Henry III: England's Longest Reigning King

How did a nine-year-old boy save England from the brink of collapse? How did he transform a disastrous legacy into a remarkably stable reign? When King John died in 1216, civil war raged, barons invited a French prince to seize the throne, and the new monarch Henry III was just nine years old. Against all odds, the boy king navigated rebellion, rebuilt royal authority after Magna Carta, and laid the foundations for one of the longest reigns in English history. Matt Lewis finds out more from renowned Medieval historian David Carpenter. More: Rise of The Plantagenets Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rise-of-the-plantagenets/id1564113746?i=1000772235290&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Pc6YHNDFRUDjq0KFxAWwg King John: Worst Medieval Monarch? Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/king-john-worst-medieval-monarch/id1564113746?i=1000679878596&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2O5vN33xBGeREbv250bwvC Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:42Matt Lewis?

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• 2:19Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Today and next week, we've got a bit of a treat from the archives. King Henry III of England isn't a monarch who gets talked about very much, yet his reign saw the defeat of a French invasion, the glorious final exploits of William Marshall's stunning career, the embedding of Magna Carta, the emergence of Parliament, and the revolt of Simon de Monfort. He's perhaps swamped by some huge personalities and events, but it was also a significant period of peace and good relations with France and Scotland that few would repeat in the medieval period. Henry III gives us a royal family that worked well together and supported each other. Add to that that he remains the fifth longest-reigning monarch in the British Isles,

• 3:03Matt Lewis?

  only behind Elizabeth II, Victoria, George III, and James VI of Scotland. And I think this grandson of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine needs some better PR. In 2022, I had the pleasure of speaking to Professor David Carpenter, the leading expert on Henry III and his extraordinary reign. David has written the Yale Monarch Series biography of Henry III in two parts. This episode covers the first part, and next week you can enjoy the second instalment. So we can all show Henry III a little bit more appreciation than he usually gets. Can you just start off for us, please, by placing Henry III into some context in the medieval period? When was he? I think he's one of those people

• 3:46Matt Lewis?

  that people aren't sure where he was, when he reigned, how he fits into the jigsaw of kings.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Well, Henry III was the son of King John, and he reigned, as you said, for a very long time, from 1216 to 1272. He was only nine when he came to the throne in 1216, in the middle of the great Magna Carta civil war. He was 65 when he died in 1272 and was buried in that magnificent tomb in Westminster Abbey with that wonderful gilt bronze effigy above it. I think to place him or to contextualise a reign, we have to think he's a king in a new age. He's the first king who has to deal with the challenge of Magna Carta because Magna Carta becomes established in his reign. He's the first king who has to deal with the challenge of Parliament because Parliament by that name,

• 4:34Speaker 03

  and in a way as an institution, is a product of the reign of Henry III. So he's having to face all these new restrictions. He's also, of course, the first king who never ruled in Normandy. And so the whole Anglo-Norman realm has come to an end with the loss of Normandy in 1204. So he's a much more sort of English-based king. The only lands he has in France is Gascony. He's also having to deal with a rise in English national feeling too, which is partly to brain. But you know, the England for the English becomes a very emotive slogan during the course of the reign. So in all these ways, I think he's the first, if you like, I think your bridge analogy is a very good one. He's the first of the late medieval kings who's got to deal with new problems,

• 5:17Speaker 03

  got to deal with restrictions of Magna Carta, the demands of Parliament. He would have liked to have get taxation from Parliament in a way previous kings didn't need to do. So he's facing a whole series of new problems in a very different world.

• 5:33Matt Lewis?

