth into the wet streets to hear the latest news, and laughing nymphs with fair faces gazed watchfully from basement and loophole, as if impatient for some spectacle to gratify their curiosity; for on that day, in spite of Louis of France and the Anglo-Norman barons who had brought him into England, Henry, the son of John, was to be crowned king, and the place appointed for the ceremony was the abbey of Gloucester – that abbey to which, more than a hundred years later, the remains of his murdered grandson were to be brought by Abbot Thokey from Berkeley Castle, under circumstances so melancholy.

At this time Henry of Winchester was in his tenth year. He was a strong, healthy boy, and good-looking, with the fair hair and fair complexion of the Plantagenets. But one unfortunate defect there was in his countenance. Part of one of his eyelids hung down in such a way as partly to cover the eyeball, and thus gave an unpleasant expression to a face which would otherwise have been handsome. Such as the boy was, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, took him by the hand, led him to the castle hall in which were assembled Neville, William Ferrars, Earl of Derby, and the few magnates who had come at his invitation to Gloucester, and, placing him in the midst of them, said —

“Behold your king!”

The nobles, who had been accustomed to the second Henry, and Richard, and John, and who had never pictured to themselves a monarch of ten, scarcely knew how to act. Never, indeed, save in the case of Edgar Atheling, had a child figured as King of England, and how he was to deal with the difficulties that beset the throne was more than they could imagine. For a time they remained silent. But Pembroke again spoke, pointed out the degradation of a foreign prince being in possession of the kingdom, and asked them earnestly to crown the rightful heir and drive out the foreigner and his myrmidons. Suddenly, as if by inspiration, they all threw off their reserve, and cried with one voice —

“So let it be: let the boy be king. Long live King Henry!”

Pembroke having succeeded so far, lost no time in bringing the business to a conclusion. On Friday, the 28th of October, Henry was ceremoniously conducted by the barons and prelates to the abbey church, placed upon a throne, and consecrated; and the crown of St. Edward not being within reach, he was crowned with the golden collar which his mother was in the habit of wearing round her neck. In the absence of Langton, the bishop of Bath performed the ceremony, and the royal boy, having taken the oaths usually taken by the kings of England at their coronation, “to bear reverence and honour to God and to his Holy Church, and to do right and justice to all his people,” did homage besides to the Church of Rome, for his kingdom of England and Ireland.

But so utterly had the public mind been poisoned against King John and all related to him, that even in Gloucester, the stronghold of royalty, popular opinion was divided, and the partisans of the young king, who were known by the white cross of Guienne which they wore on their breasts, had frays in the streets with the adherents of Prince Louis.

“By my faith,” remarked the Earl of Derby to Pembroke as they returned from the abbey to the castle, riding on either hand of the royal boy, “I much marvel to see that even in this city of Gloucester many faces frown sullenly on King Henry’s state.”

“Even so,” replied Pembroke, thoughtfully, “and the sky is dull and dismal. A little while, and the clouds will clear away and the sun shine as of yore.”

“May God and the saints so order it!” said Derby.

A few days later, Henry, at the suggestion of the papal legate, took the cross, that his cause might appear the more sacred in the eyes of both friends and foes; and Pembroke, having been appointed Protector, with the title of “Rector regis et regia,” during Henry’s minority, appointed Henry de Marisco Keeper of the Great Seal, gave notice of the coronation to continental countries, and issued a proclamation of pardon to all offenders who should make their submission within a reasonable time. In consequence, Salisbury, Warren, Arundel, Roger Merley de Merley, and William Marshal, eldest son of the Protector, broke with Louis and swore allegiance to Henry. But still the aspect of affairs appeared most gloomy, for Louis was in possession of a large portion of England, and Robert Fitzwalter and the confederate barons were still, in spite of his coldness and affronts, bent on placing the heir of France on the English throne.

And what did Isabel of Angoulême do in this emergency? Not certainly what a woman with a fine sense of duty would have thought of doing, nor what she would have done if she could have foreseen the future. But at that time clouds and darkness rested on the house of Plantagenet, and if a magician could have shown Isabel her future and that of the royal race of England in one of those magic mirrors in which Catherine de Medici was in the habit of seeing the fortunes of her descendants, she would, doubtless, either have deemed the whole a delusion or shrunk from the fate that awaited her new venture in life.

