Among the evils that the Popes brought upon the Church at this period, none were so serious as those that proceeded from their interference with the rights of patronage. This was ordinarily effected by “provisions” or simple announcements that the Pope had provided a person, named or unnamed, for a vacant benefice. The light in which English benefices were regarded at Rome was shown as early as 1226, when Honorius sent a demand, not indeed confined to England, that two prebends in every cathedral church should be made over to the papacy. This demand was rejected by the bishops. While Honorius and his legates did not watch over the young king for nought, the relations between England and the papacy entered on a new and darker phase with the accession of Gregory IX.; for he used this country to supply him with money for his war with the Emperor Frederic II. Moreover, the death of Stephen Langton in 1228 deprived the Church and nation of one of the ablest champions of national rights. Stephen, the papal collector—there was now always an officer of this kind resident in England—roused general indignation by his conduct. He had brought over with him a tribe of usurers, and fear of papal censure drove men to have recourse to them; so the collector and the money-lenders played into one another’s hands. The rights of patrons were set aside, and many livings were held by Italians, who never came near them, and farmed them out to others. The wrath of the people broke forth in 1332. A secret league was formed under the direction of a Yorkshire knight, named Robert Twenge, who called himself William Wither. Letters were sent to the bishops and chapters warning them against obeying provisions; and bands of armed knights, with masks on their faces, burst open the granaries of the Italian clerks, distributed their corn among the people, and robbed and beat the foreigners on the highways. Hubert de Burgh, the chief justiciar, was said to have been concerned in the movement, and the accusation hastened his fall. Still, the Pope saw that it was advisable to give way, and sent letters confirming the rights of private patrons. On the death of Stephen Langton the Pope took a further step towards the enslavement of the English Church by treating the course taken by Innocent III. with reference to Langton’s election as a precedent for future action. At the request of the king, who offered Gregory the bribe of a tenth on all movables throughout his kingdom, he set aside the choice of the chapter and nominated Richard Grant to the archbishopric.
Edmund Rich, archbishop, 1234-1240.
When Richard died in 1234, Gregory confirmed this precedent by quashing three successive elections of the chapter, and compelling the monks to accept Edmund Rich. Edmund had been famous as a teacher at Oxford; he was pious, and had considerable political talent. He saw with indignation the overwhelming influence exercised by the Poitevin and other foreign favourites of the king, against which the bishops as a body were steadily working. He at once took the headship of the national party, and though the Pope favoured the foreigners, compelled the king by a threat of excommunication to dismiss Peter des Roches and his adherents. Nevertheless no permanent reform was effected, and the king’s marriage was followed by a fresh influx of foreigners, many of whom were provided for at the expense of the Church. Appeals to Rome were multiplied, and efforts were made to displace the common law for the canon law. Council of Merton, 1236.These efforts caused much displeasure; and when it was proposed at the Council of Merton to bring the law of legitimacy into conformity with the law of Rome, the barons answered, “We will not suffer the laws of England to be changed.” The archbishop’s authority was weakened by the arrival of the legate Otho, who, in 1237, held a council at London, in which he caused a large body of constitutions to be accepted. Fresh demands were made by Gregory both for money and patronage, and against these the archbishop and clergy protested in vain, for the Pope was upheld by the king. Nevertheless Henry now and then grew restive under the papal yoke, for he knew that he and his kingdom were being ruined, and once, when an unusually large demand was made upon him, told the legate, with oaths and bitter words, that he was sorry he had ever allowed him to land in his kingdom. Edmund found himself set at nought by the legate, thwarted by the king and the Pope, and utterly unable to check the evils by which the Church was oppressed. His troubles reached a climax in 1240, when Gregory, in order to bind the Roman citizens to his side, determined to distribute the benefices of England among their sons and nephews, and ordered the archbishop and two of the bishops to provide benefices for as many as three hundred Roman ecclesiastics. Edmund left the kingdom in despair, and died the same year, and Henry procured the election of Boniface of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, a man of worldly mind and small ability, who, though not without some sense of duty, was chiefly guided by his own interests.
Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, 1235-1253.
The noblest figure in the history of the Church at this period is that of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and master of all sciences, as Roger Bacon declared him to be. He was also a man of action; his life was holy and his courage invincible. He was a warm friend of the mendicant friars, the Franciscans and Dominicans, who were established in England in the early part of this reign. The work of these Orders, which will be described in another volume of this series, produced a vast effect on the Church, not merely by moving the laity of every class, especially in towns, to repentance and confession, and by imparting new life to Oxford, but also by stirring up the clergy to efforts after better things. A new light was shining; and children of the light, such as was Robert Grosseteste, were glad to walk in it, while even others were conscious that it would be well to prevent men perceiving that they loved darkness. Grosseteste was anxious for the reformation of his diocese, the largest and most populous in England, and was active in the work of visitation. His canons refused his visitation, and he had a long suit with them, which established the right of bishops to visit their chapters. He endeavoured to enforce celibacy on his clergy, for clerical marriages seem to have been common, and ordered them to prevent excessive drinking and feasting, the practice of sports and plays in churches and churchyards, and all private marriages. He took part in a movement from which the Church still reaps benefit, the erection of vicarages, setting apart in rectories subject to monastic appropriation a sufficient portion of land and tithe for the perpetual and independent endowment of the vicarage. The king sometimes yielded to his influence; but Henry never remained long under one influence, especially if it was for good. Grosseteste always acted under a strong sense of spiritual responsibility; he held that the Pope, when he was in need, had a right to the goods of the clergy, and did not shrink from carrying out his demands. Nor did he raise any objection to the appointment of papal nominees to English benefices on the ground of their foreign birth, or even their ignorance of English. If, however, they were unfit for their duties, either spiritually or canonically, his reverence for the Pope did not blind him, and he refused to present them. Nor did he ever hesitate to resist the king’s unrighteous oppression of the Church. Henry’s demands on both clergy and laity in 1244 brought about an attempt at combined resistance by the bishops and barons. He met the resistance of the clergy by producing letters from the Pope, Innocent IV., bidding them support his “dearest son.” Some of the clergy and laity alike wavered. “Let us not be divided from the common counsel,” Grosseteste said, “for it is written, If we are divided we shall all straightway perish.” Unfortunately the two orders had not yet learnt the necessity of standing by each other, and the alliance failed.
Extortion and remonstrance.
Innocent IV. made at least as large demands on England as Gregory had done, and treated her with more cynical insolence. His envoy, Martin, was like him, and at last goaded the long-suffering nation to violence. Fulk Fitz-Warin came to him with the short message, “Leave England, and begone forthwith.” “Who bids me? Did any one send you?” asked the legate. Fulk told him that he was sent by the baronage assembled in arms at a tournament, and warned him that if he delayed to depart till the third day he and all his “would be cut to pieces.” The trembling legate complained to the king. Henry, however, told him that he could not restrain his barons. “For the love of God and the reverence of my lord the Pope, give me a safe-conduct!” the legate prayed. “The devil give you a safe-conduct to hell, and all through it!” was the answer of the perplexed and petulant king. A strong remonstrance, in the form of a letter from the people of England, was read by the English representatives at the Council of Lyons, in which it was stated that Italian ecclesiastics drew over 60,000 marks a year from the country. For a while Henry, who was thoroughly alarmed at the state of affairs, wished to check the drain of money to Rome, and wrote to Grosseteste complaining that the bishops had undertaken to collect a tallage which the Pope had laid on the clergy. Grosseteste replied that they were bound to obey their spiritual father and mother (the Pope and the Church) then in exile and suffering persecution, for the papal court was still in exile at Lyons. This view was taken by many noble-minded churchmen, and especially by the friars, who, though they proved themselves the friends of constitutional freedom, strongly maintained the duty of supporting the Popes in their struggle with the Empire.
