KING HENRY III AND SIMON DE MONTFORT

A STRUGGLE OF PERSONALITIES AND POLITICS THAT CHANGED THE COURSE OF ENGLISH HISTORY

Darren Baker│August 2, 2025│ Get article

Thank you for coming out to commemorate the 760th anniversary of the Battle of Evesham. It also happens to be an anniversary for me personally. It was 20 years ago today that I first came to Evesham. We were in the UK on a family holiday and I noticed on the map that Evesham was not too far from one of our tourist destinations. I was quite happy to find a monument had been erected to Simon de Montfort there. Then six years later, in 2011, I made my first visit to Lewes, this time remembering to have my picture taken next to the monument they have at that battlefield. These visits rekindled my interest in Simon de Montfort, who was something of a boyhood hero of mine. That might seem strange for a kid growing up in a place called Goose Creek, South Carolina, but my mother was a big fan of English history and in one of her books I read the story of this Frenchman who defeats the king in battle and rules in his name, all in the interest of the people and good government. I remember thinking, wait a minute. That’s 500 years before the Declaration of Independence. What’s going on here?

I was sufficiently inspired by both visits to try and raise greater public awareness about Simon de Montfort and focused my efforts on 2014, which would mark the 750th anniversary of his famous summons to parliament, the one where the boroughs and towns were invited for the first time on record. This wider representation in parliament allowed historians of the Victorian era to tout England’s democratic credentials, not so much as a counterweight to the empire building going on at the time, rather to remind the world that the English were championing the rights of man and chopping off the heads of kings long before the French got around to it in 1789. I decided I would use the upcoming anniversary to remind everyone that Simon de Montfort, Frenchman though he was, was central to this history.

So I established a website, simon2014.com. I started reading everything, posting everything. I wrote a five-act play about Simon de Montfort and sent out a monthly newsletter dedicated to him for two years. I also visited Evesham a couple more times. Here you see a picture of Battlewell in winter, the spot where Simon de Montfort was reputedly cut down, and here in summer is Greenhill, where Edward mustered his forces, waving the captured banners that gave de Montfort’s men that false sense of hope before the battle. Despite these attempts, I made no headway in generating interest about de Montfort. Some of it was the timing. The following year, 2015, marked the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and that naturally captured more coverage. And there was that whole carpark king thing, you know, the winter-of-our-discontent guy.

All that was left to me was to write a book about Simon de Montfort as a sort of swan song and be done with it. I had spent nearly four years on the project, four years of what seemed like that’s all I did, because there’s so much information to amass, absorb, sort, check and cross-check. And I was doing this for just one period of medieval history. How other historians manage to do it for multiple periods is beyond me. The previous biography of Simon de Montfort had come out twenty years earlier, in 1995. John Maddicott’s book is rightly considered a classic today, but my view of it at the time is it treated de Montfort too harshly, seeing him too much as an opportunist rather than idealist. My book would go back to the heroic figure who inspired a nation. I called it With All For All, a phrase I borrowed to emphasize de Montfort’s audacity, that go-for-broke attitude that symbolized everything he took in hand. It came out in 2015, did some business, then fell off the radar. I thought that was it, time to do other things. But it had been a great experience, and I got to meet some of the giants of the academic world like John Maddicott and Michael Clanchy. They were always friendly, helpful and encouraging, which is something because I’m not academically trained. I wandered into their field out of enthusiasm and they appreciated it.

But the next year, 2016, marked yet another anniversary, the coronation of Henry III that took place 800 years ago in Gloucester. Henry was definitely in need of a biography. My biography of Simon de Montfort was the ninth or tenth to come out since the beginning of Victorian scholarship, whereas Henry III only had two. Although one of them, by Maurice Powicke, is of unsurpassed excellence, you can see why. The Henry in my de Montfort book is the one familiar to anyone familiar with this story: a weak, naïve, rather simple-minded fool whose favoritism for foreigners and relatives and his hairbrained scheme to buy the kingdom of Sicily led the barons into taking his kingdom into guardianship. Henry’s attempt to take it back provoked a rebellion that ended with him under the rod of Simon de Montfort. Definitely no king to inspire a biography, much less a nation, but there was something intriguing about him, something I felt was missing. With the anniversary as my guidepost, I had at it.

