Blood Cries Afar (45 page)

Louis was politically as well as militarily astute. He knew he had to play for time in the hope of fresh forces from France while simultaneously stalling the Henricians and hedging his bets through negotiating towards a favourable settlement. It was not a winning strategy, but the only other options were surrender or immediate departure from England. Even if he chose the latter so as to personally drum up support in France, it would have effectively ended his expedition; his leaving would have been taken as a sign of non-commitment to the cause. The political consequences would have been the collapse of the baronial party as more and more of its members availed themselves of the amnesty to lessen the retribution they feared would follow.

The opportunity for high-level negotiations overseen by leading churchmen presented itself at the start of June. A prestigious embassy of clerics had arrived in London from France under safe conduct, ostensibly to preach the Fifth Crusade (1217–19) against Egypt. The delegation was led by Archbishop Simon of Tyre from the crusader states. With him were two of Europe’s foremost abbots – those of Clairvaux and Cîteaux – and the Abbot of Pontigny. Conrad, the head of the Cistercian order, was later made legate to France. It was usual for the Archbishops of Tyre to recruit help for the imperilled Holy Land: one of Simon’s predecessors was in England in 1188 to seek the assistance of the aging Henry II.
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While it was a genuine coincidence that the Archbishop’s party had been in France at this time, there is more to its arrival in England than urging people to take up the cross. As the Anonymous says, Simon ‘on hearing of this war crossed the sea and came to England to make peace if he could’.
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It has been perceptively suggested that the embassy was persuaded to go to England by Philip Augustus, anxious to secure a settlement for his son;
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indeed, it is worth speculating further and considering that the letters Louis dispatched from Dover to his father the evening before raising the siege and returning to London had specifically asked for the intervention of the Archbishop. Nicholas Vincent’s detailed study of Guala’s career shows how Pope Honorius III had consistently applied pressure on Philip to demand that his son made peace, commissioning the Abbots of Cîteaux and Clairvaux with this mission on 6 December 1216, threatening him with papal sanctions. On 21 April 1217 Honorius had written directly to Philip, ‘mentioning the efforts at peace-making by the Archbishop of Tyre and the Abbot of Cîteaux’.
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The Papacy’s motivations behind its involvement in the peace process was determined in no small part by the fact that its desire for crusaders would be hampered by the involvement of so many English and French knights in the war in England. We have seen how Savary de Mauléon left the royalist cause at the end of 1216 to return to his native Poitou and thence to embark on crusade.

We have a detailed knowledge of the negotiations as the Archbishop recorded them and Guala sent a letter to Honorius from about 13 June also detailing the progress of the discussions.
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There were several meetings, the last and main one being held between Brentford and Hounslow starting on Monday 12 June. Here four members each from Henry’s and Louis’s councils discussed terms; behind each side stood the agreed number of twenty supporting knights. A draft treaty was drawn up which, while not harsh on Louis, clearly pointed to the French Prince’s defeat. He was to free the English – barons, knights and townspeople – from their oaths to him, and in the future make no further alliances with them against Henry or his heirs; likewise, the barons would swear that they would make no further alliances against the King with Louis or anyone else. Alexander II of Scotland was to restore to the English crown all lands and castles seized in the war. Similarly, Louis and the French had to return their lands, and Eustace the Monk had to return the Channel Islands he had taken on pain of confiscation of his fiefs. All rebels would have to offer security of their faith to the King. Magna Carta was reinforced. Other clauses dealt more favourably with the matter of ransoms and prisoners, reparations and absolution from excommunications.

But the talks collapsed over the matter of Louis’s leading clerical supporters. To his credit, Louis insisted that Elias of Dereham, a clerk of Sephen Langton and previously of Hubert Walter, Robert de St Germain, a clerk of Louis’s ally the King of Scotland, Gervase of Howbridge, dean of canons at St Paul’s, and Simon Langton, Louis’s chancellor in England, be included in the terms of the peace treaty. He was prepared to see them stripped of their benefices, but only if they were equally compensated with secular rents. The most important of the four was Simon, the Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton’s brother and previously Archbishop Elect of York. Guala, who had developed quite an antipathy to Langton, insisted that this concession was unacceptable, or at least until and if the pope acquiesced to it. He may have had the backing of some hardliners such as the Earl of Chester, who believed the treaty too lenient. Nor could Guala easily forgive them for publicly defying the decree of papal excommunication by preaching the rebels’ cause. From the pulpit at St Paul’s they had given sermons to the Londoners, and ‘made it understood’ that the excommunication could be ignored because the pope was not fully cognisant of the facts of the situation and that ‘Louis and his men were good people.’
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The Archbishop of Tyre’s letter to the pope made it clear that ‘Louis would in no way make peace without them.’
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There was no movement on either side and so at the last moment the talks collapsed. War was back on the agenda.

