Free The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain by Derek Wilson

receiving lands and offices from the king. In 1241 Boniface of Savoy, another of Eleanor’s uncles, was appointed to the important position of Archbishop ofCanterbury (though he was not confirmed in office by the pope until 1243).
    1242–52
    Still determined to recover his family’s possessions on the continent, Henry led an expedition to Poitou in the spring of 1242. His army was too small for the task, and he was seriously short of money to equip his soldiers or to buy mercenaries. The result of this rash enterprise was a humiliating and costly failure, and the king also lost the respect of seasoned campaigners, such as Richard of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort. Simon was heard to blurt out that Henry was so incompetent that his subjects ought to lock him away. It was October 1243 before the king was able to renew his truce with Louis and return to England. As for his brother Richard, Henry bought him off with large gifts, the weak response he frequently made to win the support of potential opponents.
    In 1244 Henry, needing more taxes, summoned a parliament. The magnates refused to give him any money unless he appointed a justiciar and a chancellor to exercise some control over royal policy and finances, but Henry refused this restriction of the royal power. The birth of a second son, Edmund, softened the attitude of the barons, and a compromise was worked out and a modest financial grant agreed. To augment this grant Henry imposed a tax on the Jews (always an easy target). What particularly galled him was that, while he found it difficult to extract money from hisown subjects, the pope made frequent financial demands on the clergy, which they met. Henry was not the only one who resented money being drained out of the country in this way. The papal nuncio (representative) went in fear of his life and appealed to the king: ‘For the love of God and the reverence of my lord the pope, grant me a safe conduct.’ Henry retorted: ‘May the devil give you a safe conduct to hell and all through it.’ At a great council in 1246 king and magnates drafted a protest to Rome about these exactions and refused to allow the English church to pay, but the papacy held all the European churches in a stranglehold and, as Bishop Grosseteste of Lincoln pointed out, Henry’s clergy had no choice but to pay.
    Henry launched an expedition against Dafydd of Wales, but the Welsh refused direct engagement. For months Henry’s troops, underemployed and underpaid, carried out savage raids throughout north Wales, impoverishing the country and creating a famine in the land. Eventually the death of Dafydd without an heir enabled Henry to establish his overlordship. This was another costly and unnecessary military expedition.
    Later in the year Henry staged a spectacular ceremony that was both a genuine expression of piety and a bid for popularity. He had acquired from the Holy Land a phial supposedly containing some of the blood of Christ. He went personally to St Paul’s Cathedral to receive the relic, having spent the previous night in a vigil and a bread-and-water fast. Determined to gain maximum publicity, he orderedMatthew Paris to record the event in detail, which the chronicler duly did:
The king then gave orders that all the priests of London should assemble with due order and reverence at St Paul’s … dressed as for a festival, in their surplices and hoods, attended by their clerks, becomingly clad, and with their symbols, crosses and tapers lighted. Thither the king also went and, receiving the vessel containing the aforesaid treasure with the greatest honour, reverence and awe, he carried it above his head publicly, going on foot, and wearing an humble dress, consisting of a poor cloak without a hood, and … proceeded without stopping to the church of Westminster. 1
    If Henry hoped that such displays would incline the magnates to support his policies he was to be disappointed. Further parliaments in 1248 declined to provide money