called annates and firstfruits; the granting of livings was called provisors or provisions. Henry comes of age. Ministry of Hubert de Burgh. In 1227 Henry, who was then twenty, declared himself of age to govern, and continued Hubert de Burgh in the office of justiciar. This statesman ruled well; he was the last of the men who, like Hubert Walter and Geoffrey FitzPeter, had been trained in the system of Henry II. During four years of his rule Peter des Roches, his rival, was away on a crusade, but in 1231 he returned, and immediately begun to plot the fall of Hubert. The justiciar had many enemies, and he is said to have used his power to increase his own wealth; so Peter des Roches had little difficulty in forming a party against him, and won over the king to his views. Fall of Hubert. Henry, like many weak persons, was unscrupulous when roused, so he attacked Hubert with fury, flung him into prison, and stripped him of his wealth and offices; and when the prisoner escaped and took sanctuary in a church, he had a moat dug round it and starved Hubert into surrender. The fall of Hubert de Burgh took place in 1232; he was the last of the great justiciars who had acted as the king's chief ministers since the time of William Rufus. After his time the Chancellor (see note, p. 56) became the most important of the king's officers. After Hubert's fall Henry took the conduct of affairs into his own hands, and twenty-six years of bad government followed. A considerable change had come over the state of affairs Henry's since the death of John. William the Conqueror government. and Henry II. had found a great source of their power in their wealth, which arose partly from the large number of manors in the king's hands, and partly because they had been practically able to levy aids and scutages at will. The extravagance of Richard and John, however, had stripped the crown of a large part of its possessions, while, although the clauses about aids and scutages had beer. omitted when the Great Charter was republished, the king had found it in practice impossible to levy these taxes without the consent of his tenants. Hence the king was continually pressed for money, and there were special causes in Henry's Povey of the king. case which produced a constant drain upon his lightened purse. In the first place, Peter des Roches was surrounded by a group of Poitevins who obtained offices from Henry through the influence Greediness of of their fellow-countryman. The favour shown to the foreign favourites. Poitevins. Poitevins instantly caused the nobles to form an opposition, at the head of which was Richard Marshall, the second son of the late regent, who, unhappily, was soon killed in Ireland by treachery. Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, then took the lead, and matters had come to the point of civil war when the dismissal of Peter des Roches and his friends removed the grievance of the barons. Unfortunately, the Poitevins were not the only persons who thought they had a claim to Henry's bounty; in 1236 the king married Eleanor of Provence, and her uncles, William Provençals. of Valence, Boniface of Savoy, and Peter of Savoy, arrived in England with a troop of Provençals, and soon obtained as large a share of the revenue as the Poitevins had done. Then Isabella of Angoulême, Henry's mother, who had married Hugh de la Marche and had a numerous family, sent over Henry's half-brothers, including another William of Valence, to push their fortunes in England, and brought with them another body of Poitevins. Half-brothers of the king. Lastly, Henry was in debt to the pope. The pope had been continually pushing his claims to money, and making provisions for Debts to the his dependents. The man who made the greatest the Papacy. роре. resistance was Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln; but he could do little to stop the provisions, while Boniface of Savoy, the queen's uncle, who became archbishop in 1241, did nothing to help. In 1237, Cardinal Otho, in spite of the irritation of the clergy Exactions of and people, came over to England and collected vast sums for the papal treasury. At the Council of Lyons, in 1245, the English complained that sixty thousand marks a year went into the hands of the pope and the foreign clergy. These sums had been exacted from the clergy and people; but in 1254 the pope, who had been warring in Italy against the descendants of the Emperor Frederick, who had son, and incurs married Henry's sister, offered the crown of Sicily which had been part of the dominions of that monarch, to Richard, Henry's brother. He refused it, and it was accepted Henry accepts the crown of Sicily for his further debts. for Edmund, the king's second son, then nine years old. Henry had no money to pay an army to go to Sicily, so the pope entered upon the war himself, and put down all the expenses to Henry's account; consequently, by 1257, Henry's debt to the pope amounted to 135,000 marks. Meanwhile in other respects Henry's government had been unsuccessful; in 1242 he had been led by his mother to make an expedition to Gascony in support of his stepfather. Useless France. This adventure cost him a large sum, and only resulted expeditions to in the battles of Taillebourg and Saintes, in which the balance was certainly on the side of the French king, and the arrival in England of a fresh batch of Poitevins, who came back with Henry in 1243. Weakness of Moreover, Henry's rule in England had been hopelessly weak, and on one occasion a number of his own servants were convicted of highway robbery, to which they had Henry's rule. been driven by the arrears into which their salaries had fallen. It must not be supposed that this state of things had been viewed with indifference by the country. In 1244 the earls, barons, and bishops had