The peace delegation returned to France in mid-June, the Archbishop of Tyre receiving a letter of consolation from Abbot Gervase of Prémontré for having so nearly achieved peace, ‘which, when it was nearly accomplished, was obstructed on account of four clerks; would that they had never learned their letters’.
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Back in England, it was the man of the cloth Guala who was agitating for an immediate military response and the seasoned warrior William Marshal who advocated caution. Guala wanted London besieged, but other commanders were against such action. London remained a formidable fortress and it seemed better to wait for the flow of defections to weaken Louis further. These were accelerated by the failed peace talks: in the week that followed over 60 left Louis for Henry. There was also a potentially serious threat from Wales to deal with: Prince Llewelyn, enraged by the desertion of his son-in-law Reginald de Braose to Henry, invaded his lands, seizing Swansea Castle and hence control of the Gower peninsula; the regent looked on perturbed as Llewelyn advanced towards the Marshal’s castle at Haverford and took hostages from Pembrokeshire.
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The regent’s decision to leave the capital alone and lead the royal court west to Gloucester for the first week of July was probably influenced by these events; William certainly availed himself of the opportunity to visit his castles of Goodrich and Chepstow at that time. But the Welsh provocations were more of a distraction than anything else. At this time Lynn submitted to the King through the hands of Falkes de Bréauté and a sense of reclaiming political ascendancy was reinforced by the reissuing of Magna Carta and its enforcement by the sheriffs of England. From Gloucester on 4 July, Henry’s advisers issued a summons for Oxford on 15 July to determine what they should do next.

While the royalists played the waiting game, which they felt secure in doing and which may well have been employed for the want of any better strategy, it was Louis who took the initiative. With a treaty off the table, he redoubled and redirected his energies to the familiar activity of soldiering.
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Louis was too careful a man to close the door on diplomacy entirely: while he again rejected the wishes of Honorius for submission when the pope sent his confessor Brother Nicholas to meet him, he also sent the Count of Nevers to Windsor where he held talks with the queen mother; but although ‘they spoke well together and left on good terms’, nothing was accomplished. Again, this may have simply been stalling on Louis’s part; William Marshal ‘knew well’ the French Prince’s true intentions. And these were not peaceful.

Worried about the defections and also the loyalty of London, Louis moved his residence in the capital to the Tower for greater security. Strategically, he was not in a strong position; but nor was he a spent force. London, even if a little shaky, was still too tough a nut to crack for the royalists at the moment, and Louis still had a large force there, with the prospect of more men, if not on the horizon, then just beyond it. The hardcore of baronial rebels remained and prisoners taken at Lincoln (and elsewhere) were gradually being ransomed. And now Louis was no longer restrained by high-level peace talks. His campaign in England set about revitalising itself.

The first course of action was, as ever, to go on a
chevauchée
or two. The main purpose was a logistical one – to gather supplies for London and plunder to pay for the troops – but on a lesser scale it also reminded the royalists that Louis remained a force to be reckoned with and at least worthy of greater concessions in any future settlement. Making the most of the royal camp’s temporary move back to Gloucester, the first ravaging force, a large one according the Anonymous, made straight for the wealthy monastery town of Bury St Edmunds under the leadership of the Viscount of Melun, Hugh Tacon and the Flemish knight Eustace de Neville. This was not a free ride but a daring raid as the royalist garrisons surrounded London. Wendover says the French were in great want of supplies and believed themselves to be hemmed in. Bury St Edmunds rewarded their endeavour, provided rich pickings. This was followed up by a raid by the Duke of Brittany: he made ‘a wonderful
chevauchée
’, says the admiring Anonymous – to where he does not say – in which the lesser soldiers gained much. It was a great morale booster, and when the Duke returned to London he was warmly congratulated.
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The royalists had not met up at Oxford on 15 July as planned, but did so instead between about 21 and 25 July, issuing instructions on 22 July for another meeting to be held there before returning again to Gloucester; the consequent assembly held between 7 and 13 August ended with yet another summons to meet back at Oxford on 25 August. The sketchiness of the sources make it hard to judge movements and actions: were these ad hoc and unclear, reacting passively to events; or do they mask a coherent underlying plan? As the biographer of William Marshal makes no mention of the latter, and indeed depicts his hero as surprised and dismayed at the events that followed, it might be easier to assume that there was indeed no overarching plan in the royalist camp at this stage, other than to wait and see while building up their forces. However, this is not the whole picture. The war was about to enter its final and decisive stage as the theatre of operations shifted to the English Channel. Louis’s future in England relied on reinforcements from France: he knew it, and William Marshal knew it. Thus the Anonymous’s comments mentioned earlier that the regent ‘knew well’ what Louis was up to: busily recruiting more troops in France. While on land the royalists appeared to do very little, they were busily preparing and strengthening their forces at sea.

