A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Buried in pomp at Westminster, in a magnificent tomb adorned with relics, part of his massively expensive rebuilding of the abbey which had involved the importation of craftsmen from as far away as Rome, Henry was to enjoy a brief period of fame from beyond the grave. Shortly after his burial, a local beggar claimed to have been cured of blindness by praying at Henry’s tomb. Henry’s widow, Queen Eleanor, was inclined to believe the story. For a while, it seemed that Henry’s tomb might become venerated as a wonder-working shrine. It was Henry’s own son, Edward I, who put a stop to all this. The man who claimed to have been cured, so Edward reportedly exclaimed, was a fraudster whom Henry would rather have hanged than helped. By Edward, as by posterity, Henry was to be judged a good man, yet never a saint: a King of extraordinary personal piety, who nonetheless failed in his chief aim of ruling in peace and harmony. From that failure, however, and from Henry’s very personal and very Christian misrule, were to emerge some of the more significant constitutional developments of English history.

  Between 1204 and 1259 when the terms of the Treaty of Paris allowed Henry III to surrender his rights in Normandy and Anjou in exchange for French recognition of English lordship over Gascony, the Plantagenet empire in France was effectively dismembered. Partly through the cruelty of King John, partly through the feckless affability of his son, the Plantagenets lost a large part of their landed dominion. In England, a sense of political identity emerged so that by the 1260s the Song of Lewes could declare that through Henry’s defeat in battle

  The proud people are fallen, the faithful are glad.

  Now England breathes again, hoping for liberty,

  To whom may God’s grace grant prosperity.

  The baronial wars of the 1260s were fought out for the most part between English barons and an English-born King, with both sides claiming the support and interest of ‘the community of the realm’, an entity whose very existence might have been doubted fifty years before. Even if we allow that Simon de Montfort, the rebels’ leader, was a Frenchman, almost all of his followers were English by birth. The rebellion of 1264, therefore, stands in stark contrast to the previous rebellions of 1173–4 or 1215–17, in which the English or Anglo-Norman baronage had looked to foreign alliances, chiefly with the Capetian kings of France, and in which the barons of Henry II and John had actively encouraged French or Flemish armies to cross the Channel. In 1215, the idea of placing restraints upon the King by written statute must have seemed to many as doomed to fail. Yet by 1272 no King of England could go against the terms of Magna Carta without risking heavy and immediate retribution. England was set on the path to constitutional monarchy and the limitation of the King’s sovereign powers. France, by contrast, was fast developing a Parlement that was little more than a royal law court, its kings rich enough and surrounded by such an aura of omniscience that absolutism rather than constitutionalism became increasingly the national norm.

  In Henry III, Protestant historians of the seventeenth century could point to a King whose subservience to Rome and to foreign favourites led to national English resistance to the financial and superstitious excesses of the Roman Catholic Church. In even broader terms, Henry’s reign could be written as a story of the struggle between King and the barons represented in Parliament, prophetic of the greater Civil War that was to engulf England in the 1640s, and similarly brought to pass through the King’s financial extravagance and the consequent ‘national’ resistance to taxation. From this derives the view still commonly held: that Henry III was essentially an incompetent absolutist; a believer in the divine right of kings some four hundred years in advance of the Stuart monarchs; a spendthrift patron of wicked foreign favourites, opposed by the stern will of the English barons, themselves acting as little more than ‘Whigs in armour’.

  Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris Chroniclers

  In reality, although by the 1260s the Plantagenet family had lost a large part of their European ‘empire’, their role in European affairs remained undiminished. For a more balanced, less anachronistic view of the situation here, we might turn to the chief contemporary chroniclers of Henry III’s reign, both of them monks of St Albans in Hertfordshire, both of them with contacts at the royal court and with the many courtiers who visited St Albans in travelling to and from London. Neither Roger of Wendover, whose chronicle ends in 1234, nor Matthew Paris, who continued Wendover’s chronicle from 1234 until his own death in 1259, was an admirer of Henry III or of royal administration in general. It is through their writing that we gain our keenest insights into both the King’s particular incompetence and the failings of his administration as a whole. Yet no reader of their chronicles could fail to notice that Henry III, like his Plantagenet predecessors, was a truly European figure, whose interventions in European politics were significant for the histories of France, Sicily, Spain, the papacy and the German empire. Even such distant events as the Albigensian crusade against heresy in southern France, from which the reputation of Simon de Montfort and his ancestors was chiefly derived, or the fate of the Norwegian King Haakon IV, an almost exact contemporary of Henry III, dependent upon England for the engraving of his seal, and a patron at one time of the chronicler Matthew Paris who himself visited Norway, fell within Henry’s sphere of influence as recorded by the St Albans’ chroniclers.

