The history of England, from the accession of Henry III. to the death of Edward III. (1216-1377)

by T. F. Tout

Earl Randolph needed the Welsh alliance the more because he definitely threw in his lot with the enemies of Hubert de Burgh. In April, 1223, a bull of Honorius III. declared Henry competent to govern in his own name, a change which resulted in a further strengthening of Hubert's power. Towards the end of the year Randolph joined with William of Albemarle, the Bishop of Winchester and Falkes de Bréauté, in an attempt to overthrow the justiciar. The discontented barons took arms and laid their grievances before the king. They wished, they said, no ill to king or kingdom, but simply desired to remove the justiciar from his counsels. Hot words passed between the indignant Hubert and Peter des Roches, and the conference broke up in confusion. The barons still remained mutinous, and, while the king held his Christmas court at Northampton, they celebrated the feast at Leicester. At last Langton persuaded both parties to come to an agreement on the basis of king's friends and barons alike surrendering their castles and wardships. This was a substantial victory for the party of order, and during the next few months much was done to transfer the castles to loyal hands. Randolph himself surrendered Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth.

Comparative peace having been restored, and the judicial bench purged of feudal partisans, private persons ventured to complain of outrageous acts of "novel disseisin", or unlawful appropriation of men's lands. In the spring of 1224 the king's justices went throughout the country, hearing and deciding pleas of this sort. Sixteen acts of novel disseisin were proved against Falkes de Bréauté. Despite all the efforts of Langton and Hubert, that able adventurer, though stripped of some of his castles, fully maintained the position which he first acquired in the service of John. He was not the man to put up tamely with the piecemeal destruction of his power by legal process, and, backed up secretly by the feudal leaders, resolved to take the law into his own hands. One of the most active of the judges in hearing complaints against him was Henry of Braybrook. Falkes bade his brother, William de Bréauté fall upon the justice, who had been hearing suits at Dunstable, and take him prisoner. William faithfully fulfilled his brother's orders, and on June 17 the unlucky judge was safely shut up in a dungeon of Bedford Castle, of which William had the custody, as his brother's agent. So daring an outrage on the royal authority was worse than the action of William of Albemarle four years before. Hubert and the archbishop immediately took strong measures to enforce the sanctity of the law. While Langton excommunicated Falkes and his abettors, Hubert hastily turned against the traitor the forces which were assembling at Northampton with the object of reconquering Poitou. Braybrook was captured on Monday. On Thursday the royal troops besieged Bedford.

The siege lasted from June 20 to August 14. The "noble castle of Bedford" was new, large, and fortified with an inner and outer baily, and two strong towers. Falkes trusted that it would hold out for a year, and had amply provided it with provisions and munitions of war. In effect, though William de Bréauté and his followers showed a gallant spirit, it resisted the justiciar for barely two months. When called upon to surrender the garrison answered that they would only yield at their lord's orders, and that the more as they were not bound to the king by homage or fealty. Nothing was left but a fight to the death. The royalists made strenuous efforts. A new scutage, the "scutage of Bedford," was imposed on the realm. Meanwhile Falkes fled to his accomplice, the Earl of Chester, and afterwards took refuge with Llewelyn. But the adventurer found such cold comfort from the great men who had lured him to his ruin that he perforce made his way back to England, along with a motley band of followers, English and French, Scottish and Welsh.[1] A hue and cry was raised after him, and, like William of Albemarle, he was forced to throw himself into sanctuary, while Randolph of Chester openly joined the besiegers of Bedford. In his refuge in a church at Coventry, Falkes was persuaded to surrender to the bishop of the diocese, who handed him over to Langton.

[1] The names of his familia taken with him are in Patent Rolls of Henry III., 1216-1227, pp. 461-62.

During Falkes's wanderings his brother had been struggling valiantly against overwhelming odds. Petrariae and mangonels threw huge stones into the castle, and effected breaches in keep and curtain. Miners undermined the walls, while over-against the stronghold two lofty structures of wood were raised, from which the crossbowmen, who manned them, were able to command the whole of the interior. At last the castle was captured in four successive assaults. In the first the barbican was taken; in the next the outer baily was stormed; in the third the interior baily was won; and in the last the keep was split asunder. The garrison then allowed the women and captives, including the wife of Falkes and the unlucky Braybrook, to make their way to the enemies' lines. Next day the defenders themselves surrendered. The only mercy shown to these gallant men was that they were allowed to make their peace with the Church before their execution. Of the eighty prisoners, three Templars alone were spared.

