War, Peace, Solomon’s Bed and Henry III’s Patronage at Westminster

This paper focuses on the impact of internal war in medieval England, specifically the Barons’ Wars of the 1260s and their possible consequences for the political art of the English realm at its very heart, in the king’s great chamber in the Palace of Westminster, the murals of which were recorded in the 19th century. By examining the imagery of the king’s bed in the chamber and its reference to the bed of King Solomon, it pursues the idea that the Barons’ Wars, which dragged on through the 1260s when the chamber was repainted, may have been more important for an assessment of the murals’ significance than has previously been thought. By combining Solomonic and Coronation imagery with a Psychomachia, the suggestion is that Henry III, their patron, consciously cultivated an ideology of peaceable kingship, and that the murals in question may in fact have been partly or wholly an innovation of the post-war period. The paper is a contribution both to ‘peace studies’ and to our understanding of the politics of English court art.