HENRY III.
Character of Henry--Administration of William Marshall--Hubert
de Bergh--Henry his own minister--Foreign favorites--General
misgovernment--Papal intrigue and taxation.
The reign of Henry III. is not only one of the longest but one of the
most difficult in English history. It contains more than one great
crisis, and coincides in time with an epoch of vast progress; but the
critical importance is by no means equally diffused, and the rate and
fashion of the progress are matter for minute study, rather than for
vivid illustration. The reign covers more than half of one of the most
eventful and brilliant centuries of the world’s history; a century
made famous by the actions of some of the greatest sovereigns, the
most illustrious scholars, the wisest statesmen; the most noble period
of architecture; the last act of the Crusades, the last struggle of
the Papacy with the yet undiminished strength of the Empire. The life
which, on the Continent, runs in these streams is not without its
purpose in England.
[Sidenote:
Character of
Henry III.
]
England also looks on the thirteenth century as her great architectural
age, the age of her great lawyers and some of her greatest divines.
She also has her weight in European affairs, her struggles with the
Papacy, her attempts at sound government. But the real interest of
English history lies in minute constitutional steps of progress, which
are to be estimated rather by their later and united effects, than by
the actual and momentary appearance of growth. For during this time,
England has no guiding or presiding genius. Her king is a man by no
means devoid of all the picturesque qualities of his forefathers, and
possessed of some negatively good qualities which they had not; but on
the whole a degenerate son of such great ancestors, degenerate from
their strength and virtues as well as from their faults and vices.
Henry III. is perhaps a better husband and father, a more devout man,
than any of his predecessors; he is not personally cruel or regardless
of human life; he has no passion for war, no insatiable greed for the
acquisition of territory, such as in the case of his ancestors had
cost so much bloodshed. He is content for the most part to be king of
England, and his success in retaining some part of his Continental
dominion, is the result far more of the honesty of his adversary than
of any ambition, skill, or force of his own. In these respects, England
might have been expected to fare better under Henry, than she had done
under John or Richard or Henry II.; better even than she was to fare
under Edward I.; yet she can scarcely, even viewed in the results, be
said to have done so. The long reign was a long period of trouble,
suffering, and disquietude of every sort. We have no reason to suppose
that Henry was deficient in personal courage, or in skill in arms,
such as a brave knight might possess without being a great captain
in fieldwork or in sieges; or that he was wanting in the desire to
be thought a splendid and magnificent sovereign--as, indeed, he was
thought--for he reaped the advantages of the political position which
Henry II. had planned, and he outlived the greater princes whose power
and character and career had thrown his own into the shade. Yet England
did nothing great in his time except as against him. He had no great
design, no energetic purpose. He was not strong enough to be true,
although he was strong enough to be pertinacious, resolute enough to
be false. He was vain and extravagant; and this, with the exception of
his falseness, is the worst that can be said of him. Hence, whilst he
could not inspire love or loyalty, he could inspire hatred, and hatred
is not, in the case of kings, as is so often said of the feeling in the
case of lower men, incompatible with contempt: a king may inspire both
feelings, and be despised for moral weakness and iniquity, whilst he
cannot safely be contemned altogether, because of his great power to
cause mischief. Then, vanity and extravagance, which are minor faults
in a man with strong purposes, become aggravations and incentives to
hatred in a man whose other motives and purposes are weak. Henry III.
was well hated. His life, good or evil, had no gloss or glitter upon
it; it was mean in the midst of its magnificence; it was wanting in the
one element that leads men to respect, even where they fear and blame,
the character of reality or “veracity to a man’s self.” There was no
purpose, as there was no faith in it.
[Sidenote:
Division of
the reign.
]
Fifty-six years of such a king cannot but be a wearisome lesson to the
reader, if the eye rest on the king only or on the circle of events
of which he is the centre; and to a certain degree, in these ages in
which we have to depend chiefly on the historians of the time, with
little help from other sorts of literature, the king is necessarily the
centre of every circle. The monotony of detail may, however, be broken
by arranging the reign in four divisions. Henry was nine years old when
he began to reign. The first portion, then, comprises the years of his
minority, and may be regarded as closing about the year 1227, although,
as the influence of his early ministers continued to affect him for
some years longer, that date is not a very distinct limit. The second
division comprises the years of his personal administration, during
which he mismanaged matters for himself, and which end at the year
1258, when, having brought affairs to a dead lock, he was obliged to
consent to be superseded by a new scheme of government embodied in the
Provisions of Oxford. The third period includes the years of eclipse,
from 1258 to 1265, when the battle of Evesham gave him again the
power as well as the name of king. The last period contains the seven
years intervening between the battle of Evesham and the king’s death,
and depends for its historic interest entirely on the fact that it
witnessed the results of the great struggle--the clearing of the board
after the crisis of the game was past.
