John Richard Green - History of the English People, Volume II (of 8)

J >> John Richard Green >> History of the English People, Volume II (of 8)

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[Sidenote: The Opus Majus]

No trace of this fiery haste remains in the book itself. The "Opus Majus"
is alike wonderful in plan and detail. Bacon's main purpose, in the words
of Dr. Whewell, is "to urge the necessity of a reform in the mode of
philosophizing, to set forth the reasons why knowledge had not made a
greater progress, to draw back attention to sources of knowledge which had
been unwisely neglected, to discover other sources which were yet wholly
unknown, and to animate men to the undertaking by a prospect of the vast
advantages which it offered." The developement of his scheme is on the
largest scale; he gathers together the whole knowledge of his time on every
branch of science which it possessed, and as he passes them in review he
suggests improvements in nearly all. His labours, both here and in his
after works, in the field of grammar and philology, his perseverance in
insisting on the necessity of correct texts, of an accurate knowledge of
languages, of an exact interpretation, are hardly less remarkable than his
scientific investigations. From grammar he passes to mathematics, from
mathematics to experimental philosophy. Under the name of mathematics
indeed was included all the physical science of the time. "The neglect of
it for nearly thirty or forty years," pleads Bacon passionately, "hath
nearly destroyed the entire studies of Latin Christendom. For he who knows
not mathematics cannot know any other sciences; and what is more, he cannot
discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedies." Geography,
chronology, arithmetic, music, are brought into something of scientific
form, and like rapid sketches are given of the question of climate,
hydrography, geography, and astrology. The subject of optics, his own
especial study, is treated with greater fulness; he enters into the
question of the anatomy of the eye besides discussing problems which lie
more strictly within the province of optical science. In a word, the
"Greater Work," to borrow the phrase of Dr. Whewell, is "at once the
Encyclopedia and the Novum Organum of the thirteenth century." The whole of
the after-works of Roger Bacon--and treatise after treatise has of late
been disentombed from our libraries--are but developements in detail of the
magnificent conception he laid before Clement. Such a work was its own
great reward.

From the world around Roger Bacon could look for and found small
recognition. No word of acknowledgement seems to have reached its author
from the Pope. If we may credit a more recent story, his writings only
gained him a prison from his order. "Unheard, forgotten, buried," the old
man died as he had lived, and it has been reserved for later ages to roll
away the obscurity that had gathered round his memory, and to place first
in the great roll of modern science the name of Roger Bacon.

[Sidenote: Scholasticism]

The failure of Bacon shows the overpowering strength of the drift towards
the practical studies, and above all towards theology in its scholastic
guise. Aristotle, who had been so long held at bay as the most dangerous
foe of mediaeval faith, was now turned by the adoption of his logical
method in the discussion and definition of theological dogma into its
unexpected ally. It was this very method that led to "that unprofitable
subtlety and curiosity" which Lord Bacon notes as the vice of the
scholastic philosophy. But "certain it is"--to continue the same great
thinker's comment on the Friars--"that if these schoolmen to their great
thirst of truth and unwearied travel of wit had joined variety of reading
and contemplation, they had proved excellent lights to the great
advancement of all learning and knowledge." What, amidst all their errors,
they undoubtedly did was to insist on the necessity of rigid demonstration
and a more exact use of words, to introduce a clear and methodical
treatment of all subjects into discussion, and above all to substitute an
appeal to reason for unquestioning obedience to authority. It was by this
critical tendency, by the new clearness and precision which scholasticism
gave to enquiry, that in spite of the trivial questions with which it often
concerned itself it trained the human mind through the next two centuries
to a temper which fitted it to profit by the great disclosure of knowledge
that brought about the Renascence. And it is to the same spirit of fearless
enquiry as well as to the strong popular sympathies which their very
constitution necessitated that we must attribute the influence which the
Friars undoubtedly exerted in the coming struggle between the people and
the Crown. Their position is clearly and strongly marked throughout the
whole contest. The University of Oxford, which soon fell under the
direction of their teaching, stood first in its resistance to Papal
exactions and its claim of English liberty. The classes in the towns, on
whom the influence of the Friars told most directly, were steady supporters
of freedom throughout the Barons' Wars.

