As for his ‘set pieces’ of monarchical showmanship, these were plainly masterpieces; even the cynical chronicler Matthew Paris, who writes only to find fault, admired them. One which had recently taken place at the time of Edward and Eleanor’s marriage was the marriage of Edward’s sister Margaret to Alexander of Scotland in 1251, and a consideration of this conveys not just a sense of Henry’s talent in this department but also something of the atmosphere of the English court. The focus on the great event was plainly considerable. In his determination to produce a magnificent and memorable display, there are a good 130 orders evidenced in the administrative records, scattered over a period of months prior to the wedding. These come from the king directly, and cover all manner of clothes, gifts, catering and decoration. So we can see that the king and queen wore heavy silk robes furred with ermine, while twelve-year-old Edward and his companions went through at least three costume changes over the day. The edited highlights are Edward’s violet twilled-silk tabard embroidered with three gold leopards front and back and trimmed with miniver (squirrel belly), another made of cloth of gold, again twilled with miniver, and a third with a particoloured tunic of chequered cloth of gold and plain coloured cloth, to be worn with a brightly striped shirt underneath. One can only imagine that Edward had to be forcibly inserted into these garments by his companions, Ebulo de Montibus and Nicholas de Molis. The young Scottish king was presented with a sword with a silk-covered scabbard and a decorated silver pommel and silver gilt spurs. Margaret departed to her marital home bearing, aside from her own trousseau of clothes, ten cloths of gold for religious offerings, a costly bed, a number of ornate saddles and over £300 worth of jewellery, including thirty-five brooches and 173 rings. The feast featured (among many other items) salted fallow and fresh roe deer, a multitude of hams, 10,000 haddock and 500 conger eels plus over 12,000 gallons of wine. All in all, very little expense was spared to give the impression that a great and powerful king was in charge of events; but the records show the reality – an aesthete more concerned with catering than politics.
On Eleanor’s arrival, another of these set pieces was put in place – a well-conceived and well-executed show to emphasise the importance of the royal wedding and, through this, the status of the royal family. In this way Henry III was perhaps a forerunner of Henry VIII, with his keen eye for the well-staged and publicised shows of kingship and the well-thought-out dynastic painting. In the ‘keeping up with the Capets’ aspect of kingship he was therefore not without talents.3
In almost all other key respects, however, Henry was spectacularly untalented. He had none of the Norman or Angevin military talent. While he was apparently tutored in the military arts by distinguished knights, the skills seem never to have taken with him. Matthew Paris, mocking his crusading ambitions, described him as a ‘petty king, untaught in military discipline, who has never galloped a horse in battle, wielded a sword and brandished a spear’. His one major military expedition was into Poitou in 1242, where he attempted to reclaim some of the territory which Louis IX had been steadily gaining there. In sole command of the campaign for the only time in his life, he advanced northwards along the Charente from Saintes – neglecting the obvious precaution of taking the fortified castle of Taillebourg which lay en route. While King Louis may well have been the least militarily talented member of his own family, he knew better than this. He promptly proceeded to Taillebourg, cutting Henry off from his base and coming very close to capturing him. Henry was forced to take advantage of a brief truce to flee back to Saintes – leaving Louis to turn the English retreat into a costly rout. The result? An expensive five-year truce and the loss of Poitou. At home, his lack of military skills would later help to prompt the resurgence of problems in Wales at a time when the lack of clear succession to the leadership of Wales should have enabled the English king to make hay.4
Henry also appears to have been almost totally devoid of political sense. The first and key charge against him is his playing of favourites. Throughout his majority rule he tended to seize on a person or group and elevate them to undue prominence, while acting with ill grace or ingratitude to other key players on the political scene. As will be examined in more detail below, this tendency was politically disastrous. His choice of non-English favourites in particular was inflammatory, because it eroded the political status of powerful families with powerful interests to defend, and it was particularly ill timed as the loss of the Plantagenet foreign empire, and with it the nobility’s related landholdings in those areas, created a more inward-looking, nationalistic society in England.
So Henry’s favouritism created hostility in the powerful nobles whose support he needed. His lavish gifts to his favourites exacerbated that hostility, and they also materially damaged his own position by impoverishing the Crown and limiting his ability to offer patronage elsewhere or to deal with crises as they arose. Ultimately, much of Eleanor’s life’s work became to make good some of the damage wrought in this respect by her father-in-law.
