He Who Holds the Purse Strings…

This is the follow-on from Limiting Power

No Government can operate without funds.  Part 2 shows how English kings lost the ability to raise money without the consent of their barons and representatives of some small section of the commons.

It was hardly surprising that the barons did not believe that John would honour Magna Carta. They refused to stand their armies down and invited Prince Louis of France to lead them. Quite what they expected from Prince Louis had he beaten John, I’m not sure… but fortunately for England which might well have become an appendage of France (I jest, or do I?) and John’s son, Henry, King John died on the 19th of October 1216.

Henry was just nine when he became King of England. He was the first minor to ascend the throne since Ethelred the Unready in 978. Henry assumed the crown under the regency of William Marshal, 1st Earl of Pembroke, and, after William’s death, under Hubert de Burgh. Marshall issued a revised and shortened version of Magna Carta immediately. It had the effect of rallying the barons to Henry’s cause. The clause appointing a committee to over-ride the King’s authority was quietly consigned to history – but not forgotten. Nonetheless, Regents would not and could not rule with same authority as a monarch – they had to work with a council of precisely those men who had asserted their right to be consulted under John. They were given a taste of power.

Money, of course, was still a problem. Between 1217 and 1224, three separate taxes were levied. Based on a traditional tax of the sort levied by earlier kings, they did not raise much. However, the conquest of Poitou in 1224 by Louis VIII of France required an English response, for which funds larger than could be raised by ‘traditional’ taxation (1) were required.

The regents and council could have levied scutage, but that was only payable by those who owed the Crown knight service and would not have raised the necessary sums. A special tax of a fifteenth on moveable property was authorised at a great council held at Westminster ‘with the consent of the clerical and lay magnates’ in exchange for the reissue of Magna Carta.

I don’t propose to discuss the history of taxation here, but the fifteenth of 1225 became the template for all government taxation until 1332 – all that changed was the rate at which it was levied. What is important is that a principle had been set – taxation had been granted by consent of the lords temporal and spiritual. The fortieth of 1232 was also granted in the same way.

In 1237, the first officially designated Parliament met at Westminster, where Henry sought a thirtieth on the grounds that ‘his officials had mismanaged his income’, and because of the huge expense of his and his sister’s weddings. There appears to have been some opposition to the request, but a thirtieth was eventually granted after the king agreed to once more confirm Magna Carta. Here we see, again, the idea that a tax is granted by Parliament in exchange for concessions by the Crown.

Between 1237 and 1269 no further taxes were levied. Feudal aids were part of the Crown’s prerogative and did not need consent – but they were limited to providing for the ransom of the king, the marriage of his eldest daughter and the knighting of his eldest son and were not levied from the community at large only from those on Crown lands (ancient demesnes) and they did not yield a huge amount of money. The two latter forms of aid were collected during this period, and it has been suggested that they were seen as a last resort by the Crown because the Great Councils persistently refused to grant other taxes.

It is my contention that from the time of King John there was a continual tussle between monarchs who wanted to exercise, as they saw it, their God Given Right to rule exactly as they pleased, and the Ruled, who sought to place limitations on monarchical power. In many ways this conflict is still going on, except that the Crown’s authority has been taken over by Parliament – and there is, now, no way of placing limitations on that Power, other than by a tick on a piece of paper every five years… but I digress!

The biggest drawback with any system of government that is based on primogeniture and heredity is, of course, that one cannot be sure just how the next monarch will turn out – will he be efficient, intelligent, and politically astute or will he be inept and incompetent? It is pretty obvious that strong and efficient kings who kept their barons happy managed to maintain their hold on Power far better than those who were weak and alienated the ruling class. And so we see over the next centuries an ever changing balance of power between Rulers and Ruled. But it seems clear, to me, that strong monarchs never managed to regain all that weak monarchs lost..

So what sort of king was Henry III once he reached the age where he could rule by himself?

He was a bit more interested in religion than some kings, being so impressed with the Anglo-Saxon saint king Edward the Confessor that he named his eldest son Edward. He designated Westminster, where St Edward had founded the abbey, as the fixed seat of power in England and Westminster Hall became the place where the council of nobles met and he spared no expense to renovate the Abbey.

When Henry reached maturity he was keen to restore royal authority. However, he spent most of his reign fighting the barons over Magna Carta and the right to choose his own advisers. Henry’s mother, Isabella of Angoulême, had married Hugh X of Lusignan (2) after John’s death and had had a further nine children. Henry married a Frenchwoman and promoted many of his and her French relatives to positions of power and wealth. Henry’s tendency to govern for long periods with no publicly-appointed ministers who could be held accountable for their actions and decisions did not make matters any easier. Many English barons came to see his method of governing as foreign and unacceptably autocratic. The seeds were set for another battle about who should advise the King…

Enter Simon de Montfort, a Frenchman with a claim to the Earldom of Leicester. In 1229, he successfully petitioned Henry for the Earldom, which he received the following year, although he did not take full possession for some years. In 1238, Simon married Henry’s sister, Eleanor, and all seemed set for Simon to become one of those ‘hated foreigners’ who were so despised by the English barons. This was not to be, and in 1239 Henry and Simon had a huge argument. Their relationship reached a crisis in the 1250s when de Montfort was brought to trial on spurious charges. He was acquitted by the Peers of the Realm, much to Henry’s displeasure.

