READING HALLTHIRD MILLENNIUM LIBRARY |
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THE LIFE OF SIMON DE MONTFORT . EARL OF LEICESTER
CHAPTER V.
PARLIAMENTARY HISTORY, 1249-1257.
The state of things in England had not improved during
Simon’s absence in Gascony. The wearisome tale of oppression and futile
resistance, of broken promises and disunion, need not be told in full. The king
tried all sorts of means to get money, mulcted the Londoners and the Jews, and
made spasmodic efforts to be thrifty, but all in vain. He did not give de
Montfort much aid, but the contributions, which apparently nothing but Simons
presence could obtain, small as they were, increased his difficulties. In 1252
there came a change. The king, who, as we have seen, had already given up the
part of national leader which sat so badly on him, was now in close
communication with the Pope, and had procured a bull granting him a tithe of
the spiritual revenues of the Church for the space of three years, on the
pretext of an aid for his expenses in the contemplated crusade. An assembly of
the prelates accordingly met in London in October
1252. The clergy appear to have been summoned separately at first, in
order that they might be prevailed upon the more easily when deprived
of the assistance of the laity. Both archbishops were absent. The
papal bull, granting the three years’ tithe, was then read aloud to them,
and the kings proctors, assuming the grant as a matter of certainty,
went on to ask that the money for one year, or at least half of. it,
should be paid before the king started. Upon which the Bishop of
Lincoln exclaimed, in great anger, “What is this, by our Lady! ye take things
too much for granted. Think ye we shall consent to this accursed
contribution? Far be it that we should so bow the knee to Baal”. And when
the Bishop-elect of Winchester, the king’s half-brother, hinted that France had
submitted, and England would have to do the same, Grosseteste retorted that for
that very reason England should not yield, and so strengthen the exaction by a
precedent. The great majority of the bishops supported him. The king
then altered his tactics, and requested submissively that an aid might be
granted him. But the bishops remained firm, and pleaded the absence of the
primates of York and Canterbury as an excuse for avoiding a
decision. Henry then tried, as usual, to influence them singly, and began
with the Bishop of Ely. The bishop still refusing to yield, he turned
savagely upon him, and bade his servants “turn out that boor”. Meanwhile the
lay baronage had begun to assemble, though in small numbers. The season was
very rainy, the roads were almost impassable, and when the travellers arrived, wet, dirty, and out of temper, they found London a sea of mud,
provisions at famine prices, and the city so full of people that it was almost
impossible to get a lodging. And for what were they summoned? Only to hear once
more the neverending demand for money. The king
however does not seem to have dared to lay before the laity the demand for the
tenth, which indeed did not immediately concern them, but asked their advice in
the matter of Gascony, laying the blame of the troubles there on the Earl of
Leicester, whose violence, he said, had so disturbed the province. At the end
of his address, as if merely by the way, he requested money to help him on the
crusade. The magnates answered that their reply must depend on that of the
clergy, and laughed in secret at the “silly king who, without skill or
experience in war, was going to make an attempt in which the King of France and
all his chivalry had failed”. The council broke up in the midst of universal
indignation.
However, in the spring of 1253, when de Montfort had
left Gascony and was staying in France, affairs in the province had come to
such a pitch as to necessitate active interference, and the Easter Parliament
yielded to the king’s request. After a discussion, which lasted more than a
fortnight, the barons granted him a scutage, and the clergy acquiesced in the
collection of the tithe. As the price however of the concession they
demanded that the king should observe all privileges and liberties previously
granted, both lay and clerical, and, on his promising this, a solemn
excommunication of all those who should infringe the charters was pronounced
with book and candle by the assembled prelates, the king and the whole council
taking part. But the effect of this imposing ceremony was spoilt by a
deed, which perhaps caused more universal indignation than any other, and made
the name of the chief actor in it “to stink in the nostrils” of all
Englishmen. Peter d'Aigueblanche, Money got
Bishop of Hereford, a native of Savoy, proposed to the king a plan for getting
money, to which the latter consented, but which nowadays would send its
perpetrators to the common gaol. The royal seal
was affixed to a schedule which was fastened so that the inside could not be
seen : the schedule was blank. The swindlers then, under some pretext or other,
obtained the signatures of several bishops and abbots to the schedule, which
was taken to Rome and filled up with an obligation to pay certain merchants of
Sienna sums of money owed them by the king. The Pope was duped into
believing that the prelates in question had signed with their eyes open, and
threatened them with excommunication if they did not act up to their
engagements. This story is given by so many authorities that in its main
features it cannot be doubted, it fully accounts for the vengeance taken
upon the Bishop of Hereford ten years later than this.
