together with the disturbances on the Welsh Marches, it formed the
chief among a series of very trivial charges which were brought
against Hubert, and produced his fall. On the 29th of July 1232, he
was suddenly suspended from all his offices. His place was taken by
Stephen de Segrave, a close ally of Des Roches. Peter de Rivaux,
probably the Bishop’s son, was made treasurer, and other favourites
of the Bishop were raised to office. Hubert, aware of the strength
of his enemies, took refuge in the Priory of Merton in Surrey. He
was granted a few weeks to prepare his defence, and to get ready
accounts which were demanded of all the money that had ever passed
through his hands. Supposing that he was thus at liberty for the
present, he went to Bury St. Edmunds to join his wife, but on his
journey thither, at Brentwood, he was, by order of the Court,
assaulted, and fled for refuge to the sanctuary of a neighbouring
chapel. He was torn from his refuge, and hurried to London. The
favour he had gained in the eyes of the people and his whole
political aim are well shown in the words that are reported to have
been used by a smith when ordered to put irons on him: “Is not this
that true and noble Hubert who has so often snatched England from
the devastating hand of the foreigners, and made England, England?”
The Church obliged Henry to restore him to his sanctuary, and the
love with which he was regarded was shown by the touching offer of
his own chaplain, Luke, Bishop of Dublin, to give himself up in
his place. The effect of taking sanctuary was, that the fugitive
was bound to swear before the coroner that he would leave England
for ever. This exile he was bound to seek within forty days,
leaving the coast within a tide after his arrival there, or, if
the wind made that impossible, walking daily into the sea to show
his willingness to do so. Hubert could not bring himself to abjure
England; he would not therefore leave his sanctuary, and being
surrounded by his enemies, was starved into submission. He was
treated mercifully; his Crown fiefs were taken from him, his own
property he retained, but he was kept in confinement in the Castle
of Devizes.
[Sidenote: Revolution under Des Roches. 1233.]
[Sidenote: Earl of Pembroke upholds Hubert.]
Once in command of the government, Peter des Roches pushed headlong
to the attainment of his objects. The friends of De Burgh were
swept from the Court. The offices were filled with foreigners.
Henry was persuaded to bring over 2000 troops from France. But
Hubert was not the only Englishman among the nobility. Richard
Marshall of Pembroke, the second son of the great Regent, and now
his representative, raised the voice of patriotism, and declared
to the King that as long as foreigners were ruling none of his
English counsellors would appear at Court. Des Roches answered
insolently that the King and his foreigners would soon bring rebels
to reason. At assemblies at Oxford and at Westminster the same sort
of language was used. By Peter’s advice, the King began to proceed
against his discontented subjects. He deprived Gilbert Basset of
his property, and ordered the apprehension of his brother-in-law
Siward; they fled to the Earl Marshall, their property fell to
Rivaux. In August, a day was appointed for the delivery of hostages
by the suspected nobles. Pembroke, the Marshall, hearing that there
was a plot against his life, retired to his Welsh possessions. The
King summoned troops to meet him at Gloucester. The Marshall and
his friends were outlawed without trial; fresh foreign troops came
thronging over, and civil war began. The King’s army did not fare
well, and the clergy began to take up the cause of the Marshall.
They protested against the confiscation of a peer’s property
without trial. “There are no peers in England,” said Des Roches,
“as in France; the King may sentence whom he will, and drive
them from the country.” The clergy could not hear such absolute
principles unmoved. They threatened Des Roches and his favourites
with excommunication; and when the King demanded their censure upon
the Marshall for an attack upon Gloucester, they said the city was
his, and they found no grounds for censure.
[Sidenote: Edmund of Canterbury causes Des Roches’ fall. 1234.]
[Sidenote: Henry becomes his own minister.]
