CHAPTER V
THE YOUNG KING
1223–1227
Aetatem habet; ipse de se loquatur.
1223
The recognition of Henry’s partial coming of age (if such a phrase may be allowed) in December, 1223, re-introduced into English politics and into the government of England a factor which had been absent from them for seven years, but which until John’s death had always been, and was again to be for many generations, a factor of great, perhaps we should rather say of the very greatest importance: the character and will of the King. Thenceforth neither the Council as a body, nor any member of it, could do any act in the King’s name without consulting him and obtaining his sanction; nor could they, if the King desired anything to be done which lay within the limits of his regal powers as defined in October, 1223, prevent him from doing it, except by persuading him to give up his desire in deference to their advice. The circumstances by which such abnormal authority had become connected with the justiciarship had ceased to exist; that office was once more reduced within its proper limits; and if Hubert now aspired to rule England in Henry’s name, the only way in which he could do so was by acquiring and keeping complete personal ascendency over Henry himself. If, however, the papal mandates which brought about this altered condition of things had really been procured by Peter des Roches, in the hope that when Hubert’s official importance was thus diminished he himself might regain the foremost place in his old pupil’s confidence and become the chief adviser of the Crown in Hubert’s stead, he was doomed to wait a long time for the fulfilment of his hope. Until Henry’s final coming of age and for many years after, so far as the King’s policy was dictated by any one, it was dictated by Hubert de Burgh. But even during the years which were still to elapse before Henry attained his complete majority, Hubert’s dictatorship was very far from absolute. In October, 1223, the King was sixteen years old; he was universally esteemed an intelligent, serious-minded lad; and he had been carefully educated. In later life he did not prove a man of lofty mental capacity or great force of character; but he did prove to possess a will of his own, though it was too often a fitful and a wayward will—precisely the kind of will which may be only too easily influenced, but never entirely directed or controlled, by another person. If Henry’s will, at the opening of his seventeenth year and in the first flush of his newly acquired regal independence, had been so utterly dormant as to move only at Hubert’s impulsion, he would indeed have been a marvellously degenerate descendant of his Angevin and Norman ancestors. For such an unnatural supposition there is no ground whatever. There is every reason to believe that from December, 1223, onwards Henry, within the limits defined in October, and with the assistance of his Council, although relying mainly on the advice of one member of it, actually governed as well as reigned.
On the breaking up of the council in London the Earl of Chester and his party went to Northampton to concert their plans and muster their forces pending the expiration of the “truce” at the octave of S. Hilary. They removed to Leicester on hearing that the King was coming to hold his Christmas court at Northampton.[941] Sumptuous preparations were made for the festival; the majority of the magnates, as well as the Primate and other bishops, rallied round the King, and there came together “so many earls and barons and knights in arms that neither in the days of the King’s father, nor since, was such a festival remembered to have been celebrated in England.”[942] On the day after Christmas {26 Dec.} the Archbishop and his suffragans put on their albs, lighted their candles, and excommunicated all “disturbers of the King, the realm, and the Church, and invaders of ecclesiastical property.”[943] Stephen then sent a message to the discontented barons at Leicester, bidding them come to speak with the King, and warning them that a refusal would place them within the scope of the excommunication just published {26–28 Dec.}. Alarmed by this threat, and conscious of the inferiority of their forces, they obeyed the summons.[944] They were brought into the presence of the King, the Primate, and some of the bishops, and the Pope’s order for the restitution of the King’s property was exhibited to them there. Then the King himself called upon them all to obey it by immediately surrendering the castles and other wardenships which they held for him. For a while they hesitated whether to yield or appeal to the Pope; but another word of warning from the Archbishop decided them, and they agreed to do what was required of them, on condition that the Justiciar and all other holders of royal property should at once do likewise. Stephen answered eagerly, “It is meet that there be such a distribution of castles as shall make all parties equal without scandal.”[945] On this a universal surrender was made in legal form by the delivery of a glove or a hat from every individual both of Chester’s party and of Hubert’s, the two leaders themselves included.[946]
