Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule, 1207-1258

The English Monarchs

by David Arscott Carpenter

The first in a ground-breaking two-volume history of Henry III’s rule, from when he first assumed the crown to the moment his personal rule ended

Nine years of age when he came to the throne in 1216, Henry III had to rule within the limits set by the establishment of Magna Carta and the emergence of parliament. Pacific, conciliatory, and deeply religious, Henry brought many years of peace to England and rebuilt Westminster Abbey in honor of his patron saint, Edward the Confessor. He poured money into embellishing his palaces and creating a magnificent court. Yet this investment in "soft power" did not prevent a great revolution in 1258, led by Simon de Montfort, ending Henry's personal rule.

Eminent historian David Carpenter brings to life Henry's character and reign as never before. Using source material of unparalleled richness—material that makes it possible to get closer to Henry than any other medieval monarch—Carpenter stresses the king’s achievements as well as his failures while offering an entirely new perspective on the intimate connections between medieval politics and religion.

Genres: History, Biography, Medieval, Nonfiction, British Literature, Medieval History, Politics

765 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2020

About the author

David Arscott Carpenter is an English historian, currently Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He has written widely on the reign of Henry III.

David Carpenter is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and an expert in thirteenth-century England. He has published extensively on politics and society in the reigns of King John and Henry III as well as on the context, issue and reception of Magna Carta. His book The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284 is widely read by scholars, students and the general public. Professor Carpenter has been tracing versions of Magna Carta 1215 for the Magna Carta Project and is currently preparing a book on the Charter for Penguin.

