The Plantagenets (32 page)

All those in the abbey church’s sparse crowd would have realized that this was a dreadful way to start a reign. The most uncertain transfer of power seen for nearly a century was placing the crown on the head of a child. No boy had been king since the time of Aethelred, in the days before the Conquest. And the precedents from that reign were miserable indeed: Aethelred had presided over a time of Viking raids and invasions, and had been deposed for a year. Grim times confronted England if it were to be thrown back into an age of Saxon chaos.

A few men remained devoted to avoiding that fate. Henry III was fortunate to have around him a group of supporters committed not to seizing power for themselves, but to maintaining the fragile office of kingship as his predecessors had created it. On his deathbed John had realized the jeopardy that faced the Plantagenet legacy and begged for the elderly William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, to become his son’s guardian. Pembroke, now well into his seventies, had accepted the task at first with knightly reticence, and then in typically grandiloquent style, declaring that ‘if all the world deserted the young boy, except me, do you know what I would do? I would carry him on my
shoulders … I would be with him and never let him down, from island to island, from land to land, even if I had to scavenge for my daily bread.’

Notwithstanding the Marshal’s chivalrous pomp, it was not just to the solemn nine-year-old Henry’s advantage that such an attitude prevailed among a few good men in England. The future of the dynasty depended on it. The king – if he was ever to take office fully – would need officers committed to restoring his authority and rights against the most severe and fundamental challenge to them in living memory.

The other key men around the new king included the wealthy Poitevin Peter des Roches, John’s former justiciar and bishop of Winchester. Des Roches had crowned Henry, and despite his widespread unpopularity in the country at large, was to become his tutor and mentor, on and off, for the next two decades. Then there was Bicchieri, representing the pope as Henry’s feudal overlord, whose presence in the royal camp could be expected to add legitimacy to the cause. Finally there was Hubert de Burgh, the Norfolk-born loyalist who had served John for more than a decade. In the office of justiciar, de Burgh presented an acceptable face of government to those who mistrusted ‘aliens’. These men would form the core of a working coalition whose first and urgent task was to see off the invasion and resolve the crises that engulfed the realm.

The first crisis was military. The rebellious northern barons had a dangerous leader in Prince Louis, and he and his allies had captured and held castles all over England. Many were garrisoned by foreign mercenaries. Louis had broad control over the south-east, and French ships patrolled the Channel. The only way to rid the realm of the French was in battle.

The future of Henry’s reign was decided at Lincoln. It was the last and perhaps the greatest military engagement of William Marshal’s long and distinguished life. Having assembled 400 knights and 250 crossbowmen from all parts of the kingdom in Newark after Whitsun in 1217, Marshal marched his men straight to Lincoln, arriving on 20 May to find that Louis’s forces had entered the walled city and were
besieging the castle. The French prince himself was further south, besieging Dover, and the count of Perche was in command at Lincoln, surrounded by the bulk of the rebellious English earls. The French knew that Marshal was arriving, but they procrastinated over strategy. As they did so, Marshal was addressing his knights with a speech to rival that written by Shakespeare for Henry V: ‘These men have seized and taken by force our lands and our possessions,’ he said. ‘Shame on the man who does not strive, this very day, to put up a challenge … if we beat them, it is no lie to say that we will have won eternal glory for the rest of our lives.’

The rhetoric worked. Marshal took charge of the loyal knights, telling them to be ready to slit their own horses’ throats if they needed to take shelter behind the carcasses in the open plain that lay before the northern entrance to the city. Bishop des Roches commanded the crossbowmen, and Ranulf earl of Chester one group of knights, but they could only watch with awe as Marshal led a direct frontal cavalry attack on the city and the French besiegers. The old man was so desperate to join battle that he almost forgot to put on his helmet before he charged the enemy. When he adjusted his armour and led the first charge, he ploughed into the French defenders with such force that he punched a hole three lances deep in their lines. If this was the last chance to save the dynasty he had served all his life, then Marshal was determined to give it his all.

