The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  The Lusignans were a clique. They arrived together and were planted into English life en masse, much as the queen’s Savoyard uncles had fared when they arrived in the 1230s. They were, however, considerably harsher and more unpleasant in their conduct than the Savoyards, and there was significant tension between the two groups. The Lusignans were seen as – and were – haughty, ill-mannered, violent, proud, contemptuous and quarrelsome. Even in a society regularly punctuated by violence, they managed to attract attention for their unpleasantness: a dispute between Aymer and the queen’s Savoyard uncle Boniface, archbishop of Canterbury, resulted in an armed band of Lusignan supporters ransacking Lambeth palace, stealing money, silver and plate, and hot-footing it with hostages to their castle at Farnham. The king, who relied on the Lusignans for cash loans, did not enforce satisfactory punishment for this or other misdemeanours. Indeed, quite the opposite was true: in 1256 Henry gave an order that writs against his favourites should not be acted upon. It was a serious failure of government, and unsurprisingly it was viewed as a direct violation of the clause in Magna Carta that forbade the denial or delay of justice.

  And this was just a single example among many. By the mid-1250s the king was seen by the barons at court and by much of the country at large as dominated by his new favourites at the expense of good governance. As a group of barons would later write to the pope: ‘if anyone brought a complaint and sought judgement against the Lusignans … the king turned against the complainant in a most extraordinary manner, and he who should have been a propitious judge became a terrible enemy.’

  This last line summed it up. The king as judge had become the king as aggressor. By his undue leaning towards his Lusignan cousins, Henry was undermining what was increasingly being seen, from the baronial side at least, as his basic responsibility under Magna Carta: a duty to provide accessible, ready, reasonably even-handed justice. He was exercising or corrupting public authority to favour private interest. Mild-spirited as he was, in the language of classical political philosophy, the king was becoming a tyrant.

  Worse still, Henry was growing delusional. The final problem of the 1250s, which connected almost all the rest of them and illustrated both the scope of Henry’s vision of kingship and the reach of his awesome folly, lay on an island far from the borders of England: Sicily.

  The Sicilian project stemmed from the confluence of two of Henry’s obsessions: his enthusiastic religiosity and his obsession with recreating the empire of his forefathers. When Henry decided to take the Cross in 1250, a significant shift in his foreign policy followed. Having spent his entire reign attempting to build anti-French alliances in the East, particularly with Emperor Frederick II, to whom he had married his sister, Henry shifted tack.

  Now he dreamed of sending a vast army east to assist with the recapture of Jerusalem. The city, reclaimed for the Christians by Frederick II during the Sixth Crusade in 1228, had in 1244 been invaded and almost wholly razed by fierce Khwarezmian clans from further east. Louis IX had taken up the crusading mantle in 1248, and Henry determined to join the project. In the short term, this had allowed him to collect a crusading tax, but it was no cynical financial trick. Pious Henry, who decorated his palaces with paintings of Richard the Lionheart fighting a supposed duel with Saladin, genuinely imagined the glory that would be showered upon the house of Plantagenet by reviving its crusading tradition.

  Unfortunately, Henry’s fanciful crusading plans still had to compete with his real obligations in Gascony, which devoured his time and, more important, his money. Although he amassed plenty of coin through clerical taxation, by 1255 almost all the money he had raised had been sunk in restoring order to Gascony following the calamitous de Montfort years. Yet the king’s crusading ambition remained undimmed. Rather than give up his ambition, he readjusted his sights, from Outremer to somewhere closer to home. In 1254, Pope Innocent IV began to hawk the theoretically vacant crown of Sicily around the princes of Europe, claiming that as the feudal overlord of the island, its crown was in his power to award. Henry saw an opportunity. He could reclaim a far-flung former Plantagenet land, a project that would combine his enthusiasm for crusading with his ambition to restore his ancient inheritance.

