The Plantagenets (38 page)

Henry would go to his grave believing himself to be a king of Norman and Angevin stock. But the world could no longer pretend that English kings were connected in any meaningful political sense to the cities of Le Mans and Angers, Rouen or Tours. Even the remaining slivers of the duchy of Aquitaine, held for so many decades by Eleanor and her family, fiercely and proudly independent of France, were acknowledged to be a fiefdom. Henry’s barons had seen to that. Geographically, politically and feudally, in an orchard a few hundred yards from the True Cross, the Plantagenet empire was finally pronounced dead.

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The trend across Europe’s great realms during the thirteenth century was of consolidation. Louis IX completed the work begun by his grandfather Philip Augustus, extending French sovereignty from Flanders to Toulouse. The amorphous, fluid condition of western Europe that had existed in the twelfth century now creaked into shape. Henry had been forced to accept an adjustment to a world in which the Plantagenet Crown was no more Angevin or Anglo-Norman, but solely English. The Treaty of Paris had confirmed that. The Sicily debacle illustrated that the early Plantagenet days, an age when kingship and kinship stretched from Scotland to the edges of Outremer, were no longer affordable, either financially or politically. England’s horizons had changed.

The Treaty of Paris was in some senses a result of the fundamental shift in the nature of royal rule that had evolved during the first forty-three years of Henry’s reign, which had resulted in the political community of England not merely influencing the king, but actively making government policy for him. Constant reissues of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, granted in return for funds to fight overseas, reset the boundaries and rules of kingship, forming the basis for a compact between Crown and political community over how the king should rule. It was a process forced through by Henry III’s doomed and fanciful ambitions, which set him continuously at odds with his barons, and codified in their ultimate act of legal rebellion: the Provisions of Oxford. The Provisions made it clear that what had once been a firmly hierarchical structure of monarchy and nobility had shifted, during the first half of the thirteenth century, to become a partnership of sorts, in which kingship was knitted into the fabric of English governance, universal but beneath an increasingly abstract law, susceptible to correction by the political community if it strayed.

Henry was described in many ways by his near contemporaries. He was flattered by Pope Alexander IV in 1258 as ‘
Rex Christianissimus
’ – a most Christian king. But it was Dante’s description that stuck:
vir simplex
– a simple man. Henry projected himself as a glorious king, but in fact he was weak, a man with an eye for art but no feel for
politics, who was never able to operate successfully in rapidly changing times.

His penchant for schemes – if not feather-brained, then certainly beyond his talent for execution – led him directly into dire financial and political trouble. Although surrounded by talented individuals, he was susceptible to taking the wrong advice from the wrong people at the wrong time. His lack of good sense and judgement meant that he was never able properly to extricate himself from the messes he landed himself in. And when crisis came, the
Rex Christianissimus
would generally disappear on one of those enigmatic tours of his favourite shrines. Born without a father, abandoned by his mother, never allowed to grow up watching another king rule, all his life dominated by others: Henry was from the start a poor candidate for the Crown, an office that required supreme self-belief as well as self-discipline.

Oddly, when the occasion demanded Henry could play the public part of high priest immaculately and with apparent enjoyment. He understood the way that kingship should look, even if he was at a loss to know how it worked. The gold coins produced in one of his great years of crisis summed it up. Wildly inappropriate as currency, they nevertheless glittered with the image of Henry as Edward the Confessor, the embodiment of England’s ancient monarchy and a national saint in the making. They also attempted to rank English kingship alongside the majesty of the imperial crown, which traded in gold
augustales
. Henry thought big, and he created a cult of royalty manifested in stained glass and wall friezes, the stunningly redeveloped palace and abbey at Westminster and countless royal houses, including the magnificently redeveloped palace at Clarendon near Salisbury. Through Henry, England learned to commune with its own history. He was, above all his ancestors and descendants, an incredibly powerful propagandist for his dynasty. That was his most valuable legacy.

