Edward was forced to defend his inheritance. Henry III. paid little heed to his misfortunes, and answered his appeal for help by saying: "What have I to do with the matter? I have given you the land; you must defend it with your own resources. I have plenty of other business to do." Nevertheless, Henry accompanied his son on a Welsh campaign in August, 1257. The English army got no further than Deganwy, and therefore did not really invade Llewelyn's dominions at all. After waiting idly on the banks of the Conway for some weeks, it retired home, leaving the open country to be ruled by Llewelyn as he would, and having done nothing but revictual the castles of the four cantreds. Next year a truce was made, which left Llewelyn in possession of the disputed districts. Troubles at home were calling off both father and son from the Welsh war, and thus Llewelyn secured his virtual triumph. Though fear of the progress of the lord of Gwynedd filled every marcher with alarm, yet the dread of the power of Edward was even more nearly present before them. The marcher lords deliberately stood aside, and the result was inevitable disaster. Edward found that the territories handed over to him by his father had to be conquered before they could be administered, and Henry III.'s methods of government made it a hopeless business to find either the men or the money for the task.
England still resounded with complaints of misgovernment, and demands for the execution of the charters. Before going to Bordeaux in 1253, Henry obtained from the reluctant parliament a considerable subsidy, and pledged himself as "a man, a Christian, a knight, and a crowned and anointed king," to uphold the charters. During his absence a parliament, summoned by the regents, Queen Eleanor and Richard of Cornwall, for January, 1254, showed such unwillingness to grant a supply that a fresh assembly was convened in April, to which knights of the shire, for the first time since the reign of John, and representatives of the diocesan clergy, for the first occasion on record, were summoned, as well as the baronial and clerical grandees. Nothing came of the meeting save fresh complaints. The Earl of Leicester became the spokesman of the opposition. Hurrying back from France he warned the parliament not to fall into the "mouse-traps" laid for them by the king. In default of English money, enough to meet the king's necessities was extorted from the Jews, recently handed over to the custody of Richard of Cornwall. After his return from France at the end of 1254, Henry's renewed requests for money gave coherence to the opposition. Between 1254 and 1258 the king's exactions, and an effective organisation for withstanding them, developed on parallel lines. To the old sources of discontent were added grievances proceeding from enterprises of so costly a nature that they at last brought about a crisis.
The foremost grievance against the king was still his co-operation with the papacy in spoiling the Church of England. Though the death of the excommunicated Frederick II. in 1250 was a great gain for Innocent IV., the contest of the papacy against the Hohenstaufen raged as fiercely as ever. Both in Germany and in Italy Innocent had to carry on his struggle against Conrad, Frederick's son. After Conrad's death, in 1254, there was still Frederick's strenuous bastard, Manfred, to be reckoned with in Naples and Sicily. Innocent IV. died in 1254, but his successor, Alexander IV., continued his policy. A papalist King of Naples was wanted to withstand Manfred, and also a papalist successor to the pope's phantom King of the Romans, William of Holland, who died in 1256.
Candidates to both crowns were sought for in England. Since 1250 Innocent IV. had been sounding Richard, Earl of Cornwall, as to his willingness to accept Sicily. The honourable scruple against hostility to his kinsman, which Richard shared with the king, prevented him from setting up his claims against Conrad. But the deaths both of Conrad and of Frederick II.'s son by Isabella of England weakened the ties between the English royal house and the Hohenstaufen, and Henry was tempted by Innocent's offer of the Sicilian throne for his younger son, Edmund, a boy of nine, along with a proposal to release him from his vow of crusade to Syria, if he would prosecute on his son's behalf a crusading campaign against the enemies of the Church in Naples. Innocent died before the negotiations were completed, but Alexander IV. renewed the offer, and in April, 1255, Peter of Aigueblanche, Bishop of Hereford, accepted the preferred kingdom in Edmund's name. Sicily was to be held by a tribute of money and service, as a fief of the holy see, and was never to be united with the empire. Henry was to do homage to the pope on his son's behalf, to go to Italy in person or send thither a competent force, and to reimburse the pope for the large sums expended by him in the prosecution of the war. In return the English and Scottish proceeds of the crusading tenth, imposed on the clergy at Lyons, were to be paid to Henry. On October 18, 1255, a cardinal invested Edmund with a ring that symbolised his appointment. Henry stood before the altar and swore by St. Edward that he would himself go to Apulia, as soon as he could safely pass through France.
