A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  In 1230, with Hubert de Burgh’s assistance, Henry mounted an ineffective expedition to Brittany in the hope of recruiting allies for the reconquest of the Plantagenet lands north of the Loire. Hubert himself had little interest in France: his family had hardly possessed any land there before the French conquest of 1204. As a result, the King was perhaps right to suspect Hubert of only lukewarm support for his continental ventures. The expedition led to financial crisis. In addition, Hubert and his household were implicated in nationwide riots against the absentee Italian clergy intruded to English churches since 1215. In the midst of these wranglings, provoked by a new sense of English national identity, the King’s former guardian, Peter des Roches, returned to court.

  Since 1224, des Roches had earned both admiration and a European-wide reputation as a crusader and as a power broker between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, himself a king who sought to rule in magnificent style, independent of any cloying council or restraint. Exploiting the King’s frustration with the government of de Burgh – who continued to treat Henry as if he were still a child and on one notorious occasion had even threatened to box the young King’s ears – des Roches stage-managed the arrest of his rival. From 1232 to 1234 he presided over a regime that threatened to restore many of the worst practices of King John. Estates, in theory guaranteed by royal charter, were arbitrarily seized and handed over to des Roches’s friends. A hugely expensive operation was mounted to support the King’s allies in France. The outcome was baronial rebellion, led on this occasion by Richard Marshal, younger son and heir to the King’s first regent, William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. Richard was killed in the subsequent fighting, the most serious outbreak of public violence since 1217, a civil war in all but name in which the Marshal affinity, one of the greatest of the military households of medieval England and previously the gamekeepers of royal policy in Ireland and the Welsh Marches, turned poacher, raiding the King’s manors, burning barns and, in dramatic circumstances late in 1233, springing Hubert de Burgh from his fog-bound prison at Devizes to carry him off to safety in Wales. In 1234, des Roches was toppled. For the first time since his accession, Henry was free to wield undisputed sovereignty.

  His response to this new-found freedom is proof both of his own weakness, and of the extent to which his character had been moulded by his former tutors. In 1236, the King took a wife, Eleanor, daughter of the Count of Provence, and related, via her mother, to the ruling house of Savoy, a county controlling the rich valleys and trade routes of western Switzerland and north-west Italy, of pivotal significance in relations within Europe, north and south of the Alps. Having shaken off one group of over-powerful ministers, the King merely replaced them with another. From 1236, it was the Queen’s Savoyard uncles, William, Thomas and Peter of Savoy, builder of London’s first Savoy hotel, created Earl of Richmond, and Bartholomew of Savoy, elected Archbishop of Canterbury, who stepped into the breach left by des Roches and de Burgh. From 1236 to 1258, Henry was to become notorious for the way in which he allowed policy to be dictated by whichever faction at court he was momentarily inclined to trust. To begin with, this trust resided with the Savoyards, and to some extent with his younger brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. After 1247, however, Henry began showering favours upon his Poitevin half-brothers, the sons of his mother, Isabella of Angoulême, who had retired to France after the death of King John, and there married Hugh de Lusignan, lord of La Marche. The King’s Lusignan half-brothers – most notably William de Valence, eventually created Earl of Pembroke when the last of the Marshal line died without male heirs, and Aymer de Lusignan, elected bishop of Winchester – swiftly came into competition with the Savoyards and with other factions at court, over patronage and perhaps above all over the degree to which they commanded the affections of the King’s son Edward, already by the mid-1250s eager to rule his own estate. The unpopularity of the Lusignans was in part personal, the consequence of their own notorious arrogance, and in part the result of deeper-seated problems in royal finance.

  England was a wealthy country, and Henry III had the potential to raise revenues far greater than those of neighbouring rulers. However, he was also committed to reconquering his father’s lands in Normandy, Anjou and especially Poitou. From the 1220s, a pattern had emerged in which the King obtained taxation from the English barons and the Church, in return for his undertaking to uphold the terms of Magna Carta, promising government by consent rather than by arbitrary royal will. The money so raised was then squandered on military expeditions to France, themselves undermined by the King’s own military incompetence and the fickleness of his French allies. For twenty years after 1237, and claiming the right recognized in Magna Carta to withhold consent to extraordinary taxation, the English barons refused to accede to the King’s repeated demands that they grant new taxes. By wringing as much as he could from his own demesne and from feudal aids not subject to baronial veto, Henry succeeded in launching two further expeditions to Gascony and Poitou. Both were costly fiascos. Indeed, the expedition of 1242 very nearly resulted in Henry being taken prisoner by the French King Louis IX. In the process, the King was forced to mismanage his own resources, sending sheriffs and judges into the counties with the chief purpose of raising money rather than doing justice. The Jews were so severely taxed that, by the 1250s, the once rich resources of their community were running dry. Complaints against misgovernment mounted.

