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On the 4th of August 1265, in a field outside the town of Evesham in Worcestershire, a nobleman in his late fifties was killed and his corpse desecrated. His severed head was then sent as a trophy to Maud Mortimer, the wife of one of his great rivals. The man was Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, and his fall was as rapid as his rise to become the ruler of England in all-but name, 15 months earlier. Who was this noble, who some see as the father of the English parliament, yet who others perceive as a paragon of a feudal lord grasping for power beyond his
birthright? This is the story of Simon de Montfort and the Second Barons' War. The man known to history as Simon de Montfort, sixth Earl of Leicester, is understood to have been born in northern France around the year 1208, though there is no precise record of the date or place of his birth. He was probably born at Montfort l'Amaury, one of the Montfort family's ancestral homes in northern France, not far from Paris in the Ile-de-France area,
though this is not known for certain. Simon was the third son of Simon de Montfort, the fifth Earl of Leicester in the English peerage and a French knight of considerable renown who was the Lord of Montfort in France. He had taken part in the Fourth Crusade in 1202 and was one of the more prominent French lords who was opposed to the decision to divert to Constantinople to attack a fellow Christian power, the Byzantine Empire. When he returned home to Western Europe, Simon's father would further burnish his reputation as a Christian knight through his leading role in the
crusade against the Cathar heresy in south-western France in the 1210s. The fifth earl's wife, young Simon's mother, was Alix de Montmorency, a noblewoman descended from several prominent aristocratic lineages in France and the Low Countries. Her grandfather, for instance, was Baldwin IV, Count of Hainaut, one of the most powerful lords in the region where Belgium is today. Simon's position as a younger son, behind his brothers Amaury and Guy, was consequential in that it meant he would have to seek his fortune away from the Montfort lands in France itself,
which it was assumed one of his older brothers would inherit before him. Establishing the extent of the lands and titles of the Montforts is important in order to understand the trajectory of Simon's life. How, after all, did the third son of a middling French lord end up becoming the most powerful aristocrat in mid-thirteenth-century England? The Montforts took their name from Montfort-l'Amaury not far from Paris, where, as we have seen, it is believed Simon may have been born. But they had lands elsewhere beyond this narrow part of northern France. Simon's paternal grandfather had married Amicia de Beaumont,
a daughter of Robert de Beaumont, the third Earl of Leicester in the English peerage. This was a time when the nobles of England and northern France were deeply interconnected, as the nobility of England were effectively a conquest aristocracy who had come from France to conquer England during the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the years that followed. Amicia's brother, Robert, had become the fourth Earl of Leicester in 1190 after her father, the third earl died on his way home from the Holy Land as part of the Third Crusade. The fourth earl, who was one of the most
powerful Anglo-Norman magnates in England, died in 1204 without producing an heir. Consequently, the Leicester lands were divided up. In theory, Simon de Montfort inherited a large part of the estate and the title of fifth Earl of Leicester by right of his descent from the third earl, but the timing was not good. The English and French were mired in a bitter war in 1204 and de Montfort's claim to the earldom of Leicester could not be fully confirmed. It would remain there though, dormant and waiting for a later member of the family to come to England and
press the claim to it in later years under more favourable political conditions. Simon de Montfort's life was shaped too by events that had started twenty years before he was born. Since the days of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the kings of England had ruled over large parts of France, most notably the Duchy of Normandy in the north and then an even larger expanse of territory in western France, as well as places in between such as the County of Anjou. Despite internecine conflicts amongst William's successors in the twelfth century,
the Angevin Empire, as the empire which the ruling House of Plantagenet controlled is known, covered England, Wales, part of Ireland and over a third of modern-day France. However, only a few years before Simon was born, King John, the father of King Henry III of England, whose long reign would overlap with Simon's life, had lost a huge proportion of the Plantagenet lands in France during a disastrous war with the French in 1204. The loss of the hugely symbolic Duchy of Normandy was an especial blow, and John's authority as king never fully recovered. In 1215,
under pressure from the discontented lords of England over excessive taxation and their insufficient involvement in governmental affairs, he agreed to the Magna Carta or 'Great Charter', whereby he made concessions to the lords of England regarding the extent of the crown's power, relative to the nobles. Even this could not forestall the outbreak of a civil war that same year. Known as the First Barons' War, it was a clash between crown and nobility, one of many that would characterise England's political history for centuries to come. Though John's death in 1216 and
the accession of his nine-year old son, Henry III, led to the swift end of the First Barons' War, the main issues that had caused it, the fundamental question of how much power the king should hold over the lords of the realm, especially when it came to taxation and the governance of the realm using that money, remained unresolved. Simon de Montfort would become the man who drove the movement for reform in decades to come. Though Simon was young at the time, the First Barons' War would surely have affected him to some extent. A far bigger influence over him would have
