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| Notes for Henry (Spouse 1) | ||||||||||||
| A Plantagenet, King Henry was King of England from 1216 until his death in 1272. Reigned 1216-1272. A minor when he took the throne he did not take the reigns of Government himself until 1234. Baronian discontent simmered, boiling over in 1258 when Henry facing financial disaster attempted to raise large sums from his magnates. Reforms were agreed upon but then renouced by Henry. Simon de Montford lead a rebellion against the King (the Barons Wars) which was defeated after initial success, thereafter Henry ceeded much of his power to his son. Burke say he was born 10 Oct 1206 and married 14 Jan, crowned 1216. HENRY III (1216-72 AD) r175 <Picture>Henry III was the first son of John and Isabella of Angouleme, born in 1207. Age nine when he was crowned, Henry's early reign featured two regents: William the Marshall governed until his death in 1219, and Hugh de Burgh until Henry came to the throne in 1232. His education was provided by Peter des Roche, Bishop of Winchester. He married Eleanor of Provence in 1236, who bore him four sons and two daughters. Henry inherited a troubled kingdom: London and most of the southeast was in the hands of the French Dauphin Louis and the northern regions were under control of rebellious barons - only the midland and southwest were loyal to the boy king. The barons, however, soon sided with Henry (their quarrel was with his father, not him), and the old Marshall expelled the French Dauphin from English soil by 1217. Henry was a cultivated man, but a lousy politician. His court was inundated by Frenchmen and Italians who came at the behest of Eleanor, whose relations were handed important Church and state positions. His father and uncle left him an impoverished kingdom; Henry financed costly, fruitless wars with extortionate taxation. Inept diplomacy and failed war led Henry to sell his hereditary claims to all the Angevin possessions in France, save Gascony (which was held as a fief of the French crown) and Calais. Henry's failures incited hostilities among a group of barons led by his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort. Henry was forced to agree to a wide ranging plan of reforms, the Provisions of Oxford. His later papal absolution from adhering to the Provisions prompted a baronial revolt in 1263, and Henry was summoned to the first Parliament, a gathering of two knights from every shire and county and a forerunner to the modern House of Commons. Parliament insisted that a council be imposed on the king to advise on policy decisions. He was prone to the infamous Plantagenet temper, but could also be sensitive and quite pious - ecclesiastical architecture reached its apex in Henry's reign. The old king, after an extremely long reign of fifty-six years, died in 1272. He found no success in war, but opened up English culture to the cosmopolitanism of the continent. Although viewed as a failure as a politician, his reign defined the English monarchical position until the end of the fifteenth century: kingship limited by law - the repercussions of which influenced the English Civil War in the reign of Charles I , and extended into the nineteenth century queenship of Victoria. | ||||||||||||
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