  There was at least some family history in the Sicilian kingdom. Henry’s aunt, Joan – daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine – had been queen of Sicily during the 1180s, and a prisoner of King Tancred II during the 1190s. Richard I had freed her during his journey east to the Third Crusade, then conquered the island to teach Tancred a lesson. Since then, the kingdom had been drawn into the interminable wars between the emperors and the papacy, a strategic piece in a struggle for power that engulfed Italy and central Europe for decades. In 1254 Henry sent emissaries requesting that the kingdom should be granted to his second son, Edmund, and his request was granted enthusiastically via the papal legate in March of that year.

  Had Henry III been richer, less beset by other problems, and a more component military strategist, securing Sicily for his second son might have resembled the masterful pan-European geopoliticking in which his grandfather Henry II had specialized. Unfortunately, he was none of those things. He was a naïve fantasist with a penchant for schemes. Richard earl of Cornwall, a troublesome but far wiser head than the king (and who would be elected king of the Germans in 1256), had been offered the Crown of Sicily in 1252. He had flatly refused it, telling the papal nuncio: ‘You might as well say “I will give or sell you the moon; climb up and take it.”’

  Nevertheless, from 1254 Henry’s crusading plans morphed into an obligation to fund the conquest of Sicily in the name of the pope. In May 1255 it was made official. A parliament was astonished when, on the inevitable St Edward’s Day, 13 October 1255, the assembled magnates were told that, in pledging to undertake the Sicilian expedition, Henry had incurred debts to the new pope Alexander IV of 135,541 marks. It was a mind-boggling sum of money: perhaps three times as much as Henry could hope to raise from clerical taxation, and ironically not far off the 150,000 marks that Richard I had been forced to pay to escape imprisonment after the Third Crusade.

  With this vast, and entirely fanciful fortune, the barons learned, Henry was to fund an army that would march through France to Sicily, using the Alpine passes that Henry controlled using his Savoyard connections. From southern Italy an amphibious invasion would be launched against the island, and its Crown seized. Clearly, this was ambitious considering Henry’s mediocre history of generalship. To make things worse, Henry had agreed that if he defaulted on his obligations England would be placed under Interdict and he would be excommunicated.

  It was a mess. And yet Henry brimmed with confidence about his new cause. He made great show of the official announcements connected with the scheme. He accepted Sicilian clergy into the realm. He celebrated when his brother Richard was elected king of the Germans in 1256 and installed the following year, thinking that he had gained a useful ally in his Sicilian project. Most preposterously, in March 1257 Henry presented his twelve-year-old son Edmund, supposedly now king of Sicily, to his assembled – and stunned – magnates and prelates. The boy was wearing full Apulian costume.

  The truth was that no aspect of the Sicilian venture was even remotely realistic. ‘The nobility of the kingdom grieved at being reduced to such ruin by the supine simplicity of one man,’ wrote Matthew Paris. Far from this new ‘crusade’ appealing to his nobles, Henry found himself despised for his reckless adventurism. The magnates would have no part in paying for his scheme, and pointed out on every possible occasion the long list of problems with the venture. But Henry had sworn on his oath – which he was much less inclined than his father to break – that he would become the pope’s man in conquering a faraway island with symbolic but very little practical value.

  By 1257, his problems in finance, faction and foreign policy had combined to create for Henry a perfect storm. The country was growing deeply sceptical about his ability to rule. The coffers were empty. The Lusignans were loathed.
He was committed to his Sicilian madness, on which he had mortgaged his kingdom and his immortal soul with no way of making his payments. The new pope Alexander IV was making ominous – albeit probably not entirely sincere – noises about executing the sentences of Interdict and excommunication. And in 1258, Henry’s barons, summoned to a parliament in Westminster in the hope that they might miraculously grant an aid to pay for the Sicilian project, arrived in radical, reforming mood.

  If any scene summed up Henry’s state of mind in the fortieth year of his reign, it was that which in 1256 he had had painted in the wardrobe at Westminster – a very personal room in which the king’s head was washed and in which he spent some of his most private hours. It was a scene in which a king was rescued by his pack of dogs from a plot made against him by his own men. As a child, Henry had seen his father’s realm invaded. He had seen as a boy king in 1216–17 his own barons turn against the Plantagenet family and invite a Capetian to be their king. Now, four decades later, with the English barons once again mutinous, it was clear that those terrible memories were coming back to haunt him. Henry had finally proven himself his father’s son.