Six bloody and brutal hours of fighting ensued. It was a grisly, awful scene: the air filled with the deafening clang of weapons upon helmets, lances shattering and flying in splinters into the air, limbs crushed and severed by blows from swords and maces, and sharp daggers plunging into the sides of men and horses alike. They fought through the city, until the streets heaved with heads and blood and human entrails. ‘The noise,’ recalled Marshal, ‘was so great that you would not have heard God thunder.’

At the end of the fighting, the French were roundly defeated. Almost every major rebel baron was captured, and the count of Perche died when a spear was thrust through his eye and into his brain. When the news of the loss reached Prince Louis in Dover, he
immediately raised his siege, made for London and began to think of terms for withdrawal.

But the war would not end before the French suffered worse humiliation. In August they were beaten at sea, when Hubert de Burgh commanded a resounding naval victory at Sandwich over French troops led by the pirate captain Eustache the Monk – who would later become the subject of his own Robin Hood-style outlaw romance. The English showered the French with arrows, and blinded them by throwing quicklime downwind, to burn out their eyes. Eustache the Monk was captured hiding in the ship’s bilges. He was offered a choice: beheading on the side of a siege engine, or on the ship’s rail. It is not recorded which fate he chose.

It was all enough for Prince Louis. Henry’s regency government had shown its mettle on the battlefield, and the French prince was happy enough to pocket a bribe and leave. His departure averted the greatest external threat to the English Crown in a century.

From Marshal to Magna Carta

William Marshal, regent of England, had lived to the age of seventy-three before his health began to fail him, but in the spring of 1219, after a distinguished life of service, he died. For many in England this was a matter of great dismay, for Marshal was as close to a non-partisan figure as existed: a loyal critic of the Crown, who had been unwavering in his support of Plantagenet kingship but never afraid to criticize when he felt that they were behaving improperly or ruling badly.

Marshal’s life story was interwoven with all the great kings of his age: Henry II, Henry the Young King, Richard I, John, Louis VII, Philip II and latterly, in battle, the future Louis VIII. He had held the torch for the passing of Plantagenet kingship to another generation, but his age now was past. Without his guiding hand, and sureness of principle and mind, the world looked set to prove an awkward and turbulent place.

In the days before he died Marshal dealt with many things, not least his children’s futures, and his wish to be invested as a Knight Templar in fulfilment of his crusader’s vow. Most important of all, he thought of Henry III’s future, and how best the child king should be educated to ensure the prosperity of his kingdom. As he lay suffering, he called for the twelve-year-old king, and took him by the hand. He told him that he wished him to be passed into the care of the new papal legate Pandulph (who had replaced Guala in 1218), and then exhorted the king to lead a better life than his father.

‘I beg the Lord our God that, if I ever did anything to please him, that in the end he grant you to grow up to be a worthy man,’ Marshal
said. ‘And if it were the case that you followed in the footsteps of some wicked ancestor and that your wish was to be like him, then I pray to God, the son of Mary, that you die before it comes to that.’

‘Amen,’ the king replied.

By the time Marshal died, the young Henry III was no babe in arms: he was old enough to be consulted on matters of governance and was given his own seal to ratify decisions made on his behalf. Yet if he had an awareness of the stiff realities of government, that did not mean that he was trusted to take on the business of rule for himself. For as long as he remained a child there would be faction and uncertainty.

Government after Marshal began by triumvirate, with Pandulph, Peter des Roches and Hubert de Burgh all having a hand in reconstructing England’s battered administration after the ravages of civil war. But after Henry’s second, more magnificent coronation in 1220 – this time in the grander surroundings of Canterbury – des Roches fell from grace and eventually departed for the Holy Land. Thereafter de Burgh dominated. Throughout the 1220s Henry clung to the justiciar for advice and leadership in rebuilding royal finance and directing campaigns to subdue internal rebellion by truculent barons and Welsh aggression under Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd.

