The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

CHAPTER VIII.

HENRY III.

Character of Henry—Administration of William Marshall—Hubert de Bergh—Henry his own minister—Foreign favorites—General misgovernment—Papal intrigue and taxation.

The reign of Henry III. is not only one of the longest but one of the most difficult in English history. It contains more than one great crisis, and coincides in time with an epoch of vast progress; but the critical importance is by no means equally diffused, and the rate and fashion of the progress are matter for minute study, rather than for vivid illustration. The reign covers more than half of one of the most eventful and brilliant centuries of the world’s history; a century made famous by the actions of some of the greatest sovereigns, the most illustrious scholars, the wisest statesmen; the most noble period of architecture; the last act of the Crusades, the last struggle of the Papacy with the yet undiminished strength of the Empire. The life which, on the Continent, runs in these streams is not without its purpose in England.

Character of
Henry III.

England also looks on the thirteenth century as her great architectural age, the age of her great lawyers and some of her greatest divines. She also has her weight in European affairs, her struggles with the Papacy, her attempts at sound government. But the real interest of English history lies in minute constitutional steps of progress, which are to be estimated rather by their later and united effects, than by the actual and momentary appearance of growth. For during this time, England has no guiding or presiding genius. Her king is a man by no means devoid of all the picturesque qualities of his forefathers, and possessed of some negatively good qualities which they had not; but on the whole a degenerate son of such great ancestors, degenerate from their strength and virtues as well as from their faults and vices. Henry III. is perhaps a better husband and father, a more devout man, than any of his predecessors; he is not personally cruel or regardless of human life; he has no passion for war, no insatiable greed for the acquisition of territory, such as in the case of his ancestors had cost so much bloodshed. He is content for the most part to be king of England, and his success in retaining some part of his Continental dominion, is the result far more of the honesty of his adversary than of any ambition, skill, or force of his own. In these respects, England might have been expected to fare better under Henry, than she had done under John or Richard or Henry II.; better even than she was to fare under Edward I.; yet she can scarcely, even viewed in the results, be said to have done so. The long reign was a long period of trouble, suffering, and disquietude of every sort. We have no reason to suppose that Henry was deficient in personal courage, or in skill in arms, such as a brave knight might possess without being a great captain in fieldwork or in sieges; or that he was wanting in the desire to be thought a splendid and magnificent sovereign—as, indeed, he was thought—for he reaped the advantages of the political position which Henry II. had planned, and he outlived the greater princes whose power and character and career had thrown his own into the shade. Yet England did nothing great in his time except as against him. He had no great design, no energetic purpose. He was not strong enough to be true, although he was strong enough to be pertinacious, resolute enough to be false. He was vain and extravagant; and this, with the exception of his falseness, is the worst that can be said of him. Hence, whilst he could not inspire love or loyalty, he could inspire hatred, and hatred is not, in the case of kings, as is so often said of the feeling in the case of lower men, incompatible with contempt: a king may inspire both feelings, and be despised for moral weakness and iniquity, whilst he cannot safely be contemned altogether, because of his great power to cause mischief. Then, vanity and extravagance, which are minor faults in a man with strong purposes, become aggravations and incentives to hatred in a man whose other motives and purposes are weak. Henry III. was well hated. His life, good or evil, had no gloss or glitter upon it; it was mean in the midst of its magnificence; it was wanting in the one element that leads men to respect, even where they fear and blame, the character of reality or “veracity to a man’s self.” There was no purpose, as there was no faith in it.

Division of
the reign.

Fifty-six years of such a king cannot but be a wearisome lesson to the reader, if the eye rest on the king only or on the circle of events of which he is the centre; and to a certain degree, in these ages in which we have to depend chiefly on the historians of the time, with little help from other sorts of literature, the king is necessarily the centre of every circle. The monotony of detail may, however, be broken by arranging the reign in four divisions. Henry was nine years old when he began to reign. The first portion, then, comprises the years of his minority, and may be regarded as closing about the year 1227, although, as the influence of his early ministers continued to affect him for some years longer, that date is not a very distinct limit. The second division comprises the years of his personal administration, during which he mismanaged matters for himself, and which end at the year 1258, when, having brought affairs to a dead lock, he was obliged to consent to be superseded by a new scheme of government embodied in the Provisions of Oxford. The third period includes the years of eclipse, from 1258 to 1265, when the battle of Evesham gave him again the power as well as the name of king. The last period contains the seven years intervening between the battle of Evesham and the king’s death, and depends for its historic interest entirely on the fact that it witnessed the results of the great struggle—the clearing of the board after the crisis of the game was past.

Accession of
Henry III.

Henry’s
party.

