CHAPTER IV
TUTORS AND GOVERNORS
1221–1223
Haeres ... cum sit dominus omnium ... sub tutoribus et actoribus est, usque ad praefinitum tempus a patre.
1221
When Pandulf resigned his offices in England the King was within three months of his fourteenth birthday. Whether his minority was to terminate then, or how much longer it should continue, was still undecided. It seems to have been considered as terminable at any time after October 1st, 1221, at the discretion of the Pope; and this may have been the reason why no provision was made for a continuance, in the hands of any person or persons whatever, of the special authority in temporal matters which had been vested in the Legate. The Council which had carried on the administration of affairs under him was, so far as we can see, simply left to carry it on without him.
The government thus constituted had no reason to anticipate any immediate difficulties. The realm was at peace within its own borders, and at peace with its neighbour lands, Scotland and France. The Welsh princes were as usual not only quarrelling among themselves but also dragging the barons of the English border into their quarrels; but a new agreement among the princes, and a truce between Llywelyn on the one part, and the Marshal and Reginald de Breuse on the other, had just been patched up by Pandulf at Shrewsbury.[807] The alliance with Scotland was further cemented by another marriage before the end of the year; in fulfilment of Henry’s promise that the Scot King’s sisters should be provided with husbands in England, Margaret—once the destined bride of Henry himself—became the fourth wife of his Justiciar, Hubert de Burgh.[808] In Ireland, Geoffrey de Marsh had so misused his day of grace, by neglecting to fulfill the promises which he had made to the King a year before, that his removal could no longer be avoided; and just before Pandulf’s resignation letters in the King’s name were sent to the native princes of Ireland and the barons of the March, setting forth Geoffrey’s misdeeds and proclaiming that in consequence of them, “we, being justly provoked thereto that we should suffer him to rule our land of Ireland no more, do by the common counsel and assent of ourself and of the magnates and faithful men of England ordain that Henry Archbishop of Dublin shall have the custody and care of that land till we shall determine otherwise.”[809] The letters patent appointing the Archbishop Justiciar in Ireland had in fact been issued a fortnight before;[810] but a formal surrender of the office by Geoffrey was necessary before they could take effect. This surrender Geoffrey made on October 25th.[811]
A new seneschal of Poitou and Gascony, Hugh of Vivonne, had been appointed on 4th January.[812] He undertook the office with evident reluctance and forebodings—or hopes—of a speedy return;[813] and at the end of nine months he seems, like many another before him, to have found himself unequal to the difficulties of the situation. A Gascon noble of greater fame and a more highly trained and widely practised diplomatist were sent both at once to relieve and supersede him. The first was Savaric de Mauléon; the second was Pandulf. On 6th October the prelates, barons, and people of Poitou and Gascony were informed that the King had committed those two counties and their appurtenances to Savaric,[814] and also that he was sending Pandulf—now described as “bishop elect of Norwich, and chamberlain to the Pope”—into Poitou “for great and difficult matters,” in which the inhabitants of the land were exhorted to give the ex-Legate every assistance in their power.[815] Pandulf seems to have set out on his mission immediately, and in the full expectation that it would be one of considerable duration; on 12th October he had letters of protection for a year from All Saints’ day.[816] The primary purpose of that mission was, seemingly, to negotiate with Hugh of La Marche. Hugh and Isabel were still clamouring for Isabel’s Aquitanian dower-lands; the English government was determined not to restore these till Hugh had performed his homage and surrendered the lands given him by John in pledge for the dowry of Joan; which lands Hugh was equally determined to keep until his wife’s claims were satisfied. By the end of September Hugh’s aggressions had become so intolerable that the English Council retaliated by seizing into the King’s hand all the lands held in England by Hugh and Isabel as part of Isabel’s dower.[817] But to retaliate in Aquitaine itself was not so easy. One great difficulty was, as usual, the want of money. The mayor and commune of London stood surety for the King to the mayor and commune of La Rochelle for the repayment of two loans, which the last-named city was requested to make “for the safe-keeping and defence of our land of Poitou,” the one of a thousand marks to Pandulf, the other of five hundred marks to Engelard de Cigogné and Emeric de Sacy, who were despatched at the same time as Pandulf, also on business “touching our land of Poitou.”[818] On 1st November letters were addressed to the mayors and good men of Cognac, Saintes, Angoulême, and Oléron, bidding them withdraw from all further allegiance to the count of La Marche, and recognize no commands save those of the King’s seneschal of Poitou.[819] No name was given to the seneschal in this letter. The acting seneschal was still Hugh of Vivonne; Savaric, it seems, was even more reluctant than Hugh had been to undertake the office—he was probably more fully aware of its difficulty—and made his acceptance of it dependent on the fulfilment of certain conditions, whether political, military, or financial, there is nothing to show. The English Council, in fact, at the very moment when they were thus writing brave words to the Aquitanian towns, knew that their only hope of dealing successfully with either Hugh de Lusignan or Savaric lay in the diplomacy of Pandulf; and on 2nd November they commissioned the ex-Legate “to procure in whatever way he could the making of a prolonged truce between the King and the count of La Marche, and, having obtained this, to persuade and exhort Savaric de Mauléon to hasten into the presence of the King, who would (God willing) do what was right concerning his (Savaric’s) requests. If, however, the elect of Norwich could not make a truce with the Count, then let him devote his care and diligence to the carrying on of the King’s business according to what had been determined in the King’s presence; and let him deliver the care and custody of those parts to Savaric, inducing him thereto as best he could, and causing him to be efficiently provided with money for the defence of the land, according to the form which had been given to him.”[820] The Council’s trust in the dexterity of Pandulf was not misplaced. That he succeeded in making with La Marche a truce which lasted through the winter and was succeeded in the spring by some more definite agreement, may be gathered from the fact that nothing more is heard of either Hugh or Isabel till April, 12221222, and then the Queen’s English dower-lands were restored to her.[821] He was equally successful in “inducing” Savaric de Mauléon to undertake the seneschalship of Aquitaine; an office for which Savaric was, probably, by far the fittest man to whom it had ever been given, or offered, since the recall of Hubert de Burgh.
