by Dan Jones
Holy Kingship
Tapers flickered in the king’s chamber throughout the night of 12 October 1247. It was the eve of the feast of the translation of St Edward, now the holiest king in English royal history and namesake of Henry’s eldest son. The king knelt, deep in devout and contrite prayers. He had been fasting on a pauper’s diet of bread and water. He was preparing himself, with a sleepless night of devotion amid the rich smoke thrown out by the candles, for a ceremony of profound royal divinity.
The next day was to be marked by a pageant of splendour, piety and magnificence. Henry had purchased from the nobles of Outremer a delicate crystalline vessel containing a portion of the blood of Christ, which was said to have been collected from Jesus as he suffered the agonies of the Passion. It fitted well into the royal relic collection, which already contained a stone marked with the footprint of Jesus, left just prior to the Ascension. On the feast of St Edward, a holy day that bound together the history of English kingship with the legions of the saints, Henry himself would now present his latest gift – which to his mind rivalled Louis IX’s Crown of Thorns as the greatest Christian relic in western Europe – to the community of the abbey at Westminster.
For once, he had something to celebrate. In a rare moment of peaceful productivity, his brother Richard earl of Cornwall was overseeing the production of a reformed coinage that would restore faith in the debased English currency and earn a tidy profit for both the treasury and the earldom of Cornwall. Better still, after a period of renewed rebellion following Dafydd ap Llywelyn’s submission to Henry in 1241, a coalition of Welsh princes had in April 1247 once more come to terms with the English Crown, accepting Henry as their feudal overlord and extending English rule further and deeper into Wales than at any time since his father’s reign. Meanwhile, the Plantagenet royal family continued to expand: in May Henry had married two of the queen’s relatives to two of his royal wards: the earl of Lincoln and the lord of Connaught. This drew two significant baronial families directly into the royal orbit, which helped the king to feel secure in his realm.
In Henry’s view, his kingship was back on course. Thus, when dawn broke on that October morning, all the priests of London assembled beneath the giant wooden spire of St Paul’s Cathedral, dressed in grand ceremonial with surplices and hoods, their clerks arranged around them, carrying symbols and crosses. Hundreds of tapers gave a glow to the dark of an autumn morning. They awaited their king.
Henry arrived, dressed humbly, in a poor cloak without a hood – a simple penitent whose mean dress was accentuated by the finery of his attendants. He entered the cathedral, and emerged, carrying the little crystal phial above his head, both hands fixed around it, both eyes trained upwards to this exquisite relic, and on to the heavens beyond. Thus he began his procession on foot along the road from London to Westminster.
It was a tiring business. The king was drained by his night of sleepless fasting, and the potholes and lumps in the road threatened constantly to bring him to his knees. But his heartfelt love of ostentatious piety and his single-minded belief in the glory of his crown demanded the discomfort. He had loved the pageantry of royal devotion all his life, since as a thirteen-year-old he had watched with awe at the Trinity Chapel in Canterbury as St Thomas Becket’s remains had been transferred to a great, golden, bejewelled coffin. His mind may have wandered to just such a memory as he processed with the holy blood, two assistants supporting his aching arms as they held his prize aloft.
Before they reached the doors of Westminster Abbey, the procession would have heard the commotion awaiting them. Songs and tears and exultations to the holy spirit rang from the abbey church. The church was in the early stages of a massive rebuilding project, begun in 1245 to redevelop it in the French Gothic style. Some £45,000 would be spent to ensure that the abbey church mimicked and rivalled the great French churches of Sainte-Chapelle, St-Denis and Reims. Slender, soaring columns were to be added, with pointed windows and stained glass decorating them; the weight was to be borne outside the walls by flying buttresses.
