Hist. G. le Mar., ll. 18041–18060.
Ille [Pandulfus] multos bellicos tumultus nondum congelatos auctoritate sibi tradita tempore legationis viriliter comprimebat.
Flores Historiarum, a. 1221.
The new Legate was not a stranger to England. His first recorded visit there had taken place in 1211. He was then in subdeacon’s orders, and a member of the household of Pope Innocent III.[519] Of his earlier life nothing is known, except that he was a Roman by birth;[520] but King John seems to have already had some indirect knowledge of him, for it was at John’s request that he and another papal envoy, a brother of the Temple, were appointed by Innocent to go and confer with the King of England for the restoration of peace to the English Church.[521] In the one interview which took place between the commissioners and the King, Pandulf was the spokesman on the papal side; and John found that he had mistaken his man. The subdeacon simply stated the terms which he was instructed to offer to John; a long argument ensued, in which John was worsted; but he still refused to submit, whereupon Pandulf told him to his face, in the presence of all the court, that the Pope meant to subdue him and had already excommunicated him and absolved his subjects from their allegiance, and that the sentence was to take effect from that day forth. “If I had not sent for you, I would make you ride about my realm for a year!” raved the King. “You might as well say you would hang us,” coolly answered Pandulf; “we look for no other reward from you”; and when John tried to frighten him by issuing in his presence orders for the mutilation and execution of sundry prisoners, one of whom was a priest, the only result was that Pandulf went to fetch a candle for the avowed purpose of formally excommunicating then and there any person who should lay hands on this particular victim, and that John, evidently alarmed lest the candle should be used against himself as well as against his officers, hurried after the dauntless subdeacon and surrendered the man to his judgement.[522] Thenceforth Pandulf became the Pope’s special confidant and assistant in all matters relating to England and its King. It was he who in January, 1213, carried to Philip Augustus the Pope’s letter charging Philip with the execution of the sentence of deprivation against John; and it was he alone who shared with the Pope the secret of the negotiations which were then already afoot for rendering Philip’s expedition needless. Four months later he was in England again, receiving, in the Pope’s behalf, first John’s assent to the identical terms which he had refused in 1211, and secondly the King’s homage to the Roman See for the realms of England and Ireland.[523]
After a hurried visit to France, to stop the intended invasion from thence,[524] Pandulf returned to England, and remained there till the beginning of the next year. His position during this time is somewhat difficult to define. His official rank was merely that of “the Pope’s messenger”;[525] he had never held a commission as Legate; and the distinction between the two offices was clearly marked when in September, 1213, an envoy of higher standing in the Curia, Nicolas, Cardinal Bishop of Tusculum, came clothed with the full powers of a Legate a latere to receive a repetition of John’s homage to Rome, and to raise the Interdict as soon as the bishops and clergy should have been compensated for their losses and wrongs. Certain payments made to Pandulf on the King’s behalf seem to indicate that he was the authorized receiver of the earliest instalments of the tribute to Rome.[526] John had already made a friend of the man who had withstood him in 1211; the Pope’s clerk was taken into the counsels of the King; “We have granted to Master Pandulf that a truce be made between ourself and the Welsh,” wrote John to the Marcher barons in July, 1213;[527] and when Pandulf went oversea in January, 1214, he went as “the King’s messenger”[528]—whether to France or to Rome, there is nothing to shew with certainty; but it is probable that he carried some of the tribute money to the Pope. He seems to have been back in England by the end of the year, when the recall of Nicolas of Tusculum left him once more sole representative of the Pope in England, but still without any higher title than before. In the spring of 1215 he and the Bishop of Chichester conjointly were delegated by the Pope to investigate the merits of a project for dissolving the union between the see of Bath and the abbey of Glastonbury.[529] In the preamble to the Great Charter “Master Pandulf, the Pope’s subdeacon and familiar,” stands with the Master of the Temple between the bishops and the lay magnates in the list of the King’s advisers; and he is the last named of the three commissioners (the other two being the Bishop of Winchester and the Abbot of Reading) to whom the Pope addressed his letter ordering that the “disturbers of King and kingdom” should be proclaimed excommunicate by the bishops. If any of these latter failed to obey the order, the commissioners themselves were empowered to suspend the recalcitrant prelates; and thus it fell to the lot of Pandulf and Bishop Peter to proclaim the suspension of Archbishop Stephen.[530]
