The History of England. T. F. Tout
the justiciar, demanding that he should surrender the custody of Tunbridge castle on the ground of some ancient claim of the see of Canterbury. Failing to obtain redress in England, Richard betook himself to Rome in the spring of 1231. There he regaled the pope's ears with the offences of Hubert, and of the worldly bishops who were his tools. In August, Richard's death in Italy left the Church of Canterbury for three years without a pastor.
While Gregory IX. did more to help Henry against Louis than Honorius III., the inflexible character and lofty hierarchical ideals of this nephew of Innocent III. made his hand heavier on the English Church than that of his predecessor. Above all, Gregory's expenses in pursuing his quarrel with Frederick II. made the wealth of the English Church a sore temptation to him. With his imposition of a tax of one-tenth on all clerical property to defray the expenses of the crusade against the emperor, papal taxation in England takes a newer and severer phase. The rigour with which Master Stephen, the pope's collector, extorted the tax was bitterly resented. Not less loud was the complaint against the increasing numbers of foreign ecclesiastics forced into English benefices by papal authority, and without regard for the rights of the lawful patrons and electors. A league of aggrieved tax-payers and patrons was formed against the Roman agents. At Eastertide, 1232, bands of men, headed by a knight named Robert Twenge, who took the nickname of William Wither, despoiled the Romans of their gains, and distributed the proceeds to the poor. These doings were the more formidable from their excellent organisation, and the strong sympathy everywhere extended to them. Hubert, who hated foreign interference, did nothing to stop Twenge and his followers. His inaction further precipitated his ruin. Archbishop Richard had already poisoned the pope's mind against him, and his suspected connivance with the anti-Roman movement completed his disfavour. Bitter letters of complaint arrived in England denouncing the outrages inflicted on the friends of the apostolic see. It is hard to dissociate the pope's feeling in this matter from his rejection of the nomination of the king's chancellor, Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester, to the see of Canterbury, as an illiterate politician.
The dislike of the taxes made necessary by the Welsh and French wars, such as the "scutage of Poitou" and the "scutage of Kerry," swelled the outcry against the justiciar. So far back as 1227 advantage had been taken of Henry's majority to exact large sums of money for the confirmation of all charters sealed during his nonage. The barons made it a grievance that his brother Richard was ill-provided for, and a rising in 1227 extorted a further provision for him from what was regarded as the niggardliness of the justiciar. Nor did Hubert, with all his rugged honesty, neglect his own interests. He secured for himself lucrative wardships, such as the custody for the second time of the great Gloucester earldom, and of several castles, including the not very profitable charge of Montgomery, and the important governorship of Dover. On the very eve of his downfall he was made justice of Ireland. His brother was bishop of Ely, and other kinsmen were promoted to high posts. He was satisfied that he spent all that he got in the King's service, in promoting the interests of the kingdom, but his enemies regarded him as unduly tenacious of wealth and office. All classes alike grew disgusted with the justiciar. The restoration of the malign influence of Peter of Winchester completed his ruin. The king greedily listened to the complaints of his old guardian against the minister who overshadowed the royal power. At last, on July 29, 1232, Henry plucked up courage to dismiss him.
With Hubert's fall ends the second period of Henry's reign. William Marshal expelled the armed foreigner. Hubert restored the administration to English hands. Matthew Paris puts into the mouth of a poor smith who refused to fasten fetters on the fallen minister words which, though probably never spoken, describe with sufficient accuracy Hubert's place in history: "Is he not that most faithful Hubert who so often saved England from the devastation of the foreigners and restored England to England?" Hubert was, as has been well said, perhaps the first minister since the Conquest who made patriotism a principle of policy, though it is easy in the light of later developments to read into his doings more than he really intended. But whatever his motives, the results of his action were clear. He drove away the mercenaries, humbled the feudal lords, and set limits to the pope's interference. He renewed respect for law and obedience to the law courts. Even in the worst days of anarchy the administrative system did not break down, and the records of royal orders and judicial judgments remain almost as full in the midst of the civil war as in the more peaceful days of Hubert's rule. But it was easy enough to issue proclamations and writs. The difficulty was to get them obeyed, and the work of Hubert was to ensure that the orders of king and ministers should really be respected by his subjects. He made many mistakes. He must share the blame of the failure of the Kerry campaign, and he was largely responsible for the sorry collapse of the invasion of Poitou. He neither understood nor sympathised with Stephen Langton's zeal for the charters. A straightforward, limited, honourable man, he strove to carry out his rather old-fashioned conception of duty in the teeth of a thousand obstacles. He never had a free hand, and he never enjoyed the hearty support of any one section of his countrymen. Hated by the barons whom he kept away from power, he alienated the Londoners by his high-handed violence, and the tax-payers by his heavy exactions. The pope disliked him, the aliens plotted against him, and the king, for whom he sacrificed so much, gave him but grudging support. But the reaction which followed his retirement made many, who had rejoiced in his humiliation, bitterly regret it.
Three notable enemies of Hubert went off the stage of history within a few months of his fall. The death of Richard le Grand has already been recorded. William Marshal, the brother-in-law of the king, the gallant and successful soldier, the worthy successor of his great father, came home from Brittany early in 1231. His last act was to marry his sister, Isabella, to Richard of Cornwall. Within ten days of the wedding his body was laid beside his father in the Temple Church at London. In October, 1232, died Randolph of Blundeville, the last representative of the male stock of the old line of the Earls of Chester, and long the foremost champion of the feudal aristocracy against Hubert. The contest between them had been fought with such chivalry that the last public act of the old earl was to protect the fallen justiciar from the violence of his foes. For more than fifty years Randolph had ruled like a king over his palatine earldom; had, like his master, his struggles with his own vassals, and had perforce to grant to his own barons and boroughs liberties which he strove to wrest from his overlord for himself and his fellow nobles. He was not a great statesman, and hardly even a successful warrior. Yet his popular personal qualities, his energy, his long duration of power, and his enormous possessions, give him a place in history. His memory, living on long in the minds of the people, inspired a series of ballads which vied in popularity with the cycle of Robin Hood,[1] though, unfortunately, they have not come down to us. His estates were divided among his four sisters. His nephew, John the Scot, Earl of Huntingdon, received a re-grant of the Chester earldom; his Lancashire lands had already gone to his brother-in-law, William of Ferrars, Earl of Derby; other portions of his territories went to his sister, the Countess of Arundel, and the Lincoln earldom, passing through another sister, Hawise of Quincy, to her son-in-law, John of Lacy, constable of Chester, raised the chief vassal of the palatinate to comital rank. None of these heirs of a divided inheritance were true successors to Randolph. With him died the last of the great Norman houses, tenacious beyond its fellows, and surpassing in its two centuries of unbroken male descent the usual duration of the medieval baronial family. Its collapse made easier the alien invasion which threatened to undo Hubert's work.
[1] "Ich can rymes of Robyn Hode, and of Randolf erl of Chestre," Vision of Piers Plowman, i., 167; ii., 94.
CHAPTER III.
THE ALIEN INVASION.
With the dismissal of Hubert on July 29, 1232, Peter des Roches resumed his authority over Henry III. Mindful of past failures, the bishop's aim was to rule through dependants, so that he could pull the wires without making himself too prominent. His chief agents in pursuing this policy were Peter of Rivaux, Stephen Segrave, and Robert Passelewe. Of these, Peter of Rivaux was a Poitevin clerk, officially described as the bishop's nephew, but generally supposed to have been his son. Stephen Segrave, the son of a small Leicestershire landholder, was a lawyer