The Plantagenets (36 page)

But the loss of a friendship was only one aspect of a decade that featured crisis from every angle. Henry’s vision of a restored Plantagenet patrimony, rejoining Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine to the English Crown, was close to his heart from the moment he assumed his majority. But as was abundantly clear to most of his contemporaries, any real attempt to realize that ambition lay far beyond his budget. While Louis IX was able to pay 150,000 livres for his Crown of Thorns, and raise 1,000,000 livres in a crusading fund, Henry III struggled to amass enough coin to launch a simple cross-Channel invasion force every four or five years.

There was simply no escaping the fact that, in comparison both with his ancestors and his rivals, Henry was poor. The means he derived from his estates in England, the profits of government, justice and trade, may have been adequate to his needs when carefully managed in peacetime – indeed, during those periods of his reign when Henry was not pursuing his inheritance in Poitou, his revenues looked positively healthy. But they were never fit for the task of fighting major wars to conquer foreign territory.

Henry did his best to mask the fact. His motto, which adorned the wall of the Painted Chamber in Westminster, was
Ke ne dune ke ne tine ne prent ke desire
– roughly translated as ‘He who does not give what
he loves does not get what he wants’. He wished to cultivate the image of the free-spending prince whose magnanimity brought bountiful reward. He had a passion for precious stones and shimmering metal. He invested heavily in his architectural projects and freely indulged his love of collecting art and jewels (although he would end up having to pawn much of his treasure in the 1260s). Like Louis IX, he travelled in style, patronized expensive religious buildings, made lavish donations to his favourite institutions and shrines, and had his daily masses celebrated by priests in gloriously decorated vestments. He stockpiled gold – the rising currency of Europe – in his personal chambers, living among stacks of ingots, gold leaf and gold dust. But unlike Louis – whose annual income at more than £70,000 was nearly twice the English king’s – behind this façade, Henry faced a deep, structural problem with royal finance.

Since he could not raise enough money by his own devices to launch successful foreign campaigns, Henry relied on ad hoc raids on particular groups such as the Jews, and the taxes that he could now obtain only through negotiation with his greatest subjects. We have already seen how, in the compact of 1225, Henry’s reign had established a principle of quid pro quo with regard to political concessions in exchange for taxes. By the late 1240s this had matured into a relationship in which the great men of England had begun to view their meetings with the king as a legitimate and customary venue in which they could air their critiques of government policy. The meetings gained a formal name when Henry III adjourned a law case to a ‘parliament’ in 1236.

Between 1248 and 1249, four of these prototype parliaments refused Henry a grant of tax to turn Simon de Montfort’s lieutenancy of Gascony into a conquest of the surrounding land. As well as refusing to grant money, they also made loud complaints about the widespread corruption in local government. Henry was reduced to raising funds through selling royal treasure, carrying out a ludicrous second recoinage in 1257, in which gold rather than silver was issued as currency, and borrowing heavily from nobles including his brother Richard.

Furthermore, since he was faced with stubborn resistance to taxation from his barons, Henry was forced to squeeze other, less regulated sources of income. He concentrated on revenue streams that drew more heavily on the pockets of his knights and lower-born subjects.

Repeated, heavy tallaging of the Jews became ever less profitable during the 1250s. Henry’s travelling royal courts attempted to take up the slack, and began to concentrate more heavily than ever on milking the profits of justice. Sheriffs – frequently foreign-born, centrally appointed officials parachuted into the shires to oversee royal government – became noticeably more rapacious in their efforts to raise money. Ignoring the shameful and unbalancing effect this had on governance in the localities, Henry would grant multiple shrievalties to his followers, leading them to press heavily for money on people to whom they were neither connected nor accountable. Meanwhile, feudal exemptions were widely sold by the Crown, leading to an unpredictable and uneven level of royal exactions in the localities. Much of this ran directly against the spirit, and at times the letter, of Magna Carta.

As the 1250s progressed Henry’s government once again began to chafe on his nobles. Problems were raised by factions at court, and by one faction in particular: a group of the king’s relatives who had recently arrived at court and who were known collectively as the Lusignans.

