Following Björner, McMillan and Rybalchenko, we develop an approach to the automatic verification of higher-order functional programs based on constrained Horn clauses. We introduce constrained Horn clauses in higher-order logic, and decision problems concerning their satisfiability and the safety verification of higher-order programs. We show that, although satisfiable systems of higher-order clauses do not generally have least models, there is a notion of canonical model obtained via a reduction to a problem concerning a kind of monotone logic program. Following work in higher-order program verification, we develop a refinement type system in order to reason about and automate the search for models. This provides a sound but incomplete method for solving the decision problem. Finally, we show that an extension of the decision problem in which refinement types are used directly as guards on existential quantifiers can be reduced to the original problem. This result can be used to show that properties of higher-order functions that are definable using refinement types are also expressible using higher-order constrained Horn clauses. (Joint work with Toby Cathcart Burn and Steven Ramsay.)