No great design is attempted during these years; the barons see no return for the great costs to which the king puts them. The King of France goes on Crusade, but Henry only raises money on the pretext, and spends or wastes it on other purposes. The Pope drains the kingdom. There are murmurs but no blows: no conspiracies, no leader. Simon de Montfort is employed in Gascony; Earl Richard minds his own business. The kingdom is again handed over to the Poictevins, yet no one has position or energy to take the lead. So matters drag on. In 1248, 1249, 1255, the demands for a regular ministry are confirmed; and now it is desired that they shall be appointed by the common council of the nation. In 1237 and again in 1253, the charters are solemnly renewed, and excommunication passed on the transgressors of them. In 1254 an assembly is held to grant an aid, to which two knights of the shire are called from each county, elected by the county court—a very important step towards the creation or development of a parliamentary system. At last, in 1257, by a series of events like these, the patience of the baronage is absolutely worn out, and the king by an extraordinary act of daring presumption gives the signal for the outbreak.
Henry and
the Popes.
The archbishops.
Our second division of the causes which led to the great crisis of the reign, comprises Henry’s relations with the popes and the papal policy. It is not a thing to be wondered at that Henry should adhere closely to the Pope: for it was papal influence that made him king, and his mind was formed under religious influences redolent of papal ideas. He had to deal too with popes of high and masterly minds, and bowed implicitly to such. He never disputed or quarrelled with any pope; no point was to his mind worth defence. He was just old enough to remember the last days of the Interdict; he knew how Honorius III. had supported him against Philip and Lewis; he watched the long humiliation of Frederick II. by Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. He never knew a weak pope. He might have resisted, and would have gained immensely by resistance; his archbishops, Stephen Langton, Richard le Grand, and Edmund of Abingdon, were three model ecclesiastics, men unassailable in the points of patriotism, independence, and sanctity. Even Boniface of Savoy, although he was neither an Englishman nor a saint, would have boldly resisted the Pope, and strengthened the king with his sword if not with his staff. But Henry was generally thwarting his archbishops; he alienated their support, and wore out their patience. Edmund he drove into exile, by his tyranny and extortion; and even Boniface on occasion chose to side with the national party rather than to support such a king.
List of papal
assumptions.
The string of papal difficulties begins in 1226, when the Pope demanded a share of the property of every cathedral, church, and monastery. In 1229 Gregory IX. demanded a tithe of all movables, which only Earl Ranulf of Chester had courage to refuse. In 1231, the Roman exactions produced public tumults, and led to the quarrel which ruined Hubert de Burgh. In 1237, the king invited Cardinal Otho to reform the Church. He stayed until 1241, visited Oxford, and put the University under interdict; visited Scotland in 1239, and in 1240 exacted enormous sums for the benefit of the Pope, besides forbidding the king to bestow preferment on Englishmen, until three hundred Italians had been provided for. In 1244, Innocent IV. sent a still more intolerable representative, Master Martin, who within a year was obliged to fly; but neither king nor parliament ventured to refuse money. Besides direct payments, a vast proportion of English livings was held by foreigners. Bishop Grosseteste, who regarded these usurpations as the very destruction of the flock for which he was ready to lay down his life, declared, that in 1252, the Pope’s nominees had revenues within the realm three times as great as the royal income. There was too, a constant succession of appeals to Rome, as the episcopal elections were disputed, and the Pope either assumed the power of presentation, or sold the justice or injustice that it pleased him to dispense. To understand how these vast sums were disposed of by the popes, involves the careful reading of the history of Frederick II. The exactions of Gregory IX. begin with the first quarrel with Frederick, and the crowning difficulties of Henry III. are caused by his entanglement with Alexander IV. on the subject of Sicily. Yet Frederick II. was his own brother-in-law, and a prince who, whatever his faults may have been, suffered papal enmity for reasons which had nothing to do with his short-comings. Frederick was admired and pitied in England as a papal victim. Lewis IX. could refuse to be an instrument in his humiliation, but Henry III. seems to have tied himself to the Pope’s chariot-wheels. The Pope and the king, according to the saying of the time, left to men only the task of discerning whether the upper or the nether millstone were the heaviest.
Henry accepts
the kingdom
of Sicily.
Fatal as the friendship of Gregory IX. and Innocent IV. had been, it was the policy of Alexander IV. which broke the long-enduring patience of the baronage and compelled them to bind the king’s hands. Innocent IV. in 1252 had offered the kingdom of Sicily to Richard of Cornwall. The negotiation went on until in 1255 it was accepted, not for Richard, but for Edmund, the king’s second son. It might have been supposed that as the quarrel was the Pope’s Alexander would have hired Henry to fight his battles; but by this adroit system of enlistment he reversed the rule. He fought the battles and expected Henry to pay him. Henry was weak enough to bear this and even to pledge the credit of the kingdom to the Pope for the sum which the crafty Italian money-lender had advanced to maintain his own quarrel. It was this act that led to the demand for a new constitution, which opens the next great epoch of this long dismal reign.
Henry’s
French
transactions.
Henry’s French transactions, the third of the three heads in which we have arranged the second portion of the reign, must be summed up very briefly, for they are in themselves the least important part of his history.