Return.
England the returning hero found at war. Archbishop Hubert, who had succeeded to the justiciarship at Christmas, had been obliged to look John’s treason in the face. As archbishop he excommunicated him; as justice he condemned him to forfeiture; as lieutenant-general of the king he led an army against him. One by one John’s castles had been taken, and at the time of Richard’s landing only Tickhill and Nottingham held out. Tickhill surrendered on hearing the news, Nottingham at the arrival of the king. John’s party at once broke up, and Richard had but to show himself to be supreme.
Richard’s
second visit
to England.
This is Richard’s second and last appearance on English soil as king. He staid only from March 13 to May 12, 1194, but he did a great deal of business. As soon as Nottingham had surrendered he called a great council there, and for three days acted as chief judge, financier and politician; taxing his friends, condemning his enemies, and concocting new plans for the security and quiet administration of the realm. By selling sheriffdoms, exacting fines and enacting taxes, he raised money to begin hostilities with Philip at once. He punished the enemies of Longchamp and the friends of John, especially his chief minister, Hugh of Nunant, Bishop of Coventry, who had as bishop and as sheriff offended the laws secular and ecclesiastical. But he showed himself by no means implacable; and, before he left, he had reconciled not only Archbishop Geoffrey and the Chancellor, but almost all the other jealous and divided parties. In accordance with the recommendation of his council, before he left England, he wore his crown in solemn state at Winchester; and, having done fairly well all that he had undertaken, showing that his pride, dignity and energy had undergone no diminution by his captivity, he sailed to Barfleur on the 12th of May, and England saw his face no more, heavily as from time to time she felt the pressure of his hand.
Government of
Hubert Walter.
From this time all Richard’s personal history is unconnected with England. From 1194 to 1198 the kingdom was governed by Hubert Walter, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who, like Longchamp, was both legate and justiciar; Longchamp retained the title and emoluments of chancellor, but did not come to England. The history of these years is simply a record of judicial and financial measures taken on the lines and inspired by the motives of Henry the Second’s policy. Hubert had been his secretary, and, being the nephew of Ranulf Glanvill, he had been fitted by education to be a sound lawyer and financier, as well as a good bishop and a successful general. He was a strong minister; and although as a good Englishman he made the pressure of his master’s hand lie as lightly as he could upon the people, as a good servant he tried to get out of the people as much treasure as he could for his master. In the raising of the money and in the administration of justice he tried and did much to train the people to habits of self-government. He taught them how to assess their taxes by jury, to elect the grand jury for the assizes of the judges, to choose representative knights to transact legal and judicial work;—such representative knights as at a later time made convenient precedents for parliamentary representation. The whole working of elective and representative institutions gained greatly under his management—he educated the people against the better time to come. But he collected vast sums—eleven hundred thousand pounds, it was said, in four years—beyond the ordinary revenue. He allowed no evasions. The king watched him closely; threatened reforms which would increase the exactions of the treasury, and directed the formation of a new national survey, or at least tried to force one on the country. The people of London, worked on by the demagogue William Fitz Osbert, insisted on a new mode of assessment in which the taxes would be collected in proportion to the means of the payers, and not by a simple poll tax. This project might be just, but was promoted by revolutionary means; Hubert summarily cowed the rioters into submission. He went to the very extreme of what was right to serve Richard, and at last he gave in to the number of influences which combined to weary him of a position of power too great to be undertaken by any single person.
Money refused
by the Great
Council, 1198.
Resignation of
the Justiciar.
Geoffrey
Fitz Peter.
This occasion is a memorable one. In the spring of 1198 Richard, as usual, wanted money, and had exhausted all the usual means of procuring it. He accordingly directed Hubert to propose to the assembled barons and bishops that they should maintain for him, during his war, a force of three hundred knights, to be paid a sum of three shillings a day. To the archbishop’s amazement, for the first time for five-and-thirty years, for the second time in English history, the demand was disputed. Again the opposition was led by a bishop, as then by St. Thomas, this time by St. Hugh. That great Hugh of Lincoln, the Burgundian Carthusian who had won the heart of Henry II. and had treated him as an equal, now acted on behalf of the nation to which he had joined himself. Herbert, the Bishop of Salisbury, the son of Henry’s old servant, Richard of Ilchester, followed the example. The estates of their churches were not bound, they said, to afford the king military service except within the four seas; they would not furnish it for foreign warfare. The opposition prevailed; the bishops had struck a chord which awoke the baronage. This body now, to a far greater extent than before, consisted of men who had little interest in Normandy, were far more English in sympathy, and perhaps also in blood, than they had been under Henry II. The occasion is marked by another consequence. The great minister resigned—not perhaps merely on this account—he had long been weary of his office; the new Pope, Innocent III., was telling him that it was unworthy of an archbishop to act as a secular judge and taskmaster. The monks of his cathedral were harassing him about the sacrilege involved in the execution of William Fitz Osbert, whom he had ordered to be taken from sanctuary and hanged; and the Roman lawyers were threatening excommunication if he did not pull down the grand new college which he had built in honor of St. Thomas at Lambeth. He had had as much as he wanted of power, and as much as he could bear of blame. He, therefore, in July, 1198, made way for a new justiciar, Geoffrey Fitz Peter, Earl of Essex, who had no such scruples of conscience and no such ecclesiastical embarrassments, but who began his administration with a severe forest assize, and by his general sternness taught the nation how good a friend, with all his short-comings, Archbishop Hubert had been. Geoffrey Fitz Peter retained his office for life, dying, as will be seen, at a critical period in the next reign.