The king, deep in his devotions, did not stop when he first reached the church. He carried on, the phial still held above his head as before, and made a tour of sanctity – a circuit of the church, then the nearby palace, and finally his own royal chambers. When this tour was complete, he returned to the church, and in an expression both of his royal munificence and his quasi-divine grandeur, he presented the priceless gift to God, the church of St Peter at Westminster, to his beloved Edward the Confessor and the community of the abbey.
This lavish visual spectacle was the high point of Henry’s royal pageantry. Before his assembled English polity, he carried off a triumphant scene that would have been the envy of Louis IX’s or Frederick II’s sophisticated courts. The bishop of Norwich later gave a sermon pointing out the pre-eminence of Henry’s relic above any other relic in Europe: ‘The cross is a most holy thing, on account of the more holy shedding of Christ’s blood made upon it, not the blood-shedding holy on account of the cross.’
He added, too, according to Matthew Paris: ‘that it was on account of the great reverence and holiness of the king of England, who was known to be the most Christian of all Christian princes, that this invaluable treasure had been sent by the patriarch of Jerusalem … for in England, as the world knew, faith and holiness flourished more than in any other country throughout the world.’
Here then, was Henry’s vision of kingship. It was an office that deliberately outstripped that of his predecessors in holiness and which, through the reverence it showed to the Confessor, redrew the lineage of the English royalty once again back to pre-Conquest times. Like Henry I, the king was knitting his own rule into the ancient Saxon lineage, celebrating its English origins, not just its Norman and Plantagenet sophistication.
But there was more to it than simple genealogy. Henry’s kingship here was made not merely a matter of right and conquest, but of divinity. Henry showed himself the king as minister, not at war with his Church, as had so often been the case under his father and grandfather, but enriching and protecting it, furthering the vision of coronation, when he had been anointed and placed into unique communion with God and his saints. It also anticipated an urge that was growing in his breast: that of becoming a crusader king. Here was Henry the intercessor, Henry the pilgrim, Henry the benefactor. He spoke to England’s soul and to its history.
He also spoke to its nobility. After the ceremony, Henry cast off his pauper’s costume and donned a glittering garment made from precious cloth, woven with shining metal thread and decorated in gold. With a simple golden crown on his head, he knighted his half-brother, the Lusignan noble William de Valence, and several other of his Poitevin and Gascon nobles. The priest-pilgrim king thus became the chivalric lord.
Even though there were plenty outside the walls of Westminster who had grave doubts about the likelihood of Jesus’s blood having survived the thirteen centuries since it was spilled on Calvary, Henry’s pious imagery was all highly fashionable: an autumnal version of the spring feast of Corpus Christi, which had been established as a yearly festival by the bishop of Liège the previous year. And it was also impossibly grand, as the chronicler Matthew Paris, who attended all the ceremonies, was at pains to point out in the account that the king commissioned him to write. But was it politically effective?
The Road to War
The answer, alas, was no. As the 1240s came to a close, Henry had managed at least to build the image of royal magnificence. But despite his masterly and beautiful approach to creating a Plantagenet myth during the late 1240s, as the fifth decade of his reign approached, Henry III was beset by political crises from all directions and in all sizes. After 1247, he began to experience a succession of troubles, mostly of his own devising, which combined by 1258 to cause the most severe political crisis in half a century. Problems came thick and fast, until, by the end of the 1250s, his reign had all but fractured into chaos.
It began in 1248, as Henry
tried to make the best use of his sometime friend Simon de Montfort. In May 1247 de Montfort had been persuaded not to leave western Europe to return to the crusades. Instead, he was sent to shore up a troublesome region of Henry’s overseas dominions: Gascony. After the failure of the 1242–3 Poitou expedition Henry had to reinforce that part of the French mainland of whose loyalty he could still be reasonably certain. De Montfort was thus sent to Gascony as royal lieutenant, with sweeping powers to govern quasi-independently and protect English interests against the incursions of the numerous threatening powers close to the Gascon borders: France, Castile, Aragon and Navarre.