Some seven or eight weeks before this, Pandulf had been—of course on the King’s recommendation—elected to the bishopric of Norwich;[531] but no steps towards his consecration were taken for more than six years. Shortly after the middle of September, 1215, he seems to have gone to Rome on a mission from John, who wrote to the Pope that “although Master Pandulf is most useful to us in England, inasmuch as he labours faithfully and devotedly for the honour of the Roman Church and of ourself and our whole realm, yet we send him to your Holiness because we can trust no one else to explain the state of ourself and our realm so well as he can do it.”[532] We find no further trace of Pandulf for nearly two years. It is doubtful whether he had returned to England before John’s death; Gualo had been residing there as Legate since May, 1216, and the subdeacon’s presence was therefore no longer necessary for the interests of either Pope or King. In July, 1218, he was at Rome, acting as notary to the Pope.[533] On 12th September Honorius appointed him to the office which Gualo had just resigned;[534] and on 2nd December he was formally welcomed as Legate in S. Paul’s cathedral in London.[535]
Pandulf had well earned his promotion; and the special appropriateness of his appointment as Legate in England was obvious. His qualifications for the post may be summed up in an adaptation of the words in which John had commended him to Honorius: there was no one in the Roman Curia who could be trusted to understand and manage the affairs of John’s heir and of his realm so well as this man whom King and Pope alike had found by experience to be “most useful, faithful, and devoted” to the interests of both. As Legate, Pandulf came to his task in far less difficult circumstances than Gualo had done. Even when he set out from Rome, however, there must have been a general consciousness that the new Legate would ere long have to take upon him another charge, with which his predecessor had never been burdened. The selection of an English noble, instead of the legal representative of the overlord of England, as governor of King and kingdom in 1216 had been occasioned by circumstances which in 1218 had ceased to exist. There was now no invader to expel, no rebellion to subdue, no need for a warrior-regent: and there was also no man among the baronage clearly marked out for the regent’s office as the Marshal had been by his personal qualities and by the universal estimation of his fellow barons. It is only fair to the English magnates to say that there are no indications of rivalry among them for the reversion of the regent’s office; but there can be no doubt that, as the Marshal himself foresaw, the appointment of any one of them as his successor must inevitably have led to jealousy and discord, and that the only person who could safely take the foremost place in the government after him was the representative of the Apostolic See. The matter might indeed not have been settled without difficulty, had its settlement been postponed till after the Marshal’s death. His forethought and his influence averted the danger, and from the day when he transferred the custody of the King to Pandulf at Reading the Legate was recognized as chief among the guardians of little Henry and his realm.
Pandulf’s supremacy, however, was of a different character from that of the Earl Marshal. Theoretically, it was more absolute, for the powers which had appertained respectively to the Marshal and to Gualo were united in his person; he was at once the elected regent of the realm and the representative of its overlord. But practically his rule was less absolute, because he had the good sense to recognize from the outset that the direction of the entire home and foreign policy of England, and of its internal government, was a charge too great for a foreign ecclesiastic to undertake single-handed. He did not assume the title of “ruler of King and kingdom”; and he shared the functions of that office with the Justiciar and the Bishop of Winchester. He took but little part in the routine of administrative business; he is seldom found attesting royal letters; he left such matters to Hubert and Peter. From the very beginning of his regency, however—even before the death of the Marshal—he claimed an exclusive right of supreme control over one department of royal administration: the treasury. This appears from some letters written by him from the west of England to the treasurer Eustace de Fauconberg and the vice-chancellor Ralf de Neville in London, in the spring of the year 1219.