The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (23 page)

Superb administrators though the Norman and Angevin kings were, and though they had made England part of a progressive European civilization, they had ruled as despots. Magna Carta changed all that. It legally limited the power of the king, forbidding him to ignore the law and authorizing a council of twenty-five barons to enforce it by all possible means, including imprisonment, if he did try to overrule it.

The leaders of the rebellion arranged that a copy of Magna Carta should be read by the sheriff to a public meeting in each county in England. Every important church and town in the kingdom was to have a copy, so that everybody could know what their rights were and what they should take for granted. Over the next eight centuries the rights proclaimed by Magna Carta powerfully informed not only England’s national consciousness but many cultures influenced by Britain and British emigrants, including those of the United States, India and Australia. Magna Carta has been one of England’s greatest contributions to political thought, an early expression of the democratic ideal that the rule of law ensures rights for everyone by virtue of their humanity and regardless of their wealth or poverty.

Among its many clauses, the charter guaranteed the rights and liberties of the English Church, not only to prevent future quarrels over the appointment of the head of the Church but also to allow chapters in cathedrals to elect their bishops. The rules of inheritance were emphasized, to stop John from ignoring them as was his wont; the procedure for collecting scutage was laid down; the urgent early-thirteenth-century problem of the indebtedness of the knightly class to Christian and Jewish moneylenders was ameliorated; and certain weights and measures were standardized.

The barons made no attempt to limit the jurisdiction of the king’s courts, though they had curtailed some of their own. The Great Charter also enunciated some fundamental principles of justice which have echoed down the centuries, like Clause 40, ‘to no one will we sell, deny or defer, right or justice’. But it also expressed the reverence for the rule of law which was the spirit of the age. Clause 39 guaranteed for the first time in English history that no freeman could be imprisoned, deprived of his property, outlawed or molested without a trial according to the law of the land in which he must be judged by his peers. Most importantly for future generations, the king was prevented from raising new taxes on the people without the permission of the council of barons.

But, though John sealed Magna Carta, slippery as ever he had no intention of holding to it. The war between king and barons began again when he fled to the Isle of Wight. From there he appealed for help to his liege lord the pope, having further ingratiated himself with him by hastily taking the Crusader oath. He begged him to free him from Magna Carta, which he said insulted the crown and therefore the Holy See. Nothing loath, Innocent III declared the Great Charter illegal, and suspended the Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton for refusing to excommunicate the English bishops and barons who had produced it.

With an army of foreign mercenaries John escaped from the Isle of Wight, made his way through England and marched into Scotland to attack King Alexander I, who had supported the rebels. Behind him he left a large number of foreign troops to harry the barons’ estates; this they did so successfully that the barons decided to ask Philip Augustus for help and to offer his son the crown of England. Speciously asserting that John’s murder of his nephew Arthur of Brittany required that he be deprived of the English crown, Philip’s son Louis invaded England–claiming the throne in the name of his wife Blanche of Castile, Henry II’s granddaughter and John’s niece. In November 1215 some 7,000 Frenchmen sailed up the Thames to support the barons and citizens of London.

The real possibility that England would undergo a new French conquest was averted by the death of the already unwell king. Having led an expedition north to capture the important city of Lincoln, in October 1216 John passed away at Newark in Nottinghamshire after a gastric upset caused by a supper of peaches and new cider. Though his heir Henry III was only nine years old, he had the advantage of youth and innocence to make him a rallying point for national enthusiasm and he was endorsed by the papal legate, Guala. To nobles like William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke and Hubert de Burgh, he was the acceptable face of Plantagenet legitimacy. With the support of the Church, they would rule in his name for eleven years.

Henceforth until the end of the fourteenth century when a new dynasty seized the throne, the kings of England were known by a different name. They could not be called Angevins, since they no longer held the land in France which entitled them to. Instead, because the family badge of the Angevin counts was the yellow broom called in French
plante genêt
(genista to us today) they became known as the Plantagenet kings.

