VIII. HENRY II…

VIII. HENRY II

1154-1189.

When Henry of Anjou, now a young man of twenty-one years, succeeded to Stephen's crown, he found the country in a most deplorable condition. The regular administration of justice had ceased, many of the counties had no sheriffs or other royal officers, the revenue had fallen off by a half, and the barons were exercising all the prerogatives of the king, even to the extent of coining money in their own names. A weak man would have found the position hopeless; a strong man, like Henry, saw that it required instant and unflinching energy, but that it was not beyond repair.

[Sidenote: =Undisputed accession of Henry.--His continental dominions.=]

Henry started with the advantage of an undisputed title; his mother, Matilda, had ceded all her rights to him, and Stephen's surviving son, William of Boulogne, never attempted to lay any claim to the crown. Moreover, the king had enormous resources from abroad to aid him. His father was long dead, so that he was himself Count of Anjou and Touraine. He had his mother's lands of Normandy and Maine already in his hands. But he had become the ruler of a still larger realm by his marriage. He had taken to wife Eleanor, the Duchess of Aquitaine, whose enormous inheritance stretched from the Loire to the Pyrenees. This was a marriage of pure policy; Eleanor was an ill-conditioned, unprincipled woman, the divorced wife of King Lewis VII. of France, and she gave her second husband almost as much trouble as she had given her first. But by aid of her possessions Henry dominated the whole of France; indeed, he held much more French territory under him than did King Lewis VII. himself, and for the political gain he was prepared to endure the domestic trouble.

The continental dominions of Henry were, indeed, so large that they quite outweighed England in his estimation. He was himself Angevin born and bred, and looked upon his position more as that of a French prince who owned a great dependency beyond sea, than as that of an English king who had possessions in France. He spent the greater part of his time on the continent, so that England was generally governed by the successive Justiciars, or prime ministers, who acted as regents while he was abroad. Henry's absence and his absorption in foreign politics were perhaps not a very grave misfortune for England; he was such a strong and able ruler, that when he had once put the realm to rights in the early part of his reign, the danger to be feared was no longer feudal anarchy, but royal despotism.

[Sidenote: =Feudal anarchy put down.--Northumberland and Cumberland recovered.=]

Henry's first measures, on succeeding to the throne, were very drastic. He began by ordering the barons to dismantle all the castles which had been built in the troublous times of Stephen, and enforced his command by appearing at the head of a large army. It is said that he levelled to the ground as many as 375 of these "adulterine castles," as they were called, because they had been erected without the king's leave. Very few of the barons ventured to resist; those who did were crushed without difficulty. Henry also resumed all the royal estates and revenues which Stephen and Matilda had lavished on their partisans during the civil war, annulling all his mother's unwise grants as well as those of her enemy. He filled up the vacant sheriffdoms, and commenced the despatch of itinerant justices round the country, to sit and decide cases in the shire courts; this custom, which became permanent, was the origin of our modern Assizes. After he had set England in order, Henry demanded the restoration of Northumberland and Cumberland from Malcolm of Scotland, the heir of King David. They were given back, after being seventeen years in Scottish hands. At the same time, Malcolm did homage to Henry for his remaining earldom in England, that of Huntingdon, which had descended to him from Waltheof. Owen, Prince of North Wales, submitted himself to the king in the same year, but not without some fighting, in which Henry met with checks at first.

Thus England was pacified, brought under firm and regular rule, and restored to her ancient frontiers. Henry even thought at this time of invading Ireland, and got a Bull from Pope Adrian IV., the only Englishman who ever sat upon the papal throne, to authorize him to subdue that country. The pretexts alleged were, that the Irish church was schismatic, inasmuch as it refused to acknowledge the papal authority, and also that Ireland was infamous for its slave-trading in Christian men. But no attempt was made to enforce the Bull Laudabiliter for many years to come.

[Sidenote: =The War of Toulouse.--Scutage.=]

Ireland might rest secure, because the king had turned aside into schemes for the augmentation of his continental dominions. Long and fruitless bickerings and negotiations with Lewis VII., the shifty King of France, ended in 1159 in the War of Toulouse. Henry laid claim to the great south-French county of Toulouse, as owing fealty to his wife's duchy of Aquitaine. He led against it the greatest army that had been seen for many years, in which the King of Scotland and the Prince of Wales served as his chief vassals. But when Lewis of France threw himself into Toulouse, Henry turned aside, moved, it is said, by the curious feudal scruple that it did not befit him as Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou to make a personal attack on his suzerain, the King of France. He ravaged the county, but did not proceed with the siege of Toulouse itself. Next year he patched up a peace with his feudal superior, which was to be confirmed by the marriage of his five-year-old son and heir, Prince Henry, with Margaret, the French king's daughter (1160). The chief interest of the very fruitless war of Toulouse was that Henry employed in it a new scheme of taxation, which was an indirect blow at the feudal system. As Toulouse was so very far from England, he allowed those of the English knighthood who preferred to stay at home, to pay him instead of personal service a composition called scutage (shield-money). The money thus received was used to hire a great body of mercenary men-at-arms, whom the king knew to be both more obedient and more efficient soldiers than the unruly feudal levies.

[Sidenote: =Quarrel with the Church.--Thomas Becket.=]

The interest of Henry's reign now shifts round to another point--the question of the relations between State and Church, which we have already seen cropping up in the reigns of Rufus and Henry I. In 1162 he appointed Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury, and rued the choice ever after, for now his troubles began. Thomas, the son of a wealthy merchant of London, had been the king's chief secretary or Chancellor for the last eight years. He was a clever, versatile, not very scrupulous man, with a devouring ambition: hitherto he had been a devoted servant, and a genial companion to the king, and had lived much more like a layman than a cleric. In spite of his priesthood, he had borne arms in the war of Toulouse, and even distinguished himself in a single combat with a French champion. Henry thought that Thomas would be no less obliging and useful as archbishop than he had been as Chancellor. He was woefully deceived. No sooner was Thomas consecrated, than his whole conduct and manner of life suddenly changed. His ambition--now that he had become a great prelate--was to win the reputation of a saint. Casting away all his old habits, he began to practise the most rigid austerity, wearing a hair shirt next his skin, stinting himself in food and drink, and washing the feet of lepers and mendicants; from a supple courtier he had become the most angular and impracticable of saints. But it was not merely to mortify his own body that Becket had accepted the archbishopric; his real object was to claim for the head of the Church in England what the Popes of his day were claiming for themselves in Western Christendom--complete freedom from the control of the State. His dream was to make the English Church imperium in imperio, and to rule it himself as an absolute master. Without the reputation of a saint, he could not dare to compass this monstrous end, so a saint he had to become. The moment that he was consecrated, he opened his campaign against the king; he threw up the Chancellorship, which Henry had asked him to retain, and commenced at once to "vindicate the rights of the see of Canterbury," that is, to lay claim to a number of estates now in the hands of various lay owners, as being Church land. When his demands were withstood, he in some cases went to law with the owners, but in others used the arbitrary clerical punishment of excommunicating his adversaries. But this was only the beginning of troubles; in 1163 he began to oppose the king in the Great Council, taking up the ever-popular cry that the taxes were over-heavy. Henry, surprised at meeting opposition from such an unexpected quarter, withdrew his proposals, which seem indeed to have been intended rather to limit the profits of the sheriffs than to raise more money.

[Sidenote: =Claims of the Ecclesiastical Courts.=]

But the growing estrangement between the king and the archbishop did not come to a full head till the end of 1163, when they engaged in a desperate quarrel on the question of the rights and immunities of the clergy. We have mentioned in an earlier chapter how William the Conqueror had established separate courts for the trial of clerical offences, and had put them under the control of the bishops. Since his day, these courts had been steadily growing in importance, and putting forth wider and wider claims of jurisdiction. The anarchical reign of Stephen, when all lay courts of justice came to a standstill, had been especially favourable to their growth. The last development of their demands had been the extraordinary assertion that they ought to try, not only all ecclesiastical offences, but all offences in which ecclesiastics were concerned. That is, not only were such crimes as bigamy or heresy or perjury to come before them, but if a member of the clerical body committed theft or assault or murder, or, again, if a layman robbed or assaulted or murdered a cleric, the cases were to be taken out of the king's court, and to be brought before the bishop's. The most monstrous absurdity of this claim was that the ecclesiastical tribunal had no power to impose any but ecclesiastical punishments, that is to say, penance, excommunication, or deprivation of orders. So if a clergyman committed the most grievous crimes, he could not receive any greater penalty than suspension from his clerical duties, or penances which he might or might not perform. It had come to be a regular trick with habitual criminals to claim that they were in holy orders--which included not only the priesthood, but sacristans and sub-deacons and other minor church officers--and so to exchange death or blinding for the milder ecclesiastical punishments.

[Sidenote: =The Constitutions of Clarendon.=]

A very bad case of murder by a priest, which Becket punished merely by ordering the murderer to abstain from celebrating the Sacraments for two years, called King Henry's attention to the usurpation of the Church courts. When he found that their claims were quite modern, and had been unknown to the old English law, he resolved at once to take in hand the settlement of the whole question of the ecclesiastical courts. At a Great Council held at Westminster, he proposed to appoint a committee to investigate the matter, and to draw up a statement of the true law of the land with regard, not only to "criminous clerks," but to all the disputes between lay and clerical personages which could arise. Becket opposed the proposal as an invasion of the rights of the Church, and by his advice the other bishops, when asked if they would undertake to abide by the decision of the committee, replied that they would do so in so far as it did not impugn their rights--which meant not at all.

The statement of the laws of England was prepared by the committee, drawn up by the Justiciar, Richard de Lucy, and laid before the Great Council at Clarendon[14] early in the next year (1164), whence the document is known as the Constitutions of Clarendon. The king in it proposed a compromise--that the Church court should try whether a "criminous clerk" was guilty or innocent, and, if it pronounced him guilty, should hand him over to the king's officers to suffer the same punishment that a layman who had committed a similar offence would suffer. In other matters, where a layman and a cleric went to law on secular matters, the case was to be tried in the king's court. No layman was to be punished for spiritual offences, or excommunicated, without the king's leave, and the clergy were strictly prohibited from making appeals to Rome, or going thither, unless they had the royal authorization.

[Sidenote: =Opposition of Becket.=]

Becket declared that the Constitutions of Clarendon violated the immunities of the Church, but for a moment he yielded and consented to sign them. Next day, however, to the surprise of all men, he asserted that his consent had been a deadly sin, that he withdrew it, and that nothing should induce him to sign the constitutions. Henry vehemently urged him to do so, and pointed out that the Archbishop of York and the rest of the bishops were ready to accept the arrangement as just and fair. But Thomas took the attitude of a martyr, refused to move, and even sent to the Pope to get absolution for his so-called sin in giving a momentary consent to the king's proposals.

[Sidenote: =He leaves England.=]

Seriously angry at the archbishop for binding up his cause with that of the criminous clerks and the usurpation of the Church courts, Henry took the rather unworthy step of endeavouring to bend Thomas to his will by allowing several of his courtiers to bring lawsuits against him, and by threatening to rake up and go through the accounts of all the public monies that had passed through his hands during the eight years that he had been Chancellor. But Becket was not a man to be bullied; he made himself yet more stiff-necked, and assumed the pose of a martyr for the rights of the Church. It was in vain that the other bishops urged him to yield; he attended the Great Council at Northampton in October, 1164, faced the king, refused to submit, and then, pretending that his life was in danger, fled by night and sailed over to Flanders. For the next six years Becket was on the continent, generally under the protection of Henry's suzerain and enemy, the King of France. He was regarded by the continental clergy as the champion of the rights of their order, and treated with the highest respect wherever he went. He did his best to stir up the King of France and his vassals against Henry II., and to induce the Pope Alexander III. to excommunicate him. But Alexander, deep in a quarrel with the great emperor Frederic Barbarossa, did not wish to make an enemy of the strongest king in Western Europe, and refused to do Becket's behest. On his own account, however, the exiled archbishop laid the sentence of excommunication on most of Henry's chief counsellors. As the great body of the bishops sided with the king, Becket's fulminations from over sea had little effect. In England he was treated as non-existent.

[Sidenote: =An interdict threatened.--Return of Becket.=]

But in 1170 a new complication brought about a change in affairs. King Henry's eldest son and namesake, Henry the younger, was now a lad of fifteen, and his father wished to crown him and take him as colleague in his kingdom. The right to crown an English king was undoubtedly one of the prerogatives of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Henry left Becket out of account, and caused the ceremony to be performed by Roger of York. This invasion of his privileges wrought Thomas to such fury that he sought out the Pope, and won him over by his vehemence to threaten to lay all England under interdict--to cut it off from Christendom, and forbid the celebration of the Sacraments within its bounds.

King Henry, who was engaged in a troublesome war with the French king, was afraid of the consequences of the papal interdict; its enforcement, he thought, would make him too unpopular. So he humbled himself to patching up a truce with Becket, though they could not even yet come to any agreement on the question of the Constitutions of Clarendon. In the autumn of 1170 the king allowed him to return to England, on a tacit agreement that bygones were to be bygones.

But Becket had hidden his true purpose from the king. He returned to England bent, not on peace, but on war. Either because his anger carried him away, or because he was deliberately aiming at martyrdom and wished to provoke his enemies to violence, he proceeded to the most unheard-of measures. He first excommunicated the Archbishop of York and the Bishops of London and Lincoln, who had taken part in the crowning of the younger Henry. Then he laid a similar sentence on those of the king's courtiers whom he accused of encroaching on the estates of the see of Canterbury.

[Sidenote: =Murder of Becket.=]

The king was still over-sea in Normandy when the news of Becket's declaration of war was brought him. Henry was a man of violent passions, and the tale moved him to a sudden outbreak of fury. "Of all the idle servants that I maintain," he cried, "is there not one that will avenge me on this pestilent priest?" The words were wrung from him by the excitement of the moment, and soon forgotten, but they had a disastrous result. Among those who heard them were four reckless knights, some of whom had personal grudges against Becket, and all of whom were ready to win the king's favour by any means, fair or foul. Their names were Reginald Fitzurse, Hugh de Morville, William de Tracy, and Richard the Breton. These four took counsel with each other, secretly stole away from the court, and crossed the stormy December seas to England. They rode straight to Canterbury, sought audience with the archbishop, and bade him remove the excommunication of Roger of York and the rest, or face the king's wrath. Thomas met their words with a fierce refusal; thereupon they withdrew after defying him and warning him that his blood was on his own head. While they were girding on their coats of mail in the cathedral close, the monks of Canterbury besought the archbishop to fly. He had plenty of time to do so, but flight was not his purpose. Far from hiding himself, he called for his robes and his attendants, and went to join in the Vesper service at the cathedral. The knights were soon heard thundering at the door; Becket threw it open with his own hands, and asked their purpose. "Absolve the bishops or die," cried Fitzurse. "Never till they have done penance for their sin," was the reply. Tracy cast his arms about the archbishop and tried to drag him outside the cathedral; but Thomas cast him down. Then Fitzurse drew his sword and cut at Becket's head, and the others felled him with repeated strokes, while he kept crying that he died for the cause of God and the Church. So ended the great archbishop, slain by lawless violence on the consecrated stones of his own cathedral. The splendid courage with which he met his death, and the brutality of his assailants, persuaded most men that he must have been in the right. The clergy looked upon him as their knight and champion, and were only too ready to make capital out of his troubles and heroic end. The poor remembered his indiscriminate almsgiving, his austerities, his opposition to the Danegelt. Every class of men felt some respect for one who had suffered exile and death for loyal adhesion to a cause, and few, except the king, thoroughly realized that the cause had really been that of ill government and clerical tyranny. Hence it came that a man whose main characteristics were his ambition and his obstinacy, and whose saintliness was artificial and deliberately assumed, took his place in the English calendar as the favourite hero of the Church. The Pope made him a saint in 1174, a magnificent shrine was erected over his remains, and for 350 years pilgrims thronged in thousands to do homage to his bones. To relate how many hysterical persons or impostors gave out that they had been healed of their diseases by a visit to his sanctuary would be tedious. The thing which would have given Becket most pleasure, could he have lived again to view it, was the sight of Henry II. doing penance at his tomb in 1174, and baring his back to be scourged by the monks of Canterbury, as a slight reparation for the hasty words that had brought about his servants' deed of murder.

There is no doubt that Henry was sincerely shocked and horrified by the news of the archbishop's death. He sent instant messages to the Pope to clear himself of the accusation of having been privy to the crime, and offered any satisfaction that Alexander might demand. Meanwhile he undertook what might be considered a kind of crusade to Ireland, with the avowed purpose of reducing it to obedience to the papacy as well as to subjection to himself.

[Sidenote: =Henry in possession of Brittany.=]

For during the times of Becket's exile (1164-70) two important series of events had been occurring, one of which put Henry in possession of Brittany, while the other had led to his interference in Ireland. The Dukes of Normandy had always claimed a feudal supremacy over Brittany. This claim Henry found an opportunity for asserting and turning to account, by forcing Conan, the Breton duke, to marry his infant heiress Constance to his own third son Geoffrey, a boy of seven years old (1166). When Conan died five years later, Henry ruled the whole duchy as guardian of his young son and daughter-in-law. Thus his power was extended over the whole western shore of France from the Somme to the Pyrenees.