Returning now to the state of affairs in October, 1216, when John had just finished his suicidal career at Newark, we find the kingdom to a very great extent in the hands of the party pledged to support Lewis, the enterprising prince to whom the French have not hesitated to attribute the title of the Lion, or the Lion-hearted. This party comprised nearly all the baronage, for John’s insane behaviour during the last year had dispersed the friends whom after the granting of Magna Carta he had gathered to his side; even his brother William, Earl of Salisbury, had gone over to the enemy. Lewis’s party had, however only one point of union, the hatred and distrust inspired by John; and when John was once removed, the disruption of the party and the expulsion of Lewis were sure to come in time. It was certain that all real national feeling would take part against a foreign king; that all the desires for free and ancient institutions and good government would have a much better chance of contentment in the prospect of the reign of the child Henry; and that even the party among the barons which still clung to the feudal ideas of government would have a much better opportunity of regaining its coveted influence through him than through Lewis. But the cause of the child was at first sight very weak. John had driven all the strong men from his side; and Archbishop Langton, on whom the defence of what was now become the national dynasty would properly have devolved, was at Rome, in temporary disgrace. It may be fairly said that had not the Roman legate Gualo taken up a decided line, had not Honorius III. seen his way to reconcile the rights of the nation with the maintenance of the Plantagenet dynasty, Lewis must for the moment have triumphed, and England would then have had to win her freedom by a mortal struggle with France. But Gualo was staunch. The great Pope who had committed England to him was just dead, but Honorius III. was no more likely than Innocent to be satisfied with half-service; and the legate saw that both his own prospects of advancement and the credit of the Roman see were involved in the success of this administration. With him was Peter des Rochos, the Bishop of Winchester, whom John had made justiciar after the death of Geoffrey Fitz Peter. He was a Poictevin who had been transformed from a knight into a bishop with few qualifications and little ceremony; but he was faithful to John and to his son, and he was the representative man of the foreign party at court, which stood chiefly if not solely by personal attachment to the king. There were two or three other bishops who had won their places in John’s chancery, the Earl Ranulf of Chester, nearly the last left of the great feudal aristocracy of the Conquest; William Marshall, the Earl of Pembroke, now growing old, who had been the intimate friend of the younger Henry, who had been a justice and regent under Richard, who had helped to set John on the throne, and had remained personally faithful to him to the last although his own sons were on the side of the barons.

The Charter
re-issued.

This little party had the child crowned on October 28, at Gloucester; and on November 12, at Bristol, re-issued the Great Charter in his name, with some important omissions. They did not venture at so critical a time to renew the articles which placed taxation in the hands of the national council or define the nature of that assembly; but in the final clause of the document these articles were declared to be suspended only because of the urgency of the times. The guardianship of the king and what little remained to him of the kingdom was placed in the hands of William Marshall, and the bishops and barons swore fealty to Henry, as his contemporaries called him—Henry IV., or Henry of Winchester, the son of King John. The office of guardian for an infant king had never yet been needed in England, at least since the days of Ethelred the Unready, and all that we know of the present arrangement is that it was made in the council, and with the acquiescence of the legate. The title that William Marshall took was “governor of the king and kingdom.” We might have expected that the queen-mother would have been guardian of the person of the King; but he had no near male kinsman to take charge of the kingdom, according to the reasonable rule that the defence of the inheritance belongs to the nearest heir, that of the person to the nearest relation who cannot inherit; and accordingly the wardship of both was entrusted by the national council to a chosen leader. No other in age, dignity, experience, or faithfulness came near the Earl of Pembroke.

Struggle with
Lewis.

The struggle with Lewis covers the first year of the reign. Winter was too far advanced at the time of the Bristol Council for much active warfare, and a truce was as usual concluded for the Christmas season, purchased by the surrender of some of the royal castles. Before the new reign began Lewis’s side had lost two of its representative men—Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the leader of the old baronial party, and Eustace de Vesey, who had conducted the intrigues with Scotland and France which had brought about the present complication. The greatness of Lewis’s early success and the haughty assumptions of his French followers were already disgusting the barons, and those who had no cause to despair of pardon were contemplating adhesion to Henry. The year 1217, however, began with brisk action. Henry’s supporters assembled at Oxford, Lewis and his party at Cambridge. The military strength was all on the side of the latter; whilst the legate was treating for a truce Lewis was besieging and taking castles. Before Lent he had reduced the whole of Eastern England, except Lincoln, which held out unswervingly under Nicolaa de Camvill, the wife of that Gerard who had drawn John into his first quarrel with Longchamp. But at Midlent Lewis was summoned to France; and, although he returned in a few weeks, he found that some of his supporters had changed sides. The Earl of Salisbury had gone over to his nephew; the legate was preaching a crusade against the disloyal and excommunicated; and the loyal barons bestirred themselves to some purpose.

Battle of Lincoln,
1217.

