The Plantagenets (37 page)

If any scene summed up Henry’s state of mind in the fortieth year of his reign, it was that which in 1256 he had had painted in the wardrobe at Westminster – a very personal room in which the king’s head was washed and in which he spent some of his most private hours. It was a scene in which a king was rescued by his pack of dogs from a plot made against him by his own men. As a child, Henry had seen his father’s realm invaded. He had seen as a boy king in 1216–17 his own barons turn against the Plantagenet family and invite a Capetian to be their king. Now, four decades later, with the English barons once again mutinous, it was clear that those terrible memories were coming back to haunt him. Henry had finally proven himself his father’s son.

The Provisions of Oxford

It was early in the morning on 30 April 1258 when a large body of nobles, knights and their followers approached the king’s hall at the palace of Westminster, their armour clattering on their bodies and their swords clanking against their sides. At their head strode four men: the queen’s uncle, Peter of Savoy; Richard de Clare, earl of Gloucester; Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk; and Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, Henry’s former friend, who was fast becoming his bête noire.

The four men and their followers must have been up since dawn, nervous with anticipation for the confrontation that lay ahead. As they approached the door to Henry’s magnificent hall, they all knew that their message would be profoundly unwelcome. Ostensibly they came to give the king a reply regarding another request he had made to a Westminster parliament for aid with the Sicilian crisis. But really they came in an attempt to detach him from his pernicious Lusignan friends and to fasten their grip upon a political crisis that could no longer be ignored. They were bonded together in a pact of mutual alliance to ‘help each other … against all people, doing right and taking nothing that we cannot take without doing wrong, saving faith to our lord the king of England and to the Crown’.

That they were driven to do so was a reflection of the times. As 1257 gave way to 1258, England had sunk into a miserable condition. Respiratory disease swept through the country during the end of the summer in 1257, before torrential rain killed the autumn crops, and a hard winter prevented the cultivation of land for the spring. Disease
and pestilence galloped through the country, and in the villages thousands of ordinary people starved. ‘Dead bodies were found everywhere, swollen and livid, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties or on dunghills or in the muddy streets,’ wrote Matthew Paris.

As the earls and their followers had been summoned to parliament three weeks previously, it had been against the background of blood and thunder. Rebellion was ripping through Wales, led by the formidable prince of Gwynedd, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The papal envoy Arlot continued to bluster about excommunication and Interdict if the Sicilian debt were not settled. And the Lusignans had broken loose of any pretence Henry gave to controlling them. At the start of April, men loyal to Bishop Aymer of Winchester had killed a follower of the influential noble John FitzGeoffrey and Henry had refused to punish the perpetrators. As parliament convened in Westminster to answer yet another request for royal finance, it was generally agreed that the king was powerless to discipline the criminal faction that dominated his court.

What occurred at the meeting on 30 April was recorded in the annals of Tewkesbury Abbey, whose author probably heard it from an eyewitness. ‘As the third hour [of the day – Terce – mid-morning] approached, noble and vigorous men, earls, barons and knights went to the court at Westminster,’ wrote the annalist. ‘They placed their swords before the entrance to the king’s hall, and appearing before the king, saluted him as their lord king in devoted manner with fitting honour.’ These were no rebels. They presented themselves to Henry, rather, as friends of the English Crown and all that it ought to stand for.

Henry, however, could not see past their armour. The swords might be resting by the door to his hall, but a group of friends hardly presented an encouraging sight when they approached the throne dressed for warfare.

‘What is this my lords?’ he asked. ‘Am I, wretched fellow, your humble captive?’

‘No,’ replied the earl of Norfolk. ‘But let the wretched Poitevins [i.e. the Lusignans] and all aliens flee from your face and ours as from the
face of a lion, and there will be “glory to God in the heavens and in your land peace to men of goodwill”.’

