A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Of more pressing concern to both barons and King was the question of how to bind the King to the future observance of the charter’s promises. Here, the charter included a ‘sanctions’ clause, clause 61, according to which a committee of twenty-five barons was to be appointed to oversee the charter’s implementation. Should the King in any way infringe the charter’s terms or fail to heed baronial warnings, then the twenty-five might rise against him and seize his resources, short of causing him or his family physical injury. A charter issued by the King as God’s supposed vicar on earth was thus made to impose a baronial committee of twenty-five extremely angry and self-ishly motivated barons between God and the King.

  With this sanctions clause at its climax, there could be no question that the charter itself would survive. The King almost immediately repudiated it. Pope Innocent III, confronted by a document that threatened to institute rebellion as a constitutional instrument and to place limitations upon the God-given authority exercised by all sovereigns, from popes to kings, not only annulled Magna Carta but ordered the suspension of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. If not exactly responsible for encouraging the barons in their claims, or for writing any particular clauses of the charter, Langton had failed to lend the King the unconditional support that the papacy believed was John’s due. Like the very idea of reducing English custom to writing, as a sort of Plantagenet Leviticus or code of laws, some of the statements of principle expressed in Magna Carta, such as the insistence under clause 60 that customs and liberties granted by the King to his barons be extended by the barons to their own men, have an ecclesiastical stamp to them. To this extent, Langton’s Parisian background was crucial in the formulation of the most detailed statement of English ‘liberties’ yet attempted. Meanwhile, born in June 1215, Magna Carta died ignominiously and ignored, within only three months of its issue. So at least the King believed.

  Henry III

  There followed a year of civil war, in which John’s military household and a loyalist party headed by the veteran William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was pitted against the baronial coalition, itself now prepared to invite the son of the King of France to join them in London. Louis, Philip’s son, was a grandson of Henry II of England and therefore a suitable foreign claimant to be groomed for the English throne. John himself died at Newark on Trent, in October 1216, with England in disarray, leaving a nine-year-old boy named Henry as his eldest son and heir. A rerun of the events of the 1130s seemed imminent, with the unsuitability of the legitimate heir to the throne – Henry III in 1216, compared with Empress Matilda and her three-year-old son, the future Henry II, in 1135 – opening the way to an opportunistic rival to seize the throne. The Plantagenet dynasty itself seemed destined for extinction. In other parts of Europe where boys had been recognized as kings, most notably in the kingdom of Sicily and the German empire where the young Frederick II had been only two years old at the time of his father’s death in 1197, attempts to govern via minority councils until the boy came of age had been marked by bloodshed and internecine strife.

  In England, a dynastic revolution was prevented by two chief factors. Firstly there was the memory of the disastrous reign of Stephen and the determination never again to deprive a young heir of his throne merely because he was not of age. This was clearly in the mind of the King’s councillors in 1216. It was still there in the 1370s, and again in the 1420s, when the future Kings Richard II and Henry VI were both crowned in boyhood, with disastrous consequences as we shall see. Secondly, in 1216 not only did John himself decree that his son Henry should succeed him, but he enlisted the assistance of the Pope to ensure that this was done.

  Ever since 1213, John had technically been a subject of the Pope, having delivered up England to Pope Innocent III as a papal fiefdom owing an annual ‘census’ or tribute of 1,000 marks (700 for England, 300 for Ireland) as part of his settlement with the English Church. Regarded by monastic chroniclers at the time as a dangerous invitation to papal imperialism, and derided by later Protestant historians as perhaps the very worst of King John’s crimes, the homage rendered by John to the papacy was in reality a clever political device, like John’s subsequent taking of vows as a crusader, intended to place England under papal protection, and above all to ensure that the Pope was now intruded as John’s overlord at a time when the French King’s claim to overlordship had already led to the confiscation of Normandy and now threatened a French invasion of England. In 1216, it was the Pope’s representative, the papal legate, Guala of Vercelli, who crowned the boy king at Gloucester Abbey. The ceremony was conducted with extreme haste, clearly to prevent Louis and the barons organizing a coronation of their own in Westminster where Louis might ‘officially’ be received as King. Because the coronation regalia, the crown and so forth, were in baronial hands in London, the legate had to employ a chaplet or crown of flowers as a makeshift alternative. Ever afterwards, Henry III looked to the Pope as his chief guardian and guide, keenly remembering that it was a papal legate who had ‘recalled the realm to our peace and subjection, consecrated and crowned us King, and raised us to our throne’.

