The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  The last Plantagenet holding in France was Gascony, and by the late 1240s Henry III’s grip here too seemed to be failing. Gascony was, of course, a notoriously difficult region to rule – or even to define. In an administrative sense, the region was usually referred to as the duchy of Aquitaine, a territorial entity whose history reached all the way back to Julius Caesar. In the course of Roman expansion and settlement, Aquitaine had at one point stretched as far as the Loire in the north and the Massif Central in the east with the Pyrenees as its southern boundary. This, more or less, was the territory inherited by the Plantagenets in the twelfth century through the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry II.

  But, by the time of Henry III, the duchy had shrunk back more nearly to the dimensions of Caesar’s original province, bounded by the Atlantic in the west, the Garonne in the east and the Pyrenees in the south. This smaller Aquitaine (or Guyenne, as it was known in French sources) more closely approximated to Gascony, a region defined by its language and culture.

  The difficulty in ruling Gascony resulted from several different factors, apart from the fact that it was so distant from the centre of English government.

  First of all, it was only partially feudalized. Along with largely independent commercial towns such as Bordeaux and Bayonne, there was also a good deal of allodial land held by headstrong local lords who claimed to owe little, if any, obedience to the duke. Moreover, the complex and contradictory customary law of the region enshrined the local lords’ legal right to make private war on each other, further destabilizing the region. Finally, Gascony was regularly threatened by its many neighbours, not only the kingdom of France, but also by the Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre and the Spanish kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, whose rulers were themselves descendants of Eleanor, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II, and at least in their view, legitimate claimants to the duchy. The policy initiated by Henry III when he had first travelled to Gascony in 1242–1243 involved concessions to the towns and the payment of fees and pensions to the nobles. Not only was this policy expensive, it also proved to have only limited success.

  Henry now turned to his brother-in-law Simon de Montfort to pacify the turbulent duchy, appointing him as king’s lieutenant in Aquitaine for a period of 7 years in May 1248. The appointment must have been somewhat unexpected.

  As recently as Christmas 1247, Montfort, who had previously accompanied Richard of Cornwall on crusade in 1240, had again taken the cross, planning to join Louis IX in his proposed expedition to the Holy Land. Between 1244 and 1248, Montfort had been virtually invisible in England, his withdrawal from court appearing somewhat peevish. Yet Montfort was a deeply religious man, and among his most important associations were his friendships with some of the greatest churchmen of his day: the Oxford Franciscan Adam Marsh (d. 1259); Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln (d. 1253); Walter de Cantilupe, bishop of Worcester (d. 1266); Richard of Gravesend, Grosseteste’s successor as bishop of Lincoln (d. 1279); and the Franciscan Eudes Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen (d. 1274). His surviving correspondence with these clerical leaders indicates the complexity of his character, a mixture of pride and self-interest with profound piety and sophisticated theological understanding. Despite his crusading zeal, however, Simon accepted the Gascon appointment, the king having promised him extensive resources, including full disposal of all duchy revenues not specifically owed elsewhere, as well as reimbursement for any expenses incurred in restoring or building castles and fortifications. Montfort was promised 2,000 marks in cash and the service of 50 knights for the first year of his lieutenancy; he probably arrived in the duchy with an even larger force than that.

  Simon travelled first to Paris where he convinced Blanche of Castile, acting as regent for her son Louis IX, to extend the truce between France and England, which was about to expire. He then visited King Thibault I of Navarre, who agreed to submit his disputes with Henry III to arbitration. Finally, Simon paid a visit to the Countess of Bigorre, ruler of the small but strategically important county to the southeast of Gascony, who named him guardian of her county in return for an annual rent of 7,000 shillings in the money of Morlaas. 12 Having settled at least some of the external threats to the duchy, Simon now turned to Gascony itself, where he faced a chaotic situation at best.

  Of the many Gascon nobles whose independence posed difficulties for whoever would rule the duchy, none was more troublesome than Gaston VII de Béarn. To say that the viscount of Béarn was volatile would be an understatement.

