T.F. Tout - The History of England

T >> T.F. Tout >> The History of England

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47

Three notable enemies of Hubert went off the stage of history within a
few months of his fall. The death of Richard le Grand has already been
recorded. William Marshal, the brother-in-law of the king, the gallant
and successful soldier, the worthy successor of his great father, came
home from Brittany early in 1231. His last act was to marry his sister,
Isabella, to Richard of Cornwall. Within ten days of the wedding his
body was laid beside his father in the Temple Church at London. In
October, 1232, died Randolph of Blundeville, the last representative of
the male stock of the old line of the Earls of Chester, and long the
foremost champion of the feudal aristocracy against Hubert. The contest
between them had been fought with such chivalry that the last public act
of the old earl was to protect the fallen justiciar from the violence of
his foes. For more than fifty years Randolph had ruled like a king over
his palatine earldom; had, like his master, his struggles with his own
vassals, and had perforce to grant to his own barons and boroughs
liberties which he strove to wrest from his overlord for himself and his
fellow nobles. He was not a great statesman, and hardly even a
successful warrior. Yet his popular personal qualities, his energy, his
long duration of power, and his enormous possessions, give him a place
in history. His memory, living on long in the minds of the people,
inspired a series of ballads which vied in popularity with the cycle of
Robin Hood,[1] though, unfortunately, they have not come down to us. His
estates were divided among his four sisters. His nephew, John the Scot,
Earl of Huntingdon, received a re-grant of the Chester earldom; his
Lancashire lands had already gone to his brother-in-law, William of
Ferrars, Earl of Derby; other portions of his territories went to his
sister, the Countess of Arundel, and the Lincoln earldom, passing
through another sister, Hawise of Quincy, to her son-in-law, John of
Lacy, constable of Chester, raised the chief vassal of the palatinate to
comital rank. None of these heirs of a divided inheritance were true
successors to Randolph. With him died the last of the great Norman
houses, tenacious beyond its fellows, and surpassing in its two
centuries of unbroken male descent the usual duration of the medieval
baronial family. Its collapse made easier the alien invasion which
threatened to undo Hubert's work.

[1] "Ich can rymes of Robyn Hode, and of Randolf erl of
Chestre," _Vision of Piers Plowman_, i., 167; ii., 94.

CHAPTER III.

THE ALIEN INVASION.

With the dismissal of Hubert on July 29, 1232, Peter des Roches resumed
his authority over Henry III. Mindful of past failures, the bishop's
aim was to rule through dependants, so that he could pull the wires
without making himself too prominent. His chief agents in pursuing this
policy were Peter of Rivaux, Stephen Segrave, and Robert Passelewe. Of
these, Peter of Rivaux was a Poitevin clerk, officially described as
the bishop's nephew, but generally supposed to have been his son.
Stephen Segrave, the son of a small Leicestershire landholder, was a
lawyer who had held many judicial and administrative posts, including
the regency during the king's absence abroad in 1230. He abandoned his
original clerical profession, received knighthood, married nobly, and
was the founder of a baronial house in the midlands. His only political
principle was obedience to the powers that were in the ascendant.
Passelewe, a clerk who had acted as the agent of Randolph of Chester
and Falkes of Breaute at the Roman court, was, like Segrave, a mere
tool.

The Bishop of Winchester began to show his hand. Between June 26 and
July 11, nineteen of the thirty-five sheriffdoms were bestowed on Peter
of Rivaux for life. As Segrave was sheriff of five shires, and the
bishop himself had acquired the shrievalty of Hampshire, this involved
the transference of the administration of over two-thirds of the
counties to the bishop's dependants. On the downfall of Hubert, Segrave
became justiciar. He was not the equal of his predecessors either in
personal weight or in social position, and did not aspire to act as
chief minister. The appointment of a mere lawyer to the great Norman
office of state marks the first stage in the decline, which before long
degraded the justiciarship into a simple position of headship over the
judges, the chief justiceship of the next generation. Hubert's offices
and lands were divided among his supplanters. Peter of Rivaux became
keeper of wards and escheats, castellan of many castles on the Welsh
march, and the recipient of even more offices and wardships in Ireland
than in England. The custody of the Gloucester earldom went to the
Bishop of Winchester. The last steps of the ministerial revolution were
completed at the king's Christmas court at Worcester. There Rivaux, who
had yielded up before Michaelmas most of his shrievalties, was made
treasurer, with Passelewe as his deputy. Of the old ministers only the
chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, was suffered to remain
in office. Finally the king's new advisers imported a large company of
Poitevin and Breton mercenaries, hoping with their help to maintain
their newly won position. The worst days of John seemed renewed.

