[2] C.V. Langlois' Le Règne de Philippe le Hardi (1887), and Gavrilovitch's Le Traité de Paris, give the best modern accounts of Edward's early dealings with the French crown.
It was nearly ten years since the presence of the monarch had restrained the turbulence of the Gascon duchy. Edward had before him the task of watching over its internal administration, and checking the subtle policy whereby the agents of the French crown were gradually undermining his authority. Two wars, the war of Béarn and the war of Limoges, desolated Gascony from the Pyrenees to the Vienne. It was Edward's first task to bring these troubles to an end. Age and experience had not diminished the ardour which had so long made Gaston of Béarn the focus of every trouble in the Pyrenean lands. He defied a sentence of the ducal court of Saint Sever, and was already at war with the seneschal, Luke of Tany, when Edward's appearance brought matters to a crisis. During the autumn and winter of 1273-74, Edward hunted out Gaston from his mountain strongholds, and at last the Béarnais, despairing of open resistance, appealed to the French king. Philip accepted the appeal, and ordered Edward to desist from molesting Gaston during its hearing. The English king, anxious not to quarrel openly with the French court, granted a truce. The suit of Gaston long occupied the parliament of Paris, but the good-will of the French lawyers could not palliate the wanton violence of the Viscount of Béarn. The French, like the English, were sticklers for formal right, and were unwilling to push matters to extremities. Edward had the reward of his forbearance, for Philip advised Gaston to go to England and make his submission. Gratified by his restoration to Béarn in 1279, Gaston remained faithful for the next few years. Edward was less successful in dealing with Limoges. There had been for many years a struggle between the commune of the castle, or bourg, of Limoges and Margaret the viscountess. It was to no purpose that the townsfolk had invoked the treaty of Paris, whereby, as they maintained, the French king transferred to the King of England his ancient jurisdiction over them. They were answered by a decree of the parliament of Paris that the homage of the commune of Limoges belonged not to the crown but to the viscountess, and that therefore the treaty involved no change in their allegiance. Edward threw himself with ardour on to the side of the burgesses. Guy of Lusignan, still the agent of his brother abroad, though prudently excluded from England, was sent to Limoges, where he incited the commune to resist the viscountess. In May, 1274, Edward himself took up his quarters in Limoges, and for a month ruled there as sovereign. But the French court reiterated the decree which made the commune the vassal of the viscountess. To persevere in upholding the rebels meant an open breach with the French court in circumstances more unfavourable than in the case of Gaston of Béarn. Once more Edward refused to allow his ambition to prevail over his sense of legal obligation. With rare self-restraint he renounced the fealty of Limoges, and abandoned his would-be subjects to the wrath of the viscountess. This was an act of loyalty to feudal duty worthy of St. Louis. If Edward, on later occasions, pressed his own legal claims against his vassals, he set in his own case a pattern of strict obedience to his overlord.
While Edward was still abroad, his friend Gregory X. held from May to July, 1274, the second general council at Lyons, wherein there was much talk of a new crusade, and an effort was made, which came very near temporary success, towards healing the schism of the Eastern and Western Churches. At Gregory's request Edward put off his coronation, lest the celebration might call away English prelates from Lyons. When the council was over, he at last turned towards his kingdom. At Paris he was met by the mayor of London, Henry le Waleis, and other leading citizens, who set before him the grievous results of the long disputes with Flanders, which had broken off the commercial relations between the two countries, and had inflicted serious losses on English trade. Edward strove to bring the Flemings to their senses by prohibiting the export of wool from England to the weaving towns of Flanders. The looms of Ghent and Bruges were stopped by reason of the withholding of the raw material, and the distress of his subjects made Count Guy of Flanders anxious to end so costly a quarrel. On July 28 Edward met Guy at Montreuil and signed a treaty which re-established the old friendship between lands which stood in constant economic need of each other. There was no longer any occasion for further delay, and on August 2 Edward and his queen crossed over to Dover. Received with open arms by his subjects, he was crowned at Westminster on August 19 by the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Kilwardby, philosopher, theologian, and Dominican friar, whom Gregory X. had placed over the church of Canterbury, despite the vigorous efforts which Edward made to secure the primacy for Robert Burnell. He had been absent from England for four years.
