Monarchy_4of6
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00:00In December 1154, one of the most charismatic of all kings of England began his reign. Henry
00:13II was a star amongst monarchs whose huge personality and keen intelligence would extend
00:20royal power as much by law as by the sword. But, like many stars, Henry was cursed with
00:30a turbulent family whose prides and passions would do much to undermine his extraordinary
00:36achievements. This is the story of King Henry II and his heirs.
00:50INTRO
01:12Henry II was just 21 years old when he inherited the throne of England.
01:19But Henry was only half English.
01:22He spoke French and he was heir to great lands and titles in France.
01:28The young Henry was a product of that hybrid Anglo-French culture
01:33which had ruled in England since the time of the Norman conquest.
01:37He was born here in Anjou,
01:39his father's ancestral lands in the heart of France.
01:43But if his father were French,
01:45his mother was the daughter of the English king, Henry I,
01:49and she made sure that the young Henry was familiar with England as well.
01:54Between the ages of 10 and 14, he lived at Bristol,
01:58where he had an English guardian and an English tutor
02:02who gave him his lifelong love of learning.
02:07He then returned to France, where he accumulated territories year by year,
02:13Normandy, Anjou, and finally Aquitaine,
02:16through his marriage to the beautiful Eleanor.
02:21But England was the greatest prize of all.
02:24Fought over for 20 years by Henry's mother Matilda and his cousin Stephen,
02:29it now fell into Henry's grasp.
02:33Partly because Stephen had no heir,
02:36but above all because the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, the barons,
02:40saw in Henry a man they had to do business with.
02:44But though he was the barons' candidate,
02:47Henry quickly showed them who was master.
02:51It was a time when God and his angels slept,
02:55as the chroniclers lamented, with pardonable exaggeration.
02:59Nowadays, such thuggish disorder
03:02tends to come from those at the bottom of the social pile.
03:06Then it came from the men at the top, known as barons.
03:10The barons seized royal castles
03:13and they built new illegal castles of their own.
03:16And the hard-won unity of England threatened to disintegrate
03:21into a series of baronial statelets,
03:24each with its own castle capital.
03:27Henry, who had a vigorous sense of royal authority,
03:30was determined to stamp on this development.
03:33So royal castles, he decreed, must be returned to the king
03:37and illegal castles should be demolished.
03:45One man, Hugh Mortimer, the Marchal Lord, dared to resist.
03:52Henry took his forces to the Welsh Marches,
03:55the seat of Mortimer's power,
03:57and he laid siege simultaneously to all three of Mortimer's castles,
04:02including this one at Wigmore in Herefordshire.
04:06One by one, Mortimer's castles surrendered,
04:09until finally, on the 7th of July, 1155,
04:13Baron Mortimer himself made a formal submission to the king
04:18in front of a specially summoned assembly
04:21of bishops, earls and barons.
04:24Henry had given an object lesson in the arts of kingship
04:28to his mightiest subjects
04:30and he'd made a spectacularly successful start to his reign.
04:37Henry's vision of royal authority extended beyond England
04:41to the whole of Britain, over which, like his greatest predecessors,
04:46the Anglo-Saxon Edgar and the Norman William the Conqueror,
04:49he saw himself as having imperial authority.
04:53The King of Scots was driven back behind the old frontiers of his kingdom.
04:59In Wales, he made the princes do homage to him,
05:02formally acknowledging him as their superior.
05:06For two decades, England had been weak,
05:09but now the crown was worn by a man
05:11whose personality matched the pretensions of the position.
05:16He overawed and faced down opponents at every turn.
05:21He is a great, indeed the greatest of monarchs,
05:25but he has no superior of whom he stands in awe,
05:28nor subject who may resist him.
05:32His energy and temper were legendary
05:35and his physical presence mesmerising.
05:43His face was one upon which a man might gaze 1,000 times
05:47and still feel drawn to gaze on again.
05:50Henry's charismatic personality gave him the best of both worlds.
05:55He could consult and take advice as an English king was bound to,
05:59but he could always be pretty confident of winning the argument.
06:03And he could win even when he wasn't there in person,
06:07thanks to his innovations in the law,
06:09which became a kind of mirror reflecting and multiplying his royal authority.
06:15The main writing office was known as the Chancery,
06:19and these are typical of the documents that it produced.
06:22They're called writs, that is, standardised royal orders.
