last Otto gave up his cause in despair, and devoted himself to the more profitable work of exacting money from the English clergy.  Falkes died in 1226.  With him disappears from our history the lawless spirit which had troubled the land since the war between John and his barons.  The foreign adventurers, of whom he was the chief, either went back in disgust to their native lands, or, like Peter de Mauley, became loyal subjects and the progenitors of a harmless stock of English barons.  The ten years of storm and stress were over.  The administration was once more in English hands, and Hubert enjoyed a few years of well-earned power.

New difficulties at once arose.  The defeat of the feudalists and their Welsh allies involved heavy special taxation, and the king’s honour required that an effort should be made both to wrest Poitou from Louis VIII., and to strengthen the English hold over Gascony.  Besides national obligations, clergy and laity alike were still called upon to contribute towards the cost of crusading enterprises, and in 1226 the papal nuncio, Otto, demanded that a large proportion of the revenues of the English clergy should be contributed to the papal coffers.  To the Englishman of that age all extraordinary taxation was a grievance quite irrespective of its necessity.  The double incidence of the royal and papal demands was met by protests which showed some tendency towards the splitting up of the victorious side into parties.  It was still easy for all to unite against Otto, and the papal agent was forced to go home empty handed, for councils both of clergy and barons agreed to reject his demands.  Whatever other nations might offer to the pope, argued the magnates, the realms of England and Ireland at least had a right to be freed from such impositions by reason of the tribute which John had agreed to pay to Innocent III.  The demand of the king’s ministers for a fifteenth to prosecute the war with France was reluctantly conceded, but only on the condition of a fresh confirmation of the charters in a form intended to bring home to the king his personal obligation to observe them.  Hubert de Burgh, however, was no enthusiast for the charters.  His standpoint was that of the officials of the age of Henry II.  To him the re-establishment of order meant the restoration of the prerogative.  There he parted company with the archbishop, who was an eager upholder of the charters, for which he was so largely responsible.  The struggle against the foreigner was to be succeeded by a struggle for the charters.

In January, 1227, a council met at Oxford.  The king, then nearly twenty years old, declared that he would govern the country himself, and renounced the tutelage of the Bishop of Winchester.  Henry gave himself over completely to the justiciar, whom he rewarded for his faithful service by making him Earl of Kent.  In deep disgust Bishop Peter left the court to carry out his long-deferred crusading vows.  For four years he was absent in Palestine, where his military talents had ample scope as one of the leaders of Frederick II.’s army, while his diplomatic skill sought, with less result, to preserve some sort of relations between the excommunicated emperor and the new pope, Gregory IX., who in this same year succeeded Honorius.  In April Gregory renewed the bull of 1223 in which his predecessor recognised Henry’s competence to govern.