They advanced from the West, just as had been the case in the end of Stephen’s days, Lincoln again appearing to be the decisive battle-ground. And so it was. Lewis returned in an evil mood, determined to treat England as a conquered country; the barons detected his design and deserted him one by one. At Whitsuntide the king’s party advanced to relieve Lincoln under the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of Chester, and the legate. Lincoln was relieved at the cost of a battle; but in the battle was slain Lewis’s chief captain, the Count of Perche, and Saer de Quincy and Robert Fitz-Walter, the leading spirits of the anti-royalists, were captured. Lewis was not there, but engaged in the siege of Dover Castle, which had not yet been taken. On the news of the battle he threw himself into London, and there awaited foreign succor. The foreign succor came as far as Thanet; but there, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, it was beaten and dispersed by the English fleet, which thus justified the pains and cost that John had spent upon it.

Departure of
Lewis.

Third issue of
the Charter.

That defeat decided the struggle; within a month Lewis had consented to make peace and go home. The legate showed a wise and politic mercy in treating the rebels as ecclesiastical offenders and admitting them to absolution and penance; and William Marshall was not anxious to alienate friends by exacting the penalties for a treason which it might be difficult to define, and in which his own family was largely implicated. By Michaelmas 1217 the peace was restored, and the Charter again re-issued in a still more modified form. This may be regarded as the ending of the Magna Carta struggle in its first phase. It was now become permanently the palladium of English constitutional liberty; it was recognized as the salvation of king and kingdom, and the legate, instead of anathematizing, had turned and blessed it.

The rule of William Marshall continued until his death, early in 1219. The kingdom was ostensibly at peace; but order was not easily restored after a struggle which had lasted for more than four years, and which was itself the result of a long period of misgovernment. In the general struggle for power which followed the pacification it was not always the wisest or the best men that gained the ultimate ascendency. It is clear that from the very first there were among the royal counsellors men who had neither understood nor sympathized with the policy of Langton. Hence the omission from the re-issued charters of the clauses by which the king forbade and renounced unconstitutional taxation, and prescribed the order of the national council. Many of the men who had been leaders of the baronial party at Runnymede had fallen into treasonable complicity with France or had perished in the war; so that the regent was forced to give a disproportionate share of power to the personal friends of John, foreigners and mercenaries as they were, or to men like the Earl of Chester and the Count of Aumâle, who fought really for their own feudal independence. Thus we must account for the power of such men as Falkes de Breauté, who almost caused a civil war before he would submit to the law or resign to the king the castles which he held as the king’s servant. Hence also, perhaps, the retention of Hubert de Burgh in the justiciarship; for he, great man as he afterwards proved himself, was as yet only known as a creature of John. Hence too the distinguished position retained by Peter des Roches, although he, as Bishop of Winchester, had a dignity and power of his own. Hence, further on, the jealousy with which, after the death of the Earl of Pembroke, the administration of Hubert de Burgh was viewed by the barons, and the constant risings against royal favorites and against the too strong government exercised in the name of the boy king. These troubles furnish nearly all the history of the years of Henry’s minority.

Work of
William
Marshall.

New Government.

Second
coronation.

The expulsion of the French, the restoration of order, and the securing of the validity of the Great Charter by successive and solemn confirmations, were the chief debt that England owed to William Marshall. So long as he lived he was able also to lessen the pressure of the hand of the Roman legate and to keep in order the foreign servants of John. Early in 1219 he died. Gualo, a few months before, having incurred considerable odium by his severe and avaricious conduct during an otherwise beneficial administration, resigned the legation and returned to Rome. The place of the regent was not easy to fill, and no successor was appointed with the same power and functions. Peter des Roches became guardian of the royal person; Pandulf, the envoy of 1213, became legate in Gualo’s place; and these two, with Hubert de Burgh as justiciar, formed a sort of triumvirate or supreme council of regency. Langton had now returned from exile; the Earls of Chester, Salisbury, and Ferrars had gone on Crusade, and matters seemed likely to run smoothly for some time. At Whitsuntide 1220 Henry was solemnly crowned at Westminster at the express command of the Pope, by the hands of Archbishop Langton, and with all the ceremonies which at the Gloucester coronation had been omitted. It was a very grand ceremony; all the due services of the great feudatories were regularly performed, and it was made a sort of typical exhibition of the national restoration. It had also a political intention. If Henry was now in full possession of his royal dignity, it was high time for him to take back into the royal custody the castles which through policy or necessity had been hitherto left in dangerous hands. The feudal lords must learn to submit to Henry III. as they had done to Henry II.; the foreign adventurers must be removed from the posts which although they had earned them by fidelity, they had made the strongholds of tyranny and oppression. England must be reclaimed for the English, and not even the legatine, not even the papal, influence must be allowed to retard the national progress towards internal unity and prosperity.

William of
Aumâle and
Falkes de
Breauté.

