he was succeeded in the government by Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and Hubert de Burgh, the justiciary (1218). The counsels of the latter were chiefly followed; and had he possessed equal authority in the kingdom with Pembroke, he seemed to be every way worthy of filling the place of that virtuous nobleman. But the powerful barons, who had once broken the reins of subjection to their prince, and obtained an enlargement of their liberties and independence, could ill be restrained by laws under a minority. They retained by force the royal castles, which they had seized during the past convulsions, or which had been committed to their custody by the protector; and they usurped the king's demesnes.

Notwithstanding these intestine commotions in England, and the precarious authority of the crown, Henry was obliged to carry on war in France. Louis VIII., who had succeeded to his father Philip, instead of complying with Henry's claim, who demanded the restitution of Normandy and the other provinces wrested from England, made an irruption into Poitou (1224), took Rochelle after a long siege, and seemed determined to expel the English from the few provinces which still remained to them. Henry sent over his uncle, the Earl of Salisbury, who stopped the progress of Louis's arms; but no military action of any moment was performed on either side.

§ 12. The character of the king, as he grew to man's estate, became every day better known; and he was found in every respect unqualified for maintaining a proper sway among those turbulent barons whom the feudal constitution subjected to his authority. Gentle, humane, and merciful even to a fault, he seems to have been steady in no other circumstance of his character; but to have received every impression from those who surrounded him, and whom he loved, for the time, with the most imprudent and most unreserved affection. Hubert de Burgh, while he enjoyed his authority, had an entire ascendant over Henry, and was loaded with honors and favors beyond any other subject. Besides acquiring the property of many castles and manors, he 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 (1231), and exposed him to the violent persecutions of his enemies. The man who succeeded him in the government of the king and kingdom was Peter, Bishop of Winchester, a Poitevin by birth, 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

A.D. 1218-1253.

PAPAL USURPATIONS.

147

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 Poitevins and other foreigners, who, he believed, could be more safely trusted than the English, and who seemed useful to counterbalance the great and independent power of the nobility. Every office and command was bestowed on these strangers; they exhausted the revenues of the crown, already too much impoverished; they invaded the rights of the people; and their insolence drew on them the hatred and envy of all orders of men in the kingdom.

The king, having married Eleanor, daughter of the Count of Provence (14th January, 1236), was surrounded by a great number of strangers from that country also, whom he caressed with the fondest affection, and enriched by an imprudent generosity. The resentment of the English barons rose high at the preference given to foreigners, but no remonstrance or complaint could ever prevail on the king to abandon them, or even to moderate his attachment toward them. The king's conduct would have appeared more tolerable to the English had any thing been done meanwhile for the honor of the nation, or had Henry's enterprises in foreign countries been attended with any success or glory to himself or to the public. But though he declared war against Louis IX. in 1242, and made an expedition into Guienne, upon the invitation of his step-father, 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 Poitou, and was obliged to return, with the loss of honor, into England. He was more successful in 1253 in repelling an invasion made by the King of Castile upon Guienne; but he thereby involved himself and his nobility in an enormous debt, which both increased their discontents, and exposed him to great danger from their enterprises.

$ 13. The chief grievances suffered by the English during this reign were, however, the usurpations and exactions of the court of Rome. All the chief benefices of the kingdom were conferred on Italians; great numbers of that nation were sent over at one time to be provided for, and non-residence and pluralities were carried to an enormous height. The benefices of the Italian clergy in England amounted to 60,000 marks a year, a sum which exceeded

the annual revenue of the crown itself. The Pope exacted the revenues of all vacant benefices, the twentieth of all ecclesiastical revenues without exception, the third of such as exceeded 100 marks a year, and the half of such as were possessed by non-residents. He claimed the goods of all intestate clergymen; he pretended a title to all money gotten by usury; he levied benevolences upon the people; and when the king, contrary to his usual practice, prohibited these exactions, he threatened him with excommunication.

But the most oppressive expedient employed by the Pope was the embarking of Henry in a project for the conquest of Naples, or Sicily on this side the Fare (1255). He pretended to dispose of the Sicilian crown, both as superior lord of that particular kingdom, and as vicar of Christ, to whom all kingdoms of the earth were subjected; and he made a tender of it to Henry for his second son Edmund. Henry accepted the insidious proposal, gave the Pope unlimited credit to expend whatever sums he thought necessary for completing the conquest, and was surprised to find himself on a sudden involved in an immense debt of 135,541 marks, besides interest. He applied to the parliament for supplies, but the barons, sensible of the ridiculous cheat imposed by the Pope, determined not to lavish their money on such chimerical projects. In this extremity the clergy was his only resource. The Pope published a crusade for the conquest of Sicily from King Mainfroy, a more terrible enemy, as he pretended, to the Christian faith than any Saracen. He levied a tenth on all ecclesias. tical benefices in England for three years, and gave orders to ex. communicate all bishops who made not punctual payment. Ho granted to the king the goods of intestate clergymen, the revenues of vacant benefices, and the revenues of all non-residents.

