It was now about the close of June, and intelligence reached London that John was at Winchester, and the barons determined to have some satisfactory understanding. Accordingly they sent a deputation to Winchester to inform him of their doubts, and to demand whether or not he really intended to keep the promises he had made at Runnymede. The king received the deputation with apparent frankness, ridiculed their suspicions as being utterly without foundation, and appointed a meeting with them in July, at Oxford, to which city he was on the point of removing. The barons were neither deceived by the king’s manner nor deluded by his words. They had lost the last lingering respect for his good faith; and they felt instinctively that he was exercising all his duplicity and all his ingenuity to free himself from their wardship and bring about their destruction, and vague rumours that mercenaries were being levied on the Continent added to their alarm. It was even said that John intended to take advantage of their absence at the tournament at Stamford to seize London; and, though he was without any army capable of taking a city, this report influenced them so far that they postponed the tournament, and named a distant day for its taking place at Hounslow. Ere long affairs reached a new stage, and caused more perplexity. It suddenly became known in London that John, regardless of his promise to hold a conference with the barons at Oxford, had left that city suddenly, ridden to the coast, and embarked in a ship belonging to one of the Cinque Ports, but with what object could not be divined; and though from that time the wildest stories were told on the subject, his movements were shrouded in such mystery that nothing certain was known. Even in the month of September, when the barons met in London and held a council at the house of the Templars, they were utterly at a loss to imagine what had become of the sovereign whom two months earlier they had browbeaten at Runnymede, and bound in chains which they then believed could never be broken. “He is drowned,” said one. “He has turned fisherman,” said a second. “No,” said a third; “he is roaming the narrow seas as a pirate.” “Doubtless he is living on the water,” said a fourth, “but it is in the company of the mariners of the Cinque Ports, whom he is, by an affectation of frankness and familiarity, alluring to his side in case of a struggle.” “Such fables are wholly unworthy of credit,” said a fifth. “For my part, I doubt not the truth of what is bruited as to his being weary of royalty and the troubles it has brought with it, and that he has abjured Christianity and taken refuge among the Moors of Granada, whose alliance he formerly sought.”