Dan Snow's History Hit - Henry III: The Pacific King

Episode Date: July 12, 2020

David Carpenter joined me on the podcast to examine one of England's most remarkable monarchs. Just nine years old when he came to the throne in 1216, David explains how Henry was pacific, conciliatory, and deeply religious. His rule was constrained by limits set by the Magna Carta and the emergence of parliament. We discussed the 'soft power' which maintained a steady peace, Henry's patron saint Edward the Confessor, and his building of the magnificent Westminster Abbey. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Downstone's History. I've been looking forward to this episode of History for a long time because I've wanted to get David Carpenter on the podcast for ages. He's a very distinguished historian. He's the Professor of Medieval History at King's College, London, but also just importantly, he's a wonderful man, a great collaborator, and a great communicator. You're going to hear him talking all about Henry III. He's the world's leading expert on Henry III. This is like Alien versus Predator, I guess, in a good way. You're going to hear him disagreeing with Lord Jonathan Sumption about the importance of Magna Carta. I mean, this is hardcore stuff. The two of them disagree. The two of them are intellectual giants. Whoever wins, we win. There

you go. So David Carpenter is talking all about Henry III. Enjoy. Listen out for that bit when he takes on Jonathan Sumption. In fact, he went around Jonathan Sumption's house to have an out with him. It's just awesome. This is how historians roll, everyone. It's just brilliant. If you want to watch documentaries, as well as listen to podcasts, we've got a new history channel. It's called History Hit TV. We've got hundreds of hours of documentaries on there. It's like Netflix for history. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and then your second month is one pound, euro, or dollar. It's awesome. Please go and check that out. In the meantime, though, here's David Carpenter talking about Henry

III. David, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. No, well, thank you very much for asking me. Well, you opened my eyes to Henry III 15 years ago, I think it was. I know, because you just said, I said, what are you working on at the moment? You said, I'm writing about Henry III. And then I looked a bit blank and you said, that's the problem. Incredibly long-serving monarch, hugely important, established lots of things. No one knows anything about him. No, I think that's right.

I mean, I think he has been a very unknown king, very unfairly, because his reign was of crucial importance. He reigned for 56 years, 1216, 1272. He was nine when he came to the throne, 65 when he died. I can't remember, it was certainly the longest reign of any medieval king. I think George III was the first king to outdo him. I mean, it was, as you say, a reign of crucial importance in very many ways. Well, let's talk about the circumstances of his accession and childhood, basically, because his dad is King... Quickly, David, where are we on King John?

King John has died having rejected Magna Carta in the midst of a great civil war in which the barons have offered the throne to the eldest son of the king of france when john dies in that great hurricane howling around newark castle in october 12 16 louis the eldest son of the king france really controls london has the allegiance of two-thirds the barons no king therefore comes to a throne in more parlous situation than nine-year-old son of john and where are sort of john the risk of being a pathetic reductionist awful or misunderstood awful okay he was okay i you know i'm yet to meet a story who doesn't think that it's amazing no i'll always remember once on the melvin bragg program quoting my great friend john gillingham

to the effect that john was a shit and mel Melvin Bragg tried to shut me up, because you can't say that at nine o'clock on a Monday morning. Well, the brave new world of podcasting, we welcome such honesty. Anyway, it was certainly true. And therefore, I'm presuming, I mean, he was an appalling uncle, a useless brother, a pretty bad son. I'm presuming he wasn't a great dad. His contact with his son, Henry III, was probably very, very limited.

And that's because John's itinerary, quite different from Henry III's, was quite extraordinary. I mean, he hardly spent two or three days in any one place. He was always on the move, whereas Henry was based at Winchester, Corfe, these great castles, because his security, of course, was tremendously important. castles because his security of course was tremendously important and so you know on any kind of consistent basis Henry would never really have known his father what he would have known of course was known his reputation he did know of course that he often looked back on his father's and compared his reign to John's he said you know my reign has given you long peace in place of terrible civil war. We've never suffered an interdict.

