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THE LIFE OF SIMON DE MONTFORT . EARL OF LEICESTER
CHAPTER VI.
THE POSITION OF PARTIES IN 1258.
Before we enter upon the final act of the drama,
it will be better perhaps to pause and review the parties which were
arrayed against the king, the steps in his policy and in that of the Pope
which had led to the union of the national forces against them, the
evils complained of, and the claims made. The
national party may be said to have consisted of the whole body of the clergy,
the greater portion of the lay baronage, including almost all
the smaller barons, and London with the sea-port towns; the other towns
were perhaps rather on the king’s side than on that of his opponents, and the
lower classes cannot be said to have had much influence on affairs as yet. The
king’s supporters were at first, with the exception of a few lukewarm members
of the baronage, and some still rarer exceptions in the Church, only his
creatures, his foreign relatives, and the crowd of parasites whom he had
introduced; these however with their dependents made up no contemptible
force. Later on, by the desertions from the opposition, by the aid he
received from the foreign clergy in the country,
through the moral influence of the Pope and the King of France, his party
became far superior to that of his foes. It is observable that the originators
of the revolt of 1215, the northern barons, had much less to do with that of
1258, and afterwards took up a neutral if not royalistic attitude. The strength
of the opposition lay at this time in the great midland baronage, which had in
the earlier struggle formed the second rank in historical order if not in
importance. The weight of the smaller barons was now much greater, and the
civic element had received an accession of strength in the south-eastern
sea-ports. The influence of the universities must not be neglected, but, though
morally great, it was not of much practical use when it came to blows. In the
earlier revolt the national party, though more completely successful at first,
and though it left behind it an imperishable monument, hardly preserved its
superiority long enough to find time to disintegrate; but signs were not
wanting to show that, had circumstances permitted, had John been really
overpowered, it would have broken up of itself, as it did after the victory it
won in the Mad Parliament. It was a great disadvantage in the latter case that
there was no churchman of the eminence and character which enabled Stephen
Langton to take the lead of the whole party. Deprived of their natural head—for
Archbishop Boniface was in no way worthy of the chair of St. Thomas—the clergy
could only take up a subordinate position, and their ranks were less united
than before. It was also a great drawback that there was no Fitz-Walter, no
William Marshall. Simon de Montfort was by birth, and in the opinion of his
peers remained to the end, an alien. The popular instinct saw as usual more
clearly than the eyes which were blinded by the prejudices of an exclusive
caste. It must be allowed that as a whole the baronage do not come
nearly so well out of the ordeal as their fathers. True national feeling was
not so strong in the most powerful portion of society as it had been fifty
years before; it had descended one step, and it received expression at the
hands of an individual rather than a class. The kernel of the constitutional
party, the band of men that followed Simon de Montfort to the end, was so small
and comparatively so weak that it never had any chance of ultimate success. The
class that was to win by his most advanced reforms was not ready to enjoy, nor
strong enough to hold, the benefits he offered them. The movement of 1258 was
only the natural result of thirty years of bad government; its chief result was
to show the incompleteness of the political ideas of the time, and to throw the
real leader into clearer relief. The movement of 1264 was premature; its
budding principles were nipped by the frosts incident to a too early spring,
but they contained the germs of a fruit which is far from having ripened yet.
Of the elements of the opposition above-mentioned the
Church had probably most to complain of, and to her we owe more than to any
other body the protection of our freedom in
early days. It has been already seen how for half a
century before Magna Carta the opposition to unjust taxation was kept up by the
Church and by the Church alone. Edmund Rich had not the courage or
the power needful to follow in Langton’s steps, but he did his best; the
roll of great names was continued by Grosseteste, Cantelupe, Sewal, Basset. It is impossible to say how much
we are indebted to the example of the Church, to its broadening and anti-feudal
influence, to its institutions, which kept the idea of universal equality
combined with order, of authority and the popular voice, ever before the
people. Still for a great part of this century the English clergy were thrust
out of their right position by the general situation of the
Church. The key to the papal policy in England during the first half of
the thirteenth century is the struggle between the papacy and the empire; the
immediate harm the struggle did was immense, and the papal power declined from
the very moment of victory; but out of evil comes good, and it may be fairly
said that we owe the constitutional advance of that century in a great measure
to the ambition of Rome.
Fortunately for England, the simultaneous deaths of
John and Innocent III gave her time to recover from the effects of the
civil war and of papal interference. It was in opposition to king and Pope that
the barons had won the charter; the leader of the opposition was the head of the
English Church, and before the Reformation that Church was perhaps never nearer
a schism than at that moment. Honorius III did not lose the opportunity of
influencing England through the monarchy; his protection of the youthful king
was most hearty, and, on the whole, beneficial to the country, for his legates,
avaricious as they were, exerted themselves in the cause of order, and order
was what the country wanted at the moment. But the accession of Gregory IX, the
policy of Frederick II, the coming of age of Henry III, gave a new direction to
the relations of England and Rome. Henry was full of gratitude and devotion to
the papacy; both temporally and spiritually he felt himself bound to support
the Church everyone who could claim any connexion with Rome found a welcome at his Court. But his weakness allowed unscrupulous
men to get him into their power, and under the evil auspices of Peter des
Roches papal exactions reached an unprecedented height. Fortunately the
national spirit of Langton rested, to some extent, on his immediate successors,
and the fall of the Bishop of Winchester checked for a time the subservience of
England to the Pope.
Still the growing vehemence of the conflict between
Frederick, ‘the wonder of the world’, and the papacy, a conflict in which not
Christendom alone, but Mohammedanism too was involved, prevented
England from remaining aloof. The bond which had been signed by John,
degrading England to the position of a fief of Rome, supplied the legal ground
of exactions, which, apart from Peter’s pence and the regular
feudal tribute of a thousand marks, were limited only by
the endurance of the English people. England had not remained untouched by the
distant waves of the storm raised by Hildebrand and Henry, by Alexander
and Barbarossa; but it was under Innocent III, and still more
under his successors, that she was drawn into the full influence of the
hurricane. She was as yet untainted by heresy, and though the cruel deceptions
of the Albigensian crusade obtained but little sympathy here, political reasons
may be sufficient to account for
the notable absence of Englishmen from the armies of the elder
Simon de Montfort. But although men from every part of Europe
had contributed to crush the spark of free-thought that arose in a corner of France,
it was a different matter when heretical opinions were, rightly or wrongly,
attributed to the temporal head of Christendom. Frederick, the fascinating
embodiment of the spirit of that early renaissance, drew all eyes upon him by
the splendour of his youthful achievements, the vigour of his intellect, the novel luxury and eastern
elegance of his Court, the air of mystery which at once attracted and repelled
the vulgar gaze. His caustic epigrams went the round of Europe, and were
treasured up against him in the note-books of the Popes. But what told more for
him than all this was the fact that the battle against the temporal power was
no longer fought by a pure Church, aiming at most at a complete spiritual
independence, but by an arrogant hierarchy, organised and disciplined on feudal principles, aspiring to universal dominion. Gregory
excommunicated Frederick for not going on crusade, and was enraged beyond
measure because he went. The policy of Innocent, who used the voice of the
Church assembled at Lyons to pull down one of the two pillars of Christendom,
was condemned even by the saintly Louis. The restoration of the kingdom of
Jerusalem, though not reckoned by Rome, was remembered to Frederick’s advantage
by the rest of Europe, and men shuddered, as at the worst of civil wars, when
the forces of the Emperor, with the red cross still upon them, marched to meet
the forces of the Pope. The exactions of the Curia would have offended the
national sense of Englishmen, even had they been devoted to the crusade against
the infidel for which they were nominally made; but when it was known that the
crusade was against fellow-Christians, the demands of Rome were felt to have no
ground. The general feeling in Europe was expressed, though others dared not
express it so boldly, by the Paris priest, who, when bidden to publish the ban
against Frederick, declared from his pulpit that the Pope excommunicated the
Emperor, and the Emperor the Pope; which of the two were right he could not
tell, but “in the name of God who knoweth all” he
excommunicated him who was in the wrong. In England the feeling is stated
by Matthew Paris to have been, as elsewhere, one of great confusion and
uncertainty; men knew not which side to take. “The Church”
they said, “and especially that most devoted branch of it, the English Church,
suffers daily oppression from the Curia, but never has she been oppressed by
the Emperor. The Pope accuses the Emperor of heresy; but
in his letters he writes as a humble Catholic concerning God”.
