CHAPTER II
THE REGENCY OF WILLIAM THE MARSHAL
1216–1219

He was a verray perfight gentil knight.

1216

The coronation of Henry III had brought England face to face with a problem which was practically new in her history: the problem of a royal minority. In the days before the Norman Conquest, indeed, three English kings had been crowned before they reached the age which for men of lower degree was counted as that of legal majority; and the last of these three, Æthelred the Redeless, had come to his throne at almost the same age as Henry. But these cases were all too remote to furnish precedents for the guidance of the statesmen into whose hands the task of carrying on the government of England was thrown by the death of John. They could not even furnish a precedent for the choice of a regent; and the choice actually made was the result of circumstances which may without exaggeration be called unique. None of the known rules of English law concerning wardship were altogether applicable to the case of the Crown. As the law of England then stood, the wardship of a free tenement held by other than military tenure, and of its infant heir, belonged to the infant’s next-of-kin who was not capable of inheriting the tenement; the wardship of an infant tenant in chivalry, and of his land, belonged to his overlord. If the analogy of the former case were to be followed, the regency would have fallen to the King’s mother, Isabel of Angoulême. Not only, however, was the task, in the circumstances then existing, far too weighty to be laid upon a woman and a foreigner, but it was obviously impossible to treat the crown and realm of England as a mere ordinary socage tenement. Wardship in chivalry, on the other hand, would until little more than three years before Henry’s accession have supplied no analogy at all; for the King and kingdom of England had no overlord upon earth before John’s homage to the Pope in May, 1213. By virtue of that homage England became a fief of the Roman see, and consequently on John’s death the wardship of his youthful heir and his distracted realm vested legally in Pope Honorius III. It might therefore have been expected that the regency would be at once assumed by the Pope’s representative in England, the Legate Gualo. But Gualo was an Italian who had been scarcely fifteen months in the land, and he was a priest. The needs of the time imperatively demanded that the acting head of the state, whose first task must be to drive out an alien invader and bring back rebels to allegiance, should be an Englishman and a warrior; and Gualo’s conduct showed that neither he nor Honorius ever contemplated any other arrangement. In all the transactions connected with the crowning of the new King and the organization of the new government the Legate seems to have purposely kept himself as much as possible in the background, guarding the rights of the Pope and the interests of the Pope’s ward not by direct intervention but rather by his mere presence, and putting forth his official powers only when their exercise was required to confirm, by the Papal sanction given through him, the measures agreed upon by the great men of the land, on whom the actual responsibility of appointing a regent thus devolved. If in undertaking that responsibility they were guided by any precedent or analogy at all, it must have been one drawn from a land far remote from England, but probably better known to many Englishmen in the days of Richard Cœur-de-Lion’s nephew than most of the countries nearer home; a land, too, which for fifty years in the preceding century had been ruled by kings of the same blood as Richard and Henry themselves. The “Assizes of Jerusalem” in which the jurisconsults of Cyprus, towards the end of the thirteenth century, embodied the traditions of law and custom said to be derived from a code originally compiled by the first King of the Latins in Jerusalem, Godfrey of Bouillon, and modified by his successors down to Saladin’s capture of the Holy City in 1187, contain an ordinance about minor heirs which runs thus: “If he” (the minor) “is a lord of land”—that is, a sovereign or suzerain lord—“his body and his fortresses ought to be guarded as shall be agreed by the community of his men.”[327] This provision had been acted upon in the case of King Baldwin III, on whose accession, at the age of thirteen, the princes and barons of the realm claimed and exercised the right to elect a regent.[328] What the magnates of Palestine thus did in 1174 the magnates of England did as freely in 1216. Not only did Gualo make no claim to the regency for himself, but he did not even attempt to dictate their choice. If indeed that choice was influenced by any one outside their own circle, that one was the late King. John’s commendation, however, could scarcely have been needed to point out the man for the office.

