HIS3406 Lecture Notes on Henry III and the Emergence of Parliament by Fred Cheung

1. HIS3406 Lecture Notes on Henry III and the Emergence of Parliament (by Fred Cheung)

2. The Angevin (Plantagenet) Kings: Henry II (Father of the English Common Law), r. 1154-1189 Richard I (the Lion-Hearted), r. 1189-1199 John (the Lackland), r. 1199-1216 Henry III, r. 1216-1272 Edward I, r. 1272-1307 Edward II, r. 1307-1327 Edward III, r. 1327-1377 Richard II, r. 1377-1399

3. Main References: Hollister, The Making of England, 257-285 Kenneth Mackenzie, The English Parliament. (London: Penguin, 1962), pp. 9-62 David A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III. (London, 1990) Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics, 1205-1238. (Cambridge, 1996) Robert C. Stacey, Politics, Policy, and Finance under Henry III, 1216-1245. (Oxford, 1987) John R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort. (Cambridge, 1994)

4. When King John died in October 1216, his heir was his nine-year-old son Henry, thus, Henry III (r. 1216-1272). Meanwhile, Prince Louis, son of King Philip of France, declared himself to be the rightful king of England. By October 1216, Prince Louis and the rebels controlled most of northern and southeastern England, including the city of London. According to Hollister, �the young king Henry III�s support lay mainly in the midlands and the west: two great royalist lords, William the Marshal, earl of Pembroke, and Ranulf, earl of Chester, controlled between them the marshes of Wales ��

5. These men, most of them were born in the old Angevin heartland of Anjou and the Touraine, had lost everything they had on the continent when the Angevin Empire collapsed. Their loyalty to King John had won them a new place in England, �� For these �foreign� captains and castellans, the civil war was a life-or-death struggle to retain the place they had won for themselves in England. �� the prospect that the royalists could defeat Prince Louis and the rebels by military force appeared remote. The old king [John]�s death was in that respect a blessing, because it gave his supporters a chance to try to end the civil war through a politically negotiated settlement. ��

6. In 1215, Magna Carta had been an attempt at peace that had produced a war. �� In November 1216, however, the new king�s supporters, led by William the Marshal and the papal legate Gaula, issued a revised version of the Great Charter as a foundation upon which negotiations between the royalists and the rebels might be reopened. �� the war dragged on until the spring of 1217, when it ended with a crushing and wholly improbable military victory by the royalists over the rebels at the battle of Lincoln. �� and so, when the charter was reissued again in 1217 in its final form, it contained only a few, relatively minor alterations from the 1216 version. �� With only minor modifications thereafter, it was the 1217 version of Magna Carta that thus became the law of the land. ��

7. From 1216 until his death in 1219, the greatest of these men was the aged earl William he Marshal, whose service to the Angevin cause dated back to his days as a landless household knight during the 1160s. �� Under the Marshal, Hubert de Burgh continued as justiciar, an office he had held since 1215. Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester �� continued as one of the barons of the exchequer, but now became the young king�s personal guardian also. ��

8. After the Marshal�s death in 1219, however, a factional struggle for control of the young king�s court quickly erupted between Hubert de Burgh and Peter des Roches. Around des Roches were gathered most of the old king�s foreign military captains and castellans, as well as Earl Ranulf of Chester and a number of other barons and knights. As justiciar, however, de Burgh controlled both the exchequer and the judiciary, and he also had the support of the English bishops, led by Archbishop Stephen Langton. In the ensuing struggles over offices and property, de Burgh�s advantages as justiciar were decisive. By the end of 1224, de Burgh was in undisputed control of the government, and des Roches had lost his position at court. ��

9. In January 1227, nineteen-year-old King Henry brought his long minority to an end by declaring himself of full age. �� By 1230, however, the young king�s enthusiasm for de Burgh was waning. �� [King Henry III would like to recover Poitou, at least, and insisted in raging another war; while de Burgh regarded �Normandy and Anjou as irrecoverable, and Poitou as ungovernable�.] [In 1230, Henry III] returned home bankrupt, ill, and humiliated, having succeeded only in strengthening his control over Gascony, ��

10. [On the other hand, Peter des Roches returned to England in 1231; and he persuaded King Henry III that the financial and military failures of the past few years should be the responsibility of de Burgh.] [In 1232, Henry III] elevated Peter des Roches. By summer, des Roches and his nephew Peter des Rivallis had begun a sweeping consolidation of the king�s financial administration into their own hands. �� De Burgh�s own dismissal from the court quickly followed. Des Roches now began a thoroughgoing campaign to restore his own followers to the offices and lands they had lost in 1223-1224.