  And as you mentioned, he's the son of King John and John's second wife, Isabella of Angoulême. Do we have any evidence of Henry's relationship with his parents? So we know he's nine when John passes away, but do we have any early evidence of his childhood, how he got on with his father? Because nobody seemed to get on very well with John.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  No, no, you're quite right about that. I think Henry could have only had very vestigial memories of his father because John moved with great speed round the country. And the amount of time John would have spent with his son, I think, was very, very small. Would have spent more time with his mother. But then, of course, his mother, in a way, deserted him in 1218, when he was only 11, and went back to Angoulême. So you know, Henry at a very early age is deprived of both a father and a mother. And that may have had a profound effect on him. It's terribly difficult to know. But Henry later is the first of who might call the exorious kings. I mean, he loves his wife, Eleanor Provence, who he marries in 1236.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  There's never any suggestion of bastards, mistresses, or anything like that. And he's also very, very close to his half-brothers from Poitou and so on. And he's very close to his children. Maybe this desire to hold the family around him was because he had no family of his own, no father, no mother influencing his life. Mind you, perhaps not having John influencing your life might have been a good thing. I think also it may go back to there. Of course, two other key features of Henry. The first was his intense piety. This is a Rex Christianismus, a most Christian king can see that in his huge arms giving to the poor. I mean, at the times in his reign, he's feeding 500 paupers at court every day.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  There would be no beggars lying in the strand in Henry's day, as there are today. I mean, they would have been down at Westminster having a good meal. The other aspect of his piety was the divine service, you know, huge interest in attendance at the mass. And then, of course, his patron, Saint Edward the Confessor. How does this come back to the minority or to his father? In that I think Henry must have been hugely aware that his father had been excommunicated by the Pope, that England had suffered an interdict. And then was the whole question of where is his father? And visions of John being tortured by burning robes in purgatory in the 1220s. So Henry must have grown up thinking, oh my God, where is my father?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  What can I do to get him out of purgatory? And above all, I need to avoid anything like that happening to myself. So Henry's intense religiosity may have owed quite a lot to a very intended contrast with his father. It was also, of course, product of the age, the age of the friars, the age of great bishops trying to reform the lives of the clergy and laity and so on. So I think that's a very important part of the legacy you're talking about, the legacy of King John. I think I'll mention one other thing too, which of course the other characteristic that contemporaries said about Henry again and again was this is a Rex simplex. Or verse, a man, this word simplex.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Now, that's quite a difficult word to catch the flavour of today because it can be a compliment, meaning you are honest, straightforward. And many very holy men were described as simplex. But it could also be an absolute criticism because it could mean that you're plain stupid. Now, in Henry's case, I don't think you quite con him stu— well, perhaps you could. But he was certainly very naive, and he found it very difficult to gauge what would be practical in politics, very difficult to gauge the consequences of his action. Now, how might this go back to the minority? I think kings always find it very difficult to be wise when they've grown up as kings.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  And obviously, Henry VI is a good example of that. You know, the most successful kings are those who've cut their teeth in politics before they come to the throne. Perhaps not even just the most successful ones, but the most sort of worldly wise ones. I mean, John was like that. Okay, John was nobody's fool, and he was a real calculator. I mean, Henry wasn't like that. And I think that may take us back to the minority. So in all these ways, I think the minority is both personally with the king, his simplicity, his piety, his love of family may go back to the minority. But also, of course, the political framework. The minority establishes Magna Carta in English political life,

• 10:10Speaker 03

  and that leads us on to the establishment of Parliament as well. So you know, I think one needs to be sympathetic towards Henry in all those kinds of ways.

• 10:20Matt Lewis?

  And so John dies when Henry is nine years old, and Henry becomes King of England as a child. And I guess everyone would accept that John hadn't done a very good job of being king. And he dies within 18 months of Magna Carta being sealed and then repudiated. So what is the state of the Kingdom of England when this child becomes king?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, Henry III could quite easily have never ruled at all or ruled for a few days, because when he came to the throne, the barons had, in a way, decided to almost abandon Magna Carta. They felt it hadn't worked. And what they'd done was to offer the throne to the eldest son of the King of France, Louis, who came to England, invaded England in May 1216 with great success. And by the time John died, Louis controls London, probably two thirds of the barons have recognised him. He hasn't actually been crowned king, but they've recognised him as king. And it looked as for all the world as though he was going to win the war and somehow or other Henry would have been, I don't know, sent off to a monastery or disappeared or something like that. Now, of course, nothing like that happened. And this takes us back to the framework of the reign, because the

• 11:25Speaker 03

  minority government of Henry III, led by the papal legate, Gualle, William Marshall, Earl Pembroke, they realised in this desperate situation, the only way forward was to change course completely and accept what John had rejected. And in a way, the barons had despaired of making work and accepted Magna Carta. So the first thing the new government did was to issue a new version of Magna Carta. And of course, they then could say, look, what are you fighting for? We've now conceded the main cause of the war. And although the war didn't end, and there was a great battle at Lincoln in 1217, I think actually the procreation of this new version of Magna Carta was crucial, because none of the English

• 12:08Speaker 03

  barons fought very hard at the Battle of Lincoln. They sort of struck a blow and then surrendered. Not one English baron in this decisive battle, totally different from Hastings, seeing off a foreign invasion in a way, determining the whole future of the monarchy. Not a single English baron was actually killed in the Battle of Lincoln. And I think it was because they appreciated they'd already won.

• 12:32Matt Lewis?

  I love the story at Lincoln of William Marshall, aged nearly 70, so desperate to head off into battle that he forgets to put his helmet on and a page has to catch his horse and remind him that he ought to be wearing a helmet to do this kind of thing.