been the death of his father in 1218 at Toulouse in south-western France while he was leading part of the Albigensian Crusade to wipe out the Cathar heresy that had arisen in the Pyrenees and Occitan region of France from around the 1140s onwards. Then Simon's mother died in 1221. Therefore his childhood was marked by the loss of his parents. We know little about his education, though in keeping with medieval tradition, it was largely based on military training and by the mid-1220s he was himself engaged in the Albigensian Crusade against the heretical Cathars. Already, though,
seeing that his older brother Amaury was scheduled to inherit the bulk of the family's lands in France, Simon could see that his future might lie in England rather than in France. The exact date is not certain, but it was seemingly around 1230, a year after the Albigensian Crusade ended via the Treaty of Meaux between King Louis IX of France and Count Raymond of Toulouse, that Simon made his way to England. He was approximately 22 years of age by then and had apparently determined that with Amaury the main claimant to the de Montfort lands in France,
he himself could stake out a claim to the family's largely dormant, yet far from insignificant, claim to the earldom of Leicester in England. It was fortuitous timing. After years of procrastinating about finally ruling in his own stead, King Henry was beginning to show some signs of an independent mind, and one of the projects which the young king became focused on was the idea of establishing de Montfort as a powerful lord in the East Midlands, not least to offset the power of a series of excessively powerful earls and lords there who had never been fully tamed at the end of the
First Barons' War. It helped that Henry and Simon got along. They were similar in age and Henry, who was a pious and good-natured man, though clearly of only middling intelligence and modest capabilities as a king, took well to de Montfort, who knew how to build up a warm relationship with him by charming the young king and encouraging him to exercise his own power as monarch. Henry quickly rewarded him by allowing Simon to pay homage for the Leicester lands in 1231, though it would only be in 1239 that the earldom was fully and formally conferred on him. Meanwhile,
de Montfort also enjoyed friendly relationships with several other senior English nobles, notably Ranulf, Earl of Chester. In 1236 Simon played a prominent role in the celebrations surrounding the king's marriage to Eleanor of Provence. In short, within a few years of transferring his interests from France to England, de Montfort had become one of the most powerful lords of the realm and a close ally and friend of the king. The decline of the relationship would shape England's politics over the next thirty years. It was not simply that de Montfort managed to rise
to the top of the English court and establish actual physical control over the earldom of Leicester and its lands within a few years of arriving in England in the 1230s. He carried out an even more stunning political and dynastic coup in January 1238 when he married the king's own sister, Eleanor. She was the youngest child of King John, born around 1215 just as he was conceding the terms of the Magna Carta to his nobles. As a sister of the King of England, she was an important dynastic chess piece for the English crown and her two older sisters,
Joan and Isabella, had already been married off respectively to King Alexander II of Scotland and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. The English needed strong dynastic alliances like this if they were to be able to reclaim the lands they had lost in France in the days of King John. Moreover, Eleanor had been a widow since the death of her first husband, William Marshal, second Earl of Pembroke, the most powerful magnate of England, in 1231. It was therefore staggering news when it became known that the king's sister, rather than marrying a prominent
European monarch or prince of some kind, was to marry the upstart French lord who had arrived in England and inveigled his way into the good graces of the malleable king. What was more, the marriage went ahead without consultation with some of the senior lords of England, outraging the nobility, many of whom argued that royal marriages carried financial implications, and that they should have been consulted over Eleanor's marriage under the terms of the Magna Carta. The king's own brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was so infuriated by the match
that he briefly raised a rebellion. Richard and the other malcontents were ultimately pacified, the marriage went ahead and Eleanor and Simon went on to have numerous children, including four sons who reached adulthood, Henry, Simon, Amaury and Guy, and a daughter named Eleanor. Ironically, as soon as the discontent about de Montfort's marriage to Eleanor died down, the king fell out with his new brother-in-law over the issue of his sister's dowry or wedding portion and de Montfort's rising debts to other nobles. The souring of relations with the king
contributed to Leicester's decision to take the cross like his father before him and in 1240 he set out for the Holy Land as part of the Barons' Crusade. This was arguably the most successful Crusade since the First Crusade all the way back in the late 1090s and led to the capture of territory on the West Bank of the Jordan River, in the Negev and in western Syria. De Montfort's military contribution to it was limited, albeit this did not prevent the lords of the Kingdom of Jerusalem from petitioning Emperor Frederick II to make de Montfort the governor of the Kingdom of