  The influence of the Pope and his legates was not always regarded by the English as so benign. It led, after 1215, to the importation of large numbers of Italians into England, promoted to churches and benefices previously held by clergy attached to the rebel barons, these churches thereafter transformed into the object of regular papal ‘provision’, a system whereby the Pope claimed the right to override the claims of local patrons and to intrude his own candidates into parishes and cathedral prebends. As early as the 1220s, provision led to complaints in England culminating in a full-scale riot against Italians and provisors. Through to the 1350s, it remained a major source of tension in dealings between England and Rome.

  It is therefore all the more ironic that it should have been the papal legate, the representative of Pope Innocent III (who himself had done most to annul and anathematize the 1215 Magna Carta), who now sought to rescue the charter, presented at Bristol in November 1216 as a manifesto of future good government, reissued by the boy King and his counsellors, sealed by the legate Guala, in very similar terms to the 1215 document, save for the omission of the controversial sanctions clause which in 1215 had placed a baronial committee above the King. Magna Carta was reissued again in November 1217, again under the legate’s seal. It was these reissues of the charter that rescued it from oblivion and set it on its course to fame and semi-scriptural status as the foundation stone of English constitutional law. Without Paris-trained theologians such as Stephen Langton, and without Italian papal legates, Magna Carta might never have been written, and would most certainly never have survived. The emergence of English liberties was a truly European affair, embodied in the universalities of the Latin language, not an isolated ‘island story’ to be narrated in Anglo-Saxon or Eurosceptic grunts.

  Parliament

  With the reissue of Magna Carta came the idea of the King as a member, albeit as the most senior member, of the council by which England was governed. Kingship was not divested of its sacral elements. Indeed, King John’s son and successor was to attempt to portray himself as direct heir to Edward the Confessor, the most sacral King in English history. Even so, with the adoption of Magna Carta as a manifesto of good government, and with the insistence at each successive political crisis that it be reissued as a totemic summary of English ‘liberties’, we do indeed find ourselves on the broad highway that led via Magna Carta to the recognition that the King could not act without council or consent, to Parliament and to the idea of a ‘community of the realm’ in whose interests the King must govern and with which he must work in harmony.

  The word ‘Parliament’, in the sense of a ‘talking shop’ or meeting of the King’s great council, was first used in 1236. Parliament itself first met in 1254, whilst Henry III was in Gascony. The King’s brother, who presided over this meeting, required each of the counties of England to send two elected representatives to dis
cuss the matters of the realm, which in practice meant to discuss the possibility of assisting the King with taxes. In 1265, these county members were joined by nominated representatives of up to sixty English boroughs and towns. The county and borough members, the ‘Commons’, thereafter were summoned only intermittently during the reign of Edward I and did not become a regular feature of Parliament’s meetings until the reign of Edward II, when it became accepted that they alone had the right to grant or withhold ‘subsidy’ (the grant of taxation) to the crown.

  Parliament itself, meanwhile, in the sense of the seventy or so earls, barons and bannerets and the twenty bishops and fifty abbots entitled to individual summonses, met on a near annual basis during the reign of Edward I, through to the 1290s. By the 1320s, when the practicalities begin to become clear, the nominated county and borough members were meeting as a House of Commons, for the most part distinct from the 150 or so ‘lords’ spiritual and temporal who claimed the right, by precedence and status, to sit in a ‘House of Peers’. Within the next twenty years, the lower clergy (parish priests and so forth), who through to the 1320s had sent representatives to the Commons, were meeting separately in their own assembly known as ‘Convocation’, alone judged capable of granting or withholding taxes payable by the Church.