You know, the spiritual life of the country has been far more satisfactory. So Henry was very aware of the contrast. And I suppose the other thing, of course, is that where was his father now in the afterlife. I think Henry's piety may very well have been conditioned by the fear of his father's fate, not wanting to end up in, you know, being tormented by devils in purgatory or even worse in hell. So I think Henry's deep piety had a lot to do with what had happened to the reputation of his father. Let's be honest, King John, if there is a hell, that man is in it. So he dies in Newark of dysentery. I'm now able to practice my one historical joke on you.

All right, go for it. Here we go. I mean, I'm not even sure it's a joke. So King John's dysentery saved his dynasty. Oh, is that meant to be a joke? I'm not... OK, fine. OK, I'll notch that one up as it fell flat.

But actually, dying was the best thing he ever did, presumably. Yeah, no, I mean, people said that at the time. Even the Pope said that he thought that maybe John's death was a sort of disguised blessing of God because it removed a large part of the cause of the discord. I think, though, it's important to realise that there was a gigantic policy change as well because, remember, the cause of the Civil War

and the offer of the throne to Prince Louis had been John's rejection of Magna Carta. And what the minority government of Henry III did, as soon as the young king had been crowned, in one of the most courageous, far-sighted decisions, was to completely change course on the Magna Carta front and to concede what John had rejected in a revised version. In November 1216 in Bristol, therefore, the young king,

essentially, though it's his governors doing it, issued a new version of Magna Carta. And I think that was the second crucial reason for winning the war. It was two reasons. The first was the replacement, evil King John with a young, innocent son. And that was said in all the propaganda at the time. And second was, well, what are you fighting for anymore? We've conceded the main cause of the war. We've conceded Magna Carta. And although there were two big battles still to be fought, the Battle of Lincoln against the combined Anglo-French forces, and then the Sea Battle of Sandwich. I think one of the extraordinary things about the Battle of Lincoln, which is a decisive battle in May 1217, was that the barons on the side of Louis never fought very hard. They sort of struck a token blow and then all surrendered. Not one of them was

killed. And the reason for that was that they knew in their hearts that what they were fighting for had already been conceded. And that's how Magna Carta comes to survive. At the end of the 12, 15, 17 Civil War, as the final closure, the minority government, in Henry's name, issued a second new version of the charter, this time with the Charter of the Forest, which no doubt you will know about living in the new forest. I celebrated the anniversary of the Charter of the Forest with as much excitement as I celebrated that of Magna Carta.

So while I've got you, one, recently a distinguished former Supreme Court justice came onto this podcast and was very rude about Magna Carta. Is that my friend Jonathan Sumption? I think so. Ah, right. Just briefly, Magna Carta, irrelevant document of its time with no enduring historical importance, or gigantic touchstone of all modern political liberty? More the latter. Perhaps I could start with a slight anecdote, because when I saw Jonathan Sumption's excoriations about Magna Carta,

he actually, in fact, lives the other side of the heath to me, I must say, in a much grander house. But anyway, I thought what he said was partly true, but partly very misconceived. So I cycled one Saturday morning to his house with a copy of my new book on Magna Carta and put it through the letterbox. And then I cycled away along the wall of Greenwich Park

and there was this great shout, Stop! Stop! stop stop so I actually thought probably my last hour had come because you know presumably judges of the Supreme Court have all got all these kinds of protection and probably they probably thought I put a bomb or something through the door but actually it was Jonathan Sumption himself chasing after me so that we could go back to his house and have a discussion about it so what did i say which is now i come to the answer of your mind you of course if i had been shot it would have all been hushed up wouldn't it my body would have been found floating down the thames a few days later mystery death of london academic i mean assumption doesn't make mistakes no so i didn't

actually persuade in my point of view what did i I say? I mean, his line is basically that Magna Carta is an elitist document concerned with the rights and privileges of a small group of barons, has nothing to do to the rights and liberties of all the rest of us. So, you know, although he might be in favour of human rights, why on earth cloak the struggle for those today in a 800-year-old document which had nothing really to do with the rights and liberties of most people. That's true and it's not true. It's true in the sense that Mac MacArthur was indeed only granted to people who were free and of course that excluded a large proportion of the unfree peasant population. But on the other hand to say that it's just about a small elite is quite wrong.

