To check the rapacity of the king, and to stop the seizure of Church revenues for Italian clerics, and thereby to raise the English clergy from their state of sluggish despondency was Grosseteste’s work for England. We find him conspicuous at the council summoned by the king to meet at Westminster in 1244. In vain Henry III. appealed for money, bishops and nobles reminded him that the money so frequently granted had done no good either to the king or the country, and that a justiciar and chancellor must be appointed for the strengthening of the state. Henry demurred, tried postponements and delays, and these failing, summoned the bishops alone, and confronted them with a letter from Pope Innocent IV. exhorting them to give liberally to the king. Even this failed to move the prelates. After much discussion, however, some were for “a mild answer,” for many of the prelates “fearing the king’s instability and the pusillanimity of the royal counsellors,” were unwilling to deny the pope’s request. Grosseteste clinched the matter by declaring they must all stand together with the barons:[36] “We may not be divided from the common counsel. For it is written if we be divided we shall all perish forthwith,” The next day Henry tried to get at each of the bishops separately—an old device. “But they with wary heed would not be so entrapped, and by departing early in the morning escaped the net in which they had once been caught; and so the council broke up to the king’s discontent.” (Matthew Paris.)
Again in 1252 Henry summoned the bishops, and tried to coerce them into giving him money by producing a papal mandate, authorising the payment of a full tithe of all Church revenues to the king for the space of three years. To make matters worse, “payment was not to be made on the old assessment, but on a new assessment conducted with strict inquiry, at the will and judgment of the royal agents and extortioners, who would seek their own profit before the king’s.” The excuse was that the king was about to start on a pilgrimage. Grosseteste was then an old man, but he blazed out at this monstrous demand, especially when the king’s messengers went on to explain that the tithe for two years might be paid at once, and that the third year’s tithe could also be raised before the king actually started. “By our Lady,” said the sturdy bishop of Lincoln, “what does all this mean? You assume that we shall agree to this damnable levy, and go on arguing from premises that have not been admitted. God forbid that we should thus bend our knee to Baal.”
The king’s half-brother, Ethelmar, bishop-elect of Winchester, deprecated resistance to the will of pope and king, and urged that the French had consented to pay a similar demand. “Yes,” said the Bishop of Ely, “and it brought their king no good.” “For the very reason the French have yielded must we resist,” replied Grosseteste. “To do a thing twice makes it a custom, and if we pay too, we shall have no peace. For my own part, I say plainly that I will not pay this evil demand, lest the king himself as well as us should incur the heavy wrath of God.” The other bishops followed Grosseteste’s lead, and the old man went on to advise them to pray the king to think of his eternal salvation, and to restrain his rash impulses. Henry naturally declined to send an independent remonstrance to the pope against the mandate, and the bishops decided they could do nothing in the way of granting this special tithe. But they were hard put to it, “between the pulling of the king and the pushing of the pope.”
All Grosseteste’s dealings with the king show the same firm resolution to stop the royal extortion, and to insist on the fulfilment of the charters of liberties obtained from the crown. He carries on the work of Stephen Langton, always backing up the unsuccessful efforts of the good St. Edmund Rich (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1234–1240) to keep Henry faithful to his word, and prepares the way for the great campaign of his friend Simon of Montfort.[37] The very worst period of Henry’s long reign is covered by Grosseteste’s episcopal life. Hubert de Burgh’s wise rule was over by 1232, and Peter des Roches and the horde of aliens were fleecing the country for the next twenty years. It is not till after Grosseteste’s death that the barons dealt with Henry’s misrule to any purpose.
At the great council held in London in 1248, at which Grosseteste was present, a full list of the national grievances is given: the lavish waste of the wealth of the country on foreigners, the ruin of trade by the arbitrary seizure of goods by the king and his agents, the robbery of poor fishermen by royal authority, “so that they think it safer to trust themselves to the stormy waves and seek a further shore,” and the keeping bishoprics and abbacies vacant so that the crown may enjoy the revenues therefrom, are the chief causes of complaint. They were not new grievances, for the most part, and they were not to die with Henry III., all charters and royal promises notwithstanding.
Added to the common wrongs of Henry’s wretched misrule were the papal extortions, directly encouraged by the king. In return for papal mandates directing churchmen to supply the king with money, what could Henry—himself the most devoted servant of the papacy—do but help the pope to get what he could out of England? The wealth of England was held to be of fabulous amount at Rome, and popes beset by fierce ungodly emperors naturally turned to it in their need as to a treasury.
But the thing was intolerable to Grosseteste. He had studied in Paris, he welcomed Dominican and Franciscan friars from the continent as no other prelate did, and had no objection to foreigners per se. But the pope claimed the revenues of church livings for boys and presented illiterates to benefices—to the obvious degradation of the Church in England. Grosseteste was always willing enough to raise what money he could for the holy see, but appoint unworthy and incompetent clerks to livings in his diocese, that he would not do—not for any pope.
The country groaned under the biting avarice of the Roman see, as it bled under the vampire politics of Peter des Roches and his needy, greedy crew of Bretons and Poitevins.
What it all meant to England Matthew Paris has told us in his description of things in 1237:
“Now was simony practised without shame and usurers on various pleas openly extorted money from the common people and lesser folk; charity expired, the liberty of the Church withered away, religion was trampled to the dust. Daily did illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed with bulls from Rome, burst forth into threats; and, in spite of the privileges handed down to us from good men of old, they feared not to plunder the revenues consecrated by our holy forefathers for the service of religion, the support of the poor, and the nourishment of strangers, but thundering out their excommunications they quickly and violently carried off what they demanded. And if those who were wronged and robbed sought refuge by appealing or pleading their privileges, they were at once suspended and excommunicated by a papal writ. Thus mourning and lamentation were heard on all sides, and many exclaimed with heart-rending sobs, ‘It were better to die than to behold the sufferings of our country and its saints. Woe to England, once the chief of provinces, the mistress of nations, the mirror of the Church, the exemplar of religion, and now brought under tribute,—trampled on by worthless men, and the prey of men of low degree.’”