Edward's sojourn in France was fruitful of results which he was unable to reap for the moment. Conscious of the inveterate hostility of the French king, he strove to establish relations with foreign powers to counterbalance the preponderance of his rival. When the death of Richard of Cornwall reopened the question of the imperial succession, Charles of Anjou had been anxious to obtain the prize for his nephew, Philip III., on the specious pretext that the headship of Christendom would enable the King of France to "collect chivalry from all the world" and institute the crusade which both Gregory X. and Edward so ardently desired. But the most zealous enthusiast for the holy war could hardly be deceived by the false zeal with which the Angevin cloaked his overweening ambition. It was a veritable triumph for Edward, when Gregory X., though attracted for a moment by the prospect of a strong emperor capable of landing a crusade, accepted the choice of the German magnates who, in terror of France, elected as King of the Romans the strenuous but not overmighty Swabian count, Rudolf of Hapsburg. As Alfonso of Castile's pretensions were purely nominal, this election ended the Great Interregnum by restoring the empire on a narrower but more practical basis. Though Gregory strove to reconcile the French to Rudolf's accession, common suspicion of France bound Edward and the new King of the Romans in a common friendship.
Family disputes soon destroyed the unity of policy of the Capetian house. Philip III., well meaning but weak, was drifting into complete dependence on Charles of Anjou, whom Edward distrusted, alike as the protector of the murderers of Henry of Almaine and as the supplanter of his mother in the Provençal heritage. Margaret of Provence, the widow of St. Louis, had a common grievance with Edward and his mother against Charles of Anjou. She hated him the more inasmuch as he was depriving her of all influence over her son, King Philip. It was easy in such circumstances for the two widowed queens of France and England to form grandiose schemes for ousting Charles from Provence. Rudolf lent himself to their plans by investing Margaret with the county. Edward's filial piety and political interests made him a willing partner in these designs. In 1278 he betrothed his daughter Joan of Acre to Hartmann, the son of the King of the Romans. The plan of Edward and Rudolf was to revive in some fashion the kingdom of Arles[1] in favour of the young couple. Though Rudolf was unfaithful to this policy, and abandoned the proposed English marriage in favour of a match between his daughter and the son of the King of Sicily, the two queens persisted in their plans, and new combinations against Charles and Philip for some years threatened the peace of Europe.
[1] Fournier's Le Royaume d'Arles et de Vienne (1891) gives the best modern account of Edward's relations to the Middle Kingdom.
It is unlikely that Edward hoped for serious results from schemes so incoherent and backed with such slender resources. Besides his alliance with the emperor, he strove to injure the French king by establishing close relations with his brother-in-law, Alfonso of Castile, who since 1276 was at war with the French. Earlier than this, he made himself the champion of Blanche of Artois, the widow of Henry III. of Navarre and Champagne. He wished that Joan, their only child, should bring her father's lands to one of his own sons, and, though disappointed in this ambition, he managed to marry his younger brother, Edmund of Lancaster, to Blanche. Though the French took possession of Navarre, whereby they alike threatened Gascony and Castile, they suffered Blanche to rule in Champagne in her daughter's name, and Edmund was associated with her in the government of that county. The tenure of a great French fief by the brother of the English king was a fresh security against the aggressions of the kings of France and Sicily. It probably facilitated the conclusion of the long negotiations as to the interpretation of the treaty of Paris, and the partition of the inheritance of Alfonse of Poitiers. Edward's position against France was further strengthened in 1279 by the death of his wife's mother, Joan of Castile, the widow of Ferdinand the Saint and the stepmother of Alfonso the Wise, whereupon he took possession of Ponthieu in Eleanor's name. Scarcely had he established himself at Abbeville, the capital of the Picard county, than the negotiations at Paris were so far ripened that Philip III. went to Amiens, where Edward joined him. On May 23 both kings agreed to accept the treaty of Amiens by which the more important of the outstanding difficulties between the two nations were amicably regulated. By it Philip recognised Eleanor as Countess of Ponthieu, and handed over a portion of the inheritance of Alfonse of Poitiers to Edward. Agen and the Agenais were ceded at once, and a commission was appointed to investigate Edward's claims over lower Quercy. In return for this Edward yielded up his illusory rights over the three bishoprics of Limoges, Périgueux, and Cahors. It was a real triumph for English diplomacy.