Yet after 1259, Henry became in many ways an irrelevance. He was old and broken, humiliated and overmatched by circumstance. As de Montfort and the barons attempted to rule in the king’s name, the
locus of royal power shifted gradually but inevitably from Henry to his twenty-year-old son, the aggressive, soldierly Lord Edward. Edward would not be king for more than a decade, but he was most decidedly the future of the Plantagenet family, if indeed that illustrious family was to have a future at all.

PART IV

Age of Arthur

(1263–1307)

Now are the islanders all joined together,

And Albany reunited to the royalties

Of which king Edward is proclaimed lord.

Cornwall and Wales are in his power,

And Ireland the great at his will …

Arthur had never the fiefs so fully.

– THE CHRONICLE OF PETER LANGTOFT OF BRIDLINGTON

Lewes

Shortly after dawn on 14 May 1264, a small army stood in quiet array, high on the Downs outside the town of Lewes, in Sussex. Their numbers were slight, but they were zealous. They had crept through thick woodland in the dead of night to claim their ground. Now they were prepared for that most unusual of medieval military engagements: a pitched battle.

The army comprised just a few hundred cavalry, accompanied by several times that number of foot soldiers and servants. As the morning sun climbed through the sky they looked down upon the enemy. It was far greater in number. Before them, along a front that stretched the best part of a mile between Lewes priory and the castle nearby, was a royal army packed with more than 1,000 armed knights, equipped as if for a Welsh invasion, attended by thousands of infantry and led by royal princes in foul and bloody mood. This Plantagenet force was hell-bent on vengeance against rebels who had defied royal rule for too long. They had derided offers to negotiate: the rebels could have peace, they had said, if they presented themselves with nooses around their necks, ready for hanging.

The small rebel army was led by the 56-year-old Simon de Montfort, who was lame with a broken leg and had been wheeled to the battlefield on a cart. Yet if he was injured, de Montfort was also, six years on from the Provisions of Oxford, still an implacable enemy of the king. His righteous political opposition had led him to stoke the fires of anti-royal sentiment wherever he could. In 1262 Henry had obtained a papal bull freeing him from the obligations of the
Provisions and de Montfort had briefly left the realm; only to return in 1263, raising rebellion at the head of a baronial coalition, convinced that war was now the only way to force Henry III to govern according to the vision laid out in 1258. Now de Montfort surrounded himself with young aristocrats in awe of his military reputation, fervent godliness and constant haranguing against a king whom hostile writers characterized as depraved, debauched and ruinous to the kingdom.

De Montfort’s war had begun well, and the rebels had succeeded in capturing much of southern England, but since the turn of the year, the tide had turned towards the royalists. During the spring Henry and Edward summoned a powerful army in Oxford and deployed it against Montfort’s rebel forces in a series of sieges. By Easter royalist forces had squeezed de Montfort out of everywhere but London. By bringing an army to Lewes, de Montfort was preparing for a final showdown.

It was a desperate move. No pitched battle had been fought in England for nearly fifty years. In comparison with the staple tactical set-pieces of siege and plunder, battles were wasteful, uncertain and chaotic. So strenuously did medieval commanders avoid them that few if any of the knights on either side had ever fought in one.

Yet with two armies facing one another on the edge of the Downs, it was clear that a moment of reckoning had been reached. De Montfort’s men, with white crosses pinned to their clothing, were zealous. The mood in the royal camp was vigorous and uncompromising. And none were more so than Henry’s son, the Lord Edward.

Edward was just under a month short of his twenty-fifth birthday. In the six years since rebellion against his father had broken out, he had seen more than his share of violence and difficulty. He had grown up to watch his father flee from and writhe against de Montfort’s attempts to shackle and reform the Crown; had seen him suffer the disintegration of his royal prerogative as de Montfort and the barons forced legislation and ordinances upon his father, aiming to control the royal household and to persecute members of the royal family whose influence the barons judged pernicious.

