FOOTNOTES:
[14] A royal manor near Salisbury.
[16] From the sprig of broom (planta genista) that his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, is said to have worn as a badge.
CHAPTER IX.
RICHARD I. AND JOHN.
1189-1216.
When Henry of Anjou died broken-hearted at Chinon, his eldest surviving son Richard succeeded him in all his vast dominions, save in the duchy of Brittany, which fell to the child Arthur, the son of Richard's brother Geoffrey. John, the late king's youngest-born, received a fit reward for his treachery to his father in losing the appanage that had been destined for him. He did not obtain any independent principality of his own, but Richard made him Earl of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset.
From the moment of his accession the new king began to busy himself with preparations for going to the Crusade. He had taken the Cross in 1187, and his penitence for lingering in Europe and troubling his father, when he should have been over-seas fulfilling his vow, seems to have had a real influence upon him. But the mere love of adventure must be allowed to have had a far larger share in turning his steps to the East. Richard had the habits and instincts of a turbulent feudal baron, not those of a king. He had spent his life up to this time in petty wars with his father, his brothers, and his vassals in Aquitaine; such an existence pleased him well, and he dreamed of more exciting warfare on a larger stage in the lands of the Infidel, as the highest ambition that he could conceive.
Preparations for the Crusade.—Sale of lands and offices.
The moment that he had been crowned, Richard set to work to scrape together every penny that he could procure, in order to provide against the expenses of the forthcoming Crusade. He began by selling every office and dignity that was vacant, with a gross disregard for the interests of the crown and the welfare of his subjects. He took £3000 from William Longchamp, the haughty and quarrelsome Bishop of Ely, and appointed him both Chancellor and Justiciar; that is, he made regent in his absence the most unsuitable man that could have been found. He sold the earldom of Northumberland to Hugh, Bishop of Durham, for £1000. A still greater bargain was obtained by William, King of Scotland, who for the sum of 10,000 marks (£6666) was let off the homage to the crown of England, which Henry II. had imposed upon him after the battle of Alnwick. Richard jestingly said that "he would have sold London itself if he could have found a rich enough buyer." But every town that wanted a charter, every baron who coveted a slice of crown land, every knight who wished to be made a sheriff, obtained the desired object at a cheap rate.
The Jews in England.—Outbreak of persecution.
Richard's reign began with an outburst of turbulence which illustrated his careless governance well enough. Among the many classes of subjects to whom his father had given peace and protection was the Jewish colony in England, a body which had been rapidly growing in numbers as England recovered from its ills under Henry's firm hand. The Jews were much hated by their neighbours, partly as rivals in trade of the native merchant, and as usurers who lent money at exorbitant interest, but most of all because of their race and religion. But they had settled under the king's protection, and in return for the heavy tribute which they paid him, obtained security for their life and goods. They were often called the "king's property," because he kept the right of taxing and managing them entirely in his own hands.
At Richard's coronation a deputation of Jewish elders came to bear him a gift. They were set upon by the king's foreign servants and cruelly beaten, in mere fanatical spite. The news spread, and on a false rumour that the king had approved the deed, the London mob rose and sacked the Jews' quarter. Nor was this all; the excitement spread over all England, and at Norwich, Stamford, Lincoln, York, and other places, there were riots in which many Jews were slain. At the last-named city a fearful tragedy occurred; all the Jews of York took refuge in the castle, and when they were beset by a howling mob who cried for their blood, they by common consent slew their wives and children, and then set fire to the castle and burnt themselves, rather than fall into the hands of their enemies. No adequate punishment was ever inflicted for these disgraceful riots; even at York only a fine was imposed on the town.
The third Crusade.—Quarrel of Richard and Philip of France.
Richard left England in December, 1189, and, after raising additional forces and stores of money in his continental dominions, sailed from Marseilles for the East. Richard was one of three sovereign princes who engaged in the third Crusade; the other two were the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa and Philip Augustus, King of France. The emperor led the troops of Germany by the land route through Constantinople and Asia Minor, but Richard and Philip had wisely resolved to go by sea. Frederic lost three-fourths of his army in forcing his way through the Turkish sultanate in Asia Minor, and was accidentally drowned himself ere he crossed the borders of Syria. Only a small remnant of the German host ever reached the Holy Land. Richard and Philip fared much better, and gained the Levant in safety, after halting in Sicily for the winter of 1190-91. It was during their stay at Messina that the two kings became bitter personal enemies; in his father's time Richard had been the friend of the French, and he did not realize for some time the fact that in succeeding to Henry's dominions he had also succeeded to the jealous hatred which Philip nourished for his over-great vassal, the Duke of Aquitaine and Normandy. But in Sicily Richard detected the French king plotting and intriguing against him, and for the future regarded him as a secret enemy, and viewed all his acts with suspicion.
Richard conquers Cyprus.
If we were relating the personal acts of Richard rather than the history of England, there would be much to tell of his feats in the East. He began by subduing the isle of Cyprus, whose ruler, Isaac Comnenus—a rebel against the Emperor of Constantinople—had ill-treated the shipwrecked crews of some English vessels. After conquering the whole island, he took formal possession of it, and with great pomp married there his affianced bride, Berengaria of Navarre, who had come out from Europe to join him. He then sailed for the Holy Land, and landed near Acre, in the centre of the seat of war.
Capture of Acre, 1191.
Acre was at this moment beset by those of the Crusaders who had arrived before Richard. But their camp was itself being besieged by a great Saracen host under Sultan Saladin, who had raised all the levies of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, to relieve the beleaguered city. The landing of the hosts of England and France soon turned the tide of war, and ere long Acre fell. Richard earned and obtained the whole credit of the success by his energy and courage, while his rival Philip, by his jealous bickering with the English, merited a name for disloyalty and lukewarm zeal. It must be confessed that Richard won himself many enemies by his haughtiness and hasty temper; not only did he quarrel with Philip, but he mortally offended Leopold of Babenberg, the Duke of Austria. The German had planted his banner upon the walls of Acre as if he had taken the town himself, and Richard had it hewn down and cast into the ditch.
Return of Philip.—Richard fails to reach Jerusalem.
Less than three weeks after Acre fell, the King of France suddenly announced his intention of returning home, though nothing had yet been done to defeat Saladin or recapture Jerusalem. He left part of his army behind him under the Duke of Burgundy, and sailed off, after making a vain promise that he would not molest Richard's dominions so long as he was at the Crusade.
Thus left to himself, Richard led the crusading host southward along the coast, and defeated Saladin at a pitched battle at Arsouf. He forced his way to within a few miles of Jerusalem, but, before attacking it, turned back to secure himself a base on the sea, through which he could get stores and provisions from his ships. He took Ascalon, therefore, and garrisoned it, and afterwards captured many neighbouring forts, and intercepted a great caravan which was bringing arms and stores for Saladin across the desert from Egypt. But when he wished to start again for Jerusalem, dissensions broke out in the crusading camp. The subject of dispute was the succession to the throne of Jerusalem. Richard supported Guy of Lusignan, one of his Poitevin vassals, while the French and the bulk of the other Crusaders wished to elect an Italian prince, Conrad of Montferrat. The quarrel kept the army idle till the hot season of 1092 arrived, and endured till Conrad was slain by a Saracen fanatic; then Richard moved forward, but when he had arrived within four hours' march of Jerusalem, the French portion of the army, worn out by thirst and exhaustion, refused to advance any further. Richard was forced to fall back when at the very goal, and refused even to look upon the Holy City. "My eyes shall never behold it, if my arm may not reconquer it," he cried, and, muffling his face in his cloak, he turned back towards the coast.
