Unruly, p.21
Unruly, page 21
Henry is a pitiable figure, and the aged William Marshal an inspiring, likeable, avuncular champion. ‘If all the world deserted the young boy, except me,’ he apparently said, ‘do you know what I would do? I would carry him on my shoulders and walk with him thus … and never let him down from island to island, from land to land.’ The image of an old man carrying a child to safety on his shoulders cuts through all the dynastic and regal bullshit. It’s simple and human – it bespeaks love.
We can’t know what their feelings really were. There are so many centuries between us and them and their world was, by our standards, weird. But they still ate and drank and lived and died and hoped and lusted and feared and felt lonely. William Marshal was a warrior and a politician, hugely rich and hugely successful. He’d been a Plantagenet loyalist his whole life, had been in and out of favour with John – who hadn’t? – but had shown consistent support of the principle of Angevin kingship.
Earlier in his life, he’d been on crusade and served both Henry II and ‘Henry the young king’, so it was apt that he ended his career serving Henry the even younger king. He was about seventy by the time Henry III became king, which was pretty old even to be alive in those days, so it seems likely that he was fond of the kid. As a supporter of John, he knew what a disaster his son had been born into and must have looked on this child, wearing a woman’s fascinator and carrying a man’s sword amid medieval military turmoil, with a grand-father’s fondness. Similarly, the fatherless child, suddenly told that God had appointed him in charge of everything, must have loved the indomitable old man who turned up and cared.
Their love conquered all. Or England, anyway. As I’ve said, the momentum was going Henry III’s way, however helpless he seemed, because the prospect of Prince Louis, son of an ambitious and aggressive king of France, becoming king of England only looked attractive as an alternative to John. With John’s replacement by an innocent child, all reasons for supporting the Frenchman evaporated.
At the Battle of Lincoln in 1217, seventy-six years after another Battle of Lincoln which had nearly handed the throne to Henry III’s great-grandmother Matilda, William Marshal’s army decisively defeated the rebel barons and supporters of Prince Louis. For Louis the jig was up and he headed home. By the Treaty of Lambeth later that year, he renounced his claim to the English throne and received 10,000 marks. The rebel barons were given an amnesty. Marshal, as regent of England, and protector of the king, had done his young sovereign proud.
Throne alone
William Marshal died in 1219, but Henry III’s minority was far from over. In some ways, it continued for his whole reign. He never quite stopped being a child. But then why should he? He hadn’t asked to be king.
This is something many of us feel about the current royal family: they’re trapped. They didn’t ask for this. Theirs is a thankless role, and if they do get thanks they’re stressed and obsequious ones from anxious people holding flowers and reeking of shower gel. Few of us would swap places with them, for all their wealth and fame. Many people don’t want fame at all, but even those who do want it wouldn’t want the shit sort the royals have got – a fame you’re landed with and can’t take any credit for. They’ve earned it even less than reality TV stars – or, rather, even less than other reality TV stars.
We feel this absence of monarch-envy all the more keenly because we’re lucky enough to live in a time and place where the basics of a pleasant life – food, shelter, entertainment, freedom – are available to millions. The royals’ riches and luxury count for much less than in more squalid eras. For most of history the king, however overworked and unhappy, whatever the agonizing RSI from endless crown-wearing he endured, at least knew where the next meal was coming from, which put him in the most fortunate section of society.
The potential undesirability of being king hasn’t been an issue in this book so far. Almost all the kings seemed to want to be king. Possible exceptions: Aethelred the Unready came to the throne as a child and had a very unenjoyable reign, and Edward the Confessor was far too holy to enjoy anything. But, in general, the preceding kings wanted to be king. They were into it and ambitious for it, however good or bad they were at it.
Since the Conquest, they also all got a decent amount of training for the job. William the Conqueror schooled his sons in the martial and political arts of the eleventh century and even the worst of them, Robert Curthose, was relatively professional. William II, Henry I, Stephen, Matilda, Henry II, Richard I and John were all keen on the job and grew up with major regal role models: close relatives who were actually rulers. The only ruler little Henry III knew was himself.
His minority was a success – the kingdom was stabilized in his name, the rebellion ended, the French expelled. And that was his training in kingship: a period where everyone scraped and bowed to him but grown-ups, adult men, replacement fathers, made all the real decisions. It reminds me of the skewed life experiences of those child actors who make it big, like poor old Macaulay Culkin – not that he’s likely to be poor and, ridiculously, he’s still not old. Weird childhoods, even if they’re ostensibly successful, can screw you for life.
So when Henry III tentatively embarked on his personal rule, it soon panned out as a dispiriting mixture of the weak and the delusional. He was often dominated by a chief adviser whom he would follow to the point of alienating other major barons, and he showed divisive favouritism, in terms of money, lands and offices, to various groups of his relatives – initially the Savoyard relations of his wife Queen Eleanor of Provence, and then his Lusignan half-brothers, sons of his mother the dowager Queen Isabella of Angoulême. These are classic ways not to be a successful king, later honed by Edward II with disastrous consequences. Henry III hadn’t quite perfected this brand of shitness, which is why, unlike Edward II, he didn’t die in prison.
