The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  Although Eleanor developed something of a reputation for avarice, she did not bring a great following of Castilians with her to court, and she does not seem to have inspired the sort of resentment that Eleanor of Provence had sometimes occasioned. Eleanor is best remembered today for the memorial crosses that Edward constructed along the route of her funeral cortege in 1290, celebrating both his beloved consort and his dynasty. In 1299, Edward married for a second time to Margaret of France, youngest daughter of Philip III. Although much younger than the king, she quickly gave birth to two sons and a daughter. The boys, Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock, would play significant roles in the reign of their half-brother, Edward II. The fact that he passed over both of them in awarding the hitherto royal earldom of Cornwall to his favourite, Piers Gaveston, was among the first controversial acts of his reign. It is perhaps unsurprising that both ended the reign supporting Queen Isabella against their brother, the king.

  Edward II’s family relations were troubled. His mother died when he was 6 years old and most of his sisters left court while he was still a boy. His relationship with his father was difficult, with several well-documented confrontations taking place in the later years of the reign of Edward I. On the other hand, for much of the reign, his marriage to Isabella of France may have been happier than is sometimes suggested. Certainly, as a 12-year-old girl she was overlooked in the early years of the reign at a time when the king’s undivided attention was focused on Piers Gaveston. But between 1312 and 1321, Isabella gave birth to four children and played a prominent role in diplomacy. The crises of the middle years of the reign were largely unconnected to the queen, but her marginalization by the younger Despenser in the 1320s ultimately led to a revolution of sorts when she returned from France in 1326 at the head of an army, accompanied by Roger Mortimer. Edward II also faced difficulties with the broader royal family. As already mentioned, his half-brothers eventually turned against him, but it was his cousin, Thomas of Lancaster, who proved his nemesis throughout much of the reign. Here, the policy of Edward I in reducing the number of earls and concentrating power in the main line of the royal family, came back to pose serious problems for his son.

  The deposition of Edward II was portrayed by contemporaries as an act of abdication in favour of his son, maintaining thereby the integrity of the Plantagenet dynasty. Nevertheless, Edward III would need to restore the image of the royal house both at home and abroad. Edward III’s early marriage to Philippa of Hainault, despite the irregular circumstances in which it was arranged, proved successful in every way. The queen was an invaluable companion and confidante to her young husband during the difficult first years of the reign. She would go on to fulfill the primary duty of any medieval queen by producing seven sons and five daughters, seven of whom survived into adulthood. Philippa also succeeded in integrating members of her Hainault affinity into the court without causing unnecessary conflict with the English nobility. Edward, for his part, devoted a great deal of his energy in providing for these children, but significantly he looked beyond England itself in identifying prospects and resources with which to settle them. In some cases, this meant within Britain, including Wales and Ireland, whereas in other cases it meant foreign marriages and titles. Edward was also careful to respect and reward the broader royal family, most notably Henry of Grosmont, earl and later duke of Lancaster. Unfortunately, a central aspect of Edward’s vision for a cooperative royal family was undermined by the prolonged illness and premature death of the Black Prince in 1376. This led to yet another Plantagenet minority for his grandson Richard II, and the almost inevitable internal conflict that comes with a regency.

  Richard II must surely have been shaped by the heroic image of his father and grandfather, and yet both were ill and declining in the years to his accession. Buffeted by the chaotic conditions of his minority, in Anne of Bohemia Richard found a refuge. Richard and Anne appear to have had a genuinely warm and affectionate relationship, and yet there were no children of their union. It is possible that Anne was barren or that Richard was infertile. It is also possible that they entered into a chaste marriage as a matter of religious conviction, although such an undertaking would have been remarkable for a royal couple.

