The Minority of Henry the Third

by Kate Norgate

From that time forth Peter never held office as a minister of state. He never had done so, save during those sixteen months of his justiciarship in 1214–1215.[577] He had, however, received another token of John’s confidence; he had been entrusted with the education of John’s heir. We have seen that in October, 1216, the Earl Marshal, with the assent of the other loyal barons, bestowed on Peter the important charge of the little King’s person, expressly on the ground that he had already been the child’s “master” and proved himself “a very good” one, who had “brought him up carefully and well.” As Henry was but just nine years old when these words were spoken,[578] we must infer from them that he had been under Peter’s care from a very tender age. Probably John had placed him in the bishop’s household as early as it was possible to do so, somewhat as Henry II had placed his eldest son, when quite a young child, in the household of Thomas the Chancellor.[579] The Marshal and the magnates did only what was natural and right when they replaced their young sovereign under the charge of his former tutor. The commission which Peter received from them, however, involved more than the boy’s education; it expressly included the responsibility for his personal safety. The man to whom was confided a charge so weighty as this obviously needed no official title to vindicate for him a prominent place among the counsellors by whose advice England was to be governed in his royal pupil’s name; and the active and versatile Southerner, experienced and efficient alike in matters of war, of administration, of finance, and of well-nigh every kind of public business, secular and ecclesiastical, was a colleague whose help the official governors of the realm would have been foolish indeed to reject or undervalue on the score of his foreign birth. They and he seem to have worked together without perceptible friction throughout the regency of the Marshal. The sharp words which passed between Peter and the regent shortly before the latter’s death, and Peter’s unseemly behaviour to the younger Marshal and the Legate next day, probably resulted from a misunderstanding on the part of the bishop. He evidently thought that the proposal to appoint a new “guardian of King and Kingdom” and the symbolical delivery of the King into the hands of Pandulf were meant to deprive himself of his precious charge. There was, however, no such intention. Pandulf gave Peter the rebuke which his violence deserved, but immediately replaced Henry under his care.[580]

1218–1219

For the first six months of Pandulf’s regency the chronicles are blank, so far as the internal history of England is concerned. Throughout those months, however, one man was openly setting the government at defiance. In December, 12161216, the royal castles of Rockingham and Sauvey, with the important Forest jurisdictions attached to them,[581] had been committed by the Earl Marshal to the custody of William de Fors, the titular Count of Aumale[582] (or “Albemarle,” as it seems to have been commonly called in England), “that he might dwell in them with his men until his own lands, which the King’s enemies had occupied during the war, should be restored to him.”[583] The actual custodian of Sauvey, Geoffrey de Serland, was apparently somewhat unwilling to hand the place over to the young count;[584] and as Geoffrey’s loyalty is unquestioned, his reluctance was probably caused by some doubts either of William’s loyalty, or of his fitness for the charge of such an important post. If so, these doubts were well founded. On 11th February, 12181218, William, having received restitution of his own lands, was bidden to deliver up Rockingham and Sauvey to another custodian.[585] This order was not obeyed; and a contemporary writer asserts that the Earl Marshal before his death “greatly repented” of having put these castles into the young count’s hands, “because of the complaints which arose out of the ill-doings of the said count and his officers who dwelt there and wrought serious injuries to the people of the district, both rich and poor.”[586] For some unexplained reason, however, no further steps seem to have been taken in the matter till six months after the Marshal’s death. Then, on 30th November, 1219,1219 a lengthy indictment against Aumale was issued in the form of letters patent to the barons, knights, and freeholders of the five counties—Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Rutland, Leicestershire, and Yorkshire—in which the bulk of his possessions lay. Count William was not only detaining, against the royal will and command, certain lands and castles of the King’s which had been placed in his charge (to wit, Rockingham and Sauvey), but was also fortifying and victualling them in the King’s defiance, although a day had actually been set—“to which he paid no heed”—for him to surrender them to the King in person. He was also holding tournaments; more especially he had lately held and attended one at Brackley, contrary to the King’s express orders, and regardless of a sentence of excommunication passed upon him by the Legate. He was therefore to be avoided as an excommunicate and a rebel; the persons addressed were warned, on pain of condign punishment, not to assist him in fortifying Sauvey, but to be ready to take action against him in whatever way they should be directed by future letters from the King; and the sheriffs of the five counties were ordered to proclaim him excommunicate.[587] Strangely enough, neither in record nor chronicle do we find any further mention of William of Aumale till the following April {1220}, when an order addressed to him for forty bucks to be sent to the King at Westminster shows that he was again recognized as warden of a royal Forest, which can only have been that of Rockingham or Sauvey;[588] and his next appearance is in the middle of June, when he was one of the sureties for King Henry’s fulfilment of a treaty with the King of Scots.[589] He seems to have been absolved on condition of taking the Cross[590] and of surrendering the castles and setting forth on his crusade within a given period. Such an arrangement would serve, for the time being, the purposes of Count and Legate alike. William remained in possession; Pandulf avoided, or at least staved off for a while, the responsibility of taking forcible measures against a man whom the Marshal had apparently deemed it prudent to treat with forbearance.

