1215 and All That

by Ed West

  Failed foreign wars aggravated the Crown’s problems. Henry tried to invade France in 1242, an escapade that ended in miserable failure. The conflict was begun, bizarrely, by Henry’s mother, Isabella, who had left England just nine months after her son became king, having had enough of it. She had then married Hugh of Lusignan, the son of her former betrothed, despite his being engaged to her daughter Joan—‘one of the most extraordinary marriages in history.’4 Isabella started a war, setting the Poitevin barons against the King of France because she had been insulted by being told to stand when Louis’s mother was seated, one of the stupider reasons for beginning a war in history; Isabella was ‘killed,’ as she described it when she was made to stand in the French king’s chamber like some ‘fatuous servant.’ Then when her husband entertained the French at Lusignan, ‘she ransacked the castle, took all her good[s] back to Angouleme and kept Hugh waiting outside for three days before she would see him.’5 Hugh must have been really glad he married her.

  Henry ill-advisedly became involved and returned home beaten, just like his father; his mother was lucky to escape with her life.

  The king would hold meetings with the most important barons, where he’d beg for money and they’d moan about the state of the country. Henry initially tried to shift attention away from money troubles at home by embarking on Crusade, but having raised the money for the adventure, the king instead gave the cash to Pope Alexander IV, who in turn nominated Henry’s son Edmund Crouchback as the King of Sicily. The throne of the island kingdom had become vacant in 1250 following the death of Frederick II, who is today perhaps most notable as a very innovative but also very cruel pioneer in the social sciences. Among his great ideas was a language deprivation experiment in which young children were raised without human interaction to see if language was natural, and another where prisoners were shut in a cask to see if their soul could be observed leaving them when they died.

  Henry III seems to have been not the most hard-nosed negotiator in the world; he paid the Holy Father £90,000, almost as much as the king’s ransom, for the right to the Sicilian throne—but part of the deal stated that he had to conquer it first. Henry had also signed a sub-clause that if he was defeated during the invasion, then he would be excommunicated (in fairness, Sicily has been invaded something like thirty-four times, most recently by the Allies in 1943, so he might expect to achieve this feat). Henry also promised to go on crusade which, even his best friends might tell him, would not be his thing; on the upside there would be plenty of churches to visit in the Middle East, but you had to fight your way past Muslim armies to get at them.

  Pope Alexander had told Henry of ‘the royal family of England whom we regard with special affection’ and that in Sicily, Edmund would be ‘received like the morning star.’ Richard, Henry’s shrewder brother, had also been offered the island but replied to the papal representative: ‘You might as well try and sell me the moon as a bargain, saying “go up there and grab it.”’ Then the Pope double-crossed the king and gave the country to Henry’s brother-in-law instead.

  To the barons, this was the latest in a long line of disastrous mistakes by the king. The informal meetings had begun to take a more formalized shape, and in 1236 they were first called ‘Parliament’ (literally, ‘a talk’ in French). This Parliament met four times between 1248 and 1249, when they refused to give money to the king, complaining about corruption and the monarch’s French in-laws.

  And if you’re a medieval monarch, the last thing you need when everything is going wrong is for God to start smiting you, and in 1258 this is exactly what He did, with a terrible famine. Some fifteen thouand are estimated to have died in London, and people visiting the capital saw rotting corpses lying in the gutter. So many inhabitants were haggard and starved that there weren’t enough of them to bury the dead, which is never a good look for a city. That year, the queen was forced to flee by the Thames, where the mob spotted her and pelted her with manure, shouting ‘down with the witch! Let’s drown her!’ Her eldest son had just carried out a bank robbery in the center of town, which had somewhat undermined support for the royals.