Jerusalem. This was never granted and de Montfort soon returned to Western Europe. In the end, the biggest success for him was that Henry III openly welcomed him back to court upon his return, absence having healed the damage to their relationship. De Montfort joined the king on a campaign in France in 1242, which, while a disaster from a military perspective, indicated to the English nobles that after his foray to the Holy Land, the Earl of Leicester had been fully rehabilitated in the king's good graces. Privately de Montfort was more critical
of Henry's military capabilities and criticised his ill-fated attempt to try to rejuvenate the English position in France. De Montfort's relationship with Henry reached its height in the years after his return from the Holy Land. In 1244 he was given custody over Kenilworth Castle, a semi-royal medieval palace that had been built as one of the great Norman strongholds of twelfth-century England. He also became a more regular visitor to court, where his position as the influential brother-in-law of the king made him a powerful figure, in addition to being one
of the realm's premier nobles. Contemporaries were torn in terms of how to interpret his conduct in this era. On the one hand, Montfort was a man of genuine religious devotion, who patronised the church and provided salaries to the leading church scholars of the day in England, notably Adam Marsh, a prominent Franciscan scholar, and Walter de Cantilupe, the Bishop of Worcester. He was himself multilingual. French was his native tongue, he acquired Latin as the language of the church and scholarship, and he must have learned some English after moving to England, although the
Norman ruling class in mid-thirteenth century England still spoke French to a considerable extent. De Montfort was also known to be austere in his personal conduct, dressing plainly and avoiding the excessive banqueting that was often criticised in the High Middle Ages as a sign of vice. Yet, at the very same time, nobody could overlook the fact that there was a ruthlessness to de Montfort when it came to maximising his power, something which even Marsh and others critiqued, even as they served in his noble household. Above all, he understood that land and money
meant power, and he endlessly pressed the king to reward him with more of both. In 1248 Henry III granted de Montfort arguably his greatest promotion yet when he made him the lieutenant of the English outpost at Gascony in western France, the last major remaining English enclave in France after the loss of Normandy and the other territories back in 1204. Montfort was given a seven-year commission to rejuvenate the Duchy of Aquitaine on behalf of the king, and renounced his plans to join the Seventh Crusade to the Holy Land in order to essentially preside
over a viceregal court in Gascony, making him the royal representative in France. His methods were heavy-handed. In Gascony he was determined to expand the English sphere of influence and did so by ignoring the rights of the local nobles and laying waste to the castles of those who refused to accept a strengthened form of English royal rule. This in turn led to the Gascon nobles circumventing de Montfort to petition directly to King Henry III in England about the methods being employed by his brother-in-law. Henry, who was a pious and generally good-natured ruler,
but a man who lacked the kind of resolve needed to take firm stances, buckled in the face of the claims and recalled his sister's husband to answer charges before the council at Westminster in 1252. Although he escaped formal censure, Leicester was not publicly backed by Henry. Instead, the king led a fresh expedition to Gascony in person in 1253, a statement of his unwillingness to back how de Montfort had presided over the government of the French enclave. This was a notable turning point in the relationship between king and subject. After many years of peace between them,
they were now back to where they had been in 1239, though on this occasion, Leicester could not make haste for the Holy Land and allow Henry to forget about the incident between them. The remainder of the 1250s was characterised by the growing breach in relations between de Montfort and Henry, even as support for Henry's rule as a whole weakened. The causes of the discontent amongst the wider nobility were myriad. There had been no breakthroughs in France. Instead the intermittent attempts to rebuild the English position there had led to increased taxation,
while Henry's campaign to acquire the throne of the Kingdom of Sicily for his second son, Edmund, also led to a drain on the royal coffers to try to support a Quixotic enterprise to acquire control of an island that was simply too remote from England to ever be effectively conquered. Added to this was discontent at the influence of Henry's half-brothers at court in the 1250s, especially William de Valence. These were the children from Henry's mother's second marriage to Hugh of Lusignan, and the species of royal favouritism which Henry displayed towards them
was treated warily by the English earls. All of these issues came to a head in 1258 when the so-called 'Mad Parliament' was convened. Here, in a remarkable rebuff to his power, the nobles established an unprecedented brake on the king's power known as the Provisions of Oxford. This established a commission of fifteen men who would supervise the government, creating a veto over the king's independence of action in a move which went well beyond the provisions of the Magna Carta and how the barons had tried to check John's royal power through it more than four decades
earlier. Thus, de Montfort's split from Henry was now mirrored in a wider sundering of relations between the nobles and the king, with Leicester an obvious leader for those who opposed the crown and the influence of the Lusignan faction. A set of parallel and interrelated developments were occurring in France as the Treaty of Paris was negotiated in 1258 and 1259. While King John had lost the Duchy of Normandy, he and his son after him had continued to cling to the title of Duke of Normandy, as though the duchy would inevitably be reclaimed from the French one day.
