William Marshal, regent of England, had lived to the age of seventy-three before his health began to fail him, but in the spring of 1219, after a distinguished life of service, he died. For many in England this was a matter of great dismay, for Marshal was as close to a non-partisan figure as existed: a loyal critic of the Crown, who had been unwavering in his support of Plantagenet kingship but never afraid to criticize when he felt that they were behaving improperly or ruling badly.
Marshal’s life story was interwoven with all the great kings of his age: Henry II, Henry the Young King, Richard I, John, Louis VII, Philip II and latterly, in battle, the future Louis VIII. He had held the torch for the passing of Plantagenet kingship to another generation, but his age now was past. Without his guiding hand, and sureness of principle and mind, the world looked set to prove an awkward and turbulent place.
In the days before he died Marshal dealt with many things, not least his children’s futures, and his wish to be invested as a Knight Templar in fulfilment of his crusader’s vow. Most important of all, he thought of Henry III’s future, and how best the child king should be educated to ensure the prosperity of his kingdom. As he lay suffering, he called for the twelve-year-old king, and took him by the hand. He told him that he wished him to be passed into the care of the new papal legate Pandulph (who had replaced Guala in 1218), and then exhorted the king to lead a better life than his father.
‘I beg the Lord our God that, if I ever did anything to please him, that in the end he grant you to grow up to be a worthy man,’ Marshal said. ‘And if it were the case that you followed in the footsteps of some wicked ancestor and that your wish was to be like him, then I pray to God, the son of Mary, that you die before it comes to that.’
‘Amen,’ the king replied.
By the time Marshal died, the young Henry III was no babe in arms: he was old enough to be consulted on matters of governance and was given his own seal to ratify decisions made on his behalf. Yet if he had an awareness of the stiff realities of government, that did not mean that he was trusted to take on the business of rule for himself. For as long as he remained a child there would be faction and uncertainty.
Government after Marshal began by triumvirate, with Pandulph, Peter des Roches and Hubert de Burgh all having a hand in reconstructing England’s battered administration after the ravages of civil war. But after Henry’s second, more magnificent coronation in 1220 – this time in the grander surroundings of Canterbury – des Roches fell from grace and eventually departed for the Holy Land. Thereafter de Burgh dominated. Throughout the 1220s Henry clung to the justiciar for advice and leadership in rebuilding royal finance and directing campaigns to subdue internal rebellion by truculent barons and Welsh aggression under Llywelyn the Great of Gwynedd.
De Burgh did his best to treat with Llywelyn and rebuild the ravaged royal finances. Yet kingship without the king was a ship captained by committee, and any realm under a minority smacked of weakness. When Philip II died in 1223, his 35-year-old son – England’s erstwhile invader – became Louis VIII, and determined almost at once to attack the English Crown’s position in Poitou.
After the domestic disturbance of the early years, this was the first real foreign crisis of the reign. The critical blow fell in summer 1224 when the citizens of La Rochelle heard the thunderous approach of a French army before their walls. The new and energetic king of France wheeled his siege engines against them from the land; with a weak and still impoverished young king of England on the other side of the Channel it was not surprising that the townsmen surrendered almost immediately, selling their allegiance for French coin.
Poitou itself had been held precariously ever since John’s ill-fated sally in 1214. But losing La Rochelle removed a vital English foothold on the continental coast and a base for defence or recovery of possessions there, and it put Channel shipping into serious jeopardy. As the chronicler Roger of Wendover explained: ‘[La] Rochelle is … where the kings of England and their knights usually land for the defence of those districts; but now the way was closed to the king.’
Meanwhile, the Aquitanian baron Hugh de Lusignan, who had married John’s widow Queen Isabella and was thus now technically Henry’s stepfather, overran most of Gascony. The already truncated English rump of Aquitaine was reduced to Bordeaux and a few coastal towns. All that was left of the western seaboard of the Plantagenet continental possessions was in danger of being lost for good.
Recovering Gascony and Poitou was a matter of urgency for Hubert and Henry. Family pride depended on it. But what did it hold for anyone else? Merchants did good business in the wine trade, but they were not political men. No English baron had a stake there. Thus the need to recover Poitou and Gascony raised fundamental questions about the means by which the English Crown could finance war on the Continent. The refusal of John’s barons to join his various expeditions had touched off the crisis that ended with Magna Carta and civil war. How could Hubert and Henry convince the same class that now, eleven years later, it was in their interest to fight for land where they had no financial stake?