De Montfort took to his lieutenancy with rather too much relish. Given almost total freedom of action in rebel country, far from the centre of English royal government, at first he performed admirably, building a diplomatic shield around the borders of the duchy through alliances with the great lords of the region. But before long his rule had run short of money and long on enemies. The vexatious Gascon nobles, led by the intractably rebellious Gaston de Béarn, refused to submit to de Montfort’s high-handed rule. Resistance was dealt with severely. De Montfort confiscated land, destroyed buildings and, worst of all, cut vines – a terrible punishment in a land whose main source of income was from wine.
By 1252, Gascony was in uproar. Henry, despairingly, recalled de Montfort to face trial before the royal council. It was a fractious affair, with hurt feelings on both sides. The accusations levelled against de Montfort were severe. The Gascons called him an ‘infamous traitor’ who was guilty of extorting from the people, and imprisoning and starving to death his enemies.
According to Matthew Paris, de Montfort was acutely affronted by the aspersions cast upon his character. When first accused by the Gascons, he raged to Henry: ‘Is it, my lord king, that you incline your ear and your heart to the messages of these traitors to you, and believe those who have often been convicted of treachery rather than me your faithful subject?’
Henry gave the blithe response: ‘If everything is clear, what harm will the scrutiny do you?’ It did little to calm the troubled waters.
As de Montfort’s case came to trial before Henry’s sympathetic barons, both parties let their feelings run away with their tongues. After an incensed monologue denouncing Henry’s fecklessness in giving credence to Gascon complaints, de Montfort demanded of the king: ‘Who could believe that you are a Christian? Have you never confessed?’
Henry replied: ‘I have.’
In a bitter retort recorded by Matthew Paris, de Montfort then said: ‘But what avails confession without repentance and atonement?’
To damn so devout a king before the great and good of England was ill-advised to say the least. It marked yet another deterioration of cordial relations between Montfort and Henry. Although the royal council found in the earl’s favour when judging the case, and although he was returned briefly to Gascony, his very presence there was now antagonistic. Henry was forced to go to the duchy in person, subdue it with lavish expenditure, and fit it out for his son to take over as an appanage. And in due course, when the Lord Edward was married to Eleanor of Castile on 1 November 1254 in the abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Castile, Henry granted the duchy to his son as a wedding gift, bringing to a close a disastrous period in its administration.
As part of the settlement, Henry paid off de Montfort’s contract as lieutenant. But the king’s bitter words to his former friend – infused with sourness at the failure of a royal relationship – summed up the simmering feeling that would endure for the next decade: ‘I never repented of any act so much as I now repent of ever having permitted you to enter England, or to hold any land or honours in that country, in which you have fattened so as to kick against my authority.’
But the loss of a friendship was only one aspect of a decade that featured crisis from every angle. Henry’s vision of a restored Plantagenet patrimony, rejoining Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine to the English Crown, was close to his heart from the moment he assumed his majority. But as was abundantly clear to most of his contemporaries, any real attempt to realize that ambition lay far beyond his budget. While Louis IX was able to pay 150,000 livres for his Crown of Thorns, and raise 1,000,000 livres in a crusading fund, Henry III struggled to amass enough coin to launch a simple cross-Channel invasion force every four or five years.
There was simply no escaping the fact that, in comparison both with his ancestors and his rivals, Henry was poor. The means he derived from his estates in England, the profits of government, justice and trade, may have been adequate to his needs when carefully managed in peacetime – indeed, during those periods of his reign when Henry was not pursuing his inheritance in Poitou, his revenues looked positively healthy. But they were never fit for the task of fighting major wars to conquer foreign territory.