There are chapters on London, it's the knightly class, free tenants are protected in many of the chapters. And don't forget, free tenants would include many of peasant stock because lots and lots of peasants were not unfree. So, you know, there are many, many free peasants. So actually Magna Carta also reached out to the church, towns, knights, free tenants, very broad sections of society. Their interests are catered for in Magna Carta. And it does assert a fundamental principle that the ruler was subject to the law. So, I mean, I think to neglect that side of it is just wrong, if I may say so. I think the other important thing with Magna Carta, which again overshadows the reign of Henry III, which is that it's sometimes described in the 13th century as, remember being on the same panel as David Starkey, and he's saying, well, Magna Carta in the 13th century was just guff. It, you know, asserted all these high principles, but had very little practical effect. I think that's absolutely wrong. And two things which came out of the intense study of Magna Carta for the anniversary, partly it was part of the Magna Carta project, were first of all

that Magna Carta was incredibly well known. I mean, it was studied again and again and again. The various versions were compared and contrasted. It was copied again and again with tables of contents, descriptions of the individual clauses. People really had taken it to their hearts. They knew it. It wasn't just a vague symbol. And secondly, I mean, which brings on to Henry III, Henry III's kingship was totally different from King John's. And I think the most striking indication of that is if you compare something called the fine rolls.

Now, the fine rolls are rolls prepared by the royal chancery, which record all the offers of money to the king for concessions and favours and under John the amount if you totaled it up offered any one year was often well over £20,000 and that reflected the way John was charging people to recover property he'd seized by acts of will, offers to recover his benevolence and favour to escape his rancour. Over £20,000. Under Henry III, the sum is very rarely more than £5,000. And that just reflects the absence of that kind of arbitrary conduct of the king. And the cause of that was the letter and spirit of Magna Carta. It was also Henry's personality, because Henry's personality was in some ways very suited to post-Magna Carta kingship.

Let's talk about kingship and let's keep the theme of Magna Carta going. Let's just get away from biography for one minute because it strikes me that the emergence of Parliament under Henry III, it seems awfully coincidental that it follows just a few decades on from the issue and reissue of Magna Carta and is to do exactly with money, is it not? So can we talk about the debate during Henry's long reign over where the focus of power should lie within the state? And is that different? Or was Henry I and William II and Henry II having these arguments as well? No, they weren't. That's why Henry is a king in a new age. He's the first king to confront the restrictions of Magna Carta. He's the first king to confront the power of Parliament.

Parliament by that name first appears in an official document in 1237. The great lever, the source of all Parliament's power down the ages, control over taxation, really first appears in the 1240s. Magna Carta and Parliament are intimately linked because what Magna Carta did was to stop up traditional sources of revenue and thus made the King dependent on general taxation. And that's where Magna Carta kicked in again because the Charter said you could only impose general taxation if you get the consent of the kingdom which comes to mean the consent of parliament so previous kings hadn't needed taxation on that scale because of all these traditional sources of revenue which then magna carta stops up but also and this was a longer term factor the great landed base which

had come with the conquest well it had been there before the conquest, but it was hugely increased by the conquest. So kings could basically live off their land. That had all been given away in the course of the 12th century by the 12th century kings in return, in order to give patronage to religious houses, to great nobles and so on. So the landed base of English monarchy had been undermined

and combined with Magna Carta, great nobles and so on. So the landed base of English monarchy had been undermined. And combined with Magna Carta, that meant that a new source of royal finance had to be found. And the only source was taxation, general taxation paid by everybody in the realm granted by Parliament. I mean, that's brilliant. Problem is, I agree with the last person I've talked to. So I've gone from being a massive Magna Carta sceptic to now big pro-Magna Carta guy. Okay, so let's go back to the biography slightly. We got the battles at Lincoln and Sandwich, fascinating. Briefly, William the Marshal, does he loom large or is that biography commissioned by his son Eclipse the reality of his role? I think he looms extremely large. I mean, I think if he had not supported the

