Trouble with the Church partially – but only partially – explains what happened next. John’s reliance on Innocent III had enabled papal officials to establish themselves in England, where they appropriated benefices whose revenues went to clergy in Italy, depriving landowners of the right to appoint relatives or friends. In 1231 a group of gentry began kidnapping and robbing Roman tax collectors, who in any case were disliked as foreigners.
When the king came home after recovering nothing more than the island of Oleron, Peter des Roches told him his failure was Hubert’s fault. Henry thus dismissed Hubert in 1232, on the pretext of allowing the Roman tax collectors to be persecuted. (He was also accused of poisoning the Earl of Pembroke.) The new justiciar was Stephen de Segrave, a ‘yielding man’. Real power lay with the new treasurer Peter de Rivaux, behind whom lurked his uncle Peter des Roches. Hubert had always tried to keep on good terms with the barons, even if they disliked him. Now, however, too much efficiency and disregard for custom, together with the fact that the two Peters were not only foreigners but brought in others, angered the baronage.
The treasurer turned the Wardrobe (which previously dealt only with the king’s personal expenses) into a department that oversaw treasury, exchequer and taxation, and appointed sheriffs. More controversially, Poitevin, Flemish and Breton troops were imported from France to garrison royal castles, on Peter des Roches’s advice. ‘Poor and greedy’, says the chronicler, ‘these men did their hardest to cow the native English and the nobles, whom they called traitors and betrayers of their king. Naïvely, he believed their lies, putting them in charge of the shires and the young nobility of both sexes, who were degraded by ignoble marriages . . . wherever he went he was surrounded by foreigners.’6 One reason why Poitevins were so disliked was that instead of Norman French they spoke an incomprehensible, partly Occitan, dialect.
Peter des Roches was playing a deep game. He wanted the magnates to rise in revolt so that he could crush them and build the monarchy envisaged by King John. Just as he hoped, several rebelled, led by the old marshal’s son Richard, Earl of Pembroke. However, contrary to Peter’s expectations, his Poitevins failed to win the ensuing war, even though Earl Richard was killed in Ireland. Henry was so alarmed that he went to pray at Walsingham. Finally, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund of Abingdon, denounced Peter des Roches and his nephew for giving the king bad advice that was endangering the kingdom. Unless Henry got rid of them, he would excommunicate the king. In April 1234 Henry dismissed his ministers and expelled the Poitevin troops.
The personal rule of Henry III, 1234–58
For the next quarter of a century, Henry governed by himself. The reforms of Hubert de Burgh and Peter de Rivaux stayed, the king keeping control of central government and the sheriffs. Even Peter de Rivaux was reinstated, in a different capacity. But there was no attempt to challenge the magnates’ liberties – Henry wanted peace and stability no less than Hubert de Burgh. In 1237, and again in 1253, he reissued Magna Carta.7
In January 1236 the twenty-eight-year-old king married Eleanor, one of the daughters of Raymond Berenguer IV, Count of Provence, and his wife Beatrice of Savoy (a beauty whom Matthew Paris compared to Homer’s Niobe). His choice was dictated by foreign policy – her sister had married Louis IX – but the match turned out to be one of the happiest in English royal history. A brunette, Eleanor was intelligent and well educated, writing verse that has not survived, perhaps taught by her father who was a considerable Provencal poet.
Only twelve, if ‘very fair to behold’, she must have been terrified when at Westminster, five days after her wedding to a man she had never seen, ‘with unheard of and incomparable solemnity Eleanor wore the crown and was crowned queen’.8 She grew into a handsome, strong-minded woman who overruled her husband more than once, although she shared his tastes and was a patron of the arts in her own right.9 Her only weakness was a love of luxury. The couple were devoted to each other and to their children. When in 1246 it looked as if their seven-year-old, eldest son Edward was dying, she stayed by the boy’s bedside for three weeks. They had another son, Edmund, who also grew to adulthood, together with two daughters, one of whom died aged three, to her parents’ deep distress.