[536] Soon after the council at Reading, Pandulf went to reside for some weeks first at Cirencester, and afterwards at the abbey of Lantony at Gloucester. On 30th April he wrote from Cirencester to Eustace and Ralf conjointly: “By our authority as Legate we lay upon you strict injunctions to give all attention and diligence to the business of the Exchequer; to deposit what money you can get in the house of the Temple in London, and to pay nothing of it out to anybody without our special command and licence; and we strictly forbid that the seal be withdrawn from the Exchequer at the bidding of anyone.”[537] At the same time he wrote a separate letter to Ralf, ordering him “not to withdraw from the Exchequer with the seal at anyone’s bidding, because the proceedings of the Exchequer and the advantage of the King would be hindered thereby.”[538] On 10th May he “warned and exhorted” Ralf to “attend faithfully and devotedly to the King’s business, and especially the business of the Exchequer which is at present imminent.”[539] In subsequent letters to Ralf he emphatically reiterated his orders to store up money in the Temple and to let none of it be paid out “without our knowledge and command”; on one occasion giving as a reason that “as you well know, the King is burdened with many debts.”[540] On 16th May he so far relaxed his injunction to Ralf about not quitting the Exchequer as to give him leave “the holy blissful Martyr for to seek,”[541] if he wished it, and if there was nothing that needed to be done at the Exchequer; “but,” he added, “make haste back, and deposit the King’s seal under your own in the Temple till you return”; and on 26th May he again told the vice-chancellor not to leave the Exchequer “at the bidding of any man.”[542]
It is not certain whether the seal referred to in these letters is the King’s great seal or its duplicate the seal of the Exchequer. Nominally, the custody of both these seals appertained to the Chancellor; but since the latter years of Henry II a large part of the Chancellor’s duties, including the keeping of the great seal, had been usually delegated to a vice-chancellor; and the whole of them were left in the capable and trusty hands of Ralf de Neville throughout the greater part of the chancellorship of Richard de Marsh, which lasted from 1214 till 1226.[543] The Exchequer seal was never permitted to leave the precincts of the Exchequer, where it was kept by the Chancellor “through a deputy,”[544] who doubtless might be, but was not necessarily, identical with the vice-chancellor. With the paying of money out of the Exchequer neither Chancellor nor vice-chancellor, as such, had anything to do; this was a part of the business of the treasurer and chamberlains. It seems probable that the vice-chancellor may have been also one of the chamberlains acting at the Exchequer at this time.[545] It is certain that he was in Pandulf’s fullest confidence;[546] and he may thus in a twofold or even threefold capacity—as keeper of the King’s great seal, as the Chancellor’s deputy having the custody of the Exchequer seal, and as chamberlain—have supported Pandulf’s efforts to maintain, as a special prerogative attached to the regent’s office, the right of exclusive control over the Exchequer.[547] That there was some matter under discussion between the Legate, the Justiciar, the treasurer, and the vice-chancellor, is clear from a letter written by Hubert de Burgh on 15th May to Eustace and Ralf in which he says the Legate “sent us word that he will labour altogether by our counsel for God’s honour and the King’s advantage; and we sent him word that if he will acquiesce in your advice, we will acquiesce in his counsel, for God’s honour and the advantage of the King.”[548] The constitution of the Exchequer underwent great changes in the course of the next fifteen years; and some of these changes may have owed their origin to Pandulf, who perhaps made, or attempted to make, some experiments in the re-organization of this department of the government, possibly with a view to checking what he may have regarded as extravagance on the Justiciar’s part in the disposal of the King’s money. Some months later we find him exhorting Hubert also to “take effectual steps concerning the business of the Exchequer”;[549] and four years later one of the charges brought against Hubert was that of having been “a waster of the King’s treasure.”[550] There is, however, no means of ascertaining what really lay behind Pandulf’s mysterious orders to the vice-chancellor. If the matter was one which involved a conflict between the authority of the regent and that of the Justiciar, it was probably compromised, or at least decided by an amicable agreement; it evidently led to no subsequent friction in the council of three which virtually governed England throughout Pandulf’s legation, and in which, while the foremost place belonged by a double right to the Legate-regent, the second belonged by long-established constitutional tradition to the Justiciar.
