Henry III: Reform, Rebellion and Civil War 1258-1272
David Carpenter
Yale University Press, £25, 576 pages
Henry III (1207-1272) was, at 56 years, England’s longest reigning Catholic monarch, and (after Edward the Confessor) its most devout. His tenure bequeathed us Westminster Abbey as we know it, parliament in a recognisable form and the beginnings of the use of English as an official language.
Yet, Henry has ended up as England’s “almost forgotten King”. The 900th anniversaries of Henry’s renewal of Westminster Abbey (1969) and death (1972) passed unremarked. Being neither a “bad” king like his father John nor a “great” one, like his son Edward, Henry didn’t enter the canon of popular entertainment. John got a Shakespeare history play and Edward a Netflix series (The Outlaw King, 2018). Henry gets this two-volume biography.
Volume one appeared in 2021 and focused on Henry’s minority and “personal rule”; volume two takes us into the years of disturbance and civil unrest. His tribulations commenced at the end of a parliamentary session in 1258, when a group of barons marched, in full armour, into Westminster Hall to confront the king. “What is this, my Lords; am I, poor wretch, your prisoner?” Henry called out. The answer, for the time being, was “no”, but if the king was not a captive in his person, he was in his power.
Henry was no tyrant like his father, but his focus on pious works rather than the machinery of government had mired England in disarray. Henry’s neglect and partiality caused the administration of justice to break down. His generosity endangered crown finances.
Worse, Henry’s haughty French relatives were the chief beneficiaries of his largesse – inspiring a general xenophobia which testifies to the early stirring of English nationalism. Henry’s flighty obsession with overseas schemes, like installing his younger son Edmund as king of Sicily, rather than domestic matters, meant his mind was frequently elsewhere even when his body was not on pilgrimage to remote shrines in France.
The solution, as would emerge in the Provisions of Oxford (June 1258) and later legislation, was threefold. Henry would be subjected to a mechanism of co-decision with a permanent council (partly elected from among the barons). Law court procedures and personnel would be expanded to speed up redress. All aliens were to be expelled.
The renegade Henry’s fluctuating pattern of acceptance and evasion would eventually push the country into civil war. The barons’ leader Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was slain at the Battle of Evesham (1265). England was not truly at peace until 1267, when Henry came to a settlement with supporters of Simon whom he’d punished too harshly through disinheritance – turning them into roving bands of partisans who made the kingdom ungovernable through guerrilla warfare.
Henry’s skill was to absorb much of the rebels’ programme but on his own terms, thus consolidating the monarchy in the long term. The council was dispensed with but the reform of justice and the expansion of parliamentary franchise remained. Henry neutralised the power of the reform movement by absorbing it – much as he ameliorated the challenge of St Thomas Becket’s cult by personally displaying devotion to him.
These insights colour Carpenter’s volume, but it isn’t easy reading. In the preface, the author notes, defensively, that he “remains an academic rather than a popular historian, more concerned to delve into the detail than to think how to get the reader to turn the page”. This is reasonable but this work bursts the bounds of biography and becomes instead a general history of England in Henry’s time.
Henry often disappears from view amid regional analysis of the work of itinerant judges and land-holding patterns. Carpenter’s decades reading medieval chronicles has left a mark in his fecundity of detail and tendency to digression. Lists of minor actors present at meetings deserve banishment to footnotes; anecdotes about Carpenter’s deceased colleagues should have been excised.
Nevertheless, this volume matters – and especially in the afterglow of a coronation, when all eyes turned to Henry III’s great Westminster Abbey, Carpenter’s work asks us to think about its builder more carefully than usual.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.