Richard leaves Palestine.
After defeating the Saracens in another fight near Jaffa, Richard patched up a truce for three years with Saladin, and resolved to return home. It was obvious that with thinned ranks and disloyal allies he could not retake Jerusalem, and he had received such news from England as to the doings of his brother John and his neighbour King Philip, that he was anxious to get home as soon as possible. So he made terms with the sultan, by which Acre and the other places that he had conquered were left to the Christians, and permission was given them to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem without let or hindrance. Then, without waiting for his fleet or his army, he started off in wild haste on a private ship, intending to land at Venice and make his way overland through Germany, for "he could not trust himself in France after the news that he had just received (1193).
Richard imprisoned in Germany.
But more haste proved less speed, in this as in so many other cases. Richard's ship was wrecked in the Adriatic, and he had to land at Ragusa. His path took him through the duchy of Leopold of Austria, whom he had so grievously offended at the siege of Acre. Although he was travelling in disguise, he was recognized at Vienna, and promptly cast into prison by the revengeful duke. After keeping him awhile in chains, Leopold sold him to his suzerain, the Emperor Henry VI. That monarch, being thus placed by chance in possession of the person of a sovereign with whom he was not at war, had the meanness to trump up charges against Richard in order to have some excuse for making him pay a ransom. So he accused his captive of having murdered Conrad of Montferrat, of having unjustly deprived the rebel Isaac of Cyprus of his realm, and of having insulted Leopold the Austrian. He was in prison more than a year, and no one in England knew what had become of him, since he had been travelling disguised and almost alone when he was taken.
Discontent and intrigues in England.
Meanwhile, during the three years of Richard's absence England had been much disturbed. William Longchamp, the haughty and tactless bishop whom he had left behind him as Justiciar, made himself so much disliked by his pride, his despotism, and his violence that there was a general rising against him. The king's brother John, the Earl of Cornwall, put himself at the head of the malcontents, and began seizing all the royal castles on which he could lay hands. Longchamp was at last forced to resign his place and fled over-sea, hardly escaping the fury of the people at Dover, where he was caught in the disguise of a huckster-woman and nearly pulled to pieces. His place as Justiciar was taken by Archbishop Walter of Rouen, whom Richard sent home from the Crusade for the purpose. Walter was a prudent and able man, but found a hard task before him, for Earl John was set on making himself a party in England, and aimed at the crown. When the news of Richard's captivity reached London, John openly avowed his intention, and allied himself with Philip of France. That prince had begun to intrigue against the King of England the moment that he got back from the Crusade. He had a claim on the Vexin, a district on the Norman border, which he had once ceded to Henry II. on the understanding that it should be the dowry of a French princess whom Richard was to marry. As the marriage had never taken place, and the English king had chosen another bride, Philip had much show of reason on his side. But he aimed not only at recovering the Vexin, but at winning as much of his absent neighbour's land as he could seize. With this object he offered to support Earl John in his attempt to seize the English throne, in return for some territorial gains. John was ready enough to agree, did homage to him, and gave him up the Vexin and the city of Tours. Meanwhile they both sent secret messages to the Emperor Henry, to beg him to detain Richard in prison as long as possible.
Richard's ransom.
But Henry thought more of screwing money out of his prisoner than of keeping him for ever in his grasp. He offered to release Richard on receiving the enormous ransom of 150,000 marks (£100,000). It was a huge sum for England to raise, but so anxious was the nation to get back its king, that no hesitation was made in accepting the bargain. Meanwhile John and Philip, knowing that their enemy would soon be loose, were stirred up to hasty action. Philip raised his host and attacked Normandy, but was beaten off with loss from Rouen. John hired mercenary soldiers, gathered his friends, and seized a number of the royal castles in England. But only a small number of discontented barons backed him, and he was held in check by the loyal majority, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, who put himself at the head of the king's party. Even while this civil war was in progress, the money for Richard's ransom was being raised, by the imposition of a crushing tax of "one-fourth on all movable goods, and twenty shillings on every knight's fee."
Return of Richard.
In the spring of 1194 the emperor gave Richard his liberty, after receiving the stipulated sum and making his prisoner swear an oath of homage to him for his kingdom of England. But this preposterous vow of allegiance was not taken seriously by Richard or by England, being wrung by force from a helpless captive. On reaching England, the king put himself at the head of the army which was operating against the rebels, and took Nottingham and Tickhill, the two last strongholds which held out. John himself fled over-sea; some months later he was pardoned by his long-suffering brother.
Thus Richard was once more a free man, and in full possession of his realm. There was much in the state of England that required the master's eye, but the king was far more set on punishing his neighbour, King Philip, than on attending to the wants of his subjects. After appointing new officials to take charge of the kingdom, and raising great sums of money, he hurried over to Normandy to plunge into hostilities with the French.
War with France.—Taxation and discontent.
England never saw Richard again; indeed, in the whole course of his ten years' reign, he only spent seven months on this side of the channel. His heart was always in France, where he had been bred up, and not in England, though he had been born in the palace of Beaumont, in Oxford, not fifty yards from the spot where these lines are written. The remaining six years of Richard's reign were entirely occupied in fruitless and weary border wars with the French king. It was a war of sieges and skirmishes, not of great battles. Richard held his own, in spite of the rebellions stirred up by Philip among his vassals in Aquitaine; but he did not succeed in crushing his adversary, as might have been expected from his superior military skill. In England the struggle was only felt through the heavy taxation which the king imposed on the land, to keep up his large mercenary army over-sea. Archbishop Hubert Walter ruled as Justiciar with considerable wisdom and success, and as long as Richard was sent the money that he craved, he left the realm to itself. Hubert's rule was not altogether a quiet one, but the very troubles that arose against him show the growing strength of national feeling and liberty in England. In 1198, the Great Council, headed by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused the king's newest and most exorbitant schemes of taxation, and Hubert could not force them to pay. London in the same year was disturbed by a great democratic rising of the poorer citizens, headed by one William Fitz-Osbert, called Longbeard, who rose in riot to compel the aldermen to readjust the taxes of the city, and the Justiciar had to take arms to put it down. Fitz-Osbert fortified himself in Bow Church, but was wounded, taken, and hung.
Death of Richard.
An obscure and unworthy end was reserved for the restless and reckless son of the great Henry. He heard that Widomar, Viscount of Limoges, one of his vassals in Aquitaine, had found a great treasure-trove of gold, and bade him give it up. The viscount would not surrender all his find, so Richard laid siege to his castle of Chaluz. The place was taken, but while directing the attack the king received a wound from a crossbow bolt in his shoulder. His unskilful surgeons could not cure him, the wound gangrened, and Richard saw that his days were numbered. When the castle fell, Bertrand de Gourdon, the archer who had discharged the fatal bolt, was sought out and brought to his bedside. "What had I done that you should deal thus with me?" asked the king. "You slew my father and my two brothers with your own hands," replied the soldier, "and now I am ready to bear any torture since I know that you have to die." The fierce answer touched a chord to which Richard could respond. He bade his officers send the man away unharmed, but Mercadet, the chief among his mercenary captains, kept Gourdon in bonds till the king breathed his last, and then flayed him alive (April 6, 1199).
