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SIMON DE MONTFORT.

"On our historical, as on our political hemisphere, a new dawn is arising; and among the darkened memories which eng day shall gild with genial and grateful beams few shall shine more fairly than that of De Montfort."-West

CONTENTS.

Ators of Simon De Montfort-His Father the Leader in the War against the Heretics of Provence-Claim to the Laridom of Leicester-The Claim Acknowledged-De Montfort at Court-His Gallantry and Accomplishments-State of England after the Death of King John-Marries the King's Sister-The King's Marriage, and Influence of AliensPopular Discontent-Opposition of the Barons-De Montfort Insulted by the King-Becomes a Crusader-Sent to Sappens the Insurrection in Gascony-Foreign Intrigues-Becomes Leader of the Baronial Party-The Statutes of Oxford-The King Breaks his Oath-Submission to French Arbitration-Deceitful Conduct of the King-Outbreak of the Jama' War-The Battle of Lewes-New Political Constitution-Renewed Outbreaks -The Battle of Evesham, and Death of De Montfort-Horrible Mutilation of his Body-Reputed Miracles at his Tomb-A Terrible Revenge.

INJUSTICE OF HISTORY.

has been only in comparatively recent days, and as the result of modern investigation, ds more liberal understanding of the signifi ce of events, that the greatness and influencé Fimon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, have been

ed Unquestionably the representative leader of the great baronial party which

completed, in the reign of Henry the Third, the work begun in the time of the weak and dissolute John, and almost as unquestionably (although some inquirers have some doubt of his claims in this respect) the originator of our great system of Parliamentary representation, by which the "Commons" have so great an influence in legislation, it has been the fate of De Montfort to be lightly esteemed, or even

denounced as a traitor and a selfish conspirator, by historians of high repute.

Later critics, however, have done him justice, and he now stands revealed in the historic page as a far-sighted statesman, a bold and accomplished military leader, whose great ability gave him a predominant influence over the warlike and impetuous barons, who were impatient of the weakness of the king, and of his subordination to a crowd of rapacious foreigners, upon whom were bestowed, irrespective of personal merit or fitness, offices of emolument in the court, in the church, and in the judicature. He is revealed, too, not only as the leader of the Larons in the great struggle, but as the champion of the oppressed people, and the vindicator of. their claims to political consideration. How can we be otherwise than interested in the career of a man who made so great a mark upon his age?

About the middle of the twelfth century, a French noble, Simon the Bald, Count de Montfort, descendant of a French king, married Amicie de Beaumont (known as Blanchemains "white hands"), the daughter and co-heiress of Robert Fitzparnel, Earl of Leicester, and his wife Petronilla, the lady who bequeathed to the church at Leicester a rope made of her own hair to suspend the lamp in the choir. This Petronilla was descended from William Fitz-Osborne, Lord of Breteuil, in Normandy, Earl of Hereford, a friend of the Conqueror, and was also the heiress of Hugh de Grantemenell, Baron of Hinckley, and Hereditary Grand Steward of England. The Earl of Leicester outlived his son-in-law, and, on his death, Simon, the second of the five sons of Simon the Bald, succeeded to the title and hereditary honours.

This second Simon de Montfort, father of the more illustrious bearer of the name, was a man of note in his day, and we must give a brief space to his history, which materially influenced the early fortunes of his son. Two years after he became Earl of Leicester, he appears to have engaged in some act of rebellion-probably one of those active protests against encroachments by King John on what were believed to be baronial rights, so frequent in those unsettled times-and was banished from the kingdom, his title and estates being declared forfeited. He had many adherents, and, indeed, so powerful was his influence, that King John believed in the authenticity of a rumour that some of the foremost barons were engaged in a conspiracy, the object of which was to dethrone him and place the crown on the head of Simon.

Driven from his own country, this warlike and

energetic baron, conspicuous for his stature and strength, a born leader of armies, and a devout son of the Church,-knowing neither doubt nor scruple when the Pope required his services, soon found congenial employment abroad. Count Montalembert, the modern Roman Catholic his torian, refers with admiration to Simon's "inviolable purity of morals, and inflexible devotion to ecclesiastical authority." The stern, pitiless. able warrior was a fit instrument to be employed in the terrible work of extirpation against the heretic Albigenses, on which Pope Innocent III. was then entering.

