by Simon Schama
The inadvertent midwife to this native assertiveness was an English state that itself had been twice reborn: first in the years between 1258 and 1265 as a ‘community of the realm’ when a powerful movement of reform, the most radical until the seventeenth century, had forced the monarchy to make itself accountable to the representatives of the wider nation. Then, after that cause perished on the battlefield of Evesham along with its fervent, charismatic leader, Simon de Montfort, Edward I over-compensated for the humiliations of the Crown by trying to establish, in the British isles, the first English empire. In England itself Edward was hailed as the heir to the empire-building King Arthur, the heralded restorer of an ancient British unity. The Chronicler of Bury St Edmunds wrote, jubilantly, if prematurely: ‘England, Scotland and Wales are under his sway. He has thus acquired the former [Arthurian] monarchy of the whole of Britain, for so long fragmented and truncated.’
There was only one way to turn this fantasy into reality: coercion. Before he was done and England’s imperial presence stamped on the face of the island, Edward would leave an enduring legacy of bitterness, not least in the massive fortresses with which he studded the landscape of conquered territory. In the eighteenth century English tourists and painters visited Wales to sketch the piles of granite as exercises in the picturesque. But to the Welsh of that time and earlier they were ‘the magnificent badges of our subjection’, the architecture of colonial domination. Set against the sea to choke off the country from the outside world, should resistance ever dare raise its head, they remained hulking, alien presences in the native heartland.
The wars of the British nations were not just trials of brute strength, though. They were also a battle of ideas about sovereignty: a contest of allegiance between empire and nation, mastery and memory, the omnipotent prince and the community of the realm.
In 1774 the tomb of Edward I in Westminster Abbey was opened by a circle of antiquarians, curious about his fearsome reputation. On the side of the austere marble sarcophagus was just one inscription: Hic est malleus Scottorum (Here lies the hammer of the Scots). When the lid was lifted the tomb revealed a recumbent figure every bit as imposing as thirteenth-century reports suggested. ‘Longshanks’ lived up to his nickname, measuring a full 6 feet 2 inches in his coffin. He was, in contrast to his image in effigies and statues, clean shaven and wearing a delicate crown. He was dressed in the purple cloth of a Roman emperor, a jewelled clasp at his right shoulder. Placed in his right hand was the sceptre, crowned with the crucifix; on the left was the rod of virtue, topped by a little dove (an emblem of Christian appointment), which initially must have appeared to be pecking at his cheek. The eighteenth-century onlookers were struck by the majesty of the figure, intact after four and a half centuries, although one of them attempted to make off with a royal finger before he was stopped by the vigilant dean ofWestminster. Edward, it was also recalled, had been the first king of England since 1066 to bear an expressly English name. His eleventh- and twelfth-century predecessors, whether they thought of themselves as primarily Norman or Angevin, had been essentially French in language and culture, but Edward spoke English, had imbibed Geoffrey of Monmouth’s myth of origins with his mother’s milk and was aggressively self-conscious about the historical destiny of the English realm.
It began with the name. Henry III called his eldest son after the predecessor whom he believed had personified the highest ideals of kingship: Edward the Confessor. To say that Henry was obsessed with the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, who was canonized in 1161, would hardly be an over-statement. He had a mural painted in his bedchamber so that he could turn to the Confessor for inspiration last thing before closing his eyes at night and on opening them in the morning. Told that Edward dressed austerely, Henry took to imitating him, wearing the simplest robes. During the coronation mass arranged for his queen, Eleanor of Provence, in 1236, Henry and the queen both partook of the blood of the Saviour from the Confessor’s own chalice. The vividly illustrated history commissioned by the king and dedicated to Queen Eleanor, the Estoire de St Aedwaerd le rei, presented Edward’s reign as dedicated less to battles than to peace and piety and punctuated by a succession of miracles and prophetic visions.