De Burgh did his best to treat with Llywelyn and rebuild the ravaged royal finances. Yet kingship without the king was a ship captained by committee, and any realm under a minority smacked of weakness. When Philip II died in 1223, his 35-year-old son – England’s erstwhile invader – became Louis VIII, and determined almost at once to attack the English Crown’s position in Poitou.

After the domestic disturbance of the early years, this was the first real foreign crisis of the reign. The critical blow fell in summer 1224 when the citizens of La Rochelle heard the thunderous approach of a French army before their walls. The new and energetic king of France wheeled his siege engines against them from the land; with a weak and still impoverished young king of England on the other side of the Channel it was not surprising that the townsmen surrendered almost immediately, selling their allegiance for French coin.

Poitou itself had been held precariously ever since John’s ill-fated sally in 1214. But losing La Rochelle removed a vital English foothold on the continental coast and a base for defence or recovery of possessions there, and it put Channel shipping into serious jeopardy. As the chronicler Roger of Wendover explained: ‘[La] Rochelle is … where the kings of England and their knights usually land for the defence of those districts; but now the way was closed to the king.’

Meanwhile, the Aquitanian baron Hugh de Lusignan, who had married John’s widow Queen Isabella and was thus now technically Henry’s stepfather, overran most of Gascony. The already truncated English rump of Aquitaine was reduced to Bordeaux and a few coastal towns. All that was left of the western seaboard of the Plantagenet continental possessions was in danger of being lost for good.

Recovering Gascony and Poitou was a matter of urgency for Hubert and Henry. Family pride depended on it. But what did it hold for anyone else? Merchants did good business in the wine trade, but they were not political men. No English baron had a stake there. Thus the need to recover Poitou and Gascony raised fundamental questions about the means by which the English Crown could finance war on the Continent. The refusal of John’s barons to join his various expeditions had touched off the crisis that ended with Magna Carta and civil war. How could Hubert and Henry convince the same class that now, eleven years later, it was in their interest to fight for land where they had no financial stake?

This, in a nutshell, was to be the central dilemma of kingship for the rest of Henry’s long reign. Although he had not really known any of his royal ancestors, Henry felt keenly the historical burden of restoring their prestige, a task he saw as expressed through the defence of what was left of the continental empire, the expansion of power back into the old lands of central and western France, and building influence on the fringes of Henry II and Richard’s empire in Germany, Sicily and Castile. Yet these were precisely the burdens which, under John, had been shown to be intolerable to the political community of England. In 1224–5, the new regime needed urgently to restate the case for restoring the Plantagenet empire.

The solution came by two routes. The first appealed to fear. Wild rumours circulated that with the Channel full of French shipping and a hungry new Capetian king on the throne, England was under threat of another invasion. If continental reconquest was of little interest to the English barons, then defence of the coast was at least still a worthy rallying cause. Hubert de Burgh played on the invasion scare for all it was worth and succeeded in making it – in the short term at least – a valid reason for national military expenditure.

The second line of attack – which was to matter far more both in the political history of Henry’s reign and the constitutional development of Plantagenet kingship for nearly two centuries afterwards – was to make the decisive move in the long process to heal the wounds of John’s reign, and reissue Magna Carta. It was granted to the assembled lay and ecclesiastical lords of England in a great council in January 1225, as a political exchange for the grant of a tax of one fifteenth part of England’s movables.

Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest had been issued twice since their original promulgation. But the 1225 reissued documents were, in the long run, far more important than the versions that had been foisted upon John at Runnymede, or the two updates that had been issued by the minority government as it attempted to cling to, then to shore up power in 1216 and 1217. Together they formed a grant that would change the course not just of Henry’s reign but of the Plantagenet generations that followed him. No longer an ad hoc collection of liberties asserted hotchpotch, the charters became a symbolic statement of political principle.

The reissue of the Charter of the Forest was particularly important, for it represented a physical limitation of the reach of Plantagenet kingship. Forest law was onerous and generally resented by private landowners – resisting the creep of royal forest literally meant confronting the most powerful arm of kingship on the ground. Committees of men were appointed to physically walk the boundaries of the royal forests and provide reports on its extent.