The Poitevin gang called upon Hubert to render complete accounts for
the whole period of his justiciarship. When he pleaded that King John
had given him a charter of quittance, he was told that its force had
ended with the death of the grantor. He was further required to answer
for the wrongs which Twenge's bands had inflicted on the servants of
the pope. He was accused of poisoning William Earl of Salisbury,
William Marshal, Falkes de Breaute, and Archbishop Richard. He had
prevented the king from contracting a marriage with a daughter of the
Duke of Austria; he had dissuaded the king from attempting to recover
Normandy; he had first seduced and then married the daughter of the
King of Scots; he had stolen from the treasury a talisman which made
its possessor invincible in war and had traitorously given it to
Llewelyn of Wales; he had induced Llewelyn to slay William de Braose;
he had won the royal favour by magic and witchcraft, and finally he had
murdered Constantine FitzAthulf.

Many of these accusations were so monstrous that they carried with them
their own refutation. It was too often the custom in the middle ages to
overwhelm an enemy with incredible charges for it to be fair to accuse
the enemies of Hubert of any excessive malignity. The substantial
innocence of Hubert is clear, for the only charges brought against him
were either errors of judgment and policy, or incredible crimes.
Nevertheless he was in such imminent danger that he took sanctuary with
the canons of Merton in Surrey. Thereupon the king called upon the
Londoners to march to Merton and bring their ancient foe, dead or
alive, to the city. Randolph of Chester interposed between his fallen
enemy and the royal vengeance. He persuaded Henry to countermand the
march to Merton and to suffer the fallen justiciar to leave his refuge
with some sort of safe conduct. But the king was irritated to hear that
Hubert had journeyed into Essex. Again he was pursued, and once more he
was forced to take sanctuary, this time in a chapel near Brentwood.
From this he was dragged by some of the king's household and brought to
London, where he was imprisoned in the Tower. The Bishop of London
complained to the king of this violation of the rights of the Church,
and Hubert was allowed to return to his chapel. However, the levies of
Essex surrounded the precincts, and he was soon forced by hunger to
surrender. He offered to submit himself to the king's will, and was for
a second time confined in the Tower. On November 10, he was brought
before a not unfriendly tribunal, in which the malice of the new
justiciar was tempered by the baronial instincts of the Earls of
Cornwall, Warenne, Pembroke, and Lincoln. He made no effort to defend
himself, and submitted absolutely to the judgment of the king. It was
finally agreed that he should be allowed to retain the lands which he
had inherited from his father, and that all his chattels and the lands
that he had acquired himself should be forfeited to the crown. Further,
he was to be kept in prison in the castle of Devizes under the charge
of the four earls who had tried him.

Peter des Roches was soon in difficulties. The earls who had saved
Hubert began to oppose the whole administration. Their leader was
Richard, Earl of Pembroke, the second son of the great regent, and
since his brother's death head of the house of Marshal. Richard was
bitterly prejudiced against the king and his courtiers by an attempt to
refuse him his brother's earldom. A gallant warrior, handsome and
eloquent, pious, upright, and well educated, Richard, the best of the
marshal's sons, stood for the rest of his short life at the head of the
opposition. He incited his friends to refuse to attend a council
summoned to meet at Oxford, on June 24, 1233. The king would have
sought to compel their presence, had not a Dominican friar, Robert
Bacon, when preaching before the court, warned him that there would be
no peace in England until Bishop Peter and his son were removed from
his counsels. The friar's boldness convinced him that disaffection was
widespread, and he promised the magnates at a later council at London
that he would, with their advice, correct whatever he found there was
need to reform. Meanwhile the Poitevins brought into England fresh
swarms of hirelings from their own land, and Peter des Roches urged
Henry to crush rebellion in the bud. As a warning to greater offenders,
Gilbert Basset was deprived of a manor which he had held since the
reign of King John, and an attempt was made to lay violent hands upon
his brother-in-law, Richard Siward. The two barons resisted, whereupon
all their estates were transferred to Peter of Rivaux. Yet Richard
Marshal still continued to hope for peace, and, after the failure of
earlier councils, set off to attend another assembly fixed for August
1, at Westminster. On his way he learnt from his sister Isabella, the
wife of Richard of Cornwall, that Peter des Roches was laying a trap
for him. In high indignation he took horse for his Welsh estates, and
prepared for rebellion.