On top of these failings, Henry had big dreams and schemes, but lacked the focus, resources or talent to carry them through – except when it came to expensive architectural plans. He spent a lot of money on Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and Windsor Castle, striking a grand, regal yet pious style.
Beneath that style, there was no substance. He was very keen to reconquer the Angevin Empire, but the baronage was even less receptive to this agenda than during his father’s reign. His three feeble, underfunded expeditions, in 1230, 1242 and 1253, all failed and weakened him at home. More than ever, the English aristocracy viewed the monarch’s attempts to defend or extend his French possessions as a private matter. It was not something they wanted to get involved with or help pay for.
In 1254 he tried to make one of his sons, Edmund, king of Sicily. If you’re struggling to get a sense of how realistic an aim this was, just work out how realistic it would be to make yourself king of Sicily and multiply that by 1.6. Not very realistic then. This was an attempt by Henry to support the pope on whom, as one of those extremely pious kings, he was dead keen.
For all sorts of no doubt holy reasons, the papacy wanted to stop the Sicilian throne remaining in the hands of the Hohenstaufen family – this was the dynasty that dominated the Holy Roman Empire before the Habsburgs got going. King Henry III of England gleefully got involved, offering troops and 135,000 marks he didn’t have to help the papal cause in exchange for Edmund being declared the next king of that very distant island. Henry had no way of delivering on this promise and yet, if he didn’t, the pope was threatening to excommunicate him, something which, as one of those extremely pious kings, he would find unbelievably upsetting. It was a terrible deal.
SDMV
If you were wondering when parliament was going to get invented, it’s now. Thanks to the Magna Carta crisis, the concept of reining the king in, of expecting a certain amount of consultation on issues of major national fundraising and expenditure, had already been explored. The next king’s long minority only intensified the magnates’ expectation of being kept in the loop.
Back in 1225, during that minority, a relatively successful campaign to shore up Gascony – the English king’s remaining section of Aquitaine – had been financed off the back of the reissuing of Magna Carta. The deal that was being done between the crown and the powerful people of the realm was clear: it was money in exchange for consultation, rights and limitations on royal prerogatives.
About five and a half centuries later George III, the then King of England (and Ireland, and by that time Scotland too), lost most of his North American possessions to a rebellion based on the idea of ‘No taxation without representation’. That whole principle originated in the era we’re talking about now, when cash-strapped medieval kings, with territorial ambitions beyond their means, realized that they’d have to consult their prominent subjects, and give guarantees of reasonable government, if they wanted those lords to contribute to royal schemes. In 1236, the word ‘parliament’ was first used to refer to one such consultation session.
By the time of the king’s Sicilian fantasy, these parliaments are the established form of interaction between impecunious monarch and angsty aristos. At this point, the king would only summon his ministers and council, plus the leading magnates and churchmen – the archbishops, bishops and heads of major monastic houses. It only amounted to a few dozen men. In 1258, as the ruinous nature of Henry’s delusional geopolitical scheming became apparent, and as the barons despaired at the favouritism Henry continued to show to the unruly and contemptuous Lusignans, parliament resolved to take on the king.
The key mover and shaker in all this was a man called Simon de Montfort, who was Earl of Leicester and after whom De Montfort University in Leicester is named. He himself was named after his father, Simon de Montfort, who was named after his father, Simon de Montfort, who was named after his father, Simon de Montfort, who was named … you get the idea. The main one is the fifth Simon de Montfort of six: he named his son Simon de Montfort but that one then died without issue, which I can’t help thinking was for the best. Otherwise there’d still be one now.
The reason SDM the fifth has a university named after him is that he founded parliament, which is a jolly good thing to have done, leading as it did to democracy, freedom and the British Empire. That’s what the Victorians reckoned, anyway.
Obviously, it’s not entirely true, which, in retrospect, the Victorians might be relieved to hear because one thing that is undeniable about SDM is that he was French. He’d only arrived in England in 1230. I don’t think they would have been too keen on that: the whole British parliamentary tradition being kicked off by a Frenchman might have made their recent gargantuan struggle against Napoleon feel like a lot of wasted effort. Another undeniable thing about SDM is that he was a colossal antisemite. The Victorians would probably have minded that less.
You may suspect that his antisemitism was standard for the middle ages, but it wasn’t. It was standard for the thirteenth century, but it wouldn’t have been for the twelfth. Let’s not get overexcited: the twelfth century wasn’t exactly woke, but the various Jewish minorities around western Europe were generally left alone. Then, in the following century, the mood changed. It’s one of the many historical examples of the weird way antisemitism waxes and wanes for no clear reason, with little warning and with cataclysmic consequences for Jewish people. It’s why those who nowadays accuse Jews of hysterical sensitivity to the slightest undercurrent of antisemitism need a fucking history lesson.
Rising Christian piety and consequent extremism made the thirteenth century a time when persecuting Jews was suddenly on the rise. Powerful people started doing it as a way of proclaiming their Christian virtue, so when SDM expelled all the Jewish people from Leicester in 1231, he said he was doing it ‘for the good of my soul, and for the souls of my ancestors and successors’. That’s a pretty twisted view of the Almighty: if you don’t persecute the Jews, you’ll go to hell. It’s essentially a form of Christianity that imagines God to be like Hitler.