Opinion thus divided needed but little to throw its full weight on
the anti-papal side.
The papacy could hardly have won as it did but for the
aid of three things: first and foremost that of the two great orders of Friars
Preachers and Friars Minors, noble instruments in the hand of an evil
policy; that of the Lombard cities, whose liberties Frederick vainly and
foolishly endeavoured to crush; and that of English
gold. With the first and last only of these we are concerned here. The
enthusiastic devotion, the self-denial, the early simplicity and
poverty, of the friars won them a hold on the lower
classes in England, which was a strong tower of support to the
Church. How should the authority which canonised St.
Dominic and St. Francis go wrong? And not only among the lower classes did
their influence extend : the Franciscans became confessors to the highest
nobles; they were the leaders of education at the universities. Their chief
enemies were the older monastic foundations, who were prompted by a kind of
professional jealousy, added to a feeling of shame at the work which the friars
did and which they left undone, and of envy at the bestowal of papal favour, to revile the new comers as slaves of the papacy,
and to proclaim upon every occasion the growing corruption which too soon began
to eat into even the order of St. Francis. Thus the friars held an ambiguous
position, and those who patronised them, as Bishop
Grosseteste, were compromised in the eyes of the great body of the regular
clergy, who suffered most of all from papal exactions. On the other hand this connexion would not have had any of the like
disadvantageous effects on the position of a layman like Simon de Montfort,
who, while on most intimate terms with Adam Marsh and other leading
Franciscans, did not appear in the light of a public patron of the order. This
long friendship is however specially interesting to us, as testifying to the
serious and earnest character of Simons mind, to his thirst for knowledge, and
to his deeply religious disposition, while at the same time it may have
originated, or at least matured, those broad and popular sympathies which
afterwards so endeared him to the people.
But it was the last of the three supports
above-mentioned, and the outrageous demands of the Curia, which did
most to determine the position of the English clergy
in the constitutional struggle. This position was not taken up at
once. The attitude of the episcopate during these years varied
considerably, and is full of apparent contradictions. It depended chiefly
on the changing relations of king and Pope, to both of whom the good-will of
the English Church was of the greatest importance. In accordance with
these relations the kind of influence and the amount of pressure brought by the
Pope to bear upon his ecclesiastical vassals in England varied considerably. On
what grounds did this influence rest, and how was it
applied? Innocent III had laid down the law of episcopal elections; they
were to be free on the part of the clergy, but subject to the consent both of
Pope and king. But he further extended the papal claim. He asserted
successfully the right of sanctioning the election to bishoprics, and John
having given up his share of the right, he became sole arbiter. It
was already evident from the case of Archbishop Stephen, that this
right was equivalent to that of appointment. Still this could hardly be
extended to the whole of the episcopate, and it did not give the Pope
sufficient hold on the English Church. The hierarchical tendencies of the
episcopate were a more real support to the papacy than the right of
appointment, and these were more fully understood and more boldly used by
Innocent IV. The question of the episcopal visitation of monasteries and of
episcopal rights over cathedral chapters was that which most agitated the
English Church at this time. The most influential of the English bishops,
Grosseteste of Lincoln, Cantilupe of Worcester, and
others, were making great efforts to assert their authority over the regular
clergy within their dioceses; and, on the whole, they seem to have been
successful. Their attempts met with very strong opposition on the part of
the regular clergy, and invectives on this head are constantly met with in the
monastic chronicles of the time. Grosseteste appears to have visited his
diocese yearly, and in his first visitation deposed seven abbots and four
priors, while he made diligent enquiries into the rights of
the beneficed clergy. His example was energetically followed by the
Bishop of Worcester. We find the latter enforcing rules of his own on the
monks, and banishing the how used recalcitrant to other
abbeys. Innocent IV seems to have perceived that the bishops in England
were more important to him than the religious orders. He therefore favoured these efforts, supported the Bishop of Lincoln in
the question as to the right of visitation of the chapter, and sought to win
rather than subdue the episcopate. He listened favourably to their objections against archiepiscopal visitations, and laid down the mode
of that visitation, and a regular scale of charges. He even went so far as to
bribe them with a hint that he would allow pluralities, and conferred on the
bishopric of Lincoln the privilege that no one offered for preferment by the
Pope should be provided for out of the patronage of that see without special
recognition of the power to withhold the gift It was not till near the end of
his life, when he had a more facile ally, that the Pope turned against the
Bishop of Lincoln, and refused to allow his appeal against the exemptions
granted to the Cistercians and other orders. It was owing partly to this
politic action of Innocent IV, and partly to the conviction that it
was hopeless to depend on the king for protection, that the bishops
were induced to vote such enormous sums of money for the support
of the papal see. In the early years of Henry III
they had staunchly opposed royal claims for money, and had even resisted
the encroachments of papal power; but, as time went on, their resistance to the latter
had grown very weak. Their opposition to the king was always stronger, and
they were never at one with him; it was only at one period, about the year
1247, that even the lower clergy were on his side, and then he was raving at
the episcopate for conceding to the Pope the aid they refused the sovereign.
These causes then—the claim of visitation and the concessions made to the Pope
by the higher clergy—were chiefly instrumental in producing the split that for
so long a time divided the Church of England, and made a firm defence of their rights impossible. The episcopal policy
will be best understood by a brief examination of the character and conduct of
Bishop Grosseteste, the most distinguished churchman of his day.
Robert Grosseteste, during the latter half of his
episcopate, and, in the absence of Archbishop Boniface,
the real head of the English Church, was a staunch
churchman, a man full of belief in the ecclesiastical power, in its world-wide
extension, its holy office. He was moreover an ardent supporter of the papacy,
a believer in rule and order; though sprung from the people, he was no
democrat; in a word, he was as real a member of the hierarchy as Gregory or
Innocent. But this high opinion of the Church brought with it a deep-rooted
conviction of its great responsibility, its dangers, and its duties. This vast
power must be exercised only for the glory of God; no taint of earthly motives
must corrupt that dignity which is so high above the earth. It was this noble
ideal which he defended alike against king and Pope. The power of the Pope was
unlimited, he thought; he allowed to Pope and cardinals the right of all
presentations, but this right should not be abused to thrust Italians, unable
to speak English, or relatives of the Pope with nothing else to recommend them,
into English benefices. The last act of his life was to refuse Innocents demand
of a canonry at Lincoln for one of his nephews. The monarchy was ordained of
God, he considered, but its duty was not to waste the people committed to it,
nor to coerce the Church which was independent of it. Carrying this notion of
spiritual superiority further, he placed the papacy above the empire, and
therefore supported it in its struggle, which he regarded with somewhat of
prejudice, as carried on by the Church and not by an individual. He seems never
to have opposed a demand for a contribution to be made bona fide on behalf of
the Pope. It was a different matter when the tenth was demanded for the king by
the Pope in 1252. It was not till the temporal ambition of the Pope became
fully apparent, and Innocent leagued with Henry for the prosecution of so
worldly an object as the Sicilian crown, that he set his face against the
project with all the vigour of a character which
remained strong as ever in spite of approaching death.
