SIMON DE MONTFORT, EARL OF LEICESTER. By JOHN RICHARD GREEN.

[A valiant soldier, astute politician, and public-spirited reformer of the thirteenth century, born about 1200, died 1265. The son of that De Montfort who led the cruel crusade against the Albigenses of southern France, Simon became in early life an English subject, received the highest honors from Henry III, and also secured the hand of his sister in marriage. He sympathized with and became a leader of the English barons in demanding the necessary concessions to complete and enforce that great charter wrung from King John at Runnymede; and finally took up arms to constrain Henry. In the civil war which ensued Simon of Montfort was for the most part victorious, but finally found himself forsaken by the fickle baronage whose cause he had espoused. He was obliged to throw himself on the support of the people. In the last Parliament he convoked, in the year of his death, he summoned knights and burgesses to sit by the side of the barons and bishops, thus creating a new force in the English constitution, which wrought a great change in the political system of the country. He was slain and his army defeated some months later at the battle of Evesham by Prince Edward.]

When a thunderstorm once forced the king, as he was rowing on the Thames, to take refuge at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, Earl Simon of Montfort, who was a guest of the prelate, met the royal barge with assurances that the storm was drifting away, and that there was nothing to fear. Henry’s petulant wit broke out in his reply: “If I fear the thunder,” said the king, “I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world.”

The man whom Henry dreaded as the champion of English freedom was himself a foreigner, the son of a Simon de Montfort whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in southern Gaul. Though fourth son of this crusader, Simon became possessor of the English earldom of Leicester, which he inherited through his mother, and a secret match with Eleanor, the king’s sister and widow of the second William Marshal, linked him to the royal house. The baronage, indignant at this sudden alliance with a stranger, rose in a revolt which failed only through the desertion of their head, Earl Richard of Cornwall; while the censures of the Church on Eleanor’s breach of a vow of chastity, which she had made at her first husband’s death, were hardly averted by a journey to Rome. Simon returned to find the changeable king quickly alienated from him and to be driven by a burst of royal passion from the realm. He was, however, soon restored to favor, and before long took his stand in the front rank of the patriot leaders. In 1248 he was appointed governor of Gascony, where the stern justice of his rule and the heavy taxation which his enforcement of order made necessary earned the hatred of the disorderly nobles. The complaints of the Gascons brought about an open breach with the king. To Earl Simon’s offer of the surrender of his post if the money he had spent in the royal service were, as Henry had promised, repaid him, the king hotly retorted that he was bound by no promise to a false traitor. Simon at once gave Henry the lie; “and but that thou bearest the name of king it had been a bad hour for thee when thou utteredst such a word!” A formal reconciliation was brought about, and the earl once more returned to Gascony, but before winter had come he was forced to withdraw to France. The greatness of his reputation was shown in an offer which its nobles made him of the regency of their realm during the absence of King Lewis on the crusade. But the offer was refused, and Henry, who had himself undertaken the pacification of Gascony, was glad before the close of 1253 to recall its old ruler to do the work he had failed to do.

