[323] _Pat. Rolls_, vol. i. p. 91. [324] _Chron. Merton_, Petit-Dutaillis, p. 515. [325] Cf. _ib._, R. Wend., vol. iv. p. 32, _Hist. Ducs_, p. 205, and _Hist. G. le Mar._, ll. 17717–20. [326] Rob. Autiss. Contin. II., Pertz, _Rer. Germ. Scriptt._, vol. xxvi. p. 282. CHAPTER II THE REGENCY OF WILLIAM THE MARSHAL 1216–1219 He was a verray perfight gentil knight. [Sidenote: 1216] The coronation of Henry III had brought England face to face with a problem which was practically new in her history: the problem of a royal minority. In the days before the Norman Conquest, indeed, three English kings had been crowned before they reached the age which for men of lower degree was counted as that of legal majority; and the last of these three, Æthelred the Redeless, had come to his throne at almost the same age as Henry. But these cases were all too remote to furnish precedents for the guidance of the statesmen into whose hands the task of carrying on the government of England was thrown by the death of John. They could not even furnish a precedent for the choice of a regent; and the choice actually made was the result of circumstances which may without exaggeration be called unique. None of the known rules of English law concerning wardship were altogether applicable to the case of the Crown. As the law of England then stood, the wardship of a free tenement held by other than military tenure, and of its infant heir, belonged to the infant’s next-of-kin who was not capable of inheriting the tenement; the wardship of an infant tenant in chivalry, and of his land, belonged to his overlord. If the analogy of the former case were to be followed, the regency would have fallen to the King’s mother, Isabel of Angoulême. Not only, however, was the task, in the circumstances then existing, far too weighty to be laid upon a woman and a foreigner, but it was obviously impossible to treat the crown and realm of England as a mere ordinary socage tenement. Wardship in chivalry, on the other hand, would until little more than three years before Henry’s accession have supplied no analogy at all; for the King and kingdom of England had no overlord upon earth before John’s homage to the Pope in May, 1213. By virtue of that homage England became a fief of the Roman see, and consequently on John’s death the wardship of his youthful heir and his distracted realm vested legally in Pope Honorius III. It might therefore have been expected that the regency would be at once assumed by the Pope’s representative in England, the Legate Gualo. But Gualo was an Italian who had been scarcely fifteen months in the land, and he was a priest. The needs of the time imperatively demanded that the acting head of the state, whose first task must be to drive out an alien invader and bring back rebels to allegiance, should be an Englishman and a warrior; and Gualo’s conduct showed that neither he nor Honorius ever contemplated any other arrangement. In all the transactions connected