The Plantagenets (33 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
That the reissue of the charters represented a quid pro quo between king and political community was unmistakable, to Roger of
Wendover at least: ‘All the assembly of bishops, earls, barons, abbots, and priors … gave … that they would willingly accede to the king’s demands [for a fifteenth] if he would grant them their long-sought liberties.’
Thus the deal was struck, and on 15 and 16 February 1225 packets of orders were sent to every county sheriff in England, ordering them to proclaim and observe the charters and carry out new surveys of the forest boundary, while also making provision for the assessment and collection of a tax that would unlock tens of thousands of pounds of national wealth for an expedition that – for all its advertisement as a means to protect the coasts – was essentially a private royal expedition of reconquest.
In immediate political terms the tax was wildly successful, raising £45,000 – far more than from previous attempts by the minority government to raise finance by feudal levies. The money enabled Henry and Hubert to muster a well-equipped summer expedition to relieve Gascony. It was led by the king’s younger brother Richard – by now a vigorous young man of sixteen, who had been raised to the rank of earl of Cornwall as a birthday present at the beginning of the year – and the 49-year-old statesman, military veteran and royal uncle, the earl of Salisbury.
The expedition, richly equipped and led by an old hand, was a success. The English came fast and fought hard, driving back the French and preventing them from overrunning the last of the English possessions. Salisbury soon found that he could not retake Poitou in a single campaigning season, but their efforts secured Gascony and its valuable wine trade for the English Crown, establishing a dependency that would last for more than two centuries. It was a high point of Henry’s minority.
Yet the territorial and trade gains were arguably of less significance than the bargain that was struck at home: that of consultation, reform and public finance. As English royal flags fluttered above Gascon castles, copies of the two great charters flew around the kingdom across the Channel. Royal lawyers scratched their heads and wondered how they could find gaps in the charters and ways to maintain royal
prerogative wherever possible. But the genie was out of the bottle. The charters were revered wherever they landed. And it swiftly became obvious that a constitutional bargain had been struck. Henry’s administration had begun a process by which finance for military expeditions was bargained for with detailed concessions of political liberties, written up in the form of charters that were distributed far and wide across the realm. The deal had been done in an assembly of barons, bishops and other magnates which, if it could hardly yet be called a parliament, was at least something like the beginnings of what would become one. The feudal prerogatives of kings and their rights over their subjects were now a matter for debate and discussion with the political community. It was a compact that would endure for the rest of the Middle Ages.
Henry’s minority could, and perhaps should, have come to an end in late 1225. It would have been a reasonable date for many reasons: the king would have been eighteen, old enough to call himself a man. The definitive issue of the charters would have marked both a clean break with his father’s reign and a point from which decisively to launch his own. And it would have proved especially advantageous when, in November 1226, Louis VIII died of dysentery aged thirty-nine, and the long minority of his son, the new French king, twelve-year-old Louis IX, began.
But 1225 did not mark a clean break. Nor indeed did January 1227, when a nineteen-year-old Henry declared himself fully of age at a council in Oxford. Although the king began to build up his own household, independent of his advisers, it was clear that he was far from competent in the exercise of power. He was pulled in two directions, particularly with regard to France. On the one hand, Henry attempted to raise money for the reconquest of Normandy and Poitou in 1228 and 1229, while simultaneously wriggling where he could out of the obligations of the charters that had been promulgated in 1225. Yet on the other, it was clear that real power still lay with de Burgh, whose reticence for war on the Continent damped the enthusiasm that both Henry and his brother Richard earl of Cornwall felt for it. Henry’s dismally unsuccessful attempts to invade Normandy in 1229 and 1230 were restrained by de Burgh’s caution, which prevented the major offensive required to match the king’s ambition.
With de Burgh clinging on to power in his position as justiciar-for-life, and Henry lacking the strength and self-confidence to grasp the reins of government, the quasi-minority continued: a tortuous affair, drawn out long past its rightful length, for the best part of another decade. It was not until 1234 that Henry truly shook off the men whom he had inherited from his father’s reign, and it took a crisis of the utmost gravity to induce him to do so.