Reviews

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was still waiting for my copy of David Carpenter’s Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule to arrive when a review of it by Dominic Selwood appeared. The preface, he tells us, has something about lampreys, together with a video reference on how to eat them. Selwood checks it out and informs us that it’s a bloody spectacle, but Agincourt it ain’t, and what he sees clearly unnerves him. Given that Henry is best remembered for his taste and cultivation, the thought of the king chomping down on this hideous-looking fish might make us wonder what other surprises are in store for us in the narrative.
Plenty is the obvious answer, for this is a massive biography of more than 700 pages, and it’s just volume 1. It’s not until halfway through do we learn that Henry and his queen enjoyed eating lampreys because they found other fish ‘insipid’. It’s one of many revealing anecdotes that bring the little-known king to life. For that Henry can thank Carpenter, who has proved that a reign based on peace and piety can be every bit as exciting and compelling as those seeped in war and bloodshed.
Henry III had the longest reign of any medieval English monarch, and all 56 years of it were well documented, in records, rolls, writs, letters and chronicles, easily 10,000 pages at the minimum. Digesting and organising it all into this supremely accessible biography, complemented by the famous Carpenter wit and crisp writing style, can only be described as a herculean feat. The bibliography alone runs to 26 pages of small type and shows how voluminous the studies of Henry and his reign have been. If no single biography has been produced before that takes in all this material, it’s probably because the task looked so daunting. It would take years for such an undertaking.
More like decades, as Carpenter explains in the preface. He’s been busy along the way, most notably with The Struggle for Mastery, still the finest history of Britain in the first two centuries following the Norman Conquest, and more recently Magna Carta to coincide with the 800-year anniversary of the Great Charter in 2015. Since Henry was the first king to rule under Magna Carta or a constitution of any sorts, modern historians have tended to focus their efforts on how well he did there. None of them, however, has delved into the details to quite the extent Carpenter has done here.
Readers will have to wait before getting an idea what his verdict on the king will be. That’s because of Henry’s minority, which covers the period 1216–27, almost a fifth of his reign. These are vital years to the political history of England. In 1990 Carpenter published an entire book on it of more than 400 pages. Naturally he can’t go into the minority here in the depth he might have liked, but he sets the stage for many of the problems to come, particularly with two phenomena that became entrenched during these early years of Henry’s reign: the rise of the parliamentary state and English nationalism.
We’re already sixty pages into the book before Henry is an adult and ready to assume full regnal authority. The first issue to deal with is his appearance, namely whether he had the drooping eyelid ascribed to him by Nicholas Trevet writing fifty years after Henry’s death. According to Carpenter, the droop is confirmed in a drawing of the king by Matthew Paris, which is indeed the case, but it doesn’t appear in any of Paris’s other drawings of Henry, nor does he mention it in his extensive, contemporary chronicle. If anything, he complained of the penetrative power of Henry’s vision when it came to money. It’s an important point, because a drooping eyelid would have been immediately noticed by people coming into contact with the king and perhaps had a subtle effect on their relationship. Carpenter notes that congenital ptosis, the modern diagnosis of the condition, is known to cause psychological problems in children, but he doesn’t speculate on how it might have affected Henry (if he had it at all).
The first glimpse we get of the grownup Henry is his ambition to reclaim the continental empire seized from his father King John by the French in 1204. It became an obsession for him, but Carpenter demonstrates that he had all the wrong qualities to make it a success. He was too warm-hearted, too indulgent, he lacked ferocity and a knack for the jugular. His hanging of the 80-strong garrison at Bedford when he was 16 years old is put down to the prompting of his advisers. Perhaps it traumatised Henry, for Carpenter adds that the king did not carry out a single political execution for the rest of his reign.
Carpenter also finds no evidence that Henry attended any tournaments or engaged in hunting as a past time. In short, he has no makings of a warrior king, a fact sure to hurt his introduction to modern audiences, among whom even warrior queens now seem to be the rage. When his invasion of France looked set in 1230, a poet wrote that the king should forget about his ‘love of white bread, good sauce and clear wine’ and instead strike a blow to win the hearts of his subjects. He ended up storming only a single castle during his six months on the continent. His failure to give battle to the French or at least to launch the ‘ravaging expeditions’ so beloved of his descendants left the chroniclers bewildered, and Carpenter brilliantly captures their impatience in the personal tone of the narrative. He does admit, however, that the king’s men were lukewarm themselves. They had nothing to gain from the recovery of Normandy and so were content to let Henry try and negotiate his way to victory.
The few gains he did score are mentioned, and it’s important, because Henry is a king who needs his due. He’s perennially unsure of himself, which shouldn’t be surprising given his childhood. Abandoned by his mother, burdened by his father’s legacy, surrounded by old men always putting their own agendas first. So great was the impact of his minority that it was hard to forget he was a boy king once. Evidently Henry himself sometimes forgot it. He once annulled a charter because he claimed it had been made under false pretences, adding that he was underage at the time of issue, but as Carpenter points out, the king was already 23. Carpenter doesn’t believe that Henry was being deliberately deceitful, because he wasn’t clever enough for that, rather he had convinced himself that he had not truly become his own man until his personal rule began in 1234.
It’s just one of many examples of Henry’s ‘simplicity’, the catch-all word used by chroniclers to describe what they saw as the king’s naiveté and inability to think things through. He was a simpleton, basically, and Carpenter himself blames the problems that beset him and the realm on his lack of maturity and intelligence. Indeed, he rams the point home by declaring that none of Henry’s immediate predecessors could ever be called ‘simple’. It’s the same with the king’s contemporaries. They are always wise, circumspect, masterful, visionary, terms never applied to Henry himself. As for why these competent people were happy to serve such a weak and ‘pusillanimous’ (wimpy) monarch, the answer is why not. Where they led, he followed.