Henry may have been shocked, but he could not have been surprised to have such a blunt demand presented to him. Hostility towards the Lusignans was near-universal; it is likely that the men who stormed into his presence had the covert backing of the queen. Henry had been asked many political questions in his reign. Now he had run out of answers. Bigod told him that the magnates all agreed: the king ought to swear to obey their counsels; both Henry and the Lord Edward ought to swear on the gospels that they would be bound by the consideration of a panel of twenty-four barons, half elected by the king, and half by the magnates; the king should not attempt to impose any taxes; and Henry should hand over the royal seal – the ultimate tool of government – to a responsible person, whose identity would be decided by the twenty-four. The twenty-four were to elect a continual council of fifteen to guide the king’s hand on matters of day-to-day government, while a parliament was to meet three times a year and to appoint royal ministers.

These were extraordinary demands, but on that April morning there seemed to be no way around them. Events were beyond Henry’s control, and the sheer strength of the collective political will of the barons was impossible to resist. The same day, both Henry and his son Edward swore on the gospels to do as Bigod asked. After a decade of mounting catastrophe, Henry’s personal exercise of power had finally failed, and now kingship was to be performed by committee – its essential functions placed in the hands of the baronial community.

But as the experiences of the barons’ forefathers at Runnymede had shown, Plantagenet kingship could not easily be contained. Henry, like John before him, wriggled, attempting to exploit his right to appoint half the committee of twenty-four by packing it with Lusignans. Yet his efforts foundered on an inability to find even a dozen men of sufficient status and rank who still supported his kingship. Eight weeks later, at Oxford, another parliament met, the town bristling with the vicious weaponry of knights loyal to either side, all
supposedly there en route to a campaign in Wales, but in reality present in case full-blown civil war should erupt.

At Oxford, Henry’s resistance collapsed. He was presented head-on with a litany of his failings, and was accused of failing to observe Magna Carta. ‘When parliament opened, the proposal and unalterable intention of the magnates was adopted, most firmly demanding that the king should faithfully keep and observe the charter of the liberties in England,’ recorded Matthew Paris. ‘They moreover demanded that a justiciar should be appointed to dispense justice to those suffering injury, with equal impartiality towards rich and poor. They also asked for other things touching the kingdom for the common good, the peace and the honour of the king and kingdom alike.’

Henry and Edward immediately took another oath to abide by the barons’ reforms, but there was serious opposition from the Lusignans themselves, who adamantly rejected calls for them to give up lands and castles awarded to them by the king. They were told in no uncertain terms what to expect if they resisted the baronial opposition. According to Matthew Paris: ‘the earl of Leicester [Simon de Montfort], addressing himself to William de Valence, who was blustering more than the others, replied, “Know for certain and make no mistake about it, you will either give up the castles which you hold of the king, or you will lose your head.”’ Horrified, the Lusignans fled Oxford to the safety of Aymer’s diocese of Winchester. They were formally expelled from the country later in the year, but in the meantime parliament broke up, in the words of the same chronicler: ‘uncertainly and inconclusively’.

The barons’ proposals at Oxford had been drawn up in close consultation with the knights of the shires, and a wide-ranging programme of reform was issued, which sought not only to regulate central government, but to address the serious issues of corruption at shire level. The measures were known as the Provisions of Oxford, and although arranged in a different format to Magna Carta, it was almost as wide-ranging. The Provisions allowed for four knights in each county to investigate abuses by royal officials, and established a
sworn panel of twenty-four to oversee government of the realm. Hugh Bigod was appointed justiciar by the magnates, and all of the major royal officers – from the treasurer and chancellor to the sheriffs, bailiffs, escheators and castellans who exercised royal power in the shires – were to be appointed by parliament. The knights who had assembled at Oxford never made it to Wales, as the war there was abandoned.

On 18 October 1258 proclamations were sent in the king’s name to the people of England and the king’s subjects in Ireland, telling them of the new order that had been established, and their duty to obey it. That this was a truly national programme of reform was emphasized by the fact that the proclamations were written in French, Latin and Middle English, declaring: ‘Know ye all well that we will and grant that that which all our councillors, or the greater part of them, that were chosen by us and by the community of our kingdom, have done and shall do for the glory of God and in loyalty to us, for the benefit of the country in the judgement of the aforesaid councillors, be firm and lasting in all things always without end. If any man or men oppose we will and command that all our loyal subjects hold them deadly foes.’ A further proclamation followed, two days later, confirming the procedure by which the four knights of each shire appointed under the Provisions of Oxford should go about the business of investigating corruption by royal officials.