[Sidenote: Its Political Influence]

Politically indeed the teaching of the schoolmen was of immense value, for
it set on a religious basis and gave an intellectual form to the
constitutional theory of the relations between king and people which was
slowly emerging from the struggle with the Crown. In assuming the
responsibility of a Christian king to God for the good government of his
realm, in surrounding the pledges whether of ruler or ruled with religious
sanctions, the mediaeval Church entered its protest against any personal
despotism. The schoolmen pushed further still to the doctrine of a contract
between king and people; and their trenchant logic made short work of the
royal claims to irresponsible power and unquestioning obedience. "He who
would be in truth a king," ran a poem which embodies their teaching at this
time in pungent verse--"he is a 'free king' indeed if he rightly rule
himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of
his realm, but nothing is lawful to him for its destruction. It is one
thing to rule according to a king's duty, another to destroy a kingdom by
resisting the law." "Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be
known what the generality, to whom their laws are best known, think on the
matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make
daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their
own affairs which are at stake they will take the more care and will act
with an eye to their own peace." "It concerns the community to see what
sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm." The
constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole
nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs and to have a voice in
the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so
clearly stated before. But the importance of the Friar's work lay in this,
that the work of the scholar was supplemented by that of the popular
preacher. The theory of government wrought out in cell and lecture-room was
carried over the length and breadth of the land by the mendicant brother,
begging his way from town to town, chatting with farmer or housewife at the
cottage door, and setting up his portable pulpit in village green or
market-place. His open-air sermons, ranging from impassioned devotion to
coarse story and homely mother wit, became the journals as well as the
homilies of the day; political and social questions found place in them
side by side with spiritual matters; and the rudest countryman learned his
tale of a king's oppression or a patriot's hopes as he listened to the
rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar.

[Sidenote: Henry the Third]

Never had there been more need of such a political education of the whole
people than at the moment we have reached. For the triumph of the Charter,
the constitutional government of Governor and Justiciar, had rested mainly
on the helplessness of the king. As boy or youth, Henry the Third had bowed
to the control of William Marshal or Langton or Hubert de Burgh. But he was
now grown to manhood, and his character was from this hour to tell on the
events of his reign. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father
the young king was absolutely free. There was a geniality, a vivacity, a
refinement in his temper which won a personal affection for him even in his
worst days from some who bitterly censured his rule. The Abbey-church of
Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor,
remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of men
of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. But
of the political capacity which was the characteristic of his house he had
little or none. Profuse, changeable, false from sheer meanness of spirit,
impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless
in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an empty and
prodigal magnificence, his one notion of government was a dream of
arbitrary power. But frivolous as the king's mood was, he clung with a weak
man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy; and this was the policy not
of Hubert or Langton but of John. He cherished the hope of recovering his
heritage across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown;
and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises which force had
wrested from the king and which force could wrest back again. France was
telling more and more on English opinion; and the claim which the French
kings were advancing to a divine and absolute power gave a sanction in
Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority which was still maintained
by his favourite advisers in the royal council. Above all he clung to the
alliance with the Papacy. Henry was personally devout; and his devotion
only bound him the more firmly to his father's system of friendship with
Rome. Gratitude and self-interest alike bound him to the Papal See. Rome
had saved him from ruin as a child; its legate had set the crown on his
head; its threats and excommunications had foiled Lewis and built up again
a royal party. Above all it was Rome which could alone free him from his
oath to the Charter, and which could alone defend him if like his father he
had to front the baronage in arms.

[Sidenote: England and Rome]

His temper was now to influence the whole system of government. In 1227
Henry declared himself of age; and though Hubert still remained Justiciar
every year saw him more powerless in his struggle with the tendencies of
the king. The death of Stephen Langton in 1228 was a yet heavier blow to
English freedom. In persuading Rome to withdraw her Legate the Primate had
averted a conflict between the national desire for self-government and the
Papal claims of overlordship. But his death gave the signal for a more
serious struggle, for it was in the oppression of the Church of England by
the Popes through the reign of Henry that the little rift first opened
which was destined to widen into the gulf that parted the one from the
other at the Reformation. In the mediaeval theory of the Papacy, as
Innocent and his successors held it, Christendom, as a spiritual realm of
which the Popes were the head, took the feudal form of the secular realms
which lay within its pale. The Pope was its sovereign, the Bishops were his
barons, and the clergy were his under vassals. As the king demanded aids
and subsidies in case of need from his liegemen, so in the theory of Rome
might the head of the Church demand aid in need from the priesthood. And at
this moment the need of the Popes was sore. Rome had plunged into her
desperate conflict with the Emperor, Frederick the Second, and was looking
everywhere for the means of recruiting her drained exchequer. On England
she believed herself to have more than a spiritual claim for support. She
regarded the kingdom as a vassal kingdom, and as bound to aid its overlord.
It was only by the promise of a heavy subsidy that Henry in 1229 could buy
the Papal confirmation of Langton's successor. But the baronage was of
other mind than Henry as to this claim of overlordship, and the demand of
an aid to Rome from the laity was at once rejected by them. Her spiritual
claim over the allegiance of the clergy however remained to fall back upon,
and the clergy were in the Pope's hand. Gregory the Ninth had already
claimed for the Papal See a right of nomination to some prebends in each
cathedral church; he now demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the
priesthood, and a threat of excommunication silenced their murmurs.
Exaction followed exaction as the needs of the Papal treasury grew greater.
The very rights of lay patrons were set aside, and under the name of
"reserves" presentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal
market, while Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings of the
Church.