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Yes, that's always interpreted by historians in very different ways. So Georges Dubois, who liked to put the marshal in the context of his chivalric youth, thought that this was a return to his youth. And, you know, he was a young man again, charging into battle, forgetting his helmet. Whereas J C Halt, Sir James Halt, who had a very materialistic view of all this, thought he'd forgotten it because he was already calculating the ransoms and the value of the ransoms he might get after he'd won the battle. So that's become a sort of a rather nice pointed departure in different ways for historians. Of course, the other extraordinary thing about Lincoln, which again comes back to, you know, this

• 13:25Speaker 03

  is still a chivalric society, is that the only great lord killed at the battle was the leader of the French army, the Count of Perche. And according to the life of William Marshall, I mean, he was fighting with William Marshall, and William Marshall brought a great blow down on William Marshall's helmet. Lucky he had actually in the end got it, and the dents were shown afterwards. And then another knight managed to thrust his spear through the very narrow eyepiece of the Count of Perche, and then he sort of swayed on his horse and fell down. And he was dead. And no one actually thought he was dead. They just thought perhaps, you know, heat of the battle, he fainted. It was only when they took off his helmet that they saw the ghastly injury. But the key point is, everyone was terribly sorry about it. What a shame, that he should have died

• 14:08Speaker 03

  in this way. Of course, William Marshall was also only not trying to kill the Count of Perche, he was trying to capture him, trying to put the reins of his horse. So it makes the point that this is still at the high level, a chivalric society in which great nobles are not generally killed in battle, they're not executed for political crimes. Worth remembering, John didn't execute a single noble who'd rebelled against him. He murdered one or two people, but, you know, you had to murder them because there was no sort of judicial way of getting rid of them. So that was also another benign context of the reign, which unfortunately is beginning to shift by the end of the reign with the Battle of Evesham, when of course, Montfort and his closest associates were brutally

• 14:52Speaker 03

  killed, murdered in a way, on the battlefield.

• 14:56Matt Lewis?

  So to some extent, it feels like John personally was the problem who had created this war, and that his death, it's probably not fair to say that dying was the best thing he ever did for England, but that his death sort of allowed the space for these problems to be ended. Were the English nobility keen to come back to the royal side? Were they happy to champion a nine-year-old boy at that point, rather than a French prince?

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they were for three reasons. First, they'd won because Magna Carta had been accepted. Secondly, the fact that, and this is another very important context for it, in fact, he was only nine, meant that the great councils, prototype parliaments, are going to play a very important part in the governance of the country. And so the king's will is not going to be exercised for quite a long time. And that means the barons themselves are going to be running things. And that was an important context for Henry's reign, because in the 1240s, 50s, he faces again and again the demand that the barons should choose his chief ministers. And that goes back to the minority, when that was exactly what they had done. So that was the second reason, therefore, why the

• 16:02Speaker 03

  barons were very happy, you know, to have a nine-year-old son who's going to be completely harmless for another 10 years or so. The third was that, and this takes us back to the context I mentioned, already England for the English is becoming a powerful emotive force. And by the time Louis had brought a lot of Frenchmen to England, he'd given them a lot of favour. And I think this was beginning to be resented. So the king's side were able to portray the war as saving England from the French. And that was another, I think, important factor in ultimately Henry's victory.

• 16:40Matt Lewis?

  And so, as we mentioned, England then is faced by quite a long minority with a young king. It encompasses some well-known names, including William Marshall that we've mentioned, Hubert de Bure, Peter de Rush. How easily did they manage to pick up the pieces of the kingdom in the years after 1216? What was the lasting impact of these characters on both Henry and England?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  I think the key characters there were Hubert de Bure and William Marshall. But above all, Hubert de Bure, who was extraordinary achievement, if you think about it, he governed England effectively from 1219, after William Marshall's death, all the way through to 1232. And so he actually was kept on by Henry, after Henry had attained his full power in 1227. I mean, extraordinary period of time to have actually been in charge of the government of the kingdom. Now, why was it important? It was, I think, less for principle, but practicality, had a vision of how monarchy should function in the future after the disasters of John's reign. And that was twofold. On the one hand, yes, royal

• 17:46Speaker 03

  power needed to be rebuilt. And he did rebuild royal power. He recovered for Henry control over his castles, over his sheriftdoms, and he rebuilt royal finance, so that by the time of the early 1230s, I mean, the Crown's revenue was more or less back to what it had been at the start of John's reign. That was one thing he did. But the second thing he did was that he realised this had to take place within the context of the acceptance of Magna Carta. And so it's a revived kingship, but within new limits. And the final definitive version of Magna Carta, which is still on the Statute Book of the United Kingdom today,

• 18:26Speaker 03

  is not, of course, John's Charter of 1215, it's Henry III's Magna Carta of 1225. And I think there also, Hubert de Bure had an important alliance with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton. And the 1225 Charter was different from all its predecessors in that it was consensual, in that it was conceded in return for a tax. So nobody could say, this has been forced on the king. And that was shown in the Wonderful Witness List, in which all the great and good of the land came together to witness it, whatever side they'd been on the civil war. And also, it was more inclusive in that it has a new preamble saying that the liberties are granted to everybody, not just the free. And so, in