Hubert de Burgh’s reputation as a statesman had yet to be made; but a career of distinction in more ways than one already lay behind him. His origin is absolutely unknown. The surname of which he and his brothers seem to be the earliest bearers mentioned in history represents, no doubt, the birthplace of one of their ancestors, probably their father;[551] but whether that place was Peterborough, or Brough in Westmorland, or one of the many Burghs and Burys in England or of the almost as numerous “Bourgs” in the continental dominions of the Angevin house, there is nothing to shew. In the early years of John’s reign Hubert’s brother William played some part in the affairs of the Anglo-Norman March in Ireland.[552] {1201–1205} Hubert himself was in 1201 chamberlain to John,[553] and entrusted with the wardenship of the Welsh Marches.[554] At the close of 1202 he was constable of Falaise, and had charge of the captive Arthur of Brittany, whom he saved from John’s cruelty chiefly, it seems, out of regard for the interests of John himself.[555] In 1204 he was constable of Chinon; he held it against the forces of Philip Augustus for twelve months, and when at last—long after the rest of the old Angevin lands were lost—its walls were so shattered that further defence became impossible, he sallied forth at the head of his men, fighting desperately, and was only made prisoner when disabled by a severe wound.[556] On his release he returned to his duties as chamberlain; and he was also sheriff of six counties at various times during the next eight or nine years.[557] Early in 1214 John appointed him seneschal of Poitou,[558] whence he returned in the following April with some troops for the King’s service;[559] shortly afterwards all the King’s subjects from over sea who obeyed his summons to come and help him against the barons were instructed to place themselves under Hubert’s orders.[560] In June Hubert became chief Justiciar of England.[561] For the exercise of the Justiciar’s ordinary functions he had little scope during the next two years; it was as constable of Dover castle that he rendered his most important services to John and to John’s youthful successor. From May, 1216, till August, 1217, he was practically absorbed in one task, the defence of Dover; and although the account of the sea fight on S. Bartholomew’s day given by an historian of the next generation,[562] which ascribes the entire credit of that decisive victory to Hubert alone, is very far from being borne out by contemporary and impartial authorities,[563] he undoubtedly shewed himself on that day as brave and capable on board ship as he had so often proved himself on land. Thus he passed from the military to the political stage of his career supported by the well-earned respect and goodwill of all parties in the realm.
The Bishop of Winchester’s position at the council-table was peculiar. He had no official title and no specific functions in the civil administration of the kingdom; his connexion with the government was a purely personal one. A donjon of fourteenth century construction overlooking a hamlet built on the slope of a hill with a little stream flowing round its foot, some twelve kilometres south of Poitiers, is in all likelihood the successor of a castle from which Peter des Roches and his family derived their surname. In his youth Peter had been a knight in the service of Richard Cœur-de-Lion;[564] and he must have shown great aptitude for the career of a warrior, since, long after his helmet had been replaced by a mitre, he was regarded as “learned in the military art,” and proved himself worthy of his reputation when he acted as “the master counsellor” of the English host on the day of the Fair of Lincoln. When and why he became a clerk there is nothing to shew; but he seems to have done so shortly before or soon after Richard’s death. In June, 1198, he was Richard’s chamberlain;[565] a year later he was a “beloved clerk” of John’s, and treasurer of Poitou.[566] In the favour of Richard’s successor he rose rapidly. On 3rd January, 1202, he was made dean of S. Martin’s at Angers;[567] but his time was spent mostly in England as a clerk in the royal household;[568] and though he still bore the title of treasurer of Poitou at the beginning of 1205,[569] he must have lost the profits of all his continental dignities and offices when the Angevin lands passed into the hands of Philip of France. For these he was indemnified by grants of various ecclesiastical revenues and offices in England;[570] and before February 5th, 1205, he was elected Bishop of Winchester,[571] the see which ranked next to the two archbishoprics in wealth and importance. He of course owed his election to the influence of the King; a part of the chapter had chosen another candidate, against whom Peter had to plead at Rome for confirmation; his pleading was successful, and he was consecrated by Innocent III on 25th September.[572] Peter was the one bishop who remained in England throughout the years of interdict. In 1210, during the King’s absence in Ireland, he joined with the Justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter and the Earl of Chester in an expedition into Wales which prevented a threatened Welsh invasion.[573] In October, 1213, Geoffrey FitzPeter died; and on 1st February, 1214, John appointed the Bishop of Winchester chief Justiciar of England.[574] The King’s choice of a foreigner for this office is said to have caused much grumbling among the barons,[575] the more so as John was on the eve of quitting the realm for a military expedition to Aquitaine, so that during his absence, which lasted eight months, Peter was practically viceroy of England. One chronicler asserts that Peter “by misusing his power turned the wrath of the barons against the King”;[576] but there is no proof that the country was any worse administered during those eight months than it had been for several years previously, and nothing to indicate that Peter was guilty of personal tyranny or extortion, or, in short, that he did anything worse than carry on the King’s government as he found it. Nor is it by any means clear that he was really disliked or distrusted, except by one section of the baronage—the section whose lofty patriotism and keen sense of nationality were soon to be displayed in their scheme for the annexation of England to France. The substitution of Hubert for Peter as Justiciar at Midsummer, 1215, may have taken place in deference to the King’s other advisers; but there is no evidence that such was the case; nothing is known about the circumstances of Hubert’s appointment; and it is quite possible that Peter may have resigned the justiciarship of his own accord.
