Read The History of England - Vols. 1 to 6 Online
Authors: David Hume
Besides acquiring the property of many castles and manors, he 1231.
married the eldest sister of the king of Scots, was created earl of Kent, and by an unusual concession, was made chief justiciary of England for life: Yet Henry, in a sudden caprice, threw off this faithful minister, and exposed him to the violent persecutions of his enemies. Among other frivolous crimes objected to him, he was accused of gaining the king’s affections by enchantment, and of purloining from the royal treasury a gem, which had the virtue to render the wearer invulnerable, and of sending this valuable curiosity to the prince of Wales.
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The nobility, who hated Hubert on account of his zeal in resuming the rights and possessions of the crown, no sooner saw the opportunity favourable, than they inflamed the king’s animosity against him, and pushed him to seek the total ruin of his minister. Hubert took sanctuary in a church: The king ordered him to be dragged from thence: He recalled those orders: He afterwards renewed them: He was obliged by the clergy to restore him to the sanctuary: He constrained him soon after to surrender himself prisoner, and he confined him in the castle of the Devises. Hubert made his escape, was expelled the kingdom, was again received into favour, recovered a great share of the king’s confidence, but never showed any inclination to reinstate himself in power and authority.
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The man, who succeeded him in the government of the king and Bishop of Winchester kingdom, was Peter, bishop of Winchester, a Poictevin by birth, minister.
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who had been raised by the late king, and who was no less distinguished by his arbitrary principles and violent conduct, than by his courage and abilities. This prelate had been left by king John justiciary and regent of the kingdom during an expedition which that prince made into France; and his illegal administration was one chief cause of that great combination among the barons, which finally extorted from the crown the charter of liberties, and laid the foundations of the English constitution. Henry, though incapable, from his character, of pursuing the same violent maxims, which had governed his father, had imbibed the same arbitrary principles; and in prosecution of Peter’s advice, he invited over a great number of Poictevins and other foreigners, who, he believed, could more safely be trusted than the English, and who seemed useful to counterbalance the great and independant power of the nobility.
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Every office and command was bestowed on these strangers; they exhausted the revenues of the crown, already too much impoverished;
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they invaded the rights of the people; and their insolence, still more provoking than their power, drew on them the hatred and envy of all orders of men in the kingdom.
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The barons formed a combination against this odious ministry, 1233.
and withdrew from parliament; on pretence of the danger, to which they were exposed from the machinations of the Poictevins. When again summoned to attend, they gave for answer, that the king should dismiss his foreigners: Otherwise they would drive both him and them out of the kingdom, and
put the crown on another head, more worthy to wear it:p
Such was the style they used to their sovereign! They at last came to parliament, but so well attended, that they seemed in a condition to prescribe laws to the king and ministry. Peter des Roches, however, had in the interval found means of sowing dissention among them, and of bringing over to his party the earl of Cornwal, as well as the earls of Lincoln and Chester. The confederates were disconcerted in their measures: Richard, earl Mareschal, who had succeeded to that dignity on the death of his brother, William, was chased into Wales; he thence withdrew into Ireland; where he was treacherously
murdered by the contrivance of the bishop of Winchester.q
The estates of the more obnoxious barons were confiscated, without legal sentence or trial by their peers;
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and were bestowed with a profuse liberality on the Poictevins. Peter even carried his insolence so far as to declare publickly, that the barons of England must not pretend to put themselves on the same foot with those of France, or assume the same liberties and privileges: The monarch in the former country had a more absolute power than in the latter. It had been more justifiable for him to have said, that men, so unwilling to submit to the authority of laws, could with the worse grace claim any shelter or protection from them.
When the king at any time was checked in his illegal practices, and when the authority of the Great Charter was objected to him, he was wont to reply; “Why should I observe this charter, which is neglected by all my grandees, both prelates and nobility?” It was very reasonably said to him: “You ought, sir, to set them the
So violent a ministry, as that of the bishop of Winchester, could not be of long duration; but its fall proceeded at last from the influence of the church, not from the efforts of the nobles. Edmond, the primate, came to court, attended by many of the PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011)
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other prelates; and represented to the king the pernicious measures embraced by Peter des Roches, the discontents of his people, the ruin of his affairs; and after requiring the dismission of the minister and his associates, threatened him with excommunication, in case of his refusal. Henry, who knew that an excommunication, so agreeable to the sense of the people, could not fail of producing the most dangerous effects, was obliged to submit: Foreigners were banished: The natives were restored to their place in council:
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The primate, who was a man of prudence, and who took care to execute the laws and observe the charter of liberties, bore the chief sway in the government.
But the English in vain flattered themselves that they should be 1236. 14th January.
long free from the dominion of foreigners.
The king, having married Eleanor, daughter of the count of
King’s partiality to
Provence,u
was surrounded by a great number of strangers from foreigners.
that country, whom he caressed with the fondest affection, and
enriched by an imprudent generosity.w
The bishop of Valence, a prelate of the house of Savoy, and maternal uncle to the queen, was his chief minister, and employed every art to amass wealth for himself and his relations. Peter of Savoy, a brother of the same family, was invested in the honour of Richmond, and received the rich wardship of earl Warrenne: Boniface of Savoy was promoted to the see of Canterbury: Many young ladies were invited over from Provence, and married to the
chief noblemen in England, who were the king’s wards:x
And as the source of Henry’s bounty began to fail, his Savoyard ministry applied to Rome, and obtained a bull; permitting him to resume all past grants; absolving him from the oath, which he had taken to maintain them; even enjoining him to make such a resumption, and representing those grants as invalid, on account of the prejudice which ensued from them to the Roman pontiff, in whom the superiority of the kingdom was vested.
