Count Floris the unlucky

Count Floris V of Holland (1254-96). Floris’s career might be taken as a classic example of the brutal and amoral politics of this era.

Floris was just two years old when his father, Count William, was killed by the Frisians. In 1282 he defeated the Frisians in battle and succeeded in recovering his father’s body. He was supported by the Count of Hainault, an arch-enemy of the Count of Flanders of the House of Dampierre. This feud sowed the seeds of Floris’s downfall.

In 1290 Floris was lured to a meeting by Count Guy of Flanders, and imprisoned at Biervliet in Zeeland until he agreed to abandon his claims to land on the Scheldt estuary. After he was released, Floris declared war on Flanders and invaded Zeeland, but was persuaded to relent by Edward I of England. Edward wanted to recruit both Guy and Floris as allies against Philip le Bel of France, and so brokered peace between them.

In 1292 Floris got involved in the succession dispute over the vacant throne of Scotland. Via his great-great-grandmother Ada, a sister of William the Lion, he had a weak claim to the throne. Floris succeeded in delaying the proceedings for almost a year while he looked for some missing paperwork. In reality he had no interest in becoming King of Scots. He colluded with Robert de Bruce, the Competitor, who supplied Floris with two forged documents ‘proving’ the count’s claim to the throne. These were judged to be insufficient and Bruce was unable to supply originals, because there were none. The whole thing was a fraud, designed to enable Bruce to purchase the crown of Scotland from Floris in the unlikely event that Edward would support his claim. Floris simply wanted money.

 The gambit failed, and Edward put John Balliol on the throne instead. Floris now played a dangerous game. In 1295 he took a bribe from the King of France to desert King Edward: his price was 4000 livres annually for life and a lump sum of 25,000 livres. He left the English camp on 9 January 1296, a fatal decision. Floris’s defection angered Edward, Count Guy, and his domestic enemies in Holland. A plot was hatched, whereby Floris would be kidnapped and smuggled over to England, where he would be given an ultimatum: return to Edward’s allegiance or surrender his title to his anglophile son, John. The kidnappers seized Floris while he was out hunting, but then panicked when some of his followers tried to rescue him. Floris was thrown into a ditch and stabbed thirty-six times. Most of his killers got away, but one was captured and tortured to death in public over a period of five hours.

The dead man’s son, John, was then married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth of Rhuddlan. This renewed the Anglo-Dutch alliance. John, described as an ‘imbecilic runt’, appeared at the wedding at Ipswich in the company of John of Renesse, one of his father’s murderers. The new Count of Holland died in 1299, aged just fifteen, probably murdered by the Count of Hainault.