The moment that John was dead, the insurgent barons began to be conscious of the huge mistake that they had made in calling over Lewis of France to their aid. John's successor was his eldest son Henry, a young boy of nine, against whom no one could feel any personal objection. But the rebels had committed themselves to the cause of Lewis, and could not go back. The civil war therefore continued, but the supporters of Lewis were without heart or enthusiasm in his cause.
The young Henry was in the hands of William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, one of the great barons who had refused to join Lewis. Pembroke at once crowned the young king at Gloucester, and made him declare his adherence to the Great Charter, and solemnly republish it. This act cut away the ground from under the feet of Lewis's party, as they could not any longer pretend that they were fighting merely to recover their constitutional rights. One after another they began to drop away, and go over to Henry's side.
The fortune of the civil war soon began to turn in favour of the young king. It was decided by two great battles. Lincoln castle was being besieged by the followers of Lewis, French and English. To relieve it William the Marshal set out with a small army, and, surprising the enemy in the streets of the town, while they were busied in the siege, he inflicted a great defeat upon them. Most of the great English barons of Lewis's party were taken prisoners in the fray. Shortly after a second decisive engagement completely shattered Lewis's hopes. He was expecting great reinforcements from France, which were to be brought to him by a fleet commanded by Eustace the Monk, a cruel pirate captain whom he had hired to serve him because of his naval skill. But Hubert de Burgh, the Justiciar of King Henry, put to sea from Dover with a small squadron of ships raised from the Cinque Ports, and met the French in mid-channel off Sandwich. The English had the better, most of the hostile vessels were captured, and Eustace the Monk was taken and hung for his former piracies. This was the first great naval battle which an English fleet ever won.
Deprived of hope of succour from France, and seeing most of his English supporters captives in Pembroke's hands, Prince Lewis resolved to abandon his enterprise and leave England. He proffered terms to Pembroke and de Burgh, who eagerly accepted them. So by the treaty of Lambeth he undertook to depart and give up his claim to the crown, while the Earl Marshal and Justiciar on their part consented to grant an amnesty to all Lewis's partisans, and to restore them to possession of their estates. To facilitate Lewis's quick retreat he was given a sum of 10,000 marks (September 17, 1217).
Thus the civil war came to an end, but its evil effects long endured, William of Pembroke, who acted till his death in 1219 as regent of the realm, did all that he could to quiet matters down; but there was much trouble left to his successor, Hubert de Burgh, the great Justiciar, who bore sway in England for all the remaining years of King Henry's minority. Hubert conferred many and signal benefits on the realm. He discomfited an attempt of the Pope to govern England through his legates, under the plea that John's homage of 1213 made the kingdom the property of the Holy See. He put down the turbulence of many of John's old courtiers and mercenaries, who, presuming on their fidelity in the civil war, refused obedience to the law of the land. The leaders of these persons were Peter des Roches, an intriguing Poitevin whom John had made Bishop of Winchester, and Fawkes de Bréauté, who had been the chief captain of the late king's Gascon soldiers. Peter was compelled to go on a Crusade, and Fawkes was crushed by force of arms when he presumed to refuse to give up the king's castle of Bedford, and had the impudence to seize and imprison a justice of assize who had given a legal decision against him. Fawkes himself escaped over-seas, but de Burgh took Bedford Castle, and hung William de Bréauté, the rebel's brother, because he had dared to hold out against the king's name (1224).
Hubert's wise and salutary rule endured till the king came of age (1227), and for some years after he was still retained as Justiciar. But Henry, on coming to maturity, soon showed himself jealous of the great man who had protected his helpless boyhood. The new king was a strange mixture of good and evil. He was a handsome, courteous youth, blameless in his private life, and kind and liberal to his friends. He proved a good father and husband, and a great friend to the Church. He loved the fine arts, and built many stately edifices, of which the famous abbey of Westminster is the best known. But he had many serious faults: he was an incorrigible spendthrift; he was quite incapable of keeping any promise for more than a few days. He was of a busy volatile disposition, always vaulting from project to project, and never carrying to its end any one single plan. Being full of self-confidence he much disliked any one who gave him unpalatable counsel, or strove to keep him from any of his wild ephemeral schemes. This was the secret of his ingratitude to Hubert de Burgh, who never shrank from opposing his young master when the occasion demanded it. Moreover, Henry had the great fault of loving foreigners over-much; he surrounded himself with a horde of his relatives from the continent. His wife Eleanor of Provence brought a host of brothers and uncles from Savoy and southern France, and his mother sent over to England her children by her second marriage with her old lover, the Count of La Marche. [17] On these kinsmen Henry lavished not only great gifts of money, but earldoms, baronies, and bishoprics, to the great vexation of the English. His strangest act was to confer the archbishopric of Canterbury on his wife's uncle, Boniface of Savoy, a flighty young man of most unclerical habits. Henry was not cruel or malicious, like his father, and personally he was not disliked by his subjects, a fact which explains the patience with which they bore his vagaries for many years. But his actions were nearly always unwise, and his undertakings were invariably unsuccessful, so that his long- suffering vassals were at last constrained to take the reins of government out of his hands.