  The King’s talent at spending more than he possessed merely increased the competition between the factions at court to grab whatever favours remained at the King’s disposal. Added to this, the Savoyards and the Lusignans were all of them aliens, Frenchmen or Franco-Italians. Alien favourites had long been a target for the hatred of the politically discontented barons of England. The King found it impossible to lay such hatred to rest. Nonetheless, from the mid-1230s onwards, and no doubt learning from the experiment in arbitrary rule attempted under Peter des Roches, he came increasingly to adopt King Edward the Confessor as his patron and role model. Edward appealed to Henry III, in part because of his perceived Englishness, wisdom and sanctity, in part because, like Henry, he was a King who had been raised as an orphan, a mere boy at the time of his father’s death, abandoned thereafter by his strong-willed French mother. Under Henry’s patronage, the history of Edward’s reign was rewritten to supply a model of harmonious and pious rule. In token of this, from 1245 Henry set about rebuilding the Confessor’s great church at Westminster.

  For his work on Westminster Abbey, as for his many other building projects, Henry deserves to rank as one of the most artistically inclined of England’s kings, the greatest royal patron of the arts before Charles I. His patronage was no mere aesthetic self-indulgence, but emerged from a keen sense of religious duty. At a time when Europe’s kings outbid one another to advertise their Christian piety, Henry stood out as a man of almost fanatical religious sentiment. A keen family man, who appears to have lavished genuine affection on his wife and children, he is more or less unique amongst the medieval kings of England in having fathered not a single bastard. Fidelity was just one amongst his many Christian virtues. At Westminster and his other palaces, Henry instituted a quite extraordinary programme of alms for the poor, at the feast of All Souls in 1234, for example, demanding that his servants find and feed 10,000 paupers, a figure regarded as absurd. The King, so it was said, attended Mass as many as three times a day. At the altar, he would hold and kiss the priest’s hand as the sacraments were consecrated. At Westminster and elsewhere, he built up a vast collection of Christian relics. In one six-month period in 1235, for example, he is recorded taking possession of bones and other mementoes of saints George, Theodore, Panteleon, Jerome and Augustine, besides relics of the golden gate at Jerusalem, of the Holy Sepulchre, of the burning bush from which God had spoken to Moses, and a stone ‘to protect the King against thunder’, a reminder that Henry III had a morbid fear of thunderstorms. A few years later, in 1247, he obtained a relic of the blood shed by Ch
rist at the crucifixion, deposited amidst elaborate ceremonial at Westminster Abbey.

  It is symptomatic of Henry’s wider failure that his blood relic, in theory one of the greatest treasures that could be boasted by any Church in Christendom, was scoffed at almost from the moment of its arrival in England. How could Christ, it was asked, who had ascended into heaven perfect in every part, have left behind such relics as blood (or elsewhere milk teeth, hair, his umbilicus and most notoriously his foreskin)? An answer was devised for the King by Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln and one of England’s greatest scientists, but it was not widely read and even less believed. Only one miracle is known to have been worked by Henry’s blood relic and, unlike the dozens of miraculous healings worked at such ‘anti-royal’ centres as the shrine of Becket at Canterbury, this Westminster miracle was an entirely local affair, involving a boy drowned in a pond at Hyde, the park belonging to the Westminster monks just to the north of the abbey precinct, revived when a candle measured to the boy’s height was burned before the Westminster relic. In thanksgiving, Henry processed to the abbey from Tothill (now in the modern St James’ Park), ordering that the abbey’s bells be rung and promising the monks a gold cup decorated with precious stones, in commemoration.

