Robert Burnell - Foreign Service

Foreign Service

Burnell was active in the king's foreign policy, especially towards France, Scotland and Wales, and undertook a number of diplomatic missions to those countries. Burnell served as the royal spokesman on several of these occasions, one of them being at Paris in 1286 when he made a speech detailing the history of English–French relations since the Treaty of Paris of 1259. The speech was a prelude to discussions, successfully concluded, involving the homage that Edward owed to King Philip IV of France, for Edward's land in France. Burnell was employed in Gascony during the late 1280s, helping to administer that duchy and to reorganise its government. He showed himself sensitive to the Gascon desire for independence and did not attempt to impose the same systems of government that were used in England. The historian Michael Prestwich therefore argues that the first half of Edward's reign was the period when Gascony enjoyed its most successful government under the Plantagenets. Later, in June 1291, Burnell gave two speeches at the great council of English and Scottish nobles in Norham to decide the succession to the Scottish crown. Edward had been asked to mediate an end to the crisis over the succession, or the Great Cause as it was known in England.

In Welsh affairs, Burnell attended a number of councils dealing with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the Welsh ruler, and in 1277 he escorted Llywelyn to Westminster, where Llywelyn pledged homage to Edward. Burnell was present during Edward's conquest of Wales in the 1280s; he witnessed documents in Rhuddlan in 1282, and subsequently at Conwy and Caernarfon.

Some time before 1290 Burnell vowed to go on crusade to help reinforce the crusader city of Acre, which was threatened by Muslims in the late 1280s, but he never fulfilled his obligation.