Revolt of Henry. CHAP. 10. troops and attacked Normandy, while the king of Scotland, as had been concerted, made an irruption into the northern counties of England. The young King earl of Leicester, appointed by young Henry and the king of France to invade England with a band of Flemings and Normans, landed in Suffolk, and being joined by the earl of Norfolk, he plundered and burnt Norwich, which was without a garrison, and seized upon Hageneth castle. The earl of Ferrers, no sooner heard of the landing of Leicester on the eastern coast, than, in conjunction with the earl of Chester and other barons, who complained that the king had wronged them by seizing and destroying their castles, appeared in arms. He garrisoned his castles of Tutbury and Duffield, which, in despite of the king's ordinances, he had greatly enlarged and strengthened, and, levying forces from among his vassals in Derbyshire, he marched against Nottingham, which was then held for the king by Reginald de Lacie. That town he entered with little difficulty, and having burnt it, he proceeded to unite his forces with those of the earl of Leicester, who was preparing to advance into the heart of the kingdom. King Henry, in the meantime, having quelled the different insurrections that had been incited in his French provinces, and having expelled his enemies from Normandy and Brittany, hastened to return to England. Before his arrival, the earl of Leicester had been defeated and taken prisoner at St. Edmondsbury, by the troops under Bohun, constable of England, and Richard de Lacie, the high justiciary and regent. The castle of Tutbury was besieged by a strong body of loyalists, aided by a band of Welsh auxiliaries under the command of Rees, a Welsh prince, who was greatly attached to the English monarch. The earl of Ferrers, under these circumstances, repaired to Northampton, where Henry then held his court, and there having submitted to royal authority, he was pardoned, upon condition of surrendering his castles, and giving security for his future fidelity. The castles were ordered to be demolished, and there now remain but few vestiges of that at Duffield on the elevated site from which it commanded a large district in the vale of the Derwent, for some miles north of the town of Derby. Earl Ferrers. At the beginning of the reign of Richard I. the earl of Ferrers, for some reasons that do not appear in history, was for a time dispossessed of his Derbyshire estates. These, together with the castles of the Peak and Bolsover, were given to the king's brother John, earl of Morton or Mortagne, and subsequently king of England. The earl of Ferrers, nevertheless, attended his valiant sovereign to the Holy Land; and we may justly conclude, that he led with him a band of brave followers from this county. He perished at the siege of Acre, which happened in the year 1191. During the troublesome reign of John, the barons who constantly adhered to him increased their power and possessions by charters and grants. William de Ferrers demanded a special charter, nominating him earl of Derby, which perhaps was the more necessary as his father had been so extraordinarily deprived of that dignity. He also obtained a grant of the third penny upon all pleas pleaded before the sheriff of Derbyshire. His other grants will be more particularly stated in the family history of the Ferrers. Whatever were his services, we may well doubt whether his loyalty was not greater than his patriotism, since we find his name as one CHAP. 10. of the witnesses to that charter in which king John surrendered the realm Earl Ferrers. of England to the pope. de Briwere. It will be manifest to our readers, that much of this portion of the his- The family tory of the county must be so closely connected with the histories of the great families who have held possessions within its boundaries, as to be frequently a repetition of that which more properly belongs to another portion of this work. This will sometimes be unavoidable; but we shall endeavour to confine ourselves to the narration of incidents that do not involve such duplication of detail.-In the reign of king John, we find the family of Briwere rising into extraordinary power and obtaining large possessions in Derbyshire. To William de Briwere, were granted the manor of Chesterfield and the whole wapentake of Scarsdale. He was also constituted governor of Bolsover castle. confederated Among the confederated barons who after John's abject surrender of Barons his crown and sceptre to Pandulph the pope's legate, formed a league against against King a sovereign who had so shamefully abandoned the honour of the realm, John. we find none who were connected with Derbyshire, with the exception of Robert and Ralph de Gresley:* this family held the manor of Manchester in Lancashire, and Halton castle in Cheshire, and was in possession of Gresley castle, with the manors of Heathcote, Swardingcote and Church Gresley, in this county. The barons had, early in the reign of this perverse and abandoned monarch, displayed their dissatisfaction at his conduct. His voluptuous libidinism knew no bounds, and he made enemies of many of the powerful nobility, whose attachment was required to strengthen his title to the crown, by his debauchery of their wives and daughters. The people were oppressed by taxes levied unjustly; and even the clergy withdrew from him their support. As Philip, king of France, a prince of politic mind and ambitious spirit, aimed at the possession of the French provinces, over which John retained an irresolute and irritating sway, and was continually inciting commotions in those districts, the king of England was particularly dependent upon the aid of his