  Curiously, the development of Parliament may have been influenced by an extreme weather event on the other side of the world: the massive eruption of Mount Rinjani in Indonesia in 1257, the greatest explosion in the last ten thousand years, cooled the earth by as much as two degrees centigrade and led to crop failure across Europe.6

  This led to the barons meeting at Oxford that year, issuing the Provisions of Oxford, which made a series of demands, among them that each county and city should send two knights to Parliament, and that Parliament should choose half of a council to rule the land. The Provisions of this ‘Mad Parliament’ were issued not just in Latin and French but also, for the first time for any political document since the Battle of Hastings, in English too. The Oxford rebels demanded that King Henry ‘faithfully keep and observe the charter of the liberties of England,’ by which they meant Magna Carta.

  Henry’s consort, Queen Eleanor of Provence, was especially unpopular because she had the rights to many tolls, which Londoners didn’t like paying. Henry and Eleanor had been married when he was twenty-eight and she was just twelve,* and she unfortunately came with lots of family members; certainly part of the motivation for the hostility to the royal family was naked xenophobia against her various hanger-on relatives. Although by marrying her, Henry was helping to import a cultural revival of art and literature from France and Germany, epitomized by the Gothic cathedrals of Notre Dame and Chartres, as well as literature and poetry, the people pelting her with excrement from London Bridge probably didn’t see it that way.

  These ‘Savoyard’ relatives of the Queen were notorious. Henry III even made the queen’s uncle Boniface Archbishop of Canterbury, the last foreigner to have the job. Boniface was so unpopular he walked around with protective armor underneath his priestly vestment, and it was hardly surprising when he once punched a priest in the face over an ecclesiastical dispute, while Mathew Paris said he was ‘noted more for his birth than his brains,’ and spent half of his twenty-nine-year reign outside of the country.* Henry also made his French half-brother Aymer de Valence Bishop of Winchester, despite being a teenager.

  The position of so many foreigners in the English court was exploited by the rebel leader, the not-very-English Simon De Montfort. De Montfort was the hero of the baron’s revolt and of Parliamentary rule, but he was perhaps the least sympathetic character of the entire period. His father had led the exceptionally cruel and needlessly violent Albigensian crusade against Cathars in the south of France, and the younger Simon de Montfort had arrived in England at the age of twenty-two, having spent his teens persecuting religious minorities and without a word of English.

  Married to the king’s sister, another Eleanor, he was stupendously rich, and the tales of gargantuan feasting at his house would shame a Roman emperor. Variously described as the ‘father of Parliament’ by some and a greedy, opportunistic, violent maniac by others, De Montfort was both dashing and terrifying. In one especially pathetic moment the king once told him: ‘I’m horribly frightened of thunder and lightning but, by God’s head, I’m more frightened of you than all the thunder and lightning in the world.’ One chronicler, the Dominican Thomas Stubbs, said of Simon that had he lived to be king ‘he might have become a destroyer rather than a savior.’ Another, Canon Thomas Wykes of Osney, said Simon was a criminal who called his fellow barons ‘unreliable wretches.’

  Henry had been upset by De Montfort marrying his sister. The couple fled to France, after which Simon briefly went on crusade, although it’s not known whether he saw any fighting. But he was possibly influenced by what he saw in Palestine, where an oligarchy of powerful barons ran the Kingdom of Jerusalem with a nominal king; this is clearly what he intended for England.

  Exploiting popular xenophobia against the Provençals (being from just outside Paris, Simon and the southern French would have seen each other as foreigne
rs, and spoken a different if vaguely comprehensible language), De Montfort proposed that Parliament should meet without the permission of the king. All the king’s officials would be chosen annually, and subject to the new council of twenty-four, with fifteen picked by Parliament (i.e., De Montfort)—and he appealed to Magna Carta to justify his program. The king accused De Montfort of treason, to which he replied in the manner of an old-style gentleman looking for a fight: ‘That word is a lie and were you not my sovereign it would be an ill hour for you when you dared utter it.’