John was and remains England’s most unpopular king. Despite his competence he had the reputation for being both cruel and unlucky. Not only did he lose Normandy, so earning again the title Jean Sans Terre which his father had affectionately given him, or John Lackland as later generations called him when English became the spoken language instead of French. He is also said to have lost the crown jewels of England when, in October 1216 shortly before he died, his baggage train was sucked down in a whirlpool formed by the incoming tide as it crossed the channel of the Welland. At a point still known as King’s Corner between Cross Keys Wash and Lynn, as the king supposedly watched from the northern shore, half his army disappeared beneath the waters of the Wash and the crown of England was never seen again. This episode would enable many schoolchildren to joke that John had lost the crown of England in the Wash.

Henry III succeeded to the throne as a small boy. Despite his immensely long reign there always remained something weak and childlike about his personality. He had a reputation for ‘simplicity’. This was not a compliment in the context of a king required to rule over strong and turbulent barons already used to a limited monarchy and to getting their own way. The abiding passions of Henry’s life were his religious faith, which often caused him to neglect regal duties, and his devotion to his greedy French and Italian relations. Their demands for office, which his father John had always happily complied with, meant that a constant theme in England during his fifty-six-year reign was a hatred of foreigners. Henry was thus a poor head of state. On the other hand his strong aesthetic sense did much to advance the arts in England. The country’s churches benefited from being adorned by the skilled continental craftsmen he so admired, but his greatest monument is Westminster Abbey, the rebuilding of which in the English Gothic style over twenty years was a passionate personal project. Ultimately, however, one of the most significant developments of his reign was that in 1265 the first prototype of the House of Commons was convened.

William Marshall, the elderly Earl of Pembroke, who had been a wise counsellor to Henry’s grandfather Henry II, became regent, and his pragmatic actions did much to restore the royal fortunes. He remained alive long enough to ensure that Louis and his French armies were expelled from England and that his youthful charge was backed by the papacy. Then, to end the civil war and secure the barons’ allegiance, he cleverly reissued Magna Carta on behalf of the boy king. But, although the French threat to the throne had evaporated, the next ten years were turbulent ones resembling the anarchy under Stephen. When William Marshall died, his place as chief adviser to the young king was taken by Hubert de Burgh. De Burgh’s time was soon occupied ridding England of John’s foreign favourites, noblemen who had been granted enormous amounts of English land as a reward for helping John but were now riding roughshod over English customs, imprisoning judges and ignoring the law. De Burgh besieged many of the foreigners’ illegal castles and chased most of them out of the country.

But in 1227 the situation changed for the worse when the pope declared that Henry III’s minority was at an end and that he was of an age to rule. Henry turned away from de Burgh and restored to power, as justiciar, one of John’s most grasping ministers, Peter des Roches, who had been both chancellor and Bishop of Winchester. Henry continued blithely to hand out land and offices in unprecedented quantities: Peter des Roches’ nephew, for example, became sheriff for no fewer than ten counties: York, Berkshire, Gloucester, Somerset, Northumberland, Devon, Lancashire, Essex, Hampshire and Norfolk. In 1233 the English lost their patience. William Marshall’s son Richard tried to force the king to dismiss Peter des Roches. Civil war followed. Though Richard Marshall was treacherously slain when the bishops threatened to excommunicate the king if he did not remove des Roches, Henry eventually gave way. In 1234 he dismissed des Roches and his Poitevin supporters and restored Hubert de Burgh to his estates.

But the king did not learn from these encounters. Though he was far more English in his tastes than any of his line and named his children after English saints, he soon brought a whole new set of foreigners to power when in 1236 he married Eleanor of Provence and adopted her Savoyard relations as his own. Under their influence he attempted to rule without any kind of council of English barons. The country was also plagued by interference from the papacy. Previously, under more resolute kings, the increased assertion of papal power had been resisted. To Henry III, surrounded as he was by French and Italian advisers, there seemed little wrong in allowing the pope to supersede ancient electoral rights and remove incumbents from their positions.

As a result a great number of French and Italian priests became absentee bishops and abbots, taking very little interest in their parishioners. The queen’s uncle, the Savoyard Boniface, became a loathed Archbishop of Canterbury on the death of the saintly Edmund Rich in 1240 but hardly bothered to visit England. The unpopularity of these foreigners was not helped by a massive hike in taxation ordered by Pope Gregory IX to pay for his war against the emperor Frederick II, which Henry’s religious nature impelled him to obey. The only important figure in the English Church who had the courage to protest was Robert Grossteste, the Bishop of Lincoln. But a single voice had no impact.

