Henry III

Henry III (1207-1272) was king of England from 1216 to 1272. His reign saw the rise of English nationalism and the development of a strong baronial claim to participate in government.

The eldest son of King John and Isabella of Angoulême, Henry III was born on Oct. 1, 1207. At the death of his father, he ascended the throne on Oct. 19, 1216, and was crowned at Gloucester. Ten days later William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, was appointed regent. On Pembroke's death in 1219, Hubert de Burgh, who served as justiciar, became the most powerful man in government. In the first years of the regency, England was under papal influence due to Henry's father, John. Efforts were made to maintain peace through negotiating with Louis of France in 1217, reconfirming the Great Charter in 1223 and making peace with Wales.

In 1223 Pope Honorius III allowed Henry to be declared of age for certain limited purposes. In January 1227 Henry declared himself of full age and commenced to attempt to regain the overseas French possessions that had been lost. In the preceding years he had lost most of his French possessions but by 1225 had recovered Gascony, and in 1228, for baronial support, he agreed to restore the forest liberties. By 1230 he was invading Poitou and Gascony, and the following year to obtain scutage (a form of revenue) he reaffirmed the liberties of the Church.

Henry, by 1232, hoped to act as his own minister and caused the dismissal of Hubert de Burgh. He then alienated the English barons by replacing English officers with Poitevin friends and was forced to back down in 1234 due to pressure from Hubert de Burgh and the barons. In 1235 to gain foreign support he married his sister Isabella to the emperor Frederick II, and on January 20 the following year he married Eleanor of Provence. This marriage, which resulted in two sons and three daughters who survived infancy, caused England to be flooded with his wife's worthless relations, and the period is marked by the rise of English nationalism as the barons saw the government passing into the control of foreigners.

By 1239 Henry's behavior was such that even his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort and his brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, joined the opposition. Henry, while making minor concessions, continued to fill state and Church offices with foreigners. Baronial opposition to the misgovernment of the King continued to grow. In 1242 they refused a grant for the French war, and 2 years later both barons and the Church protested, but these efforts failed due to lack of leadership as Henry detached his brother Richard from the opposition through the marriage arranged with Sanchia, daughter of Raymond Berenger IV, Count of Provence.

In 1252 Henry alienated Simon de Montfort, who had been governor of Gascony, and a crisis developed when Henry agreed to finance Pope Alexander II's struggle with Manfred in return for the grant of the crown of Sicily to Prince Edmund, Henry's son. This "Sicilian Venture" would be of no value to England, and so the barons came to Parliament at Westminster, clad in armor and ready for a confrontation. With Montfort as their leader, in 1258 the barons met at the "Mad" Parliament and drew up the "Provisions," which gave the barons control of the executive and the right to nominate half of the Council as well as establishing a committee of 24 to institute reforms.

The barons soon quarreled as Montfort aimed at a more popular government, and the Earl of Gloucester became the leader of the more autocratic-minded barons. As a result, in 1261 Henry was able to regain power and obtained a papal bull absolving him from the terms of the "Provisions." In 1264 the conflict with the barons was referred to Louis IX of France for arbitration, and by the Mise of Amiens a favorable decision was given for the King. Although the decision was upheld by Pope Urban IV, the barons refused to accept the award, and civil conflict developed. After capturing Leicester and other areas, the baronial forces marched into the south for provisions. At the Battle of Lewes on May 14, 1264, Montfort defeated the King and forced a calling of Parliament.

Montfort's position now being too powerful, some of the barons deserted to the side of the King, whose forces led by Prince Edward defeated and killed Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. With the death of the opposition leader, Henry revoked all his recent acts, confiscated the lands of the rebels, and in the Battle of Kenilworth ensured peace for the rest of his reign. By now power had slipped from the hands of the King to his son Edward, and the last years of the reign saw the passage of some reforms at the 1267 Parliament of Marlborough.

Perhaps one of Henry's greatest achievements was the completion of Westminster Abbey in 1269. On Nov. 16, 1272, Henry died at Westminster, and his body was buried in the abbey 4 days later before the high altar, his heart being buried at Fontevrault.

