Baker Darren - Henry III: The Great King England Never Knew It Had

For my mother, who shared a
birthday with Henry

Cover illustration: Coronation of King Henry III (British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A XIII)

First published 2017

This paperback edition published 2019

The History Press

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Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

Darren Baker, 2017, 2019

The right of Darren Baker to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 750 98522 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

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Tell anybody youre writing a biography of Henry III and chances are they have heard of Henry VIII, the king with all the wives. Henry IV, V and VI enjoy less, but some, familiarity thanks to title works by Shakespeare, who also rendered Henry VII, the first of the Tudors, for the stage. Going all the way back to the beginning, Henry I was the king of the bastards, fathering at least twenty of them, and his equally licentious grandson Henry II was the father of Richard the Lionheart and King John, whom he cursed as bastards on his deathbed. But the third Henry always draws a blank.

Henry who?

Thats what a guard at Westminster Palace asked after I explained, at his urging, what I was doing lingering around the grounds one sunny morning. I told him I was trying to imagine what all this must have looked like during the reign of this particular Henry, adding offhandedly that he was the greatest king of medieval England. He smugly drew back and directed the attention of this obviously ill-informed North American towards the statue of Richard the Lionheart just off in the distance.

Theres our greatest king, he declared.

The message was clear. I could take my Henry whoever wherever and leave history to the statues.

It was a fitting send-off given all the debate and anxiety then going on in Britain about invasive foreigners, which happened to be the same issue that dominated Henrys reign eight centuries earlier. An ambitious and visionary king, he was determined to keep his increasingly insular country inside Europe. He welcomed people and ideas from the Continent and was keen to replace the greed and dull projection of power of his predecessors with a more humane and open-hearted monarchy. The pageantry of English royalty today is his creation, as is the centrepiece of national heritage, Westminster Abbey.

Parliament next door is also his contribution. It was under his rule that it became a legislative body and sat elected representatives for the first time. If Henry is remembered at all, its because of that institution, although for reasons he might not appreciate. The barons and clergy, fed up with all the foreigners, the spending and the kings cooperation with the papacy, the Brussels of its day, conspired to rein him in. In the civil war that followed, he was defeated and subjected to the first ever parliamentary state. Henry became a captive of his own government and his reputation never recovered.

It should not have been that way. His uncle Richard the Lionheart endured a far more humiliating captivity and yet there he sits atop a horse outside Parliament with his sword raised up high. Other warrior kings like Edward III and Henry V are similarly glorified because they won great victories and stamped the authority of England wherever they went. They commanded fear and respect as a great king should.

Henry was never cut out to be a warrior. He wasnt even cut out to be a king if we judge him by their manly pursuits. Instead of hunting and killing, he liked to build and decorate. Instead of making war, he fed the poor. As he had no mistresses, he had no bastards. He loved his children dearly, and his devotion to his wife Eleanor of Provence allowed queenship to flourish in England. Hearing all that, our guard might say he sounds like one swell fellow, but lacks the qualities most people expect in a great king. Its all about him chopping heads and the women he beds, you understand.

These men ruled in a harsh age, and nearly all of them came to sorry ends. Henry III, again, was the exception. He died in his exquisitely painted chamber after the longest reign of any English monarch until the modern age, one that gave his people peace and prosperity for nearly fifty years. He had his faults and miscues to be sure, all of them described to devastating effect by his contemporaries, who vented their xenophobic rage on the man they held responsible for Englands wealth going into the hands of scroungers from abroad. Modern historians have been less withering, but still unimpressed with his legacy, at least in comparison to the men he shared the stage with: the saintly Louis IX of France, the charismatic Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire and Henrys own brilliant adversary Simon de Montfort. They too, by the way, came to sorry ends.

I was inclined to see Henry in this manner when I set out to write a biography of Montfort. Indeed, the introduction to this volume has been construed to convey this image of him. The circumstances that brought him to the throne certainly point in that direction. Young boy at the time, nation at war with itself, regency dominated by powerful men like William Marshal, forced to govern under the restrictions of Magna Carta. Excuses for failure can be easily made with a political education of this sort, but it speaks little of Montforts own greatness if the king was truly so weak and misguided for decade after decade. In undertaking this biography, I went in search of a worthier opponent. By the time I finished, eighteen months later, I had found much more than that. Henry III was not just a dynamic and capable king, even a great one all things considered, but also a colourful and complicated personality.

He was, for example, witty, eloquent, and well informed, had a phenomenal memory and mischievous sense of humour, but he could also be temperamental, devious and prone to making hasty judgements. While he had a mystical side that drew him, not surprisingly, to the number three, he wasnt as superstitious as some supposedly steelier kings. Some of the chances he took appear positively reckless, but also understandable given what he hoped to achieve, and more or less had to in order to revive the Plantagenet dynasty. He took pride in being the first king since the Norman Conquest to be born and raised in England, but he never longed to see more of it, or the rest of Britain and Ireland for that matter, the way he did for France. Although abandoned by his mother and manipulated by the ministers of his minority, piety and charity led him to forgive them and everybody else who betrayed his trust. The insecurity and loneliness of his youth made him needy and emotionally driven, something most men in his position would try to conceal, but not Henry. With him, everything was out there, in his speeches, letters, and documents. It might just as well be, for deep down he knew everything was part of a plan that would turn out well in the end. Its little wonder then that as that very end approached, he embarked on his boldest quest yet, to set the creation of the universe in stone. And date it for good measure.