William Stubbs

“ Only the profound conviction that his own claims over Scotland were indisputably legal and that all the misery and bloodshed which had followed the renewal of the war must justly be charged upon Wallace—a conviction akin in origin to the other mistakes which we have traced in Edward’s great career—can have overcome the feeling of admiration and sympathy which he must have felt for so brave a man. ”

“ It tells us that the greatest sin for which a king can be brought to account is not personal vice or active tyranny, but the dereliction of kingly duty; the selfish policy which treats the nation as if it were made for him, not he for the nation. It is the greatest sin and the greatest folly, for it at once draws down the penalty and leaves the sinner incapable of avoiding it or resisting it; it leaves the nation to be oppressed by countless tyrants, and is by so much worse than the tyranny of one. ”

“ The reign of Stephen was, it may be fairly said, the period at which all the evils of feudalism came in England into full bearing, previous to being cut off and abolished forever under his great successor. The reign exemplifies to us what the whole century that followed the Conquest must have been if there had not been strong kings like William I., and Henry I., sturdily to repress all the disintegrating designs of their barons and to protect the people. ”

“ The English, disliking his attempts at foreign sovereignty, represented him as a foolish, extravagant, tricky man, who for the name of Emperor sacrificed his real interests and imperilled the interests of his country; a man who would let the Germans delude him out of all his treasure and then come back to England and take the unpopular side, as he did in the barons’ war. The Germans, who always treated the English kings as rich fools to be handled from time to time for their own profit, got out of him all they could in the way of money and privileges, and showed their gratitude by mocking him. ”

“ The Earl of Warwick carried him off whilst Pembroke was off his guard, and he was beheaded in the presence of the Earl of Lancaster. It is more easy to account for than to justify the hatred which the earls felt towards Gaveston. His conduct had been offensive, his influence was no doubt dangerous, but the actual mischief done by him had been small; neither he nor Edward had exercised power with sufficient freedom as yet to merit such a punishment, and no policy of mere caution or apprehension could excuse the cruelty of the act. ”

“ The Normans too, the great nobles who had divided the land, and hoped to create little monarchies of their own in every county and manor, had had hard times. Confiscation, mutilation, exile, death had come heavily upon them. They also had had a lesson to learn, to rid themselves of personal and selfish aims, to consolidate a powerful state under a king of their own race, and to content themselves as servants of the law with the substantial enjoyment of powers which they found themselves too weak to wrest out of the hands of the king, the supreme lawgiver and administrator of the law. ”

“ Count Theobald, vexed and disappointed as he was, refused to contest the crown which his brother already wore; Geoffrey and Matilda were quarrelling with their own subjects in Anjou; and Robert of Gloucester, who hated Stephen more than he loved Matilda, saw that he must bide his time. Some crisis must soon occur; he knew that Stephen would soon spend his treasure and break his promises. Meanwhile the old king must be buried like a king; and the great lords came over with the corpse to Reading where he had built his last resting-place. ”

“ Even the barons who composed the House of Lords owed their places there not so much to the fact that they held great estates as the immediate vassals of the crown, as to the summons by which they were selected from a great number of persons so qualified. Even if this had not been the case, the institution of the House of Commons would itself have marked the extinction of the ancient feudal idea that the council of the king was merely the assembly of those who held their land under him. ”

“ But the succession of Henry is hailed by the writers of his time as a dawn of hope, a certain omen of restoration and refreshing. Often and often, it is true, such omens are discerned on the accession of a new king; men hasten to salute the rising sun; good wishes to the new sovereign take the form of prophecy, and, where they are fulfilled, partly help on their own fulfilment. Here, however, we have omens that were amply fulfilled, and an epoch which those who lived in it were the first to recognise. ”

“ In England the expansion of judicial machinery and judicial business, which followed the reforms of Henry II., had worked, out of old and new materials, a body of customs which became known as the common law; and one great summary of the hitherto unwritten law of England had been published towards the end of the last reign by Henry Bracton, one of the judges of the king’s court. Men’s minds had been invited by these and the like influences to this study. The nation, awaking to political work, began to see the necessity of changing or amending the existing system of law. ”

“ His greatness was not without an element which sets it far above all the greatness that arises from mere success; he had it to learn, and he learned, to rule himself, to cast away his own cherished idea of reigning, and faithfully and honorably abide by the conditions which, although forced upon him, he saw at last were needed for the true realization of his character as a national king. ”