For thirty years, however, Henry worked his will on England (1228-58) before drawing down the storm on his head. For the first five of them he was still somewhat restrained by the influence of Hubert de Burgh. But in 1232 the old Justiciar was not only dismissed, but thrown into prison, because Henry was wroth with him for frustrating an unwise and unnecessary war with France. But the king's ingratitude provoked such angry opposition that Hubert was ultimately released, and suffered to dwell in peace on his own lands.
After dismissing Hubert, Henry threw himself into the hands of Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, one of John's old courtiers. Peter knew or cared nothing about English laws and customs, and led the king into so many illegal and unconstitutional acts, that the whole nation called for his banishment. At last the Great Council, led by Edmund of Abingdon, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, frightened the king into dismissing him (1234).
But England did not profit very much by Peter's fall. Henry resolved to become his own prime minister; he did not appoint any one to the office of Justiciar, and a little later he abolished that of Chancellor also. He thought that he would act as his own chief justice and private secretary, but, as he was no less volatile than busy, he only succeeded in getting all public business into hopeless arrears.
Henry's personal government endured for the weary time of twenty-four years. The events of the period were very insignificant, and only call for very brief mention. The sole foreign war was a brief struggle with Lewis IX. of France. One of Henry's many ephemeral schemes was the idea of winning back the continental dominions that his father had lost. So in 1241 he picked a quarrel with the good King Lewis, and invaded Poitou. He was disgracefully beaten at the battle of Taillebourg (1242), and was forced to make peace. The mild and pious King of France contented himself with leaving things as they had been before the war, though if he had chosen he might have forced Henry to surrender Bordeaux and Guienne, the last possessions of the English crown beyond the seas.
Far worse for England than Henry's abortive invasion of France were his dealings with the papacy. Henry was a devoted servant of the Church, and whenever the Popes tried to lay any burden on England, Henry did his best to make the nation submit. Rome was at this time deep in a struggle with the brave and brilliant Emperor Frederic II., and the Popes were always wanting money to keep up the war against him. In 1238 Gregory IX. sent over to England his legate, Cardinal Otho, who pretended to come to reform the clergy, but really did little more than extort great sums of money from them, on all possible excuses. When he left the realm it was said that he took more English Church treasure with him than he left behind, and he had thrust 300 Italian priests into English benefices by the aid of the king's patronage. A few years later Henry allowed himself to be made the Pope's tool in an even more disgraceful way. Alexander IV. was trying to wrest the kingdom of Sicily from the heirs of the Emperor Frederic II., and, as he could not succeed by his own strength, determined to make the docile King of England do the work for him. So he offered to make Henry's younger son Edmund, a boy of ten, King of Sicily, if Henry would undertake the expense of conquering that country. The scheme was just one of the wild adventurous plans that took the flighty monarch's fancy, so he eagerly accepted the Sicilian crown for his son, and promised the Pope that he would find the money to raise a great army. But as he had never any gold in his own treasury—since he spent it all on his buildings and his wife's relatives—he had to raise the great sums required for the invasion of Sicily out of the nation. In 1257, therefore, he summoned the Great Council, and told them that he must at once have liberal grants from them, because he had pledged England's credit to the Pope, and had made the realm responsible to Alexander IV. for 140,000 marks. The baronage were full of rage and disgust, for the conquest of Sicily was no concern of England's, but a matter of private spite on the part of the papacy. And, moreover, the king had not the least right to pledge the revenues of England to Alexander without having consulted the Great Council. Instead, therefore, of a grant of 140,000 marks, Henry received the outpourings of thirty years of suppressed indignation and discontent. He was told that he could no longer be allowed to rule the realm without the aid and counsel of his barons; that his interference in distant wars was foolish; that his foreign relations were a flight of locusts eating up the land; that his ministers and favourites were unjust, greedy, and extortionate. The king was seriously frightened, and consented to call another Great Council together at Oxford, to provide for the better governance of the realm, and not merely for the payment of his own debts.
