furnish their master with taxation for French wars, or to follow his
banner to distant Aquitaine. But most of all did they dislike his
practice of flooding England with strangers from beyond seas, for whom
offices and endowments had to be found. The moment that he had got rid
of the honest and capable old justiciar Hubert de Burgh, who had
pacified the country during his minority, and set the machinery of
government once more in regular order, Henry gave himself over to
fostering horde after horde of foreign favourites. There was first his
Poitevin chancellor, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, with a
numerous band of his relations and dependents. As a sample of the king's
methods it may be mentioned that he once made over nineteen of the
thirty-five sheriffdoms, within a fortnight, to Peter of Rivaux, a
nephew of the chancellor. Des Roches was driven from office after two
years (1234), and his friends and relatives fell with him. But they were
only the earliest of the king's alien favourites; quite as greedy were
the second family of his mother, Isabella of Angoulême, who after King
John's death had married her old betrothed, Hugh of Lusignan. Henry
secured great English marriages for three of them, and made the fourth,
Aymer, bishop of Winchester. Their kinsmen and dependents were equally
welcomed. Even more numerous and no less expensive to the realm were the
Provençal and Savoyard relatives of Henry's queen, Eleanor of Provence.
The king made one of her uncles, Boniface of Savoy, archbishop of
Canterbury--it was three years before he deigned to come over to take up
the post, and then he was discovered to be illiterate and unclerical in
his habits, an unworthy successor for Langton and Edmund of Abingdon,
the great primates who went before him. Peter of Savoy, another uncle,
was perhaps the most shameless of all the beggars for the king's bounty;
not only was he made earl of Richmond, but his debts were repeatedly
paid and great sums were given him to help his continental adventures.
Simon de Monfort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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