“ Bishop Roger of Salisbury was not only a powerful ecclesiastic but the royal justiciar, the head of all the courts and the treasurer of all the money of the king. Under him was a set of clerks who would set the fashion for one school of the clergy, secular in mind and aim and manners; often married men, so far as their right to marry can be accounted valid, canons of cathedrals where they provided for their children and made estates for themselves ”

“ Roger of Salisbury, the great justiciar of Henry I., was now an old man. He had contributed more perhaps than any other to set Stephen on the throne, and had not only first placed in his hands the sinews of war, but had maintained the revenue of the crown by maintaining the administration of justice and finance. He had not served for naught. He had got his son made chancellor; two of his nephews were bishops, one of them treasurer of the king as well. He had no humble idea of his own position: he had built castles the like of which for strength and beauty were not found north of the Alps. ”

“ He is content for the most part to be king of England, and his success in retaining some part of his Continental dominion, is the result far more of the honesty of his adversary than of any ambition, skill, or force of his own. In these respects, England might have been expected to fare better under Henry, than she had done under John or Richard or Henry II.; better even than she was to fare under Edward I.; yet she can scarcely, even viewed in the results, be said to have done so. The long reign was a long period of trouble, suffering, and disquietude of every sort. ”

“ Character of Henry—Administration of William Marshall—Hubert de Bergh—Henry his own minister—Foreign favorites—General misgovernment—Papal intrigue and taxation.
The reign of Henry III. is not only one of the longest but one of the most difficult in English history. It contains more than one great crisis, and coincides in time with an epoch of vast progress; but the critical importance is by no means equally diffused, and the rate and fashion of the progress are matter for minute study, rather than for vivid illustration. ”

“ With Otho’s aid he drew in all the Flemish nobles and the Low Country Germans, who hated the Hohenstaufen, and so hated their ally the King of France not only as a bad neighbor but as an ally of the Emperor. This confederation might ultimately have been successful if Richard had lived to guide it. He had at last by patient and forgiving kindness drawn John from Philip’s side; he had got the King of Scots also safe under his influence. ”

“ Gilbert of Gloucester was dead, and the heads of the baronage were Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the Marshall, and Humfrey Bohun Earl of Hereford, the Constable of England; men not of high character or of much patriotism, but of great power and spirit, and eager to take the opportunity of asserting their position, which the king’s measure for enforcing equal justice had threatened to shake. Bohun, too, had been imprisoned on account of the private war which he had carried on against Gloucester in 1288. Edward’s legal reforms had touched the baronage like every other class. ”

“ Gaveston had stolen the king’s heart from his people, and led him into every sort of tyranny and dishonesty; the Lord Henry de Beaumont, to whom Edward had given the Isle of Man, and the lady de Vescy, his sister, were little better; the Friscobaldi, the Italian bankers who received the customs, were the enemies of the people and mere instruments of oppression. Gaveston was to be banished for life, Beaumont to be expelled from the council, and the Friscobaldi to be sent home. Not content with this, the Ordainers further enacted some very important limitations on the king’s power. ”

“ The feudal rights of Aquitaine—the right, that is, to demand homage and service—extended far beyond the limits of the sovereign authority of the dukes, and it was always an object to turn a claim of overlordship into an actual exercise of sovereign authority. The tie between the great county of Toulouse and the duchy of Aquitaine was complicated both by legal difficulty and by questions of descent. The rights over Auvergne, claimed by both the king and the duke, were so complex as to be the matter of continual arbitration, and at last were left to settle themselves. ”

“ It was in England alone that the problem of national self-government was practically solved; and although under the Tudor and Stewart sovereigns Englishmen themselves ran the risk of forgetting the lesson they had learned and being robbed of the fruits for which their fathers had labored, the men who restored political consciousness, and who recovered the endangered rights, won their victory by argumentative weapons drawn from the storehouse of medieval English history, and by the maintenance and realization of the spirit of liberty in forms which had survived from earlier days. ”

“ The old archbishop Thurstan, who had struggled victoriously twenty years before against King Henry and the archbishop of Canterbury to boot, sent his suffragan to preach the national cause. Not only the knights with their men-at-arms, but the husbandmen, with their sons and servants, the old Anglo-Saxon militia, the parish priests at the head of their parishioners, streamed forth over hill and plain, and in the Battle of the Standard, as it was called, they beat the Scots at Cowton Moor with such completeness that the rebellion came to nothing in consequence. ”