  Henry refused this radical proposal, and in 1260 there began the Second Barons’ War. One of the major engagements took place at Lewes in 1264, where De Montfort gave a moving speech in which he said they were fighting for England, God, the Virgin Mary, the saints, and the Church. They called themselves the Army of God. De Montfort may have had God on his side, but the king had his extremely violent son ‘the Lord Edward’ on his, accompanied by a large number of bloodthirsty Scottish knights, who were more frightening than the Almighty on the ground. Among them was Robert the Bruce, whose grandson of the same name would centuries later share a platform with Edward in that moving historical documentary Braveheart. The conflict became so bitter that the royalists at Lewes flew the dragon banner ‘that signaled the intention of fighting to the death, taking no prisoners,’ the first sign that the code of chivalry was starting to break down.7 Before the battle of Lewes, during the formal exchange of letters between sides, Edward told his uncle that ‘from this time forth we will do our utmost to inflict injury upon your persons and possessions.’

  On that day De Montfort’s men got the upper hand, although it was inconclusive. Then in July, with the threat of a French invasion, De Montfort sent royal writs to each county calling for a national army. He received a very enthusiastic response, and though the invasion never came, it was clear who was in charge; even the Mayor of London told the king he would be his faithful man ‘as long as you be good.’

  Simon De Montfort was close to winning and at one point had both Henry and his son captive, but ultimately the Lord Edward won the war. The future Edward I, although he shared Henry’s droopy eye, was in every respects the opposite of his father; monstrously violent and terrifying, he was still invading neighboring countries into his late sixties.

  Edward became known as the leopard, after the then-common belief that the animal could change its spots; for he would side with whoever was winning, then stab them in the back and twist the knife. He had started off as a supporter and ally of De Montfort, and had once raised the money to pay for the Crown’s affairs by pulling off an armed robbery at the Templars’ bank, where the queen had pawned her jewelry. Edward and his followers had told the Templars he wanted to view his mother’s jewels inside but when they let him in, he went around with iron hammers smashing the chests and taking the gems.

  While imprisoned by the rebels, the prince had managed to convince his presumably rather dim jailors to let him try out one of their horses—and promptly rode off, shouting ‘Lordlings I bid you good day.’ And thereafter he conducted the conflict with the utmost ruthlessness, poisoning rebel negotiator William de Clare over breakfast negotiations (he woke up the next day and died from stomach pains, while his brother’s hair fell out), employing a cross-dressing spy called Margoth, and turning up to battle in the enemy’s colors. This was the trick he used at Evesham in 1265, which ended with De Montfort dead along with two of his sons.

  The battle was followed by the execution of thirty rebel knights, and Edward cut off De Montfort’s testicles and had them hung around his nose, while his torso was cut into four and his head sent to a noblewoman who had helped Edward escape captivity, as a touching little present. These cold-blooded executions were considered quite shocking: ‘such was the murder of Evesham, for battle it was not.’

  The king was almost killed because he was dressed in rebel colors, and had to cry pathetically: ‘I am Henry of Winchester your king! Do not kill me!’ His son led him away from the battlefield.

  The king’s goons enacted terrible revenge on their enemies around the country, and after the battle—afterwards Henry confiscated 254 estates from rebels. There followed widespread civil disorder and unrest among outlaws called the ‘Disinherited,’ many from noble families who had been forced to flee into the forest; it is during this period that the story of Robin Hood first emerges. Among the many atrocities, the Sheriff of Essex was accused of having plotted to release flying cockerels carrying incendiary bombs over London during 1267. In the 1260s, a brigand took over Bristol and ruled for several years, effectively setting himself up as local ruler. An army three hundred–strong marched around Norfolk causing havoc and doing whatever they pleased, and a band of fifty men, including the Abbots of Sherbourne and Middleton, raided the Countess of Lincoln’s home at Kingston Lacy and took everything. The Prior of Bristol was even worse: his gang invaded an estate in Wiltshire and murdered all the men and raped the lady of the house.

