With Hubert’s fall ends the second period of Henry’s reign.  William Marshal expelled the armed foreigner.  Hubert restored the administration to English hands.  Matthew Paris puts into the mouth of a poor smith who refused to fasten fetters on the fallen minister words which, though probably never spoken, describe with sufficient accuracy Hubert’s place in history:  “Is he not that most faithful Hubert who so often saved England from the devastation of the foreigners and restored England to England?” Hubert was, as has been well said, perhaps the first minister since the Conquest who made patriotism a principle of policy, though it is easy in the light of later developments to read into his doings more than he really intended.  But whatever his motives, the results of his action were clear.  He drove away the mercenaries, humbled the feudal lords, and set limits to the pope’s interference.  He renewed respect for law and obedience to the law courts.  Even in the worst days of anarchy the administrative system did not break down, and the records of royal orders and judicial judgments remain almost as full in the midst of the civil war as in the more peaceful days of Hubert’s rule.  But it was easy enough to issue proclamations and writs.  The difficulty was to get them obeyed, and the work of Hubert was to ensure that the orders of king and ministers should really be respected by his subjects.  He made many mistakes.  He must share the blame of the failure of the Kerry campaign, and he was largely responsible for the sorry collapse of the invasion of Poitou.  He neither understood nor sympathised with Stephen Langton’s zeal for the charters.  A straightforward, limited, honourable man, he strove to carry out his rather old-fashioned conception of duty in the teeth of a thousand obstacles.  He never had a free hand, and he never enjoyed the hearty support of any one section of his countrymen.  Hated by the barons whom he kept away from power, he alienated the Londoners by his high-handed violence, and the tax-payers by his heavy exactions.  The pope disliked him, the aliens plotted against him, and the king, for whom he sacrificed so much, gave him but grudging support.  But the reaction which followed his retirement made many, who had rejoiced in his humiliation, bitterly regret it.

Three notable enemies of Hubert went off the stage of history within a few months of his fall.  The death of Richard le Grand has already been recorded.  William Marshal, the brother-in-law of the king, the gallant and successful soldier, the worthy successor of his great father, came home from Brittany early in 1231.  His last act was to marry his sister, Isabella, to Richard of Cornwall.  Within ten days of the wedding his body was laid beside his father in the Temple Church at London.  In October, 1232, died Randolph of Blundeville, the last representative of the male stock of the old line of the Earls of Chester, and long the foremost champion of the feudal