[Sidenote: =Ireland.--Expedition of Strongbow.=]

Henry's interference in Ireland sprang from more complicated causes. Ireland in the twelfth century was--as it had been since the first dawn of history--a group of Celtic principalities, always engaged in weary tribal wars with each other. Sometimes one king gained a momentary superiority over the rest, but his power ceased with his life. In the ninth century the island had been overrun by the Danes; they had not succeeded in occupying a broad Danelagh such as they won in England, but had built up a number of small kingdoms on the coast, round their fortified strongholds of Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Limerick. These principalities still existed in Henry's time, while the interior was held by the five kings of Ulster, Munster, Connaught, Meath, and Leinster. At this moment Roderic O'Connor of Connaught claimed and occasionally exercised authority as suzerain over the other kings. But he had no real power over the land, which lay half desolate, had become altogether barbarous, and teemed with cruel and squalid tribal wars. The introduction of this distressful country into English politics may be laid at the door of Dermot McMorrough, King of Leinster. This prince had been driven out of his realm by his suzerain, Roderic, King of Connaught, because he had carried off the wife of Roderic's vassal, O'Rourke, Lord of Breffny. Dermot came to England, and asked aid of Henry II., who, as we have already seen, had long possessed a papal Bull, authorizing the conquest of Ireland.[15] Henry would not stir himself, being in the midst of troubles with the King of France, but gave the exiled king leave to obtain what help he could from the English barons. Dermot placed himself in the hands of Richard de Clare, nicknamed Strongbow, Earl of Pembroke, a warlike but impecunious peer who had great influence in South Wales. Richard raised a small army of Anglo-Norman knights and Welsh archers--less than 2000 men in all--and landed in Ireland to restore Dermot to his throne. He met with quite unexpected success, sweeping Dermot's enemies out of Leinster, and conquering the Danish princes of Wexford and Dublin. He married Dermot's heiress Eva, and on the king's death in 1171 succeeded him as ruler in his kingdom. Other barons and knights from South Wales came over to join him, and they obtained a complete mastery over the native Irish, whose light-armed bands could not resist the charge of the mail-clad knights or stand before the archers, even when they were in overwhelming numerical superiority. In a battle before the gates of Dublin, a few hundred followers of Strongbow routed the whole host of Roderic of Connaught, though he was supported by a considerable body of Danish Vikings.

[Sidenote: =Henry invades Ireland in person.=]

Now, Henry did not wish to see one of his vassals building up a great kingdom in Ireland, independent of his authority. So, taking advantage of the papal authorization that he had so long kept by him, he crossed himself in 1171 with a great army and fleet, landed at Waterford, and marched to Dublin. He had no trouble in getting his authority recognized. Not only did Strongbow do him homage for the kingdom of Leinster, but, one after another, most of the native Irish kings came to his court and paid allegiance to him. From henceforth the Kings of England might call themselves "Lords of Ireland," but their power in the island was not very easy to exercise, nor did it extend to the remoter corners of the land. About half the soil of Ireland was seized by English and Norman adventurers, who built themselves castles and held down the Celts around them. The other half, mostly consisting of the more rugged and barren districts, remained in the hands of the native chiefs. But the settlers in the course of time intermarried with the Irish, and adopted many of their customs, so that they became tribal chiefs themselves. A century later the grudge between the settlers and the natives was still bitter, but they had become so closely assimilated that it was hard for a stranger to distinguish them. The one were as turbulent, clannish, fierce, and barbarous as the other. Only on the east coast round Dublin, in the district that was afterwards known as the English 'Pale,' did the Anglo-Irish dwell in a settled and civilized manner of life, and obey the King of England's mandates. The larger part of the island had to be reconquered four centuries after.

Perhaps the only permanent and immediate result of Henry's visit to Ireland was the submission of the Irish Church to the Pope. In a synod held at Cashel in 1172, all the bishops of the land acknowledged the papal supremacy, and abandoned the old customs of their Church. Thus the papal yoke was the first and most unhappy gift of England to Ireland.

[Sidenote: =Reconciliation with the Pope.=]

It was on his return from Dublin that King Henry met the legates of Alexander III. at Avranches, in Normandy, and, on swearing that he had neither planned nor consented to the murder of Becket, was taken into the Pope's favour, and received complete absolution. In return, he promised to go on a crusade, and swore that he would support Alexander against his enemy the Emperor Frederic I. He also consented to annul the Constitutions of Clarendon, but did not make any formal surrender of the principles on which they rested--the right of the State to deal with ecclesiastical persons guilty of secular offences. Thus ended the tragedy of Becket's strife with the king; the archbishop had obtained by his death what he could never win in his life, and the question between Church and State was left open, instead of being settled, as had at first seemed likely, in favour of the king.

[Sidenote: =Conspiracy of Princes Henry and Richard.=]

In less than a year after the penance at Avranches, Henry was plunged into a new sea of troubles, in which the Church party saw the vengeance of Heaven for the fate of Becket. All these troubles sprang from the undutiful conduct of Henry's sons, four graceless youths who had been brought up in the worst of schools by their able but unprincipled mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Henry, the eldest son, was now in his nineteenth year; Richard, the second son, in his seventeenth. But, in spite of their youth, the two boys, encouraged and supported by their mother, conspired against their father and king. In 1173 Henry fled to the court of Lewis of France, alleging as his grievance the fact that the king would not grant him a great appanage--England or Normandy--to rule in his own right. With the aid of Louis VII, the young Henry stirred up all the discontented elements in his father's dominions. He arranged for a simultaneous rising of the discontented barons of Brittany, Anjou, and Poitou, for a rebellion in England to be headed by the earls of Leicester, Derby, and Norfolk, and for an invasion of Northumbria by William, the King of the Scots.

[Sidenote: =Suppression of the rebels.--Moderation of Henry.=]

This widespread conspiracy actually came to a head; but its outbreak only served to show King Henry's strength and activity. He was himself in France when the storm burst: taking in hand the work that lay nearest to him, he put down the Bretons and Angevins, and forced the King of France to conclude a truce. Then in the winter of 1173-4 he turned upon his son Richard's partisans in Poitou, and, after much fighting, pacified the land. Meanwhile the king's representative in England, the Justiciar Richard de Lucy, had called out the levies of the shires against the revolted barons. The campaign was settled by a battle at Fornham, in Suffolk, where the rebels were scattered and the Earl of Leicester taken prisoner. One after another the castles of the disloyal barons fell, and when England was pacified, Ralf de Glanville led a force against the Scots, surprised them at Alnwick, and took their king William the Lion prisoner (1174).

Thus Henry had triumphed over all his foes. In the moment of victory he showed extraordinary moderation. He neither executed any of the rebels nor confiscated their lands, but only insisted that all their castles should be demolished. He gave his sons a full pardon, and restored them to his favour; with their mother he was far more wroth, and never would live with her again. The King of the Scots was only released on doing homage to the English crown, not merely for his earldoms of Huntingdon and Lothian, which had always been reckoned English fiefs, but for his whole kingdom of Scotland (1175).

This was Henry's greatest triumph: the danger of feudal anarchy had once more assailed him, and he had beaten it down with such a firm hand that England was never troubled again with a purely selfish and anarchic baronial rising for more than two centuries. But this victory did not win the king a quiet and glorious end to his reign. His wicked and ungrateful sons were to be the bane of his elder years.

[Sidenote: =Prosperity and Legislation.--Itinerant justices.--The fyrd.=]

The effect of the blow that he had dealt his disloyal subjects lasted about eight years, a period of quiet and prosperity on both sides of the Channel, during which Henry passed many excellent laws, and more especially dealt with the administration of justice, arranging permanent circuits for the itinerant justices who sat in the county courts to hold the assizes. He also issued regulations for the uniform arming and mustering of the shire-levies, the old English fyrd which had served him so well against the rebels in 1173. Abroad he was universally recognized as the greatest king of the West. He was chosen as the fairest arbitrator in several disputes between contemporary princes--even by the distant Kings of Spain. He married his daughters to the Kings of Castile and Sicily and the great Duke of Saxony, the chief vassal of the German crown. To each of his sons he promised a great inheritance: Henry was to have England, Normandy, and Anjou; Richard was to take his mother's portion in Aquitaine; Geoffrey was already provided for with his wife's duchy of Brittany: John, the youngest son, was to be King of Ireland, and the Irish chiefs were made to do homage to him.

[Sidenote: =Second rebellion of Henry and Geoffrey.=]

All this prosperity lasted till 1183, when Henry was fifty-two, and his four sons respectively twenty-eight, twenty-six, twenty-four, and sixteen. Tired of waiting any longer for his inheritance, and forgetful of the warning that he had received in 1174, Henry the younger once more took arms against his father: his aider and abettor was the new King of France, Philip Augustus, the son of Lewis VII., as bitter an enemy of the Angevin house as his predecessor had been. Henry also persuaded his brother Geoffrey to bring in the Bretons to his aid. Richard and John, the king's second and fourth sons, were for the time being faithful to their father; indeed, the actual casus belli, which Henry the younger published as his justification, was that the king had unfairly favoured Richard against him. This time the fighting was all on the continent; the English baronage were too much cowed to stir.

Henry the younger had only been a few months in rebellion when he died, stricken down by a fever (1183). But the civil war in Aquitaine did not end with his death; it dragged on its path till Geoffrey, his accomplice in the rebellion, was accidentally killed at a tournament three years later (1186). Henry had no issue, but Geoffrey left an infant heir, the unfortunate Arthur of Brittany, whose sad end was to shock the succeeding generation.

[Sidenote: =The Third Crusade.--The Saladin tithe.=]

Henry's two rebellious sons being dead, peace was for a time restored in his continental dominions. Men's minds were turned away for a time from civil strife by dire news from the East. The Saracens had just routed the Christian King of Palestine, and recaptured Jerusalem. The work of the First Crusade was undone, and the Holy Sepulchre and the True Cross had fallen back into the hands of the infidels. The nations of the West were profoundly shocked; King Henry, his eldest surviving son Richard, and his great enemy Philip of France, all swore to take the cross and go forth to save the wrecks of the kingdom of Jerusalem from Saladin, the victorious lord of Syria and Egypt. All their baronage vowed to follow them, and the Great Council of England voted for the support of the new crusade a heavy tax, the "Saladin tithe," as it was called, which was to be a tenth of every man's goods and chattels. This was the first impost levied on personal property, that is, property other than land, which was ever raised in England. Previously, the Danegelt and the other taxes that had been raised, were calculated on landed property alone.

[Sidenote: =Third rebellion of Richard and John.--Death of Henry II.=]

It would have been well for the King of England if his son and his French neighbour had sailed for the Holy Land in the year that they made their vow. For another and crowning grief was about to fall upon Henry. Richard, now his heir, revolted against him, even as Henry the younger and Geoffrey had done four years before. Like his elder brother, Richard alleged that his father would not give him enough; he complained that the king did not allow him to be crowned as his colleague, and that he made too much of John, the youngest and best loved of his four sons. The ungrateful conduct of Richard broke Henry's heart; though only fifty-six years of age, he began visibly to fail in health and mind. He made little endeavour to resist his son, and allowed him to overrun Anjou and Maine unopposed. Instead of calling out all his energies and appealing to the loyalty of his English and Norman subjects, he cast himself upon his couch and gave himself up to passionate grief. Rather than take arms against Richard, he determined to give him all that he asked. So, rising from, his bed, he dragged himself to Colombières, where he met Richard and the King of France, and swore to grant all they claimed. It was noticed that his bodily weakness was so great that his servants had to hold him on his horse while the interview was taking place. Two days later he expired; the final death-blow that prostrated him was the discovery of the fact that his youngest son, John, whom he had believed to the last to be faithful to him, had secretly aided Richard and joined in the rebellion. For when he swore to pardon all Richard's accomplices, and was given the list of their names, he found that of John set at the head of the catalogue of traitors. "Let things go as they will; I have nothing to care for in the world now," he said; and, turning his face to the wall, gave up his spirit (July 7, 1189).

[Sidenote: =Character of Henry II.=]

So died Henry of Anjou, whom after-ages styled Plantagenet.[16] He was an Englishman neither by birth nor by breeding, and the greater part of his reign was spent abroad--two years was the longest continuous stay that he ever made on this side of the Channel. But, foreigner as he was, he was the best king that England had known since Eadgar, or that she was to know till Edward I. That he ended the awful anarchy which had prevailed since the accession of Stephen, was a merit that should never be forgotten. When the feudal danger was at its greatest, he boldly faced it, ended private wars, pulled down illegal castles, and reduced the baronage to its due obedience. And when the land was subdued beneath his hand he ruled it justly, not as a grasping tyrant, but as a wise and merciful master. Among the kings of his day he was conspicuous for two rare virtues, a willingness to pardon and forget, and a determination to stand firm by the letter of his promise. He had his faults--a hasty temper, a far-reaching ambition, a tendency to deal with men as if they were merely counters in the great game of politics; nor was his private life entirely free from blame. But he loved order and justice so well, and gave them in such good measure to his subjects, that his virtues must always outweigh in English minds his occasional lapses from the right path.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] A royal manor near Salisbury.

[15] See p. 99.

[16] From the sprig of broom (planta genista) that his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, is said to have worn as a badge.

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IX. RICHARD I. AND JOHN

1189-1216.

When Henry of Anjou died broken-hearted at Chinon, his eldest surviving son Richard succeeded him in all his vast dominions, save in the duchy of Brittany, which fell to the child Arthur, the son of Richard's brother Geoffrey. John, the late king's youngest-born, received a fit reward for his treachery to his father in losing the appanage that had been destined for him. He did not obtain any independent principality of his own, but Richard made him Earl of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset.

From the moment of his accession the new king began to busy himself with preparations for going to the Crusade. He had taken the Cross in 1187, and his penitence for lingering in Europe and troubling his father, when he should have been over-seas fulfilling his vow, seems to have had a real influence upon him. But the mere love of adventure must be allowed to have had a far larger share in turning his steps to the East. Richard had the habits and instincts of a turbulent feudal baron, not those of a king. He had spent his life up to this time in petty wars with his father, his brothers, and his vassals in Aquitaine; such an existence pleased him well, and he dreamed of more exciting warfare on a larger stage in the lands of the Infidel, as the highest ambition that he could conceive.

[Sidenote: =Preparations for the Crusade.--Sale of lands and offices.=]

The moment that he had been crowned, Richard set to work to scrape together every penny that he could procure, in order to provide against the expenses of the forthcoming Crusade. He began by selling every office and dignity that was vacant, with a gross disregard for the interests of the crown and the welfare of his subjects. He took £3000 from William Longchamp, the haughty and quarrelsome Bishop of Ely, and appointed him both Chancellor and Justiciar; that is, he made regent in his absence the most unsuitable man that could have been found. He sold the earldom of Northumberland to Hugh, Bishop of Durham, for £1000. A still greater bargain was obtained by William, King of Scotland, who for the sum of 10,000 marks (£6666) was let off the homage to the crown of England, which Henry II. had imposed upon him after the battle of Alnwick. Richard jestingly said that "he would have sold London itself if he could have found a rich enough buyer." But every town that wanted a charter, every baron who coveted a slice of crown land, every knight who wished to be made a sheriff, obtained the desired object at a cheap rate.

[Sidenote: =The Jews in England.--Outbreak of persecution.=]

Richard's reign began with an outburst of turbulence which illustrated his careless governance well enough. Among the many classes of subjects to whom his father had given peace and protection was the Jewish colony in England, a body which had been rapidly growing in numbers as England recovered from its ills under Henry's firm hand. The Jews were much hated by their neighbours, partly as rivals in trade of the native merchant, and as usurers who lent money at exorbitant interest, but most of all because of their race and religion. But they had settled under the king's protection, and in return for the heavy tribute which they paid him, obtained security for their life and goods. They were often called the "king's property," because he kept the right of taxing and managing them entirely in his own hands.

At Richard's coronation a deputation of Jewish elders came to bear him a gift. They were set upon by the king's foreign servants and cruelly beaten, in mere fanatical spite. The news spread, and on a false rumour that the king had approved the deed, the London mob rose and sacked the Jews' quarter. Nor was this all; the excitement spread over all England, and at Norwich, Stamford, Lincoln, York, and other places, there were riots in which many Jews were slain. At the last-named city a fearful tragedy occurred; all the Jews of York took refuge in the castle, and when they were beset by a howling mob who cried for their blood, they by common consent slew their wives and children, and then set fire to the castle and burnt themselves, rather than fall into the hands of their enemies. No adequate punishment was ever inflicted for these disgraceful riots; even at York only a fine was imposed on the town.

[Sidenote: =The third Crusade.--Quarrel of Richard and Philip of France.=]

Richard left England in December, 1189, and, after raising additional forces and stores of money in his continental dominions, sailed from Marseilles for the East. Richard was one of three sovereign princes who engaged in the third Crusade; the other two were the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa and Philip Augustus, King of France. The emperor led the troops of Germany by the land route through Constantinople and Asia Minor, but Richard and Philip had wisely resolved to go by sea. Frederic lost three-fourths of his army in forcing his way through the Turkish sultanate in Asia Minor, and was accidentally drowned himself ere he crossed the borders of Syria. Only a small remnant of the German host ever reached the Holy Land. Richard and Philip fared much better, and gained the Levant in safety, after halting in Sicily for the winter of 1190-91. It was during their stay at Messina that the two kings became bitter personal enemies; in his father's time Richard had been the friend of the French, and he did not realize for some time the fact that in succeeding to Henry's dominions he had also succeeded to the jealous hatred which Philip nourished for his over-great vassal, the Duke of Aquitaine and Normandy. But in Sicily Richard detected the French king plotting and intriguing against him, and for the future regarded him as a secret enemy, and viewed all his acts with suspicion.

[Sidenote: =Richard conquers Cyprus.=]

If we were relating the personal acts of Richard rather than the history of England, there would be much to tell of his feats in the East. He began by subduing the isle of Cyprus, whose ruler, Isaac Comnenus--a rebel against the Emperor of Constantinople--had ill-treated the shipwrecked crews of some English vessels. After conquering the whole island, he took formal possession of it, and with great pomp married there his affianced bride, Berengaria of Navarre, who had come out from Europe to join him. He then sailed for the Holy Land, and landed near Acre, in the centre of the seat of war.

[Sidenote: =Capture of Acre, 1191.=]

Acre was at this moment beset by those of the Crusaders who had arrived before Richard. But their camp was itself being besieged by a great Saracen host under Sultan Saladin, who had raised all the levies of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, to relieve the beleaguered city. The landing of the hosts of England and France soon turned the tide of war, and ere long Acre fell. Richard earned and obtained the whole credit of the success by his energy and courage, while his rival Philip, by his jealous bickering with the English, merited a name for disloyalty and lukewarm zeal. It must be confessed that Richard won himself many enemies by his haughtiness and hasty temper; not only did he quarrel with Philip, but he mortally offended Leopold of Babenberg, the Duke of Austria. The German had planted his banner upon the walls of Acre as if he had taken the town himself, and Richard had it hewn down and cast into the ditch.

[Sidenote: =Return of Philip.--Richard fails to reach Jerusalem.=]

Less than three weeks after Acre fell, the King of France suddenly announced his intention of returning home, though nothing had yet been done to defeat Saladin or recapture Jerusalem. He left part of his army behind him under the Duke of Burgundy, and sailed off, after making a vain promise that he would not molest Richard's dominions so long as he was at the Crusade.