Despite or perhaps because of the influence of so many foreigners, a new sense of Englishness had been growing in the country. The several reissues of Magna Carta in every shire town helped convey to English people some idea of their rights. The new orders of mendicant or begging friars were another unifying development, acting in effect like newspapers carrying news of the latest events from town to town and enabling those living in isolated villages and hamlets to feel part of the whole. The mendicant friars were travelling brothers, usually Dominicans and Franciscans, who breathed a new ardour for truth into the Church by the sermons they preached at market crosses in the open air. Unconnected to vested interests, they had more critical minds than the regular clergy.

The sense of nationhood was further encouraged by the burst of intellectual energy at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. There intelligent youths from every region were able to exchange ideas and learn from outstanding lecturers such as Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (who arrived in Oxford around 1230 and set up the Franciscans there) and his fellow Franciscan Roger Bacon. The towns too were now flourishing. A highly profitable trade in raw wool flowed between England and Flanders, from where it was dispersed to continental weaving towns to become cloth. And there had been a resurgence of writing in English: the song ‘Sumer is icumen in’ dates from this period, written in the language known as Middle English.

Yet in the hands of careless foreigners the efficient government of England was decaying. The Welsh princes once again began to expand south under Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and his grandson Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. Hitherto English kings had been able to rely on income from crown lands, but Richard I and Henry’s father John had sold so much that there was little left. The crown was so bankrupt that a number of the king’s servants were even convicted of highway robbery because he had not paid their salaries. Bad feeling against the king was becoming universal.

The discontent was fanned by a last attempt to get back the Angevin Empire. Henry III was an exceptionally devoted son. On John’s death his mother Isabella of Angoulême had married the son of John’s Poitevin enemy Hugh de Lusignan. By 1242 under the French king Louis IX the kingdom of France was continuing to expand dramatically at the expense of the traditional rights of the Poitevin barons. In response to the pleas of his mother and stepfather, Henry took an English army to invade Poitou. He was defeated so conclusively at the Battle of Taillebourg that by the next generation Poitou was directly ruled by the King of France. In 1259 by the Treaty of Paris the king accepted what had been fact since 1214, that only the Gascon region of Aquitaine remained to England. With this defeat yet another wave of foreigners, more of Henry III’s numerous half-brothers and sisters, arrived in England. They too had to be accommodated like the Savoyards, with offices and bishoprics.

When Henry III took it upon himself, as a good son of the Church, to pay for the papal wars against the emperor, the country bent under new taxes. Although Frederick II was dead, the papacy was still determined to break up his empire. In return for English money, Henry’s second son Edmund had been promised the kingdom of Sicily, while Henry’s brother Richard of Cornwall was elected King of the Romans with papal support in 1257. The price tag for these grandiose plans was an enormous £135,000, which Henry had no hope of paying without raising fresh taxes. And by virtue of Magna Carta he could not raise those taxes without obtaining the permission of the Great Council of twenty-five barons. In 1258 he was duly forced to call a meeting of the Council.

The king’s perpetually impoverished state meant he called the Great Council together on a regular basis to borrow from it. As these meetings became more frequent it began to be so much the custom for barons to have their say in the affairs of the realm that the Council began to be referred to as a Parliament (from the French
parler
, to talk). By the 1250s the barons were quite clear on their objectives. The closed court circle prevented them obtaining any influence. If the king wished to raise more taxes he must reconfirm the Charters and restore the offices of justiciar, chancellor and treasurer which Henry had done without since 1244.

Thus it was that early in 1258, when the king asked for that £135,000 to meet the cost of the pope’s Crusade, the barons and knights rebelled. At the Great Council or Parliament at Westminster they declared that no more cash would be forthcoming from them until the government of England was reformed.