And was I in for a surprise, because it quickly became apparent that Henry was anything but the caricature of him created by the chroniclers of his era. These were churchmen whose hatred of foreigners was matched only by their obsession with money. They were convinced that the foreigners at court, who were typically relations of the king and queen, were robbing the English blind and poisoning the king’s mind against them. It was same invective they used against the Jews and it was equally misplaced and diabolical. The fact is Henry’s foreign relations were vital to his interests on the continent, which is to say Plantagenet interests. His king’s council was dominated by Englishmen, often from humble backgrounds. And as for the offer of Sicily, the king would have been a complete fool to turn it down. But modern historians can’t get over these issues or the captive monarchy. The way they see it, there had to be something wrong with this guy to lose a whole kingdom. Myself, I was so inspired by Henry that I went to Gloucester to be present for the anniversary of his coronation, only to discover that the ceremony, for whatever reason, had been held a month earlier. No problem, I dressed up my nephew in red robes and recreated the coronation at the high altar on the exact date of the 28th of October.

By that point my book was only a little over half finished, but I already had a subtitle picked out: The Great King England Never Knew It Had. Now what makes any ruler great is of course subjective. Most people would agree that Henry deserves recognition for the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey, which was very much his own personal creation. I would also add his concern for the poor and the peace and security he gave his people, which stand in stark contrast to all the wars soon to plague England. For example, the wars of Edward III. He’s remembered as a great warrior king, but what legacy did he leave behind? Already in the summer of his death in 1377, the French were sacking and burning the coastal villages of southern England, including ironically Lewes. But it’s warrior kings like Edward, not peacemakers like Henry, who get all the glory.

Henry V is another example. When this Henry marched into Paris in 1420, he was coolly received for what he was, a foe and conqueror. By contrast, in 1254, Henry III got a rapturous welcome from the crowds of Paris because he arrived as a friend and admirer. But nobody’s gonna pay to watch something like that on stage, so for Shakespeare the choice of kings to write about was obvious. He has Henry V warn the French, “We will mow down your fresh fair virgins!” But what would he have Henry III say? “Notre Dame is indeed grand, but I can do better”? Actually, Shakespeare did dramatize Henry III, if unwittingly. His portrait of King Lear as an old man who’s lost his kingdom, caught in a raging storm, well, that’s Henry III at Evesham. And if you throw in the version of how he was forced to fight incognito against his son, then all I can say is Shakespeare really missed his chance there.

It’s a pity, really, because Evesham is for most people the final nail in Henry’s coffin. The obelisk erected to commemorate the battle has a relief of the king on the ground, begging a knight not to kill him. Real heroic stuff. This description comes from a chronicle that worshipped de Montfort, but two other chronicles, neither of them friendly to the king either, say that Henry joined the other side as soon as the battle started. He could well have been raining blows down on his former captors. That might seem farfetched to some, because Henry always gets a bad rap as a soldier. It goes back to his first two military expeditions to the continent. In the first one, in 1230, he gained no glory because the French refused to engage his forces and Henry couldn’t bring himself to ravage innocent villagers the way English armies did during the later Hundred Years’ War. The expedition in 1242 ended ingloriously after his French allies deserted him, forcing the entire English army–king, barons, earls, including Simon de Montfort– to run for their lives. During the rout, Simon was heard to utter his infamous insult that the king should be taken away and locked up behind iron bars. He later claimed he had been overcome by the anguish of the moment. He certainly regretted saying it, because he spent the next year trying to grovel his way back into Henry’s favor. In the end, he still needed to beg the queen’s mother to intercede for him. Henry’s third and final expedition to the continent, in 1253, was completely successful, but ironically it was to clean up the mess left behind by de Montfort when he ruled Gascony on the king’s behalf.

