It is difficult to define precisely the composition, during the minority of Henry III, of the body known as the King’s Council. That body included, besides the Primate of all England, the justices, and the great officers of State--justiciar, chancellor, treasurer,--certain persons who were called to be members of it on personal rather than official grounds, such as Bishop Peter of Winchester, Philip d’Aubigné, the Earl of Chester, and the King’s uncle, Earl William of Salisbury. Since the spring of 1219 the most onerous and important part of the work of government had been shared, under Pandulf, between Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches; Hubert, as Justiciar, naturally taking the more prominent part. Among our materials for the history of the time we find no suggestion anywhere that they were other than true yoke-fellows, till at Whitsuntide, 1221, there occurred the mysterious affair of Peter de Maulay.[822] The only two chroniclers who record De Maulay’s arrest say nothing more about its grounds than that he was “accused of treason.” Falkes de Bréauté, four years later, asserted that Peter de Maulay after dining at court was called into the King’s chamber as if for some private discourse, and there denounced as a traitor who had made a compact with the King of France to deliver into his hands the Lady Eleanor of Brittany, Henry’s cousin, who had been a State prisoner in Corfe castle for many years; moreover, according to Falkes, a greater personage than the castellan of Corfe was involved in the accusation; it was asserted that a ship to convey the lady over sea had been made ready by the Bishop of Winchester, who at the time of the arrest was absent from England on a pilgrimage to Compostella, and that the bishop was really gone not to pay his devotions to S. James, but to talk over the plot with Philip Augustus. Falkes declared that the only real plotters in the case were the Justiciar and his “accomplices,” who for their own private ends had planned the arrest of Peter de Maulay in the absence of Peter des Roches, and invented this story against both; and he adds that they overwhelmed De Maulay with insults, blows, and other indignities, and loaded him with chains, before they cast him into prison.[823] Falkes’s story is almost certainly correct thus far, that no real plot existed; for, whatever ill-treatment Peter de Maulay may have undergone at the time of his arrest, his innocence was implicitly acknowledged within less than a week, by his release as soon as he had surrendered Corfe; and the accusation against the other Peter, if ever really made, was clearly dropped at once and never revived. The whole plot seems to have been a sheer fiction; but we can hardly accept Falkes’s account of its origin. Hubert and Peter des Roches may have been jealous of each other; and they may have differed on some questions of policy--perhaps, amongst other things, as to the expediency or the justice of requiring compliance with the letter of