continuation of the monarchy, of the Henrican monarchy, if he hadn not supported the continuation of the monarchy, of the Henrician monarchy, if he hadn't supported the young king after John's death, a bit like Churchill in 1940, if he'd gone over to Louis at that stage, I think the Angevin dynasty would have come to an end and Louis probably would have in the end become king of England. And the European consequences of that calculable of England and you know the European consequences

of that calculable in the England and France coming under the same dynasty in 1216 so I think that the marshal's decision partly for reasons I think of principle I mean I don't think the biography is wrong in celebrating the virtues of chivalry prowess loyalty and so on I think the marshal had a genuine sense of loyalty to the dynasty, loyalty to the young king. There are also, though, purely practical reasons. I mean, it's an amazing description of discussion in the life at the very beginning of the reign

of whether he should indeed take on the duty of being regent. And some of his entourage look at this entirely in materialistic terms. And one group say, do take it on, jobs for the boys. The other group say, for heaven's sake, don't. The young king's got no money. You'll have to pay everybody. So in the end, the marshal does take it on, possibly thinking if he wins, he will have great power.

But also I think he makes this speech in the life, which I don't think is made up, saying, you know, I will protect the young king, whatever happens, if necessary I will carry him on my shoulders to Ireland. So it's a mixture of motives. I think equally crucial was the role of the Papal Legate who made, without any ability to consult the Pope, Papal Legate Gwala, who made an extraordinary courageous decision to accept Magna Carta, because after all, the Pope had quashed it. So, you know, that complete change of papal policy towards the Great Charter was of very great importance. Did it help that they took

out some of the more revolutionary bits? Oh, I'm sure it did. I mean, I'd love to see the letter in which Guala explained it all to the Pope. It doesn't survive. But I'm sure he said, look, don't worry. The executive committee is out. Yeah, exactly. The security clause, the 25 barons forcing the king to keep the charter, that's all gone out. So I'm sure Guala made a lot of the fact that the most objectionable parts of the charter had been dispensed with.

Well, now, David, you've trapped me between my extreme love for William the Marshal and also my oft-lamented fascination with an Anglo-French state that could stretch from the shores of northern Lancashire and Cumbria to the warm waters of Nice. I wish that had happened too so now I don't really know who I wanted to win that. No well I suppose it could have happened in the 15th century too as a result of a hundred years war. What a much better king, sorry to put this in, Henry III was, who was a rex pacificus and gave England all that time of peace and very little foreign war compared to Edward III and Henry V, who, you know, untold suffering to so many people in France

as a result of a hundred years war. But I realise that you can take a different view. Well, I wonder though if it's just our childhoods where we still had this Our Island Story fascination with the warrior lords. So Edward III, Henry V, Edward IV. Were we obsessed by this? And I wonder if new generations will just call time on them.

Who today holds the candle up for Louis XIV? I mean, the man was an idiot. And I wonder if times are changing. I hold very mixed feelings about this. I mean, I'm personally a pacifist, so I have great sympathy with Henry III being a rex pacificus, although he wasn't consistent in that. But I do think we need to look at history on its own terms. And the fact of the matter was that, of course, in their own day, great warrior kings like Edward III, Henry V. Well, we could talk about Prince Edward in a second, yeah.

Yeah, they were all celebrated. And I think you could be a different type of king. I mean, Henry was widely respected for his piety, for his affability, his generosity, although far too generous. So, you know, you could be a king in a different image. And, of course, Henry's patron saint, Edward the Confessor, was a king in a different image. And, of course, Henry's patron saint, Edward the Confessor, was a king in a very different image.

