Henry III & the Pacification of England

“The Best Knight That Ever Lived” – Magna Carta Reissued – The Battle of Lincoln – Eustace the Monk & The Battle of Sandwich – The End of the First Barons’ War – A Costly Fiasco – The 12th Century Renaissance – A Francophile King – Wales, Scotland, & Ireland – The Savoyards & Poitevins – The Poitou Rebellion – The Rise of Simon de Montfort – The Provisions of Oxford – The Second Barons’ War – The Battle of Lewes – The First Representative Parliament – The Battle of Evesham

The late King John left an England divided. The rebellious barons, along with Dauphin Louis and his French soldiers, occupied half of England, and the French had possession of almost all of John’s scanty continental territories. The Dauphin, intent on taking the English throne for himself, saw the road wide open; but John’s nine-year-old son Henry threw a wrench into his ambitions. The young Henry—England’s first “child king” since the Norman Conquest—was quickly crowned on 28 October 1216 in Gloucester Cathedral. The usual coronation site at Westminster was in the hands of the French, who held London along with most English ports. Henry wore his mother’s golden circlet, since the coronation regalia were in London. Because the archbishops of Canterbury and York were absent, Henry was anointed by the bishops of Worcester and Exeter. The boy was knighted by the seventy-year-old William Marshal, who had served all prior Plantagenets (Henry II, Richard, and John) and who would be eulogized by the Archbishop of Canterbury as “the greatest knight that ever lived.” Because of his minority, Henry’s rule was put on the shoulders of two regents: Hubert de Burgh and William Marshal. Marshal was top tier of the two, being named Protector of the Boy King. Henry’s mother, the widowed Isabella of Angouleme, would leave Henry in Marshal’s care in 1217 to return to Angouleme where she married her old flame Hugh de Lusignan; she would start a new life with Hugh, putting the chaos of her marriage to John behind her, and virtually leaving her children with John to their fate. 

Marshal worked fast to secure the kingdom for Henry by making overtures to the rebellious barons. He persuaded many that their best hope wasn’t in French rule but in a new king, and he announced that he would rule within the bounds of a reformed Magna Carta (though he eliminated the security clause, licensing civil war if the king violated the charter, as well as some clauses unfavorable to the Church). Many, but not all, of the recalcitrant barons were drawn back into the royal fold, but the First Barons’ War was far from over: the French still held many castles, ports, and the city of London—and the Dauphin wasn’t eager to budge. The Dauphin had been named “King of England” by his rebel supporters, but the declaration had no legal backing since the English Church and the papacy supported Henry’s claim. The regency considered evacuating to the backwaters of England, but doing so would give Louis free reign in England and make his bid for the throne even easier. Marshal stood firm against such a retreat, and he girded his loins, named Peter des Roches as Henry’s guardian, and marched into the field to personally lead England’s royal forces. Louis faced a worthy opponent in Marshal, and the Dauphin’s hold began to weaken: John’s death had diffused some of the tensions that fueled the war in the first place, a handful of royal castles were holding out against the rebels, and Marshal’s pledge to adhere to Magna Carta made many barons question the purpose of rebellion. After all, didn’t his assent to Magna Carta mean that their goals had been accomplished? Still, many of the barons only hardened against Marshal, desiring a clean break from the Plantagenet line—even if that meant kneeling before a Frenchman ruling from London. 

The Dauphin crossed the Channel back to France in February 1217 to gather reinforcements, and during his absence arguments began to drive a wedge between Louis’ French and English supporters. The papal legate to England, Cardinal Guala, worked night and day to rally papal support to Henry’s cause. His machinations began at Henry’s coronation: the boy king gave homage to the papacy, recognizing the Pope as his feudal lord, and Pope Honorius declared Henry to be his vassal and ward. Guala enabled Henry to take the cross, declaring himself a crusader and thus entitled to special protection from Rome, and Guala declared Henry’s struggle against the rebels a religious crusade. A number of rebels who had been on the fence after Henry’s coronation defected back to the royalist cause, not wishing to fall afoul of the Church, and the tide began to turn in Marshal’s favor. 

Nearing the city of Lincoln

Louis returned at the tail-end of April and promptly split his forces in two. One army marched north to besiege Lincoln Castle, and the other stayed in southern England to capture Dover Castle. When Marshal learned that the Dauphin had divided his forces, he gambled on leaving one rebel force free to rampage in the south while putting his whole weight against the enemy at Lincoln. The rebels had taken the city and were besieging the royalist-held Lincoln Castle. Marshal’s crossbowmen assaulted and took the city’s North Gate. His infantry secured the gate, and the crossbowmen climbed onto the rooftops and began pouring volleys down on the rebel forces encamped around the castle. Before the rebels could organize, Marshal led his infantry—with his knights at the vanguard—against the besiegers. A fierce battle ensued. Marshal gave the rebel commander the opportunity to surrender, but he vowed to fight to the death. For hours the battle raged in the city’s cramped streets, but in time the besiegers gave up and scattered through the city streets. By the end of the battle, the city was back in royal hands and a large number of senior rebels had been captured. The historian David Carpenter notes that the Battle of Lincoln was “one of the most decisive [battles] in English history.”