06:27The writ itself is written out on the slip of parchment
06:30and then it's authenticated by attaching the great seal.
06:34The seal is deliberately large and impressive
06:37and it carried the king's image to the furthest corners of his dominions.
06:42And it makes an important point about the nature of kingship.
06:46On the front, the king is seated as a lawgiver and judge.
06:52On the reverse, he is mounted and armed as the warrior defender of his people.
06:57The writ is much less showy than the seal,
07:00but its effects were even more far-reaching.
07:03For, in the course of Henry's reign,
07:06writs were developed to deal with all the most common legal problems
07:10of the king's subjects.
07:12They were mass-produced by the Chancery clerks
07:15and they were available for a fee to every freeman.
07:19Previously, the king's justice had depended on the king's actual presence.
07:24Now, with the writ, the seal and the magic of writing,
07:29the king and his justice could be everywhere for everybody.
07:34But Henry's was not the only monarchy in England.
07:38There was another power in the land.
07:41The church was a state within a state.
07:44It was also a super-state,
07:46whose boundaries were even wider than those of Henry's empire.
07:51Once the church had been the nursemaid of monarchy,
07:54now it threatened to become its master.
08:01In the Middle Ages, the power of the church soared over England
08:06and all Western Europe.
08:08Like the European Union today, whose frontiers it shares,
08:12the power of the church reached everywhere,
08:15crossing borders, claiming rights
08:18and dispensing its own justice in its own courts.
08:22But, unlike the European Union,
08:25the church also had its own officials on the ground,
08:28the priests, bishops and archbishops.
08:31And above all, it had its own very visible head,
08:35the pope in Rome.
08:37The pope, as the successor of St Peter,
08:40claimed the religious allegiance of all Catholic Christians,
08:44including kings and emperors.
08:47But the pope was also an elective monarch,
08:51the heir of the Roman emperors,
08:53who often claimed to be the political superior of kings as well.
08:58And kings, however good Christians they were,
09:01rarely took that claim lying down.
09:06No-one was less disposed to lie down than Henry.
09:09He thought he'd found the perfect instrument
09:12to control the church in Thomas Beckett,
09:15whom he appointed Archbishop of Canterbury.
09:19Beckett was a middle-class Londoner
09:21whom Henry had plucked from obscurity
09:23to make Chancellor, Chief Minister and his closest personal friend.
09:28He expected similar loyalty from his new archbishop, in vain.
09:33From the first, Beckett went out of his way
09:36to pick a fight with the king.
09:38He ostentatiously resigned the chancellorship
09:41and he took an extreme and intransigent stance
09:44on any issue, however petty,
09:47which affected the church's claim to absolute independence.
09:51Why the transformation in Beckett,
09:54from the king's dearest friend to his bitterest enemy?
09:58Had he undergone a religious transformation?
10:01Was he just a consummate actor,
10:03throwing himself with zest into a new part?
10:07Was he trying to prove himself to his fellow clergy,
10:10many of whom thought him no better than a royal stooge?
10:15Any and every of these explanations is possible.
10:19What is certain, however, is that Beckett's behaviour
10:22provoked an equal and opposite reaction in the king.
10:26Neither man would give way.
10:29One or the other would have to break or to be broken.
10:37Henry's first ten years on the throne had been a glittering success.
10:42But now he confronted two major challenges.
10:46Who should succeed to Henry's vast empire after his death?
10:51And where did ultimate authority lie?
10:54With the king or with the church and churchmen?
11:00It was the issue of priests who committed crimes
11:03like murder and highway robbery,
11:05which sparked off the final clash with the church.
11:08These thugs in cassocks were tried in church courts
11:12where they received derisory sentences.
11:16After the collapse of one such murder trial,
11:19Henry demanded that the man be handed over to a royal court.
11:23Beckett refused.
11:26Henry met the challenge head on,
11:29and at a meeting of the council held in the royal palace of Clarendon
11:34near Oxford, he tabled a list of what he claimed were the customs of the realm.
11:39The customs left the church jurisdiction over matters of faith,
11:44but disputes about property or the punishment of clergy
11:48who were convicted of crimes like robbery or homicide
11:52were to belong in the future to the king's laws.
11:57Beckett disdained Henry's pseudo-historical arguments.
12:01Instead, as usual, he took the high moral ground,
12:05basing himself on the words in the Bible,
12:08Touch not mine anointed.
12:11But even Beckett yielded before Henry's crude threats of force
12:16and accepted the constitutions.