• 19:11Speaker 03

  its exclusivity, in its consensual nature, it is new. And that was shown also by the church getting behind it in a new way, because the church now launched sentences of excommunication against everybody who broke Magna Carta. The Charter is being embraced by the whole of society. And I think that is Hubert de Bure's dual achievement. On the one hand, he rebuilt royal power, but within new limits. And that's pointing the way forward for late medieval monarchy. Of course, acceptance of Magna Carta is another factor in the development of the parliamentary state, because it does shut up many traditional sort, both in letter

• 19:53Speaker 03

  and spirit. It shuts up arbitrary sources of revenue on which John and others had depended, and therefore makes it all the more necessary for the king to get taxation from Parliament. And Magna Carta itself says, if you want general taxation, Parliament has to agree to it. And so Magna Carta both restricted ancient sources of revenue and said, if you want new sources of revenue, e.g. taxation, you have to get the consent of what in effect is Parliament to have it. And that therefore, again, points the way forward to a different form of monarchy. And I think you're so right at the start, you know, Henry III is a bridge, his reign is a bridge between the arbitrary, intrusive form of kingship of King John

• 20:36Speaker 03

  and his predecessors, and Edward the First type of kingship, and late medieval kingship, which is to some extent, particularly under Edward III, say, far more consensual and dependent on taxation from Parliament.

• 20:50Matt Lewis?

  And it begins to create this mechanism whereby you come to Parliament for taxation, and in return, Parliament says, well, we'd like you to change this, reform that, do that a little bit better. And it becomes this kind of bargaining balancing act between Parliament and king.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Another extraordinary feature of Henry's reign is that the great lever, the source of Parliament's power through the ages, first appears in the 1240s and 1250s, when Henry goes to Parliament, again and again, says, can I have taxation? And they say, yes, but you can have taxation, but only if you reform the realm, and in particular, if you let us choose your ministers. So Henry thought, kept on saying, no, I'm not going to agree that, until he's finally overwhelmed by the Great Revolution of 1258. So, yeah, I mean, in a way, the demands Parliament was putting to the king in the 1240s and 50s were just as radical as any put to Charles I.

• 21:43Matt Lewis?

  And to some extent, do you think it was central to the acceptance and embedding of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest alongside that, that there was a minor king who didn't have the ability to say, I don't want this. There were people in the government who were going along with it on his behalf.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It's almost impossible to know what might have happened had Henry, or a king of a different character, come to the throne in 1216, 1217. I'm not sure about that, because Henry's character, as it evolved, which is a factor in why there was such a long period of peace in his reign, was an emollient one. And he was angry, but he was off, easily appeased. He had none of the cruelty, the spiky manipulative skills of his father. And so I think Henry's character would probably have led to the acceptance of Magna Carta anyway. And it's remarkable, formally, he has full power in 1227, just before he's 21. And yet he's still perfectly happy for Hubert de Boer to

• 22:42Speaker 03

  go on running things for him in tandem for another five years. There was something sluggish, indolent about Henry's personality, or at any rate, perhaps as a bit unfair, he liked a comfortable life. And Hubert de Boer says, look, let's take things carefully. We want to appease great magnets, while of course, building up my own power. Henry sort of goes along with it. So I'm not sure his youth, I think his personality was the key thing here.

• 23:13Matt Lewis?

  I think we tend to see weakness as well, but I think you can see strength in accepting that there's a man beside you who's doing a good job and allowing him to carry on doing that good job while you continue to learn, rather than coming as a newly king in his majority and sweeping everybody aside and saying, right, now I'm in charge.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Yes, I wish Henry, in a sense, had continued to learn. I mean, that's another interesting question over the years. Does he get wiser? I think his mode of kingship was sort of just naturally similar to Hubert de Boer in that it's cautious, it's pacific. I mean, Henry's own campaign in 1242-3 in France was no real different from Hubert de Boer's in 1230. Doesn't show much vim and vigour. I mean, there were things innate here, because the other characteristics of Henry is he was Rex Pacificus. He has no aptitude for the business of war and no delight in war. There's no evidence he ever attended tournaments and so on. And I think that must have been innate to him. It must have been

• 24:09Speaker 03

  some physical, emotional characteristic in him, because I'm absolutely sure there, Henry's tutors were desperate to convert him into a contemporary would call a melee strenuous, a strenuous active knight. He must have been the despair of his tutors in that respect.

• 24:42Matt Lewis?

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• 25:24Matt Lewis?

  specific goals and background. Plus, there are no wait lists. You can often get an appointment as soon as tomorrow. Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com/medieval to get started. That's R U L A dot com forward slash medieval. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.

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• 27:46Matt Lewis?

