Part 7

Grosseteste relied on the friars, Franciscan and Dominican, to revive religion in his diocese. From their first coming to England he had befriended the little brothers of St. Francis and St. Dominic’s order of preachers, and at Oxford had been conspicuously their rector. He writes to Pope Gregory IX. in the highest praise of the Franciscans: “Inestimable benefits have been wrought in my diocese by the friars. They enlighten our whole land with the bright light of their preaching and learning.”

The secular clergy and the monks generally by no means shared Grosseteste’s appreciation of the preachers of poverty, and when the Bishop of Lincoln began to rout up the monasteries in his diocese with visitations and enquiries the dismay was considerable. The Benedictine monks in England were good, easy men in the thirteenth century--Grosseteste finds no grave faults against morality to rebuke in them--fond of their pleasant social life, and enjoying the comfort of an existence that had few temporal cares beyond finding money for pope and king. At the worst their sloth was culpable. Grosseteste charged upon them with his preaching friars, calling for amendment and the fulfilment of duties, attacking old abuses sanctioned by custom, and showing no tolerant sympathy for the infirmities and shortcomings of middle-aged clerks.[34] Respect him they must, for the learning and high character of the bishop were conspicuous in the land, but the dislike of all this strenuous exhortation was not concealed. The very chapter of Lincoln, which had elected him bishop, refused to admit Grosseteste as their visitor, or to acknowledge his jurisdiction over their proceedings, and only after six years of controversy and litigation was the case finally decided at Rome (1245) wholly in the bishop’s favour. A sentence of excommunication pronounced upon him by the monks at Canterbury during the vacancy of the see was of course entirely ignored by Grosseteste. If the clergy resented Grosseteste’s call to arms, it is to be remembered that they had suffered considerably from the tyranny of the times, and had been reduced under the general oppression to a feeble and sluggish timidity. The old “Song of the Church”[35] tells how low they had fallen:

Free and held in high esteem the clergy used to be, None were better cherished: or loved more heartily. Slaves are they now: despised, brought low, Betrayed (as all deplore) By those from whom: their help should come; I can no more.

King and pope alike in this: to one purpose hold. How to make the clergy yield their silver and their gold. Truth to say: the pope gives way, Far too much to the king Our tithes he grants: for the crown’s wants To his liking.

To check the rapacity of the king, and to stop the seizure of Church revenues for Italian clerics, and thereby to raise the English clergy from their state of sluggish despondency was Grosseteste’s work for England. We find him conspicuous at the council summoned by the king to meet at Westminster in 1244. In vain Henry III. appealed for money, bishops and nobles reminded him that the money so frequently granted had done no good either to the king or the country, and that a justiciar and chancellor must be appointed for the strengthening of the state. Henry demurred, tried postponements and delays, and these failing, summoned the bishops alone, and confronted them with a letter from Pope Innocent IV. exhorting them to give liberally to the king. Even this failed to move the prelates. After much discussion, however, some were for “a mild answer,” for many of the prelates “fearing the king’s instability and the pusillanimity of the royal counsellors,” were unwilling to deny the pope’s request. Grosseteste clinched the matter by declaring they must all stand together with the barons:[36] “We may not be divided from the common counsel. For it is written if we be divided we shall all perish forthwith,” The next day Henry tried to get at each of the bishops separately--an old device. “But they with wary heed would not be so entrapped, and by departing early in the morning escaped the net in which they had once been caught; and so the council broke up to the king’s discontent.” (Matthew Paris.)

Again in 1252 Henry summoned the bishops, and tried to coerce them into giving him money by producing a papal mandate, authorising the payment of a full tithe of all Church revenues to the king for the space of three years. To make matters worse, “payment was not to be made on the old assessment, but on a new assessment conducted with strict inquiry, at the will and judgment of the royal agents and extortioners, who would seek their own profit before the king’s.” The excuse was that the king was about to start on a pilgrimage. Grosseteste was then an old man, but he blazed out at this monstrous demand, especially when the king’s messengers went on to explain that the tithe for two years might be paid at once, and that the third year’s tithe could also be raised before the king actually started. “By our Lady,” said the sturdy bishop of Lincoln, “what does all this mean? You assume that we shall agree to this damnable levy, and go on arguing from premises that have not been admitted. God forbid that we should thus bend our knee to Baal.”

