Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 38.djvu/301

Montfort thusiastic love of the people clung to the grave, stern soldier, who stood like a pillar, unshaken by promise or threat or fear of death, by the oath he had sworn." The excommunication issued against him in 1264 avowedly rested on political grounds alone; one chronicler indeed says that in 1268 Clement IV absolved the dead earl and all his adherents, declaring that the sentence against them had been won on false pretences from his predecessor (Cont. . ii. 247), but this can hardly be, for in 1275 we find Edward I trying to prevent Simon's son, Almeric, from getting the excommunication revoked at Rome (Hist. MSS. Comm. 4th Rep. p. 396). It had, however, never been published in England, and was never recognised there. The tomb which covered the shockingly mutilated corpse in the abbey church of Evesham at once became a shrine where miracles were wrought. The Franciscans, in whose schemes of religious revival Simon had shared heart and soul, drew up in his honour immediately after his death an office in which he was invoked as the "guardian of the English people." In popular song the martyr of Evesham was coupled with the martyr of Canterbury. The tomb and the church which contained it have perished; but under a window in the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey there still remains a monument to Simon of Montfort: his shield of arms, sculptured there when he stood high in the favour of Henry III, and left untouched after his fall. The cause which seemed to have fallen with him gained in fact more from his death than from his life. In October 1267 "a series of demands, strangely neglected by historians, but constituting a solemn assertion of English liberty" (, Archceol. Journ. xxi. 297), were embodied in the Ban of Kenilworth, to which Henry and Edward gave their assent. In November 1269 king and parliament passed the statute of Marlborough, "where the very spirit of the great earl and of freedom is alive again" (ib. p. 277). Nor was the final acceptance of Simon's greatest constitutional innovation long delayed; "in the parliament of 1295 that of 1265 found itself at last reproduced" (, Hist . Engl. People, i. 356). "The victor of Evesham was the true pupil of the vanquished; the statesmanship of De Montfort is interwoven, warp and woof, into the government of Edward I" (, Quarterly Review, cxix. 57).

[Matthew Paris's Chronica Majora, vols. iii–v., and Historia Anglorum, vols. ii. iii.; Annales Monastici, vols. i–iv.; Robert of Gloucester, vol. ii.; John of Oxenedes; Royal Letters, vols. i. ii.; Letters of Adam Marsh (Monumenta Franciscana, vol. i.) and of Robert Grosseteste (all in Rolls Ser.); Chronicles of Melrose and of Lanercost (Bannatyne Club); Rishanger's Chronicle, ed. Halliwell, Political Songs, ed. Wright, and Chronica Majorum Londoniarum, published with Liber de Antiquis Legibus (Camden Soc.); documents in Patent and Close Rolls of John and Henry III; Rymer's Fœdera, vol. i. pt. i.; Nichols's Hist. of Leicester, vol. i.; Manners and Household Expenses in XIII Cent., ed. Botfield and Turner (Roxburghe Club); Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, vols. ii. and iii., ed. Teulet and Laborde. A short account of Simon which occurs in the so-called Chronicle of the Templar of Tyre (Gestes des Chiprois, ed. G. Raynaud, Soc. de l'Orient Latin, série historique, v. 172–176) is interesting as the work of a writer who had once been page to the wife of John de Montfort, lord of Tyre, whose father (Philip) was first cousin to the earl, and is also curious as showing how fully and, on the whole, how accurately the main principles and features of the struggle in England were known and appreciated in so distant a land. Simon's first modern biographer was the Rev. Sambrook Russell, who contributed a fair sketch of his life to Nichols's History of Leicester. Dr. Pauli's work on Simon of Montfort, Creator of the House of Commons, may be best consulted in the English translation by Miss Una M. Goodwin, the text having been so revised as to be virtually a new edition. As its title implies, it deals with Simon almost exclusively from the point of view of English constitutional history. Mr. G. W. Prothero's Simon de Montfort is a more elaborate study of the earl's character and career as a whole; but no complete biography of him was possible till the store of documents bearing upon his government in Gascony, his diplomatic relations with France, and his personal relations with Henry III, which are preserved in the national archives of France and among the Additional MSS. in the British Museum, were unearthed, some by MM. Balasque and Dulaurens (Etudes sur Bayonne, vol. ii., appendices), more by M. Charles Bémont, whose Simon de Montfort has virtually superseded all the earlier lives. M. Bémont has also dealt with the Gascon affair in Revue Historique, iv. 241–77. For Simon's place among English statesmen see Bishop Stubbs's Constitutional History, vol. ii. ch. xiv., and the remarkable contemporary Song of Lewes, edited by T. Wright among the Political Songs (Camden Soc.), and separately by Mr. C. L. Kingsford in 1891. See also Blaauw's Barons' War, ed. Mr. C. H. Pearson; art. by Dr. Shirley in Quarterly Review, cxix. 26–57; Stubbs's Early Plantagenets; and J. R. Green's Hist. of the English People.]

 MONTFORT, SIMON, the younger (1240–1271), second child of Simon of Montfort, earl of Leicester [q. v.], and Eleanor his wife, was born near Brindisi in the summer of 1240 (cf. Flores Histor. iii. 264, and