He summoned his sulfragans to Boulogne, and gave them the excommunication to be published. The bishops obeyed the primate so far as to meet him at Boulogne, but took care that their papers were confiscated at Dover. In the beginning of 1261 Boniface was at Amiens, pleading the king's cause in the arbitration which had been referred to Louis IX. When war broke out, Boniface was one of the foremost members of the party of exiles who raised forces in France and intrigued against the barons. On the triumph of the royalists in 1265 Boniface returned to England. It would seem that he was not considered strong enough to conduct the reactionary policy by which Henry III proposed to reduce the rebellious party in the church. His reputation suffered through the activity of the papal legate, Cardinal Ottobone, who left his mark on the history of the English church by the constitutions enacted under his guidance in the council of London in 1268. In this legislative work Boniface was incapable of taking any share. When Edward set out for a crusade in 1269, Boniface offered to accompany him. He does not, however, seem to have gone further than Savoy, where he died, at the castle of St. Helena, on 18 July 1270, and was buried in the burying-place of the Savoy house at Hautecombe.
Archhishop Boniface did nothing that was important either for church or state in England. He was a man of small ability, even in practical matters, with which alone he was competent to deal. He is praised for three things only: he freed the see of Canterbury from debt; he built an almshouse at Maidstone; and he finished the erection of the great hall at Lambeth which Hubert Walter had begun.
[The life of Boniface has to be gleaned from scattered notices in Matthew Paris, Matthew of Westminster, the annals contained in Luard‘s Annales Monastici, the letters of Bishop Grosseteste, Shirley's Royal Letters of the Reign of Henry III, the letters of Adam de Marisco in Brewer’s Monumenta Franciscana, and the documents in Rymer's Fœdera, vol. i. A connected account is given by Godwin, De Præsulibus Angliæ, and from the foreign side by Guichenon, Histoire de la Maison royale de Savoie, i. 259; in greater detail by Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vol. iii.]
BONINGTON, RICHARD PARKES (1801–1828), painter in oil and water colours, was born at the village of Arnold, near Nottingham, on 25 Oct. 1801. His grand-father was governor of Nottingham gaol, to which post his father succeeded, but the latter lost it through irregularities. His mother’s name was Parkes, and she kept a Ladies’school at Arnold, which was afterwards moved to Nottingham; but it was broken up by the imprudent conduct of her husband, and the family went to Calais. The father had previously taken to painting, and he exhibited a landscape at the Royal Academy in 1797, and a portrait in 1808, and published a few coloured prints. At Calais he set up a bobbin net lace factory with Clarke and Webster, and was one of the first to promote in this locality an industry which has since become very prosperous there, His partnership was, however, broken up in 1818, and he subsequently kept a lace shop with Webster in Paris. When very young Richard showed a great love for art and acting. He is said to have sketched ‘everything’ at three years old, and to have drawn with accuracy, and even taste, when seven or eight. At Calais he gained instruction from Louis Francia, the water-colourist. At Paris, when only fifteen, he studied at the Louvre. It was there, in 1816 or 1817, that Eugene Delacroix, then himself a student, was first struck with Bonington’s skill, as he watched him silently copying old pictures, generally Flemish landscapes, in water-colours, and a friendship soon sprang up between them. ‘Je l'ai beaucoup connu et je l'aimais beaucoup,’ he writes in a letter published in Burger’s study of Bonington in C. Blane's ‘Histoire des Peintres.’ At this time painting in water-colour was almost unknown in France, and his drawings, whether originals or copies, sold rapidly when exhibited in the shop windows of M. Schroth and Madame Halin. He became a pupil at the Institute, and for a while (in 1850 certainly) drew in the atelier of Baron Gros. His progress was very rapid, but he is said to have disregarded academic precepts, and also to have displeased Gros by his laxity, till one day, after seeing one of his water-colours in a shop, Gros embraced him before all the pupils, and told him to leave his atelier and marcher seul. He also studied and sketched much in the open air, taking excursions down the Seine. In 1822 he for the first time exhibited at the Salon, and obtained a premium of 430 francs from the Société des Amis des Arts for his two drawings—Views at Lillebonne and Havre.
In 1824 the same society purchased his ‘Vue d‘Abbeville’ at the Salon, where Bonington also exhibited a coast scene with fishermen selling their fish, and a ‘Plage sablonneuse.’ He as well as two other Englishmen, Constable and Copley Fielding, received a medal. The work of English artists in this year's Salon is acknowledged to have revolutionised the landscape art of France, and Bonington had certainly no small share