Many barons began to fear that Henry was following in his father’s footsteps and needed to be kept in check. Simon became leader of those who wanted to reassert Magna Carta and force the king to surrender more power to a baronial council. In 1258, Henry was forced to agree to the Provisions of Oxford, which effectively abolished the absolutist Anglo-Norman monarchy and gave power to a council of fifteen barons to deal with the business of government and provided for a thrice-yearly meeting of Parliament to monitor their performance.

By 1262 those supporting de Montfort and those supporting Henry grew ever more polarised. In 1262, Henry obtained a papal bull exempting him from the Provisions – and both sides began to raise armies. By 1263, Simon and his supporters, who were mainly commoners and younger barons, were in control of most of southeastern England. At the Battle of Lewes on the 14th of May 1264, Henry was defeated and taken prisoner along with Prince Edward and Henry’s brother, Richard of Cornwall.

For just over a year, Simon was the de facto ruler of England. In 1265, he summoned a Parliament the likes of which had never been seen, but which was to form the basis of our Parliamentary system.

Simon sent to every county and to a number of boroughs, asking each to send two elected representatives to Parliament. The right to vote was given to all those who owned the freehold of land to an annual rent of 40 shillings (‘Forty-shilling Freeholders’). In the Boroughs, the franchise varied.

Many of the barons who had initially supported Simon began to think that he had gone far too far with his reforming zeal and a number of his supporters deserted him. Prince Edward escaped and raised an army and defeated Simon at the Battle of Evesham on the 4th of August 1265. Simon died in the fighting and parts of his mutilated body were sent throughout the kingdom. (3)

Edward, as both the Scots and Welsh were to find out, took no prisoners and spent the next few years subduing the remaining pockets of resistance. Although Henry still reigned, there is no doubt that Edward was the ruling hand and was determined to have no more nonsense about limitations of Royal Power.

By 1268, Edward was ready to go a Crusade and he needed money.

The grant of a twentieth in 1270 shows how far things had changed from 1207 when John raised a thirtieth on personal incomes and moveables. The process began in the York Parliament of September 1268, but the absence of many important men (maiores Angliae) led to the postponement of the grant until a fuller parliament could be held the following October in Westminster. It is thought that maiores Angliae refers to representatives of the commons – i.e. those representatives of the counties and boroughs. It was not until the Parliament of 1270, which included representatives of the Commons, that a tax was finally granted – despite several Parliaments (without the commons) being held in the intervening period. According to the chroniclers it was granted conditional on a new confirmation of Magna Carta and some legislation against Jews.

Edward was certainly more successful in obtaining taxes than his father had been: ten taxes on moveables between 1275 and 1306 and three feudal impositions, but he never managed to raise taxes without the consent of Parliament which by 1270 consisted of the Lords, Lay and Spiritual, and the Commons, the representatives of the Shires and Borough. That is not to say that he didn’t try. In 1297, Edward managed to persuade a group of magnates to grant him an eighth (in rural areas) and fifth (in boroughs). The levy met with such opposition that Edward was forced to convene a more representative Parliament which promptly revoked the former tax and granted a ninth.

Despite his best efforts, Edward bequeathed a throne that was reliant on Parliament for money.

Reading the Parliamentary Rolls, it is quite clear that Members of the Commons were expected to present grievances, petitions and the like to the King, in the clear understanding that a tax would only be granted if those grievances were dealt with and petitions were granted. Of course, the Crown tried to manipulate the elections to Parliament and often succeeded. But it’s also patently clear that, by being summoned to Parliament on a frequent basis, the representatives of both the Shires and the Boroughs formed alliances that gave them more courage to thwart unreasonable (or even reasonable!) demands from the Crown. Just as the barons of England had long formed a ‘community’ with similar ideals – so too did the Commons of England.

The story of the Crown’s efforts to raise money, whether within Parliament or by other means, is a fascinating aspect of the struggle between the rights of a king and those of his subjects, but the battle over financial aid to the Crown had been lost in Henry III’s reign.

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(1) Carucage, based on the Anglo-Saxon Danegeld.

(2) He was the son of the man to whom she had been betrothed before she married John.

(3) The odd bits and pieces left over were collected by the monks of Evesham and buried in consecrated ground. The grave became a place of pilgrimage for the common folk of England, until Henry and Edward had his remains removed. There was an attempt to canonise him, but this was strongly opposed by the monarchy. It is said that Bonaparte described Simon as one of the greatest Englishmen. A little ironic since he was French! In 1965 a commemoration stone was set on his reputed grave and unveiled by the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Archbishop of Canterbury.