Thus left to himself, Richard led the crusading host southward along the coast, and defeated Saladin at a pitched battle at Arsouf. He forced his way to within a few miles of Jerusalem, but, before attacking it, turned back to secure himself a base on the sea, through which he could get stores and provisions from his ships. He took Ascalon, therefore, and garrisoned it, and afterwards captured many neighbouring forts, and intercepted a great caravan which was bringing arms and stores for Saladin across the desert from Egypt. But when he wished to start again for Jerusalem, dissensions broke out in the crusading camp. The subject of dispute was the succession to the throne of Jerusalem. Richard supported Guy of Lusignan, one of his Poitevin vassals, while the French and the bulk of the other Crusaders wished to elect an Italian prince, Conrad of Montferrat. The quarrel kept the army idle till the hot season of 1092 arrived, and endured till Conrad was slain by a Saracen fanatic; then Richard moved forward, but when he had arrived within four hours' march of Jerusalem, the French portion of the army, worn out by thirst and exhaustion, refused to advance any further. Richard was forced to fall back when at the very goal, and refused even to look upon the Holy City. "My eyes shall never behold it, if my arm may not reconquer it," he cried, and, muffling his face in his cloak, he turned back towards the coast.

[Sidenote: =Richard leaves Palestine.=]

After defeating the Saracens in another fight near Jaffa, Richard patched up a truce for three years with Saladin, and resolved to return home. It was obvious that with thinned ranks and disloyal allies he could not retake Jerusalem, and he had received such news from England as to the doings of his brother John and his neighbour King Philip, that he was anxious to get home as soon as possible. So he made terms with the sultan, by which Acre and the other places that he had conquered were left to the Christians, and permission was given them to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem without let or hindrance. Then, without waiting for his fleet or his army, he started off in wild haste on a private ship, intending to land at Venice and make his way overland through Germany, for he could not trust himself in France after the news that he had just received (1193).

[Sidenote: =Richard imprisoned in Germany.=]

But more haste proved less speed, in this as in so many other cases. Richard's ship was wrecked in the Adriatic, and he had to land at Ragusa. His path took him through the duchy of Leopold of Austria, whom he had so grievously offended at the siege of Acre. Although he was travelling in disguise, he was recognized at Vienna, and promptly cast into prison by the revengeful duke. After keeping him awhile in chains, Leopold sold him to his suzerain, the Emperor Henry VI. That monarch, being thus placed by chance in possession of the person of a sovereign with whom he was not at war, had the meanness to trump up charges against Richard in order to have some excuse for making him pay a ransom. So he accused his captive of having murdered Conrad of Montferrat, of having unjustly deprived the rebel Isaac of Cyprus of his realm, and of having insulted Leopold the Austrian. He was in prison more than a year, and no one in England knew what had become of him, since he had been travelling disguised and almost alone when he was taken.

[Sidenote: =Discontent and intrigues in England.=]

Meanwhile, during the three years of Richard's absence England had been much disturbed. William Longchamp, the haughty and tactless bishop whom he had left behind him as Justiciar, made himself so much disliked by his pride, his despotism, and his violence that there was a general rising against him. The king's brother John, the Earl of Cornwall, put himself at the head of the malcontents, and began seizing all the royal castles on which he could lay hands. Longchamp was at last forced to resign his place and fled over-sea, hardly escaping the fury of the people at Dover, where he was caught in the disguise of a huckster-woman and nearly pulled to pieces. His place as Justiciar was taken by Archbishop Walter of Rouen, whom Richard sent home from the Crusade for the purpose. Walter was a prudent and able man, but found a hard task before him, for Earl John was set on making himself a party in England, and aimed at the crown. When the news of Richard's captivity reached London, John openly avowed his intention, and allied himself with Philip of France. That prince had begun to intrigue against the King of England the moment that he got back from the Crusade. He had a claim on the Vexin, a district on the Norman border, which he had once ceded to Henry II. on the understanding that it should be the dowry of a French princess whom Richard was to marry. As the marriage had never taken place, and the English king had chosen another bride, Philip had much show of reason on his side. But he aimed not only at recovering the Vexin, but at winning as much of his absent neighbour's land as he could seize. With this object he offered to support Earl John in his attempt to seize the English throne, in return for some territorial gains. John was ready enough to agree, did homage to him, and gave him up the Vexin and the city of Tours. Meanwhile they both sent secret messages to the Emperor Henry, to beg him to detain Richard in prison as long as possible.

[Sidenote: =Richard's ransom.=]

But Henry thought more of screwing money out of his prisoner than of keeping him for ever in his grasp. He offered to release Richard on receiving the enormous ransom of 150,000 marks (£100,000). It was a huge sum for England to raise, but so anxious was the nation to get back its king, that no hesitation was made in accepting the bargain. Meanwhile John and Philip, knowing that their enemy would soon be loose, were stirred up to hasty action. Philip raised his host and attacked Normandy, but was beaten off with loss from Rouen. John hired mercenary soldiers, gathered his friends, and seized a number of the royal castles in England. But only a small number of discontented barons backed him, and he was held in check by the loyal majority, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, who put himself at the head of the king's party. Even while this civil war was in progress, the money for Richard's ransom was being raised, by the imposition of a crushing tax of "one-fourth on all movable goods, and twenty shillings on every knight's fee."

[Sidenote: =Return of Richard.=]

In the spring of 1194 the emperor gave Richard his liberty, after receiving the stipulated sum and making his prisoner swear an oath of homage to him for his kingdom of England. But this preposterous vow of allegiance was not taken seriously by Richard or by England, being wrung by force from a helpless captive. On reaching England, the king put himself at the head of the army which was operating against the rebels, and took Nottingham and Tickhill, the two last strongholds which held out. John himself fled over-sea; some months later he was pardoned by his long-suffering brother.

Thus Richard was once more a free man, and in full possession of his realm. There was much in the state of England that required the master's eye, but the king was far more set on punishing his neighbour, King Philip, than on attending to the wants of his subjects. After appointing new officials to take charge of the kingdom, and raising great sums of money, he hurried over to Normandy to plunge into hostilities with the French.

[Sidenote: =War with France.--Taxation and discontent.=]

England never saw Richard again; indeed, in the whole course of his ten years' reign, he only spent seven months on this side of the channel. His heart was always in France, where he had been bred up, and not in England, though he had been born in the palace of Beaumont, in Oxford, not fifty yards from the spot where these lines are written. The remaining six years of Richard's reign were entirely occupied in fruitless and weary border wars with the French king. It was a war of sieges and skirmishes, not of great battles. Richard held his own, in spite of the rebellions stirred up by Philip among his vassals in Aquitaine; but he did not succeed in crushing his adversary, as might have been expected from his superior military skill. In England the struggle was only felt through the heavy taxation which the king imposed on the land, to keep up his large mercenary army over-sea. Archbishop Hubert Walter ruled as Justiciar with considerable wisdom and success, and as long as Richard was sent the money that he craved, he left the realm to itself. Hubert's rule was not altogether a quiet one, but the very troubles that arose against him show the growing strength of national feeling and liberty in England. In 1198, the Great Council, headed by Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, refused the king's newest and most exorbitant schemes of taxation, and Hubert could not force them to pay. London in the same year was disturbed by a great democratic rising of the poorer citizens, headed by one William Fitz-Osbert, called Longbeard, who rose in riot to compel the aldermen to readjust the taxes of the city, and the Justiciar had to take arms to put it down. Fitz-Osbert fortified himself in Bow Church, but was wounded, taken, and hung.

[Sidenote: =Death of Richard.=]

An obscure and unworthy end was reserved for the restless and reckless son of the great Henry. He heard that Widomar, Viscount of Limoges, one of his vassals in Aquitaine, had found a great treasure-trove of gold, and bade him give it up. The viscount would not surrender all his find, so Richard laid siege to his castle of Chaluz. The place was taken, but while directing the attack the king received a wound from a crossbow bolt in his shoulder. His unskilful surgeons could not cure him, the wound gangrened, and Richard saw that his days were numbered. When the castle fell, Bertrand de Gourdon, the archer who had discharged the fatal bolt, was sought out and brought to his bedside. "What had I done that you should deal thus with me?" asked the king. "You slew my father and my two brothers with your own hands," replied the soldier, "and now I am ready to bear any torture since I know that you have to die." The fierce answer touched a chord to which Richard could respond. He bade his officers send the man away unharmed, but Mercadet, the chief among his mercenary captains, kept Gourdon in bonds till the king breathed his last, and then flayed him alive (April 6, 1199).

[Sidenote: =Rule of the Justiciar.--Coroners.=]

Of all the kings who ever ruled in this land Richard cared least for England, and paid least attention to its needs. But his reign was not therefore one that was harmful to his realm. The yoke of an absent king, even if he be a spendthrift, is not so hard as that of a tyrant who dwells at home, and England has known much worse days than those of the later years of Richard Coeur de Lion. His ministers kept up the traditions of the administration of Henry II., and ruled the land with law and order, duly summoning the Great Council, assessing taxation with its aid, and levying it with as little oppression as they could, through agents selected by the nation. One considerable advance in the direction of liberty was granted by Richard, when he allowed the shire-moots to choose for themselves "coroners," officials who were to take charge of the royal prerogatives in the counties in place of the sheriff; they were to investigate such matters as murder, riot, or injury to the king's lands or revenues, and the other offences which were called "the pleas of the crown." Thus an officer chosen by the people was substituted for one chosen by the crown, a great advantage to those who were to come under his hand. The "coroner" still survives in England, but all his duties save that of inquiring into cases of suspicious death have long been stripped from him.

[Sidenote: =John and Arthur of Brittany.--War in France.=]

Richard the Lion-hearted left two male kinsmen to dispute about his vast dominions. These were Arthur of Brittany, the son of his next brother Geoffrey, and John of Cornwall, his false and turbulent youngest brother. The English Great Council chose John as king without any hesitation; they would not take Arthur, a mere boy of twelve, who had never been seen in England; they preferred John in spite of his great and obvious faults. But in the continental dominions of Richard there was no such unanimity: the unruly barons of Anjou and Aquitaine thought they would gain through having a powerless boy to reign over them, rather than the unscrupulous and grasping Earl John. If it had not been for the old queen dowager, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who came forward to defend her best-loved son's claims, and to persuade her Gascon vassals to adhere to his cause, John would never have obtained any hold on the continent. By Eleanor's aid he triumphed for a moment, but baron after baron rose against him, using Arthur's name as his pretence, and civil war never ceased from the moment of John's accession. Philip of France, who now, as always, had his own ends to serve, feigned to espouse the cause of Arthur, and acknowledged him as his uncle's heir alike in Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine. Thus the war between France and England, which had dragged on through the reign of Richard, continued in a new form all through the time of John. There was a partial pacification in 1200, when Philip was bought off from Arthur's cause by the cession of the county of Evreux; but he took arms again in 1202, on the flimsy pretext that John, as Duke of Normandy, refused to plead in French law courts against his own vassals.

[Sidenote: =Character and policy of John.=]

Philip was induced to resume the struggle mainly because of his rival's growing unpopularity in all parts of his dominion. As king, John displayed on a larger scale all the faults that he had shown before his accession. All the vices of the Angevin house reached their highest development in him; he was as hot-tempered as his father, as false as his mother, as ungrateful as his brother Henry, as cruel, extravagant, and reckless as his brother Richard. His own special characteristic was a crooked and short-sighted cunning, which brought him through the troubles of one moment only to involve him in deeper vexations in the next. His reign in England had begun with heavy taxation for the French war. He had irritated the baronage by divorcing his wife Hawise, the heiress of the great earldom of Gloucester, without any cause or reason. Then he had carried off by violence Isabella of Angoulême from her affianced husband, the Count of La Marche, one of his greatest vassals in Aquitaine, and married her in spite of the threats of the Church.

[Sidenote: =Murder of Arthur of Brittany.=]

It was Count Hugh of La Marche who in revenge led the next rising of the unruly French vassals of John. He sent for Arthur of Brittany, who came to his aid with a great band of King Philip's knights, and together they invaded Aquitaine and laid siege to Mirebeau, where lay the old Queen Eleanor, John's one trusty supporter in the south. Roused by the news of his mother's danger, the King of England made a hasty dash on Mirebeau, surprised the rebel camp, and captured Arthur of Brittany with all his chief supporters. This success was fated to be his ruin, for when he found his nephew in his hands, John could not resist the temptation to murder him. After keeping him in prison for some months, he had him secretly slain in the castle of Rouen (April, 1203). The poor lad had only just reached the age of sixteen when he was thus cut off.

[Sidenote: =Loss of John's continental dominions.=]

Arthur's murder profoundly shocked John's subjects on both sides of the sea, but it was absolutely fatal to his cause in France. His rebellious subjects, unable to use Arthur's name against their master any longer, threw themselves into the hands of the King of France, and took him as their direct lord and sovereign. Philip went through a solemn form of summoning John, as Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, to present himself at Paris, and there be tried for slaying his nephew. When John failed--as was natural--to appear, he was condemned in his absence, and adjudged to have forfeited all the fiefs that he held from the French crown.

To give effect to his sentence, Philip invaded Normandy and began to lay siege to its fortresses. John crossed to Normandy, but did not take the field; his conduct was so strange that men thought that some infatuation from heaven had fallen upon him as a judgment for having slain his nephew. He lay at Rouen for many months, giving great feasts, and boasting that when he chose he would drive King Philip out of the duchy. But, instead of sallying out to make his vaunts good, he quietly looked on, while Philip took town after town with little resistance. The Normans did not love John, and fought feebly or not at all. Only Château Gaillard, a great castle which Richard I. had built to guard the valley of the lower Seine, made any serious defence. Instead of opposing the enemy, John fled from Normandy and took refuge in England. After his departure, Rouen and the remaining cities of the duchy threw open their gates to the French. In the following year Philip pursued his victorious career, and completed the conquest of Anjou and Touraine. In 1206 he fell upon Aquitaine, and conquered Poitou and Northern Guienne. Only the great ports of Bordeaux and La Rochelle, with the southern half of Guienne, remained true to John.

Thus passed away, not only the great but ephemeral continental empire which Henry II. had built up, but also the Norman duchy itself, whose fortunes had been united to those of England for nearly a century and a half. For the future the Plantagenet kings owned only a corner of southern France, and were no longer great continental sovereigns. The monarch's loss was the nation's gain. England's kings were no longer foreigners; they did not spend half their time abroad, or devote their whole energy to schemes of aggrandisement in France. The Anglo-Norman barons, too, were compelled to become wholly English, since their estates over-sea fell into the hands of the enemy and passed away from them. In this way John's cruelty and shiftlessness did more for England's good than the wisdom and strength of his father.

But in the mean while John, being deprived of his continental dominions, was constrained to reside in England, and proved a most undesirable neighbour to his unhappy subjects. After an unsuccessful attempt to reconquer Poitou in 1206, he made peace with King Philip, on such terms as he could obtain. Bordeaux and the duchy of Guienne remained with him, but he was compelled to acquiesce in the loss of all his other provinces.

[Sidenote: =Quarrel with Innocent III.--Stephen Langton.=]

John was barely quit of his disastrous French war when he became involved in a quarrel with the papacy, of which the issue was even more disgraceful than that of his strife with King Philip. In 1205 died Archbishop Hubert Walter, who had served King Richard so well as Justiciar. In ordinary times his successor would have been duly nominated by the king and elected by the monks of Canterbury, who formed the cathedral chapter of that see. But John was in evil plight at the time; he was universally disliked, and the clergy all over Europe were being spurred on by the example of the bold and arrogant Pope Innocent III. to assert new and unheard-of claims and privileges. When the news of Hubert's death was brought, a majority of the monks of Canterbury met in secret conclave and elected Reginald, their sub-prior, as archbishop, without asking the king's leave. Reginald at once started off for Rome to get his appointment confirmed by Pope Innocent. When John heard what had been done, he came to Canterbury in great wrath, and by threats and menaces compelled the monks to proceed to a second election, and to chose his favourite, John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, to fill Hubert Walter's place. He then sent an embassy to Rome to submit this election to the Pope. But Innocent III. would have neither Reginald nor John for archbishop; he said that the first had been secretly and illegally chosen, while the second had been imposed on the chapter by force and threats. Then he took the unprecedented step of appointing to the see himself; he made the representatives of both John and Reginald come before him, and frightened or cajoled them into accepting his nominee, Stephen Langton, a worthy and learned English cardinal who resided with him at Rome. Langton was personally all that could be desired, but it was a flagrantly illegal usurpation that the Pope should impose him on the English king and nation without their consent.

[Sidenote: =The interdict.=]

John was driven to fury by this arrogant claim of the Pope. He refused to accept the nomination, or to allow Langton to enter England. In return Innocent laid an interdict on the realm, suspending on his own authority the celebration of divine service, closing the churches, and even prohibiting the dead from being buried in consecrated ground. If the English Church had stood by the king and refused to take notice of this harsh decree, it would have been of little effect. But the clergy always followed the Pope; they looked upon themselves as a great international guild depending on the Roman see, and disregarded all their rights and sympathies as Englishmen. The majority of the bishops published the interdict, and bade their flocks observe it. Many of them, fearing John's inevitable wrath, fled over-sea the moment that they had promulgated the sentence (1208). They were wise to do so, for the king raged furiously against the whole body of clergy; he exiled the monks of Canterbury, seized the estates and revenues of the absconding bishops, and declared that, till the interdict was removed, all ecclesiastical persons should be outside the pale of the law. They should not be allowed to appear in the courts, and no one who molested them should be punished. John set the example of seizing clerical property himself, and many of his courtiers and officers followed his lead.

[Sidenote: =The Pope deposes John.=]

Thus began a long struggle between the power of the Pope and that of the king. For five years it continued, to the great misery of England, for the nation was deeply religious, and felt most keenly the deprivation of all its spiritual privileges. Yet for a long time the people stood by the king, for it was generally felt that the Pope's arbitrary conduct was indefensible. John himself cared nought for papal censures, as long as nothing more than spiritual pressure was brought to bear on him. He filled his coffers with Church money, and laughed at the interdict. But presently Innocent found a more effective way of bending the king's will. He proclaimed that he would depose John for contumacy, and give his kingdom to another. The mandate to drive him out was entrusted to John's old and active foe, Philip of France, who at once began to prepare a great fleet and army in Normandy (1213).

