The author offers a revision of the negative traditional view of Henry III's foreign policy initiatives and alleged adventures. For a reign bracketed by unrest--baronial civil wars at the onset and at the end-- Weiler identifies a leitmotif operative in English diplomacy until 1259, namely the recovery of the lost Angevin territories in northern France. More importantly, however, he forcefully argues the need to place Henry's foreign policy within a broader international context, with a special focus on relations with the empire/German monarchy.
Several factors condition such a reappraisal. Henry inherited the dynamic of past rivalries, namely Plantagenets and Welfs vs. Capetians and Hohenstaufen. Diplomacy with the empire had to recognize certain idiosyncrasies, such as the role of German princes in policy-making, the elective nature of the German monarchy, and the heterogeneity of the empire's constituent kingdoms. Before 1250, personal relations between Henry and Frederick bulked large; after that date, Henry received new opportunities to re-shape his foreign policy vis-à-vis the empire and Europe in general.
The volume is divided into three chronological parts: the legacy of the battle of Bouvines (from Henry's accession in 1216 until Frederick II marries his sister Isabella in 1235--chapters 1 and 2); the "grand expectations" of closer Plantagenet-Hohenstaufen relations (from 1235 until Frederick's death in 1250--chapters 3, 4, and 5); and the final two decades of Henry's reign, wherein he reacted to the decline of the Hohenstaufen with new diplomatic initiatives to enhance his own dynasty's place in European politics (chapters 6, 7, 8).
Within each chapter, Weiler provides subsections that shift focus between different emphases: English, imperial, papal, and, to a lesser extent, Capetian policies. This makes for dense analysis that requires careful reading.
The generally unsuccessful diplomatic initiatives and military campaigns of Henry's early reign as a child, adolescent, and young adult form the theme of the first chapter: the failed reconquest of territories lost by King John to the Capetians, Henry's own loss of Poitou in 1224, and his government's inability to take advantage of Louis IX's minority after 1226. However, Weiler gives his reader little sense of Henry's personal contribution during these years to the policy set by his regents.
Frederick II's policy during this period focused on anything but England and the Plantagenets, and included his desire to achieve coronation as emperor, his relations with Popes Honorius III and Gregory IX, his crusade vow and marriage to the heiress of Jerusalem (Isabella/Yolanda of Brienne), his attempted "pacification" of Lombardy, and the centrality of the Hohenstaufen/Capetian alliance, as solidified in the Treaty of Catania (1223).
More frequent were English royal contacts with the German regency government of Frederick's son Henry (VII), and with prominent German princes such as the archbishop of Cologne, the king of Bohemia, and the dukes of Brabant, Brunswick, and Austria. Nevertheless, negotiations during the mid- and late 1220s failed to secure a bride for the English king among several princely houses, or to marry his sister to Henry (VII). Furthermore, no enhancement of such diplomatic ties could somehow "sidestep" Frederick II's persistent domination of German policy north of the Alps.
Though excommunicated for delaying his departure on crusade, Frederick's successful return from Outremer and the restoration of peace between him and Gregory IX made such dominance in German affairs very clear. As the fortunes of Henry (VII) foundered and led to his deposition and imprisonment by his father, he ceased to be an object of Plantagenet diplomacy. Indeed, the English king's interactions with other German princes gradually tapered off for the remainder of Frederick's life.
Conversely, Frederick's and Gregory's interests increasingly converged in preparations for a new crusade and in the fulfillment of its precondition, namely peace in the West (including Lombardy and the city of Rome). At first, Henry III's desire to regain the lost Plantagenet territories did not figure here, nor could the English king offer the emperor anything useful. In order not to be diplomatically marginalized, Henry was obliged to accept prolongations of truce with Louis IX's government as a necessary, albeit undesirable, postponement to the recovery of his inheritance.
Ironically, it was the dawning possibility of Henry's potential utility, so Weiler argues, that led to the widower emperor's sudden initiative in late 1234 to negotiate a marriage with Henry's sister Isabella. Weiler considers this to have been clever policy triangulation by Frederick: the emperor received a prestigious bride, a substantial dowry, the expectation of English military assistance, and a grateful brother-in-law. He also signaled thereby his conformance to papal desires to secure peaceful relations between the three most important European monarchs in furtherance of the crusade. For Henry, any hopes for positive results from this new amity would rest on shakier foundations.