This being his attitude, it is not surprising that he
was misunderstood, and it must be confessed that his notions of the
ecclesiastical power led him at first to sacrifice the national interests to
this object. He would have said that he regarded the souls of his people rather
than their pockets; but the mass of the clergy, whose laxities he visited so
severely, and who had to bear the expenses to which he consented, were hardly
likely to sympathise with him. We accordingly find
him and the rest of the bishops becoming suspect throughout England, and
considered weak and cowardly. Grosseteste’s sympathy with the friars, and its
effect on his position in the Church, have been already alluded to. The feeling
of hostility which he stirred up could not altogether be obliterated by his
constant support of national liberties against royal encroachment, and his
unswerving refusal to appoint incompetent aliens to the dignities of the
Church. There were few souls high enough fully to appreciate and love him; he
was looked upon as an Ishmael, whose hand was against every man, and every
man’s hand was against him. Still, the beautiful legends told of what happened
at his death, and the miracles said to have been performed at his shrine, show
that the classes in which his friends the friars had most influence revered him
as a saint. His last opposition to the Pope, on the question of
presentation, seems to have obscured the true conception of his
character, which is evident from his life as a whole; Matthew Paris,
constrained to find some ground of praise, calls him in terms which he would
have been the first to reject, “an outspoken opponent of king and Pope, the
hammer of the Romans”; while he goes on to acknowledge his many other virtues,
and his fulfilment of all the highest duties of a bishop. Such was the
friend, the protector, the counsellor of Simon de Montfort.
About the time of Grosseteste’s death a change
occurred, which caused this split to heal, and united the clerical
Party. Innocent IV had, from the time of his accession, taken up a still
more decided line of action than his predecessor. The fruits of this were soon
felt in England. “He laid aside all shame” we read, and extorted larger sums of
money than any before him, so that “a murmur of complaint, loud though late,
rose up from the heart of England”. His opinion of England was expressed in the
words, “Verily it is an inexhaustible fount, and where there is much abundance,
thence can much be extorted”. But for some time, and especially during the heat
of the struggle, when Innocent depended mainly on the episcopate, the king’s
opposition threw difficulties in his way. We have seen the warmth of Henry’s
youthful devotion and gratitude to the Holy See, which Honorius did not live to
put to the test. Gregory IX stood towards him in the double relation of a
feudal lord and a spiritual father; while claiming the right of appointment, he recognised to a certain extent the ancient royal
rights over the Church. This policy bore fruit in the partial approval shown by
Henry of his action against Frederick, as testified by the publication of the
ban in England. But during most of his papacy, and the first part of that of
Innocent IV, the connexion between Henry and his
great brother-in-law the Emperor, the threats and entreaties of the latter, and
the authority exerted by the Pope, without royal leave, over the bishops, did
much to cool the ardour of Henry’s devotion. From the
first Innocent IV had paid considerable attention to him, and had issued bulls
confirming his rights, declaring his intention not to interfere with lay
patronage, bidding the clergy support their king; such favours were however too cheap to win Henry completely. After the death of the Emperor
and the collapse of the secular power he made greater efforts. Henry had now
nothing more to fear from the indignation of the Emperor; his dynastic ambition
could be utilised to its full extent. Innocent
perceived that he could not win all interests, he therefore confined his
attention to the king, and sought to make him his firm ally by more substantial favours. About the same time Henry, on his side,
showed an inclination to come to a better understanding with the Pope. As early
as 1250 we find him requesting the tenth. The Pope at that time declined to
grant it, declaring it unconstitutional to do so without consent of the clergy.
He also refused to allow him the tenth requested from the Church of Scotland, a
demand which he styled “utterly unheard of”. But such petty scruples soon gave
way when it occurred to him that he might make use of Henry as a tool to uproot
imperialism in Italy. The crusade from which he had formerly dissuaded him, as
endangering the peace of his own country, was now urged upon him with the
greatest eagerness; the unconstitutional tenth from England, and that
unheard-of contribution from Scotland, were now granted willingly enough. The
move was a bold one, and at first appeared likely to prove successful; but the
Pope had over-reached himself. It was this alliance of their foes which united
the different sections of the English clergy, and welded them into the solid
mass they had formed forty years before. Instead of the mutual support which
king and Pope expected, nothing went further to undermine the influence
of both than this unnatural union of the temporal and spiritual power,
this coalition of the Pope who ought to have been an emperor with the king who
ought to have been a monk.
Along with this process of union grew the political
ideas of the Church, and its clearness of political vision. Nothing is more
remarkable than the reverence displayed at first for the papacy. In the
long lists of grievances drawn up by the representatives of the clergy, it is
constantly suggested that the true state of the case is hidden from the Pope
and the Curia, that if they knew the reality they would never countenance such
exactions. The convocation in 1255 declared their intention of appealing to the
Pope, “who beyond doubt was a most holy man”. But the truth began to dawn upon
them at last, although as late as 1257 they resolved to claim papal protection
against the king. Long before this it had been darkly hinted that Pope and king
were intriguing merely to get money, and the temper of convocation in 1257
showed that they were becoming convinced of the fact. The deception by which
money was demanded as a subsidy for the crusade, while it was intended for the
Sicilian scheme, and the exposure of the still grosser piece of trickery practised by the Bishop of Hereford, must have shown
everyone the truth. The crusades were in many ways one of the chief
supports of papal power during this age, and the Popes knew well how to convert
the crusading spirit to their own ends. But at this time devotion to the
Church, we are informed, began to grow cold, and therewith the impulse towards crusades. Moreover, with the growth of national
feeling in England had grown the idea of a National Church. In 1244 we find the
theory of a distinction between Churches advanced; the clergy in their
remonstrance say that as the Church of Rome has its patrimony, so other
Churches have theirs; that they are not tributary Churches, the Pope having
indeed the care of all souls, but being in no sense the owner of all Church
property. On the contrary, they recognise the right
of lay patronage, and the consequent claim to a voice in the management of
Church property which belongs to lay and of patrons. Once too, in 1246, they
recollect that there is an authority yet higher than the Pope; they threaten to
appeal to the General Council; but they do not seem to have dared to carry out
the threat. They replied to Rustand’s demands with
the argument, that it is true in a certain sense that the property of the
Church belongs to the Pope, but only inasmuch as it is under his protection; he
has no more right to the enjoyment or appropriation of it than a king has to
seize the property of subjects whom it is his duty to defend. The venality of
the Curia, from which they had often to buy the confirmation of elections, the
secular character of the struggle in which the Pope was engaged, scandalised many whom the mere amount of the papal
exactions might not have offended;
But the less ideal grievances they had to complain
of—the vast number of Italian ecclesiastics in possession of
English revenues, amounting, according to one calculation, to more
than three times the ordinary royal income; the incompetence of these
persons, and the consequent neglect of their cures; the summoning of English
ecclesiastics out of England to plead before church the Curia: the pernicious
effect of the clause ‘Non obstante’ so often introduced into papal decrees, and
thence imitated in royal edicts, by which all confidence in agreements and
grants was destroyed; that ‘most obnoxious statute’, that all prelates must
come to Rome to be confirmed in their sees; and, more than
all, the ever-increasing pecuniary demands—these were
doubtless more present to their minds than the advanced theories mentioned
above. The avarice of Rome is a constant theme of the satirical poems,
whose punning verse assailed not only the Curia, but many English prelates
too. Certain bishops are said to prefer lucre to Luke, marks to Mark, the
bag to the Book. But at Rome matters are at their worst, and if the head
of the world be foul, how is the rest of the body to be clean? Everything
is for sale in Rome: “Give, and it shall be given unto you”, is the rule; he
that gives most gets most favour from the
judges. Pope and cardinals lead the race for wealth, all other dignitaries
follow in their order; all pillage as they can. If such were the feelings
raised by papal extortion, what was likely to be the effect when the king
joined hands with the extortioner, and brought the whole weight of popular
indignation on himself, with far less dignity and reverence to defend him than
belonged to his ecclesiastical ally? It was but natural, if the efforts of the
English Church were henceforward more heartily and more effectively directed
against the encroachments of the king than they had been against those of the
Pope.
It remains to consider the constitutional position of
the Church in England, and its relations to the king. The new ideas concerning
the independence of the Church, as yet comparatively moderate and vague in
Lanfranc’s day, had been recognised to a certain
extent by William I. The corner-stone of ecclesiastical liberty, a separate lay
and clerical jurisdiction, though only partially granted by him, showed how far
things had advanced from the almost complete fusion of Church and State before
the Conquest Yet under the Conqueror the Church was full of Norman vassals, and
was little more than an instrument of royal despotism. It was revivified by the
purity of Anselm, but the successful tyranny of Rufus shows how little able it
was as yet to stand firm against the king. The slight support which Anselm
received from Rome threw the English Church back upon itself, and contributed
to the growth of its nationality; but Anselm was and remained an Italian, and
the struggle for investiture which he fought had far less of interest
for England than the struggle which made Thomas a popular hero. It was not
till Stephen’s reign that the Church began to take up a really independent position.