[Sidenote:
Accession of
Henry III.
]
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
party.
]
Returning now to the state of affairs in October, 1216, when John
had just finished his suicidal career at Newark, we find the kingdom
to a very great extent in the hands of the party pledged to support
Lewis, the enterprising prince to whom the French have not hesitated
to attribute the title of the Lion, or the Lion-hearted. This party
comprised nearly all the baronage, for John’s insane behaviour during
the last year had dispersed the friends whom after the granting of
Magna Carta he had gathered to his side; even his brother William, Earl
of Salisbury, had gone over to the enemy. Lewis’s party had, however
only one point of union, the hatred and distrust inspired by John;
and when John was once removed, the disruption of the party and the
expulsion of Lewis were sure to come in time. It was certain that all
real national feeling would take part against a foreign king; that all
the desires for free and ancient institutions and good government would
have a much better chance of contentment in the prospect of the reign
of the child Henry; and that even the party among the barons which
still clung to the feudal ideas of government would have a much better
opportunity of regaining its coveted influence through him than through
Lewis. But the cause of the child was at first sight very weak. John
had driven all the strong men from his side; and Archbishop Langton,
on whom the defence of what was now become the national dynasty would
properly have devolved, was at Rome, in temporary disgrace. It may be
fairly said that had not the Roman legate Gualo taken up a decided
line, had not Honorius III. seen his way to reconcile the rights of
the nation with the maintenance of the Plantagenet dynasty, Lewis
must for the moment have triumphed, and England would then have had
to win her freedom by a mortal struggle with France. But Gualo was
staunch. The great Pope who had committed England to him was just dead,
but Honorius III. was no more likely than Innocent to be satisfied
with half-service; and the legate saw that both his own prospects
of advancement and the credit of the Roman see were involved in the
success of this administration. With him was Peter des Rochos, the
Bishop of Winchester, whom John had made justiciar after the death of
Geoffrey Fitz Peter. He was a Poictevin who had been transformed from a
knight into a bishop with few qualifications and little ceremony; but
he was faithful to John and to his son, and he was the representative
man of the foreign party at court, which stood chiefly if not solely
by personal attachment to the king. There were two or three other
bishops who had won their places in John’s chancery, the Earl Ranulf
of Chester, nearly the last left of the great feudal aristocracy of
the Conquest; William Marshall, the Earl of Pembroke, now growing old,
who had been the intimate friend of the younger Henry, who had been
a justice and regent under Richard, who had helped to set John on
the throne, and had remained personally faithful to him to the last
although his own sons were on the side of the barons.
[Sidenote:
The Charter
re-issued.
]
This little party had the child crowned on October 28, at Gloucester;
and on November 12, at Bristol, re-issued the Great Charter in his
name, with some important omissions. They did not venture at so
critical a time to renew the articles which placed taxation in the
hands of the national council or define the nature of that assembly;
but in the final clause of the document these articles were declared to
be suspended only because of the urgency of the times. The guardianship
of the king and what little remained to him of the kingdom was placed
in the hands of William Marshall, and the bishops and barons swore
fealty to Henry, as his contemporaries called him--Henry IV., or
Henry of Winchester, the son of King John. The office of guardian
for an infant king had never yet been needed in England, at least
since the days of Ethelred the Unready, and all that we know of the
present arrangement is that it was made in the council, and with the
acquiescence of the legate. The title that William Marshall took was
“governor of the king and kingdom.” We might have expected that the
queen-mother would have been guardian of the person of the King; but
he had no near male kinsman to take charge of the kingdom, according
to the reasonable rule that the defence of the inheritance belongs
to the nearest heir, that of the person to the nearest relation who
cannot inherit; and accordingly the wardship of both was entrusted by
the national council to a chosen leader. No other in age, dignity,
experience, or faithfulness came near the Earl of Pembroke.
[Sidenote:
Struggle with
Lewis.
