Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule, 1207–1258 by David Carpenter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule, 1207–1258 by David Carpenter Linda E. Mitchell Henry III: The Rise to Power and Personal Rule, 1207–1258. By David Carpenter. [Yale Monarchs Series.] (New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2020. Pp. 800. $23.00 paperback. ISBN: 9780300259193.) David Carpenter has devoted his life’s work to King Henry III (r. 1216–1272), eldest son of King John and Isabelle of Angoulême. This book—the first volume of a two-volume biography—covers Henry from his birth to the year of what Carpenter calls “The Revolution of 1258” (also known as the Second Barons’ War). Carpenter’s earlier book, The Minority of Henry III (1990), covered the time between 1216 and 1228 in 400 densely packed pages. A collection of essays, The Reign of Henry III, was published in 1996. Thus the scholarly community has had to wait thirty years for Carpenter to address in detail this unusual king, whose fifty-six-year reign spanned more than half the thirteenth century. The second volume, covering 1258 to 1272, is presumably forthcoming. I use the word “detail” deliberately, because Carpenter’s work—both the book on the minority and the present volume that clocks in at over 750 pages—is a granular study of the grainiest variety. It is impossible to describe in a review of this length the sheer quantity of detail Carpenter provides. One reason for this is his own obsession with the reign. Another reason is Henry III himself, who oversaw the enormous expansion of the English chancery in the thirteenth century and the consequent survival of a vastly larger body of public documents than in previous reigns. Even as I am grateful for Carpenter’s tracking of every royal activity for every month of Henry’s reign after he assumed independent control in 1225, I was weighed down by it. Carpenter decided to present a narrative string of facts, peppered with the opinions and gossip of medieval chroniclers, especially Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris—themselves highly influential historians of their era—that offers mountains of detail but not much in the way of analytical discernment. This could be considered traditional history at its best, but perhaps also at its most traditional. For readers of this journal, Henry III is important because of his patronage of Westminster Abbey, his notable piety, and his embrace of Edward the Confessor as his and his family’s personal saint. Henry III was, indeed, a genuinely pious man, one whose faith was never brought into question, even as his judgement frequently was. Carpenter acknowledges Henry’s devotion to the Church, featured in a chapter on its own, “The Piety of Henry III,” while at the same time subtly denigrating it by contrasting the king’s lack of interest in martial activities with his enthusiasm for church beautification, almsgiving, and generosity to mendicant friars of all kinds. In making this contrast, Carpenter draws from similar criticisms voiced by chroniclers like Matthew Paris. Carpenter’s own indecision about Henry (was he a good king or a bad king?) is particularly in evidence when he juxtaposes the political crises Henry did a poor job of managing with the king’s interest in domestic decorative arts, especially after his marriage to Eleanor of Provence and the quick inflation of his family. Carpenter [End Page 806] is as unimpressed with Henry’s homebody-ness as his monastic chroniclers were and he spends little time on the possible reasons for the king’s obsession with supporting and sustaining his extended family. Carpenter adopts the standard masculine tropes of martial success and vigorous physical activity as legitimate assessments of a monarch, thus refusing to question the conclusions of men whose lives were spent in cloisters and far away from contact with women and families. In this day and age, it might be useful to raise an eyebrow to such presentations. Henry’s own growing dependence on his wife, a very intelligent and opinionated woman who was twelve at the time of their marriage—he was twenty-eight—was, as usual, added to the list of the king’s sins of “simplicity” and “immaturity” (read...