The Magnificent Century (25 page)

Guy does not seem to have stayed long, but Henry filled his saddlebags on his departure with so much gold that more horses had to be secured. It would have been a wonderfully fine thing for England if Aymer had returned at the same time, because the youngest of the trio of brothers was to prove himself more troublesome and obnoxious even than William. He had been intended for the Church and could have ranked even with Boniface in point of unsuitability, being violent, overbearing, grasping, and brash. Henry, with his usual lack of judgment about people, seems to have taken a particular fancy to Aymer. He went to infinite pains, and aroused a corresponding amount of indignation among his subjects, in finding benefices for him. Aymer received the rich church of St. Helen in Abingdon, the rectory of Wearmouth, and many other profitable livings. His appointments were so numerous, in fact, that the young man had to appoint a steward to collect his income. This was no more than a beginning. The chapter of Durham stoutly refused to elect him as their bishop on the ground that he was too young and ignorant, and not all the threats Henry made could lead them to a change of mind. Then in 1250 the Bishop of Winchester died and Henry insisted that Aymer be selected to succeed him. The Winchester chapter refused, using the same arguments employed at Durham and adding for good measure that the King’s candidate was not yet in holy orders, being no more than an acolyte.

What his representatives, John Mansel and Peter Chacepork, had failed to do, Henry now decided to take on himself. He went to Winchester and, assuming the seat in the chapter house reserved for the bishop, proceeded to exhort the monks in the most extraordinary way. “I was born in this city,” he declared, “and baptized in this church: wherefore you are bound to me by the ties of great affection and ought not to oppose my will in any way.… My brother Aymer, if elected, will for a long time enlighten this church, like the sun, with the rays of his noble and royal extraction, and of his most willing kindness and youth in which he is pleasing both to God and man.” At the end of a long discourse he came to the one point which
mattered, that if the monks opposed him he would find means to punish them most severely.

The poor monks, realizing that an appeal to Home would do them no good, gave in most reluctantly and chose the youth of noble and royal extraction as their spiritual leader. A year later the appointment was confirmed by the Pope at Lyons, and the new bishop, now one of the most richly endowed men in England, began to live in high and mighty state. The monks of Winchester soon had good reason to repent of their weakness in electing Aymer. He oppressed them and on one occasion kept them shut up in their chapter house for three days without food. Some of them ran away and took sanctuary in the monasteries.

A curious situation developed out of the arrival of Henry’s relatives. Eleanor remained loyal to her own uncles and cousins, the Provençals and Savoyards, and wanted all the plums for them. Henry’s preference had been transferred to his half brothers, and he was determined to make them wealthy and influential. The two parties, as was to be expected, began to clash, openly and bitterly. The public, wryly amused at the struggle between the rival bands of harpies, called them the Queen’s Men and the King’s Men. They had no reason to find any satisfaction, however, in the situation. Between them the warring relatives were gobbling up all the offices in the kingdom and filling their pockets with the national wealth.

The two parties clashed with particular bitterness on one occasion. Aymer, taking advantage of the absence of Boniface, placed an appointee of his own as prior of the hospital of St. Thomas the Martyr at Southwark, which was within the province of Canterbury. Eustace of Lyons, a high official at Canterbury, ordered the man to vacate and, when this had no effect, seized him and put him in one of the episcopal prisons, Aymer got together an armed force and set the archbishop’s manor at Maidstone on fire. He then attacked the palace at Lambeth, tearing the doors off their hinges and getting possession of the person of Eustace of Lyons, who had just been ready to sit down to his dinner, and put
him
in prison. The clash was so sudden and violent that the nation gasped with surprise, Bans of excommunication (which were hurled about these days as freely as maledictions) flew back and forth, and it looked as though something in the nature of civil war in the world of copes and miters would be the result. Boniface came back and did some excommunicating of his
own, including everyone who might have been concerned in the episode with the sole exception of the royal family. Henry, taking on himself the role of peacemaker, summoned both Boniface and Aymer to attend him when he went to Winchester for the Christmas festivities. After a bountiful breakfast, supplied most generously by the townspeople (Henry did not forgo his intention, however, of demanding two hundred marks from them as a gift), he called the two prelates together and forced them to exchange the kiss of peace, after Aymer had declared that he had not directed the violent measures of his people. This brought the incident to a close.

The need to provide for all the Queen’s Men as well as the King’s Men kept Henry in a poorer state than ever. Acting on the advice of his Council, he was prepared to sell his plate but did not believe anyone could be found to purchase it. His councilors, after saying to him, “As all rivers flow back to the sea, so everything you now sell will return to you in remunerative gifts,” expressed the opinion that the citizens of London were in a position to act as purchasers. The King became almost apoplectic with rage at this information.

“These clowns!” he cried. “If the treasures of Octavian were for sale, the city of London would purchase and suck it all up. If they are rich enough to buy my possessions, they can afford to give me the money I need.”

On many occasions after that he compelled them to make pay tallages or even forced loans. The Queen’s Men and King’s Men, as a result, were able to continue eating off gold plate.

Enter the villain!

Parliament had been meeting regularly, generally around Hilarytide, and had been countering Henry’s petulant demands for money, money, and more money with specific counterdemands. He must adhere to the provisions of the Charter, he must stop going into debt for foreign relatives, he must appoint responsible men to the posts of justiciar, treasurer, and chancellor. The King’s answer to this, was to help himself to money illegally and to put more and more power into the hands of one man, a man who suited him perfectly but did not suit the rest of the nation at all.