The conquered territories of Count Raymond of Toulouse and his allies were given by the Pope to the great leader; but Simon did not live to possess them in peace, for he was killed by a stone at the siege of Toulouse in 1218. His wife survived him three years; and his eldest son, Almeric, who became Constable of France in succession to his grandfather, De Montmorency, having been unsuccessful in maintaining his inheritance against the successors of Raymond, ceded his claim to Louis VIII. of France.

The redoubtable Count de Montfort and his Countess, Alice, were the parents of four sons and two daughters. The eldest son, Almeric, mentioned above, took part in the Crusades, and married Beatrice, the daughter of Count de Vienne; and their son, John, renounced all English claims. The second son, Guy, was also a Crusader, and was killed at Castelnauderi, four years after his marriage with Petronills. Countess of Bigorre, who survived him thirtyfive years, and consoled herself for his loss by marrying four other husbands, all of whom she outlived. Robert, a third son, died unmarried; and the fourth son was the most famous of the race, the Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, whose career we are relating.

THE EARLDOM OF LEICESTER.

A year before the death of King John, the forfeited English estates of the elder Simon had been granted to his nephew, Ranulph, Earl of Chester, a youth, Peter de Roches, Bishop of Winchester, holding the lands in trust. It is probable that the new King, Henry III., or at least his advisers, were not unwilling that the gift should be set aside, and that, certain conditions being complied with, the dignities anl estates might revert to the De Montfort family. Almeric de Montfort, the eldest of the brothers, had frequently since his father's death urged his claims, and when, in 1232, the Earl of Chester died, he sent his brother Simon (the intervening

brothers being dead), to England, with a petition to King Henry. Thinking it possible that his own offer to do homage might be disallowed, as be bad recently succeeded to the high office of Constable of France, he professed that he would be satisfied if Simon, who held no lands under the French King, were permitted to do homage. To this arrangement King Henry acceded; and Almeric having made a solemn renunciation of his claims in favour of his brother (with the reversion only in case of failure of heirs male), A was admitted to the hereditary posses se and honours in the presence of the King at Shrewsbury, in May, 1232.

DE MONTFORT at Court.

At the age of about thirty-two (there is some discrepancy as to the date of his birth, but there sems to be good authority for fixing it in the year 1200), the young Frenchman appeared at the English Court as Earl of Leicester. He inharted the noble physical frame and mental qualities of his father, and the more versatile mind and quick talents of his mother, the daughter of the Montmorencies. The Chronicle of Lanercost decribes him as tall and handsome; sad other authorities mention him as "a gentleman of choice blood, education, and features." In his youth he had experience of the hardsups of war, and had probably taken part in campaigns by the side of his renowned father. In France he had associated not only with princes and courtiers, but with learned men, and there a reason to believe that he was, in respect of inlectual culture, far in advance of the majority of the English barons. During a long period he Apt up a literary correspondence with Adam de Marano, one of the most distinguished scholars of the thirteenth century. He was ambitious of a sanguished alliance, and had sought marriage with widowed ladies of princely blood; but the Trach King, not pleased perhaps by the withtraval of so gallant a gentleman from his own Court interfered to prohibit the alliances. The niy first sought was Matilda, Countess of Bouage the second, Joan, Countess of Flanders, and widow of a Portuguese prince. In the latter case, indeed, a form of marriage appears to have been through; but when, several years afterwards, the lady married Prince Thomas of Savoy, she took a solemn oath that her marriage with Sinn de Montfort was not valid.

MARRIAGE OF HENRY III. Four years after his accession to the title, the Eat of Leicester, in the performance of the duties

of his inherited office of High Steward, attended to hold the basin of water at the feast which followed the coronation of the young Queen Eleanor, whom King Henry III. espoused in January, 1236. The King had expressed himself strongly averse to matrimony, although, for reasons of state, his council were continually urging him to contract it. When almost a child, he had been betrothed to Joanna, afterwards Queen of Castile ; and that promise having been annulled by the Pope's dispensation, five unsuccessful treaties for his marriage with other princesses were proposed. At length, at the age of twenty-nine, he yielded to remonstrances, and offered his hand to Eleanor, one of the four beautiful daughters of Raymond, Count of Provence, all of whom became queens. Some of the manuscript poems of this accomplished lady are still preserved at Turin; and it is said that specimens of her poetic talent having reached the English Court, led to her marriage with the King of England.

CONDITION OF ENGLAND.