Yet that man was one who had not only passed the age of three score years and ten,[329] but had passed it without ever having held any office, in court, camp, or administration, of sufficient importance to give scope for the display of any special capacities for generalship or government, or for the acquisition of special knowledge and experience in the conduct of politics or of war. Neither by birth nor by origin was William the Marshal a magnate of the highest rank. The founder of the Marshal family, one Gilbert, who seems to have been either a cadet or a connexion by marriage of the Norman house of Tancarville, was marshal to Henry I; that office became hereditary in his family, and furnished a surname to all his race. The office of the King’s Marshal was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a grand serjeanty and nothing more; the military duties and responsibilities originally involved in it had long since passed into other hands, and the material advantages attached to it seem to have been of small extent and importance; it gave to its holder little more than a position of honour and dignity in the royal household, the right of carrying the sword of state on certain public occasions, and, possibly, a sort of inchoate right to the custody of the royal castle of Marlborough. William was a younger son; at the age of twelve years or thereabouts {c. 1155} he was sent, with a companion and a serving-lad, to seek his fortune abroad, in the household of his father’s cousin William of Tancarville, the chamberlain of Normandy. There he shewed so little promise of distinction that the other young squires declared “William Waste-meat”[330] to be good for nothing but eating, drinking, and sleeping. The chamberlain, however, had a better opinion of his young kinsman. He knighted him at a moment when Henry II and Louis VII were at strife and some partisans of Louis were threatening the Norman Vexin: and Sir William in his first fight—in defence of the castle of Drincourt—proved himself well worthy of his spurs.[331] But immediately afterwards the two Kings made peace; and it was not in war, but in the tournaments which on the Continent (they were as yet unknown in England) furnished at once a school of arms and a means of subsistence for the younger members of the baronial houses in time of peace, that William first made himself a name.[332]

By 1170 William had acquired such a reputation that he was chosen by Henry II not only to be a member of the household of the “young King”—Henry’s eldest son—but was specially appointed to watch over and direct the lad’s military training.[333] Three years later {1173} young Henry himself, when offered knighthood at the hands of some of the noblest and most illustrious among the chivalry of France, declared that he would receive it only from “the best knight that ever was or will be,” and handed his sword to William the Marshal.[334] After nearly twelve years of close companionship {1182} slanderous tongues parted William from the young King, shortly before the latter’s final revolt against his father.[335] The slander was, however, detected and William was recalled[336] in time to watch over his young lord’s death-bed {1183} and receive his dying charge to fulfil in his stead a vow which he had made of pilgrimage to the Holy Land.[337] On William’s return to Europe, early in 1187, Henry II took him into his own service as a knight of his household;[338] and thenceforth till the hour of Henry’s death he was the King’s best counsellor and closest friend.[339]

1189

The first act of Henry’s successor was to confirm a grant which Henry had promised to William, of the hand of the greatest heiress in his realm, Isabel de Clare.[340] Her heritage included the English earldom of Pembroke or Striguil, the Norman barony of Longueville, and a fief in Ireland comprising nearly the whole of the ancient kingdom of Leinster. William’s marriage suddenly raised him from the position of a portionless younger son, “without a furrow of land, and with no fortune but his knighthood,” to that of a magnate of high rank, great wealth, and considerable territorial importance, and thus gave him, as a matter of course, a permanent and definite place in the royal council; but he showed no disposition to take a prominent part in politics. As one of the subordinate justiciars appointed by Richard to assist in the government of the realm during the King’s absence on Crusade, he at first supported John against William of Longchamp, and afterwards, when John’s treason was made manifest, supported the new justiciar, Walter of Coutances, against John. After Richard’s return William was almost constantly with him in Normandy, taking his full share in the warfare with Philip Augustus which occupied the last five years of Richard’s life; but his share was that of a devoted follower and a brave knight, not of a great noble holding an independent command. It was only at Cœur-de-Lion’s death {1199} that William the Marshal came to the front of affairs. The dying King had appointed him constable of the castle of Rouen, which contained the ducal treasure; it was he who won for Richard’s chosen successor, John, the support of the Norman primate, and thus largely contributed to secure for John acceptance in Normandy as duke.[341] The FitzGilbert patrimony had come to him in 1194, on the death of his elder brother.[342] The earldom of Pembroke or Striguil, which he had held by courtesy since his marriage with the young countess, was granted to him by formal investiture on John’s coronation day;[343] a few months later the office of Marshal was conferred by royal charter on him and his heirs for ever.[344] Throughout the greater part of John’s reign {1200–1216} he was sheriff of Sussex and Gloucestershire, and he was also an assistant justice and baron of the Exchequer. For some years after John’s accession he seems to have been in almost constant attendance on the King; during the Interdict he resided chiefly on his Irish lands. From 1213 onwards he was again John’s constant companion and his most trusted counsellor; and in that capacity his name stands in the preamble of the Great Charter first among the lay magnates in the list of the persons by whose advice the Charter was granted. Throughout the troubles of the succeeding year he adhered quietly but steadily to the King, whose dying testimony has been quoted already—“He has always served me loyally; in his loyalty, above that of any other man, I put my trust.”