The Magnificent Century (9 page)

After his second coronation he approached Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, who was to play a remarkable part in his long reign, and asked for information as to the nature of the grace wrought in a king by the unction. The bishop replied that it conferred on kings the sevenfold gifts of the Spirit as in confirmation. The boy thanked him earnestly, and the story was passed along as an evidence of the serious turn of his mind and of his desire to acquire a true understanding. It seems more likely to have been a gesture, a deliberate effort to create that exact impression. He was already showing an inclination to win by persuasion the things his father had rudely grasped as his right. If the anointing at Westminster had conferred the sevenfold gifts on Henry, the effects, alas, soon wore off: for no king was more prone to disregard the obligations of his office, to break promises, to play fast and loose with the people whose welfare should have been his first consideration.

Already it was clear enough that the boy’s charm was superficial and that he was going to prove, although in a far different way, as hard to hold in check as his father. There was none of the savagery of John in the new King; he would not be cruel or wantonly destructive, but he would be selfish and willful, and his hand on the rudder of state would be uncertain, unskilled, unpredictable.

On the other side of the shield he was devout (all men were devout in this splendid century), he was generous, and with a real tendency to learning. He became well versed in poetry and he had a fine discrimination in matters of art, most especially in architecture, becoming known later as Henry the Builder. These qualities, admirable in themselves, were not of the kind most needed in a man called to kingship.

It was natural for a boy of this disposition to weary of the restraints of tutelage and to develop impatience with those who exercised authority over him. Peter des Roches, suave, diplomatic, and ever watchful as he was, was unable to hold the King on leash. He fell out of favor suddenly. This was an excellent thing, for otherwise the Poitevin would have taken into his venal hands the administration of the kingdom. Henry at fourteen wanted to escape from his tutor, and it was at this stage that Hubert de Burgh took up where William the Marshal had left off.

The question as to when Henry would come of age was causing much discussion. In France a king’s majority began legally when he was fourteen, that having been the age of Philip Augustus when his father gave him a share in the authority of kingship. In England the rule seems to have been to leave the decision to circumstances. For six years Hubert de Burgh was the real head of the state, and he governed with a firm hand in spite of the tides of opposition which surged about him. Peter des Roches had departed the kingdom and gone on a pilgrimage to Compostela as soon as he lost favor (he would come back when things were more propitious), but the foreign influence was still being exerted in insidious ways in the dark little offices at Westminster where the business of government was being carried out. In addition, the powerful barons of England were now openly resentful of the new head of the state and bitterly critical of the wealth he was acquiring for himself.

The next years, in spite of this opposition, saw many forward steps taken. The administration of the realm was firm and consistent in the best traditions of Henry II.

The years of the minority were made difficult by a chronic lack of funds. It had been found hard, after the expulsion of the French, to get into operation the various processes of law by which money came to the offices of the Crown. Debts had been accumulating in the meantime, the greatest being the sums owed to the Vatican.

The papacy had always taken an annual toll from England as a matter of course. Starting with the Rome penny, as it was called in Anglo-Saxon days, the yearly tribute took the form of Peter’s pence after the Conquest. One of the duties of the Archbishop of Canterbury was to supervise the collection of Peter’s pence, which he did with the assistance of the bishops. It did not amount to a very large sum in the days of the Norman kings, particularly as a habit had developed of sending to Rome only a relatively small part of what was collected. A letter from one pope of the period complained that it “was collected faithfully but paid faithlessly.” Another papal letter complained bitterly that only three hundred marks had reached Rome while the bishops had retained more than one thousand marks of the amount collected. The actual work of collection devolved on
the parochial priest. His duty it was to gather in the tithes, holding suspended over any grumblers or defaulters in his flock the threat of excommunication.

Peter’s pence, of course, was collected in all Christian countries subject to Rome and served as one of the main sources of the papacy’s still inadequate revenue. England was on a different footing, however, since John had declared the kingdom a fief of Rome. He had agreed to pay an annual tribute of one thousand marks, seven hundred for England, three hundred for Ireland. During the first years of the minority it was impossible to pay this tribute. In addition to war debts, it was necessary to give ten thousand marks to Louis of France and half of that sum to make up arrears in the pension of Richard’s widow, Berengaria, who had been allowed by John to exist in poverty. Fortunately the Pope who succeeded that man of wide vision and iron will, Innocent III, was sympathetic to the difficulties of the nation and permitted the tribute to go unpaid. Cencius Savelli had been chamberlain at the Vatican under Innocent, a gentle old man, well loved by everyone. When he was selected to succeed under the title of Honorius III, he brought to the papacy one fixed idea, that the work of Innocent must be carried on, particularly his plans for continuation of the Crusades.

That Honorius was willing to let the payments lapse did not mean, however, that the return to normal conditions in England would find the Crown with a clean slate. He was a careful administrator, a believer in close attention to detail, and a shrewd financier. During his term as chamberlain he had written
The Book of the Revenues of the Church
, and it surprised no one when he demanded payment from England of all arrears.

The necessity of making up the unpaid tribute hung over the early years of Henry’s reign like a dark cloud. The King himself had no desire to avoid the debt, but the writs he issued for the money due Rome were often returned because there was no money in the treasury to pay them. It followed that the arrears were paid off in installments extending over a long period of years.

Honorius, and the popes who followed after his death on March 18, 1227, at the Lateran, found it necessary on occasions to send special representatives to England to supervise the collection of funds for the purpose, and this led to a very great evil, the stimulation
of usury. The money for Rome was paid through Italian banking houses, and when Master Otto or Master Martin sat at Westminster to inquire into sums due their master, they generally had a keenwitted Florentine financier sitting beside them. When men were unable to meet their obligations the banker was often willing to make a loan for the purpose. The bankers did not always return to Italy, and this led to a firm establishment of the Lombardy moneylender in the country. He became a much more feared exponent of usury than the Jew because he had papal sanction and was, presumably, under the protection of the Church.

