A history of England

by Charles Oman

Hubert's wise and salutary rule endured till the king came of age (1227), and for some years after he was still retained as Justiciar. But Henry, on coming to maturity, soon showed himself jealous of the great man who had protected his helpless boyhood. The new king was a strange mixture of good and evil. He was a handsome, courteous youth, blameless in his private life, and kind and liberal to his friends. He proved a good father and husband, and a great friend to the Church. He loved the fine arts, and built many stately edifices, of which the famous abbey of Westminster is the best known. But he had many serious faults: he was an incorrigible spendthrift; he was quite incapable of keeping any promise for more than a few days. He was of a busy volatile disposition, always vaulting from project to project, and never carrying to its end any one single plan. Being full of self-confidence he much disliked any one who gave him unpalatable counsel, or strove to keep him from any of his wild ephemeral schemes. This was the secret of his ingratitude to Hubert de Burgh, who never shrank from opposing his young master when the occasion demanded it. Moreover, Henry had the great fault of loving foreigners over-much; he surrounded himself with a horde of his relatives from the continent. His wife Eleanor of Provence brought a host of brothers and uncles from Savoy and southern France, and his mother sent over to England her children by her second marriage with her old lover, the Count of La Marche. [17] On these kinsmen Henry lavished not only great gifts of money, but earldoms, baronies, and bishoprics, to the great vexation of the English. His strangest act was to confer the archbishopric of Canterbury on his wife's uncle, Boniface of Savoy, a flighty young man of most unclerical habits. Henry was not cruel or malicious, like his father, and personally he was not disliked by his subjects, a fact which explains the patience with which they bore his vagaries for many years. But his actions were nearly always unwise, and his undertakings were invariably unsuccessful, so that his long- suffering vassals were at last constrained to take the reins of government out of his hands.

Dismissal of Hubert de Burgh.—Personal government.

For thirty years, however, Henry worked his will on England (1228-58) before drawing down the storm on his head. For the first five of them he was still somewhat restrained by the influence of Hubert de Burgh. But in 1232 the old Justiciar was not only dismissed, but thrown into prison, because Henry was wroth with him for frustrating an unwise and unnecessary war with France. But the king's ingratitude provoked such angry opposition that Hubert was ultimately released, and suffered to dwell in peace on his own lands.

After dismissing Hubert, Henry threw himself into the hands of Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, one of John's old courtiers. Peter knew or cared nothing about English laws and customs, and led the king into so many illegal and unconstitutional acts, that the whole nation called for his banishment. At last the Great Council, led by Edmund of Abingdon, the saintly Archbishop of Canterbury, frightened the king into dismissing him (1234).

But England did not profit very much by Peter's fall. Henry resolved to become his own prime minister; he did not appoint any one to the office of Justiciar, and a little later he abolished that of Chancellor also. He thought that he would act as his own chief justice and private secretary, but, as he was no less volatile than busy, he only succeeded in getting all public business into hopeless arrears.

War with France.

Henry's personal government endured for the weary time of twenty-four years. The events of the period were very insignificant, and only call for very brief mention. The sole foreign war was a brief struggle with Lewis IX. of France. One of Henry's many ephemeral schemes was the idea of winning back the continental dominions that his father had lost. So in 1241 he picked a quarrel with the good King Lewis, and invaded Poitou. He was disgracefully beaten at the battle of Taillebourg (1242), and was forced to make peace. The mild and pious King of France contented himself with leaving things as they had been before the war, though if he had chosen he might have forced Henry to surrender Bordeaux and Guienne, the last possessions of the English crown beyond the seas.

Henry's servility to the pope.—Exasperation of the baronage.