The queen brought her uncles to England, William, Bishop elect of Valence, and his brother Peter of Savoy, to both of whom Henry took a liking. Although the magnates loathed William, the king tried to bully the Winchester monks into electing him as their bishop, but failed; and he left England – to be poisoned in Italy. More tactful, if so formidable that fellow Savoyards called him ‘Little Charlemagne’, Peter stayed on. In 1241 the king made him Earl of Richmond, the same year that he secured the election of a third uncle, Boniface, an arrogant man whom Matthew Paris says was more distinguished for birth than brains, as Archbishop of Canterbury. These were only the most notable of the Provencals and Savoyards brought in by the queen, many of whom she married to heiresses. The English hated them no less than they did the Poitevins.
A few years earlier Henry had given the earldom of Leicester to his protégé Simon de Montfort, whose Anglo-Norman family had been deprived of it by John. In 1238 Simon secretly married the king’s sister, the widowed Countess of Pembroke – according to Henry, Simon had seduced her. As the king was still childless, there were implications for the succession. His hottempered brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall became so angry that he threatened to revolt, supported by the Londoners and the bishops, the latter protesting that the lady had taken a vow of perpetual chastity. Richard calmed down on being paid the huge sum of 16,000 marks – nearly £12,000 – for his crusading expenses. The next year, Henry fell out with Simon, who also went on Crusade.
In 1235 Matthew Paris followed Roger of Wendover as chronicler at St Albans Abbey, which he remained until his death in 1259. He wrote so readably that great men sent to St Albans to borrow his books, and in 1236 the king ordered Matthew to write Edward the Confessor’s life, Le Estoire de Seint Aedward le Rei, summoning him to court. Despite having little respect for Henry, whom he met many times, Matthew’s account of the reign is invaluable.10
The end of the Angevin Empire
In February 1242 Henry summoned the magnates to London, to raise funds for another French campaign. ‘Everybody knew that the count of La Marche, who was pestering the king to come over at once with all the cash he could bring, did not think much of English soldiers and had no respect for the fighting qualities and courage of our kingdom’s knighthood’, Matthew tells us. ‘He regarded the king as a fool and was only interested in laying hands on his money.’11 When Henry told his magnates he had accepted the count’s invitation, they told him his plan was unworkable; that previously he had made their lives a misery by extracting huge sums which he squandered, and that they refused to be robbed again. Pleading, Henry found enough money for his expedition, which sailed in May.
The opportunity he thought he saw in Poitou was provided by his termagant mother Isabella. In 1220 she had married Hugh of Lusignan, Count of La Marche, the son of her former betrothed, despite his being affianced to her daughter – ‘one of the most extraordinary marriages in history’.12 In 1241, while visiting the court of Louis IX, Isabella was insulted by being told to stand when Louis’s mother and other great ladies were seated. Furious, she persuaded the Poitevin barons to rebel, bullying her husband into leading them. They were joined by Count Raymond of Toulouse and various Pyrenean lords, troubadours singing songs that accused the English king of failing to free the people south of the Loire.
Louis invaded Poitou a month before the English landed, capturing castles and cowing its barons. When Henry confronted the French army at Taillebourg in July, he realized he was heavily outnumbered and reproached Hugh of Lusignan for not bringing the Poitevin knights he had promised in his letters. ‘I promised no such thing’, replied the count. ‘Blame it on your mother, my wife. By the throne of God, she’s got us into this mess without my knowing anything about it.’13 Barely escaping capture, H
enry fled, never drawing rein until he reached Saintes and finally taking refuge at Bordeaux – ‘since we could no longer linger among these perfidious Poitevins who have no shame’.14 He stayed there until the following autumn and, as the English magnates had expected, ‘spent his treasure to no purpose’.
Taillebourg ended the Angevin dream of reconquest. It was a disaster mainly thanks to Isabella, who fled to Fontevrault where she stayed until her death, lucky not to be lynched: French and Poitevins gathered outside the abbey walls, yelling that she was a wicked Jezebel. King Louis fastened his grip on Poitou, Count Hugh losing his independence. Henry returned to England a beaten man, as his father had done thirty years before.