The demand for the restoration of the royal castles produced the first outbreak. Just as, at the beginning of the reign of Henry II., William of Aumâle had refused to surrender Scarborough, so now his grandson refused to surrender Rockingham. Immediately after the coronation the king was brought to the siege, but the garrison fled as he approached. The earl, undismayed, seized in 1221 the castles of Biham and Fotheringay; and although he resisted not only the strength of the government but the sentence of excommunication also, he was forced to submit. In 1222 and 1223 the struggle was renewed in more formidable dimensions. The Earl of Chester, who had at first supported the government, made himself the spokesman of the feudal party; and the foreigners, the chief of whom was Falkes de Breauté, did their best to unseat the justiciar, who was now recognised as the chief man in the administrative council. The evil was increased by the discord in the council itself. Peter des Roches was known to prompt the resistance to Hubert de Burgh and to be the patron of the foreigners; he neither understood nor loved the institutions of England, and although an able and experienced man was very ambitious and altogether unscrupulous. In 1224, however, the contest was decided. An act of violent insubordination on the part of Falkes de Breauté brought down the king and the kingdom upon him; the great conspiracy of which he held the strings was broken up, and he himself, notwithstanding the secret support of Peter des Roches and the open mediation of the Pope, was banished from the land. His fall involved the humiliation of the feudal lords who were allied with him, and the expulsion of the foreigners whom he represented and headed. Peter des Roches himself had to take a subordinate place.

Work of
Hubert de
Burgh.

Re-issue of
the Charter.

Long before this England had been relieved from the presence of the legate. In 1220 Langton had gone to Rome and obtained a promise that so long as he lived no other legate should be sent to England. Pandulf seems to have regarded the promise as implying his own recall. He was weary of his post; and having obtained his election to the see of Norwich, resigned in July 1221. Before the end of the year 1224 the able hand of Hubert de Burgh had shaken off the three dangerous influences; he had reclaimed England for the English. But he had done it at considerable cost of taxation. This the country was ill able or disposed to bear, and the alarm of war was sounding on the side of France, where Lewis succeeded his father in 1223. It was in order to obtain from the nation a grant of money to defray these expenses and to equip an army that Henry, under Hubert’s advice, for the third time confirmed the charter. But, although these were the special occasions of the re-issue, the confirmation itself is a typical act, and might be regarded as the renewed good omen of a happy reign. Most of the hereditary enemies of Henry were dead; all foreign influences were banished; the right of the nation to sound and good government was recognised by the charter itself. The general acquiescence in the policy of the administration was shown by the grant of a fifteenth of all movable property to the king, which was made conditional on the confirmation of the charter, and the national union was proved by the long list of prelates and magnates who attested it. Henry, by altering the terms in which he enacted it from the older form, “by the council” of his barons, to “by my spontaneous will,” seemed to be giving more than a mere official ratification—a personal and sincere adhesion to the great formula of the constitution.

Henry in 1227.

Two years after this Henry came of age, and then begins not only his dangerous and unbusinesslike meddling with foreign politics but the gradual revelation of the fact that he was not more willing than his father had been to act and reign as a constitutional king. From this point date the constant demands of the Pope on the one hand, and the king on the other, for money to be spent on purposes which called forth little sympathy in England, or which were opposed to the national instincts; constant difficulties with the administration, and, consequent upon those difficulties, that alienation of popular affection from the person of the young sovereign whose growth had been intently and hopefully watched—an alienation which grew from year to year, as the conviction gained ground that he was not to be trusted, any more than he could be honored or admired. But for this conviction that serious attack on his authority, which amounted in the end to an absolute superseding or deposition, could have been neither contemplated nor carried into effect. This was not the mere result of a mismanaged minority. No doubt the possession or even the anticipation of the possession of great power is a dangerous obstacle to education; and in every case of a royal minority which we have in English history we find the same miserable story of a most important charge neglected, and the most important of all possible trusts unfulfilled. It may be that Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches had to work on an unkindly soil. In the child of John and Isabella we should not look for much inherited goodness; yet Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother, was a very different man from Henry himself. Still the fault cannot be ascribed altogether to education. It would have been a sore discipline for a noble mind, but to Henry it was fatal. He learned nothing great; what was good in him was dwarfed and warped.

The history of the thirty-one years, 1227 to 1258, which form the period of his personal administration, is one long series of impolitic and unprincipled acts. These acts may, it is true, be arranged under certain distinct heads, but it is not to be forgotten that they were at the time the successive expressions of one weak, headstrong mind, and as such have a unity and a bearing upon one another, creating as they proceed a tide of hostile feeling in the nation that becomes at last overwhelming. It would be an unprofitable exercise of ingenuity and patience to detail these acts in order of time, and to point out how one led to another. They may be divided into the three heads of internal misgovernment, a mischievous foreign policy pursued under the guidance of the popes, and the unfortunate line adopted with regard to the French provinces on which the king still retained his hold.