However, she consulted no mirror except that in which she had been in the habit of surveying the fair oval face and the regular majestic features which had won her so much fame throughout Christendom as “the Helen of the Middle Ages,” and she had no difficulty in learning that she still retained the charms necessary to fascinate the hearts of men. In England, indeed, she could not cherish the hope of any great matrimonial success, but there were countries beyond the narrow seas where she might yet achieve conquests, so she thought of her native land, with its sparkling rivers and its beautiful climate, and a few months after John’s death, leaving the boy-king and his infant brother Richard and his three sisters to their fate, she embarked for the Continent and repaired to Angoulême.

Now it happened that Hugh, Count de la Marche, had not exactly been guilty of betraying “the noon of manhood to a laurel shade,” but he had refrained from taking a wife for better or for worse. He had, indeed, entered into a contract of marriage with one of Isabel’s daughters, but the princess was still an infant, and Count Hugh soon showed a decided preference for the mother. Accordingly, a marriage was speedily brought about, and Isabel, as wife of the Count de la Marche, lived many years, and wrought so much mischief that, when finally she fled to Fontrevaud and died penitent within that religious house, people said that she ought to be called Jezebel rather than Isabel for having sown the seeds of so many crimes; and she begged that she might not be laid in the choir with the second Henry and Eleanor of Guienne and Cœur-de-Lion, but buried in the common cemetery as a penance for her sins, which were many.

It was well, perhaps, for the young King of England and for the people which he was to rule under circumstances so difficult, that Isabel of Angoulême took her departure and left him to begin his reign under happier auspices. An intriguing and ambitious woman might have spoiled all. As it happened, Pembroke had his own way, and felt that he was equal to the crisis.

CHAPTER XXXIX

A CONQUEROR IN IMAGINATION

WHEN King John died at Newark, and when the boy Henry was crowned at Gloucester, Louis of France and the Anglo-Norman barons were still before Dover. But Hugh de Burgh held out gallantly; and Louis, wearying of an enterprise in which there was no prospect of success, swallowed the vow he had made never to move from before the castle till he had taken it and hanged the garrison, and resolved on withdrawing from the siege, and employing his energies to consolidate the conquests he had already achieved in England. Accordingly, he returned to London, which was still devoted to his cause, and on the 6th of November took possession of the Tower, which, doubtless, he considered a stronghold which would stand him in good stead, in case of the citizens becoming refractory, and requiring to be kept down with the strong hand.

So far the French prince, notwithstanding his check at Dover, saw no reason to despair of ultimate triumph over the obstacles which barred his way to the throne, and, looking upon young Henry’s coronation as a farce, he was already a conqueror in imagination. Moreover, he daily showed himself more and more indifferent to the opinions of his Anglo-Norman allies, bestowing all his confidence on the lords and knights who had accompanied him from France, and not scrupling to make Robert Fitzwalter and his confederates feel the full humiliation of their position. It is difficult to guess whether or not Fitzwalter believed the story which was current as to the death of his daughter, Maude the Fair, by the poisoned egg. But even if so, his conscience must sometimes have reproached him when he reflected that, in order to gratify his revenge for a private wrong, he had played a part similar to that of Count Julian of Spain, when, five hundred years earlier, he, in order to avenge the wrongs of his daughter, Caba, had invited the Moors to seize the kingdom of Roderick, overthrew the monarchy of the Goths, and placed his native land and its inhabitants at the mercy of foreign invaders. Probably, however, Fitzwalter seldom thought either of Count Julian’s country or of his own, but gave his whole attention to his own safety and his own interests, and troubled himself very lightly with the misery which he had been the means of bringing on England and on Englishmen.

At all events, when Louis, having taken possession of the Tower, again marched from the capital to pursue his career of conquest, Fitzwalter accompanied the French prince, and aided him in his various enterprises. His position, indeed, and that of the other Anglo-Normans who aided the foreigners to ravage the country, even if they were destitute of patriotism, could hardly have been very pleasant; for at that time there existed no love between the barons of England and the warriors of France; and it appears that the continental adventurers were in the habit of assuming airs of superiority, and treating the islanders with something very like contempt, vapouring about their own prowess, repeating the wretched joke about Englishmen being born with tails like horses as a punishment for somebody having cut off the tail of Thomas à Becket’s horse, and describing the islanders, without distinction of race, as “English tails.”