Further Reading

There is much literature on Henry III's long and important reign. F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward (2 vols., 1947), is the best biography. Kate Norgate, The Minority of Henry the Third (1912), surveys the early years. The baronial system and Henry's relationship to it are examined in E. F. Jacobs, Studies in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion, 1258-1267 (1925), and R. F. Treharne, The Baronial Plan of Reform (1932). An excellent narrative is Tufton Beamish, Battle Royal: A New Account of Simon de Montfort's Struggle against King Henry III (1966). For general background on the period see F. M. Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 1216-1307 (1953; 2d ed. 1962).

Additional Sources

Bennetts, Pamela., The de Montfort legac, New York, St. Martin's Press 1973.

Carpenter, David., The minority of Henry III, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Carpenter, David., The minority of Henry III, London: Methuen London, 1990.

Carpenter, David., The reign of Henry III, London; Rio Grande, Ohio: The Hambledon Press, 1996.

Colvin, Howard Montagu., Building accounts of King Henry II, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971.

Turner, Ralph V., The king and his courts; the role of John and Henry III in the administration of justice, 1199-12, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press 1968. □

Henry III (1207–72), king of England (1216–72). Henry was one of the most cultured monarchs ever to sit on the English throne. He seems to have been inspired by artistic beauty for its own sake, judging by his recorded payments for a wide range of objects—silver, gold, and enamel work, hangings and embroideries, and frescos for the royal palaces. Equally, it is plain that he chose to sink large sums into works of art to give visual expression to his heightened conception of monarchy and dynasty. Nowhere is this more apparent than Westminster abbey, which he established as the royal necropolis. Huge sums were spent on its rebuilding after 1245, despite an ever-worsening overall financial position. Henry also brought a new mystique and theatricality to English monarchy. He loved display and liturgical ceremony, as when he processed to Westminster abbey in 1247 personally bearing his newly acquired relic of the Holy Blood. He increased the number of occasions when the Laudes regiae, the liturgy in praise of the ruler, were to be chanted; and he deliberately promoted the cult of Edward the Confessor, his beloved patron saint, having his own tomb in Westminster abbey placed within the aura of sanctity of Edward's tomb.

Henry's conception of monarchy looked back to the period before Magna Carta when kingship was untrammelled and unlimited, in theory if not in practice, and he may well have sought to counter the dramatic growth in constitutional ideas by deliberately emphasizing the aura of kingship. The traumatic experiences of his early years—the bringing down of his father, king John, French invasion and civil war, tutelage by baronial regency council—probably propelled him in this direction as well. He certainly had consistently a definite set of views which held as axiomatic that a king is free in his sovereignty to do as he will, be it appointment or removal of ministers and officials, or conduct of foreign policy. In so doing, Henry was ignoring the new realities following Magna Carta and this contributed to that series of crises which characterize his reign after his personal rule began in 1232. It culminated in the demand for radical reform in 1258 and the imposition of the provisions of Oxford, the prelude to the so-called Barons' War that tore the country apart until the defeat of Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham (1265). But it was by no means only, even chiefly, constitutional issues that were at stake, in 1258 or before. Recent research has shown how much friction was generated by very real political issues, of patronage, for example, and Henry's protection of his kinsmen and favourites from justice. Protest against his hated half-brothers, the Lusignans, who came to England after 1247, lay at the heart of the sworn baronial confederacy of 1258.

Henry was particularly vulnerable in 1258 because he faced imminent excommunication if he did not meet the gigantic debt he owed to the papacy, incurred when he accepted the grant of the kingdom of Sicily to his son Edmund in 1254. This was the culmination of a foreign policy that became ever more grandiose. At first, Henry's chief goal was the recovery of those parts of the Angevin empire lost under John. This was entirely reasonable. It was not inevitable that they would never be recovered, and as an Angevin Henry was dynastically impelled to seek to regain his inheritance and restore the honour of his lineage. But for a variety of reasons none of the expeditions dispatched to France succeeded, and the odds stacked against Henry steadily rose as the power of Louis IX of France and his brothers, installed in the former Angevin territories, increased. His failure led him into a wider European strategy that involved a network of foreign allies, including Emperor Frederick II, who married Henry's sister Isabella in 1236, and the Savoyards, the powerful kinsmen of Eleanor of Provence, whom Henry himself married in 1236. When Frederick was deposed by Pope Innocent IV in 1245, Henry was drawn into an attempt to secure the different parts of the imperial inheritance. He accepted the crown of Sicily for Edmund, he encouraged his brother Richard of Cornwall to accept the kingdom of Germany in 1257, and there are signs that he briefly toyed with the idea of extending his influence to the east Mediterranean through a marriage alliance involving Edmund and the Lusignan rulers of Cyprus, who also had claims to Jerusalem.

