Part 268

"Nothing is so hard to realise as chaos; and nothing nearer to chaos can be conceived than the government of Henry III. Henry was, like all the Plantagenets, clever; like very few of them, he was devout; and if the power of conceiving a great policy would constitute a great King, he would certainly have been one. … He aimed at making the Crown virtually independent of the barons. … His connexion with Louis IX., whose brother-in-law he became, was certainly a misfortune to him. In France the royal power had during the last fifty years been steadily on the advance; in England it had as steadily receded; and Henry was ever hearing from the other side of the Channel maxims of government and ideas of royal authority which were utterly inapplicable to the actual state of his own kingdom. This, like a premature Stuart, Henry was incapable of perceiving; a King he was, and a King he would be, in his own sense of the word. It is evident that with such a task before him, he needed for the most shadowy chance of success, an iron strength of will, singular self-control, great forethought and care in collecting and husbanding his resources, a rare talent for administration, the sagacity to choose and the self-reliance to trust his counsellors. And not one of these various qualities did Henry possess. … Henry had imbibed from the events and the tutors of his early childhood two maxims of state, and two alone: to trust Rome, and to distrust the barons of England. … He filled the places of trust and power about himself with aliens, to whom the maintenance of Papal influence was like an instinct of self-preservation. Thus were definitely formed the two great parties out of whose antagonism the War of the Barons arose, under whose influence the relations between the crown and people of England were remodelled, and out of whose enduring conflict rose, indirectly, the political principles which contributed so largely to bring about the Reformation of the English Church. The few years which followed the fall of Hubert de Burgh were the heyday of Papal triumph. And no triumph could have been worse used. … Thus was the whole country lying a prey to the ecclesiastical aliens maintained by the Pope, and to the lay aliens maintained by the King, … when Simon de Montfort became … inseparably intermixed with the course of our history. … In the year 1258 opened the first act of the great drama which has made the name of Simon de Montfort immortal. … The Barons of England, at Leicester's suggestion, had leagued for the defence of their rights. They appeared armed at the Great Council. … {808} They required as the condition of their assistance that the general reformation of the realm should be entrusted to a Commission of twenty-four members, half to be chosen by the crown, and half by themselves. For the election of this body, primarily, and for a more explicit statement of grievances, the Great Council was to meet again at Oxford on the 11th of June, 1258. When the Barons came, they appeared at the head of their retainers. The invasion of the Welsh was the plea; but the real danger was nearer home. They seized on the Cinque Ports; the unrenewed truce with France was the excuse; they remembered too vividly King John and his foreign mercenaries. They then presented their petition. This was directed to the redress of various abuses. … To each and every clause the King gave his inevitable assent. One more remarkable encroachment was made upon the royal prerogative; the election in Parliament of a chief justiciar. … The chief justiciar was the first officer of the Crown. He was not a mere chief justice, after the fashion of the present day, but the representative of the Crown in its high character of the fountain of justice. … But the point upon which the barons laid the greatest stress, from the beginning to the end of their struggle, was the question of the employment of aliens. That the strongest castles and the fairest lands of England should be in the hands of foreigners, was an insult to the national spirit which no free people could fail to resent. … England for the English, the great war cry of the barons, went home to the heart of the humblest. … The great question of the constitution of Parliament was not heard at Oxford; it emerged into importance when the struggle grew fiercer, and the barons found it necessary to gather allies round them. … One other measure completed the programme of the barons; namely, the appointment, already referred to, of a committee of twenty-four. … It amounted to placing the crown under the control of a temporary Council of Regency [see OXFORD, PROVISIONS OF]. … Part of the barons' work was simple enough. The justiciar was named, and the committee of twenty-four. To expel the foreigners was less easy. Simon de Montfort, himself an alien by birth, resigned the two castles which he held, and called upon the rest to follow. They simply refused. … But the barons were in arms, and prepared to use them. The aliens, with their few English supporters, fled to Winchester, where the castle was in the hands of the foreign bishop Aymer. They were besieged, brought to terms, and exiled. The barons were now masters of the situation. … Among the prerogatives of the crown which passed to the Oxford Commission not the least valuable, for the hold which it gave on the general government of the country, was the right to nominate the sheriffs. In 1261 the King, who had procured a Papal bull to abrogate the Provisions of Oxford, and an army of mercenaries to give the bull effect, proceeded to expel the sheriffs who had been placed in office by the barons. The reply of the barons was most memorable; it was a direct appeal to the