This may have suited Henry very well. For although he may have wished (somewhat desultorily) to recover the French territories of Normandy and Anjou lost by his father, John, he was seldom in a position to do much about it. His minority was dominated by baronial guardians who ensured that when he asked for taxation grants, the condition of their being granted by the council was Henry’s reaffirmation of the validity of the Magna Carta. In any case, he seemed unsuited to the life of relentless itinerant campaigning that had been characteristic of his Angevin forbears, preferring, for the most part, seats to saddles. When he kept some of Henry and John’s hunting lodges – at Clarendon, for example – he turned them into Plantagenet design statements, heavily influenced by Eleanor’s Mediterranean culture, gorgeously decorated with polychrome tiles and ceilings painted with stars and the crescent moon.
To be a sedentary, rather than a peripatetic monarch was not simply a matter of pampered indolence, however. It was meant to be a concentration of power. The new English monarchy, in both its secular and spiritual forms, would have its proper seat in the place Edward the Confessor had designated: Westminster. Although Henry was not responsible for building Westminster Hall, it was in his reign that it became the great ceremonial space of the Crown, both for his personal household and the court, acting as the highest institution of justice in the land. It was also where the council met, which, in the years after the Magna Carta, became increasingly bold in asserting its right to judge the propriety and wisdom of the policies for which the monarchy would require funds. The council was not quite yet a recognizable parliament (although the term came to be used first in the 1230s), but it was certainly more than the pliant instrument of the royal will.
In keeping with his lofty vision of a restored and emphatically English monarchy that could command awe and reverence, Henry demolished the Romanesque basilica of Edward and the Norman kings and replaced it with an immense Gothic church, comparable to the greatest of the French cathedrals and designed by an architect from Rheims where the kings of France were crowned. Henceforth, this would be the symbolic heart of the kingdom, the place where all English monarchs themselves would be crowned and buried. At its mystical centre Henry III planned an astounding shrine to the Confessor. It was to be inlaid with Purbeck marble, decorated with gold and set high above the altar, like the Ark of the Covenant, while around its base would be a pavement of glittering Italian mosaics. In preparation for the re-entombment, Henry had the bodies of Edward and his queen, Edith, moved to the sanctuary (thus inadvertently smuggling one of the Godwines into Westminster). The first phase alone of the abbey rebuilding took thirty-nine years and some £46,000 – an immense sum that did nothing to endear the king to those who shouldered the burden of the taxes. Even so, we may be sure that Henry III had not a shred of doubt that it had been (other people’s) money well spent. ‘O man,’ read his proud inscription at the Confessor’s tomb, ‘if you wish to know the cause. The king was Henry, friend of the present saint.’
So while his ancestors had battled, Henry of Winchester, with the droopy eyelid and the stolid manner, was content to build (especially after a failed expedition to Poitou in 1242). At the opposite end of London from Westminster he constructed the powerful enclosing wall around the Tower, and inside it the ‘Wakefield’ Tower and a number of smaller buildings, including the menagerie. Out in the country he encouraged projects of enormous magnitude, such as the building of St Alban’s Cathedral and the removal of the Norman cathedral and bishop’s palace of Old Sarum to the new and less exposed site that became Salisbury. Henry is the first English king to be depicted in contemporary images, where he is seen as a master-builder, conferring with masons and architects and men busy with pulleys and plumb-lines.
But because architectural campaigning cost a
lmost as much as the military version, it was seen by the keepers of purses and guardians of the charter, for all its ostensible veneration of the English Confessor, as a suspicious extravagance. Their suspicions were strengthened by the conspicuousness at court of men who were now, tellingly, described in opposition rhetoric as ‘foreigners’. There were two groups: the Provençal and Savoyard kin of Queen Eleanor, and Henry’s own half-brothers (the children of his mother’s second marriage), the Lusignans, who came from the western French region of the Poitou. A generation or two before, the presence of newcomers from continental Europe in the royal household or lodged in some of the principal offices and bishoprics of the land would hardly have been any kind of occasion for comment, since they were scarcely more foreign than the king himself. But in the post-Magna Carta decades of the early thirteenth century the definition of what served and what compromised the interests of the English realm had become much more explicitly nativist, in the literal sense of discriminating on the grounds of where one was born. In the literature of protest the phrase natus est crops up for the first time with heavily loaded significance.