Weiler aptly characterizes the years 1235-50, the subject of his study's second portion, as a period of "grand expectations." To begin with, political and diplomatic interactions between the two new brothers-in-law grew in frequency and intimacy, centering on the installment payment of Isabella Plantagenet's dowry, crusade preparations, and Italian affairs.
However, Frederick did not intend to jeopardize his traditionally good relations with the now-nervous Capetians, and in 1236 Henry had the ticklish task of politely avoiding the emperor's attempt to mediate between him and Louis IX at a meeting between all three monarchs planned, but not fulfilled, for Vaucouleurs. Luckily for the English king, Frederick's desire for further mediation slackened as he became more embroiled in renewed struggle with the Lombard cities and as his relations with Gregory IX regarding several issues worsened. The dowry payments, which Henry scrambled to make, did partly fund the emperor's military needs.
For his part, the English king tried to secure other allies, for example his wife Eleanor of Provence's Savoyard relatives. Such links augmented Henry's diplomatic friendships and contacts, but could not alter the fact that his support for the emperor proved weightier than Frederick's support for him. The Plantagenet ruler could only nurture hopes that his brother-in-law would eventually assist him in recovering his lost inheritance in northern France.
Frederick's second excommunication in March 1239 placed Henry in the middle, for the emperor strove mightily to enlist the aid of all European monarchs to intercede diplomatically on his behalf and not to assist the papacy either militarily or financially in the conflict that ensued. Like Louis IX and the kings of Castile, Henry III also had to walk a fine line between neutrality and mediation on the one hand, and the securing of personal political advantage on the other.
In his lands, Henry did not impede the publication of Frederick's excommunication or the papacy's collection of taxes to finance its war against him. Nevertheless, Henry also remained in close touch with the emperor, did not permit his vassals or troops to be used against the latter, and repeatedly interceded diplomatically with the curia on Frederick's behalf. The king realized that the emperor was in no position to provide assistance against the Capetians; in turn, Frederick recognized that Henry would provide reliable diplomatic support as long as it did not involve him challenging the papacy directly.
Weiler carefully gauges how the political and diplomatic ground shifted after Frederick's 1245 deposition at the Council of Lyons. Henry's proctors there worked hard to avoid this development, and the king labored thereafter to ameliorate the emperor's situation. This counted little, however, in the face of unrelenting armed struggle, failed attempts at reconciliation, and the outbreak of civil war in Germany occasioned by the election of papally supported anti-kings.
Like Henry, Louis IX also assiduously promoted the cause of reconciliation between papacy and emperor, but proved more adept, so Weiler argues, in utilizing the political uncertainty to expand ruthlessly his family's lands and influence, and thus "laid the foundations for the Capetians' ascendancy in Europe" (120).
Capetian success could have represented a Plantagenet setback. Nevertheless, Henry also sought to cope in different ways with the incipient power-vacuum of Frederick's final years. He renewed his contacts with some German princes while avoiding being drawn into civil war, strengthened his relations with Iberian monarchs, and reasserted Plantagenet interests in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland. Without being disloyal to the emperor, he forged new links and diplomatic approaches. In these ways he was no different from his fellow kings.
The two decades following Frederick's death in 1250 represented Henry's liberation from a foreign policy fixated mostly on regaining the lost territories of northern France. Unable to make headway militarily against the Capetians or to counter their expansion into Toulouse and Provence, the English king became very proactive in the new political landscape, forging initiatives that involved the crusade and the attempt to replace the Hohenstaufen on the Sicilian and German/imperial thrones. As Weiler aptly notes, this partly represented a role reversal in Anglo-imperial diplomacy. Both Henry's assumption of the Cross (1250) and his involvement in the so-called "Sicilian Business" were integral parts of this new approach, not, as some have argued, the frivolous distractions of a fickle king. Weiler is persuasive when he characterizes the third portion of his study as involving an attempted transition in empire and Regno from Hohenstaufen to Plantagenet interests.
For the time being, Henry avoided any entanglement in the conflict between rival German kings Conrad IV and William of Holland. During 1250-54, he prepared his own crusade expedition while pursuing the fulfillment of several preconditions, such as prolongation of truce with the Capetians, increased diplomatic contact with fellow monarchs of Navarre and Castile, pacification of Gascony, and the securing of dynastic continuity through arrangement of his son Edward's marriage to Eleanor of Castile.