Foreign favourites
On his return, even more southern Frenchmen surrounded the king, partly because of his brother Richard’s marriage to the queen’s sister, Sanchia of Provence (‘Cynthia’ in English), who brought a fresh influx of her fellow countrymen. At the same time, after Louis IX’s conquest of Poitou, Henry’s Lusignan half-brothers fled to England, where William became Earl of Pembroke and Aymer Bishop elect of Winchester, while Guy was given so much money that he needed packhorses to carry it. (Matthew Paris jeered that as a result Henry was reduced to ‘robbing or begging in order to eat’.) What caused deep offence was the Lusignans’ arrogance and that of their agents.15 But the king protected them, so they appeared to be above the law.
Henry wanted his wife to share his fascination with the Confessor, one reason why he commissioned Matthew Paris’s biography which was dedicated to her. Spending tens of millions in today’s money, he rebuilt Edward’s church at Westminster Abbey in an English version of the new Gothic style, reburying him in a tomb adorned with mosaics of marble, glass and gold by Cosmati craftsmen from Rome, surrounded by a Cosmati pavement, the only example of such work outside Italy. (Their wonderful pavement in front of the High Altar was restored in 2012.) Painted in green, carmine or indigo, the entire building was designed as an extended shrine.
Learning from Matthew Paris’s book that Edward had worn the plainest clothes, Henry began to dress simply. There was a statue of Edward in every palace chapel, while a likeness of him was painted on the throne and scenes from his life painted in the royal bedchambers. The cult had a political as well as a spiritual function, proclaiming Henry’s right to represent the pre-Conquest kings of England. Even before work began at Westminster, he built a great hall at Winchester, where many of the old kings lay buried.
Foreign affairs
In 1252, ‘unwilling to recall that he had twice presented Gascony by charter to Earl Richard, he [Henry] gave it to his eldest son Edward, mainly because of the queen’s insistence’, Matthew Paris tells us sardonically. ‘When he heard, Earl Richard was enraged and left court.’16 After a surprisingly successful campaign pacifying Gascony, which had been in revolt after Simon de Montfort’s harsh viceroyalty, in 1254 Henry and Eleanor visited Louis IX at Paris. The visit turned into a family party as the two queens were sisters, and Louis was transformed into a firm friend. Henry was so thrilled by the new Sainte-Chapelle (built to house a relic of the True Cross) that Parisians joked he wanted to take it home with him in a cart.
Henry’s piety was unruffled by papal tax gatherers syphoning off 5 per cent of the English Church’s income. In 1240 the rectors of Berkshire, ‘each and every one’, complained in a collective letter to Pope Gregory IX that they had no obligation to finance his war on the Emperor – Frederick II might be excommunicated but he was not a heretic. They were expressing resentment that was felt all over England.
But the king did not want to upset Rome. After Frederick died, Henry reached an agreement with Alexander IV in 1255 by which the pope absolved him from his oath to go on Crusade, and recognized his younger son Edmund as King of Sicily in place of the late Emperor’s bastard son Manfred. In return, Henry paid over £90,000, with gold that he had been hoarding for his Crusade. Alexander wrote eloquently of ‘the royal family of England, whom we regard with special affection’, and how Edmund would be ‘received [in Sicily] like the morning star’.17
Two years later, Richard of Cornwall was crowned King of the Romans at Aachen – Holy Roman Emperor elect. He paid huge sums for the privilege, his brother telling him that such an honour exalted the whole English nation. Henry was so euphoric that he issued a beautiful gold coin worth 20 silver pence, showing the King of England on his own throne with crown, orb and sceptre. Because the gold content was undervalued, it quickly disappeared from circulation, but the six surviving examples are a monument to Henry’s flamboyant heyday.
There remained the small problem of replacing the warlike King Manfred with ten-year-old Edmund. (When Richard of Cornwall had been offered Sicily before Henry accepted it for Edmund, he told Pope Alexander’s nuncio, ‘You might as well try and sell me the moon as a bargain, saying, “Go up there and grab it.”’18) Optimistically, the pope invaded Manfred’s territory and, after his troops were defeated, sent Henry a bill in 1257 for nearly £100,000 – although the king had already paid huge sums. Fearful of being excommunicated if he did not settle it, Henry summoned the magnates to a ‘parliament’ (which meant a discussion) at Westminster Abbey, parading Edmund in Apulian dress and explaining his predicament. The bishops offered just over £52,000 if the lower clergy would agree, but the barons refused outright.