[Sidenote: =John's surrender.=]

The English barons and people were more angered than frightened, and a great army mustered on Barham Down, in Kent, to oppose the French landing. But the king himself was much cowed by the Pope's threat. He knew that he was disliked and despised by his subjects, and he did not trust them in the hour of danger. Instead of fighting the quarrel out, he made secret proffers of submission. So the Pope's envoy, Pandulf, came to Dover, and received John's abject surrender. Not only did he agree to acknowledge Langton as archbishop, and to restore all the lands and revenues of which he had robbed the Church, but he stooped to win Innocent's favour by doing homage to him, and declaring the kingdom of England a fief of the Holy See. He gave his crown into Pandulf's hands, and then took it back from him as a gift from the Pope. In return the papal mandate to Philip was withdrawn, and Pandulf bade the French king dismiss his fleet and army, and cease to make war on the vassal of the Church (May, 1213).

John's gift of the English crown to the Pope had been done secretly and privately, without any summoning or consulting of the Great Council; it had been accomplished behind the back of the nation. When it became known, the baronage and the people were alike disgusted at the king's grovelling submission. He had induced them to suffer untold miseries in his cause, and had then left them in the lurch and surrendered all that they had been fighting for.

[Sidenote: =Destruction of the French fleet.=]

For the moment, however, John's intrigue had its success. The papal approval was withdrawn from the King of France, and--what was of more importance--an English fleet under William Longsword, the Earl of Salisbury fell upon the French invasion-flotilla as it lay in the Port of Damme, and took or sunk well-nigh every vessel. The king was free from danger again, and talked of taking the offensive against the French and crushing his enemy Philip.

[Sidenote: =The baronage and Archbishop Langton.=]

The last act of John's troubled reign was now beginning. While the king was dreaming of nothing but war in France, the nation was preparing to put a stop to his erratic and tyrannical rule by armed force. When Archbishop Langton was received in England, he proved himself no mere creature of the Pope, but a good Englishman. One of his first acts was to propose to the baronage, at a great assembly in St. Paul's Cathedral, that the king should be asked to ratify and reissue the charter that his great-grandfather Henry I. had granted to the English people, binding himself to abstain from all vexatious and oppressive customs, and abide by the ancient customs of the realm. This proposal was accepted at once by the great majority of the barons as the wisest and most constitutional means of bringing pressure on the king.

[Sidenote: =Invasion of France.--Defeat and return of John.=]

John meanwhile had called out the whole military force of the nation for an invasion of France. But all the barons of the North refused to follow him, and so great was the discontent of the English that he had mainly to depend on foreign mercenaries. He staked all his fortunes on the ensuing campaign, believing that if he could reconquer his lost continental dominions, he would afterwards win his way to complete control in England. His schemes were very far-reaching: Philip was to be attacked from north and south at once; while John was to land in Poitou and march on the Loire, a great confederacy of John's allies were to assail France from the north. This league was headed by John's nephew, Otho of Saxony, who claimed the title of emperor, but had been withstood in Germany by competitors whom Philip of France had supported. In revenge Otho gathered a North-German army, supported by the Dukes of Brabant and Holland, and the Counts of Boulogne and Flanders. John sent a mercenary force under the Earl of Salisbury to join him, and the combined host entered France and met King Philip at Bouvines, near Lille. John had trusted that his own attack on southern France would have distracted the French king's attention, but Philip left him almost unopposed, and gathered the whole force of France to oppose the Germans and Flemings. While John was overrunning Poitou and storming Angers, Philip was crushing his confederates. At the battle of Bouvines the combined army was scattered to the winds; the emperor was put to flight, and the Earl of Salisbury and the Count of Boulogne captured (July 27, 1214). Otho of Saxony was ruined by the fight, and never raised his head again; nor did any German host invade France for the next three hundred years. John, though he had not been present at the fight, was as effectually crushed as Otho. Free from danger from the north, the French king turned upon him, and drove him out of his ephemeral conquests in Poitou, so that he had to return to England completely foiled and beaten.

[Sidenote: =The barons take up arms.=]

But in England John had now to face his angry baronage. When he came home in wrath, and began to threaten to punish every man who had not followed him to the invasion of France, the barons drew together and prepared for armed resistance. In earlier days we have seen the English nobility withstanding the king in the cause of feudal anarchy. In the time of Stephen or of Henry II., the crown had represented the interests of the nation, and the barons those of their own class alone. It was then for England's good that the king should succeed in establishing a strong central government by putting down his turbulent vassals. But now things were changed. Henry II. had made the crown so strong that the nation was in far greater danger of misgovernment by a tyrannical king than of anarchy under a mob of feudal chiefs. The barons did not any longer represent themselves alone; they were closely allied both with the Church and with the people for the defence of the common rights of all three against a grasping and unscrupulous monarch. In the present struggle the baronage were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, their wisest counsellor, and they were everywhere supported both by the towns and by the smaller freemen of the whole realm. We shall see that in the oncoming struggle they demanded, not new privileges for themselves, but law and liberty for every subject of the English crown.

The first meeting of the barons was held at Bury St. Edmunds, in November, 1214: it was attended mainly by the lords of the North; the majority of the nobility had not yet moved. They formulated their demand that the king should give England a charter of liberties, drew up a list of the points which were to be insisted on, and determined to go in arms to the king at Christmas to lay their requests before him. John was seriously frightened; he asked the Pope's aid, took the vows of a crusader in order to get the sympathy of the Church on his side, and collected an army of mercenaries. But when he sounded the intentions of those of his vassals who had not yet taken arms, he found that one and all approved of the demands of the insurgent barons, and refused to aid him against them.

[Sidenote: =Meeting at Runnymede.=]

John was always lacking in moral courage; instead of taking the field at the head of his mercenaries, he began to treat with the rebels, resolved to grant all they asked, and then to bide his time and repudiate his promises at the earliest possible opportunity. So befell the famous meeting at Runnymede, where the king solemnly swore to grant all the provisions of the "Great Charter," which had been drawn up for his signature by Archbishop Langton and a committee composed of an equal number of the insurgent barons and of those who had not taken up arms.

[Sidenote: =The Great Charter.=]

The Great Charter was signed on the 15th of June, 1215, in the presence of the archbishop, the whole of the baronage, and a vast assembly of all ranks. It is a document of sixty-three clauses, of which many were quite trivial and related to purely personal or local grievances. But the important part of its provisions may be summed up under six heads.

Firstly, the king promises that "the English Church shall be free"--free, that is, from violent interference in the election of its prelates, and from illegal taxation.

Secondly, the feudal rights of the king over his tenants-in-chief are defined. He is only to raise the customary "aids" and dues, and their amount is laid down. His rights of wardship over widows and orphans are stated and limited. In a similar way the tenants-in-chief promise to exercise only these same rights over their own vassals.

Thirdly, there is to be no taxation without the consent of the Great Council--the first indication of the control of Parliament over the national revenues.

Fourthly, the administration of justice is to be strengthened and purified. No one is to be tried or punished more than once for the same offence. No one is to be imprisoned on the king's private fiat, but if arrested he must be at once put on trial, and that before a jury of his peers. Fines for every sort of offence are to be fixed and made proportionate to the crime, not to the king's idea of the amount he could extract from the criminal.

Fifthly, the king is not to put foreigners, ignorant of the laws of England, in any judicial or administrative post, and he is at once to dismiss all his foreign mercenary troops.

Sixthly, the city of London, and all other cities which enjoy rights and privileges under earlier royal charters, are to be fully confirmed in them.

The Great Charter then plunges into a mass of smaller grievances, where we need not follow it. But it ends with a most peculiar and important clause, which shows how little the baronage trusted the king. A body of twenty-five guardians of the Charter is appointed, who undertake to see that the king carries it out, and they are authorized to constrain him to observe it by force of arms if he swerves from his plighted word. These guardians include seven earls, fourteen barons, three sons of great lords whose fathers still survived, and the Mayor of London.

The character of Magna Carta is very noticeable; it is rather unsystematic in shape, being mainly composed of a list of grievances which are to be remedied. It does not purport to be a full statement of the English constitution, but only a recapitulation of the points on which the king had violated it. But it is not merely a check on John's evil doings, but a solemn engagement between the king, the barons, the Church, and the people that each shall respect the rights of the other. Wherever it is stated that the king is to abstain from using any particular malpractice against his vassals, it is also added that his vassals will on their part never use that same form of oppression against their own tenants. Thus it guarantees the rights of the small man against the great, no less than those of the great man against the king. It is in this respect that the Charter differs from many grants of privileges exacted by foreign nobles from foreign kings. Abroad the barons often curbed the royal power, but they did it for their own selfish ends alone, not for the common good of the nation.

[Sidenote: =John's faithlessness.--Attitude of the Pope.=]

John had signed the Charter in a moment of fear and depression of spirits. He did not intend to observe it a moment longer than he could help, and called its provisions "mere foolishness." When the barons dispersed, he violated his engagements by gathering another great horde of mercenaries, and sent to Rome to his suzerain Innocent III., to get absolution from the oath he had sworn. As he had once utilized the nation against the Pope, so he would now utilize the Pope against the nation.

[Sidenote: =Civil war.=]

Innocent, who cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of England, resolved to support his obedient vassal. He censured Archbishop Langton for siding with the barons, and summoned him to Rome to answer for his conduct. He freed the king from his oath, and he swore that he would excommunicate any man who took arms against him. But John had taught his barons to despise ecclesiastical thunders. They flew to arms, and war broke out. The king at first had the advantage; his mercenaries were all at hand, and the barons were scattered and unorganized. The king took Rochester, and hung the garrison who held out against him, and then started northward, harrying the land with fire and sword as far as Berwick.

[Sidenote: =Lewis of France elected king by the barons.=]

Provoked beyond endurance, the majority of the barons swore that they would cast away John and all his house. They declared him deposed, and resolved to choose a new king. But they made a great mistake in their choice, for they offered the crown to Lewis, the Prince-royal of France, who had married Blanche, one of John's nieces. Any other candidate would have been better, for Lewis was the son of King Philip, the great enemy of England, and by calling him in, the barons seemed to be allying themselves with the national foe. Many who would have gladly served against John in another cause, refused to take arms in that of the Frenchman (1216).

[Sidenote: =Lewis in England.--Death of John.=]

Meanwhile Prince Lewis landed in Kent, was received into London, and became master of all eastern England. But he soon found that he was the king of a faction, not of the whole nation. Many of the barons joined John rather than serve a foreigner; many more remained neutral. The whole realm was divided; here and there castles and towns held out against the new king, and in especial the seamen and merchants of the Cinque Ports refused to open their gates to a Frenchman. John resolved to try the ordeal of battle; he took Lincoln, and marched southward. But while his army was crossing the sea-marshes of the Wash it was overtaken by a high tide, and all his baggage and treasure, with many of his men, were swept away. John himself escaped with difficulty, and fell ill next day, of rage and grief and overexertion, as is most probable, though contemporary writers thought he had been poisoned. To the great benefit of England, he died within a week of his seizure, at Newark Castle (October 19, 1216). No man had a good word to say for him; cruel, perjured, rash and cowardly by turns, an evil-liver, a treacherous son and brother, he was loathed by every one who knew him.

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X. HENRY III

1216-1272.

The moment that John was dead, the insurgent barons began to be conscious of the huge mistake that they had made in calling over Lewis of France to their aid. John's successor was his eldest son Henry, a young boy of nine, against whom no one could feel any personal objection. But the rebels had committed themselves to the cause of Lewis, and could not go back. The civil war therefore continued, but the supporters of Lewis were without heart or enthusiasm in his cause.

[Sidenote: =William, Earl of Pembroke.--Henry crowned.=]

The young Henry was in the hands of William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, one of the great barons who had refused to join Lewis. Pembroke at once crowned the young king at Gloucester, and made him declare his adherence to the Great Charter, and solemnly republish it. This act cut away the ground from under the feet of Lewis's party, as they could not any longer pretend that they were fighting merely to recover their constitutional rights. One after another they began to drop away, and go over to Henry's side.

[Sidenote: =Defeat of Lewis.--English naval victory.=]

The fortune of the civil war soon began to turn in favour of the young king. It was decided by two great battles. Lincoln castle was being besieged by the followers of Lewis, French and English. To relieve it William the Marshal set out with a small army, and, surprising the enemy in the streets of the town, while they were busied in the siege, he inflicted a great defeat upon them. Most of the great English barons of Lewis's party were taken prisoners in the fray. Shortly after a second decisive engagement completely shattered Lewis's hopes. He was expecting great reinforcements from France, which were to be brought to him by a fleet commanded by Eustace the Monk, a cruel pirate captain whom he had hired to serve him because of his naval skill. But Hubert de Burgh, the Justiciar of King Henry, put to sea from Dover with a small squadron of ships raised from the Cinque Ports, and met the French in mid-channel off Sandwich. The English had the better, most of the hostile vessels were captured, and Eustace the Monk was taken and hung for his former piracies. This was the first great naval battle which an English fleet ever won.

Deprived of hope of succour from France, and seeing most of his English supporters captives in Pembroke's hands, Prince Lewis resolved to abandon his enterprise and leave England. He proffered terms to Pembroke and de Burgh, who eagerly accepted them. So by the treaty of Lambeth he undertook to depart and give up his claim to the crown, while the Earl Marshal and Justiciar on their part consented to grant an amnesty to all Lewis's partisans, and to restore them to possession of their estates. To facilitate Lewis's quick retreat he was given a sum of 10,000 marks (September 17, 1217).

[Sidenote: =Hubert de Burgh Justiciar.=]

Thus the civil war came to an end, but its evil effects long endured, William of Pembroke, who acted till his death in 1219 as regent of the realm, did all that he could to quiet matters down; but there was much trouble left to his successor, Hubert de Burgh, the great Justiciar, who bore sway in England for all the remaining years of King Henry's minority. Hubert conferred many and signal benefits on the realm. He discomfited an attempt of the Pope to govern England through his legates, under the plea that John's homage of 1213 made the kingdom the property of the Holy See. He put down the turbulence of many of John's old courtiers and mercenaries, who, presuming on their fidelity in the civil war, refused obedience to the law of the land. The leaders of these persons were Peter des Roches, an intriguing Poitevin whom John had made Bishop of Winchester, and Fawkes de Bréauté, who had been the chief captain of the late king's Gascon soldiers. Peter was compelled to go on a Crusade, and Fawkes was crushed by force of arms when he presumed to refuse to give up the king's castle of Bedford, and had the impudence to seize and imprison a justice of assize who had given a legal decision against him. Fawkes himself escaped over-seas, but de Burgh took Bedford Castle, and hung William de Bréauté, the rebel's brother, because he had dared to hold out against the king's name (1224).

[Sidenote: =Character of Henry.--His foreign favourites.=]

Hubert's wise and salutary rule endured till the king came of age (1227), and for some years after he was still retained as Justiciar. But Henry, on coming to maturity, soon showed himself jealous of the great man who had protected his helpless boyhood. The new king was a strange mixture of good and evil. He was a handsome, courteous youth, blameless in his private life, and kind and liberal to his friends. He proved a good father and husband, and a great friend to the Church. He loved the fine arts, and built many stately edifices, of which the famous abbey of Westminster is the best known. But he had many serious faults: he was an incorrigible spendthrift; he was quite incapable of keeping any promise for more than a few days. He was of a busy volatile disposition, always vaulting from project to project, and never carrying to its end any one single plan. Being full of self-confidence he much disliked any one who gave him unpalatable counsel, or strove to keep him from any of his wild ephemeral schemes. This was the secret of his ingratitude to Hubert de Burgh, who never shrank from opposing his young master when the occasion demanded it. Moreover, Henry had the great fault of loving foreigners over-much; he surrounded himself with a horde of his relatives from the continent. His wife Eleanor of Provence brought a host of brothers and uncles from Savoy and southern France, and his mother sent over to England her children by her second marriage with her old lover, the Count of La Marche.[17] On these kinsmen Henry lavished not only great gifts of money, but earldoms, baronies, and bishoprics, to the great vexation of the English. His strangest act was to confer the archbishopric of Canterbury on his wife's uncle, Boniface of Savoy, a flighty young man of most unclerical habits. Henry was not cruel or malicious, like his father, and personally he was not disliked by his subjects, a fact which explains the patience with which they bore his vagaries for many years. But his actions were nearly always unwise, and his undertakings were invariably unsuccessful, so that his long-suffering vassals were at last constrained to take the reins of government out of his hands.

[Sidenote: =Dismissal of Hubert de Burgh.--Personal government.=]

For thirty years, however, Henry worked his will on England (1228-58) before drawing down the storm on his head. For the first five of them he was still somewhat restrained by the influence of Hubert de Burgh. But in 1232 the old Justiciar was not only dismissed, but thrown into prison, because Henry was wroth with him for frustrating an unwise and unnecessary war with France. But the king's ingratitude provoked such angry opposition that Hubert was ultimately released, and suffered to dwell in peace on his own lands.

After dismissing Hubert, Henry threw himself into the hands of Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, one of John's old courtiers. Peter knew or cared nothing about English laws and customs, and led the king into so many illegal and unconstitutional acts, that the whole nation called for his banishment. At last the Great Council, led by Edmund of Abingdon, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, frightened the king into dismissing him (1234).

But England did not profit very much by Peter's fall. Henry resolved to become his own prime minister; he did not appoint any one to the office of Justiciar, and a little later he abolished that of Chancellor also. He thought that he would act as his own chief justice and private secretary, but, as he was no less volatile than busy, he only succeeded in getting all public business into hopeless arrears.

[Sidenote: =War with France.=]

Henry's personal government endured for the weary time of twenty-four years. The events of the period were very insignificant, and only call for very brief mention. The sole foreign war was a brief struggle with Lewis IX. of France. One of Henry's many ephemeral schemes was the idea of winning back the continental dominions that his father had lost. So in 1241 he picked a quarrel with the good King Lewis, and invaded Poitou. He was disgracefully beaten at the battle of Taillebourg (1242), and was forced to make peace. The mild and pious King of France contented himself with leaving things as they had been before the war, though if he had chosen he might have forced Henry to surrender Bordeaux and Guienne, the last possessions of the English crown beyond the seas.