]
The struggle with Lewis covers the first year of the reign. Winter
was too far advanced at the time of the Bristol Council for much
active warfare, and a truce was as usual concluded for the Christmas
season, purchased by the surrender of some of the royal castles.
Before the new reign began Lewis’s side had lost two of its
representative men--Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, the leader
of the old baronial party, and Eustace de Vesey, who had conducted
the intrigues with Scotland and France which had brought about the
present complication. The greatness of Lewis’s early success and the
haughty assumptions of his French followers were already disgusting
the barons, and those who had no cause to despair of pardon were
contemplating adhesion to Henry. The year 1217, however, began with
brisk action. Henry’s supporters assembled at Oxford, Lewis and his
party at Cambridge. The military strength was all on the side of the
latter; whilst the legate was treating for a truce Lewis was besieging
and taking castles. Before Lent he had reduced the whole of Eastern
England, except Lincoln, which held out unswervingly under Nicolaa de
Camvill, the wife of that Gerard who had drawn John into his first
quarrel with Longchamp. But at Midlent Lewis was summoned to France;
and, although he returned in a few weeks, he found that some of his
supporters had changed sides. The Earl of Salisbury had gone over to
his nephew; the legate was preaching a crusade against the disloyal
and excommunicated; and the loyal barons bestirred themselves to some
purpose.
[Sidenote:
Battle of Lincoln,
1217.
]
They advanced from the West, just as had been the case in the end
of Stephen’s days, Lincoln again appearing to be the decisive
battle-ground. And so it was. Lewis returned in an evil mood,
determined to treat England as a conquered country; the barons detected
his design and deserted him one by one. At Whitsuntide the king’s party
advanced to relieve Lincoln under the Earl of Pembroke, the Earl of
Chester, and the legate. Lincoln was relieved at the cost of a battle;
but in the battle was slain Lewis’s chief captain, the Count of Perche,
and Saer de Quincy and Robert Fitz-Walter, the leading spirits of the
anti-royalists, were captured. Lewis was not there, but engaged in
the siege of Dover Castle, which had not yet been taken. On the news
of the battle he threw himself into London, and there awaited foreign
succor. The foreign succor came as far as Thanet; but there, on St.
Bartholomew’s Day, it was beaten and dispersed by the English fleet,
which thus justified the pains and cost that John had spent upon it.
[Sidenote:
Departure of
Lewis.
]
[Sidenote:
Third issue of
the Charter.
]
That defeat decided the struggle; within a month Lewis had consented
to make peace and go home. The legate showed a wise and politic mercy
in treating the rebels as ecclesiastical offenders and admitting them
to absolution and penance; and William Marshall was not anxious to
alienate friends by exacting the penalties for a treason which it
might be difficult to define, and in which his own family was largely
implicated. By Michaelmas 1217 the peace was restored, and the Charter
again re-issued in a still more modified form. This may be regarded as
the ending of the Magna Carta struggle in its first phase. It was now
become permanently the palladium of English constitutional liberty; it
was recognized as the salvation of king and kingdom, and the legate,
instead of anathematizing, had turned and blessed it.
The rule of William Marshall continued until his death, early in 1219.
The kingdom was ostensibly at peace; but order was not easily restored
after a struggle which had lasted for more than four years, and which
was itself the result of a long period of misgovernment. In the general
struggle for power which followed the pacification it was not always
the wisest or the best men that gained the ultimate ascendency. It is
clear that from the very first there were among the royal counsellors
men who had neither understood nor sympathized with the policy of
Langton. Hence the omission from the re-issued charters of the clauses
by which the king forbade and renounced unconstitutional taxation,
and prescribed the order of the national council. Many of the men who
had been leaders of the baronial party at Runnymede had fallen into
treasonable complicity with France or had perished in the war; so
that the regent was forced to give a disproportionate share of power
to the personal friends of John, foreigners and mercenaries as they
were, or to men like the Earl of Chester and the Count of Aumâle, who
fought really for their own feudal independence. Thus we must account
for the power of such men as Falkes de Breauté, who almost caused a
civil war before he would submit to the law or resign to the king the
castles which he held as the king’s servant. Hence also, perhaps, the
retention of Hubert de Burgh in the justiciarship; for he, great man
as he afterwards proved himself, was as yet only known as a creature
of John. Hence too the distinguished position retained by Peter des
Roches, although he, as Bishop of Winchester, had a dignity and power
of his own. Hence, further on, the jealousy with which, after the death
of the Earl of Pembroke, the administration of Hubert de Burgh was
viewed by the barons, and the constant risings against royal favorites
and against the too strong government exercised in the name of the boy
king. These troubles furnish nearly all the history of the years of
Henry’s minority.