He was likewise a rex pacificus, a good and peaceful king. But on the other hand, you know, we can't ignore the fact that in contemporary terms in the Middle Ages and long afterwards, there was the image of the warrior king. And, of course, you know, it's significant, isn't it, that who becomes England's patron saint Henry III wanted did all he could to get Edward the Confessor accepted as England's patron saint but of course he was soon bowled out in the next hundred years by

Saint George a saint who had absolutely no connection with England at all but of course you know whereas the most famous image of Edward the Confessor was him giving a ring to a pilgrim going to the Holy Land, the most famous image of George was of him slaying a dragon and rescuing Fair Maiden in distress. So, you know, for the red-blooded Englishman, there was no contest. No, that's the problem. Let's divide up his rule. Let's talk about the civil disturbances in a second, but let's talk about this Rex Pacificus. Was it controversial at the time? Because he did make some attempts to win back land or engage in

the traditional pastime of English kings, which was to try and conquer bits of France. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. history hits. There are new episodes every week. He was trying to recover the lost empire of his ancestors, you know, Normandy, Anjou, Poitou. Poitou lost in his own reign early in 1224. So Henry did launch two expeditions to try and recover them. And he was completely committed to that at 1230, 1242. I mean, they were both abject failures. Truth was, Henry had absolutely no expertise in the business of war. So in some ways, that was so good, because I think the Hundred Years' War could easily have started in Henry's reign. But, I mean, Henry just was not good at it. And although he wanted the results of successful war, he just didn't have the energy, the ambition and the expertise to attend it.

And so these were very brief expeditions, which, as I say, were abject failures. And in the end, of course, Henry does make a very statesmanlike treaty with the King of France, his contemporary rival, later great friend, Louis IX, Saint Louis, and accepts the loss of the continental possessions in return for being recognised as Duke of Aquitaine and the ruler of Gascony in the Great Treaty of Paris of 1259. Is that the one that their wives basically get together? Treaty of Paris of 1259. Is that the one that their wives basically get together? Yeah, no, I mean, that's another feature of Henry's reign, the revival of queenship. I mean, Henry married Eleanor of Provence in 1236. Her sister had earlier married the King of France, Louis IX, sister Margaret. And Eleanor of Provence played a tremendously important part in the politics of the reign, a greater part, I think, certainly than any queen

since Eleanor Aquitaine in the 12th century. But the Peace of Paris was underpinned by this very close family relationship in which the kings came to love each other, the queens obviously were sisters, and it did create this familial friendship between the two courts which I think made possible both the Treaty of Paris itself they met in Paris in 1254 and wonderful series of celebrations and just found how much they got on and loved each other and that underpinned the Treaty of Paris

in 1259 but also laid the foundations for nearly a quarter of a century of Anglo-French peace. I mean, it's worth comparing that to, you know, any negotiations, the Brexit negotiations, if you like. I mean, it makes a terrific difference. Both sides have this love and trust together. And a classic example of how international relations and the negotiation of peace treaties can be helped by as i've said this very close friendship between the parties involved in negotiations rather than faux belligerence via zoom calls well you might say that yes it'd be so difficult to negotiate by loop or not in person. And what was so interesting about Gilles Paris was that he was founded on personal meetings between Henry and

Eleanor, Louis and Margaret in Paris in December 1254. That was the origin of it. For somebody who doesn't loom very large in this sort of populist geography, he leaves behind an impressive architectural legacy. Now, is that just because he was around for a long time? Did he waste money on these big buildings that seem impressive to successive generations, but actually are unwise to build at the time? How do you think of those? Well, Henry's greatest achievement was to rebuild Westminster Abbey. And I think it was tremendously important for him, but also very important for his reputation. I mean, the origin of that was that he'd adopted the confessor in

the 1230s as his patron saint. Edward the Confessor, last great Anglo-Saxon king of England, died 5th of January 1066, buried in the abbey at Westminster he'd buried. And the monks of Westminster, of course, wanted a saint. And so their great efforts led to the canonisation of Edward the Confessor in 1163. Now actually no king of England had taken much interest in Edward the Confessor after that and Henry III didn't inherit some great intense dynastic affection for the confessor but it all changed in the 1230s when Henry does adopt the confessor as his patron saint, I think because he'd been let down by temporal ministers, he was in a terrible situation just for a few years in the early 1230s,