Internal misgovernment.

Papal demands.

Foreign
affairs.

Crisis of 1258.

Under the first of these come Henry’s reluctance to observe the charters, heavy taxation for a long series of years, the revival of the hated system of foreign favoritism, the rash displacement and replacement of ministers, the attempts of the king to rule by means of mere clerks and servants without proper ministers, and the series of domestic troubles which arise from these causes. Under the second head come the heavy demands of the popes for pecuniary help, or for the preferment of Italians in English churches, and the successive attempts made by the several pontiffs to use Henry, his wealth, and influence in Europe, for the destruction of the house of Hohenstaufen, and thus for the promotion of designs which worked his final humiliation. Under the third come the several expeditions to France, the negotiations with Lewis IX., the administration of Gascony, and the part taken by Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort in the administration of that province. These three lines of mischief combine to produce the great crisis of 1258, in which the leading spirit was Simon de Montfort, in which the critical and determining cause was the negotiation with the Pope for the kingdom of Sicily, and in which the form of the constitutional demands made by the opposition was determined by the character of the internal misgovernment which had been going on so long. Where the same points so frequently recur a chronological summary becomes monotonous, and a comprehensive sketch is sufficient to convey all the lessons that are of real value.

Henry of
age.

Henry’s first act was an ill-omened one. In January, 1227, in a council at Oxford, he declared himself of full age to govern, emancipated himself from the guardianship of Peter des Roches, but insisted that all charters and other grants sealed during his minority should be regarded as invalid until a confirmation of them had been purchased at a fixed rate. This declaration, founded, it would seem, on a resolution of the council agreed on in 1218, that no grants involving perpetuity should be sealed until he came of age, was heard with great alarm. The alarm spread further when it was known that the forest boundaries, which had been settled by perambulation in 1225, were to be re-arranged under royal direction. If the forest liberties were to be tampered with, the Great Charter itself would be in peril. But either the alarm was unfounded or the excitement that followed ensured its own remedy. Large sums were raised by confirming private charters; but, on a representation made by a body of the earls the forest administration was let alone and the Great Charter was not threatened. The whole project was seen to be a mere expedient for raising money.

Papal taxation.

Fall of
Hubert de
Burgh.

Matters went on peacefully for some four or five years, and if complaints of misgovernment were heard they were, by the ready action of Hubert, who continued to be justiciar, either remedied or silenced. From 1227 to 1232 Hubert filled the place of prime minister, in very much the same way as Hubert Walter and Geoffrey Fitz Peter had done, sacrificing his own popularity to save his master’s character, and risking his master’s favor by lightening the oppressions and exactions of irresponsible government. Besides the wars with Wales and Scotland which mark these years, and the pecuniary demands which were necessarily made for carrying on the wars, the chief interest of the period arises from the fact that it saw the first of those papal claims and exactions which were to exercise so baneful an influence on the rest of the reign. Archbishop Langton died in 1228, and Henry’s envoys at Rome purchased the confirmation of his successor, Archbishop Richard, by promising the Pope a heavy subsidy to sustain him in his war with the Emperor. When the time came for this demand to be laid before the assembled council Earl Ranulf of Chester took the lead in opposing it. The means taken notwithstanding to exact money roused a strong popular feeling. The papal collectors were plundered, the stores taken in kind were burned; and so ineffectual were the means taken to suppress the outrages, that suspicion fell, not without good reason, on the justiciar himself as conniving at this rough justice. Henry was already weary of his minister, and his strongest feelings were the devotion which he consistently maintained towards the papacy and his determination, equally resolute, to let no scruple prevent him from acquiring money whenever he had the opportunity. Peter des Roches, who had been absent from England for some years on Crusade, had now returned. He lost no opportunity of increasing the king’s dislike to Hubert, and of promoting the interest of the foreigners who were beginning again to speculate on Henry’s weakness. The king was told that his poverty was owing to the dishonesty of his ministers, who were growing rich to his disadvantage; he had no money to carry on war, whilst Hubert de Burgh was becoming more powerful in acquisitions and alliances, and was even using his influence to screen offenders against the Apostolic see. Henry was not slow in learning to be ungrateful. He had been taught by Hubert himself that he must discard the favorite servants of his father; Hubert had to exemplify, however unrighteously, his own lesson.

Victory of
Peter des
Roches.

In July 1232 he was driven from office, overwhelmed, as Becket had been, with charges which it was impossible definitely to disprove; and after some vain attempts to escape, he was before the end of the year a prisoner and penniless. His successor in the justiciarship was Stephen Segrave, a creature of Peter des Roches. Peter himself resumed the influence over the unstable king which he had won in his early years, and filled the court and ministry with foreigners, in whose favor he displaced all the king’s English servants.

Richard Marshall.