If further drawbacks to kingship were needed, Henry also blatantly lacked any interest in the legal and administrative work which Henry I and Henry II – and also to a certain extent his father, John – had established in English minds as the duty of the king to the country. Henry had no interest whatsoever in the workings of the system of justice in the country or in the abuses which caused dissatisfaction among key sections of the population. He was not even prepared to buy popularity by the easy means of his presence – he travelled as little throughout his dominions as he could, basing his court at a small nucleus of favourite palaces, largely southern, for the majority of his time. Here he would stay for weeks at a stretch, attending to the ceremonial and religious aspects of kingship and moving only when an extraordinary reason demanded it.5
Finally, although plainly not without personal charm, he lacked the politician’s instinct for the correct use of charm, and even more importantly the ability to select and use people of talent. He was also apparently (in the Angevin way) prone to fits of temper, but never learnt to use them to impress, as Henry II had and Edward would. Henry appears to have had a tendency to lose his temper to the point of irrationality, generally with someone to whom he owed gratitude or a favour, and this tendency showed him to be no politician. Worse, it alienated people he needed – usually just at the point when he needed them most.6
Some excuses for Henry can be found. He had no model of kingship to follow in his early years; King John died when Henry was only nine years old and had been much occupied with political and military crises in his latter years, sending his wife and children away from him to safety. Unlike Louis IX, who also lost his father young, Henry had no great regent in his mother. Louis, of course, was sheltered and trained by the redoubtable Blanche of Castile. In England, Henry had no parent at all. In the wake of John’s death, Henry’s mother, Isabella, countess of the politically important – but vulnerable – Angoulême, left England and her children and returned in 1218 to her territories. There she contracted a territorially impeccable marriage with Hugh de Lusignan, the head of the most dangerous set of her neighbours. The Lusignan approach will become apparent, but by way of introduction they had on more than one occasion tried to kidnap Eleanor of Aquitaine, their nominal overlord. On one occasion they merely killed the Earl of Salisbury and took the young William Marshal hostage. At a later date they succeeded in kidnapping Eleanor herself and took the county of La Marche as the price of her release. Following her second marriage in 1220, Isabella settled down to raise a further, large, family – which was to prove more than a little significant in the decade after Eleanor arrived in England.7
All in all, however, when one looks at the English court under Henry, he appears as one of the people least naturally gifted in the skills required of a king. Even before Edward emerged as king in waiting, there were quite a number of other people who might have discharged Henry’s job with more credit.
One of them was his own wife, Eleanor of Provence.
Despite her name, her most significant familial heritage was from Savoy; her mother, Beatrice, came from the sizeable and talented ruling family of that region. At the time of his marriage in 1237 Henry may not quite have appreciated what he was getting, given that Eleanor was only twelve. In time she herself proved quite a formidable political operator, and her family still more so. For the first few years of the marriage Eleanor’s role was conventional: she was, it seems clear from the descriptions, beautiful, which appealed to Henry’s aesthetic sensibilities. Being so much younger than Henry she was initially inclined to idealise him, which soothed him. She shared with him a love of arts and romance – and he showered her with presents and remodelled apartments for her in at least nine royal residences. One of his rare forays outside his usual round of castles was a trip early in their marriage to Glastonbury so she might see the site celebrated in Arthurian romances.8
Eleanor also fulfilled her primary function: Edward was born on 17 or 18 June 1239, when she was about sixteen years old, and he was followed a year later by Margaret, with Beatrice and Edmund following in 1243 and 1245 respectively. So, for the early years of her marriage she was simply the beautiful, adored young queen and mother of a growing family, and her relationship with Henry seems to have been idyllic. Bolstered by her popularity, Henry adopted her relatives (known as the Savoyards) as his first significant group of foreign favourites and established them in a variety of positions of power. But Eleanor had an eye to her financial affairs and to power, too, and by the middle of the decade she had begun to flex her political muscles, ably advised by a her politically acute relatives, sometimes in opposition to her husband. Their main battleground, the question of relatives, will be examined in more detail later in the chapter, but there is certainly evidence that by the early 1250s Henry had begun to find some of Eleanor’s assertions of her rights a little wearing. In particular, in early 1252 she even forced him into litigation over a dispute regarding the right to present a clergyman to a living, and had the unforgivable cheek of being found to be in the right. The relationship between Henry and Eleanor in fact deteriorated to the extent that, later in 1252, just a couple of years before the marriage of Edward and Eleanor, Eleanor of Provence was actually banished from court by her husband and her finances frozen.