The treaty constituted a diplomatic acceptance of the reality of the territorial situation in France. Henry agreed to formally accept that he had lost Normandy and many other lands formerly held by the kings of England in Anjou, Maine and Poitou. In return, King Louis IX of France acknowledged Henry in his rule of the Duchy of Aquitaine and the wider Gascony region, with Henry paying homage to Louis. Although this was a practical solution to decades of uncertainty in France, it did not sit well with the English lords and in particular with de Montfort,
as his wife, Eleanor, owing to her position as a daughter of the deceased King John, held lands in Aquitaine that had to be renounced as part of the agreement. Eleanor and Simon's objections were only lifted once Henry agreed to compensate them, finally allowing the treaty to be sealed at Paris in December 1259. The episode is revelatory of the duplicitous nature of de Montfort's conduct, at once presenting himself as the champion of wider English causes, while being tenaciously self-interested in his dynasty's own power and finances.
If the events of 1258 and 1259 had seen a sharp rise in the potential for open conflict between king and nobility, with de Montfort emerging as a figurehead of the opposition to the crown, the early 1260s confirmed that there was a full-blown crisis in England. Henry petitioned Pope Alexander IV for him to be absolved of the Provisions of Oxford and promptly dismissed the baronial council that had been established in 1258 when Alexander obliged him. With the reform movement seemingly crushed, de Montfort withdrew to his French lands to consider his next steps. All he
had to do was wait, as Henry's inherent weakness as a ruler revealed itself again before long, in particular his tendency to show excessive favour to nobles who were widely disliked. A rising in Wales under Llywelyn ap Gruffudd added to his woes, as did the decision of his own son and heir, the much more formidable Lord Edward, the future King Edward I, to begin sympathising with the noble faction against his father. In this unstable atmosphere the reformers' hopes revived and in the spring of 1263 de Montfort headed back to England to lead them once more. Now the atmosphere was
much more confrontational and violence quickly spread as his supporters launched attacks on the retinues of the king's favourites. A sign of the discord was that both factions agreed to allow King Louis IX of France to try to arbitrate in their disagreements, a decision which proved disastrous for de Montfort. He had believed Louis would side with him. Instead, the French monarch, regardless of their former differences, came down on Henry's side at a conference at Amiens in January 1264. His judgment, known as the Mise of Amiens, annulled the Provisions of Oxford
altogether and restored to Henry his full royal power. For Montfort and his allies, who had staked so much on the idea of having the Provisions reinstated, the verdict was unacceptable. It left them with little option except to rebel in the way that their forebears had done almost exactly half a century earlier when King John had refused to honour the terms of the Magna Carta. In the months after the debacle at Amiens, England slid into the civil war known as the Second Barons' War. The opening stages were not good for the reform party. De Montfort had broken
his leg in a riding accident and was confined to London at the outset, even as Henry and his forces struck hard against rebel positions in the Midlands. For instance, he stormed the important baronial stronghold of Northampton on the 5th of April and captured a number of leading rebels, among them Montfort's own son, Simon the Younger. Leicester responded by consolidating his grip on the southeast, where his support was strongest in and around London. Then, gathering his army, he marched out of London in early May 1264 to seek a direct battle with the king, who had moved down
into Sussex. This was a considerable gamble, as de Montfort's forces were outnumbered, perhaps two to one, by the royal army under Henry and the Lord Edward, who had confirmed his support for his father. But de Montfort's skill as a commander was about to be confirmed. On the morning of the 14th of May the two armies faced off against each other on the low hills above the town of Lewes with the fate of the war hanging in the balance. The Battle of Lewes was prefaced by Henry's army taking up a position around Lewes itself, believing that their superior numbers gave
them a considerable advantage from this position. On the morning of the battle, de Montfort's forces which were perhaps as few as around 5,000 in contrast to 10,000 royalist troops, came down the hills to fall upon the royalists in and around the town. Leicester had drawn his own men up in four divisions and, in a clever ruse, had ordered that his own litter which he had been using in previous weeks to carry him around while his leg was broken, should be left on the hill, creating the illusion that he was still immobilised and unable to move around at will. In reality he was amongst
his men. The battle opened well for the royalists. On their right, the Lord Edward launched a strong cavalry charge against de Montfort's left wing, shattering their lines and driving them from the field in a bloody rout. But then the prince made an error that led to the loss of the overall battle. Instead of wheeling back to support his father after breaking through de Montfort's wing, Edward pursued the fleeing contingent far away from the field, depleting the royalist forces. By the time he returned, with his horses worn out from the pointless chase, the battle had turned
