as a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed these great
nobles to find a fortune in the English realm. The Poitevin lords brought
in their train a bevy of ladies in search of husbands, and three English
earls who were in royal wardship were wedded by the king to foreigners. The
whole machinery of administration passed into the hands of men who were
ignorant and contemptuous of the principles of English government or
English law. Their rule was a mere anarchy; the very retainers of the royal
household turned robbers and pillaged foreign merchants in the precincts of
the Court; corruption invaded the judicature; at the close of this period
of misrule Henry de Bath, a justiciary, was proved to have openly taken
bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.

[Sidenote: Henry and the Baronage]

That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on unchecked in defiance
of the provisions of the Charter was owing to the disunion and sluggishness
of the English baronage. On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard,
the Earl Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth as their leader to
demand the expulsion of the strangers from the royal Council. Though
deserted by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent
against him and forced the king to treat for peace. But at this critical
moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland; he
fell in a petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head. The
interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon, forced the king to
dismiss Peter from court; but there was no real change of system, and the
remonstrances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of
Lincoln, remained fruitless. In the long interval of misrule the financial
straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on exaction. The Forest
Laws were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant,
loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free
quarters wherever it moved. Supplies of this kind however were utterly
insufficient to defray the cost of the king's prodigality. A sixth of the
royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites. The debts of
the Crown amounted to four times its annual income. Henry was forced to
appeal for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted in
1237 on promise of control in its expenditure and on condition that the
king confirmed the Charter. But C