The institution that began to regard itself as the co-protector of England was parliament. Before the crisis of 1258 it was still largely indistinguishable from the royal council of ecclesiastics and barons that had advised or cajoled the Angevins. But even though clause 61 of Magna Carta, which had proposed a supervisory body to oversee the conformity of royal government with its provisions, had not survived the amendments, the spirit of that shockingly audacious initiative had lived on. Through the years of Henry’s minority the councils-become-‘parliaments’ had grown accustomed to considering the propriety or irresponsibility of projects needing hefty supplies of money and to threatening to withhold sums if they disapproved. As the English earls and bishops watched while Henry III doled out castles, offices, bishoprics and land on demand to his foreign courtiers, the baronial parliament began to assert a quite different and much more ambitious claim: the right to approve, veto or even dismiss the king’s choice of officers and advisers. Pushed to its logical extreme in the late 1250s and 1260s, this claim would be tantamount to making the exercise of royal sovereignty conditional on its accountability to those who said they represented the communitas regni (community of the realm). Needless to say, this interference in the king’s choice of councillors was taken by Henry as a grave infringement of his sovereign prerogatives, and he resolved to resist it. The resulting conflict led, in the end, to a civil war, the captivity of the king and a revolutionary crisis every bit as momentous for the fate of the nation as the civil wars of the seventeenth century.
Although the pressure for reform came from many of the highest nobles and clerics of England, the figure who ultimately came to personify its uncompromising resolve, both on and off the battlefield, was the aristocrat Simon de Montfort. Never has there been a less likely leader of an opposition movement claiming to speak and act on behalf of the English community of the realm. For although de Montfort came to be Earl of Leicester, in his origins and early career he was every bit as ‘foreign’ as the pernicious courtiers he and his allies sought to evict from power. His father, also called Simon, whose home estate lay about 30 miles west of Paris, had put his Christian zeal to work by organizing the ‘crusade’ (in effect a mass slaughter) against the Albigensian heretics and the expulsion of the Jews from the south of France. On his mother’s side, though, the senior Simon had inherited the earldom of Leicester. When Simon junior came to claim it in person in 1229 he was just eighteen years old and must have seemed to the older nobles another self-serving French adventurer with a purported claim on an English fortune, who needed to be kept as far as possible away from the king. But there was something oddly compelling about the young man – an eloquent intelligence and a peculiar air of confident self-assertion that made his presence forcefully felt. Yet when Simon secretly married Henry’s sister, Eleanor, in 1238 (a matter affecting the succession and therefore within the council’s right to consultation), the suspicions of opportunism must have been confirmed. It did not help that after her first husband died, the sixteen-year-old widow had, in the presence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, taken a solemn vow of perpetual chastity. When Simon and the king subsequently became sharply estranged, the arguments were personal rather than political. Frustrated in his attempt to have Simon repay a debt to his own father-in-law, Henry let it be known that he had consented to de Montfort’s marriage to his sister only after discovering she was pregnant. Correctly suspecting that he was about to be arrested, Simon took the swelling Eleanor and fled by boat downriver and across to France.
In the 1250s the periodic bickering between the brothers-in-law took on much more serious implications. Simon and Henry were now both in their forties. De Montfort had been a crusader in the Holy Land for two years, fighting alongside the Hohenstaufen emperor, Frederick II, and he returned in the mid-1240s very much the seasoned traveller and cosmopolitan aristocrat. More importantly, he had become deeply pious, rising at midnight to spend the rest of the night in silent vigil and saying the Psalter by heart. He began to wear a hair shirt and, although munificent in his hospitality to others, was frugal in his own habits, dressing in what for an aristocrat were the ostentatiously modest hues of ‘burnet and bluet’. He had also become close to, and corresponded with, some of the most articulate and thoughtful clerics of the day: Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln; Walter de Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester; and the Franciscan scholar, Adam Marsh. All three were committed to the mission of converting lay rulers to the reinstated ideals of Christian government: charity, justice and clemency. Just before he died in 1253, Grosseteste had written a treatise distinguishing between just rule and tyranny, and this was a document that was evidently to have a profound effect on the intense and temperamentally dogmatic de Montfort. Henceforth his political convictions were held religiously.
