The heart of a king

In December 1291 the heart of Henry III of England was dispatched for burial to the abbess and convent of Fontrevault in northern France, southeast of Angers. In his letter to the abbess Edward I described his father as ‘of celebrated memory’ and confirmed all the rights and privileges bestowed by his Angevin forebears on the convent. Henry III’s heart was laid to rest in Anjou, the homeland of his ancestors, placed next to his mighty forebears.

This was part of a long-running practice of honouring the Angevin past. At Christmas 1286 Edward had sent six pieces of gold to Fontrevault, to be laid upon the tombs of Henry II, Richard I, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Isabella of Angouleme. In 1330 his grandson Edward III was still giving alms to Fontrevault, the mausoleum of the Angevin dynasty.

By Edward I’s reign the continental possessions of his house had shrunk to a fragment of their former glory; only the duchy of Aquitaine and county of Ponthieu remained of a domain that had consisted of much of western France and its Atlantic seaboard. A line of kings that had once ruled a great network of continental territories, larger than that controlled by the Capetian kings of France, could not easily forget that legacy. This explains the grim determination to hang onto Aquitaine, despite repeated French invasions and enormous financial and logistical problems: it could even be argued that Edward I sacrificed his ambitions in Scotland to recover Aquitaine, though that would require a wider perspective on events than many are maybe prepared to admit.

The heart of the Plantagenet dynasty, literally and figuratively, lay in France.