None of these schemes came to anything, and the huge costs incurred in the pursuit of Sicily, by stimulating the events of 1258, forced him to abandon them. In 1259, too, he finally accepted reality and agreed to the treaty of Paris, whereby he renounced his French claims as well. Henry's capacity to play for very high stakes, and yet lose, is truly remarkable.

S. D. Lloyd

Bibliography

Carpenter, D. A. , The Reign of Henry III (1996);
Clanchy, M. T. , England and its Rulers 1066–1272 (Glasgow, 1983);
Powicke, F. M. , King Henry III and the Lord Edward (2 vols., Oxford, 1947).

Henry III 1207–72, king of England (1216–72), son and successor of King John.

Reign

Early Years

Henry became king under a regency; William Marshal, 1st earl of Pembroke , and later Pandulf acted as chief of government, while Peter des Roches was the king's guardian. At the time of Henry's accession, England was torn by civil war and partially occupied by the French prince Louis (later King Louis VIII ). In 1217, however, the French were defeated and withdrew. Some of the English barons, Louis's former allies, continued to cause trouble; but Hubert de Burgh , chief justiciar and the greatest power in the government after 1221, gradually restored order.

Between the Barons and the Church

In 1227, Henry was granted full powers of kingship, and in 1230, with typical willfulness and against the advice of the justiciar, he led an unsuccessful expedition to Gascony and Brittany. In 1232 the king dismissed Hubert de Burgh, and for the next two years the government was controlled by Peter des Roches and his nephew (or son), Peter des Rivaux. This administration, which consisted of trained civil servants (many of them Poitevin), was hated by the barons, and a baronial revolt (1233–34) forced Henry to dismiss it.

Henry then assumed direct control of the government, but despite frequent protests from the barons and from his brother, Richard, earl of Cornwall , the king continued to surround himself with French favorites, including relatives of Eleanor of Provence (whom he married in 1236) and his own Poitevin half brothers. The latter involved him in a disastrous campaign (1242) to expel Louis IX of France from Poitou.

In 1238, Henry had weathered a storm of baronial protest caused by the secret marriage of his sister, Eleanor, to Simon de Montfort , earl of Leicester. The king subsequently (1248) sent Montfort to restore English authority in Gascony, but he totally alienated his former friend when he recalled him (1252) to answer charges of unjust administration.

In 1254, Henry accepted the papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily for his younger son, Edmund, earl of Lancaster (see Lancaster, house of ), agreeing in return to finance the conquest of the kingdom from the Hohenstaufen dynasty. However, the English barons, disturbed by the king's subservience to the papacy (which had already resulted in large papal exactions and an influx of foreign clergy into England) and angry that they had not been consulted, refused the necessary funds. Threatened by the pope with excommunication, Henry was forced to come to terms with the baronial opposition, now led by Simon de Montfort. The king accepted its plan for conciliar government set forth in the Provisions of Oxford (1258), supplemented by the Provisions of Westminster (1259).

Divisions in the baronial party enabled Henry to repudiate (1261) the provisions, with papal sanction, and in 1263 war broke out (see Barons' War ). An attempt to have Louis IX of France arbitrate the dispute led to the Mise of Amiens (1264), a declaration completely in the king's favor, and the war was renewed. Montfort won (1264) the battle of Lewes and summoned (1265) his famous representative Parliament . However, the heir to the throne, Prince Edward (later Edward I ), led the royal troops to decisive victory at Evesham (1265), where Simon de Montfort was killed, and by 1267 the barons had capitulated. From 1267 on, Prince Edward actually ruled the realm, and Henry was king in name only.

Legacy

Henry III has suffered at the hands of many historians, in part, because of the hostility of contemporary chroniclers. His long reign, however, showed progress in several respects. Learning flourished, particularly at Oxford, where Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon inspired others by their intense pursuit of knowledge and their championing of the natural sciences. Many magnificent buildings were erected, including Salisbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Commerce and industry thrived, even though interrupted by warfare.

