Simon de Montfort

Simon de Montfort was born on May 23, 1208, at the family seat of Montfort-l'Amaury, a fortified town west of Paris ^[1]. He was the youngest son of Simon de Montfort the elder, a formidable soldier who commanded the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of southern France, and Alice de Montmorency, a forceful woman who accompanied her husband on campaign. The father's death at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, killed by a stone hurled from a mangonel worked, according to chroniclers, by the women of the city, left the family's fortunes uncertain ^[2].

The Montforts held a curious double inheritance. Through Simon's grandmother Amicia de Beaumont, the family had a claim to the earldom of Leicester in England, yet as subjects of the French crown they could not hold English lands while the two kingdoms were at odds. Simon's elder brother Amaury resolved the problem in the 1230s by formally surrendering the English claim to Simon, keeping the French lands for himself ^[1]. Armed with little more than this paper claim, the young Simon crossed to England around 1230 to persuade King Henry III to recognize him.

He succeeded remarkably quickly. Henry, an impressionable king fond of continental company, took to the ambitious newcomer. Simon received the Leicester estates in 1231 and was gradually accepted into the inner circle of the court, though he was not formally invested as Earl of Leicester until 1239 ^[3]. For a landless younger son from France, it was an extraordinary ascent, and one that bred resentment among English barons who watched foreigners collect favors from their king.

In January 1238 Simon married Eleanor, the king's youngest sister and widow of William Marshal the younger. The wedding took place quietly in the king's private chapel at Westminster, without the consent of the great barons, who were furious when they learned of it ^[2]. Eleanor had sworn a vow of chastity after her first husband's death, and the marriage scandalized churchmen as well as magnates. The match nonetheless bound Simon to the royal family and raised him to the first rank of English politics.

The friendship with Henry proved volatile. In 1239, at the churching of Queen Eleanor of Provence, the king publicly and bitterly accused Simon of having seduced his sister before the marriage and of using the king's name as security for debts without permission. Simon and his wife fled to France in humiliation ^[3]. The quarrel was patched up, and Simon took the cross, campaigning in the Holy Land in 1240 and 1241, where the barons of the crusader kingdom thought well enough of him to propose him as governor of Jerusalem, an offer that came to nothing ^[1].

A harder test came in Gascony, the last major English possession in France, where Henry appointed Simon as his lieutenant in 1248. Simon ruled the turbulent duchy with a soldier's severity, seizing castles and imprisoning troublesome lords. Gascon complaints poured back to Westminster, and in 1252 Henry put his own brother-in-law on trial before the barons. Simon was acquitted, but the episode destroyed what remained of trust between the two men ^[4]. Simon is reported by chroniclers to have raged at the king's ingratitude during the hearings, and the breach never fully healed.

By the late 1250s Henry III's rule had drifted into crisis. His finances were wrecked by an absurd scheme to buy the crown of Sicily for his second son, his Lusignan half-brothers monopolized patronage, and famine sharpened discontent in the countryside ^[4]. In April 1258 a group of seven magnates, Simon among them, confronted the king in armed procession at Westminster and forced him to accept a program of reform.

The result was the Provisions of Oxford of June 1258, a constitutional settlement without precedent in England. Royal government was placed under a council of fifteen barons, parliaments were to meet three times a year, and local officials were made answerable for abuses ^[5]. Simon was not the sole author of the Provisions, but over the following years he became their most unyielding defender as other reformers drifted back to the king's side. Contemporaries noted the oath he had sworn to the Provisions and his refusal, unusual among the barons, to treat it as negotiable.

Henry obtained papal absolution from his oath and clawed back power, and in 1263 Simon returned from France to lead the reformist party in open defiance. Both sides agreed to submit the dispute to King Louis IX of France, whose Mise of Amiens in January 1264 annulled the Provisions entirely in Henry's favor ^[5]. Simon rejected the award, and England slid into the conflict historians call the Second Barons' War.

On May 14, 1264, Simon's smaller army met the royal host at Lewes in Sussex. Despite a leg injury that had forced him to travel by cart earlier that year, he directed the battle from the high ground of the Downs and won a crushing victory, capturing King Henry, his brother Richard of Cornwall, and the heir to the throne, the Lord Edward ^[6]. The settlement that followed, the Mise of Lewes, left Henry as king in name while real power passed to Simon and a small governing council. For the next fifteen months a crowned and anointed king of England was effectively the prisoner of one of his subjects.

