Henry III: Reform, Rebellion and Civil War 1258-1272
David Carpenter
Yale University Press, £25, 576 pages
Henry III (1207-1272) was, at 56 years, England’s longest reigning Catholic monarch, and (after Edward the Confessor) its most devout. His tenure bequeathed us Westminster Abbey as we know it, parliament in a recognisable form and the beginnings of the use of English as an official language.
Yet, Henry has ended up as England’s “almost forgotten King”. The 900th anniversaries of Henry’s renewal of Westminster Abbey (1969) and death (1972) passed unremarked. Being neither a “bad” king like his father John nor a “great” one, like his son Edward, Henry didn’t enter the canon of popular entertainment. John got a Shakespeare history play and Edward a Netflix series (The Outlaw King, 2018). Henry gets this two-volume biography.