1220

A like forbearance was exercised towards the Justiciar of Ireland, Geoffrey de Marsh. Shortly before the Marshal’s death Geoffrey appears to have announced his intention of going on Crusade; {1219} and the Council seized the opportunity thus afforded them to insist that before he went, he must come to England to perform his homage to the King, and confer with them touching the state of affairs in Ireland. For this purpose they gave him on 23rd April a safe-conduct till All Saints’ day; and they arranged that during his absence from Ireland the Archbishop of Dublin, who had been his colleague in the office of Justiciar during the past twelve months, should take sole charge of the March.[591] The Archbishop was himself anxious to go to England for an interview with the King; and as Geoffrey delayed his departure, he at length wrote and asked permission to do so.[592] His request seems to have crossed with some royal letters issued on 22nd September, ordering that his appointment as chief Justiciar should take effect from Candlemas next, and that by that date Geoffrey should be in England without fail;[593] and this order Geoffrey was just preparing to obey when it was followed by a warm assent to the Archbishop’s proposed visit, which the King’s advisers said “would be most welcome for many reasons.” On this Geoffrey was disposed to make the Archbishop’s impending departure from Ireland a reason for again deferring his own; the Archbishop, however, besought the King not to let him do so, but to bid him “commit the custody of the land, according as the Council may provide, to some other man.”[594] The Archbishop was certainly in England in the summer of 1220; but there is no sign of Geoffrey’s presence there at Candlemas. Summoned again, this time to meet the King and Council at Nottingham on 1st June, he at last came over, but was unavoidably prevented from being at Nottingham on the appointed day, and begged that a later date might be fixed on which he might “lay before the King and council the affairs of the King’s land in Ireland, and”—thus he wrote to his “very dear friend” Hubert de Burgh—“they may be settled by the counsel of yourself and other of the King’s faithful men and of our friends.”[595]

The settlement took the form of a convention between the King and Geoffrey, drawn up at Oxford on 11th August, in presence of the Legate and the Archbishop of Dublin, as well as Peter des Roches, Hubert de Burgh, and other members of the royal council. The Justiciar is in future to answer at the King’s Exchequer in Dublin for escheats, wards, fines, gifts, tallages, reliefs, and aids, from Ireland; and the proceeds of all these, after they have been accounted for at the Exchequer, are to be rendered to the King at his command. Out of the assessed revenue of Ireland, and its “reasonable perquisites” other than those above mentioned, the Justiciar is to maintain the garrisons of the King’s land and castles in Ireland; the garrisons to be such as shall be determined by the advice of Archbishop Henry, Thomas FitzAdam, and Richard de Burgh. The surplus of these revenues and perquisites shall be accounted for at the Dublin Exchequer by the view of these three persons; and clerks of the King, appointed for the purpose, shall keep a counter-roll of all these things. The Justiciar shall appoint as constables of the King’s castles loyal and fit men who shall swear to keep the castles faithfully and safely for the King, so that in case of the Justiciar’s capture, or death, or misconduct, the castles shall be safe; and these constables shall give hostages for their fidelity to the Archbishop of Dublin and the Earl Marshal, and shall also send to the King, through the Archbishop, charters of fealty. The Justiciar gave his two sons as hostages; the Earl Marshal stood pledge for him; and he himself further pledged the whole of his lands, to fall in to the King and the Marshal respectively (he held some of each), in case of his failure to keep faith. He also took an oath to keep all these promises, on pain of being excommunicated by the Archbishop of Dublin in case of breaking them; and as he had left his seal in Ireland for legal purposes there, this writing was at his request sealed with the seals of his brother William and of the Archbishop of Dublin, until he, Geoffrey, could put his own seal to it.[596]