This was apparently the case in the first years following the minority. Henry adhered to the counsels of Hubert de Burgh, formerly his principal regent, and after he was ousted, Peter des Roches, the French-born boyhood tutor and guardian of the king. It’s easy to see each man as a father figure to Henry, and perhaps he saw them as such, because he continuously turned a blind eye to their shenanigans and manipulation of his trust. Hubert lined his pockets with the royal bounty, while Peter pushed Henry to act more authoritarian, to forget about the niceties of Magna Carta. Under future reigns, both men would have faced the grimmest of executions, but it was the nature of the times, and Henry’s piety, to forgive and rehabilitate, even if it only worked against him in the end.
This section covers more than a hundred pages and throughout it you can feel Carpenter’s exasperation with the king, as if he’s telling him, ‘You damn fool. Get a grip!’ He doesn’t need to say what’s obvious, that Henry commands no respect, and Carpenter for one isn’t going to give him any until he mans up. His writing reflects this. The king, who’s famous for his temper, doesn’t calm down, he’s calmed down. We can imagine minders patting him on the head, whispering words of comfort into his ear. That’s it, sire, take a deep breath. Just relax.
Carpenter’s opinion of the young king in these dismal years is withering, but what of the men around him? He’s contemptuous of Peter and his gang, whose assault on Magna Carta he could only find dangerous and distasteful. Hubert, on the other hand, seems to evoke admiration. Carpenter even presents him as co-ruler. It’s always ‘Henry and Hubert’, and when it’s not that, ‘Hubert and Henry’. While admitting there’s much to be said against Hubert, he feels his long service to Henry in winning the civil war and reclaiming power for the monarchy outweigh his incitement of anti-foreigner hatred and violence or his treasonous sabotage of Henry’s dreams of re-conquest. However much these things happened, we should remember that a less ‘gullible and grateful king’ would have made sure they didn’t.
Then there’s Richard Marshal, who conducted a guerrilla war against Peter’s regime in 1233–34. The latest interpretation of this conflict suggests Marshal blundered his way into it, but Carpenter is having none of it. He follows the line of the chroniclers at the time, who believed Marshal’s only motivation was to protect Magna Carta and Englishmen from grasping foreigners. Carpenter does not deny the obvious hypocrisy. Marshal was happy to thumb his nose at Magna Carta when it suited him, and being a recent liegeman of the king of France, he was more the foreigner than Peter. But none of that withstanding, he’s a heroic figure fighting against an unjust regime. His spurning of peace offers, his deliberate humiliation of Henry, whom his propagandists derided as ‘the boy king’, and his horrific depredations in alliance with the Welsh do not move Carpenter to outrage. Rather he eulogises Richard Marshal as a ‘precursor of Simon de Montfort’.
The situation is equally problematic for a couple of other English legends Carpenter holds in esteem. There’s Marshal’s father William, the famed ‘greatest knight’, whose knighting of the young Henry before his coronation seems to have done him little good, and Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, who ensured the enshrinement of Magna Carta in the nation’s legal foundation. Both men receive gingerly treatment from Carpenter. In the case of Marshal, he dutifully serves as Henry’s first regent and gets rid of crown prince Louis of France, who with the help of rebellious barons (including Marshal’s namesake son) had tried to wrest the throne from John, then from Henry.
What we’re not told is that Louis got a huge payoff and free pass to go home, ostensibly because Marshal was worried the king of France would seize his family’s estates in Normandy if Louis were captured and ransomed. The deal was bitterly criticised at the time, not least by Peter des Roches, because it represented Henry’s best chance to get some of his father’s continental lands back. Apparently Marshal got Louis to promise to return some of the lands, so when Louis became king of France in 1223, Henry sent Langton to Paris to remind him of it, but the archbishop returned empty-handed.
The back story here is that Langton’s brother Simon was Louis’s greatest friend and supporter among the English rebels. Neither brother seems to have made much effort to hold Louis to account, and Simon even remained on the French payroll long after Henry acceded to Stephen’s pleas to lift his brother’s banishment. It can be argued that no one had a chance to succeed with Louis, but important here is what Henry would have thought. Were these men serving his interests or their own? His greatest desire was to get back his father’s lands, and the two most powerful men in the realm, Marshal for the barons and Langton for the bishops, failed him here.
Of course, there’s no guarantee that such information will help readers understand Henry’s motives any better. Whatever brought him to the mess he finds himself in after Richard Marshal’s death and martyrdom (in the minds of the chroniclers) he’s got to claw his way back, and this he does remarkably well. Carpenter calls this period, the onset of Henry’s personal rule, the ‘years of success’, covering 80 pages of the king reaching consensus with his magnates, passing much needed legislation and carrying out financial reform. The emotionally starved Henry also finds a bride at this time. Craving family life, his marriage to Eleanor of Provence might be expected to add stability to the kingdom. Instead things start to get rocky again.
That’s because the foreigners are back. There’s his wife’s uncle, the first of four brothers from Savoy who found service under Henry, and a papal legate. Carpenter finds both men impressive and skilful, but he attributes their presence in England to the 30-year-old king’s fear of going it alone. They would be there to ‘succour and solace’ him in his uncertainty. No reason is given why Henry’s English ministers were unable to fill this role. It could be argued that the king never fully regained his trust in them or the bishops following the recent turmoil, and bringing in these outsiders was his way of undercutting them. Carpenter, however, doubts Henry had the intellectual capacity to scheme in this fashion. He was just a simple guy.
The next decade is a mixed bag for Henry. Carpenter praises his triumph in Wales and Ireland and the lasting peace he achieved with Scotland. He accomplished all this despite his ‘lack of martial spirit and love of a comfortable life, qualities not universally celebrated in a king’. A second chance at reclaiming Poitou brought Henry back to the continent in 1242, only to be comprehensively defeated by Louis IX at Saintes. Unlike most historians, Carpenter is not contemptuous of Henry’s efforts here. He lauds his ‘courage’ in pursuing the invasion against the resistance of his barons and credits him for conducting a vigorous coastal campaign. He does, however, indulge in a bit of schadenfreude by noting that he and his wife had one of their best meals ever in the same city from which Henry had to flee as he sat down to his own dinner. You can check out the full review here

