Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (33 page)

Magna Carta had saved Henry’s crown. It remained to be seen whether he would honour the charter when he grew to manhood.

IV

At Oxford in 1227 Henry declared himself of age. He was nineteen. But he was still king in name only. And, despite his declaration, he remained so for another five long years.

Real power instead belonged to Hubert de Burgh, who had acted as justiciar since 1219. De Burgh had been a key figure in restoring the monarchy; he had rallied support and preserved its powers. But now he was reluctant to give up his regency. Henry chafed at his control. More and more, he felt slighted and powerless, and in any case de Burgh was losing his grip. He fumbled an attempt to retake Normandy and Poitou, and it ended in a shaming debacle. And when Henry made it clear that he wanted to get married, Hubert saw this as another threat and spread rumours that the king was deformed and impotent. Things reached such a pitch that the angry young king was said to have vented his frustration by attacking his protector with a blunted sword.

By 1232 Henry III had summoned up the courage to overthrow the men and mentors who had restrained him for so long. But breaking with Hubert, virtually a father-figure, was evidently hard for the inexperienced, isolated king. Finally, after a fearful quarrel between the two, Henry stuck to his resolve. Hubert was stripped of his offices and castles and was presented with a hefty bill for all his expenditure as justiciar. Now Henry was determined to be king in deed as well as king in name, and he was determined above all to break the shackles of Magna Carta.

For Henry was not only looking back to the glorious monarchy of Henry II. He was also influenced by the revived monarchy of France. He favoured French courtiers, and his greatest building project was wholly French in style.

The Westminster Abbey we know today is essentially the work of Henry, though its interior is only a pale shadow of the masterpiece he created, which glowed with red and blue and gold. Work started in 1245; it cost a fortune, employed hundreds of craftsmen and lasted for twenty-five years, in the most ambitious project of church building that western Europe had yet seen. Indeed, it was so ambitious that it almost bankrupted the king and inflicted severe political damage on him. But for Henry it was worth it, for he was building a monument to the greater glory of God and to the monarchy.

Westminster Abbey, with the shrine of the royal saint, Edward the Confessor, at its heart, was intended to be the crowning glory of Henry’s vision of kingship. But it was a vision that was intensely controversial to some of his barons. For it seemed as un-English as the architecture of the Abbey itself: the models of Henry’s kingship were foreign too – the French monarchy and the papacy; even its agents were foreign born.

Here Henry’s psychology came into play as, throughout his life, he had a tendency to fall under the influence of stronger, more powerful characters. This meant that he got rid of de Burgh only to submit himself to another man who had nurtured him as an infant king, Peter des Roches, the bishop of Winchester. It was an ominous choice since des Roches had been close to King John. In the last years of that reign the bishop had held the position of justiciar and exacerbated the tensions between king and people as an enthusiastic tax-collector and authoritarian. It was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire: de Burgh had been unpopular with the nobility because he was a
novus homo
– a self-made man and a grasping outsider. Des Roches was even more unpopular because of his association with John and, most of all, because he was not English. Henry’s own behaviour made things worse. He was generous to a fault, giving land and office not only to des Roches but also to his foreign-born family and friends. The Frenchman became virtual ruler of England.

But he lasted only two years. The barons loathed des Roches. He had displaced them at court. His French kinfolk had squeezed taxes out of the country. He had got the pope to cancel previous charters which limited the rights of the crown. And rumours were flying about that the Frenchified court was egging Henry on to take up arms against the barons, claw back the power that John had lost and emulate the claims to absolute sovereignty of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.

England was at the brink of civil war once again. And indeed fighting did break out for some months. In February 1234 the barons, under the leadership of the archbishop-elect of Canterbury, Edmund Rich, denounced Henry in public at Westminster. Before his elevation to Canterbury, Rich – an ascetic former Oxford don – had been an outspoken opponent of foreign office holders and a champion of Magna Carta.