  Richard’s lack of concern to produce an heir seems apparent from his decision to marry Isabella, the 7-year-old daughter of Charles VI of France in 1396. Yet, not surprisingly, the question of the succession was of paramount importance throughout the reign, not least of all to Richard’s eldest uncle, John of Gaunt. By the terms of the entail of Edward III, Gaunt was Richard’s heir, to be followed by his own son, Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV. Richard’s suggestion at various times in the reign that he would designate an heir, such as the earl of Aumerle, was threatening to the house of Lancaster and surely played its part in Bolingbroke’s decision to seize not just his inheritance in 1399, but the crown, bringing the Plantagenet dynasty to a sudden end.

  The story of the Plantagenet dynasty is compelling. The two centuries during which they ruled saw the last foreign invasion of England, three different outbreaks of civil war, as well as a popular uprising of unprecedented scale, and the initiation of a century-long war with France. During this same period, the quintessentially English institution of parliament was born and took shape.

  Meanwhile, a new sense of English identity was being embraced both at the top and bottom ends of society, an identity formed in relation both to a broader British identity and the continent. The Plantagenet kings played a crucial role in all of these developments, recasting England in fundamental and enduring ways.

  CHAPTER 1: HENRY III (1216 – 1272)

  The reign of King Henry III (1216–1272) was as long as it was eventful, and remains controversial today. With hindsight, it is possible to say that the most important date in the reign occurred well before the king’s birth and more than a decade before his accession. This date was 24 June 1204 and it was when Rouen surrendered and with it the duchy of Normandy, to Philip II ‘Augustus’ of France.

  War with France had been provoked by the precipitate marriage of King John to Henry’s mother, Isabella of Angoulême, on 24 August 1200, and John proved unable to recover his patrimony. The devastating defeat of his allies at the battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214 confirmed the loss of Normandy and threatened the rest of the Plantagenet inheritance; upon this, everything else in the reign of Henry III would turn. This may not, however, have been obvious to Henry when his father unexpectedly died at Newark during the night of 27–28 October 1216. At the time, King John was confronted by widespread revolt among his own English subjects, as well as the presence of a French army that was solidly entrenched on English soil. As heir to the throne, John left a 9-year-old son. The fate of the Plantagenet dynasty hung by a slender thread. The reign of Henry III would prove to be a watershed in the development of English notions of kingship. For the supporters of the boy-king in 1216, however, the articulation of idealized visions of kingship would have to wait: for the moment, survival would be enough.

  Henry III had been born in Winchester on 1 October 1207, the eldest of five children born to King John and his second wife, Isabella of Angoulême. Although his mother would survive well into the reign of Henry III (she died on 4 June 1246), and the children by her second marriage (in 1220) to Hugh de Lusignan, count of La Marche, would ultimately play a pivotal part in Henry’s reign, Isabella herself appears to have played a very limited role in the dramatic events of the first year of the reign. Balked of any meaningful role in the regency council that formed around her son after the defeat of Louis of France, in 1218 she chose to return to Angoulême. In the early years of the reign, therefore, Henry III looked not to his immediate family so much as to the broader familia of his father, to men such as William Marshal and Peter des Roches, and to the many castellans and captains, more of them French than English, whose loyalty was Henry’s greatest initial strength. Henry’s quasi-orphanage may also have drawn him to a closer bond with mystical
parents, embodied in his lifelong devotion to the cults of Edward the Confessor and the Virgin Mary.

  On his deathbed, John reputedly had begged his executors to make sure that William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, would assume the guardianship of his young heir. This the Marshal did, but only with grave misgivings about the likelihood of success, and only after receiving the endorsement of all those around the young king, including the only other likely candidate for the guardianship, Ranulf, earl of Chester. In the words of The History of William Marshal, evocative not only of the chivalric ethos of the day but also of St Christopher and the Christ child, the Marshal promised that if necessary he would ‘carry [the king] on my shoulders step by step, from island to island, from country to country, and I would not fail him, not even if it meant begging my bread’.1 Fortunately, he would not have to carry the boy alone. In consequence of John having resigned the kingdom to Pope Innocent III in 1213, the papal legate, Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, was already in residence in England at the accession of Henry III, and his support for the boy provided a degree of legitimization that no rival could hope to match. Another crucially important figure in these early days of the reign was Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, who probably exercised more personal influence over the young king than anyone else, acting as Henry’s tutor until his fourteenth birthday in October 1221.