Although the banishment lasted only a couple of weeks and the couple reconciled after this, producing one more child (a daughter Katherine), and despite the fact that she was entrusted by Henry with the regency in early 1254, the adoration of Eleanor which observers marked in her early years as queen seems to have gone by this stage. Whether the rift was ever fully mended may be open to doubt. There were almost certainly no more children after Katherine, although Eleanor’s fertility was proved; she was only just approaching her thirties at this time and there were no lengthy enforced separations for some years after this. As both Henry’s mother and Eleanor of Castile herself demonstrate, it was quite usual for a woman in a flourishing marriage to keep producing children well into her forties – Henry’s mother had ten children by Hugh de Lusignan after her thirty-third birthday, and Eleanor of Castile was bearing children up to her mid-forties. It therefore appears that there may have been a degree of estrangement in the marriage, due to Henry’s dislike of having to face Eleanor’s abilities and determination.9
Eleanor of Provence may well have taken such estrangement in her stride as, tutored by her Savoyard relatives, she had determined on an important political role for herself in controlling Edward as the heir. A Savoyard, William de Dya, was appointed joint custodian of Edward, along with the Englishman Hugh Giffard, and Bernard of Savoy was appointed keeper of Windsor Castle, where the children spent most of their time. With her people in place even when she was not present, Eleanor could trust that her children, and in particular her son, were being raised to mind her priorities.10
Aside from her political role in managing the royal heir, Eleanor carved out for herself a rather greater wifely role than had become traditional, following the disgrace of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the succession of two non-interventionist queens in the form of Berengaria of Navarre and Isabella of Angoulême. In particular, impelled by necessity, she established something of a financial powerbase for herself during Henry’s life. The means by which she did this was the provision to her by Henry of a succession of highly remunerative wardships and her attempts to increase her own prerogative income. Both of these steps were controversial. The wardships which she acquired were high profile, and were then exploited by her, in a fashion which her own biographer concedes was ruthless, in pursuit of quick and substantial returns. Her attempts to expand the ambit of her prerogative income, including an ambitious attempt to expand the incidence of the tax known as ‘queen’s gold’, were controversial both at a national and local level. The former can be seen in the fact that questions were asked at the Oxford parliament of 1258. As for the latter, the queen’s gold issue provoked a very serious hostility to Eleanor among Londoners in particular, and this hostility was to come home to roost in later years.11
It seems likely that Eleanor was a warm person who got on well with other women and formed strong friendships; Howell found evidence of long correspondences with more than one intimate friend, and on reading her letters a lively, charming person speaks through the years. To add to her beauty she obviously also had a keen interest in style and dress. Howell notes that her wardrobe records a wide variety of beautiful and luxurious items of clothing: gowns in vibrant colours trimmed with borders worked with gold or silver thread or decorated with pearl buttons, capes trimmed with fur, indoor slippers and goatskin boots. Overall, they present the impression of a queen for whom style was an indispensable aspect of queenship.12
Another major player in the English political world was Henry’s younger brother Richard of Cornwall. Richard appears also to have lacked any great interest in or aptitude for martial endeavour. Although he did go on Crusade with Simon de Montfort in the earlier years of Henry’s reign, he does not appear to have returned with any great reputation as a soldier. The reputation with which he returned was far more as a politician, supported by a number of actions on Crusade, including the conclusion of an advantageous truce and negotiation of the return of numerous high-ranking hostages, including Simon de Montfort’s brother. But there is no reason to doubt his courage. The debacle at Saintes in 1242 illustrates both his bravery and his political abilities: he crossed the River Charente to the enemy camp armed only with a pilgrim’s staff to make a personal appeal to King Louis for a short truce, which was granted. Powicke concludes that he was in better control of his temper than Henry and that he made better use of his wits.13
In the early part of Henry’s majority reign, Richard was a powerful force in arguments for administrative reform, speaking on behalf of influential barons. He was also very good at business, accumulating a large range of estates, often as the price of his agreement with his brother at difficult moments. He worked hard at the management of his properties, becoming, largely by his own efforts, one of the richest men in the kingdom. By the time of Eleanor’s introduction to English politics in 1255 Richard was, in a quiet way, a great man at court, married to Eleanor of Provence’s sister Sanchia – a marriage to which he was reconciled, characteristically, by a large grant of money. Richard’s biographer makes the good point that while Henry and Richard were both tied by their marriages to the Savoyard faction, Henry impoverished himself by giving them gifts – whereas Richard made them loans, which he ensured were repaid.14
The third relative who had abilities better suited to kingship than Henry was in many ways the most important: Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. De Montfort was the son of the famous general of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars in southern France. As a younger son, Simon had arrived in England with next to nothing and had been warmly welcomed by Henry, presumably on the strength of his great charm and his equally considerable reputation (the origins of which are mysterious) as a warrior. As to his charm, th
e records provide clear evidence of that most ephemeral of characteristics: his ‘pleasant and courteous way of speaking’ is noted by one chronicler and its effect can be traced in his personal conquests of other, perhaps better, judges than Henry, such as Robert Grosseteste and Louis IX. It can also be seen from the records which remain of his 1253 trial, where both partisan and non-partisan chroniclers were plainly swept away by the force of his advocacy, and also from both his ability to get people to act against their own interests and his ultimately well-placed confidence that he was a fit match for one of the greatest heiresses of his day.15
However, he had gradually come to cast a very uncomfortable shadow over Henry. To add to his reputation as a great warrior had come two important additions: status and money. In terms of status, he was already very well born; although it is conventional to describe his father as coming of the minor French nobility, he was in fact descended from William the Conqueror via one of Henry I’s numerous illegitimate progeny. He also had a claim to the prestigious, though impoverished, English earldom of Leicester, which he made good by purchasing the claim and persuading Henry III to endorse it. However, to this he added hugely by his marriage, in 1238, to the king’s own sister Eleanor, widow of William Marshal the younger, Earl of Pembroke (following some attempts at other, even more stellar, heiresses).
Eleanor herself, it should be noted in passing, has a tolerable claim to being a better candidate for king than Henry based on pure ability. Powicke considered her the most able of the daughters of John – who included the Queen of Scots and the Holy Roman Empress. Recent scholarship, particularly that of Wilkinson, has highlighted her considerable abilities as a politician in her own right in networking for her family and in fighting the cause of her dower rights, as well as some military ability in holding Dover Castle in 1265. Certainly, the picture of her which emerges suggests a rather tougher personality than Henry could claim to possess.16
Eleanor of Castile: The Shadow Queen Page 8