order below their own. They summoned three knights elected from each county in England to meet them at St. Albans to discuss the state of the realm. It was clear that the day of the House of Commons could not be far distant, when at such a crisis an appeal to the knights of the shire could be made, and evidently made with success. For a moment, in this great move, the whole strength of the barons was united; but differences soon returned, and against divided counsels the crown steadily prevailed. In June, 1262, we find peace restored. The more moderate of the barons had acquiesced in the terms offered by Henry; Montfort, who refused them, was abroad in voluntary exile. … Suddenly, in July, the Earl of Gloucester died, and the sole leadership of the barons passed into the hands of Montfort. With this critical event opens the last act in the career of the great Earl. In October he returns privately to England. The whole winter is passed in the patient reorganising of the party, and the preparation for a decisive struggle. Montfort, fervent, eloquent, and devoted, swayed with despotic influence the hearts of the younger nobles (and few in those days lived to be grey), and taught them to feel that the Provisions of Oxford were to them what the Great Charter had been to their fathers. They were drawn together with an unanimity unknown before. … They demanded the restoration of the Great Provisions. The King refused, and in May, 1263, the barons appealed to arms. … Henry, with a reluctant hand, subscribed once more to the Provisions of Oxford, with a saving clause, however, that they should be revised in the coming Parliament. On the 9th of September, accordingly, Parliament was assembled. … The King and the barons agreed to submit their differences to the arbitration of Louis of France. … Louis IX. had done more than any one king of France to enlarge the royal prerogative; and Louis was the brother-in-law of Henry. His award, given at Amiens on the 23d of January, 1264. was, as we should have expected, absolutely in favour of the King. The whole Provisions of Oxford were, in his view, an invasion of the royal power. … The barons were astounded. … They at once said that the question of the employment of aliens was never meant to be included. … The appeal was made once again to the sword. Success for a moment inclined to the royal side, but it was only for a moment; and on the memorable field of Lewes the genius of Leicester prevailed. … With the two kings of England and of the Romans prisoners in his hands, Montfort dictated the terms of the so-called Mise of Lewes. … Subject to the approval of Parliament, all differences were to be submitted once more to French arbitration. … On the 23d of June the Parliament met. It was no longer a Great Council, after the fashion of previous assemblies; it included four knights, elected by each English county. This Parliament gave such sanction as it was able to the exceptional authority of Montfort, and ordered that until the proposed arbitration could be carried out, the King's council should consist of nine persons, to be named by the Bishop of Chichester, and the Earls of Gloucester and Leicester. The effect was to give Simon for the time despotic power. … It was at length agreed that all questions whatever, the employment of aliens alone excepted, should be referred to the Bishop of London, the justiciar Hugh le Despenser, Charles of Anjou, and the Abbot of Bec. If on any point they could not agree, the Archbishop of Rouen was to act as referee. … It was … not simply the expedient of a revolutionary chief in difficulties, but the expression of a settled and matured policy, when, in December 1264, [Montfort] issued in the King's name the ever-memorable writs which summoned the first complete Parliament which ever met in England. {809} The earls, barons, and bishops received their summons as of course; and with them the deans of cathedral churches, an unprecedented number of abbots and priors, two knights from every shire, and two citizens or burgesses from every city or borough in England. Of their proceedings we know but little; but they appear to have appointed Simon de Montfort to the office of Justiciar of England, and to have thus made him in rank, what he had before been in power, the first subject in the realm. … Montfort … had now gone so far, he had exercised such extraordinary powers, he had done so many things which could never really be pardoned, that perhaps his only chance of safety lay in the possession of some such office as this. It is certain, moreover, that something which passed in this Parliament, or almost exactly at the time of its meeting, did cause deep offence to a considerable section of the barons. … Difficulties were visibly gathering thicker around him, and he was evidently conscious that disaffection was spreading fast. … Negotiations went forward, not very smoothly, for the release of Prince Edward. They were terminated in May by his escape. It was the signal for a royalist rising. Edward took the command of the Welsh border; before the middle of June he had made the border his own. On the 29th Gloucester opened its gates to him. He had many secret friends. He pushed fearlessly eastward, and surprised the garrison of Kenilworth, commanded by Simon, the Earl's second son. The Earl himself lay at Evesham, awaiting the troops which his son was to bring up from Kenilworth. … On the fatal field of Evesham, fighting side by side to the last, fell the Earl himself, his eldest son Henry, Despenser the late Justiciar, Lord Basset of Drayton, one of his firmest friends, and a host of minor name. With them, to all appearance, fell the cause for which they had fought."

