The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

Simon de
Montfort.

Simon de Montfort was a very different man, and very different estimates have been formed of him. On one side he is regarded as an almost inspired statesman, a scholar, a saint, a martyr; on the other he is a mere adventurer, a demagogue, a man full of selfish ambitions and personal hatreds, a rebel, a traitor, a criminal. A short notice of his chief actions may indicate what reason there is for either, neither, or both of these estimates. Simon de Montfort was no doubt an adventurer, descended from a race of counts that had played for high stakes with very little capital, and had been persistently pushing into power for some centuries. His father was the scarcely less renowned Simon de Montfort, the persecutor of the Albigensian heretics, who had, at the head of that cruel crusade, been made Count of Toulouse, and perished in making good his claims. The Counts of Evreux, his remoter ancestors, had made their way into that position by a fortunate marriage as early as the time of Henry I. They had made a bold attempt in the time of Lewis VI. to claim the high stewardship of France; in later times one of the family had held, in the right of his wife, the earldom of Gloucester after the death of Geoffrey de Mandeville and Hawisia. Earl Simon, the Crusader, was a nephew of the last Earl of Leicester of the house of Beaumont, on whose death John divided his earldom into two, that of Winchester going to Saer de Quincy as co-heir, and that of Leicester to Simon de Montfort. But that Simon, although he was Earl of Leicester, had little to do with England; he was an enemy of John, and the barons are said, at one time, to have thought of calling him in as a deliverer. His crusade against the Albigenses was directed really against Raymond of Toulouse, who was John’s brother-in-law; and as John was never loth to keep the lands of his enemies in his own hands, the revenues of the earldom seldom found their way into the treasury of the Montforts. This Simon had four sons; Amalric, Count of Montfort, was the eldest, and the second Simon, the hero of the barons’ war, was the youngest. Amalric, of course, was his father’s heir, but he contented himself with his patrimony in France; and the two intermediate brothers being now dead, Simon, according to Matthew Paris, attempted, at the Council of Bourges, in 1226 or 1227, to recover the county of Toulouse. Failing to do this, he came to England to see whether he could not get the earldom of Leicester, and his brother consented to make over to him such rights in it as he possessed. After some years he succeeded. Henry allowed the arrangement between the brothers to take effect, and gave Simon the honor of Leicester. He had already failed in two attempts to make himself a great position by marriage with the countesses of Flanders and Boulogne. In a third he was more successful; Henry connived, as it was said, at a clandestine marriage between Simon and his sister Eleanor, the widow of the second William Marshall—an unlawful marriage, as she had taken a vow of widowhood—and soon after, in 1239, gave him the title of Earl. Richard of Cornwall, and others of the baronage were exceedingly angry at this, and Henry himself in no long time quarrelled with his new brother-in-law, who had to leave England, and had some expense and trouble in obtaining the recognition of his marriage as lawful.

For some years he appears to have been coolly treated, and perhaps nursed his wrongs. But up to this time there is little about him to distinguish him from the other foreigners with whom England swarmed. By what process he educated himself into the ideas and position of an English baron, we have but little information to show. It is clear, however, that he did so; that he had much intercourse with the clergy, especially with that section which, with Bishop Grosseteste, was bent on resisting the royal exactions and papal usurpations; that he devoted much thought and care to the education of his children; and that when, in the parliament of 1244, the prelates and barons selected a committee to treat with the king, his name, with that of Earl Richard of Cornwall, was among the first chosen. In his own earldom, nearly the only notice found of him, is that he persecuted the Jews of Leicester, and this slight indication may show that he had somewhat of his father’s spirit—that some persecuting zeal was an ingredient in his peculiar form of piety. From this date we find him, however, employed more and more in public business, and for several years together commanding in Gascony, where the complaints of his severity and impolicy were probably occasioned as much by Henry’s deceitful treatment of his foreign adherents, as by Simon’s own fault. Of this, however, it is impossible to judge certainly; we only know that the bitter feelings which existed between him and the king were constantly more and more embittered, and that Earl Richard, although sometimes he was obliged to take Simon’s part, had the same personal antipathy, which grew greater, and produced terrible results in the next generation. In Gascony, however, Simon must have gained a good deal of political experience; and he was already by inherited talent and early training, a highly accomplished soldier and tactician.

Such was the man whom Henry III. had raised and trained to his own confusion; a brilliant, religious, enterprising, experienced man, who had cultivated popularity; and who, although a foreigner, an adventurer, a man descended from high feudal parentage, and an adept in all the lessons of feudal insubordination, had yet fitted himself to be a leader of the English baronage in a crusade against tyranny. Earl Simon’s greatness throws all the other actors into the shade, for Bishop Grosseteste, who if he had lived, would no doubt have taken a great place in the story, died in 1253; and of the other prelates, besides Archbishop Boniface, the only one of much personal eminence at the time, was Walter of Cantilupe, Bishop of Worcester. Of the barons, the most eminent were Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and William of Ferrers, the last Earl of Derby of that house which had been engaged in every conspiracy and intrigue since the days of Stephen.

