The Plantagenets (35 page)
Authors: Dan Jones
It was enough of a cooling-off period to ease the de Montforts back into royal favour. When de Montfort returned from the East in 1242 he found Henry III in confident mood. The English king had taken advantage of a succession dispute in Wales between two sons of Llywelyn the Great, supporting Llywelyn’s son Dafydd as the new ruler of Gwynedd and receiving his homage at Gloucester, establishing the superior authority of Plantagenet kingship. As with his father before him, supremacy at home had encouraged Henry III to think of renewing the Plantagenet claims overseas, and he was planning a military expedition to Poitou. There was little enthusiasm among the magnates, who refused to grant the taxation that would allow for a grand conquest, so Henry required all the money and talent he could gather to launch what amounted to a purely private invasion. De Montfort’s skill as a general was needed in Henry’s service.
In the end, however, the Poitou expedition was a disaster: the English army was small, underfunded, accompanied by a paltry 200 knights, regularly betrayed by supposed Poitevin allies and completely outwitted by the strategy of Louis IX. De Montfort fought with general distinction, but it was in a hopeless cause. Henry III suffered a string of humiliating losses, during the course of which he was shown up as the worst general his family had ever produced. The campaign caused yet another quarrel with Richard earl of Cornwall, to whom Henry promised Gascony as a reward for his valiant service in a losing cause, before reneging on the queen’s advice. At Saintes, de Montfort was overheard likening Henry to Charles the Simple, the tenth-century Carolingian king of France whose military failings led to him being imprisoned by his own subjects. Even if they were outwardly reconciled, it was clear that de Montfort and Henry were unlikely to remain at peace for very long. Indeed, it seemed an increasingly vain hope that any of Henry’s extended family would be able to see their holy but hapless king through many more untroubled years.
Tapers flickered in the king’s chamber throughout the night of 12 October 1247. It was the eve of the feast of the translation of St Edward, now the holiest king in English royal history and namesake of Henry’s eldest son. The king knelt, deep in devout and contrite prayers. He had been fasting on a pauper’s diet of bread and water. He was preparing himself, with a sleepless night of devotion amid the rich smoke thrown out by the candles, for a ceremony of profound royal divinity.
The next day was to be marked by a pageant of splendour, piety and magnificence. Henry had purchased from the nobles of Outremer a delicate crystalline vessel containing a portion of the blood of Christ, which was said to have been collected from Jesus as he suffered the agonies of the Passion. It fitted well into the royal relic collection, which already contained a stone marked with the footprint of Jesus, left just prior to the Ascension. On the feast of St Edward, a holy day that bound together the history of English kingship with the legions of the saints, Henry himself would now present his latest gift – which to his mind rivalled Louis IX’s Crown of Thorns as the greatest Christian relic in western Europe – to the community of the abbey at Westminster.
For once, he had something to celebrate. In a rare moment of peaceful productivity, his brother Richard earl of Cornwall was overseeing the production of a reformed coinage that would restore faith in the debased English currency and earn a tidy profit for both the treasury and the earldom of Cornwall. Better still, after a period of
renewed rebellion following Dafydd ap Llywelyn’s submission to Henry in 1241, a coalition of Welsh princes had in April 1247 once more come to terms with the English Crown, accepting Henry as their feudal overlord and extending English rule further and deeper into Wales than at any time since his father’s reign. Meanwhile, the Plantagenet royal family continued to expand: in May Henry had married two of the queen’s relatives to two of his royal wards: the earl of Lincoln and the lord of Connaught. This drew two significant baronial families directly into the royal orbit, which helped the king to feel secure in his realm.
In Henry’s view, his kingship was back on course. Thus, when dawn broke on that October morning, all the priests of London assembled beneath the giant wooden spire of St Paul’s Cathedral, dressed in grand ceremonial with surplices and hoods, their clerks arranged around them, carrying symbols and crosses. Hundreds of tapers gave a glow to the dark of an autumn morning. They awaited their king.