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The opposition, made to the intended resumption, prevented it from taking place; but the nation saw the indignities, to which the king was willing to submit, in order to gratify the avidity of his foreign favourites. About the same time, he published in England the sentence of excommunication pronounced against the emperor Frederic, his brother-in-law;
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and said in excuse, that, being the pope’s vassal, he was obliged by his allegiance to obey all the commands of his holiness. In this weak reign, when any neighbouring potentate insulted the king’s dominions, instead of taking revenge for the injury, he complained to the pope as his superior lord, and begged him to give protection to his vassal.
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The resentment of the English barons rose high at the preference Grievances.
given to foreigners; but no remonstrance or complaint could ever prevail on the king to abandon them, or even to moderate his attachment towards them. After the Provençals and Savoyards might have been supposed pretty well satiated with the dignities and riches which they had acquired, a new set of hungry foreigners were invited over, and shared among them those favours, which the king ought in policy to have conferred on the English nobility, by whom his government could have been supported and defended. His mother, Isabella, who had been unjustly taken by the late king from the count de la Marche, to whom she was betrothed, was no sooner mistress of herself by the death of her husband, than PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011)
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she married that nobleman;b
and she had born him four sons, 1247.
Guy, William, Geoffrey, and Aymer, whom she sent over to
England, in order to pay a visit to their brother. The good-natured and affectionate disposition of Henry was moved at the sight of such near relations; and he considered neither his own circumstances, nor the inclinations of his people, in the honours and riches which he conferred upon them.
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Complaints rose as high against the credit of the Gascon as ever they had done against that of the Poictevin and of the Savoyard favourites; and to a nation prejudiced against them, all their measures appeared exceptionable and criminal. Violations of the Great Charter were frequently mentioned; and it is indeed more than probable, that foreigners, ignorant of the laws, and relying on the boundless affections of a weak prince, would, in an age, when a regular administration was not any where known, pay more attention to their present interest than to the liberties of the people. It is reported, that the Poictevins and other strangers, when the laws were at any time appealed to, in opposition to their oppressions, scrupled not to reply,
What did the English laws signify to them? They
minded them not.
And as words are often more offensive than actions, this open contempt of the English tended much to aggravate the general discontent, and made every act of violence, committed by the foreigners, appear not only an injury, but an
I reckon not among the violations of the Great Charter, some arbitrary exertions of prerogative, to which Henry’s necessities pushed him, and which, without producing any discontent, were uniformly continued by all his successors, till the last century.
As the parliament often refused him supplies, and that in a manner somewhat rude and indecent,
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he obliged his opulent subjects, particularly the citizens of London, to grant him loans of money; and it is natural to imagine, that the same want of economy, which reduced him to the necessity of borrowing, would prevent him from being very punctual in the repayment.
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He demanded benevolences or pretended
voluntary contributions from his nobility and prelates.g
He was the first king of England since the conquest, that could fairly be said to lie under the restraint of law; and he was also the first that practised the dispensing power, and employed the clause of
Non-obstante
in his grants and patents. When objections were made to this novelty, he replied, that the pope exercised that authority; and why might not he imitate the example? But the abuse, which the pope made of his dispensing power, in violating the canons of general councils, in invading the privileges and customs of all particular churches, and in usurping on the rights of patrons, was more likely to excite the jealousy of the people, than to reconcile them to a similar practice in their civil government. Roger de Thurkesby, one of the king’s justices, was so displeased with the precedent, that he exclaimed,
Alas! what times are we fallen into? Behold, the
civil court is corrupted in imitation of the ecclesiastical, and the river is poisoned
from that fountain.
The king’s partiality and profuse bounty to his foreign relations, and to their friends and favourites, would have appeared more tolerable to the English, had any thing been done meanwhile for the honour of the nation, or had Henry’s enterprizes in foreign countries, been attended with any success or glory to himself or to the public: At least, such military talents in the king would have served to keep his barons in awe, and have given weight and authority to his government. But though he declared war PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011)
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against Lewis IX. in 1242, and made an expedition into Guienne, upon the invitation of his father-in-law, the count de la Marche, who promised to join him with all his forces; he was unsuccessful in his attempts against that great monarch, was worsted at Taillebourg, was deserted by his allies, lost what remained to him of Poictou, and was
obliged to return, with loss of honour, into England.h
The Gascon nobility were attached to the English government; 1253.
because the distance of their sovereign allowed them to remain in a state of almost total independance: And they claimed, some time after, Henry’s protection against an invasion, which the king of Castile made upon that territory.
Henry returned into Guienne, and was more successful in this expedition; but he thereby involved himself and his nobility in an enormous debt, which both encreased their discontents, and exposed him to greater danger from their enterprizes.
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Want of economy and an ill-judged liberality were Henry’s great defects; and his debts, even before this expedition, had become so troublesome, that he sold all his plate and jewels, in order to discharge them. When this expedient was first proposed to him, he asked, where he should find purchasers? It was replied, the citizens of London.
On my word,
said he,
if thetreasury of Augustus were brought to sale, the
citizens are able to be the purchasers: These clowns, who assume to themselves the
name of barons, abound in every thing, while we are reduced to necessities.
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And he was thence forth observed to be more forward and greedy in his exactions upon the