Gascony for the moment was so quiet that the rebellious hordes called the Pastoureaux, who had desolated the royal domain, withdrew from Bordeaux in terror of Simon's threats. But the expense of maintaining order pressed heavily on the seneschal's resources, and his master showed little disposition to assist him. Moreover Gascony could not long keep quiet. There were threats of fresh insurrections, and the whole land was burning with indignation against its governor. Complaints from the Gascon estates soon flowed with great abundance into Westminster. For the moment Henry paid little attention to them. His son Edward was ten years of age, and he was thinking of providing him with an appanage, sufficient to support a separate household and so placed as to train the young prince in the duties of statecraft. Before November, 1249, he granted to Edward all Gascony, along with the profits of the government of Ireland, which were set aside to put Gascony in a good state of defence. Simon's strong hand was now more than ever necessary to keep the boy's unruly subjects under control. The King therefore continued Simon as seneschal of Gascony, though henceforth the earl acted as Edward's minister. "Complete happily," Henry wrote to the seneschal, "all our affairs in Gascony and you shall receive from us and our heirs a recompense worthy of your services." For the moment Leicester's triumph seemed complete, but the Gascons, who had hoped that Edward's establishment meant the removal of their masterful governor, were bitterly disappointed at the continuance of his rule. Profiting by Simon's momentary absence in England, they once more rose in revolt. Henry wavered for the moment. "Bravely," declared he to his brother-in-law, "hast thou fought for me, and I will not deny thee help. But complaints pour in against thee. They say that thou hast thrown into prison, and condemned to death, folk who have been summoned to thy court under pledge of thy good faith." In the end Simon was sent back to Gascony, and by May, 1251, the rebels were subdued.
Next year Gaston of Béarn stirred up another revolt, and, while Simon was in England, deputies from the Aquitanian cities crossed the sea and laid new complaints before Henry. A stormy scene ensued between the king and his brother-in-law. Threatened with the loss of his office, Simon insisted that he had been appointed for seven years, and that he could not be removed without his own consent. Henry answered that he would keep no compacts with traitors. "That word is a lie," cried Simon; "were you not my king it would be an ill hour for you when you dared to utter it." The sympathy of the magnates saved Leicester from the king's wrath, and before long he returned to Gascony, still seneschal, but with authority impaired by the want of his sovereign's confidence. Though the king henceforth sided with the rebels, Simon remained strong enough to make headway against the lord of Béarn. Before long, however, Leicester unwillingly agreed to vacate his office on receiving from Henry a sum of money. In September, 1252, he laid down the seneschalship and retired into France. While shabbily treated by the king, he had certainly shown an utter absence of tact or scruple. But the tumults of Gascony raged with more violence than ever now that his strong hand was withdrawn. Those who had professed to rise against the seneschal remained in arms against the king. Once more the neighbouring princes cast greedy eyes on the defenceless duchy. In particular, Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, who succeeded his father Ferdinand in 1252, renewed his father's claims to Gascony.
The only way to save the duchy was for Henry to go there in person. Long delays ensued before the royal visit took place, and it was not until August, 1253, that Bordeaux saw her hereditary duke sail up the Gironde to her quays. The Gascon capital remained faithful, but within a few miles of her walls the rebels were everywhere triumphant. It required a long siege to reduce Bénauge to submission, and months elapsed before the towns and castles of the lower Garonne and Dordogne opened their gates. Even then La Réole, whither all the worst enemies of Montfort had fled, held out obstinately. Despairing of military success, Henry fell back upon diplomacy. The strength of the Gascon revolt did not lie in the power of the rebels themselves but in the support of the neighbouring princes and the French crown. By renewing the truce with the representatives of Louis, Henry protected himself from the danger of French intervention, and at the same time he cut off a more direct source of support to the rebels by negotiating treaties with such magnates as the lord of Albret, the Counts of Comminges and Armagnac, and the Viscount of Béarn. His master-stroke was the conclusion, in April, 1254, of a peace with Alfonso of Castile, whereby the Spanish king abandoned his Gascon allies and renounced his claims on the duchy. In return it was agreed that the lord Edward should marry Alfonso's half-sister, Eleanor, heiress of the county of Ponthieu through her mother, Joan, whom Henry had once sought for his queen. As Edward's appanage included Aquitaine, Alfonso, in renouncing his personal claims, might seem to be but transferring them to his sister.
In May, 1254, Queen Eleanor joined Henry at Bordeaux. With her went her two sons, Edward and Edmund, her uncle, Archbishop Boniface, and a great crowd of magnates. In August Edward went with his mother to Alfonso's court at Burgos, where he was welcomed with all honour and dubbed to knighthood by the King of Castile, and in October he and Eleanor were married at the Cistercian monastery of Las Huelgas. His appanage included all Ireland, the earldom of Chester, the king's lands in Wales, the Channel Islands, the whole of Gascony, and whatsoever rights his father still had over the lands taken from him and King John by the Kings of France. Thus he became the ruler of all the outlying dependencies of the English crown, and the representative of all the claims on the Aquitanian inheritance of Eleanor and the Norman inheritance of William the Conqueror. The caustic St. Alban's chronicler declared that Henry left to himself such scanty possessions that he became a "mutilated kinglet".[1] But Henry was too jealous of power utterly to renounce so large a share of his dominions. His grants to his son were for purposes of revenue and support, and the government of these regions was still strictly under the royal control. Yet from this moment writs ran in Edward's name, and under his father's direction the young prince was free to buy his experience as he would. Soon after his son's return with his bride, Henry III. quitted Gascony, making his way home through France, where he visited his mother's tomb at Fontevraud and made atonement at Pontigny before the shrine of Archbishop Edmund. Of more importance was his visit to King Louis, recently returned from his Egyptian captivity. The cordial relations established by personal intercourse between the two kings prepared the way for peace two years later.
