call a parliament. His summonses were in both instances refused; and the messengers who bore the refusal, might have added the as unwonted tidings, that songs were now daily to be heard against the favourite, filled with warnings to the sovereign. Amid other signs. and portents of social change had arisen the political ballad. In it shone forth the first vera effigies of the Poitevin Bishop; nimble at the counting of money as he was slow in expounding the gospel ;; site ting paramount in Exchequer, when he ought to be in Winchester; pondering on pounds and not upon his book; preferring lucre to Luke; and setting more store by a handful of marks than by all the doc trines of their namesake saint. Would the king avoid the shipwreck of his kingdom, it asked? then let him shun for ever the stones and rocks (Roches) in his way. The warning was quickly followed up. The standard of rebellion was let loose in the Welsh districts by no less a person than Pembroke's son; the clergy, oppressed by Papal tax and tallage, began to take part in the general discontent; and in midst of a feast at the palace, Edmund of Canterbury (Langton's successor) presented himself with a statement of national grievances and a demand for immediate redress. His father, he reminded the king, had well nigh forfeited his crown; the English people, he added, would never submit to be trampled upon by foreigners in England; and for himself, he should excommunicate all who any longer refused, in that crisis of danger, to support the reform of the government and the welfare of the nation. This was in February, 1234. In April a parliament had assembled; Peter and his Poitevins were on their way home across the sea; the ministers who had made themselves hateful were dismissed: and the opposition barons were in power.

This will read like the language of a modern day; but if these events have any historic significance, they establish what can only in the modern phrase be properly described as ministerial responsibility and parliamentary control. Nor were they the isolated events of their class which marked the feeling of the time. Again and again, during this prolonged reign, the same incidents recur, in precisely the same circle of resistance and submission. Subsidies are requested, and contemptuously refused; grievances are redressed, and aid is given. Then, when Court coffers are filled, Court promises are forgotten; till distress brings round again the old piteous petition, and assistance is once more yielded, with new conditions of restraint and Constitutional safeguards hitherto

undemanded. In five years from the time of which I have been treating, the money granted was paid into the hands of selected barons, with as strict a proviso for account as modern Parliaments have claimed over public expenditure; while in two years later, on the payment of certain monies to the Exchequer, the city of London exacted a stipulation that the Justiciary, Chancellor, and Treasurer, might hereafter be appointed with the consent of Parliament, and hold their offices only during good behaviour. And thus it was that the great lawyer, Bracton, at the close of a reign which he adorned with his judicial talents, and made remarkable by the composition of a treatise which went far to establish uniformity of legal practice, found himself able to reckon as superior to the King, not only God and the law by which he is made king, but his great court of earls and barons; so that if he were without a bridle, that is the law, they ought to put a bridle upon him.' This court, this Curia Regis, consisting of Chief Justiciary, Chancellor, Constable, Marshal, Chamberlain, Steward, and Treasurer, was what in modern time might be called the Cabinet of the King.

In 1236, being then in his twenty-ninth year, Henry married' Eleanor, the daughter of Raymond Count of Provence. Great were the festivities at the marriage and coronation, and most minute are the descriptive raptures of the contemporary chronicler, who declares that the whole world could not produce a more glorious and ravishing spectacle. Yet all that so moved the good Mathew of Paris may pass away for us into quiet oblivion, saving one figure of the coronation crowd. He who served at the feast as High Steward, with the basin of water, has outlived the rest of the pageant. He was of the great family of de Montfort. His grandfather, descended from a French king, had, by marriage with Robert of Leicester's heiress, obtained his English estates and earldom. His father had led the terrible crusades against the heretic Albigenses, which stained with so much gentle blood the popedom of Innocent the Third. But with the son the fame of both had increased; for to the extraordinary personal stature, strength, and beauty of his race, he joined a power of command and a persuasive genius which subdued or fascinated all men. a time when to be of foreign descent was to be marked for popular distrust, de Montfort, alone among the nobles of the court, was singled out for the favour of the people. He was but seven years older than Henry; yet the gravity of his repute, the dark ground of religious enthusiasm which set off the lustre of his military

At

fame, his patronage of learning, and his knowledge of the peaceful arts, were spread afar over Europe. The men of the court intrigued against him; but their leader Richard, the skilful and powerful brother of the sovereign, he swiftly changed into his own associate and peculiar friend. The king was jealous of his power; yet in two years from the date of his own marriage, and while he was yet childless, he saw de Montfort wedded to his sister in the chapel of St. Stephen. There passed a whisper at these nuptials that he was surely aiming for a throne; but with that old chapel, and the name of Simon de Montfort, there came to be connected in after years a yet more daring and more enduring ambition. The birth of Prince Edward in the third year of Henry's marriage gave fresh direction to men's thoughts, but Henry's impatience of his kinsman only strengthened. He looked with vague discomfort and fear on one whom the people honoured, whom the clergy trusted, and whom the barons were content should represent them. One day an insult, an office of trust the next, showed the vacillation of his doubts and dread. At length he sent him to an honourable exile in Guienne; appointing him its governor by royal patent, and committing it in charge to his fame to save that province from surrender and loss in a serious existing rebellion.