12:18Soon, however, Beckett repudiated his submission
12:22on the grounds that it had been extorted under duress,
12:26and the dispute between king and archbishop
12:29flared up more fiercely than before,
12:32and this time, in fear of his life, Beckett fled abroad.
12:38But Beckett's flight only focused attention on the issue of the succession.
12:45Henry decided to leave each of his four sons a substantial inheritance.
12:51In 1169, he announced how his dominions would be divided on his death.
12:57His eldest son and principal heir, Henry,
13:00would receive England, Normandy and Anjou.
13:04Richard would be Duke of Aquitaine,
13:07and Geoffrey would receive Brittany.
13:11There was no land as yet for his beloved baby son, John.
13:15Henry had an eye on conquering Ireland for him.
13:20Henry had two reasons for dividing his lands amongst his sons.
13:25The first was to placate the King of France,
13:28whose kingdom was threatened with extinction
13:31by the vastness of Henry's power,
13:33whilst the second was to try to keep the peace amongst his teenage sons,
13:38who, it was already clear, had inherited his own ferocious temper.
13:43But, in practice, the division of his lands
13:46proved to be a disastrous miscalculation.
13:50He had whetted his sons' appetite with the promise of future power,
13:54but he'd given them little or nothing in the present,
13:57and there was also a risk that the irritated princes
14:00and the exiled archbishop might make common cause.
14:05For, from his haven in France, Becket continued to defy Henry
14:09by making ever more grandiose claims to the independence of the Church.
14:15Since it is certain that kings receive their power
14:18from the Church, so you have not the power...
14:20..restored to the Church of Canterbury,
14:22from which you received your promotion and coronation,
14:25the rank and status it held in the time of your predecessors...
14:28..you have not the power to absolve or excommunicate anyone,
14:32nor to drag clerks before secular tribunals.
14:36Henry brushed aside Becket's claims,
14:39but Becket, on the loosened abroad,
14:41was more dangerous, Henry felt, than Becket at home.
14:45So a compromise was patched up,
14:47and Becket was allowed to return to England.
14:52And what a return!
14:54For, at Christmas 1170, word reached Henry
14:57that Becket, who'd learned nothing and forgotten nothing,
15:01was up to all his old tricks.
15:04The archbishop, his enemies insinuated to the king,
15:07was careering round the country with armed knights,
15:10and he was excommunicating bishops,
15:12who were loyal to Henry.
15:14Something snapped, and there resulted
15:16one of those famous Plantagenet rages.
15:19Will no-one rid me of this turbulent priest?
15:22The king exclaimed, or words to that effect.
15:25Now, Henry had said such things before,
15:28and nothing much had happened.
15:30But this time, four royal knights took the king at his word,
15:34and they rode furiously to England and to Canterbury
15:38to bring Becket back.
15:40They went to Canterbury to bring Becket to account,
15:44whatever that might mean.
15:48On the 29th of December, the four knights,
15:51Reginald FitzUrse, William the Tracey, Hugh of Moorville
15:55and Richard Brito, arrived at Canterbury Cathedral.
15:58They accused Becket of treachery against his king.
16:01Becket hotly denied the charges.
16:03The knights withdrew, menacingly, saying they'd be back.
16:08The other clergy begged Becket to flee whilst there was still time,
16:12but he refused, deciding instead to make a final stand.
16:22The knights came back with drawn swords.
16:25It was Reginald FitzUrse who struck the first blow,
16:28taking off the back of Becket's head.
16:33Still denouncing his assailants,
16:35the archbishop fell to the pavement of his cathedral,
16:39and the others piled in.
16:42Moments later, Becket lay dead.
16:47When he heard the news, Henry plunged into an agony of grief,
16:51shutting himself away for three whole days,
16:55so that his friends feared for his health, if not for his life.
16:59Was it personal grief for the death of his one-time friend,
17:03or horror at what had been done in his name?
17:06In either case, the king's response fully matched the enormity of the deed,
17:11for Europe was stunned by the murder of an archbishop in his own cathedral,
17:16on the orders of his own king.
17:19And letters rained upon the pope, even from members of Henry's own family,
17:24demanding that he take action against a sacrilegious king
17:28who was worse than a Nero, or even than a Judas.
17:32And Becket's ghost, growing more powerful year by year,
17:36was to serve as the perfect cover for resistance or rebellion
17:41against the murderer king.
