CHAPTER VIII.
HENRY III.
Character of Henry—Administration of William Marshall—Hubert de Bergh—Henry his own minister—Foreign favorites—General misgovernment—Papal intrigue and taxation.
The reign of Henry III. is not only one of the longest but one of the most difficult in English history. It contains more than one great crisis, and coincides in time with an epoch of vast progress; but the critical importance is by no means equally diffused, and the rate and fashion of the progress are matter for minute study, rather than for vivid illustration. The reign covers more than half of one of the most eventful and brilliant centuries of the world’s history; a century made famous by the actions of some of the greatest sovereigns, the most illustrious scholars, the wisest statesmen; the most noble period of architecture; the last act of the Crusades, the last struggle of the Papacy with the yet undiminished strength of the Empire. The life which, on the Continent, runs in these streams is not without its purpose in England.
Character of
Henry III.
England also looks on the thirteenth century as her great architectural age, the age of her great lawyers and some of her greatest divines. She also has her weight in European affairs, her struggles with the Papacy, her attempts at sound government. But the real interest of English history lies in minute constitutional steps of progress, which are to be estimated rather by their later and united effects, than by the actual and momentary appearance of growth. For during this time, England has no guiding or presiding genius. Her king is a man by no means devoid of all the picturesque qualities of his forefathers, and possessed of some negatively good qualities which they had not; but on the whole a degenerate son of such great ancestors, degenerate from their strength and virtues as well as from their faults and vices. Henry III. is perhaps a better husband and father, a more devout man, than any of his predecessors; he is not personally cruel or regardless of human life; he has no passion for war, no insatiable greed for the acquisition of territory, such as in the case of his ancestors had cost so much bloodshed. He is content for the most part to be king of England, and his success in retaining some part of his Continental dominion, is the result far more of the honesty of his adversary than of any ambition, skill, or force of his own. In these respects, England might have been expected to fare better under Henry, than she had done under John or Richard or Henry II.; better even than she was to fare under Edward I.; yet she can scarcely, even viewed in the results, be said to have done so. The long reign was a long period of trouble, suffering, and disquietude of every sort. We have no reason to suppose that Henry was deficient in personal courage, or in skill in arms, such as a brave knight might possess without being a great captain in fieldwork or in sieges; or that he was wanting in the desire to be thought a splendid and magnificent sovereign—as, indeed, he was thought—for he reaped the advantages of the political position which Henry II. had planned, and he outlived the greater princes whose power and character and career had thrown his own into the shade. Yet England did nothing great in his time except as against him. He had no great design, no energetic purpose. He was not strong enough to be true, although he was strong enough to be pertinacious, resolute enough to be false. He was vain and extravagant; and this, with the exception of his falseness, is the worst that can be said of him. Hence, whilst he could not inspire love or loyalty, he could inspire hatred, and hatred is not, in the case of kings, as is so often said of the feeling in the case of lower men, incompatible with contempt: a king may inspire both feelings, and be despised for moral weakness and iniquity, whilst he cannot safely be contemned altogether, because of his great power to cause mischief. Then, vanity and extravagance, which are minor faults in a man with strong purposes, become aggravations and incentives to hatred in a man whose other motives and purposes are weak. Henry III. was well hated. His life, good or evil, had no gloss or glitter upon it; it was mean in the midst of its magnificence; it was wanting in the one element that leads men to respect, even where they fear and blame, the character of reality or “veracity to a man’s self.” There was no purpose, as there was no faith in it.
Division of
the reign.
Fifty-six years of such a king cannot but be a wearisome lesson to the reader, if the eye rest on the king only or on the circle of events of which he is the centre; and to a certain degree, in these ages in which we have to depend chiefly on the historians of the time, with little help from other sorts of literature, the king is necessarily the centre of every circle. The monotony of detail may, however, be broken by arranging the reign in four divisions. Henry was nine years old when he began to reign. The first portion, then, comprises the years of his minority, and may be regarded as closing about the year 1227, although, as the influence of his early ministers continued to affect him for some years longer, that date is not a very distinct limit. The second division comprises the years of his personal administration, during which he mismanaged matters for himself, and which end at the year 1258, when, having brought affairs to a dead lock, he was obliged to consent to be superseded by a new scheme of government embodied in the Provisions of Oxford. The third period includes the years of eclipse, from 1258 to 1265, when the battle of Evesham gave him again the power as well as the name of king. The last period contains the seven years intervening between the battle of Evesham and the king’s death, and depends for its historic interest entirely on the fact that it witnessed the results of the great struggle—the clearing of the board after the crisis of the game was past.
Accession of
Henry III.
Henry’s
party.