The sudden outburst of wrath on the part of the baronage in 1258 is explained not only by the fact that all men had lost patience with King Henry, for that had been the case for many years, but much more by the fact that the baronage had at last found a champion and mouthpiece in Simon de Montfort, the great Earl of Leicester. Simon was not one who might have been expected to prove a wise and patriotic statesman and a good Englishman, for he had originally come into notice as one of the king's foreign favourites. His grandmother had been the heiress of the earldom of Leicester, but she had married a Frenchman, the Count of Montfort. Their child was Simon the elder, a great crusading chief and a cruel persecutor of heretics. He was a bitter enemy of King John, and had never been permitted to get hold of the Leicester estates. In 1232 his son Simon the younger came across to England, to beg King Henry to make over to him the confiscated lands of his grandmother's earldom. Henry could never resist a petitioner, especially when he was a foreigner; he not only took Simon into favour and granted him the earldom of Leicester, but he married him to his sister, the Princess Eleanor, and for a time made him his confidant. But the king's sudden friendship did not endure, and ere very long he tired of Simon, and sent him over to govern Guienne, which was always in a state of chronic insurrection. Simon put down rebellion with a strong hand, and made himself unpopular with the Gascons, who sent many complaints of him to the king. But the fatal cause of estrangement between him and the earl was a money matter: Simon had expended large sums in the king's service, using his own money and borrowing more. When he sent in his accounts to Henry, the latter could not or would not pay, and very meanly allowed the loss to fall on Simon (1250).
Simon then settled down into opposition to the king, though he was ready enough to serve the realm in all times of danger. He had now been living for many years in England, and his neighbours found him a just and sincere man, and one who had done his best to accustom himself to English ways of life and thought. He was especially beloved by the clergy, who admired his fervent piety and pure life. So it came to pass that the man who had once been known only as the king's favourite, was called Earl Simon the Righteous, and looked upon as the most patriotic and trustworthy of the nobles of the realm.
Great men had been singularly wanting among the ranks of the English baronage, since William of Pembroke died and Hubert de Burgh was disgraced. It was not till Simon came to the front as the king's opponent that the nation's discontent with Henry was adequately expressed.
The Great Council—or Parliament as we may now call it, since that word was just coming into use—met at Oxford in June, 1258, to take counsel for the better administration of England. Some called it the "Mad Parliament," because of the anger of the barons, and their desire to make hasty and sweeping changes. Henry, when he met it, found that he had no supporters save his foreign kinsmen and a few personal dependents, so that he was forced to submit to all the conditions which the barons imposed upon him.
So were ratified the "Provisions of Oxford," which provided for the government of England, not by the king, but by a group of committees. Henry was to do nothing without the consent of a privy council of fifteen members, which was now imposed upon him. Another committee of twenty-four was to investigate and right all the grievances of the realm; and a third, also of twenty-four, was to take charge of the financial side of the government, pay off the king's debts, and administer his revenues. Henry was forced to make a solemn oath to abide by the rules stated in Magna Carta, which he had often before promised to keep, but had always evaded or disregarded after a time.
By the Provisions of Oxford the governance of the realm was taken altogether out of the hands of the king, and handed over to those of the three committees. But the new scheme was far too cumbersome, for neither of the three bodies had any authority over the others, and it was difficult to keep them together. There were many who were jealous of Simon de Montfort, who sat in each of the three, and was the ruling spirit of the whole government. It was said that he took too much upon himself, and that the nation had not muzzled the king merely in order to hand itself over to be governed by the earl.
In spite of these murmurings, and in spite of the king's attempts to shake off the control which had been imposed on him, the Provisions of Oxford were observed for four years. But Henry was preparing to tear himself free as soon as possible. He sent privately to Rome and got absolved from his oath by the Pope. He courted those who were jealous of Earl Simon, and he encouraged many of his foreign relatives and dependents to creep back to England. In 1261 he felt strong enough to break loose, seized the Tower of London, and raised an army. But he found himself too weak, dared not come to blows with the adherents of the Provisions of Oxford, and again consented to place himself in the hands of the guarantors. But as disputes about his conduct continued to arise, he offered to submit his rights, and those of the barons, to the arbitration of his neighbour, St. Lewis of France, whose probity was recognized by all the world. Simon and his friends consented—an unwise act, for they might have remembered that the French king was not well acquainted with the constitution or the needs of England. By a decision called the Mise of Amiens, from the city at which it was proclaimed, St. Lewis announced that Henry ought to abide by the customs stated in Magna Carta, but that he need not keep the Provisions of Oxford, which were dishonourable to his crown and kingly dignity (1263).