[Sidenote: =Henry's servility to the pope.--Exasperation of the baronage.=]

Far worse for England than Henry's abortive invasion of France were his dealings with the papacy. Henry was a devoted servant of the Church, and whenever the Popes tried to lay any burden on England, Henry did his best to make the nation submit. Rome was at this time deep in a struggle with the brave and brilliant Emperor Frederic II., and the Popes were always wanting money to keep up the war against him. In 1238 Gregory IX. sent over to England his legate, Cardinal Otho, who pretended to come to reform the clergy, but really did little more than extort great sums of money from them, on all possible excuses. When he left the realm it was said that he took more English Church treasure with him than he left behind, and he had thrust 300 Italian priests into English benefices by the aid of the king's patronage. A few years later Henry allowed himself to be made the Pope's tool in an even more disgraceful way. Alexander IV. was trying to wrest the kingdom of Sicily from the heirs of the Emperor Frederic II., and, as he could not succeed by his own strength, determined to make the docile King of England do the work for him. So he offered to make Henry's younger son Edmund, a boy of ten, King of Sicily, if Henry would undertake the expense of conquering that country. The scheme was just one of the wild adventurous plans that took the flighty monarch's fancy, so he eagerly accepted the Sicilian crown for his son, and promised the Pope that he would find the money to raise a great army. But as he had never any gold in his own treasury--since he spent it all on his buildings and his wife's relatives--he had to raise the great sums required for the invasion of Sicily out of the nation. In 1257, therefore, he summoned the Great Council, and told them that he must at once have liberal grants from them, because he had pledged England's credit to the Pope, and had made the realm responsible to Alexander IV. for 140,000 marks. The baronage were full of rage and disgust, for the conquest of Sicily was no concern of England's, but a matter of private spite on the part of the papacy. And, moreover, the king had not the least right to pledge the revenues of England to Alexander without having consulted the Great Council. Instead, therefore, of a grant of 140,000 marks, Henry received the outpourings of thirty years of suppressed indignation and discontent. He was told that he could no longer be allowed to rule the realm without the aid and counsel of his barons; that his interference in distant wars was foolish; that his foreign relations were a flight of locusts eating up the land; that his ministers and favourites were unjust, greedy, and extortionate. The king was seriously frightened, and consented to call another Great Council together at Oxford, to provide for the better governance of the realm, and not merely for the payment of his own debts.

[Sidenote: =Simon de Montfort.=]

The sudden outburst of wrath on the part of the baronage in 1258 is explained not only by the fact that all men had lost patience with King Henry, for that had been the case for many years, but much more by the fact that the baronage had at last found a champion and mouthpiece in Simon de Montfort, the great Earl of Leicester. Simon was not one who might have been expected to prove a wise and patriotic statesman and a good Englishman, for he had originally come into notice as one of the king's foreign favourites. His grandmother had been the heiress of the earldom of Leicester, but she had married a Frenchman, the Count of Montfort. Their child was Simon the elder, a great crusading chief and a cruel persecutor of heretics. He was a bitter enemy of King John, and had never been permitted to get hold of the Leicester estates. In 1232 his son Simon the younger came across to England, to beg King Henry to make over to him the confiscated lands of his grandmother's earldom. Henry could never resist a petitioner, especially when he was a foreigner; he not only took Simon into favour and granted him the earldom of Leicester, but he married him to his sister, the Princess Eleanor, and for a time made him his confidant. But the king's sudden friendship did not endure, and ere very long he tired of Simon, and sent him over to govern Guienne, which was always in a state of chronic insurrection. Simon put down rebellion with a strong hand, and made himself unpopular with the Gascons, who sent many complaints of him to the king. But the fatal cause of estrangement between him and the earl was a money matter: Simon had expended large sums in the king's service, using his own money and borrowing more. When he sent in his accounts to Henry, the latter could not or would not pay, and very meanly allowed the loss to fall on Simon (1250).

Simon then settled down into opposition to the king, though he was ready enough to serve the realm in all times of danger. He had now been living for many years in England, and his neighbours found him a just and sincere man, and one who had done his best to accustom himself to English ways of life and thought. He was especially beloved by the clergy, who admired his fervent piety and pure life. So it came to pass that the man who had once been known only as the king's favourite, was called Earl Simon the Righteous, and looked upon as the most patriotic and trustworthy of the nobles of the realm.

Great men had been singularly wanting among the ranks of the English baronage, since William of Pembroke died and Hubert de Burgh was disgraced. It was not till Simon came to the front as the king's opponent that the nation's discontent with Henry was adequately expressed.

[Sidenote: =The Provisions of Oxford.=]

The Great Council--or Parliament as we may now call it, since that word was just coming into use--met at Oxford in June, 1258, to take counsel for the better administration of England. Some called it the "Mad Parliament," because of the anger of the barons, and their desire to make hasty and sweeping changes. Henry, when he met it, found that he had no supporters save his foreign kinsmen and a few personal dependents, so that he was forced to submit to all the conditions which the barons imposed upon him.

So were ratified the "Provisions of Oxford," which provided for the government of England, not by the king, but by a group of committees. Henry was to do nothing without the consent of a privy council of fifteen members, which was now imposed upon him. Another committee of twenty-four was to investigate and right all the grievances of the realm; and a third, also of twenty-four, was to take charge of the financial side of the government, pay off the king's debts, and administer his revenues. Henry was forced to make a solemn oath to abide by the rules stated in Magna Carta, which he had often before promised to keep, but had always evaded or disregarded after a time.

By the Provisions of Oxford the governance of the realm was taken altogether out of the hands of the king, and handed over to those of the three committees. But the new scheme was far too cumbersome, for neither of the three bodies had any authority over the others, and it was difficult to keep them together. There were many who were jealous of Simon de Montfort, who sat in each of the three, and was the ruling spirit of the whole government. It was said that he took too much upon himself, and that the nation had not muzzled the king merely in order to hand itself over to be governed by the earl.

[Sidenote: =Counter-efforts of Henry.--The Mise of Amiens.=]

In spite of these murmurings, and in spite of the king's attempts to shake off the control which had been imposed on him, the Provisions of Oxford were observed for four years. But Henry was preparing to tear himself free as soon as possible. He sent privately to Rome and got absolved from his oath by the Pope. He courted those who were jealous of Earl Simon, and he encouraged many of his foreign relatives and dependents to creep back to England. In 1261 he felt strong enough to break loose, seized the Tower of London, and raised an army. But he found himself too weak, dared not come to blows with the adherents of the Provisions of Oxford, and again consented to place himself in the hands of the guarantors. But as disputes about his conduct continued to arise, he offered to submit his rights, and those of the barons, to the arbitration of his neighbour, St. Lewis of France, whose probity was recognized by all the world. Simon and his friends consented--an unwise act, for they might have remembered that the French king was not well acquainted with the constitution or the needs of England. By a decision called the Mise of Amiens, from the city at which it was proclaimed, St. Lewis announced that Henry ought to abide by the customs stated in Magna Carta, but that he need not keep the Provisions of Oxford, which were dishonourable to his crown and kingly dignity (1263).

[Sidenote: =Civil war breaks out.=]

The Mise of Amiens precipitated the outbreak of civil war, for Simon and his party refused to accept the decision which had been given against them, though they had promised to abide by it. This flinching from their word alienated from them many who would otherwise have taken the side of reform, and it was felt that a grave responsibility lay on Simon for striking the first blow. Hence it came to pass that the king was supported by a larger party than might have been expected. His own brother and son, Richard of Cornwall and Prince Edward, who had hitherto usually leaned to the party of reform and striven to guide him towards moderation, now supported him with all their power. The Earls of Norfolk and Hereford and many other great barons also took arms in his favour. Earl Simon, on the other hand, was helped by the Earls of Gloucester and Derby, and enthusiastically supported by the citizens of London, who had been maddened by the king's arbitrary taxes.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Lewes.--The Mise of Lewes.=]

When, after much preliminary fighting, the armies of Henry and Simon faced each other in Sussex for a decisive battle, it was found that the king had much the larger army. He drew up his host outside the walls of Lewes, while Simon, who had marched from London, lay on the downs beyond it. When the shock came, the fiery Prince Edward, who led the right wing of the royalists, fell furiously on Simon's left wing, which was mainly composed of the levies of London, and drove them far off the field. But, carried away by his pursuit, he never thought of returning to help his father, and meanwhile Earl Simon had beaten the king's division, and rolled the royalist army back against the town wall of Lewes, where those of them who could not enter the gate at once were taken prisoners. Among the captives were the king himself, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and most of the chiefs of the royalist party. Prince Edward, rather than continue the civil war, gave himself up to the insurgents on the following day, to share his father's fate (May, 1264).

The immediate result of the battle was the issue of a document called the Mise of Lewes, by which King Henry promised to keep the charter, to dismiss all his foreign relatives and dependents, and to place himself under the control of a privy council, whom Parliament should choose to act as his ministers and guardians.

[Sidenote: =Rule of Simon de Montfort.--Captivity of the king and Prince Edward.=]

A Parliament was hastily summoned and delegated three electors to nominate this privy council, namely, Earl Simon, the Earl of Gloucester, and the Bishop of Chichester. The electors, naturally but unwisely, appointed none but their own trusted supporters. Thus England came under the rule of a party, and a party whose violent action had been disliked by a great portion of the nation. The king was but a puppet in their hands; he was practically their prisoner, for three of the council always attended his steps and kept him in sight. Now, Henry, irritating and faithless as his conduct had always been, was not personally disliked, and the sight of their monarch led about like a captive and forced to obey every behest of his captors, was very displeasing to many who had formerly felt no sympathy for him. It was felt, too, that his son Edward was being very hardly treated by being kept in honourable captivity and deprived of all share in the government; for the prince had taken the side of reform till the outbreak of the civil war, had only joined his father when Simon took arms, and had behaved with great patriotism and self-denial in refusing to continue the struggle after Lewes.

For two years Earl Simon governed England, and the king was kept under close guard. This period was not one of peace or prosperity; the land was still troubled by the echoes of the civil war, and in his anxiety to maintain his dominant position the earl incurred many accusations of harshness and rapacity. He was especially blamed for depriving Prince Edward of his earldom of Chester, for favouring Llewellyn Prince of North Wales in his quarrel with Roger Mortimer, a great lord of the Welsh marches who had been on the king's side at Lewes, but most of all for giving too much trust and power to his own sons. The young Montforts were rash and arrogant men, who harmed the people's cause more by their turbulence than they aided it by their courage and fidelity. In short, they were as Samuel's sons of old, and wrought their father no small damage and discredit.

[Sidenote: =The Parliament of 1265.--Representation of Shires and Boroughs.=]

The chief event for which Earl Simon's tenure of power is remembered is his summons of the celebrated Parliament of 1265. This incident is noteworthy, not so much for anything that the Parliament did, as for the new system on which it was constructed. Hitherto the Great Council had usually been composed only of the barons and bishops, though on two or three occasions in the thirteenth century the smaller vassals of the crown had been represented by the summons of two knights from each shire, chosen in the county court by all the freeholders of the district. But de Montfort not only called these "knights of the shire" to his Parliament of 1265, but also summoned two citizens or two burgesses from each of the chief cities and boroughs of the realm. Thus he was the first to give the towns representation, and to put together the three elements, lords, borough members, and county members, which form the Parliament of to-day. It must be confessed that Simon's immediate object was probably to strengthen his own side in the assembly, rather than to initiate a scheme for the reform of the Great Council in a democratic direction. Many barons were against him, and them he did not summon at all. Many more were jealous or distrustful of him, and it was mainly in order to swamp their opposition that he called up the great body of knights of the shire and members for the towns,--for London and the rest of the chartered cities were strongly in favour of his cause.

This Parliament confirmed all Simon's acts; outlawed those of the king's party who had fled over-seas, and refused to accept the terms of the Mise of Lewes; imposed a three-years exile in Ireland on some of those who had made only a tardy submission, and put all the royal castles into the hands of trusty partisans of the earl. It made few regulations for the better governance of the realm, but left everything in Simon's hands and at his discretion.

[Sidenote: =Prince Edward escapes.=]

It was impossible that the regency of the great earl should last for long. There were too many men in England who felt that it was unseemly that the king and his son should live in close restraint, while one who, in spite of all his merits, was still a foreigner and an adventurer, ruled the realm. The beginning of Simon's troubles came from a quarrel with his own chief supporter, the young Earl of Gloucester. Gilbert de Clare thought that he was not admitted to a sufficient share in the government of the kingdom, and soon fell into a bitter feud with Simon's sons. His anger led him into conspiring against the great earl. By his counsel Prince Edward escaped from his keepers, by an easy stratagem and a swift horse. Once free, the prince called his party to arms, and was joined by Gloucester, Mortimer, and many of the barons of the Welsh marches.

On hearing of this rising in the west, Montfort hurried to the Welsh border with a small army, taking the king in his train. He bade Simon, the second of his sons, to collect a larger army and follow him. But Edward and Gloucester seized the line of the Severn, and threw themselves between father and son. The earl retraced his steps, slipped back across the Severn, and reached Evesham, while his son had marched as far as Kenilworth, so that a few miles only separated them. But Edward lay between, and was eager for the fight.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Evesham.--Death of Simon de Montfort.=]

By a sudden and unexpected attack the prince surprised and scattered young Montfort's army under the walls of Kenilworth; he then hurried off to attack Simon. The earl lay in Evesham town, which is girt round by a deep loop of the river Avon. Edward and Gloucester seized the narrow neck of this loop, while another royalist force, under Mortimer, crossed the river and watched the only bridge which leads southward out of the town. Simon awoke to find himself surrounded. "God have mercy on our souls," he cried, "for our bodies are our enemy's." Gathering his little army in a compact mass, he dashed at the prince's superior force, and tried to cut his way through. But the odds were against him, and after a short sharp fight he was slain, with his eldest son Henry, Hugh Despencer the Justiciar of England, and many of the best knights of the baronial party. King Henry almost shared their fate: he had been compelled to put on his armour and ride in the earl's host, and was wounded and almost slain before he was recognized by his son's victorious soldiery.

Thus died Earl Simon the Righteous, a man much loved by those who knew him well, courteous and kindly, pious and honest, wise and liberal. But it cannot be denied that he was touched by an overweening ambition, and that when England fell beneath his hand, he ruled her more as a king than a regent, and forgot that he was but the deputy and representative of the nation. His rise and success freed England from the thriftless rule of Henry, and set a boundary to the use of the royal prerogative. His short tenure of power gave the realm the valuable gift of the full and representative Parliament. His fall was sad but not disastrous to the English, for his work was done, and he was fast drifting into the position of the autocratic leader of a party, and ceasing to be the true exponent of the will of the whole nation.

[Sidenote: =Ascendency of Prince Edward.=]

The best testimony to the benefits that Simon had conferred on England was the fact that Henry III. never fell back into his old ways. He was now an elderly man, and in his captivity had lost much of his self-confidence and restless activity. He had been freed, not by his own power, but by his son and the Earl of Gloucester, both of whom had been friends of reform, though enemies of Simon. Edward had now won an ascendency over his father which he never let slip, and his voice had for the future a preponderant share in the royal council. It is to his influence that we may ascribe the wise moderation with which the relics of Simon's party were treated.

[Sidenote: =End of the civil war.=]

Evesham fight did not end the war, for the three surviving sons of Simon, with the Earl of Derby and some other resolute friends, still held out. It took two years more to crush out the last sparks of civil strife, for the vanquished party fortified themselves in the castle of Kenilworth and the marshy isles of Ely and Axholme. But Edward gradually beat down all opposition, and the end of the war is marked by the Dictum of Kenilworth (October, 1266), in which the king solemnly confirms the Great Charter, and pardons all his opponents, on condition of their paying him a fine. Only the heirs of the Earls of Leicester and Derby were disinherited. The younger Montforts went into exile in Italy, where a little later they revenged themselves on the king by cruelly murdering his nephew Henry of Cornwall, as he was praying in Viterbo cathedral.

There is little to tell about the last five years of the reign of Henry III. The land gradually settled down into tranquillity, and we hear little more of the misgovernment which had rendered his early years so unbearable. Prince Edward went on a Crusade, when he saw that the realm was pacified. He greatly distinguished himself in the Holy Land, and took Nazareth from the infidels. He was still beating back the Saracen, when he was called home by the news of his father's decease. After a stormy life the old king had a peaceful ending, dying quietly in his bed on the 16th of November, 1272.

FOOTNOTE:

[17] See p. 123.

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XI. EDWARD I

1272-1307.

[Sidenote: =Immediate accession of Edward.=]

The confidence and admiration which the English nation felt for Prince Edward were well shown by the fact that he was proclaimed king on the day of his father's death without any form of election by the Parliament. This was the first time that the English crown was transferred by strict hereditary succession, and that the old traditions of the solemn choice by the Great Council were neglected. Edward was still absent in Palestine, but the government was carried on in his name without trouble or friction till he landed in England on August 2, 1274. It was nineteen months since his father had died, yet nothing had gone amiss in the interval, so great was the belief of the English in the wisdom and justice of the coming king.

[Sidenote: =His character.=]

Edward was probably the best and greatest ruler, save Alfred, that England has ever known. He was a most extraordinary contrast to his shifty father, and his cruel, treacherous grandsire. His private life was a model to all men; nothing could have shown a better conception of the respective claims of patriotism and of filial duty than his conduct during the civil war. His court was grave and virtuous, and his faithful wife, Eleanor of Castile, was the object of his chivalrous devotion. Edward was religious without superstition, liberal without unthriftiness, resolute without obstinacy. But the most striking feature of his character was his love of good faith and justice. His favourite device was Pactum serva, "Keep your promise," and in all his doings he strove to carry it out. It was this that made him such an admirable king for a country where constitutional liberty was just beginning to develop itself. If he promised his Parliament to abandon any custom or introduce any reform, he might be trusted honestly to do his best to adhere to his engagement. It must not be supposed that he never fell out with his subjects; his conceptions of the rights and duties of a king were so high that it was impossible for him to avoid collisions with Parliament. But when such collisions occurred, though he fought them out with firmness, yet, if beaten, he accepted his defeat without rancour. His justice was perhaps too severe: he could pardon on occasion, but he had a stern way of dealing with those whom he regarded as traitors or oath-breakers; the chief blots on his reign are instances of merciless severity to conquered rebels. Edward has been accused of having some times adhered too closely to the letter of the law, when it told in his own favour, but there seems little reason to doubt that he was honestly following his own lights. Compared with any contemporary sovereign, he was a very mirror of justice and equity.