Simon’s character had now thoroughly developed. He had inherited the strict and severe piety of his father; he was assiduous in his attendance on religious services, whether by night or day; he was the friend of Grosseteste and the patron of the Friars. In his correspondence with Adam Marsh we see him finding patience under his Gascon troubles in the perusal of the Book of Job. His life was pure and singularly temperate; he was noted for his scant indulgence in meat, drink, or sleep. Socially he was cheerful and pleasant in talk; but his natural temper was quick and ardent, his sense of honor keen, his speech rapid and trenchant. His impatience of contradiction, his fiery temper, were in fact the great stumbling-blocks in his after career. But the one characteristic which overmastered all was what men at that time called his “constancy,” the firm, immovable resolve which trampled even death under foot in its loyalty to the right. The motto which Edward I chose as his device, “Keep troth,” was far truer as the device of Earl Simon. We see in his correspondence with what a clear discernment of its difficulties both at home and abroad he “thought it unbecoming to decline the danger of so great an exploit” as the reduction of Gascony to peace and order; but once undertaken, he persevered in spite of the opposition he met with, the failure of all support or funds from England, and the king’s desertion of his cause, till the work was done. There is the same steadiness of will and purpose in his patriotism. The letters of Grosseteste show how early he had learned to sympathize with the bishop in his resistance to Rome, and at the crisis of the contest he offers him his own support and that of his associates. He sends to Adam Marsh a tract of Grosseteste’s on “the rule of a kingdom and of a tyranny,” sealed with his own seal. He listens patiently to the advice of his friends on the subject of his household or his temper. “Better is a patient man,” writes honest Friar Adam, “than a strong man, and he who can rule his own temper than he who storms a city.” “What use is it to provide for the peace of your fellow-citizens and not guard the peace of your own household?” It was to secure “the peace of his fellow-citizens” that the earl silently trained himself as the tide of misgovernment mounted higher and higher, and the fruit of his discipline was seen when the crisis came. While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the enthusiastic love of the people gathered itself round the stern, grave soldier who “stood like a pillar,” unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn.

In England affairs were going from bad to worse. The Pope still weighed heavily on the Church. Two solemn confirmations of the charter failed to bring about any compliance with its provisions. In 1248, in 1249, and again in 1255, the great council fruitlessly renewed its demand for a regular ministry, and the growing resolve of the nobles to enforce good government was seen in their offer of a grant on condition that the chief officers of the crown were appointed by the council. Henry indignantly refused the offer, and sold his plate to the citizens of London to find payment for his household. The barons were mutinous and defiant. “I will send reapers and reap your fields for you,” Henry had threatened Earl Bigod of Norfolk when he refused him aid. “And I will send you back the heads of your reapers,” retorted the earl. Hampered by the profusion of the court and by the refusal of supplies, the crown was penniless, yet new expenses were incurred by Henry’s acceptance of a papal offer of the kingdom of Sicily in favor of his second son, Edmund. Shame had fallen on the English arms, and the king’s eldest son, Edward, had been disastrously defeated on the Marches by Llewelyn of Wales. The tide of discontent, which was heightened by a grievous famine, burst its bounds in the irritation excited by the new demands from both Henry and Rome with which the year 1258 opened, and the barons repaired in arms to a great council summoned at London. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of the charter—its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage, and a definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge; its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the charter, and his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken.

The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state. “Now England breathes in the hope of liberty,” sang a poet of the time; “the English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and their foes are vanquished.” The song announces with almost legal precision the theory of the patriots. “He who would be in truth a king, he is a ‘free king’ indeed if he rightly rule himself and his realm. All things are lawful to him for the government of his kingdom, but nothing for its destruction. It is one thing to rule according to a king’s duty, another to destroy a kingdom by resisting the law.... Let the community of the realm advise, and let it be known what the generality, to whom their own laws are best known, think on the matter. They who are ruled by the laws know those laws best; they who make daily trial of them are best acquainted with them; and since it is their own affairs which are at stake, they will take more care, and will act with an eye to their own peace.... It concerns the community to see what sort of men ought justly to be chosen for the weal of the realm.” The constitutional restrictions on the royal authority, the right of the whole nation to deliberate and decide on its own affairs, and to have a voice in the selection of the administrators of government, had never been so clearly stated before.

It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king, yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war. A new Parliament was summoned in January, 1265, to Westminster, but the weakness of the patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics. But it was just this sense of his weakness that drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in our history. As before, he summoned two knights from every county. But he created a new force in English politics when he summoned to sit beside them two citizens from every borough. The attendance of delegates from the towns had long been usual in the county courts when any matter respecting their interests was in question; but it was the writ issued by Earl Simon that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the knight of the shire, the baron, and the bishop in the Parliament of the realm.