The Dauphin’s aspirations suffered a crippling blow with the defeat at Lincoln, and he was attuned to the winds of change, concluding that his cause was all but lost. He abandoned his siege of Dover Castle and retreated to London. He opened negotiations with Cardinal Guala and promised to renounce his claim to the English throne if his supporters received any forfeited land, were freed from excommunication, and if Henry’s regency swore to uphold Magna Carta. Loyalists who had bled against the rebellious barons found these terms too lenient and inappropriately generous to rebel clergy, and the peace terms fell through. The Dauphin remained entrenched in London and Marshal prepared to put the capital city under siege, but Louis received good news: a French relief force would be disembarking from Calais to bring him soldiers, supplies, and siege engines. Perhaps, the Dauphin wondered, hope wasn’t yet lost? News of the French relief force reached England, and Hugh de Burgh, co-regent with Marshal, summoned the sailors of the Cinque Ports to do their duty and repel the enemy. The sailors, however, weren’t too keen on bleeding for England; after all, hadn’t they bled enough under King John’s tyranny? De Burgh convinced them to fight not for their country but for booty—imagine the wealth they would come into if they were able to capture the French fleet! Thus emboldened, de Burgh scraped together a counter fleet consisting of just over fifteen large ships and twenty smaller vessels.  

The Battle of Sandwich 1217

The English had their work cut out for them. The French fleet that set out from Calais consisted of eleven troopships (including the flagship); the first five ships carried over 100 knights, and the six behind them carried men-at-arms. Seventy smaller vessels laden down with supplies followed in their wake. The fleet was led by a man well-known in England and credit with “diabolical ingenuity”: Eustace the Monk, privateer of the Channel Seas. Eustace had once been a monk, but he broke his monastic vows to become a pirate. He attracted a large following, and his fleets menaced the Channel. From 1205 to 1208 he’d been put under contract by King John to harass the French coast, but in 1212 he started working for France; by 1215 he was transporting siege engines to the rebellious barons, and when the Dauphin invaded England, Eustace transported him across the Channel. Eustace commanded the fleet from his flagship, the Great Ship of Bayonne, but the vessel was overloaded with 36 knights, a large trebuchet, and a number of horses. When Eustace sailed past Sandwich, de Burgh gave chase, coming up behind them. The fleets closed in on each other, and the English archers aboard-ships were able to pepper the French vessels with arrows. Because the archers had a greater rate of fire and better range than the French crossbowmen, the French could only cower in the ships until the English came into range of their crossbows. Once the range closed, the crossbowmen returned fire, but their rate of fire couldn’t match that of the English archers. As the English ships came upwind of the French vessels, they unleashed calcium oxide—quicklime—that caught the wind and floated over the French ships, momentarily blinding them. This use of chemical warfare gave the English an opportunity to cut the French at the jugular by taking Eustace’s flagship. John FitzRoy, one of the late King John’s illegitimate sons, moved in for the killing stroke. De Burgh’s ship moved alongside his, and the two of them pulled up on either side of the Great Ship of Bayonne. Eustace demanded support from the other French ships, but they held off. Both de Burgh and FitzRoy grappled with the flagship, and they boarded and fought against Eustace and his contingent of knights. Overwhelmed, the knights yielded. They could fetch a pretty penny in ransoms, but the French sailors and common soldiers were worthless and thus indiscriminately slaughtered. Eustace tried to hide in the bilge, but he was uncovered and dragged out onto the deck. He offered to pay 10,000 marks for his own ransom, but the English viewed him as a traitor since he had formerly been contracted to England. He had no fate but to suffer a traitor’s death: he was promptly tied down, blubbering like a fool, and his head was lopped off with a single blow. With their flagship taken and Eustace dead, the French fleet scattered, hightailing it back for Calais. The English, buoyed on by victory and gripped by a desire for plunder, rammed and grappled and cut rigging to disable the enemy vessels. Nine troopships were able to escape the maelstrom, but only because the English were preoccupied with seizing the booty-laden supply vessels. The French sailors aboard the supply ships were either slain aboard decks or tossed into the Channel to drown. Two or three sailors were spared on each vessel, not out of pity or benevolence but because someone needed to sail the booty back to England.