About the same time the religious revival, and the increased study of the canon
law, gave the Church at once a hold on popular veneration and a greater sense
of its own dignity. It began to appear as the representative of popular
liberties, at least by force of example. By Becker’s time England had
learnt to consider the English Church as its own, and this feeling was
strengthened by Becker’s well-known attitude towards the papacy. He was
disgusted by the compromising policy of Alexander III, who dared not offend Henry:
never would he go to Rome, he swore; let them go who prevailed in their sins.
He was less of an ultramontane than Robert Grosseteste. His martyrdom was a
victory for the English Church, and frustrated the plans by which Henry had
hoped. to subject it to the state; it was also a great advantage for
the papacy. After that event papal influence rose, and royal
influence fell, till John gave up the right of consent to election which Henry
I had formulated in law, and conceded to the Church perfect freedom in the
matter. The omission of any special mention of the right in subsequent
confirmations of Magna Carta was probably due to the same feeling on the part
of the regents which prompted the omission of the constitutional
clauses. Taking advantage of this, Henry III constantly ignored the claims
of the cathedral chapters to the choice of bishops. The persons selected
by those bodies seem, it is true, to have been often so unworthy as to justify
papal interference, and to the papal choice we owe some of the greatest
ornaments of the English Church. But the same defence cannot be made for the king; Peter des Roches, Archbishop Boniface, Aylmer of
Winchester, Peter d'Aigueblanche, are mournful
illustrations of the use he made of royal power. It is evident that the theory
of the independence of the Church had made but little advance in England,
though it had received constitutional recognition in Magna Carta. The English
Church was indeed less independent of the king in 1258 than in 1215, and far
less independent of the Pope than in the days of Becket.
But this subjection to royal power was more and more
resented. Ideas on this point were now further developed; ecclesiastical
principles were more closely applied to the existing state of society than ever
before. In the great manifesto of ecclesiastical rights which Grosseteste
published about the year 1236, in the form of a letter to the primate, he
opposed the recent ordinance by which the king appointed abbots as itinerant
justices, laying down the principle that no ecclesiastic can hold a secular
office. The subjection of ecclesiastical to secular tribunals ‘in actione personali’, and
especially in cases of supposed disobedience to royal mandate, was objected to
on the ground that consecrated members are freer than lay members of the great
body of the Church, just as the spirit rules the flesh, not the flesh the
spirit. Ecclesiastical judges ought to decide in disputed questions whether a
case belonged to the ecclesiastical or to the secular court, seeing that
authority is delegated by the former, as by a superior, to the
latter. The king, it was alleged, violated this principle; nay, he went
further, and often prevented ecclesiastics from deciding in purely
ecclesiastical cases, or hindered their decision, sometimes even gave judgment
himself. Bishops ought not to be compelled to give account of their right to
presentation, or their reasons for refusing those offered for preferment; in
cases of disputed patronage the ecclesiastical courts should decide; it might
even be questioned whether laymen ought to have patronage at all. This last
principle was not, as we have seen, collisions the general opinion of the
bishops, nor did Grosseteste make a dogma of it; but, even omitting this, the
theory put forward was one which could not fail to bring the ecclesiastical
into perpetual conflict with the secular power. It is noteworthy that
Grosseteste in this letter never appeals to Magna Carta: once only he appeals
to the Oxford Council of 1222, in which Archbishop Langton excommunicated the
violators of ecclesiastical liberties. His arguments are chiefly deduced from
analogies from the Old Testament, from the primitive Church, or the writings of
the Fathers.
The wrongs which the Church, like other bodies, had to
complain of under Henry III were not so much consistent oppression as
constantly recurrent molestation, an ever-varying infringement of privilege, a
total want of sympathy with other men’s opinions, an inherent love of
irregularity. The king often interfered with elections; he
strove, when unable to persuade the clergy en masse,
to extort money from the prelates separately, he made monasteries pay for a congé d’élire, issued edicts affecting the
Church without its consent, claimed the property of
ecclesiastics dying intestate, and finally endeavoured to prevent discussion in the
ecclesiastical assemblies altogether. The great difficulty of determining the
lay and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which Grosseteste tried to settle, was
constantly appearing. The clergy in 1240 complained of the interference of
secular judges in ecclesiastical cases, and the articles which the English
Church in 1258 declared to be of the most pressing importance have special reference
to the summoning of prelates before secular tribunals, the liberation by
secular authorities of culprits condemned in ecclesiastical courts, as well as
the punishment of the latter by loss of temporal property, and many other
questions of a similar nature. An attempt was made by the king in 1247, at a
time when he was on unusually good terms with the majority of the clergy, owing
to his temporary opposition to the Pope, to settle many of the disputed points,
and rather to the advantage of the Church : but, if we are to believe the
clergy, he did not regard his own enactments in this more than in any other
matter. We have a list of grievances, drawn up by Bishop Grosseteste, in which
the same complaints were made, and many minor charges brought against the king
and his sheriffs and bailiffs, of unjust action at law, interference with the
testaments of priests, and the like. It must, of course, be remembered that we
have here only one side of the question; still, granting that there is some
exaggeration, there will remain a large residuum of truth, which must have
weighed very heavily against
the king in the approaching 1258 struggle. The
list of privileges of the Church, compiled by Robert Marsh, under the direction
of the Bishop of Lincoln, contains theories still further
advanced than those in the protest already mentioned,
with which he began his episcopate. The principle of separate
jurisdiction is maintained in this document, even to the extent
that no ecclesiastic should be compelled to take an oath in a secular
court; and the theory of the sacredness of Church property, of the
servants of the Church, of property under its protection, is expressed with
great fulness and vigour. “As the father is
not subject to the son” argues the compiler of this ecclesiastical Bill of
Rights, “neither should the ecclesiastic be subject to the layman”. Such
then were the relations in which the Church stood towards king and Pope, such
its internal condition, and the ideas that animated it, such the grievances
that aroused its opposition and welded it together, till it grew to be the
soundest element of the party at the head of which Simon de Montfort stood.
The other of the two great supports of the national
party, the lay barons, had not so much to complain of as the Church, while they
had more power of resisting oppression. Consequently their resistance was more
fitful and their principles less developed, though on the other, hand their
temporal power made them more important when it once came to blows. Their
greatest ground of complaint, as it was one of the greatest in the Church, was
the ruinous influx of aliens into England. These persons, headed by the queen’s
uncles and afterwards by the king’s half-brothers, seized upon the posts of honour and emolument near the king’s person, were thrust
into important positions, as sheriffs, bailiffs, and castellans, and completely
occupied the king’s ear, to the exclusion of the rightful governors and councillors of the realm. “England for the English” was the
cry which raised the loudest response; the expulsion of the aliens was the
first step of the victorious barons in 1258, as it had been the first step of
the reformers of 1215. Not only was universal jealousy stirred up, but enormous
loss entailed upon the country by the influence of foreigners over the king,
which they made use of to persuade him to war and other undertakings against
the advice of his council; by their extravagance and the king’s imprudent
generosity to them; and by the violations of feudal rights, especially in the
matter of wards and widows, which were perpetrated for their advantage. It was
chiefly to ensure against these that the Statute of Merton was passed. The
breaches of trust committed by the king as guardian form a most important item
in the baronial indictment, and the ground on which it was easiest to bring
home to him direct violation of the law. Another grave point in
which the king infringed the charters was in the matter of the
Forest Laws. Lands already disafforested were alleged to have been
planted again, and rights on lands not within the forest bounds sold as if
they belonged to the king. But the chief grievances of the barons, the
hardest to formulate or to bring under any distinct law, were the amount and
the frequency of taxation, , the scandalous misuse to which the taxes were put the
unjust action of sheriffs and bailiffs, as well as of the itinerant justices,
and the general misgovernment and confusion of the country. From these
grievances are distinctly traceable the constitutional advances made
during this period.
