Foix the fail

Gaston I of Foix-Béarn was the 9th Count of Foix and 22nd Viscount of Béarn as well as Co-Prince of Andorra, a landlocked microstate in the Pyrenees sandwiched between France and Spain. His father was Roger the Dodger alias Count Roger-Bernard III of Foix-Béarn, and his mother Marguerite, daughter of the notorious Gaston de Béarn who gave Henry III, Simon de Montfort, Edward I and Philip III so much trouble before he was finally ‘persuaded’ to go to the Holy Land.

Gaston’s namesake and grandson was a chip off the old rotten block. After the final peace was declared between England and France in 1303, he chose to revive his dynastic feud against the house of Armagnac, which had gone into abeyance during the Anglo-French war. He bided his time and finally took up arms in August 1305, just when it looked as though Gascony might recover from the years of conflict. The seneschal, John de Havering, was entertaining the pope at Bordeaux when news reached him of the invasion of Armagnac. A memorandum survives in the form of a medieval ‘newsletter’, describing the outbreak of war:

Item: the lord seneschal, in the city of Bordeaux, received reliable reports that on the 16th day of August the count of Foix had entered the territory of the count of Armagnac with a very great host of armed men, ravaging the said count's homeland and holdings with murder, plundering, and the burning of castles, towns and churches within the realm of the said lord king and duke, in contempt of his kingly honour.

Havering summoned his council. This included the Savoyard knight Othon de Grandson, Edward I’s long-term friend and one of the few survivors of the Bridge of Boats in North Wales in 1282. The Foix-Armagnac war was a far more serious affair than the recent Albert-Caumont affair, and so Havering decided to lead the police operation in person. He raised an army of at least 370 Gascon nobles and their retinues, probably the largest field army seen in Gascony since Henry III’s expedition in 1253.

The seneschal marched against Gaston, ‘to defeat the rebels, to rout these enemies and to set right the aforesaid outrages’. Gaston quickly realised his mistake: his father had profited while England and France were at war, but in time of peace there was no way of playing off one kingdom against another. To save himself he adopted his grandfather’s policy of squealing to a higher authority. As the memorandum states:

When the lord seneschal of Gascony came on with the above-mentioned army in pursuit of the count of Foix and his accomplices, the count foresaw that he could not well escape it, and that he would be taken prisoner and destroyed because of his crimes and outrages. To avoid imminent danger and irresistible ruin, he requested the lord pope, through the mediation of the countess his mother, the countess of Bearn, the lady Constance, his sister, and many nobles on behalf of the said count, to deign to intervene to make peace; he, favouring their supplications, and with the advice of his college, stilled and checked the aforesaid war by the means he proposed, to wit that the count of Foix would, before a set date, cause all the harm which had been done by him or carried out in whatever way by his order in the aforesaid region of Armagnac, to be compensated.

Thus Gaston threw himself on the mercy of Pope Clement, who agreed to protect him from Havering’s wrath so long as he paid war damages. And so all was quiet again. For a while.