Meanwhile the parliamentary struggle continued, rising
and falling with monotonous variation. The magnates who assembled in January
1254, in the king’s absence, refused his demand for an aid, suspecting that his
pretext, the state of Gascony, was nothing but a false alarm: they promised
however to go in person to help him should it appear to be necessary. It is
remarkable as a step in the theory of assent to taxation that the bishops and
abbots, while promising an aid on their own account, refused to bind the rest
of the clergy by the same obligation. The partial good-will shown by the magnates on this occasion was soon cooled by the discovery that the king
had been attempting to dupe them. They assembled after Easter to hear his
renewed requests. They were made, as before, on the ground that an invasion by
the King of Castile was imminent. This was a strange excuse, seeing that just
at this time Eleanor of Castile was formally betrothed to Prince Edward.
Unfortunately too for Henry, Simon de Montfort was present, and was able to
give the magnates information as to the real state of things in the province,
which confirmed them in their decision not to send aid till they were better
certified as to the truth of the Spanish invasion. It was strange, they
said, that they never heard of such a danger when the Earl of Leicester
was in Gascony. So the council was dissolved, and Henry’s ruse failed. On the
king’s return, after Christmas 1254, the council, which met first at
Portsmouth, was shifted to London, and then to Winchester, and was finally
dissolved without any result. At the Easter Parliament of 1255, which was very
largely attended, the barons answered the king’s request for money, this time
in the shape of a renewal of the demand for the power of electing the three
chief officers of the Crown. They now supported the claim by a reference to
ancient custom, though history would hardly bear them out on this head. They
also laid to his charge fresh violations of the charters, and, as the king
would not yield to their request, Parliament was prorogued, in order that some
change of feeling might induce one party or the other to give way. The names of
those who were present at this Parliament are not preserved to us, so that we
do not know whether Simon de Montfort was there or not. He was in England, at
any rate, in the preceding autumn, and there is no reason to suppose,
especially after his nominal reconciliation with the king, that he absented
himself. He had been so far reinstated in his former position as to be
sent in the summer of 1254 on a confidential errand to Scotland, with a message
for the king, so secret and important that it could not be trusted to
paper. What its import was one can only guess.
By this time the real cause of the king’s renewed
demands had become known. The late Pope, Innocent IV, had endeavoured to make Henry his firm ally by appealing to his dynastic ambition. He had first
of all offered the throne of the Two Sicilies, as a
fief of the Church, escheated after the death of Frederick, to Richard of
Cornwall; and when that cautious and somewhat miserly prince drew back, he
chose the kings younger son Edmund as the recipient of his favour.
The weak but ambitious father, with his usual imprudence, eagerly took the
bait, and this was the crusade for which the tenth was to be granted. The
enemies of the Church were the imperialists: the promised land was Sicily
instead of Palestine. The great emperor and his two sons were dead, but the Ghibeline party did not perish with them, and Manfred,
Prince of Tarento, natural son of Frederick, was not
likely to yield without a struggle. But the king shut his eyes to all
difficulties, and the death of Innocent IV in 1254 caused no interruption, for
his successor, Alexander IV, took up the scheme with equal energy. Innocent had
extended the grant of the tenth to Henry for a further term of two years; he
had bidden both king and queen to abstain from useless expenses, in order the
better to prosecute the affair; more than once he urged Henry to enter actively
on it, and one of the last acts of his life was to bid him hasten to the
protection of Apulia, or he would have to find some other more worthy of the
throne. Even Richard, though too cautious to undertake the conquest of Sicily,
could not withstand the temptation of an imperial crown; Henry urged his
election, in the hope of an accession of strength against France; the Pope
eagerly promoted the same object, and he was crowned at Aachen, though only
supported by a portion of the Electors, in 1257. Henry, once started on this
ambitious policy, could not stop; and though unable to hold his provinces in
France, accepted the worthless offer of half the lands belonging to the King of
Castile in Africa as a dowry for Alfonso’s sister. The Pope, while allowing him
to change his vow of crusade for the help to be given to the Church in Sicily,
would not go so far as to let him dispute with the Saracens in Africa this
chimerical possession. The conditions on which the kingdom of the Two Sicilies was given to Edmund were embodied in a formal
agreement in 1255, by which the future king was reduced to the position of a
mere slave of Rome, restricted in a most degrading manner under terms which no
feudal lord would have thought of imposing on a vassal. The obligations entered
into by the king included the immediate liquidation of a debt of more than
135,000 marks, said to have been incurred by the Pope in the conquest of the
land. The negotiations connected with this engagement are the prominent feature
of the next few years, and did more than anything else to bring about the
catastrophe.
