to English saints, more especially to royal saints such as Edward the Confessor and Edmund of East Anglia.  Yet he showed less sympathy with English ways than many of his foreign-born predecessors.  Educated under alien influences, delighting in the art, the refinement, the devotion, and the absolutist principles of foreigners, he seldom trusted a man of English birth.  Too weak to act for himself, too suspicious to trust his natural counsellors, he found the friendship and advice for which he yearned in foreign favourites and kinsmen.  Thus it was that the hopes excited by the fall of the Poitevins were disappointed.  The alien invasion, checked for a few years, was renewed in a more dangerous shape.

During the ten years after the collapse of Peter des Roches, swarms of foreigners came to England, and spoiled the land with the king’s entire good-will.  Henry’s marriage brought many Provencals and Savoyards to England.  The renewed troubles between pope and emperor led to a renewal of Roman interference in a more exacting form.  The continued intercourse with foreign states resulted in fresh opportunities of alien influence.  A new attempt on Poitou brought as its only result the importation of the king’s Poitevin kinsmen.  The continued close relationship between the English and the French baronage involved the frequent claim of English estates and titles by men of alien birth.  Even such beneficial movements as the establishment of the mendicant orders in England, and the cosmopolitan outlook of the increasingly important academic class contributed to the spread of outlandish ideas.  As wave after wave of foreigners swept over England, Englishmen involved them in a common condemnation.  And all saw in the weakness of the king the very source of their power.

The first great influx of foreigners followed directly from Henry’s marriage.  For several years active negotiations had been going on to secure him a suitable bride.  There had also at various times been talk of his selecting a wife from Brittany, Austria, Bohemia, or Scotland, and in the spring of 1235 a serious negotiation for his marriage with Joan, daughter and heiress of the Count of Ponthieu, only broke down through the opposition of the French court.  Henry then sought the hand of Eleanor, a girl twelve years old, and the second of the four daughters of Raymond Berengar IV., Count of Provence, and his wife Beatrice, sister of Amadeus III., Count of Savoy.  The marriage contract was signed in October.  Before that time Eleanor had left Provence under the escort of her mother’s brother, William, bishop-elect of Valence.  On her way she spent a long period with her elder sister Margaret, who had been married to Louis IX. of France in 1234.  On January 14, 1236, she was married to Henry at Canterbury by Archbishop Edmund, and crowned at Westminster on the following Sunday.