Henry arrived, dressed humbly, in a poor cloak without a hood – a simple penitent whose mean dress was accentuated by the finery of his attendants. He entered the cathedral, and emerged, carrying the little crystal phial above his head, both hands fixed around it, both eyes trained upwards to this exquisite relic, and on to the heavens beyond. Thus he began his procession on foot along the road from London to Westminster.
It was a tiring business. The king was drained by his night of sleepless fasting, and the potholes and lumps in the road threatened constantly to bring him to his knees. But his heartfelt love of ostentatious piety and his single-minded belief in the glory of his crown demanded the discomfort. He had loved the pageantry of royal devotion all his life, since as a thirteen-year-old he had watched with awe at the Trinity Chapel in Canterbury as St Thomas Becket’s remains had been transferred to a great, golden, bejewelled coffin. His mind may have wandered to just such a memory as he processed with the holy blood, two assistants supporting his aching arms as they held his prize aloft.
Before they reached the doors of Westminster Abbey, the procession would have heard the commotion awaiting them. Songs and tears and exultations to the holy spirit rang from the abbey church. The church was in the early stages of a massive rebuilding project, begun in 1245 to redevelop it in the French Gothic style. Some £45,000 would be spent to ensure that the abbey church mimicked and rivalled the great French churches of Sainte-Chapelle, St-Denis and Reims. Slender, soaring columns were to be added, with pointed windows and stained glass decorating them; the weight was to be borne outside the walls by flying buttresses.
The king, deep in his devotions, did not stop when he first reached the church. He carried on, the phial still held above his head as before, and made a tour of sanctity – a circuit of the church, then the nearby palace, and finally his own royal chambers. When this tour was complete, he returned to the church, and in an expression both of his royal munificence and his quasi-divine grandeur, he presented the priceless gift to God, the church of St Peter at Westminster, to his beloved Edward the Confessor and the community of the abbey.
This lavish visual spectacle was the high point of Henry’s royal pageantry. Before his assembled English polity, he carried off a triumphant scene that would have been the envy of Louis IX’s or Frederick II’s sophisticated courts. The bishop of Norwich later gave a sermon pointing out the pre-eminence of Henry’s relic above any other relic in Europe: ‘The cross is a most holy thing, on account of the more holy shedding of Christ’s blood made upon it, not the blood-shedding holy on account of the cross.’
He added, too, according to Matthew Paris: ‘that it was on account of the great reverence and holiness of the king of England, who was known to be the most Christian of all Christian princes, that this invaluable treasure had been sent by the patriarch of Jerusalem … for in England, as the world knew, faith and holiness flourished more than in any other country throughout the world.’
Here then, was Henry’s vision of kingship. It was an office that deliberately outstripped that of his predecessors in holiness and which, through the reverence it showed to the Confessor, redrew the
lineage of the English royalty once again back to pre-Conquest times. Like Henry I, the king was knitting his own rule into the ancient Saxon lineage, celebrating its English origins, not just its Norman and Plantagenet sophistication.
But there was more to it than simple genealogy. Henry’s kingship here was made not merely a matter of right and conquest, but of divinity. Henry showed himself the king as minister, not at war with his Church, as had so often been the case under his father and grandfather, but enriching and protecting it, furthering the vision of coronation, when he had been anointed and placed into unique communion with God and his saints. It also anticipated an urge that was growing in his breast: that of becoming a crusader king. Here was Henry the intercessor, Henry the pilgrim, Henry the benefactor. He spoke to England’s soul and to its history.
He also spoke to its nobility. After the ceremony, Henry cast off his pauper’s costume and donned a glittering garment made from precious cloth, woven with shining metal thread and decorated in gold. With a simple golden crown on his head, he knighted his half-brother, the Lusignan noble William de Valence, and several other of his Poitevin and Gascon nobles. The priest-pilgrim king thus became the chivalric lord.
Even though there were plenty outside the walls of Westminster who had grave doubts about the likelihood of Jesus’s blood having survived the thirteen centuries since it was spilled on Calvary, Henry’s pious imagery was all highly fashionable: an autumnal version of the spring feast of Corpus Christi, which had been established as a yearly festival by the bishop of Liège the previous year. And it was also impossibly grand, as the chronicler Matthew Paris, who attended all the ceremonies, was at pains to point out in the account that the king commissioned him to write. But was it politically effective?