The king’s half-brother, Ethelmar, bishop-elect of Winchester, deprecated resistance to the will of pope and king, and urged that the French had consented to pay a similar demand. “Yes,” said the Bishop of Ely, “and it brought their king no good.” “For the very reason the French have yielded must we resist,” replied Grosseteste. “To do a thing twice makes it a custom, and if we pay too, we shall have no peace. For my own part, I say plainly that I will not pay this evil demand, lest the king himself as well as us should incur the heavy wrath of God.” The other bishops followed Grosseteste’s lead, and the old man went on to advise them to pray the king to think of his eternal salvation, and to restrain his rash impulses. Henry naturally declined to send an independent remonstrance to the pope against the mandate, and the bishops decided they could do nothing in the way of granting this special tithe. But they were hard put to it, “between the pulling of the king and the pushing of the pope.”

All Grosseteste’s dealings with the king show the same firm resolution to stop the royal extortion, and to insist on the fulfilment of the charters of liberties obtained from the crown. He carries on the work of Stephen Langton, always backing up the unsuccessful efforts of the good St. Edmund Rich (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1234–1240) to keep Henry faithful to his word, and prepares the way for the great campaign of his friend Simon of Montfort.[37] The very worst period of Henry’s long reign is covered by Grosseteste’s episcopal life. Hubert de Burgh’s wise rule was over by 1232, and Peter des Roches and the horde of aliens were fleecing the country for the next twenty years. It is not till after Grosseteste’s death that the barons dealt with Henry’s misrule to any purpose.

At the great council held in London in 1248, at which Grosseteste was present, a full list of the national grievances is given: the lavish waste of the wealth of the country on foreigners, the ruin of trade by the arbitrary seizure of goods by the king and his agents, the robbery of poor fishermen by royal authority, “so that they think it safer to trust themselves to the stormy waves and seek a further shore,” and the keeping bishoprics and abbacies vacant so that the crown may enjoy the revenues therefrom, are the chief causes of complaint. They were not new grievances, for the most part, and they were not to die with Henry III., all charters and royal promises notwithstanding.

Added to the common wrongs of Henry’s wretched misrule were the papal extortions, directly encouraged by the king. In return for papal mandates directing churchmen to supply the king with money, what could Henry--himself the most devoted servant of the papacy--do but help the pope to get what he could out of England? The wealth of England was held to be of fabulous amount at Rome, and popes beset by fierce ungodly emperors naturally turned to it in their need as to a treasury.

But the thing was intolerable to Grosseteste. He had studied in Paris, he welcomed Dominican and Franciscan friars from the continent as no other prelate did, and had no objection to foreigners _per se_. But the pope claimed the revenues of church livings for boys and presented illiterates to benefices--to the obvious degradation of the Church in England. Grosseteste was always willing enough to raise what money he could for the holy see, but appoint unworthy and incompetent clerks to livings in his diocese, that he would not do--not for any pope.

The country groaned under the biting avarice of the Roman see, as it bled under the vampire politics of Peter des Roches and his needy, greedy crew of Bretons and Poitevins.