  The menagerie which Henry installed in the grounds of the Tower of London to some extent symbolized this world-wide reach, including three leopards sent by the German emperor (to commemorate the three leopards of Henry’s heraldic shield), a polar bear sent from Norway (kept chained, but allowed to catch fish in the Thames), and an elephant acquired by Louis IX of France whilst on crusade in Egypt. When the elephant died, after only three years at the Tower, its bones were gifted by Henry to the monks of Westminster. According to the Bestiary, the standard medieval encyclopedia of animal lore, burnt elephant bone could drive out snakes. It seems improbable that this was a useful function so far as the monks of Westminster were concerned. More likely, the King’s elephant, like the Holy Blood, and the rest of Henry III’s vast relic collection, joined that jumble of objects that had already been gifted to Westminster Abbey, in effect the first British Museum, with the King as its principal benefactor and the monks as curators in chief: part time-capsule, part monument to the sacral authority conferred by coronation, part cabinet of curiosities, in all respects testifying to the historical and international significance of England’s kings.

  Meanwhile, England had moved from the periphery to the centre of European affairs. The marriages of successive members of the ruling dynasty, culminating in Henry III’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence, and the marriage of his sister to the German Emperor Frederick II, entangled the Plantagenets and their English subjects with the politics of Italy, Germany and southern France. It was the English dowry paid to the German Emperor Henry V in 1120, and the ransom payments made on behalf of Richard I of England to Henry VI in the 1190s that had helped the twelfth-century German emperors in their campaigns in Italy, enabling Henry V to re-enter the Italian scene and greatly assisting Henry VI in his conquest of Sicily. In the same way, by the late 1230s, it was the wealth of England that Emperor Frederick II milked in support of his own Italian campaigns. Perhaps more significantly still, in the late 1250s, following Frederick’s death, it was to Henry III’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, that the German electors were to turn in their search for a successor to Frederick as King of Germany. Richard, a forgotten figure in the mainstream of popular history, is the only Englishman ever to have aspired to rule over the Holy Roman Empire. His aspirations proved fruitless, but for a decade, from the late 1250s, it was Richard, buoyed up by the vast resources that he obtained as Earl of Cornwall from the stannaries (the tin mines) of western England, who ruled a Rhineland kingdom stretching from the North Sea to the Alps.

  It was from the Rhineland that Richard’s son returned in the 1260s, bringing with him yet another blood relic, this time said to have been collected from the Crucifixio
n by the apostle Nicodemus and to have been hung around the neck of all emperors from the time of Charlemagne onwards. Gifted to the Cistercian Abbey of Hailes in Gloucestershire, this was destined to become the focal point of one of the most popular (and controversial) shrines in England, its merits still being debated in the 1530s when the Holy Blood of Hailes was ‘exposed’ by Protestant reformers as a holy fraud, rumoured to be topped up each week with the blood of a freshly slaughtered duck. Meanwhile, and calling upon yet another rich vein of mythology, it was Richard of Cornwall who rebuilt the cliff-top castle of Tintagel, intending it, as early as the 1230s, as a sort of theme-park re-creation of the castle of King Arthur, described by Geoffrey of Monmouth, now made visible to any mariner tacking up the north Cornish coast. At precisely the same time that the legends of Arthur, Parsifal and the Grail Castle were scaling the heights of popularity in Europe, Richard of Cornwall, with his relics and his castles, his wealth and his claim to stand as imperial successor to Charlemagne, should remind us of the close and significant cultural ties that now bound England not just to France but to the mainstream of European history.

  For all of the xenophobic rhetoric of its barons, thirteenth-century England was very much a part of European affairs, wealthy and confident enough to launch the career of a Richard of Cornwall or an aspiring King of Sicily. Perhaps the clearest indication of this confidence comes not just from Matthew Paris’ recital of the details of Anglo-European diplomacy, but from the maps with which Paris decorated his chronicles. Here, not only did Paris seek to place Britain within a wider context, but produced what are in effect the first recognizable images of the British Isles. Paris’ world map – a ‘Mappa Mundi’, like the far more elaborate late thirteenth-century example still preserved at Hereford Cathedral – shows Britain as a small detached fragment of northern Europe, clinging on at the very bottom margin, clenched between channels facing Normandy and Spain, with Africa closer even than Flanders. Far more realistic are Paris’ attempts to plot, through a series of strip maps, the journey to be followed between London and Jerusalem, noting the more important landmarks en route, the greater churches, the terrible Alps and even such features as the storks roosting on the towers of Turin. In this telling, Britain was very much a part of the Christian or European mainstream.

  As for Britain itself, what is perhaps most striking about Matthew Paris’ various attempts to map these islands is not just his attention to detail but his willingness to imagine England as merely part, albeit by far the largest part, of a North Sea archipelago that included Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man (though not Ireland). In these maps, the Severn divides England from Wales, and Hadrian’s wall together with a whole series of rivers, from the Tyne northwards, snake across the borders between England and Scotland. At the bridge of Stirling, Matthew shows Scotland tightening to a narrow causeway, rather like the waist to an hourglass. Even so, it is clear from these drawings that a man, might travel, should he so wish, from Dover to the furthest reaches of Caithness without ever quitting dry land. In the decades to come, one particular man was to attempt just such a journey, seeking through warfare and diplomacy at last to unite the various parts of Britain and to bring both Wales and Scotland under English rule. His name was Edward, the son of King Henry III, and it was at Stirling Bridge, Matthew Paris’ narrow causeway between England and the north, that his plans first came unstuck.

