Born in 1207, Henry III came to the throne in 1216 and reigned—though did not always rule—until his death in 1272. The caveat derives from the fact that in 1258, when the narrative of Henry III, 1207–1258: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule ends, an alliance of magnates was preparing to seize power and rule in the king's name. Several scholars call the imposition and experience of baronial rule from 1258 to 1265 the first English Revolution, and it is a favorite phrase of the author of this book, David Carpenter. The fundamental question Carpenter confronts is, “How did Henry III get himself into such straits?” The volume—the first of two planned volumes on Henry's rule—consists of a linked set of studies that address this issue, including the organization of his court, his relations with his wife, the nature of his interactions with his extended family, his personal artistic taste, his piety, and his management of (or failure to manage) his expenses.
Henry III was not a warrior king. He did not even like tournaments or hunting. Falconry was fun. He gave his birds pet names. He called a white gyrfalcon “Blackman” and others “Refuse, Blanchepenny, Pilgrim, Lespaynol” (24, 411). Carpenter implies that the monarch's fondness for and time spent with his birds relate to his distaste for work, and he meticulously documents Henry's laziness in general. When war came, the king was reluctant to lead troops into battle. He had a mercurial character—laying sieges and lifting sieges in rapid succession, failures to follow up on advantages his commanders achieved, hot anger momentarily uncontrollable, which he could not harness to good effect, and the like. This was true of his military encounters in Britain per se and of the two times he mounted disastrous invasions of France to redeem the Plantagenet holdings his father had lost. It was, of course, not a reign of uninterrupted tragedy. Henry could plan, and when motivated strongly he could scrape together large amounts of treasure, as, for example, by mulcting English Jews, for campaigns both military and non-military, but he was far more effective in carrying through projects on the non-military side. He loved to build and poured vast sums into his pride and joy, Westminster Abbey and the shrine of his patron, Edward the Confessor. He gave alms to the poor in staggering amounts. He tried to adhere to the oft-reconfirmed Charter, the legacy of his father's reign. Sometimes he slipped up, but he was not a tyrant. His largesse to his friends and relatives, especially his so-called foreign kin (half-siblings from western France, where his mother remarried, and relatives through his wife from Provence and Savoy), was over the top. Some native English magnates benefited, but the political nation at large hated the aliens, as they called them, especially the ones from western France.
Henry was also, to put it politely, a little slow. Carpenter speculates that Henry's own twelve-year-old bride pleased him at age twenty-eight, when he married her, precisely because she was someone whom he could actually govern or who was, as Carpenter more delicately puts it, “very much his to mould” (180). She, however, matured steadily. “Eleanor was a wise woman” and, being “far stronger and more intelligent than her husband,” achieved her own personhood (562).
Governing the realm was harder. Henry recalled, improved, and reissued the currency, a genuine success, but some of the king's monetary policies, like his attempt at bimetallism, were incomprehensible, indeed inane. He liked to play as an adult, but he endangered people who joined him (Carpenter documents a drowning). He wanted unalloyed praise, so when he detected sarcasm he reacted fiercely, condemning his jester to death, in one instance, for a harmless if a biting quip. Wiser heads prevailed, and Henry rescinded the order. Yet he did not absorb the deeper lesson of kingly self-restraint.
Carpenter is able to recover and relate all these anecdotes because the records are so good and because he is a true master of it, but he bends over backwards, too far I think, to excuse aspects of Henry's personal rule. Here is an instance: “Henry's conduct of ecclesiastical appointments blackened his reputation and, in [Bishop Robert] Grosseteste's view, endangered his soul. Yet some of the worst excesses were committed,” Carpenter writes, “by Henry's agents without his consent” (441). Surely, this does not vindicate the king. Or, as another illustration: a royal cook, Roger by name, got on one of the king's half-brother's nerves, so the latter had the man's “hair pulled out (hair by hair)” and then had him “strung up naked” (405). The reader does not learn how Henry reacted, especially whether that alien half-brother got a few less lavish gifts for a while to punish him for such barbarity. If anyone can find out, Carpenter, who knows the gifting habits of the king so well, is the scholar to do so. I assume the silence means no.
Periodically, individuals or groups of barons were so aggrieved by the king that they made plans, like the so-called Paper Constitution of 1244, to curb his authority. He would usually react by promising to abide by Magna Carta and its companion document since 1217, the restrictive Charter of the Forest. Increasingly the possessing classes signaled their dismay, since he rarely followed through with deeper reforms, by refusing to vote taxes to help the king pay for wars, to finance his largesse, or to support his extraordinary generosity to the churches and to his kin. Such reluctance depressed him. He claimed in the 1250s, rather late in the period of his personal rule, that he would go on crusade, and he began to acquire treasure. He got distracted over troubles in Gascony, did some good peacekeeping there in 1253–1254, but the cost of peace included a promise to Alfonso X of Castile, a potential foe, also to contribute to a planned North African Crusade. Could the English king really do both?
At least by the 1250s Henry seems to have realized that he was never going to recover the lands that King John and he, in his younger days, had lost to the French, even though his ambassadors pestered the French king, now Louis IX (Saint Louis), to return them. No deal. In the face of the obvious, Henry came to feel that it was time to make peace with Louis, his brother-in-law (they had married sisters). However, he was also—and it brought him down—enamored of the pope's proposal for him to send troops or (preferably) money for troops to dislodge the church's enemies in the kingdom of Sicily and secure its crown for his second son. He needed money for this. Never forgetting the role of the church, in the person of a papal legate, in saving the throne for him after his father's death, Henry was giddy at the prospect of faraway conquest, “flinging himself before an altar, [swearing] by Saint Edward that he would lead the army out to Sicily himself” (633). His barons refused to support him without a thorough reform of the realm.
Despite all of this, Carpenter's final balance sheet continues to give Henry the benefit of the doubt. I believe the king was far less successful than he does, but we both agree that the proof of the pudding lies in Henry's handling of the baronial crisis that he himself provoked, an analysis of which will commence in earnest in the succeeding volume.