Meanwhile, afraid for his life, De Burgh had escaped from Devizes
and again taken sanctuary. Again he was illegally torn from it,
again the Church remonstrated, and he was again restored. A sudden
inroad into Wiltshire under the Marshall’s friend Siward set him at
liberty, and he immediately joined the Marshall at Strigul. Again
and again the royal troops were worsted; and at length, in 1234, at
a meeting of the clergy at Westminster, Archbishop Edmund took the
matter up, explained to the King the wretched effects of trusting
to his foreign counsellors, warned him that excommunication would
most likely fall upon him too, and induced him at length to order
the Bishop of Winchester to retire and attend to his spiritual
work in his diocese. For a month longer the war went on, or rather
attacks continued to be made upon the followers of Peter. But in
May, news arrived that Richard Marshall had been treacherously
killed in Ireland at the instigation of Des Roches. This was more
than the King himself could bear, and the Archbishop received
orders to restore to favour all those whom Des Roches had outlawed.
Gilbert Marshall received the property and office of his late
brother, and Hubert was allowed to retain the earldom of Kent
and his own property. This change was followed by the removal of
Peter’s creatures. After some years of absence, he himself returned
to England, was received into favour, and died in his diocese in
1239.
The fall of Des Roches was not productive of such advantageous
changes in the government as might have been expected. Segrave
held for a few years the office of Justiciary. On his death the
office was not renewed till after the Parliament at Oxford. Ralph
Neville continued in more or less favour as Chancellor till 1244,
when that office also fell into abeyance. The King practically
became his own minister, and unfortunately his views of government
had more in common with those of Des Roches than with those of De
Burgh. It is true that the growing power of the Great Council,
which was gradually gaining the name of Parliament, prevented any
great infractions of the Charter, and compelled the King again and
again to renew that document, though always in exchange for an aid.
The frequency of renewal, however, seems to show repeated efforts
on the part of the King to free himself from it; nor was the state
of his treasury such as to enable him to do without legitimate
sources of revenue. The real faults of his reign were not illegal
extensions of the royal power, but the readiness with which he
allowed and even joined in the exactions of the Papal See, and
the total absence of national objects which distinguish his rule,
which may be traced to his culpable partiality to foreigners. From
the year 1236 till the Parliament of Oxford, these errors were
continually on the increase.
[Sidenote: Henry’s marriage.]
[Sidenote: Influence of the Queen’s uncles.]
The first great influx of foreigners was caused by his marriage.
In 1236, he married Eleanor, the second daughter of Count Raymond
Berenger of Provence, and sister of the Queen of France. From
that moment, the Court was in the hands of the Queen’s relatives.
It was especially the Queen’s uncles into whose hands patronage
fell. William, Bishop of Valence, was the first. To him was given
the vast property of Richmond in Yorkshire, which had previously
belonged to the Counts of Brittany, and the King had almost
succeeded in securing for him the Bishopric of Winchester when news
of his death was brought. He was succeeded by another uncle, Peter
of Savoy. Richmond was handed on to him; Pevensey and Hastings
were intrusted to him, and the wardship of the Earl of Warrenne,
which completed his power in the south-east corner of England. To
increase his influence, he brought over numbers of young foreign
ladies, and married them to some of the great Earls of England. The
death of Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1240, allowed
the King to secure that See, after an interval of five years,
for another of his uncles, Boniface, whose violence and warlike
bearing, as well as his youth, made him a strange contrast to his
predecessor. Peter de Aigue Blanche, another Savoyard, was made
Bishop of Hereford, and afterwards became Henry’s disreputable
agent in the business of the Sicilian monarchy. This lavish support
of foreigners naturally caused great discontent in England, and was
repeatedly the subject of complaints in the Great Council. Thus,
in 1236 and 1237, there were three stormy councils, nor was the
money the King required granted till the sanctions of the Magna
Charta were again renewed. The arrival of the Cardinal Otho as
Papal Legate did not mend matters; his efforts at reconciliation
were useless, and he soon tuned his attention to collecting money
for the Church. At this time, for a very short period, it seemed as
if Richard Earl of Cornwall, the King’s brother, might have assumed
the post of leader of the English party; but his patriotic efforts
were short-lived. A few years after he married the Queen’s sister,
and threw his influence upon the side of the foreigners.