The king had other notable victories as well, like the storming of Northampton in 1264, but it’s true he preferred to avoid bloodshed. We see this in the peace he imposed on Scotland in 1244, on Wales in 1247, and on his own barons in 1261. His peace treaty with France in 1259 is still one of the great political achievements of the Middle Ages, never mind how some historians try to blame it for all the ills that later beset relations between France and England. But that doesn’t mean Henry shied away from taking a hard, sometimes brutal line. During the siege of Bedford in 1224, he reduced the castle to rubble and hanged the entire garrison. He warned them to surrender or he would hang the lot of them. They didn’t and he did. In the campaign leading up to the battle of Lewes, which by the way demonstrated Henry’s total mastery of de Montfort in the war up to that point, the king had several hundred insurgents rounded up and sent to the chopping block after they killed his cook. “Kill my cook, will you?”

But where did the elevation of Henry III leave Simon de Montfort? Just months after my book appeared, I was given a publication date for the paperback version of my de Montfort biography. When the publisher asked if there was something I wanted to change in it, I said yes, everything. Title, cover, a whole new book. I called it Simon de Montfort and the Rise of the English Nation to emphasize that his real historical contribution was the reawakening of English nationalism which had lain dormant since the Norman Conquest two hundred years earlier. But his contribution to the evolution of parliament was spurious at best. As I indicated earlier, it was mostly an invention of the Victorians. They even invented a name for the conflict, “The Second Barons’ War,” to suggest that the constitutional history of England was a work in progress, starting with the war over Magna Carta in 1216 and reigniting with the war over the Provisions of Oxford in 1263. The only problem is the baronial struggle against King John was distinctly lacking in the war against Henry III. Simon de Montfort’s greatest support came from members of the church, from townsfolk, from peasants and the vast multitude of drifters created by the population explosion at that time, which was an unfortunate consequence of all the peace and prosperity of Henry’s reign. These men saw opportunity for themselves in shaking up the status quo. I’m reminded of the first letter we have from Alexander Hamilton. In it, he bemoans his life as a young clerk in the West Indies and wishes there was a war as a means to escape it. Sure enough, the Revolutionary War broke out shortly afterwards and Hamilton was on his way.

The sad reality is there was no need for the war that resulted in the Battle of Evesham. The reforms begun in 1258, while perhaps promising more than they could ever deliver, were successful. The people were heard, redresses were made, laws were enacted offering protection against the great lords, and parliament became a prerogative of not just the king’s will but of national government. And the thing is, Henry was okay with it. He accepted Magna Carta back in the days of his minority and reissued it throughout his reign. He initially accepted the Provisions of Oxford, the first ever constitution, because the realm was under unprecedented pressure: There was famine created by poor weather and harvests, there was war with Wales and every indication that Scotland would join them in alliance, the supply of patronage was drying up, creating divisions at court, and there were Henry’s own personal quests to the fulfill his crusade vow and put his son Edmund on the throne of Sicily. Neither of them came to pass because the realm became engulfed in war, a war started by Simon de Montfort, and his reasons for it were not political, but personal.

It’s important to remember that the seeds of this conflict go back more than thirty years. Henry and Simon first met as young men brought up in the turmoil of war. As a boy, Henry was shuffled from castle to castle for his safety and protection. Simon was confined to the castle of Carcassonne in the south of France, which was his family’s base of operations during the Albigensian Crusade. Both men grew up to be gifted speakers burning with ambition. They were also very pious individuals, though of a different sort. Henry’s piety was expressive. He loved the ritual of Christianity and used it to foster peace, charity and forgiveness. De Montfort’s piety was inward. It was all about him waking up at midnight and praying till dawn, wearing a hair shirt and abstaining from sex with his wife, this of course after he had already fathered seven children. They both struggled with the legacies bequeathed to them by their fathers. Henry yearned to win back the lands lost by King John, while de Montfort yearned for the power and glory that made his namesake father a legend in his own time.