Hubert’s fall was great enough in itself to excite pity; even Earl Ranulf of Chester, who had been most opposed to him as a minister, was moved to intercede for him. But far more than his personal disgrace the reversal of his English policy alarmed the baronage. Earl Ranulf, the natural head of opposition, died in 1232; Richard of Cornwall, who had hitherto shown signs of attachment to the national cause, was scarcely fitted to lead an attack on his brother’s ministers; the Earl Marshall Richard, son of the great regent, and younger brother of William Marshall who had married the king’s sister, became the spokesman of the nation. Richard Marshall was one of the most accomplished knights and the most educated gentlemen of the age; but he had to contend against the long experience and unscrupulous craft of Peter des Roches. After a distinct declaration made by the barons to the king, at his suggestion, that they would not meet the Bishop of Winchester in court or council, and a positive demand for the dismissal of the foreign servants who had been placed in office by him, the Earl Marshall was declared a traitor. The king marched against him and drove him into alliance with the disaffected Welsh. A cruel stratagem of Peter des Roches induced him to cross over to Ireland to defend his estates there, and, in a battle into which he was drawn by Peter’s agents, he was betrayed and mortally wounded. For a long time after his death the baronage continued to be without a leader of their own.

Fall of Peter
des Roches.

The cunning of Bishop Peter prevailed to the destruction of Earl Richard, but it was not sufficient to ensure his own position. The barons, although they lost their leader when the Earl Marshall fled, were not inclined to be submissive, and the bishops, now under the guidance of Edmund of Abingdon, the primate consecrated in 1234, insisted that justice should be done to the Earl Marshall and that the foreigners should be removed. The king was compelled to submit; Bishop Peter was ordered to retire from court, and with him fell the men whom he had patronized. But it was too late to do justice to the earl or to stop the measures contrived for his ruin. As a matter of fact the dismissal of Peter des Roches preceded by a few days the death of his victim far away in Ireland. Hubert de Burgh, however, profited by the change and regained his estates, although not his political power, when his rival fell.

Henry’s
plan of governing.

To some extent the administration of Hubert and of Peter after him had been a continuance of the royal tutelage; from this time Henry determined to be not only king but chief administrator. Stephen Segrave had been a very mean successor to Hubert in the great office of justiciar; henceforth the officer who bears the name is no longer the lieutenant-general of the king, but simply the chief officer of the law courts. The supreme direction of affairs Henry kept in his own incompetent hands. The position of the chancellor too was stronger than was convenient to a king who intended to have his own way. Ralph Neville, the Bishop of Chichester, had received the great seal in 1226, by the advice and consent of the great council of the nation; he now refused to surrender it to the king except at the express command of the assembly by which he had been appointed. Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him in 1238, but he retained the income and title of chancellor until his death in 1244. The constant petitions of the barons that a properly qualified justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer should be elected or appointed, subject to the approval of the national council, show that this independent action of the king was regarded with jealousy, and that they had already in germ the idea of having the affairs of the kingdom administered by men who would be responsible, not only as Becket and Hubert de Burgh had been to the king, but to the nation, as represented at the time in the great council of the barons.

Influx of
foreigners.

The history of these years is a series of national complaints and royal short-comings and evasions, diversified by occasional campaigns or splendid marriage ceremonies. In 1235 Henry married his sister Isabella to the Emperor Frederick II.; in 1236 he himself married Eleanor of Provence. Both marriages were the occasions of great outlay of money, which the nation was rapidly becoming more and more unwilling to pay. Nor was the discontent owing to taxation only. The queen’s relations poured into the country as into a newly discovered gold-field; dignities, territories, high office in Church and State were lavished upon them, and the rumor went abroad that they were attempting to change the constitution of the kingdom. Under their influence the old foreign agents who had flourished under the patronage of Peter des Roches returned into court and council, and brought with them the old abuses and the old jealousies in addition to the new. In 1238 the king gave his sister Eleanor, the widow of William Marshall the younger, to Simon de Montfort. The marriage and subsequent quarrel with Simon served to augment the jealousy and divisions at court. In 1242 Henry made a costly expedition to France, from which he returned in 1243; a new flood of strangers, this time the Poictevin sons and kinsfolk of his mother, followed him. In 1244 Earl Richard of Cornwall married the queen’s sister; and in 1245 Boniface of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, was consecrated to the see of Canterbury.

Constitutional
grievances.

Each of these years is marked by a struggle about taxation conducted in the assembly of barons and bishops, which from this time is known both in history and records by the name of Parliament. In these discussions the lead is taken sometimes by the bishops, sometimes by the barons; now it is the papal, now the royal demands that excite opposition. The charters are from time to time confirmed as a condition of a money grant; and as often as money is required they are found to need fresh confirmation. Up to the time of his marriage Earl Richard of Cornwall constantly appears among the remonstrants; Archbishop Edmund, as long as his patient endurance lasts, heads the opposition of the bishops; Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, the great divine, scholar, and pastor of the Church, is not less distinguished as a leader in the plans propounded for the maintenance of good government and the diminution of the royal power of oppression.