  Such ceremonies served political as well as religious ends, helping to advertise Henry’s self-image as a benevolent Christian prince. The cup in which the Westminster relic was stored seems deliberately to have echoed the image of the Holy Grail, itself now entering English mythology as a precious treasure hidden somewhere on the estates of Glastonbury Abbey. Ceremonial and processions through the London parks, jewels and an appeal to antiquity are still amongst the most potent symbols of English monarchy. The King’s celebration of the feasts of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster, in January and October each year, became the high points of the royal calendar, intended to draw together King, barons and people to both worship and take counsel together. Unfortunately, such majestic gestures were extremely costly to mount and, set against a background of factionalism and personal incompetence on behalf of the King, only emphasized the disparity between Henry’s ambitions and his achievements. The jewelled path that Henry laid towards his own salvation was the same path that led to baronial rebellion and civil war.

  All might still have been well had Henry restricted his territorial ambitions to England. In the early 1250s, there were signs that this would indeed be the case. Negotiations were opened with King Louis IX, in which Henry offered to abandon his by now empty titles to Normandy and Anjou, in return for French recognition of his rights in Gascony. At this point, however, Henry became embroiled in one of the greatest acts of folly ever perpetrated by an English king. For some years the Pope had been seeking a buyer for the realm of Sicily, in theory confiscated from the German Emperor Frederick II, in practice still ruled by Frederick’s sons. The price that the Pope demanded was wholly absurd: not only would his candidate for the Sicilian throne have to mount a campaign of conquest, but he would be required to repay the expenses that the Pope himself claimed to have incurred over Sicily, a sum eventually calculated as 135,000 silver marks (£90,000), well in excess of Henry III’s annual income. Henry was nonetheless persuaded to accept the offer, in part through his own folly and his desire to provide a kingdom for his younger son, Edmund, in part through the diplomatic skills of the Savoyard party at court. The febrile but absurd anticipation that these arrangements generated at court can be gauged from a list of the Sicilian crown jewels now released into English custody: the great crown of Emperor Frederick II, a golden apple and so forth, all of the baubles with which monarchy was advertised, yet entirely meaningless in terms of land or power. Sicily had still to be conquered, even if the King could raise the vast sums promised to the Pope. Into this spiralling flood of debt and disappointed expectations vanished the Sicilian regalia, pawned to pay for a venture that lacked the slightest prospect of success.

  The outcome was predictable. Despite an ever harsher exploitation of the King’s resources, and hence an ever growing sense of baronial discontent, the money that had been pledged to the Pope could not be raised. The English barons opposed all calls for their assistance, either military or financial. Anger at the favours showered upon Henry’s foreign kinsmen mounted, and in 1258, following a series of violent encounters sparked off by the Lusignans, a deputation of barons, headed by the Earl of Norfolk, came before the King in Westminster Hall, armed and demanding reform. The Lusignans were to be banished. The King’s finances were to be thoroughly over-hauled. All bad customs were to be abolished, and the King’s personal government itself to be put into commission. A council representing barons and royalists would be appointed to exercise what had previously been considered the prerogative and patronage powers of the King. There followed a complicated process of manoeuvre, marked by the issue of a series of constitutional settlements, the so-called Provisions of Oxford (1258) and Westminster (1259) concerned with the regulation both of central and of local government. From this, one man, the King’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, emerged as a somewhat improbable champion of English and baronial interests. Simon was not only a courtier, married in controversial circumstances to the King’s sister Eleanor, but undeniably a Frenchman, born and raised in France. He had no great respect for the King’s intelligence. During Henry’s expedition to Poitou in 1242, he is said to have declared that the King was a fool who should be locked away for his own and other people’s safety. Like Henry, Simon was something of a religious fanatic, with a hatred of Jews and a strong sense of his own religious duty. Unlike Henry, he was a competent commander of troops.