  And again, very similar to Henry VI, who comes to the throne as a child and shows no aptitude for that kind of thing.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  I mean, Henry VI obviously went mad, but was, I think, just almost a blank in terms of personality. Henry has a very strong personality. There are things he very much wants to do. He actually wanted passionately to recover the lost lands in France, although he had no ability, no aptitude for war, and so was no good at doing it. So Henry is active, if in an armchair sort of way. Of course, he's a lover of beautiful things. Perhaps I should say that I think I've been working on these Henry III reigns for 40 years now. It's dreadful to think that it's 40 years since I first signed contract with what was then the Air Matthewan English monarchs series. How have I managed to keep going all that

• 28:34Speaker 03

  time, although writing other things, including books on Magna Carta along the way? It's the extraordinary fascination of Henry's own character. And I think you can get closer to him than any other medieval king. And that's primarily because of his amazing letters. And these are all recorded, year by year, by the Chancery, which writes them and then seals them, on these amazing chancery rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, or National Archives now at Kew. And there are thousands and thousands of these letters on these rolls every year. And a lot of them are bog standard ministry stuff, and the king probably didn't know anything about them. But others are deeply, deeply personal.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  I mean, you can get really close to Henry from them. You know, warm-hearted, emotional, affable, easygoing, angry often, but very easily calmed down, a connoisseur of art and architecture, deeply pious, and Rex Pacificus. All these characteristics come out. And I think in a way, you sort of feel he was an ideal king for a post-Magna Carta age, in his sort of affability, his love of a quiet life. I mean, I sometimes in my lectures say, well, you know, why was there then the Great Revolution of 1258, which is where volume one of my Ockens, where here's this king who's accepted Magna Carta, who has

• 29:58Speaker 03

  given many years of peace to the kingdom, which people praised him for, because I'm Matthew Paris, praises that. But he's also deeply pious, has built Westminster Abbey, and has given the abbey to the kingdom, he's given a wonderful relic to the kingdom, the relic of holy blood. How is it then that this king is overtaken in 1258 by a revolution, far more revolutionary than Magna Carta, which actually strips him of power and vests the government of the country in the hands of a magnet council? You know, nothing like that's happened to any king before. And of course, that takes us to the other side of his personality, both the things he wanted to do and the things he was unable to do. So I mean,

• 30:41Speaker 03

  On the one hand, what he'd done in that warm-hearted, emotional family way was to establish the relations of his wife, the Savoy from Savoy, but also to establish his own half-brothers in England and give them wonderful rewards. I mean, one poet said, what is the main characteristic of Henry? It is giving like a living fountain. I mean, he was a soft touch, you know. Kings have got to be able to say no. Louis the Ninth, his contemporary King of France, was, despite being revered as a saint, was very good at saying, no, no, you can't have what you want. Henry says, for those he loves, yes, yes, yes. And that created huge factional struggles at court in which English nobles

• 31:24Speaker 03

  got involved. So that was one cause of the revolution. The other was Henry's extraordinary naivety, again, the simplicity, with this mad scheme to place his second son on the throne of Sicily, which he both had to pay the cope, ninety thousand pounds, simply for the sort of permission to make him king, and then had to go and conquer Sicily from its own stalford ruler. I mean, completely impossible things to do, as everyone told it. But then that's where Henry's piety played in false, because Henry wrote one of the most extraordinary letters. He writes to the Pope and says, well, yes, everybody tells me this is impossible, that Parliament has said to me, there's no way, the terms are impossible. But then Henry says, but trusting in God, who can move mountains and

• 32:09Speaker 03

  quell tempests, I'd nonetheless sign up and will go ahead. And then the next day, he makes this huge offering of a wonderful cope to the shrine of Edward the Confessor, that the Edward the Confessor, his patron saint, would make a happy ending to the Sicilian project. The other third area, why there's a revolution, is that I think Sicily and all the factions at court relating to mismanagement of patronage, that might have led to a revolution at the court and a new council and so on. But the other problem was that Henry had done nothing to reform the running of local government. So throughout the counties of England, there's huge discontent at the activities of the king's officials, his sheriffs, his

• 32:50Speaker 03

  judges, and also Henry had been so indulgent towards many of his great magnets, foreign and native, and allowed them to increase the authority of their own courts, make their own officials more oppressive. So there was seething discontent in the localities, and that Henry's failure to reform the realm meant that that was why the revolution had such wide scope in 1258, unwinding a political society. So knights and free men, peasants, all become involved in this great upsurge of protest against Henry's misrule. So it's not a king with great ideas about royal absolutism. It's a king who's, I think people say, he's

• 33:32Speaker 03

  shown himself unable to rule effectively. And that's, again, why he's difficult to grasp, because he's not a bad king, not an evil king in any kind of way, and he has done good things for the kingdom. He's brought long years of peace. And yet, on the other hand, you could say it was peace with injustice and also peace with, as I've said, all kinds of factional struggles at court, which his wife, Eleanor Provence, becomes involved, because she was a far tougher character than Henry was. I mean, Eleanor Provence was an remarkable woman. She comes to England at the age of twelve in 1236. She can't speak the language. She's not a great heiress. She doesn't bring anything with her. And