Both of these proclamations were in Henry’s name, but the reality was that government had been removed from his hands. The strings were now being pulled by his baronial puppet-masters. Henry’s personal rule was in utter disarray, his friends were expelled from the country, and the powers of the Crown had been taken over by the barons. For the next three years, government would proceed by the rule of the magnate council, with baronial envoys taking over the negotiations for peace in Wales and France, and attempting to persuade the pope to forget the whole sorry Sicilian business. Simon de Montfort came to the fore as an abrasive voice in the centre of politics – not quite a regent, but the dominant voice in the new regime.

Henry, as he always tended to do at moments of crisis, disappeared into religious devotion. After Oxford he toured his favourite shrines at St Albans, Bury St Edmunds and Waltham Abbey, mourning his three-year-old daughter Katherine, who had died from a sickness in 1257. In his absence, baronial reform continued apace. The Provisions of Westminster, issued in October 1259, laid down a far-reaching programme of reforms in law and government, and set the schedule for an eyre to investigate systematically abuses by royal officials. By the end of 1259, Henry was reduced to a dithering irrelevance. Plantagenet kingship, which had been at first the kingship of conquest, then of government by royal institutions, was now itself institutionalized.

On 4 December 1259, the 52-year-old Henry III knelt amid the gnarled trunks and wind-stripped branches of the apple trees in the orchard of Louis IX’s luxurious Parisian palace. Before him stood Louis, seven years younger, the saintliest king in Europe. The two deeply devout men were about to transact one of the most sacred acts of kingship. It had taken Henry a long time to reach Paris, and it might have taken him until some time after Christmas, since in his trauma he had attempted to stop at every church on the road to Paris in order to hear the mass. Even Louis had tired of the English king’s compulsive need to hear the mass, and had expedited his approach by having as many of the churches shut as possible.

Never a jovial man, Henry III was now very solemn indeed. The baronial council had made a peace with France despite the obstructions of Simon de Montfort, who held a personal stake in continued hostilities, and the Lord Edward, who opposed any diminution of the Crown’s authority. The peace came with one mighty and onerous term: to complete the Treaty of Paris, Henry was compelled to do liege homage to Louis, renouncing once and for all his claims to empire and acknowledging that he held his remaining continental possessions as a peer of France, rather than a king in his own right. English kings had done homage before, of course: Henry II had done so in the first stages of his conquest in 1156 in order to secure Louis VII’s support against his rebellious brother Geoffrey, and John had done
homage for Normandy before he became king, as part of his machinations against Richard. Neither of those ceremonies had approached the one-sidedness of Henry III’s submission. There was not even the smack of equality about this ceremony: it was a lord before his master.

As the ceremony progressed, the archbishop of Rouen read aloud the terms of the treaty. His voice swept around the orchard, decreeing the new state of affairs. Henry renounced all that remained of his claims to rule the lands that had been held by Henry II and Richard I: Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Poitou. In the south he was to be confirmed only in his right to Gascony and his wife’s interests further inland – areas including the Saintonge and Agenais. In a hollow show of gratitude for his reduced status, he promised to pay Louis 15,000 marks and to supply the French king with funds to support 500 crusading knights for two years. Thus was Henry accepted into the roll of the French aristocracy: no longer a prince below God, but a duke below his lord king.

The party that gathered to witness the ceremony stood just a few hundred yards away from some of the holiest relics in the West: Louis’s stunning Sainte-Chapelle held both the Crown of Thorns and a fragment of the True Cross. But even the holiness and magnificence of the surroundings could not obscure the fact that, as he knelt before the French king, Henry was finally bringing to a close a great chapter of English kingship.