[1] Matthew Paris, Chron. Maj., v., 450.
Edward remained in Gascony about a year after his father. He checked with a stern hand the disorders of his duchy, strove to make peace between the Rosteins and Colons, and failing to do so, took in 1261 the decisive step of putting an end to the tumultuous municipal independence of the Gascon capital by depriving the jurats of the right of choosing their mayor.[1] Thenceforth Bordeaux was ruled by a mayor nominated by the duke or his lieutenant. Edward's rule in Gascony has its importance as the first experiment in government by the boy of fifteen who was later to become so great a king. Returning to London in November, 1255, he still forwarded the interests of his Gascon subjects, and an attempt to protect the Bordeaux wine-merchants from the exactions of the royal officers aroused the jealousy of Henry, who declared that the days of Henry II. had come again, when the king's sons rose in revolt against their father. Despite this characteristic wail, Edward gained his point. Yet his efforts to secure the well-being of Gascony had not produced much result. The hold of the English duke on Aquitaine was as precarious under Edward as it had been in the days of Henry's direct rule.
[1] See Bémont, Rôles Gascons, i., supplément, pp. cxvi.-cxviii.
The affairs of Wales and Cheshire involved Edward in responsibilities even more pressing than those of Gascony. On the death of John the Scot without heirs in 1237, the palatinate of Randolph of Blundeville became a royal escheat. Its grant to Edward made him the natural head of the marcher barons. The Cheshire earldom became the more important since the Welsh power had been driven beyond the Conway. Since the death of David ap Llewelyn in 1246, divisions in the reigning house of Gwynedd had continued to weaken the Welsh. Llewelyn and Owen the Red, the two elder sons of the Griffith ap Llewelyn who had perished in attempting to escape from the Tower, took upon themselves the government of Gwynedd, dividing the land, by the advice of the "good men," into two equal halves. The English seneschal at Carmarthen took advantage of their weakness to seize the outlying dependencies of Gwynedd south of the Dovey. War ensued, for the brothers resisted this aggression. But in April, 1247, they were forced to do homage at Woodstock for Gwynedd and Snowdon. Henry retained not only Cardigan and Carmarthen, but the debatable lands between the eastern boundary of Cheshire and the river Clwyd, the four cantreds of the middle country or Perveddwlad, so long the scene of the fiercest warfare between the Celt and the Saxon. Thus the work of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth was completely undone, and his grandsons were confined to Snowdon and Anglesey, the ancient cradles of their house.
It suited English policy that even, the barren lands of Snowdon should be divided. As time went on, other sons of Griffith ap Llewelyn began to clamour for a share of their grandfather's inheritance. Owen, the weaker of the two princes, made common cause with them, and David, another brother, succeeded in obtaining his portion of the common stock. Llewelyn showed himself so much the most resourceful and energetic of the brethren that, when open war broke out between them in 1254, he easily obtained the victory. Owen was taken prisoner, and David was deprived of his lands. Llewelyn, thus sole ruler of Gwynedd, at once aspired to follow in the footsteps of his grandfather. He overran Merioneth, and frightened the native chieftains beyond the Dovey into the English camp. His ambitions were, however, rudely checked by the grant of Cheshire and the English lands in Wales to Edward.
Besides the border palatinate, Edward's Welsh lands included the four cantreds of Perveddwlad, and the districts of Cardigan and Carmarthen. Young as he was, he had competent advisers, and, while he was still in Aquitaine, designs were formed of setting up the English shire system in his Welsh lands, so as to supersede the traditional Celtic methods of government by feudal and monarchical centralisation. Efforts were made to subject the four cantreds to the shire courts at Chester; and Geoffrey of Langley, Edward's agent in the south, set up shire-moots at Cardigan and Carmarthen, from which originated the first beginnings of those counties. The bitterest indignation animated Edward's Welsh tenants, whether on the Clwyd or on the Teivi and Towy. They rose in revolt against the alien innovators, and called upon Llewelyn to champion their grievances. Llewelyn saw the chance of extending his tribal power into a national principality over all Wales by posing as the upholder of the Welsh people. He overran the four cantreds in a week, finding no resistance save before the two castles of Deganwy and Diserth. He conquered Cardigan with equal ease, and prudently granted out his acquisition to the local chieftain Meredith ap Owen. Nor were Edward's lands alone exposed to his assaults. In central Wales Roger Mortimer was stripped of his marches on the upper Wye, and Griffith ap Gwenwynwyn, the lord of upper Powys, driven from the regions of the upper Severn. In the spring of 1257 the lord of Gwynedd appeared in regions untraversed by the men of Snowdon since the days of his grandfather. He devastated the lands of the marchers on the Bristol Channel and slew Edward's deputy in battle. "In those days," says Matthew Paris, "the Welsh saw that their lives were at stake, so that those of the north joined together in indissoluble alliance with those of the south. Such a union had never before been, since north and south had always been opposed." The lord of Snowdon assumed the title of Prince of Wales.