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The history of the town and county of Poole
by John Sydenham
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Excerpt:
£the Longespees.]—With the other possessions of the elder house of Salisbury, the manor of Cimford and its members passed by this marriage into the hands of LonGespee, who was so named from the long sword he wore. We find nothing recorded of this gallant warrior previous to his being affianced to Ela, and it is probable, from all concurrent circumstances, that he was then a youth just rising into manhood, and that his munificent brother, Rich
. * Dugdale, in his Baronage, incorrectly says " months" instead of "years."
C
ard, with whom he appears to have been a peculiar favourite, took the earliest opportunity thus to confer upon him a provision suitable to his royal birth. On the death of Richard I., he adhered faithfully to John during the early part of his reign, and was in frequent attendance on the king, through the vagrant life in which his reign was spent. Immediately upon his marriage, or at least very shortly after, Longespee entered upon Ela's hereditary office of the shrievalty of Wiltshire. At the coronation of John, May 27,N 1199, at Westminster, the earl of Salisbury was amongst the concourse of nobility present. He was appointed constable of Dover castle, Sept. 9, 1204, and held that office for about twenty months. In 1205 he was appointed to the command of some troops embarked by John in his attempted enterprise for the recovery of Normandy. In 1209 he was constituted warden of the marches in Wales. He adhered steadily to his royal brother during that stormy period, when Pope Innocent fulminated his interdict against king John; and is named first amongst those whom Matthew Paris calls the king's "consiliarii iniquissimi." He was, of course, involved in some of the scenes of humiliation which John was doomed to encounter. In 1213 he was one of the four great barons, whose names appear in the treaty entered into by John with the pope, and who all swore on the king's behalf to his observance of the ignominious conditions imposed by the pontiff. In the same year, he commanded the English fleet in the war with France, and surprising the fleet of Philip, the French king, entirely destroyed it. This expedition was unusually short; for, surprising a large French fleet at anchor in the haven of Dam, deserted by the soldiers, who had marched to ravage the country, the English forces, having soon overcome the sailors, immediately loaded thirty of the transports with every kind of store and provision, and sent them off to sail for England. They then proceeded to fire the despoiled vessels, amounting to a hundred or more, which were lying dry on the shore. This fatal loss blasted all Philip's grand projects, and obliged him to relinquish his undertaking,—viz., the reduction of Flanders, —and to return to Paris extremely mortified. In 1214 he was one of the five earls taken at the battle of Bovines, gained by Philip over the emperor Otho, of Germany; but recovered his liberty in the following year. In the contest between John and his barons, Longespee attached himself to the party of the king, and was one of those threatened by the confederate barons, when besieging John in the tower, with the plundering of their estates. He was also one of those who attended on the king's side at Runnymede; and we find him amongst those named in Magna Charta. When the king had collected an army of foreign mercenaries, with the assistance of the pope, to whom he had been again reconciled, he divided his forces into two bodies, giving the command of one of them to Longespee, who first placed garrisons in the castles of Windsor, Hertford, and Berkhampstead, and then proceeded to watch the city of London, where the barons had fixed themselves, and cut off the supply of their provisions. He then ravaged Essex, Hertford, Middlesex, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire. By these exertions, the arms of the king were so successful, that the barons had only two castles left, Mountsorrel in Leicestershire, and that of Robert de Ros in Yorkshire. At that crisis they turned for aid to prince Louis, the dauphin of France, who, in May, 1216, landed at Sandwich. We now encounter a remarkable change in the conduct of the carl of Salisbury. He who had been so loyal to his brother throughout all his difficulties, is now found suddenly to join the French invader. In assigning a motive for this conduct, our chroniclers entertain diverse views. Matthew Paris ascribes the desertion to a conviction on the part of Salisbury and those who were associated with him, that they were cleaving to the strongest party, "as if they accounted it now perfectlv certain that Louis would obtain the kingdom of England;" whilst the chronicle of Melrose speaks of their conduct as having been adopted with the intention rather of subverting than ©f assisting the cause of Louis. And their subsequent behaviour would seem to favour this last conjecture. On the 18th of October, in the same year, death terminated the turbulent and miserable reign of John, and shortly afterwards Longespee and the other three earls again changed their party, and acknowledged the young king, Henry III*. On this return, Longespee was appointed sheriff of Somerset and governor of the castle of Sherborne; and was alsoconstituted sheriff of Lincoln and governor of the castle there. The Clause Rolls for many subsequent years teem with entries of money and' lands which were conferred upon him. From some of them we gather that the king presented him with £1000 in money, the payment of which was completed in November, 1219; and, besides, paid him yearly the sum of #300, until he was provided with escheated lands of that value. Lands of the value of JE500 had been promised to him by king John. He received scarcely fewer favours from the crown, than had fallen to his share when he was the companion of the late king. Besides the weightier matters already mentioned, gifts of deer and of timber are particularly frequent. In May, 1220, he assisted at the foundation of the new cathedral' church of New Sarum. The bishop laid the first stone for pope Honorius; the second for Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury; the third for himself. Then the fourth was laid by William, earl of Salisbury; and the fifth, by his wife, the countess Ela, "a woman truly praiseworthy," adds the chronicler of this splendid pageant. For some time subsequent to this, Longespee appears to. have led a courtly life, and was generally in attendance on his king: but, in the spring of 1224, his nephew, prince Richard, the king's brother, was placed under his guidance, that his maiden sword might be fleshed under the direction of so experienced and gallant a soldier, in the plains of Gascony. Having collected an army, the earl proceeded with his royal nephew through Gascony, reducing to obedience those who refused homage and fealty to king Henry. This campaign lasted about two years, in which Longespee bore the most conspicuous part. The voyage, on his return to England, was most disastrous and protracted for upwards of three months. During the interval, all his friends had despaired of his safety, except his faithful wife, who, though now a matron whose age and dignity ought to have commanded greater respect, became again an object of pursuit to the fortune-hunters of the court. The person who then had the greatest sway in the country, was the justiciary Hubert de Burgh; a man who was no less remarkable on account of his power and prosperity under one king, than for his trials and sufferings under another. It is related by Matthew Paris, that, whilst king Henry was deeply affected with grief at the supposed loss of the carl of Salisbury, this potent minister, Hubert, came and required from him that he would bestow carl William's wife, to whom Uiat earldom belonged by hereditary right, on his own nephew Reimund, that he might marry her. The king yielded to this petition, provided the eountess [could be induced to consent; but she received Reimund with scorn for his offers, and protestations of her assurance of her husband's safety. On the arrival of the earl, after giving public thanks for his preservation and safe return, he proceeded to the king at Marlborough, and complained of the conduct of the justiciary and Reimund. Peace was however made between them; the justiciary invited the earl to his table, where, it is said, the carl was infected with secret poison*, and, thence returning to his
* The frequent insinuation.? of suspected poison which occur In old chronieles, seldom deserve any other regard than as evidences of the ignorance of the times in pathological science. It is evident that nothing could be more likely to act as poison than the royal fcaslings of Marllrorough, after the long privations of a disastrous voyage and shipwreck,—The memory of Hubert dc Burgh baa suffered considerably