[Sidenote:
Work of
William
Marshall.
]
[Sidenote: New Government.]
[Sidenote:
Second
coronation.
]
The expulsion of the French, the restoration of order, and the
securing of the validity of the Great Charter by successive and solemn
confirmations, were the chief debt that England owed to William
Marshall. So long as he lived he was able also to lessen the pressure
of the hand of the Roman legate and to keep in order the foreign
servants of John. Early in 1219 he died. Gualo, a few months before,
having incurred considerable odium by his severe and avaricious conduct
during an otherwise beneficial administration, resigned the legation
and returned to Rome. The place of the regent was not easy to fill, and
no successor was appointed with the same power and functions. Peter des
Roches became guardian of the royal person; Pandulf, the envoy of 1213,
became legate in Gualo’s place; and these two, with Hubert de Burgh as
justiciar, formed a sort of triumvirate or supreme council of regency.
Langton had now returned from exile; the Earls of Chester, Salisbury,
and Ferrars had gone on Crusade, and matters seemed likely to run
smoothly for some time. At Whitsuntide 1220 Henry was solemnly crowned
at Westminster at the express command of the Pope, by the hands of
Archbishop Langton, and with all the ceremonies which at the Gloucester
coronation had been omitted. It was a very grand ceremony; all the due
services of the great feudatories were regularly performed, and it was
made a sort of typical exhibition of the national restoration. It had
also a political intention. If Henry was now in full possession of his
royal dignity, it was high time for him to take back into the royal
custody the castles which through policy or necessity had been hitherto
left in dangerous hands. The feudal lords must learn to submit to Henry
III. as they had done to Henry II.; the foreign adventurers must be
removed from the posts which although they had earned them by fidelity,
they had made the strongholds of tyranny and oppression. England must
be reclaimed for the English, and not even the legatine, not even
the papal, influence must be allowed to retard the national progress
towards internal unity and prosperity.
[Sidenote:
William of
Aumâle and
Falkes de
Breauté.
]
The demand for the restoration of the royal castles produced the
first outbreak. Just as, at the beginning of the reign of Henry
II., William of Aumâle had refused to surrender Scarborough, so now
his grandson refused to surrender Rockingham. Immediately after the
coronation the king was brought to the siege, but the garrison fled
as he approached. The earl, undismayed, seized in 1221 the castles of
Biham and Fotheringay; and although he resisted not only the strength
of the government but the sentence of excommunication also, he was
forced to submit. In 1222 and 1223 the struggle was renewed in more
formidable dimensions. The Earl of Chester, who had at first supported
the government, made himself the spokesman of the feudal party; and the
foreigners, the chief of whom was Falkes de Breauté, did their best to
unseat the justiciar, who was now recognised as the chief man in the
administrative council. The evil was increased by the discord in the
council itself. Peter des Roches was known to prompt the resistance
to Hubert de Burgh and to be the patron of the foreigners; he neither
understood nor loved the institutions of England, and although an able
and experienced man was very ambitious and altogether unscrupulous.
In 1224, however, the contest was decided. An act of violent
insubordination on the part of Falkes de Breauté brought down the
king and the kingdom upon him; the great conspiracy of which he held
the strings was broken up, and he himself, notwithstanding the secret
support of Peter des Roches and the open mediation of the Pope, was
banished from the land. His fall involved the humiliation of the feudal
lords who were allied with him, and the expulsion of the foreigners
whom he represented and headed. Peter des Roches himself had to take a
subordinate place.
[Sidenote:
Work of
Hubert de
Burgh.
]
[Sidenote:
Re-issue of
the Charter.