The attempts made by the Pope to expel Manfred from
Southern Italy were not successful. The papal forces were almost annihilated by
that prince, aided by a large body of Saracens, whom Frederick had settled at
Nocera. Shortly before this event the Bishop of Bologna had been sent with the
ring of investiture to England, and on his arrival the king lost no time in
getting the ceremony performed, and in addressing his son in public as King of
Sicily and Apulia. His paternal pride was however destined to receive a rude
check. The scheme was thoroughly unpopular in the country; the report that a
papal legate was on the point of arriving added greatly to the general
discontent, while the attitude of many of the greater barons, at this time
thought to have been bought over by the king, brought the nation to the verge
of despair. The Earl of Leicester, the one steadfast friend of national
liberty, was probably at this time absent in France. He had gone thither on
business of his own, and was empowered to prolong the truce, as it was a matter
of great importance that no obstacle should prevent the passage of the army
which Henry, with a childish sanguineness, hoped to convey to Italy.
The papal ambassador did appear, though not,
as was dreaded, furnished with the authority of a legate; his name
was Rustand; he was a lawyer, and a Gascon by birth.
On his arrival the Sicilian affair was brought forward by the king in the
October Parliament, 1255, with pressing demands for money. Earl Richard headed
the opposition, and declared he would have nothing to do with an engagement
undertaken without his counsel and the assent of the baronage. The barons,
returning in a remarkable manner to the original form of the Great Charter,
complained that they had not all been summoned to Parliament, and, in the
absence of so many of their peers, could, in accordance with the charter,
assent to nothing. At the ecclesiastical assembly held at the same time, the
Bishop of London vowed he would lose his head rather than submit, and was
supported by the Bishop of Worcester, who professed an equal readiness to be hanged.
The hopes raised by these bold utterances were further encouraged by the
proclamation of the Bishop of London, that no one in his diocese should obey
the orders or instructions of Rustand. Upon
this the king violently attacked him, and threatened to persuade the Pope to
unfrock him. The bishop made the memorable reply, “Let them take away my mitre, and I will put on my helmet”. The clergy in general,
in their diocesan assemblies, agreed on a single form of protest, in which they
objected that the tenth had been granted without their assent, and
that the previous concessions had been made for a specified object, which had
not even been attempted. Meanwhile Rustand and others
vigorously preached a crusade, which, being directed against
Christians instead of heathens or heretics, provoked more
scoffing than enthusiasm. Large sums had already been sent to Italy,
and had been swallowed up by the war against Manfred, whose success,
joined to a natural feeling of indignation against the way in which the
Pope had handed over the country to an unknown foreigner, caused all Apulia to
swear allegiance to him.
The opposition of all classes in England rendered and
the payment of the sums demanded quite impossible. The Pope sent letter after
letter urging haste, and threatening with excommunication all who refused to
pay the tenth. He even threatened to put the kingdom under an interdict,
and left no stone unturned to get the money. Next year the king
instead of lowering raised his demands. He produced papal letters in
support of the claim for a renewal of the tenth for five years, and other
extravagant exactions. The prelates, assembled separately in February 1256,
hard pressed by king and Pope, bullied by Rustand,
were on the point of giving way, but for the support of the lay magnates. They
however remained firm. It seems almost strange that they should have thought it
worthwhile to argue the point, or to give reasons for their refusal. They urged
however in self-defence the state of the realm, the
disturbances in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Gascony; pointed out the
difficulties of the Sicilian undertaking, the disadvantageous conditions
offered by the Pope; and finally, since the contract was made without their
knowledge, refused the aid demanded.