17:46The result was that, as Henry feared,
17:49the problems of the church and the succession came together
17:52and threatened to overwhelm him.
17:54In 1173, a great rebellion started.
17:57It was led by Henry's own elder sons.
18:00Henry decided that it was Becket's memory that was the greater threat.
18:07He would exorcise it with a single grand gesture of self-abasement.
18:18First, Henry fasted.
18:21Then, stripped only to a rough-woolen shirt,
18:25he walked barefoot to Becket's shrine.
18:30Here, in Canterbury Cathedral,
18:33where he prostrated himself before his erstwhile enemy.
18:38Next, he, Henry King of England,
18:42submitted to a public scourging by all of the clergy present.
18:47Bishops, abbots and each of the monks of Canterbury
18:51took it in turn to flog him.
18:54Finally, he lay all night and all day
18:59on the cold stones in front of the shrine.
19:02It was an extraordinary, untypical gesture
19:05by that proud and passionate man.
19:08But the penance and the humiliation, he calculated,
19:12was worth it if it contrived to separate Becket,
19:16the saint as he now was,
19:18from the coalition of Henry's enemies now arrayed against him.
19:22And it did, almost immediately.
19:28The king awoke the following morning
19:30to hear that an invasion of England, planned by the rebels,
19:34had been thwarted.
19:36Henry had indeed stooped to conquer,
19:39for, despite the sound and fury over Becket's martyrdom,
19:43Henry was able to preserve many of his claims over the church,
19:47and subsequent kings of England would reassert and intensify them
19:51until, finally, they assumed that supremacy over the church,
19:55of which Henry had only dreamed.
19:58His furious energy saw off repeated acts of disloyalty
20:02and rebellion by his sons,
20:04in alliance with Henry's most dangerous enemy,
20:08the King of France.
20:10But, finally, in 1189, Henry lost his grip.
20:14He was defeated in battle by Richard and the King of France,
20:18and his health collapsed.
20:22Mortally sick, and already a broken man at the age of only 56,
20:28Henry was carried back in a litter,
20:31here to his castle of Chinon, in his native Anjou, to die.
20:36One of the conditions imposed on him by Richard and the King of France
20:41was that he should pardon the conspirators against him.
20:45When the list was read out,
20:48it included the name of his beloved youngest son, John.
20:53It was the final blow.
20:56Why should I reverence Christ, the dying king cried out
21:00when he was asked to make his final confession?
21:03And why should I honour him who has taken all my honour from me?
21:09Confessed, nevertheless, he did,
21:11and immediately afterwards, on the 6th of July, 1189,
21:17Henry died.
21:21Henry's body was brought for burial to the nearby abbey of Fontevraux,
21:25the traditional burial place of the Counts of Anjou.
21:29Like a wounded animal, he'd gone home to die.
21:32Yet he had been one of England's most successful kings,
21:36able in his prime to enforce his authority on barons,
21:40bishops and even other princes.
21:42For centuries, he had turned his vision of kingship into a reality.
21:47Would his successors be able to sustain it?
21:56Alongside the tomb of Henry II,
21:59here in the abbey of Fontevraux in Anjou,
22:02lies this one of his son and eventual heir, Richard.
22:07Richard ruled the family empire for almost ten years
22:11when he was mortally wounded in a siege here in France.
22:16But during all that time, Richard spent only six months in England.
22:21Instead, he used England merely to bankroll his adventures elsewhere,
22:26above all, on crusade in the Holy Land.
22:30These adventures won Richard a golden reputation
22:34and the name Coeur de Lion, Lionheart.
22:38He would be a hard act to follow,
22:40especially as England had got used to an absentee king,
22:44and especially as his heir was his younger brother, John.
22:49My brother John, Richard Sneered,
22:52is not man enough to conquer a country,
22:55if there is anyone to offer even the feeblest resistance.
23:02So John was no mighty warrior like his father, Henry II,
23:07nor a charismatic leader of men like his brother Richard, Coeur de Lion.
23:12Still worse, there was an unfortunate streak of mistrustfulness,
23:16even paranoia, in his character.
23:19On the other hand, he was unusually interested in the mechanics of government,
23:23which he pursued with an often obsessive interest.
23:29There is no more contrary breed than professional historians.
23:34For John's contemporaries and for most succeeding generations of historians,
23:39John was the very model of a bad king.