  During his remarkably long tenure of the county from 1229 until his death in 1290, Gaston revolted against his English overlords on at least three occasions, and repeatedly avoided performing homage for Béarn per se. In 1248, he was to be found ravaging the area around Dax, illustrating the ongoing conflict between towns and regional lords in the duchy. Other local lords were engaged in similar campaigns. The towns themselves, despite numerous privileges and concessions from Henry III, were generally divided by factional strife and provided only limited support to the king or his lieutenant. Although Simon immediately toured the duchy and its various administrative centres, he refused to recognize customary privileges. Moreover, armed with his mandate from Henry III, he seized possession of important castles and began construction of entirely new fortifications. All of these actions were viewed as provocative by the restless nobles and burgesses of Gascony.

  In June 1249, Bordeaux was the scene of bloody faction fighting between the Colom and Soler families. Simon suppressed this urban violence with violence of his own. When confronted with resistance, as in Bordeaux, the lieutenant was ruthless. Lands and buildings were confiscated and destroyed, and Montfort even cut vines, an unforgivable act here in the heart of the wine country. By December 1249, representatives of the Soler clan had arrived in London to lay their protests before the king himself. They were soon followed by the current mayor of Bordeaux, William Raymond Colom, who presented the other side of the story. Although Henry referred the matter back to Bordeaux for trial – before Simon – he also wrote to his lieutenant, urging a less militant style of governance. The king’s willingness to hear these complaints in the first place was a worrisome development from Simon’s point of view. Inevitably, complaints about the earl’s conduct continued to reach the ear of the king in London.

  Gaston de Béarn himself, having been placed under arrest by the lieutenant, travelled to England in person to plead his case, and to Montfort’s dismay the viscount was pardoned and restored to his rights and lands. Gaston was, after all, the cousin of Queen Eleanor, and Henry may have thought that in receiving Gaston’s homage he had gone a long way toward stabilizing the duchy. At the same time, however, he had both undercut his lieutenant’s authority and insulted his honour, both of which proved to be counter-productive. Writing from Paris while representing the duchy at the French king’s Parlement in March 1250, Montfort complained of the difficulty of his task, which required him to fight a guerrilla war without the commitment of his royal master, either financial or political. Henry’s dispatch of commissioners to hear and settle disputes between Montfort and the Gascons in May 1251 confirms the legitimacy of Simon’s complaints.

  At the end of the year, in December 1251 while in York for the marriage of Henry III’s daughter Margaret to Alexander III of Scotland, the king and earl confronted each other over the situation in Gascony. In Montfort’s absence, Gascony had once again risen in revolt against his oppressive rule. Montfort sought leave to return and quell the uprisings, but Henry forbade this, blaming the earl’s harsh rule for the duchy’s unsettled conditions. Balked of his authority as lieutenant, Simon then demanded compensation for his expenses in accordance with the terms of his letters of appointment. Henry demurred. Only the intervention of Queen Eleanor prevented a complete impasse, and by March at least some of their financial disagreements had been settled. Meanwhile, Gaston de Béarn – his recent homage to Henry III notwithstanding – was busy besieging La Réole, and he would soon swear allegiance
to Alphonso X of Castile, encouraging the Spanish king to revive his own claim to the duchy.

  In January 1252, Henry sent a commission including his half-brother, Geoffrey de Lusignan, to investigate the state of affairs in the duchy. A truce was arranged, but the Gascon nobles refused to travel to London for hearings unless Montfort was also in England, not Gascony. Montfort did return to England, and in May 1252 Henry held a ‘trial’ of his lieutenant before his council. The charges against Montfort, many of which have survived, were delivered by Géraud de Malemont, the longtime archbishop of Bordeaux. Montfort was dismissive of the allegations levelled against him, repeatedly pointing to the terms of his appointment in justification of his actions. It is difficult to accept the characterization of the hearings provided by Montfort’s friend Adam Marsh, who wrote that Simon acted throughout the hearings with ‘the moderation of gentleness and the fullness of magnanimity.’ Matthew Paris paints a very different picture, recording an exchange between the earl and King Henry that rings true. Baffled by the king’s lack of support, which Montfort felt to be obliged him through the terms of his appointment, he challenged the king by saying: ‘Who can believe that you are a Christian? Have you ever confessed?’ The king replied with a simple ‘Indeed’, which led Montfort to ask the rhetorical question: ‘What is the use of confession without penance and satisfaction?’ As with his criticism of Henry’s generalship 10 years earlier, these pointed remarks were deeply hurtful to the king and not easily forgiven or forgotten.