Twice Henry gave Simon his chance, and twice he flubbed it. In 1238, the king married him to his sister Eleanor, giving him wealth and status beyond his dreams, but then he took advantage of his position as the king’s brother-in-law to name Henry as surety for his loans. When the king found out about it, he was furious and ordered him tossed into the Tower of London. Ten years later, in 1248, Henry appointed Simon his governor of Gascony, but he abused that position as well and Henry was forced to recall him. The king always forgave him, but de Montfort seethed with revenge against anyone who crossed him. Ten more years later, in 1258, when Henry agreed to share power with his barons, Simon was fifty years old and knew it was his last chance to achieve greatness. And while he was at it, he would make the king, his longtime benefactor, pay for all the injustices and humiliations he felt he had suffered under him. In the years that followed, Henry outwitted him again, leaving de Montfort an angry and bitter exile living in France. But there were other disgruntled barons with their own beefs with the royal family. When they invited de Montfort to come back and lead them in war against the king, the queen and their son Edward, all for the sake of settling scores with them, he didn’t hesitate.

In 1263, he launched a lightning strike that forced the king to reinstate the Provisions of Oxford, but the very people who engineered his comeback then deserted him, exposing him and his followers to the king’s wrath. Simon tried to buy time by appealing to King Louis of France, swearing on the Bible that he and his men would abide by whatever decision he made. When Louis came out against them, they broke their oath and restarted the war. It was going pretty badly for them when Simon gambled on defeating the king’s much bigger army in one pitched battle. His father had done the same thing fifty years earlier at the Battle of Muret in 1213. The king of Aragon’s army was perhaps six times bigger, but the elder Simon was a crusader. Surely God was on their side. Although the king of Aragon was also a crusader, Simon’s father won a spectacular victory, even killing his Christian opponent. Inspired by example, Simon declared, on his own authority, that his rebellion was a crusade. Sure enough, God made him victorious at the Battle of Lewes. There were even reports that St. George himself was seen rallying the rebel troops, possibly the earliest reference to George as the patron saint of England.

The truth of the battle is more down to earth. This picture is from the castle at Lewes, where Edward’s army was bivouacked. It shows the high ground where de Montfort’s men were spotted on the morning of May 14th. Looking south from the castle here, we see the ruins of the priory. It was here that Henry and his brother Richard of Cornwall got their men into formation and advanced towards de Montfort’s army. Edward had the cream of the cavalry with him and started things off with a charge that smashed de Montfort’s left wing. All he now had to do was wheel his forces around and hit Simon in the flank, but instead he rode off the battlefield to have his revenge on the London militia for the stoning of his mother during the 1263 riots. While he was off joyriding, Henry was fighting hand-to-hand combat at the front. It was said that he killed many enemy soldiers despite taking three wounds, but Edward’s catastrophic exit allowed de Montfort, fighting downhill, to throw everything he had against the royal brothers and broke through their lines. All was still not lost, though. Edward could have taken command of the castle or regrouped his men with reinforcements from nearby garrisons, but he blundered again by riding into his father’s defensive perimeter at the priory. Now they were both trapped. In the negotiated surrender that followed, Edward was hauled off to prison while Henry was forced again to reinstate the Provisions of Oxford. Only this time there would be no power sharing. Simon and Simon alone would be the master of the realm.

Officially, it was a constitutional monarchy. The king was not deposed, but the government was controlled by de Montfort and his favorites. This unnatural state of things did not go unnoticed, nor the way Simon and his family, having taken the lion’s share of the confiscated wealth, turned the regime into a tightly run racket. But Edward’s escape from custody a year later did not guarantee de Montfort’s downfall, rather it took Simon’s own mistakes of strategy. After trapping him here at Evesham, Edward organized a death squad to kill him, probably to kill Simon’s oldest son Henry de Montfort too. During his imprisonment, Edward had been forced to cede his lordship of Chester to young Henry and probably wanted to get it back without any legal wrangling. I would even suggest that Edward discussed the fate of the de Montforts with his father as the two of them traveled with the court to Hereford just prior to his escape. As for the act of carving up Simon’s body on the battlefield afterwards, I can’t believe either Henry or Edward condoned it, not just because it was a disgraceful thing to do, but because it saddled them with a blood feud with the de Montfort family, who still held powerful positions in France and the Holy Land. That feud resulted in the murder of the king’s nephew Henry of Almain, who in 1271 was hacked to pieces in a church in Italy by the younger sons of Simon de Montfort.