No lasting peace could arise from acts which emphasised the essential incompatibility of French and English interests by enlarging the territory of the English kings in France. The undercurrent of hostility still continued; and the proposal of Pope Nicholas III. that Edward should act as mediator between Philip III. and Alfonso of Castile led to difficulties that deeply incensed Edward, and embroiled him once more both with France and Spain. Under Angevin influence, both Philip and Alfonso rejected Edward's mediation in favour of that of the Prince of Salerno, Charles of Anjou's eldest son. Disgust at this unfriendliness made Edward again support the plans of Margaret of Provence against the Angevins. In 1281 Margaret's intrigues formed a combination of feudal magnates called the League of Macon, with the object of prosecuting her claims over Provence by force of arms. Edward and his mother, Eleanor, his Savoyard kinsfolk, and Edmund of Lancaster all entered into the league. But it was hopeless for a disorderly crowd of lesser chieftains, with the nominal support of a distant prince like Edward, to conquer Provence in the teeth of the hostility of the strongest and the ablest princes of the age. The League of Macon came to nothing, like so many other ambitious combinations of a time in which men's capacity to form plans transcended their capacity to execute them. Margaret herself soon despaired of the way of arms and was bought off by a money compensation. The league mainly served to keep alive the troubles that still separated England and France. In 1284 Philip gained a new success in winning the hand of Joan of Champagne, Count Edmund's step-daughter, for his son, the future Philip the Fair. When Joan attained her majority, Edmund lost the custody of Champagne, which went to the King of France as the natural protector of his son and his son's bride. With his brother's withdrawal from Provins to Lancaster, Edward lost one of his means of influencing the course of French politics.
A compensation for these failures was found in 1282 when the Sicilian vespers rang the knell of the Angevin power in Sicily. When the revolted islanders chose Peter, King of Aragon, as their sovereign, Charles, seeking to divert him from Sicily by attacking him at home, inspired his partisan, Pope Martin IV., to preach a crusade against Aragon. It was in vain that Edward strove to mediate between the two kings.
The only response made to his efforts was a fantastic proposal that they should fight out their differences in a tournament at Bordeaux with him as umpire, but Edward refused to have anything to do with the pseudo-chivalrous venture. At last, in 1285, Philip III. lent himself to his uncle's purpose so far as to lead a papalist crusade over the Pyrenees. The movement was a failure. Philip lost his army and his life in Aragon, and his son and successor, Philip IV., at once withdrew from the undertaking. In the year of the crusade of Aragon, Charles of Anjou, Peter of Aragon, and Martin IV. died. With them the struggles, which had begun with the attack on Frederick II, reached their culminating point. Their successors continued the quarrel with diminished forces and less frantic zeal, and so gave Edward his best chance to pose as the arbiter of Europe. Though Edward's continental policy lay so near his heart that it can hardly be passed over, it was fuller of vain schemes than of great results. Yet it was not altogether fruitless, since twelve years of resolute and moderate action raised England, which under Henry III. was of no account in European affairs, to a position only second to that of France, and that under conditions more nearly approaching the modern conception of a political balance and a European state system than feudalism, imperialism, and papalism had hitherto rendered possible.