Rule of the Justiciar.—Coroners.
Of all the kings who ever ruled in this land Richard cared least for England, and paid least attention to its needs. But his reign was not therefore one that was harmful to his realm. The yoke of an absent king, even if he be a spendthrift, is not so hard as that of a tyrant who dwells at home, and England has known much worse days than those of the later years of Richard Cœur de Lion. His ministers kept up the traditions of the administration of Henry II., and ruled the land with law and order, duly summoning the Great Council, assessing taxation with its aid, and levying it with as little oppression as they could, through agents selected by the nation. One considerable advance in the direction of liberty was granted by Richard, when he allowed the shire-moots to choose for themselves "coroners," officials who were to take charge of the royal prerogatives in the counties in place of the sheriff; they were to investigate such matters as murder, riot, or injury to the king's lands or revenues, and the other offences which were called "the pleas of the crown." Thus an officer chosen by the people was substituted for one chosen by the crown, a great advantage to those who were to come under his hand. The "coroner" still survives in England, but all his duties save that of inquiring into cases of suspicious death have long been stripped from him.
John and Arthur of Brittany.—War in France.
Richard the Lion-hearted left two male kinsmen to dispute about his vast dominions. These were Arthur of Brittany, the son of his next brother Geoffrey, and John of Cornwall, his false and turbulent youngest brother. The English Great Council chose John as king without any hesitation; they would not take Arthur, a mere boy of twelve, who had never been seen in England; they preferred John in spite of his great and obvious faults. But in the continental dominions of Richard there was no such unanimity: the unruly barons of Anjou and Aquitaine thought they would gain through having a powerless boy to reign over them, rather than the unscrupulous and grasping Earl John. If it had not been for the old queen dowager, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who came forward to defend her best-loved son's claims, and to persuade her Gascon vassals to adhere to his cause, John would never have obtained any hold on the continent. By Eleanor's aid he triumphed for a moment, but baron after baron rose against him, using Arthur's name as his pretence, and civil war never ceased from the moment of John's accession. Philip of France, who now, as always, had his own ends to serve, feigned to espouse the cause of Arthur, and acknowledged him as his uncle's heir alike in Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. Thus the war between France and England, which had dragged on through the reign of Richard, continued in a new form all through the time of John. There was a partial pacification in 1200, when Philip was bought off from Arthur's cause by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he took arms again in 1202, on the flimsy pretext that John, as Duke of Normandy, refused to plead in French law courts against his own vassals.
Character and policy of John.
Philip was induced to resume the struggle mainly because of his rival's growing unpopularity in all parts of his dominion. As king, John displayed on a larger scale all the faults that he had shown before his accession. All the vices of the Angevin house reached their highest development in him; he was as hot-tempered as his father, as false as his mother, as ungrateful as his brother Henry, as cruel, extravagant, and reckless as his brother Richard. His own special characteristic was a crooked and short-sighted cunning, which brought him through the troubles of one moment only to involve him in deeper vexations in the next. His reign in England had begun with heavy taxation for the French war. He had irritated the baronage by divorcing his wife Hawise, the heiress of the great earldom of Gloucester, without any cause or reason. Then he had carried off by violence Isabella of Angoulême from her affianced husband, the Count of La Marche, one of his greatest vassals in Aquitaine, and married her in spite of the threats of the Church.
Murder of Arthur of Brittany.
It was Count Hugh of La Marche who in revenge led the next rising of the unruly French vassals of John. He sent for Arthur of Brittany, who came to his aid with a great band of King Philip's knights, and together they invaded Aquitaine and laid siege to Mirebeau, where lay the old Queen Eleanor, John's one trusty supporter in the south. Roused by the news of his mother's danger, the King of England made a hasty dash on Mirebeau, surprised the rebel camp, and captured Arthur of Brittany with all his chief supporters. This success was fated to be his ruin, for when he found his nephew in his hands, John could not resist the temptation to murder him. After keeping him in prison for some months, he had him secretly slain in the castle of Rouen (April, 1203). The poor lad had only just reached the age of sixteen when he was thus cut off.
Loss of John's continental dominions.
Arthur's murder profoundly shocked John's subjects on both sides of the sea, but it was absolutely fatal to his cause in France. His rebellious subjects, unable to use Arthur's name against their master any longer, threw themselves into the hands of the King of France, and took him as their direct lord and sovereign. Philip went through a solemn form of summoning John, as Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, to present himself at Paris, and there be tried for slaying his nephew. When John failed—as was natural—to appear, he was condemned in his absence, and adjudged to have forfeited all the fiefs that he held from the French crown.
To give effect to his sentence, Philip invaded Normandy and began to lay siege to its fortresses. John crossed to Normandy, but did not take the field; his conduct was so strange that men thought that some infatuation from heaven had fallen upon him as a judgment for having slain his nephew. He lay at Rouen for many months, giving great feasts, and boasting that when he chose he would drive King Philip out of the duchy. But, instead of sallying out to make his vaunts good, he quietly looked on, while Philip took town after town with little resistance. The Normans did not love John, and fought feebly or not at all. Only Château Gaillard, a great castle which Richard I. had built to guard the valley of the lower Seine, made any serious defence. Instead of opposing the enemy, John fled from Normandy and took refuge in England. After his departure, Rouen and the remaining cities of the duchy threw open their gates to the French. In the following year Philip pursued his victorious career, and completed the conquest of Anjou and Touraine. In 1206 he fell upon Aquitaine, and conquered Poitou and Northern Guienne. Only the great ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle, with the southern half of Guienne, remained true to John.
Thus passed away, not only the great but ephemeral continental empire which Henry II. had built up, but also the Norman duchy itself, whose fortunes had been united to those of England for nearly a century and a half. For the future the Plantagenet kings owned only a corner of southern France, and were no longer great continental sovereigns. The monarch's loss was the nation's gain. England's kings were no longer foreigners; they did not spend half their time abroad, or devote their whole energy to schemes of aggrandisement in France. The Anglo-Norman barons, too, were compelled to become wholly English, since their estates over-sea fell into the hands of the enemy and passed away from them. In this way John's cruelty and shiftlessness did more for England's good than the wisdom and strength of his father.
But in the mean while John, being deprived of his continental dominions, was constrained to reside in England, and proved a most undesirable neighbour to his unhappy subjects. After an unsuccessful attempt to reconquer Poitou in 1206, he made peace with King Philip, on such terms as he could obtain. Bordeaux and the duchy of Guienne remained with him, but he was compelled to acquiesce in the loss of all his other provinces.
Quarrel with Innocent III.—Stephen Langton.
John was barely quit of his disastrous French war when he became involved in a quarrel with the papacy, of which the issue was even more disgraceful than that of his strife with King Philip. In 1205 died Archbishop Hubert Walter, who had served King Richard so well as Justiciar. In ordinary times his successor would have been duly nominated by the king and elected by the monks of Canterbury, who formed the cathedral chapter of that see. But John was in evil plight at the time; he was universally disliked, and the clergy all over Europe were being spurred on by the example of the bold and arrogant Pope Innocent III. to assert new and unheard-of claims and privileges. When the news of Hubert's death was brought, a majority of the monks of Canterbury met in secret conclave and elected Reginald, their sub-prior, as archbishop, without asking the king's leave. Reginald at once started off for Rome to get his appointment confirmed by Pope Innocent. When John heard what had been done, he came to Canterbury in great wrath, and by threats and menaces compelled the monks to proceed to a second election, and to chose his favourite, John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, to fill Hubert Walter's place. He then sent an embassy to Rome to submit this election to the Pope. But Innocent III. would have neither Reginald nor John for archbishop; he said that the first had been secretly and illegally chosen, while the second had been imposed on the chapter by force and threats. Then he took the unprecedented step of appointing to the see himself; he made the representatives of both John and Reginald come before him, and frightened or cajoled them into accepting his nominee, Stephen Langton, a worthy and learned English cardinal who resided with him at Rome. Langton was personally all that could be desired, but it was a flagrantly illegal usurpation that the Pope should impose him on the English king and nation without their consent.