[Sidenote: =Edward as a general.=]

In addition to showing great merits as administrator, Edward was notable both as a good soldier and a wise general. His tall and robust frame and dauntless courage made him one of the best knights of his day. Yet he was no mere fighting man, but a skilled tactician. He had long forgotten the reckless impulsiveness that lost the day at Lewes, and had become one of the best captains of his age. He deserves a prominent place in the history of the art of war for being the first who discovered the military value of the English long-bowmen, and turned them to good account in his battles. Hitherto English generals, like continental, had been trusting entirely to the charge of their mailed cavalry. Edward, as we shall see at Falkirk, had learnt that the bowman was no less effective than the knight in the deciding of battles.

The years of Edward's long and eventful reign are full of interest and importance both within and without the bounds of England. The history of his legislation and of the development of the power of Parliament under him deserve close observation no less than his successful dealings with Wales, and his almost successful scheme for the conquest of Scotland. Nor can his relations with France be left without remark.

[Sidenote: =Edward and the Church.--Statute of Mortmain.=]

His legislation, most of which falls into the earlier years of his reign, requires the first notice. Throughout the whole of it we trace a consistent purpose of strengthening the crown by restricting the rights both of the Church and the baronage. His first collision with the Church dates from 1279, when Archbishop Peckham made an attempt to reassert some of Becket's old doctrines as to the complete independence and wide scope of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. When Peckham summoned a national council of clergy at Reading in 1279, and issued certain "canons" in support of the independence of the Church courts, Edward replied not merely by compelling him to withdraw the objectionable document, but by passing the celebrated Statute of Mortmain, or De Religiosis, as it is sometimes called. This was a measure destined to prevent the further accumulation of estates in the "dead hand" (in mortua manu) of the Church. It was estimated that a fourth of the surface of England was already in the possession of the clerical body, and this land no longer paid its fair proportion of the taxes of the realm. For a large share of the king's revenue came from reliefs, or death-duties, and escheats, or resumption of lands to which there was no heir, and as a monastery or bishopric never died, the king got neither reliefs nor escheats from them. The statute prevented any man from alienating his land to the monasteries, and specially forbade the fraudulent practice of making ostensible gifts to the Church and receiving them back. For landholders had sometimes pretended to make over their estates to a monastery, in order to escape the taxation due on feudal fiefs, while really, by a corrupt agreement with the monks, they kept the property in their own power, and so enjoyed it tax-free. For the future land rarely fell into the "dead hand," since it could not be given away without the king's consent. Very few new monasteries were built or endowed after the passing of this statute, but the crown not unfrequently relaxed the rule in favour of the colleges in the universities, which were just now beginning to spring up.

[Sidenote: =Edward and the baronage.--Writ of Quo Warranto.=]

Edward's dealings with the baronage are even more important in the history of the English constitution than his contest with the clerical body. He showed a consistent purpose of defending the rights of the crown against the great feudal lords, and of bringing all holders of land into close dependence on himself. His first attempt of the kind was the issue of the writ Quo Warranto in 1278. This writ was a royal mandate ordering an inquiry "by what warrant" many of the old royal estates had come into private hands, for the king thought that much state property had passed illegally out of the possession of the crown, by the thriftlessness of his father and the disorder of the civil wars of 1262-65. This project for an inquiry into old rights and documents both vexed and frightened the baronage. They murmured loudly. The tale is well known how John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, when asked to produce the evidence of his right to certain lands, dashed down an old rusty sword before the commissioners, crying, "This is my title-deed. My ancestors came over with King William, and won their lands by the sword, and with this same sword I will maintain them against any one who tries to take them from me." The whole baronage showed such a hostile feeling against Edward's proposal that he finally contented himself with making a complete list of the still remaining crown lands, but did not raise the question of the resumption of long-alienated estates.

Another device of the king's for binding the landholders of the realm more closely to himself, was his scheme for making knights of all persons who held estates worth more than £20 a year. His object was not so much to gain the fees due from those who received knighthood, as to bring all the middle class of landholders, who held under the great feudal lords, into closer relation with himself through the homage and oath which they made to him after receiving the honour (1278).

[Sidenote: =The statute "De Donis."=]

In subsequent legislation Edward took care to conciliate the baronage by strengthening not only his rights over them, but their rights over their vassals. The most important of these was "escheat," the right of resuming possession of land when its holder died without an heir. This right was always liable to be defeated by the tenant selling his land; and its value was yet more diminished if he could dispose of part of the land, in such a way that the buyer became his own sub-tenant. A clause in Magna Charta had restricted this process, but the barons wished to limit even more their tenants' power of parting with land. On the other hand, as society became more industrial, and less warlike, it became more desirable that land should pass freely from man to man These conflicting interests resulted in two enactments, which are landmarks in English History. The first, the Second Statute of Westminster, contains the famous clauses 'De Donis Conditionalibus.' It forbade the alienation of land granted to a person and his actual lineal descendants, or to use a modern phrase, it made possible the creation of perpetual entails. The barons soon saw that it enabled them to settle their lands on their own families, and it was regularly employed for this purpose for about 200 years, till at last a legal fiction was invented which greatly cut down the power of tying up land.

[Sidenote: =The statute "Quia Emptores."=]

On the other hand, the statute Quia Emptores (1290), far from restricting the power of alienation, expressly allowed it in all cases not coming within the statute De Donis: but at the same time it enacted that the purchaser, whether of the whole or part of an estate, should become the tenant, not of the seller, but of the seller's lord; in other words, it put an end to subinfeudation. This led, in the end, to the enormous multiplication of the lesser vassals of the crown, and tended to the ultimate extinction of all subtenancies, so that the king was the gainer in the long run, since whenever a great estate was broken up, he became the immediate lord of all those among whom it was dispersed.

[Sidenote: =The Statute of Winchester.=]

Besides the great statutes we have already named, several other items of King Edward's legislation demand a word of notice. The Statute of Winchester (1285) reorganized the national militia, the descendant of the old fyrd, ordaining what arms each man, according to his rank and wealth, should furnish for himself. It also provided for the establishment of a watch or local police for the suppression of robbers and outlaws.

[Sidenote: =Expulsion of the Jews.=]

But all the king's doings were not so wise; to his discredit must be named his intolerant edict for the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290. Edward seems to have picked up in his crusading days a blind horror of infidels of all sorts. He disliked the Jews, somewhat for being inveterate clippers and debasers of the coinage, more for being usurers at extortionate rates in days when usury was held to be a deadly sin, but most of all for the mere reason that they were not Christians. To his own great loss--for the taxes of the Jews were a considerable item in his revenues--he banished them all from the land, giving them three months to sell their houses and realize their debts. It was 360 years before they were again allowed to return to the realm.

[Sidenote: =Parliamentary representation.=]

The same years that are notable for the passing of the statutes of Mortmain and Quia Emptores, and for the expulsion of the Jews, were those in which the English Parliament was gradually growing into its permanent shape. We have already told how Simon de Montfort summoned in 1265 the first assembly which corresponds to our modern idea of a Parliament, by containing representatives from shires and boroughs, as well as a muster of the great barons and bishops who were tenants-in-chief of the crown. As it chanced Edward did not call a Great Council in exactly that same form till 1295, but in the intervening years he generally summoned knights of the shire to attend the deliberation of his lords, and consent to the granting of money. On two occasions in 1283 the cities and boroughs were also bidden to send their representatives, but these were not full Parliaments, for at the first, held at Northampton, no barons were present, while at the second, which sat at Acton-Burnell, the clergy had not been summoned. It was not till 1295 that Edward, then in the thick of his Scotch and French wars, summoned barons, clergy, knights of the shire, and citizens, all to meet him, "because that which touches all should be approved by all." But the complete form of Parliament was found to work so well that it was always summoned in that shape for the future.

[Sidenote: =Condition of Wales.=]

We may now turn to Edward's political doings. The affairs of Wales require the first notice. We have already mentioned in earlier chapters how the southern districts of that country had long ago passed, partly by conquest, partly by intermarriage with the families of native chiefs, into the hands of various Anglo-Norman barons. These nobles of the Welsh Marchland, or Lords Marchers as they were called, had as their main duty the task of overawing and restraining the princes of North Wales, where Celtic anarchy still reigned supreme. Anglesea, the mountain lands of Snowdon, Merioneth, and the valley of the Dee were the last home of the native Welsh. In this land of Gwynedd native princes still ruled, and proved most unruly vassals to the English crown. Whenever England was vexed by civil war, the Welsh descended from their hills, attacked the Lords Marchers, and pushed their incursions into Cheshire and Shropshire. Sometimes they pushed even further afield; in 1257 they ravaged as far as Cardiff and Hereford. If it had not been that the princes of North Wales were even more given to murderous family feuds than to raids on the English border, they would have been an intolerable pest; but their interminable petty strife with each other generally kept them quiet.

[Sidenote: =Invasion of Wales.=]

In 1272, the ruler of North Wales was Llewellyn-ap-Gruffyd, a bold and stirring prince, who had put down all his rebellious brothers and cousins, and united the whole of Gwynedd under his sword. Following the example of his ancestors, Llewellyn had plunged with alacrity into the English civil wars of the time of Henry III. He had allied himself with Simon de Montfort, and under cover of this alliance had made cruel ravages on the lands of the Lords Marchers in South Wales. He held out long after Simon fell at Evesham, and only made peace in 1267, when he was admitted to very favourable terms and confirmed in the full possession of his principality. When Edward ascended his father's throne, he bade Llewellyn come to his court and do him homage, such as the ancient princes of Wales had been accustomed to offer. But he was met with repeated refusals; six times he summoned the Welshman to appear, and six times he was denied, for Llewellyn said that he would not leave his hills unless he was given as hostages the king's brother, Edmund of Lancaster, and the Justiciar Ralph of Hengham. He feared for his life, he said, and would not trust himself in his suzerain's hands. Edward was not accustomed to have his word doubted, and, being conscious of his own honest intentions, was bitterly angered at his vassal's distrust and contumacious answers. But the king's wrath reached its highest pitch in 1275, when he found that Llewellyn had put himself in communication with France, and sent to the French court for Eleanor de Montfort, Earl Simon's daughter, to take her to wife. The ship that carried the bride was captured off the Scilly Isles by a Bristol privateer, and she with her brother, Amaury of Montfort, fell into Edward's hands. After Llewellyn had made one further refusal to do homage, Edward raised a great army and invaded Wales. The prince and his wild tribesmen took refuge in the fastnesses of Snowdon, but Edward blockaded all the outlets from the hills, and in a few months the Welsh were starved into submission. Llewellyn was forced to surrender himself into his suzerain's hands, but received better terms than might have been expected. He was made to do homage, and to give up the land between Conway and the Dee, the modern shire of Denbigh, but was allowed to retain the rest of his dominions, and received his bride from Edward's hands. He was also reconciled to his brothers, whom he had long before driven away from Wales, and David--the eldest of these exiles--was given a great barony cut out of the ceded lands on the Dee (1277).

[Sidenote: =Rebellion of Llewellyn and David of Wales.=]

Though he had felt the weight of Edward's hand, the Prince of Wales was unwise enough to provoke his suzerain the second time. Finding that there was much discontent in the ceded districts of Wales, because the king was systematically substituting English laws and customs for the old Celtic usages, Llewellyn resolved to make a sudden attempt to free them and to throw off his allegiance. His brother David joined in the plot, though he had always been protected by Edward, and owed all that he possessed to English aid. On Palm Sunday, 1282, the two brothers secretly took arms without any declaration of war. David surprised Hawarden Castle, captured the chief justice of Wales, and slew the garrison, while Llewellyn swept the whole coast-land as far as the gates of Chester with fire and sword.

This treacherous and unprovoked rebellion deeply angered the king; he swore that he would make an end of the troublesome principality, and raised an army and a fleet greater than any that had ever been sent against the Welsh. After some slight engagements, the English once more drove Llewellyn and his host into the crags of Snowdon. Convinced of his folly, the prince sent to ask for peace; but Edward would not again grant the easy terms that he had given in 1277. Llewellyn should become an English earl, he said, and be granted lands worth £1000 a year; but the independent principality of North Wales had been tried and found wanting--it should be abolished and annexed to England.

[Sidenote: =Death of Llewellyn.--Execution of David.=]

Llewellyn, though in the sorest straits, refused these terms. By a dangerous night march he slipped through the English lines with a few chosen followers, and hastened into mid-Wales, to stir up rebellion in Brecknock. But near Builth he fell in with a small party of English, and was slain in the skirmish which followed by an esquire named Adam of Frankton, who knew not with whom he was fighting. David, his brother, now proclaimed himself Prince of Wales, and held out in Snowdon for some months longer. But he was ultimately betrayed to the king by his own starving followers. He was taken over the border to be tried before the English Parliament, which met at Acton Burnell, just outside the walls of Shrewsbury. There was far more dislike felt for him than for his brother. Llewellyn had always been an open enemy, but David had long served at the English court, and had been granted his barony by Edward's special favour. Hence it came that the Parliament passed the death-sentence for treason on the last Prince of Wales, and he was executed at Shrewsbury, with all the horrid details of hanging, drawing, and quartering, which were the traitor's lot in those days. The harshness of his punishment almost makes us forget the provocation that he had given the king; mercy for traitors was not characteristic of Edward's temper (1283).

[Sidenote: =Settlement of Wales.=]

Edward stayed for nearly two years in Wales after the fighting had ended; he devoted himself to reorganizing the principality, on the English model. Llewellyn's dominions were cut up into the new counties of Anglesea, Merioneth, and Carnarvon. Strong castles were built at Conway, Beaumaris, Carnarvon, and Harlech, to hold them down, and colonies of English were tempted by liberal grants and charters to settle in the towns which grew up at points suitable for centres of commerce. For the future governance of the land Edward drew up the "Statute of Wales," issued at Rhuddlan in 1284; he allowed a certain amount of the old Celtic customary law to survive, but introduced English legal usages to a much larger extent. The Welsh murmured bitterly against the new customs, but found them in the end a great improvement. Edward endeavoured to solace their discontent by placing many of the administrative posts in Welsh hands, and their national pride by reviving the ancient name of the principality. For in 1301 he gave his heir Edward, who had been born at Carnarvon, the title of Prince of Wales, solemnly invested him with the rule of the principality at a great meeting of all the Welsh chiefs, and set him to govern the land. Later kings of England have followed the custom, and the title of Prince of Wales has become stereotyped as that of the heir to the English crown. It must not be supposed that Wales settled down easily and without friction beneath Edward's sceptre. There were three or four risings against his authority, headed by chiefs who thought that they had some claim to inherit the old principality. One of these insurrections was a really formidable affair; in 1294, Madoc, the son of Llewellyn, raised half North Wales to follow him, beat the Earl of Lincoln in open battle, and ravaged the English border. The king himself, though sorely vexed at the moment by wars in Gascony and Scotland, marched against him at mid-winter, but had to retire, foiled by the snows and torrents of the Welsh mountains. But next spring Madoc was pursued and captured, and sent to spend the rest of his life as a captive in the Tower of London (1295).

[Sidenote: =Foreign affairs.=]

For a few years after the annexation of Wales, the annals of England are comparatively uneventful. Some of Edward's legislation, with which we have already dealt, falls into this period, but the king's attention was mainly taken up with foreign politics, into which he was drawn by his position as Duke of Aquitaine. He spent some time in Guienne, succeeded by careful diplomacy in keeping out of the wars between France and Aragon, which were raging near him, and introduced a measure of good government among his Gascon subjects. But more important events nearer home were soon to attract his attention.

[Sidenote: =Scotland.--Accession of Margaret of Norway.=]

In 1286 perished Alexander III., King of Scotland, cast over the cliffs of Kinghorn by the leap of an unruly horse. He was the last male of the old royal house that descended from Malcolm Canmore and the sainted Queen Margaret. Three children, two sons and a daughter, had been born to him, but they had all died young, and his only living descendant was his daughter's daughter, a child of four years. Her mother had wedded Eric, King of Norway, and it was at the Norwegian court that the little heiress was living when her grandfather died. Though Scotland had never before obeyed a queen-regnant, her nobles made no difficulty in accepting the child Margaret, the "maid of Norway" as they called her, for their sovereign. A regency was appointed in her name, and the whole nation accepted her sway.

[Sidenote: =Scheme for uniting the two crowns.=]

Now Edward of England saw, in the accession of a young girl to the Scottish throne, a unique opportunity for bringing about a closer union of England and Scotland. There was no rational objection to the scheme: a century had elapsed since the two countries had been at war, their baronages had become united by constant intermarriage; the Lowlands--the more important half of the Scotch realm--were English in speech and manners. Most important of all, there were as yet few or no national grudges between the races on either bank of the Tweed. Of the rancorous hostility which was to divide them in the next century no man had any presage.

When the little Queen of Scotland had reached her seventh year, the king proposed to the Scots' regents that she should be married to his own son and heir, Edward of Carnarvon. He pledged himself that the kingdoms should not be forcibly united; Scotland should keep all its laws and liberties and be administered by Scots alone, without any interference from England. The regents did not mislike the scheme; they summoned the Parliament of the northern realm to meet at Brigham-on-Tweed, and there Edward's offers were accepted and ratified with the consent of the whole realm (July, 1290).

[Sidenote: =Death of Margaret.=]

The next step was to send to Norway for the young queen, for she had been living at her father's court till now, and had never visited her own kingdom. She set sail for Scotland in the autumn of the year 1290, but adverse winds kept her vessel tossed for weeks in the wild North Sea. The strain was too much for the frail child; when at last she came ashore at Kirkwall in the Orkneys, it was only to die. With her life ended the fairest opportunity of uniting the two realms on equal terms that had ever been known.