The king summoned the military tenants to appear with horses and arms
at Gloucester on the 14th. There Richard Marshal was declared a traitor
and an invasion of his estates was ordered. But the king had not
sufficient resources to carry out his threats, and October saw the
barons once more wrangling with Henry at Westminster, and claiming that
the marshal should be tried by his peers. Peter of Winchester declared
that there were no peers in England as there were in France, and that
in consequence the king had power to condemn any disloyal subject
through his justices. This daringly unconstitutional doctrine provoked
a renewed outcry. The bishops joined the secular magnates, and
threatened their colleague with excommunication. A formidable civil war
broke out. Siward and Basset harried the lands of the Poitevins, while
the marshal made a close alliance with Llewelyn of Wales. The king
still had formidable forces on his side. Richard of Cornwall was
persuaded by Bishop Peter to take up arms for his brother, and the two
new earls, John the Scot of Chester, and John de Lacy of Lincoln,
joined the royal forces. Hubert de Burgh took advantage of the
increasing confusion to escape from Devizes castle to a church in the
town. Dragged back with violence to his prison, he was again, as at
Brentwood, restored to sanctuary through the exertions of the bishop of
the diocese. There he remained, closely watched by his foes, until
October 30, when Siward and Basset drove away the guard, and took him
off with them to the marshal's castle of Chepstow.

The tide of war flowed to the southern march of Wales. Llewelyn and
Richard Marshal devastated Glamorgan, which, as a part of the
Gloucester inheritance, was under the custody of the Bishop of
Winchester. They took nearly all its castles, including that of
Cardiff. Thence they subdued Usk, Abergavenny, and other neighbouring
strongholds, while an independent army, including the marshal's
Pembrokeshire vassals and the men of the princes of South Wales, wasted
months in a vain attack on Carmarthen. The king's vassals were again
summoned to Gloucester, whence Henry led them early in November towards
Chepstow, the centre of the marshal's estates in Gwent. Earl Richard
devastated his lands so effectively that the king could not support his
army on them, and was compelled to move up the Wye valley towards the
castles of Monmouth, Skenfrith, Whitecastle, and Grosmont, the strong
quadrilateral of Upper Gwent which still remained in the hands of the
king's friends. Marching to the most remote of these, Grosmont, on the
upper Monnow, Henry spent several days in the castle, while his army
lay around under canvas. On the night of November 11, the sleeping
soldiers were suddenly set upon by the barons and their Welsh allies;
they fled unarmed to the castle, or scattered in confusion. The
assailants seized their horses, harness, arms and provisions, but
refrained from slaying or capturing them. The royal forces never
rallied. Many gladly went home, giving as their excuse that they were
unable to fight since they had lost their equipment. Henry and his
ministers withdrew to Gloucester. More convinced than ever of the
treachery of Englishmen, the king entrusted the defence of the border
castles to mercenaries from Poitou.

The fighting centred round Monmouth, which Richard approached on the
25th with a small company. A sudden sortie almost overwhelmed the
little band. The marshal held his own heroically against twelve, until
at last Baldwin of Guines, the warden of the castle, took him prisoner.
Thereupon Baldwin fell to the ground, his armour pierced by a lucky
bolt from a crossbow. His followers, smitten with panic, abandoned the
marshal, and bore their leader home. By that time, however, the bulk of
the marshal's forces had come upon the scene. A general engagement
followed, in which the Anglo-Welsh army drove the enemy back into
Monmouth and took possession of the castle. This set the marshal free
to march northwards and join Llewelyn in a vigorous attack upon
Shrewsbury. In January, 1234, they burnt that town and retired to their
own lands loaded with booty. Meanwhile Siward devastated the estates of
the Poitevins and of Richard of Cornwall. Afraid to be cut off from his
retreat to England the king abandoned Gloucester, where he had kept his
melancholy Christmas court, and found a surer refuge in Bishop Peter's
cathedral city. Thereupon Gloucestershire suffered the fate of
Shropshire. "It was a wretched sight for travellers in that region to
see on the highways innumerable dead bodies lying naked and unburied,
to be devoured by birds of prey, and so polluting the air that they
infected healthy men with mortal sickness."[1]

[1] Wendover, iv., 291.