Now it must have been sufficiently mortifying to Fitzwalter, and De Quency, and De Roos to be supposed to have tails like horses, and perhaps still more mortifying to them as Normans to be treated as English. Nevertheless, they bore all taunts and insults as best they could, and fought side by side with their laughing allies – no doubt valiantly and well. First they besieged and took the castle of Hertford, and then the great castle of Berkhampstead, a place renowned in the history of the Norman Conquest. Elated by his successes, Louis proceeded to St. Albans, and threatened to burn the magnificent abbey which Offa, the Saxon king, had founded and dedicated to the proto-martyr of Britain, if the abbot did not come and do him homage. Trembling for the edifice, and trembling for his own safety, the abbot, nevertheless, declined to do what, as an Englishman, he could not do with honour. However, the holy man offered a large sum of money as a bribe, and Louis, having accepted the abbot’s gold instead of his homage, passed on. But ere this a serious misunderstanding had broken out in his camp, and threatened mischievous consequences. When Berkhampstead was taken by the French, Fitzwalter suggested that the castle, on which he pretended to have an hereditary claim, should be committed to his custody. Louis thereupon consulted the French knights who were with him whether or not he should do as Fitzwalter wished.

“No,” answered they, scornfully. “How can any confidence be placed in English tails, who are traitors to their own sovereign?”

Louis returned to Fitzwalter.

“You must wait patiently till the kingdom is conquered,” said he, “and I will then give every man what he has a right to possess.”

Fitzwalter remonstrated, but Louis curtly refused to listen longer to the proposal; and the Anglo-Norman baron grew purple with rage. A violent quarrel ensued; and it looked as if the French prince was about to lose an adherent whose value in calm moments he could hardly fail to recognise. Fitzwalter, however, had linked himself too firmly with the Frenchman to have it in his power to break his chains, and the matter was accommodated. But the friends of the Anglo-Norman baron, exposed to frequent insults of the kind, grew sullen and discontented; and Louis began to perceive that it would not be prudent to rely too far on the fidelity of men born on English ground, and to concert measures for surrounding himself with a force of foreigners sufficient to render him independent of aid from the natives. With this view he consented to a truce with the Protector from Christmas to Easter, and resolved to employ the interval in a voyage to France, and to make a great attempt to persuade his crafty sire to furnish a force formidable enough to overawe all his enemies, and to terminate his successes as a conqueror with a crowning triumph.

Accordingly, Louis, having appointed the Lord De Coucy as his lieutenant in England, set out for the coast of Sussex to embark at Shoreham for the Continent, dreading no interruption. This time he found himself wrong in his calculations. There was a serious obstacle in the way, in the shape of a small but very formidable body of men, headed by a warrior in his teens, wearing a long white jacket, and wielding a very formidable battle-axe, who rushed to the assault with very little respect for persons – whether royal or knightly – under a white silken banner on which figured a fierce raven with open beak, and spread wings, and outstretched neck.

CHAPTER XL

A CAMP OF REFUGE

IMMEDIATELY after his exploit at Chas-Chateil, William de Collingham, as if a great idea had been suggested to him, repaired with Oliver Icingla to an islet deep in the forests of Sussex, overgrown with willows and rushes, and surrounded by marshes which regularly in autumn overflowed with water and became a large lake, with the islet rising in the midst. This islet had at one period been inhabited, and the ruins of a fortress, of which the origin and history were lost in the obscurity of ancient days, were still visible; but now it had no inhabitant save an anchorite, who dwelt among the ruins in a rude hermitage built of timber and overgrown with moss, and who appeared to be cut off from communication with mankind, occupying himself much with the study of the stars, and enjoying the reputation of being able to predict events, as if he had been privileged to read what was written in the book of fate.

It was in this islet, situated in the recesses of what remained of the great forest which before the Conquest extended all over Sussex, that Collingham determined to establish a camp of Refuge for Englishmen who, like himself, would not bow the knee to Prince Louis and his myrmidons, and he had several reasons for selecting the place; some of these he frankly stated, but the principal reason, which was a very strong one, he, like a prudent man, kept to himself. However, he proceeded to throw up intrenchments, constructed huts of earth and wood, set up his raven banner, and summoned all to come thither who had made up their minds to endure any privations and fight to the death rather than submit to the French invaders and lay down their arms.

The summons of Collingham was not disregarded. Within a fortnight some five hundred men had sworn to follow the raven banner for better or for worse, and never a day passed without some new band of outlaws, or some individual fighting man, or some ardent patriot, coming and adding to the number. No doubt there were bad as well as good among those who took refuge on the islet; but under Collingham’s discipline all were under the necessity of living decently and in order.

