Exaction followed exaction, the very rights of the lay patrons were set aside, and under the name of " reserves " presentations to English benefices were sold in the Papal market, while Italian clergy were quartered on the best livings of the Church. The general indignation found vent at last in a wide conspiracy; letters from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be ruined by the Romans" were scattered over the kingdom by armed men; tithes gathered for the Pope and foreign clergy were seized and given to the poor, the Papal commissioners beaten, and their bulls trodden under foot. The remonstrances of Rome only revealed the national character of the movement; but as inquiry proceeded the hand of the Justiciar himself was seen to have been at work. Sheriffs had stood idly by while the 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. The charge came at a time when Henry was in full collision with his minister, to whom he attributed the failure of his attempts to regain the foreign dominions of his house.

An invitation from the barons of Normandy had been rejected through Hubert's remonstrances, and when a great armament gathered at Portsmouth for a campaign in Poitou, it was dispersed for want of transport and supplies. The young King drew his sword and rushed madly on the Justiciar, whom he charged with treason and corruption by the gold of France; but the quarrel was appeased, and the expedition deferred for the year. The failure of the campaign in the following year, when Henry took the field in Britanny and Poitou, was again laid at the door of Hubert, whose opposition was said to have prevented an engagement. The Papal accusation filled up the measure of Henry's wrath. Hubert was dragged from a chapel at Brentwood where he had taken refuge, and a smith was ordered to shackle him. "I will die any death," replied the smith, "before I put iron on the man who freed England from the stranger and saved Dover from France." On the remonstrances of the Bishop of London Hubert was replaced 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.

There was a certain refinement in Henry's temper which won him affection even in the worst days of his rule. The Abbey-church of Westminster, with which he replaced the ruder minster of the Confessor, remains a monument of his artistic taste. He was a patron and friend of artists and men of letters, and himself skilled in the "gay science" of the troubadour. From the cruelty, the lust, the impiety of his father he was absolutely free. But of the political capacity which had been the characteristic of his house he had little or none. Profuse, changeable, impulsive alike in good and ill, unbridled in temper and tongue, reckless in insult and wit, Henry's delight was in the display of an empty and prodigal magnificence, his one notion of government a dream of arbitrary power. But frivolous as the King's mood was, he clung with a weak man's obstinacy to a distinct line of policy. He cherished the hope of recovering his heritage across the sea. He believed in the absolute power of the Crown; and looked on the pledges of the Great Charter as promises which force had wrested from the King and which force could wrest back again.

The claim which the French kings were advancing to a divine and absolute power gave a sanction in Henry's mind to the claim of absolute authority which was still maintained by his favourite advisers in the royal council. The death of Langton, the fall of Hubert de Burgh, left him free to surround himself with dependent ministers, mere agents of the royal will. Hosts of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the Court. His marriage with Eleanor of Provence was followed by the arrival in England of the 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 on Archbishop Edmund's death consecrated 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 Angoulême. Aymer was made Bishop of Winchester; William of Valence received the earldom of Pembroke. Even the King's jester was a Poitevin. Hundreds of their dependants followed these great lords 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 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; Henry de Bath, a justiciar, was proved to have openly taken bribes and to have adjudged to himself disputed estates.