Falkes threw himself upon the king's mercy, appealing to his former services to Henry and his father. He surrendered to the King the large sums of money which he had deposited with his bankers, the Templars of London, and ordered his castellans in Plympton and the other west-country castles of his wife to open their gates to the royal officers. In return for these concessions he was released from excommunication. His life was spared, but his property was confiscated, and he was ordered to abjure the realm. Even his wife deserted him, protesting that she had been forced to marry him against her will. On October 26 he received letters of safe conduct to go beyond sea. As he left England, he protested that he had been instigated by the English magnates in all that he had done. On landing at Fécamp he was detained by his old enemy Louis, then, by his father's death, King of France. But Louis VIII. was the last man to bear old grudges against the Norman adventurer, especially as Falkes's rising had enabled him to capture the chief towns of Poitou.

Even in his exile Falkes was still able to do mischief. He obtained his release from Louis' prison about Easter, 1225, on the pretence of going on crusade. He then made his way to Rome where he strove to excite the sympathy of Honorius III., by presenting an artful memorial, which throws a flood of light upon his character, motives, and hopes. Honorius earnestly pleaded for his restitution, but Hubert and Langton stood firm against him. They urged that the pope had been misinformed, and declined to recall the exile. Honorius sent his chaplain Otto to England, but the nuncio found it impossible to modify the policy of the advisers of the king. Falkes went back from Italy to Troyes, where he waited for a year in the hope that his sentence would be reversed. At last Otto gave up his cause in despair, and devoted himself to the more profitable work of exacting money from the English clergy. Falkes died in 1226. With him disappears from our history the lawless spirit which had troubled the land since the war between John and his barons. The foreign adventurers, of whom he was the chief, either went back in disgust to their native lands, or, like Peter de Mauley, became loyal subjects and the progenitors of a harmless stock of English barons. The ten years of storm and stress were over. The administration was once more in English hands, and Hubert enjoyed a few years of well-earned power.

New difficulties at once arose. The defeat of the feudalists and their Welsh allies involved heavy special taxation, and the king's honour required that an effort should be made both to wrest Poitou from Louis VIII., and to strengthen the English hold over Gascony. Besides national obligations, clergy and laity alike were still called upon to contribute towards the cost of crusading enterprises, and in 1226 the papal nuncio, Otto, demanded that a large proportion of the revenues of the English clergy should be contributed to the papal coffers. To the Englishman of that age all extraordinary taxation was a grievance quite irrespective of its necessity. The double incidence of the royal and papal demands was met by protests which showed some tendency towards the splitting up of the victorious side into parties. It was still easy for all to unite against Otto, and the papal agent was forced to go home empty handed, for councils both of clergy and barons agreed to reject his demands. Whatever other nations might offer to the pope, argued the magnates, the realms of England and Ireland at least had a right to be freed from such impositions by reason of the tribute which John had agreed to pay to Innocent III. The demand of the king's ministers for a fifteenth to prosecute the war with France was reluctantly conceded, but only on the condition of a fresh confirmation of the charters in a form intended to bring home to the king his personal obligation to observe them. Hubert de Burgh, however, was no enthusiast for the charters. His standpoint was that of the officials of the age of Henry II. To him the re-establishment of order meant the restoration of the prerogative. There he parted company with the archbishop, who was an eager upholder of the charters, for which he was so largely responsible. The struggle against the foreigner was to be succeeded by a struggle for the charters.

In January, 1227, a council met at Oxford. The king, then nearly twenty years old, declared that he would govern the country himself, and renounced the tutelage of the Bishop of Winchester. Henry gave himself over completely to the justiciar, whom he rewarded for his faithful service by making him Earl of Kent. In deep disgust Bishop Peter left the court to carry out his long-deferred crusading vows. For four years he was absent in Palestine, where his military talents had ample scope as one of the leaders of Frederick II.'s army, while his diplomatic skill sought, with less result, to preserve some sort of relations between the excommunicated emperor and the new pope, Gregory IX., who in this same year succeeded Honorius. In April Gregory renewed the bull of 1223 in which his predecessor recognised Henry's competence to govern.

Thus ended the first minority since the Conquest. The successful restoration of law and order when the king was a child, showed that a strong king was not absolutely necessary for good government. From the exercise of royal authority by ministers without the personal intervention of the monarch arose the ideas of limited monarchy, the responsibility of the official, and the constitutional rights of the baronial council to appoint ministers and control the administration. We also discern, almost for the first time, the action of an inner ministerial council which was ultimately to develop into the consilium ordinarium of a later age.