  Within a decade of Evesham, King Henry had granted the barons and their Parliament most of the power they’d demanded in the first place. The economy turned around, and best of all, in 1267, a huge shipment of wine from Gascony arrived in London, hugely improving morale. Henry III lived until 1272, becoming ever more senile as he devoted more time to hanging around churches.

  In 1275, now Edward I, the new king formalized Parliament, allowing for the first time knights and burgesses (city men) into the Privy Council, the inner circle of advisers that was a sort of the forerunner to the Cabinet. Finally, in 1297, came the Confirmatio Cartarum, the Confirmation of the Charters, which formalized Magna Carta into law. The barons had effectively won, although admittedly to De Montfort it might not have looked that way at the time.

  ____________

  * And they were certainly sharing a bed within three years. We know this because a knife-wielding maniac had broken into the king’s chamber in the night, but he was luckily in bed with his wife.

  * In 1249, during the height of the famine, Boniface had arrived at St. Bartholomew’s priory where he ordered the canons to come to him. However, they were saying Mass, and refused, and so the archbishop grabbed the sub-prior, repeatedly punching him and saying, ‘This is the way to deal with English traitors.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Legacy of

  Magna Carta

  Today the doors to the US Supreme Court feature eight panels showing important moments in legal history, one with an angry-looking King John facing a baron, between them being Magna Carta.1

  The dream of 1215 did not end at Evesham, and while De Montfort had died, his legacy lived on. That’s not to say he didn’t have his faults; he was arrogant, vain, and may have turned out far worse than the king were he in charge. Even for the standards of the time, he was insanely anti-Semitic, and expelled all the Jews from Leicester, where he was earl (although compared to his nephew Edward he was Oskar Schindler).

  But this aristocratic, French religious bigot is still a hero of English liberties nonetheless, as the man who tried to establish restrictions on the power of the monarch. Today his picture hangs outside the United States House of Representatives in remembrance of his legacy. He also has the honor of having a university and concert hall in Leicester named after him, as well as a nonleague football stadium and a bridge on the northeast stretch of the A46 from Bath to Cleethorpes. Worth having your testicles chopped off for, surely.

  In 1300, Edward I reconfirmed the Charter when there was further discontent among the aristocracy; the king may have been lying to everyone, but he at least established the precedent that kings were supposed to pretend to be bound by rules. Edward had tried to tax without consent once, in 1297, but had to back down after a near revolt; kings would never try again. From 1300, sheriffs were ordered to read the Great and Forest charters four times a year ‘before the people in full county court’ and also at Westminster Hall ‘in the language of the country’ as well as Latin, something which would
have taken well over an hour: ‘Some in the county court may have listened with rapt attention. Others probably went out to the alehouse.’2 Back in 1279, Archbishop Peckham ordered Magna Carta to be placed in cathedrals and big churches, but Edward ordered them taken down, as he didn’t like this individual initiative. It was already becoming a sacred document.

  Twice, Magna Carta helped to remove rulers in the fourteenth century. In addition, Edward III was the first king effectively appointed by Parliament after his father had been overthrown in 1327. Parliament often reaffirmed the charter to the monarch, with forty such announcements by 1400.3 Under Edward III, the so-called ‘six statutes’ spelled out the idea of due process, and this became perhaps the most important plank of freedom in the English-speaking world. The wording of Charter 39 was expanded, with ‘free man’ changed to ‘no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be,’ and stating that no one could be dispossessed, imprisoned, or executed without ‘due process of law,’ the first time that phrase was used.

  Magna Carta was last issued in 1423 and was barely referenced in the later fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, with the country going through periods of dynastic fighting followed by Tudor despotism. By Elizabeth I’s time, Magna Carta was so little cared about that William Shakespeare’s play King John didn’t even mention it. The work mainly attacks John for not standing up to the Pope enough, which at this time of anti-Catholic paranoia was seen as a far bigger crime than a few murders and violations of the law.