The first grievance, that of taxation, did not
directly injure the great barons to any great extent;
indirectly it did, by sapping the wealth of the
country, and diminishing in the case of their Church patronage the value of
their property. Direct taxation they were able to resist, and this the
king knew well, or he would not so often have requested their assent. For
a long time they did not take active measures to
prevent scutage and other taxes, to which they refused to
consent, from falling heavily on the weaker barons and the great body of
freeholders. Aid was unconditionally refused by the barons several times; and
from them the king could get nothing: but often, when scutage was denied in
Parliament, we hear nevertheless that the king extorted it, and we cannot doubt
on whom the burden mainly fell. Thus in the matter of taxation it was
gradually seen that though the king had a legal right, as the revised
charter allowed him, this right was rendered in a great measure
nugatory by the power of resistance possessed by the principal taxpayers. The
smaller, being unable to resist, were urged by force of example to win the same
position by combination and an appeal to constitutional justice: constitutional
principles were evidently still more important to them than to their superiors.
On the other hand, the right which the greater vassals claimed and won, they
won not only for themselves but also for the lower class. The latter were
useful to their superiors, and while supporting them, gained strength and
confidence in themselves, until, having at last got a leader, they were able
to stand alone when the jealousy of the greater barons forced that leader to
rest almost entirely upon them.
The right of withholding assent to taxation was
constantly put into practice, but never distinctly formulated as it had been in
Magna Carta. The feeling grew rapidly that what had once been granted could not
be taken away by royal edicts or papal condemnations. The Great Charter in its
first form became more and more the rallying-point, though in many respects an
advance was made on it: for instance, in 1244 the right of assent was claimed,
as we have seen, not only in the case of extraordinary aids, but also in that
of the regular feudal contributions. The theory of self-taxation was passing
through the intermediate stage of a supposed bargain between the king and his
subjects, confirmation of the charters being the price paid ; but this very
arrangement shows that the older theory, that the tax was a charge made by the
king on property in reality belonging to him, and levied for his own good and
not that of the country, was still believed. The feudal notion still possessed
too strong a hold on the popular mind : the remonstrances took the form of a
protest against the abuse of an acknowledged right rather than that of a claim
for legal justice. Still this very abuse as rapidly undermining the older
theory, and with the claim for assent grew the secondary claim for a voice in
the employment of the money. This led very soon to a demand for a share, if not
in the legislation, at least in the government, especially in its relations
with foreign countries. I have in passing remarked the occasions on which
different constitutional principles first appeared; it will be needless
therefore to do more than to sum them up here. We find the above-mentioned
ideas on several occasions strongly though informally expressed. The clergy as
well as the barons declare that the object for which a certain tax was granted
has not been followed; the king recognises the right
to know what is to be done with the tax, by telling them it is for a crusade,
or a Welch war, or an expedition to Gascony. Not only this, but the barons
ask the very pertinent question, what has become of the money? they enquire
into the reasons of its disappearance, upbraid the king with his private
extravagance, his expenses in wine, robes, and the like, and display an
inquisitiveness and a regard for their own interests which must have been very
irksome to a spendthrift like Henry. To prevent such misuse of public money it
was proposed, as early as 1237, that it should be paid into the hands of a
committee, and spent only by their consent—one of the most advanced financial
ideas that we meet with during the whole of this period. But, since it was
necessary to strike at the root of the matter, the barons were
led further to claim a general control on over the king’s actions,
which would, if carried out, have amounted to a practical abolition of monarchical
power. We find the aid for Sicily refused because the king had acted
without the advice of his council; a decided objection was shown to the war
with France in 1242, and aid refused by the barons because the war was entered
upon against their will; ten years afterwards, the council insisted on the
acquittal of Simon de Montfort, in direct opposition to the royal inclinations.
As the abuse of taxation led to a demand for a share
in the guidance of the kingdom as a whole, so the decay of the bureaucracy
established by Henry II brought about the claim on a share in the internal
government and the administration of justice. We saw that the right of election
to the high offices of State was not recognised either by the compilers or the revisers of Magna Carta; even the one limitation
on the freedom left to royal choice, namely, that the objects of that choice
should be fitting persons, vague as this was, was dropped in the subsequent
confirmations. The power thus given to the executive, especially in the matter
of law, was immense. The system elaborated by the Court-lawyers had a levelling
tendency, by which the old rights of jurisdiction exercised by the feudal lord
over his tenants were gradually superseded. It brought the king and
the lower classes together, to the detriment of baronial power. To
get this machinery into their hands was therefore the object of the barons
in claiming the right of appointment. The demand they put forward in 1215,
though for a time allowed to rest, was not forgotten. As early as 1236 we
find the Bishop of Chichester resisting the king’s wish to deprive him of the
great seal, on the ground that it was given with the assent of the common
council, and not by the king alone. In 1244 the joint committee of clergy
and laity complained that justice was not done, and demanded that only such
persons should be chosen to high office as should be willing and able to guard
the interests of the nation. It was seen however that the king was no fit
judge of these interests; accordingly, four years afterwards, the demand was
directly made that the high officers should be appointed by, or at least
through the co-operation of, the council of the realm, as was
the custom under the kings predecessors. This demand
was repeated in 1255, and again refused.
In the long interval, when there was neither Chief
Justiciar nor Chancellor in England, the king was able, by means of his
underlings, to inflict endless annoyance and damage upon his subjects, as well
as in various ways to extort large sums of money. So lucrative a source of
wealth was the so-called administration of justice, that he never really gave
way on this point till 1258, and appears only once even to have held out the
hope that he would do so. The barons, in their petition of 1258, stated some of
the ways in which the king got money, and the evils thence ensuing. The visits
of the justices, according to the petitioners, were so arranged that persons
having property in different counties were summoned to several places at once,
and were fined for non-attendance. Further, so many exemptions from service as
jurors were granted, that is to say, doubtless bought, that in many counties it
was impossible to hold the grand assize. The facilities which this would give
for all sorts of injustice, the practical destruction of the jury system, and
the consequent violation of the spirit of the Great Charter, need not to be
enlarged upon. It was equally fatal when advantage was taken of the absence of
a Chancellor to issue writs which thwarted the course of justice, when persons
living in different counties were prevented from impleading one another, when
the laws on debt were abused by collusion between the justices and the Jews.
Closely connected with the question of jurisdiction was that of the appointment
of sheriffs. The office, it appears, was generally farmed from the king, the
consequence being that the sheriffs looked on their power as a means of making
money. They levied excessive fines, and often on trivial pretexts: for
instance, the holding of two acres of land in a county was considered
sufficient ground for summoning the holder to the county court, and fining him
for non-attendance. They took fines for the receiving of malefactors, and
mulcted the neighbouring villagers if they could not
account for a traveller who had happened to die on
the road. That the condition of law and justice in the country was very low, is
shown by the fact that in 1236 all the sheriffs had to be removed from office
on account of their venality, by the disclosures at Winchester in 1249, and by
stories which illustrate the shameless use the sheriffs could make of their
power and the want of protection from their toils. Such being the evils from
which the people had to suffer at the hands of the royal officers, it is
remarkable that the power of appointing sheriffs does not seem to have been
distinctly claimed (though it may have been included in the general demand for
the right of appointing to the high offices), till the Mad Parliament. As soon
as the idea of summoning the middle classes to the franchise began to gain
ground, the political power possessed by the sheriffs, and their influence over
the county courts in the election of the four knights, in sending out the
summons to Parliament, and the like, made it very necessary that the national
party should insist on their appointment by Parliament.