  The hastily arranged coronation of Henry III on 28 October 1216 at Gloucester can have had little positive impact on Henry’s vision of kingship. Being denied access to Westminster, which was in the hands of Philip Augustus’s son and heir, Louis, count of Artois, he was without the royal regalia. Furthermore, the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, was absent at the papal court in Rome.

  Guala therefore called upon the bishop of Winchester, assisted by the bishops of Worcester and Exeter, to place the makeshift crown – a simple lady’s chaplet – on the young king’s head. Nevertheless, the ceremony gave Henry a patina of legitimacy that Louis lacked in the eyes of the English church, and increasingly among the lay aristocracy as well. The coronation reinforced what was probably Henry’s single greatest advantage: unlike Louis who claimed election as king of England, Henry was the rightful heir of his father and, for a feudal audience with their own lands and sons to consider, this was an unassailable argument. It was an argument further reinforced on 12 November by the reissue of a new version of the Magna Carta – a document that both King John and Pope Innocent III had repudiated, but which both King Henry III and Pope Honorius III (in the person of the legate Guala) now embraced.

  The Battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217 and the subsequent naval battle off Sandwich on 24 August of that year consolidated Henry’s position. At Lincoln, William Marshal, that great paladin of the age, now in his 70s, performed his last great feat of arms, thoroughly routing the forces of the future Louis VIII of France. His bold decision to risk everything on a frontal assault against the rebel troops besieging Lincoln Castle led to the death of the French commander, and the capture of many of the leading English rebels. It was a truly decisive victory.

  Meanwhile, another great figure of the minority, Hubert de Burgh, also emerged as a war hero. His defiant defence of Dover Castle in the face of a siege by Prince Louis had, in part, been responsible for the victory at Lincoln, having compelled Louis to divide his forces. De Burgh’s naval victory over the infamous pirate, Eustache the Monk, off Sandwich prevented reinforcements and supplies from reaching the French and virtually guaranteed the final victory for Henry III.

  Accordingly, in September, Louis agreed to the Treaty of Kingston-Lambeth, withdrawing his claim to the English throne. The excommunication of his followers was withdrawn by the papal legate, and their lands were restored to the status quo ante bellum, allowing for a lasting settlement. In November, the rapprochement of the king and his subjects was further consolidated by another re-issuance, at a great council in Westminster, of the Magna Carta, along with a wholly new Charter of the Forest that was drafted to address some of the most common and resented abuses perpetrated by Henry’s royal ancestors.

  Throughout 1218, William Marshal continued to lead the king’s government, but only with the consent and counsel of the political community. As the Marshal lay dying in 1219, he returned the young king to the protection of the papacy in the person of the new papal legate Pandulf Verraccio, who had replaced Guala in 1218, and who would remain in England until the return of Archbishop Langton in 1221. Yet, despite the endorsement of the legate by the ‘common consent and provision of all the kingdom’, the day-to-day affairs of state were ultimately entrusted to Hubert de Burgh, the justiciar, in preference to Henry’s tutor, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester. The choice of de Burgh rather than des Roches was highly significant. Des Roches, one of the detested ‘Poitevins’ of King John’s reign (although, in reality, he was from Touraine), personified the evils of the previous reign, having served John as justiciar in the run-up to the civil war, from 1213 to 1215. Wealthy, powerful and an alien to boot, he was considered unlikely to follow the Marshal’s moderate course. Hubert de Burgh, on the other hand, was an Englishman of modest background and means, a man more likely to be amenable to the will of the baronage than the powerful bishop of Winchester.