• 34:14Speaker 03

  yet gradually, she proves a far tougher character than her husband, who showers her with gifts and favours, and she drives forward all the patronage to her own relations, and in the end, supports the revolution of 1258 to get rid of her rivals. So she is a remarkable character. I would say the building of Westminster Abbey, what were Henry's great achievements? That one was the peace, and people said that. And the other, even if peace to some extent, injustice, the other was the building of Westminster Abbey. I mean, this great, great church, which he builds, which still survives today, the Great Coronation Church, it breathes his expansive, opulent spirit and its wonderful decoration,

• 34:59Speaker 03

  its cosmopolitanism too, because it's influenced by the French cathedrals. The shrine of the Confessor comes from Italy and made by Italian craftsmen. It shows Henry's devotion to the Pope and all these things. So the building of Westminster Abbey is Henry's great achievement.

• 35:18Matt Lewis?

  I think, as you have said, we can get close to Henry, we can get quite close to him as a person, yet he remains difficult to place in a box of a type of kingship. Was he successful or not? Was he militarily minded? Clearly not. But he also wasn't at the other extreme of being solely pious and having no redeeming features in secular business. And I think one of the interesting aspects is he's also one of the only medieval king where we see a sight of his sense of humour. There's one incident on the crossing back from France, I think, where we get him playing a practical joke, and you just don't see that with other kings. Can you tell us a little bit about that, please? I find that interesting, so.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Let me just start with your first point, which is that, yes, Henry is difficult to categorise. I mean, he's not a bad and evil king like King John. He's not a great king like his son, Edward the First. He's not a hopeless and hapless king like his grandson, Edward the Second. Edward the Second is all famous for sort of spending a lot of time with actors and with agricultural labourers. You can't see Henry the Third doing that. He's much more likely to be found with good and pious men. So he is difficult to categorise. And Matthew Parris, at one point, the great chronicler of the reign, advances two models of kingship. On the one hand, there are kings who are very brave,

• 36:36Speaker 03

  warlike, like Alfred, Arthur, King Canute. On the other hand, there are kings who are wise, pious, courteous, moderate in terms of character. Now, Henry obviously can't fit the first model of kingship. And unfortunately, he doesn't entirely fit the second, because no one would have said he was wise. But you could have said, and this is why he survived, you see, that, yes, he does fit it sort of the second model, because he is moderate, he is hugely pious, and in those ways, he gains very great respect, because the obituaries written after his death all say, yes, he was simplex, but they also say he was terrifically

• 37:21Speaker 03

  pious, and he built Westminster Abbey. And that's why he survives and dies in his bed. So he can't quite fit the model of second kingship. Now, what the actual confessor was famous for was being atempere, atempere, and it's very difficult, but well-tempered, well-tempered is what's being said there. And Henry's well-tempered, I think, comes out in his sense of humour. And there were two aspects of that. One, there was a sort of slapstick sense of humour, in which, when he went to Bath in 1256, was it, he got his jester thrown in. And we know that because next day, and again, one of these letters, the Roman bath, he gave the jester a new suit of clothes to replace the ones ruined

• 38:03Speaker 03

  by the ducking. And I think Henry did play sort of, you know, pull me, push me, ragtag games with his jesters, in, I think, a perfectly sort of amicable way. But on the other hand, there's sometimes a slightly more sophisticated sense of humour, which, again, we know from these letters. I mean, at some point in the 1230s, he issued a very, very apparently pompous letter patent, giving one of his clerks full power to cut the hair of the other clerks in his court, because Henry goes on to say, they're getting far too long, and they're sort of nourishing these great curls and so on. And then Henry goes on to say, well, and if you don't do this, I'll take the scissors to your own hair. Now, I'm sure

• 38:45Speaker 03

  this was meant to be a joke, and you can imagine Henry sort of chasing around with a pair of scissors to cut the hair of the barber he's commissioned to cut the hair of the other clerks. I mean, the other very nice one is in the ship coming back from Gascony in 1243, where one of the problems with medieval sense of humour was often never quite sure whether it is a sense of humour or not. But here, the actual record in a charlaty roll says the king is having a joke. He's playing a game with one of his clerks. And what Henry did was to order the clerk drawing up the roll to write down a whole series of absolutely ridiculous debts that this other clerk, Peter the Poet of him,