Lastly, we find the provision that the Parliament
should be regularly summoned, which was allowed to drop in the revised charter,
insisted on certainly in one instance. In 1255 the barons based their refusal
to act on the ground that they had not all been summoned; and closely connected
with this was the reason given, according to some authorities, for the
interruption of business in the Parliament of 1249, namely, the absence of the
Earl of Cornwall, just as in 1253 the clergy declared they could do nothing in
the absence of the archbishops. It was felt that no decree or concession made
by Parliament or council could be binding unless all members took part in it, or
were at least invited to do so. With regard to another provision of the
charter, that Parliament must be summoned to meet at a certain spot, we find
the notion gaining ground that not only must it be summoned to a certain spot,
but always to the same. This principle was however urged only when occasion
seemed to require it. In 1236 the barons would not meet in the Tower, but
insisted on assembling at Westminster, though they do not seem to have objected
to being summoned to Merton just before. For many years after that the
principle seems to have been lost sight of. The national council met at various
places, London, Oxford, Portsmouth, Winchester; in fact wherever the king
happened to be. But the principle was necessary to the separate
and independent existence of a Parliament, if it was to be considered
more than a mere offshoot of the Court; and we shall find it in after-years
insisted on with great earnestness. The provision, which was perhaps times of
most important of all, that Parliament should meet at regular intervals, though
not distinctly laid down during this period, was nevertheless usually observed.
It met generally three times a year, about the beginning of Lent, shortly after
Easter, and in the autumn. The exact time of meeting varied a good deal, but we
find these dates fairly well kept. It seems impossible to determine whether
sufficient notice was always given, and the Parliaments were, of course,
interrupted when the king was at war, unless they were summoned by the regency;
but there was no lack of frequency in them. Under the existing system of
government, the mere fact of the barons assembling in Parliament did not impose
any considerable check on the king, and the refusal to summon them at all would
have been a very extreme measure. It had become customary, when the king wanted
a general grant of money, to announce the fact in a great council: if the
barons conceded it, well and good; if not, the king was not prevented by their
refusal from levying taxes on the weaker barons, and on others who were still
more in his power. An unconditional refusal was, as we have seen, very rare;
and, in spite of difficulties, the king always seemed to hope that he would be
able to persuade or terrify into submission. There was therefore no great
temptation to desist from summoning Parliaments, though Henry would probably
have tried ;the experiment had he seen how, through their regular assembling
and their almost continuous resistance, there was built up a power which was to
shatter that of the monarchy. The statutes of Merton mark a great advance in
the history of parliamentary legislation; but though the summons ‘to consult on
important business’ seems to become more frequent, and thus the general right
of Parliament to assist in the government of the country was more and more
clearly recognised, this was confined to questions of
external policy, or such as demanded immediate action. The reign is very barren
in legislation properly so called, in administrative organisation such as that which distinguished the reign of Henry II; but what there was
generally carried out in the old way, and the common council of the realm had
very little to do with it. Still, all the advance that was made tended
inevitably in this direction; the initiative in legislation is the last and
culminating triumph of parliamentary government. One fact, though of small
importance in itself, yet deserves to be noticed: the name Parliament had
already begun to be used, as it had in France a century before. Already, as we
have seen, most of its privileges had won or were winning recognition, either
in fact or in theory; it was no long step, though it was a very difficult one,
to formulate or systematise those privileges, and to
perfect its constitution.
Of the particular evils suffered by that
ill-defined class, the smaller barons and the freeholders,
which formed the greater part of de Montfort’s own supporters, as distinct
from the large and loosely-connected reform party of 1258, it is very hard
to form an idea. They were the same, to a great extent, with those of which the
great vassals had to complain, only in an exaggerated form. Taxation pressed
much more heavily upon them; they were less able to combine, and quite unable
to resist singly the oppression of the kings tax-gatherers, his justices, and
his sheriffs: wards and widows from the class of small tenants-in-chief were
completely in his hands. But the greatest grievance of the smaller barons, as
their want well as that of the greater subtenants, the towns, and probably the
more important freeholders, the evil the redress of which, had they had a
voice, they would doubtless have demanded most loudly, was the want of
representation. The possession of this privilege would have gone far to remedy
all their other wrongs. The common council, though in a sense a representative
body, failed entirely to represent the wishes and interests of the middle and
lower classes; just as the prelates, as a body, seem often to have acted in a
way contrary to the wishes of the mass of clergy. But the latter had a
means of making their wishes known through their own assemblies; the chapters
and monasteries were bodies which could easily send representatives. The
like assembly for the smaller barons did not exist, for the county courts were
not in a position to give force and expression to public opinion. The
distinction between the special and collective summons shows the difference
which had long ago crept in; the power of the greater barons had grown, while
that of the others had sunk. Their attendance had become for many reasons next
to impossible, and political representation did not exist. The example of the
clergy could not fail to arouse in them a longing for at least an equal share
in the government. And if this class felt the want,
what must have been the political unrest of the large and important body of
subtenants, who had not even the consolation, which the smaller
tenants-in-chief had, of feeling themselves on a nominal equality with the
great barons, nor the vantage-ground which this position presented for further
political action? But they had no means of making their wishes known at the
time, or of revealing to us their feelings, for they had no chroniclers; the
way in which they and the Londoners followed Earl Simon is almost the only
proof we have—though it is a sufficient one—that he undertook to supply a real
want.
Of the other two constituents of Earl Simon’s
following, London and the sea-port towns, it is easy enough to see why the
first was so staunch a partisan. The superiority of London to other towns was
if possible more remarkable in those days than it is now. It had a long
municipal history to look back on already. It had long been connected with the
cause of liberty, and had held a high place in the country. London was the
first to recognise Stephen as king. The commune of
London supported John, during his brother’s reign, in the revolt against
Longchamp; its adhesion to the baronial cause was most important in 1215, and
it was rewarded by special mention in Magna Carta. The population was more
mixed than in other towns, more mercantile and habituated to travel, and
consequently more open to new ideas. But the city was by no means undivided.
The monopolies possessed by the guilds were doubtless very oppressive to the
poorer part of the population. Already we find two distinct parties among the
citizens; the poor are very democratical, they have
great weight in the municipal government, and elect a popular mayor; the richer
citizens are on the side of the king, the poor are for the barons. The city had
already obtained important privileges, and if the remark is true that English
liberties have all been bought and paid for, of no class is it so true as of
the civic class. John had granted the right of annually electing a mayor; the
royal sheriffs had no authority within the town; the citizens even farmed the
revenues of the whole county of Middlesex.
But these privileges were of little avail against the
royal power. The history of London during this period is a history of
unparalleled exactions and tyranny. The right of apportioning and collecting
their own taxes did not lessen the total amount of taxation to be borne. The
city being looked on as royal demesne, the king, whenever he was unable to get
money from Parliament, and often at other times, extorted it from London,
availing himself unsparingly of the omission of the clause in Magna Carta which
had provided that the aids demanded of the city were to be such as were
reasonable. It may probably be said with truth that the Londoners and the
Jews together contributed more to pay the king’s private expenses than all the
rest of the kingdom together. Large sums were exacted almost every other year
for the fifteen years before 1258, amounting in one case, in 1252, to 20,000
marks. These exactions were made by way of tallage,
and without reason given, ‘as if the citizens had been slaves of the lowest
condition’, says a sympathising chronicler. A source
equally large was that of fines, which were imposed on every available pretext,
for readmitting an outlaw—the permission for which was granted when the king
was young and therefore was alleged to be null and void—for letting a prisoner
escape from Newgate, for not keeping the assize of
bread and beer, and so forth. We have seen into what trouble a quarrel with the
Abbot of Westminster brought the citizens; in like manner a disturbance between
the Londoners and some young courtiers whilst playing at the quintain caused
the former to be fined in a large sum of money. The royal wish that they should
exchange certain liberties they possessed for others belonging to the Abbot of
Westminster caused them endless trouble : the authorities stood firm, but the
king often renewed violation of the demand. It being found that the mayor and
the privileges; chief citizens were emboldened by the outcry of the masses, who clamoured for a voice in the decision, they were
summoned to Windsor, in direct violation of their charters. They had to pay to
get their sheriffs appointed and their charters confirmed. A fair, lasting a
fortnight, was decreed by the king to be held at Westminster, for the advantage
of the abbey, and the citizens of London had to shut up their shops and carry
their goods to the fair. The king frequently removed the mayor, for declaring
that the royal command to elect a certain person sheriff was an infringement of
their liberties, or for using indignant expressions at the withdrawal of an
ancient privilege. The municipal authorities were sometimes deposed in the most
arbitrary manner, and the city put under governors appointed by the king. New
gifts were constantly demanded, and presents turned into precedents. Henry even
added insult to injury. He was annoyed that in spite of constant draining the
wealth of London increased. When he heard that the Londoners had bought up the
plate he had sold to pay his private expenses, he exclaimed, “They would buy up
the treasures of Octavian, these boors who call themselves barons. London is an
endless fount of wealth”. Direct injuries such as these were sufficient to
justify any measures of redress; it is impossible to estimate the damage to
trade, the discouragement to manufacture, the loss of public confidence, from
which the greatest mercantile city in England must have suffered.