[Sidenote: Formation of a national party under Simon de Montfort.]
A far greater man took the post he thus resigned. Simon de
Montfort, destined to be the real national leader of England, was
rising into importance. The sister and heiress of Count Robert of
Leicester had married the Count of Montfort, and died in 1204. In
1215, the whole English property had been given to Ralph Earl of
Chester. Simon de Montfort, the Conqueror of the Albigenses, never
possessed it, but his eldest son Almaric, after the death of the
Earl of Chester, in 1232, demanded the property and honours of
Leicester for his younger brother Simon, who was thus acknowledged
as the owner of the property. He held the bason of water as
High-Steward at the Queen’s coronation, shortly after married the
King’s sister, the widow of William, second Earl of Pembroke, and
succeeded in getting that marriage acknowledged by Gregory IX. in
1238. Like all those who had to do with Henry, he was obliged to
bear extraordinary changes of fortune from the fickle character
of the King. An angry quarrel drove him abroad, and, in 1240, in
company with Richard of Cornwall, he set out for the Holy Land.
[Sidenote: Revival in the Church.]
[Sidenote: Grostête.]
During their absence the government of England grew continually
worse. Men began to weary of the personal government of the King.
For several years the great offices of justiciary and chancellor
had been left unfilled, and their duties performed by subordinate
officials, upon whom the King lavished his favours. One of the
chief of these was Mansell, who is said to have held no less than
700 livings, and to have been in the yearly receipt of 8000 marks.
The Church was gradually driven to make common cause with the lay
opposition. It was a time of spiritual revival. The great monastic
orders had lapsed into the position of wealthy landowners. The
work which in the early times they had so well performed, the
civilization of the country districts, was over. They had become
lazy and luxurious. The prelates had for the most part deserted
their spiritual calling and become statesmen. The Church as a
whole, as represented by the Pope, had misused its influence.
Crusades had become the instruments of temporal aggrandizement,
or of revenge upon the personal enemies of the Pope. A spiritual
revival had been set on foot almost at the same time by St. Dominic
and St. Francis d’Assisi, who had founded the two great orders of
Dominicans and Franciscans, the Black and Grey Friars. The vow of
poverty, evaded by the older orders, had become a reality. The
establishments of the Friars had met with great success; thousands
thronged to be enrolled in their orders. They had rapidly spread
over Europe, and had lately arrived in England, and there begun
their work of regeneration. They had laboured chiefly in the towns
and among the most wretched outcasts of society, and had there
called into life new religious energy, mingled with hatred towards
their wealthy predecessors the old monks, and with a consciousness
of personal equality in the sight of God, which tended much to
strengthen the democratic feeling which supplied Simon de Montfort
with his strongest support. Their teaching had not affected the
lower classes alone; numbering among them many learned men, they
speedily got possession of the education at Oxford, and found a
friend in Grostête, the learned Bishop of Lincoln. The reforms
which the Church demanded were carried out by him as far as
possible in his diocese; and under his guidance, and that of Edmund
Rich, the Church of England was becoming at once spiritual and
national. The folly of the King, who filled the high ecclesiastical
offices with foreign favourites, the exactions of the Pope, who,
acting hand in hand with him, placed hundreds of benefices in the
hands of Italian priests, compelled all that was best in the Church
to throw itself absolutely on the side of the reformers.
[Sidenote: Affairs of Poitou.]
[Sidenote: Loss of Poitou. 1243.]
[Sidenote: Prince Richard joins the foreign party.]
Ecclesiastical and secular misgovernment went on side by side.
