John's eldest son, Henry, was crowned at the age of nine. During his
long and feeble reign of fifty-six years England's motto might well
have been the warning words of Scripture, "Woe to thee, O land, when
thy king is a child!" since a child he remained to the last; for if
John's heart was of millstone, Henry's was of wax.
Dante in one of his poems, written perhaps not long after Henry's
death, represents him as he sees him in imagination just on the
borderland of purgatory. The King is not in suffering, for as he has
done no particular good, so he has done no great harm. He appears "as
a man of simple life, spending his time singing psalms in a narrow
valley."
That shows one side of his negative character; the other was his love
of extravagance, vain display, and instability of purpose. Much of
the time he drifted about like a ship without compass or rudder.