Any hopes the Dauphin had of refreshing his campaign floundered with the French fleet, and he entered another flurry of peace talks with Cardinal Guala. This time they were able to reach an agreement with the Treaty of Lambeth (a.k.a. the Treaty of Kingston) on 13 September. The terms mirrored those of the earlier peace talks, except now the rebellious clergy weren’t pardoned: their lands and appointments remained forfeit. Louis accepted a gift of 6,666 pounds to speed his departure from England, and he promised Cardinal Guala that he would try to persuade Philip II of France to return Henry’s French territories (this did not happen). With the Dauphin expelled and the First Barons’ War drawn to a close by the end of 1217, the boy king’s regency could get to work at bringing stability back to the country. When the elderly Marshal died in 1219, Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, took the reigns of the government. As Henry got older, he began to mold into the image of his father. In time this meant that he would fall afoul of his barons just as his father had done, but for the moment it meant his eyes were upon those great swathes of French territory that used to be in the keeping of the Plantagenet kings. His father’s legacy was marred by losing those lands, and Henry hoped his legacy would be made by winning them back. 

As soon as the Dauphin left England in 1217, the heir to the French throne sharpened his blade and joined in the Albigensian Crusade in southern France. This crusade was a 20-year-long war initiated by Pope Innocent III to stamp out the heretical Cathar sect in Languedoc, of southern France. For over five years the Dauphin warred against the Cathars, and in 1223 he succeeded the throne in the wake of the death of his father, Philip II; thus the Dauphin became Louis VIII of France. The Albigensian Crusade, originally couched in terms of orthodoxy-vs.-heresy, devolved into a political conflict pitting the southern French nobles against their northern counterparts. Louis spearheaded the war effort for the northern rebels, but while laying siege to Avignon he fell ill with dysentery and died. He was succeeded by his son (also named Louis) who became Louis IX. He inherited a France torn by competition between the northern and southern barons, and as soon as he ascended the throne he faced a series of revolts. His tenuous grasp on France worked in Henry’s favor: with France in chaos, Henry could capitalize on her internal weaknesses and strive after “reclaiming his inheritance,” “restoring his rights,” and “defending his legal claims”—all phrases he invoked while discussing his desire to reclaim England’s lost French lands. 

His first target was the profitable Duchy of Normandy, and in 1226 he promised to marry Yolande of Brittany, forging an alliance with her father, the Duke of Brittany. This would enable him to use Brittany as a launching-pad into Normandy. Henry’s cousin, the Queen of France, was wise unto his schemes, and she persuaded the Duke of Brittany to give Yolande to one of her sons instead. Henry then pledged himself to Joan of Ponthieu, but again the Queen of France offered a better deal. Undeterred, Henry launched a campaign into France’s border territories in 1230, invading Poitou. He campaigned all summer, wreaking havoc but refusing to meet any opposition head-on, and at the coming of fall he hurried into English-held Gascony (a small strip of territory which, surprisingly, John hadn’t lost). Henry forged a four-year truce with Louis IX and returned empty-handed to England. The historian Huw Ridgeway called his expedition “a costly fiasco.” In 1234 the truce ended, and Louis moved fast to gobble up pockets of English-held territory. Henry, who had just passed out of the bounds of regency to begin ruling on his own accord, couldn’t afford to send help. He would have to leave his French ambitions for another day.

Two years into the four-year truce, Henry faced a political war back home. In 1232 his chief minister, Hubert de Burgh, was thrown from power. Peter des Roches had left England to fight in the crusades and had returned in August 1231. He aligned himself with Hubert’s political opponents and went before Henry, arguing that de Burgh had squandered royal money and lands and was guilty for a series of riots that had erupted against foreign clerics. Hearing of the charges, de Burgh sought safety in Merton College Chapel, but Henry sniffed him out, had him arrested, and imprisoned him in the Tower of London. Des Roches took the reigns of Henry’s government. He wasn’t an easy man of compromise, and he began stripping his opponents of their estates and overstepping the courts to accomplish his aims. Plenty of barons voiced complaints, including Richard Marshal, the son of the late William Marshal. They accused Henry of failing to protect their feudal rights as cemented in the recent reissues of Magna Carta. A small civil war (it would be more apt to call it a violent squabble) broke out between the followers of des Roches and Richard Marshal. Des Roches sent armies into Richard’s lands in Ireland and South Wales; Richard allied himself with Prince Llewelyn, and his own supporters rose up against des Roches in England. Henry feared that Louis IX might use England’s revolts as a gateway to invade Brittany (the four-year truce was about to expire), and the Archbishop of Canterbury entered the fray in 1234, holding a number of councils in which he persuaded the king to dismiss des Roches. Henry did as advised and gave des Roches the boot, but not before Richard was mortally wounded in battle. The year was 1234 and Henry began reigning on his own accord. 