  To constitutional historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the road from Magna Carta to Parliament appeared both swift and straight. In fact, this sort of ‘Whig interpretation’ of the emergence of constitutional liberty is a gross oversimplification of more complicated and less linear processes. To understand this, we need to engage with the events of a reign longer than those of Henry II and King John combined, longer indeed than any reign in English history save for those of George III, Victoria and Elizabeth II.

  Henry the ‘Preoccupied’

  Henry III, King of England from 1216 to 1272, is one of those unfortunate kings famed neither for great wickedness nor for outstanding worth. Dante, writing less than fifty years after Henry’s death, considered him worthy of inclusion in the Divine Comedy, but placed him in Purgatory, amidst the third class of the late-repentant, the ‘preoccupied’: ‘There, alone, sits Henry of England, King of the simple life’, more blessed in his posterity than by his own deeds. Shakespeare, three hundred years later, had no use for Henry III save as a walk-on part in his tragedy of King John, where the infant Henry attends the final agonies of his father, but spends more time in weeping than in speech. The one point of agreement between Dante and Shakespeare, shared by most historians who have since written on the subject is that Henry III pales into insignificance when compared either with his father, the ‘wicked’ King John, or with his eldest son, the ‘good’ King Edward I.

  Even in his own lifetime, Henry never caught the imagination of his contemporaries in the same way as his father or his son. Although ruling at the same time as two of the most vividly reported kings of the Middle Ages – the German Emperor Frederick II, and King Louis IX of France – Henry was commemorated by no contemporary biographer. Instead, his life, his ‘policy’ (if he ever had one) and his personality have to be reconstructed using a less than satisfactory combination of chronicle and administrative sources that tends to emphasize ‘policy’ at the expense of ‘personality’. Matthew Paris, the great chronicler of St Albans Abbey, who several times met the King and on occasion seems to have been treated almost as an official royal historiographer, tells us that Henry, despite a less than prepossessing appearance (one of his eyelids drooped), was no fool. He could recite the names of 250 English baronies, of all of the electors who had the right to choose the Holy Roman Emperor, and, here demonstrating his extraordinary personal piety, of all of the sainted kings of the Anglo-Saxon past. Such lists, however, like the extraordinary detail that emerges from the records of the King’s commands for paintings, statuary and decoration in his palaces, speak less of great intelligence than of a rote-like determination to demonstrate the King’s expertise.

  Henry was not autistic. The record of his genuine affection for his wife and children, and even his remarkable petulance and bursts of rage, speak of a rich emotional engagement with those around him. Even so, he was perhaps the least ‘clever’ king to have ruled England since Edward the Confessor. Hence the incredible events at Lincoln in 1255, when Henry effectively sponsored a pogrom, moved by the complaints of a local woman that her son (‘Little Saint Hugh’) had been abducted and murdered by the city’s Jews. Previously, whenever such stories of Jewish ritual murder had reached the ears of kings or royal justices, they had been rejected with a healthy degree of scepticism. Henry’s emotional engagement and his deep identification with the cult of a child martyr, led to tragedy and appalling injustice. Hence too the story told by the Italian chronicler, Salimbene. Henry III, so this story went, was insulted at his court by a jester or minstrel. In a variation of remarks already passed against William the Conqueror, the jester announced that Henry resembled Jesus Christ. When questioned, he explained that just as Christ had possessed the wisdom of a man of thirty from the time that he was conceived, so Henry, though an adult, could claim to possess the wisdom of a baby boy. Henry demanded that the man be taken away and hanged. His courtiers pretended to comply, but as soon as they were out of earshot, let the jester go free. The story was intended to illustrate Henry’s simplicity and petulance, his lack of authority, of guile and even of common sense.