The Lusignan brothers – William and Aymer de Valence – were Henry’s younger half-siblings through his mother Queen Isabella of Angoulême’s second marriage to Hugh X de Lusignan. The Lusignans had revolted against Louis IX during Henry’s ill-fated Poitou campaign of 1241–2, and the French king held a fierce grudge against the family. William, Aymer, their brothers Guy and Geoffrey and their sister Alice had arrived in England in 1247. Henry received them with much acclaim and fanfare, knighting William at his great Westminster ceremony on 13 October 1247; but the king’s recklessly partisan generosity towards the Lusignans caused widespread resentment, tinged with xenophobia towards an apparently self-interested group
of distinctively non-English origin. William de Valence, as well as his belting as a knight, had also been granted marriage to a Marshal heiress, and had thus come to be lord of Pembroke and plenty of other manors and castles in Wales and the borders. Aymer, meanwhile, became bishop-elect of Winchester, while Guy and Geoffrey were granted wardships and money. More importantly, however, as friends of the king they were frequently protected from royal justice.

The Lusignans were a clique. They arrived together and were planted into English life en masse, much as the queen’s Savoyard uncles had fared when they arrived in the 1230s. They were, however, considerably harsher and more unpleasant in their conduct than the Savoyards, and there was significant tension between the two groups. The Lusignans were seen as – and were – haughty, ill-mannered, violent, proud, contemptuous and quarrelsome. Even in a society regularly punctuated by violence, they managed to attract attention for their unpleasantness: a dispute between Aymer and the queen’s Savoyard uncle Boniface, archbishop of Canterbury, resulted in an armed band of Lusignan supporters ransacking Lambeth palace, stealing money, silver and plate, and hot-footing it with hostages to their castle at Farnham. The king, who relied on the Lusignans for cash loans, did not enforce satisfactory punishment for this or other misdemeanours. Indeed, quite the opposite was true: in 1256 Henry gave an order that writs against his favourites should not be acted upon. It was a serious failure of government, and unsurprisingly it was viewed as a direct violation of the clause in Magna Carta that forbade the denial or delay of justice.

And this was just a single example among many. By the mid-1250s the king was seen by the barons at court and by much of the country at large as dominated by his new favourites at the expense of good governance. As a group of barons would later write to the pope: ‘if anyone brought a complaint and sought judgement against the Lusignans … the king turned against the complainant in a most extraordinary manner, and he who should have been a propitious judge became a terrible enemy.’

This last line summed it up. The king as judge had become the king as aggressor. By his undue leaning towards his Lusignan cousins,
Henry was undermining what was increasingly being seen, from the baronial side at least, as his basic responsibility under Magna Carta: a duty to provide accessible, ready, reasonably even-handed justice. He was exercising or corrupting public authority to favour private interest. Mild-spirited as he was, in the language of classical political philosophy, the king was becoming a tyrant.

Worse still, Henry was growing delusional. The final problem of the 1250s, which connected almost all the rest of them and illustrated both the scope of Henry’s vision of kingship and the reach of his awesome folly, lay on an island far from the borders of England: Sicily.

The Sicilian project stemmed from the confluence of two of Henry’s obsessions: his enthusiastic religiosity and his obsession with recreating the empire of his forefathers. When Henry decided to take the Cross in 1250, a significant shift in his foreign policy followed. Having spent his entire reign attempting to build anti-French alliances in the East, particularly with Emperor Frederick II, to whom he had married his sister, Henry shifted tack.

Now he dreamed of sending a vast army east to assist with the recapture of Jerusalem. The city, reclaimed for the Christians by Frederick II during the Sixth Crusade in 1228, had in 1244 been invaded and almost wholly razed by fierce Khwarezmian clans from further east. Louis IX had taken up the crusading mantle in 1248, and Henry determined to join the project. In the short term, this had allowed him to collect a crusading tax, but it was no cynical financial trick. Pious Henry, who decorated his palaces with paintings of Richard the Lionheart fighting a supposed duel with Saladin, genuinely imagined the glory that would be showered upon the house of Plantagenet by reviving its crusading tradition.