At a later stage of Henry’s reign the Vatican discovered one flaw in this arrangement. Two great Italian banking houses failed, the firms of Buonsignori and Ricciardi. The collapse swept away the sum of eighty thousand florins which had been gathered in England for transfer to the papacy.

In addition to the regular forms of tribute there were many other payments which kept draining the island of money, special subsidies for this and that, obventions and legacies for the Crusades, mandatory income taxes, benefices, penitentiary fees, compositions, fines, procurations, pecuniary penances, indulgences. Even more expensive still, and infinitely harder to swallow, was the practice of giving church appointments in England to Italians. This began as soon as John made the grievous error of declaring the country a fief of Rome. Hundreds of posts fell vacant during the years of the interdict, and no effort was made to fill them. As soon as the ban was lifted the legate began to fill them with Italians. They came swarming into the country, eager to enjoy the fat livings and causing nationwide indignation by the ostentation with which they conducted themselves. This practice continued after John’s death, although as years went on it took the form of absentee holding. The Italian appointees fell out of the habit of going to England, preferring to remain in Rome and have the revenues paid them there. This was just as well, perhaps, because the men thus favored with canonries and prebends never fitted themselves to fill their offices by learning English and they did less harm by staying out of the country. Much of this was nepotism, the posts being awarded to the relatives of popes and cardinals, but a part of it was the result of a practice which had grown up to relieve the poverty of the papacy. A huge staff was maintained at the Vatican, and the funds were not sufficient to maintain
an adequate pay roll. Each nation was expected to assist by appointing a number of these clerks and officials to livings while they continued to work in Rome.

England was suffering a much heavier drain on her financial resources, however, than any other country. A survey of the situation in 1231 led to the conclusion that many hundred livings in England were in the possession of Italians while substitutes, paid starvation wages, carried on the work. The annual payments made to foreign holders of benefices amounted to seventy thousand marks, which was more than the revenue of the government. Years later one of the popes agreed to establish a limit by which no more than eight thousand marks could be paid to foreign benefice holders, and this was estimated as five per cent of the income of the Church in England. On that basis of reckoning the amount taken from the Church had been running as high as forty per cent.

The strain was felt more during the minority than at any other time. In 1221 Stephen Langton made such a strong presentation to the Pope of the spiritual stagnation in many of the parishes affected that Honorius made a sweeping concession. As the sinecures fell vacant through death, the right to appoint successors would revert to England. Had this guarantee been carried out, the evil of absenteeism would gradually have been eliminated; and so the archbishop was well content with what he had accomplished. Unfortunately the clamor in Rome for subsistence continued as great as ever. When one comfortably endowed Italian died there would be a scramble to step into his shoes. In too many cases letters were received in England making Italian appointments with the words
Non obstante
marked on the margin, which meant that no restriction on foreign appointments must be allowed to stand in the way.
Non obstante!
The phrase became odious to English eyes and one to which, unfortunately, they became well accustomed as the years and the decades rolled on.

Naturally there was plenty of nepotism and simony in England as well. Henry did not differ from other kings in having candidates of his own when desirable posts fell vacant. As he grew older he became more and more addicted to favoritism. There was a dark little room behind the Exchequer at Westminster, and here he was known to sit when questions of appointments were being threshed out. Frequently his candidates were foreigners—Poitevins, Gascons, relatives
from Angoumois or Provence; and seldom were they fitted to perform the functions of the office.

It has been recorded that John Mansel was invested with livings running from three hundred to seven hundred in number during the years that he served the King in various capacities. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but it may safely be assumed that the total of his appointments was large to the point of absurdity. These livings were not conferred on a humble official for his own individual profit. The revenue thus secured was either for the royal purse or for the benefit of friends and relatives of the King. In fairness to Rome, also, it should be pointed out that Westminster followed the same principle of giving livings to state officials while they continued to fill their governmental duties because the Crown was too poor to pay them.

The importance of Hubert de Burgh continued to increase during the last years of the minority. He was the first of a long succession of commoners who rose to posts of almost supreme power and lived in some, at least, of the magnificence of royalty. Lacking their stature, he was still the forerunner of such great and fascinating figures as Jacques Coeur, Cardinal Wolsey, Cardinal Richelieu, Fouquet. He had been created Earl of Kent and was firmly establishing himself in Wales, being castellan of the three fortresses of Montgomery, Carmarthen, and Cardigan. The Tower of London had come back into his hands, and he resided there a large part of the time although he had set up a palatial residence of his own on a piece of land which later became Whitehall. The royal castles of Dover, Canterbury, Rochester, and Norwich were in his hands, to mention the most important only.

He was the sheriff of seven counties. The sheriff is today a relatively unimportant local officer; in these early days he was the King’s representative and the embodiment of the law in his county, the lineal descendant of the Norman viscount. He lived in a royal castle in the county seat and, although he had to call the knights of the shire to pass judgment on cases tried in the shire courts which met for a day every four weeks, he presided at the shire moots with powers which could be made arbitrary, and the hundred-moots were
called at his will. He was the manipulator of
scotale
and the controller of
scot and lot
; he conducted inquests, collected taxes, and managed the machinery of law enforcement.

Needless to state, Hubert de Burgh did not fulfill the duties of his seven shrievalties himself. He engaged deputies for that. But a large part of the revenue of each came to him and stayed in his heaping purse.