23:43But now a new generation of historians has come along
23:46who argue on the contrary that John was a good thing,
23:50or, at any rate, a good administrator.
23:53And, indeed, it's true that his reign sees the start
23:57of the great parchment rolls which record the government's correspondence
24:02and form the essential basis for scholarly history.
24:06But to praise John for being a royal filing clerk
24:10is historians looking after their own with a vengeance.
24:15For John's obsession with record-keeping
24:18was a sign not of strength but of weakness.
24:21He was so keen on documentation
24:24because he was so mistrustful of his subjects,
24:28and his subjects, in turn, distrusted a king who was nitpicking
24:33and always eager to revive an old, outdated royal imposition
24:38and to invent a new one.
24:42The result was tax, tax and more tax,
24:45and what made things worse was the fact that John had the misfortune
24:49to confront the most effective king of France for generations,
24:53Philip Augustus.
24:55By 1204, John had been shorn of a third of his territories,
24:59including his ancestral lands of Normandy, Anjou and Brittany.
25:04For the first time since the Norman conquest,
25:07the King of England was that and little more.
25:10In an attempt to recover his position,
25:13John decided to follow in his father's footsteps
25:16by striking at the power of the church.
25:19But, once again, he had the misfortune to encounter
25:22one of the greatest medieval popes, Innocent III.
25:27The struggle began as a dispute
25:29about the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
25:32but it quickly escalated
25:34as both sides wheeled in their heaviest weapons.
25:38Innocent laid England under an interdict.
25:41This was a kind of clerical general strike
25:44in which the clergy refused to say mass,
25:48marry couples or bury corpses.
25:51In retaliation, John resorted to one of Margaret Thatcher's
25:55favourite weapons against the unions
25:57and confiscated all the property of the church,
26:00which amounted to almost a third of the land in England.
26:04Who would win?
26:06The clerical strikers or the royal strike-breaker?
26:11Pope Innocent, despite his name, was a formidable politician
26:15who turned real weapons as well as spiritual ones
26:19against the King of England.
26:21For he not only excommunicated John, but declared him deposed
26:25and invited Philip Augustus, John's other great enemy,
26:29to launch a crusade and seize the throne of England for himself.
26:35Under threat by his two most dangerous enemies,
26:38John had to buy one off,
26:40and the price he was prepared to pay was astonishing.
26:44It was England itself.
26:47On 15th May 1213,
26:50King John received the Pope's representative at Dover Castle.
26:55At the meeting, John agreed to everything that the Pope demanded,
27:00to do penance for his offences against the church,
27:03to accept the Pope's choice as Archbishop of Canterbury
27:07and to pay compensation for everything that he'd seized from the church.
27:12But John also went much further,
27:15and in a dramatic move, he issued a charter
27:18in which, of his own free will,
27:21he acknowledged the Pope as his overlord
27:24and agreed to pay a large annual cash tribute.
27:29John had handed ultimate authority over the Kingdom of England to the Pope
27:34and had agreed to pay him a yearly fee to lease it back.
27:38John had saved his neck, but at what cost?
27:41John was humiliated at home and abroad as a king and as a man.
27:48There was now only one way for John to re-establish his authority,
27:52to reconquer his lost lands in France.
27:59He raised a great army, but he needed a great deal of cash to pay for it.
28:04The barons were pressed hard and the rest of his subjects rung dry.
28:08John was playing a desperate game for the highest of stakes.
28:13If the dice rolled in his favour and he won a great victory in France,
28:17all would be well.
28:19But once again, his luck failed.
28:28On 27 July 1214, the English and French armies met at Bouvines in Flanders.
28:36At first, the English seemed victorious
28:38and Philip himself was thrown from his horse,
28:41but the French struck back and overwhelmed the English.
28:46Paris rejoiced, but in England, John faced mutiny.
28:50The barons sank their own differences
28:53and presented a united front against the king.
28:57Never again, they decided, would a king be able to behave as John had done
29:02and backed up their demands with the threat of overwhelming force.
29:08The part of honours broker between the king and the barons
29:11was played by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
29:15He professed to be neutral,
29:17but, in fact, he inclined to the barons
29:20and secretly helped them structure their demands.
29:23Finally, the terms were agreed and, on 15 June 1215,
29:29the two sides met in a field near Windsor known as Runnymede.
29:34The barons, who had come fully armed, presented their demands
29:38and King John, reluctantly and already in bad faith,
29:43granted what they wished.
