Henry III died on this day of 16 November in 1272 in his chamber at Westminster Palace. His last months had not been easy with riots erupting in Norwich and London. Says Maurice Powicke, who devoted much of his academic life to the king and his reign of more than 20,000 days, “Henry had rarely found the peace for which his nature must have craved. Even his great days had their annoyances. He had never been free from his exacting people. Yet he had held his own, with the uneasy persistence and the reluctant submission to hard facts of the querulous realist. The old man left his kingdom greater than it was when, a fair-faced child, he rode from Devizes to be crowned at Gloucester. England was more united, more prosperous, more richly endowed, more beautiful in 1272 than it was in 1216.”
Death of Henry III