The treaty remained a dead letter. Henry found it quite impossible to raise either the men or the money promised, and abandoned any idea of visiting Sicily in person. Meanwhile Naples and Sicily were united in support of Manfred, and discomfited the feeble forces of the papal legates who acted against him in Edmund's name. At last the Archbishop of Messina came from the pope with an urgent request for payment of the promised sums. It was in vain that Henry led forth his son, clothed in Apulian dress, before the Lenten parliament of 1257, and begged the magnates to enable him to redeem his bond. When they heard the king's speech "the ears of all men tingled". Nothing could be got save from the clergy, so that Henry was quite unable to meet his obligations. He besought Alexander to give him time, to make terms with Manfred, to release Edmund from his debts on condition of ceding a large part of Apulia to the Church,—to do anything in short save insist upon the original contract. The pope deferred the payment, but the respite did Henry no good. Edmund's Sicilian monarchy vanished into nothing, when, early in 1258, Manfred was crowned king at Palermo. Before the end of the year, Alexander cancelled the grant of Sicily to Edmund. Yet his demands for the discharge of Henry's obligations had contributed not a little towards focussing the gathering discontent.[1]
[1] For Edmund's Sicilian claims, see W.E. Rhodes' article on Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, in the English Historical Review, x. (1895), 20-27.
While Henry was seeking the Sicilian crown for his son, his brother Richard was elected to the German throne. Since William of Holland's death in January, 1256, the German magnates, divided between the Hohenstaufen and the papalist parties, had hesitated for nearly a year as to the choice of his successor. As neither party was able to secure the election of its own partisan, a compromise was mooted. At last the name of Richard of Cornwall was brought definitely forward. He was of high rank and unblemished reputation; a friend of the pope yet a kinsman of the Hohenstaufen; he was moderate and conciliatory; he had enough money to bribe the electors handsomely, and he was never likely to be so deeply rooted in Germany as to stand in the way of the princes of the empire. The Archbishop of Cologne became his paid partisan, and the Count Palatine of the Rhine accepted his candidature on conditions. The French party set up as his rival Alfonso X. of Castile, who, despite his newly formed English alliance, was quite willing to stand against Richard. At last, in January, 1257, the votes of three electors, Cologne, Mainz, and the Palatine, were cast for Richard, who also obtained the support of Ottocar, King of Bohemia. However, in April, Trier, Saxony, and Brandenburg voted for Alfonso. The double election of two foreigners perpetuated the Great Interregnum for some sixteen years. Alfonso's title was only an empty show, but Richard took his appointment seriously. He made his way to Germany, and was crowned King of the Romans on May 17, 1257, at Aachen. He remained in the country nearly eighteen months, and succeeded in establishing his authority in the Rhineland, though beyond that region he never so much as showed his face.[1] The elevation of his brother to the highest dignity in Christendom was some consolation to Henry for the Sicilian failure.
[1] See for Richard's career, Koch's Richard von Cornwallis, 1209-1257, and the article on Richard, King of the Romans, in the Dictionary of National Biography.
The nation was disgusted to see maladministration grow worse and worse; the nobles were indignant at the ever-increasing sway of the foreigners; and several years of bad harvests, high prices, rain, flood, and murrain sharpened the chronic misery of the poor. The withdrawal of Earl Richard to his new kingdom deprived the king and nation of an honourable if timid counsellor, though a more capable leader was at last provided in the disgraced governor of Gascony. Simon still deeply resented the king's ingratitude for his services, and had become enough of an Englishman to sympathise with the national feelings. Since his dismissal in 1253 he had held somewhat aloof from politics. He knew so well that his interests centred in England that he declined the offer of the French regency on the death of Blanche of Castile. He prosecuted his rights over Bigorre with characteristic pertinacity, and lawsuits about his wife's jointure from her first husband exacerbated his relations with Henry. It cannot, however, be said that the two were as yet fiercely hostile. Simon went to Henry's help in Gascony in 1254, served on various missions and was nominated on others from which he withdrew. His chosen occupations during these years of self-effacement were religious rather than political; his dearest comrades were clerks rather than barons.
Among Montfort's closer intimates, Bishop Grosseteste was removed by death in 1253. But others of like stamp still remained, such as Adam Marsh, the Franciscan mystic, whose election to the see of Ely was quashed by the malevolence of the court; Eudes Rigaud, the famous Archbishop of Rouen, and Walter of Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester, who formed a connecting link between the aristocracy and the Church. Despite the ineffectiveness of the clerical opposition to the papacy, the spirit of independence expressed in Grosseteste's protests had not yet deserted the churchmen. Clerks had felt the pinch of the papal exactions, had been bled to the uttermost to support the Sicilian candidature, and had seen aliens and non-residents usurping their revenues and their functions. More timid and less cohesive than the barons, they had quicker brains, more ideas, deeper grievances, and better means of reaching the masses. If resentment of the Sicilian candidature was the spark that fired the train, the clerical opposition showed the barons the method of successful resistance. The rejection of Henry's demands for money in the assemblies of 1257 started the movement that spread to the baronage in the parliaments of 1258. In the two memorable gatherings of that year the discontent, which had smouldered for a generation, at last burst into flame. In the next chapter we shall see in what fashion the fire kindled.