The barons’ war 1258–65
Henry was thought to have squandered 950,000 marks (over £600,000) in a decade. For years he had been extorting loans from Londoners and Jews, besides extracting every sort of fine and feudal due, and shortly before the pope presented his bill the barons had declined to pay another ‘aid’ on the grounds that they were not summoned in the way laid down by Magna Carta. Not only was the king’s credit exhausted, but he had antagonized the barons by favouring the Lusignans, whose arrogance infuriated them; when Simon de Montfort came back to England and had a spectacular row with William of Valence, they applauded him. The parliament met at Westminster early in April 1258 to discuss the Sicilian business, which gave them a chance to take action.19
On 30 April Simon de Montfort, with the Earls of Norfolk and Gloucester and others, entered Westminster Hall in armour, surrounding Henry. ‘What’s this, my lords?’ gasped the king. ‘Am I your prisoner?’ ‘No, my lord,’ answered Roger Bigod. ‘But make those wretched, unbearable Poitevins, and all the other foreigners, get out of your sight and ours.’20 Henry and his heir the Lord Edward were forced to swear on the Gospels that they would introduce a new system of government. A committee of twenty-four, twelve chosen by the king and twelve by the magnates, was to discuss reforms. Somewhat tactlessly, among his twelve members Henry nominated all four Lusignan half-brothers.
What Henry’s supporters called the ‘Mad Parliament of Oxford’ met in June 1258. The magnates ordered the knights on their estates to accompany them, armed, on the pretext of preparing for a campaign in Wales. ‘They were frightened civil war would break out if there was any disagreement, and that the king and his Poitevin brethren might bring in foreign troops’, Matthew tells us. ‘So they put a guard on all the sea ports.’21 It was the first time that knights had attended a parliament in such numbers and, from the magnates’ point of view, it gave them ideas above their station. Moreover, these minor landowners had a lot to worry about as it was a rainy summer, which meant a bad harvest and famine.
A ‘petition of the barons of England’ was presented. As a result, a new council of fifteen was elected by four of the twenty-four, to appoint all great officials, sheriffs and royal castellans, while it was agreed that parliament should meet three times a year to monitor government. A justiciar was appointed for the first time since 1234, with the chancellor and the treasurer under the council’s control. The petition was strongly supported by the knights, as it included their grievances about sheriffs who pocketed illegal fines and ‘powerful people of the realm’ who bought bonds from Jewish bankers and then foreclosed. Everybody knew that the noble bond sharks in
cluded ‘Poitevins’.22
Reluctantly, the king swore to observe the ‘Provisions of Oxford’. Among them was an act resuming all the lands he had granted to his Poitevin half-brothers. ‘They and their henchmen take the opportunity to behave insolently, aggressively and haughtily to Englishmen, robbing them of their goods and treating them with utter contempt’ says the act.23 By the end of June the Lusignans had been chased out of England.
In October another parliament at Westminster redefined the office of sheriff and its duties, nineteen knights becoming sheriffs of their counties. Proclamations were then issued by the council of fifteen, which promised to redress wrongs and were read aloud in every shire court, in Latin, French and English – the first royal documents in the native language since the Conquest. They stated the king’s wish that swift justice should be done throughout his realm for poor as well as rich, and made the sheriffs salaried servants of the Crown.
Stubbs writes of Henry’s ‘feminine quality of irresolute pertinacity which it would be a mockery to call elasticity’,24 but now he showed real political sense. Realizing that his brother-in-law Louis IX might be persuaded to intervene, in November 1259 he went to Paris where he agreed to abandon the lost lands, Louis acknowledging his lordship of Gascony as a French vassal; in future, each English king was to pay homage for the duchy on succeeding to his throne. Henry stayed in France for months, forging a close bond with the French royal family – he was a pallbearer at the funeral of Louis’s eldest son – while postponing a new parliament and letting the reformers quarrel with each other.
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