The interdict.
John was driven to fury by this arrogant claim of the Pope. He refused to accept the nomination, or to allow Langton to enter England. In return Innocent laid an interdict on the realm, suspending on his own authority the celebration of divine service, closing the churches, and even prohibiting the dead from being buried in consecrated ground. If the English Church had stood by the king and refused to take notice of this harsh decree, it would have been of little effect. But the clergy always followed the Pope; they looked upon themselves as a great international guild depending on the Roman see, and disregarded all their rights and sympathies as Englishmen. The majority of the bishops published the interdict, and bade their flocks observe it. Many of them, fearing John's inevitable wrath, fled over-sea the moment that they had promulgated the sentence (1208). They were wise to do so, for the king raged furiously against the whole body of clergy; he exiled the monks of Canterbury, seized the estates and revenues of the absconding bishops, and declared that, till the interdict was removed, all ecclesiastical persons should be outside the pale of the law. They should not be allowed to appear in the courts, and no one who molested them should be punished. John set the example of seizing clerical property himself, and many of his courtiers and officers followed his lead.
The Pope deposes John.
Thus began a long struggle between the power of the Pope and that of the king. For five years it continued, to the great misery of England, for the nation was deeply religious, and felt most keenly the deprivation of all its spiritual privileges. Yet for a long time the people stood by the king, for it was generally felt that the Pope's arbitrary conduct was indefensible. John himself cared nought for papal censures, as long as nothing more than spiritual pressure was brought to bear on him. He filled his coffers with Church money, and laughed at the interdict. But presently Innocent found a more effective way of bending the king's will. He proclaimed that he would depose John for contumacy, and give his kingdom to another. The mandate to drive him out was entrusted to John's old and active foe, Philip of France, who at once began to prepare a great fleet and army in Normandy (1213).
John's surrender.
The English barons and people were more angered than frightened, and a great army mustered on Barham Down, in Kent, to oppose the French landing. But the king himself was much cowed by the Pope's threat. He knew that he was disliked and despised by his subjects, and he did not trust them in the hour of danger. Instead of fighting the quarrel out, he made secret proffers of submission. So the Pope's envoy, Pandulf, came to Dover, and received John's abject surrender. Not only did he agree to acknowledge Langton as archbishop, and to restore all the lands and revenues of which he had robbed the Church, but he stooped to win Innocent's favour by doing homage to him, and declaring the kingdom of England a fief of the Holy See. He gave his crown into Pandulf's hands, and then took it back from him as a gift from the Pope. In return the papal mandate to Philip was withdrawn, and Pandulf bade the French king dismiss his fleet and army, and cease to make war on the vassal of the Church (May, 1213).
John's gift of the English crown to the Pope had been done secretly and privately, without any summoning or consulting of the Great Council; it had been accomplished behind the back of the nation. When it became known, the baronage and the people were alike disgusted at the king's grovelling submission. He had induced them to suffer untold miseries in his cause, and had then left them in the lurch and surrendered all that they had been fighting for.
Destruction of the French fleet.
For the moment, however, John's intrigue had its success. The papal approval was withdrawn from the King of France, and—what was of more importance—an English fleet under William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the French invasion-flotilla as it lay in the Port of Damme, and took or sunk well-nigh every vessel. The king was free from danger again, and talked of taking the offensive against the French and crushing his enemy Philip.
The baronage and Archbishop Langton.
The last act of John's troubled reign was now beginning. While the king was dreaming of nothing but war in France, the nation was preparing to put a stop to his erratic and tyrannical rule by armed force. When Archbishop Langton was received in England, he proved himself no mere creature of the Pope, but a good Englishman. One of his first acts was to propose to the baronage, at a great assembly in St. Paul's Cathedral, that the king should be asked to ratify and reissue the charter that his great-grandfather Henry I. had granted to the English people, binding himself to abstain from all vexatious and oppressive customs, and abide by the ancient customs of the realm. This proposal was accepted at once by the great majority of the barons as the wisest and most constitutional means of bringing pressure on the king.
Invasion of France.—Defeat and return of John.
John meanwhile had called out the whole military force of the nation for an invasion of France. But all the barons of the North refused to follow him, and so great was the discontent of the English that he had mainly to depend on foreign mercenaries. He staked all his fortunes on the ensuing campaign, believing that if he could reconquer his lost continental dominions, he would afterwards win his way to complete control in England. His schemes were very far-reaching: Philip was to be attacked from north and south at once; while John was to land in Poitou and march on the Loire, a great confederacy of John's allies were to assail France from the north. This league was headed by John's nephew, Otho of Saxony, who claimed the title of emperor, but had been withstood in Germany by competitors whom Philip of France had supported. In revenge Otho gathered a North-German army, supported by the Dukes of Brabant and Holland, and the Counts of Boulogne and Flanders. John sent a mercenary force under the Earl of Salisbury to join him, and the combined host entered France and met King Philip at Bouvines, near Lille. John had trusted that his own attack on southern France would have distracted the French king's attention, but Philip left him almost unopposed, and gathered the whole force of France to oppose the Germans and Flemings. While John was overrunning Poitou and storming Angers, Philip was crushing his confederates. At the battle of Bouvines the combined army was scattered to the winds; the emperor was put to flight, and the Earl of Salisbury and the Count of Boulogne captured (July 27, 1214). Otho of Saxony was ruined by the fight, and never raised his head again; nor did any German host invade France for the next three hundred years. John, though he had not been present at the fight, was as effectually crushed as Otho. Free from danger from the north, the French king turned upon him, and drove him out of his ephemeral conquests in Poitou, so that he had to return to England completely foiled and beaten.
The barons take up arms.
But in England John had now to face his angry baronage. When he came home in wrath, and began to threaten to punish every man who had not followed him to the invasion of France, the barons drew together and prepared for armed resistance. In earlier days we have seen the English nobility withstanding the king in the cause of feudal anarchy. In the time of Stephen or of Henry II., the crown had represented the interests of the nation, and the barons those of their own class alone. It was then for England's good that the king should succeed in establishing a strong central government by putting down his turbulent vassals. But now things were changed. Henry II. had made the crown so strong that the nation was in far greater danger of misgovernment by a tyrannical king than of anarchy under a mob of feudal chiefs. The barons did not any longer represent themselves alone; they were closely allied both with the Church and with the people for the defence of the common rights of all three against a grasping and unscrupulous monarch. In the present struggle the baronage were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, their wisest counsellor, and they were everywhere supported both by the towns and by the smaller freemen of the whole realm. We shall see that in the oncoming struggle they demanded, not new privileges for themselves, but law and liberty for every subject of the English crown.