  When, in 1263, Henry attempted to reassert his personal authority, Simon insisted that the disputes between King and barons be put to arbitration before Louis IX. When Louis passed a judgment entirely in favour of the King, Simon summoned his supporters to arms. On 14 May 1264, at Lewes on the Sussex downs, not far from the site of Battle of Hastings. with the London mob and a rag-tag army of baronial supporters behind him, Simon defeated Henry III in battle. The King, his eldest son Edward, and the King’s brother Richard were all taken prisoner. For the next twelve months Simon ruled, in reality if not in name, as protector of England. Mistrusted by even his closest allies, and faced with the threat that the King’s friends overseas were preparing a counterattack, Simon summoned a Parliament attended by representatives of the English boroughs and shires. Kings had often summoned great councils, and on occasion such councils had not only been described using the French word ‘parliament’, but had been attended by representatives from the shires. The Parliament summoned in 1265 did little to alter the course of civil war. It marked, nonetheless, the first occasion when the borough and county franchise served as the basis of a parliamentary summons to the third estate. From this, by many twists and turns, was to emerge the idea of a House of Commons meeting in council with King and lords.

  From his Parliament, Simon rode out to defeat and death at Evesham. The King’s son Edward escaped from imprisonment at Hereford and mustered an army. On 4 August 1265, he and his royalist allies caught up with Simon de Montfort and the King at Evesham. Confused by the banners which Edward’s army carried (yet another proof of the significance of heraldry), Montfort and his men at first thought that allies were approaching. When their mistake became clear, Montfort commented on the discipline of Edward’s army:

  By the arm of St James [one of England’s most precious relics, long prized by Henry II] they are advancing well. They have not learned that for themselves but were taught it by me!

  In the ensuing blood bath, fought out in a loop of the river Avon, in the meadows and gardens in front of the town of Evesham itself, Montfort and a large number of his knights were slain, at least thirty of them, compared with only half a dozen royalist knights killed in the previous year’s battle at Lewes and perhaps only one or two killed at Lincoln in 1217. Evesham marked a sudden and alarming escalation in political violence, ratcheting up the scale of upper-
class vendetta. Not until the 1680s, or perhaps the 1720s, it might be argued, were the tensions created here fully dissipated. In token of the hatred that had driven on his enemies, Montfort’s feet and hands were cut off. His testicles were hung either side of his nose on his severed head, which was then sent as a trophy by Roger de Mortimer to his wife at Wigmore Castle. Henry III, who had been kitted out in Montfortian armour and had been forced to cry out at the height of the battle ‘I am Henry of Winchester your King. Do not kill me!’, was released from captivity.

  Over the next few months, in an orgy of revenge, the King’s men occupied and pillaged the lands of anyone suspected of supporting de Montfort’s regime. Those Montfortians who survived had little choice but to persist in their rebellion. Henry III spent 19 October 1266, the fiftieth anniversary of his accession to the throne, at Kenilworth in Warwickshire, encamped before the walls of the great castle which for the past four months had resisted siege. As a boy, Henry had attended the jubilee of St Thomas at Canterbury Cathedral, marked by the translation of Becket’s remains to a magnificent new shrine on 7 July 1220, a date calculated in precise accordance with the Jubilee recorded in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, ten days into the seventh month after seven-times-seven years from the date of Becket’s martyrdom. By contrast, in 1266, so far as we can tell, no crowds of well-wishers gathered, and no anthems were raised in thanksgiving for the King’s long reign – the longest yet recorded for an English sovereign. Instead, men awaited in trepidation the proclamation of peace terms intended to save England from civil war.

  Under the terms eventually agreed, former rebels might buy back their lands. Until his death, on 16 November 1272, the King continued to rule and to conduct his customary religious devotions. The last few years of the reign were spent in resolving the disputes of the late civil war and in raising the money needed to dispatch Henry’s son Edward at the head of a English crusade to the Holy Land. Henry himself had taken vows as a crusader many year before, but characteristically it was the King’s son rather than Henry himself who was to discharge Henry’s promises. England meanwhile remained in a state of disturbance and high tension, its castles garrisoned, gangs of outlaws on the loose. Virtually the last act of Henry’s life, in the autumn of 1272, was to ride over to Norwich to view the ruins of the cathedral, burned when tensions between the Norwich monks and the surrounding townsmen boiled over into riot and arson. Winchester Cathedral only narrowly escaped a similar fate in January 1274. Two of the greatest Norman cathedrals in England, monuments to the Conquest of 1066, untouched by the feeble English rebellions of the eleventh or twelfth centuries, were very nearly destroyed by a resurgent England of burgesses and townsmen convinced of their own rights and determined to guard against the predations of either monks or kings.