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But his project was suddenly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate, Hubert Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshal. So completely had both the baronage and the Church been humbled by his father that the attitude of their representatives revealed to the king a new spirit of national freedom which was rising around him, and John at once braced himself to a struggle with it.
The new attitude of the knighthood, their social connexion as landed gentry with the baronage, their political union with the burgesses, really welded the three orders into one, and gave that unity of feeling and action to our Parliament on which its power has ever since mainly depended.
The separate powers of the Chancellor, whatever was the original date at which they were first exercised, seem to have been thoroughly established under Edward the First. What reconciled the nation to the exercise of powers such as these by the Crown and its council was the need which was still to exist for centuries of an effective means of bringing the baronage within the reach of the law.
There she was, Vesta Van Warden, the young wife of John Van Warden, clad in rags, with marred and scarred and toil-calloused hands, bending over the campfire and doing scullion work she, Vesta, who had been born to the purple of the greatest baronage of wealth the world had ever known.
With the young Edward in her hands she was able to procure soldiers from the Count of Hainault by promising her son's hand to his daughter; the Italian bankers supplied funds; and after a year's preparation the Queen set sail in the autumn of 1326. A secret conspiracy of the baronage was revealed when the primate and nobles hurried to her standard on her landing at Orwell.
He had no love for his father, but he had seen him in the later years of his reign struggling against the pressure of the baronage, evading his pledges as to taxation, and procuring absolution from his promise to observe the clauses added to the Charter.
He resolved to make Rome his ally, to turn its spiritual thunders on his foes, to use it in breaking up the confederacy it had formed, in crushing the baronage, in oppressing the clergy, in paralyzing as Rome only could paralyze the energy of the Primate.
The success of the one would have doomed England to a royal despotism, that of the other to a feudal aristocracy. Fortunately for our freedom the English baronage had been brought too low by the policy of the kings to be able to withstand the crown single-handed. From the first moment of the contest it had been forced to make its cause a national one.
Two such decisive failures seemed for the time to have utterly broken Richard's power. Weakened as the crown had been by losses abroad, it was clearly strong enough as yet to hold its own against the chief of the baronage.
The sovereign again stood alone in the face of the baronage. It was only by playing on their jealousies and divisions that Mary Stuart could withstand the nobles who banded themselves together to overawe the Crown. Once she broke their ranks by her marriage with Darnley; and after the ill-fated close of this effort she strove again to break their ranks by her marriage with Bothwell.
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