A contemporary gave us a physical description of Henry in adulthood: “His mind seemed not to stand on a firm basis, for every sudden accident put him into passion.” Clearly Henry inherited the classic Plantagenet temper. Henry stood around five feet six inches and was a large man. He had a drooping left eyelid (which his son Edward inherited) that covered half his eye, giving him a malevolent appearance. Though Henry hoped to be a sharp contrast against his father, the reality was that Henry would go down in history as a political and military failure. He tried (and failed) to reconquer Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, and his Francophile tendencies, coupled with movements that chafed against baronial sensibilities and his elevation of foreign favorites to circles of power, brought about a second baron’s rebellion. To Henry’s credit, however, he was able to guide English-controlled Ireland to its medieval peak, solidify the boundary between England and Scotland, brought much-desired peace to the country in the wake of numerous revolts and civil wars, and paved the way for one of England’s most preeminent kings, Edward Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots. Henry III gets a bad rap, but England prospered during his reign: writing, education, art, and architecture boomed, so much so that some historians have coined this period of English history as the climax of the “12th Century Renaissance.” The turn of the 13th century saw an increased use of writing in the government; in 1199 the chancery clerks began keeping copies, on rolls of parchments, of most royal letters sent out under the king’s great seal. Increased record-keeping marked a shift from habitual memorization to writing things down, so that the whole population was, in a sense, “participating in literacy”: even though the vast majority of Englishmen couldn’t read, they grew accustomed to seeing day-to-day business done through writing. By the late twelfth century schools of higher learning began to spread throughout England, and by the 1220s two universities—first at Oxford and then at Cambridge—were established. Henry named Winchester, where St. Edward the Confessor founded his abbey, as the seat of power in England; Westminster Hall became the central ceremonial place of the kingdom where the nobles met. Henry undertook sweeping architectural reforms, importing French architects from Rheims to renovate Westminster Abbey in the new Gothic style that was all the rage in France. Work on the Abbey began in 1245, and its centerpiece was a shrine to the Confessor that was finished in 1269 and made complete with the saint’s relics. Henry funded renovations to the Tower of London and in Lincoln and Dover; he added the Great Hall to Winchester Cathedral; he ordered construction of Salisbury Cathedral; and he overhauled Windsor Castle, turning it into a glorious palace complex. The architectural historian John Goodall notes that Henry II was “the most obsessive patron of art and architecture ever to have occupied the throne of England.”

Henry garnished a reputation of being overly pious. He insisted on hearing Mass multiple times each day, and his journeys were often lengthened by frequent stops to participate in religious activities. It was for this reason that Louis IX, when expecting a visit from the English king, banned priests from Henry’s route to make sure he showed up on time. Henry, aware of the pitfalls of his piety, commented, “If [the papal prelates] knew how much I, in my reverence of God, am afraid of them and how unwilling I am to offend them, they would trample on me as an old and worn-out shoe.” Henry shared the Catholic loathing of the Jews, and he compelled those within his domain to wear a special “badge of shame” in the form of Two Tablets—not too unlike the way Hitler made Jews wear their own badges in the Third Reich. Henry’s favorite saint was the last Saxon king, Edward the Confessor; when he learned that the Confessor preferred simple garb, he started wearing simple clothes to imitate his idol. He had a mural of the Confessor painted in his bedchamber so that he could be inspired at both the start and end of his day, and he even named his oldest son—Edward—after the saint. 

Henry’s piety didn’t awaken discontent in England, but his Francophile tendencies certainly did. He had a high view of French culture, surrounded himself with French foreigners, welcomed French counselors into his inner circle, and even sought to model the English monarchy after the French model. In 1236 the 29-year-old king married the 13-year-old Eleanor of Provence, with whom he would have five children: Edward (the future King Edward), Margaret (who would marry Alexander III, the boy king of the Scots), Beatrice (who would marry the Duke of Brittany), Edmund Crouchback (Edmund was a Saxon name), and another daughter named Katherine. Eleanor’s French family—and especially her Savoyard uncles and Lusignan half-siblings—received special treatment: Henry elevated them to prominent positions of power and wealth (Eleanor’s Uncle Pietro became Earl of Richmond, and her Uncle Bonifacio became the Archbishop of Canterbury). This incurred suspicion among many of the barons who accused him—first privately and then publicly—of being a “foreign” ruler not in name but in action. 