[Sidenote: =Extinction of the royal line.--Rival claimants.=]

Edward's scheme had fallen through, and his grief was great; but much greater was the dismay in Scotland, where the regents found themselves face to face with the calamity of the extinction of the whole royal house. There was no longer any king or queen in whose name the law of the realm could run, or the simplest duties of government be discharged. Gradually claimants for the crown began to step forward, basing their demands on ancient alliances with the old kingly line, but the nearest of these connections went back more than a hundred years, to female descendants of King David, who had died in 1153. In this strait the Scots determined to appeal to King Edward as arbitrator between the pretenders, whose rivalry seemed likely to split the kingdom up into a group of disorderly feudal principalities. Edward readily consented, seeing that in the capacity of arbitrator he could find an opportunity of making more real the old English right of suzerainty over the kingdom of Scotland. It will be remembered that as far back as the tenth century, the kings of the Scots had done homage to Edward the elder, and that they held the more important half of their realm, Lothian and Strathclyde, which together form the Lowlands, as grants under feudal obligations from the English crown. But the exact degree of dependence of Scotland on England had never been accurately fixed, though Scottish kings had often sat in English Parliaments, and sometimes served in the English armies. It might be pleaded by a patriotic Scot that, as Earl of Lothian, his king had certain obligations to the English sovereign, but that for his lands north of the Forth and Clyde he was liable to no such duties. This depended on the nature of the discharge given by Richard I. to William the Lion in 1190, when he sold the Scottish king a release of certain duties of homage in return for the sum of 10,000 marks. But the agreement of Richard and William had been drawn up in such an unbusiness-like manner that no one could say exactly what it covered.

[Sidenote: =Edward's arbitration.--Balliol and Bruce.=]

King Edward was determined to put an end to this uncertainty, and, as a preliminary to accepting the post of arbitrator in the Scottish succession dispute, required that the regents and all the nobles of the northern realm should acknowledge his complete suzerainty over the whole kingdom. After some hesitation they consented. Edward made a tour through Edinburgh, Stirling, and St. Andrews, and there received the homage of the whole nobility of Scotland. He then appointed a court of arbitration to sit at Berwick, and adjudicate on the rights of the thirteen claimants to the crown; it consisted of eighty Scots and twenty-four Englishmen.

The court found that of serious claims to the crown there were only two--those of John Balliol and Robert Bruce, each of whom descended in the female line from the old King David I., who had died in 1153. The positions of Balliol and Bruce were closely similar: they were descended from two Anglo-Norman barons of the north country, who had married two sisters, Margaret and Isabella, the great-granddaughters of David I. Both of them were as much English as Scotch in blood and breeding. Balliol was Lord of Barnard Castle, in Durham; Bruce had been Sheriff of Cumberland, and had long served King Edward as chief justice of the King's Bench. Like so many of the Scottish barons, they were equally at home on either side of the border. The point of difficulty to decide between them was that, while Balliol descended from the elder of the two co-heiresses, Bruce was a generation nearer to the parent stem, and claimed to have a preference on this account by Scottish usage.

THE SCOTTISH SUCCESSION IN 1292.

DAVID I., = Matilda, 1124-1153. | daughter of Waltheof, | Earl of Huntingdon. | Henry, Earl of Northumberland and Huntingdon, died 1152. | +----------------+------+----------------+ | | | MALCOLM IV., WILLIAM THE LION, David, 1153-1165. 1165-1214. Earl of Huntingdon. | | +-------------+ +-----+-----+ | | | ALEXANDER II., Alan, = Margaret. Isabella = Robert 1214-1249. Lord of | | Bruce, | Galloway. | | Lord of ALEXANDER III., | | Annandale. 1249-1286. | | | | +----+ | | | | Devorguilla, = John Robert | heiress of | Balliol, Bruce, +-----+------------+ Galloway. | Lord of [Claimant | | | Barnard in 1292] Eric of = Margaret, Alexander, | Castle. died 1295. Norway | died 1283. died 1283. | | | | | | +----------+--------+ +--------+ | | | | MARGARET, JOHN Margaret = John Robert = Margaret, the Maid BALLIOL, Balliol. | Comyn. Bruce | Countess of Norway, king | died | of 1286-1290. 1292-1296. | 1305. | Carrick. | | | EDWARD John, ROBERT BRUCE, BALLIOL, "The Red Comyn," king 1306-1329. king slain 1306. | 1332-1334. DAVID II., 1329-1370.

[Sidenote: =Edward's decision.--His claims of suzerainty.=]

The court of arbitration decided that this plea of Bruce's was unsound, and that his rival's right was undoubted. Edward therefore decided in favour of Balliol, who straightway did him homage as King of all Scotland, and was duly crowned at Scone (1292). So far the King of England's conduct had been unexceptionable; he had acted as an honest umpire, and had handed over the disputed realms to the rightful heir. But Edward's legal mind saw further consequences in the acknowledgment of allegiance which Balliol had made. This soon became evident when he began to allow persons who had been defeated in the Scottish law courts to appeal for a further decision to those of England, in virtue of the suzerainty of the latter country. Such a claim was valid in feudal law, and Edward as Duke of Aquitaine had often seen his Gascon subjects make an appeal from the courts of Bordeaux to those of Paris. But to the Scots the idea was new, for no such custom had prevailed between England and Scotland, and they complained that Edward was breaking the promise which he had made at the time of the arbitration, to respect all the old privileges of the Scotch crown. In this they were practically right, for ancient usage was on their side. Balliol was a weak man, and might have yielded to Edward's demand; but his barons refused to hear of it, and bound him to do nothing save with the consent of a council of twelve advisers, who were to determine his course of action. The discontent of the Scots was soon to have most deplorable consequences for both realms.

[Sidenote: =War with Philip of France.=]

At this time Edward was just becoming involved in a bitter quarrel with Philip the Fair, the young King of France. Philip coveted Aquitaine, and was determined to have it. He picked a quarrel with the King of England about the piratical doings of certain English seamen in the Channel. The mariners of the Cinque Ports and of Normandy had long been sworn foes; they fought whenever they met, without any concern as to whether England and France were at war or not. In 1293 there was a regular pitched battle between them, off St. Mahé, in Brittany; the Normans had the worse, and many of them were slain. This affray seemed to King Philip an admirable excuse for attacking his neighbour. He summoned Edward to Paris, as Duke of Aquitaine, to answer before his feudal lord for the misdoings of the English seamen. The King of England was not averse to giving satisfaction, and sent to offer to submit to an arbitration, in which the damages done by his subjects should be assessed. But Philip was not seeking damages, but an excuse for war; he at once declared Edward contumacious for not appearing in person, and proclaimed the forfeiture of the whole duchy of Aquitaine. Hardly realizing the French king's intentions, Edward despatched his brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, to endeavour to satisfy his offended suzerain. Philip then declared that he would consider himself satisfied if Edward surrendered into his hand, as a token of submission, the chief fortresses of Gascony: they should be restored the moment that compensation had been made for the doings at St. Mahé. Earl Edmund accepted the offer, and the castles were duly placed in Philip's hands. Then, with a barefaced effrontery that disgusted even his own nobles, the French king repudiated the agreement, and declared that he should retain Guienne permanently. Edward was thus committed to an unexpected war, while all his strongholds in Aquitaine were already in the enemy's hands. He began to arm in great wrath, and sent ambassadors abroad to gather allies among Philip's continental foes, chief of whom were the Emperor Adolf of Nassau and the Counts of Brabant, Holland, and Flanders.

[Sidenote: =Alliance of Philip with the Welsh and Scots.=]

But Philip also had looked about him for allies. At this moment Madoc-ap-Llewellyn rose in rebellion in North Wales, relying on French aid, and, what was of far greater importance, the discontent of the Scots took the form of open war with England. John Balliol embraced the French alliance, promised to wed his son to Philip's daughter, and sent raiding bands across the border to harry Cumberland and Northumberland.

[Sidenote: =Edward invades Scotland.--Balliol gives up his crown.=]

Edward resolved at once to ward off the nearer dangers before taking in hand the reconquest of Guienne. How he put down the dangerous rebellion of Madoc the Welshman, we have related in an earlier page. That campaign had taken up the best part of the year 1295; in the next spring the turn of Balliol came. He was summoned to appear before his suzerain at Newcastle, and when he did not obey, Edward crossed the Tweed with a great host. Berwick, the frontier fortress and chief port of Scotland, was stormed after a very short siege, and three weeks later the Scottish king was completely routed at the battle of Dunbar (April 27, 1296). So unskilfully did the Scots fight, that they were beaten by Edward's vanguard under John de Warenne--the hero of the rusty sword at the Quo Warranto inquest--before the king and the main body of the English army came upon the field. One after another, Edinburgh, Perth, Stirling, and all the chief towns of Scotland yielded themselves, and ere long the craven-spirited king of the north surrendered himself, and gave up his crown into Edward's hands, asking pardon as one who had been misled and coerced by evil counsellors.

Edward then held a Parliament of all the Scottish barons, and received their homage, being resolved to reign himself as king north as well as south of the Tweed. He told the assembled nobles that none of the old laws of Scotland should be changed, and issued an amnesty to Balliol's late partisans. It seemed that all resistance was at an end, and that the union of the crowns was to take place with no further trouble or bloodshed. John de Warenne--the victor of Dunbar--was appointed guardian of the realm, and Edward turned southward in triumph, taking with him the Scottish regalia, and the Holy Stone of Scone, on which the Kings of Scotland were wont to be crowned. That famous relic still remains at Westminster, where Edward placed it, and serves as the pedestal of the coronation chair of the Kings of England to this day.

[Sidenote: =The expedition to Guienne.=]

The king thought that Scotland was tamed even as Wales had been, forgetting that the Scots had hardly tried their strength against him, and had yielded so easily mainly because their craven king had deserted them. Dismissing northern affairs from his mind, he now turned to the long-deferred expedition to Guienne. The greater part of that duchy was still in King Philip's greedy hands, and only Bayonne and a few other towns were holding out against him. Edward determined to land in Flanders himself, and there to stir up his German allies against France, but to send the great bulk of the English levies to Gascony, under the Marshal, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk.

[Sidenote: =Illegal taxation.--Conflict with the Church.=]

But the expedition was not to take place without much preliminary trouble and difficulty. Edward was in grave need of money to furnish forth his great army, and tried to levy new taxes without any formal grants from Parliament. This at once brought him into conflict with the clergy and the baronage. The arrogant Pope Boniface VIII. had just published a bull named Clericis Laicos, from its opening words. It forbade the clergy to pay any taxes to the crown from their ecclesiastical revenues. Archbishop Winchelsey thought himself bound to carry out the Pope's command, and refused, in the name of all his order, to assent to any portion of the national taxation falling on Church land. The king, who was in no mood to stand objections, was moved to great wrath at this unreasonable claim. He copied the behaviour of his grandfather, King John, in a similar crisis, and by his behest the judges proclaimed that no cleric should have law in the king's courts till the refusal to pay taxes was rescinded. Edward himself sequestrated the lands of the see of Canterbury, and intimated to all tenants on the estates of the clergy that nothing should be done against them if they refused to pay their rents. Many ecclesiastics thereupon withdrew their refusal to contribute to the national expenses; but the archbishop held out, and the quarrel ran on for some time. At last Boniface VIII. was induced to so far modify his bull as to admit that the Church might make voluntary grants for the purpose of national defence. Winchelsey therefore promised the king that he would endeavour to induce the clergy to make large contributions of their own free will, if Edward on his side would confirm the Great Charter, and swear to take no further measures against Church property. To this offer Edward could not refuse his consent; he was in urgent need of money, and, although it was a bad precedent to allow the clergy to assess their own taxation outside Parliament, and on a different scale from the contributions of the rest of the realm, he accepted Winchelsey's compromise.

[Sidenote: =Conflict with Parliament.--Confirmatio Cartarum.=]

But this struggle of the king and the Church was but one important episode of a contention between the king and the whole nation, which filled the years 1296-7. Edward had provoked the barons and the merchants of England no less than the clergy--the former by bidding them sail for Gascony in the winter, and pay him a heavy tax; the latter by seizing all their wool--England's greatest export--as it lay in harbour, and forcing them to pay a heavy fine, the mal-tolt, or evil tax, as it was called, before he would let it be sent over-sea. All this had been done without the consent of Parliament. The barons, headed by Roger Bigod, who had been told off to head the expedition to Guienne, refused to go abroad unless the king himself should lead them, urging that their feudal duty was only to defend the kingdom, and not to wage wars beyond it. Bigod flatly refused to set out unless the king went with him. "By God, Sir Earl, thou shalt either go or hang!" exclaimed Edward, irritated at the contumacy of one who, as Marshal of England, was bound to hold the most responsible post in the army that he was striving to raise. "And by God, Sir King, I will neither go nor hang!" shouted the equally enraged Earl Marshal. He flung himself out of the king's presence, and with the aid of his friend Bohun, the Earl of Hereford, gathered a great host, and prepared to withstand the king, if he should persist in endeavouring to carry out his design. Edward, however, sailed himself for the continent without forcing the barons to follow him. When he was gone, a Parliament met. Archbishop Winchelsey and the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford took the lead in protesting against the king's late arbitrary action, and by their council a recapitulation of the Great Charter was drawn up, with certain articles added at the end which expressly stipulated that the king should never raise any tax or impost without the consent of lords and commons in Parliament assembled--so that such an exaction as the late mal-tolt would be in future illegal. The document, which is generally known as the Confirmatio Cartarum, was sent over-sea to the king. He received it at Ghent, and after much doubting signed it, for he always wished to have the good-will of the nation, and knew that a persistence in the exercise of his royal prerogative would bring on a rebellion such as that which had overturned his father in 1263. From this moment dates the first practical control of the Parliament over the royal revenue, for the clause in Magna Carta which stipulates for such a right had been so often violated both by Henry III. and his son, that it required to be fully vindicated by the Confirmatio Cartarum before it was recognized as binding both by king and people.

Meanwhile Edward got little aid in Flanders from his German allies, and found that he had small chance of punishing King Philip by their arms. He saw Bruges and Lille taken by the French, and finally returned foiled to England, called thither by evil news from the north.

[Sidenote: =Rising of the Scots.--William Wallace.=]

Scotland was once more up in arms. Though the Anglo-Norman lords who formed the bulk of the baronage had readily done homage to the English monarch, the mass of the nation were far less satisfied with the new condition of affairs. They felt that their king and nobles had betrayed them to the foreigner--for to many of them, notably the Highlanders, the Galloway men, and the Welsh of Strathclyde, the Englishman still seemed foreign. Edward had not made a very wise choice in the ministers whom he left behind in Scotland; Ormesby, the chief justice, and Cressingham, the treasurer, both made themselves hated by their harsh and unbending persistence in endeavouring to introduce English laws and English taxes. In the spring of 1297 an insurrection broke out in the West Lowlands, headed by a Strathclyde knight, named William Wallace (or le Walleys, i.e. the Welshman). He had been wronged by the Sheriff of Lanark, took to the hills, and was outlawed. His small band of followers soon swelled to a multitude, and the regent, John de Warenne, was obliged to march against him in person. Despising the tumultuary array of the rebels, who got no real help from the self-seeking barons of Scotland, the earl marched carelessly out of Stirling to attack Wallace, who lay on the hill across the river, beyond Cambuskenneth bridge. Instead of waiting to be attacked, Wallace charged when a third of the English host had crossed the stream. This vanguard was overwhelmed and driven into the Forth, while de Warenne could not bring up his reserves across the crowded bridge. He withdrew into Stirling, leaving several thousand dead on the field, among them the hated treasurer Cressingham, out of whose skin the victorious Scots are said to have cut straps and belts.

This unexpected victory caused a general rising: some of the barons and many of the gentry joined the insurgents. Wallace, Andrew Murray, and the Seneschal of Scotland, were proclaimed wardens of the realm in behalf of the absent John Balliol, and their authority was generally acknowledged. Warenne could do nothing against them, and prayed his master to come over-sea to his help. Meanwhile, Wallace crossed the Tweed at the head of a great band of marauders, and harried Northumberland with a wanton cruelty which was to lead to bitter reprisals later on.

[Sidenote: =Edward in Scotland.--Battle of Falkirk.=]

It was not till 1298 that Edward returned to England, and took in hand the suppression of the rebellion. He crossed the border with the whole feudal levy of England, twenty thousand bowmen, and a great horde of Welsh light infantry; soon he was joined by many Scots of the English faction. Wallace burnt the Lothians behind him, and retired northward for some time without fighting. Edward's great host was almost forced to retire for want of provisions, but when the news was brought him that Wallace had pitched his camp at Falkirk, he pressed on to bring the Scots to action. He found them drawn up behind a morass, formed in four great clumps of pikemen, with archers in the intervals, and a few cavalry in the reserve. The first charge of the English horse was checked by the bog; the second was beaten back by the steady infantry of the Scots. Then Edward brought forward his archers, and bade them riddle the heavy masses of the enemy with ceaseless arrow-flights, till a gap was made. Then the English horse charged again; the Scottish knights in reserve fled without attempting to save the day, and the greater part of the squares of pikemen were ridden down and cut to pieces. Wallace fled to the hills, and the English cruelly ravaged all the Lowlands. But the Scots did not yet submit; the barons deposed Wallace, of whom they had always been jealous, and named a regency to supersede him, under John Comyn, the nephew of their exiled king. The struggle lingered on for several years more, for Edward was hindered from completing his work by the continual pressure of the French war. It was not till 1301-2 that he resumed and finished the conquest of the Lowlands. But in 1303 he was at length able to make a definitive peace with Philip IV., who restored to him all the lost fortresses of Guienne. Free at last from his continental troubles, Edward swept over Scotland from end to end, carrying his arms into the north as far as Elgin and Banff. The regent Comyn and all the barons of the land submitted to him, and by the capture of Stirling in 1304 the last embers of resistance were quenched.

[Sidenote: =Subjection of Scotland.--Wallace executed.=]

Scotland was apparently crushed: the king reorganized the whole country, cutting it up into counties and sheriffdoms like England, providing for its representation in the English Parliament, and setting up new judges and governors throughout the land. The administration was, for the most part, left in the hands of Scots, though the king's nephew, John of Brittany, was appointed regent and warden of the land. The last hope of the survival of Scottish independence seemed to vanish in 1305, when Wallace, who had maintained himself as an outlaw in the hills long after the rest of his countrymen had submitted, fell into the hands of the English. He was betrayed by some of his own men to Sir John Menteith, one of Edward's Scottish officials. Menteith sent him to London, where he was executed as a traitor, with all the cruelties that were prescribed for men guilty of high treason. It would have been better for the king's good name if he--like so many other Scots--had been pardoned; but Edward could not forgive the prime mover of the insurrection, and the cruel waster of the English border.