and the monks of Westminster said, look, you know, put your trust in an eternal minister who will never let you down and will intercede at God's right hand to both help you in this life, give you material success in this life and get you to the next so from the 1230s onwards it was central absolutely central to Henry's life this devotion to the confessor something seen in no other previous king no other king had ever adopted someone as their patron saint in this intense way and so we're coming on to Westminster Abbey now the great building project because Henry then thought

well of course the key thing if you've adopted someone as your patron saint is to prove to the patron saint that you are indeed devoted to him and of course the only way you do that is by gifts and offerings and so Henry thought what more wonderful gift could I give the confessor

and this might seem odd but to pull down the church he himself built at Westminster, now certainly ruinous and out of date, and build a magnificent new church in its place, and then at the centre point of the new church have a new shrine for the confessor, where his body can be translated. And so the whole point of the abbey was to be the most magnificent church in the country if not in the world and to that you know Henry I think is intensely involved in the design of it with a great master mason called Henry Dorens I'll come on to it in a second so I mean Henry's purpose is very very clear it is to build a stunning, stunning church, quite different, quite outshining anything else in the country.

And, of course, she's succeeded absolutely magnificently because if you compare the Abbey, Westminster Abbey, as we have it today, to any other great cathedral going up in England at the same time, Salisbury, for example, I mean, it is stunningly different. And that's particularly the case in its height. So, you know, whereas contemporary English cathedrals are 70, 80 feet high, Westminster Abbey is 104 feet high from the floor to the top of the vault. It's just simply an extraordinary feeling of difference.

If you go to Salisbury and then you go to the Abbey, you can see what Henry III was trying to do. Also, the radiating chapels, the flying buttresses, everything like that was just so new in England. These are wonderful rose windows, the great north front. Now where did it all come from? It all came from France because the master mason, the great architect who Henry worked with, Henry de Rheins, was probably from Reims in France. He may not have been a Frenchman but he certainly worked at reams and all these features came from the great french cathedrals so you know they were so

new to england i think people were awed by this it is true of course that if a french mason had seen westminster abbey he would have said well very nice but small scale because actually the great french cathedrals reach much higher i think there were technical reasons why Henry couldn't do that but I think Henry would then have said oh yes but the Abbey is much more magnificent and that's where the English side of the Abbey comes in because it's decorative splendor was in a very English mode and the use of purbeck marble, the use of intercut moulding sculpture, these little formalized roses which cover it, a whole surface extraordinary things that was simply not seen in the great French Cathedral. So

Henry was saying it's a much more splendid magnificent church than anything you can see in France. And there actually is one other fascinating feature of the abbey's design which actually takes us back to what I think one of the most transformative things done at the abbey in recent years has been to open up what's called the Queen's Galleries and these are great triforium galleries at the whole central stage of the building with their external walls create a huge rooms at the middle level of the church. And very uncommon, they no longer built in the 13th century. Henry wanted them. It just made the church so much grander to have these gallowid triforums. I'm sorry, they'd be now

open to the public in the last four or five years at the Abbey, and that's where all the Abbey's treasures are now housed. Why did Henry want them? It made the church grander but also I'm sure he thought, you see because this is a great national church, that's where all the crowds of paupers and ordinary people can go up to at great services and so at coronations today these great galleries are filled with people and indeed as a little boy I was at the 1953 coronation of the Queen and I remember seeing the people leaning out of these galleries to view the spectacle. So sorry just to come back finally to answer your question the Abbey was a tremendous success for Henry III and broadcast

his kingship very widely because you've got to remember location location location it's at the center of the realm it's at westminster not tucked away in the countryside and so everyone sees this great building going up and it both shows to everyone that the confessor is at the back of henry's kingship but it's also asking everyone to be grateful to henry because henry's also giving the confessor to the kingdom that the confessor is going to be England's national saint so everyone can go there can benefit from the confessor's intercession. Contemporaries actually appreciated what Henry had done when the abbey was consecrated in 1269 the best chronicler of the period someone called

