Part 11

Though Henry's taxes were vexatious and never-ending, though his subservience to the pope and his flighty interference in foreign politics were ever irritating the magnates and the people, and though outbreaks of turbulence were not unknown during his long period of personal rule, it would yet be a mistake to regard the central years of the 13th century as an unprosperous period for England. Indeed it would be more correct to regard the period as one of steady national development in wealth, culture and unity. The towns were growing fast, and extending their municipal liberties; the necessities of John and the facile carelessness of Henry led to the grant of innumerable charters and privileges. As was to be seen again during the first period of the reign of Charles I., political irritation is not incompatible either with increasing material prosperity or with great intellectual development. The king's futile activity led to ever more frequent gatherings of the Great Council, in which the theory of the constitution was gradually hammered out by countless debates between the sovereign and his subjects. Every time that Henry confirmed the Great Charter, the fact that England was already a limited monarchy became more evident. It is curious to find that--like his father John--he himself contributed unconsciously to advances towards representative government. John's writ of 1213, bidding "discreet men" from each shire to present themselves at Oxford, found its parallel in another writ of 1253 which bids four knightly delegates from each county to appear along with the tenants-in-chief, for the purpose of discussing the king's needs. When county members begin to present themselves along with the barons at the national assembly, the conception of parliament is already reached. And indeed we may note that the precise word "parliament" first appears in the chroniclers and in official documents about the middle of Henry's reign. By its end the term is universally acknowledged and employed.

Intellectual life.

We may discern during these same years a great intellectual activity. This was the time of rapid development in the universities, where not only were the scholastic philosophy and systematic theology eagerly studied, but figures appear like that of the great Roger Bacon, a scientific researcher of the first rank, whose discoveries in optics and chemistry caused his contemporaries to suspect him of magical arts. His teaching at Oxford in 1250-1257 fell precisely into the years of the worst misgovernance of Henry III. It was the same with law, an essentially 13th-century study; it was just in this age that the conception of law as something not depending on the pleasure of the king, nor compiled from mere collected ancestral customs, but existing as a logical entity, became generally prevalent. The feeling is thoroughly well expressed by the partisan of Montfort who wrote in his jingling Latin verse:--

"Dicitur vulgariter 'ut rex vult lex vadit': Veritas vult aliter: nam lex stat, rex cadit."

Law has become something greater than, and independent of, royal caprice. The great lawyers of the day, of whom Bracton is the most celebrated name, were spinning theories of its origin and development, studying Roman precedents, and turning the medley of half-understood Saxon and Norman customs into a system.

Religious life: the friars.

Intellectual growth was accompanied by great religious activity; it is no longer merely on the old questions of dispute between church and state that men were straining their minds. The reign of Henry III. saw the invasion of England by the friars, originally the moral reformers of their day, who preached the superiority of the missionary life over the merely contemplative life of the old religious orders, and came, preaching holy poverty, to minister to souls neglected by worldly incumbents and political prelates (see MENDICANT MOVEMENT). The mendicants, Dominican and Franciscan, took rapid root in England; the number of friaries erected in the reign of Henry III. is astounding. For two generations they seem to have absorbed into their ranks all the most active and energetic of those who felt a clerical vocation. It is most noteworthy that they were joined by thinkers such as Grosseteste, Adam Marsh, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Still more striking is the fact that the friars threw themselves energetically into the cause of political reform, and that several of their leading brothers were the close friends and counsellors of Simon de Montfort.

Literature and art.

Architecture and art generally were making rapid strides during this stirring time. The lofty Early English style had now completely superseded the more heavy and sombre Norman, and it was precisely during the years of the maladministration of Henry III. that some of the most splendid of the English cathedrals, Salisbury (1220-1258) and Wells (1230-1239), were built. The king himself, when rearing the new Westminster Abbey over the grave of Edward the Confessor, spent for once some of his money on a worthy object. It may be noted that he showed a special reverence for the old English royal saint, and christened his eldest son after him; while his second bore the name of Edmund, the East Anglian martyr. These were the first occasions on which princes of the Angevin house received names that were not drawn from the common continental stock, but recalled the days before the Conquest. The reappearance of these old English names bears witness to the fact that the vernacular was reasserting itself. Though French was still the language of the court and of law, a new literature was already growing up in the native tongue, with such works as Layamon's _Brut_ and the _Ormulum_ as its first fruits. Henry III. himself on rare occasions used English for a state document.