11. De Burgh�s supporters were systematically hounded from office. Their lands were confiscated, �� Rumors began to fly that des Roches was encouraging the king to adopt a whole series of dangerous ideas about kingship, telling him, for example, that a king could not be bound to the law ��

12. Potentially, such actions were a threat to the property and liberty of every English landholder. But they were particularly offensive to the English bishops, who by the summer of 1233 were united in their opposition to des Roches�s regime. These actions were also strongly opposed by the group of professional royal judges that had taken shape during the minority. We can arrive at some sense of thee judges� political views during this period from a systematic legal treatise entitled On the Laws and Customs of England. �� the most famous of these early passages limiting the arbitrary exercise of the king�s will is the following:

13. The king has a superior, namely, God. Also the law by which he is made king. Also his court (curia), namely the earls and barons, because the earls (comites) are called, so to speak, the partners of the king, and he who has a partner has a master. And therefore if the king should be without a bridle, that is without law, the earls and barons ought to put a bridle on him, lest they, like the king, should be without a bridle. [Bracton: On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. And trans. Samuel E. Thorne, vol. II (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 110.]

14. No clearer statement of the supremacy of law and the sanctity of trial by peers can be imagined. �.. In the end, des Roches overreached himself. A breach between des Roches and Richard Earl Marshal (son and heir of William the Marshal) led to a rebellion �� The English bishops, led by Edmund Rich, the archbishop-elect of Canterbury, now united to threaten the king with excommunication from the Church if he did not dismiss des Roches and his party of �foreigners� from court. Behind the bishops� threats lay their conviction that des Roches and his supporters, including the king, had betrayed their oaths to observe Magna Carta, an act of perjury for which excommunication was the appropriate remedy.

15. Bowing to the pressure, in April 1234 Henry reluctantly dismissed both des Roches and des Rivallis from court. �� Between 1234 and 1236, Henry strove conscientiously to restore his subjects� faith in his commitment to the Charters. �..

16. In 1215, Magna Carta had promised that �No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.� That promise had been repeated, unaltered, in all subsequent versions of the Charter. It was �� particularly of the years between 1232 and 1234, that established that promise, along with the rest of the provisions of Magna Carta, as the law of the land. �� never again would the very survival of the Charters be in doubt.

17. In 1236, Henry III was twenty-nine years old. �� He was respectably well-educated, he was usually amiable; he was a man of artistic tastes; and he was genuinely pious. �� But he was a poor judge of character; he had no military ability whatsoever; �� He did, however, have enormous ambitions. From 1227 until 1243, he worked steadily, though ineffectively, toward the recovery of Poitou. �� His goal was to become a figure in European politics ��

18. To promote this aim, Henry took steps to attract continental figures to his court. Among the first to arrive was Simon de Monfort �� In 1237, the dashing de Montfort wooed and won the king�s widowed sister Eleanor, �� and de Montfort became a central military and diplomatic figure around Henry�s court. Ultimately, he would emerge as the leader of the baronial forces that sought to rule England in the king�s name between 1258 and 1265. De Montfort was a man of great ability and even greater self-confidence. He had connections with many of the leading members of the Capetian nobility and with King Louis IX, from whom he held extensive lands in France. He was precisely the sort of man who Henry believed could help him to become a figure of European-wide significance.