It is undeniable that the engagement by Henry with Innocent IV in 1254 to place his son Edmund on the Sicilian throne ended badly. However, Weiler makes a plausible argument that the entire project at the outset made sense as a part of a larger policy to promote the English king's crusade by securing a staging point for the voyage east. Even the scale of papal financial demands, so Weiler alleges, were at first "neither unreasonable nor excessive" (149).
To be sure, Henry's handling of the plan was clumsy and inflexible. He had not taken his leading barons into his confidence on this matter, nor had anticipated Manfred Hohenstaufen's energetic--and momentarily successful--military and political efforts. Neither Henry nor Edmund made their physical presence felt in the Regno. The momentum of the project simply escaped the English king's control. He could not meet the papacy's increasingly onerous payment schedule. His mode of operation--but not the goal of securing Sicily--became by 1258 a major factor in baronial opposition, political crisis, and conflict at home.
The wreck of the Sicilian Business only became clear by 1262. In the meantime, however, its needs and the needs of Henry's wider crusade project also led to further domestic and diplomatic endeavors. In 1258 he accepted the Provisions of Oxford to stave off baronial revolt. In order even to dream of marching an army to conquer Sicily or to embark on crusade meant that Henry also needed closure with his long-held hopes to regain from the Capetians the lands lost by his father and by himself. Such a realization prompted the Treaty of Paris with Louis IX in 1259, which involved both the surrender of Plantagenet claims and the end of a decades-long state of actual or quasi-war. In addition, the death of William of Holland early in 1256 eventually set the stage for the disputed election of Richard of Cornwall, Henry's brother, as rex Romanorum later that year. The English king could not but see Richard's accession as part of a wider program that included the crusade and the assumption of Plantagenet power both in Sicily and in the empire.
Just as Weiler offers a more positive and rounded assessment of Henry's foreign policy, so too does he provide a revisionist view of Richard's German kingship. As had his predecessor, William of Holland, so too did Richard rely considerably on his Rhenish princely supporters during the first few years after his election. But he was wise enough also to reach out to former Hohenstaufen supporters, to foster friendly relations with the Capetians, and to project the image of a non-partisan ruler. After all, Richard had to work hard to minimize the rival candidacy of the Castilian king, Alfonso X.
Nevertheless, during much of the 1260s Richard could not build on this good start. While his English connections had made him an attractive royal candidate, they also diverted him from consolidating his claims. His entanglement in the English baronial struggle entailed frequent absences from Germany, and even captivity in England by the rebel barons during 1264-65.
The eventual victory of the royalists in the baronial struggle at Evesham and Richard's ability to outlive or outlast his opponents in Germany permitted him, so Weiler argues, to stage a comeback of sorts after 1268. Richard married a German noblewoman and held a diet the next year at Worms; there a kingdom-wide peace was declared and an unpopular transport/trade duty abolished. Although his English concerns--his return to his native land in order to arbitrate various disputes and to serve as regent--and his death in 1272 prevented further consolidation of his power in Germany, Weiler contends that Richard's reign was neither a political disaster nor a reckless political adventure, but instead both a harbinger of the imminent stabilization of the empire by Rudolf of Habsburg and a stage in the evolution of the imperial office from the last years of Frederick II's reign. From his brother's Henry's standpoint, Richard's kingship was initially only one means to an end in an ambitious post-1250 diplomacy. However, after 1265 it was all that remained of that diplomacy.
Weiler summarizes his findings in his conclusion. Before 1250, Henry was intent on preventing a closer rapprochement between the Hohenstaufen and Capetians, while trying to enlist imperial or German support for the recovery of his lost territories. After 1250 he reoriented his foreign policy toward crusade, the Sicilian Business, his own rapprochement with the Capetians, and his brother Richard's candidacy for and reign as rex Romanorum. Many of his English barons became opposed more to the means whereby he operated--that is, without their solicited counsel--than the goals for which he aimed. These goals were not in themselves foolish. Nor was Henry III largely incompetent in their formulation. His diplomacy was not untypical of his times.
The density of Weiler's analysis has already been noted; the rich detail of diplomatic contacts and the author's aim to consider each aspect from different standpoints--that of the Plantagenets, Hohenstaufen, Capetians, the papacy, or of individual German princes-- complicates the narrative. A second reading by this reviewer proved helpful in providing some critical and analytical distance. In sum, Weiler's study is an important reappraisal not only of thirteenth- century English and imperial diplomatic history, but also of political history as well.