The Mise of Amiens precipitated the outbreak of civil war, for Simon and his party refused to accept the decision which had been given against them, though they had promised to abide by it. This flinching from their word alienated from them many who would otherwise have taken the side of reform, and it was felt that a grave responsibility lay on Simon for striking the first blow. Hence it came to pass that the king was supported by a larger party than might have been expected. His own brother and son, Richard of Cornwall and Prince Edward, who had hitherto usually leaned to the party of reform and striven to guide him towards moderation, now supported him with all their power. The Earls of Norfolk and Hereford and many other great barons also took arms in his favour. Earl Simon, on the other hand, was helped by the Earls of Gloucester and Derby, and enthusiastically supported by the citizens of London, who had been maddened by the king's arbitrary taxes.
When, after much preliminary fighting, the armies of Henry and Simon faced each other in Sussex for a decisive battle, it was found that the king had much the larger army. He drew up his host outside the walls of Lewes, while Simon, who had marched from London, lay on the downs beyond it. When the shock came, the fiery Prince Edward, who led the right wing of the royalists, fell furiously on Simon's left wing, which was mainly composed of the levies of London, and drove them far off the field. But, carried away by his pursuit, he never thought of returning to help his father, and meanwhile Earl Simon had beaten the king's division, and rolled the royalist army back against the town wall of Lewes, where those of them who could not enter the gate at once were taken prisoners. Among the captives were the king himself, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and most of the chiefs of the royalist party. Prince Edward, rather than continue the civil war, gave himself up to the insurgents on the following day, to share his father's fate (May, 1264).
The immediate result of the battle was the issue of a document called the Mise of Lewes, by which King Henry promised to keep the charter, to dismiss all his foreign relatives and dependents, and to place himself under the control of a privy council, whom Parliament should choose to act as his ministers and guardians.
A Parliament was hastily summoned and delegated three electors to nominate this privy council, namely, Earl Simon, the Earl of Gloucester, and the Bishop of Chichester. The electors, naturally but unwisely, appointed none but their own trusted supporters. Thus England came under the rule of a party, and a party whose violent action had been disliked by a great portion of the nation. The king was but a puppet in their hands; he was practically their prisoner, for three of the council always attended his steps and kept him in sight. Now, Henry, irritating and faithless as his conduct had always been, was not personally disliked, and the sight of their monarch led about like a captive and forced to obey every behest of his captors, was very displeasing to many who had formerly felt no sympathy for him. It was felt, too, that his son Edward was being very hardly treated by being kept in honourable captivity and deprived of all share in the government; for the prince had taken the side of reform till the outbreak of the civil war, had only joined his father when Simon took arms, and had behaved with great patriotism and self-denial in refusing to continue the struggle after Lewes.
For two years Earl Simon governed England, and the king was kept under close guard. This period was not one of peace or prosperity; the land was still troubled by the echoes of the civil war, and in his anxiety to maintain his dominant position the earl incurred many accusations of harshness and rapacity. He was especially blamed for depriving Prince Edward of his earldom of Chester, for favouring Llewellyn Prince of North Wales in his quarrel with Roger Mortimer, a great lord of the Welsh marches who had been on the king's side at Lewes, but most of all for giving too much trust and power to his own sons. The young Montforts were rash and arrogant men, who harmed the people's cause more by their turbulence than they aided it by their courage and fidelity. In short, they were as Samuel's sons of old, and wrought their father no small damage and discredit.
The chief event for which Earl Simon's tenure of power is remembered is his summons of the celebrated Parliament of 1265. This incident is noteworthy, not so much for anything that the Parliament did, as for the new system on which it was constructed. Hitherto the Great Council had usually been composed only of the barons and bishops, though on two or three occasions in the thirteenth century the smaller vassals of the crown had been represented by the summons of two knights from each shire, chosen in the county court by all the freeholders of the district. But de Montfort not only called these "knights of the shire" to his Parliament of 1265, but also summoned two citizens or two burgesses from each of the chief cities and boroughs of the realm. Thus he was the first to give the towns representation, and to put together the three elements, lords, borough members, and county members, which form the Parliament of to-day. It must be confessed that Simon's immediate object was probably to strengthen his own side in the assembly, rather than to initiate a scheme for the reform of the Great Council in a democratic direction. Many barons were against him, and them he did not summon at all. Many more were jealous or distrustful of him, and it was mainly in order to swamp their opposition that he called up the great body of knights of the shire and members for the towns,—for London and the rest of the chartered cities were strongly in favour of his cause.