  The greatest problem facing the minority government was the recovery of crown lands and the more general re-establishment of the king’s authority. To achieve this, it was necessary to replace many of the sheriffs and castellans who had held their positions since the previous reign, and who, in truth, had been among those most loyal to Henry during the civil war. Further complicating matters, these men argued that their appointments could not be terminated until the king had come of age. Pandulf urged the justiciar to proceed along an aggressive course, but de Burgh acted with deliberation and caution. He was right to do so, for it was not only ‘aliens’ such as Faukes de Bréauté and the Poitevin count of Aumale, William de Forz, who resisted the reassertion of royal authority. In 1219, the Sheriff of Northumberland considered it useless to travel south to meet with the justiciar prior to the assembly of a great council, while in the following year the earl of Salisbury, William Longespée, wrote to Hubert concerning a royal order for the dismantling of Harbottle Castle in Northumberland, asserting that only the ‘chief council of the king’ could take such a decision. Between 1220 and 1223 – at which time the pope declared the king to be of age – the struggle to reassert royal authority moved forward slowly, but began to gain momentum.

  The second coronation of Henry III at Westminster on 17 May 1220, appropriately the feast of Pentecost, was a decidedly different affair than the makeshift ceremony of 1216. The regalia, most if not all of it new, was splendid. A bejeweled golden crown was paired with a golden sceptre and a silver staff, while the king was richly robed in a tunic surmounted with a dalmatic of red samite decorated with gold orphreys and jewels, along with matching stockings and shoes. The coronation ceremony culminated in one sense with Archbishop Langton placing the crown of St Edward the Confessor on the king’s head. In another sense, the repetition of the king’s coronation oath, with its emphasis on the king’s duty to preserve and recover the rights of the crown, signalled a renewed determination to do just that, to take possession of crown lands and castles in the name of the newly recrowned king. Indeed, on the following day, an oath was taken by the barons in which they reportedly swore to restore royal castles and wards into the king’s hand, as well as to make faithful account for their farms at the exchequer. Over the next few years, considerable progress was made, with the king’s administration, increasingly led by de Burgh, trading concessions in some areas – such as the discontinuation of a forest eyre in 1222, and a reaffirmation of the Charters in 1223 – for the recovery of royal rights in others, such as the resumption of the royal demesne.

  In 1223, Pope Honorius III declared the 16-year-old Henry ready to rule in his own right. Almost at once, he faced a crisis. His former adversary, now King Louis VIII, invaded Poitou in 1224 and quickly overran
it. At the same time, Hugh de Lusignan, second husband to Henry’s mother, launched an attack on Gascony.

  The English response was both swift and forceful, an army being dispatched in 1225 under the earl of Salisbury and the king’s 16-year-old brother Richard. They were quickly able to drive Lusignan out of Gascony, but Poitou remained in the hands of the king of France. The funding for this war had been made available by a tax on movables agreed to by a great council. In return, in February 1225, the king had reissued both the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, sealed with the king’s own seal. This third version of the charters became definitive: although Henry and later kings would reconfirm the charters, there would be no further amending of their content. The 1225 version of the Magna Carta did not greatly differ from its predecessors of 1215 and 1217, yet its importance should not be underrated. The repeated reissue of the charters established them as law, mandating standards for royal government. Additionally, the linkage between the political concessions made in great councils (and later parliaments) and grants of taxation became an increasingly important factor in royal government, one of the most significant developments of the reign.

  On 8 January 1227 in Oxford, ‘by common counsel’, Henry III declared himself fully of age. In fact, however, for the next 5 years it was Hubert de Burgh, now elevated to the peerage as earl of Kent and in 1228 named justiciar for life, who dominated political life. The king meanwhile built up a large military retinue in his own household, and turned his thoughts to recovery of the Plantagenet lands in France. The prospect of such a recovery was enhanced by the unexpected death of Louis VIII in November 1226, leaving a 12-year-old boy, another Louis, as his heir. Henry was further encouraged by representations from the nobles of Normandy and Poitou seeking English intervention; in 1229, he collected the necessary funds through the imposition of a scutage and prepared to invade.