Parliamentary
discussions.

Every class suffered under the absolute administration, but the citizens of London, and the Jews perhaps most heavily, as from them without any intermediate machinery the king contrived to wring money. Not slowly or gradually, but by great and rapid accumulations the heap of national grievances grew, and but for the want of a leader a forcible attempt at revolution must have occurred much sooner than it did. In 1237 the national council gave their money under express conditions, none of which were observed, as to the control and purpose of expenditure. In 1242 they presented to the king a long list of the exactions to which they had submitted out of their good-will to assist him, but from which no good had arisen. In 1244, when Henry had assembled the magnates in the refectory at Westminster and with his own mouth had asked for money, the two great estates present, lay and clerical, determined, after debating apart, to act in concert, and chose twelve representatives to make terms with the king. The twelve, of whom the chief were Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort, demanded the confirmation of the charters and the election of a justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer; they broached even a plan for constitutional reform according to which a perpetual council was to be appointed to attend the king and secure the execution of reforms to be embodied in a new charter. Henry first resisted, then produced an order from the Pope; but the barons were unable to persevere in their designs. They refused, however, to make a large grant, and voted a sum which they could not legally object to pay, for the marriage of the king’s daughter.

Henry’s
impolicy.

The pages of the great historian, Matthew Paris, teem with details like this. Whether money were given or refused, the king went on asking for more; whether he met the national complaints with promise or with insult, the evils remained alike unredressed. No permanent ministers were appointed; the king nominated a clerk or a judge from time to time to despatch formal business, and every important transaction for which he himself was not personally competent was left to be settled at haphazard. Some good results followed; the country learned that the king was really dependent on the nation, although it failed to impress that lesson upon Henry himself; every year the machinery for assessing and collecting the taxes assumed more and more a representative character, and the forms as well as the spirit of a parliamentary constitution grew apace. But in the countless assemblies which were held during this part of the reign, it is not possible to trace any uniformity or even any tendency towards a system of representative government. The councils are more busy about their powers than about their constitution, and the representative machinery already in use for carrying out the executive part of the public business does not yet reach the region of legislative or supreme taxation.

National
inactivity.

No great design is attempted during these years; the barons see no return for the great costs to which the king puts them. The King of France goes on Crusade, but Henry only raises money on the pretext, and spends or wastes it on other purposes. The Pope drains the kingdom. There are murmurs but no blows: no conspiracies, no leader. Simon de Montfort is employed in Gascony; Earl Richard minds his own business. The kingdom is again handed over to the Poictevins, yet no one has position or energy to take the lead. So matters drag on. In 1248, 1249, 1255, the demands for a regular ministry are confirmed; and now it is desired that they shall be appointed by the common council of the nation. In 1237 and again in 1253, the charters are solemnly renewed, and excommunication passed on the transgressors of them. In 1254 an assembly is held to grant an aid, to which two knights of the shire are called from each county, elected by the county court—a very important step towards the creation or development of a parliamentary system. At last, in 1257, by a series of events like these, the patience of the baronage is absolutely worn out, and the king by an extraordinary act of daring presumption gives the signal for the outbreak.

Henry and
the Popes.

The archbishops.

Our second division of the causes which led to the great crisis of the reign, comprises Henry’s relations with the popes and the papal policy. It is not a thing to be wondered at that Henry should adhere closely to the Pope: for it was papal influence that made him king, and his mind was formed under religious influences redolent of papal ideas. He had to deal too with popes of high and masterly minds, and bowed implicitly to such. He never disputed or quarrelled with any pope; no point was to his mind worth defence. He was just old enough to remember the last days of the Interdict; he knew how Honorius III. had supported him against Philip and Lewis; he watched the long humiliation of Frederick II. by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. He never knew a weak pope. He might have resisted, and would have gained immensely by resistance; his archbishops, Stephen Langton, Richard le Grand, and Edmund of Abingdon, were three model ecclesiastics, men unassailable in the points of patriotism, independence, and sanctity. Even Boniface of Savoy, although he was neither an Englishman nor a saint, would have boldly resisted the Pope, and strengthened the king with his sword if not with his staff. But Henry was generally thwarting his archbishops; he alienated their support, and wore out their patience. Edmund he drove into exile, by his tyranny and extortion; and even Boniface on occasion chose to side with the national party rather than to support such a king.

List of papal
assumptions.

