In fact, the young king continued to be dependent on his justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, who, by now accustomed to wielding virtually absolute authority, continued to frame policy, sometimes acting in secrecy. This created tension between king and justiciar and encouraged the opposition of a baronial faction jealous of de Burgh’s power. In 1230, after a long and difficult period of preparation, Henry crossed the Channel at the head of an army for the recovery of his Angevin inheritance. But this campaign, the last real attempt to recover Normandy for the English crown, was carried out in a half-hearted fashion and came to nothing.
When, in 1231, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, returned from crusade to great acclaim he became the leader of the court faction opposed to the justiciar. Henry havered in his support for first one, then the other of his advisers, but in July 1232 he had a fierce argument with de Burgh, dismissed him as justiciar and gave the job to des Roches. But the bishop was no more capable of uniting the baronage behind the throne than his predecessor had been. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Rich, accused the regime of corruption and maladministration and threatened the king with excommunication if he did not get rid of des Roches. In May 1234 Henry weakly gave in and ordered the bishop to retire to his diocese. The office of justiciar lapsed. Only now did Henry III’s personal rule truly begin.
1235–41
England now entered on a period of peace and relative stability. Henry could not afford a foreign war, and the old faction leaders were either soon dead or had made their peace with each other and the king. Henry concentrated on diplomacy in his foreign affairs. He married his sister, Isabella, to the Emperor Frederick II in 1235 and began in earnest to seek a wife for himself. He eventually chose Eleanor, the 11-year-old daughter of the Count of Provence. Eleanor’s sister was married to Louis IX, which made the English and French kings brothers-in-law. Henry was now connected by marriage to the leading figures in European affairs. In 1236 he and Louis agreed a four-year truce. Moreover, Eleanor was connected on her mother’s side to the influential counts of Savoy, whose lands were strategically placed to control the Alpine passes into Italy. The wedding took place in January 1236, and Henry made sure that the lavish ceremonial would set new standards of royal magnificence.
The marriage was a success. Despite the difference in their ages, Henry and Eleanor not only developed a great affection for each other, but the young queen exercised considerable influence. She was intelligent and soon developed a keen sense of political realities. She brought with her several of her Savoyard relatives, which proved to be both an advantage and a disadvantage to Henry. The establishment of more foreigners at court led, in time, to a build-up of resentment, but some of Eleanor’s relatives were men of real ability who gave good advice.
Foremost among them was the Bishop of Valence, William of Savoy, and when Henry reorganized his council he put William in charge. The new body carried out important economic and administrative reforms that placed the royal finances on a more secure footing. It also instituted a survey of English law, which culminated in the Statute of Merton (1236). The council meeting in Merton Abbey was augmented by the leading judges, among whom was the brilliant legist William Ralegh. The document that emerged sought to apply in detail the general principles enunciated in Magna Carta: it defined the rights of vulnerable members of society such as widows and minors; it protected from exploitation children who had inherited property on the death of their parents; it tidied up the law relating to the enclosure of common land by powerful magnates; and it brought Irish law into line with English law.
In January 1238 Henry’s sister, Eleanor, was married in clandestine circumstances. She had previously been the wife of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke (son of the regent), and on his death in 1231 she had taken a vow of permanent chastity. But she had been only 16 at the time, and her resolve weakened when she met a young Frenchman who had arrived in England to claim his inheritance as Earl of Leicester. This was Simon de Montfort, a vigorous young knight who had proved himself in military service to the French king. The couple formed a liaison (Henry would later claim that Eleanor had been seduced) and, to avoid scandal, Henry had them secretly married. This caused a furore. The king’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, felt personally affronted, the leading barons insisted that they should have been consulted, and the Archbishop of Canterbury complained that Eleanor had broken her sacred vow. Richard and his supporters flew to arms, and Henry retreated to the Tower of London. Thanks to the intervention of William of Savoy peace was achieved by a payment of 16,000 marks to Richard to enable him to go on crusade. The next year Simon was invested with the Earldom of Leicester. He and Eleanor went to live in France but were reconciled to the king in 1240, shortly before Simon went on crusade.