All these facts make it sufficiently clear that England was irritated rather than crushed by Henry's irregular taxation and thriftless expenditure. The nation was growing and prospering, despite of its master's maladministration of its resources. On several occasions when he endeavoured to commit parliaments to back his bills and endorse his policy, they refused to help him, and left him to face his debts as best he might. This was especially the case with the insane contract which he made with Pope Innocent IV. in 1254, when he bound the realm of England to find 140,000 marks to equip an army for the conquest of Naples and Sicily. Henry lacked the energy to attempt to take by force what he could not obtain by persuasion, and preferred to break his bargain with the pope rather than to risk the chance of civil war at home.

Public discontent. The Provisions of Oxford.

It was over this Sicilian scheme, the crowning folly of the king, that public opinion at last grew so hot that the intermittent criticism and grumbling of the baronage and the nation passed into vigorous and masterful action. At the "Mad Parliament," which met at Oxford, 1258, the barons informed their master that his misgovernment had grown so hopeless that they were resolved to put him under constitutional restraints. They appointed a committee of twenty-four, in which Simon de Montfort was the leading spirit, and entrusted it with the duty, not only of formulating lists of grievances, but of seeing that they were redressed. Henry found that he had practically no supporters save his unpopular foreign relatives and favourites, and yielded perforce. To keep him in bounds the celebrated "Provisions of Oxford" were framed. They provided that he was to do nothing without the consent of a permanent council of fifteen barons and bishops, and that all his finances were to be controlled by another committee of twenty-four persons. All aliens were to be expelled from the realm, and even the king's household was to be "reformed" by his self-constituted guardians. The inevitable oath to observe honestly all the conditions of the Great Charter of 1215 was, as usual, extorted from him with special formalities. Though Montfort and the barons voiced the public discontent, the constitution which they thus imposed on the king had nothing popular about it. The royal functions of which Henry was stripped were to be exercised by a series of baronial committees. The arrangement was too cumbersome, for there was nothing which would be called a central executive; the three bodies (two of twenty-four members each, the third of fifteen) were interdependent, and none of them possessed efficient control over the others. It was small wonder that the constitution established by the Provisions of Oxford was found unworkable. They were not even popular--the small landholders and subtenants discovered that their interests had not been sufficiently regarded, and lent themselves to an agitation against the provisional government, which was got up by Edward, the king's eldest son, who now appeared prominently in history for the first time. To conciliate them the barons allowed the "Provisions of Westminster" to be enacted in 1259, in which the power of feudal courts was considerably restricted, and many classes of suit were transferred to the royal tribunals, a sufficient proof that the king's judges did not share in the odium which appertained to their master, and were regarded as honest and impartial.

The limited monarchy established by the Provisions of Oxford lasted only three years. Seeing the barons quarrelling among themselves, and Montfort accused of ambition and overweening masterfulness by many of his colleagues, the king took heart. Copying the example of his father in 1215, he obtained from the pope a bull, which declared the new constitution irregular and illegal, and absolved him from his oath to abide by it. He then began to recall his foreign friends and relatives, and to assemble mercenaries. De Montfort answered by raising an army, arresting prominent aliens, and seizing the lands which the king had given them. Henry thereupon, finding his forces too weak to face the earl, took refuge in the Tower of London and proposed an arbitration. He offered to submit his case to Louis IX., the saintly king of France, whose virtues were known and respected all over Europe, if the baronial party would do the same. An appeal to the pope they would have laughed to scorn; but the confidence felt in the probity of the French king was so great that Montfort advised his friends to accede to the proposal. This was an unwise step. Louis was a saint, but he was also an autocratic king, and had no knowledge of the constitutional customs of England. Having heard the claims of the king and the barons, he issued the mise of Amiens (Jan. 23, 1264), so called from the city at which he dated it, a document which stated that King Henry ought to abide by the terms of Magna Carta, to which he had so often given his assent, but that the Provisions of Oxford were wholly invalid and derogatory to the royal dignity. "We ordain," he wrote, "that the king shall have full power and free jurisdiction over his realm, as in the days before the said Provisions." The pope shortly afterwards confirmed the French king's award.