19. In 1235, Henry took another step toward the realization of his continental ambitions by marrying his sister Isabella to Emperor Frederick II of Germany. In 1236, he took a further step in this direction by marrying Eleanor, the second daughter of the count of Provence. Elearnor�s eldest sister, Marguerite, was already the wife of King Louis IX of France. By this marriage, Henry and Louis thus became brothers-in-law, ��

20. As Henry�s financial situation worsened during the 1250s, his local officials became more and more oppressive, not least because the king himself was pressing these men to pay larger and larger sums from the shires into his own hands. �� As the king�s debts mounted, splits also began to develop within the circle of magnates at Henry�s court. �� By the spring of 1258, two straight years of famine had reduced thousands of English peasants to near-starvation.

21. The stage was set for a political revolution, to which the beleaguered king was compelled to give his reluctant consent. In May 1258, King Henry met with his magnates in parliament at Oxford, to plead for their help in resolving his Sicilian debts. The magnates responded, however, by declaring that they would not consider any request for taxation until the government of the realm was reformed. Bowing to their demands, Henry agreed to allow a committee of twenty-four great men to appoint a new royal council of fifteen royal council of fifteen members, whose advice on all matters Henry agreed to follow. ��

22. A justiciar was appointed �� A chancellor and a treasurer were also appointed. All three of these great officers were to answer annually for their conduct in their office to the royal council. The council, in turn, was to be supervised by three regularly scheduled meetings per year of the magnates in parliament. �� Henry�s authority to make decisions on his own, �� was now ended. Instead, he agreed to act only with the consent and approval of the Council of Fifteen �� [However, by 1261], the councilors were increasingly divided amongst themselves. In 1262, Henry III, finding his opponents now hopelessly divided, abolished the Provisions of Oxford altogether. ��

23. Simon de Montfort had been one of the powers behind the Provisions of Oxford in 1258 and had also served as a member of the Council of Fifteen. When King Henry rescinded the Provisions in 1262, Simon left England �� In the spring of 1263, however, he returned to England to lead a powerful faction of disaffected magnates drawn heavily from amongst the barons and knights of the Welsh march. De Montfort and his partisans attacked the estates of those they blamed for having betrayed the Provisions, ��

24. By the end of 1263, a destructive and dangerous stalemate had been reached between the king�s forces and those of de Montfort. The two sides thereupon agreed to submit their dispute to the arbitration of King Louis IX of France. �� [Louis�] arbitration verdict, known as the Mise of Amiens (1264), constituted a ringing denunciation of the baronial cause �� Henry�s opponents now took up arms in a direct rebellion against the king.

25. �� As the months went by, de Montfort�s party steadily eroded. �.. In August 1265, at the battle of Evesham, Edward [Henry III�s eldest son and heir] routed Simon de Montfort�s army. Simon himself was slain �� and Henry III resumed his authority �.. but his power passed more and more into the hands of his able son and heir [Edward]. �� Edward had already won the confidence of his new subjects; they were anxious now to see whether he deserved it.

26. The word �parliament� was used in a variety of contexts during the High Middle Ages to refer to meetings of various kinds at which views were exchanged or expressed --- in short, a parley. ��

27. Parliaments were royal assembles, summoned by the king to meet in his presence. �� The king�s council, with its increasingly professional expertise, functioned as the vital core of every parliament and was responsible for initiating and transacting most of its business. �� From the 1250s on, English parliaments also frequently included representatives of the towns, the shires, and sometimes the lower clergy. As a result, English parliaments inevitably had an important political and consultative aspect that one does not always find elsewhere. In retrospective, the presence of these representative elements, especially when taxation was to be discussed, was a constitutional development of enormous significance. ��

28. Ultimately, Parliament�s role in approving extraordinary taxes would become the key to its power, �� Most of the parliaments of the age were summoned on royal initiative for the purpose of doing the king�s business, whether by granting him an aid, hearing a judicial case, or otherwise supporting his policies. Rather than limiting the monarchy, they served it. �� the parliamentary idea emerged in thirteenth century England because the monarchy --- particularly under Edward I --- regarded parliaments as useful instruments of royal policy. (Hollister, The Making of England, pp. 259-284).