In June 1239 Henry and his subjects were able to rejoice in the birth of an heir – the baby was named Edward, in honour of Henry’s favourite saint – but at the end of the year the news was brought to Henry that William of Savoy had died in Italy, and the king was distraught. Matthew Paris recorded that he had torn off his clothes and thrown them into the fire. Despite this, 1239 and the following few years were the happiest of the king’s reign. In 1240 his wife gave birth to a daughter, and Henry engaged in a successful campaign against Gruffydd-ap-Llewelyn of Wales. Meanwhile, more and more of the queen’s Savoyard relatives were arriving in England and receiving lands and offices from the king. In 1241 Boniface of Savoy, another of Eleanor’s uncles, was appointed to the important position of Archbishop of Canterbury (though he was not confirmed in office by the pope until 1243).
1242–52
Still determined to recover his family’s possessions on the continent, Henry led an expedition to Poitou in the spring of 1242. His army was too small for the task, and he was seriously short of money to equip his soldiers or to buy mercenaries. The result of this rash enterprise was a humiliating and costly failure, and the king also lost the respect of seasoned campaigners, such as Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort. Simon was heard to blurt out that Henry was so incompetent that his subjects ought to lock him away. It was October 1243 before the king was able to renew his truce with Louis and return to England. As for his brother Richard, Henry bought him off with large gifts, the weak response he frequently made to win the support of potential opponents.
In 1244 Henry, needing more taxes, summoned a parliament. The magnates refused to give him any money unless he appointed a justiciar and a chancellor to exercise some control over royal policy and finances, but Henry refused this restriction of the royal power. The birth of a second son, Edmund, softened the attitude of the barons, and a compromise was worked out and a modest financial grant agreed. To augment this grant Henry imposed a tax on the Jews (always an easy target). What particularly galled him was that, while he found it difficult to extract money from his own subjects, the pope made frequent financial demands on the clergy, which they met. Henry was not the only one who resented money being drained out of the country in this way. The papal nuncio (representative) went in fear of his life and appealed to the king: ‘For the love of God and the reverence of my lord the pope, grant me a safe conduct.’ Henry retorted: ‘May the devil give you a safe conduct to hell and all through it.’ At a great council in 1246 king and magnates drafted a protest to Rome about these exactions and refused to allow the English church to pay, but the papacy held all the European churches in a stranglehold and, as Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln pointed out, Henry’s clergy had no choice but to pay.
Henry launched an expedition against Dafydd of Wales, but the Welsh refused direct engagement. For months Henry’s troops, underemployed and underpaid, carried out savage raids throughout north Wales, impoverishing the country and creating a famine in the land. Eventually the death of Dafydd without an heir enabled Henry to establish his overlordship. This was another costly and unnecessary military expedition.
Later in the year Henry staged a spectacular ceremony that was both a genuine expression of piety and a bi
d for popularity. He had acquired from the Holy Land a phial supposedly containing some of the blood of Christ. He went personally to St Paul’s Cathedral to receive the relic, having spent the previous night in a vigil and a bread-and-water fast. Determined to gain maximum publicity, he ordered Matthew Paris to record the event in detail, which the chronicler duly did:
The king then gave orders that all the priests of London should assemble with due order and reverence at St Paul’s … dressed as for a festival, in their surplices and hoods, attended by their clerks, becomingly clad, and with their symbols, crosses and tapers lighted. Thither the king also went and, receiving the vessel containing the aforesaid treasure with the greatest honour, reverence and awe, he carried it above his head publicly, going on foot, and wearing an humble dress, consisting of a poor cloak without a hood, and … proceeded without stopping to the church of Westminster.1
If Henry hoped that such displays would incline the magnates to support his policies he was to be disappointed. Further parliaments in 1248 declined to provide money for more military adventures on the continent, although he did manage to scrape together enough funds to send Simon de Montfort to Gascony to enforce his rule over the people of that region. All this achieved was the expenditure of more royal treasure and the antipathy of the Gascons, who complained bitterly of the cruelty of de Montfort’s troops and officials. Henry recalled de Montfort and invited his accusers to come to court and present their complaints.
