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But the active and ambitious spirit of Edward, while his conquests brought such considerable accessions to the English monarchy, could not be satisfied, so long as Guienne, the ancient patrimony of his family, was wrested from him by the dishonest artifices of the French monarch. Finding that the distance of that province rendered all his efforts against it feeble and uncertain, he purposed to attack France in a quarter where she appeared more vulnerable; and with this view he married his daughter Elizabeth to John, earl of Holland, and at the same time contracted an alliance with Guy, earl of Flanders, stipulated to pay him the sum of seventy-five thousand pounds, and projected an invasion with their united forces upon Philip, their common enemy.[**] He hoped that, when he himself, at the head of the English, Flemish, and Dutch armies, renforced by his German allies, to whom he had promised or remitted considerable sums, should enter die frontiers of France, and threaten the capital itself, Philip would at last be obliged to relinquish his acquisitions, and purchase peace by the restitution of Guienne. But in order to set this great machine in movement, considerable supplies were requisite from the parliament; and Edward, without much difficulty, obtained from the barons and knights a new grant of a twelfth of all their movables, and from the boroughs that of an eighth. The great and almost unlimited power of the king over the latter, enabled him to throw the heavier part of the burden on them; and the prejudices which he seems always to have entertained against the church, on account of the former zeal of the clergy for the Mountfort faction, made him resolve to load them with still more considerable impositions, and he required of them a fifth of their movables. But he here met with an opposition, which for some time disconcerted all his measures, and engaged him in enterprises that were somewhat dangerous to him; and would have proved fatal to any of his predecessors.
* Homing, vol. i. p. 72, 73, 74.
** Rymer, vol. ii. p. 761. Walsing, p. 68.
Boniface VIII., who had succeeded Celestine in the papal throne, was a man of the most lofty and enterprising spirit; and though not endowed with that severity of manners which commonly accompanies ambition in men of his order, he was determined to carry the authority of the tiara, and his dominion over the temporal power, to as great a height as it had ever attained in any former period. Sensible that his immediate predecessors, by oppressing the church in every province of Christendom, had extremely alienated the affections of the clergy, and had afforded the civil magistrate a pretence for laying like impositions on ecclesiastical revenues, he attempted to resume the former station of the sovereign pontiff, and to establish himself as the common protector of the spiritual order against all invaders. For this purpose he issued very early in his pontificate a general bull, prohibiting all princes from levying without his consent any taxes upon the clergy, and all clergymen from submitting to such impositions; and he threatened both of them with the penalties of excommunication in case of disobedience.[*] This important edict is said to have been procured by the solicitation of Robert de Win chelsey, archbishop of Canterbury, who intended to employ it as a rampart against the violent extortions which the church had felt from Edward, and the still greater, which that prince’s multiplied necessities gave them reason to apprehend. When a demand, therefore, was made on the clergy of a fifth of their movables, a tax which was probably much more grievous than a fifth of their revenue, as their lands were mostly stocked with their cattle, and cultivated by their villains, the clergy took shelter under the bull of Pope Boniface and pleaded conscience in refusing compliance.[**] The king came not immediately to extremities on this repulse; but after locking up all their granaries and barns, and prohibiting all rent to be paid them, he appointed a new synod, to confer with him upon his demand. The primate, not dismayed by these proofs of Edward’s resolution, here plainly told him that the clergy owed obedience to two sovereigns, their spiritual and their temporal; but their duty bound them to a much stricter attachment to the former than to the latter: they could not comply with his commands, (for such, in some measure, the requests of the crown were then deemed,) in contradiction to the express prohibition of the sovereign pontiff.[***]
* Rymer, vol. ii. p. 706. Heming. vol. i. p. 104.
** Heming, vol., i. p. 107. Trivet, p. 296. Chron. Dunst.
vol. ii p. 652
*** Hemming. vol. i. p. 107.
1297.
The clergy had seen, in many instances, that Edward paid little regard to those numerous privileges on which they set so high a value. He had formerly seized, in an arbitrary manner, all the money and plate belonging to the churches and convents, and had applied them to the public service;[*] and they could not but expect more violent treatment on this sharp refusal, grounded on such dangerous principles. Instead of applying to the pope for a relaxation of his bull, he resolved immediately to employ the power in his hands; and he told the ecclesiastics that, since they refused to support the civil government, they were unworthy to receive any benefit from it; and he would accordingly put them out of the protection of the laws. This vigorous measure was immediately carried into execution.[**] Orders were issued to the judges to receive no cause brought before them by the clergy; to hear and decide all causes in which they were defendants; to do every man justice against them; to do them justice against nobody.[***] The ecclesiastics soon found themselves in the most miserable situation imaginable. They could not remain in their own houses or convents for want of subsistence; if they went abroad in quest of maintenance, they were dismounted, robbed of their horses and clothes, abused by every ruffian, and no redress could be obtained by them for the most violent injury. The primate himself was attacked on the highway, was stripped of his equipage and furniture, and was at last reduced to board himself with a single servant in the house of a country clergyman.[****] The king, meanwhile, remained an indifferent spectator of all these violences: and without employing his officers in committing any immediate injury on the priests, which might have appeared invidious and oppressive, he took ample vengeance on them for their obstinate refusal of his demands. Though the archbishop issued a general sentence of excommunication against all who attacked the persons or property of ecclesiastics, it was not regarded; while Edward enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing the people become the voluntary instruments of his justice against them, and inure themselves to throw off that respect for the sacred order by which they had so long been overawed and governed.
* Walsing. p. 65. Heming. vol. i. p. 51.
** Walsing. p. 69. Heming. vol. i. p. 107.
*** M. West. p. 429.
**** Heming. vol. i. p. 109.
The spirits of the clergy were at last broken by this harsh treatment. Besides that the whole province of York, which lay nearest the danger that still hung over them from the Scots, voluntarily, from the first, voted a fifth of their movables, the bishops of Salisbury, Ely, and some others, made a composition for the secular clergy within their dioceses; and they agreed not to pay the fifth, which would have been an act of disobedience to Boniface’s bull, but to deposit a sum equivalent in some church appointed them, whence it was taken by the king’s officers.[*] Many particular convents and clergymen made payment of a like sum, and received the king’s protection.[**] Those who had not ready money, entered into recognizances for the payment. And there was scarcely found one ecclesiastic in the kingdom who seemed willing to suffer, for the sake of religious privileges, this new species of martyrdom, the most tedious and languishing of any, the most mortifying to spiritual pride, and not rewarded by that crown of glory which the church holds up with such ostentation to her devoted adherents.