Meanwhile the object of Henry’s
wishes was critical rapidly falling from his grasp. He was sorely vexed by
the news he received of Manfred’s successes. The election of Richard to
the German Crown raised up a rival in the King of Castile, and a feeling of
jealousy in France which threatened every moment to burst forth into war. This
situation of course produced disturbances in Gascony, which were fomented by
the Spaniards. The Welsh harried the frontiers, the nobles of the northern
marches were disaffected towards the English king and his son-in-law of
Scotland, yet the infatuated monarch would not give up the struggle. He thought
to impress his subjects with a fait accompli, when in the Lent Parliament of
1257 he produced his son Edmund, with the royal ring on his finger, and in the
Apulian dress, as King of the Two Sicilies, before
the assembled magnates. At the same time he confessed the enormous debt of
350,000 marks, which he owed on his return from Gascony, and the full extent of
which seems to have been hidden from the public hitherto. In answer to his
appeal the laity remained obstinate, and the king was forced to use the
expedient of a scutage for an expedition against the Welsh, which probably
could only be levied on the poorer and weaker tenants. The clergy however,
seemingly in despair, voted the king the large sum of 52,000 marks on
consideration of that which ere now must have been
seen to be the weakest of safeguards, a fresh confirmation of. the charters,
and the promise of redress of grievances which were to be embodied in a
protest. This was the last great contribution which went to swell the list of
papal and royal exactions. Whether the money was ever collected or not seems
uncertain. The king is said to have refused to accept so paltry a gift. The
convocation which assembled in the following August to draw up the list of
grievances was dissolved prematurely on account of the Welsh war, and the grant
was probably lost sight of in the confusion of the next year. The ravages of
the Welsh drove the king in the summer of 1257 to summon all the forces of the
kingdom against them, but the army, by wanton destruction of the crops in order
to anticipate the enemy, did more harm to the country than the
Welsh. After suffering several defeats the famine which they
themselves had produced forced them to return. The failure of the
expedition, and the wound it inflicted on the national pride, were apparently
the last thing needed to break down the reverence of the people for their king.
At the same time a change occurred in Henry’s foreign
policy, which shows incidentally the growing strength of the
opposition. It is remarkable that all the ambassadors sent with Simon de
Montfort in the summer of 1257 to prolong the truce with France were among the
earls supporters, excepting Peter of
Savoy, who however had been one of his best
friends in 1252, and was after all but a lukewarm royalist. Hugh Bigod was the baronial Justiciar next
year. Adam Marsh was one of his oldest and most intimate friends; the
mantle of Grosseteste had fallen on Walter de Cantilupe,
Bishop of Worcester. Although the same cannot be said of the ambassadors
appointed to conduct the Sicilian affair in conjunction with the earl, yet
their instructions left no doubt as to what must be the result of their
embassy, and coincided with what we find afterwards to have been Simon’s
policy. The king was still very unwilling to relinquish the enterprise,
and wrote to the Pope to say that in spite of the opposition of the barons he
hoped still to carry it through. The commissioners were entrusted
with full power to amend the conditions on which the concession of the kingdom
of Sicily had been made. They were to obtain a relaxation of the threat of
interdict, and a further respite in the performance of the king’s engagements.
If possible, the matter was to be peaceably arranged by the marriage of Edmund
with Manfred’s daughter. If the Pope refused these proposals, they were to
offer him a choice between three courses, which were such that he was extremely
unlikely to take any one of them. In case of need they were empowered to
renounce the whole scheme. It was evident that the Pope would hardly grant such
conditions as would satisfy de Montfort, and that if he had the direction of
the affair it would end in a complete renunciation. It was announced that the
object of the embassy to France was to secure peace for the prosecution of the
Sicilian scheme; the best result of the embassy to Rome would have been that of
securing peace with France by the removal of the cause of jealousy, the
Sicilian scheme itself. Simon de Montfort did not go to Rome, nor did his
colleagues; they could ill be spared by their
respective parties at this crisis. They did however go to France; but, though
kindly received by the king, they got nothing but hard words from the nobility,
and returned with small success. As long as the English claims on Normandy were
kept up, a lasting peace with France was impossible.