From that time forth Peter never held office as a minister of state. He never had done so, save during those sixteen months of his justiciarship in 1214–1215.[577] He had, however, received another token of John’s confidence; he had been entrusted with the education of John’s heir. We have seen that in October, 1216, the Earl Marshal, with the assent of the other loyal barons, bestowed on Peter the important charge of the little King’s person, expressly on the ground that he had already been the child’s “master” and proved himself “a very good” one, who had “brought him up carefully and well.” As Henry was but just nine years old when these words were spoken,[578] we must infer from them that he had been under Peter’s care from a very tender age. Probably John had placed him in the bishop’s household as early as it was possible to do so, somewhat as Henry II had placed his eldest son, when quite a young child, in the household of Thomas the Chancellor.[579] The Marshal and the magnates did only what was natural and right when they replaced their young sovereign under the charge of his former tutor. The commission which Peter received from them, however, involved more than the boy’s education; it expressly included the responsibility for his personal safety. The man to whom was confided a charge so weighty as this obviously needed no official title to vindicate for him a prominent place among the counsellors by whose advice England was to be governed in his royal pupil’s name; and the active and versatile Southerner, experienced and efficient alike in matters of war, of administration, of finance, and of well-nigh every kind of public business, secular and ecclesiastical, was a colleague whose help the official governors of the realm would have been foolish indeed to reject or undervalue on the score of his foreign birth. They and he seem to have worked together without perceptible friction throughout the regency of the Marshal. The sharp words which passed between Peter and the regent shortly before the latter’s death, and Peter’s unseemly behaviour to the younger Marshal and the Legate next day, probably resulted from a misunderstanding on the part of the bishop. He evidently thought that the proposal to appoint a new “guardian of King and Kingdom” and the symbolical delivery of the King into the hands of Pandulf were meant to deprive himself of his precious charge. There was, however, no such intention. Pandulf gave Peter the rebuke which his violence deserved, but immediately replaced Henry under his care.[580]
For the first six months of Pandulf’s regency the chronicles are blank, so far as the internal history of England is concerned. Throughout those months, however, one man was openly setting the government at defiance. In December, 12161216, the royal castles of Rockingham and Sauvey, with the important Forest jurisdictions attached to them,[581] had been committed by the Earl Marshal to the custody of William de Fors, the titular Count of Aumale[582] (or “Albemarle,” as it seems to have been commonly called in England), “that he might dwell in them with his men until his own lands, which the King’s enemies had occupied during the war, should be restored to him.”[583] The actual custodian of Sauvey, Geoffrey de Serland, was apparently somewhat unwilling to hand the place over to the young count;[584] and as Geoffrey’s loyalty is unquestioned, his reluctance was probably caused by some doubts either of William’s loyalty, or of his fitness for the charge of such an important post. If so, these doubts were well founded. On 11th February, 12181218, William, having received restitution of his own lands, was bidden to deliver up Rockingham and Sauvey to another custodian.[585] This order was not obeyed; and a contemporary writer asserts that the Earl Marshal before his death “greatly repented” of having put these castles into the young count’s hands, “because of the complaints which arose out of the ill-doings of the said count and his officers who dwelt there and wrought serious injuries to the people of the district, both rich and poor.”