The string of papal difficulties begins in 1226, when the Pope demanded a share of the property of every cathedral, church, and monastery. In 1229 Gregory IX. demanded a tithe of all movables, which only Earl Ranulf of Chester had courage to refuse. In 1231, the Roman exactions produced public tumults, and led to the quarrel which ruined Hubert de Burgh. In 1237, the king invited Cardinal Otho to reform the Church. He stayed until 1241, visited Oxford, and put the University under interdict; visited Scotland in 1239, and in 1240 exacted enormous sums for the benefit of the Pope, besides forbidding the king to bestow preferment on Englishmen, until three hundred Italians had been provided for. In 1244, Innocent IV. sent a still more intolerable representative, Master Martin, who within a year was obliged to fly; but neither king nor parliament ventured to refuse money. Besides direct payments, a vast proportion of English livings was held by foreigners. Bishop Grosseteste, who regarded these usurpations as the very destruction of the flock for which he was ready to lay down his life, declared, that in 1252, the Pope’s nominees had revenues within the realm three times as great as the royal income. There was too, a constant succession of appeals to Rome, as the episcopal elections were disputed, and the Pope either assumed the power of presentation, or sold the justice or injustice that it pleased him to dispense. To understand how these vast sums were disposed of by the popes, involves the careful reading of the history of Frederick II. The exactions of Gregory IX. begin with the first quarrel with Frederick, and the crowning difficulties of Henry III. are caused by his entanglement with Alexander IV. on the subject of Sicily. Yet Frederick II. was his own brother-in-law, and a prince who, whatever his faults may have been, suffered papal enmity for reasons which had nothing to do with his short-comings. Frederick was admired and pitied in England as a papal victim. Lewis IX. could refuse to be an instrument in his humiliation, but Henry III. seems to have tied himself to the Pope’s chariot-wheels. The Pope and the king, according to the saying of the time, left to men only the task of discerning whether the upper or the nether millstone were the heaviest.

Henry accepts
the kingdom
of Sicily.

Fatal as the friendship of Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. had been, it was the policy of Alexander IV. which broke the long-enduring patience of the baronage and compelled them to bind the king’s hands. Innocent IV. in 1252 had offered the kingdom of Sicily to Richard of Cornwall. The negotiation went on until in 1255 it was accepted, not for Richard, but for Edmund, the king’s second son. It might have been supposed that as the quarrel was the Pope’s Alexander would have hired Henry to fight his battles; but by this adroit system of enlistment he reversed the rule. He fought the battles and expected Henry to pay him. Henry was weak enough to bear this and even to pledge the credit of the kingdom to the Pope for the sum which the crafty Italian money-lender had advanced to maintain his own quarrel. It was this act that led to the demand for a new constitution, which opens the next great epoch of this long dismal reign.

Henry’s
French
transactions.

Henry’s French transactions, the third of the three heads in which we have arranged the second portion of the reign, must be summed up very briefly, for they are in themselves the least important part of his history.

Of all the possessions of Henry II. only Aquitaine and Gascony remained to John at the time of his death; and these remained, not because they loved the Plantagenets, for they hated them, but because they hated all government, and found that distant England was a less vigorous mistress than nearer France. So, as they had opposed Henry II., they resisted Philip and Lewis; and they continued subject to the English kings until the reign of Henry VI., but shorn of their proportions. Henry III. in his early years entertained some idea of reclaiming all. In 1225 Richard of Cornwall was sent to Bourdeaux, and re-established order in Gascony; in 1229, during the minority of Lewis IX., not only Gascons but Normans proposed to Henry the restoration of the Continental dominions of his house; and in 1230 he actually went across by Brittany and Anjou and received the homage of Poictou, whilst the Earl of Chester made an attempt on Normandy. But in the following year a truce was made, and no more is said of a French war for twelve years. In 1242, however, at the invitation of the Poictevins, over whom Lewis had set his brother Alfonso as count, Henry made a great expedition, which he managed with so little felicity that he owed his escape from captivity to the mercy of his enemy, just as he owed his continued possession of Gascony to that enemy’s good faith. After his return home in 1243 the only foreign difficulties which occurred for several years arose from the conduct of the Gascons, who, finding no pressure put upon them by Lewis, took courage to rebel on their own account, and required constant chastisement. From 1249 onwards Simon de Montfort was employed to keep them in order; and whilst his demands for money were one cause of Henry’s difficulties at home, Henry’s treatment of him laid the foundation of a lasting enmity. The complaints of the Gascons against his severe administration were readily listened to, and Simon was easily convinced that his employment in France was a mere expedient for securing his ruin. In 1253 he resigned his command, and Henry for the third time went in person to France, where he stayed for a year and a half, returning at the end of 1254 more hopelessly in debt than ever.

From this point the accumulating grievances of the nation, whether constitutional, religious, or political, blend in one mass; all the oppressed and offended make common cause. Extortion, faithlessness, improvidence, impotence at home and abroad, compel and suggest their own remedy; and every class having been insulted or oppressed, the time and the men for reform and revenge are not wanting.