The good news, though, is that SDM’s action earned a stinging rebuke from Leicester City Council. I’m sure it would have made him think again if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that it came 770 years later.
It’s a tricky business appointing heroes from the past. You can see why SDM was latched on to when they were looking to name a new university. He orchestrated the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, which hugely limited the king’s power, providing for a Privy Council to oversee the government of England in light of Henry’s burgeoning incompetence. The king accepted the Provisions at a parliament in Oxford. (Parliaments in the middle ages were held all over the country, wherever the king summoned them, rather than exclusively in the Palace of Westminster as they are today.) Judging by this, SDM seems to be a successful pioneer of both parliament and an early form of pseudo-cabinet government. How brilliantly anachronistic! It’s like he’s a time-traveller signalling to us across the centuries. Very exciting for Victorian historians and people looking to name institutions in the Leicester area.
Then it transpires he’s been murdering Jews. That’s torn it – turns out he’s a monster. Maybe parliamentary democracy isn’t such a great idea after all.
This is obviously unfair. Nobody completely escapes their own era, except Shakespeare. It would be a tall order to expect SDM both to invent parliament and to buck the antisemitic trend of the century he lived in. But when you’re looking for a hero, the latter does cast a pall over the former.
I reckon the debunking of SDM is quite helpful. The development of a parliamentary system isn’t like a battle – it’s not the sort of thing that heroes do. It’s not even like the invention of a new spinning machine or hoe. It comes out of circumstances, not the head of one person. But people are interested in people, in stories about the doings of people, so it was an attractive idea to say parliament was the product of one great man’s great life. But it wasn’t really and the man they chose was just a major magnate of his time: capable, intelligent, ambitious, militarily skilful, antisemitic, like dozens of others who lived around the same time.
Let’s keep talking
In a way, parliament was just a new name for a process that had been developing since before the Conquest. The Anglo-Saxon witan had been crucial to endorsing royal power. That all changed when William arrived with a new aristocracy to whom he gave most of England. There was an implied deal: you helped me win so you get a piece of this. That deal changed over time – Henry I and Henry II had a working arrangement, again not overtly stated other than in Henry I’s coronation charter, with the powerful people of England that both sides were usually content with. Stephen obviously didn’t, Richard pushed his luck but was very good at fighting and John pushed his luck but wasn’t.
However, with the loss of Normandy, the priorities of the king and his barons diverged. There was stuff to discuss, primarily about money and resources. Magna Carta was an attempt to kick that process off – parliaments were the continuation of it. The old deal was dead and new deals needed to be made.
This was embarrassing for Kings John and Henry III but it was inevitable. The financial balance of power was transformed because the English monarchs had lost control of huge amounts of territory and all the potential money that came with it, and the French kings had gained it.
Back during the reign of Louis VII, Philip Augustus’s father, the King of France only directly controlled an area around Paris about the size of East Anglia, while Henry II ruled an area nearly half the size of modern France (albeit nominally as the French king’s vassal) and this was on top of England and Ireland. By Henry III’s reign, the Plantagenets still aspired to cut a Henry II-style continental dash, but only had Louis VII-scale royal resources. So they needed money and support from their magnates. Henry I’s approach wouldn’t work any more, even if John or Henry III had been able to rival Henry I’s competence.
This new status quo wasn’t SDM’s doing, but he had the nous to exploit it. He wasn’t a great legislative innovator, just an opportunistic overmighty subject, like many before and since. His insight was to use parliament as a tool in his power grab. He pointed out the flaws, corruption and unaccountability of royal government, but only in order to wrest control of the country from Henry and set up his own flawed, corrupt and unaccountable regime.
Still, he did invite shire knights and town burgesses to the parliament of 1264 as well as the barons. These influential commoners had also been invited to a parliament in 1254, and SDM was only repeating the experiment in an attempt to shore up his support base rather than out of a commitment to representative government. But it powerfully reinforced a precedent which has led inexorably to Grant Shapps having a full-time job.
This nascent House of Commons didn’t come close to including anyone common. Even the burgesses, the lowest down the new parliamentary pecking order, were big players back where they came from – merchants or senior craftsmen, the beginnings of an urban middle class. But the word ‘middle’ can be confusing. They were in the middle in the sense that they were between the aristocracy on one side and the peasantry on the other, but the two slices of bread in this sandwich were of wildly contrasting size. The melba toast of a few dozen toffs on top and, underneath, a 6-foot-thick doorstep representing 3 million peasants.
Most of the English were growing their own food. That’s what really happened in the middle ages: subsistence farming. The new commoners admitted to parliament were well above that vast-majority experience, though they were more involved in trade than their baronial superiors – above all in wool, England’s most lucrative export commodity. Yet it’s the House of Lords, not Commons, whose chairperson (for centuries the lord chancellor, though today the lord speaker) sits, not on a chair, but on a woolsack in acknowledgement of wool’s economic importance to the realm in which parliaments first assembled.