These evils were probably also at the root of the
discontent felt by the Cinque Ports and the other sea-Port towns. The barons in
1248 complained that the king seized merchandise, in point of fact committed
highway robbery by means of his officials, that he confiscated wine, wax, silk,
and other goods, without paying for them. It was even alleged that his
officials seized fish, and compelled the fishermen to transport it far inland.
The barons in 1258 complained that the king’s agents at fairs and markets took
twice or thrice as much as they were entitled to; the general result of all
this being, as they said, that prices rose, that English merchants were ruined,
and foreign trade ceased to flow into the country. A striking example of the king’s
arbitrary procedure in these matters is the prohibition of the export of wool,
which he is said to have issued in 1244, in order to annoy the French. It may
be doubted if such an edict could have ever been fully executed, but the mere
fact of its having been issued shows how little importance regard was paid to
commercial interests. All these things would be the more resented by the
sea-ports, owing to the importance which they felt themselves to possess; for
on them fell the whole duty of supplying the navy, and of defending the coast
in time of war. This duty was common of course to London with
the Cinque Ports; the latter however had also an importance of their
own. Instructions were issued to Dover and other towns, to prevent the
entry of foreign emissaries without the royal leave; the possession of Dover
Castle was most important in the barons’ war, and it was entrusted by Simon de
Montfort to his eldest son Henry, as the key of England by which the invasion
of foreign mercenaries was to be prevented.
But while London was so far advanced in material
prosperity and in political ideas, and while the other sea-ports followed her
example, the majority of the towns were in a more backward
condition. Barons of London and barons of the Cinque Ports we hear of, but
in hardly any other cities. The castles of the great lords,
the magnificent abbeys and episcopal palaces, the homes of the smaller barons
and other landed proprietors, gave the country an air of wealth and splendour which was totally absent from the
towns. They were still in many cases mere collections of the poorest and
weakest part of the community. They had hardly any independent
existence; they were generally royal demesne, subject to tallage and other exactions at the king’s pleasure, or they
were equally at the mercy of some great noble. Many had indeed got
considerable municipal privileges, such as York, Lincoln, Oxford,
Winchester, but for these they looked to the king and to the king
only. Their traditions, so far as they went, generally led them in the
same direction; Northampton and Leicester had supported Henry II against his
sons; Northampton had helped John against the barons. Their budding life
naturally looked to the monarchy for protection against the tyranny of
feudalism, and Henry III, like his father and grandfather, had shown them great favour. The evils from which London and the other
mercantile ports suffered did not press so heavily on the inland towns; their
trade was but small, and the spirit of liberty was not so strong in them as in
the sea-faring population. Not many towns had got beyond the wish for mere
passive liberty, or at most for municipal authority. The municipal freedom of
London had been completed by the liberty of electing its own mayor. The
citizens were strong enough to protect themselves, and had nothing more to gain
by connexion with the Crown, while they had
everything to lose by its rapacity. They began to covet a share in the
government of the country, from which they were, in their corporate existence,
as completely excluded as the uncultured peasants outside their walls. The same
idea was much later in presenting itself to the minds of the generality of
townsfolk, and yet they had to be included when the franchise was extended to
the seaports, however little gratitude they felt for the gift. From these
reasons we find London and the Cinque Ports among the most active if not the
most efficient supporters of Simon de Montfort; while the other towns were
mostly neutral, if not actively on the side of the king.
The only remaining element of the reform party the
Universities, did not perhaps add much practical weight, in a struggle which
had to be decided by the sword, but their moral influence was great, and that
was almost entirely with Simon de Montfort. The importance of Oxford had risen
in this century to an unprecedented height, and the number of students is said
to have reached 15,000. The distinct existence of the University, with a
Chancellor and a jurisdiction of its own, was recognised by royal edicts. Its fame was in all lands : many teachers at Paris were Oxford
men. The study of logic and the appeal to the understanding, so actively favoured by the Franciscans, had introduced a freedom of
discussion which was applied to politics. The hatred of its national
foreigners, which was so strong throughout England, found vivid expression at
Oxford in the attack on the servants of the legate Otho in 1238; an
anti-royalist feeling was probably at the bottom of the frequent collisions
with the townsfolk which occurred at both Universities. The reforming
tendencies of the younger portion of Oxford were sufficiently shown by the fact
that in 1264 the students turned out en masse to join
the national party; and this event fully justified the king’s suspicions if not
his policy, when he issued orders for the temporary suppression of the
University. Lastly, Bishop Grosseteste never relinquished his early connexion with Oxford, and stood forth as its protector on
every possible occasion. Adam Marsh, its Doctor Illustris,
was a popular lecturer there, and at the same time an active politician.
Which side these men favoured in the struggle we have
clearly seen.
Thus it appears that almost all classes of society
were alienated from the king, but they were not yet united against
him. The two classes that were able to take the initiative had not acted
in real unison since the time of John; their interests were not so far
interwoven nor mutually dependent enough to force them into alliance, till the
grievances of each grew to such an extent as to convince them that they were
necessary to each other. They had made attempts, as in 1244, to combine, but
the combination failed to produce any effect; we are told they were disunited
and undecided. The disunion was kept up by the king, who often sought to win
the great barons by favours, and, if we are to
believe the historians, he was not unsuccessful in bribing several who seemed
to have put their hands to the plough. As long as the Pope confined himself to
exactions from the Church the barons looked on comparatively unmoved, though
protesting now and then; but when he began to support the king, and to drag him
into transactions which affected the whole realm, they began to be seriously
alarmed. The result of this feeling was seen in 1256, when the clergy were on
the point of giving way to Rustand, but were
encouraged by lay support to resist
But both parties might have
waited long for each other, had not the man who by his character and connexions was best fitted to be the link between
them seen the necessity of mutual support, and formed the central point of
contact for layman and ecclesiastic, merchant and baron, rich and poor. The
temper of the country was by this time ready. The ‘divinity that doth hedge a
king’ had long ago faded away from Henry. More than twenty years before this
the barons had threatened to choose another king, if he did not free himself
and the country from the hated Peter des Roches. Men had begun to laugh at his
authority; they had seen through his ruses, his pretext of a crusade, or a war
with France; the incapacity he showed in the conduct of the Gascon wars and in
his expeditions against the Welch convinced them that royalty and generalship
did not always go together. He was the first English king since the Conquest
who had decidedly failed in the art of war. Ill-omened comparisons between him
and his father became frequent. “He takes the cross as John did” it was
remarked. When he met with opposition from the Master of the Hospitallers, he
asked, “Will ye expel me like my father John?” His ungovernable temper had
given bitter offence to many of the nobles, and degraded him in the eyes of
all. In 1255 he attacked the Earl Marshal, who was defending his friend Robert
de Ros, with violent language, and called him a traitor before the assembled
peers. “Thou liest” replied the earl, “and what couldst thou do if thou wert in the right?” “I would seize
thy corn” said Henry, “and thresh it out and sell it”. “And I” retorted Bigod, “would send thee the heads of thy threshers”. When
such a scene was possible, Henry must have sunk very low in popular estimation;
but there were still more dangerous indications of political ideas which might
be fatal to an arbitrary system of government. On an occasion already alluded
to the Master of the Hospitallers, when Henry wished to cancel his charter,
said to him, “As long as thou keepest justice thou
canst be king ; as soon as thou breakest it, thou ceasest to be a king”. And in the same spirit the clergy,
answering Rustand, had compared the Pope’s rights to
those of the king, declaring the duty of both to be to defend and not to waste
the goods of their subjects.
