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Basset insurrection throughout the kingdom if the king aimed at his life, or even at the forfeiture of his estates. Fulk seems to have stood by his relative in all his trouble, so far that when Henry, at the parliament of London, uttered his hasty wish that some one would kill his enemy, John Mansel warned him that the bishop of London was prepared to exercise his spiritual powers against any such offenders. In 1252 we find Fulk amongst the bishops who supported Grosseteste's opposition to the tenth of the church revenues granted to Henry III by the pope. Next year his name again appears when the king's request was granted in return for the confirmation of Magna Charta (April 1253). Matthew Paris tells a curious story that in this year, on the night of Bishop Grossseteste's death, Fulk heard bells ringing in the air in token of what had just occurred (9 Oct. 1253). The death of Grosseteste left the English church without a leader to head them against the papal demands, and on one occasion at least (October 1255) Fulk seems to have assumed this position, when his bold declaration that he would rather lose his head than submit to such intolerable oppression nerved his fellow-prelates to resist the new demands just brought in by Rustand, who complained to the king that the whole resistance on this occasion was due to the influence of the bishop of London. It was on Henry's threatening him with the pope's displeasure that Fulk made his famous answer: ‘The pope and the king may indeed take away my bishopric, for they are stronger than I; let them take away my mitre, and my helmet will remain.’ Two years later (Lent 1257), when Richard of Cornwall left England to contest the imperial crown, he appointed Fulk the head overseer of all his possessions in England. This fact may point to some degree of reconciliation with the royal house, especially when coupled with the fact that during the course of the same year the bishop became one of the sworn advisers of the king, in which capacity he took a special oath not to betray the king's counsels. When the barons met at Oxford (June 1258) and forced the king and his son Edward to swear to grant their requests, Fulk seems to have held more or less aloof from the struggle, and Matthew Paris remarks that in this he blackened his fair fame, inasmuch as he was of nobler race than the other bishops. The exact ground for this charge seems to be that Fulk was the most prominent Englishman who absolutely refused his assent to the Oxford provisions; in fact the Tewkesbury annals draw no distinction between his conduct and that of the foreign favourites, who withdrew from Oxford to Winchester. Indeed, whatever may have been the exact course pursued by him on this occasion, he at least succeeded in breaking with the baronial and popular party, of which he had hitherto been one of the most prominent members. His name henceforward appears consistently on the king's side; it stands first on the list of the king's half of the commission of twenty-four appointed by the provisions of Oxford to draw up a constitution, first among the twelve commissioners of parliament, and second among the twenty-four appointed to treat of the king's aid. His brother, Philip Basset, is associated with him in the latter two lists, but it is worth noting that neither of the two was appointed a member of the king's perpetual council of fifteen (Annales Monastici (R.S.), i. 447, 449, 450, and Const. Hist. ii. 89). Fulk Basset did not live to see the utter breakdown of the new plans of reform. At Michaelmas he was present with the king and queen of England, Prince Edward, and many other bishops, when Boniface of Savoy dedicated the cathedral of New Sarum. Within seven months of this date Fulk was carried off by a severe pestilence which visited Paris, London, and other places, and was buried on 25 May 1259 in his own cathedral. Though he never seems to have taken so firm a position with regard to the papal exactions as Grosseteste had done, and though once in his life at least he allowed his baronial feelings to influence his conduct as servant of the king, yet on the whole he deserves the praise with which Matthew Paris dismisses him: ‘A man noble and of high birth, who, had he not lately wavered, were the anchor of the whole kingdom and the shield of its stability and defence.’ His name and that of his nearest relatives were long preserved in the records of his own cathedral by the many chantries which they endowed in connection with St. Paul's.

[Rymer, i. 342; Matt. Paris (R.S.), iv. 89, 171, 393, &c., v. 120–7, 190, 705, &c; Burton, Tewkesbury, and Dunstable Annals in Luard's Annales Monastici (R.S.), i., ii., iii.; Simpson's Registrum Ecclesiæ S. Pauli; Milman's Annals of St. Paul's; Le Neve's Fasti, ii. 284, iii. 121.]  BASSET, FULK, (d. 1271), archbishop of Dublin. [See .]

BASSET, GILBERT (d. 1241), baronial leader, was the eldest son of Alan Basset [q. v.], baron of Wycombe. About 1231 he appears to have negotiated a truce with Llewellyn of Wales on behalf of Henry III. Alan Basset appears to have died in 1232,