Unfortunately, Henry’s fanciful crusading plans still had to compete with his real obligations in Gascony, which devoured his time and, more important, his money. Although he amassed plenty of coin through clerical taxation, by 1255 almost all the money he had raised had been sunk in restoring order to Gascony following the calamitous de Montfort years. Yet the king’s crusading ambition remained undimmed. Rather than give up his ambition, he readjusted
his sights, from Outremer to somewhere closer to home. In 1254, Pope Innocent IV began to hawk the theoretically vacant crown of Sicily around the princes of Europe, claiming that as the feudal overlord of the island, its crown was in his power to award. Henry saw an opportunity. He could reclaim a far-flung former Plantagenet land, a project that would combine his enthusiasm for crusading with his ambition to restore his ancient inheritance.

There was at least some family history in the Sicilian kingdom. Henry’s aunt, Joan – daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine – had been queen of Sicily during the 1180s, and a prisoner of King Tancred II during the 1190s. Richard I had freed her during his journey east to the Third Crusade, then conquered the island to teach Tancred a lesson. Since then, the kingdom had been drawn into the interminable wars between the emperors and the papacy, a strategic piece in a struggle for power that engulfed Italy and central Europe for decades. In 1254 Henry sent emissaries requesting that the kingdom should be granted to his second son, Edmund, and his request was granted enthusiastically via the papal legate in March of that year.

Had Henry III been richer, less beset by other problems, and a more component military strategist, securing Sicily for his second son might have resembled the masterful pan-European geopoliticking in which his grandfather Henry II had specialized. Unfortunately, he was none of those things. He was a naïve fantasist with a penchant for schemes. Richard earl of Cornwall, a troublesome but far wiser head than the king (and who would be elected king of the Germans in 1256), had been offered the Crown of Sicily in 1252. He had flatly refused it, telling the papal nuncio: ‘You might as well say “I will give or sell you the moon; climb up and take it.”’

Nevertheless, from 1254 Henry’s crusading plans morphed into an obligation to fund the conquest of Sicily in the name of the pope. In May 1255 it was made official. A parliament was astonished when, on the inevitable St Edward’s Day, 13 October 1255, the assembled magnates were told that, in pledging to undertake the Sicilian expedition, Henry had incurred debts to the new pope Alexander IV of 135,541 marks. It was a mind-boggling sum of money: perhaps three
times as much as Henry could hope to raise from clerical taxation, and ironically not far off the 150,000 marks that Richard I had been forced to pay to escape imprisonment after the Third Crusade.

With this vast, and entirely fanciful fortune, the barons learned, Henry was to fund an army that would march through France to Sicily, using the Alpine passes that Henry controlled using his Savoyard connections. From southern Italy an amphibious invasion would be launched against the island, and its Crown seized. Clearly, this was ambitious considering Henry’s mediocre history of generalship. To make things worse, Henry had agreed that if he defaulted on his obligations England would be placed under Interdict and he would be excommunicated.

It was a mess. And yet Henry brimmed with confidence about his new cause. He made great show of the official announcements connected with the scheme. He accepted Sicilian clergy into the realm. He celebrated when his brother Richard was elected king of the Germans in 1256 and installed the following year, thinking that he had gained a useful ally in his Sicilian project. Most preposterously, in March 1257 Henry presented his twelve-year-old son Edmund, supposedly now king of Sicily, to his assembled – and stunned – magnates and prelates. The boy was wearing full Apulian costume.

The truth was that no aspect of the Sicilian venture was even remotely realistic. ‘The nobility of the kingdom grieved at being reduced to such ruin by the supine simplicity of one man,’ wrote Matthew Paris. Far from this new ‘crusade’ appealing to his nobles, Henry found himself despised for his reckless adventurism. The magnates would have no part in paying for his scheme, and pointed out on every possible occasion the long list of problems with the venture. But Henry had sworn on his oath – which he was much less inclined than his father to break – that he would become the pope’s man in conquering a faraway island with symbolic but very little practical value.

By 1257, his problems in finance, faction and foreign policy had combined to create for Henry a perfect storm. The country was growing deeply sceptical about his ability to rule. The coffers were empty.
The Lusignans were loathed. He was committed to his Sicilian madness, on which he had mortgaged his kingdom and his immortal soul with no way of making his payments. The new pope Alexander IV was making ominous – albeit probably not entirely sincere – noises about executing the sentences of Interdict and excommunication. And in 1258, Henry’s barons, summoned to a parliament in Westminster in the hope that they might miraculously grant an aid to pay for the Sicilian project, arrived in radical, reforming mood.