BURGH, HUBERT DE (d. 1243), chief justiciar of Eng land in the reign of John and Henry III., entered the royal service in the reign of Richard I. Already in 1201 he was cham berlain to King John, the sheriff of three shires, the constable of Dover and Windsor Castles, the warden of the Cinque Ports and of the Welsh Marches. He served with John in the Continental wars which led up to the loss of Normandy. It was to his keeping that the king first entrusted the captive Arthur of Brittany. Coggeshall is our authority for the tale of Hubert's refusal to permit the mutilation of his prisoner; but his loyalty was not shaken by the subsequent murder of Arthur. In 1204 Hubert persisted in a long and obstinate defence of Chinon, at a time when nearly the whole of Poitou had passed into French hands. In 1213 he was appointed seneschal of Poitou.
Both before and after the issue of the Great Charter Hubert adhered loyally to the king; he was rewarded, in June 1215, with the office of chief justiciar, which he retained after the death of John and the election of William, the earl marshal, as regent. But, until the expulsion of the French from England, Hubert was entirely engaged with military affairs. He held Dover suc cessfully through the darkest hour of John's fortunes; and his naval victory gained over Eustace the Monk, the noted privateer and admiral of Louis, in the Straits of Dover (Aug. 1217), compelled Louis to accept the treaty of Lambeth, under which he renounced his claims to the crown and evacuated England. The justiciar naturally assumed, after the death of William Marshal (1219), the leadership of the English loyalists. He was opposed by the legate Pandulf (1218-21), who claimed the guardianship of the kingdom for the Holy See; by the Poitevin Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, who was the young king's tutor; by the foreign mercenaries of John, among whom Falkes de Breaute took the lead ; and by the feudal party under the earls of Chester and Albemarle. On Pandulf's departure the pope was induced to promise that no other legate should be appointed in the lifetime of Archbishop Stephen Langton. In 1223 the justiciar suddenly announced the resumption of all the castles, sheriffdoms, and other grants which had been made since the king's accession. A plausible excuse was found in the next year for issuing a sentence of confiscation and banishment against Falkes de Breaute. Finally, in 1227, Hubert, having proclaimed the king of age, dismissed the bishop of Winchester from his tutorship.
Hubert now stood at the height of his power. His possessions had been enlarged by four successive marriages, particularly by that which he contracted in 1221 with Margaret, the sister of Alexander II. of Scotland; in 1227 he received the earldom of Kent which had been dormant since the disgrace of Odo of Bayeux. But Henry III. chafed against Hubert's objections to wild plans of foreign conquest and inconsiderate concessions to the papacy. They quarrelled violently in 1229 at Portsmouth, when a sufficient supply of ships was not forthcoming for an expedition to France. In 1231 Henry lent an ear to those who asserted that the justiciar had secretly encouraged armed attacks upon the aliens to whom the pope had given English benefices. Hubert was suddenly disgraced and required to render an account of his long administration. Some colour was given to the attacks of Peter des Roches and his nephew Peter des Rievaux by Hubert's injudicious plea that he held a charter from King John which exempted him from any liability to produce accounts. He was dragged from the sanctuary at Bury St. Edmunds, in which he had taken refuge, and was kept in strait confinement until Richard of Cornwall, the king's brother, and three other earls offered to be his sureties. On the outbreak of Richard Marshal's rebellion (1233), he was carried off by the rebels to the Marshal stronghold of Striguil, in the hope that his name would add popularity to their cause. In I234 he was admitted, along with the other supporters of the fallen Marshal, to the benefit of a full pardon. He regained his earldom and held it till his death, although he was once in serious danger from the avarice of the king (1239), who was tempted by Hubert's enormous wealth to revive the charge of treason which had formerly been brought against him.
Hubert's ambition of founding a great family was not realized. His earldom died with him, though he left two sons. In constitu tional history he is remembered as the last of the great justiciars. The office was now shorn of its most important powers and became politically insignificant.
See The Histoire des ducs de Normandie, edited by F. Michel for the Soc. de l'Hist. de France (1840) ; Roger of Wendover's Flores Historiaruni, edited for the English Historical Society by H. 0. Coxe (1841-44) ; the Chronica Majora of Matthew Paris, edited by H. R. Luard for the Rolls Series (5872-83) ; the Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal, edited by Paul Meyer for the Soc. de l'Hist. de France (1891, etc.) ; J. E. Doyle's Official Baronage of England, ii. pp. 271 274; R. Pauli's Geschichte von England, vol. iii.; W. Stubbs's Consti tutional History of England, vol. ii.