In 1234 Henry began his personal rule, and while his ambitions to reconquer those French lands lost by his father remained paramount, he sequestered them to a later date and focused on affairs closer to home. The first flashpoint was the Welsh Empire of Llewelyn the Great. Llewelyn had capitalized on England’s unrest during the First Barons’ War by reclaiming those territories he’d lost during the middle of King John’s reign. Henry, during his minority, lacked the strength to contest him, and while Henry focused his energies on pacifying England in the wake of the civil war and on planning campaigns into France, Llewelyn was able to breathe easy. The Welsh prince’s wife Joan—Henry’s half-sister—died in 1237; that same year Llewelyn suffered a paralytic stroke, but he didn’t die until April 1240 at a Cisterian Abbey. His son Dafydd ap Llewelyn took the reigns of his father’s expansive Welsh Empire. Henry, now ousted from France and able to send armies into Wales, launched a trifecta of campaigns into Wales. He built a number of new castles, expanded the County of Chester, and increased English dominance over the scattered Welsh princes not under Dafydd’s control. In southern Wales the Marcher territories along the English-Welsh border grew more independent of the Crown, and in the north Dafydd resisted Henry’s incursions. When Dafydd died in 1246, the Welsh Empire passed to his son Llewelyn ap Gruffudd (a.k.a. Llewelyn the Last). Henry set his teeth against Llewelyn the Great’s grandson, and the two of them forged the Treaty of Woodstock, whereby the Welsh Empire was winnowed down in size whilst Llewelyn the Last retained the crown jewel of Gwynedd. Llewelyn the Last didn’t keep the peace, and in 1256 he inaugurated war against the English. Violence spread like gangrene across Wales. Henry promised a brutal response, but it never materialized—he had too much going on at home with restless barons. In 1267, shortly after the conclusion of the Second Barons’ War, Henry recognized Llewelyn the Last as the “Prince of Wales” in the Treaty of Montgomery.

Henry had much friendlier relations with Scotland (though his son Edward would not carry on this legacy). Henry was the feudal lord to the Scot king Alexander II, who had occupied parts of Northumbraland during the First Baron’s War. The Pope excommunicated Alexander, and he retreated back into Scotland. Alexander married one of Henry’s sisters, and in 1237 they sealed the Treaty of York, which solidified the boundary between England and Scotland, thus securing England’s northern frontier. Alexander’s seven-year-old son, Alexander III, took the throne in 1249. Henry knighted Alexander and in 1251 he orchestrated the boy’s marriage to his daughter Margaret. Though Alexander refused to give homage to Henry, the two maintained a good relationship. In 1255 rebellious Scottish barons imprisoned the Scot king and his wife in Edinburgh Castle, and Henry launched a successful rescue operation. He guided the young Alexander during his minority years, and to his credit he didn’t use the child king as a pretext for seizing Scotland; instead he showed favor towards Alexander by helping bring stability to the Scottish kingdom. Southwest across the Irish Sea, England-controlled Ireland reached its medieval peak under the reign of Henry III. Ireland brought over 1000 pounds a year into the royal treasury, and Henry turned it into a source of estates for his supporters. In the 1240s a number of English barons went to meet their maker, and Henry took many of their lands and redistributed it among his supporters—many of whom were French foreigners who had rebelled against Louis IX and hoped to find a new life in England. In the 1250s Henry granted large swathes of Irish frontier territories to those who had won his favor, creating a buffer zone against the hostile native Irish clans. As English power increased on the island, the local Irish kings underwent harsher harassment. Henry bequeathed Ireland to his son Edward on the condition that it would never be severed from the Crown. 

Simon de Montfort

The flood of French foreigners into England—which would incense England’s barons and lead to another nationwide crisis—had its genesis in The Poitou Rebellion in France. In 1241 the barons in Poitou, including Henry’s stepfather Hugh de Lusignan, rebelled against King Louis IX. The Poitou rebels counted on Henry’s support, who hoped that a successful rebellion would give him a foothold for re-conquering the Angevin Empire; but that support was slow in coming. Henry didn’t arrive in Poitou until the summer of 1242, and it wasn’t long before Hugh de Lusignan reconciled with Louis, leaving Henry stranded in French territory. On 20 May Henry’s army was encircled by the French at a place called Taillebourg. Henry’s brother Richard managed to hold off the French attack, and Henry hightailed it to Bordeaux. Louis gave chase, and Simon de Montfort—a French-born friend and counselor to Henry who had married Henry’s sister Eleanor, much to the chagrin of England’s barons—conducted an expert rearguard withdrawal that enabled most of Henry’s army to escape unscathed. De Montfort was furious with Henry’s refusal to face the French in battle, and he told him matter-of-factly that he should be locked up like the Carolingian king of old, Charles the Bald. Had Henry stood his ground and fought, perhaps England could’ve won a foothold in France; but as it was, Henry and his forces were forced to retreat across the Channel. The Poitou Rebellion collapsed, and Henry forged a five-year truce with Louis. Failure convinced him that he wouldn’t be able to regain lost lands by force; by this point Louis was the preeminent European monarch, and France was on the up-and-up. Henry turned to diplomacy, building alliances with other states who could better put military pressure on France.