The leader of the revolt was a baron named Simon de Montfort, a Frenchman who had inherited the earldom of Leicester through his mother. De Montfort had begun his life in England as one of the unpopular foreign favourites, and had at first risen high because he was married to Henry III’s sister. A fierce and passionate character, in 1248 de Montfort had been entrusted with restoring order to the last remnant of the Angevin Empire in mainland France, the southernmost county of Gascony, where he was made seneschal or governor. He was the son of the Simon de Montfort who had terrorized the Albigensian heretics in that region of France a generation earlier, and he used the same strong-armed techniques to subdue the independently minded towns and tempestuous nobles. But success was achieved at a price. The weak-minded king grew alarmed at the Gascon complaints about the severity of de Montfort’s methods and began to take their side. The bitter and disillusioned Simon de Montfort rapidly became a rallying point for opposition to the king.

In June 1258 a second Parliament met at Oxford, with the barons ready for war should Henry III not accede to their demands. Although the king and his cronies dubbed it the Mad Parliament, the Parliament’s demands were coolly rational. There was to be a new agreement to supplement the conditions laid down in the Great Charter. Known as the Provisions of Oxford this stipulated that an inner circle or Council of Fifteen was to be chosen by Henry and the barons to administer the country with the king.

The Provisions of Oxford represented a further advance in limiting the royal powers. Their revolt was justified to de Montfort and others by the longstanding Judaeo-Christian doctrine of the righteousness of resisting tyrants, and the concept of the commonweal or good of the community. The Fifteen forced the king to expel all the foreigners (including the king’s Poitevin half-brothers) from their official positions, appoint Englishmen as ministers and put an end to his expensive foreign adventures.

The rule of the Fifteen nominally lasted from 1259 to 1263. Jealousies among the barons saw it degenerate into a battle for leadership between de Montfort and Richard of Gloucester and resulted in what are known as the Barons’ Wars. Soon the Lord Edward, Henry III’s decisive eldest son, the future King Edward I, was intriguing to create a royalist faction within the Fifteen, where his chief accomplice was the Earl of Gloucester. With their backing Henry revoked the Provisions of Oxford, had the pope annul his obligations and went to war. But both sides were so evenly matched that the French king Louis IX was appealed to for judgement. The Mise of Amiens of 1264 was the result, which denounced the Provisions of Oxford as illegal.

But Simon de Montfort and his supporters would not abide by the Mise of Amiens and were determined to continue the war. At Lewes in Sussex on 14 May 1264 the decisive battle of the campaign was fought. Earl Simon, who was a brilliant general, captured both the king and his heir, and by a treaty called the Mise of Lewes the king’s power was handed over to a committee of nine. In reality England was ruled by the great earl. However, the royalist opposition had not completely given up. With the Welsh marcher lords gathering for the king, and the queen raising a force on the French coast among her relations, Simon de Montfort saw that he had to act swiftly to get the whole of the country behind him. He therefore summoned in 1265 what is–misleadingly–known as the first English Parliament.

Unlike the earlier Parliaments, that of 1265 was not just a council of barons, but something which approximated more closely to the modern Houses of Parliament. A precursor of the Commons was convoked to discuss the government of the country with the barons and bishops (the Lords). Not only was every shire to elect two knights to give their views at the meeting, but a number of cities and boroughs in England were invited to send two representatives, who by the end of the century had become known as burgesses. The English were used to giving their views on a regular basis to the king, whether via sheriffs who reported on the results of a grand jury inquest or via merchants when the king wished to borrow money. But these were informal gatherings. The Parliament of 1265 was the first time in English history that all the estates of the realm met in the same place. But they did not merely give their assent to taxes. During their meeting all present contributed their views on matters of public policy. This would rapidly become a valued tradition.

A year later Simon de Montfort’s rule came to an end. In the course of a de Montfort-led expedition to put down a royalist insurrection among the Welsh marcher lords on behalf of the captive Lord Edward, the king’s son managed to escape. Many barons now joined their soldiers to those of the Welsh marchers and swung to the side of Henry III. De Montfort was forced to recross the Severn and, on a blisteringly hot day in August 1265, face Edward and the marcher lords at the Battle of Evesham. Edward, who was soon to be famous as ‘the Hammer of the Scots’, outgeneralled de Montfort by surrounding him on all sides. As he surveyed the scene and saw that death was near, Simon said half admiringly, ‘By the arm of St James they come on cunningly; God have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are the Lord Edward’s!’