§ 14. About the same time Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the brother of the king, was engaged in an enterprise no less expensive and vexatious than that of Henry, and not attended with much greater probability of success. The immense opulence of Richard having made the German princes cast their eyes on him as a candidate for the empire, he was tempted to expend vast sums of money on his election; and he succeeded so far as to be chosen King of the Romans, which seemed to render his succession infallible to the imperial throne (1256); but he found at last that he had lavished away the frugality of a whole life in order to procure a splendid title.

The king was engaged in constant disputes with his barons, who frequently addressed him with the severest remonstrances. He was compelled several times to confirm the Great Charter; and on one of these occasions it was done in the most solemn and

A.D. 1253-1258.

SIMON DE MONTFORT.

149 even awful manner. All the prelates and abbots were assembled ; they held burning tapers in their hands; the Great Charter was read before them; they denounced the sentence of excommunication against every one who should thenceforth violate that fundamental law; they threw their tapers on the ground, and exclaimed, May the soul of every one who incurs this sentence so stink and corrupt in hell! The king bore a part in this ceremony, and subjoined, "So help me God I will keep all these articles inviolate, as I am a man, as I am a Christian, as I am a knight, and as I am a king crowned and anointed." Yet was the tremendous ceremony no sooner finished than his favorites, abusing his weakness, made him return to the same arbitrary and irregular administration, and the reasonable expectations of his people were thus perpetually eluded and disappointed. All these imprudent and illegal measures afforded a pretense to Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, a younger son of that Simon de Montfort who had conducted the crusade against the Albigenses, to attempt an innovation in the government, and to wrest the sceptre from the feeble and irresolute hand which held it. He had married the king's sister, Eleanor, widow of the Earl of Pembroke, and had governed Gascony for many years with vigor and success. He secretly called a meeting of the most considerable barons, who embraced the resolution of redressing the public grievances by taking into their own hands. the administration of government. Henry having summoned a Parliament (May 2, 1258) in expectation of receiving supplies for his Sicilian project, the barons appeared in the hall clad in complete armor, and with their swords by their side. A violent altercation ensued; and the king at length promised to summon another Parliament at Oxford, on June 11, in order to arrange a new plan of government.

§ 15. This Parliament, which the Royalists, and even the nation, from experience of the confusions that attended its measures, afterward denominated the mad Parliament, met on the day appointed; and as all the barons brought along with them their military vassals, and appeared with an armed force, the king, who had taken no precautions against them, was in reality a prisoner in their hands, and was obliged to submit to all the terms which they were pleased to impose upon him. A council of state, consisting of 15 barons, was selected to make the necessary reforms. The king himself took an oath that he would maintain whatever ordinances they should think proper to enact for that purpose. Simon de Montfort was at the head of this supreme council, to which the legislative power was thus in reality transferred; and all their measures were taken by his secret influence and direction. Their chief enactments, called the Provisions of Oxford, were, that four

knights should be chosen by each county, to point out the grievances of their neighborhood; that three sessions of Parliament should be regularly held every year, in the months of February, June, and October; that a new sheriff should be annually elected by the votes of the freeholders in each county; that no heirs should be committed to the wardship of foreigners, and no castles intrusted to their custody; and that no new warrens or forests should be created, nor the revenues of any counties or hundreds be let to farm.

The Earl of Leicester and his associates roused anew the popular clamor which had long prevailed against foreigners, and they fell with the utmost violence on the king's half-brothers, who were supposed to be the authors of all national grievances, and whom the king was obliged to banish. The barons formed an association among themselves, and swore that they would stand by each other with their lives and fortunes; they displaced all the chief officers of the crown, the justiciary, the chancellor, the treasurer, and advanced either themselves or their own creatures in their place. The whole power of the state being thus transferred to them, they ventured to impose an oath, by which all the subjects were obliged to swear, under the penalty of being declared public enemies, that they would obey and execute all the regulations, both known and unknown, of the barons. Not content with the usurpation of the royal power, they introduced an innovation in the constitution of Parliament, which was of the utmost importance. They ordained that this assembly should choose a committee of 12 persons, who should, in the intervals of the session, possess the authority of the whole Parliament, and should attend, on a summons, the person of the king in all his motions. Thus the monarchy was totally subverted without its being possible for the king to strike a single stroke in defense of the constitution against the newly-erected oligarchy.

$ 16. But the barons, in proportion to their continuance in power, began gradually to lose that popularity which had assisted them in obtaining it; and the fears of the nation were aroused by some new edicts, which were plainly calculated to procure to themselves an impunity in all their violences. They appointed that the circuits of the itinerant justices, the sole check on their arbitrary conduct, should be held only once in seven years; and men easily saw that a remedy which returned after such long intervals, against an oppressive power which was perpetual, would prove totally insignificant and useless. The cry became loud in the nation that the barons should finish their intended regulations. The current of popularity was now much turned to the side of the crown, and the rivalship between the Earls of Leicester and