Both these embassies, though unsuccessful, were signs
of a new foreign policy, which struck at the roots of one of the great
causes of internal discontent. They are the first indications that the steady
opposition of the English people to unwise interference in foreign affairs was
beginning to tell. It was the first triumph of a tendency
which the final cession of Normandy two years later, when Simon de
Montfort was in power, shows to have been after the earl’s own
heart. The king in giving way so far as he did seems to have had an
inkling of what was about to happen; he may well have been
appalled at the temper of the country. He had just had a warning of
the fiery passions smouldering around him, only
waiting for an opportunity to burst forth in a great conflagration. It was
apparently at the time when the magnates were assembled in London for
the Lent Parliament of 1257 that a violent quarrel broke out between the Earl
of Leicester and William of Valence. The latter, trusting that his
royal brother would support him in his insolence, and not content with humbler
prey, had made an inroad on de Montfort’s lands, and carried off some of
his property. The earl seems to have brought the matter before the king, and
in the dispute which arose William added insult to injury by
calling Simon, in the presence of the assembled barons, a
traitor, which, as the chronicler naively observes, is a great offence to a
knight. Whereupon Simon was so enraged that he drew his sword, and
would have revenged himself upon his enemy then and there but
for the intervention of the king, who, in fear for his brother’s life, threw
himself between the disputants. The incident was probably soon forgotten,
but it was enough to show what was to be feared. However, after the Welsh
expedition, a moment of quiet ensued; several of the chiefs of the opposition
were absent in France; the year closed without any indication that an outbreak
was nearer than it had been any time within the last five years.
Meanwhile Henry found leisure to visit the Abbey of St
Albans, and means to make princely offerings to the shrine. These were indeed
the occupations which best suited him, the only consolations which he still
retained. Such a spectacle arouses feelings of a mingled nature. For while we
condemn Henry as a ruler, and find him hardly less despicable as a man, yet, in
the midst of such trouble as was shortly to burst upon him, some feeling of
pity is mingled with our resentment The death of his daughter Katharine, the
illness of the queen, the triumph of the Welsh, the disappointment of his hopes
in Sicily, threw him about this time into a violent fever. He was now just
fifty years old. The gaiety and conversational powers which had enlivened his
brothers table at Wallingford, and astonished the monks of St Albans, had given
place to a violence of temper, to which indeed he had always been liable, but
which had now reached such a point that when the fit was on him—and the slightest
opposition sufficed to rouse it—his most constant attendants dared not approach
him. He had hardly a man, beyond creatures like John Mansel, whom
he could call his friend; he had alienated almost all his
vassals in turn; the English barons whom he tried to win took his gifts and
opposed him in the council; the foreigners whom he pampered sneered at him, and
used him for their own of selfish ends. But though no one loved him, his
character was not such as to make him hated as his father was; he was the object
of dislike and contempt rather than of hatred and fear. With his brother
Richard he was never on good terms; even his eldest son, in whom a noble
character was nearly ruined by paternal indulgence, had openly called him to
account for his injustice. He had no claim on the affections of his people; he
had not added to, nay, he had diminished, English power abroad. He could not
dazzle the nation with feats of arms like his uncle Richard, or enforce their
respect like his grandfather with administrative reform. Affectionate he was,
but his was too often the random affection which is worthless to its object;
liberal, but with other men’s money; personally brave, but no commander;
virtuous, but his virtues were of a negative kind. He was not cruel, but he looked
on the traders and the Jews as sheep kept only to be shorn; he was not by
nature a despot, but he had no idea of political rights. He was ambitious, but
short-sighted; credulous, but distrustful; sanguine, but timid. He was not
resolute, but obstinate; not selfish, but weak; a man of great desires, but
little will. He possessed a certain cunning, but not the astuteness and
decision of John. He had the same want of political insight, but neither the
nobility of character nor the power of inspiring affection, which characterised Charles I. To his credit it must be
acknowledged that, with a father and grandfather who were notoriously
licentious, Henry was a blameless husband; but this very uxoriousness was no
small cause of his troubles. In a superstitious age two traits in his
character commanded some respect, however little they
may win now. Although not grateful as a rule, but rather chafing
under an obligation, he never forgot the debt he owed to Rome for saving him
his crown. Although no oath was sacred to him, although he thought
nothing of seizing without the shadow of an excuse the goods of a merchant, his
devoutness was such that the pious King of France said, “Whatever
be his sins, his prayers and offerings will save his soul”.