_Simon de Montfort (Quarterly Review, January, 1866)._

See PARLIAMENT, THE ENGLISH: EARLY STAGES OF ITS EVOLUTION.

"Important as this assembly [the Parliament of 1264] is in the history of the constitution, it was not primarily and essentially a constitutional assembly. It was not a general convention of the tenants in chief or of the three estates, but a parliamentary assembly of the supporters of the existing government."

_W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 14, section 177 (volume 2)._

ALSO IN: _W. Stubbs, The Early Plantagenets._

_G. W. Prothero, Life of Simon de Montfort, chapter 11-12._

_H. Blaauw, The Barons' War._

_C. H. Pearson, England, Early and Middle Ages, volume 2._

ENGLAND: A. D. 1271. Crusade of Prince Edward:

See CRUSADES: A. D. 1270-1271.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1272. Accession of King Edward I.

ENGLAND: A. D. 1275-1295. Development of Parliamentary representation under Edward 1.

"Happily, Earl Simon [de Montfort] found a successor, and more than a successor, in the king's [Henry III.'s] son. … Edward I. stood on the vantage ground of the throne. … He could do that easily and without effort which Simon could only do laboriously, and with the certainty of rousing opposition. Especially was this the case with the encouragement given by the two men to the growing aspirations after parliamentary representation. Earl Simon's assemblies were instruments of warfare. Edward's assemblies were invitations to peace. … Barons and prelates, knights and townsmen, came together only to support a king who took the initiative so wisely, and who, knowing what was best for all, sought the good of his kingdom without thought of his own ease. Yet even so, Edward was too prudent at once to gather together such a body as that which Earl Simon had planned. He summoned, indeed, all the constituent parts of Simon's parliament, but he seldom summoned them to meet in one place or at one time. Sometimes the barons and prelates met apart from the townsmen or the knights, sometimes one or the other class met entirely alone. … In this way, during the first twenty years of Edward's reign, the nation rapidly grew in that consciousness of national unity which would one day transfer the function of regulation from the crown to the representatives of the people."

_S. R. Gardiner and J. B. Mullinger, Introduction to the Study of English History, chapter 4, section 17._

"In 1264 Simon de Montfort had called up from both shires and boroughs representatives to aid him in the new work of government. That part of Earl Simon's work had not been lasting. The task was left for Edward I. to be advanced by gradual safe steps, but to be thoroughly completed, as a part of a definite and orderly arrangement, according to which the English parliament was to be the perfect representation of the Three Estates of the Realm, assembled for purposes of taxation, legislation and united political action. … Edward's first parliament, in 1275, enabled him to pass a great statute of legal reform, called the Statute of Westminster the First, and to exact the new custom on wool; another assembly, the same year, granted him a fifteenth. … There is no evidence that the commons of either town or county were represented. … In 1282, when the expenses of the Welsh war were becoming heavy, Edward again tried the plan of obtaining money from the towns and counties by separate negotiation; but as that did not provide him with funds sufficient for his purpose, he called together, early in 1283, two great assemblies, one at York and another at Northampton, in which four knights from each shire and four members from each city and borough were ordered to attend; the cathedral and conventual clergy also of the two provinces were represented at the same places by their elected proctors. At these assemblies there was no attendance of the barons; they were with the king in Wales; but the commons made a grant of one-thirtieth on the understanding that the lords should do the same. Another assembly was held at Shrewsbury the same year, 1283, to witness the trial of David of Wales; to this the bishops and clergy were not called, but twenty towns and all the counties were ordered to send representatives. Another step was taken in 1290: knights of the shire were again summoned; but still much remained to be done before a perfect parliament was constituted. Counsel was wanted for legislation, consent was wanted for taxation. The lords were summoned in May, and did their work in June and July, granting a feudal aid and passing the statute 'Quia Emptores,' but the knights only came to vote or to promise a tax, after a law had been passed; and the towns were again taxed by special commissions. In 1294, … under the alarm of war with France, an alarm which led Edward into several breaches of constitutional law, he went still further, assembling the clergy by their representatives in August, and the shires by their representative knights in October. {810} The next year, 1295, witnessed the first summons of a perfect and model parliament; the clergy represented by their bishops, deans, archdeacons, and elected proctors; the barons summoned severally in person by the king's special writ, and the commons summoned by writs addressed to the sheriffs, directing them to send up two elected knights from each shire, two elected citizens from each city, and two elected burghers from each borough. The writ by which the prelates were called to this parliament contained a famous sentence taken from the Roman law, 'That which touches all should be approved by all,' a maxim which might serve as a motto for Edward's constitutional scheme, however slowly it grew upon him, now permanently and consistently completed."

_W. Stubbs, The Early Plantagenets, chapter 10._

"Comparing the history of the following ages with that of the past, we can scarcely doubt that Edward had a definite idea of government before his eyes, or that that idea was successful because it approved itself to the genius and grew out of the habits of the people. Edward saw, in fact, what the nation was capable of, and adapted his constitutional reforms to that capacity. But although we may not refuse him the credit of design, it may still be questioned whether the design was altogether voluntary, whether it was not forced upon him by circumstances and developed by a series of careful experiments. … The design, as interpreted by the result, was the creation of a national parliament, composed of the three estates. … This design was perfected in 1295. It was not the result of compulsion, but the consummation of a growing policy. … But the close union of 1295 was followed by the compulsion of 1297: out of the organic completeness of the constitution sprang the power of resistance, and out of the resistance the victory of the principles, which Edward might guide, but which he failed to coerce."

_W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, chapter 15, section 244 and chapter 14, section 180-182._

_W. Stubbs, Select Charters, part 7._