The Demon's Brood (12 page)

A thriftless, shiftless king

Frederick Maitland
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On 14 May 1264, after two warhorses had been killed under him, and reeling from sword and mace blows, Henry III staggered down from the battle on the Downs above Lewes to take refuge in the Black Monks' priory. Simon de Montfort's men surrounded it, shooting flaming arrows that set fire to the roof of its great church (bigger than Chichester Cathedral) until the king sent out an envoy to ask for terms. He then agreed to everything for which the rebels had asked, becoming a crowned figurehead; his son Edward was hostage for his behaviour.

Usually remembered only for his struggle with Simon, Henry is one of our most interesting kings, an aesthete (if the term can be used of a medieval man) who built on the grand scale, and
even if it was no thanks to him he left the parliamentary system. Prouder than any previous post-Conquest ruler of being heir to the Anglo-Saxon kings, he was the most English monarch since 1066.

Since the enemy occupied London and Winchester, the nine-year-old Henry was crowned at Gloucester, with a plain gold circlet. But by then, ten days after John's death, Louis seemed more like a French conqueror than Magna Carta's saviour, and many who had opposed John saw no reason why a small boy should lose his inheritance to a foreigner. His father's will won papal support by urging compensation for the Church and help for the Holy Land.

On his deathbed the late king had begged his supporters to make William Marshal regent. ‘For God's sake, beg the Marshal to forgive me', John had told them. ‘I know he is truer than any other man and I beseech you to make him my son's guardian and see he takes care of him – my son can never keep these lands without the Marshal's help.'
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Reluctantly (he was nearly seventy) and only after a great deal of persuasion, William accepted, saying he felt as though he was sailing on a bottomless sea with no prospect of landfall, but, if need be, would find refuge in Ireland and take the boy there on his shoulders. His council included Hubert de Burgh, holding out at Dover, and Peter des Roches, who became the king's tutor.

On hearing John was dead, Louis thought he had won. But the rebels were angered by his giving English estates to Frenchmen and by atrocities committed by his troops, whom the chroniclers call refuse and scum. William Marshal reissued Magna Carta with a new Charter of the Forest, demolishing the rebels' platform, and during Louis's absence in France in Lent 1217 the barons began to desert him. In May, while Louis was besieging Dover, William's troops stormed Lincoln, killing or
capturing half his army. Then a fleet bringing reinforcements from France was destroyed off Sandwich.

When King Philip, Louis's father, heard William Marshal was in command, he said that his son had lost. In September Louis agreed to stop helping the English rebels and to give back the Channel Islands, the regency council paying him over £7,000 to go home. Rebel barons went unpunished. By the time William Marshal died in 1219, the old hero had restored some sort of law and order, and in 1221 Henry was crowned for a second time, at Westminster with the crown of St Edward. Yet the monarchy was still very weak and there was no guarantee Louis might not invade again. The Crown was heavily in debt, while the magnates had little respect for its authority.

The chief justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, governed England for more than a decade. A man on the make from the petty gentry who was turning himself into a magnate by acquiring castles and estates, he grew increasingly unpopular. Nevertheless, aided by Archbishop Langton and lawyers such as Henry de Bracton, he ensured the monarchy's survival. In a full-scale campaign, he put an end to the Earl of Albemarle's seizure of other men's castles, while he checked the ravages of Falkes de Breauté (a Norman who had been King John's favourite commander) by storming his stronghold at Bedford and hanging eighty of his men. For lack of money Hubert was unable to relieve La Rochelle when Louis VIII besieged it, and in consequence by autumn 1224 Gascony alone remained from the Angevin empire. Even so, Hubert stayed in power after Henry came of age in 1227, becoming Earl of Kent.