Thomas Wikes probably at the consecration of 1269. And he said it's an incomparable church. It's the greatest church in the world. So, you know, it was a terrific achievement of Henry for which people thanked him. And I think that comes into how, you know, there are different ways in which kingship can work. And Henry's kingship certainly worked like that in that this showed more than anything else that he was a good and pious king. Speaking of Westminster Abbey, you told me long ago that you used to work at Westminster Abbey and you once had to go into the Royal Crypt to check out a leak of gas or something and you saw into royal coffins. land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories

that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I did, yes, perfectly true that my father was Dean of Westminster, which is how this happened. In the 1970s, there was this feeling there was a leak of gas underneath Henry VII's chapel. A small party went down to just check this out, basically,

and it was the vault where the coffins of Queen Anne and Charles II were. And actually, I'd rather wish I hadn't gone. It was not a pleasant experience at all because these coffins were sort of crumbling away and you could see part of Charles II's body so when I think about it I actually feel I just wish I hadn't gone really it's not at all a pleasant memory one curious thing if you looked up at the top of the vault which is all quite low you could see little smudges and someone actually pointed out they were probably the smudges from the candles of Dean Stanley when the vault had last been opened 100 years before.

So that is true. I am pleased to say, on a happier note, that Dean Stanley, this extraordinary dean of the 1870s who explored many of the vaults and opened indeed tombs to have a look at the corpses of medieval monarchs quite wrongly I think he was actually going to open the coffin of Henry III himself and he got taken off the beautiful effigy and he was going to inspect the body but mercifully during the course of the day according to the story his colleagues at Westminster sort of interceded with Queen Victoria, who said she wasn't amused at this plan to open the coffin of her predecessor. And so Stanley was stopped. And so Henry III's coffin has never been opened, I'm pleased to say. I used to wonder about sort of infrared and all kinds of ways of, you know, looking into it. But then I wrote a very learned article based on primary sources

showing what was in Henry's coffin. So I'm slightly loath to have it opened anyway now or inspected in case I'm proved wrong. I've taken too much of your time, but I must ask about the Baron's War because we talk about Henry being very peaceful. There was a nasty civil war during his reign. I've given a very positive view of Henry, which I think is right. He was warm-hearted, open-handed, pacific. He was deeply

pious. He was a connoisseur of art and architecture. He craved a comfortable life. He was uxorious, voted to his wife. All those things were good. And all of that chimed in this post-Magnacarter age. He was so different from the hard-driving father. And yet you might say, well, how on earth is there this great revolution in 1258 depriving him of, led by Simon de Montfort, and leads on to a terrible civil war? And I'm afraid that's due to two other characteristics of Henry, which contemporaries dwelt on again and again. The first was his simplicity. I think that's hard to define.

I mean, several reviews of my book have sort of said Henry was thick and so on. I don't think that. I think that that's unfair. He was articulate. He was interested in facts, figures, very interested in the amount of money coming into the exchequer. I think he was more naive. He found it very hard to judge how to get from A to B, what was viable and what was not. And that did plunge him into the most awful scrapes, the worst being this madcap scheme to place his second son on the throne of Sicily. The other characteristic commented on again and again was, I suppose, going back to the warm-hearted. He was warm-hearted, but he was just open-handed to the people he loved and trusted.

I mean, he was just such a soft touch. And the generosity of his gift-giving, combined with his political inability to sort out quarrels, led to terrible factional struggles at court. And I think just one other thing, which is that somehow, I think Henry's piety let him down. Because he was such a good and pious king, feeding hundreds of paupers every day, thousands of paupers on great ecclesiastical festivals, rigorous in his attendance at mass. I think it gave him a purity of conscience, which meant he took his eye off

what was wrong in the realm. And his failure to reform local government and the way local government was run was creating deep antagonism in the counties of England. And so what happened in 1238 was a combination of a court coup in which one group of courtiers, King's foreign relatives, turned on another group and then this deep dissatisfaction with the nature of the rule in the localities and that does lead into a terrible civil war, Henry trying to recover power and so on. I mean in the end Henry wins through and I think one of the most striking contrasts with Reign of His Father, which again takes us back

to the good side of Henry, is that there was no formal attempt to depose Henry, although I'm sure Simon de Montfort would have loved to have done it, as there was to depose King John. I mean, when King John reneged on Magna Carta, the opposition barons deposed him.

