The foreignness of the Poitevins was compounded by their greed. They came to the court to receive annual stipends. They were eager for lands and for money, but these could only be granted at the expense of the native lords. In the spring of 1233 these magnates let it be known that they would refuse to attend the king’s council if ‘the aliens’ were present; the king’s representative replied that he had every right to choose foreign counsellors and that he would find the force necessary to quell this baronial mutiny. In June 1233 the lords were summoned to the king’s presence in Oxford; they refused to obey. They also delivered a message to the effect that they would throw Henry and the foreigners out of the country before electing a new king. The barons were declared contumacious; they were exiles and outlaws, their lands nominally granted to the Poitevin courtiers.
In this lay a cause for war. The barons went on the offensive, and within six months the king’s forces were defeated. The lands and properties of ‘aliens’ were despoiled. The bishops of the land enforced a truce, in which the king effectively surrendered. The rebel lords were pardoned, and certain of the Poitevins were banished from court. Yet Henry could not separate himself from his instinctive partiality for his extended family of Frenchmen. He was himself half-French, the son of Isabella of Angoulême.
His marriage to Eleanor of Provence in 1236 only compounded the problem. According to Matthew Paris, ‘he took a stranger to wife without the advice of his own friends and natural subjects’. The twelve-year-old girl had brought in her entourage her uncle, William of Savoy. He was half-brother to the king himself, sharing a mother in Isabella. He knew that Henry was impressionable and pliable. He had come to stay. The Savoyards were soon everywhere. Peter of Savoy was given the territory in Yorkshire known as the honour of Richmond. It was he who built the Savoy Palace between the Strand and the Thames, now the site of the Savoy hotel. Boniface of Savoy was granted the archbishopric of Canterbury. Henry had not learned the simple lesson. He believed that the country was his alone. Why should he not distribute it to half-brothers or second cousins or great-nephews if he so wished? He was king.
The opposition to Henry, over succeeding years, took various forms and the expressions of grievance were variously couched. The Poitevins and Savoyards were still too much favoured. The queen was playing too dominant a role. The king was being given ill, or indifferent, advice. He was irresolute and inconstant in policy. He was too much in thrall to the pope. When one of his English barons remonstrated with him for ignoring the clauses of the Magna Carta he is said to have replied, ‘Why should I observe this charter, which is neglected by all my grandees, both prelates and nobility?’ The answer came, that he ought as king to set an example. The general impression is of weak or bad government on a sufficiently large scale to merit some intervention.
In 1244 he demanded a large sum from parliament. In return the lords insisted that they be given authority to elect the justiciar and the chancellor, thus taking command of the law and the exchequer. The king agreed only to renew his vow to accept the provisions of the Magna Carta. Four years later, when he asked parliament to grant him more money, the lords refused. They told him the revenue was wasted on wax candles and on useless processions; they also informed him that the food and drink he consumed, even the clothes he wore, were snatched from their lawful owners. Five years later Henry again demanded money, on the ground that he was about to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. No one really believed him. Once more he only exacted the sum by a solemn vow to obey the precepts of the Magna Carta. Once more he reneged on his promises. We see here the unsettled reign of the first king of England struggling in the restraints of law.
Then there came what was called at the time ‘a new and sudden change’. On 7 April 1258 a parliament was called, since the king again needed money. He had promised the pope the vast sum of 135,541 marks, in return for his son Edmund being installed as king of Sicily; the Sicilian adventure was a fiasco, but the debt remained.
The king’s demands were all the more onerous because this was a time of famine. The harvest of 1257 had failed, and by the spring of the following year the price of wheat had increased two and a half times. We may survey the activities of kings and lords, but another life sometimes escapes observation: the life of the wretched. Matthew Paris reports, in this year of dearth, ‘an innumerable multitude of poor people, swollen and rotting, lying by fives and sixes in pigsties, on dunghills, and in the dirt of the streets’. The resources of the country were confined to relatively few people. Approximately 60 per cent of the agricultural population was deemed to be too poor to pay taxes. They were not on anyone’s list to be saved or protected. No ‘state’ was in place to succour them, and so they went to the wall. The king was in any case only concerned with his own financial problems.
The barons of England were not inclined to honour his debts. At the end of April 1258, after much fruitless debate, a party of barons made their way to the court at Westminster. They deliberately put their swords beside the entrance to the king’s hall before saluting Henry in the expected manner. But he was unnerved by the sight of their weapons. An eyewitness report, placed in the Tewkesbury chronicles, describes the scene. ‘What is this, my lords?’ he asked them. ‘Am I, wretched fellow, your captive?’
Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk, replied for them all. ‘No, my lord, no! But let the wretched and intolerable Poitevins and all aliens flee from your face and ours as from the face of a lion, and there will be glory to God in the heavens and in your land peace to men of good will.’
This affords a glimpse of the colourful and spirited speech of the thirteenth century. Bigod then asked the king to accept ‘our counsels’. Henry, naturally enough, asked what they might entail. The barons had already agreed among themselves on their demands. The king was to be guided and advised by a group of twenty-four councillors, twelve to be chosen by the king and twelve chosen by the barons. If the king had refused these terms, he faced a real prospect of civil war. He knew as much himself, and so after deliberation he accepted the terms offered to him. He must also have been swayed by the fact that the barons agreed to grant him ‘aid’ in his financial embarrassments.
A committee of twenty-four was chosen and, in the summer of 1258, published what amounts to a manifesto on domestic and international affairs. The major proposal was a simple one. The king was to be directed by the advice of a council of fifteen men nominated by the barons, and parliament itself would choose the justiciar, chancellor and treasurer. The king’s acceptance of what became known as the Provisions of Oxford was issued in English as well as in Latin and French, testimony to the manifest identity of the realm. In practice the council was soon ruling the country. It took possession of the great seal. It settled all the matters of state without the king’s presence. If he remonstrated with them, they replied that ‘this is how we wish it’. Henry had become a minor again. This was no longer the government of a king.
That was the reason it did not, and could not, work. How could the power of the country, exercised by one man for thirty-one years, now be dispersed between fifteen people? Quarrels broke out between the barons over the nature and purpose of their control of the king, and they found it difficult to deal with international affairs without the direct intervention of the king with his fellow monarchs. The barons themselves had their own local interests – they were, after all, primarily regional magnates – which were not necessarily compatible with national administration. It was said that they were concerned only with self-aggrandizement.