Poitou didn’t fare well under Louis, and the defeated Lusignan nobles feared Louis’ reprisals. In 1247 Henry invited the disaffected nobles to England, and those who took him up on the offer were rewarded with expansive estates—at the expense of the English barons. Hearing news of such treatment in England, a flood of Poitevins followed in the Lusignans’ wake. Over a hundred heavy-hitting Frenchmen settled in England; two-thirds were given hefty incomes, and Henry encouraged them to help him in his struggles against the French king on the Continent: some served as mercenaries and others as diplomats. He distributed many on England’s internal frontiers: in the Welsh Marches, as a barrier against the Welsh kingdoms, and on the fringes of English-controlled Ireland, as a buffer zone against hostile Irish clans. Henry saw the Lusignan presence in England as a symbol of his aspirations to bring Poitou back into the English fold, but the disaffected English barons had a strikingly different view: this was nothing short of a subversive foreign invasion. Contemporary chroniclers—such as Matthew Paris and Roger of Wendover—wrote about these newcomers with an unabashed xenophobic attitude. The term “Poitevin” was attached to all French foreigners, but by now many were coming from Anjou and other French territories. By the 1250s a fierce rivalry had developed between the well-established “Savoyards” (who had begun entrenching themselves in England after Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236) and the newly-arrived Poitevins (who started flocking en masse after the collapse of the Poitou Rebellion). Their rivalry took on the contours of turf wars, precursors to the Bloods and Crypts, and Henry did little to curb it. By 1258 the public loathing of the Poitevins reached an apex, with Simon de Montfort (never minding his French origins) standing as one of their strongest critics. 

His opposition to the Poitevins put him squarely at odds with Henry, but their relationship had been in a downhill spiral since the early 1250s when de Montfort was blamed for an uprising in English-controlled Gascony. In 1252 de Montfort had been the lieutenant of Gascony, and his harsh rule prompted a revolt aided by King Alfonso X of neighboring Castile. Henry’s court had been split over where to place blame: de Montfort and his supporters argued that the unruly Gascons were at fault, but Henry and the Lusignans blamed de Montfort’s inept rule. Regardless of where fault lie, action had to be taken, and Henry managed to bring peace to Gascony by signing an alliance with Alfonso in 1254. Gascony was given to Henry’s son Edward, and Edward in turn married Alfonso’s half-sister Eleanor. Before returning to England, Henry journeyed through France to meet with Louis. The meeting had been orchestrated by the monarchs’ wives, and though the two kings begrudgingly played along (as all wise husbands know to do), the two of them came out of it close friends. The hatchet between France and England was buried (for a time), and Louis showed Henry his friendship by giving him a gigantic gift: an elephant!

But Henry would find no such reconciliation with de Montfort. 1254 was a busy year for the king: he put down the revolt in Gascony, forged an alliance with Castile, found friendship in the French king, and then he agreed to fund a war in Sicily on behalf of Pope Innocent IV. In return he would receive a title for his second son Edmund. Henry, however, failed to uphold his side of the bargain, and four years later, in 1258, the Pope threatened to excommunicate him if he didn’t pay up. Henry approached his barons in parliament in April 1258, looking for funds, and de Montfort used this as an opportunity to deal with the hated Poitevins once and for all. He formed a cabal with a number of the leading barons, who had grown weary of Henry’s methods of government (which seemed, to them, to echo those of his father, Bad King John). Popular sentiment was turning against the king, as a famine was crippling England; though this was wholly outside Henry’s control, many pious folk took it as a divine indictment on his reign. The fact that he was under threat of excommunication didn’t help. Many prophesied that Henry would become like his father—indeed, in many ways he was following the same path. On 30 April 1258 the baron Roger Bigod, backed by his co-conspirators and under the guidance of de Montfort, marched into Westminster in the middle of the king’s parliament and carried out a coup d’état. He demanded that Henry submit to a cataclysmic reform of English government, forgoing his personal rule and governing through a council of 24 barons and clergy. Half would be chosen by Henry and half by the barons. Henry, fearful of being arrested and thrown into the Tower, agreed. Henry’s appointments to the council were stocked with the despised Lusignans, so at a parliament the next month, de Montfort’s cabal unveiled the Provisions of Oxford, which—if stamped with Henry’s approval—would abolish the absolutist Anglo-Norman monarchy and give power over the kingdom to a privy council of fifteen barons, elected solely by the nobility, to oversee the government with triannual meetings of parliament to review their performance. The privy council would appoint England’s justiciar, chancellor, and treasure. If April’s parliament hack was a coup d’état, June’s parliament was nothing short of a top-down revolution. Again Henry submitted, only because he was powerless to refuse. Henry was put on the backburner, and for the first time since the creation of England under Alfred the Great and his successors, England wasn’t ruled by a monarch but by an oligarchy of her most powerful nobles.