Henry’s rule and, specifically, his ways of raising money were alienating more and more of his subjects, for in order not to upset the barons he imposed more and more on his less powerful subjects. Sheriffs, under pressure to raise taxes efficiently, used harsh measures to extract money from the people, and the practice known as ‘purveyance’ was particularly resented – this was the system whereby provisions and other goods were taken for the king’s household without payment. In addition, an increasing number of Henry’s agents were Savoyards, and his subjects, not unnaturally, associated their sufferings with the activities of the king’s foreign favourites.
In 1249 Archbishop Boniface alienated London and undid any good Henry might have done by his ‘holy blood’ ceremony two years earlier. The king granted to the archbishop the right of purveyance in the capital, and when the citizens resisted the archbishop’s demands he sent his own troops to enforce obedience. So unpopular was Boniface that he took to travelling everywhere wearing armour under his vestments. The priests of St Paul’s Cathedral shut him out and were promptly excommunicated, and an incident at St Bartholomew’s Priory permanently undermined his authority. He had ordered the canons to attend him in their chapter house, but, when he arrived, they were at worship in the church and refused to move. Boniface burst in on the service, grabbed the sub-prior and set about him with his fists, shouting, ‘This is the way to deal with English traitors!’ A scuffle ensued, and the disturbance soon spread outside the priory. Boniface was forced to flee by boat to his palace at Lambeth, and shortly afterwards he left for Rome.
In 1250 Henry announced his intention of going on crusade, but, like so many of his projects, this was abandoned for lack of funds. In 1251 in a grand ceremony at York the king’s eldest daughter, Margaret, was married to Alexander III of Scotland, who did homage to Henry. There was another confrontation between Henry and de Montfort in 1252. The king had sent envoys to Gascony to investigate the charges of misrule, and when they reported back Henry obliged de Montfort to answer the allegations against him in open parliament. He largely sided with the plaintiffs and reprimanded de Montfort. The intercession of Queen Eleanor prevented the king from imposing a severe punishment, but de Mont-fort felt humiliated, returned to Gascony and carried on much as before. Eventually, Henry dismissed him.
1253–8
In the summer of 1253 Henry determined to solve the Gascony problem in person, and he travelled there with a small army, several barons having refused to accompany him. He was, however, joined by local allies and had little difficulty in pacifying his lands. He was generous to all who submitted and in compensating those who had suffered at the hands of de Montfort, rewarding them with pensions, positions and land grants, and was even reconciled to de Montfort, again by means of paying for his friendship. He then made a treaty with Alfonso of Castile, which involved the marriage of Prince Edward to Alfonso’s half-sister, Eleanor. The wedding took place in November 1254. Having provided for his elder son by settling many lands upon him, Henry now set about making ambitious plans for Edward’s nine-year-old sibling, Edmund. Pope Innocent IV was in conflict with the king of Sicily and proposed to Henry that he be deposed in favour of Edmund.
On his way home in the autumn of 1254 Henry paid a state visit to Louis IX in Paris, and he took this golden opportunity to impress his host and all of Paris with his kingly beneficence. He fed crowds of the capital’s poor before entertaining his host at a sumptuous banquet and distributing expensive gifts to the French nobility. Small wonder that he arrived back in England heavily in debt, having squandered all the money he had set aside for his crusade.
