Abstract

Between 1234 and 1258 King Henry III, having emerged from the tutelage of ministers inherited from his father, controlled the government of England himself. Looking at this period of personal rule, it would be easy to gain the impression that Henry's kingship, in its theory, and also to some extent its practice, challenged the position of the magnates. M. T. Clanchy, for example, in a justly famous article has suggested that in the 1240s and 1250s Henry III evolved a theory of royal absolutism, a theory which had threatening implications for the magnates. He has also stressed the extent to which Henry was “the initiator both of the methods and of the theory” behind Edward I's quo warranto campaign, which questioned the liberties possessed by the magnates in the field of local government. As for Henry's court, the impression has been given by R. F. Treharne that few English barons were present there, and that the king was largely surrounded by officials and foreign relatives — the latter being his wife's Savoyard uncles and his own Poitevin half-brothers of the house of Lusignan. G. W. S. Barrow has written that Henry “appeared to be excluding the barons as a class from membership of his royal council.” The question whether Henry, like his father John, was pressing magnates to pay their debts has never been investigated; but Matthew Paris's picture of the king as a “vigilant and indefatigable searcher after money” might indicate that the revolution of 1258, like that of 1215, was a “rebellion of the king's debtors.”