The first meeting of the barons was held at Bury St. Edmunds, in November, 1214: it was attended mainly by the lords of the North; the majority of the nobility had not yet moved. They formulated their demand that the king should give England a charter of liberties, drew up a list of the points which were to be insisted on, and determined to go in arms to the king at Christmas to lay their requests before him. John was seriously frightened; he asked the Pope's aid, took the vows of a crusader in order to get the sympathy of the Church on his side, and collected an army of mercenaries. But when he sounded the intentions of those of his vassals who had not yet taken arms, he found that one and all approved of the demands of the insurgent barons, and refused to aid him against them.
Meeting at Runnymede.
John was always lacking in moral courage; instead of taking the field at the head of his mercenaries, he began to treat with the rebels, resolved to grant all they asked, and then to bide his time and repudiate his promises at the earliest possible opportunity. So befell the famous meeting at Runnymede, where the king solemnly swore to grant all the provisions of the "Great Charter," which had been drawn up for his signature by Archbishop Langton and a committee composed of an equal number of the insurgent barons and of those who had not taken up arms.
The Great Charter.
The Great Charter was signed on the 15th of June, 1215, in the presence of the archbishop, the whole of the baronage, and a vast assembly of all ranks. It is a document of sixty-three clauses, of which many were quite trivial and related to purely personal or local grievances. But the important part of its provisions may be summed up under six heads.
Firstly, the king promises that "the English Church shall be free"—free, that is, from violent interference in the election of its prelates, and from illegal taxation.
Secondly, the feudal rights of the king over his tenants-in-chief are defined. He is only to raise the customary "aids" and dues, and their amount is laid down. His rights of wardship over widows and orphans are stated and limited. In a similar way the tenants-in-chief promise to exercise only these same rights over their own vassals.
Thirdly, there is to be no taxation without the consent of the Great Council—the first indication of the control of Parliament over the national revenues.
Fourthly, the administration of justice is to be strengthened and purified. No one is to be tried or punished more than once for the same offence. No one is to be imprisoned on the king's private fiat, but if arrested he must be at once put on trial, and that before a jury of his peers. Fines for every sort of offence are to be fixed and made proportionate to the crime, not to the king's idea of the amount he could extract from the criminal.
Fifthly, the king is not to put foreigners, ignorant of the laws of England, in any judicial or administrative post, and he is at once to dismiss all his foreign mercenary troops.
Sixthly, the city of London, and all other cities which enjoy rights and privileges under earlier royal charters, are to be fully confirmed in them.
The Great Charter then plunges into a mass of smaller grievances, where we need not follow it. But it ends with a most peculiar and important clause, which shows how little the baronage trusted the king. A body of twenty-five guardians of the Charter is appointed, who undertake to see that the king carries it out, and they are authorized to constrain him to observe it by force of arms if he swerves from his plighted word. These guardians include seven earls, fourteen barons, three sons of great lords whose fathers still survived, and the Mayor of London.
The character of Magna Carta is very noticeable; it is rather unsystematic in shape, being mainly composed of a list of grievances which are to be remedied. It does not purport to be a full statement of the English constitution, but only a recapitulation of the points on which the king had violated it. But it is not merely a check on John's evil doings, but a solemn engagement between the king, the barons, the Church, and the people that each shall respect the rights of the other. Wherever it is stated that the king is to abstain from using any particular malpractice against his vassals, it is also added that his vassals will on their part never use that same form of oppression against their own tenants. Thus it guarantees the rights of the small man against the great, no less than those of the great man against the king. It is in this respect that the Charter differs from many grants of privileges exacted by foreign nobles from foreign kings. Abroad the barons often curbed the royal power, but they did it for their own selfish ends alone, not for the common good of the nation.
John's faithlessness.—Attitude of the Pope.
John had signed the Charter in a moment of fear and depression of spirits. He did not intend to observe it a moment longer than he could help, and called its provisions "mere foolishness." When the barons dispersed, he violated his engagements by gathering another great horde of mercenaries, and sent to Rome to his suzerain Innocent III., to get absolution from the oath he had sworn. As he had once utilized the nation against the Pope, so he would now utilize the Pope against the nation.
Civil war.
Innocent, who cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of England, resolved to support his obedient vassal. He censured Archbishop Langton for siding with the barons, and summoned him to Rome to answer for his conduct. He freed the king from his oath, and he swore that he would excommunicate any man who took arms against him. But John had taught his barons to despise ecclesiastical thunders. They flew to arms, and war broke out. The king at first had the advantage; his mercenaries were all at hand, and the barons were scattered and unorganized. The king took Rochester, and hung the garrison who held out against him, and then started northward, harrying the land with fire and sword as far as Berwick.
Lewis of France elected king by the barons.
Provoked beyond endurance, the majority of the barons swore that they would cast away John and all his house. They declared him deposed, and resolved to choose a new king. But they made a great mistake in their choice, for they offered the crown to Lewis, the Prince-royal of France, who had married Blanche, one of John's nieces. Any other candidate would have been better, for Lewis was the son of King Philip, the great enemy of England, and by calling him in, the barons seemed to be allying themselves with the national foe. Many who would have gladly served against John in another cause, refused to take arms in that of the Frenchman (1216).
Lewis in England.—Death of John.
Meanwhile Prince Lewis landed in Kent, was received into London, and became master of all eastern England. But he soon found that he was the king of a faction, not of the whole nation. Many of the barons joined John rather than serve a foreigner; many more remained neutral. The whole realm was divided; here and there castles and towns held out against the new king, and in especial the seamen and merchants of the Cinque Ports refused to open their gates to a Frenchman. John resolved to try the ordeal of battle; he took Lincoln, and marched southward. But while his army was crossing the sea-marshes of the Wash it was overtaken by a high tide, and all his baggage and treasure, with many of his men, were swept away. John himself escaped with difficulty, and fell ill next day, of rage and grief and overexertion, as is most probable, though contemporary writers thought he had been poisoned. To the great benefit of England, he died within a week of his seizure, at Newark Castle (October 19, 1216). No man had a good word to say for him; cruel, perjured, rash and cowardly by turns, an evil-liver, a treacherous son and brother, he was loathed by every one who knew him.
CHAPTER X.
HENRY III.
1216-1272.
The moment that John was dead, the insurgent barons began to be conscious of the huge mistake that they had made in calling over Lewis of France to their aid. John's successor was his eldest son Henry, a young boy of nine, against whom no one could feel any personal objection. But the rebels had committed themselves to the cause of Lewis, and could not go back. The civil war therefore continued, but the supporters of Lewis were without heart or enthusiasm in his cause.
William, Earl of Pembroke.—Henry crowned.
The young Henry was in the hands of William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, one of the great barons who had refused to join Lewis. Pembroke at once crowned the young king at Gloucester, and made him declare his adherence to the Great Charter, and solemnly republish it. This act cut away the ground from under the feet of Lewis's party, as they could not any longer pretend that they were fighting merely to recover their constitutional rights. One after another they began to drop away, and go over to Henry's side.
Defeat of Lewis.—English naval victory.
The fortune of the civil war soon began to turn in favour of the young king. It was decided by two great battles. Lincoln castle was being besieged by the followers of Lewis, French and English. To relieve it William the Marshal set out with a small army, and, surprising the enemy in the streets of the town, while they were busied in the siege, he inflicted a great defeat upon them. Most of the great English barons of Lewis's party were taken prisoners in the fray. Shortly after a second decisive engagement completely shattered Lewis's hopes. He was expecting great reinforcements from France, which were to be brought to him by a fleet commanded by Eustace the Monk, a cruel pirate captain whom he had hired to serve him because of his naval skill. But Hubert de Burgh, the Justiciar of King Henry, put to sea from Dover with a small squadron of ships raised from the Cinque Ports, and met the French in mid-channel off Sandwich. The English had the better, most of the hostile vessels were captured, and Eustace the Monk was taken and hung for his former piracies. This was the first great naval battle which an English fleet ever won.