barons. In the year 1201, the province of Poictou revolted, and John, roused from his licentious indolence by the apprehension of losing so fair a district of his continental dominions, summoned the barons to meet him on the approaching Whitsuntide, at Portsmouth, with horses and arms. Instead of obeying this summons, the barons assembled at Leicester, and after a conference among themselves, they came to a determination that they would not accompany the king in this expedition, unless he first solemnly promised to govern strictly by the laws of the realm. John, who was as intemperately violent as he was unstable of purpose, provoked by this declaration, instantly employed the troops which he had already raised from the immediate vassals of the crown, in seizing the castles of the refractory barons. William de Albini, one of William de the most illustrious ancestors of the dukes of Rutland, then held the castle of Belvoir, and was the first against whom the displeasure of the sovereign • The connexion of this extensive family with Derbyshire seems to have been only by a collateral branch. The lineage of the barons Robert and Ralph has been long extinct. Albini. Barons. CHAP. 10. was directed. His castle was attacked, and after a short defence, was surConfederate rendered. The barons had not imagined that the king would defer his expedition on account of their disobedience to his commands, but rather expected that the troubled state of Poictou would induce him to comply with a representation which was as just, as his necessities appeared to be urgent. They were consequently unable to resist his attack upon their castles. They submitted, and obtained their pardon and the restoration of their fortresses, upon their furnishing the aid required, and placing into the king's power, as hostages for their fidelity, one of the children or near kinsmen of each. The English forces, when landed in France, served their unworthy prince with faithfulness and intrepidity. At a battle near Mirabel, the unfortunate nephew of king John, prince Arthur, the just claimant of the English crown, who had recently espoused the eldest daughter of the French king, was taken prisoner, together with John's most inveterate enemy, Hugh, earl of Marche. The young prince was shortly after put to death at Rouen, and the king, thus delivered from his rival kinsman, for whose sake alone he was weak enough to imagine that Philip of France had been employing his intrigues, his money and his forces, resigned himself wholly to his natural indolence and the careless pursuit of dissolute pleasures. His barons, irritated at the pusillanimity of his conduct, pointed out to him that their own honour and that of his crown were sacrificed in his thus permitting the king of France to become master of the extensive provinces in that country, which had been held by his ancestors. He heard their remonstrances and dismissed them with angry petulance. In a short time he lost Normandy, with all his other French possessions, and then returned to England to endure the indignities that were about to be heaped upon him by the pope's legate. After his abject submission to the court of Rome, he relied so confidently on the sentence of excommunication, which the pope had promised to pronounce against all who should dare to oppose him, that he began to entertain a design for recovering his French territories. He accordingly prepared for an expedition upon an extensive scale, and, having appointed the bishop of Winchester and Fitz-Piers to act in his absence as regents of the kingdom, he again summoned the barons of the realm to meet him with all their adherents, in arms, at Portsmouth. The barons again remonstrated; upon which the king hastily marched to the central provinces of the kingdom with such troops as were under the immediate command of the crown, and threatened again to seize their castles and punish them for their disobedience. The barons remonstrated, and they did this with the more firmness, as a secret communication of their general discontent had taken place among them, through the instrumentality of Cardinal Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, a prelate of strong and independent mind, who saw with indignation the absolute subjection of the English church to the see of Rome. Langton had privately intimated to such of the barons, bishops and abbots as appeared to him worthy of his confidence, the existence of a charter, granted by Henry I. at the commencement of his reign, which recapitu lated and confirmed most of the institutes in favour of the liberties of the CHAP. 10. land, which had existed among the Saxons, and had been collected together Confederate by the command of Edward the Confessor. During something more than Barons. a hundred years, at a period of ignorance and turbulence, when the dominion of force and superstitious fraud over the human mind was at its height, the barons had lost all but a very confused tradition of the important nature of such a charter, and they listened to the reading of the copy which Langton had taken from the archives of a monastery, with pleasure and astonishment. They instantly bound themselves by oath to adhere together for the re-establishment of those laws, which they now regarded as the only bond of their allegiance to the crown. For a time, this league of the barons remained undivulged, but the pope's legate having become acquainted with it, and having communicated it to the king, with the view of urging him by his fears to crouch more abjectly under the protection of Rome, the barons, by the advice of the archbishop, resolved to make a public demand of their liberties. At the latter end of the year 1214, John returned