[586] For some unexplained reason, however, no further steps seem to have been taken in the matter till six months after the Marshal’s death. Then, on 30th November, 1219,1219 a lengthy indictment against Aumale was issued in the form of letters patent to the barons, knights, and freeholders of the five counties—Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Rutland, Leicestershire, and Yorkshire—in which the bulk of his possessions lay. Count William was not only detaining, against the royal will and command, certain lands and castles of the King’s which had been placed in his charge (to wit, Rockingham and Sauvey), but was also fortifying and victualling them in the King’s defiance, although a day had actually been set—“to which he paid no heed”—for him to surrender them to the King in person. He was also holding tournaments; more especially he had lately held and attended one at Brackley, contrary to the King’s express orders, and regardless of a sentence of excommunication passed upon him by the Legate. He was therefore to be avoided as an excommunicate and a rebel; the persons addressed were warned, on pain of condign punishment, not to assist him in fortifying Sauvey, but to be ready to take action against him in whatever way they should be directed by future letters from the King; and the sheriffs of the five counties were ordered to proclaim him excommunicate.[587] Strangely enough, neither in record nor chronicle do we find any further mention of William of Aumale till the following April {1220}, when an order addressed to him for forty bucks to be sent to the King at Westminster shows that he was again recognized as warden of a royal Forest, which can only have been that of Rockingham or Sauvey;[588] and his next appearance is in the middle of June, when he was one of the sureties for King Henry’s fulfilment of a treaty with the King of Scots.[589] He seems to have been absolved on condition of taking the Cross[590] and of surrendering the castles and setting forth on his crusade within a given period. Such an arrangement would serve, for the time being, the purposes of Count and Legate alike. William remained in possession; Pandulf avoided, or at least staved off for a while, the responsibility of taking forcible measures against a man whom the Marshal had apparently deemed it prudent to treat with forbearance.
A like forbearance was exercised towards the Justiciar of Ireland, Geoffrey de Marsh. Shortly before the Marshal’s death Geoffrey appears to have announced his intention of going on Crusade; {1219} and the Council seized the opportunity thus afforded them to insist that before he went, he must come to England to perform his homage to the King, and confer with them touching the state of affairs in Ireland. For this purpose they gave him on 23rd April a safe-conduct till All Saints’ day; and they arranged that during his absence from Ireland the Archbishop of Dublin, who had been his colleague in the office of Justiciar during the past twelve months, should take sole charge of the March.[591] The Archbishop was himself anxious to go to England for an interview with the King; and as Geoffrey delayed his departure, he at length wrote and asked permission to do so.[592] His request seems to have crossed with some royal letters issued on 22nd September, ordering that his appointment as chief Justiciar should take effect from Candlemas next, and that by that date Geoffrey should be in England without fail;[593] and this order Geoffrey was just preparing to obey when it was followed by a warm assent to the Archbishop’s proposed visit, which the King’s advisers said “would be most welcome for many reasons.” On this Geoffrey was disposed to make the Archbishop’s impending departure from Ireland a reason for again deferring his own; the Archbishop, however, besought the King not to let him do so, but to bid him “commit the custody of the land, according as the Council may provide, to some other man.”[594] The Archbishop was certainly in England in the summer of 1220; but there is no sign of Geoffrey’s presence there at Candlemas. Summoned again, this time to meet the King and Council at Nottingham on 1st June, he at last came over, but was unavoidably prevented from being at Nottingham on the appointed day, and begged that a later date might be fixed on which he might “lay before the King and council the affairs of the King’s land in Ireland, and”—thus he wrote to his “very dear friend” Hubert de Burgh—“they may be settled by the counsel of yourself and other of the King’s faithful men and of our friends.”[595]
The settlement took the form of a convention between the King and Geoffrey, drawn up at Oxford on 11th August, in presence of the Legate and the Archbishop of Dublin, as well as Peter des Roches, Hubert de Burgh, and other members of the royal council. The Justiciar is in future to answer at the King’s Exchequer in Dublin for escheats, wards, fines, gifts, tallages, reliefs, and aids, from Ireland; and the proceeds of all these, after they have been accounted for at the Exchequer, are to be rendered to the King at his command. Out of the assessed revenue of Ireland, and its “reasonable perquisites” other than those above mentioned, the Justiciar is to maintain the garrisons of the King’s land and castles in Ireland; the garrisons to be