Henry III was nine years old when his father died, and he was crowned in a hurry. The ceremony was a west-country affair that took place in Gloucester Abbey, a safe haven behind loyalist lines in the midst of a civil war that engulfed England. Beneath the great nave of the Norman abbey church, a reduced smattering of ecclesiastical and lay lords watched uncertainly as the bishops of Winchester, Worcester and Exeter carried out the anointing, and placed a simple lady’s coronet on the child’s head. There were no regalia and little pageantry, for all the sacred robes and effects of a full coronation were at Westminster, which was controlled by the rebels. But there was no time to stand on ceremony. This was an expedient, heavily simplified ceremony designed to transfer what was left of a Plantagenet king’s authority to the young boy.
Henry was the elder of John’s two sons; his younger brother Richard was just seven years old in 1216. Even as a young child, Henry was notable for his serious countenance and manner of speaking. He would grow up to be deeply pious – devoted to all manner of cults, particularly that of the Virgin Mary – and such a voracious hearer of the mass that it sometimes interfered with his ability to conduct government business. The young king stood in Gloucester Abbey and, in a fragile voice, swore before the great altar that he would observe honour, peace and reverence towards God and the Holy Church and its ordained ministers all the days of his life; that he would give his people justice; that he would abolish bad laws and customs and observe the good.
How realistic were these promises? Certainly Henry had to make them, for they were the sacred oaths of a king. But a truer reflection of the authority that kept England from collapse was evident when the child did homage for his kingdoms of England and Ireland to the pope, represented in person by the legate Cardinal Guala Bicchieri. He swore an oath to put England under the protection of the Church and a few men of God.
Ninety miles away, Westminster was under the protection of the French – held by Philip II’s son Louis. Castles across the country were manned by garrisons of French knights, invited to England by the rebel barons, who wished to elect a new king from the house of Capet, rather than suffer under a fourth from the house of Plantagenet. The baleful end to John’s reign had left England partitioned, distressed nearly as badly as it had been during the early days of the Anarchy. Once again, the succession had become not simply a question of legitimacy, but a trial of strength.
All those in the abbey church’s sparse crowd would have realized that this was a dreadful way to start a reign. The most uncertain transfer of power seen for nearly a century was placing the crown on the head of a child. No boy had been king since the time of Aethelred, in the days before the Conquest. And the precedents from that reign were miserable indeed: Aethelred had presided over a time of Viking raids and invasions, and had been deposed for a year. Grim times confronted England if it were to be thrown back into an age of Saxon chaos.
A few men remained devoted to avoiding that fate. Henry III was fortunate to have around him a group of supporters committed not to seizing power for themselves, but to maintaining the fragile office of kingship as his predecessors had created it. On his deathbed John had realized the jeopardy that faced the Plantagenet legacy and begged for the elderly William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, to become his son’s guardian. Pembroke, now well into his seventies, had accepted the task at first with knightly reticence, and then in typically grandiloquent style, declaring that ‘if all the world deserted the young boy, except me, do you know what I would do? I would carry him on my shoulders … I would be with him and never let him down, from island to island, from land to land, even if I had to scavenge for my daily bread.’
Notwithstanding the Marshal’s chivalrous pomp, it was not just to the solemn nine-year-old Henry’s advantage that such an attitude prevailed among a few good men in England. The future of the dynasty depended on it. The king – if he was ever to take office fully – would need officers committed to restoring his authority and rights against the most severe and fundamental challenge to them in living memory.
The other key men around the new king included the wealthy Poitevin Peter des Roches, John’s former justiciar and bishop of Winchester. Des Roches had crowned Henry, and despite his widespread unpopularity in the country at large, was to become his tutor and mentor, on and off, for the next two decades. Then there was Bicchieri, representing the pope as Henry’s feudal overlord, whose presence in the royal camp could be expected to add legitimacy to the cause. Finally there was Hubert de Burgh, the Norfolk-born loyalist who had served John for more than a decade. In the office of justiciar, de Burgh presented an acceptable face of government to those who mistrusted ‘aliens’. These men would form the core of a working coalition whose first and urgent task was to see off the invasion and resolve the crises that engulfed the realm.
The first crisis was military. The rebellious northern barons had a dangerous leader in Prince Louis, and he and his allies had captured and held castles all over England. Many were garrisoned by foreign mercenaries. Louis had broad control over the south-east, and French ships patrolled the Channel. The only way to rid the realm of the French was in battle.
The future of Henry’s reign was decided at Lincoln. It was the last and perhaps the greatest military engagement of William Marshal’s long and distinguished life. Having assembled 400 knights and 250 crossbowmen from all parts of the kingdom in Newark after Whitsun in 1217, Marshal marched his men straight to Lincoln, arriving on 20 May to find that Louis’s forces had entered the walled city and were besieging the castle. The French prince himself was further south, besieging Dover, and the count of Perche was in command at Lincoln, surrounded by the bulk of the rebellious English earls. The French knew that Marshal was arriving, but they procrastinated over strategy. As they did so, Marshal was addressing his knights with a speech to rival that written by Shakespeare for Henry V: ‘These men have seized and taken by force our lands and our possessions,’ he said. ‘Shame on the man who does not strive, this very day, to put up a challenge … if we beat them, it is no lie to say that we will have won eternal glory for the rest of our lives.’
The rhetoric worked. Marshal took charge of the loyal knights, telling them to be ready to slit their own horses’ throats if they needed to take shelter behind the carcasses in the open plain that lay before the northern entrance to the city. Bishop des Roches commanded the crossbowmen, and Ranulf earl of Chester one group of knights, but they could only watch with awe as Marshal led a direct frontal cavalry attack on the city and the French besiegers. The old man was so desperate to join battle that he almost forgot to put on his helmet before he charged the enemy. When he adjusted his armour and led the first charge, he ploughed into the French defenders with such force that he punched a hole three lances deep in their lines. If this was the last chance to save the dynasty he had served all his life, then Marshal was determined to give it his all.
Six bloody and brutal hours of fighting ensued. It was a grisly, awful scene: the air filled with the deafening clang of weapons upon helmets, lances shattering and flying in splinters into the air, limbs crushed and severed by blows from swords and maces, and sharp daggers plunging into the sides of men and horses alike. They fought through the city, until the streets heaved with heads and blood and human entrails. ‘The noise,’ recalled Marshal, ‘was so great that you would not have heard God thunder.’
At the end of the fighting, the French were roundly defeated. Almost every major rebel baron was captured, and the count of Perche died when a spear was thrust through his eye and into his brain. When the news of the loss reached Prince Louis in Dover, he immediately raised his siege, made for London and began to think of terms for withdrawal.
But the war would not end before the French suffered worse humiliation. In August they were beaten at sea, when Hubert de Burgh commanded a resounding naval victory at Sandwich over French troops led by the pirate captain Eustache the Monk – who would later become the subject of his own Robin Hood-style outlaw romance. The English showered the French with arrows, and blinded them by throwing quicklime downwind, to burn out their eyes. Eustache the Monk was captured hiding in the ship’s bilges. He was offered a choice: beheading on the side of a siege engine, or on the ship’s rail. It is not recorded which fate he chose.
It was all enough for Prince Louis. Henry’s regency government had shown its mettle on the battlefield, and the French prince was happy enough to pocket a bribe and leave. His departure averted the greatest external threat to the English Crown in a century.