What it all meant to England Matthew Paris has told us in his description of things in 1237:

“Now was simony practised without shame and usurers on various pleas openly extorted money from the common people and lesser folk; charity expired, the liberty of the Church withered away, religion was trampled to the dust. Daily did illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed with bulls from Rome, burst forth into threats; and, in spite of the privileges handed down to us from good men of old, they feared not to plunder the revenues consecrated by our holy forefathers for the service of religion, the support of the poor, and the nourishment of strangers, but thundering out their excommunications they quickly and violently carried off what they demanded. And if those who were wronged and robbed sought refuge by appealing or pleading their privileges, they were at once suspended and excommunicated by a papal writ. Thus mourning and lamentation were heard on all sides, and many exclaimed with heart-rending sobs, ‘It were better to die than to behold the sufferings of our country and its saints. Woe to England, once the chief of provinces, the mistress of nations, the mirror of the Church, the exemplar of religion, and now brought under tribute,--trampled on by worthless men, and the prey of men of low degree.’”

The arrival of Otho, in 1237, a papal legate (on the request of Henry), far from remedying, increased the contemporary distress. For though Otho was a discreet man, he was more eager to get money for Rome than to deal with the oppression that plagued England, and when he did give advice it was spurned by those who saw his grasping hands. Archbishop Edmund was particularly vexed at having a papal legate set over him, and what with one disappointment and another finally gave up in despair the task of guiding the English Church, and in 1240 went to die at Pontigny, where his predecessors Anselm and Thomas had lived in exile.

Grosseteste stuck to his post, and the Franciscans and Dominicans, whom he aided, poured in oil and wine on the wounds of the Church folk, and revived religion in the country.

Grosseteste fought the extortionate papal demands for Church revenues all the time. In 1239, with his fellow bishops, he tells Otho plainly that the Church is drained dry by the grasping importunity of Rome. Otho left in 1241, and that same year saw Boniface of Savoy, a handsome, soldierly man appointed to Canterbury as St. Edmund’s successor. The following year came a new extortioner from Rome, named Martin, an altogether inferior person to Otho, but with all the legate’s powers of suspension and excommunication. His confiscations and rapacity provoked a remonstrance to the pope even from Henry. Martin at last, in 1245, had to fly for his life from England, and when Grosseteste subsequently had a calculation made of the English Church revenues enjoyed by foreigners, it was found that the incomes of foreign clerks appointed by Pope Innocent IV. amounted to more than 70,000 marks--more than treble the king’s income. And all this was done in spite of refusals by Grosseteste to appoint illiterates or allow boys to hold benefices.

The barons sided with the Church against Martin, and drew up a long protest which they sent to the pope at the council of Lyons in 1245. In this they complained:--That the pope, not content with Peter’s Pence, which had been paid cheerfully from old times, wrung money from the Church against the law of the realm, without the king’s permission; and that the pope wrongfully put ignorant, covetous, or absentee Italians into English livings notwithstanding his own promises, the rights of patrons, and the privileges of the English clergy. A year later the protest was repeated with another item objecting to the pope’s claim to recall former charters.

Innocent IV.’s answer to this was to threaten to dethrone Henry as he had dethroned his brother-in-law, the Emperor Frederick. The king weakly said no more, the barons, without a leader, were equally silent, and the Church continued “to sate the greed of Rome.”

But in Grosseteste there was no spirit of surrender. In 1253, the very last year of his life, he was called upon by the pope to provide a nephew of his with a canonry at Lincoln, and the bishop’s letter of refusal is, perhaps, the only well remembered thing of all Grosseteste’s writings. This letter was not, as commonly stated, sent to the pope but to his representative who was also named Innocent.[38] “The pope has power to build up,” wrote Grosseteste, “but not to pull down. These appointments tend to destruction, not edification, being of man’s device and not according to the words of the Apostles or the will of Christ. By my very love and obedience to the Holy See I must refuse obedience in things altogether opposed to the sanctity of the Apostolic See and contrary to Catholic unity. As a son and a servant I decline to obey, and this refusal must not be taken as rebellion, for it is done in reverence to divine commands.”

(This letter is quoted by Matthew Paris and in the _Burton Annals_. It can be read in full in the _Epistles_, No. 128.)