demanded control over the appointment An opposition of ministers, and in 1255 the same demand was renewed by Parliament, as the great council of the nation had now begun to be called. It was refused, but the demand showed that the opposition had realized the right way to influence the king's policy, and were slowly feeling their way towards making the ministers responsible to the nation. Rise of Simon At length the barons found a leader against the foreigners, in the person of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. Simon was himself a foreigner. He was the second son of another Simon de Montfort, who had led the de Montfort. Crusade against the Albigenses, but when his father died the elder son succeeded him, and Simon came over to England to try and get the earldom of Leicester, to which his mother, being the sister of the late earl, had a claim. This claim was admitted by Henry III., who received de Montfort at court; and de Montfort's next step was to marry Eleanor, the sister Marriage with of Henry, and widow of William Marshall, eldest son of the regent. From 1248 to 1253 the Earl of Leicester acted as His arrival in England. Henry's sister. . governor of Gascony, where he gained much experience, but acquired a character for severity, and he was unjustly charged by his subjects with peculation, tyranny, and cruelty. The result was a quarrel with Henry, and de Montfort left England for some time. Takes the lead of the opposition. On his return he was reconciled to Henry, but in 1257 he quarrelled with William of Valence, the king's half-brother, and took the leadership of the opposition. The time was very favourable for attacking Henry's government. The king's younger brother, Richard Earl of Cornwall, had just gone to Germany, where he had been elected King of the Romans. Henry was desperately in debt, and the Parliament of 1258, often called the Mad Parliament of Oxford, under the lead of Simon de Montfort and Richard Earl of Gloucester, took upon itself to reform the administration. The plan they adopted was to take the government out of the hands of Henry and hand it over to a committee of twenty-four Provisions of persons, who were to reform all grievances in Church Oxford. and State. Besides this committee, another body of fifteen were to act for the future as council to the king; the fifteen were to hold three Parliaments a year. For the reform of the country the committee ordained that sheriffs should be chosen annually by vote, and that the sheriffs, treasurer, chancellor, and justiciar should give in their accounts once a year. By a threat of resuming the lands which had been granted by Flight of the Henry out of the estates of the crown, his halfforeigners. brothers were terrified into flight, and with them departed the great body of foreigners, partiality for whom had been in the eyes of his subjects Henry's worst crime. Henry accepts but is freed from his promise by the pope. The government of the council really lasted from 1258 to 1264. Henry had taken an oath to accept the provisions, but the provisions, he asked the pope as his overlord to absolve him from it, and the pope did so. Henry and his barons could come to no terms; and, in 1263, Henry appealed to Louis IX. of France to arbitrate between him and Louis was an excellent sovereign, but knew nothing about the merits of the case, so at Amiens he gave a decision in favour of Henry. This decision is generally called the "Mise of Amiens." his subjects. Arbitration of St. Louis. War between the king and the barons. Open war now broke out between the king and the barons. As a rule, the north, with Devon and Cornwall, i.e. the poorer districts, were for Henry; the Midlands were divided; the South, Cinque Ports, and London, i.e. the wealthy parts of the country, were warmly for Simon de Montfort. The Mortimers on the Welsh border were for the king, Llewelyn Prince of Wales was for de Montfort. In 1264 was fought the battle of Lewes, in which the king and Prince Edward, his eldest son, were defeated, and gave themselves up by a treaty called the "Mise of Lewes." The government now fell into the hands of de Montfort and Gilbert Earl of Gloucester, son of the earl mentioned above, and they summoned the celebrated Parliament of 1265. Battle of Concilium. We saw that at the Conquest the place of the witena-gemot had been taken by the great council. This body contained the archbishops, bishops, and abbots, earls, and greater The Magnum and lesser barons. On very great occasions all of these assembled, but as a rule only the greater men attended its meetings. Magna Carta, in arranging for the calling of an assembly to vote scutages and extra aids, had provided that the archbishops, bishops, earls, and greater barons only, were to be summoned by writs sent to each separately, while the lesser barons were to be summoned by a general writ, sent to the sheriff in the county court. It was not to be expected that many would take advantage of such a general summons, so the next step was to send, as the, representatives of the lower barons, persons elected in the county court. Such repre Representatives chosen for the shires. sentatives were first summoned to a Parliament in 1254, and in 1265 two knights from each shire were summoned. and as their Representa tives chosen and boroughs. for the cities Though the chartered towns took some part in the election of the knights of the shire, this was not felt to be enough; good will was very important, de Montfort and his friends called upon the principal cities and boroughs to send each two representatives, so that this Parliament of 1265 was the first Parliament which contained, together with the archbishops, bishops, mitred abbots, earls, and greater barons, representatives from counties, cities, and boroughs. Parliament of 1265. |