]
Long before this England had been relieved from the presence of the
legate. In 1220 Langton had gone to Rome and obtained a promise that
so long as he lived no other legate should be sent to England. Pandulf
seems to have regarded the promise as implying his own recall. He
was weary of his post; and having obtained his election to the see
of Norwich, resigned in July 1221. Before the end of the year 1224
the able hand of Hubert de Burgh had shaken off the three dangerous
influences; he had reclaimed England for the English. But he had done
it at considerable cost of taxation. This the country was ill able
or disposed to bear, and the alarm of war was sounding on the side
of France, where Lewis succeeded his father in 1223. It was in order
to obtain from the nation a grant of money to defray these expenses
and to equip an army that Henry, under Hubert’s advice, for the third
time confirmed the charter. But, although these were the special
occasions of the re-issue, the confirmation itself is a typical act,
and might be regarded as the renewed good omen of a happy reign. Most
of the hereditary enemies of Henry were dead; all foreign influences
were banished; the right of the nation to sound and good government
was recognised by the charter itself. The general acquiescence in the
policy of the administration was shown by the grant of a fifteenth of
all movable property to the king, which was made conditional on the
confirmation of the charter, and the national union was proved by the
long list of prelates and magnates who attested it. Henry, by altering
the terms in which he enacted it from the older form, “by the council”
of his barons, to “by my spontaneous will,” seemed to be giving more
than a mere official ratification--a personal and sincere adhesion to
the great formula of the constitution.
[Sidenote: Henry in 1227.]
Two years after this Henry came of age, and then begins not only his
dangerous and unbusinesslike meddling with foreign politics but the
gradual revelation of the fact that he was not more willing than
his father had been to act and reign as a constitutional king. From
this point date the constant demands of the Pope on the one hand,
and the king on the other, for money to be spent on purposes which
called forth little sympathy in England, or which were opposed to the
national instincts; constant difficulties with the administration,
and, consequent upon those difficulties, that alienation of popular
affection from the person of the young sovereign whose growth had
been intently and hopefully watched--an alienation which grew from
year to year, as the conviction gained ground that he was not to be
trusted, any more than he could be honored or admired. But for this
conviction that serious attack on his authority, which amounted in the
end to an absolute superseding or deposition, could have been neither
contemplated nor carried into effect. This was not the mere result of a
mismanaged minority. No doubt the possession or even the anticipation
of the possession of great power is a dangerous obstacle to education;
and in every case of a royal minority which we have in English history
we find the same miserable story of a most important charge neglected,
and the most important of all possible trusts unfulfilled. It may be
that Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches had to work on an unkindly
soil. In the child of John and Isabella we should not look for much
inherited goodness; yet Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother, was
a very different man from Henry himself. Still the fault cannot be
ascribed altogether to education. It would have been a sore discipline
for a noble mind, but to Henry it was fatal. He learned nothing great;
what was good in him was dwarfed and warped.
The history of the thirty-one years, 1227 to 1258, which form the
period of his personal administration, is one long series of impolitic
and unprincipled acts. These acts may, it is true, be arranged under
certain distinct heads, but it is not to be forgotten that they were
at the time the successive expressions of one weak, headstrong mind,
and as such have a unity and a bearing upon one another, creating as
they proceed a tide of hostile feeling in the nation that becomes at
last overwhelming. It would be an unprofitable exercise of ingenuity
and patience to detail these acts in order of time, and to point out
how one led to another. They may be divided into the three heads of
internal misgovernment, a mischievous foreign policy pursued under the
guidance of the popes, and the unfortunate line adopted with regard to
the French provinces on which the king still retained his hold.
[Sidenote: Internal misgovernment.]
[Sidenote: Papal demands.]
[Sidenote:
Foreign
affairs.
]
[Sidenote: Crisis of 1258.]
Under the first of these come Henry’s reluctance to observe the
charters, heavy taxation for a long series of years, the revival of
the hated system of foreign favoritism, the rash displacement and
replacement of ministers, the attempts of the king to rule by means
of mere clerks and servants without proper ministers, and the series
of domestic troubles which arise from these causes. Under the second
head come the heavy demands of the popes for pecuniary help, or for the
preferment of Italians in English churches, and the successive attempts
made by the several pontiffs to use Henry, his wealth, and influence
in Europe, for the destruction of the house of Hohenstaufen, and thus
for the promotion of designs which worked his final humiliation. Under
the third come the several expeditions to France, the negotiations
with Lewis IX., the administration of Gascony, and the part taken by
Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort in the administration of that
province. These three lines of mischief combine to produce the great
crisis of 1258, in which the leading spirit was Simon de Montfort,
in which the critical and determining cause was the negotiation with
the Pope for the kingdom of Sicily, and in which the form of the
constitutional demands made by the opposition was determined by the
character of the internal misgovernment which had been going on so
long. Where the same points so frequently recur a chronological summary
becomes monotonous, and a comprehensive sketch is sufficient to convey
all the lessons that are of real value.
