Stephen Church

"We cannot know what impact the loss of his mother may have had on the young Henry. Modern historians have been critical of her actions, seeing them in terms of ‘abandonment’, but the medieval mindset was not the same as ours, and it is unwise to ascribe modern sensibilities to our medieval forebears, especially when it was perfectly normal for them to be brought up outside the nuclear family and within a broader familial network, which might include cousins and aunts and uncles living in far-flung places."

"The greatest problem that Henry faced was that, after a long minority, his subjects had become used to a king who did not rule."

"Henry might not be King Louis’s equal in matters of war, but he would be in matters of style (the confusion of style with substance is a recurring theme in Henry’s life)."

"We might like to think of Henry III as a gentle and pious king (an image he wanted us to see), but many of those who suffered under the rule of his local officials had a different perspective on their monarch."

"Henry’s major problem was that the local communities of England rather liked the idea that the ruler needed their consent if he were to rule legitimately. It was no longer enough that Henry was God’s anointed; the reforms that had followed in the wake of the Provisions of Oxford had created a widespread expectation that consent could and should be a political force in national politics. Simon and his baronial colleagues had not acted alone in their reforms, but had tapped into the grievances of the county communities of thirteenth-century England. Indeed, it was these local grievances that gave the reformers their political weight."

"In thirteenth-century Europe, battles were rare, in part because they occurred only when both sides felt certain that they had the decisive advantage (it was relatively straightforward to avoid battle when necessary) and in part because the quickest way to win a battle was to kill or capture the opposition commander; unlike their modern counterparts, medieval war leaders led from the front and, as a result, were subject to more than their fair share of attention. A leader had to be certain of success if he were to engage the enemy in a battle."

"In the September Parliament, Henry made the announcement that the lands of Simon and his supporters were forfeit, and that the main beneficiaries were to be members of the royal family. In this act we are once again reminded that many thirteenth-century men and women had a tenuous grasp of the ethics of rulership, despite their repeated public pronouncements to the contrary: the kingdom was put there by God in order that they might predate on it."

"Most contemporaries would have argued that it was a king’s job to put in peril his soul for the good of his Church and of his people. But Henry was too self-obsessed to do that, too determined to live a life of a confessor saint and thereby join the mystical body of Christ in heaven and so be revered by the faithful in this world. In an age when the cult of royal saints was in the ascendancy, Henry’s ambition is understandable, but it was hardly justifiable and it was certainly not heroic."