[Sidenote: =Robert Bruce.--Murder of John Comyn.=]

For some two years Scotland was governed as part of Edward's realm, but the nation submitted from sheer necessity, not from any good will. In 1306 the troubles broke out again, owing to the ambition of a single man. Robert Bruce, the grandson of the Bruce who had striven with Balliol in 1292, was the leader in the new rising. Like his grandfather, he was more of an English baron than a pure Scot. He had taken Edward's side in the civil wars, and seems to have hoped that his fidelity might be rewarded by the gift of the Scottish crown when the Balliols were finally dismissed. Receiving no such guerdon, he conspired with some of his kinsfolk and a few of the Scottish earls, and endeavoured to get John Comyn, the late regent of Scotland, to join him. But when Comyn refused--at an interview in the Greyfriars Kirk at Dumfries--to break his newly sworn faith to King Edward, Bruce slew him with his own hand before the altar, and fled to the north. There was method in this murder, for, after the Balliols, Comyn had the best hereditary claim to the Scottish throne.[18]

[Sidenote: =Severity of Edward.=]

Gathering his followers at Scone, Bruce had himself crowned King of Scotland. But his royalty was of the most ephemeral nature; few of the Scots would join one whose past record was so unsatisfactory, and his army was beaten and dispersed by de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, whom King Edward sent against him. Bruce had to take to the hills almost alone, and for many months was chased about the woods and lochs of Perthshire and Argyleshire by Highland chiefs eager to earn the price that Edward had set upon his head. His kinsmen, Nigel, Alexander, and Thomas, with most of his chief followers, were captured, tried and executed, for Edward was driven to wild anger by the unprovoked rising of one who had hitherto been his hot partisan. Even the ladies of Bruce's house were cast into dungeons, and the Countess of Buchan, who had crowned him at Scone, was shut up in an iron cage. The king's hand fell far more heavily on Scotland than before: the lands of Bruce's partisans were confiscated and given to Englishmen, and all who had favoured him were slain or outlawed.

[Sidenote: =Death of Edward.=]

Unhappily for the king, these harsh measures had a very different result from that which he had expected. The hangings and confiscations gave Bruce many new partisans, and his misfortunes made him the nation's favourite. When he left his island refuge in Argyleshire in the spring of 1307 and landed in Carrick, he was joined by a considerable force. Edward, though now an old man, and stricken down by disease, swore that he would make an end of the traitor. He mounted his horse for the last time at Carlisle, and rode as far as Burgh-on-Sands, where bodily weakness forced him to stop. Feeling the hand of death upon him, he made his son Edward of Carnarvon swear to persevere in the expedition against Bruce. He even bade him bear his coffin forward into Scotland, for his very bones, he said, would make the Scots quake. Four days of illness ended his laborious life (July 17, 1307). His unworthy son at once broke up the army, leaving Bruce to make head unopposed, and used his father's funeral as an excuse for returning home. Edward was buried under a plain marble slab at Westminster, with the short inscription--

"EDWARDVS PRIMVS MALLEVS SCOTORVM HIC EST. PACTVM SERVA."

FOOTNOTE:

[18] See table on p. 160.

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XII. EDWARD II

1307-1327.

[Sidenote: =Character of Edward II.=]

Seldom did a son contrast so strangely with his father as did Edward of Carnarvon with Edward the Hammer of the Scots. The mighty warrior and statesman begot a shiftless, thriftless craven, who did his best to bring to wrack and ruin all that his sire had built up. The younger Edward's character had been the cause of much misgiving to the old king during the last years of his life. He had already shown himself incorrigibly idle and apathetic, refusing to bear his share of the burdens of royalty, and wasting his time with worthless favourites. The chief of his friends was one Piers de Gaveston, a young Gascon knight, whom his father--much to his own sorrow--had made one of his household. Piers was a young man of many accomplishments, clever, brilliant, and showy, who kept a bitter tongue for all save his master, and had an unrivalled talent for making enemies. He kept the listless prince amused, and in return Edward gave him all he asked, which was no small grant, for Piers was both greedy and extravagant.

The new king was neither cruel nor vicious, but he was inconceivably obstinate, idle, and thriftless. It has been happily said of him that he was "the first King of England since the Conquest who was not a man of business." Hitherto the descendants of William the Norman had retained a share of their ancestor's energy; even the weak Henry III. had been a busy, bustling man, ready to meddle and muddle with all affairs of state, great or small. But Edward II. took no interest in anything; the best thing that his apologists find to say of him is that he showed some liking for farming.

[Sidenote: =The Scottish expedition abandoned.=]

The moment that his father was dead, Edward broke up the great army that had been mustered at Carlisle, and returned home. If the campaign had been pursued, there was every chance of crushing Bruce, whose position was still most precarious, for all the fortresses of the land were held by the English, and most of the Scottish nobles still refused to join the pretender. But Edward only sent north a small force under the Earl of Pembroke, which made no head against the forces of Bruce.

[Sidenote: =Ascendency of Piers Gaveston.=]

When Edward settled down in his kingship, the English nation found itself confronted by a new problem--how to deal with a king who altogether refused to trouble himself about the governance of the realm. He referred all men who came to him to his "good brother Piers," and went about his pleasures without further concern. When, a few months after his accession, he was to wed Isabel, the daughter of the King of France, he went over-sea, leaving the regency in the hands of the Gascon upstart, whom he created Earl of Cornwall, granting him the old royal earldom that had been held by the descendants of Richard, the brother of Henry III. He also gave him in marriage his niece, the daughter of the Earl of Gloucester, and lavished upon him a number of royal estates.

Baronage and people alike were moved to wrath by seeing the king hand over the governance of the realm to his favourite. The proud nobles who had been content to bend before Edward's father, would not for a moment yield to a king who was but the creature of Gaveston. Troubles began almost immediately on the young king's accession; he was besought, in and out of Parliament, to dismiss the Gascon. He bowed before the storm, and sent him out of England for the moment--but only to give him higher honours by making him Lord Deputy of Ireland. When the king recovered from his fright, Gaveston was recalled, and returned more powerful and more arrogant than before (1309).

[Sidenote: =The Scottish war.=]

Meanwhile the war in Scotland was going very badly. Many of the nobles, after long doubting, joined Bruce, because they saw that they were likely to get little protection from the feeble king whom they had hitherto served. Several important places fell into the insurgents' hands, and it was universally felt that only a great expedition headed by the king himself could stay Bruce's progress.

Edward, however, was enduring too much trouble at home to think of reconquering Scotland. The barons were moving again, headed by three personal enemies of Gaveston's, whom he is said to have mortally offended by the nicknames he had bestowed on them. The first was the king's cousin,[19] Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, a turbulent, ambitious man, who covered a scheming love of power by an affectation of patriotism and disinterestedness. The other two were Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke,[20] and Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. Gaveston's name for Lancaster was "The Actor," which, indeed, well hit off his pretence of unreal virtue. Pembroke he called "Joseph the Jew," and Warwick "The Black Dog of Arden."

[Sidenote: =The Lords Ordainers.=]

It was these three lords who in 1310 led an attack in Parliament on the king and his favourite, and drew up a scheme for taking the direct rule of the realm out of their hands. Following the precedent of the Provisions of Oxford,[21] the Parliament named a committee of regency, or body of ministers, composed of twenty-one members, who were called the Lords Ordainers, and were to draw up a scheme for the reform of all the abuses of the kingdom. The twenty-one comprised the Archbishop of Canterbury and all the leading men of England, but Thomas of Lancaster and his friends had the ascendency among them. The king complained that he was treated like a lunatic, and deprived of the right that every man owns, of being allowed to manage his own household. He resolved by way of protest, to show that he could do something useful, and, taking Gaveston with him, made an incursion into Scotland. Bruce was cautious, and retired northward, burning the country behind him. The king struggled on as far as the Forth, and then turned back without having accomplished anything. On his return he was forced to sign a promise to redress many administrative grievances which the Lords Ordainers laid before him--to consent to banish Gaveston, choose all his ministers with the counsel and consent of his baronage, disallow all customs and taxes save such as Parliament should grant, and reform the administration of justice. Edward signed everything readily, but immediately departed into the north, bade Gaveston return to England and join him, and published a repudiation of the new ordinances, as forced on him by threats and violence (1311).

[Sidenote: =Murder of Gaveston.=]

This contumacy brought matters to a head. Lancaster and his friends took arms and laid siege to Scarborough, where the favourite lay. Gaveston surrendered on a promise that he should have a fair trial in Parliament. But while he was being taken southward, the Earl of Warwick came upon his keepers, drove them away, and took Piers out of their hands. Without trial or form of justice, "The Black Dog of Arden" bade his retainers behead the favourite by the wayside on Blacklow Hill (May, 1312). Thomas of Lancaster approved by his presence this gross and faithless violation of the terms on which Gaveston had surrendered at Scarborough.

[Sidenote: =Progress of Bruce.=]

This outburst of lawless baronial vengeance removed Edward's favourite, but did the realm no other good. The king was compelled to pardon Gaveston's murderers, but he could not be forced to forget what they had done, and even his slow and craven heart conceived projects of revenge. But these had to be postponed for a time to the pressing needs of the Scotch war. Bruce had taken Perth in 1312, Edinburgh and Roxburgh fell to him in the following year, and he was besieging Stirling, the last important stronghold still in English hands. Even Edward was stirred: he bade all England arm, and vowed to march to the relief of Stirling in the next spring. A great host mustered under the royal banner, but Thomas of Lancaster factiously refused to appear, on the plea that the ordinances of 1311 forbade the king to go out to war without the consent of Parliament. This act alone is a sufficient proof that Thomas was a mere self-seeking politician, and not the patriot that he would fain have appeared.

[Sidenote: =Battle of Bannockburn.=]

King Edward, with an army that is rated at nearly 100,000 men by the chronicler, pushed on to relieve Stirling, and met no opposition till he reached the burn of Bannock, two miles south of that town. There he found Bruce and his host of 40,000 men posted on a rising ground, with the brook and a broad bog in his front. On their flanks the Scots had protected themselves by digging many pits lightly covered with earth and brushwood, so as to break the charge of the English horse. Edward displayed all the marks of a bad general: instead of endeavouring to use his superior numbers to turn or surround the enemy, he flung them recklessly on the Scottish front. When his archers, who by themselves might have settled the battle, had been driven away by the Scots horse, he pushed his great array of mailed knights against the solid masses of Bruce's infantry. After struggling through brook and bog, the English came to a standstill before the steady line of spears. Charge after charge was made, but the knights could not break through the sturdy pikemen, and at last recoiled in disorder. At this moment a mass of Scottish camp-followers came rushing over the hill on the left, and were taken by the exhausted English for a new army. Edward's great host broke up and fled, the king himself outstripping his followers, and never halting till he reached Dunbar. The Earl of Gloucester, six other barons, two hundred knights, and many thousand men of lower rank were left upon the field. The Earls of Hereford and Angus, and seventy knights were taken prisoners.

The fight of Bannockburn completely did away with the last chance of the union of England and Scotland. The English garrisons surrendered, and the Scots of the English party yielded themselves to Bruce, save a few who, with the Earls of Athole and Buchan, took refuge south of the border. For the future Bruce was undisputed king beyond the Tweed, and, instead of acting upon the defensive, was able to push forward and attack England. His ambition was completely satisfied, and his long toils and wanderings ended in splendid success. His whole career, however, was that of a hardy adventurer rather than that of a patriotic king, and his triumph estranged two nations which had hitherto been able to dwell together in amity, and plunged them for nearly three centuries into bloody border wars. It was from the atrocities committed by Englishman on Scot and Scot on Englishman during the fatal years 1306-14 that the long national quarrel drew its bitterness, and for all this Bruce, who commenced his reign by treason, murder, and usurpation, is largely responsible, Edward I. must take his full share of blame for his hard hand and heart, but Bruce's ambition masquerading as patriotism must bear as great a load of guilt.

[Sidenote: =Rule of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster.=]

The shame which King Edward brought home from the ignominious day of Bannockburn, lowered him yet further in his subjects' eyes. The Earl of Lancaster, who had avoided participating in the defeat by his unpatriotic refusal to go forth with the king, was now able to take the administration of affairs into his hands. He dismissed all Edward's old servants, put him on an allowance of £10 a day for his household expenses, and for some years was practically ruler of the realm.

[Sidenote: =War in Ireland.=]

Lancaster might have passed for an able man if he had not laid his hand on the helm of the state; but he guided matters so badly that he soon wrecked his own reputation both for ability and for patriotism (1314-18). The generals of the Scottish king crossed the border and ravaged the country as far as York and Preston, and at the same time Edward Bruce, the brother of Robert, sailed over to Ireland with an army and began to raise the native Irish against their rulers. The great tribes of the O'Neils and the O'Connors joined him, in the hope of completely expelling the English, and by their aid Edward Bruce was crowned King of Ireland, and swept over the whole country from Antrim to Kerry, burning the towns and castles of the English settlers. It is from these unhappy years (1315-17) that we may date the weakening of the royal authority in Ireland, and the restriction of English rule to the eastern coast--"the Pale" about Dublin, Dundalk, and Wicklow. When the war seemed over, and the victory of Edward Bruce certain, the dissensions of the Irish ruined his cause. Lord Mortimer routed Edward's allies the O'Connors at Athenree in 1317, and the King of Ireland himself and his Scottish followers were cut to pieces at Dundalk, a year later, by the Chief Justice, John de Birmingham. Dublin and the Pale were thus saved, but little or no progress was made in restoring the King of England's authority in the rest of the land.

[Sidenote: =Bruce invades England.--Edward recovers power.=]

Though victorious in Ireland, the English under Lancaster's rule were unable to keep their own borders safe. Bruce took Berwick, ravaged Durham, and cut the whole shire-levy of Yorkshire to pieces at Mytton bridge. In despair, Lancaster asked for a truce, and obtained it (1320). But the temporary cessation of the Scottish war only gave the opportunity for the English to come to blows in civil strife. Thomas of Lancaster had by this time made so many enemies, that the king was able to gather together a party against him: though slow and idle, Edward was unforgiving, and well remembered that he had Gaveston's blood to avenge. He found his chief supporters in the two Despensers, West-country barons, the son and grandson of that Despenser who had been Simon de Montfort's Justiciar, and had fallen at Evesham. Taking advantage of the times, Edward assembled an army under the plea that he must chastise a baron named Baddlesmere, who had rudely excluded Queen Isabella from Leeds Castle, in Kent, when she wished to enter. Having taken Leeds and hung its garrison, the king with a most unexpected show of energy suddenly turned on Lancaster. Earl Thomas called out his friends, and the Earl of Hereford, Lord Mortimer, and many of the barons of the Welsh Marches rose in his favour. He was forced, however, to fly north when the king pursued him, and had made his way as far as Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire, when he found himself intercepted by the shire-levies of the north, headed by Harclay, the Governor of Carlisle. A battle followed, in which Hereford was slain and Lancaster taken prisoner.

[Sidenote: =Vengeance of Edward. 1322.=]

The king was now able to wreak his long-delayed vengeance for Gaveston's murder. He sent Earl Thomas to the block, and hung or beheaded eight barons and thirty knights of his party. Lord Mortimer and the rest were stripped of their lands and banished. These wholesale executions and confiscations not only provoked the baronage, but caused the nation to look on Earl Thomas as a martyr, though he was in fact nothing better than a selfish and turbulent adventurer.

[Sidenote: =Rule of the Despensers, 1322-26.=]

Edward, having taken his revenge, subsided into his former listlessness and sloth, handing over the whole conduct of affairs to his new ministers, the two Despensers. Father and son alike were unwise, greedy, and arrogant; they used the king's name for their own ends, and soon made themselves as well hated as Gaveston had been ten years before. Yet for four years they maintained themselves in power, even after they had advised the king to take the necessary but unpopular step of acknowledging Bruce as King of Scotland, and concluding a truce for thirteen years with him.

[Sidenote: =Queen Isabella and Mortimer.--Fall of the Despensers.=]

The slothful Edward and the arrogant Despensers soon tired out the patience of England, and they fell before the first blow levelled against them. The blow came from an unexpected quarter. Edward's wife, Isabella of France, was visiting the court of her brother, Charles IV., on a diplomatic mission concerning some frontier feuds in Guienne. At Paris she met and became desperately enamoured of the exiled Marcher-baron, Roger Mortimer. He drew her into a conspiracy against her husband; by his advice she induced her young son Edward, the heir of England, to cross over and join her. When the boy was safely in her hands, she sent to King Edward to bid him dismiss the Despensers, because they had wronged and insulted her. When he refused, she and Mortimer gathered a force of Flemish mercenaries and crossed to England. They had already enlisted the support of the kinsmen and friends of Lancaster, Hereford, Baddlesmere, and the other barons who had been slain in 1322. On landing in Suffolk, Isabella was at once joined by them, and found herself at the head of a large army. Edward and his unpopular ministers fled towards Wales; but the elder Despenser was caught at Bristol and promptly hanged. His son Hugh and the king were captured three weeks later; the former was executed, while his master was taken under guard to London (November, 1326).

[Sidenote: =Edward deposed.--His son proclaimed king.=]

The queen then summoned a Parliament in the name of her son, Prince Edward. Articles were placed before it, accusing the king of breaking his coronation oath, of wilfully neglecting the right governance of the land, of promoting unworthy favourites, of losing Scotland and Ireland, and of slaying his enemies without just cause or a fair trial. The Parliament pronounced him unfit to reign, deposed him, and elected his young son to fill his throne in his stead.

[Sidenote: =Death of Edward.=]

Edward was constrained by force to resign his crown, and at once thrown into prison. He was first consigned to the charge of Henry of Lancaster, the brother of Earl Thomas; but Henry kept him safely, and there were those who did not desire his safety. Presently the queen and Mortimer took him from Lancaster's hands and removed him to Berkeley Castle. There he was treated with gross neglect and cruelty, in the deliberate design of ending his life; but when his constitution proved strong enough to resist all privations, his keepers secretly put him to death (September 21, 1327).

Thus ended the unhappy son of Edward I., the victim of an unfaithful wife, and a knot of barons bent on revenging an old blood-feud. That he deserved his fate it would be hard to say, but that he owed it entirely to his own unwise choice of favourites it is impossible to deny.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Son of Edward I.'s brother Edmund, Earl of Lancaster.

[20] A grandson of one of Henry III.'s foreign relatives.

[21] See p. 140.

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