by Dan Jones
‘I beg the Lord our God that, if I ever did anything to please him, that in the end he grant you to grow up to be a worthy man,’ Marshal said. ‘And if it were the case that you followed in the footsteps of some wicked ancestor and that your wish was to be like him, then I pray to God, the son of Mary, that you die before it comes to that.’
‘Amen,’ the king replied.
By the time Marshal died, the young Henry III was no babe in arms: he was old enough to be consulted on matters of governance and was given his own seal to ratify decisions made on his behalf. Yet if he had an awareness of the stiff realities of government, that did not mean that he was trusted to take on the business of rule for himself. For as long as he remained a child there would be faction and uncertainty.
Government after Marshal began by triumvirate, with Pandulph, Peter des Roches and Hubert de Burgh all having a hand in reconstructing England’s battered administration after the ravages of civil war. But after Henry’s second, more magnificent coronation in 1220 – this time in the grander surroundings of Canterbury – des Roches fell from grace and eventually departed for the Holy Land. Thereafter de Burgh dominated. Throughout the 1220s Henry clung to the justiciar for advice and leadership in rebuilding royal finance and directing campaigns to subdue internal rebellion by truculent barons and Welsh aggression under Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd.
De Burgh did his best to treat with Llywelyn and rebuild the ravaged royal finances. Yet kingship without the king was a ship captained by committee, and any realm under a minority smacked of weakness. When Philip II died in 1223, his 35-year-old son – England’s erstwhile invader – became Louis VIII, and determined almost at once to attack the English Crown’s position in Poitou.
After the domestic disturbance of the early years, this was the first real foreign crisis of the reign. The critical blow fell in summer 1224 when the citizens of La Rochelle heard the thunderous approach of a French army before their walls. The new and energetic king of France wheeled his siege engines against them from the land; with a weak and still impoverished young king of England on the other side of the Channel it was not surprising that the townsmen surrendered almost immediately, selling their allegiance for French coin.
Poitou itself had been held precariously ever since John’s ill-fated sally in 1214. But losing La Rochelle removed a vital English foothold on the continental coast and a base for defence or recovery of possessions there, and it put Channel shipping into serious jeopardy. As the chronicler Roger of Wendover explained: ‘[La] Rochelle is … where the kings of England and their knights usually land for the defence of those districts; but now the way was closed to the king.’
Meanwhile, the Aquitanian baron Hugh de Lusignan, who had married John’s widow Queen Isabella and was thus now technically Henry’s stepfather, overran most of Gascony. The already truncated English rump of Aquitaine was reduced to Bordeaux and a few coastal towns. All that was left of the western seaboard of the Plantagenet continental possessions was in danger of being lost for good.
Recovering Gascony and Poitou was a matter of urgency for Hubert and Henry. Family pride depended on it. But what did it hold for anyone else? Merchants did good business in the wine trade, but they were not political men. No English baron had a stake there. Thus the need to recover Poitou and Gascony raised fundamental questions about the means by which the English Crown could finance war on the Continent. The refusal of John’s barons to join his various expeditions had touched off the crisis that ended with Magna Carta and civil war. How could Hubert and Henry convince the same class that now, eleven years later, it was in their interest to fight for land where they had no financial stake?
This, in a nutshell, was to be the central dilemma of kingship for the rest of Henry’s long reign. Although he had not really known any of his royal ancestors, Henry felt keenly the historical burden of restoring their prestige, a task he saw as expressed through the defence of what was left of the continental empire, the expansion of power back into the old lands of central and western France, and building influence on the fringes of Henry II and Richard’s empire in Germany, Sicily and Castile. Yet these were precisely the burdens which, under John, had been shown to be intolerable to the political community of England. In 1224–5, the new regime needed urgently to restate the case for restoring the Plantagenet empire.
The solution came by two routes. The first appealed to fear. Wild rumours circulated that with the Channel full of French shipping and a hungry new Capetian king on the throne, England was under threat of another invasion. If continental reconquest was of little interest to the English barons, then defence of the coast was at least still a worthy rallying cause. Hubert de Burgh played on the invasion scare for all it was worth and succeeded in making it – in the short term at least – a valid reason for national military expenditure.
The second line of attack – which was to matter far more both in the political history of Henry’s reign and the constitutional development of Plantagenet kingship for nearly two centuries afterwards – was to make the decisive move in the long process to heal the wounds of John’s reign, and reissue Magna Carta. It was granted to the assembled lay and ecclesiastical lords of England in a great council in January 1225, as a political exchange for the grant of a tax of one fifteenth part of England’s movables.
Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest had been issued twice since their original promulgation. But the 1225 reissued documents were, in the long run, far more important than the versions that had been foisted upon John at Runnymede, or the two updates that had been issued by the minority government as it attempted to cling to, then to shore up power in 1216 and 1217. Together they formed a grant that would change the course not just of Henry’s reign but of the Plantagenet generations that followed him. No longer an ad hoc collection of liberties asserted hotchpotch, the charters became a symbolic statement of political principle.