[Diane James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scholarly and yet accessible, this is a fascinating biography of Henry III’s minority and personal rule. It will be followed by a second volume. This pious, alms giving, sedentary, comfort loving monarch was devoted to his wife, Eleanor of Provence. He was credited with largely ruling peacefully and building Westminster Abbey. He failed to modernise the realm though which led to revolt and insubordination and the end of his personal rule. Fascinating detail of the man, his court and his family in 13th century Europe.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magisterial biography of King Henry III up to the end of the personal rule in 1258. If you want an in-depth researched biography of the period, this is the book for you. I now know rather more about H3 than I intended to, but the characters are interesting and the King’s strengths and weaknesses, especially the latter, play an important role in how he got to the revolt of 1258. Volume 2 awaits …. although I think some time in the future.

[Mark Bowden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastically detailed biography of one of England's less considered but crucially important monarchs. Carpenter has brought together a wealth of detailed evidence, scholarly commentary and his own deep understanding to achieve a rounded picture of a pious and sincere but flawed individual. I look forward keenly to the publication of the second volume.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a mammoth book. At over 700 pages in actual reading material, it's hard to believe there's more story to tell. But there is. In fact, the author has a second volume planned. When I tell you that every fact possible about Henry III has been included in this book, believe me. There were times, quite often as a matter of fact, when I felt overwhelmed when reading the book, simply by the recording of every single detail of every single aspect of Henry's reign. The parts of the book I enjoyed the most were the bits on how Henry lived. That was far more interesting to me than the accounts of courtiers who took advantage, military campaigns gone wrong, and similar things.

That being said, I will definitely read the second volume when it is released. This is recommended for hardcore fans of the time period and not for those who are new to the subject.

[Logan Rickard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very detailed and informative book on the life of a king you don’t hear much about concerning English history. Took me a bit longer to read as it’s very heavy in it’s academic work, but overall really enjoyed it and the sheer volume of info that David Carpenter has concerning Henry III. Kudos to the years or even decades likely spent accumulating this knowledge to put together an entertaining and thorough book.

[Mat]

5* in Guardian (iPhone screen capture)

[Chalice Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest (or at least most interesting) Medieval monarch hands down.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This deserves more than five stars. It's not often you read a book that has been given so much praise and feel the praise has somehow fallen short of the achievement.

[Comes · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far one of the best biographies in the Yale Kings series. Despite it's impressive length it never felt like a drag to read.

[Ron Nurmi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very detailed and well-researched book on a medieval English king.

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece decades in the making by a superb historian. What else needs to be said?