Parliament
of 1258.

The struggle opens at the parliament held at Midlent at Westminster, in 1257, when the king presented his son Edmund to the barons as king of Sicily, and announced that he had pledged the kingdom to the Pope for 140,000 marks. He demanded an aid, a tenth of all church-revenue, and the income of all vacant benefices for five years The clergy remonstrated. The ears of all tingled, says the historian, and their hearts died within them, but he succeeded in obtaining 52,000 marks, and was encouraged to try again. This he did the next year, 1258, at a parliament held soon after Easter at London. This assembly met on April 9, and continued until May 5. Every one brought up his grievances; the king insisted on having money. The Pope had pledged himself to the merchants, Henry had pledged himself to the Pope; was all Christendom to be bankrupt? The barons listened with impatience; at last the time was come for reform, and the king was obliged to yield. On May 2 he consented that a parliament should be called at Oxford within a month after Whitsuntide, and that then and there a commission of twenty-four persons should be constituted, twelve members of the royal council already chosen and twelve elected by the barons; then if the barons would do their best to get the king out of his difficulties by a pecuniary aid, he would, with the advice of these twenty-four, draw up measures for the reform of the state of the kingdom, the royal household and the Church. It will be remembered that in 1215 the execution of the articles of Magna Carta was committed to twenty-five barons, with power to constrain the king to make the necessary reforms; in this case the arrangement is somewhat different, although the method of proceeding is not quite dissimilar, and both alike afforded precedents for that superseding of the royal authority by a commission of government which we find in the reigns of Edward II. and Richard II.

Parliament
at Oxford.

At Oxford the parliament met on June 11, and the barons presented a long list of grievances which they insisted should be reformed. If this list be compared with the list of grievances on which Magna Carta was drawn up, it will be found that many points are common to the two documents. We may thus infer that notwithstanding the constant confirmations of the charters which were issued by the king, the observance of them was evaded by violence or by chicanery; that the king enforced some of the most offensive feudal rights, and that his officers found little check on their exactions. Castles had been multiplied, the itinerant judges had made use of their office to exact large sums in the shape of fines, and the sheriffs had oppressed the country in the same way. English fortresses had been placed in the hands of foreigners, and the forest laws had been disregarded. A great number of other evil customs are now recounted. But, strange to say, there is no proposal to restore the missing articles of the Charter of Runnymede, by which taxation without the consent of the national council is forbidden.

Provisions of
Oxford.

These grievances were to be redressed before the end of the year; and the aliens were to be removed at once from all places of trust. But this was not the most critical part of the business. The Provisions of Oxford, as they were called, were intended to be much more than an enforcement of Magna Carta; a body of twenty-four was chosen, twelve by the king, twelve by the earls and barons, to reform the grievances; of the king’s twelve the most eminent were his three half-brothers, the Lusignans, his nephew Henry of Cornwall, and the Earls of Warenne and Warwick; of the baronial twelve the chief were the Bishop of Worcester, the Earls of Leicester, Gloucester, and Hereford, Roger Mortimer, Hugh Bigot, and Hugh le Despenser. A next step was to restore the three great dignities of the administration which had been so long in abeyance; Hugh Bigot was made justiciar, but the great seal still remained in the hands of a keeper who must be supposed to have taken the oath of chancellor. The king was then provided with a council of fifteen advisers; each of the two twelves selected two out of the other twelve, and these four nominated the fifteen, subject to the approval of the whole twenty-four. The chiefs of this permanent council were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of Worcester, and the Earls of Gloucester, and Leicester. The fifteen were to hold three annual sessions, or parliaments, in February, June, and October; and with them the barons were to negotiate through another committee of twelve. There was another body still, also consisting of twenty-four members, who had the special task of negotiating the financial aids; and the original twenty-four were empowered to undertake the reform of the Church. Of course these several committees contained very much the same elements, the Earls of Leicester, Gloucester, and Norfolk, Roger Mortimer, and others being elected to each. It was a cumbrous arrangement, and scarcely likely to be permanent, but was accepted with great solemnity. Everybody was sworn to obey, and several minor measures were ordered to give security to the new constitution. It is this framework of government, the permanent council of fifteen, the three annual parliaments, the representation of the community of the realm through twelve representative barons, that is historically known as the Constitution of the Provisions of Oxford. Henry was again and again forced to swear to it, and to proclaim it throughout the country. The grievances of the barons were met by a set of ordinances called the Provisions of Westminster, which were produced after some trouble in October 1259. Before the scheme had begun to work the foreign favorites and kinsmen fled from the court and were allowed to quit the country with some scanty remnant of their ill-gotten gains. Their departure left the royalist members of the new administration in a hopeless minority.