When the pope heard of this answer he talked angrily of “the old madman” who dared to sit in judgment on him, and blustered about the king of England being his vassal. The cardinals, however, said frankly that Grosseteste had spoken the truth, and that he was far too good a man to be condemned. “He is Catholic,” they declared, “and of deepest holiness. More religious, and more saintly than we are, and of better life. They say that among all the bishops there is no one his equal, still less his superior. All the clergy of France and England know this. Besides, he is considered a great philosopher, thoroughly learned in Latin and Greek; and he is zealous for justice, and a man who deals in theology, a preacher to the people, a lover of chastity, and a persecutor of those who practise simony.” So they extolled him. And it is to the everlasting credit of the cardinals of the Roman See in that year 1253 that they could discern the sincerity and the great qualities of the brave old bishop who defied the pope’s unrighteous commands. There was no question at Rome of any disloyalty on Grosseteste’s part to the Holy See, no suggestion of any failing as a good Catholic.[39] And Pope Innocent IV. wisely let the matter drop, when the cardinals assured him it would never do to interfere with Grosseteste.

Before he died Grosseteste made a last appeal “to the nobles of England, the citizens of London and the community of the whole realm” on behalf of the Rights of the English Church, making a careful list of the ills to be redressed. He also solemnly charged his friend Simon of Montfort, never, as he valued his immortal soul, to forsake the cause of the English people, but to stand up even to the death, if needs be, for a true and just government, and with prophetic foresight spoke of the heavier troubles coming on the land.

On October 9th, 1253, the long life and the magnificent battling with odds were over, and the great bishop passed away. He was buried in Lincoln Cathedral, and in 1307, King Edward I. and the dean and chapter of St. Paul’s made application for his canonization, but without success. Fifty years later and Edward III.’s Statutes of Provisors, 1351, and Praemunire, 1353, by their prohibition of papal bulls and of the appointment of papal nominees to English benefices, may be accepted as the real acknowledgment of Grosseteste’s political work.

“I confidently assert (wrote Matthew Paris) that his virtues pleased God more than his failings displeased Him.”

Simon of Montfort and the English Parliament

1258–1265

AUTHORITIES: Matthew Paris; William of Rishanger; Thomas of Wykes; Adam of Marsh--_Monumenta Frascescana_, _Burton Annals_, _Annales Monastici_; Robert of Gloucester--_Royal letters of Henry III._ (Rolls Series); _Political Songs_ (Camden Society, 1839); _Chronicle of Melrose_; Stubbs--_Constitutional History_, vol. ii; and _Select Charters_; W. H. Blaauw--_The Barons’ War_; Dr. Pauli--_Simon of Montfort_ (translated by Una M. Goodwin); G. W. Prothero--_Simon of Montfort_; Dr. Shirley in _Quarterly Review_, cxix. 57.

SIMON OF MONTFORT AND THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT

1258–1265

“In the year of our Lord 1238, which was the twenty-second of his reign, King Henry held his court in London at Westminster, and there on the day after Epiphany, which was a Thursday, Simon de Montfort solemnly espoused Eleanor, daughter of King John, sister of Henry III., and widow of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke. The king himself gave away the bride to the said Simon, Earl of Leicester, who received her gratefully by reason of his disinterested love for her, her own beauty, the rich honours that were attached to her, and the distinguished and royal descent of the lady, for she was the legitimate daughter of a king and queen, and furthermore was sister of a king, of an empress (the wife of Frederic II.), and of a queen (Joan, wife of Alexander II. of Scotland). Our lord the pope, too, gave him a dispensation to marry this noble lady.”

Thus Matthew Paris, when Earl Simon, then a man about thirty-seven, and “tall and handsome,” enjoyed the royal favour and stood godfather to the infant Prince Edward. Simon had only done homage as Earl of Leicester in 1232; his boyhood was passed in France, and his father was the great soldier who led the French crusade against the Albigenses. Earl Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother--soon to become King of the Romans--objected to the marriage, regarding it as one more victory for the foreigners whom Henry nourished at the expense of England. But Simon was no real alien. His grandmother had been sister and heiress of the Earl of Leicester, and Simon’s French training no more made him a stranger in England than did Stephen Langton’s years of study in Paris and Rome unfit him for the primacy of the English Church.