As he had grown up through the years of discontent, Edward had frequently changed his position with regard to reform. Brought up under the protection of his mother’s Savoyard brothers, in 1258 he had sided with his father’s Lusignan relatives. The following year he had allied with the reform party. Between 1260 and 1263 he had flipped his allegiance another three times. But by 1264 Edward was a diehard loyalist.

Edward’s view of his enemies was broadly captured by the writer of the ‘Song of Lewes’, who noted that under de Montfort’s influence ‘the degenerate race of the English, which used to serve, inverting the natural order of things, ruled over the king and his children’. A letter sent in Edward’s name to de Montfort’s army on the day before the battle accused the earl of being a ‘perfidious traitor, the falsehood of yourself’, and promised the rebels that ‘from this time forward we will, with all our mind and our strength, wheresoever we shall have the means of doing so, do our utmost to inflict injury upon your persons and your possessions’. Surrounded by the warlike Marcher lords whom he had befriended during his youth, Edward took command of the division on the right flank of the army, which stood before Lewes castle, where he had been lodging. His uncle Richard, earl of Cornwall, who had returned to England following a collapse in his position as king of the Germans, was at the head of the central division; Edward’s father, the king, commanded the left flank, before the priory.

Facing Edward’s division stood a rebel band of Londoners. These were not fighting men. To Edward, they were an unforgivable rabble, who had abandoned the Plantagenets and gravely insulted his mother the queen by pelting her with rubbish from the streets of London the previous year. When battle began, with an almighty roar, Edward’s cavalry charged the Londoners.

Edward led his charge with the aggression that characterized a seasoned horseman with a love of the melee. He had spent several years abroad during his youth, refining the martial arts of kingship and competing in the fashionable tournaments held by the European aristocracy. Now the melee was real, and such was the strength of his
attack that Edward’s men easily scattered the opposing division’s cavalry, driving them back across the valley, to the banks of the river Ouse. They caused havoc among the rebel lines, and proceeded to chase the routed Londoners for several miles across the Sussex countryside, killing and maiming all they could reach.

By the time Edward’s men regrouped and returned to the battlefield it was past midday. Judging by their own success, Edward’s men expected to see the rest of the Montfortian rabble slaughtered or imprisoned. Instead, they gazed upon a scene of utter devastation for the royal cause.

By leaving the lines to chase away the rebels’ left flank, Edward had tipped the scales of battle against the royal army. They had suffered a humiliating defeat. Henry’s central division had been driven back by the charges of the rebels behind the walls of the priory behind them. Richard earl of Cornwall, on the other hand, had pushed the division on the royalist left hard against the enemy, but on reaching high ground he had found himself surrounded, and had been forced to take cover from his enemies in a windmill. Edward returned to the battlefield to hear raucous rebel songs and taunts being hurled towards his uncle in this makeshift castle, and to learn that his father was also surrounded and effectively defeated.

The battle was clearly lost, and the only respectable or pragmatic solution was a negotiated surrender. Indeed, de Montfort threatened to behead the captured aristocrats, including Richard earl of Cornwall, if such an agreement was not forthcoming. This was a token both of his seriousness and of the frightening degree to which English politics was disintegrating: no aristocrat had been executed in England since William I had beheaded Earl Waltheof in the eleventh century. In return for allowing Henry to remain at his liberty and titular king (a necessity for both sides, in order to prevent a degeneration into total anarchy), de Montfort demanded that Edward and his cousin, Henry of Almain, son of Richard earl of Cornwall, be handed over as prisoners.

*  *  *

The peace that was hammered out on the day of the battle was known as the Mise of Lewes. The political terms reinstated, in modified form, the Provisions of Oxford and bailed numerous of Edward’s Marcher allies to appear before parliament for judgement. Several political questions were deferred to French arbitration, and Edward and Henry of Almain went to prison. Henry remained king, with an imposed household. But he was now, more than at any time in his reign, a puppet king. The power behind the throne lay now not with a broad baronial coalition, but squarely in the hands of Simon de Montfort.