The king swore that he would never make peace with the marshal, unless
he threw himself on the royal mercy as a confessed traitor with a rope
round his neck. Having, however, exhausted all his military resources,
he cunningly strove to entice Richard from Wales to Ireland. The two
Peters wrote to Maurice Fitzgerald, then justiciar of Ireland, and to
the chief foes of the marshal, urging them to fall upon his Irish
estates and capture the traitor, dead or alive. Many of the most
powerful nobles of Ireland lent themselves to the conspiracy. The Lacys
of Meath, his old enemies, joined with Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Marsh, and
Richard de Burgh, the greatest of the Norman lords of Connaught, and
the nephew of Hubert, in carrying out the plot. The confederates fell
suddenly upon the marshal's estates and devastated them with fire and
sword. On hearing of this attack Richard immediately left Wales, and,
accompanied by only fifteen knights, took ship for Ireland. On his
arrival Geoffrey Marsh, the meanest of the conspirators, received him
with every profession of cordiality, and urged him to attack his
enemies without delay. Geoffrey was an old man; he had long held the
great post of justiciar of Ireland; and he was himself the liegeman of
the marshal. Richard therefore implicitly trusted him, and forthwith
took the field.

The first warlike operations of Earl Richard were successful. After a
short siege he obtained possession of Limerick, and his enemies were
fain to demand a truce. Richard proposed a conference to be held on
April 1, 1234, on the Curragh of Kildare. The conference proved
abortive, for Geoffrey Marsh cunningly persuaded the marshal to refuse
any offer of terms which the magnates would accept, and Richard found
that he had been duped into taking up a position that he was not strong
enough to maintain. Marsh withdrew from his side, on the ground that he
could not fight against Lacy, whose sister he had married. The marshal
foresaw the worst. "I know," he declared, "that this day I am delivered
over to death, but it is better to die honourably for the cause of
justice than to flee from the field and become a reproach to
knighthood."

The forsworn Irish knights slunk away to neighbouring places of
sanctuary or went over to the enemy. When the final struggle came, later
on the same April 1, Richard had few followers save the faithful fifteen
knights who had crossed over with him from Wales. The little band,
outnumbered by more than nine to one, struggled desperately to the end.
At last the marshal, unhorsed and severely wounded, fell into the hands
of his enemies. They bore him, more dead than alive, to his own castle
of Kilkenny, which had just been seized by the justiciar. After a few
days Richard's tough constitution began to get the better of his wounds.
Then his enemies, showing him the royal warranty for their acts, induced
him to admit them into his castles. An ignorant or treacherous surgeon,
called in by the justiciar, cauterised his wounds so severely that his
sufferings became intense. He died of fever on the 16th, and was buried,
as he himself had willed, in the Franciscan church at Kilkenny. No one
rejoiced at the death of the hero save the traitors who had lured him to
his doom and the Poitevins who had suborned them. Their victim, the weak
king, mourned for his friend as David had lamented Saul and Jonathan.[1]
The treachery of his enemies brought them little profit. While Richard
Marshal lay on his deathbed, a new Archbishop of Canterbury drove the
Poitevins from office.

[1] _Dunstable Ann._, p. 137.

In the heyday of the Poitevins' power the Church sounded a feeble but
clear note of alarm. The pope expostulated with Henry for his treatment
of Hubert de Burgh, and Agnellus of Pisa, the first English provincial
of the newly arrived Franciscan order, strove to reconcile Richard
Marshal with his sovereign in the course of the South-Welsh campaign.
More drastic action was necessary if vague remonstrance was to be
translated into fruitful action. The three years' vacancy of the see of
Canterbury, after the death of Richard le Grand, paralysed the action
of the Church. After the pope's rejection of the first choice of the
convent of Christ Church, the chancellor, Ralph Neville, the monks
elected their own prior, and him also Gregory refused as too old and
incompetent. Their third election fell upon John Blunt, a theologian
high in the favour of Peter des Roches, who sent him to Rome, well
provided with ready money, to secure his confirmation. Simon Langton,
again restored to England, and archdeacon of Canterbury, persuaded the
pope to veto Blunt's appointment on the ground of his having held two
benefices without a dispensation. His rejection was the first check
received by the Poitevin faction. It was promptly followed by a more
crushing blow. Weary of the long delay, Gregory persuaded the Christ
Church monks then present at Rome to elect Edmund Rich, treasurer of
Salisbury. Edmund, a scholar who had taught theology and arts with
great distinction at Paris and Oxford, was still more famous for his
mystical devotion, for his asceticism and holiness of life. He was
however an old man, inexperienced in affairs, and, with all his
gracious gifts, somewhat wanting in the tenacity and vigour which
leadership involved. Yet in sending so eminent a saint to Canterbury,
Rome conferred on England a service second only to that which she had
rendered when she secured the archbishopric for Stephen Langton.

