the seal from him and naming to this as to other offices at his pleasure.  His policy was to entrust all high posts of government to mere clerks of the royal chapel; trained administrators, but wholly dependent on the royal will.  He found equally dependent agents of administration by surrounding himself with foreigners.  The return of Peter des Roches to the royal councils was the first sign of the new system; and hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the Court.  The king’s marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence was followed by the arrival in England of the new queen’s uncles.  The “Savoy,” as his house in the Strand was named, still recalls Peter of Savoy who arrived five years later to take for a while the chief place at Henry’s council-board; another brother, Boniface, was consecrated on Archbishop Edmund’s death to the highest post in the realm save the Crown itself, the Archbishoprick of Canterbury.  The young Primate, like his brother, brought with him foreign fashions strange enough to English folk.  His armed retainers pillaged the markets.  His own archiepiscopal fist felled to the ground the prior of St. Bartholomew-by-Smithfield who opposed his visitation.  London was roused by the outrage; on the king’s refusal to do justice a noisy crowd of citizens surrounded the Primate’s house at Lambeth with cries of vengeance, and the “handsome archbishop,” as his followers styled him, was glad to escape over sea.  This brood of Provencals was followed in 1243 by the arrival of the Poitevin relatives of John’s queen, Isabella of Angouleme.  Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of Valence received at a later time the earldom of Pembroke.  Even the king’s jester was 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]