  EDWARD I TO EDWARD III, 1272–1377

  In the 1080s, Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror, had declared that he would become King of England even if he were in Alexandria when his father died. It was an empty boast. In the entire period between 1066 and 1272, only one King had followed his father on to the English throne as his father’s eldest son, and the circumstances here, with the accession in 1216 of the nine-year-old Henry III, at the height of civil war, with most of southern England under rebel or French control, were hardly an advertisement of the stability of English kingship. By contrast, in 1272, not only was Henry III’s eldest son accepted unquestioningly as England’s King but, in bizarre fulfilment of Curthose’s boast, he happened at the time to be, if not in Alexandria, then returning across the Mediterranean from crusade in the Holy Land. Edward’s very name, chosen in honour of Edward the Confessor, the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, promised stability and a return to good order.

  In the century after 1272, England was to be ruled in turn by three kings, all named Edward, each of them of very different character. The heroic, crusading Edward I is generally ranked amongst the premier league of great English kings, responsible for the conquest of Wales, for the first attempted English conquest of Scotland and for the restoration of royal authority after the chaos and confusion of his father’s reign. By contrast, Edward I’s son and heir, Edward II, ranks if not as the worst, then as perhaps the most feckless of England’s medieval rulers, utterly unsuited to his position, a sexually ambiguous wastrel, literally a layabout who had difficulty even in getting up each morning, persuaded after fifteen years of weak rule and disasters both in foreign and domestic policy into a final period of tyranny and extortion which plunged England into yet further baronial rebellion and led eventually to his deposition and murder.

  Whatever qualities Edward I had possessed skipped a generation, being reborn in Edward III, albeit that the character of the new King, like that of Edward I before him, was moulded in quite deliberate determination to avoid the failings of his father. Edward III it was who built up the great war machine of England, reviving the military glories of his grandfather’s reign, setting England on course to become a state organized for war. As the son of the King of England and of a daughter of the King of France, Edward III inherited a claim to the French throne, leading after 1337 to the outbreak of the Hundred Years War, that great slogging match in which the national and political identities of both countries were reforged. It is already symptomatic of the emergence of English identity, that, even in 1340, when Edward III came to devise a new style for himself, as King of both nations, he chose to place England above France in the list of his titles: ‘Edward King of England and France’, positioning (in his letters to the English, though not on his seal or his letters to the French where he styled himself ‘King of France and England’) what in the twelfth century would have been regarded as the cart of French plenty very much behind the proud and no longer supine English horse.

  Europe’s Oldest Dynasty

  Through to the thirteenth century, the Plantagenet kings of England could still be dismissed as callow new bugs in the playground of European dynastic politics, overshadowed by the sixth-formers and prefects of other nations. Four generations on, by the end of the reign of Edward III, all this had changed. The Plantagenets, first crowned in 1154, were by the 1370s well on the way to becoming the longest established dynasty in Europe. The Hohenstaufen emperors of Germany had vanished from the imperial scene as early as 1250. The royal houses of France, Sicily, Navarre, Castile, Scotland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, Armenia, Byzantium, Jerusalem and even Bulgaria had all suffered deposition or dynastic disruption. By the time of the death of Edward III in 1377, only the rulers of Aragon and Portugal could claim that their crowns had passed from King to King in unbroken succession to match the succession of the Plantagenet rulers of England, and even then not without slips and skips along the way. As the crowned representative of a sixth generation of Plantagenet kings, Edward III could claim that he and his ancestors had ruled England for as many generations and for an even longer period of time (six generations, and 233 years as opposed to 195) than that which separated Alfred, true founder of the house of Wessex, from the Norman Conquest. The Plantagenet house had become a venerable and time-honoured institution, just as hallowed by antiquity as the house of Alfred had been in 1066.

  As befitted their rank, the Plantagenets had also acquired a family mausoleum, Westminster Abbey, and patron saints: King Edward the Confessor, whose presence there determined the emergence of Westminster as the p
rincipal royal family mausoleum from Henry III onwards, and St Thomas Becket who, for all the anti-royal and potentially subversive qualities of his original legend, had been recruited as a supporter of kingship as early as 1174, with Henry II’s reconciliation at his shrine. By 1318, Becket was believed to have endowed the

  kings of England with a miraculous gift, the ‘Oil of St Thomas’, supposedly granted to him by the Virgin Mary and intended for use in the English coronation. Edward II asked that he might be anointed with this oil, although it was not actually employed in royal ceremonial until 1399. Its purpose was clearly to rival the oil held in the ‘Sainte Ampoule’ at Rheims, supposedly brought down to earth in the mouth of a dove and used at the inauguration of all kings of France from Clovis in 496 through to its destruction by the French revolutionaries in 1794. Even in terms of its sacral stage properties, the Plantagenet dynasty was beginning to rival the greatest royal actors in Christendom.