from an expedition in France, which he had rendered doubly disgraceful, because, although he was well attended by the baronial forces, who were on all occasions alive to the honour of their country, and had the emperor of Germany and the earl of Flanders for his allies, yet his openly expressed suspicions of his nobility and his own indolence prevented him from seizing the advantages a combination of favourable circumstances placed within his reach. In spite of the remonstrances of that portion of the nobility whom he had no reason to mistrust, he permitted Philip, without those preventive movements that had been previously laid down as the plan of the campaign, to march into Flanders and there obtain the important victory of Bovines. Even then, the barons urged him, in vain, to seize the opportunity which the absence of the French king offered him of recovering the hereditary possessions of his forefathers. He was jealous of both their advice and their valour; and listening to the dictates of the pope's legate, who was unwilling that the new tributary of Rome should become too powerful, he patched up a hasty truce with Philip and returned to England. There his capricious and exorbitant taxes rendered him hateful as a tyrant, while his indolence and debauchery made him contemptible as a man. The barons having revisited their estates, and instructed their retainers to hold themselves in readiness for the performance of the military duties attached to their condition under the feudal laws, met at St. Edmundsbury, in the presence of the cardinal, archbishop Langton. They renewed their oath; and resolved, that immediately after the approaching Christmas they would, with men, arms and horses, go to the king and demand of him, a charter for the establishment and security of their liberties, founded upon that which the archbishop had disclosed and explained to them, but somewhat still more liberal as related to the rights of those who claimed to be accounted free. This new charter seems to have been elaborately drawn up, and embraces the just rights and immunities of Englishmen, not in a legislative so much as in a direct legal sense. There is in the seventeenth and eighteenth articles, mention made of the summoning of peers, prelates, and of those who hold of the crown in chief, to a general council for Barons. CHAP. 10. the assessing of scutages and other business to be named in the summons, Confederate but there is no outline in it of such a parliament as we at present possess. Its object was chiefly to provide against arbitrary demands and practices, some of which had by the continued abuse of justice obtained the warrant and authority of custom. It insists upon the personal security of men in every condition, protecting even the villane or serf from such amercements as might deprive him of the means of gaining his livelihood. This is the Magna Charta, or the Great Charter of the Realm. The barons assembled at the appointed time, and having apprized the king of their intention, and sent many of their armed retainers before them, he was struck with terror at their resolute procedure, and consented to meet them at the hall of the New Temple, which then occupied the ground on which the Middle Temple in London now stands. Having heard their demands, he promised, in general terms, his acquiescence, but required time for deliberation, and assured them he would meet them again at the ensuing Easter. This period of delay he employed in summoning the immediate vassals of the crown to attend him, and in hiring foreign soldiers in Brabant. He called also upon the pope to protect him against his disobedient subjects by a solemn interdict and excommunication, and in order to have a pretence for compelling those subjects to aid in place of arming against him, he assumed the cross, and declared his purpose of leading an army against the infidels in the Holy Land. Robert Fitzwalter was the leader of the barons. His patriotism was excited by a serious family injury which this debauched monarch had inflicted upon him. He was the father of a beautiful daughter, whom John had endeavoured to debauch, and of whose person he had used the most desperate means to obtain possession. Failing in his purpose, his licentious desires were converted into hatred, and, it is said, he caused her privately to be poisoned. The irritated parent swore implacable revenge. The principal residence of Fitzwalter was Baynard castle in London, and he had also a castle at Erith in Kent, a few miles from the metropolis. There many of the barons retired to await the decision of the king; but as that post was scarcely maintainable against the troops which John was drawing around him, they retired to Stamford in Lincolnshire, and there commanded the attendance of their armed retainers. The king retired to Oxford, where he received a memorial from the barons, which terminated with the declaration, that unless he granted the liberties they demanded, they were prepared to seize upon the castles and possessions of the crown. Irritated at this threat, the unhappy king, in a paroxysm of rage, declared that he would not be made the slave of his subjects, and sent them a peremptory refusal. The barons, under the command of their leader, Robert Fitzwalter, on whom the archbishop had bestowed the imposing title of " Marshal of the Army of God and of his Holy Church," immediately marched to Northampton. From Northampton, after possessing themselves of the castle, they marched to Bedford, which was delivered up to them by William de Beauchamp. In two days they reached London, where they instantly laid siege to the tower, in which John had taken refuge. Their cause being thus successful in its com |