decisively. De Montfort had hurled his remaining divisions against the royal centre and left flank, where King Henry was. They had smashed into their lines and broken them, while the king's horse was killed from beneath him. The crown army was then scattered and many took refuge in the nearby priory of Lewes. By the end of the day, de Montfort had won a stunning victory. The king was taken prisoner and the Lord Edward surrendered. A new agreement, known as the Mise of Lewes, cast aside the terms King Louis had overseen at Amiens and confirmed the Provisions of Oxford. With his
enemies defeated, for a brief time, de Montfort was left effectively as the master of England, ruling in the name of a captured king. This was the peak of de Montfort's long career. Three and a half decades after arriving in England, he was now effectively a pseudo-king, with the real king as his prisoner. This peak would only last for fifteen months, yet in that span of time Leicester proved to be an effective if controversial ruler. There were two key elements to this. One is generally viewed positively and was another key moment
in the development of England's constitutional history. In January 1265, with the war continuing against Henry's supporters and in an attempt to broaden his own base of support, de Montfort called a parliament to convene at Westminster. He also included a dispensation that was without precedent. In addition to ordering earls, barons and bishops to assemble outside London, he also summoned two knights from every shire to come to the capital to deliberate on matters, as well as two burgesses from each of the main cities and towns of the land. Never before had
the ordinary townsmen been called to sit in the parliament. For this de Montfort has been hailed as one of the fathers of the English House of Commons and a pioneer of representative government that was then expanded in centuries to come by England and Britain to large parts of the world. We should not view it as too idealistic a measure though; clearly this was a calculated move to shore up his own power base. Still the innovation of convening two people from the towns and shires outlived the Second Barons' War and was de Montfort's most enduring legacy.
The second well-known element of de Montfort's time as ruler of England was far less salubrious. He was a ferocious persecutor of England's Jewish community. The thirteenth century witnessed a wider intensification of Anti-Semitic sentiment across large parts of Europe, fuelled by the same Christian revivalist fervour that inspired the Crusades. As a younger lord, de Montfort had once expelled the entire Jewish community from the town of Leicester. His rebellion, in turn, had involved the cancellation of debts owed to Jewish moneylenders. Then, during the war,
his supporters carried out several massacres of England's Jews. In London alone perhaps as many as 500 Jewish residents were massacred in 1264. This set an ugly precedent and the same anti-Semitism pervaded England's government long after de Montfort's death. In 1275 King Edward I would issue the Statute of Jewry, banning the lending out of money at interest rates, an issue which was a lightning rod for discontent against Jews across Europe for hundreds of years. Having then bled the community dry through fiscal impositions, Edward issued the Edict of Expulsion
of the kingdom's Jewish people in 1290, one of the first permanent expulsions of the Jews from any medieval European kingdom and one that set a grim precedent that other realms would follow. By the fifteenth century a considerable proportion of the continent's Jewish people had moved far to the east to Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. De Montfort was a central, though frequently overlooked individual in this unpleasant process, with all its negative implications for modern European history. De Montfort's supremacy did not last long. His
recourse to a broader parliamentary franchise to acquire greater support for his position was indicative of how unstable his position was. To compound matters, his sons had begun acting in an inflammatory manner, seizing lands around England in a way that alienated key allies, chief amongst them Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who sided with the royalists in the spring of 1265. Then, in May, the Lord Edward escaped from captivity and took charge of an army in the March region. He rapidly began to turn the strategic situation against de Montfort. The impasse came to
a head on the 4th of August 1265 at the Battle of Evesham in Worcestershire, in a large loop where the River Avon bends, where Lord Edward's army made contact with Leicester's. Then, in a cunning deception, the royalist forces engaged in a surprise advance using a banner captured from the contingents of Leicester's son, Simon the Younger. De Montfort at first mistook these for his son's forces coming to relieve his own position, only realising the truth when Edward's forces, which outnumbered his own substantially, were upon him. What followed was less a battle than a massacre,
