heraldryofyorkmi01custuoft

TREHOUS. 127
Hubert, therefore, thought it prudent to admit that the boy was alive.
Upon which John moved him from Falaise to Rouen, and coming to the
castle in a boat during the night-time, ordered him to be brought forth.
The young Prince, aware of his danger, and now more subdued by his
misfortune, threw himself on his knees before his uncle and begged for
mercy but the barbarous tyrant, making no reply, stabbed him with his
;
own hands, and fastening a stone to the dead body, threw it into the Seine.
In whatever manner, however, Arthur met his death, John seems to
have been universally credited with the responsibility of it. Matilda de
Braose, wife of William de Braose (Matthew Paris tells us, ii., 523) when
the King's soldiers came to her demanding her sons as hostages for the
fidelity of their father in case the Pope should put the country under an
interdict, uttered these taunting words " I will not : give up my children
" to your King John, because he basely murdered his nephew Arthur, whom
" he ought honourably to have guarded." Her husband tried in vain to
palliate such an incautious utterance ;
and John, in a fury, as soon as it
was reported to him, sent off secretly in hot haste a large body of soldiers
and retainers to seize William de Braose and all his family who only
saved themselves by precipitate flight into Ireland. But John had his
revenge, for two years afterwards (1210)
he seized them in Meath, and on
their escaping to the Isle of Man, recaptured them and sent them heavily
ironed to Windsor Castle, where, by his orders, Matilda and her eldest son,
William, were starved to death. One of the soldiers of King Louis, at a
conference between Louis and the Papal legate, Waldo (651), openly
charged John with his nephew's death, as a thing well known by all (res
notissima est omnibus] ; and King Louis's ambassadors to Pope Innocent
gave as their reason for dethroning John, " that he had killed his nephew
" treacherously, with his own hands by that sort of death which the
" English call murder."
him
Innocent, however, whom John had conciliated by appealing to
to interpose his authority between him and the French monarch (Hume,
vol. i., 447), seems to have taken a more lenient view of the proceeding, and
replied (Matthew Paris, p. 659) that " many Emperors and Princes, and
" even Kings of France, are said in their annals to have killed many
" innocent people, but we do not read that any of them were sentenced to
" death ;
and when Arthur was taken at the Castle of Mirabel, not as an
" innocent man, but as a guilty man and traitor to his lord and uncle, to
"
whom he had done homage and fealty, he could have been condemned
" by right to even the gravest death without condemnation."
However, this friendly intercourse did not last long, and the Holy
Father, who could condone murder and cruelty when employed to further a
matter of State policy, could not so regard any lack of submission to his