John Mansel bad been for many years a minor official in the King’s
household. In some records he is first noticed as the King’s chaplain, in others as his secretary. He was of obscure parentage, the accepted belief being that he was the son of a country priest and, therefore, illegitimate. Some say he was raised as a servant or as a member of the song school at Westminster. His rise in the service of the King was rapid, and in the period following the disastrous second campaign in Poitou (in which he fought bravely) he was appointed to reside at the Exchequer and to handle the rolls of receipt, although it is uncertain if he was allowed at any time the title of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Becoming one of the King’s advisers, he displayed such an uncanny sureness in sensing the kind of advice the King wanted to hear that, lo and behold, he was soon chief adviser.

In addition to his duties at the Exchequer, he was deep in the affairs of the embattled royal household; and here he seems to have moved with amazingly sure feet, avoiding the daggers of Poitou on one hand and the poniards of Savoy on the other. He became the departmental jack-of-all-trades, and the King seems to have depended on him whenever a knotty problem required unsnarling either at home or abroad. No more tactful man ever lived. When Henry’s daughter Margaret, who had been married in magnificent state to the youthful King of Scotland, was reported held in solitary confinement by the regents in charge of the kingdom, it was Mansel who was sent to straighten things out; and what happened is a story which will be told in its proper place. He was sent on European missions having to do with peace treaties and the marriage of the royal children. He even interposed once in a London civic dispute, deposing several aldermen without bringing down on his head the wrath of the great city.

He was, in fact, the perfect servant for a ruler who wanted to keep all power in his own hands but was incapable of exercising it. Mansel, remaining a priest of not too exalted rank and having no definite title in state organization, did most of the work and was rewarded with a full share of the enmity of the public.

He became the most hated man in the kingdom, after the uncles and sisters and cousins and aunts. The nobles could not reconcile themselves to a priest of minor standing (he was even charged with being secretly married) wielding so much power. He had made himself, as it happened, most peculiarly vulnerable by his greediness in the matter of benefices. Honest, it may be assumed, in his handling
of royal revenues, he depended on church appointments for his personal gain. No ecclesiastical post was safe from him. He was the pluralist of pluralists. It is probable that he held at one time as many as three hundred livings, and in some records the number is given as seven hundred. The estimates of his yearly income vary from four thousand to eighteen thousand marks. That he died in poverty may be accepted as an indication that he was acting as depositary for this steady flow of income and that much of it was finding a final resting place in a more exalted pocket than that of plain John Mansel, Certainly he would not have been allowed so to corrupt the machinery of appointments for his own sole gain. He was retaining, this handy man of the King, a considerable share of the revenue, nevertheless. During the first visit that the King and Queen of Scotland made to the English court after the trouble which Mansel had helped in straightening out, he gave a stately dinner for them at his home in Tothill Fields. Seven hundred dishes were prepared for the first course alone. He was reported to have said, on acquiring a benefice which paid only twenty pounds a year, “This will provide for my dogs.” He was called bitterly “the richest clerk in the world.”

There can be no doubt that Mansel, although a skilled administrator, was a bad influence in the Council of the King. The advice he whispered in the King’s ear confirmed the latter in his stubborn shortsightedness. “Don’t agree under compulsion,” or “Remember that you are the King,” was always the gist of it. Lacking completely in perspective, this ubiquitous clerk continued, as the situation became more strained and the wrath of the baronage mounted, to preach non-compliance. Indifferent to the temper of the people, he never changed his mind and was in part, at least, responsible for the King’s refusal to make concessions. It is not surprising that the barons, aware of how matters stood, included in their terms a demand that John Mansel be dismissed.

The years rolled on. More children were born to Henry and Eleanor. The King became involved in absurd international adventures and fell more into debt all the time. He rebuilt Westminster Abbey and added more walls and more towers to the Tower of London. He continued to disregard the Charter and to rule as he saw fit, a slack kind of rule, raising revenue by illegal tallages and the bludgeoning of Jews into forced loans. The tide of national discontent
rose higher each year until it threatened to swamp the weakening walls of royal privilege, behind which Queen’s Men and King’s Men still battened on the indulgent zany and most of the work of administration had fallen into the bands of a stubborn-minded and acquisitive clerk.

H
ENRY
has appeared often enough in these pages in his official capacity for his measure as a king to be understood. Eleanor as Queen is as easily understandable: haughty, passionately conscious of her high destiny, contemptuous of the lower orders, unwilling to yield an inch from her conception of what was due royalty. It is only fair now to depict them as private individuals, as husband and wife, as father and mother of a growing family. It is a much pleasanter picture which emerges.

They were a devoted family. Henry was deeply attached to Eleanor and remained so to the end of his days except for a few furious but brief rifts. He is one of the few kings who seems never to have taken a mistress, a strange degree of constancy to find in a son of John. Eleanor was a faithful and, as far as can be seen, an affectionate wife. They loved their children as wholeheartedly as any butcher and his mate in the Shambles or any pair of villeins in wattled cottage and toft. The children returned this love in full measure. Edward, the first child, was militant in his devotion to his parents. He never forgave London the enmity which developed between its citizens and the Queen, even though he never trod on their privileges as she had and so must have realized how wrong she had been. As he grew older and began to have the clarity of vision and the level sense of values which were to make him such a splendid king, he must have seen that Henry was a fumbling and weak figure as head of the State; but if he did, he never allowed it to show. He might have seen the shortcomings
of Henry himself, but he would brook no criticism in any other quarter of this Skimpole of a king who expected everything to come his way and tossed his money about with an urbane smile and a shrug for the morrow.