Before his consecration as archbishop on April 2, 1234, Edmund had
already joined with his suffragans on February 2 in upholding the good
fame of the marshal and in warning the king of the disastrous results
of preferring the counsels of the Poitevins to those of his
natural-born subjects. A week after his consecration Edmund succeeded
in carrying out a radical change in the administration. On April 9 he
declared that unless Henry drove away the Poitevins, he would forthwith
pronounce him excommunicate. Yielding at once, Henry sent the Bishop of
Winchester back to his diocese, and deprived Peter of Rivaux of all his
offices. The followers of the two Peters shared their fate, and Henry,
despatching Edmund to Wales to make peace with Llewelyn and the
marshal, hurried to Gloucester in order to meet the archbishop on his
return. His good resolutions were further strengthened by the news of
Earl Richard's death. On arriving at Gloucester he held a council in
which the ruin of the Poitevins was completed. A truce, negotiated by
the archbishop with Llewelyn, was ratified. The partisans of the
marshal were pardoned, even Richard Siward being forgiven his long
career of plunder. Gilbert Marshal, the next brother of the childless
Earl Richard, was invested with his earldom and office, and Henry
himself dubbed him a knight. Hubert de Burgh was included in the
comprehensive pardon. Indignant that his name and seal should have been
used to cover his ex-ministers' treachery to Earl Richard, Henry
overwhelmed them with reproaches, and strove by his violence against
them to purge himself from complicity in their acts. The Poitevins
lurked in sanctuary, fearing for the worst. Segrave forgot his
knighthood, resumed the tonsure, and took refuge in a church in
Leicester. The king's worst indignation was reserved for Peter of
Rivaux. Peter protested that his orders entitled him to immunity from
arrest, but it was found that he wore a mail shirt under his clerical
garments, and, without a word of reproach from the archbishop, he was
immured in a lay prison on the pretext that no true clerk wore armour.
Of the old ministers Ralph Neville alone remained in office.

With Bishop Peter's fall disappeared the last of the influences that
had prevailed during the minority. The king, who felt his dignity
impaired by the Poitevin domination, resolved that henceforward he
would submit to no master. He soon framed a plan of government that
thoroughly satisfied his jealous and exacting nature. Henceforth no
magnates, either of Church or State, should stand between him and his
subjects. He would be his own chief minister, holding in his own hands
all the strings of policy, and acting through subordinates whose sole
duly was to carry out their master's orders. Under such a system the
justiciarship practically ceased to exist. The treasurership was held
for short periods by royal clerks of no personal distinction. Even the
chancellorship became overshadowed. Henry quarrelled with Ralph Neville
in 1238, and withdrew from him the custody of the great seal, though he
allowed him to retain the name and emoluments of chancellor. On
Neville's death the office fell into abeyance for nearly twenty years,
during which time the great seal was entrusted to seven successive
keepers. Like his grandfather, Henry wished to rule in person with the
help of faithful but unobtrusive subordinates. This system, which was
essentially that of the French monarchy, presupposed for success the
constant personal supervision of an industrious and strong-willed king.
Henry III was never a strenuous worker, and his character failed in the
robustness and self-reliance necessary for personal rule. The magnates,
who regarded themselves as the king's natural-born counsellors, were
bitterly incensed, and hated the royal clerks as fiercely as they had
disliked the ministers of his minority. Opposed by the barons,
distrusted by the people, liable to be thrown over by their master at
each fresh change of his caprice, the royal subordinates showed more
eagerness in prosecuting their own private fortunes than in consulting
the interests of the State. Thus the nominal government of Henry proved
extremely ineffective. Huge taxes were raised, but little good came
from them. The magnates held sullenly aloof; the people grumbled; the
Church lamented the evil days. Yet for five and twenty years the
wretched system went on, not so much by reason of its own strength as
because there was no one vigorous enough to overthrow it.