Henry III

There followed a year of civil war, in which John’s military household and a loyalist party headed by the veteran William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, was pitted against the baronial coalition, itself now prepared to invite the son of the King of France to join them in London. Louis, Philip’s son, was a grandson of Henry II of England and therefore a suitable foreign claimant to be groomed for the English throne. John himself died at Newark on Trent, in October 1216, with England in disarray, leaving a nine-year-old boy named Henry as his eldest son and heir. A rerun of the events of the 1130s seemed imminent, with the unsuitability of the legitimate heir to the throne – Henry III in 1216, compared with Empress Matilda and her three-year-old son, the future Henry II, in 1135 – opening the way to an opportunistic rival to seize the throne. The Plantagenet dynasty itself seemed destined for extinction. In other parts of Europe where boys had been recognized as kings, most notably in the kingdom of Sicily and the German empire where the young Frederick II had been only two years old at the time of his father’s death in 1197, attempts to govern via minority councils until the boy came of age had been marked by bloodshed and internecine strife.

In England, a dynastic revolution was prevented by two chief factors. Firstly there was the memory of the disastrous reign of Stephen and the determination never again to deprive a young heir of his throne merely because he was not of age. This was clearly in the mind of the King’s councillors in 1216. It was still there in the 1370s, and again in the 1420s, when the future Kings Richard II and Henry VI were both crowned in boyhood, with disastrous consequences as we shall see. Secondly, in 1216 not only did John himself decree that his son Henry should succeed him, but he enlisted the assistance of the Pope to ensure that this was done.

Ever since 1213, John had technically been a subject of the Pope, having delivered up England to Pope Innocent III as a papal fiefdom owing an annual ‘census’ or tribute of 1,000 marks (700 for England, 300 for Ireland) as part of his settlement with the English Church. Regarded by monastic chroniclers at the time as a dangerous invitation to papal imperialism, and derided by later Protestant historians as perhaps the very worst of King John’s crimes, the homage rendered by John to the papacy was in reality a clever political device, like John’s subsequent taking of vows as a crusader, intended to place England under papal protection, and above all to ensure that the Pope was now intruded as John’s overlord at a time when the French King’s claim to overlordship had already led to the confiscation of Normandy and now threatened a French invasion of England. In 1216, it was the Pope’s representative, the papal legate, Guala of Vercelli, who crowned the boy king at Gloucester Abbey. The ceremony was conducted with extreme haste, clearly to prevent Louis and the barons organizing a coronation of their own in Westminster where Louis might ‘officially’ be received as King. Because the coronation regalia, the crown and so forth, were in baronial hands in London, the legate had to employ a chaplet or crown of flowers as a makeshift alternative. Ever afterwards, Henry III looked to the Pope as his chief guardian and guide, keenly remembering that it was a papal legate who had ‘recalled the realm to our peace and subjection, consecrated and crowned us King, and raised us to our throne’.

The influence of the Pope and his legates was not always regarded by the English as so benign. It led, after 1215, to the importation of large numbers of Italians into England, promoted to churches and benefices previously held by clergy attached to the rebel barons, these churches thereafter transformed into the object of regular papal ‘provision’, a system whereby the Pope claimed the right to override the claims of local patrons and to intrude his own candidates into parishes and cathedral prebends. As early as the 1220s, provision led to complaints in England culminating in a full-scale riot against Italians and provisors. Through to the 1350s, it remained a major source of tension in dealings between England and Rome.

It is therefore all the more ironic that it should have been the papal legate, the representative of Pope Innocent III (who himself had done most to annul and anathematize the 1215 Magna Carta), who now sought to rescue the charter, presented at Bristol in November 1216 as a manifesto of future good government, reissued by the boy King and his counsellors, sealed by the legate Guala, in very similar terms to the 1215 document, save for the omission of the controversial sanctions clause which in 1215 had placed a baronial committee above the King. Magna Carta was reissued again in November 1217, again under the legate’s seal. It was these reissues of the charter that rescued it from oblivion and set it on its course to fame and semi-scriptural status as the foundation stone of English constitutional law. Without Paris-trained theologians such as Stephen Langton, and without Italian papal legates, Magna Carta might never have been written, and would most certainly never have survived. The emergence of English liberties was a truly European affair, embodied in the universalities of the Latin language, not an isolated ‘island story’ to be narrated in Anglo-Saxon or Eurosceptic grunts.