and Robert de Vere.  Robert Fitz-Walter, who took the command of their united force, represented both parties equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house of Brionne, while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, Richard de Lucy, had been his grandfather.  Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrimage, these nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no longer with John’s delays.  If he refused to restore their liberties they swore to make war on him till he confirmed them by Charter under the king’s seal, and they parted to raise forces with the purpose of presenting their demands at Christmas.  John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of election, while he embittered still more the strife with his nobles by demanding scutage from the northern nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou.  But the barons were now ready to act, and early in January in the memorable year 1215 they appeared in arms to lay, as they had planned, their demands before the king.

[Sidenote:  John deserted]

John was taken by surprise.  He asked for a truce till Easter-tide, and spent the interval in fevered efforts to avoid the blow.  Again he offered freedom to the Church, and took vows as a Crusader against whom war was a sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of allegiance and fealty from the whole body of his subjects.  But month after month only showed the king the uselessness of further resistance.  Though Pandulf was with him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the way of aid from Rome; the commissioners whom he sent to plead his cause at the shire-courts brought back news that no man would help him against the charter that the barons claimed:  and his efforts to detach the clergy from the league of his opponents utterly failed.  The nation was against the king.  He was far indeed from being utterly deserted.  His ministers still clung to him, men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival, Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the administrative school of his father and who, dissent as they might from John’s mere oppression, still looked on the power of the Crown as the one barrier against feudal anarchy:  and beside them stood some of the great nobles of royal blood, his father’s bastard Earl William of Salisbury, his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and Henry Earl of Cornwall, a grandson of Henry the First.  With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal the elder, Earl of Pembroke.  William Marshal had shared in the rising of the younger Henry against Henry the Second, and stood by him as he died; he had shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp and in the outlawry of John.  He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-course, to recall the government to the path of freedom and law, but shrinking from a strife which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen’s day, and looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to bear upon the king than in forcing them from him by arms.