29:47The agreement became known as Magna Carta, the Great Charter,
29:52but, in fact, it was only the most famous and ambitious
29:55of a succession of attempts
29:57stretching back through the coronation oath of Henry I
30:01and the memories of Anglo-Saxon England
30:03to define the rights and duties of king and people.
30:08The original of Magna Carta, sealed by King John himself,
30:12has long since vanished.
30:14After all, the king had no desire to preserve the record
30:18of his own humiliation.
30:20But this, kept in Salisbury, is one of the only four survivors
30:25of the copies that were distributed to each county in 1215.
30:30Nowadays, the fame of Magna Carta rests on clauses like this.
30:36No free man shall be seized or imprisoned
30:40or stripped of his goods or possessions,
30:43save by lawful judgment of his peers or equals
30:47or by the law of the land.
30:50Or this one.
30:52To no one shall we sell or deny or delay justice.
30:58Provisions like these are or have become
31:02what we call basic human rights.
31:05Echoes of them survive in the statute book
31:08and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
31:12But they come a very long way down the document,
31:15at the top of the provisions
31:18that really concern the authors of the document,
31:21the bishops and the barons.
31:24The first clause states that the church in England shall be free.
31:31That is, free from royal interference.
31:35Whilst the second limits the king's rights
31:38to exact death duties or fines from barons
31:42when their lands were handed over to their heirs.
31:46Magna Carta quickly became and remained
31:49a touchstone of liberties in the Middle Ages itself.
31:52It also had very sharp contemporary teeth
31:56because this clause allows the barons to use force
32:01to bring John into line
32:03if he showed any sign of backsliding from Magna Carta.
32:07It was tough stuff and John didn't like it one bit.
32:13It seemed a total defeat,
32:15but John had one last card up his sleeve.
32:18Immediately he appealed to his new overlord, the Pope,
32:22to have it annulled.
32:23Innocent agreed and Magna Carta was promptly declared null and void.
32:30The barons were outraged at the king's faithlessness
32:34and open war broke out.
32:36For the barons, it was no longer a question of restraining John
32:40but of dethroning him.
32:42They even turned to the national enemy
32:44and invited Louis, son of the French king,
32:47to take the English throne.
32:49Louis invaded and by the autumn of 1216
32:53had seized much of the south-east of England,
32:56including London itself.
32:58Would England be divided?
33:00Or would there be the first violent change of dynasty since 1066?
33:07Suddenly, at this point, on the night of 18th October 1216,
33:13John died.
33:19His heir was his son Henry,
33:21but Henry was only nine years old.
33:29The child's cause looked hopeless,
33:31but with John safely out of the way,
33:34the prospect of a French succession lost its attraction
33:38for an important group of barons and bishops.
33:41Instead, they decided that the young Henry
33:44should be brought to Gloucester and crowned as quickly as possible.
33:49On the morning of 28th October 1216,
33:52the impromptu coronation took place.
33:57The boy, who was a grave, handsome, golden-haired child,
34:02was brought to Gloucester Cathedral here.
34:05He wore a specially made set of little royal robes.
34:09First, he took the customary coronation oath.
34:12Then he paid homage to the Pope's representative, the legate.
34:17Finally, and with all the traditional ceremonies,
34:20he was anointed and crowned,
34:23though the crown, in fact, was one of his mother's tiaras,
34:26or hair ornaments.
34:28Bearing in mind the circumstances,
34:30it was inevitable that Henry's coronation
34:33was a bit of a makeshift affair, but it was real nonetheless.
34:37It had imbued him with the magical, mystical authority of kingship,
34:42and he never forgot the fact.
34:44Now it was up to his regents to persuade his country
34:48to accept him as king.
34:52Their first moves were not military, but propagandistic,
34:56for already there was something called public opinion,
34:59and Henry responded to it by issuing a letter in the king's name,
35:03which argued that his youth meant that he'd had no part
35:06in the sins of his father.
35:08We hear that a call arose between our father
35:11and certain nobles of our kingdom.
35:14Whether the justification or not, we do not know.
35:21Next, Henry's regents made a major political concession.
35:25They reissued Magna Carta
35:27with clauses authorising the use of force against the king.
35:31At a stroke, the charter was rescued from oblivion
35:34and the cause of civil war removed,
35:37and Henry universally recognised as king.
35:41For the remainder of his minority,
35:43the spirit of Magna Carta was adhered to,
35:45and the great men of the kingdom had a real say in government.