Henry responded, like his grandfather and namesake Henry II, with an ostentatious show of piety. But he lacked the theatrical brilliance of his predecessor. He trekked from shrine to shrine in the East Anglian countryside, hoping something would turn up to save him. But it did not. Real power now lay with the archbishop and the council. Edmund took decisive action to head off civil war and provide leadership in a divided country. In April the division between Henry and the barons and bishops was revealed in dramatic style at Canterbury during Edmund Rich’s consecration as archbishop. Henry sat with Peter des Roches alone on one side of the choir; the other bishops all sat on the other side, facing them as if in a trial. A month later the new archbishop threatened Henry with the ultimate sanction: unless des Roches was dismissed the king would be excommunicated.

Henry backed down. Des Roches was sent away and the council was reconstituted. The king had learned the hard way that his power was not unconditional. For a decade and a half peace of sorts was maintained. This was helped by the poverty of the crown. Henry might dream of autocracy, but he couldn’t afford it. After the dark years of John and the settlement of Magna Carta it had become harder for the crown to raise large taxes. Attempts to bypass restraints and squeeze out more revenue were resisted by nobles and prominent subjects armed with a sheaf of charters guaranteeing their rights.

As a result Henry’s greatest ambition was thwarted. He wanted to restore his family’s honour by rebuilding the great empire of his grandfather Henry II, which had been squandered by his father. But the great reconquest never quite worked. The king’s coffers were always empty. And he was a hopeless general. He wavered, refused to make firm or timely decisions and had a tendency to fall into his enemy’s traps. Having failed in France, Henry dreamed of redeeming himself by going on crusade like his valorous uncle Richard. But that, too, never got off the ground.

Ironically, these were the best years of his reign, as, in spite of the king, peace was preserved at home and abroad. Good relations were maintained with the nobility and their rights were respected. Henry’s personal rule was tolerated as long as it was light of touch and inexpensive. And for Henry’s part, weak and sensitive as he was, the horrors of civil war which he remembered from his childhood and early years as king were to be avoided at all costs.

But these salutary memories dimmed with age. Henry grew more reckless and his folly led to the unravelling of his rule. From the late 1240s he increased the pressure on his subjects. Not on the landed nobility, of course, who were in a position to resist him, but on the lesser folk and clergy, who were hit hard by increased demands for tax. The money raised was wasted on Henry’s erratic and futile foreign adventures. And the king slipped further into debt. He also slipped into the mire of his own delusions. In the 1250s he hatched several madcap schemes, the most notorious being a plan to set up his son, Edmund, as king of Sicily. Sicily was a papal fief and Pope Innocent IV had put it up for sale. Henry was required to pay almost £100,000 for its crown. And, on top of that, he would have to provide an army to remove the current ruler, who was squatting on the island.

Henry was in debt to the papacy; he owed great sums to other great families of Europe; and all he had to show were vain dreams. The nobility flatly refused to bail Henry out. And the Church had come to feel that the king was under the thrall of the pope, to the detriment of the liberties of the English Church. Political support was wearing dangerously thin for Henry.

It was not just Henry’s costly and quixotic adventures. His family, too, was deeply mistrusted. In 1236, he had married Eleanor of Provence, and her Savoyard family were showered with lands, titles and provided with good marriages. Eleanor’s uncle Boniface was also made archbishop of Canterbury, a conspicuously poor successor to Edmund Rich, the renowned academic, the doughty champion of the English Church and the upholder of Magna Carta. Boniface, the chronicler Matthew Paris commented acidly, was noted more for his birth than his brains: in ‘learning, manners and years’ he fell short of what was expected of a successor of Dunstan, Anselm, Becket and Edmund. He too spent a lot of his time advancing the interests of his relations. Other members of the family became leading councillors. And after the wave of Savoyards came Henry’s half-siblings, the many children of Henry’s mother’s second marriage. They were known as the Lusignans, and they swarmed to England from 1247. Like their rivals the Savoyards they were treated with extreme generosity by Henry.