This slothful progress towards adulthood and independence, and his over-reliance on fatherly ministers to guide his hand to the point of regency, were products of the king’s character. Henry was from his earliest years vague and somewhat guileless, possessed of vision but not the ability to put his ideas into practice, or the stomach for headstrong personal government that had been common among even the worst of his ancestors.
Having grown up with no kingly role model, Henry was excessively drawn to paternal figures, an instinct that also underlay his infuriating tendency to take the last, rather than the best, piece of advice given. Henry had inherited the Plantagenet temper, and there were numerous occasions during his reign when he flew into rages with his friends and ministers, hurling violent abuse at them and occasionally trying to brain them with nearby objects; during one fit of temper he tried to attack Hubert Walter with a blunted sword. Yet he could rarely stay angry with his advisers for long enough to displace or remove them, and as a consequence they remained around him, governing on his behalf for an unseemly length of time.
The longer that de Burgh’s hands stayed clamped on the levers of power, the deeper into malaise Henry’s reign subsided. While the justiciar enriched himself with wardships that gave him the profits of major estates, Henry suffered the political consequences of petty squabbling between Hubert and leading young barons who should have formed a loyalist core around the new king: in particular William Marshal’s son Richard, and Richard earl of Cornwall, who were provoked into revolt in 1231.
De Burgh’s regime was bad enough – obviously self-serving and at odds with the king’s own aims in government. Yet things grew far
worse in 1231 with the return from crusade of Henry’s one-time tutor, Peter des Roches. The overbearing des Roches had no intention of allowing de Burgh to run England for his own profit, and saw to it that he manoeuvred himself swiftly back into a position of royal influence. Henry was briefly torn between two senior officials, both of whom had exercised formative and paternal influence on him, but who could never work together, particularly in the absence of a king powerful enough to keep them from faction and infighting. In the end, it was des Roches’s sway that proved the stronger. In July 1232 there was a violent quarrel at Woodstock between the king and de Burgh, which ended with the 24-year-old king accusing his mentor of a bewildering array of crimes, including poisoning the earl of Salisbury and the earl of Pembroke, both of whom had recently died (almost certainly unmolested by de Burgh). De Burgh was tried in London before his peers – an unmistakable nod towards the demands of Magna Carta and the new political reality – and he was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in Devizes castle.
So the pendulum swung. Des Roches now dominated Henry and government. Henry briefly delighted in the precious jewels and trinkets that he had confiscated from de Burgh, and enjoyed a rare period of solvency: in September 1232 des Roches secured for him a tax to pay for a campaign in Brittany and in 1233 the government laid a savage tally on the Jews. But to the country at large, nothing had changed. Des Roches’s rule was no advance on what had preceded it, not only because des Roches was even less popular and more overbearing an influence than de Burgh, and brought with him hated followers who had blighted John’s reign. Rather, the bishop’s presence beside Henry only exacerbated the deeper problem of the reign. England needed kingship in person, and not by proxy. And yet for two more years it got further partisan rule by an overbearing minister. To secure his position, des Roches rid the court of his opponents and set about building up himself and his followers with lucrative royal offices, castles and lands. According to Wendover, under des Roches’s guidance Henry ‘exiled his nobles and barons without judgement of their peers, burning their villages and houses, cutting down their
woods and orchards, and destroying their parks and fishponds’. The principles of Magna Carta were trodden underfoot. This did nothing to improve relations between the king and Richard Marshal, who rebelled twice in 1233, sparking a minor civil war and throwing Henry’s attempts to campaign against rebels in Wales into disarray.
It was clear to all that the situation was untenable. According to Roger of Wendover, magnates were beginning to talk of deposing Henry in June 1233. In a great council at Westminster in February the English bishops implored the king to rid himself of des Roches and his pernicious henchmen and stand on his own. Henry agreed, but immediately, as would become his way at times of crisis, took fright at the prospect of imposing his will on the politics of his realm. Instead of sweeping the board and installing new ministers, he vanished from Westminster for more than a month on a tour of the holy shrines of East Anglia, praying to the holy fragment of the True Cross in the monastery at Bromholm, the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Walsingham and other favourite monasteries.