Simon de Montfort and his friends were put in an awkward position by this decision, to which they had so unwisely committed themselves. But they did not hesitate to declare that they must repudiate the mise. Simon declared that it would be a worse perjury to abandon his oath to keep the Provisions of Oxford than his oath to abide by the French king's award. He took arms again at the head of the Londoners and his personal adherents and allies. But many of the barons stood neutral, not seeing how they could refuse to accept the arbitration they had courted, while a number not inconsiderable joined the king, deciding that Leicester had passed the limits of reasonable loyalty, and that their first duty was to the crown.

The barons' war: battle of Lewes.

Hence it came to pass that in the campaign of 1264 Simon was supported by a minority only of the baronial class, and the king's army was the larger. The fortune of war inclined at first in favour of the royalists, who captured Northampton and Nottingham. But when it came to open battle, the military skill of the earl sufficed to compensate for the inferiority of his numbers. At Lewes, on the 14th of May, he inflicted a crushing defeat on the king's army. Henry himself, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and many hundreds of his chief supporters were taken prisoners. His son Prince Edward, who had been victorious on his own flank of the battle, and had not been caught in the rout, gave himself up next morning, wishing to share his father's fate, and not to prolong a civil war which seemed to have become hopeless.

Montfort's parliament.

On the day that followed his victory Leicester extorted from the captive king the document called the "mise of Lewes," in which Henry promised to abide by all the terms of the Provisions of Oxford, as well as to uphold the Great Charter and the old customs of the realm. Montfort was determined to put his master under political tutelage for the rest of his life. He summoned a parliament, in which four knights elected by each shire were present, to establish the new constitution. It appointed Simon, with his closest allies, the young earl of Gloucester and the bishop of Chichester, as electors who were to choose a privy council for the king and to fill up all offices of state. The king was to exercise no act of sovereignty save by the consent of the councillors, of whom three were to follow his person wherever he went. This was a far simpler constitution than that framed at Oxford in 1258, but it was even more liable to criticism. For if the "Provisions" had established a government by baronial committees, the parliament of 1264 created one which was a mere party administration. For the victorious faction, naturally but unwisely, took all power for themselves, and filled every sheriffdom, castellany and judicial office with their own firm friends. Simon's care to commit the commons to his cause by summoning them to his parliament did not suffice to disguise the fact that the government which he had set up was not representative of the whole nation. He himself was too much like a dictator; even his own followers complained that he was over-masterful, and the most important of them, the young earl of Gloucester, was gradually estranged from him by finding his requests often refused and his aims crossed by the old earl's action. The new government lasted less than two years, and was slowly losing prestige all the time. Its first failure was in the repression of the surviving royalists. Isolated castles in several districts held out in the king's name, and the whole March of Wales was never properly subdued. When Simon turned the native Welsh prince Llewelyn against the marcher barons, he gave great offence; he was accused of sacrificing Englishmen to a foreign enemy. The new regime did not give England the peace which it had promised; its enemies maintained that it did not even give the good governance of which Simon had made so many promises. It certainly appears that some of his followers, and notably his three reckless sons, had given good cause for offence by high-handed and selfish acts. Much indignation was provoked by the sight of the king kept continually in ward by his privy councillors and treated with systematic neglect; but the treatment of his son was even more resented. Edward, though he had given little cause of offence, and had behaved admirably in refusing to continue the civil war, was deprived of his earldom of Chester, and put under the same restraint as his father. There was no good reason for treating him so harshly, and his state was much pitied.