Deprived of hope of succour from France, and seeing most of his English supporters captives in Pembroke's hands, Prince Lewis resolved to abandon his enterprise and leave England. He proffered terms to Pembroke and de Burgh, who eagerly accepted them. So by the treaty of Lambeth he undertook to depart and give up his claim to the crown, while the Earl Marshal and Justiciar on their part consented to grant an amnesty to all Lewis's partisans, and to restore them to possession of their estates. To facilitate Lewis's quick retreat he was given a sum of 10,000 marks (September 17, 1217).
Hubert de Burgh Justiciar.
Thus the civil war came to an end, but its evil effects long endured, William of Pembroke, who acted till his death in 1219 as regent of the realm, did all that he could to quiet matters down; but there was much trouble left to his successor, Hubert de Burgh, the great Justiciar, who bore sway in England for all the remaining years of King Henry's minority. Hubert conferred many and signal benefits on the realm. He discomfited an attempt of the Pope to govern England through his legates, under the plea that John's homage of 1213 made the kingdom the property of the Holy See. He put down the turbulence of many of John's old courtiers and mercenaries, who, presuming on their fidelity in the civil war, refused obedience to the law of the land. The leaders of these persons were Peter des Roches, an intriguing Poitevin whom John had made Bishop of Winchester, and Fawkes de Bréauté, who had been the chief captain of the late king's Gascon soldiers. Peter was compelled to go on a Crusade, and Fawkes was crushed by force of arms when he presumed to refuse to give up the king's castle of Bedford, and had the impudence to seize and imprison a justice of assize who had given a legal decision against him. Fawkes himself escaped over-seas, but de Burgh took Bedford Castle, and hung William de Bréauté, the rebel's brother, because he had dared to hold out against the king's name (1224).
Character of Henry.—His foreign favourites.
Hubert's wise and salutary rule endured till the king came of age (1227), and for some years after he was still retained as Justiciar. But Henry, on coming to maturity, soon showed himself jealous of the great man who had protected his helpless boyhood. The new king was a strange mixture of good and evil. He was a handsome, courteous youth, blameless in his private life, and kind and liberal to his friends. He proved a good father and husband, and a great friend to the Church. He loved the fine arts, and built many stately edifices, of which the famous abbey of Westminster is the best known. But he had many serious faults: he was an incorrigible spendthrift; he was quite incapable of keeping any promise for more than a few days. He was of a busy volatile disposition, always vaulting from project to project, and never carrying to its end any one single plan. Being full of self-confidence he much disliked any one who gave him unpalatable counsel, or strove to keep him from any of his wild ephemeral schemes. This was the secret of his ingratitude to Hubert de Burgh, who never shrank from opposing his young master when the occasion demanded it. Moreover, Henry had the great fault of loving foreigners over-much; he surrounded himself with a horde of his relatives from the continent. His wife Eleanor of Provence brought a host of brothers and uncles from Savoy and southern France, and his mother sent over to England her children by her second marriage with her old lover, the Count of La Marche. [17] On these kinsmen Henry lavished not only great gifts of money, but earldoms, baronies, and bishoprics, to the great vexation of the English. His strangest act was to confer the archbishopric of Canterbury on his wife's uncle, Boniface of Savoy, a flighty young man of most unclerical habits. Henry was not cruel or malicious, like his father, and personally he was not disliked by his subjects, a fact which explains the patience with which they bore his vagaries for many years. But his actions were nearly always unwise, and his undertakings were invariably unsuccessful, so that his long- suffering vassals were at last constrained to take the reins of government out of his hands.
Dismissal of Hubert de Burgh.—Personal government.
For thirty years, however, Henry worked his will on England (1228-58) before drawing down the storm on his head. For the first five of them he was still somewhat restrained by the influence of Hubert de Burgh. But in 1232 the old Justiciar was not only dismissed, but thrown into prison, because Henry was wroth with him for frustrating an unwise and unnecessary war with France. But the king's ingratitude provoked such angry opposition that Hubert was ultimately released, and suffered to dwell in peace on his own lands.
After dismissing Hubert, Henry threw himself into the hands of Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, one of John's old courtiers. Peter knew or cared nothing about English laws and customs, and led the king into so many illegal and unconstitutional acts, that the whole nation called for his banishment. At last the Great Council, led by Edmund of Abingdon, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, frightened the king into dismissing him (1234).
But England did not profit very much by Peter's fall. Henry resolved to become his own prime minister; he did not appoint any one to the office of Justiciar, and a little later he abolished that of Chancellor also. He thought that he would act as his own chief justice and private secretary, but, as he was no less volatile than busy, he only succeeded in getting all public business into hopeless arrears.
War with France.
Henry's personal government endured for the weary time of twenty-four years. The events of the period were very insignificant, and only call for very brief mention. The sole foreign war was a brief struggle with Lewis IX. of France. One of Henry's many ephemeral schemes was the idea of winning back the continental dominions that his father had lost. So in 1241 he picked a quarrel with the good King Lewis, and invaded Poitou. He was disgracefully beaten at the battle of Taillebourg (1242), and was forced to make peace. The mild and pious King of France contented himself with leaving things as they had been before the war, though if he had chosen he might have forced Henry to surrender Bordeaux and Guienne, the last possessions of the English crown beyond the seas.
Henry's servility to the pope.—Exasperation of the baronage.
Far worse for England than Henry's abortive invasion of France were his dealings with the papacy. Henry was a devoted servant of the Church, and whenever the Popes tried to lay any burden on England, Henry did his best to make the nation submit. Rome was at this time deep in a struggle with the brave and brilliant Emperor Frederic II., and the Popes were always wanting money to keep up the war against him. In 1238 Gregory IX. sent over to England his legate, Cardinal Otho, who pretended to come to reform the clergy, but really did little more than extort great sums of money from them, on all possible excuses. When he left the realm it was said that he took more English Church treasure with him than he left behind, and he had thrust 300 Italian priests into English benefices by the aid of the king's patronage. A few years later Henry allowed himself to be made the Pope's tool in an even more disgraceful way. Alexander IV. was trying to wrest the kingdom of Sicily from the heirs of the Emperor Frederic II., and, as he could not succeed by his own strength, determined to make the docile King of England do the work for him. So he offered to make Henry's younger son Edmund, a boy of ten, King of Sicily, if Henry would undertake the expense of conquering that country. The scheme was just one of the wild adventurous plans that took the flighty monarch's fancy, so he eagerly accepted the Sicilian crown for his son, and promised the Pope that he would find the money to raise a great army. But as he had never any gold in his own treasury—since he spent it all on his buildings and his wife's relatives—he had to raise the great sums required for the invasion of Sicily out of the nation. In 1257, therefore, he summoned the Great Council, and told them that he must at once have liberal grants from them, because he had pledged England's credit to the Pope, and had made the realm responsible to Alexander IV. for 140,000 marks. The baronage were full of rage and disgust, for the conquest of Sicily was no concern of England's, but a matter of private spite on the part of the papacy. And, moreover, the king had not the least right to pledge the revenues of England to Alexander without having consulted the Great Council. Instead, therefore, of a grant of 140,000 marks, Henry received the outpourings of thirty years of suppressed indignation and discontent. He was told that he could no longer be allowed to rule the realm without the aid and counsel of his barons; that his interference in distant wars was foolish; that his foreign relations were a flight of locusts eating up the land; that his ministers and favourites were unjust, greedy, and extortionate. The king was seriously frightened, and consented to call another Great Council together at Oxford, to provide for the better governance of the realm, and not merely for the payment of his own debts.