Simon believed he already had direct experience of what Grosseteste meant by tyranny, petty or otherwise. In 1247 the king had made him lieutenant of the last Plantagenet territory in France: Gascony, with its priceless wine trade centred on Bordeaux. De Montfort proceeded to conduct his government with such uncompromising rectitude that it triggered rebellion among the local Gascon nobles, the last thing Henry needed. To pacify them, in 1252 the king agreed to the drastic step of putting de Montfort on trial, in effect a form of impeachment for overstepping the bounds of his authority. Sparks flew between them, kindling a fire of mutual recrimination. Henry accused Simon of provoking insurrection and made it clear that he would not ‘keep covenant with a traitor’, but de Montfort spoke back to the king as if he were a peer, upbraiding and even threatening him, and reacting to the accusation of treason by replying: ‘That word is a he and were you not my sovereign it would be an ill hour for you when you dared utter it.’ At another point Simon glared furiously at Henry and asked him if he had been confessed, since he seemed no Christian at all.
Acquitted – and popular with most of the nobility, who felt that he had been subjected to a show trial – Simon was sent back to Gascony for another tour of duty. The king and de Montfort even became sufficiently reconciled for Henry to give Simon and Eleanor two royal castles, one of them the immense and grandiose Kenilworth in Warwickshire. It quickly became something more than just a baronial fortress; it was, rather, a centre of courtly and even scholarly life, which completely overshadowed any other noble residence in the country. But when he returned from Gascony in 1253, Simon began to treat his own personal grievances (often monetary, in the form of arguments over his wife’s unreleased dowry) as part of the larger public malady afflicting the kingdom. By the time the next major crisis arose in 1258 Simon had begun to speak and act as if he, the cosmopolitan, had nothing dearer to his heart than the interests of England. In common with some of the most important magnates, like Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, de Montfort believed that Henry had finally begun to reveal himself as the true son
of his father, King John, and that unless he were restrained as John had been, the king was quite as capable of political mischief. The proof seemed to be Henry’s irresponsible acceptance, in 1254, from the pope, Alexander IV, of a kingdom in Sicily for his second son, Edmund. But this was not a free gift. England would pay for the liberation of the island from the hands of one of the pope’s Hohenstaufen enemies, a commitment the king had made without consulting the council, although he must have known there was little chance of this being sanctioned. Henry had got himself into an unenviable position: if he reneged on his sworn promise to the pope, he (like his father before him) would face an interdict on the country or even personal excommunication. So he persevered, with increasing shortness of temper, and demanded that he receive the necessary funds to prosecute the Sicilian ‘crusade’ and, in due course, levies of men from his tenants-in-chief.
What Henry got instead on 28 April 1258 at Westminster was an armed confederacy of seven barons, including Gloucester, Norfolk and de Montfort himself. The fact that they had left their swords at the entrance to Westminster Hall did little to reassure the suddenly frantic Henry: ‘What is this my lords, am I wretched fellow, your captive?’ The barons, led by the Earl of Norfolk, responded that they came not in rebellion but, on the contrary, in all due loyalty to liberate the king from wicked and corrupt foreign counsel. ‘Let the wretched and intolerable Poitevins and all aliens flee from your face and ours as from the face of a lion and there will be glory to God in the heavens and peace to men of goodwill.’ Henry had little choice but to agree and, according to the chronicler Matthew Paris: ‘acknowledged the truth of the accusations . . . and humbled himself declaring that he had too often been beguiled by evil counsel and . . . made a solemn oath at the shrine of St Edward that he would fully and properly amend his old errors and show favour and kindness to his native born subjects.’ Specifically, Henry agreed to the establishment of a committee of twenty-four (half appointed by himself, half by the parliament) to draft reforms for the government of the realm and report back to the council.