Tapers flickered in the king’s chamber throughout the night of 12 October 1247. It was the eve of the feast of the translation of St Edward, now the holiest king in English royal history and namesake of Henry’s eldest son. The king knelt, deep in devout and contrite prayers. He had been fasting on a pauper’s diet of bread and water. He was preparing himself, with a sleepless night of devotion amid the rich smoke thrown out by the candles, for a ceremony of profound royal divinity.
The next day was to be marked by a pageant of splendour, piety and magnificence. Henry had purchased from the nobles of Outremer a delicate crystalline vessel containing a portion of the blood of Christ, which was said to have been collected from Jesus as he suffered the agonies of the Passion. It fitted well into the royal relic collection, which already contained a stone marked with the footprint of Jesus, left just prior to the Ascension. On the feast of St Edward, a holy day that bound together the history of English kingship with the legions of the saints, Henry himself would now present his latest gift – which to his mind rivalled Louis IX’s Crown of Thorns as the greatest Christian relic in western Europe – to the community of the abbey at Westminster.
For once, he had something to celebrate. In a rare moment of peaceful productivity, his brother Richard earl of Cornwall was overseeing the production of a reformed coinage that would restore faith in the debased English currency and earn a tidy profit for both the treasury and the earldom of Cornwall. Better still, after a period of renewed rebellion following Dafydd ap Llywelyn’s submission to Henry in 1241, a coalition of Welsh princes had in April 1247 once more come to terms with the English Crown, accepting Henry as their feudal overlord and extending English rule further and deeper into Wales than at any time since his father’s reign. Meanwhile, the Plantagenet royal family continued to expand: in May Henry had married two of the queen’s relatives to two of his royal wards: the earl of Lincoln and the lord of Connaught. This drew two significant baronial families directly into the royal orbit, which helped the king to feel secure in his realm.
In Henry’s view, his kingship was back on course. Thus, when dawn broke on that October morning, all the priests of London assembled beneath the giant wooden spire of St Paul’s Cathedral, dressed in grand ceremonial with surplices and hoods, their clerks arranged around them, carrying symbols and crosses. Hundreds of tapers gave a glow to the dark of an autumn morning. They awaited their king.
Henry arrived, dressed humbly, in a poor cloak without a hood – a simple penitent whose mean dress was accentuated by the finery of his attendants. He entered the cathedral, and emerged, carrying the little crystal phial above his head, both hands fixed around it, both eyes trained upwards to this exquisite relic, and on to the heavens beyond. Thus he began his procession on foot along the road from London to Westminster.
It was a tiring business. The king was drained by his night of sleepless fasting, and the potholes and lumps in the road threatened constantly to bring him to his knees. But his heartfelt love of ostentatious piety and his single-minded belief in the glory of his crown demanded the discomfort. He had loved the pageantry of royal devotion all his life, since as a thirteen-year-old he had watched with awe at the Trinity Chapel in Canterbury as St Thomas Becket’s remains had been transferred to a great, golden, bejewelled coffin. His mind may have wandered to just such a memory as he processed with the holy blood, two assistants supporting his aching arms as they held his prize aloft.
Before they reached the doors of Westminster Abbey, the procession would have heard the commotion awaiting them. Songs and tears and exultations to the holy spirit rang from the abbey church. The church was in the early stages of a massive rebuilding project, begun in 1245 to redevelop it in the French Gothic style. Some £45,000 would be spent to ensure that the abbey church mimicked and rivalled the great French churches of Sainte-Chapelle, St-Denis and Reims. Slender, soaring columns were to be added, with pointed windows and stained glass decorating them; the weight was to be borne outside the walls by flying buttresses.
The king, deep in his devotions, did not stop when he first reached the church. He carried on, the phial still held above his head as before, and made a tour of sanctity – a circuit of the church, then the nearby palace, and finally his own royal chambers. When this tour was complete, he returned to the church, and in an expression both of his royal munificence and his quasi-divine grandeur, he presented the priceless gift to God, the church of St Peter at Westminster, to his beloved Edward the Confessor and the community of the abbey.
This lavish visual spectacle was the high point of Henry’s royal pageantry. Before his assembled English polity, he carried off a triumphant scene that would have been the envy of Louis IX’s or Frederick II’s sophisticated courts. The bishop of Norwich later gave a sermon pointing out the pre-eminence of Henry’s relic above any other relic in Europe: ‘The cross is a most holy thing, on account of the more holy shedding of Christ’s blood made upon it, not the blood-shedding holy on account of the cross.’
He added, too, according to Matthew Paris: ‘that it was on account of the great reverence and holiness of the king of England, who was known to be the most Christian of all Christian princes, that this invaluable treasure had been sent by the patriarch of Jerusalem … for in England, as the world knew, faith and holiness flourished more than in any other country throughout the world.’
Here then, was Henry’s vision of kingship. It was an office that deliberately outstripped that of his predecessors in holiness and which, through the reverence it showed to the Confessor, redrew the lineage of the English royalty once again back to pre-Conquest times. Like Henry I, the king was knitting his own rule into the ancient Saxon lineage, celebrating its English origins, not just its Norman and Plantagenet sophistication.
But there was more to it than simple genealogy. Henry’s kingship here was made not merely a matter of right and conquest, but of divinity. Henry showed himself the king as minister, not at war with his Church, as had so often been the case under his father and grandfather, but enriching and protecting it, furthering the vision of coronation, when he had been anointed and placed into unique communion with God and his saints. It also anticipated an urge that was growing in his breast: that of becoming a crusader king. Here was Henry the intercessor, Henry the pilgrim, Henry the benefactor. He spoke to England’s soul and to its history.
He also spoke to its nobility. After the ceremony, Henry cast off his pauper’s costume and donned a glittering garment made from precious cloth, woven with shining metal thread and decorated in gold. With a simple golden crown on his head, he knighted his half-brother, the Lusignan noble William de Valence, and several other of his Poitevin and Gascon nobles. The priest-pilgrim king thus became the chivalric lord.
Even though there were plenty outside the walls of Westminster who had grave doubts about the likelihood of Jesus’s blood having survived the thirteen centuries since it was spilled on Calvary, Henry’s pious imagery was all highly fashionable: an autumnal version of the spring feast of Corpus Christi, which had been established as a yearly festival by the bishop of Liège the previous year. And it was also impossibly grand, as the chronicler Matthew Paris, who attended all the ceremonies, was at pains to point out in the account that the king commissioned him to write. But was it politically effective?