The King sailed for Acre, and after some stay there, finding that his weakened force could effect nothing, and hearing that the death of his mother, Queen Blanche, had left France without a regent, he returned home, and landed 5th of September, 1254, six years after his departure.
The Countess Ella and her son Nicholas, Bishop of Salisbury, raised an effigy to William like that of his father, and the figures of the father and son lie opposite to each other in the new cathedral founded by Bishop Poore.
CAMEO XXX. SIMON DE MONTFORT. (1232-1266.)
King of England. 1216. Henry III.
Kings of Scotland. 1214. Alexander II.
1249. Alexander III.
Kings of France. 1226. Louis IX.
Emperor of Germany. 1209. Friedrich II.
1249. Conrad IV.
1255. William.
Popes. 1227. Gregory IX.
1241. Celestin IV.
1242. Innocent IV.
1254. Alexander IV.
1261. Urban IV.
The lawlessness of John Lackland led to the enactment of Magna Charta; the extravagance of Henry of Winchester established the power of Parliament, and the man who did most in effecting this purpose was a foreigner by birth.
Amicia, the heiress of the earldom of Leicester, was the wife of Simon, Count de Montfort, an austere warrior, on whom fell the choice of Innocent III. to be leader of the so-called crusade against the unfortunate Albigenses. Heretics indeed they were; but never before had the sword of persecution been employed by the Church, and their fate is a grievous disgrace to Rome, and to the Dominican order. Strict in life, but of cruel temper, Count Simon was a fit instrument for the massacres committed; and being a leader of great skill, he gained complete victories over the native princes of the heretics, who, though not holding their opinions, were unwilling to let them perish without protection. Raymond de St. Gilles Count de Toulouse, Gaston Count de Béarn, and all the most famous names of the south of France, took up arms in their defence; and even Pedro, King of Aragon, joined, the confederacy; but at the battle of Muret all were totally defeated, and Pedro lost his life.
The nobles were imprisoned, the peasants murdered by wholesale, villages burnt down and the inhabitants slain, with out distinction of Catholic or heretic, and all the time the followers of Montfort deemed themselves religious men. The Lateran Council actually invested Simon with the sovereignty of the counties of Toulouse and Carcassonne; but he was extremely hated there, and Count Raymond, recovering his liberty, attacked him, and regained great part of his own dominions. Montfort was besieging the town of Toulouse, when, while hearing mass, intelligence was brought to him that the garrison were setting fire to his machines. He rose from his knees, repeating the first verse of the Song of Simeon, and rushing out to the battle, was struck on the head by a stone from a mangonel on the walls, and killed on the spot, June 25, 1218. He was a remarkable type of that character fostered by the system of the Middle Ages, where ambition and cruelty existed side by side with austere devotion, and were encouraged as if they did service to Heaven.
His second son, Simon, had the same strong sense of religion, together with equal talents, and unusual beauty of person, skill in arms, and winning grace of deportment. The elder son, Amaury, was the heir of the county of Montfort, and for some time Simon remained landless, the earldom of Leicester having been forfeited on account of the adherence of the family to the party of Louis the Lion in the wars that followed the signing of Magna Charta.
In 1232, however, young Simon came to England to attempt the recovery of his mother’s inheritance, and his graceful manners and Southern tongue at once delighted Henry III. Another heart was at the same time gained; the King’s sister, Eleanor, who had been left a widow at sixteen by the death of the brave Earl of Pembroke, had, in her first despair, made a vow of perpetual widowhood, and received the ring of dedication from the Archbishop; but at the end of six years all this was forgotten; she fell in love with the handsome Provençal, and prevailed on the King to sanction with his presence a hasty private wedding in St. Stephen’s Chapel.