35:49Magna Carta had saved Henry's crown.
35:52Meanwhile, it remained to be seen
35:54if he would honour the charter when he came of age.
36:02In 1232, Henry III was preparing a coup d'état
36:07that would overthrow the men and measures
36:09that had restrained him for so long.
36:13Though he was 25, it had been difficult to persuade his nobles
36:17that he was no longer a child
36:19and that they should relinquish control.
36:23Now he was determined to be king indeed, as well as king in name,
36:28and he was determined, above all,
36:30to break free from the shackles of Magna Carta.
36:37Henry was also influenced by the revived monarchy of France.
36:42He favoured French courtiers
36:44and his greatest building project was wholly French in style.
36:49This, the Westminster Abbey that we know today,
36:52is essentially the work of Henry,
36:55though its interior is only a pale shadow
36:58of the masterpiece that he created,
37:00which glowed with red and blue and gold.
37:05Work started in 1245.
37:08It cost a fortune, employed hundreds of craftsmen
37:12and lasted for 25 years
37:14in the most ambitious project of church building
37:17that Western Europe had yet seen.
37:20Indeed, it was so ambitious that it almost bankrupted the king
37:24and inflicted severe political damage on him.
37:28But for Henry, it was worth it,
37:30for he was building a monument to the greater glory of God
37:34and to the monarchy.
37:37Westminster Abbey was intended to be the crowning glory
37:42of Henry's vision of kingship.
37:45But it was a vision that was intensely controversial
37:49to some of his barons,
37:51for it seemed as un-English as the architecture of the abbey itself,
37:56for Henry's models of kingship were foreign,
38:00the French monarchy and the papacy,
38:04and his agents were foreign too.
38:07Henry shard power and wealth
38:10onto a close-knit circle of French relatives and favourites.
38:14Inevitably, the English barons resented it
38:18and they were spurred on by Henry's autocratic style of kingship.
38:25They were furious with the king
38:27for his successful reassertion of royal power
38:30and his appointment of his foreign relations to high office,
38:34and they saw the two as being closely connected,
38:37claiming that Henry's foreign officials treacherously whispered to him
38:42that the king was above the law.
38:46The barons were determined to restore the traditional English practice.
38:51They would re-impose Magna Carta
38:54and they would devise a new machinery of government
38:57that would so tie the king's hands
39:00that neither he nor his heirs would ever be able to escape from it again.
39:07The nobles quickly found a leader in Simon de Montfort.
39:11De Montfort was himself a Frenchman.
39:14Like so many of his compatriots, he'd been brought to England by Henry,
39:18showered with favour and given the Oldham of Leicester.
39:22Henry even dared to marry the king's sister without Henry's permission.
39:28This marriage sowed the seeds of distrust between Simon and the king.
39:34Once, when the two men were out hunting together
39:37and had stopped to shelter from a thunderstorm,
39:40Henry is said to have told Simon that, much as he feared the lightning,
39:45he feared Simon more.
39:48The key to Simon's character was his past as a crusader.
39:52Crusaders see the world in simple black and white.
39:56Once, Simon's enemy had been the infidel,
39:59but now it was those who supported Henry's autocratic style of monarchy.
40:05In 1258, de Montfort and six other leading barons
40:09swore an oath of mutual loyalty.
40:12Together, they were more than a match for the king
40:15and they had their own distinct ideas of how England should be run.
40:20The two sides met at Oxford.
40:23The council at Oxford drew up a revolutionary new way of governing the country
40:29that was intended to turn England into a crowned republic
40:34and Henry, despite his high view of kingship, had no choice but to agree.
40:40The provisions of Oxford, as the new constitutional blueprint was known,
40:45looked back to Anglo-Saxon England
40:48with its tradition of a strong national community
40:51and they also looked abroad to Germany and Italy
40:55where new self-governing communes or city-states
40:59like Florence or Venice were appearing.
41:02The result was to leave Henry as king, but king in name only.
41:08Instead, his powers would be exercised by an elected council of 15,
41:13which in turn would answer to parliaments meeting at three set intervals a year.
41:19No other European country had tried such an audacious governmental experiment
41:25and no other king had been subject to such humiliation.
41:31The king was determined to avenge himself.
41:34The only way was force
41:36and in 1264 the two sides confronted each other outside Lewes in East Sussex.