The English barons resented this influx of foreign dependants who assumed positions of political importance. Above all they saw the Lusignans egging Henry on in his lunatic schemes abroad and arbitrary rule at home. They were, to boot, harsh landlords and arrogant courtiers. The connection between foreign advisers and domestic tyranny was clear in the barons’ minds. And the bid to gain Sicily was seen as a means of freeing Henry to become an autocrat like his father. It was as if the lessons of the fall of Peter des Roches in 1234 had been forgotten.

Gossip about the king’s shaky hold on the crown spread around the country. One who relished the ins and outs of the court was the Benedictine monk Matthew Paris. Paris was supposed to concentrate on more exalted matters as he was the official historian of the abbey at St Albans. But, like many scholars cloistered away in academic pursuits, he hungered for something meatier than the humdrum of parochial research. Thus his history of St Albans grew into a history of everything. Soon he had outgrown his monastic life as well; he was being wined and dined by the great and the good, who fed his appetite for court gossip and political tales. It is from Paris that we get the juicy titbits of information about, for example, de Burgh’s accusations that Henry was impotent and other insights into court life that only a privileged insider would know.

He even met Henry at one of the king’s grand ceremonies at Westminster Abbey. The historian monk and the king got on well and over the years they would swap stories and bits and pieces of learning. This introduction allowed Paris to extend his collection of elevated informants who sent him letters and official documents. Several times Henry came to St Albans to catch up on Paris’s monumental history. And probably to see how he would fare in it. For the king was a very eager back-seat writer and, as Paris said, he stayed up most of the night ‘and guided my pen’.

But Henry comes off very badly in Matthew Paris’s history. Presumably he showed the king a favourable draft only when he came to St Albans. He liked Henry the man, but deplored his weaknesses as a ruler. Paris was a patriotic Englishman: he was sensitive about customary liberties, and he was nauseated by foreign influence on the crown. And monk though he was, he mistrusted the papacy. Indeed, he came to believe that there were two millstones between which poor old England was being ground: the pope and the king. His description of the mood in the country revealed his own opinion of Henry:

… he did not keep his promises, having little regard for the keys of the church and for the conditions of the Great Charter so many times paid for … he exalted his uterine brothers [the Lusignans] in a most intolerable manner, contrary to the law of the kingdom as though they had been born in this country …

Moreover, the king was reproached with advancing and enriching the interests of all foreigners, and with despising and pillaging his own natural subjects, to the ruin of the whole kingdom … he was so needy, whilst others possessed money in abundance, that he could not, for want of money, recover the rights of the kingdom, nay, that he could not even check the injurious incursions of the Welsh, who were the very scum of mankind.

Most disastrously Henry’s ruinous debts cast him on the unpopular members of his family for financial support. In turn they became even more autocratic, confirming the barons’ worst fears. By 1158 the competing groups in the royal family and the court had fatally undermined Henry. Government was on the point of breakdown.

V

The nobles found a leader in Simon de Montfort. De Montfort himself was a Frenchman. Like so many of his compatriots, he had been brought to England by Henry, showered with favour, and given the earldom of Leicester. He even dared to marry the king’s sister without Henry’s permission. Nonetheless, Simon was given positions of high authority and command, becoming Henry’s lieutenant in Gascony (the last remaining portion of the monarchy’s French empire), where he acted more or less as a free agent. Henry was clearly impressed and in awe of Simon. Simon for his part was often contemptuous of his king; he believed he was indispensable. Simon, in other words, was only the latest in the long line of powerful characters who had overshadowed Henry. But, from the beginning, the relationship had a novel edge of tension. Once, when the two men were out hunting together, they stopped to shelter from a thunderstorm. Henry is said to have told Simon that much as he feared the lightning, he feared Simon more.

The key to Simon’s character was his past as a crusader. Crusaders see the world in simple black and white. Once Simon’s enemy had been the Infidel; now it was those who supported Henry’s autocratic style of monarchy. First in the sights of Simon and his followers were the Lusignans. In 1258 de Montfort and six other leading barons swore an oath of mutual loyalty. Together they were more than a match for the king and they in turn had their own distinct ideas of how England should be run.