As this royal marriage greatly affected the social and political condition of England, and was indeed one of the causes which led indirectly to the outbreak of the civil wars of which De Montfort was the great central figure, it may be advisable to sketch briefly the condition of England in the twenty years which had elapsed between the accession of the boy king and his marriage.

When John, King of England, died miserably in the abbey at Newark, on the 19th of October, 1216, his eldest son, Prince Henry, was only just ten years old. The barons, who shortly before had invited the assistance of the King of France in their opposition to the misgovernment of John, began to weary of the alliance they had courted. Determined to dethrone the weak and vicious King, they had permitted, even invited, the Dauphin Louis, who led the French army, to assume the title of King of England, and he was even crowned in London before the death of John. Very soon, however, the barons discovered that they were drifting towards a greater danger than that from which they had wished to escape,

After the death of John, the barons were divided into three parties. Some were ready to acknowledge the French Dauphin as King of England; others were for uniting England with France. The leading motive of these two parties was to present a firm front against the pre tensions of Rome, the Pope, before the King's death, having pronounced Magna Charta to be void, and claimed that John had annexed the

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The French soldiers, we read in contemporary records, began to conduct themselves as if they were in a conquered country. "The greater the resistance," says the historian Thierry, "made by the English to their arbitrary exactions, the more did these foreign invaders show themselves cruel and grasping; and the accusation which had been so fatal to King John was renewed against the Dauphin Louis. It was said that he had favoured a project, in concert with his father, for exterminating or banishing all the rich men of England, and for putting Frenchmen in their places."

The Normans who had come over with the Conqueror a hundred and fifty years before had felt no scruples about seizing the estates of the English nobles and assuming their titles, and their descendants readily enough acquiesced in this doctrine of the right of the strong hand; but even those who had been the first to invite French aid seriously objected to the followers of Louis imitating the example. They united to defend their order as they had united to wring the Great Charter from John; and now, as then, found it was their interest to take sides with the townsmen and common people. They had welcomed the French Dauphin as the saviour of the kingdom; in the revulsion of feeling they echoed the words which Shakespeare has put into the mouth of Faulconbridge :—

"Shall a beardless boy,

A cockered silken wanton, brave our fields,
And flesh his spirit in a warlike soil;
Mocking the air with colours idly spread,
And find no check?"

For the first time a national spirit of independence united the hitherto antagonistic Nor man and English races-the subduers and the subdued; and that spirit, destined before many years were past to give a definite shape to the British constitution, is best expressed by again quoting the words of the gallant Bastard :

"This England never did, nor ever shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
But when it first did help to wound itself.
Come the three corners of the world in arms,
And we shall shock them,-nought shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true."

That spirit nerved the arms of the stout knights and men-at-arms who fought under De Montfort

(foreign by birth, but English by adoption) in the great war of the barons against foreign influences; that spirit animated alike the Englishmen who sailed forth to meet the great Armada, and their descendants who conquered in the great sea-fight of Trafalgar.

"Wherefore," says the historian already quoted, "being excited for the general welfare to take up arms, all parties united in favour of Prince Henry, the son of King John." Open war broke out between the now united barons and the French prince. After several contests, Louis was defeated at Lincoln. His father, Philip Augustus, King of France, despatched reinforcements, under the leadership of a desperado known as "Eustace the Monk," but perhaps more accurately described as "a well-known freebooter of the Channel" To intercept this force, embarked in eighty large ships, an English fleet of forty vessels, many of them of small size, was fitted out, and sailed from Dover under the command of Hubert de Burgh (an able and patriotic Englishman, whom Shakespeare, less just than usual, has painted in odious colours in King John). The fleets met, and the English displayed that prowess on the sea which is their national characteristic, although it must be admitted that, in one respect at least, their mode of fighting was rather peculiar. "From the decks of the English vessels bowmen poured their arrows into the crowded transports; others hurled quicklime into their enemies' faces, while the more active vessels crashed with their armed prows into the sides of the French ships." Eustace the Monk, accustomed to fierce fighting as no doubt he was, was disastrously beaten by the brave sailors of the Cinque Ports, and his large fleet was utterly destroyed.

This defeat sealed the fate of the foreign interlopers. Louis accepted terms of capitulation, by which the lives of his followers were granted on condition of their immediately quitting England.