• 39:27Speaker 03

  had incurred. So they were a hundred pounds, because he was rude to the king on the ship, or something like that. You can imagine the roll being laid out on a table in one of the cabins. And so Peter the Poet of him comes in and looks at all these extraordinary things. Oh, my God, what is going on? You know, help. And presumably, the king and the other clerks are all standing around laughing as they see his reaction. But Henry didn't want the joke to go too far, because the point of the roll was to actually keep a record of debts, which then the exchequer would collect. So Henry said, look, when Peter the Poet of him isn't looking, actually cross them all out, so there'll be no ill consequences for this. But I think that shows a rather nice sense of humour of the king.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  I don't think it's in any way malicious. It's just everyone having a good laugh, really. And I think Henry was very, very close to his household clerks, but also many people in his entourage in that kind of affable way. I mean, it's interesting to know whether he was a bore or not. I mean, I think it depends what you're interested in. I mean, he obviously loved talking about his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. He loved talking about miracles, holy men, and so on. You know, some people would think this is wonderful, others wouldn't. Some people would enjoy The jokes and japes at court, others wouldn't. And coming back to the sort of ragtag jokes, throwing the jester in, but there was nothing improper at Henry's court either.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Because one thing he abolished, there was the service of one man who held lamb in return on Christmas Day, coming to the court, blowing a whistle, doing a leap and doing a fart. And that was the service he had to perform. It probably went back to very early Norman times. Anyway, Henry abolished this on the grounds it was indecent. And he said in future, you just have to pay an annual rent. So I think that also gives us like flavour of what Henry's court was like. In some ways, it was mass every day, huge emphasis on religious service at court. It was feeding paupers in great numbers every day, but it was also having fun and jokes.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  But it was absolutely not improper. And of course, as I've said, there was no bastards or mistresses at court in, I'll tell you, for the king in Henry's day. And that must have been partly innate, partly because he really loved his wife, but also again, the teachings of the friars and so on, and the chastity. One of the obituaries comments on Henry's chastity, which separates him, of course, both from John and Henry the Second and so many previous kings. Partly a function of the age, it was true of Henry, this great contemporary Louis the Ninth as well, but it was something innate, I think.

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• 43:42Matt Lewis?

  I think it's striking how we not only have these examples of a sense of humour, but as you say, there's no malice, there's no spite in it. He's putting things right, you know, pushes a jester in but buys him some new clothes, plays a joke on Peter, but makes sure it never goes too far because it struck from the record. You don't imagine his father taking so many efforts to make sure the jokes never went too far and actually hurt anybody.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Just going back to the contrast with the father. I mean, you've got to remember, John was a murderer. I mean, murdered Arthur, he'd murdered Matilda de Brieuse. He was also widely criticised for cruelty in torturing prisoners too, prisoners in Corf and so on. And taking hostages, torturing prisoners or keeping prisoners in terrible conditions, nothing like that in Henry's reign at all. He's not in any sense cruel, unpleasant person. I think anyone meeting Henry would know that. He would be exasperating. You know, you think, oh God, why is he giving so much patronage to these foreign relations? Why is he pursuing the Sicilian project? It's just madness.

• 44:43Speaker 03

  And yet, on the other hand, you would like him, think, well, this is a warm-hearted, generous, emotional person. Because another wonderful story of going back to the sense of humour with the jester, which I think actually is not based on a bad source, in that there was this jester who came to Henry and said, "Oh, King, you're very Christ-like." And Henry was very pleased to hear this. And so made the mistake of asking for more information. And so the jester said, "Well, you're as wise now as on the day you were born." The point being that Christ, of course, was wise all the way through. So the jester, you know, you're as wise now as on the day you were born. In other words, you're not very wise, you are simple.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Henry was very cross by this and ordered the jester to be taken away and hanged. But of course, all that happened was, again, showing Henry, the court just went through some sort of mock hanging and then told the jester to sort of make himself scarce and come back when the king had calmed down. And you get wonderful letters in which Henry says, "Oh, look, do come back to court despite all these sort of harsh words I said to you and so on, you know, I've forgiven you."

• 45:50Matt Lewis?

  So he's got a quick temper, but not the malice to go with it that his father probably had. And we mentioned a couple of times, Henry's military efforts in France early on in his majority, which didn't go particularly well. And after that, we see a period of long peace with France, with Louis the Ninth. I've often wondered, would Henry have been annoyed that Louis got to be a saint and Henry didn't? But Henry also makes peace with Scotland, Wales, Ireland. Do we give him enough credit for managing all of this? Or would he have been seen as a failure in a medieval context for not pursuing conquest?

• 46:25Speaker 03

  That was such an interesting question, and I think it goes back again to Matthew Paris. And what's so interesting about Matthew Paris's two models of kingship is that he shows there was a second model. The first model is the warlike king. The second model is the wise, pious, good-natured, very Christian king. And so I think Henry was able to fit into that second model, apart from not being very wise. And the obituaries after his death are in many ways very complimentary. So I think that's almost one up to English society that he was able to accept a king who was not warlike. I mean, you're quite right too, that the consequences of that, I think, were very, in many ways, beneficial.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  I mean, this is a huge contrast of the reign of his father and his son in terms of relations with Scotland. Long, long period of Anglo-Scottish peace from which both countries must greatly have benefited. And it's partly, you know, family connections. So that Alexander III marries Henry III's daughter. Henry's does, of course, conquer North Wales in the 1240s. It didn't last very long. But I think if you look at the chronology of that, the wars in Wales were very much last resorts. I mean, it's absolutely clear that Henry did not want to have to fight them. And in the mid 1240s, he had, according to previous agreements, he actually had the right