[Sidenote: Fall of Hubert de Burgh]

The general indignation at last found vent in a wide conspiracy. In 1231
letters from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be
ruined by the Romans" were scattered over the kingdom by armed men; tithes
gathered for the Pope or the foreign priests were seized and given to the
poor; the Papal collectors were beaten and their bulls trodden under foot.
The remonstrances of Rome only made clearer the national character of the
movement; but as enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen
to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done;
royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their acts; and
the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance of
Hubert de Burgh. No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the mind
of the king. But he was already in full collision with the Justiciar on
other grounds. Henry was eager to vindicate his right to the great heritage
his father had lost: the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they
loved England but because they hated France, spurred him to war; and in
1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons. But while Hubert held
power no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife. The Norman
call was rejected through his influence, and when a great armament gathered
at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport
and supplies. The young king drew his sword and rushed madly on the
Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.
But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred for the year. In
1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poitou, but the failure
of the campaign was again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was
said to have prevented a decisive engagement. It was at this moment that
the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry's wrath against his
minister. In the summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar,
and dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven
him to take sanctuary. A smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly
refused. "I will die any death," he said, "before I put iron on the man who
freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." The
remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the king to replace Hubert in
sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner
into the Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless in the
realm. His fall left England without a check to the rule of Henry himself.

CHAPTER III
THE BARON'S WAR
1232-1272

[Sidenote: The Aliens]

Once master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick to declare his plan of
government. The two great checks on a merely personal rule lay as yet in
the authority of the great ministers of State and in the national character
of the administrative body which had been built up by Henry the Second.
Both of these checks Henry at once set himself to remove. He would be his
own minister. The Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the king
and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law-courts. The Chancellor had
grown into a great officer of State, and in 1226 this office had been
conferred on the Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent of the
Great Council. But Henry succeeded in wresting the seal from him and naming
to this as to other offices at his pleasure. His policy was to entrust all
high posts of government to mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained
administrators, but wholly dependent on the royal will. He found equally
dependent agents of administration by surrounding himself with foreigners.
The return of Peter des Roches to the royal councils was the first sign of
the new system; and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were summoned
over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative
posts about the Court. The king's marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence
was followed by the arrival in England of the new queen's uncles. The
"Savoy," as his house in the Strand was named, still recalls Peter of Savoy
who arrived five years later to take for a while the chief place at Henry's
council-board; another brother, Boniface, was consecrated on Archbishop
Edmund's death to the highest post in the realm save the Crown itself, the
Archbishoprick of Canterbury. The young Primate, like his brother, brought
with him foreign fashions strange enough to English folk. His armed
retainers pillaged the markets. His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the
ground the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who opposed his
visitation. London was roused by the outrage; on the king's refusal to do
justice a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate's house at Lambeth
with cries of vengeance, and the "handsome archbishop," as his followers
styled him, was glad to escape over sea. This brood of Provencals was
followed in 1243 by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John's queen,
Isabella of Angouleme. Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of
Valence received at a later time the earldom of Pembroke. Even the king's
jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed these great
nobles to find a fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords brought
in their train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and three English
earls who were in royal wardship were wedded by the king to foreigners. The
whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men who were
ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English government or
English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy; the very retainers of the royal
household turned robbers and pillaged foreign merchants in the precincts of
the Court; corruption invaded the judicature; at the close of this period
of misrule Henry de Bath, a justiciary, was proved to have openly taken
bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.