such as shall be determined by the advice of Archbishop Henry, Thomas FitzAdam, and Richard de Burgh. The surplus of these revenues and perquisites shall be accounted for at the Dublin Exchequer by the view of these three persons; and clerks of the King, appointed for the purpose, shall keep a counter-roll of all these things. The Justiciar shall appoint as constables of the King’s castles loyal and fit men who shall swear to keep the castles faithfully and safely for the King, so that in case of the Justiciar’s capture, or death, or misconduct, the castles shall be safe; and these constables shall give hostages for their fidelity to the Archbishop of Dublin and the Earl Marshal, and shall also send to the King, through the Archbishop, charters of fealty. The Justiciar gave his two sons as hostages; the Earl Marshal stood pledge for him; and he himself further pledged the whole of his lands, to fall in to the King and the Marshal respectively (he held some of each), in case of his failure to keep faith. He also took an oath to keep all these promises, on pain of being excommunicated by the Archbishop of Dublin in case of breaking them; and as he had left his seal in Ireland for legal purposes there, this writing was at his request sealed with the seals of his brother William and of the Archbishop of Dublin, until he, Geoffrey, could put his own seal to it.[596]
From this document it must be inferred that nothing worse than mismanagement was proved against Geoffrey. His mismanagement however had clearly reached a point at which any sovereign of full age, and in a position to enforce his commands, would have put an end to it by summarily dismissing Geoffrey from his office. But the guardians of Henry III knew that they were not in a position to enforce the dismissal of the Justiciar whom Henry’s father had left in charge of the March in Ireland. Geoffrey was not willing to resign because he was not prepared to render an account of his stewardship. If they issued a direct order for his supersession it was highly probable that he would set them and their order at defiance, and that he would be supported in his defiance by the wardens of the royal castles who owed their appointments to him. Henry could not go, as John had gone, with an armed force at his back, to settle matters in Ireland for himself; nor could anyone in England be sent to do so in his stead. Should force be needed to subdue Geoffrey, the task of subduing him could only be committed to some of the barons of the March; and to commit it to any of these would be to plunge the whole March into a civil war which might result in the complete destruction of the King’s authority there. The case against Geoffrey was clearly not strong enough to justify Pandulf and his colleagues in taking measures which involved such a risk. The course which they took in giving Geoffrey another chance of redeeming his errors, while hedging him round with the strongest moral restraints that could be devised to prevent a repetition of those errors, was at once more politic and more just.
Pandulf’s most congenial sphere of action was diplomacy; and at the outset of his legatine career he was called upon to exercise his diplomatic gifts on a readjustment of the relations between the Kings of England and Scotland. In 12181218 Alexander of Scotland—seemingly with the knowledge and assent of the English government—sent to the Pope a copy of the treaty which has been made between his father and John in 1209, and requested that Honorius would by his apostolic authority either confirm or annull it, as should seem to him best. Honorius committed the decision of the matter to Pandulf,[597] who was then on his way to England {Nov.}. Pandulf, after studying the text of the document,[598] {1219} appointed a day for a formal discussion of the questions at issue between the parties, in his presence, at Norham on 2nd August, 1219.[599] Alexander appeared in person; Henry was represented by a proctor. The discussion ended in an agreement that on the morrow of All Souls’ day another meeting should take place before the Legate, wheresoever he might be, “to treat concerning peace between the two Kings; and if peace cannot then be attained, the cause shall be proceeded with according to law.” Where this second meeting was held we know not, nor by what means peace was “then attained”; but it certainly was attained: “We are coming back at once” wrote Pandulf, in the triumph of his successful mediation, to Peter des Roches, “for, as Stephen de Segrave” (King Henry’s proctor) “and Master Robert of Arènes may have told you by word of mouth, our lord the King’s matters with the King of Scotland are by God’s grace now happily settled.”[600]