The activities of the other main line of the house of Brienne in France,
the Beaumonts, cannot help but look rather parochial by comparison
with their kin. What little we can see of Robert of Beaumont and his
family, in the early fourteenth century, simply suggests that his main goal
was to cement the dynasty’s position in the immediate surrounding
region–that is, in Anjou and Maine, with an eye on the Breton border
to the west. The careers of Robert’s younger son, Geoffrey of Le Lude,
and of his daughter, Mary, abbess of Ronceray in Angers, likewise attest
to a power that was very much regional in its focus. Under Robert’s
eldest son and heir, John, we can begin to see signs of wider aspirations,
however, and these come across, especially, in the marriages that John
undertook before the mental break-down that blighted the last years of
his life. Thefirst of these was to Isabella, daughter of the important lord
of Harcourt. Whilst it is not clear what produced this‘Norman’mar-
riage, it is tempting to suggest that it grew out of the Beaumonts’links
with their more powerful kinsmen, the house of Eu. After Isabella’s
death, John married Margaret of Poitiers, who hailed, in fact, from the
family of Valentinois. Their son, Louis II, also made afine match: to
Isabella, daughter of James of Bourbon, the former count of Ponthieu
and La Marche. However, Louis was the last male in the direct line. He
died of wounds he received at the battle of Cocherel, which took place on
16 May 1364. The viscounty of Beaumont passed, ultimately, to the
ruling house of Valois, in the person of the count of Alençon.^27
Whilst the house of Beaumont in France had thus petered out by the
late fourteenth century, the cadet branch of the dynasty, based mainly in
England, did very much better. In theprevious chapter, we examined the
rise of this particular branch,first under King Edward I, and then, much
more rapidly, under his son and successor, Edward II. It is worth reiter-
ating, though, that this ascent depended on two closely related points.
First, there had to be no‘baronial reaction’against the new king. Second,
he had to win the Scottish war–or, at least, to bring it to a satisfactory
conclusion. The Beaumonts’‘nightmare scenario’duly came to pass in
the early 1310s, however, and this had the effect of throwing their future
into doubt.
Much of the opposition to King Edward II can be put down to the
grasping nature of his late father’s regime. But such complaints were
given a cutting edge by what was seen as the new king’s excessive
profligacy towards his‘foreign’favourites. The standout example of the
latter was, of course, Piers Gaveston, but Henry of Beaumont and his
(^27) See Genealogy 3; and below,162.
146 Hubris and Nemesis (c. 1311–1356)