At this camp of refuge, on the evening of the 2nd of June, 1216, an hour after sunset, arrived William de Collingham and Oliver Icingla, riding one horse, like the old Knights of the Temple, accompanied by the russet bloodhound which Clem the Bold Rider had that morning been patting in the stable-yard of the White Hart, but which now willingly followed its old master, from whom it had been taken by Hugh de Moreville, who coveted the animal as well as the rest of the patrimony which Oliver Icingla ought to have derived from his mother. As for the knight and the squire, they were by no means in the best plight. The garments of both – the rustic garments which they had worn to disguise themselves – were spotted with blood, and their appearance indicated that they had been engaged in a desperate struggle for life or death.

All doubt on this subject, however, vanished when, after passing the water on a raft, Collingham and Oliver entered the camp and threw down their weapons. Both warriors were wounded: the sword of the knight was hacked and red; the axe of the squire was dyed dark with gore. Moreover, the strong steed that had carried them to the place of refuge was so weary and wounded that it died that night of fatigue and loss of blood. Such was the consequence to the patriotic warriors of one of their earliest conflicts with the enemy; they were to have many more equally sanguinary, but not so unequal in numbers.

But fierce as they had found the combat, neither Collingham nor Icingla was daunted. No sooner were their wounds dressed and bound up by the anchorite than, assembling the men by the light of the moon, they took a solemn oath, by the cross on the hilt of the knight’s sword, not to sleep under a roof, nor to dine in a hall, nor to drink a brimming can at a chimney corner, till Prince Louis and the French were expelled from England. At the same time, every man present – Oliver Icingla included – engaged never to decline a combat with three of the enemy, and to yield implicit obedience to the commands of their leader, upon which Collingham swore to relieve them from their promise if he was known to shrink from an encounter single-handed with six of the enemy.

And now every man understood what he was expected to do, and the work was begun with spirit, and the camp of refuge soon boasted of a thousand men, mostly archers, who attacked the French, and the Anglo-Normans who sided with them, whenever an opportunity presented itself, and, as historians tell us, made themselves particularly formidable when Louis marched into Sussex to take possession of the county.

“Louis, availing himself of John’s weakness,” says Carte, “sent William Fitzpiers, Earl of Essex, and Robert Fitzwalter, and William Huntingfield into Essex and Suffolk, and marching himself into Sussex, took all the fortresses in the county, but could not quell William de Collingham, who, with a thousand archers, made incursions from the woods and forests in those parts, killed several thousands of the French in different encounters, and held out all the time that the hostilities lasted. There was no attacking this man,” adds Carte, “in the fortresses wherein he kept without great disadvantage.”

It was not, however, till the French had learned by severe experience what manner of man Collingham was, and the ferocity of his “Ravens” – for so his followers were called, from the fierce raven on his banner – that they came to regard him as invincible and his camp as impregnable. In the effort to put him down, more than one continental warrior of high name was tried and found wanting. Especially did there fail in this endeavour a very valiant captain of free lances, who had been entrusted with the castle of Lewes, and who was deemed equal to any enterprise of the kind.

He was a native of Rheims, his name was Clarembald, and he was one of the mercenary leaders who had come with Louis to conquer England, bringing with him a rather remarkable surname, which, no doubt, he hoped to exchange for a territorial title derived from some earldom or barony on the Thames, or the Humber, or the Tweed. In fact, from his nocturnal excursions into towns and villages in Anjou and Normandy during the wars of King John and Philip Augustus, Clarembald had won the surname of “Eveille-chiens,” or Wake-dog, and he had rendered the surname very terrible to such as had learned what it was to have the misfortune to be the foe of his friends.

When Louis seized the castles of the king’s adherents in Sussex, Clarembald was appointed governor of Lewes, one of the castles of the Warrens, and he began to rule the neighbourhood with a rod of iron. Nowhere did the inhabitants of England find the invaders so tyrannical and so merciless. In vain the unfortunate English endeavoured to soften his heart by rendering him every possible honour. It only made him worse. He vexed them, tormented them, plundered them, hounded his dogs on their cattle so as to drive them into the marshes, and by breaking their limbs or backs killed or rendered them worthless. Nay more, he lamed their horses, slaughtered their sheep, and treated them very much as the French magnates of the fourteenth century treated Jacques Bonhomme, till the said Jacques, rendered furious by cruel treatment, turned on his persecutors, and proved to the world, during that outbreak known as the “Jacquerie,” how much worse than the beasts of the forest a human being can become when brutalised by long and continuous oppression.

Now Clarembald Eveille-chiens received very peremptory orders from Prince Louis to attack and destroy the camp of refuge in Sussex, and the bold warrior immediately prepared for the enterprise, only regretting, as far as he was concerned, that it was not one in which there was any chance of plunder.