[Sidenote:
Henry of
age.
]
Henry’s first act was an ill-omened one. In January, 1227, in a council
at Oxford, he declared himself of full age to govern, emancipated
himself from the guardianship of Peter des Roches, but insisted that
all charters and other grants sealed during his minority should be
regarded as invalid until a confirmation of them had been purchased at
a fixed rate. This declaration, founded, it would seem, on a resolution
of the council agreed on in 1218, that no grants involving perpetuity
should be sealed until he came of age, was heard with great alarm. The
alarm spread further when it was known that the forest boundaries,
which had been settled by perambulation in 1225, were to be re-arranged
under royal direction. If the forest liberties were to be tampered
with, the Great Charter itself would be in peril. But either the alarm
was unfounded or the excitement that followed ensured its own remedy.
Large sums were raised by confirming private charters; but, on a
representation made by a body of the earls the forest administration
was let alone and the Great Charter was not threatened. The whole
project was seen to be a mere expedient for raising money.
[Sidenote: Papal taxation.]
[Sidenote:
Fall of
Hubert de
Burgh.
]
Matters went on peacefully for some four or five years, and if
complaints of misgovernment were heard they were, by the ready action
of Hubert, who continued to be justiciar, either remedied or silenced.
From 1227 to 1232 Hubert filled the place of prime minister, in
very much the same way as Hubert Walter and Geoffrey Fitz Peter had
done, sacrificing his own popularity to save his master’s character,
and risking his master’s favor by lightening the oppressions and
exactions of irresponsible government. Besides the wars with Wales
and Scotland which mark these years, and the pecuniary demands which
were necessarily made for carrying on the wars, the chief interest of
the period arises from the fact that it saw the first of those papal
claims and exactions which were to exercise so baneful an influence on
the rest of the reign. Archbishop Langton died in 1228, and Henry’s
envoys at Rome purchased the confirmation of his successor, Archbishop
Richard, by promising the Pope a heavy subsidy to sustain him in his
war with the Emperor. When the time came for this demand to be laid
before the assembled council Earl Ranulf of Chester took the lead in
opposing it. The means taken notwithstanding to exact money roused
a strong popular feeling. The papal collectors were plundered, the
stores taken in kind were burned; and so ineffectual were the means
taken to suppress the outrages, that suspicion fell, not without good
reason, on the justiciar himself as conniving at this rough justice.
Henry was already weary of his minister, and his strongest feelings
were the devotion which he consistently maintained towards the papacy
and his determination, equally resolute, to let no scruple prevent
him from acquiring money whenever he had the opportunity. Peter des
Roches, who had been absent from England for some years on Crusade, had
now returned. He lost no opportunity of increasing the king’s dislike
to Hubert, and of promoting the interest of the foreigners who were
beginning again to speculate on Henry’s weakness. The king was told
that his poverty was owing to the dishonesty of his ministers, who were
growing rich to his disadvantage; he had no money to carry on war,
whilst Hubert de Burgh was becoming more powerful in acquisitions and
alliances, and was even using his influence to screen offenders against
the Apostolic see. Henry was not slow in learning to be ungrateful. He
had been taught by Hubert himself that he must discard the favorite
servants of his father; Hubert had to exemplify, however unrighteously,
his own lesson.
[Sidenote:
Victory of
Peter des
Roches.
]
In July 1232 he was driven from office, overwhelmed, as Becket had
been, with charges which it was impossible definitely to disprove; and
after some vain attempts to escape, he was before the end of the year a
prisoner and penniless. His successor in the justiciarship was Stephen
Segrave, a creature of Peter des Roches. Peter himself resumed the
influence over the unstable king which he had won in his early years,
and filled the court and ministry with foreigners, in whose favor he
displaced all the king’s English servants.
[Sidenote: Richard Marshall.]