In August 1267, two years after the battle, Henry and Edward returned to Evesham on their way to Wales. It’s our great misfortune that we have no information on what they did while they were here, the same as we don’t know of any final words that passed between Henry and Simon before the battle. Probably there weren’t any. After thirty-five years of ups and downs, they were sick of each other. We do know that Henry was an avid tourist. Might father and son have wandered over the battlefield together, perhaps standing at the site where Simon’s body was chopped up? What was left of it had been buried in the abbey church, but it was removed before the king’s visit and reburied elsewhere in secret. No doubt Henry and Edward did take a moment to pray at the tomb of Henry de Montfort. After all, young Henry had been named after the king, who served as his godfather when he was baptized. Of course, that was long ago, when Simon had just joined the royal family and he and the king were still the best of friends.

After doing my books on Henry and Simon, I wrote a dual biography of their wives, both named Eleanor. It’s incumbent upon the historian to remember that these two women played every big a role in these events as their husbands. The chronicler who described Henry at Evesham in unflattering terms also said that the queen, Eleanor of Provence, was responsible for all the troubles that plagued the realm. He comes right out and says it. She’s the root, the originator, and the sower of all the discord. But of course, she’s a woman and a foreigner, must be her. There was that infamous incident during the first war in 1263 when London erupted in riots and the queen left the Tower of London to try to reach the safety of Windsor. She got as far as London Bridge when she was met by a mob that pelted her and her crew with all kinds of objects. She later got her revenge when Henry gave her custody of the bridge after Evesham and she did nothing for its upkeep, hence the nursery rhyme associated with her: “London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.”

What people don’t know about Eleanor of Provence is her own contribution to constitutional history. In 1254, while Henry was in Gascony, the queen, who had just given birth but was serving as his regent, ordered the sheriffs to have two knights elected from each county for the purpose of representation in the forthcoming parliament. This was the first democratically elected assembly, if you will, and it met 11 years before Simon de Montfort’s more famous parliament. Historians, however, even to this day, give credit for this innovation to Henry’s brother Richard of Cornwall, who was Eleanor’s chief adviser during her regency. I show in this biography and in my one on Richard that the weight of evidence is all on her side.

My latest book, released this year, has Edward as the central character. His reign as king is quite well known, but not so much his life before that outside the legends associated with him, like his escape from custody before Evesham. It was said that he winded all the horses in his riding party except one, then bolted on the only fresh one. It’s a quite fanciful story that offers no hint of the inside job that actually sprang him. The first part of my book covers the year that Edward was a prisoner of the regime. I have him use that time to reflect on all the mistakes that he made leading up to the defeat at Lewes, including at one point supporting Simon de Montfort against his father. Hence I call it his Confessions. For the record, he left behind no Confessions, but all the material in it comes directly from the sources of that period.

The second part follows Edward from the victory at Evesham to his coronation nine years later. It’s called the Chronicle because it’s an amalgam of all the major chronicles. One of my aims was to refute the claim that Edward was the boss in the years following Evesham. If anything, he had to compete with the men who helped him bring about the restoration, not to mention his mother Eleanor of Provence and the newly arrived papal legate. Henry is only referred to as the king or lord king as he is in the chronicles and is very much in charge during these years. It’s one of the reasons Edward yearned to go on crusade. He was twenty-nine and more desperate than ever to break free of his parents.

His crusade accomplished no more than Henry’s Sicilian Business did, only it cost a lot more. It did help him chalk up another legend. As you probably know, a messenger was allowed into Edward’s quarters who turned out to be a trained assassin. Edward was wounded in the struggle that followed, but managed to wrest the dagger from the assassin and kill him with it. Now if we go back 33 years before that to 1238, a would-be assassin crept into Henry’s chamber at the palace of Woodstock. There was no good Shakespeare material here, no Macbeth-like earl calling on the king late at night and wondering if he sees a dagger before him. That’s because there was no king. Henry was sleeping with Eleanor that night in her chamber. The intruder was apprehended and for all we know Henry didn’t hear about it till morning. Hardly the stuff of legends, right? And that’s what we want. That’s why we appreciate Edward, because he gives us legends. But with Henry, you can always spice it up if you want to. For one thing, we can be reasonably sure that he and Eleanor were having reasonably good sex that night. That’s because Edward was born a little over nine months later. He was possibly conceived at the very moment the gleaming blade was sunk deep into the king’s fluffy pillow. And if that ain’t meaty enough for you, Henry ordered the man brought to him at Coventry, and there had him tied to horses and ripped apart in front of spectators. It’s the first reference we have to execution by quartering in England.

