第47章 ENGLAND UNDER KING JOHN,CALLED LACKLAND(3)

Which was Excommunication.King John was declared excommunicated,with all the usual ceremonies.The King was so incensed at this,and was made so desperate by the disaffection of his Barons and the hatred of his people,that it is said he even privately sent ambassadors to the Turks in Spain,offering to renounce his religion and hold his kingdom of them if they would help him.It is related that the ambassadors were admitted to the presence of the Turkish Emir through long lines of Moorish guards,and that they found the Emir with his eyes seriously fixed on the pages of a large book,from which he never once looked up.That they gave him a letter from the King containing his proposals,and were gravely dismissed.That presently the Emir sent for one of them,and conjured him,by his faith in his religion,to say what kind of man the King of England truly was?That the ambassador,thus pressed,replied that the King of England was a false tyrant,against whom his own subjects would soon rise.And that this was quite enough for the Emir.

Money being,in his position,the next best thing to men,King John spared no means of getting it.He set on foot another oppressing and torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite in his way),and invented a new punishment for one wealthy Jew of Bristol.Until such time as that Jew should produce a certain large sum of money,the King sentenced him to be imprisoned,and,every day,to have one tooth violently wrenched out of his head-beginning with the double teeth.For seven days,the oppressed man bore the daily pain and lost the daily tooth;but,on the eighth,he paid the money.With the treasure raised in such ways,the King made an expedition into Ireland,where some English nobles had revolted.

It was one of the very few places from which he did not run away;

because no resistance was shown.He made another expedition into Wales-whence he DID run away in the end:but not before he had got from the Welsh people,as hostages,twenty-seven young men of the best families;every one of whom he caused to be slain in the following year.

To Interdict and Excommunication,the Pope now added his last sentence;Deposition.He proclaimed John no longer King,absolved all his subjects from their allegiance,and sent Stephen Langton and others to the King of France to tell him that,if he would invade England,he should be forgiven all his sins-at least,should be forgiven them by the Pope,if that would do.

As there was nothing that King Philip desired more than to invade England,he collected a great army at Rouen,and a fleet of seventeen hundred ships to bring them over.But the English people,however bitterly they hated the King,were not a people to suffer invasion quietly.They flocked to Dover,where the English standard was,in such great numbers to enrol themselves as defenders of their native land,that there were not provisions for them,and the King could only select and retain sixty thousand.

But,at this crisis,the Pope,who had his own reasons for objecting to either King John or King Philip being too powerful,interfered.He entrusted a legate,whose name was PANDOLF,with the easy task of frightening King John.He sent him to the English Camp,from France,to terrify him with exaggerations of King Philip's power,and his own weakness in the discontent of the English Barons and people.Pandolf discharged his commission so well,that King John,in a wretched panic,consented to acknowledge Stephen Langton;to resign his kingdom 'to God,Saint Peter,and Saint Paul'-which meant the Pope;and to hold it,ever afterwards,by the Pope's leave,on payment of an annual sum of money.To this shameful contract he publicly bound himself in the church of the Knights Templars at Dover:where he laid at the legate's feet a part of the tribute,which the legate haughtily trampled upon.But they DO say,that this was merely a genteel flourish,and that he was afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket it.

There was an unfortunate prophet,the name of Peter,who had greatly increased King John's terrors by predicting that he would be unknighted (which the King supposed to signify that he would die)before the Feast of the Ascension should be past.That was the day after this humiliation.When the next morning came,and the King,who had been trembling all night,found himself alive and safe,he ordered the prophet-and his son too-to be dragged through the streets at the tails of horses,and then hanged,for having frightened him.

As King John had now submitted,the Pope,to King Philip's great astonishment,took him under his protection,and informed King Philip that he found he could not give him leave to invade England.

The angry Philip resolved to do it without his leave but he gained nothing and lost much;for,the English,commanded by the Earl of Salisbury,went over,in five hundred ships,to the French coast,before the French fleet had sailed away from it,and utterly defeated the whole.

The Pope then took off his three sentences,one after another,and empowered Stephen Langton publicly to receive King John into the favour of the Church again,and to ask him to dinner.The King,who hated Langton with all his might and main-and with reason too,for he was a great and a good man,with whom such a King could have no sympathy-pretended to cry and to be VERY grateful.There was a little difficulty about settling how much the King should pay as a recompense to the clergy for the losses he had caused them;but,the end of it was,that the superior clergy got a good deal,and the inferior clergy got little or nothing-which has also happened since King John's time,I believe.