This, in a nutshell, was to be the central dilemma of kingship for the rest of Henry’s long reign. Although he had not really known any of his royal ancestors, Henry felt keenly the historical burden of restoring their prestige, a task he saw as expressed through the defence of what was left of the continental empire, the expansion of power back into the old lands of central and western France, and building influence on the fringes of Henry II and Richard’s empire in Germany, Sicily and Castile. Yet these were precisely the burdens which, under John, had been shown to be intolerable to the political community of England. In 1224–5, the new regime needed urgently to restate the case for restoring the Plantagenet empire.
The solution came by two routes. The first appealed to fear. Wild rumours circulated that with the Channel full of French shipping and a hungry new Capetian king on the throne, England was under threat of another invasion. If continental reconquest was of little interest to the English barons, then defence of the coast was at least still a worthy rallying cause. Hubert de Burgh played on the invasion scare for all it was worth and succeeded in making it – in the short term at least – a valid reason for national military expenditure.
The second line of attack – which was to matter far more both in the political history of Henry’s reign and the constitutional development of Plantagenet kingship for nearly two centuries afterwards – was to make the decisive move in the long process to heal the wounds of John’s reign, and reissue Magna Carta. It was granted to the assembled lay and ecclesiastical lords of England in a great council in January 1225, as a political exchange for the grant of a tax of one fifteenth part of England’s movables.
Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest had been issued twice since their original promulgation. But the 1225 reissued documents were, in the long run, far more important than the versions that had been foisted upon John at Runnymede, or the two updates that had been issued by the minority government as it attempted to cling to, then to shore up power in 1216 and 1217. Together they formed a grant that would change the course not just of Henry’s reign but of the Plantagenet generations that followed him. No longer an ad hoc collection of liberties asserted hotchpotch, the charters became a symbolic statement of political principle.
The reissue of the Charter of the Forest was particularly important, for it represented a physical limitation of the reach of Plantagenet kingship. Forest law was onerous and generally resented by private landowners – resisting the creep of royal forest literally meant confronting the most powerful arm of kingship on the ground. Committees of men were appointed to physically walk the boundaries of the royal forests and provide reports on its extent.
That the reissue of the charters represented a quid pro quo between king and political community was unmistakable, to Roger of Wendover at least: ‘All the assembly of bishops, earls, barons, abbots, and priors … gave … that they would willingly accede to the king’s demands [for a fifteenth] if he would grant them their long-sought liberties.’
Thus the deal was struck, and on 15 and 16 February 1225 packets of orders were sent to every county sheriff in England, ordering them to proclaim and observe the charters and carry out new surveys of the forest boundary, while also making provision for the assessment and collection of a tax that would unlock tens of thousands of pounds of national wealth for an expedition that – for all its advertisement as a means to protect the coasts – was essentially a private royal expedition of reconquest.
In immediate political terms the tax was wildly successful, raising £45,000 – far more than from previous attempts by the minority government to raise finance by feudal levies. The money enabled Henry and Hubert to muster a well-equipped summer expedition to relieve Gascony. It was led by the king’s younger brother Richard – by now a vigorous young man of sixteen, who had been raised to the rank of earl of Cornwall as a birthday present at the beginning of the year – and the 49-year-old statesman, military veteran and royal uncle, the earl of Salisbury.
The expedition, richly equipped and led by an old hand, was a success. The English came fast and fought hard, driving back the French and preventing them from overrunning the last of the English possessions. Salisbury soon found that he could not retake Poitou in a single campaigning season, but their efforts secured Gascony and its valuable wine trade for the English Crown, establishing a dependency that would last for more than two centuries. It was a high point of Henry’s minority.
Yet the territorial and trade gains were arguably of less significance than the bargain that was struck at home: that of consultation, reform and public finance. As English royal flags fluttered above Gascon castles, copies of the two great charters flew around the kingdom across the Channel. Royal lawyers scratched their heads and wondered how they could find gaps in the charters and ways to maintain royal prerogative wherever possible. But the genie was out of the bottle. The charters were revered wherever they landed. And it swiftly became obvious that a constitutional bargain had been struck. Henry’s administration had begun a process by which finance for military expeditions was bargained for with detailed concessions of political liberties, written up in the form of charters that were distributed far and wide across the realm. The deal had been done in an assembly of barons, bishops and other magnates which, if it could hardly yet be called a parliament, was at least something like the beginnings of what would become one. The feudal prerogatives of kings and their rights over their subjects were now a matter for debate and discussion with the political community. It was a compact that would endure for the rest of the Middle Ages.