Disastrous expeditions to France, and consequent exactions from
the people, were intermingled with the visits of Papal emissaries,
to wring from the wretched clergy contributions for the Papal
war against the Hohenstaufen. In 1242, the King undertook to
regain Poitou. Richard of Cornwall had been nominal Count of that
province, when, in 1241, Louis gave his brother Alphonse the same
title. The most important nobleman in the country was the Count
de la Marche, who had married Henry’s mother. He at first did
homage to the new Count, but afterwards, urged it is supposed by
his ambitious wife, renounced his fealty, and demanded assistance
from Henry. The King therefore landed in the following year in
Gascony. De la Marche soon began to repent of what he had done,
and Henry, never a very active warrior, was disheartened by his
treachery. The armies at length met near Taillebourg, on the
Charente. Afraid of being surrounded, Henry employed his brother
Richard, who had gained general favour with the French by liberally
ransoming prisoners in the Crusade, to secure an armistice. He
took the opportunity of falling back to Saintes, where he was
almost surprised by the pursuing enemy. After this he was gradually
driven backwards to the Garonne, while Marche and his revolted
barons again accepted their French lord. The year was wasted in
fruitless negotiations with the discontented Count of Toulouse,
and in collecting money and troops from England. Henry quarrelled
with his own nobles, who gradually left his army; and early in
1243 returned to England, having accepted a peace, which deprived
him of the whole of Poitou and of the Isle of Rhé. Gascony was now
the only part of France remaining to the English. It was during
this campaign that Richard of Cornwall met and married Sancha, the
Queen’s sister, throwing up from this time all chance of leading
the national party, and attaching himself to the foreigners.
[Sidenote: Exactions in Church and State. 1244.]
[Sidenote: Council at Lyons.]
[Sidenote: Futile attempts to check exactions. 1246.]
Such a war did not tend to the popularity of the King. The
exchequer had been empty, money was stringently and often illegally
exacted. A new Pope, Innocent IV., was elected, and the exactions
from the English clergy resumed more vigorously than ever: for the
Pope was carrying on the contest he had inherited against Frederick
II., and was now summoning at Lyons the council his predecessor had
failed to collect, in hopes of destroying for ever the power of the
Hohenstaufen. His agent, Master Martin, travelled through England,
pillaging the clergy till the English could bear it no longer, and
the barons joined with the Church in demanding his dismissal. The
foreign element in the Church too continued its baneful activity.
Boniface, the Archbishop, laid waste his rich see, cutting down the
timber and sending the profits abroad, while the King attempted,
though in vain, to secure the Bishopric of Chichester for Robert
de Passelewe. The nation determined to demand its rights at
the Council of Lyons. The English ambassadors there took an
opportunity of charging the Pope with not being contented with his
Peter’s Pence and the yearly 1000 marks which John had promised,
with sending his messengers to make further exactions, and with
filling English benefices against the will of their patrons with
Italian priests. 60,000 marks a year thus passed into the hands of
foreigners, ignorant of the language, and mostly living abroad. The
Pope vouchsafed no answer, but shortly afterwards issued a Bull
forbidding pluralities, and promising to respect the rights of
patrons. The Bull remained a dead letter; and the very next year
6000 marks were exacted, and foreign priests were as plentiful as
ever, admitted to their benefices under what was spoken of as “non
obstante” clauses, which set aside all previous Bulls. The feeling
in England against the Pope, who exacted, and the King, who allowed
the exactions, grew more and more determined.
[Sidenote: Inroad of Poitevin favourites. 1247.]
[Sidenote: Discontent of Barons.]
[Sidenote: Continued misgovernment.]
[Sidenote: Tallages on the cities.]
[Sidenote: Diversion of the crusade. 1250.]
In 1247 matters grew still worse. A fresh swarm of foreigners
arrived in England; De la Marche was dead, and the King’s
half-brothers came over and were at once received with favour
and honoured with profuse gifts. Chief among them was William of
Valence, and his brother Aymer, who, in the year 1250, was made
Bishop of Winchester, though he was never consecrated. The foreign
policy of England was by these men managed for their own interests.