It's important to remember that. And then they offered the throne to Louis, the eldest son of the King of France. There's no formal effort to depose Henry III. And I think that's because Simon de Montfort gauged that it just wasn't a starter. I mean, people might shake their heads about some of the things Henry did, People might shake their heads about some of the things Henry did, but everyone regarded him as a good and pious man, totally different from King John. That's why Henry survived and lived to die in his bed, buried in Westminster Abbey under that splendid tomb, and lived to see the consecration of what I think is still the greatest church in the realm. Did he survive partly because of his warlike son who was in the tradition of his great-uncle Richard the Lionheart

and his grandpa Henry II? No, of course, that's also true. I'm writing about this in Volume 2 of the biography at the moment or just re-revising my chapter about it. But, I mean mean the extraordinary contrast between the sluggish military campaigns of Henry III in France in 1230-1242 and also in Wales in the 1240s on the one hand and the vigour with which his son Lord Edward the future Edward I prosecutes the civil war from 1263 onwards,

is just quite extraordinary. And you just know there is a new hand on the tiller. It's not Henry driving this forward. It's his son, Edward, who, I mean, there's no evidence Henry III ever attended a tournament, whereas Edward was a great attender at tournaments as a youth. He was also, to be fair to Edward, though much wiser, he did have a feeling of the need to reform local government, the interest groups and society he needed to conciliate and control.

But on the other hand, what does he do? He builds these great grim castles to consolidate the conquest of Wales and fails, and Henry would have been very upset at this, fails to complete Westminster Abbey. So the great western towers of the Abbey, and not, of course, Henry III's, they were built in the 18th century. It's funny, the old Plantagenets, aren't they?

I mean, talk about skipper generation. You go from the extremes of Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Richard, I mean, it's a yo-yo. I can't keep up with it. It's exhausting. Henry's difficult to categorise. At least he wasn't nearly as bad as Edward II, who I think must qualify as one of the worst kings to sit on the English throne. And of course, the interesting contrast there in that two things. First of all, Edward II had no reputation for piety. He couldn't get up in the morning to hear Mass. In that sense, he's totally different from Henry.

He was also far more vindictive. I mean, Henry was basically easygoing. He did forgive Montfort again and again in the 1250s, and it's only right at the end that things change. I think Edward II always tried me as a thoroughly unpleasant character. I've got a warm, warm affection for Henry III, and when I think of him doing things I would have counselled against, it's rather in the spirit of, you know,

that of an old and dear friend who, against all your advice, is insisting on doing something you think is wrong-headed. I'm glad you've reached that level of intimacy with Henry the Long Dead. I do think you can get closer to Henry III than probably any other medieval monarch, and that is due to an absolute unique source, which are these letters of the king recorded on the rolls of the Chancery. The Chancery is the office responsible for writing and sealing all the king's letters. I mean, there's thousands and thousands of letters, probably actually millions of letters of Henry.

I mean, many of them are bog-standard administrative, but others are deeply personal letters about his piety, his building works, his relationships with his queen, with his nobles and family. Deeply personal letters. Those roles survive very patchily under King John and then they don't exist at all for the 12th century kings. And then for the kings of the later Middle Ages, they cease to record their personal letters. They become very, very bureaucratic, administrative records. So it's just this golden age in the mid-13th century,

the reign of Henry III, when these letters recorded on the chancery rolls really do take you very, very close to the king. I think that's why, on a day-to-day basis, certainly, I couldn't feel more intimate knowledge of Henry than any other medieval monarch, though doubtless my friends and colleagues who've written about other medieval kings would disagree. Wonderful. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much, Dan. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts, and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, and basically boosts up the chart,

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