punishment or ransom. Roger of Wendover grumbles at this clemency of the King, “who,” he says, “set a very bad precedent for others to rebel against him in like manner, trusting to be similarly treated.”[777] Pandulf was probably a better judge than Roger of the respective claims and advantages of mercy and severity in such a case. His mild policy certainly proved successful so far as Aumale himself was concerned. The count managed, indeed, to stave off the fulfilment of his crusading vow for more than twenty years longer; but in all those years he seems never, save for one brief moment in 1223, to have given any trouble to the government.[778] The next step taken by the King’s guardians towards the recovery of control over the royal castles was a weighty one. They “urged” Earl William the Marshal to surrender Marlborough[779] and Luggershall; “a thing which”--as the king himself explained in a letter written some three years later--“was most expedient for us, that thereby the other magnates should be more easily induced to resign likewise the castles of ours which they held.”[780] To conciliate the Marshal himself was, however, at that moment especially, a matter of almost greater consequence than to get possession of the castles. No other man in England had as much power to strengthen or weaken the hands of the government as he; and that power was on the increase. In June, 1220, he had ceded to his brother Richard his rights to the Norman lands of their father. Richard, having no lands in England, could do what the Earl could not--enter into his Norman heritage, by doing homage for it to Philip Augustus; and he did so without delay.[781] Thus the family was brought into close connexion with the interests of France. The Marshal’s wife, a half-sister of the Count of Aumale, had now been dead some years, and he was contemplating a marriage with a sister of Earl Robert de Bruce. In view of the relative geographical positions of Bruce’s earldom on the Scottish border and the Marshal’s lands in Ireland, the prospect of this alliance filled the English King’s Council with alarm; the more so as they believed that “there were other magnates in England who by malicious confederations were striving to turn away his heart from” the King.[782] They therefore offered him a bride of higher rank--the youngest sister of the King. The Justiciar and the Marshal pledged their faith to each other that this marriage should take place, if the King and the magnates of the realm would give their consent, which the Legate and Hubert promised to do their utmost to obtain. The Marshal then surrendered the two castles, delivering them into the hands of the Legate as their custodian, on a promise that they should be restored to him if the contract were not fulfilled within a certain time.[783]