  The Provisions of Oxford

  It was early in the morning on 30 April 1258 when a large body of nobles, knights and their followers approached the king’s hall at the palace of Westminster, their armour clattering on their bodies and their swords clanking against their sides. At their head strode four men: the queen’s uncle, Peter of Savoy; Richard de Clare, earl of Gloucester; Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk; and Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, Henry’s former friend, who was fast becoming his bête noire.

  The four men and their followers must have been up since dawn, nervous with anticipation for the confrontation that lay ahead. As they approached the door to Henry’s magnificent hall, they all knew that their message would be profoundly unwelcome. Ostensibly they came to give the king a reply regarding another request he had made to a Westminster parliament for aid with the Sicilian crisis. But really they came in an attempt to detach him from his pernicious Lusignan friends and to fasten their grip upon a political crisis that could no longer be ignored. They were bonded together in a pact of mutual alliance to ‘help each other … against all people, doing right and taking nothing that we cannot take without doing wrong, saving faith to our lord the king of England and to the Crown’.

  That they were driven to do so was a reflection of the times. As 1257 gave way to 1258, England had sunk into a miserable condition. Respiratory disease swept through the country during the end of the summer in 1257, before torrential rain killed the autumn crops, and a hard winter prevented the cultivation of land for the spring. Disease and pestilence galloped through the country, and in the villages thousands of ordinary people starved. ‘Dead bodies were found everywhere, swollen and livid, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties or on dunghills or in the muddy streets,’ wrote Matthew Paris.

  As the earls and their followers had been summoned to parliament three weeks previously, it had been against the background of blood and thunder. Rebellion was ripping through Wales, led by the formidable prince of Gwynedd, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The papal envoy Arlot continued to bluster about excommunication and Interdict if the Sicilian debt were not settled. And the Lusignans had broken loose of any pretence Henry gave to controlling them. At the start of April, men loyal to Bishop Aymer of Winchester had killed a follower of the influential noble John FitzGeoffrey and Henry had refused to punish the perpetrators. As parliament convened in Westminster to answer yet another request for royal finance, it was generally agreed that the king was powerless to discipline the criminal faction that dominated his court.

  What occurred at the meeting on 30 April was recorded in the annals of Tewkesbury Abbey, whose author probably heard it from an eyewitness. ‘As the third hour [of the day – Terce – mid-morning] approached, noble and vigorous men, earls, barons and knights went to the court at Westminster,’ wrote the annalist. ‘They placed their swords before the entrance to the king’s hall, and appearing before the king, saluted him as their lord king in devoted manner with fitting honour.’ These were no rebels. They presented themselves to Henry, rather, as friends of the English Crown and all that it ought to stand for.

  Henry, however, could not see past their armour. The swords might be resting by the door to his hall, but a group of friends hardly presented an encouraging sight when they approached the throne dressed for warfare.

  ‘What is this my lords?’ he asked. ‘Am I, wretched fellow, your humble captive?’

  ‘No,’ replied the earl of Norfolk. ‘But let the wretched Poitevins [i.e. the Lusignans] 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 in your land peace to men of goodwill”.’

  Henry may have been shocked, but he could not have been surprised to have such a blunt demand presented to him. Hostility towards the Lusignans was near-universal; it is likely that the men who stormed into his presence had the covert backing of the queen. Henry had been asked many political questions in his reign. Now he had run out of answers. Bigod told him that the magnates all agreed: the king ought to swear to obey their counsels; both Henry and the Lord Edward ought to swear on the gospels that they would be bound by the consideration of a panel of twenty-four barons, half elected by the king, and half by the magnates; the king should not attempt to impose any taxes; and Henry should hand over the royal seal – the ultimate tool of government – to a responsible person, whose identity would be decided by the twenty-four. The twenty-four were to elect a continual council of fifteen to guide the king’s hand on matters of day-to-day government, while a parliament was to meet three times a year and to appoint royal ministers.

