in 1219, and did all which in the face of such difficulties could be done to restore order. The French army had gone, but traces of a foreign invasion remained in the persons of such men as Fulkes de Breauté, who saw no reason for abandoning a profitable venture because the Dauphin had withdrawn his claim upon the Crown. William Marshall had to subdue these and their followers, to conquer the habit of disregard for law grown up among the people while their king was the most lawless of all, and to preserve peace amongst a nobility each member of which had been tempted by recent events to think himself as capable as any one else of wielding supreme power. One of the Protector's first steps in his work of restoring the administrative system was the re-issue of the Great Charter. This was no doubt regarded as a pledge of general good government; but an interesting commentary upon the idea that Magna Carta had been an immediate remedy for all evils is suggested by the fact that in this re-issue the vital clauses concerning taxation by consent were omitted, and omitted apparently without exciting the smallest opposition. The Protector was too hard pressed to hamper himself with constitutional observances, and as for the barons, it was natural that they should be less eager to lay shackles on the royal power when that power was in the hands of a deputy elected by themselves. Attitude of papal party. William Marshall, and for some years his successor Hubert de Burgh, received the support of a party whose disproportionate power was one of the evil legacies of John to his son and his people. The adherents and emissaries of the Pope enjoyed during this reign a period of such prosperity as had never been theirs in England before and was destined never to be theirs again. The legates Gualo, Pandulf, and Otto, successively despatched from Rome to England, were backed by the whole body of monks in the kingdom; they wielded both money and influence, and to some extent they played the part of arbitrator between the foreign party headed by adventurers and the national party. led by the ministers. In the light of subsequent events it is perhaps not too uncharitable to suppose that the influence of the papal party was at first thrown upon the side of the minis Difficulties of ters rather through its own need for a settled government than from any love of justice in itself. The choice during the king's minority was between the rule of William Marshall or Hubert de Burgh and an anarchy from which it would have been difficult to extract papal dues or contributions of any kind. Between the years 1220 and 1230, however, the Roman party, which was steadily becoming more and more unpopular in the country, began itself to feel the need of help, and turned to look for it among the foreigners. That defection was the last straw which made de Burgh's burden too heavy for him to bear. He was a man who de Burgh. brought both ability and energy to his thankless task. He had taken arms against Fulkes de Breauté, who tried to play the old game of fortifying castles; and his influence had kept Peter des Roches, the other foreign leader, out of the country for many years. But difficulties rose up against him on every side. The French war, which smouldered on through the whole of this reign, bursting every now and then into flame, was an almost insoluble problem for a responsible government. To prosecute it energetically achieved little and involved heavy taxation; to withdraw from it was a disgrace in the eyes of a baronage which had more regard for its own pride than for the nation's purse. The jealousies among these barons themselves, foreshadowing the bitter struggles of a later century, were another terrible obstacle to a ruler who held his power by consent of his fellows. And, greatest misfortune of all, Henry III., 'the waxen-hearted king,' could not well be prevented from growing up to manhood and assuming the power which was admittedly his. In 1232 Hubert de Burgh yielded to the combination of forces against him and resigned his office. The immediate effects upon the country were disastrous indeed, since this change inaugurated the era of Henry's personal misgovernment. But in a broader view de Burgh's retirement must be reckoned with other events of the time as having helped to foster that new conception of government which, as we have seen, had probably been suggested in the time of Richard I.'s wanderings in the East, but which must have been steadily developing during His resignation. Henry's long minority. This was the conception, essential to the growth of a free people, that authority did not subsist in the king alone, but was delegated to Ministerial system. Significance of ministers who were subject to the criticism and attack of the nation. Little interest or importance attaches to what may be called the external events of the years between the settlement of the country and the outbreak of the Barons' War. Henry was married in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence, who brought innumerable poor relations in her train to England. In 1242 he made a campaign in France, of which the object was obscure and the result humiliating. But the whole significance of the reign lies in the long struggle between a king born to a fondness for arbitrary rule and a nation awakening to the possibilities of freedom. Henry III., when he grew to manhood, seized upon the reins of government with the confidence of a vain man and clung to them with the obstinacy of a weak one. Whether he had