foreigner: a veritable‘alieninpolitics’, even more than her father had
once been. The king seems to have anticipated that there would be
hostility to his plans. He authorizedthe grant in an unorthodox way, not
by the usual means of letters patent. The next year, however, Edward
felt confident enough to extend the award to life tenure, and issued it in
the proper manner.^75 All of this was highly unusual. The whole affair
could easily be presented as a flagship example of unsuitable and
excessive royal patronage. The‘native’English baronage would wait
until the old king was dead before making its move to cut Isabella down
to size.^76
What made the grant of Bamburgh so obnoxious was the fact that it
belonged in the context of a broader process by which several other
members of Isabella’s family relocated to England to take advantage of
her proximity to the crown. Her brother, Louis, had taken holy orders. It
is possible that he was already a canon at Le Mans before he moved out
to England in the mid-1280s, obtaining an additional prebend at York.
By 1291, he had risen to become treasurer of Salisbury cathedral and had
added a number of other canonries as well, including those of Norton
and Auckland in the diocese of Durham. In short, Louis was a notorious,
well-connected pluralist, and he would later attract a great deal of criti-
cism, both on these and other grounds.^77 However, the most important
member of the house of Beaumont–that is, the one who would do the
most to shape the family’s fortunes in the British Isles–was another
brother, Henry. His adventurous and acquisitive career is probably the
one that most neatly reflects that of his grandfather, the king of Jerusalem
and Latin emperor of Constantinople. The crucial difference is that, for
Henry, opportunity did not consist of crowns and realms in the crusading
world of the eastern Mediterranean but, instead, land, wealth, title and
position in the tempestuously entangled kingdoms of England and
Scotland.
To understand these tensions, we need to go back in time to the death
of King Alexander III of Scots in 1286, leaving behind a young heiress
who did not survive for very long. This produced‘the Great Cause’:a
prolonged competition for the succession between no fewer than thirteen
rival claimants. Chief amongst these, of course, were John Balliol and
Robert de Brus (or‘Bruce’), lord of Annandale. The verdict was eventu-
ally pronounced, in Balliol’s favour, by Edward I, who saw this as his
(^75) This was in return for afinancialquid pro quoand Isabella’s promise not to remarry
76 (Prestwich,‘Isabella de Vescy and the Custody of Bamburgh Castle’, 150).
77 See below,^146 – 8.
Louis’s early career is neatly summarized in C. M. Fraser’s article in theODNB.
118 The Angevins and Athens (c. 1267–1311)