41:47Inspired by de Montfort's leadership and wearing the crusader cross,
41:51his army quickly reduced the king's forces to a broken rabble.
41:57After the battle, Henry took refuge here at Lewes Priory
42:02and here too he was joined by his son Edward
42:05who'd been victorious in his sector of the battle
42:08but had been unable to save the day for his father.
42:11Would the royalists give in or would they try to resume the fight?
42:16To concentrate minds, Simon's troops shot off a volley of burning arrows
42:21which set fire to the roof of the Priory church.
42:30Intimidated and surrounded, Henry decided to surrender.
42:34But Simon's terms were tough.
42:37Henry had to swear once again to submit to the baronial government
42:42of the provisions of Oxford
42:44and to make sure that he kept his word this time
42:47he was compelled to hand over his son Edward
42:51as a hostage for his good behaviour.
42:54The King of England was now a puppet with only the trappings of kingship
42:59as Simon, in the name of defending freedom, ruled both king and kingdom.
43:05Not even John had sunk so low.
43:11Simon was now free to impose his own vision of monarchy on Henry.
43:16The king was reduced to a mere figurehead
43:19whilst all power was exercised by Simon's baronial clique
43:23who claimed to be acting in the name of the whole community of England.
43:29But de Montfort's ideas also appealed far beyond the baronial class
43:34and this led him to broaden dramatically the membership
43:38of what was already becoming known as Parliament.
43:41Hitherto, Parliament had consisted of nobles and bishops
43:45but in 1265, Simon enfranchised new groups.
43:52Simon summoned representatives, small groups of knights from each county
43:58and burgesses or local bigwigs from the more important towns.
44:03Such representatives had been summoned before to consult on taxation
44:08but this was the first time that they'd been invited to discuss
44:12and to decide the great affairs of the realm.
44:16It was a blatant bid for support for Simon's revolution
44:20from the groups immediately below the magnates,
44:23the wider community of the realm.
44:26It was also a milestone in the history of Parliament.
44:32But despite such bold moves, Simon's revolution was to be short-lived.
44:37There was still a strong royalist party
44:40and for all Simon's own high ideals,
44:43his followers proved to be as selfish and as grasping
44:47as the king's fallen favourites.
44:50Just as the tide was turning, the king's son and heir, the Lord Edward,
44:54escaped from captivity and raised an army.
44:58Edward met fellow royalists here at Ludlow Castle.
45:02He made the symbolic promise to uphold Magna Carta
45:06and then marched to meet de Montfort's forces.
45:10The armies met just north of the town of Evesham.
45:13Simon was hoping every minute to be joined by his son
45:17at the head of reinforcements but the reinforcements never arrived
45:21and without them de Montfort was overwhelmed.
45:25De Montfort himself was killed
45:27only 15 months since his great victory at Lewes.
45:34This monument to Simon de Montfort was erected in the grounds
45:38of the former Evesham Abbey in the 1960s
45:42and it's a sign that 700 years after his defeat and death
45:46in the battle fought near here, he's not forgotten.
45:50His contemporaries remembered him too.
45:52Already at the time of his death, he was a folk hero.
45:56Soon there were reports of miracles at his tomb
46:00and he was even compared to that other great scourge of kings,
46:04St Thomas Becket.
46:06But the royalists hated him and, in a grisly revenge,
46:10they dismembered his body as the corpse of a condemned traitor.
46:15It would be less easy, however, to uproot the political ideas
46:19that de Montfort had planted.
46:23But for the moment, the royalists had triumphed
46:26and the authority of the monarchy was restored,
46:29though in practice it would be exercised by the Lord Edward.
46:35But there was one final moment of glory left to the old king.
46:40In 1269, the new Westminster Abbey,
46:44which had cost so much money and political goodwill,
46:48was finally consecrated.
46:50The king himself and his sons
46:53bore the saints' relics to their magnificent new shrine,
46:57which was encrusted with gold mosaic
47:00and inlaid with precious marbles.
47:03The shrine was the work of Italian craftsmen
47:07and it spoke of Roman imperial power and grandeur.
47:12And, despite all the crises of his reign,
47:15Henry's view of his own position remained equally exalted
47:19and he still saw himself
47:21as combining the powers of Pope and Emperor in his own kingdom.
47:26Many of his nobility, of course, led by Simon de Montfort,
47:30had taken the opposite point of view
47:33and they'd come within a whisker of victory.
47:37Which way would the balance swing in the future?