Henry’s favour was short-lived. Earl Simon made friends with Earl Richard and left for the crusades, disgusted with the king’s want of honesty. So much wisdom did he show in Palestine, and so great was his prowess, that Simon might have stayed in the east as regent for the young King of Jerusalem. But he had work to do in England, and came home with Richard in 1242.

Here against all the disorder of misrule and the royal and papal extortions Simon laboured with his friend Bishop Grosseteste, and he is conspicuous at the Parliament of Westminster in 1244, and in drawing up the great protest to the pope a year later.

Then for five years (1248–53) Simon was in Gascony contending with a body of nobles whom neither Henry II. nor Richard I. had been able to make good subjects, and whose only object in making formal acknowledgment of Henry III. was to escape the rule of Louis of France. Henry gave Simon neither men nor money, and lent a willing ear to all the complaints of Simon’s enemies in Gascony and in England.[40] At his own expense the Earl of Leicester saved Gascony for the English crown, and brought peace and law and trade to that province. Henry’s return was to make Simon answer trumped-up charges of robbery, cruelty and treason brought by Gascons in 1252. The charges were not proved, although Henry sent his own commissioner to Gascony to make enquiry. Earl Richard and other nobles who knew the country were convinced of Simon’s justice, and Simon, who was in England trying to raise supplies, turned sharply on the king, reminding him of unfulfilled promises. “Keep thy agreement with me,” he went on, “or pay me the money I have spent in thy service; for it is well known I have impoverished my earldom beyond recovery for the honour of the king.” “There is no shame in breaking my word to a traitor,” the king answered angrily. At this Simon in open wrath declared the king a liar, only saved by the shelter of royalty from the penalty of his speech. “Call thyself a Christian?” said the earl. “Dost thou ever confess thy sins?” “Yes,” said the king, “I do.” “Thy confession is useless without repentance and atonement.” said the earl. The king, more angry than ever, retorted, “I repent of one thing, and that is that I made thee an earl in England, to wax fat and kick against me. Get thee to Gascony, thou who lovest strife, and take thy fill there and meet thy father’s fate.” “I go willingly, my lord,” came the answer. “And, ungrateful as thou art, I will not return till I have made these rebels thy subjects and thy enemies thy footstool.”

Simon returned to Gascony, and though Henry again undermined his authority, he kept his word, only giving up his command when the work was done.

Adam of Marsh, a Franciscan friar, the friend and correspondent of Grosseteste, often writes to Simon in those days, encouraging and advising him. “Better is patience in a man than force,” says Adam, “and better he who rules his own passions than he who storms a city.” He prays this strong upright soldier-statesman to find comfort in the frequent reading of the Holy Scriptures, “breaking through as far as you can the cares and distractions of storm and trouble,” and recommends the 29th, 30th and 31st chapters of the book of Job, “together with the delightful commentaries of St. Gregory.”

Once more back in England, the time soon came when Simon was the recognised leader of the barons in their struggle with the king. And this leadership gave England its first representative parliament.

Henry was in greater financial difficulties than ever in 1257. The mad scheme of accepting the crown of Sicily for his second son Edmund from the pope, on condition that the cost of driving out Manfred, the Emperor Frederick’s son, undertaken by the pope, was to be paid for by England, had been adopted by Henry in spite of the opposition of bishops and nobles. Henry pledged his kingdom with the pope as security for the expenditure in Sicily,[41] and at last in the parliament of 1257 had to confess his indebtedness. Fourteen thousand marks were owing to Pope Alexander, and this wretched debt, in addition to the general contempt for law and justice by the king’s judges, sheriffs and foreign favourites, drove matters to a climax. The wet summer of 1257, followed by a failure at harvest, brought famine in the winter.