King John's enemies had reckoned on his character as a sluggard, but they found their mistake, for when he heard of the attack on his mother he hastened to Mirabel with lightning speed, hemmed in Count Hugh and Duke Arthur of Bretagne, who had joined him, and took both prisoners. The one was his rival in love, the other in empire. Count Hugh was subjected to the most insulting treatment at the hands of the king, who had him and the other insurgent barons of Poitou chained hand and foot to carts drawn by oxen. In this manner they were forced to follow him wherever he went, until he made them embark with him for England. King John was not so cruel to his nephew, Arthur, whom he merely had locked up in the citadel of Falaise, {125} [Illustration: 0129] {127}leaving himself the sole representative of the house of Plantagenet. [[A.D. 1204.]] In 1204 Queen Eleanora died, and from that moment her son John seemed lost to all sense of decency or fear, and became more corrupt and wicked than the most brutal of his subjects. Queen Isabella's influence was no check on his notorious conduct. In 1206 he entered into a treaty with his prisoner, Hugh de Lusignan, with whose aid he conquered the southern part of France. On his return to England he made some most unreasonable demands of his barons, one of them being the surrender of their children as hostages. Those young nobles who fell into his hands were required to attend the queen, serve her at meals and follow her at cavalcades and processions. The Lord of Bramber resisted the King's demand, whereupon he, with his wife and five children, were all shut up in a room at the old Castle of Windsor and deliberately starved to death. [[A.D. 1211.]] Queen Isabella had given birth to several children, but that did not prevent her brutal husband from treating her with extreme harshness. Once, when he fancied that she had a fancy for a certain knight, he had the man assassinated, and his dead body suspended over her bed. Then he shut her up in Gloucester Abbey, where she remained until 1213, when it suited his majesty to take her with him to Angoulême. King John found himself again in need of Hugh de Lusignan's assistance when Philip Augustus of France seized the northern provinces. But that brave count refused his aid unless the king would give him his eldest daughter, Joanna, for a wife. This was a singular request, considering that he had once been engaged to the mother, but he was gratified, and the infant princess was {128}forthwith handed over to him to be brought up in one of his castles as her mother had been before her. Count Hugh soon cleared the northern provinces of France of the invaders, and then John returned to England to perpetrate new acts of tyranny. [Illustration: 0132]