Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 03.djvu/385

Basset incomes for three years, and entrusted the bishop of London with the prosecution of the whole affair. Fulk Basset accordingly called a meeting in St. Paul's to treat concerning this contribution; and the king sent his messengers to be present with special instructions to forbid the payment of the whole charge. Apparently under Fulk's advice, the assembly of the clergy drew up a bold answer to the pope, enumerating the many evil results that would ensue from the payment of this imposition, and winding up with an appeal to a general council. Next year Fulk was probably suspended, in company with the other bishops belonging to the province of Canterbury, for his refusal to pay the first year's income of all vacant livings to the new archbishopric. In 1250 we read that the bishop of London crossed over to the continent about the same time that Grosseteste also left England on his famous journey to the pope at Lyons. Matthew Paris professes to be ignorant of the cause of the journey, but, according to the Tewkesbury annals (Annales Monastici, i. 141), which, however, may in this statement be slightly incorrect, it was in connection with the following incident. In the early part of this year Boniface, the archbishop of Canterbury, had determined to copy the example of Grosseteste, but to make a visitation not only of the abbots and clergy, but even of the bishops in his province. The intolerable exactions levied by the archbishop and his followers in these visitations seem to have been one of the chief causes of their unpopularity, and on this occasion Boniface's conduct may well have been more egregiously flagrant than usual. On 13 May he proceeded to visit the bishop of London. The canons of St. Paul's refused to receive him, and were simply excommunicated; but at St. Bartholomew's, where he was received with courtesy, he smote the sub-prior thrice with his fist, and in the scuffle exposed beneath his peaceful exterior garb the glitter of a mail-coat. In their powerlessness the aggrieved canons appealed to their own bishop Fulk, and he advised them to go up to Westminster at once, and lay their complaint before the king. Henry, however, refused to receive them, and supported the archbishop, who thereupon proceeded solemnly at Lambeth to renew his sentence against the recalcitrant canons, and even went so far as to involve the bishop of London for being the supporter of his own clergy. Both parties now prepared to make a final appeal to Rome; but as Basset well recognised the strength of the opposition against him, he seems to have lost no time in securing the most powerful friends he could, and Matthew Paris has preserved the letter which he wrote on this occasion to the abbot of St. Albans. In the course of the same year the bishop of London held a conference at Dunstable with Grosseteste and several other bishops, at which they signed a paper binding themselves to resist Boniface's claims to visit their dioceses. The Burton annals contain a decree of Innocent IV's with regard to this matter, in which he writes to Grosseteste, Fulk Basset, and the bishop of Wells, limiting the expenses of all church dignitaries in their visitations, and empowering these three prelates to see that this edict does not become a dead letter (July 1252). Before the end of the next year Boniface had succeeded in suppressing the claims of the canons of St. Bartholomew's, and was apparently prospering in his cause at Rome. Seeing this, Fulk, who began to fear lest the king's wrath should at the first opportunity descend not only upon him but upon his race, and result in the forfeiture of all their possessions, determined to make his submission to the archbishop, and, having so done, was absolved from the sentence of excommunication (1251). But it is only fair to remark that in the preceding year the pope had annulled Boniface's sentence against the dean and chapter of St. Paul's; and the words of Matthew Paris seem to imply that Boniface's attack upon the bishop of London had by this time assumed very much of a personal character (‘quem—scilicet Fulconem— … nuper enormiter injuriando archiepiscopus excommunicaverat et excommunicatum longe lateque fecit denuntiari’). About the same time (1251) Henry de Bathe [q. v.], the justiciary, was accused of treachery to the king, who was so enraged that we read he refused to accept any clerkly surety in so important a case, and was only induced by the personal application of the bishop of London to entrust the offender to the care of twenty-four knights, who bound themselves to be answerable for his appearance at the stated time. It was probably some rumours of this approaching mishap that had determined Fulk to make his peace with the archbishop, and so, in some degree at least, to pacify the king also; for Henry de Bathe had married a Basset, and on his fall sent his wife round to all her relatives, begging them one and all to stand by him in his time of peril. Gifts were lavished profusely, and at last Henry de Bathe, seeing the dangerous position in which he stood, took Fulk and Philip Basset as his companions in an interview with the king's brother Richard, earl of Cornwall. In the course of conversation the justiciary threatened to raise an