But back to Simon de Montfort, who after all was the reason for me coming to Evesham in the first place. We might wonder how different things would have been had Henry sent him packing when Simon arrived in England in 1229 to ask the king to grant him the earldom of Leicester. In the case of constitutional history, Simon would not have been missed at all. The rise of parliament was inevitable following the imposition of Magna Carta, and it had long been a fixture of Henry’s rule by the time Simon seized power. As for his role in establishing a nascent House of Commons, well, as I just mentioned, Eleanor of Provence beat him to it. Nor was Simon the first person in England to cultivate nationalism as a political weapon. It too was a product of Henry’s minority. A group of English barons, some of whom had treacherously tried to put a Frenchman on the throne in Henry’s place, banded together to have the foreign-born loyalists, the same men who saved the Plantagenet dynasty, banished from court. But it was Simon de Montfort who turned this nationalism, or xenophobia, into an actual movement. It would not have been lost on Edward the ease with which Simon mustered a peasant army on the shores of England to repel an invasion force led by Queen Eleanor. Forget the harvest, he warned them. The foreigners are coming and they’re “thirsting for your blood.” It’s interesting to think of these two, Simon de Montfort and Eleanor of Provence, both raised in the south of France, vying for the soul of the English nation.

In conclusion, I would like to pose the question as to why Henry III put up with Simon de Montfort for so long. I mentioned earlier that Henry had a tough, steely side to him. When Edward was king, he recalled how his father would tear the eyes out of any scoundrel going around peddling fake miracles. But Simon was a special case. For one thing, he and Henry were family. They were brothers-in-law. Henry took a lot of flak when he let Simon marry his sister Eleanor. She had been married before, to William Marshal II, and swore a vow of celibacy sometime after his untimely death. Henry for one believed that Simon had seduced her, sweet-talked the royal widow into his bed. The king quickly married them to avoid a scandal, because she could have been pregnant for all they knew. Some churchmen, however, never forgave the couple for her broken vow, with one chronicler later writing that the mutilation of Simon’s body at Evesham was just retribution for his having violated a bride of Christ. There is some indication that Simon himself was bothered by it, but years later, when his relations with Henry had bottomed out again, he claimed that he had done the king a favor by marrying his sister.

But it wasn’t just marriage into the royal family that made Simon untouchable. There were also his powerful connections in France, something other English barons didn’t have. These connections helped him avoid his trial for the insurrection he attempted in 1260 with Edward’s help. And finally, Simon was nobility. He was the earl of Leicester. The king might punish his nobles through the imposition of fines or withdrawal of royal favor, but otherwise they always got off scot-free no matter what their trespasses. That’s just the way things were. No longer after Evesham. The slaughter of Simon de Montfort and his knightly followers sent a message throughout the ruling class. From now on, troublemakers like him would be dealt with accordingly. Edward made it clear that as king he would not tolerate any disloyalty. He couldn’t quite hang his earls as he might have wished, but that time was coming.

England was about to enter a dark phase for the rest of the Middle Ages. Butchering and hanging nobles, deposing and smothering kings, humiliating and destroying innocent families, the endless wars at home and abroad, it was all downhill after Henry died in 1272. And yet it’s the bottom of the heap that rules ours hearts and minds today. I’m reminded of what a historian said about the fat, festering persona of Henry VIII. “He was a monster,” she said, “but he’s our monster. We are perversely proud of Henry VIII.” Well, I’m here to tell you that you can be proud without the perversion. Just think of the beauty of Westminster Abbey and of a time when the kingdom of England was at peace with Scotland and France and their royal families happily visited each another, of a time when queenship thrived and the Welsh had a prince they could call their own, and the poor were fed on a daily basis, and the king set the example of forgiveness, charity, generosity, and what it means to be a loving father and faithful husband. Just think of Henry III.