From this document it must be inferred that nothing worse than mismanagement was proved against Geoffrey. His mismanagement however had clearly reached a point at which any sovereign of full age, and in a position to enforce his commands, would have put an end to it by summarily dismissing Geoffrey from his office. But the guardians of Henry III knew that they were not in a position to enforce the dismissal of the Justiciar whom Henry’s father had left in charge of the March in Ireland. Geoffrey was not willing to resign because he was not prepared to render an account of his stewardship. If they issued a direct order for his supersession it was highly probable that he would set them and their order at defiance, and that he would be supported in his defiance by the wardens of the royal castles who owed their appointments to him. Henry could not go, as John had gone, with an armed force at his back, to settle matters in Ireland for himself; nor could anyone in England be sent to do so in his stead. Should force be needed to subdue Geoffrey, the task of subduing him could only be committed to some of the barons of the March; and to commit it to any of these would be to plunge the whole March into a civil war which might result in the complete destruction of the King’s authority there. The case against Geoffrey was clearly not strong enough to justify Pandulf and his colleagues in taking measures which involved such a risk. The course which they took in giving Geoffrey another chance of redeeming his errors, while hedging him round with the strongest moral restraints that could be devised to prevent a repetition of those errors, was at once more politic and more just.

Pandulf’s most congenial sphere of action was diplomacy; and at the outset of his legatine career he was called upon to exercise his diplomatic gifts on a readjustment of the relations between the Kings of England and Scotland. In 12181218 Alexander of Scotland—seemingly with the knowledge and assent of the English government—sent to the Pope a copy of the treaty which has been made between his father and John in 1209, and requested that Honorius would by his apostolic authority either confirm or annull it, as should seem to him best. Honorius committed the decision of the matter to Pandulf,[597] who was then on his way to England {Nov.}. Pandulf, after studying the text of the document,[598] {1219} appointed a day for a formal discussion of the questions at issue between the parties, in his presence, at Norham on 2nd August, 1219.[599] Alexander appeared in person; Henry was represented by a proctor. The discussion ended in an agreement that on the morrow of All Souls’ day another meeting should take place before the Legate, wheresoever he might be, “to treat concerning peace between the two Kings; and if peace cannot then be attained, the cause shall be proceeded with according to law.” Where this second meeting was held we know not, nor by what means peace was “then attained”; but it certainly was attained: “We are coming back at once” wrote Pandulf, in the triumph of his successful mediation, to Peter des Roches, “for, as Stephen de Segrave” (King Henry’s proctor) “and Master Robert of Arènes may have told you by word of mouth, our lord the King’s matters with the King of Scotland are by God’s grace now happily settled.”[600]

1219

What these “matters” were is nowhere stated. Later indications, however, point to a probability that all these obscure proceedings resulted in a ratification of the treaty as a whole, but with a modification of one article. William the Lion had given the wardship and marriage of his two daughters, Margaret and Isabel, to John, with fifteen thousand marks which were, seemingly, intended to form their dowries. The only copy of the treaty of Norham which we possess says nothing more on the subject than this; but from other sources we have reason to infer the existence in the original text of a further stipulation, that the elder girl, Margaret, was to become the wife of John’s heir, or if the boy should not live long enough, of the next heir, the baby Richard; and also of a formal surrender, made on the express condition of this marriage, of all the Scot King’s claims upon Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmorland.[601] When this treaty was made, in August 1209, Henry’s age was one year and ten months; Richard’s was seven months. Margaret of Scotland was fourteen years old at the least.[602] By 1218 Margaret’s brother and Henry’s guardians must all alike have begun to feel that this clause as it stood was doomed to prove impracticable. Henry’s great-grandfather Geoffrey of Anjou had, indeed, at the age of fifteen, married a woman ten years older than himself; and the difference of age between Henry II and Eleanor was probably not much less. But Eleanor was Duchess of Aquitaine, and Geoffrey’s bride was heiress of Normandy and England; while Margaret could bring to her husband nothing beyond her share of the fifteen thousand marks. The guardians of the reigning King of England might fairly expect to have no difficulty in finding for him in due time a matrimonial alliance fraught with greater advantages, personal and political, than were offered by a marriage under these circumstances with a sister of his own vassal; and Henry himself, when old enough to decide, was almost certain to repudiate the engagement so lightly made for him by his father. On the other hand, unless some steps were taken in anticipation of this contingency, Scotland might find that she had given England fifteen thousand marks for nothing: the non-fulfilment of this unlucky clause would invalidate the whole treaty, and might lead to a rupture between the two countries, which both parties desired to avoid. After Henry’s final coming of age in 1227, we are told, he had to give the King of Scots two hundred pounds worth of land for the quit-claim of the three northern counties, “because the former agreements[603] were not observed”—that is, because Henry had not married Margaret.[604] This compensation for his failure to marry her may have been agreed upon between the two Kings when she was betrothed to Hubert de Burgh in 1220 or 1221. Possibly, however, and even more probably, it may have been settled in Pandulf’s presence in November, 1219.