Henry soon returned to his old relations with the Pope, and matters went from bad to worse. A grant of the tenths of spiritualities was made him by Innocent in 1252. His proctors appeared before an assembly of bishops, and without asking them to allow the tax, proposed its immediate collection. The bishop of Lincoln rose in anger. “What is this, by our Lady?” he said. “You are taking matters for granted. Do you suppose that we will consent to this cursed tax? Let us never bow the knee to Baal.” The king tried in vain to frighten some of the bishops by threatening them separately. The next year he obtained a grant, and in return confirmed the Great Charter and the Forest Charter. Special solemnity was given to this act by the bishops. Excommunication was pronounced against all who broke the charters, and when it had been read they dashed the candles which they carried to the ground, saying, “So let those who incur this sentence be quenched and stink in hell;” while the king swore to observe the charters “as a man, a Christian, a knight, a king crowned and anointed.” Robert Grosseteste died soon after this ceremony, lamenting with his latest breath the oppressions of the Church, and declaring that her deliverance would only be effected by the sword. Shortly before his death he showed how greatly his feelings had been changed towards the papacy by the troubles that it had brought upon England. Robert Grosseteste’s letter to Innocent IV., 1253.Innocent ordered him to induct one of his nephews into a prebendal stall at Lincoln, adding a clause by which the Popes used to override all law—Non obstante, any privilege of the church notwithstanding. He refused in a letter in which he speaks plainly of the Pope’s conduct, saying that it was not apostolic, and reminding him that there was no sin so hateful to the Lord Jesus Christ as that men should take the milk and the wool of Christ’s sheep and betray the flock. When Innocent heard this letter read, he declared that the bishop was a “deaf old dotard,” and that his “vassal,” the king, ought to imprison him. Here, however, the cardinals interfered, and told the Pope that that might not be, for the bishop was better and holier than any of them, a great philosopher and scholar.
The English Church alienated from papacy.
Matters were brought to a crisis by the offer of the crown of Sicily to Henry for his younger son, Edmund, first made by Innocent IV., and confirmed by his successor, Alexander IV., in the hope of using the wealth of England to crush Conrad, and afterwards Manfred, the sons of Frederic II. Henry greedily swallowed the bait, and incurred an enormous debt to the Pope for the war in Apulia. By the advice of Peter, the Provençal bishop of Hereford, he tried to satisfy the Pope by the shameful trick of attaching the seals of the bishops, without their knowledge, to blank bonds, to be filled up as the Pope chose. Alexander IV. treated the English Church as insolently as his predecessor. Soon after the appointment of an Englishman to the deanery of York in 1256, an Italian cardinal appeared in the church, and was installed as dean by his companions; he had been “provided” by the Pope. The archbishop, Sewal de Bovil, had been a pupil of Edmund of Canterbury, by that time canonized, and was a friend of the famous Oxford Franciscan, Adam Marsh. He successfully resisted the intrusion. Death of Sewal de Bovil, archbishop of York, 1258.His courage brought excommunication on him and an interdict on his church, and he died broken-hearted, after sending a letter to the Pope bidding him remember that the Lord’s charge to Peter was to “feed His sheep, not shear them or devour them.” In 1256, Alexander’s envoy, Rustand, pressed the bishops for a tenth for three years for the Sicilian scheme. Fulk, bishop of London, declared that he would sooner lose his head; and Walter of Cantelupe, bishop of Worcester, that he would sooner be hanged. Henry, as his wont was, abused Fulk, and threatened that the Pope should deprive him. “Let them take away my mitre, I shall still keep my helmet,” was the bishop’s answer. The clergy remonstrated against the envoy’s proposal in their diocesan synods, and, thanks to the opposition offered by the lay barons, the Pope and the king were defeated. The reverence which Englishmen formerly had for the Roman Church had now disappeared, and bitter and contemptuous feelings had taken its place. The venality of the papal court and the wrongs of the Church were the favourite themes of the ballad-singer; and English monks loved to tell of visions which represented Innocent as dying struck by the spear of the glorified bishop of Lincoln, and of the sentence pronounced against him by the Eternal Judge on the accusation of the Church he had persecuted and degraded.