Simon's government needed legitimacy beyond the sword, and he sought it in assemblies. To the parliament he summoned for January 1265 at Westminster he called not only sympathetic barons and churchmen but also two knights from each shire and, for the first time in a national assembly, two burgesses from selected towns ^[7]. The precedent of including elected borough representatives took root, and later medieval parliaments made the practice standard. This is the achievement for which Simon de Montfort is chiefly remembered, and it is why the assembly of 1265 is often described as an ancestor of the House of Commons.

Historians are careful about what the parliament was and was not. Simon called it to shore up a narrowing base of support, not to found a democracy, and the franchise it implied was tiny ^[7]. Yet the principle that consent to government should be gathered from communities of the realm, towns included, outlived him. In 2015 the United Kingdom marked the 750th anniversary of the 1265 parliament alongside the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, pairing the two as founding moments in the story of British political liberty ^[8].

Simon and Eleanor had seven children, six sons and a daughter, and by the standards of medieval aristocratic marriages theirs appears to have been a close partnership. Eleanor managed the household accounts that survive from 1265, one of the earliest such records kept for an English noblewoman, and she held Dover Castle for the Montfortian cause in the final crisis ^[2].

Simon cultivated friendships with some of the leading religious intellectuals of his day, above all Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and the Franciscan scholar Adam Marsh, whose surviving letters mix spiritual counsel with blunt criticism of Simon's temper ^[3]. He wore a hair shirt at times and kept vigils, and contemporaries as well as later writers debated whether his piety was conviction, ambition, or both. His religion also had a dark edge turned against England's Jews: as lord of Leicester he expelled the Jewish community from the town in 1231, and attacks on Jews accompanied the Montfortian seizure of power in 1263 and 1264 ^[4].

His children fared badly after his fall. His son Henry died beside him at Evesham. Guy and Simon the younger fled to Italy, where in 1271 they murdered their cousin Henry of Almain in a church at Viterbo in revenge for their father, an act notorious enough that Dante placed Guy in the Inferno ^[1]. Eleanor ended her days in exile at the Dominican convent of Montargis in France, dying in 1275.

Simon's regime weakened through 1265. The Welsh alliance he struck with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd alienated lords of the Welsh Marches, and his sons' greed for confiscated estates cost the family allies. The decisive blow came in May, when the Lord Edward escaped his custodians near Hereford after outriding his escort, and rallied the royalists ^[6].

Edward moved with a speed his enemies did not expect. He destroyed the army of Simon's son at Kenilworth on August 1, then swung to intercept the father's force as it crossed the River Avon. On the morning of August 4, 1265, Simon found himself trapped in a loop of the river at Evesham in Worcestershire, outnumbered perhaps three to one, with the captive King Henry dragged along in his ranks ^[6]. A thunderstorm broke over the field as the armies closed. The chronicler Robert of Gloucester called the slaughter that followed the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none.

A picked squad of royalist knights had been detailed to kill Simon rather than take him for ransom, a departure from the usual conventions of war between nobles. He died fighting on foot after his horse was cut down, and his body was mutilated, with the head, hands, and feet cut off and the head sent as a trophy to the wife of one of the victors ^[4]. The monks of Evesham Abbey buried what remained before their high altar.

Almost at once, ordinary people began treating the dead earl as a saint. Pilgrims came to Evesham, miracles were recorded at his tomb and at the spring on the battlefield where his body had lain, and a collection of over two hundred miracle stories survives, even though the crown and the church suppressed the cult and he was never canonized ^[5]. Political songs of the period mourned him as a martyr who died for justice, evidence of how deeply the reform movement had reached below the baronial class.

Judgments of Simon de Montfort have swung widely ever since. Victorian historians, led by William Stubbs, cast him as the far-sighted creator of the House of Commons. Twentieth-century scholarship pushed back, stressing his acquisitiveness, his violence toward Jews, and the self-interest woven through his idealism. The fullest modern account, J. R. Maddicott's 1994 biography, presents a man in whom genuine principle and grasping ambition operated together, each feeding the other ^[4]. That double character is now central to any serious Simon de Montfort biography.

His name remains part of British public life. De Montfort University in Leicester carries it, a tower of Leicester's clock tower monument bears his statue, and a relief of Simon is among the lawgivers honored in the chamber of the United States House of Representatives ^[8]. For anyone asking who was Simon de Montfort, the shortest honest answer holds both truths: a hard, ambitious magnate of the thirteenth century, and the man whose parliament of 1265 first seated elected townsmen at the center of English government.