"the murder of Evesham", as one later English chronicler called it. Vastly outnumbered, the forces of de Montfort were surrounded and swiftly cut down, while Edward had selected a group of men who were expressly tasked with seeking out de Montfort on the battlefield. The earl fought on foot until he was hacked down. His corpse was then mutilated. The captive King Henry was very nearly killed by his own son's men, who did not recognise him, before he was rescued. Evesham decisively swung the course of the Second Barons' War in favour of the royalists. It was not
over entirely though and bands of disinherited supporters of de Montfort and the anti-royalist party fought on for two more years, most famously holding out behind the great walls of Kenilworth Castle, which endured one of the longest sieges seen in England during the High Middle Ages prior to its surrender in 1266. To end the bloodshed and bring about peace, King Henry, who was then nearing his sixtieth year and entering old age by the standards of medieval Europe, decided to offer conciliatory terms to bring the remainder of the war to a close. Under the
Dictum of Kenilworth of 1266, the rebels whose lands had been declared to be confiscated were allowed to buy them back rather than lose them for ever. The following year, in 1267, the Statute of Marlborough went further still, re-enacting many of the very reforms of the Provisions of Oxford that de Montfort had led the opposition movement in support of. Perhaps Henry was conscious that Simon the Younger and several other prominent family members and supporters had left England after the capture of Kenilworth and could raise a fresh army to disturb England again if Henry did
not find a way of establishing a lasting peace. Thus, de Montfort's cause, in a sense, outlived him, but the Second Barons' War came to an end in 1267. De Montfort's family were scattered around Western Europe in its aftermath. His widow Eleanor, the king's own sister, ended her days in exile in a convent in France, while his surviving sons were disinherited and dispersed. In 1271, Guy de Montfort and his brother, Simon the Younger, murdered their cousin, Henry of Almain, whom they blamed for their father's killing at Evesham, in the Church of San Silvestro at Viterbo
in Italy, a sacrilegious killing that shocked Christendom and forever blackened the family name. Simon the Younger died while travelling in Italy later that year in an event which chroniclers argued was a mark of god's vengeance for his earlier actions. The direct male line of the English de Montforts otherwise died out, yet Simon himself was not forgotten. At Evesham, where he was buried, a popular cult sprang up around the scene of his demise almost at once. Miracles were reported at his tomb and pilgrims flocked to the site, while among the common people
he was venerated as a saint and a martyr. Simon de Montfort was undoubtedly one of the most consequential men in the history of England during the High Middle Ages. That he ended up in the position which he did was somewhat peculiar, given his birth as the younger son of a French lord. However, that same lord had a dormant claim to one of the foremost earldoms in England. Thus, as a young man, Simon made his way across the English Channel and staked his fortunes on claiming the earldom of Leicester. Not only did he successfully claim the title, he also married
Henry III's sister. There were signs straight away of future problems between he and the king, but de Montfort's regular absences from England, first on the Barons' Crusade to the Holy Land and then as the governor of Gascony, papered over those same tensions for many years. Yet in 1252, when Henry failed to support Leicester in the dispute with the Gascons, a more permanent rupture began, and as the decade went on de Montfort became the natural leader of the opposition which Henry's brand of kingship was generating. In time he led the Second Barons' War,
captured the king in battle and became the ruler in all-but name of England for a brief while. All of this was with the goal of establishing the basic idea that a king was answerable to the realm. In this regard de Montfort played a not insignificant part in the earliest stages of the development of the unwritten English constitution, a process that took centuries and which was accomplished through repeated clashes between crown and realm. In calling for two knights to attend his parliament from each shire and two burgesses from each major city and town, de
Montfort established the concept that parliaments should be composed of more than just high-ranking nobles and the leaders of the church, an important early step on the long road to the development of modern western democracy. On the other side of the coin, there was a darker side to de Montfort. He grasped for power and was responsible for deepening the anti-Semitism that was smouldering in thirteenth-century England. One doubts as well that had his own relationship with Henry not been in a bad place by the late 1250s that he might have chosen a different path when the wider
nobility began to try to limit the king's power. Hence, historians remain quite divided on how to interpret de Montfort. There is no disputing his impact on medieval England though. What do you think of Simon de Montfort? Was he a genuine reformer responding to the long and weak rule of King Henry III, or was he a power-hungry noble trying to displace a king who was unable to manage his kingdom during a difficult situation inherited from his own father, King John? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