Henry did his best to mask the fact. His motto, which adorned the wall of the Painted Chamber in Westminster, was Ke ne dune ke ne tine ne prent ke desire – roughly translated as ‘He who does not give what he loves does not get what he wants’. He wished to cultivate the image of the free-spending prince whose magnanimity brought bountiful reward. He had a passion for precious stones and shimmering metal. He invested heavily in his architectural projects and freely indulged his love of collecting art and jewels (although he would end up having to pawn much of his treasure in the 1260s). Like Louis IX, he travelled in style, patronized expensive religious buildings, made lavish donations to his favourite institutions and shrines, and had his daily masses celebrated by priests in gloriously decorated vestments. He stockpiled gold – the rising currency of Europe – in his personal chambers, living among stacks of ingots, gold leaf and gold dust. But unlike Louis – whose annual income at more than £70,000 was nearly twice the English king’s – behind this façade, Henry faced a deep, structural problem with royal finance.
Since he could not raise enough money by his own devices to launch successful foreign campaigns, Henry relied on ad hoc raids on particular groups such as the Jews, and the taxes that he could now obtain only through negotiation with his greatest subjects. We have already seen how, in the compact of 1225, Henry’s reign had established a principle of quid pro quo with regard to political concessions in exchange for taxes. By the late 1240s this had matured into a relationship in which the great men of England had begun to view their meetings with the king as a legitimate and customary venue in which they could air their critiques of government policy. The meetings gained a formal name when Henry III adjourned a law case to a ‘parliament’ in 1236.
Between 1248 and 1249, four of these prototype parliaments refused Henry a grant of tax to turn Simon de Montfort’s lieutenancy of Gascony into a conquest of the surrounding land. As well as refusing to grant money, they also made loud complaints about the widespread corruption in local government. Henry was reduced to raising funds through selling royal treasure, carrying out a ludicrous second recoinage in 1257, in which gold rather than silver was issued as currency, and borrowing heavily from nobles including his brother Richard.
Furthermore, since he was faced with stubborn resistance to taxation from his barons, Henry was forced to squeeze other, less regulated sources of income. He concentrated on revenue streams that drew more heavily on the pockets of his knights and lower-born subjects.
Repeated, heavy tallaging of the Jews became ever less profitable during the 1250s. Henry’s travelling royal courts attempted to take up the slack, and began to concentrate more heavily than ever on milking the profits of justice. Sheriffs – frequently foreign-born, centrally appointed officials parachuted into the shires to oversee royal government – became noticeably more rapacious in their efforts to raise money. Ignoring the shameful and unbalancing effect this had on governance in the localities, Henry would grant multiple shrievalties to his followers, leading them to press heavily for money on people to whom they were neither connected nor accountable. Meanwhile, feudal exemptions were widely sold by the Crown, leading to an unpredict
able and uneven level of royal exactions in the localities. Much of this ran directly against the spirit, and at times the letter, of Magna Carta.
As the 1250s progressed Henry’s government once again began to chafe on his nobles. Problems were raised by factions at court, and by one faction in particular: a group of the king’s relatives who had recently arrived at court and who were known collectively as the Lusignans.
The Lusignan brothers – William and Aymer de Valence – were Henry’s younger half-siblings through his mother Queen Isabella of Angoulême’s second marriage to Hugh X de Lusignan. The Lusignans had revolted against Louis IX during Henry’s ill-fated Poitou campaign of 1241–2, and the French king held a fierce grudge against the family. William, Aymer, their brothers Guy and Geoffrey and their sister Alice had arrived in England in 1247. Henry received them with much acclaim and fanfare, knighting William at his great Westminster ceremony on 13 October 1247; but the king’s recklessly partisan generosity towards the Lusignans caused widespread resentment, tinged with xenophobia towards an apparently self-interested group of distinctively non-English origin. William de Valence, as well as his belting as a knight, had also been granted marriage to a Marshal heiress, and had thus come to be lord of Pembroke and plenty of other manors and castles in Wales and the borders. Aymer, meanwhile, became bishop-elect of Winchester, while Guy and Geoffrey were granted wardships and money. More importantly, however, as friends of the king they were frequently protected from royal justice.