French-born Earl of Leicester who forced conciliar government on Henry III, beat him at Lewes, ruled England for fifteen months in the captive king's name, and was killed and dismembered at Evesham.
Simon de Montfort was a younger son of a French crusading house who claimed an English earldom, married the king's sister, and ended by governing England through a council while its king was his prisoner. He led the movement that imposed the Provisions of Oxford on Henry III of England in 1258, destroyed the royal army at the Battle of Lewes in May 1264, and summoned the parliament of January 1265 that called knights of the shire and burgesses to Westminster together for the first time.
He was never king and never claimed to be. Every writ of his fifteen months in power ran in Henry's name, which was both the source of his authority and the thing that made the regime impossible to defend once the magnates who had made it began to leave it. Killed at the Battle of Evesham on 4 August 1265, he was mourned as a martyr in the Midlands and denounced as a traitor at court, and he has been argued over on those two terms ever since.
He was born about 1208 at Montfort-l'Amaury, west of Paris, the third surviving son of Simon de Montfort the elder and Alix de Montmorency. His father commanded the Albigensian Crusade in Languedoc and was killed at the siege of Toulouse in 1218 by a stone from a mangonel, leaving a reputation for ferocious effectiveness and very little for a third son. The English claim came through his grandmother Amicia, sister of the last Beaumont earl of Leicester, and in 1229 Simon agreed with his elder brother Amaury to divide the inheritance: Amaury kept the French lands, Simon took the English claim and crossed to England in 1230 with, as he later recalled, no English.
Henry III gave him the honour of Leicester in 1231 and invested him formally as earl in February 1239, nearly a decade later. One of his first acts as lord of Leicester was to expel the town's Jewish community, in a charter granting that no Jew should dwell there in his time or the time of any of his heirs to the end of the world; he gave the lands they had held to the nuns of St Mary de Pratis and described the act as good for his soul. It was not an aberration of his later career but the first fixed point in it, and the debts owed to Jewish lenders would be a war aim of his supporters thirty years later.
The friendliest evidence comes from churchmen who knew him. Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, and the Oxford Franciscan Adam Marsh were his correspondents and Marsh was his spiritual director; from their letters it is clear that Montfort had read and taken to heart Grosseteste's tract distinguishing a king from a tyrant, which is as close as the record comes to showing where his political language was learned. The same letters are not flattery. Marsh writes to him about his impatience and the harshness of his temper, and urges restraint on a man who evidently needed to be urged - a friend's warning rather than an enemy's charge, which is what makes it worth having.
The hostile view was formed in Gascony and finished at court. The lords and townsmen he governed between 1248 and 1252 accused him of ruling by seizure and imprisonment; royalist opinion after 1258 added the charge that a Frenchman by birth had made himself master of England and gaoler of its king, and the men who killed him at Evesham dismembered the body in a way that was meant to say exactly that. Matthew Paris and Adam Marsh, the two chroniclers closest to him, were both sympathisers, so the surviving picture is drawn largely by partisans on one side or the other, and the middle ground has to be reconstructed from what he actually did.
What the Midlands made of him is a third source in its own right. Within months of his death the monks of Evesham were recording miracles at his grave, the reform party's songs were circulating, and a man excommunicated in life was being venerated as a martyr. Modern historians read him more coolly without dismissing him: John Maddicott's portrait - zealous, intelligent, uncompromising, and convinced of his own rectitude - also traces the reforming commitment back to private grievance, above all his recall from Gascony and his wife's unsettled claims against the crown, and finds public principle and family advantage so entangled in 1264 and 1265 that no account separating them cleanly is likely to be true.
In January 1238 Montfort married Eleanor, Henry III's youngest sister and the widow of William Marshal the younger. The marriage was made privately in the king's chapel at Westminster with Henry's consent but without consulting the magnates, and it was a scandal twice over: Eleanor had taken a vow of perpetual chastity before the archbishop of Canterbury after her first husband's death, and a great royal marriage disposed of in secret was exactly the kind of decision the baronage expected to be consulted on. Richard of Cornwall, the king's brother, went into armed opposition and was bought off; Montfort went to Rome and obtained a dispensation.
The favour did not last. At the queen's churching in August 1239 Henry turned on him publicly, called him excommunicate, accused him of seducing Eleanor before the marriage and of naming the king as surety for his debts without leave, and drove him out of the country. They were reconciled repeatedly over the next twenty years and the underlying quarrel never closed, partly because Eleanor's dower from the Marshal estates was never properly settled and the couple pressed the claim for decades. Montfort went on the Barons' Crusade of 1240 to 1242, where the barons of the Kingdom of Jerusalem thought well enough of him to ask him to govern them, and came home to serve in Henry's failed Poitevin campaign of 1242, whose mismanagement he did not trouble to hide his opinion of.
In 1248 Henry appointed him the king's lieutenant in Gascony for seven years, with orders to pacify a duchy that had become ungovernable. He did it by force: he broke the feuding factions of Bordeaux, took castles, imprisoned opponents, and made war on Gaston de Bearn and the lords of the south. The duchy quietened and the complaints multiplied, and in 1252 the Gascons brought them to Westminster - oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, seizures - and Henry put his own lieutenant on trial before the magnates.
The trial is the hinge of his life. The magnates heard the charges and effectively cleared him; Henry, unconvinced, disputed his accounts and disowned him anyway, and Montfort resigned the lieutenancy and withdrew to France, where after the death of Blanche of Castile he was sounded out about a place in the French regency. He was reconciled and back in Henry's service by 1253. But he had been publicly abandoned by a king he had served at his own expense, and every later account of him - his own, his friends', and the modern scholarship - treats that grievance as the beginning of the politics that ended at Evesham.
The crisis of 1258 was made by money. Henry had accepted the crown of Sicily from the pope for his second son Edmund and with it a debt the English church and kingdom were expected to pay, while the king's Poitevin half-brothers monopolised patronage and a famine year sharpened everything. At the Oxford parliament of June 1258 a group of magnates came armed and imposed the Provisions of Oxford: a council of fifteen chosen jointly, parliaments three times a year, a justiciar answerable for the shires, and reforming inquests into local government. Montfort was one of the seven who swore the original confederation, and he became the man least willing to let any of it lapse.
The Provisions of Westminster of October 1259 extended the reform downwards, restricting the private courts and exactions of the great lords themselves. Montfort supported them, and in doing so lost much of the baronial support the movement depended on - the Earl of Gloucester and others had wanted the king restrained, not themselves. The alliance thinned from that point: a reform party of knights, townsmen and reforming clergy around Montfort, and a magnate class increasingly willing to live with the king.
In 1261 Henry obtained papal absolution from his oath and resumed personal rule; Montfort left for France in disgust. He returned in April 1263 at the invitation of barons who had decided the king would never keep terms, and the country slid towards war. Both sides then submitted the quarrel to Louis IX of France, who gave judgment at Amiens on 23 January 1264 and annulled the Provisions outright. The Mise of Amiens left no lawful road to reform at all. Fighting began within weeks, royal forces stormed Northampton in April and took Montfort's son Simon the Younger prisoner, and on 14 May 1264 Montfort came down off the downs above Lewes.