  To some extent, the dearth of direct biographical reporting on Henry III is characteristic of a wider phenomenon that affects historical writing on all of the early Plantagenet kings: the sudden explosion in record sources after the year 1200. The twelfth-century kings of England may or may not have kept copies of their outgoing correspondence. If they did, virtually all such copies have been lost. From 1199, however, and with ever mounting volume thereafter, the royal chancery began not only to draw up but to preserve ‘rolls’ of its outgoing letters, divided between various classes of business and by the 1230s preserving, for any one year of the King’s reign, a quite phenomenal number of individual royal letters, several thousand for each year. Where for the twelfth century we depend upon chroniclers, rumour and the King’s financial accounts (the ‘Pipe Rolls’) for our knowledge of events and government, from 1200 onwards there is a risk that the historian becomes overwhelmed by a mountain of detail. Later Plantagenet history can all too easily dissolve into an encyclopedic recital of thousands of individual ‘facts’: the narrative excitement of a train timetable is joined to the intellectual profundity of the London telephone directory, letters A to B. As a result, Henry III remains one of the least appreciated of England’s medieval kings. As Sellar and Yeatman put it in their comic masterpiece 1066 and All That, parodying the cruder political narrative taught in England’s schools, Henry III was neither a good nor a bad but ‘A Confused Sort of King’.

  As a mere boy for his first ten years on the throne, Henry could not be permitted either to fight or to govern. Instead, a self-appointed minority council stepped in to rule on the King’s behalf. At Lincoln, in May 1217, the ageing regent, William Marshal, triumphed in battle against the rebels. Louis of France remained in occupation of London, but was starved of further supplies when his ships were ambushed and sunk off the coast of Sandwich by a fleet commanded by the royalist constable of Dover, Hubert de Burgh. Louis sued for peace and did public penance outside Kingston upon Thames, dressed only in his woollen underwear, promising to pay 10,000 marks in damages for his assault upon a realm in theory placed under papal protection as a result of its status both as a papal fief and at a time when the Pope wished men’s attention to be focussed upon crusading for the recovery of Jerusalem, not upon selfish squabbling nearer home. Louis’s clerical supporters were to attend Mass, shoeless and wearing only their shirts, and to be ritually beaten seven times within the coming year. Magna Carta was reissued for the second time since 1215, as a pledge of good government from royalists to rebels. In May 1220, at Westminster Abbey – since 1066 the traditional place of
coronation – Henry was crowned for a second time, by the newly returned Archbishop Langton, in a ceremony intended to wipe clean all memory of the chaos of 1216. But still he was not permitted to rule. Within the governing minority council, bitter rivalries developed, most notably between Peter des Roches, the French-born bishop of Winchester, and Hubert de Burgh, for all his French-sounding name a native of Burgh in Norfolk and one of the first nativeborn Englishmen since 1066 to achieve a leading role in English government. Both Peter des Roches and Hubert de Burgh were former servants of King John, so that their hatred of one another was fuelled not only by issues of nationality or policy but by tensions stretching back twenty years or more.

  In 1223, des Roches attempted to persuade the Pope to end the King’s minority. The scheme misfired, and instead it was de Burgh who edged des Roches from power. The King was declared of age and began to issue charters in his own name. Magna Carta was reissued in 1225, in its final and definitive form and in return for a grant of taxation by Church and barons, intended to pay for the defence of Henry’s remaining dominion in France. Superficially, this can be read as a sign of reconciliation and recovery after the civil war of John’s reign. In reality, not only did it paper over deep divisions within the court, but it marked the first occasion since 1066, indeed perhaps the first time in English history, that a reigning king had been forced into concessions by a simple lack of funds. In 1225, 1232, 1234, and almost continually from the late 1230s onwards, the King’s lack of financial resources was to become a predominant theme in politics, forcing Henry and his successors into negotiations with their realm that were entirely to reshape the face of English kingship.