Essays in Idleness

Henry III is perhaps my favourite monarch from Canadian pre-history, speaking only of the Normans, and skipping over the Anglo-Saxons of the pre-Conquest in England. (Like them, I find Vikings distasteful.) These Normans did not tend to be saints, but until Henry Tudor they were not stinking absolutists either. Henry III is a model. Acceding to the throne at the age of nine (in 1216), a Plantagenet, and living to 1272, he had ample leisure to make his heroic mark within the XIIIth century — my preferred place to live, or at least hang out.

At his birth, the first Barons’ War was fuming, and a form of Crusade was launched against them. The French were also, as usual, revolting, and in order to raise the money to put them down, King Henry’s protectors, and later the monarch himself, agreed to be circumscribed by the terms of successive recensions of the Magna Carta. This was in the long view of things, perhaps acceptable — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton later pointed out. But what to do with all that money, once the French were put in their place?

This is where I think of Henry III Plantagenet as a model for “Engelond” and the world. He did not waste his fortune on public welfare and relief, or on the numerous gentle men and women who were breeding under conditions of peace. He invested, instead, in building of great cathedrals and abbeys, and in the glorious creations of Gothic art — in the illuminations, wall and panel paintings, sculpture and woodcarvings, metalwork, ivories, tiles, embroidery, stained glass. By this means, ignoring dull materialism in its ruder forms, he contributed to making England worth having.

It is the same when we review the other productions of history. “The peeple” might be starving, or knocked about in wars; there might be terrible and obscene injustices emerging in every place. But note, they are all dead now, and we have these wonderful works of art (if the Calvinoids or Muzzies haven’t yet destroyed them). These works testify to the noble values that command us still. Who cares if they put the Marxists, and other humourless scolds, in a bad mood?

For then came Henry’s son, the great King Edward (“Longshanks,” and “Hammer of the Scots”) to finish them off.

I continue to be loyal to the Plantagenets.