Henry’s luck hadn’t run out, though: the barons, gluttonous on power and divided on their aims, made a mess of things. The barons stocked the privy council with Englishmen and members of the Savoyard faction, keeping the hated Poitevins outside the gates of government; then the council initiated a systematic rooting-out of the Lusignans that was nothing short of a purge. But the council couldn’t keep a united front and was dismembered from the inside: de Montfort pushed for the implementation of measures that would place checks on the most powerful barons; Hugh Bigod championed moderate change; and the council’s conservative members were hesitant even about the reforms already adopted. Henry’s son Edward, though at first opposed to the reforms, sided with the radical de Montfort and helped him establish the Provisions of Westminster in 1259, which further limited the major barons and royal officials. Despite variant views, the council was able to create an official peace with France, in which Henry abandoned any claim to his family’s land in northern France while retaining legitimate rule of Gascony and a handful of neighboring territories in the south, which he retained only by giving homage to the French king and recognizing Louis as his feudal lord over those French possessions. These victories aside, de Montfort witnessed the council’s competing views of reform devolve into competing factions, and the privy council plunged into crisis. 

Henry had been granted a papal bull from Pope Urban IV absolving him from his oath to uphold the Provisions of Oxford, but sensing that the privy council’s cogency was on the decline, he bided his time. He and his wife were treated with contempt by the people of London, but still he held his tongue. In 1261 the Queen was sailing down the Thames in her barge when Londoners began pelting her ship with rotten eggs, but the mayor of London gave her refuge in the home of the Bishop of London. Her son (and future king) Edward would never forget his mother’s rough treatment at the hands of the Londoners, and all his life he would detest them. Within the year of the incident on the Thames, the privy council was in shambles due to variance among her members, and Henry capitalized on their divisiveness and made his move to regain power. He renounced the Provisions of Oxford and began to raise a royal army that would be led by his son Edward who, despite lending a helping hand to de Montfort, vowed to stand by his father if things ever hit the fan. The rebellious barons, led with de Montfort at their head, geared up for a civil war. The contours of England’s government would be decided by whoever came out on top.

Henry’s royal forces retook control of many royal castles. De Montfort called a rebel parliament independent of the king and established a rival government across rebel-held England. But when Henry mobilized his supporters and paid for a mercenary army, the barons backed down—though they had won the First Barons’ War, the memory of that conflict was fresh, and they didn’t wish to get knee-deep in civil war unless they had no other options. De Montfort packed his bags and fled to his homeland of France, and absent their figurehead, the baronial resistance crumpled. Henry rebuilt his government, but this time he chose the Savoyards rather than the Lusignans as his officials. He tried to make peace with his disaffected barons, and in the Treaty of Kingston he introduced a new system of arbitration between the monarch and the barons: if the two couldn’t come to an agreement in their disputes, they would call upon the French king across the Channel to settle the dispute for them. He softened a number of those policies that had incited baronial discontent, but any strides he made towards peace were slowly undone. Though it would’ve been politically wise to forgive and forget, the temptation to exact royal justice was just too great, and Henry began targeting those barons who had stood against him. He then recommenced his Sicilian endeavor. The barons feared that his overtures had been stopgap measures at best and outright deceptions at worst. Henry’s difficulties mounted as the Welsh began launching violent raids along the Marches, and when the Pope reversed his judgment on the Provisions of Oxford, declaring them to be valid, his fall seemed just a misstep away. It was 1263, and the barons found the backbone to begin treading yet against towards civil war. When de Montfort returned to England, everyone knew The Second Barons’ War was inevitable. 

London, inspired by a rebel uprising bolstered by de Montfort’s return, revolted, and the king and queen were trapped in the Tower of London. Queen Eleanor tried to escape up the River Thames to join her son Edward’s royalist army, but London mobs forced her back to the safety of the Tower. De Montfort strode into London and took the king and queen prisoner, setting up his own government run in the name of King Henry (a pleasant fiction). By the end of the year the rebels had taken most of southwest England, but it wasn’t long before de Montfort’s coalition began to fragment: Henry managed to escape London and petitioned his friend Louis IX for help (the Treaty of Kingston had named the French king as arbiter in inconsolable disputes between the king and his barons). De Montfort at first resisted French involvement in their affairs, but he eventually acquiesced, sending a number of representatives with King Henry across the Channel to meet with the French king. Louis was sympathetic to Henry; he knew all too well the danger powerful barons could pose, as he had just overseen a civil war in France between the northern and southern nobles. Louis’ wife Margaret, who was Queen Eleanor’s sister, no doubt encouraged him to show favor to Henry—her sister’s life may very well be at stake! Louis ruled in favor of Henry, and in the Mise of Amiens he condemned de Montfort’s rebellion, upheld Henry’s rights as king, and annulled the Provisions of Oxford. Henry returned triumphant to England, but winning the war of words didn’t translate to victory on the battlefield; the barons weren’t ready to lay down their arms just because a foreign king told them to do so.