Stockily built and 5 ft 6 in tall, Henry III had long, thick, yellow hair cut just below the ear, a beard and a moustache, with a drooping eyelid that hid half his left eye. We know exactly what he looked like from the effigy on his tomb in Westminster
Abbey; its fine, handsome features are based on his death mask. He was quiet voiced with a stammer, gentle in manner except when angry. His sharp intelligence was unbalanced by too much imagination and sensitivity, by bouts of ill health and nervous attacks. He had a naïve streak which, combined with a sardonic sense of humour, could give unintentional offence. Not a strong character, he fell under the spell of foreign favourites, who were disliked by everyone else.

‘Accomplished, refined, liberal, magnificent; rash rather than brave, impulsive and ambitious, pious and, in an ordinary sense, virtuous, he was utterly devoid of all elements of greatness', wrote Stubbs. ‘Unlike his father, who was incapable of receiving any impression, Henry was so susceptible of impressions that none of them could last long; John's heart was of millstone, Henry's of wax.'
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Yet he had unusual gifts. His lasting memorial is Westminster Abbey if his palace next door and apartments at the Tower have gone. Clarendon, too, went long ago, but excavation gives us some idea of how he rebuilt the woodland palace in the new Gothic style until it covered more than 8 acres. Using stone from Caen, his masons erected halls and chambers lit by stained glass – its earliest domestic use in England – and warmed by fireplaces, with walls, ceilings and wainscots painted in bright colours. There were gilded stone carvings over the fireplaces and doorways, and tiled pavements with lions and griffins. Henry's bedroom had frescoes of the four Evangelists, while there was a carving of the twelve months over the hearth in the queen's. The two chapels, one for the king, the other for the queen, were especially magnificent. There was a ‘great garden', together with herb gardens, covered alleys bordered by flower beds, and stabling for 120 horses. He also made extensive additions at Winchester, Marlborough and Windsor, turning them into palaces as well as castles.

Henry resembled his father in his sudden (if rarer and milder) rages, on one occasion throwing a jester into the Thames for an
unfortunate joke. Yet he was good natured, constantly giving presents to his household and alms to the poor: 5,000 paupers were fed in Westminster Hall on Edward the Confessor's day, while in his palaces were frescoes of the parable of Dives and Lazarus with the motto ‘He who does not give what he cherishes shall not obtain his desire'. Henry grew devoted to his wife and family – and did not take mistresses. ‘The “simplicity” so often mentioned by Matthew Paris and others was a kind of innocence which remained with him throughout his life and explains a curiously attractive quality.'
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Born at Winchester, the ancient capital and brought up in England, Henry was obsessed with his Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Choosing the Confessor for his patron saint, he named his eldest son after him and his second after the East Anglian martyr king, St Edmund. Genuinely devout, he made many pilgrimages to the Marian shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk, and endowed over thirty friaries. When Louis said that he often heard a sermon instead of going to Mass, Henry replied that he preferred to see a friend rather than hear someone talk about him.

At the same time, Henry III saw himself as an Angevin, mistakenly believing that Prince Louis had promised to persuade Philip II to return the lost Plantagenet lands, and that the old Marshal had missed a real chance of recovering them by failing to capture Louis in 1216–17. Unfortunately, the Capetians now ruled all France, while the Lusignan family who controlled Poitou were their loyal subjects.

Henry's obsession with the lost lands was fostered by his tutor from Touraine, Peter des Roches. Peter hoped to set him against Hubert de Burgh, whose policy was peace at all costs – with the barons, with Scots, Welsh and French. When in 1229 Hubert told the king not to invade across the Channel, Henry was
so angry that he half drew his sword and called him a traitor. Ignoring Hubert's warnings, in 1230 he led an expedition to Brittany, where he was welcomed by its count, Peter of Dreux, a dissatisfied Capetian. ‘The king stayed in the city of Nantes for most of the time, doing nothing but spend money' was what Roger of Wendover heard. ‘Since Hubert, the king's justiciar, did not want them to wage war, his earls and barons entertained each other over and over again in a true English way, eating and drinking as if keeping Christmas.'
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In despair, Henry led a meaningless
promenade militaire
down to Bordeaux, before returning to England.

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.'
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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.

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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.