Next day (30th December) new custodians were appointed to twenty-five royal castles. The former castellans thus displaced were thirteen in number. One of them had, before the general surrender, resigned on account of ill-health. Of the remaining twelve, five had been concerned in the recent attempt to oust the Justiciar—Ranulf of Chester, William de Cantelupe, Engelard de Cigogné, Brian de Lisle, and Falkes; the other seven were either neutral, or distinctly of the opposite party—Ralf de Gernon, John Russell, Stephen de Sedgrave, William Brewer, the Bishop of Norwich, the Earl of Salisbury, and the Justiciar himself. Out of the seven royal castles which Hubert had in his charge the only one not transferred to other keeping was the Tower of London, of which the custody was traditionally attached to the justiciarship.[947] On 7th January {1224} orders were given for the transfer of three more castles—Winchester, Porchester, and Southampton, all in the custody of Bishop Peter; and on 2nd February the lands of the young heir to the earldom of Devon, and the castles which formed part of them, were committed to a new warden in place of the boy’s stepfather, Falkes.[948] The actual displacement of castellans consequent on the surrender of 29th December, 1223, seems to have ended here. By that surrender several royal castles which make no appearance in the Rolls at this time must have been, like the others, placed legally in the King’s hands; but he seems to have neither appointed new wardens to them, nor re-committed them to their existing wardens; these latter were simply left in possession, as they had originally been appointed, during the King’s pleasure. Even members of the party opposed to Hubert were in this informal way suffered to retain some of their wardenships; Falkes lost—at that moment—only three of the many royal castles which he held;[949] Gloucester, which though assigned to Hubert by Ralf Musard under compulsion in the autumn of 1223 had never passed actually into Hubert’s custody, was not taken from Ralf till November, 1225.[950] On the other hand, although only five sheriffs were displaced, their displacement involved the transfer of thirteen shires to other hands, and four of the five men were opponents of Hubert; the fifth, John Russell, was merely removed from Somerset to the joint sheriffdom of Leicestershire and Warwickshire, taken from William de Cantelupe. On the same day—30th December, 1223—the Earl of Chester lost the shrievalties of Lancashire, Shropshire, and Staffordshire, and Falkes lost two out of his seven shires; on 18th January {1224} he was deprived of four more, Rutland alone being left to him; and in the interval, on 7th January, Bishop Peter was deprived of the sheriffdom of Hampshire. Considering the recent political alliance between Chester, Cantelupe, and Falkes, and the geographical relation to one another (and also, in the case of Chester’s shires, to his own Palatine county and to the Welsh border) of the shires thus taken from them, their dispossession was a reasonable precaution. Bishop Peter’s deprivation of his sheriffdom and wardenships may have been likewise dictated by prudence or suspicion; but suspicion, if it existed, was veiled beneath an appearance of courtesy; it was not till a week after the letters had been issued for the displacement of the other sheriffs and castellans that he was called upon to hand over Hampshire and its castles to a brother bishop, Richard of Salisbury.
Fifteen of the other twenty-five redistributed castles were committed to prelates {1223}. Bristol was transferred to its diocesan bishop, Jocelyn of Bath, from Bishop Pandulf of Norwich; the other fourteen had been in the charge of laymen. Jocelyn of Bath was also entrusted with one of these castles, Sherborne; eleven were committed to the bishops (in one case the archbishop) of the dioceses in which they respectively stood; the other two—Windsor and Odiham—to Archbishop Stephen.[951] These appointments, all made on 30th December, 1223, were evidently not meant to be of long duration; their object was to give the King and his advisers time for considering more fully how best to dispose of the castles, of which the greater number would meanwhile be in the keeping of guardians whose neutral position afforded the deprived castellans no ground for jealousy or suspicion. The arrangement seems however to have worked so well that very little modification of it was found necessary for several years. Its author was probably the Archbishop of Canterbury. Throughout the proceedings at Northampton he seems to have acted as spokesman on the King’s side; as head of the commission charged with the execution of the papal mandate on which those proceedings were based, he was most likely entrusted by Henry with the conduct of them. Falkes says that immediately after the surrender “the Archbishop, distributing the castles by word of mouth, deprived all the barons alike of their possessions.” The letters patent issued next day were no doubt drawn up according to this verbal distribution; but, as we have seen, the actual results were far less sweeping than the words of Falkes imply. A charge of unfair dealing which is brought by Falkes and by another writer of the time against the King and his advisers on this occasion has met with a more ready acceptance than, perhaps, it deserved. “While,” says Falkes, “the Earl of Chester and his friends made a real bodily restitution of their castles, the Justiciar and his party held theirs as before.”