Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [299]
“The King of France – he’s declared for Henry. Montfort and the Provisions are finished.”
In fact, Louis had not even hesitated. The case he heard at Amiens, where the King of England had attended in person, was quite clear to him. He had not even considered a compromise which might have saved the situation. The pope, he declared, had rightly rejected the rebellious barons and no man should ignore such spiritual authority. Henry should be given power to do whatever he wished in his kingdom, and to choose whatever friends and ministers he liked, whether it pleased his barons or not. Those, he reminded them, were the customary rights of all kings. The judgement was comprehensive, conservative and feudally correct; but it was worse than anything the English rebels had feared.
The four men looked at each other. No one had any doubt about the graveness of the crisis. This was the final arbitration – the last peaceful solution left:
It was Jocelin, finally, who broke the silence.
“They must submit.”
The two Shockleys looked at him in surprise; but it was Hugh, speaking in English, who protested:
“To Henry? But father, you’ve said yourself that he’s incompetent to rule.”
Jocelin shook his head.
“They must submit,” he explained, “because it’s King Louis’s judgement – and the pope’s.”
“You spoke up for Montfort once,” his son reminded him.
“Yes. But not now. Things have gone too far.”
This, they all knew, was the heart of the matter. For over a year now the knight, as he saw the results of Montfort’s work, had felt a growing sense of unease; and there were many like him who were troubled by the way that Simon and some of his party were humiliating the king. It offended his sense of propriety. True, Henry was incompetent; but the monarchy itself, whatever a king’s faults, was still a sacred institution. The feudal proprieties must be observed. Whatever the cost, Louis’s judgement and the authority of the pope must now be respected.
“To reform the king and the Church is one matter,” Jocelin had argued to his son the year before; “but we cannot deny the king and the Church. There must be authority.” For these sacred institutions were the only guarantees that his world knew of morality and order. “Take them away,” he warned, “and you take away the cornerstone of the building; then it will collapse.”
But now Hugh shook his head.
“No, father. I will not submit.”
“Not to King Louis? Or to the Pope?” Jocelin’s voice was dangerous.
“No. They’re both foreigners. And the pope’s too far away. They don’t understand us.”
This was an argument the older man found meaningless.
“That’s nothing to do with it,” he thundered.
Still Hugh shook his head.
The aliens in England – both the friends of the king at court and the numerous appointments by the popes of Italians to rich English benefices – had irritated many Englishmen. But the dissatisfaction that Hugh was expressing lay deeper. For the judgement of the pope and King Louis, however technically correct, was an affront to the islanders’ sense of natural justice.
Jocelin glared at him.
“You must obey the law,” he stated flatly. “And the law proceeds from the king, sanctioned by the Church. You cannot deny that.”
But Hugh only made a dismissive gesture with his arm.
“No, father. The king himself is subject to a higher law, a natural law if you like: the community of the realm: the body politic. You want royal rule – reformed, of course, but royal. Montfort has shown us something better: a political rule, to which the king himself is subject. That’s the only way for the future.”
And when old Jocelin heard this, he went white, not with anger but with shock.
Constitutionally Hugh’s statement was revolutionary; yet it was nothing new. All through the century, such ideas had been widely discussed in the universities of Europe, and even