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But Kiyomori took care that a copy of the bonze Saiko's confession, extracted under torture and fully incriminating his Majesty, should come into the Imperial hands. *It is recorded that, on this occasion, Kiyomori, learning of his son's approach, attempted unsuccessfully to conceal under priestly robes the armour he had donned to go to the arrest of Go-Shirakawa.
At an early stage, some vague news of the plot reached Kiyomori's ears and he hastened from his Fukuhara villa to Kyoto. But it soon became evident that his information was incomplete. He knew, indeed, that Prince Mochihito was involved, but he suspected Go-Shirakawa also, and he entertained no conception of Yorimasa's complicity.
He secretly informed the ex-Emperor that Yoshinaka had planned a retreat to the east, carrying his Majesty with him, and this information, at a time when the excesses committed by Yoshinaka's troops had provoked much indignation, induced Go-Shirakawa to obtain from Hiei-zan and Miidera armed monks to form a palace-guard under the command of the kebiishi, Taira Tomoyasu, a declared enemy of Yoshinaka.
The Fujiwara had used the military leaders for their own ends; Kiyomori supplemented his military strength with Fujiwara methods. These steps were mere preludes to his ambitious programme. He married his wife's elder sister to the ex-Emperor, Go-Shirakawa, and the fruit of this union was a prince who subsequently ascended the throne as Takakura.
Both of these aims seemed to be threatened with failure when Yoshitsune preferred the Court in Kyoto to the camp in Kamakura; still more so when he accepted from Go-Shirakawa rank and office for which Yoritomo had not recommended him, and yet further when he obtained from the ex-Emperor a commission to lead the Minamoto armies westward without any reference to, and in despite of, the obvious intention of the Minamoto chief at Kamakura.
Go-Shirakawa, whose fate was always to obey circumstances rather than to control them, had issued a new mandate on the arrival of Yoritomo's forces at Kyoto, and Kamakura was now authorized to exterminate Yoshitsune with all his partisans, wherever they could be found.
The Taira chief had learned to stand in awe of his son's reproaches, and when Shigemori declared that he would not survive any violence done to Go-Shirakawa, Kiyomori left the council chamber, bidding Shigemori to manage the matter as he thought fit.* Thus, Go-Shirakawa escaped all the consequences of his association with the conspirators.
The Kamakura chief's plan was to remove these limitations, and to make the appointment not only for life but also general in the scope of its functions and hereditary in his own family, reserving to the sovereign the formal right of investiture alone. Go-Shirakawa, however, appreciated the far-reaching effects of such an arrangement and refused to sanction it.
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