  Throughout the hearings, which lasted from early May until early June, it was apparent that Montfort had tremendous sympathy and support among the magnates, including the earls of Cornwall (the king’s brother Richard), Gloucester and Hereford, as well as Peter of Savoy and Montfort’s good friend Walter de Cantilupe, bishop of Worcester. Indeed, he even seems to have had the support of the queen, who uncharacteristically quarrelled publicly with her husband. The royal council found in Simon’s favour, and the king gave his judgment for the earl as well. But all too typically, Henry subsequently reversed this decision and then arranged a largely unsatisfactory compromise. A truce was effected until February 1253, when Henry III and the Lord Edward were to travel to Gascony to address its problems personally. This was, however, a pyrrhic victory: although Simon was ‘morally vindicated, he had been politically convicted’, 13 and he refused to resign his office under such circumstances.

  Henry did not finally set off for Gascony until August, leaving Queen Eleanor behind as regent, with Richard of Cornwall serving as her close adviser. In September, the king led a highly successful campaign in the Garonne valley.

  In the course of this campaigning, a reconciliation was effected between the king and earl, who joined Henry at Benauges on 9 November 1253. Montfort did, of course, drive a characteristically hard bargain before relinquishing his office.

  Nevertheless, he appears still to have felt a genuine sense of obligation and loyalty to Henry. In one of his last letters to Montfort, Bishop Grosseteste (who died on 9 October 1253) had reminded Simon of how greatly the king had honoured and rewarded him throughout his career. Perhaps with this in mind, Montfort made his peace with Henry and also declined an offer to serve as Steward of France in the interim between the death of Blanche of Castile and the return of Louis IX from crusade.

  Henry’s Gascon expedition was the most successful military undertaking of his reign. Well-funded for once, he took a force of 300 knights from England supplemented by another 100 Poitevin knights provided by his Lusignan kinsmen. His mixture of military assertion with conciliation soon brought the duchy under control. Bergerac was taken in July 1254 and the great fortress of La Réole was finally recovered from Gaston de Béarn in August, allowing Henry to return to Bordeaux and settle his affairs. An important aspect of this settlement was to eliminate the threat from Castile. To that end, Henry now arranged a marriage between his son and heir, the future Edward I, and Eleanor of Castile, half-sister of Alphonso X. Queen Eleanor had arrived in Bordeaux on 11 June with her sons Edward and Edmund, along with the archbishop of Canterbury, her uncle Boniface of Savoy. The wedding took place in Burgos in November 1254, and at Alphonso’s insistence Aquitaine was conveyed to the prince as a wedding gift. The duchy was henceforth to be considered inseparable from the English crown. Meanwhile, during his prolonged stay in Gascony, Henry initiated another diplomatic scheme involving his second son. He sent proctors to Rome to seek the vacant crown of Sicily for Edmund. Flushed with success in Gascony, the Sicilian Business, as it is usually called, seemed to Henry a means to encircle France with a Mediterranean presence linking Sicily and southern Italy with the Savoyard holdings in the north and then extending across to Gascony.

  Had the price of this adventure, to which Innocent IV readily agreed, not been prohibitively high, it might have made diplomatic and political sense. In Henry’s perpetually straightened conditions, however, it was sheer folly and would lead to the greatest crisis of the reign.

