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).
