Henry III

Henry III came to the throne in October 1216 at the age of nine, in the midst of a civil war that had seen rebel barons invite Prince Louis of France to take the English crown. The elder son of King John and Isabella of Angouleme, he was crowned hastily at Gloucester while the regent William Marshal rallied royalist forces. The reissue of Magna Carta in 1216 and 1217, together with victories at Lincoln and Sandwich, ended the war and secured the boy king's position.

His marriage in 1236 to Eleanor of Provence drew England into a remarkable web of continental connections: Eleanor's sister Margaret was queen of Louis IX of France, and another sister, Sanchia, later married Henry's brother Richard of Cornwall. The arrival of the queen's Savoyard kinsmen and of Henry's Lusignan half-brothers at court, however, fed baronial resentment of foreign influence and royal patronage.

Henry's continental ambitions largely failed. An attempt to recover Poitou collapsed at Taillebourg in 1242, and his acceptance of a papal offer of the Sicilian crown for his second son Edmund saddled the crown with unpayable debts. By the Treaty of Paris in 1259 he formally renounced Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou to Louis IX, retaining Gascony as a vassal of the French crown. At home, discontent produced the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, which placed government under baronial supervision. The resulting conflict, the Second Barons' War, was led by Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who had married Henry's sister Eleanor. Captured at Lewes in 1264, Henry was reduced to a figurehead until his son Edward destroyed Montfort's army at Evesham in 1265.

The king's deepest commitments were religious and artistic. Devoted to the cult of Edward the Confessor, he rebuilt Westminster Abbey in the new Gothic style at enormous expense, creating a shrine and a royal mausoleum. He died in November 1272 after a reign of fifty-six years, the longest of any English monarch to that date, and was buried in the abbey he had remade. His son succeeded him as Edward I.