Before long, however, Leicester unwillingly agreed to vacate his office on receiving from Henry a sum of money.  In September, 1252, he laid down the seneschalship and retired into France.  While shabbily treated by the king, he had certainly shown an utter absence of tact or scruple.  But the tumults of Gascony raged with more violence than ever now that his strong hand was withdrawn.  Those who had professed to rise against the seneschal remained in arms against the king.  Once more the neighbouring princes cast greedy eyes on the defenceless duchy.  In particular, Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile, who succeeded his father Ferdinand in 1252, renewed his father’s claims to Gascony.

The only way to save the duchy was for Henry to go there in person.  Long delays ensued before the royal visit took place, and it was not until August, 1253, that Bordeaux saw her hereditary duke sail up the Gironde to her quays.  The Gascon capital remained faithful, but within a few miles of her walls the rebels were everywhere triumphant.  It required a long siege to reduce Benauge to submission, and months elapsed before the towns and castles of the lower Garonne and Dordogne opened their gates.  Even then La Reole, whither all the worst enemies of Montfort had fled, held out obstinately.  Despairing of military success, Henry fell back upon diplomacy.  The strength of the Gascon revolt did not lie in the power of the rebels themselves but in the support of the neighbouring princes and the French crown.  By renewing the truce with the representatives of Louis, Henry protected himself from the danger of French intervention, and at the same time he cut off a more direct source of support to the rebels by negotiating treaties with such magnates as the lord of Albret, the Counts of Comminges and Armagnac, and the Viscount of Bearn.  His master-stroke was the conclusion, in April, 1254, of a peace with Alfonso of Castile, whereby the Spanish king abandoned his Gascon allies and renounced his claims on the duchy.  In return it was agreed that the lord Edward should marry Alfonso’s half-sister, Eleanor, heiress of the county of Ponthieu through her mother, Joan, whom Henry had once sought for his queen.  As Edward’s appanage included Aquitaine, Alfonso, in renouncing his personal claims, might seem to be but transferring them to his sister.

In May, 1254, Queen Eleanor joined Henry at Bordeaux.  With her went her two sons, Edward and Edmund, her uncle, Archbishop Boniface, and a great crowd of magnates.  In August Edward went with his mother to Alfonso’s court at Burgos, where he was welcomed with all honour and dubbed to knighthood by the King of Castile, and in October he and Eleanor were married at the Cistercian monastery of Las Huelgas.  His appanage included all Ireland, the earldom of Chester, the king’s lands in Wales, the Channel Islands, the whole of Gascony, and whatsoever rights his father still had over the lands taken from him and King John by the