the mental energy to evolve any definite plan for the assumption of absolute power is doubtful, but it is certain that all his inclinations drew him that way, and equally certain the reign. that he adopted the very worst means for attaining Royal his end. He surrounded himself with foreigners policy. because he had a personal preference for them, and so aroused not only the political antagonism of the English, but every fierce national prejudice as well. He maintained firmly his adherence to Rome; and since the papacy was so little loved in England that even submission to a good Pope met with scanty favour, subserviency to a rapacious one was still less likely to be popular. Finally, Henry consistently squandered his own and his people's money. Whatever a strong king might have been able to do, no weak one could now levy universal taxes without the consent of the assembled barons, and the result was that the character in which Henry most commonly appeared before his people was that of a beggar who could not account for the disappearance of his last dole. We are very apt to speak of the wild and turbulent medi Conduct of the Barons. æval baronage, and no doubt the attachment of this thirteenth century aristocracy to existing institutions was considerably less marked than is that of the corresponding classes to-day. Yet in reading the records of the years between 1232 and 1258 it is impossible not to feel that these barons had in them after all much of that distaste for extreme measures which is so characteristic of the modern British citizen. For a quarter of a century they allowed themselves to be robbed, cheated, and tricked by a king, personally incapable, who was not in the position of a professed despot, with an army behind him, but had no protection except the traditional loyalty of his subjects. The barons gave what the historians describe as angry answers; they indulged in trenchant criticisms of the royal policy; they enlisted Henry's brother Richard of Cornwall on their side to remonstrate against the oppressive taxation. But they yielded nevertheless again and again to the king's demands; even when about the year 1240 a foreigner was made archbishop; even when the papal legate demanded a fifth of the Church revenues for his master's war against the Emperor, natural ally of England on the Continent-ev even then the crisis was delayed and swords remained undrawn. Yet behind these barons was a nation through which discontent was steadily spreading; not, as in former days, discontent under feudal oppression, but under a royal policy which left the poorer people helpless in the hands of the greedy money-grubbers from Rome. The weak place in the patience of any nation, perhaps more particularly of our own, is to be found in the region of its pockets; and familiar as this truth should be to every man whose trade is politics, it seems to have been forgotten for the time by both King and Pope. Gregory IX. and his successor Innocent IV. were apparently misled by the simplicity of the means they used to extort money from England, and supposed that the game could be played for ever. One plan was to use their divinely appointed authority to command the investiture in English benefices of numerous followers of their own, who never even saw the flocks whose Feeling of the nation. Papal extortion. spiritual pastors they were, and who no doubt found it convenient to divert a portion of their revenues into the papal treasury. Another device was the famous one of selling pardons and indulgences to the ignorant. Another, simpler still, was to demand a large proportion of the property of the clergy, to hand over a part of the proceeds to the king if it was considered necessary to conciliate him, and to absorb the rest. In later years the nation prepared a tolerably effective reply to such demands, but in the meantime it could only protest with a sort of amazed dismay against this new kind of calamity. In 1240 the rectors of Berkshire became articulate in a reply to certain requests of the papal legate, earnestly drawing his attention to the absence of Biblical authority for the maxim, 'Whatsoever thou shalt exact on earth shall be exacted in heaven.' Grosseteste, the famous Bishop of Lincoln, thundered unceasingly against the organised system of robbery by which more money was actually poured into the pockets of the Italian adventurers than found its way into the royal treasury. His protests were not and could not be to any purpose, for no mediæval people could defy the Pope so long as their king went hand in hand with him, anticipated his wishes, trembled at his threats, and delightedly shared in the profits of his tyranny. But, unfortunately for Henry and happily for his subjects, they became at last fully aware that since the king was not for them he was against them. They were powerless at Rome, but they could strike a blow in England. Useless protests. Import- attitude. If we are to thank King John for the incapacity which gave us Magna Carta, the perversity of Henry III. must equally deserve our gratitude for forcing the nation into a practical application of the Charter's principles. He might have won the hearts of the common people by protecting them while he oppressed the rich, but instead of that he permitted disorder even though his government was tyrannical. He might have distracted the attention of the nation by a vigorous effort to recover the French provinces; but his foreign policy was so feeble that only the forbearance of the saintly King Louis IX. prevented |