Of the character of his great antagonist it is harder
to judge. Hitherto we have seen but little of him; our view has been confined
to the general course of the constitutional struggle, which I have traced,
however imperfectly, up to the point where it suddenly enters upon a new phase
in the Revolution of 1258. The history is a somewhat wearisome and monotonous
one; the contest seems endless and resultless; the
country is to all appearance as badly off, the chance of relief as distant, the
deadlock in the government as hopeless, as ten years before. But in the
interval parties have been forming, political ideas ripening; the conviction
that such a state of things must have an end has grown stronger and stronger.
It is impossible to trace with certainty the part Simon de Montfort took
in the preliminary struggle. The few allusions to him after his return from
Gascony leave the impression that the king tried at one time to conciliate him,
at another to keep him out of the way. We find him acting as ambassador to
France and Scotland, though on no occasion does he seem to have stayed long
away. With his public duties on one of these occasions he combined certain
private transactions in France, and such matters may have demanded his
attention at other times, but we may fairly believe that during the greater
part of the four years previous to the meeting of the Mad Parliament he was in
England. He had increased the kings obligations to him by becoming his creditor
to a large amount, not only for what was still owing to him from the Gascon
accounts, but for a voluntary loan. Various more or less doubtful securities
were given him for this debt: the money owed by the Earl of Norfolk to the
Crown; the debts of a certain Jew, Aaron by name; lastly the castle and lands
of Bigorre, in Gascony. He took his place among the
nobles who witnessed the writ by which in 1256 the title of the young king of
Scotland to the earldom of Huntingdon was confirmed. In the next
year several knights fees were conferred upon him, and he received a promise
from the king not to dispute a will he intended to make.
With such scant notice of the public life of de
Montfort we must be content. Of his private life, since the death of
Bishop Grosseteste, we know less than ever : the letters of Adam Marsh to him,
if any, as does not appear probable, were written during this period,
tell us next to nothing. There seems no reason to believe, as
has been suggested, that he submitted to a voluntary exile in France, away from
his fair lands of Kenilworth and Odiham. We need not suppose, and it is of
itself very improbable, that a man who stood in the very first rank of the
baronage, nominally reconciled to, if not actually
on friendly terms with, the king, should have left his country and abstained
from politics at such a crisis. There were indeed during the last four years no
such vigorous attempts to resist the oppressor as those of 1246
and 1248—the resistance had become rather sullen and passive—nor were
there the like opportunities of personal distinction. But are we therefore
to conclude that the man who was so prominent in the period before he took
office in Gascony, and who appears as the recognised leader in 1258, lived in retirement all this time? If his name is not mentioned
by contemporary historians as a leader, no more is the name of any other. Yet
leaders there must have been even of such opposition as there was, and it is
impossible to account for the position Simon de Montfort assumed immediately on
the outbreak of the revolution, by any other hypothesis than that he was one of
the foremost of those leaders. His opinions and character had long been known
to a small body of liberal-minded men : a much larger party were now beginning
to look up to him as the one man in whom they could trust. I have already
alluded to the change of Henry’s foreign policy in the year 1257, as a proof
that the principles embraced by the earl were making way. And by whose agency
should they have made way, if not by his? He was not the man to hurry on a
premature development in order to call attention to himself. It is no wonder if
the chroniclers, noting down events year by year, failed to observe till the
outbreak the steps by which he won the lead. His rise was gradual and
unobserved by many. His was not the flashy liberalism of unthinking youth, but
the settled judgment of a mature experience. We do not know that he ever theorised in politics; he certainly did not found a school;
in statecraft there were probably living some, though not many, who were his
superiors. The popular reverence for him was likewise slow in growing. A
nation, especially perhaps the English nation, is slow to recognise its great men. The feeling which placed Simon de
Montfort on the same pedestal with St. Thomas of Canterbury was not the growth
of a day, but it had its roots in the heart of a people. That which gave
him his strength, that which drew men to follow him to the death, was this:
that the love of right, the feeling of sympathy with an injured people, became
in him a stern resolve which no temptation could shake, no obstacle stay, no
danger intimidate. As the men of an earlier day, the links between the gloomy
present and the glories of the Great Charter, one by one disappeared, he stood
forth alone. His peers were almost all more or less suspect: on him rested no
stain of yielding. The friends and counsellors on whom he had depended
were gone; he was far past the prime of life. But his was not the nature to be
daunted by the lonely heights, solitude showed him his strength. The time was
come, and with it the man.
THE POSITION OF PARTIES IN 1258.
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