Louis’s dispatches from Dover had appealed to his father and wife for help. Philip Augustus, who had reconciled himself with Honorius, was still not prepared to jeopardise his relations with the Papacy. This precluded any public support for his son, but it did not stop him from feigning ignorance of moves to help him. This task fell to his wife, Blanche of Castille. Blanche, around 32 years of age at this time, was a redoubtable female figure of the Middle Ages who went on to become regent of France between 1226 and 1234 for her celebrated son, St Louis IX. The French historian Gérard Sivéry calls her ‘determined, intrepid and obstinate’.
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She had married Louis in 1200 and proved a faithful and dedicated wife; she now threw herself into the task of finding reinforcements to send to her husband in England. If a French source from later in the thirteenth century is to be believed, she worked her charms on her father-in-law to persuade him to provide funds for her recruitment drive. ‘Will you leave your son and my lord to die in a foreign country? For God’s sake, sire, he ought to rule after you.’ She even threatened to place the king’s grandchildren and future heir as security – in effect, hostages – to secure bankers’ loans.
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This was a little over-dramatic – nobody in England had the slightest intention of stringing Louis up – but it may have worked in cajoling Philip to offer some financial assistance.

Wendover imagines the content of Louis’s epistles to his father: with ‘a large force marching through the cities and towns around London, which prevented he and his companions from leaving the city’ (either this was written before the raids or Wendover he did not know of them), Louis tells King Philip: ‘all our supplies are failing us and our followers in the city, and even if they were abundant, we do not have the money to buy them; therefore I point out to you that I have no ability to resist, or to leave England, unless you provide me with powerful military aid.’ Wendover understands Philip’s position and says that the King, not wishing to be rebuked by the pope again, ‘lay the whole business on Louis’s wife’; Blanche ‘was not slow in attending to the matter that fell to her’.
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She recruited most heavily in Louis’s territory of Artois among its barons, burghers and his vassals. There was some resistance, as merchants, ship owners and sailors grumbled and protested that they had fulfilled their obligations to Louis the previous spring. She had to press them hard, with warnings that Louis was in grave danger. She may have reminded them that a ransom for their lord would prove even more costly than military assistance.

The exact size of the force that the resourceful Blanche raised is hard to determine. Wendover puts the figure at 300 ‘brave knights, well provisioned for war, with a large force of soldiers’; the Anonymous says there were ‘barely 100 knights’. The Melrose chronicler gives exact figures of 125 French knights, 33 crossbowmen, 146 cavalry and 833 infantry. Thus Wendover may be quite accurate if we take his figure of 300
milites
to encompass the whole cavalry element. The Dunstable annalist simply writes of ‘many powerful nobles’. The Marshal’s biographer is similarly vague, but emphasises the strength of the new army: it was large enough not only to ‘rescue’ Louis’s position but also ‘to conquer the realm’. Blanche ‘rode through all the towns in France to seek assistance in the form of great contingents of men and coffers of money’. She went about her task with such energy that she gathered such a force they would be able to conquer ‘the entire kingdom’.
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The biographer, who says that Philip was equally active in gathering the army, was exaggerating the size of the French force for dramatic effect, but clearly it was sizeable and even if comprising 100 knights plus sergeants, would go a considerable way to replacing the prisoners taken at Lincoln (and now trickling back to Louis after the payment of their ransoms) and to prolonging his campaign well into the future.