Simon de Montfort.
The sudden outburst of wrath on the part of the baronage in 1258 is explained not only by the fact that all men had lost patience with King Henry, for that had been the case for many years, but much more by the fact that the baronage had at last found a champion and mouthpiece in Simon de Montfort, the great Earl of Leicester. Simon was not one who might have been expected to prove a wise and patriotic statesman and a good Englishman, for he had originally come into notice as one of the king's foreign favourites. His grandmother had been the heiress of the earldom of Leicester, but she had married a Frenchman, the Count of Montfort. Their child was Simon the elder, a great crusading chief and a cruel persecutor of heretics. He was a bitter enemy of King John, and had never been permitted to get hold of the Leicester estates. In 1232 his son Simon the younger came across to England, to beg King Henry to make over to him the confiscated lands of his grandmother's earldom. Henry could never resist a petitioner, especially when he was a foreigner; he not only took Simon into favour and granted him the earldom of Leicester, but he married him to his sister, the Princess Eleanor, and for a time made him his confidant. But the king's sudden friendship did not endure, and ere very long he tired of Simon, and sent him over to govern Guienne, which was always in a state of chronic insurrection. Simon put down rebellion with a strong hand, and made himself unpopular with the Gascons, who sent many complaints of him to the king. But the fatal cause of estrangement between him and the earl was a money matter: Simon had expended large sums in the king's service, using his own money and borrowing more. When he sent in his accounts to Henry, the latter could not or would not pay, and very meanly allowed the loss to fall on Simon (1250).
Simon then settled down into opposition to the king, though he was ready enough to serve the realm in all times of danger. He had now been living for many years in England, and his neighbours found him a just and sincere man, and one who had done his best to accustom himself to English ways of life and thought. He was especially beloved by the clergy, who admired his fervent piety and pure life. So it came to pass that the man who had once been known only as the king's favourite, was called Earl Simon the Righteous, and looked upon as the most patriotic and trustworthy of the nobles of the realm.
Great men had been singularly wanting among the ranks of the English baronage, since William of Pembroke died and Hubert de Burgh was disgraced. It was not till Simon came to the front as the king's opponent that the nation's discontent with Henry was adequately expressed.
The Provisions of Oxford.
The Great Council—or Parliament as we may now call it, since that word was just coming into use—met at Oxford in June, 1258, to take counsel for the better administration of England. Some called it the "Mad Parliament," because of the anger of the barons, and their desire to make hasty and sweeping changes. Henry, when he met it, found that he had no supporters save his foreign kinsmen and a few personal dependents, so that he was forced to submit to all the conditions which the barons imposed upon him.
So were ratified the "Provisions of Oxford," which provided for the government of England, not by the king, but by a group of committees. Henry was to do nothing without the consent of a privy council of fifteen members, which was now imposed upon him. Another committee of twenty-four was to investigate and right all the grievances of the realm; and a third, also of twenty-four, was to take charge of the financial side of the government, pay off the king's debts, and administer his revenues. Henry was forced to make a solemn oath to abide by the rules stated in Magna Carta, which he had often before promised to keep, but had always evaded or disregarded after a time.
By the Provisions of Oxford the governance of the realm was taken altogether out of the hands of the king, and handed over to those of the three committees. But the new scheme was far too cumbersome, for neither of the three bodies had any authority over the others, and it was difficult to keep them together. There were many who were jealous of Simon de Montfort, who sat in each of the three, and was the ruling spirit of the whole government. It was said that he took too much upon himself, and that the nation had not muzzled the king merely in order to hand itself over to be governed by the earl.
Counter-efforts of Henry.—The Mise of Amiens.
In spite of these murmurings, and in spite of the king's attempts to shake off the control which had been imposed on him, the Provisions of Oxford were observed for four years. But Henry was preparing to tear himself free as soon as possible. He sent privately to Rome and got absolved from his oath by the Pope. He courted those who were jealous of Earl Simon, and he encouraged many of his foreign relatives and dependents to creep back to England. In 1261 he felt strong enough to break loose, seized the Tower of London, and raised an army. But he found himself too weak, dared not come to blows with the adherents of the Provisions of Oxford, and again consented to place himself in the hands of the guarantors. But as disputes about his conduct continued to arise, he offered to submit his rights, and those of the barons, to the arbitration of his neighbour, St. Lewis of France, whose probity was recognized by all the world. Simon and his friends consented—an unwise act, for they might have remembered that the French king was not well acquainted with the constitution or the needs of England. By a decision called the Mise of Amiens, from the city at which it was proclaimed, St. Lewis announced that Henry ought to abide by the customs stated in Magna Carta, but that he need not keep the Provisions of Oxford, which were dishonourable to his crown and kingly dignity (1263).
Civil war breaks out.
The Mise of Amiens precipitated the outbreak of civil war, for Simon and his party refused to accept the decision which had been given against them, though they had promised to abide by it. This flinching from their word alienated from them many who would otherwise have taken the side of reform, and it was felt that a grave responsibility lay on Simon for striking the first blow. Hence it came to pass that the king was supported by a larger party than might have been expected. His own brother and son, Richard of Cornwall and Prince Edward, who had hitherto usually leaned to the party of reform and striven to guide him towards moderation, now supported him with all their power. The Earls of Norfolk and Hereford and many other great barons also took arms in his favour. Earl Simon, on the other hand, was helped by the Earls of Gloucester and Derby, and enthusiastically supported by the citizens of London, who had been maddened by the king's arbitrary taxes.
BATTLE OF LEWES.
Battle of Lewes.—The Mise of Lewes.
When, after much preliminary fighting, the armies of Henry and Simon faced each other in Sussex for a decisive battle, it was found that the king had much the larger army. He drew up his host outside the walls of Lewes, while Simon, who had marched from London, lay on the downs beyond it. When the shock came, the fiery Prince Edward, who led the right wing of the royalists, fell furiously on Simon's left wing, which was mainly composed of the levies of London, and drove them far off the field. But, carried away by his pursuit, he never thought of returning to help his father, and meanwhile Earl Simon had beaten the king's division, and rolled the royalist army back against the town wall of Lewes, where those of them who could not enter the gate at once were taken prisoners. Among the captives were the king himself, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and most of the chiefs of the royalist party. Prince Edward, rather than continue the civil war, gave himself up to the insurgents on the following day, to share his father's fate (May, 1264).
The immediate result of the battle was the issue of a document called the Mise of Lewes, by which King Henry promised to keep the charter, to dismiss all his foreign relatives and dependents, and to place himself under the control of a privy council, whom Parliament should choose to act as his ministers and guardians.
Rule of Simon de Montfort.—Captivity of the king and Prince Edward.