This Parliament confirmed all Simon's acts; outlawed those of the king's party who had fled over-seas, and refused to accept the terms of the Mise of Lewes; imposed a three-years exile in Ireland on some of those who had made only a tardy submission, and put all the royal castles into the hands of trusty partisans of the earl. It made few regulations for the better governance of the realm, but left everything in Simon's hands and at his discretion.
It was impossible that the regency of the great earl should last for long. There were too many men in England who felt that it was unseemly that the king and his son should live in close restraint, while one who, in spite of all his merits, was still a foreigner and an adventurer, ruled the realm. The beginning of Simon's troubles came from a quarrel with his own chief supporter, the young Earl of Gloucester. Gilbert de Clare thought that he was not admitted to a sufficient share in the government of the kingdom, and soon fell into a bitter feud with Simon's sons. His anger led him into conspiring against the great earl. By his counsel Prince Edward escaped from his keepers, by an easy stratagem and a swift horse. Once free, the prince called his party to arms, and was joined by Gloucester, Mortimer, and many of the barons of the Welsh marches.
On hearing of this rising in the west, Montfort hurried to the Welsh border with a small army, taking the king in his train. He bade Simon, the second of his sons, to collect a larger army and follow him. But Edward and Gloucester seized the line of the Severn, and threw themselves between father and son. The earl retraced his steps, slipped back across the Severn, and reached Evesham, while his son had marched as far as Kenilworth, so that a few miles only separated them. But Edward lay between, and was eager for the fight.
By a sudden and unexpected attack the prince surprised and scattered young Montfort's army under the walls of Kenilworth; he then hurried off to attack Simon. The earl lay in Evesham town, which is girt round by a deep loop of the river Avon. Edward and Gloucester seized the narrow neck of this loop, while another royalist force, under Mortimer, crossed the river and watched the only bridge which leads southward out of the town. Simon awoke to find himself surrounded. "God have mercy on our souls," he cried, "for our bodies are our enemy's." Gathering his little army in a compact mass, he dashed at the prince's superior force, and tried to cut his way through. But the odds were against him, and after a short sharp fight he was slain, with his eldest son Henry, Hugh Despencer the Justiciar of England, and many of the best knights of the baronial party. King Henry almost shared their fate: he had been compelled to put on his armour and ride in the earl's host, and was wounded and almost slain before he was recognized by his son's victorious soldiery.
Thus died Earl Simon the Righteous, a man much loved by those who knew him well, courteous and kindly, pious and honest, wise and liberal. But it cannot be denied that he was touched by an overweening ambition, and that when England fell beneath his hand, he ruled her more as a king than a regent, and forgot that he was but the deputy and representative of the nation. His rise and success freed England from the thriftless rule of Henry, and set a boundary to the use of the royal prerogative. His short tenure of power gave the realm the valuable gift of the full and representative Parliament. His fall was sad but not disastrous to the English, for his work was done, and he was fast drifting into the position of the autocratic leader of a party, and ceasing to be the true exponent of the will of the whole nation.
The best testimony to the benefits that Simon had conferred on England was the fact that Henry III. never fell back into his old ways. He was now an elderly man, and in his captivity had lost much of his self-confidence and restless activity. He had been freed, not by his own power, but by his son and the Earl of Gloucester, both of whom had been friends of reform, though enemies of Simon. Edward had now won an ascendency over his father which he never let slip, and his voice had for the future a preponderant share in the royal council. It is to his influence that we may ascribe the wise moderation with which the relics of Simon's party were treated.
Evesham fight did not end the war, for the three surviving sons of Simon, with the Earl of Derby and some other resolute friends, still held out. It took two years more to crush out the last sparks of civil strife, for the vanquished party fortified themselves in the castle of Kenilworth and the marshy isles of Ely and Axholme. But Edward gradually beat down all opposition, and the end of the war is marked by the Dictum of Kenilworth (October, 1266), in which the king solemnly confirms the Great Charter, and pardons all his opponents, on condition of their paying him a fine. Only the heirs of the Earls of Leicester and Derby were disinherited. The younger Montforts went into exile in Italy, where a little later they revenged themselves on the king by cruelly murdering his nephew Henry of Cornwall, as he was praying in Viterbo cathedral.
There is little to tell about the last five years of the reign of Henry III. The land gradually settled down into tranquillity, and we hear little more of the misgovernment which had rendered his early years so unbearable. Prince Edward went on a Crusade, when he saw that the realm was pacified. He greatly distinguished himself in the Holy Land, and took Nazareth from the infidels. He was still beating back the Saracen, when he was called home by the news of his father's decease. After a stormy life the old king had a peaceful ending, dying quietly in his bed on the 16th of November, 1272.