clearer the national character of the movement; but as enquiry went on the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen to have been at work.  Sheriffs had stood idly by while violence was done; royal letters had been shown by the rioters as approving their acts; and the Pope openly laid the charge of the outbreak on the secret connivance of Hubert de Burgh.  No charge could have been more fatal to Hubert in the mind of the king.  But he was already in full collision with the Justiciar on other grounds.  Henry was eager to vindicate his right to the great heritage his father had lost:  the Gascons, who still clung to him, not because they loved England but because they hated France, spurred him to war; and in 1229 a secret invitation came from the Norman barons.  But while Hubert held power no serious effort was made to carry on a foreign strife.  The Norman call was rejected through his influence, and when a great armament gathered at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou it dispersed for want of transport and supplies.  The young king drew his sword and rushed madly on the Justiciar, charging him with treason and corruption by the gold of France.  But the quarrel was appeased and the expedition deferred for the year.  In 1230 Henry actually took the field in Britanny and Poitou, but the failure of the campaign was again laid at the door of Hubert whose opposition was said to have prevented a decisive engagement.  It was at this moment that the Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry’s wrath against his minister.  In the summer of 1232 he was deprived of his office of Justiciar, and dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where threats of death had driven him to take sanctuary.  A smith who was ordered to shackle him stoutly refused.  “I will die any death,” he said, “before I put iron on the man who freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France.”  The remonstrances of the Bishop of London forced the king to replace Hubert in sanctuary, but hunger compelled him to surrender; he was thrown a prisoner into the Tower, and though soon released he remained powerless in the realm.  His fall left England without a check to the rule of Henry himself.

Chapter III
the baron’s war
1232-1272

[Sidenote:  The Aliens]

Once master of his realm, Henry the Third was quick to declare his plan of government.  The two great checks on a merely personal rule lay as yet in the authority of the great ministers of State and in the national character of the administrative body which had been built up by Henry the Second.  Both of these checks Henry at once set himself to remove.  He would be his own minister.  The Justiciar ceased to be the Lieutenant-General of the king and dwindled into a presiding judge of the law-courts.  The Chancellor had grown into a great officer of State, and in 1226 this office had been conferred on the Bishop of Chichester by the advice and consent of the Great Council.  But Henry succeeded in wresting