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

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

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• 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)

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• 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 IIIs 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

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• 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 Johns 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.

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• In 1215, Magna Carta had been an attempt at peace
  that had produced a war. In November 1216,
  however, the new kings 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.

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• 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 kings
  personal guardian also.

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• After the Marshals death in 1219, however, a
  factional struggle for control of the young
  kings court quickly erupted between Hubert de
  Burgh and Peter des Roches. Around des Roches
  were gathered most of the old kings 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 Burghs 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.

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• 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 kings 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,

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• 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 kings financial administration into their
  own hands. De Burghs 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.

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• De Burghs 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

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• 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 Rochess
  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
  kings will is the following

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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. ..

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• 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.

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• 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

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• 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 kings
  widowed sister Eleanor, and de Montfort
  became a central military and diplomatic figure
  around Henrys court. Ultimately, he would
  emerge as the leader of the baronial forces that
  sought to rule England in the kings 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.

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• 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. Elearnors
  eldest sister, Marguerite, was already the wife
  of King Louis IX of France. By this marriage,
  Henry and Louis thus became brothers-in-law,

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• As Henrys 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 kings debts mounted, splits also
  began to develop within the circle of magnates at
  Henrys court. By the spring of 1258, two
  straight years of famine had reduced thousands of
  English peasants to near-starvation.

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• 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.

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• 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.
  Henrys 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.

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• 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,

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• By the end of 1263, a destructive and dangerous
  stalemate had been reached between the kings
  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
• Henrys opponents now took up arms in a direct
  rebellion against the king.

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• As the months went by, de Montforts party
  steadily eroded. .. In August 1265, at the
  battle of Evesham, Edward Henry IIIs eldest son
  and heir routed Simon de Montforts 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.

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• 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.
  

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• Parliaments were royal assembles, summoned by the
  king to meet in his presence. The kings
  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.

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• Ultimately, Parliaments 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
  kings 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).

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