The king was psychologically incapable of tightening his belt. He borrowed heavily and was largely bankrolled by his brother, Richard. He began collecting again for a crusade and committed himself up to the hilt for the Sicilian venture, promising 135,000 marks to the pope for his help in gaining the crown for Edmund. But this scheme was not the only grandiose, self-deluding vision in which he indulged. He saw himself as a lead actor on a wider stage than England: he made plans to join with Alfonso of Castile in an expedition into Muslim North Africa, and he persuaded his brother Richard to take part in a papal conspiracy against the Emperor Frederick II by accepting the imperial title ‘King of the Romans’. All the old problems continued but became worse. The king demanded money from a reluctant parliament, which responded by demanding political reforms. Henry exploited to the full every possible source of revenue, and this drew him into violations of Magna Carta. Opposition to the king deepened and widened, though many attributed his misrule to the influence of his foreign advisers.
In 1257 all Henry’s birds came home to roost. The pope was pressing him for the money he owed, but parliament disapproved of the Sicilian venture and refused to finance it. Richard left for his coronation in Aachen and was no longer available either to lend his brother money or offer him sound advice. Llewelyn-ap-Gruffydd was laying waste parts of the Welsh border and had the backing of Henry’s son-in-law, Alexander of Scotland. When Henry finally got round to leading an expedition to north Wales he achieved nothing and had to make a humiliating peace with Llewelyn. Archbishop Boniface turned against the king by summoning a convocation of bishops and clergy, which presented the king with a list of grievances. The royal court was split into factions, and even Prince Edward, now 19, declared against some of his father’s policies. Personal grief was added to political difficulty when Henry’s three-year-old daughter died.
1258
The parliament that met in April 1258 faced a dilemma. Its members wanted to impose administrative reforms and policy changes on the king – they especially wanted him to withdraw from the Sicilian adventure and get rid of his Poitevin advisers – but that would mean inducing Henry to abandon his oath to Pope Alexander, who might well respond by excommunicating the king and placing England under an interdict (the withdrawal of all services performed by the clergy). In the event, anger at Henry’s foreign policy and its crippling financial cost drove parliament, which is sometimes known as the ‘Mad (Angry) Parliament’, to drastic measures. Led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, seven barons took the lead in presenting Henry with a list of demands. They persuaded parliament to declare that they would support the raising of a new tax (a general aid) only if the king would accept a programme of reform and negotiate a fresh agreement about Sicily with the pope. In his usual, weak-willed way Henry accepted this ultimatum.
A council of 24 was appointed to draw up a programme of reform, and 12 of the king’s councill
ors met with 12 baronial representatives at Oxford in June. They agreed the Provisions of Oxford, which has sometimes been called the foundation of parliamentary democracy, a development even more important than Magna Carta. It should, more accurately however, be seen as one step in a long journey towards the restraint of arbitrary royal power.
There is no preserved official record of the list of constitutional reforms contained in the Provisions of Oxford, but notes in the Annals of Burton Abbey suggest that these were the main baronial demands: parliament was to meet three times a year on dates of its own choosing; the king was to rule through a council of 15 members approved by parliament; the office of justiciar (a combination of chief minister and royal deputy) was to be reinstated; the chancellor and treasurer were to be accountable to the council; principal royal officers were to be appointed for annual terms; royal castles were to be in the hands of castellans answerable to the council and not Henry’s Poitevin relations; and four knights in each county were to be appointed to inquire into alleged offences committed by Henry’s officials.
The Provisions identified clearly the gulf that had opened between the Plantagenet monarchy, which still entertained European ambitions, and a baronage whose members thought of themselves as ‘English’ and had little interest in fighting or paying for foreign wars. Their xenophobic attitude towards foreign interference in English affairs was widely shared. ‘Let strangers come here but go away again quickly, like visitors, not settlers,’ ran a popular song of the day. The barons also revealed the dominant interest of the magnates in local political and judicial matters. They were genuinely concerned to protect their feudal vassals from exploitation in the king’s courts and aimed to improve the standing of their own manorial and other lesser courts. Thus, for example, the Provisions had decreed that four elected knights were to attend every shire court and gather complaints relating to alleged injuries and trespasses and to make sure that they were presented to the justiciar. The increased involvement of the knights (and to a lesser extent the town burgesses) in the work of local government was, perhaps, the most important long-term outcome of the Provisions of Oxford.
The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain Page 6
