To some extent the administration of Hubert and of Peter after him had been a continuance of the royal tutelage; from this time Henry determined to be not only king but chief administrator. Stephen Segrave had been a very mean successor to Hubert in the great office of justiciar; henceforth the officer who bears the name is no longer the lieutenant-general of the king, but simply the chief officer of the law courts. The supreme direction of affairs Henry kept in his own incompetent hands. The position of the chancellor too was stronger than was convenient to a king who intended to have his own way. Ralph Neville, the Bishop of Chichester, had received the great seal in 1226, by the advice and consent of the great council of the nation; he now refused to surrender it to the king except at the express command of the assembly by which he had been appointed. Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him in 1238, but he retained the income and title of chancellor until his death in 1244. The constant petitions of the barons that a properly qualified justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer should be elected or appointed, subject to the approval of the national council, show that this independent action of the king was regarded with jealousy, and that they had already in germ the idea of having the affairs of the kingdom administered by men who would be responsible, not only as Becket and Hubert de Burgh had been to the king, but to the nation, as represented at the time in the great council of the barons.
Influx of
foreigners.
The history of these years is a series of national complaints and royal short-comings and evasions, diversified by occasional campaigns or splendid marriage ceremonies. In 1235 Henry married his sister Isabella to the Emperor Frederick II.; in 1236 he himself married Eleanor of Provence. Both marriages were the occasions of great outlay of money, which the nation was rapidly becoming more and more unwilling to pay. Nor was the discontent owing to taxation only. The queen’s relations poured into the country as into a newly discovered gold-field; dignities, territories, high office in Church and State were lavished upon them, and the rumor went abroad that they were attempting to change the constitution of the kingdom. Under their influence the old foreign agents who had flourished under the patronage of Peter des Roches returned into court and council, and brought with them the old abuses and the old jealousies in addition to the new. In 1238 the king gave his sister Eleanor, the widow of William Marshall the younger, to Simon de Montfort. The marriage and subsequent quarrel with Simon served to augment the jealousy and divisions at court. In 1242 Henry made a costly expedition to France, from which he returned in 1243; a new flood of strangers, this time the Poictevin sons and kinsfolk of his mother, followed him. In 1244 Earl Richard of Cornwall married the queen’s sister; and in 1245 Boniface of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, was consecrated to the see of Canterbury.
Constitutional
grievances.
Each of these years is marked by a struggle about taxation conducted in the assembly of barons and bishops, which from this time is known both in history and records by the name of Parliament. In these discussions the lead is taken sometimes by the bishops, sometimes by the barons; now it is the papal, now the royal demands that excite opposition. The charters are from time to time confirmed as a condition of a money grant; and as often as money is required they are found to need fresh confirmation. Up to the time of his marriage Earl Richard of Cornwall constantly appears among the remonstrants; Archbishop Edmund, as long as his patient endurance lasts, heads the opposition of the bishops; Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, the great divine, scholar, and pastor of the Church, is not less distinguished as a leader in the plans propounded for the maintenance of good government and the diminution of the royal power of oppression.
Parliamentary
discussions.
Every class suffered under the absolute administration, but the citizens of London, and the Jews perhaps most heavily, as from them without any intermediate machinery the king contrived to wring money. Not slowly or gradually, but by great and rapid accumulations the heap of national grievances grew, and but for the want of a leader a forcible attempt at revolution must have occurred much sooner than it did. In 1237 the national council gave their money under express conditions, none of which were observed, as to the control and purpose of expenditure. In 1242 they presented to the king a long list of the exactions to which they had submitted out of their good-will to assist him, but from which no good had arisen. In 1244, when Henry had assembled the magnates in the refectory at Westminster and with his own mouth had asked for money, the two great estates present, lay and clerical, determined, after debating apart, to act in concert, and chose twelve representatives to make terms with the king. The twelve, of whom the chief were Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort, demanded the confirmation of the charters and the election of a justiciar, chancellor, and treasurer; they broached even a plan for constitutional reform according to which a perpetual council was to be appointed to attend the king and secure the execution of reforms to be embodied in a new charter. Henry first resisted, then produced an order from the Pope; but the barons were unable to persevere in their designs. They refused, however, to make a large grant, and voted a sum which they could not legally object to pay, for the marriage of the king’s daughter.
Henry’s
impolicy.
The pages of the great historian, Matthew Paris, teem with details like this. Whether money were given or refused, the king went on asking for more; whether he met the national complaints with promise or with insult, the evils remained alike unredressed. No permanent ministers were appointed; the king nominated a clerk or a judge from time to time to despatch formal business, and every important transaction for which he himself was not personally competent was left to be settled at haphazard. Some good results followed; the country learned that the king was really dependent on the nation, although it failed to impress that lesson upon Henry himself; every year the machinery for assessing and collecting the taxes assumed more and more a representative character, and the forms as well as the spirit of a parliamentary constitution grew apace. But in the countless assemblies which were held during this part of the reign, it is not possible to trace any uniformity or even any tendency towards a system of representative government. The councils are more busy about their powers than about their constitution, and the representative machinery already in use for carrying out the executive part of the public business does not yet reach the region of legislative or supreme taxation.
National
inactivity.