Thus on the death of Raymond Berenger, Provence was allowed to pass
into the hands of Charles of Anjou, who had married the Queen’s
youngest sister; and thus Henry made use of a crusade, on which
he said that he was going, to demand large sums of money from the
people. In 1248 the crisis seemed approaching. At a meeting of
Parliament many charges were raised against the favourites; and
the feeling against the King’s personal government, which had
long been growing, found vent. In blind security, Henry continued
his course. The King’s revenue, squandered in empty magnificence
or lavish grants to his foreign friends, became more and more
dilapidated. Money had to be borrowed. All men with an income of
£20 were compelled to take up their knighthood; and afraid to have
recourse to illegal aids from the nobility, the King turned upon
the cities, more especially London, and demanded and obtained great
tallages from them. The crusade constantly supplied him with an
excuse for these exactions; yet even when the King of France was
taken prisoner in Egypt, Henry and his crusaders made no movement.
He contented himself with appointing a day for his expedition;
the expedition itself did not take place. Innocent indeed had
other ends in view; he was bent far more on the destruction of the
Hohenstaufen than on the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. Frederick
II. had died in December 1250, and the Pope’s energies were now
directed to driving those who remained of this family from their
kingdom of the two Sicilies.
[Sidenote: Montfort’s government of Gascony.]
[Sidenote: His quarrel with the King.]
Far indeed from assisting Louis, Henry had regarded his absence
as an opportunity for regaining his power in the south of France.
Gascony was in a state of complete confusion, chiefly through the
insurrections of Gaston of Bearn and assaults from the King of
Navarre. To bring it into order, Henry had, in 1248, appointed
Simon de Montfort his governor there. His government had been
completely successful, and at length, in 1250, Gaston was sent a
prisoner to England. In his foolish soft-heartedness, Henry at once
pardoned and released him. But the vigorous government of Simon had
excited the displeasure both of the nobles and of the towns. They
sent an embassy under the Archbishop of Bordeaux to lay charges
against him before Henry. The King, fickle and jealous, listened
to them; and Leicester was summoned home. He had almost ruined
himself in his efforts to carry on his government well, and an
angry scene of personal recrimination occurred, the King charging
him with treason, while Simon demanded repayment for the money he
had expended. It shows the state of personal contempt into which
the King had fallen, that Leicester could venture to give him the
lie direct. But the King could not do without him; by the influence
of the Earl of Cornwall the quarrel was adjusted, and De Montfort
returned as he believed to his government. His back was scarcely
turned when the King appointed in his place his young son Edward,
and ordered the Gascons not to obey De Montfort. Feeling himself
thus freed from his charge, De Montfort went to Paris. The opinion
of his abilities was so high, that he was offered the regency of
France; but slighted though he had been at home, he was still true
to his adopted country, and declined the flattering offer.
[Sidenote: By Leicester’s aid Gascony is saved.]
[Sidenote: Henry’s money difficulties.]
Left to himself, Henry found the Gascons more than he could manage.
He collected indeed much money for the expedition; the Charter
being renewed as usual as the price of a grant. The Jews had to
advance money, the towns were tallaged. But, after all, things
would have gone badly had not Leicester again patriotically offered
his services, and taken command of the disturbed province. With
his assistance, and with money obtained from England, by dint of
lying letters, narrating the extreme danger of the King from the
approach of a vast army of Christians and Saracens under the King
of Castile, peace was made with Alphonso X., at that time the
King of Castile, and a marriage arranged between Edward and his
daughter the Princess Eleanor. This expedition therefore had on
the whole been successful; but it plunged the King still deeper
into money difficulties, while his constant demands for money, and
the dishonest means he had taken to secure it, had lowered him
still further in the eyes of the people. His foolish ambition and
his adherence to the Papal See completed what his long reign of
misgovernment had begun.
[Sidenote: The Pope offers Edmund the kingdom of Sicily. 1254.]
[Sidenote: Henry accepts Sicily on ruinous terms.]