The political opinions of the day received their
highest development in the great poem, written a few years later than the point
we have reached, on the occasion of the battle of Lewes. We find here put
forward a noble ideal of political duty, as incumbent on king and subjects, and
a thoughtful conception of liberty in its relation to law, combined with a
breadth of rational feeling and a depth of political insight which would alone
be sufficient to raise the movement we are examining far above the rank of a
mere feudal revolt. That the poem embodies the ideas which animated Simon de
Montfort there can be no doubt, though it is possible he would have been
unable, if called upon, to formulate them so clearly; for the first half consists
of a minute and careful defence of his policy
and actions, in a tone of so warm approbation that it could only have been
written by one of the staunchest of his partisans. It seems likely on
many grounds that it emanated from the pen of a Franciscan, but the authorship
cannot be determined with any certainty.
The whole root of the quarrel is said to lie in this,
that the king wishes to be free to rule exactly as he pleases. This, say his
friends, is the only real kingship. The king’s will is law. He merely acts as
every great lord is entitled to do, dealing as he pleases with his own; if he
mismanages his property, on him falls the loss, but no one interferes with him;
the king merely claims the same liberty, and moreover only that which his predecessors
had before him. Therefore the barons have no right to interfere with the
appointment of high officers, or the custody of castles and the like, which
things concern only the king. The barons answer that, inasmuch as they are
bound to protect the kingdom from foreign invasion, they are bound to protect
it also from internal treachery. They do not attack the king, but his worst
enemies, when they expel his evil counsellors. Those who rule the king for
their selfish interests, and waste and impoverish the realm by introducing
aliens and ousting the native nobility, do as much harm to the country as those
who invade it with arms in their hands. It is all one whether the king
acts of malice prepense or is led away by ill advice; the barons are equally
bound to assert their position as defenders of their country.
The king is not superior to the law. He asks,
“Why am I to be limited in the choice of the officers of law by whom I rule?”
The answer is that that is not true liberty which is totally unlimited. On the
contrary, true liberty is not lost by wholesome restraint, true power does not
disappear under regulated compulsion. The law which limits royal power really
enfranchises it, because it prevents it from being hurt by evil. Such a law is
no slavery, but the saving of honour. It is not
reckoned as impotence in God that He cannot sin. In like manner the king may do
all that is good, but may not do what is evil; and this is the gift of God.
Moreover, his duty is, since his people are God’s people, and are entrusted by
God to him, to love and help them. If he does so, he deserves honour at their hands; if not, he loses his
authority, and must be recalled into the right way by the
people. Mutual dependence therefore is right; let a prince so reign
that he may never find it necessary to avoid depending on his
subjects. The prince that does so will find it result in his own ruin.
But supposing such a foolish prince to exist, what is
to be done? He will go wrong if he chooses his
own counsellors. What authority then remains? None but
that of the community. It is in the collective memory of the nation alone
that the truth concerning the laws and customs of the realm can be
discovered. Tradition is alive in the people, for they daily use the laws
of their fathers. Appeal must therefore be made to the
community; its opinion must be ascertained. The community should
choose those persons as counsellors whose interests are most wrapped up with
those of their country: such men will feel in their own persons the wrongs of
their country, as the limbs feel with the whole body.
Further, although it is preeminently necessary that
those who sit in office shall be just and wise, their obligation does not stop
short there. Subjects who waste or abuse their property must be checked, for
the whole kingdom suffers if part be destroyed. Thus the king’s argument from
the liberty allowed to every subject falls to the ground. No one can do
quite as he will, but is under authority. The ultimate authority rests
with the whole community. Law is light to him who would guide his steps and
those of his subjects aright. The law of the universe is well called a law of
fire, for fire lights, warms, burns. Such a fire is the law to a king. He
cannot change the law. It is often said, “the king’s will is law”. Truth says
otherwise, for law stands if the king fall. Law is like fire, for it lights as
truth, warms as charity, burns as zeal: with these virtues as his guides the
king will rule well. He will then remember that he holds office not for his own
but for others’ good. If he so truly love his people, he will consult and
inform his counsellors, however wise he be, in order to make all of one mind,
even as the Lord told His disciples of what He should do. Let the king seek the
glory of God, and learn to rule himself first: without that he can never rule
men.
From all this the conclusion is, first, that it is the
sacred duty of the barons, as representing the community, to look to and
protect the welfare of the kingdom, and to interfere in the government with
that object; secondly, that this object is best secured by seeing that the king
have round him native counsellors, not strangers or favourites,
who upset all law and the venerable custom of the land.
Such are the political principles put forward by an
unknown writer, six hundred years ago, as those on which the leader of the
reform party acted. It was a pity that Simon’s most powerful supporters did not
understand them better. It is the great doctrine of a General Council that is here
laid down, the doctrine that the voice of God finds its truest expression in
the voice of the people; not the people acting on mere impulse, or with
unguided judgment, but acting on the traditional and collective experience of
ages, as embodied in law. In this case law is not looked on as a mere compact,
but as a living growth, added to and kept alive by each succeeding generation.
It is therefore not a codified law nor a collection of royal edicts that is
here meant, but rather an active tendency or principle, the resultant of ages
of order and rule, which will on any special occasion lead the people
by instinct to a right decision, and will supply a constant guide to the ruler,
as a sort of political conscience, by giving him insight into the truth, love
for his people, enthusiasm for the right. It is to be observed that this
verdict of the popular voice is not claimed on all questions, but only on those
into which an insight is given by popular interest and experience. Some little
confusion is caused by the different senses in which the word law is used: at
one words time it appears to be formulated and written law, the clearly-defined
boundary of royal power; at another it is tradition or custom, living in
popular institutions; at another—and this is the most general sense—it is the
national or the individual conscience. It is also difficult to see exactly what
is meant by the community of the realm. There can hardly have been present in
the authors mind any notion of universal suffrage. The barons are looked on as
the rightful supporters of and sharers in the government; the existing theory
of the constitution is kept in view; it is probable therefore that the word is
used in its usual sense, as implying not only the whole body of
tenants-in-chief, but also subtenants and freeholder and probably all freemen.
The composition of Simon de Montfort’s Parliament may throw some light on this.
Limited as is the political liberty claimed, and
moderate as are the conclusions arrived at, nothing can be imagined more
antagonistic to the system of government pursued by Henry III than the broad
and liberal principles on which the poem is based. That system was essentially
autocratic. The European position to which Henry’s grandfather had raised the
monarchy, his connexions with other sovereigns, the
example of the Emperor Frederick II, and, most of all, the growth of royal
power in France, induced him with his imaginative and sanguine, but weak and
unstatesmanlike, nature to enter upon a Foreign policy, which demanded for any
chance of success the resolution of Henry II combined with the subtlety of
Innocent III. His expenses were necessarily very large, and some excuse may be
made for him in the fact that the regular royal revenues were probably far from
sufficient for what he attempted. But it is obvious that ought never have
attempted it. His French wars were unnecessary; nothing could be more absurd than
his Sicilian scheme. His grandfather had abstained from foreign interference as
much as possible, yet he was far more respected abroad than Henry III. And even
had he chosen to take up an active policy abroad, it is probable that with care
and good government he would have carried the baronage with him. The aids which
they granted him as it was would have been indefinitely increased, had he acted
by their counsel, dropped his foreign favourites, and
ceased from waste and illegal exaction. All they asked him, until driven
beyond endurance, was that he should keep his word. It seems impossible to find
any good defence for Henry, even though we should
attribute nothing but selfish motives to the barons; and this, though true to a
great extent of many, cannot be said of their leader, or of the party, however
small, which embraced the principles just stated. What could be expected of a
struggle, in which ideas of liberty were propounded with the clearness and
power of the political poem, while Henry had apparently nothing better to
oppose to them than the plea that he merely claimed a privilege allowed to every one, that of acting as he pleased; or the argument
that, as his subjects did not keep his laws, he could not be expected to
observe his charters?
CHAPTER VII.THE REVOLUTION OF 1258.
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