A Parliament was hastily summoned and delegated three electors to nominate this privy council, namely, Earl Simon, the Earl of Gloucester, and the Bishop of Chichester. The electors, naturally but unwisely, appointed none but their own trusted supporters. Thus England came under the rule of a party, and a party whose violent action had been disliked by a great portion of the nation. The king was but a puppet in their hands; he was practically their prisoner, for three of the council always attended his steps and kept him in sight. Now, Henry, irritating and faithless as his conduct had always been, was not personally disliked, and the sight of their monarch led about like a captive and forced to obey every behest of his captors, was very displeasing to many who had formerly felt no sympathy for him. It was felt, too, that his son Edward was being very hardly treated by being kept in honourable captivity and deprived of all share in the government; for the prince had taken the side of reform till the outbreak of the civil war, had only joined his father when Simon took arms, and had behaved with great patriotism and self-denial in refusing to continue the struggle after Lewes.
For two years Earl Simon governed England, and the king was kept under close guard. This period was not one of peace or prosperity; the land was still troubled by the echoes of the civil war, and in his anxiety to maintain his dominant position the earl incurred many accusations of harshness and rapacity. He was especially blamed for depriving Prince Edward of his earldom of Chester, for favouring Llewellyn Prince of North Wales in his quarrel with Roger Mortimer, a great lord of the Welsh marches who had been on the king's side at Lewes, but most of all for giving too much trust and power to his own sons. The young Montforts were rash and arrogant men, who harmed the people's cause more by their turbulence than they aided it by their courage and fidelity. In short, they were as Samuel's sons of old, and wrought their father no small damage and discredit.
The Parliament of 1265.—Representation of Shires and Boroughs.
The chief event for which Earl Simon's tenure of power is remembered is his summons of the celebrated Parliament of 1265. This incident is noteworthy, not so much for anything that the Parliament did, as for the new system on which it was constructed. Hitherto the Great Council had usually been composed only of the barons and bishops, though on two or three occasions in the thirteenth century the smaller vassals of the crown had been represented by the summons of two knights from each shire, chosen in the county court by all the freeholders of the district. But de Montfort not only called these "knights of the shire" to his Parliament of 1265, but also summoned two citizens or two burgesses from each of the chief cities and boroughs of the realm. Thus he was the first to give the towns representation, and to put together the three elements, lords, borough members, and county members, which form the Parliament of to-day. It must be confessed that Simon's immediate object was probably to strengthen his own side in the assembly, rather than to initiate a scheme for the reform of the Great Council in a democratic direction. Many barons were against him, and them he did not summon at all. Many more were jealous or distrustful of him, and it was mainly in order to swamp their opposition that he called up the great body of knights of the shire and members for the towns,—for London and the rest of the chartered cities were strongly in favour of his cause.
This Parliament confirmed all Simon's acts; outlawed those of the king's party who had fled over-seas, and refused to accept the terms of the Mise of Lewes; imposed a three-years exile in Ireland on some of those who had made only a tardy submission, and put all the royal castles into the hands of trusty partisans of the earl. It made few regulations for the better governance of the realm, but left everything in Simon's hands and at his discretion.
Prince Edward escapes.
It was impossible that the regency of the great earl should last for long. There were too many men in England who felt that it was unseemly that the king and his son should live in close restraint, while one who, in spite of all his merits, was still a foreigner and an adventurer, ruled the realm. The beginning of Simon's troubles came from a quarrel with his own chief supporter, the young Earl of Gloucester. Gilbert de Clare thought that he was not admitted to a sufficient share in the government of the kingdom, and soon fell into a bitter feud with Simon's sons. His anger led him into conspiring against the great earl. By his counsel Prince Edward escaped from his keepers, by an easy stratagem and a swift horse. Once free, the prince called his party to arms, and was joined by Gloucester, Mortimer, and many of the barons of the Welsh marches.
BATTLE OF EVESHAM.
On hearing of this rising in the west, Montfort hurried to the Welsh border with a small army, taking the king in his train. He bade Simon, the second of his sons, to collect a larger army and follow him. But Edward and Gloucester seized the line of the Severn, and threw themselves between father and son. The earl retraced his steps, slipped back across the Severn, and reached Evesham, while his son had marched as far as Kenilworth, so that a few miles only separated them. But Edward lay between, and was eager for the fight.
Battle of Evesham.—Death of Simon de Montfort.
By a sudden and unexpected attack the prince surprised and scattered young Montfort's army under the walls of Kenilworth; he then hurried off to attack Simon. The earl lay in Evesham town, which is girt round by a deep loop of the river Avon. Edward and Gloucester seized the narrow neck of this loop, while another royalist force, under Mortimer, crossed the river and watched the only bridge which leads southward out of the town. Simon awoke to find himself surrounded. "God have mercy on our souls," he cried, "for our bodies are our enemy's." Gathering his little army in a compact mass, he dashed at the prince's superior force, and tried to cut his way through. But the odds were against him, and after a short sharp fight he was slain, with his eldest son Henry, Hugh Despencer the Justiciar of England, and many of the best knights of the baronial party. King Henry almost shared their fate: he had been compelled to put on his armour and ride in the earl's host, and was wounded and almost slain before he was recognized by his son's victorious soldiery.
Thus died Earl Simon the Righteous, a man much loved by those who knew him well, courteous and kindly, pious and honest, wise and liberal. But it cannot be denied that he was touched by an overweening ambition, and that when England fell beneath his hand, he ruled her more as a king than a regent, and forgot that he was but the deputy and representative of the nation. His rise and success freed England from the thriftless rule of Henry, and set a boundary to the use of the royal prerogative. His short tenure of power gave the realm the valuable gift of the full and representative Parliament. His fall was sad but not disastrous to the English, for his work was done, and he was fast drifting into the position of the autocratic leader of a party, and ceasing to be the true exponent of the will of the whole nation.
Ascendency of Prince Edward.
The best testimony to the benefits that Simon had conferred on England was the fact that Henry III. never fell back into his old ways. He was now an elderly man, and in his captivity had lost much of his self-confidence and restless activity. He had been freed, not by his own power, but by his son and the Earl of Gloucester, both of whom had been friends of reform, though enemies of Simon. Edward had now won an ascendency over his father which he never let slip, and his voice had for the future a preponderant share in the royal council. It is to his influence that we may ascribe the wise moderation with which the relics of Simon's party were treated.
End of the civil war.
Evesham fight did not end the war, for the three surviving sons of Simon, with the Earl of Derby and some other resolute friends, still held out. It took two years more to crush out the last sparks of civil strife, for the vanquished party fortified themselves in the castle of Kenilworth and the marshy isles of Ely and Axholme. But Edward gradually beat down all opposition, and the end of the war is marked by the Dictum of Kenilworth (October, 1266), in which the king solemnly confirms the Great Charter, and pardons all his opponents, on condition of their paying him a fine. Only the heirs of the Earls of Leicester and Derby were disinherited. The younger Montforts went into exile in Italy, where a little later they revenged themselves on the king by cruelly murdering his nephew Henry of Cornwall, as he was praying in Viterbo cathedral.
There is little to tell about the last five years of the reign of Henry III. The land gradually settled down into tranquillity, and we hear little more of the misgovernment which had rendered his early years so unbearable. Prince Edward went on a Crusade, when he saw that the realm was pacified. He greatly distinguished himself in the Holy Land, and took Nazareth from the infidels. He was still beating back the Saracen, when he was called home by the news of his father's decease. After a stormy life the old king had a peaceful ending, dying quietly in his bed on the 16th of November, 1272.