Bibliography

See F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947, repr. 1966) and The Thirteenth Century (2d ed. 1962).

Henry III (1207–72), king of England (1216–72). Henry was one of the most cultured monarchs ever to sit on the English throne, inspired by artistic beauty for its own sake, judging by his payments for a wide range of objects—silver, gold, and enamel work, hangings and embroideries, and frescos for the royal palaces. Equally, he chose to sink large sums into works of art to give visual expression to his heightened conception of monarchy. Nowhere is this more apparent than Westminster abbey, which he established as the royal necropolis. Huge sums were spent on its rebuilding after 1245, despite an ever‐worseningfinancial position. He deliberately promoted the cult of Edward the Confessor, having his own tomb in Westminster abbey placed within the aura of sanctity of Edward's tomb.

His conception of monarchy looked back to the period before Magna Carta when kingship was unlimited, in theory if not in practice. The traumatic experiences of his early years—the bringing down of his father, King John, French invasion and civil war, tutelage by baronial regency council—probably propelled him in this direction as well. This attitude contributed to the crises which characterized his reign after his personal rule began in 1232. It culminated in the demand for radical reform in 1258 and the imposition of the provisions of Oxford, the prelude to the so‐called Barons' War that tore the country apart until the defeat of Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham (1265). But it was by no means only, even chiefly, constitutional issues that were at stake. Protest against his hated half‐brothers, the Lusignans, who came to England after 1247, lay at the heart of the baronial confederacy of 1258.

Henry was particularly vulnerable in 1258 because he faced imminent excommunication if he did not meet the gigantic debt he owed to the papacy, incurred when he accepted the grant of the kingdom of Sicily to his son Edmund in 1254. This was the culmination of a foreign policy ever more grandiose. At first, Henry's chief goal was the recovery of those parts of the Angevin empire lost under John. This was entirely reasonable. But the odds stacked against Henry steadily rose as the power of Louis IX of France and his brothers increased. His failure led him into a wider European strategy that involved a network of foreign allies, including Emperor Frederick II, who married Henry's sister Isabella in 1236, and the Savoyards, the powerful kinsmen of Eleanor of Provence, whom Henry himself married in 1236. When Frederick was deposed by Pope Innocent IV in 1245, Henry was drawn into an attempt to secure the different parts of the imperial inheritance.

None of these schemes came to anything, and the huge costs incurred in the pursuit of Sicily forced him to abandon them. In 1259, too, he finally accepted reality and agreed to the treaty of Paris, whereby he renounced his French claims as well. Henry's capacity to play for very high stakes, and yet lose, is truly remarkable.

Henry III (1207–72) King of England (1216–72). He succeeded his father JOHN at the age of nine. During his minority (until 1227) England was managed by William Marshal, the first Earl of Pembroke, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and Hubert de Burgh. Henry's personal rule soon proved his general incompetence as king, his preoccupation with aesthetic pursuits, including the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, and his preference for foreign advisers and favourites. He received an early warning of baronial frustration when a rebellion broke out (1233–34) led by Richard Marshal, the third Earl of Pembroke. In 1258, one of the king's French favourites, Simon de MONTFORT, led the English barons to draft a series of reforms (the Provisions of Oxford). While appearing to accept these, Henry sought to recover his independence. The ensuing civil war (1264–67) led to the temporary control of England by de Montfort following his victory at Lewes (1264). Although Henry recovered control after the Battle of Evesham (1265), where de Montfort was killed, he became increasingly dependent upon his son, the future EDWARD I.

Henry III (1207–72) King of England (1216–72). The influence of foreigners on his administration antagonized the nobles. He was forced to accept the Provisions of Westminster (1259), giving more power to his councillors, but renounced them in 1261, provoking the Barons' War. The leader of the barons, Simon de Montfort, was defeated at Lewes (1264) by Henry's son, the future Edward I, who thereafter ruled on his father's behalf.

Henry III ( the Lion) (1129–95) Duke of Saxony (1142–80) and of Bavaria (1156–80). A Guelph, he regained lands lost by his father, Henry the Proud, to Emperor Conrad III. As Duke of Saxony, he promoted German expansion beyond the River Elbe. In 1180, after refusing to support the Italian campaign of Emperor Frederick I, he was deprived of most of his lands.