Hubert’s fall was great enough in itself to excite pity; even Earl
Ranulf of Chester, who had been most opposed to him as a minister, was
moved to intercede for him. But far more than his personal disgrace the
reversal of his English policy alarmed the baronage. Earl Ranulf, the
natural head of opposition, died in 1232; Richard of Cornwall, who had
hitherto shown signs of attachment to the national cause, was scarcely
fitted to lead an attack on his brother’s ministers; the Earl Marshall
Richard, son of the great regent, and younger brother of William
Marshall who had married the king’s sister, became the spokesman of
the nation. Richard Marshall was one of the most accomplished knights
and the most educated gentlemen of the age; but he had to contend
against the long experience and unscrupulous craft of Peter des Roches.
After a distinct declaration made by the barons to the king, at his
suggestion, that they would not meet the Bishop of Winchester in court
or council, and a positive demand for the dismissal of the foreign
servants who had been placed in office by him, the Earl Marshall was
declared a traitor. The king marched against him and drove him into
alliance with the disaffected Welsh. A cruel stratagem of Peter des
Roches induced him to cross over to Ireland to defend his estates
there, and, in a battle into which he was drawn by Peter’s agents, he
was betrayed and mortally wounded. For a long time after his death the
baronage continued to be without a leader of their own.
[Sidenote:
Fall of Peter
des Roches.
]
The cunning of Bishop Peter prevailed to the destruction of Earl
Richard, but it was not sufficient to ensure his own position. The
barons, although they lost their leader when the Earl Marshall fled,
were not inclined to be submissive, and the bishops, now under the
guidance of Edmund of Abingdon, the primate consecrated in 1234,
insisted that justice should be done to the Earl Marshall and that the
foreigners should be removed. The king was compelled to submit; Bishop
Peter was ordered to retire from court, and with him fell the men whom
he had patronized. But it was too late to do justice to the earl or
to stop the measures contrived for his ruin. As a matter of fact the
dismissal of Peter des Roches preceded by a few days the death of his
victim far away in Ireland. Hubert de Burgh, however, profited by the
change and regained his estates, although not his political power, when
his rival fell.
[Sidenote:
Henry’s
plan of governing.
]
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.
[Sidenote:
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.
[Sidenote:
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.
[Sidenote:
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.
[Sidenote:
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.
[Sidenote:
National
inactivity.
]
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.
[Sidenote:
Henry and
the Popes.
]
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote:
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.
[Sidenote:
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.
[Sidenote:
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.
Of all the possessions of Henry II. only Aquitaine and Gascony remained
to John at the time of his death; and these remained, not because they
loved the Plantagenets, for they hated them, but because they hated
all government, and found that distant England was a less vigorous
mistress than nearer France. So, as they had opposed Henry II., they
resisted Philip and Lewis; and they continued subject to the English
kings until the reign of Henry VI., but shorn of their proportions.
Henry III. in his early years entertained some idea of reclaiming all.
In 1225 Richard of Cornwall was sent to Bourdeaux, and re-established
order in Gascony; in 1229, during the minority of Lewis IX., not
only Gascons but Normans proposed to Henry the restoration of the
Continental dominions of his house; and in 1230 he actually went across
by Brittany and Anjou and received the homage of Poictou, whilst the
Earl of Chester made an attempt on Normandy. But in the following year
a truce was made, and no more is said of a French war for twelve years.
In 1242, however, at the invitation of the Poictevins, over whom Lewis
had set his brother Alfonso as count, Henry made a great expedition,
which he managed with so little felicity that he owed his escape from
captivity to the mercy of his enemy, just as he owed his continued
possession of Gascony to that enemy’s good faith. After his return home
in 1243 the only foreign difficulties which occurred for several years
arose from the conduct of the Gascons, who, finding no pressure put
upon them by Lewis, took courage to rebel on their own account, and
required constant chastisement. From 1249 onwards Simon de Montfort was
employed to keep them in order; and whilst his demands for money were
one cause of Henry’s difficulties at home, Henry’s treatment of him
laid the foundation of a lasting enmity. The complaints of the Gascons
against his severe administration were readily listened to, and Simon
was easily convinced that his employment in France was a mere expedient
for securing his ruin. In 1253 he resigned his command, and Henry for
the third time went in person to France, where he stayed for a year and
a half, returning at the end of 1254 more hopelessly in debt than ever.
From this point the accumulating grievances of the nation, whether
constitutional, religious, or political, blend in one mass; all the
oppressed and offended make common cause. Extortion, faithlessness,
improvidence, impotence at home and abroad, compel and suggest their
own remedy; and every class having been insulted or oppressed, the time
and the men for reform and revenge are not wanting.