[Sidenote: Henry and the Baronage]

That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on unchecked in defiance
of the provisions of the Charter was owing to the disunion and sluggishness
of the English baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard,
the Earl Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth as their leader to
demand the expulsion of the strangers from the royal Council. Though
deserted by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent
against him and forced the king to treat for peace. But at this critical
moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland; he
fell in a petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. The
interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon, forced the king to
dismiss Peter from court; but there was no real change of system, and the
remonstrances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of
Lincoln, remained fruitless. In the long interval of misrule the financial
straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest
Laws were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant,
loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free
quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this kind however were utterly
insufficient to defray the cost of the king's prodigality. A sixth of the
royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of
the Crown amounted to four times its annual income. Henry was forced to
appeal for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted in
1237 on promise of control in its expenditure and on condition that the
king confirmed the Charter. But Charter and promise were alike disregarded;
and in 1242 the resentment of the barons expressed itself in a determined
protest and a refusal of further subsidies. In spite of their refusal
however Henry gathered money enough for a costly expedition for the
recovery of Poitou. The attempt ended in failure and shame. At Taillebourg
the king's force fled in disgraceful rout before the French as far as
Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a disease which
scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the conquerors. The treasury was
utterly drained, and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh appeal with
his own mouth to the baronage. But the barons had now rallied to a plan of
action, and we can hardly fail to attribute their union to the man who
appears at their head. This was the Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.

[Sidenote: Simon of Montfort]

Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose name had become
memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in
Southern Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his
mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.
But as Simon's tendencies were for the most part French John had kept the
revenues of the earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim of his
elder son, Amaury, was met by the refusal of Henry the Third to accept a
divided allegiance. The refusal marks the rapid growth of that sentiment of
nationality which the loss of Normandy had brought home. Amaury chose to
remain French, and by a family arrangement with the king's sanction the
honour of Leicester passed in 1231 to his younger brother Simon. His choice
made Simon an Englishman, but his foreign blood still moved the jealousy of
the barons, and this jealousy was quickened by a secret match in 1238 with
Eleanor, the king's sister and widow of the second William Marshal. The
match formed probably part of a policy which Henry pursued throughout his
reign of bringing the great earldoms into closer connexion with the Crown.
That of Chester had fallen to the king through the extinction of the family
of its earls; Cornwall was held by his brother, Richard; Salisbury by his
cousin. Simon's marriage linked the Earldom of Leicester to the royal
house. But it at once brought Simon into conflict with the nobles and the
Church. The baronage, justly indignant that such a step should have been
taken without their consent, for the queen still remained childless and
Eleanor's children by one whom they looked on as a stranger promised to be
heirs of the Crown, rose in a revolt which failed only through the
desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall, who was satisfied with
Earl Simon's withdrawal from the Royal Council. The censures of the Church
on Eleanor's breach of a vow of chaste widowhood which she had made at her
first husband's death were averted with hardly less difficulty by a journey
to Rome. It was after a year of trouble that Simon returned to England to
reap as it seemed the fruits of his high alliance. He was now formally made
Earl of Leicester and re-entered the Royal Council. But it is probable that
he still found there the old jealousy which had forced from him a pledge of
retirement after his marriage; and that his enemies now succeeded in
winning over the king. In a few months, at any rate, he found the
changeable king alienated from him, he was driven by a burst of royal
passion from the realm, and was forced to spend seven months in France.

[Sidenote: Simon's early action]

Henry's anger passed as quickly as it had risen, and in the spring of 1240
the Earl was again received with honour at court. It was from this moment
however that his position changed. As yet it had been that of a foreigner,
confounded in the eyes of the nation at large with the Poitevins and
Provencals who swarmed about the court. But in the years of retirement
which followed Simon's return to England his whole attitude was reversed.
There was as yet no quarrel with the king: he followed him in a campaign
across the Channel, and shared in his defeat at Saintes. But he was a
friend of Grosseteste and a patron of the Friars, and became at last known
as a steady opponent of the misrule about him. When prelates and barons
chose twelve representatives to confer with Henry in 1244 Simon stood with
Earl Richard of Cornwall at the head of them. A definite plan of reform
disclosed his hand. The confirmation of the Charter was to be followed by
the election of Justiciar, Chancellor, Treasurer, in the Great Council. Nor
was this restoration of a responsible ministry enough; a perpetual Council
was to attend the king and devise further reforms. The plan broke against
Henry's resistance and a Papal prohibition; but from this time the Earl
took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. The struggle of
the following years was chiefly with the exactions of the Papacy, and Simon
was one of the first to sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246
addressed to the court of Rome. He was present at the Lent Parliament of
1248, and we can hardly doubt that he shared in its bold rebuke of the
king's misrule and its renewed demand for the appointment of the higher
officers of state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the danger of
leaving at home such a centre of all efforts after reform that brought
Henry to send him in the autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for
the Crown the last of its provinces over sea.

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