Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/818

Rh 788 M O N M O N next eight years very few facts have been preserved. There is some ground for believing that he went to the Holy Land in 1240, and a letter is still extant in which the nobility of the kingdom of Jerusalem ask Frederick II. (June 1241) to allow Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, to act as regent till the arrival of his son Conrad. In 1242 he accompanied Henry s unsuccessful expedition to France. In the parliamentary history of these years his name appears but seldom, but where he is mentioned he is invariably found on the side of the people, resisting alike the arbitrary wastefulness of the king and the rapacious exactions of the pope. In 1248 De Montfort was appointed for six years the king s &quot;seneschal,&quot; or &quot; locum-tenens,&quot; in Gascony. In this capacity he was very inadequately supported from home with either men or money ; he more than once subdued the rebellious provinces, indeed, but meanwhile his enemies at home gained strength and encouraged the Gascons in repeated accusations and complaints against the seneschal. These re sulted in one-sided inquiries, but ultimately in his acquittal, and led to a demand on his part for reparation, and a con sequent quarrel with the king. Towards the end of 1252 De Montfort retired into France, where such was the reputation he enjoyed as a statesman that, on the death of the queen-regent and in the absence of Louis IX., he was offered the office of high steward and a place among the guardians of the crown. This, however, he declined, &quot; being unwilling to prove a renegade;&quot; and, after a partial recon ciliation with Henry, he returned to England in 1254. In the following year lie was sent on a secret mission into Scotland, and in 1257 he was one of the king s ambassadors to France; but his chief activity between 1254 and 1258, if we are to judge by the prominent place he took in the revolution of the last-named year, must have been in the meetings of parliament. At the Westminster parliament in April 1258 it was significantly upon the earls of Glou cester and Leicester that the king s half-brother, William de Valence, laid the blame of all the evils under which the country was groaning, De Montfort in particular being called by him &quot;an old traitor and a liar.&quot; At Leicester s suggestion the barons leagued for the defence of their rights, and presented themselves armed at the meeting, which extorted the appointment of the committee of twenty-four to meet at Oxford and proceed at once with the reform of the realm. The Provisions of Oxford having been signed (October 1258), De Montfort received the cus tody of the castle of Winchester, where the parliament con tinued its session, he meanwhile apparently holding the position of military commander-in-chief ; and, after the removal of the barons to London, he was appointed member of an embassy to Scotland. In the early part of 1259 he was chiefly busied with the task of adjusting the terms of a peace with France, which was not settled until the end of that year. From the date of the conclusion of that peace, owing to divisions in the reforming party, the king began to regain his lost power, and in 1262 he felt himself strong enough to repudiate the Provisions of Oxford, thus giving the signal for civil war. The successes of the barons, led by De Montfort, in the west, and his victorious entry into London again reduced the king to submission, but only to bring once more also into prominence the divided state of Leicester s supporters. Louis s one-sided Mise of Amiens (1264), however, rendered another appeal to arms on the part of the barons inevitable, and by the victory of Lewes (14th May 1264) De Montfort for the time became master of England. Taking Henry, his prisoner, along with him to London, he summoned thither the parliament, which met in June, and drew up the constitution or scheme of government associated with his name, of which the most striking feature is the new development it gives to the representative system. A still further advance in the development took place in 1265, when borough members, as distinguished from county members, were for the first time summoned. Meanwhile troubles in the west required De Montfort s presence in the field, and, by the alliance of his rival Gloucester with Roger Mortimer, as well as by the escape of Prince Edward, who put himself at the head of the royalist opposition, the great parliamentary leader was placed in serious straits. At Evesham, where he had halted on his march to join his son at Kenil worth, he was surprised by the army of Prince Edward, and after a struggle of about two hours was slain on the field of battle (4th August 1265). As regards the personal character of De Montfort, it is not surprising to find that contemporary opinion was divided ; but of his determination, constancy, and energy there can be no question, while much is re vealed by the fact that, though in an unauthorized way, his memory was revered in England as a saint and martyr, offices were drawn up in his honour, his intercession in voked, and miraculous virtues attributed to his relics. The painstaking labours of recent investigators have tended to bring into clearer light the purity and nobleness of pur pose of Simon de Montfort as a consistent defender of the rights of the governed ; on the other hand, it has also be come obvious that the representative institutions of Eng land, though largely helped forward by him, can hardly be claimed as his creation. Thus on both sides the statement of Hume that the House of Commons was planted by the inauspicious hand of this bold and artful conspirator must be rejected as inconsistent with the facts. Compare ENGLAKD, vol. viii. p. 310 sqq., and see the monographs of Pauli (Simon von Montfort, Graf von Leicester, Dcr Schopfer des Hauscs der Gcmeincn, Tubingen, 1867) and Prothero (Tlic Life of Simon de Montfort, 1877), and the literature there referred to. MONTGOMERY (Welsh, Sirydd Tre Faldwyn}, an inland county of Wales, is bounded E. by Shropshire, N.E. by Denbigh, N.W. by Merioneth, S.W. by Cardigan, and S. by Radnor. Its greatest length from south-east to north west is about 40 miles, and its breadth from east to west about 35 miles. The area is 495,089 acres, or about 773 square miles. The surface is broken and undulating, but it is only round the borders of the county that the hills reach any great height, the highest summits of the different ranges being generally in the adjoining counties. To the north are the Berwyn chain, stretching into Denbigh shire, in the east the Breidden hills, in the south the Kerry hills, and in the south-west Plinlimmon, the highest summit of which is in Cardigan. These various mountain ranges form the watershed of the numerous rivers of Montgomery shire. With the exception of the Dyfi, which rises near Bala Lake and falls into Cardigan Bay, and the Wye, which flows south into Radnorshire, all the principal rivers are tributaries of the Severn (Welsh, ffafren), which rises on the east side of Plinlimmon and traverses the whole length of the county from south-west to north-east. The principal of these tributaries are the Clywedog, the Taranon, the Rhiew, and the Vyrnwy. This fine succession of river- valleys broaden out as they reach the great vale of the Severn, and the beauty of the scenery is enhanced by an abundance of oak and other trees. The Montgomeryshire canal, which has a length of 27 miles, and passes the principal towns, is connected with the Ellesmere canal, thus affording water communication with Chester and Shrewsbury. Montgomeryshire is occupied chiefly by Lower Silurian rocks. The boundary between it and Merioneth is formed by the Bala beds. In the centre and east, near Llanfair and Montgomery, Wenlock shales prevail. In the neigh bourhood of Welshpool the Silurian rocks have been fre quently dislocated by volcanic masses, one of the most