The reign of King Henry III was one of the longest and most significant in English history. Henry, the son of King John, came to the throne at the age of nine in 1216. He died in 1272, having reigned for fifty six years, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Fittingly so, for he had rebuilt the Abbey from its foundations, thus creating the great coronation church we have today.
Henry’s reign saw a transformation in the religious life of the country with the preaching of the friars and the pastoral work of bishops. A new network of markets and fairs came into place, and the money supply rocketed following Henry’s recoinage in 1247. (Hence the way Henry’s silver pennies are today easily available on ebay.) Magna Carta became implanted into political life and the power of parliament, derived from its control of taxation, was for the first time seen in real action.
Of Henry’s own personality and outlook we know far more than for any other medieval king. This is thanks to the huge numbers of letters preserved on the rolls of the chancery, many of them very personal, a resource which does not survive in the same way for earlier and later kings. Henry was quite without the malevolence and impiety of his father. He was warm-hearted, emotional, courteous, accessible, humorous, profligate, angry sometimes but easily appeased, ambitious sometimes but pacific and physically lazy, in defeat quiescent rather than defiant, interested in detail but, in the secular sphere, lacking the intelligence to use it effectively, a king with a high sense of regality’s outward show, but sometimes a low sense of its actual practice, a connoisseur of art and architecture, a lover of beautiful things and of the people closest to his heart, a king simplex (a word often used about him) in the sense of being pious and innocent but simplex too in being naive and foolish.
Contemporaries saw both good and bad in Henry’s rule. They welcomed the long period of foreign and domestic peace, to which his easy going and pacific character contributed. They admired his piety seen in his alms giving, love of divine service, persecution of the Jews, and the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey in honour of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. Yet they deplored the open handed rewards he bestowed on his foreign relatives. (The influence of Henry’s queen, Eleanor of Provence was important here). They also stigmatised the simplicity with which he engaged in an absurd and costly scheme to place his second son on the throne of Sicily. And they lamented his failure to reform the running of local government. Confident in his works of piety, Henry, unlike his contemporary, King Louis IX (Saint Louis) in France, did not think reform was necessary to save his soul.
These failings led to the great revolution of 1258 and the period of reform, rebellion, civil war and settlement covered by volume two of my biography of Henry, just published by Yale University Press. In 1258 a revolution far more radical than Magna Carta stripped Henry of power and, under the terms of the Provisions of Oxford, placed government in the hands of a baronial council. In the ensuing struggle to maintain the Provisions, a great leader emerged, the king’s brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, one of the most remarkable men ever to dignify and defile the English political scene. Between his victory at the battle of Lewes in May 1264 and his gruesome death at Evesham in August 1265, he was the effective governor of the country.
Montfort’s enemies felt he was driven on by material grievances, a lust for power and a contempt for the king. All that is true. Yet Montfort also had a deep sense of his own righteousness and the religious nature of his mission. Here he was inspired by the example of his father (who led the Albigensian crusade) and influenced by the teachings of leading churchmen. This whole period has no parallel until the 1640s in the way politics intermingled with religion. It explains the extraordinary way the reforms of 1258 and 1259 dealt with the abuses of magnates and their officials just as much as the abuses of the king. Montfort, like Louis IX, did believe such reforms were necessary to save his soul.
There were other factors which explained Montfort’s rise to the top. He was a great general. He was also an astute politician very able to exploit issues which resonated across society. He thus saw the power of the slogan ‘England for the English’ and in 1263 promulgated a statute removing foreigners from office and, with certain exceptions, expelling them from the kingdom. He was the first populist leader in English history. To his great parliament of 1265, he summoned both burgesses from the towns and knights from the counties, thus for the first time creating in embryo a House of Commons. The widening of the political community in this period was partly due to Montfort’s vision.
In the end, Henry survived. He owed much to the status of English kingship. Was it right for it to be emasculated in this way? He owed much to the strong right arm of his son, Edward, the future Edward I, a major figure in volume 2. He was lucky that many found Montfort’s self-righteous extremism repulsive. But Henry also owed much to himself. His reputation as a ‘Rex Christianissimus’, ‘a most Christian king’ meant Montfort never tried to depose him, however much he wanted to do so. So Henry died in his bed and lies still at Westminster in a splendid tomb, topped with a regal effigy. The Abbey, seen in all its magnificence during King Charles’s coronation, is his lasting achievement.
David Carpenter is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London, and is the author of Henry III: Reform, Rebellion, Civil War, Settlement, 1258-1272 published by Yale University Press.