The reissue of the Charter of the Forest was particularly important, for it represented a physical limitation of the reach of Plantagenet kingship. Forest law was onerous and generally resented by private landowners – resisting the creep of royal forest literally meant confronting the most powerful arm of kingship on the ground. Committees of men were appointed to physically walk the boundaries of the royal forests and provide reports on its extent.
That the reissue of the charters represented a quid pro quo between king and political community was unmistakable, to Roger of Wendover at least: ‘All the assembly of bishops, earls, barons, abbots, and priors … gave … that they would willingly accede to the king’s demands [for a fifteenth] if he would grant them their long-sought liberties.’
Thus the deal was struck, and on 15 and 16 February 1225 packets of orders were sent to every county sheriff in England, ordering them to proclaim and observe the charters and carry out new surveys of the forest boundary, while also making provision for the assessment and collection of a tax that would unlock tens of thousands of pounds of national wealth for an expedition that – for all its advertisement as a means to protect the coasts – was essentially a private royal expedition of reconquest.
In immediate political terms the tax was wildly successful, raising £45,000 – far more than from previous attempts by the minority government to raise finance by feudal levies. The money enabled Henry and Hubert to muster a well-equipped summer expedition to relieve Gascony. It was led by the king’s younger brother Richard – by now a vigorous young man of sixteen, who had been raised to the rank of earl of Cornwall as a birthday present at the beginning of the year – and the 49-year-old statesman, military veteran and royal uncle, the earl of Salisbury.
The expedition, richly equipped and led by an old hand, was a success. The English came fast and fought hard, driving back the French and preventing them from overrunning the last of the English possessions. Salisbury soon found that he could not retake Poitou in a single campaigning season, but their efforts secured Gascony and its valuable wine trade for the
English Crown, establishing a dependency that would last for more than two centuries. It was a high point of Henry’s minority.
Yet the territorial and trade gains were arguably of less significance than the bargain that was struck at home: that of consultation, reform and public finance. As English royal flags fluttered above Gascon castles, copies of the two great charters flew around the kingdom across the Channel. Royal lawyers scratched their heads and wondered how they could find gaps in the charters and ways to maintain royal prerogative wherever possible. But the genie was out of the bottle. The charters were revered wherever they landed. And it swiftly became obvious that a constitutional bargain had been struck. Henry’s administration had begun a process by which finance for military expeditions was bargained for with detailed concessions of political liberties, written up in the form of charters that were distributed far and wide across the realm. The deal had been done in an assembly of barons, bishops and other magnates which, if it could hardly yet be called a parliament, was at least something like the beginnings of what would become one. The feudal prerogatives of kings and their rights over their subjects were now a matter for debate and discussion with the political community. It was a compact that would endure for the rest of the Middle Ages.
Kingship at Last
Henry’s minority could, and perhaps should, have come to an end in late 1225. It would have been a reasonable date for many reasons: the king would have been eighteen, old enough to call himself a man. The definitive issue of the charters would have marked both a clean break with his father’s reign and a point from which decisively to launch his own. And it would have proved especially advantageous when, in November 1226, Louis VIII died of dysentery aged thirty-nine, and the long minority of his son, the new French king, twelve-year-old Louis IX, began.
But 1225 did not mark a clean break. Nor indeed did January 1227, when a nineteen-year-old Henry declared himself fully of age at a council in Oxford. Although the king began to build up his own household, independent of his advisers, it was clear that he was far from competent in the exercise of power. He was pulled in two directions, particularly with regard to France. On the one hand, Henry attempted to raise money for the reconquest of Normandy and Poitou in 1228 and 1229, while simultaneously wriggling where he could out of the obligations of the charters that had been promulgated in 1225. Yet on the other, it was clear that real power still lay with de Burgh, whose reticence for war on the Continent damped the enthusiasm that both Henry and his brother Richard earl of Cornwall felt for it. Henry’s dismally unsuccessful attempts to invade Normandy in 1229 and 1230 were restrained by de Burgh’s caution, which prevented the major offensive required to match the king’s ambition.
With de Burgh clinging on to power in his position as justiciar-for-life, and Henry lacking the strength and self-confidence to grasp the reins of government, the quasi-minority continued: a tortuous affair, drawn out long past its rightful length, for the best part of another decade. It was not until 1234 that Henry truly shook off the men whom he had inherited from his father’s reign, and it took a crisis of the utmost gravity to induce him to do so.
This slothful progress towards adulthood and independence, and his over-reliance on fatherly ministers to guide his hand to the point of regency, were products of the king’s character. Henry was from his earliest years vague and somewhat guileless, possessed of vision but not the ability to put his ideas into practice, or the stomach for headstrong personal government that had been common among even the worst of his ancestors.
Having grown up with no kingly role model, Henry was excessively drawn to paternal figures, an instinct that also underlay his infuriating tendency to take the last, rather than the best, piece of advice given. Henry had inherited the Plantagenet temper, and there were numerous occasions during his reign when he flew into rages with his friends and ministers, hurling violent abuse at them and occasionally trying to brain them with nearby objects; during one fit of temper he tried to attack Hubert Walter with a blunted sword. Yet he could rarely stay angry with his advisers for long enough to displace or remove them, and as a consequence they remained around him, governing on his behalf for an unseemly length of time.