The answer, alas, was no. As the 1240s came to a close, Henry had managed at least to build the image of royal magnificence. But despite his masterly and beautiful approach to creating a Plantagenet myth during the late 1240s, as the fifth decade of his reign approached, Henry III was beset by political crises from all directions and in all sizes. After 1247, he began to experience a succession of troubles, mostly of his own devising, which combined by 1258 to cause the most severe political crisis in half a century. Problems came thick and fast, until, by the end of the 1250s, his reign had all but fractured into chaos.
It began in 1248, as Henry tried to make the best use of his sometime friend Simon de Montfort. In May 1247 de Montfort had been persuaded not to leave western Europe to return to the crusades. Instead, he was sent to shore up a troublesome region of Henry’s overseas dominions: Gascony. After the failure of the 1242–3 Poitou expedition Henry had to reinforce that part of the French mainland of whose loyalty he could still be reasonably certain. De Montfort was thus sent to Gascony as royal lieutenant, with sweeping powers to govern quasi-independently and protect English interests against the incursions of the numerous threatening powers close to the Gascon borders: France, Castile, Aragon and Navarre.
De Montfort took to his lieutenancy with rather too much relish. Given almost total freedom of action in rebel country, far from the centre of English royal government, at first he performed admirably, building a diplomatic shield around the borders of the duchy through
alliances with the great lords of the region. But before long his rule had run short of money and long on enemies. The vexatious Gascon nobles, led by the intractably rebellious Gaston de Béarn, refused to submit to de Montfort’s high-handed rule. Resistance was dealt with severely. De Montfort confiscated land, destroyed buildings and, worst of all, cut vines – a terrible punishment in a land whose main source of income was from wine.
By 1252, Gascony was in uproar. Henry, despairingly, recalled de Montfort to face trial before the royal council. It was a fractious affair, with hurt feelings on both sides. The accusations levelled against de Montfort were severe. The Gascons called him an ‘infamous traitor’ who was guilty of extorting from the people, and imprisoning and starving to death his enemies.
According to Matthew Paris, de Montfort was acutely affronted by the aspersions cast upon his character. When first accused by the Gascons, he raged to Henry: ‘Is it, my lord king, that you incline your ear and your heart to the messages of these traitors to you, and believe those who have often been convicted of treachery rather than me your faithful subject?’
Henry gave the blithe response: ‘If everything is clear, what harm will the scrutiny do you?’ It did little to calm the troubled waters.
As de Montfort’s case came to trial before Henry’s sympathetic barons, both parties let their feelings run away with their tongues. After an incensed monologue denouncing Henry’s fecklessness in giving credence to Gascon complaints, de Montfort demanded of the king: ‘Who could believe that you are a Christian? Have you never confessed?’
Henry replied: ‘I have.’
In a bitter retort recorded by Matthew Paris, de Montfort then said: ‘But what avails confession without repentance and atonement?’
To damn so devout a king before the great and good of England was ill-advised to say the least. It marked yet another deterioration of cordial relations between Montfort and Henry. Although the royal council found in the earl’s favour when judging the case, and although he was returned briefly to Gascony, his very presence there was now
antagonistic. Henry was forced to go to the duchy in person, subdue it with lavish expenditure, and fit it out for his son to take over as an appanage. And in due course, when the Lord Edward was married to Eleanor of Castile on 1 November 1254 in the abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Castile, Henry granted the duchy to his son as a wedding gift, bringing to a close a disastrous period in its administration.
As part of the settlement, Henry paid off de Montfort’s contract as lieutenant. But the king’s bitter words to his former friend – infused with sourness at the failure of a royal relationship – summed up the simmering feeling that would endure for the next decade: ‘I never repented of any act so much as I now repent of ever having permitted you to enter England, or to hold any land or honours in that country, in which you have fattened so as to kick against my authority.’