Richard Marshal and Llywelyn of Wales were in rebellion; yet the king was on a pilgrimage. In April 1234 Richard Marshal died from his wounds after a battle in Ireland and Henry was – wildly and erroneously – accused in some parts of having had him murdered. In May 1234 the crisis in government had grown so acute that the English bishops, led by the new archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Rich, were threatening to excommunicate him.
Finally Henry shook himself into action. With some regret he ordered des Roches to retire to his diocese, and took control of government in his own right for the first time. He was half-hearted about ruling, but it was clear that if he did not do so he would very swiftly find himself in the same dire circumstances that his father had suffered just before his death. At a great council held at Gloucester directly after des Roches’s fall, Henry acknowledged that his ministers had failed to abide by Magna Carta in affording their enemies ‘judgement by their peers’. He reversed some of the arbitrary land seizures undertaken by des Roches and committed himself once more to the spirit of Magna Carta by promising to take the great decisions of his
reign after consultation with great councils of his magnates. Out of the crisis of 1233–4, Henry emerged, however unwillingly, as a king – and a king in keeping with the spirit of the realm, in which consensual observance of the principles of Magna Carta was becoming esteemed above all other things.
Curiously, at the same time as he emerged into kingship it also became clear that Henry was undergoing a form of spiritual transformation. As all his realm erupted in uproar caused by his overbearing ministers, rebellious barons and truculent Welshmen, Henry – deeply wounded and confused by the upheaval – was beginning to look into English history for the inspiration he thought would help him to finally become a king worthy of the name. He found it not in one of his more recent relatives, but in the life story of one of his more distant ancestors, the saintly last of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Edward the Confessor.
Edward, whose childless reign had ended in 1066, immediately resulting in the succession wars between Harold Godwinsson and William the Conqueror, was not a king much venerated in Plantagenet England. He had been canonized in 1161, thanks to the offices of Henry III, but there was no great cult around him, and John’s request to be buried alongside St Wulfstan at Gloucester, rather than St Edward at Westminster, showed that there was little special sentiment attached to the latter. Yet to Henry, delving into his realm’s past and seeking a new father figure to prop him up once both de Burgh and des Roches had been forced from office, the Confessor seemed to be an alluring role model.
The history of the Confessor’s reign looked to Henry rather like his own. Like the Confessor, he had come to power amid a time of civil war and popular oppression. He, like the Confessor, had been to some extent betrayed by his ministers (just as de Burgh and des Roches had manipulated Henry for their own ends, so the Confessor had been undone by the treacherous Earl Godwin). The Confessor, promisingly, had endured the tribulations of kingship and ascended to Heaven accompanied by St John the Evangelist. Pertinently for the practical aspects of governance, it was the Confessor’s laws that were
held up as the ancient models for good kingship that were cited in Henry I’s Charter of Liberties. King John himself had sworn to adhere to the laws of King Edward when he was released from his excommunication by Stephen Langton in 1213. All the signs were encouraging.
From 1234 onwards, Henry began to devote himself to the cult of the Confessor with ever-growing zeal. He studied the Confessor’s life and legend, began to paint images of his famous scenes in Westminster and his other palaces, observed his feast day – 13 October – with ever more fanatical zeal, and referred in charters to ‘the glorious king Edward’ whom he regarded as his ‘special patron’. It would be the Confessor’s model that Henry sought in some form to follow for the rest of his life.
Although devotion to saints and the archetype of the pious king was well established in the medieval mind, there was still something rather extreme about Henry’s growing adoration of the Confessor. Nevertheless, no one could complain of the effect that it had had on him. From 1234 Henry III was at last an adult king governing in his own right, who professed his commitment to the spirit of Magna Carta. This was what the realm had been demanding for years.