• 47:52Speaker 03

  to conquer the whole of North Wales and conspicuously decided not to do it. So I think even with Wales, there's a degree of passivism there. And then, of course, there are only two attempts to recover the lost lands in France, 1230, 1242. Neither at all successful or driven forward with any degree of vim and vigour. So I think the two are interlinked. There's a long period of domestic peace, but that was partly because, of course, of peace abroad. And of course, Henry equally never went to Ireland and never pursued any kind of vigorous policy in Ireland. So in a way, a very new framework is being shaped in Henry's reign,

• 48:34Speaker 03

  probably more by result of just the king's personality than anything else, but a new relationship between England and its neighbours. Peace with Scotland, ultimately, of course, an acceptance of Cluel and Apgriffith as Prince of Wales, non-intervention in Ireland and the peace with France. You might well say how sad that that didn't last because Edward I, and then ultimately the Hundred Years' War, completely destroy the beneficial benevolent relations between England and its neighbours, created under Henry and destroyed under successive kings. In the Hundred Years' War, not entirely due to the King of England's fall.

• 49:14Speaker 03

  I mean, that was equally, the King of France decided that the arrangements that Henry negotiated in the Wonderful Treaty of Paris in 1259 were unacceptable to the King of England and unacceptable to the King of France. But yeah, I mean, that's a fascinating way of positioning the reign, isn't it? And making one think, actually, in terms of if peace is a benefit, even though unfortunately, you have to admit internally, it was often peace with injustice. I'll tell you, injustice when you're trying to get justice against some of the king's favourites. Nonetheless, you could say Henry's reign was more beneficial to the kingdom and you might say to Europe and to England's neighbours than the reigns of any other king.

• 49:57Speaker 03

  Having said that, I might slightly rewrite the conclusion to volume two, put that thought in, you know, why not? I mean, if you compare it to Edward III and all the awful slaughter brought, destruction brought by the Hundred Years' War in France or Henry V, what was all that for? And the high taxation, of course, which Henry's period of low taxation, because he can't get taxes from Parliament. Equally, though, of course, Henry did sometimes want the results of successful war, obviously in Sicily.

• 50:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I think we're just guilty of still quite often viewing our medieval monarchs through a lens of their military achievements. The great ones were the ones that won lots of battles and things like that. Whereas it's a strange juxtaposition because today we don't like war, we don't want to be at war. We see what's happening in the world today and we don't want it. Yet we still judge medieval monarchs by their performance on a battlefield and we ignore people like Henry, who secured decades of peace that allowed trade to prosper, low taxation, as you say, vast improvements internally because we weren't consumed by war, but we don't judge that as positively?

• 51:01Speaker 03

  No, I couldn't agree with you more, though I think a war constituency today can easily be whipped up. And say the Falklands War was something where, for good or ill, there was large political support for that. And indeed, some of the victories were glorified, weren't they? I'm not saying that was wrong necessarily, but there is still that constituency for good or ill, which is very present. But I very much agree with you that that second model of the peaceable king, which Matthew Paris mentioned, we tend not to celebrate that. Or we just haven't over the writing of history celebrated that. I mean, after all, serious historians have claimed that Henry V was the greatest king who ever sat on the English throne. It depends by what standards you judge that.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  But, you know, the successful kings, Edward I, Edward III, Henry V have normally been the great warrior kings, haven't they? And that's impregnated English history. And of course, that's the reason why Henry III was, of course, desperate that England's national saint should be Edward the Confessor. And he would have been very, very disappointed to learn that in the course of the 14th century, the Confessor was virtually forgotten. And St George, not connected with England in any kind of way, becomes England's national saint. But you can understand that, why? Because the most famous image of the Confessor, which Henry had in tiles, sculpture and painting all through his palaces and churches, was of the Confessor giving a ring to a pilgrim.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Whereas, of course, the most famous image of St George is of him killing a dragon and rescuing a maiden from distress. You know, there's no contest for sensio athletic English nobles or knights and archers between those two images. So Henry would have been disappointed. The Westminster Abbey survives his great achievement. The coronation still takes place in the great theatre of space he created before the High Altar. But the Confessor, in whose honour Henry had rebuilt the Abbey, never became England's national saint and is in a way forgotten, I think, as much as Henry III is sometimes being forgotten.

• 53:12Matt Lewis?

  I hope you found this part of Henry III's story interesting, not least because the next part is coming up next week. Then we'll hear all about the challenges Henry faced from Simon de Montfort, another big name in English medieval history. In the meantime, Mike Livingston has made a fantastic documentary for History Hit all about Simon's Rebellion as part of a series that also includes William Wallace and O. England Dua. So you can check that out if you're a subscriber right now. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that

• 53:54Matt Lewis?

  you've Gone Medieval. You can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just Gone Medieval with History Hit.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.