The time fixed by Louis for answering Henry’s demand for the restoration of his continental heritage had now come. On 10th October an embassy consisting of Bishops Pandulf of Norwich and John of Ely, Philip d’Aubigné, and Richard de Rivers, had been accredited to France to receive Louis’s reply, and to treat with him concerning a prolongation of the truce,[906] which would expire in April, 1224. These envoys met with a very unfavourable reception. Louis declared that the whole continental possessions of the Angevin house had been by a legal judgement escheated to the French Crown;[907] that they were therefore his by right--a right which, he added, he was prepared to prove in his own court, if the King of England would come and submit to its judgement; and that moreover the agreement to which he had sworn in England was no longer binding upon him, inasmuch as it had been doubly broken on the English side, first by the exaction of heavy ransoms from his partisans who had been captured at Lincoln, and secondly in that “the liberties of the realm of England, for which the war had been waged and which at his departure had been granted and sworn to by all, had been so dealt with that not only those most evil laws were brought back into use as of old, but others still more wicked were generally established throughout the realm.”[908] He wound up his harangue to the envoys with a distinct threat, which he charged them to repeat to those who had sent them: not only would he restore nothing, but he intended, when opportunity should offer, to prosecute his claim to the English Crown, as having been taken from John by a legal sentence and granted by the barons of England to himself.[909] Although the truce had still six months to run, the cry of Constantine Olaveson must have rung ominously in the ears of Hubert de Burgh when the French King’s complaints and threats were repeated to him,[910] even if the return of the envoys did not--as it most probably did--coincide with the most alarming outbreak of baronial discontent with which the government had had to deal since Louis left England.