  Henry’s return journey from Gascony to England was the occasion of a family reunion of sorts and the formation of a real friendship between the kings of England and France. Henry and Queen Eleanor, with an entourage that included Prince Edmund, Archbishop Boniface and Henry III’s half-brother William de Valence, travelled first by way of Fontevrault where Henry visited the tombs of his ancestors. He ordered that his mother’s tomb be moved within the church, finding her placement in the cemetery disrespectful. From Fontevrault, the royal party moved on to Orléans, where Henry met for the first time his brother-in-law Louis IX before proceeding on to Paris by way of Pontigny. Henry and Eleanor were also joined by Eleanor’s sister, Queen Margaret, her mother Beatrice, Dowager Duchess of Provence, and her youngest sister, another Beatrice, now married to Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou. This remarkable collection of royal brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, made their way to the capital – where Sanchia of Provence would complete the family gathering. Paris would be the site of lavish feasting, as well as generous almsgiving on behalf of both kings.

  Henry was enthralled with his tour of the city’s churches, culminating in the spectacular Sainte-Chapelle, ‘the most noble chapel of the king of France with its incomparable relics’. This visit led to the establishment of genuine affective bonds between the two royal families, bonds that would pay substantial dividends to Henry in the years to come.

  The Gascon crisis and Henry’s direct intervention were costly and had huge unforeseen consequences. During the next 5 years, Henry would struggle to overcome three interrelated sources of friction in the realm. First of all, the king was without funds. The repeated refusal of parliamentary subsidies throughout the 1250s led the king to exploit other sources of income. The sheriffs were squeezed and, in turn, they squeezed their counties, causing hardship more for the middling folk than the magnates. Although the king had frequently turned to the Jews for extraordinary funding in the past, by now their ability to pay had been severely limited. Where a tallage levied in the 1240s had realized some £40,000, in the 1250s it was unlikely to bring in even half that amount. Moreover, as the Jews were pressured to meet royal demands, they were often forced to sell the bonds they held from Christian debtors at discounted prices. The buyers of these bonds, Christians rather than Jews, could force these debtors into court and ultimately gain possession of the lands held in surety for the bonds.

  This further enflamed anti-government sentiment in the countryside, not least because some of the most prominent players in this game were the king’s own Lusignan half-brothers.

  The influx of Poitevins had begun in 1247, when Henry welcomed his half-siblings with open arms. Henry saw good, sound political reasons to make common cause with the children of his mother’s second marriage. The Lusignans were well placed both to secure the northern frontier of Gascony and to facilitate the recovery of Poitou, a fantasy to which Henry stubbornly clung. Perhaps a hundred Poitevins ultimately made their way to England, roughly two-thirds of them knights (a revers
e of the earlier Savoyard profile). They were far less lavishly rewarded than the Savoyards, there being less patronage available at the time of their arrival, but they nonetheless seemed to absorb what little patronage there was. Moreover, they were perceived, probably correctly, as obnoxious, both in their ruthless exploitation of their own lands and the acquisition of other lands in the Jewish bond market. By choice or circumstance, the Lusignans did not assimilate as easily or as fully as the Savoyards had a decade before.

  Although the two older brothers, Guy and Geoffrey de Lusignan, soon returned to Poitou, albeit with handsome pensions, two younger brothers and a sister chose to remain in England. A marriage was quickly arranged for William de Valence, who wed the heiress Joan de Munchensy through whom he became Lord of Pembroke and gained lands in Ireland. William’s marriage was supplemented by money fees worth more than £800 per annum and possession of Hertford Castle. In the same month that William was wed, Alice married John de Warenne, earl of Surrey. Henry may very well have been aware of the potential problems that his patronage of his Poitevin relations might pose. As already noted, William de Valence was knighted on a very special day, Sunday 13 October 1247, the feast of the translation of the relics of St Edward the Confessor. This was an important day in Henry’s personal calendar every year, but particularly so in 1247, for it was on that date that he conveyed the newly received relic of the blood of Jesus Christ in procession from St Paul’s to Westminster where the relic was to be housed. Clearly, William was meant to be elevated by his association with this sacred event. Finally, another younger brother, Aymer de Lusignan, sought his advancement through the church rather than the marriage market. Henry had already provided him to the church of Tisbury in Wiltshire prior to his arrival in England, but from 1247 onwards he was lavishly rewarded with benefices and pensions, while he went off to Oxford to study under a certain Master Vincent.