“I confidently assert (wrote Matthew Paris) that his virtues pleased God more than his failings displeased Him.”
Simon of Montfort and the English Parliament
1258–1265
Authorities: Matthew Paris; William of Rishanger; Thomas of Wykes; Adam of Marsh—Monumenta Frascescana, Burton Annals, Annales Monastici; Robert of Gloucester—Royal letters of Henry III. (Rolls Series); Political Songs (Camden Society, 1839); Chronicle of Melrose; Stubbs—Constitutional History, vol. ii; and Select Charters; W. H. Blaauw—The Barons’ War; Dr. Pauli—Simon of Montfort (translated by Una M. Goodwin); G. W. Prothero—Simon of Montfort; Dr. Shirley in Quarterly Review, cxix. 57.
SIMON OF MONTFORT AND
THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT 1258–1265
“In the year of our Lord 1238, which was the twenty-second of his reign, King Henry held his court in London at Westminster, and there on the day after Epiphany, which was a Thursday, Simon de Montfort solemnly espoused Eleanor, daughter of King John, sister of Henry III., and widow of William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke. The king himself gave away the bride to the said Simon, Earl of Leicester, who received her gratefully by reason of his disinterested love for her, her own beauty, the rich honours that were attached to her, and the distinguished and royal descent of the lady, for she was the legitimate daughter of a king and queen, and furthermore was sister of a king, of an empress (the wife of Frederic II.), and of a queen (Joan, wife of Alexander II. of Scotland). Our lord the pope, too, gave him a dispensation to marry this noble lady.”
Thus Matthew Paris, when Earl Simon, then a man about thirty-seven, and “tall and handsome,” enjoyed the royal favour and stood godfather to the infant Prince Edward. Simon had only done homage as Earl of Leicester in 1232; his boyhood was passed in France, and his father was the great soldier who led the French crusade against the Albigenses. Earl Richard of Cornwall, Henry’s brother—soon to become King of the Romans—objected to the marriage, regarding it as one more victory for the foreigners whom Henry nourished at the expense of England. But Simon was no real alien. His grandmother had been sister and heiress of the Earl of Leicester, and Simon’s French training no more made him a stranger in England than did Stephen Langton’s years of study in Paris and Rome unfit him for the primacy of the English Church.
Henry’s favour was short-lived. Earl Simon made friends with Earl Richard and left for the crusades, disgusted with the king’s want of honesty. So much wisdom did he show in Palestine, and so great was his prowess, that Simon might have stayed in the east as regent for the young King of Jerusalem. But he had work to do in England, and came home with Richard in 1242.
Here against all the disorder of misrule and the royal and papal extortions Simon laboured with his friend Bishop Grosseteste, and he is conspicuous at the Parliament of Westminster in 1244, and in drawing up the great protest to the pope a year later.