Much happened in the interval before Henry and de Montfort again stood face to face. The connexions of the young queen had inundated the land with new foreign adventurers. Three of her uncles grasped the chief offices of state. William of Valence became paramount at court, Peter of Savoy seized the honour of Richmond, and the archbishopric of Canterbury was obtained by Boniface of Savoy, through whose peaceful robes there glittered a coat of mail on the day of his inauguration. Loud was the national dissatisfaction. Judgment, it cried out, is now entrusted to the unjust, the laws to outlaws, peace to the turbulent, and justice to wrongdoers. It appealed to the king's brother to place himself at the head of another successful opposition; but the prudent and powerful Richard, who enjoyed the confidence of the popular barons, had suddenly become captive to the charms of the queen's young sister, and for the present found himself perforce a favourer of the alien faction. Then came over Beatrice, Countess of Provence, whom Dante celebrates for her four daughter-queens, to see the good fortune of her children. Theu bethought herself the dowager Isabella, now Countess de la Marche,

that this family of Provence might surely spare, to herself and her Poitevins, some share of the treasures and offices of her son's wealthy court. Wherefore, over came Alice her daughter, her son Guy of Lusignan, another William of Valence, her beloved Aymar, and her whole second family. And with them came foreign artists for the royal kitchens, the queen's favourite cook being brother to the Papal Legate. And there were King's men and Queen's men, each devouring the other; palmerworm eaten by locust, locust by cankerworm, and cankerworm by caterpillar. And whether Poitevin, Provençal, or Savoyard, should seize the highest place or flaunt the gayest colours, was the only reasonable doubt that could occur to the discomfited Englishman.

And then there fell suddenly on all this gaiety and glory the grim shadow of a Parliament. In 1242, to Henry's importunate demand for separate aids from the clergy (already overtaxed by hideous exactions from the Court of Rome) and the laity, a stern refusal was accompanied by a declaration that in future no supply could be granted but by the whole body of the kingdom. Certain grievances having then been removed, the money granted was placed in one of the king's castles, under the care of four barons in the confidence of parliament, in trust for its proper expenditure. In 1244 another piteous parliamentary appeal was made. But as the last previous grant, obtained like all the rest on solemn promise that the Great Charter should be sacred, had been followed by special and gross violations of its safeguards, this parliament took a tone more bitter and refractory than its predecessors. It taxed the prince with the grossest extravagance; detailed his successive breaches of the Charters; told him it would not trust him further, and that it should take into its own hands the appointment of the chief justiciary, the chancellor, and great officers. The plan, as it was afterwards detailed, seems to have been: that four of the barons should be declared conservators of the liberties of the nation, two of whom should always attend the king, to watch over the administration of justice and regulate the public expenditure; that these should be appointed by parliament and be removed only by common consent; that parliament should have absolute election of the justiciary and the chancellor; and that two justices of the bench and two barons of the exchequer should be nominated by the same body, and hold their offices independent of the crown.

Henry seems for a little while to have roused himself at this point;

to have seen at last, through the thoughtless fumes of idleness and parade which commonly surrounded him, that the prerogatives of the crown were seriously menaced; and to have thought it possible to avert the danger by trial of (what was really foreign to his nature) a direct and sharp tyranny. He declared that parliament and himself henceforward were enemies. He stretched every available prerogative, in defiance of every charter. The subject was tortured on all the ancient racks of fine, benevolence, purveyance, and other indefinite sources of plunder and exaction. The Jews, by inconceivable oppression, were turned into revenue. Nay, he canvassed for even private aids on specious pretexts, from town to town, and from castle to castle, till the bye-word was common against him that the kingdom held no such sturdy beggar as the king.

But the inevitable issue awaited him. In 1248 he was obliged to meet his barons and knights in parliament once more; and the old chronicler recounts, with evident unction, the bitter upbraidings to which he was compelled to listen. He was told that he ought to blush to ask aid from a people whom he had shunned for the society of aliens; he was reproached with disparaging English blood by foreign intermarriages; he was reminded, in reference to late atrocities of purveyance, that the wine and food consumed, the very clothes worn, by himself and his un-English household, had been forcibly taken, without compensation, from the English people; that foreign merchants now knew that property was no longer sacred in England, and therefore shunned her ports as though pirates held her in possession; nay (such the minutia to which they descended), that the poor fishermen of the coast were forced to flee for a market to the other side of the channel, in avoidance of the hungry thieves who purveyed for royalty. The king reiterated, in answer, his old, penitent, and often broken promises. Determined to have additional security, the barons demanded an oath. The oath was given; and, of course, broken.

In 1251 de Montfort and Henry met in the royal palace. The Earl was known to have been in correspondence with the popular nobles, and to have advised them from his government of Guienne through the course of their opposition to the king. He now sought personal audience of Henry to repel certain gross charges of tyranny and extortion invented to discredit him in England. He appealed to Henry's own knowledge of their falsehood, of the character of his own services, and of their inadequate rewards.