THE YOUNG KING'S COUNSELLORS, At that time the leading spirit among the English nobles was William Marischall, Earl of Pembroke, a man of great sagacity, patriotism, influence, and wealth. By his marriage with the heiress of Richard, Earl of Pembroke, better known as Strongbow, the conqueror of Ireland, he had succeeded to the title and immense estates in that country. He was appointed Regent during the minority of Henry, and for three years governed the country with great wisdom and ability, main taining the principles of the Great Charter. Afte his death, in 1219, Peter de Roches, Bishop o Winchester, a native of Poictou, who had bee

an active soldier in his youth, and who in his advanced years, long after he had been elevated to the episcopacy, was (according to Matthew Paris) selected by the Pope to command his troops -became Regent. The young King was the weak instrument of his power, and was encouraged to distrust his nobles, and dismiss a large number from the offices and dignities they enjoyed, their places being filled by foreigners.

His

For a time Hubert de Burgh exercised a whole. sume check on the Bishop of Winchester. great services and high character made him popular, and the King (who was declared of age when sixteen years old) in his feeble fashion honoured and trusted him. He had married Margaret, sister of Alexander II. of Scotland, was created Earl of Kent, and in 1228 appointed Justiciary of England for life. This was the birbest office the King could bestow, and the daties were discharged with ability and success, but with severity. Bishop Des Roches, though no longer Regent, was his bitter opponent, and a more formidable enemy was found in Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the King's brother. The result was that, within four years of his appointment to the great office of Justiciary, the King, fickle and easily influenced, deprived him of his honours sad estates, and sent him to prison.

The Bishop was again (1232) placed at the head of affairs, and again foreigners swarmed into the kingom, and again the provisions of the Great Charter were systematically violated, and the atical liberties subjected to encroachment. Warn a demand was made of him that he should observe the Charter of John, he arrogantly replied, "I am no Englishman that I should know these darters and these laws." One of the Bishop's Jarvin favourites, Stephen de Segrave, who had been a priest, but-holy orders were but light bonds in those days-had been afterwards Ighted, and had received the grant of large estates, succeeded De Burgh as Justiciary; and then says an old chronicler, "Judgment was entrusted to the unjust, the laws to outlaws, peace to the turbulent, and justice to wrong-doers." Within a year after the restoration to almost absolute power of the Bishop of Winchester, his wordart had become so intolerable that a combitation of clergy and laity, headed by Edmund of Abingdon, Archbishop of Canterbury, compled the King to dismiss him, and the Archinbrp was placed at the head of affairs.

POPULAR DISCONTENT.

Buck was the condition of England when Simon Montfort succeeded to the title of Earl of

Leicester, and appeared as High Steward at the English Court. The barons were angry at the preference shown to foreigners; the common folk bore sullenly the extortions and tyrannie, of the privileged classes. The Church, to which they had been taught to look as to some extent the champion of their liberties against kingly or baronial oppression, was crowded with aliens, whose chief care was to obtain as much wealth as possible from their benefices, a desire increased by the Papal exactions, which exceeded all former demands. Pope Gregory IX. demanded a tithe of all the moveables of the priesthood under threats of excommunication; and the demands were increased as the Papal treasury became more and more in need of money. Presentations to English benefices were openly sold in Italy, and the purchasers were "quartered on the best livings in the Church."

A year before the King's marriage, the long pent-up discontent assumed the form of active resistance. Armed men scattered letters over the kingdom, purporting to come from "the whole body of those who prefer to die rather than be ruined by the Romans." The tithes gathered for the Pope were seized and given to the poor, and the collectors were beaten and their letters of authority trodden under foot. It has been thought that Hubert de Burgh, the Justiciary, secretly encouraged these popular demonstrations, and certainly the sheriffs and other peace officers did not interfere. Probably this suspicion added the Church to his other enemies, and hastened his downfall.

Mr. Green, in his "History of the English People," says, "The old reverence for the Papacy was falling away before the universal resentment at its political ambition, its lavish use of interdict and excommunication for purely secular ends, its degradation of the most sacred sentences into means of financial extortion." With characteristic artfulness, it employed an agency to divert the popular indignation from itself to the secular Government. Begging friars, of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, shrewd, eloquent, and possessing the art of speaking to the comprehension of the people, rambled through England; and, says Mr. Green, "the rudest countryman learned the tale of a king's oppression, or a patriot's hopes, as he listened to the rambling, passionate, humorous discourse of the begging friar."

Popular ballads, too, stirred the national blood -ballads rude in construction, but vigorous and stirring, not appealing to literary taste, for nothing of the sort existed among the half-starved

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