[952] “When the castles were surrendered,” says Ralf of Coggeshall, “the King gave back to Hubert his wardenships, the other castellans being deprived of theirs.”[953] The evidence of the Rolls on this point is unfortunately very meagre and incomplete; they contain scarcely any information about the royal castles during the next eight years and more. We find, however, in the list of castles held by Hubert at his fall in 1232 only four out of the seven which he had held in 1223: the Tower, Dover, Rochester, and Canterbury.[954] The first seems never to have been taken from him.[955] Rochester was re-committed to him on 26th March, 1225,[956] and Dover not much later, perhaps even earlier.[957] The delivery of Canterbury to the Archbishop may never have been enforced; but it is equally possible that Hubert may not have regained the custody of this castle till after Stephen’s death, in 1228.[958] This evidence, though not sufficient to determine precisely how much of truth or of error is contained either in Falkes’s assertion or in Ralf’s, does suffice to show that neither the baron’s version of the matter nor the chronicler’s is altogether exact.
1224
Some at least of the deprived castellans, however, who had probably hoped for speedy re-instatement, were disappointed at not getting it,[959] and not less disappointed at the failure of the attempt to oust Hubert from the justiciarship. The nobler spirits among the malcontents seem to have fallen back, almost immediately after the surrender at Northampton, upon a more pacific and legitimate expedient for curbing his masterfulness and guarding themselves against the danger of government by “unjust laws.” On the octave of Epiphany, when the court reassembled in London, the King “was requested by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other magnates to confirm the liberties and free customs for which war had been waged against his father.”[960] The King’s quasi-majority afforded an obvious occasion for such a request. The Great Charter had been twice renewed in his name, but at a time when he was too young to understand the responsibilities to which it pledged him. Now that he was recognized as “a man in wisdom and understanding,” personally answerable for “the disposition of his realm,” he might fairly be asked to grant a new confirmation of the Charter, which those who asked for it doubtless hoped would be an end of all strife. It was only natural that on this matter Stephen de Langton should be spokesman; and he spoke urgently, pleading that the King “could not evade doing this, since at the departure of Louis he and all the nobility of the realm with him had sworn that they would all observe, and cause to be observed by all others, the liberties written down aforetime.” William Brewer took upon himself to answer for the King: “The liberties which ye ask for ought rightly not to be observed, because they were extorted by violence.” “William,” exclaimed the Archbishop, “if you loved the King, you would not thus stand in the way of the peace of his realm.” Then, says the chronicler, “the King, seeing the Archbishop moved to anger, said: ‘These liberties we have all sworn, and what we have sworn we are all bound to observe.’”[961]
With a boy’s simplicity the young King had unconsciously passed judgement on the demand which had just been made to him and on the repeated demands for confirmation of the Charters which resound through the history of the next seventy years. He had sworn to maintain the liberties which he was asked to confirm; he was bound by his oath; no amount of repetitions could make that oath any more binding than it was already, and no amount of confirmations could really give any additional security for its observance. But behind the question of confirmation lay, probably, a question of definition. One article, at least, of the Charter as republished in 1217 left a wide field open for contention: the forty-sixth article, which reserved to all the King’s subjects “the liberties and free customs which they formerly had.” This clause had replaced the one in the Charter of 1216 which reserved for future consideration certain important articles in the Great Charter of 1215.[962] It is probable that what Stephen and the magnates with whom he was acting—whoever these may have been—really wanted was a revision of the Charter, to include the substitution of some definite provisions on these reserved points for the vague saving clause of 1217. If so, William Brewer’s attitude must have shewn them that the cleavage of political opinion within the royal Council was too sharp for agreement on the subject to be possible at that moment. For the observance of the Charter as it stood they had the word of the King, and there was no reason to expect that the King would be worse than his word.[963]