Before the Battle of Evesham

In April 1264 Henry led an army into de Montfort’s territories in the Midlands. De Montfort hoped to squash Henry in a single pitched battle, and their two forces met at the Battles of Lewes on 14 May. Henry’s son Edward opened the battle with a cavalry charge and scattered the London burghers. Drawn to the chase and of single-minded purpose, Edward pursued the fleeing burghers miles from the battlefield before gaining the sense to turn around. He hoofed it back to Lewes, expecting to find his father victorious, but instead he found the royal army, though numerically superior, in shambles. Henry’s brother was slain, and Henry and Edward retreated to a local priory. They were soon surrounded by de Montfort’s men and forced to surrender. De Montfort made him pardon the rebel barons and reinstate the Provisions of Oxford, leaving Henry, according to the historian Adrian Jobson, “little more than a figurehead” in the English government. Henry agreed to rule with the advice of a council of barons, and then de Montfort ordered him to summon a parliament. 

The term “parliament” first appeared in the 1230s, and it referred to the wholesale gathering of Henry’s Great Council. Henry could raise taxes only through a grant from the Great Council (which was comprised of clergy and barons), and their meetings came to be called “parliaments” (the word means “conversations”). Henry had held a number of parliaments during his reign, but the one under de Montfort’s guidance would be different: he broadened participation in parliament to include each county of England and a spattering of heavyweight towns. This parliament, then, wasn’t limited solely to the clergy and barons; it incorporated other strata of English society. In addition to the run-of-the-mill barons, bishops, and abbots, de Montfort’s parliament included two knights elected from every county and two townsmen from the major cities. These latter “representatives” were tasked with returning to their shires and towns and informing the people of the baronial policies. For this reason de Montfort is still hailed today as one of the fathers of representative government. At the conclusion of de Montfort’s parliament, he established a ruling council of nine barons—with himself at the head—who would rule England in Henry’s stead; but de Montfort’s decision to include the lower strata of English society in parliament chafed at the sensibilities of the powerful barons, and de Montfort’s support began to wane. 

The Battle of Evesham

Despite having usurped the government, the rebels faced chaos throughout England. Queen Eleanor had fled to France where she was planning an invasion of England with the support of Louis IX. Edward’s cousin helped him escape captivity, and he rallied his father’s supporters to his side. Edward’s army chased de Montfort’s supporters through the Welsh Marches and then struck east to attack the rebel leader’s fortress at Kenilworth; then Edward turned his attention on de Montfort himself. De Montfort sallied forth from London, the captive English king in tow. When he saw his predicament against Edward’s bolstered forces, he tried to retreat, but he was cornered and forced to fight. The ensuing Battle of Evesham turned the tide of the Second Barons’ War in the royalists’ favor. Edward was triumphant, and de Montfort was slain and his corpse mutilated. Henry, wearing borrowed armor, was almost killed by his own supporters before they recognized him and escorted him to safety. 

When news of de Montfort’s death spread throughout England, much (but not all) of the baronial rebellion collapsed. Henry returned to power and ordered all rebel lands forfeit and worthy of seizure, triggering a wave of chaotic looting across the country. He determined to exact a bloody and lengthy vengeance on those who had usurped his throne time and again, but a papal legate in October 1266 persuaded him to adopt a less draconian policy. The resultant Dictum of Kenilworth allowed for the return of the rebels’ lands in exchange for a hefty cash payment. The most diehard rebels steeled themselves in Kenilworth, the home of the late great Simon de Montfort, but the place was taken late in 1266. The remaining pockets of resistance were subdued, and the last rebel holdout in the Isle of Ely surrendered in July 1267. Four months later the Statute of Marlborough reissued a number of the Provisions of Westminster, but the provisions were decidedly in favor of the king: while the powers of loyal royal officials and barons were curbed, the king’s central authority wasn’t constricted in the least. By 1270 the Second Barons’ War was a thing of the past; Henry regained control of England, and his son Edward left the island to fight for the faith in a crusading adventure.

Henry had only two more years to live, during which he succumbed to weakness and senility. Henry III died on 16 November 1272, aged 69, at the Palace of Westminster. He was buried in the original coffin of his idol, Edward the Confessor; a more elegant tomb was later built for him, and in 1290 his remains were transferred to their current location in Westminster Abbey. His tomb sits just north of Edward the Confessor’s shrine.