At the Hoketide Parliament[107] of 1255 the usual demand was made for an elective ministry and was refused;[108] at the adjourned session of this Parliament the following October, an aid to the king was denied on the distinct ground that the members, all magnates, had not been summoned according to the terms of Magna Carta.[109] The struggle, vain and threatening of future ill, went on through the next year, until by 1257 the king found himself plunged inextricably into debt, much of which was owing to the Pope. The latter had undertaken a war with Manfred with whom was lined up the Hohenstaufen power, to seat on the throne of Sicily Edmund Crouchback, Henry’s second son.[110] Henry owed him 135,000 marks, and it is said that the Londoners, the sheriffs, the clergy, and the Jews therefore suffered.
The first Parliament of 1258 was held at London on the 9th April and sat for about a month. The purple robes in which Henry garbed his foreign favorites shone richly against the gray background of his asserted poverty, and their brilliance was enough to blind the eyes of the Parliament to his necessities.
Wars were threatened on the northern and western borders, and the Pope was brandishing his sword of excommunication in case Henry continued his dilatory policy toward Apulia. Parliament refused his urgent plea for a tallage of one-third of the movables of the realm, reprehending the simplicity of the king in making his bargain with the Pope.[111] An outbreak was avoided by an adjournment until the 11th June at Oxford.
Provisions of Oxford, 1258
On that day the barons and higher clergy came together, bringing with them a heavy burden of grievances. A scheme of reform was drawn up in the famous Provisions of Oxford. They projected the control of the government by a number of representative committees.[112] The only point upon which the Provisions of Oxford touch the question of taxation is in the section which arranges for the appointment of a committee of twenty-four “by the whole of Parliament on behalf of the community” to treat of the aid demanded by the king for the prosecution of his war. The list of grievances, furthermore, for which the Provisions were to win redress, did not bring up the matter of the royal power to levy taxes in any degree whatsoever.[113] The nearest approach to such an objection came in the complaint against extortions under the feudal law and in the reference to the manner in which prises were exacted. In each instance the remonstrance was not against the principle but against the manner in which the act was accomplished.
Character of the Provisions
The Provisions of Oxford furnished no advance in the general progress toward parliamentary taxation. The only step was a step backward. They provided for one committee which should have the power of granting an aid to the king, and delegated to another most of the business of Parliament. These were movements, not toward the ideal grasped in the time of Edward I and realized in the Bill of Rights, but of a character distinctly retrogressive. The government was advantageous to none save to those who participated in it, and between the participants there was no mediator in case the distribution of advantages should be questioned. Theoretically the king’s authority remained, though it was in restraint; in fact it was given to an irresponsible and self-interested body of barons subject to the mutual jealousies which are always the incidents of oligarchic rule.
The provisional government lasted for a year and a half from its erection in June, 1258, without interruption; thereafter it continued for four years with a number of breaks until 1263, the year in which civil war began between Earl Simon and the king.
In the middle of 1261 Henry produced bulls which the Pope Alexander IV had granted to him shortly before he died absolving him from his oath to observe the Provisions, and pronouncing excommunication upon all those who should contravene the absolution.[114] The act of Henry all but brought forward the impending civil war. Simon de Montfort King and Earl Simon call knights of the shire to national assemblies and his colleagues, probably in the hope of winning the popular mind to their cause, acting as chiefs of the provisional government, addressed summonses to the various sheriffs inviting three knights from each shire to attend an assembly at St. Albans. Henry, fearing a general movement against him, sent out counter orders to the sheriffs, requiring them to send knights not to St. Albans but to Windsor, nobiscum super præmissis colloquium habituros.[115] In all probability neither of the assemblies met; at least there is no suggestion of a session of either in the chronicles of the time. They assume importance, however, as foreshadowing the later Parliaments of Simon de Montfort, and as indicative of his policy to utilize the county organization in national matters.