Pandulf’s mission to Poitou has a significance beyond its actual results. It indicates how large and disinterested was the view taken by him and by Honorius of what the papal overlordship of England and guardianship of its young King should involve. The foreign churchman who for two years and a half had been, alike in right and in fact, supreme head of the government in England had no sooner laid down his office there than he—of course with the sanction of the Pope, whose chamberlain he still remained—placed himself at the disposal of the English ministers of State, so lately his subordinates, and accepted from them a diplomatic commission which could bring no advantage of any kind either to himself or to the Roman See, solely for the purpose of helping them and their young sovereign out of a difficulty. On the other hand, the fact that these ministers, when no longer under any necessity of admitting him to a share in their counsels, were so ready to make use of his help and placed in him so much confidence as is implied in the latitude of the powers with which they entrusted him on this occasion, is a strong testimony to the estimation in which their previous relations with him had led them to hold his character, his abilities, and his devotion to the welfare of King and kingdom. As under William the Marshal, so under Pandulf, we cannot tell whether the inner working of the royal Council had been really as harmonious as its outward action appears, nor how much of its harmony, inward or outward, was due to the regent. Some indications of rivalry between certain of the King’s councillors seem to be discernible before the close of Pandulf’s rule; but so far as we can see, no open breach among them showed itself till some two years and a half after his controlling hand was removed.
It is difficult to define precisely the composition, during the minority of Henry III, of the body known as the King’s Council. That body included, besides the Primate of all England, the justices, and the great officers of State—justiciar, chancellor, treasurer,—certain persons who were called to be members of it on personal rather than official grounds, such as Bishop Peter of Winchester, Philip d’Aubigné, the Earl of Chester, and the King’s uncle, Earl William of Salisbury. Since the spring of 1219 the most onerous and important part of the work of government had been shared, under Pandulf, between Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches; Hubert, as Justiciar, naturally taking the more prominent part. Among our materials for the history of the time we find no suggestion anywhere that they were other than true yoke-fellows, till at Whitsuntide, 1221, there occurred the mysterious affair of Peter de Maulay.[822] The only two chroniclers who record De Maulay’s arrest say nothing more about its grounds than that he was “accused of treason.” Falkes de Bréauté, four years later, asserted that Peter de Maulay after dining at court was called into the King’s chamber as if for some private discourse, and there denounced as a traitor who had made a compact with the King of France to deliver into his hands the Lady Eleanor of Brittany, Henry’s cousin, who had been a State prisoner in Corfe castle for many years; moreover, according to Falkes, a greater personage than the castellan of Corfe was involved in the accusation; it was asserted that a ship to convey the lady over sea had been made ready by the Bishop of Winchester, who at the time of the arrest was absent from England on a pilgrimage to Compostella, and that the bishop was really gone not to pay his devotions to S. James, but to talk over the plot with Philip Augustus. Falkes declared that the only real plotters in the case were the Justiciar and his “accomplices,” who for their own private ends had planned the arrest of Peter de Maulay in the absence of Peter des Roches, and invented this story against both; and he adds that they overwhelmed De Maulay with insults, blows, and other indignities, and loaded him with chains, before they cast him into prison.[823] Falkes’s story is almost certainly correct thus far, that no real plot existed; for, whatever ill-treatment Peter de Maulay may have undergone at the time of his arrest, his innocence was implicitly acknowledged within less than a week, by his release as soon as he had surrendered Corfe; and the accusation against the other Peter, if ever really made, was clearly dropped at once and never revived. The whole plot seems to have been a sheer fiction; but we can hardly accept Falkes’s account of its origin. Hubert and Peter des Roches may have been jealous of each other; and they may have differed on some questions of policy—perhaps, amongst other things, as to the expediency or the justice of requiring compliance with the letter of the recent oath about the surrender of castles, in a case where a previous oath sworn to the late King could be pleaded against it.[824] We should, however, require a more impartial authority than Falkes to make us believe that Hubert’s jealousy and self-will goaded him into an attempt to ruin his rival by a device at once so monstrous and so clumsy as that which Falkes ascribes to him. He is far more likely to have been duped into believing a story invented by some unscrupulous subordinate who hoped that it might bring promotion to himself by serving (as, no doubt, it did serve) to the attainment of an end—the surrender of Corfe—which he knew the Justiciar had at heart, but which may not have commended itself to the judgement of the Bishop of Winchester.