HENRY III AND EDWARD I

Henry III

The many chroniclers of his reign have given us a very good picture of Henry III, and it is not difficult to understand his character and its influence upon England. Henry was not a national king in any sense of the word. He had an exalted idea of his royal position, and believed that the people lived for him, and not he for the people. He was frivolous and extravagant, loved pomp and ceremony, and surrounded himself with selfish favorites. He was pious in a mediaeval way and a devout son of the church; but he yielded a too ready obedience to the pope, and was too willing to sacrifice the interests of the English to the advancement of the claims and pretensions of the mediaeval papacy. He spent money freely for churches and the adornment of churches, but he destroyed the good effects of his generosity by filling church offices with favorites and using church revenues for furthering his own and the pope's Continental projects. He did nothing to advance the cause which had gained so much from the loss of Normandy and the winning of Magna Carta. In fact, we may say that he labored intentionally to injure the cause of national unity, for he listened only to the advice of foreigners and of those hostile to the best interests of the English people. During his long reign of fifty-six years he succeeded in turning every class against him, filled the land with aliens, and used England's resources for purposes that the English deeply resented. Consequently, as the national spirit was constantly growing stronger, it is little wonder that the last years of the reign were years of civil war.

Relations with the Continent

Henry was far more interested in the Continent than in England, and was willing to use his kingdom and its wealth to make more prominent his position abroad. This is shown in three particulars.

In the first place, he desired to recover his lost fiefs in France. To that end he undertook three Continental expeditions: one in 1230, which was nothing but a military demonstration along the frontiers of Normandy and Maine; a second in 1242, which nearly ended in his capture ; and a third in 1254, which resulted in a treaty of Paris, 1259, whereby he absolutely renounced his claims to the greater part of the Angevin fiefs in France, and received, from St. Louis (IX), Guienne and Gascony. These lands remained the only English possessions in France till the treaty of Bretigny, 1360.

In the second place, Henry was connected by blood or marriage with many of the great families in Europe. His mother, after the death of John, had married a Poitevin, the son of her old lover, Hugh de la March. In 1237 Henry himself married Eleanor, daughter of the count of Provence and sister of the wife of Louis IX. His brother, Richard of Cornwall, himself half a Continental prince, had taken as his second wife a  

HENRY III.

From engraving by Vertue based on the king's effigy at Westminster.

sister of Eleanor, and as his third the niece of the archbishop of Cologne. Two of Henry's sisters had married respectively Alexander II of Scotland, and Frederick II, the great Hohenstaufen, Wonder of the World " and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; while his eldest son, Edward, married a princess of Castile. These foreign connections were destined to have a most disastrous effect upon Henry's government at home.

In the third place, Henry was, by virtue of John's submission to the pope, a vassal of the Roman See. This position not only increased his intimacy with Rome, but also laid England open to excessive papal exactions.