The longer that de Burgh’s hands stayed clamped on the levers of power, the deeper into malaise Henry’s reign subsided. While the justiciar enriched himself with wardships that gave him the profits of major estates, Henry suffered the political consequences of petty squabbling between Hubert and leading young barons who should have formed a loyalist core around the new king: in particular William Marshal’s son Richard, and Richard earl of Cornwall, who were provoked into revolt in 1231.
De Burgh’s regime was bad enough – obviously self-serving and at odds with the king’s own aims in government. Yet things grew far worse in 1231 with the return from crusade of Henry’s one-time tutor, Peter des Roches. The overbearing des Roches had no intention of allowing de Burgh to run England for his own profit, and saw to it that he manoeuvred himself swiftly back into a position of royal influence. Henry was briefly torn between two senior officials, both of whom had exercised formative and paternal influence on him, but who could never work together, particularly in the absence of a king powerful enough to keep them from faction and infighting. In the end, it was des Roches’s sway that proved the stronger. In July 1232 there was a violent quarrel at Woodstock between the king and de Burgh, which ended with the 24-year-old king accusing his mentor of a bewildering array of crimes, including poisoning the earl of Salisbury and the earl of Pembroke, both of whom had recently died (almost certainly unmolested by de Burgh). De Burgh was tried in London before his peers – an unmistakable nod towards the demands of Magna Carta and the new political reality – and he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Devizes castle.
So the pendulum swung. Des Roches now dominated Henry and government. Henry briefly delighted in the precious jewels and trinkets that he had confiscated from de Burgh, and enjoyed a rare period of solvency: in September 1232 des Roches secured for him a tax to pay for a campaign in Brittany and in 1233 the government laid a savage tally on the Jews. But to the country at large, nothing had changed. Des Roches’s rule was no advance on what had preceded it, not only because des Roches was even less popular and more overbearing an influence than de Burgh, and brought with him hated followers who had blighted John’s reign. Rather, the bishop’s presence beside Henry only exacerbated the deeper problem of the reign. England needed kingship in person, and not by proxy. And yet for two more years it got further partisan rule by an overbearing minister. To secure his position, des Roches rid the court of his opponents and set about building up himself and his followers with lucrative royal offices, castles and lands. According to Wendover, under des Roches’s guidance Henry ‘exiled his nobles and barons without judgement of their peers, burning their villages and houses, cutting down their woods and orchards, and destroying their parks and fishponds’. The principles of Magna Carta were trodden underfoot. This did nothing to improve relations between the king and Richard Marshal, who rebelled twice in 1233, sparking a minor civil war and throwing Henry’s attempts to campaign against rebels in Wales into disarray.
It was clear to all that the situation was untenable. According to Roger of Wendover, magnates were beginning to talk of deposing Henry in June 1233. In a great council at Westminster in February the English bishops implored the king to rid himself of des Roches and his pernicious henchmen and stand on his own. Henry agreed, but immediately, as would become his way at times of crisis, took fright at the prospect of imposing his will on the politics of his realm. Instead of sweeping the board and installing new ministers, he vanished from Westminster for more than a month on a tour of the holy shrines of East Anglia, praying to the holy fragment of the True Cross in the monastery at Bromholm, the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Walsingham and other favourite monasteries.
Richard Marshal and Llywelyn of Wales were in rebellion; yet the king was on a pilgrimage. In April 1234 R
ichard Marshal died from his wounds after a battle in Ireland and Henry was – wildly and erroneously – accused in some parts of having had him murdered. In May 1234 the crisis in government had grown so acute that the English bishops, led by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Rich, were threatening to excommunicate him.
Finally Henry shook himself into action. With some regret he ordered des Roches to retire to his diocese, and took control of government in his own right for the first time. He was half-hearted about ruling, but it was clear that if he did not do so he would very swiftly find himself in the same dire circumstances that his father had suffered just before his death. At a great council held at Gloucester directly after des Roches’s fall, Henry acknowledged that his ministers had failed to abide by Magna Carta in affording their enemies ‘judgement by their peers’. He reversed some of the arbitrary land seizures undertaken by des Roches and committed himself once more to the spirit of Magna Carta by promising to take the great decisions of his reign after consultation with great councils of his magnates. Out of the crisis of 1233–4, Henry emerged, however unwillingly, as a king – and a king in keeping with the spirit of the realm, in which consensual observance of the principles of Magna Carta was becoming esteemed above all other things.
Curiously, at the same time as he emerged into kingship it also became clear that Henry was undergoing a form of spiritual transformation. As all his realm erupted in uproar caused by his overbearing ministers, rebellious barons and truculent Welshmen, Henry – deeply wounded and confused by the upheaval – was beginning to look into English history for the inspiration he thought would help him to finally become a king worthy of the name. He found it not in one of his more recent relatives, but in the life story of one of his more distant ancestors, the saintly last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Edward the Confessor.