  These were extraordinary demands, but on that April morning there seemed to be no way around them. Events were beyond Henry’s control, and the sheer strength of the collective political will of the barons was impossible to resist. The same day, both Henry and his son Edward swore on the gospels to do as Bigod asked. After a decade of mounting catastrophe, Henry’s personal exercise of power had finally failed, and now kingship was to be performed by committee – its essential functions placed in the hands of the baronial community.

  But as the experiences of the barons’ forefathers at Runnymede had shown, Plantagenet kingship could not easily be contained. Henry, like John before him, wriggled, attempting to exploit his right to appoint half the committee of twenty-four by packing it with Lusignans. Yet his efforts foundered on an inability to find even a dozen men of sufficient status and rank who still supported his kingship. Eight weeks later, at Oxford, another parliament met, the town bristling with the vicious weaponry of knights loyal to either side, all supposedly there en route to a campaign in Wales, but in reality present in case full-blown civil war should erupt.

  At Oxford, Henry’s resistance collapsed. He was presented head-on with a litany of his failings, and was accused of failing to observe Magna Carta. ‘When parliament opened, the proposal and unalterable intention of the magnates was adopted, most firmly demanding that the king should faithfully keep and observe the charter of the liberties in England,’ recorded Matthew Paris. ‘They moreover demanded that a justiciar should be appointed to dispense justice to those suffering injury, with equal impartiality towards rich and poor. They also asked for other things touching the kingdom for the common good, the peace and the honour of the king and kingdom alike.’

  Henry and Edward immediately took another oath to abide by the barons’ reforms, but there was serious opposition from the Lusignans themselves, who adamantly rejected calls for them to give up lands and castles awarded to them by the king. They were told in no uncertain terms what to expect if they resisted the baronial opposition. According to Matthew Paris: ‘the earl of Leicester [Simon de Montfort], addressing himself to William de Valence, who was blustering more than the others, replied, “Know for certain and make no mistake about it, you will either give up the castles whi
ch you hold of the king, or you will lose your head.”’ Horrified, the Lusignans fled Oxford to the safety of Aymer’s diocese of Winchester. They were formally expelled from the country later in the year, but in the meantime parliament broke up, in the words of the same chronicler: ‘uncertainly and inconclusively’.

  The barons’ proposals at Oxford had been drawn up in close consultation with the knights of the shires, and a wide-ranging programme of reform was issued, which sought not only to regulate central government, but to address the serious issues of corruption at shire level. The measures were known as the Provisions of Oxford, and although arranged in a different format to Magna Carta, it was almost as wide-ranging. The Provisions allowed for four knights in each county to investigate abuses by royal officials, and established a sworn panel of twenty-four to oversee government of the realm. Hugh Bigod was appointed justiciar by the magnates, and all of the major royal officers – from the treasurer and chancellor to the sheriffs, bailiffs, escheators and castellans who exercised royal power in the shires – were to be appointed by parliament. The knights who had assembled at Oxford never made it to Wales, as the war there was abandoned.

  On 18 October 1258 proclamations were sent in the king’s name to the people of England and the king’s subjects in Ireland, telling them of the new order that had been established, and their duty to obey it. That this was a truly national programme of reform was emphasized by the fact that the proclamations were written in French, Latin and Middle English, declaring: ‘Know ye all well that we will and grant that that which all our councillors, or the greater part of them, that were chosen by us and by the community of our kingdom, have done and shall do for the glory of God and in loyalty to us, for the benefit of the country in the judgement of the aforesaid councillors, be firm and lasting in all things always without end. If any man or men oppose we will and command that all our loyal subjects hold them deadly foes.’ A further proclamation followed, two days later, confirming the procedure by which the four knights of each shire appointed under the Provisions of Oxford should go about the business of investigating corruption by royal officials.