Montfort attempted to strengthen his position, and to show his confidence in the commons, by summoning to his second and last parliament, that of 1265, a new element--two citizens from each city and two burgesses from each borough in the realm. It must be confessed that his object was probably not to introduce a great constitutional improvement, and to make parliament more representative, but rather to compensate for the great gaps upon the baronial benches by showing a multitude of lesser adherents, for the towns were his firm supporters. The actual proceedings of this particular assembly had no great importance.

Battle of Evesham.

Two months later Prince Edward escaped from his confinement, and fled to the earl of Gloucester, who now declared himself a royalist. They raised an army, which seized the fords of the Severn, in order to prevent de Montfort--who was then at Hereford with the captive king--from getting back to London or the Midlands. The earl, who could only raise a trifling force in the Marches, where the barons were all his enemies, failed in several attempts to force a passage eastward. But his friends raised a considerable host, which marched under his son Simon the Younger and the earl of Oxford, to fall on the rear of the royalists. Prince Edward now displayed skilful generalship--hastily turning backward he surprised and scattered the army of relief at Kenilworth (Aug. 1); he was then free to deal with the earl, who had at last succeeded in passing the Severn during his absence. On the 4th of August he beset Montfort's little force with five-fold numbers, and absolutely exterminated it at Evesham. Simon fought most gallantly, and was left dead on the field along with his eldest son Henry, his justiciar Hugh Despenser, and the flower of his party. The king fell into the hands of his son's followers, and was once more free.

It might have been expected that the victorious party would now introduce a policy of reaction and autocratic government. But the king was old and broken by his late misfortunes: his son the prince was wise beyond his years, and Gloucester and many other of the present supporters of the crown had originally been friends of reform, and had not abandoned their old views. They had deserted Montfort because he was autocratic and masterful, not because they had altogether disapproved of his policy. Hence we find Gloucester insisting that the remnant of the vanquished party should not be subjected to over heavy punishment, and even making an armed demonstration, in the spring of 1267, to demand the re-enactment of the Provisions of Oxford. Ultimately the troubles of the realm were ended by the Dictum of Kenilworth (Oct. 31, 1266) and the Statute of Marlborough (Nov. 1267). The former allowed nearly all of Montfort's faction to obtain amnesty and regain their estates on the payment of heavy fines; only Simon's own Leicester estates and those of Ferrers, earl of Derby, were confiscated. The latter established a form of constitution in which many, if not all, of the innovations of the Provisions of Oxford were embodied. The only unsatisfactory part of the pacification was that Llewelyn of Wales, who had ravaged the whole March while he was Montfort's ally, was allowed to keep a broad region (the greater part of the modern shire of Denbigh) which he had won back from its English holders. His power in a more indirect fashion extended itself over much of Mid-Wales. The line of the March was distinctly moved backward by the treaty of 1267.

Death of Henry III.

King Henry survived his restoration to nominal, if not to actual, authority for seven years. He was now too feeble to indulge in any of his former freaks of foreign policy, and allowed the realm to be governed under his son's eye by veteran bureaucrats, who kept to the old customs of the land. Everything settled down so peacefully that when the prince took the cross, and went off to the Crusades in 1270, no trouble followed. Edward was still absent in Palestine when his father died, on the 16th of November 1272. For the first time in English history there was no form of election of the new king, whose accession was quietly acknowledged by the officials and the nation. It was nearly two years after his father's death that he reached England, yet absolutely no trouble had occurred during his absence. He had taken advantage of his leisurely journey home to pacify the turbulent Gascony, and to visit Paris and make a treaty with King Philip III. by which the frontiers of his duchy of Aquitaine were rectified, to some slight extent, in his favour. He, of course, did homage for the holding, as his father had done before him.

Edward I.