The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  Meanwhile, in September 1263, Louis IX failed to support Henry III who once again crossed the channel, as did Montfort, seeking the French king’s arbitration. Henry and the Lord Edward returned to England to face the October parliament in Westminster, but Queen Eleanor and Prince Edmund remained behind in France. In mid-October, Edward seized Windsor Castle, where he was soon joined by his father as the kingdom edged towards civil war. A truce was arranged by Richard of Cornwall in which Henry promised to observe the provisions, pending a final adjudication by Louis IX. But the king was hardly as good as his word. From Windsor, he travelled to Oxford, where he dismissed and replaced the chancellor and treasurer. Winchester, too, was taken back into royalist hands, although an attempt to seize Dover failed. Perhaps the most intriguing, and generally overlooked, episode of the period of Montfort’s initial ascendancy came on 11 December 1264 when Montfort and his entourage were trapped on the south bank of the Thames at Southwark while two separate royal armies advanced on their position. Montfort and his men apparently feared for their lives, as they confessed, took communion and took the cross in their holy war against the king and anyone who would oppose the provisions. Luckily, a sympathetic group of Londoners broke down the city gates, allowing them to gain the security of the capital. It was during the brief truce that followed this standoff on the Thames that the final arrangements were made, whereby it was decided to submit the dispute to Louis IX.

  Henry III made yet another journey to France shortly after Christmas 1263 and made his way to Amiens. The decision by both Henry and Simon to submit to the arbitration of Louis IX has been variously viewed, as either an act of desperation or a sign of over-confidence in each. On 23 January 1264, Louis IX issued his famous ‘Mise of Amiens’ in Henry’s favour, at once dismissing the provisions and confirming Henry’s right to appoint his own officials. Louis was careful, however, not to repudiate the Magna Carta or any other aspect of English common law. Whether or not Montfort’s absence from Amiens as the result of injuries sustained in a riding accident played any role in the decision is questionable. Hitherto he had been able to persuade his friend Louis IX of many things. Lacking his personal intervention, however, even the rhetorical brilliance of Thomas de Cantilupe was insufficient to carry the day. In England, the general perception seems to have been that Louis had gone beyond the scope of his commission. Indeed, although both sides had agreed to abide by the terms of the arbitration, Montfort immediately rejected the Mise of Amiens on the basis of Louis’ detachment of the provisions from the Magna Carta and sent clear signals that he would appeal the decision at Amiens by force of arms.

  In the spring of 1264, Henry, or more likely the Lord Edward and Richard of Cornwall, demonstrated considerable military skill in the run-up to the battle of Lewes. Edward managed to blunt the attacks of Montfort’s sons in the Welsh marches, while the king summoned an army and made preparations from Oxford.

  As Montfort held London and Dover, the so-called key to England, and his sons were firmly entrenched in the Midlands, Oxford was well chosen to divide the rebel forces. On 3 April, the king marched out from Oxford to Northampton, which was taken 2 days later. Simon de Montfort the younger and many other prominent supporters of the earl were taken prisoner. Although the elder Simon himself had led a relief force north from London, he only got as far as St Albans before learning of the disastrous defeat. He hurried back to the capital where, on 7 April, he unleashed a savage attack on the Jews, who were rumoured to be conspiring against his faction.

  While the royalists secured Leicester, Salisbury and Nottingham, Montfort besieged Rochester on 17 April with the support of Gilbert de Clare. The castle fell on 19 April, but not the keep, and Henry, with uncharacteristic energy, led his army south to Rochester where he successfully raised Montfort’s siege, having already taken the submission of Clare’s castle at Kingston. The earl of Gloucester’s castle at Tonbridge also fell to Henry on 30 April, and the king continued south with the object of securing the south coast and, specifically, the Cinque Ports.

  On 2 May, as the royal army made its way to the coast, the king’s cook Thomas was killed by an arrow as he marched at the head of the king’s column. In the aftermath of this failed ambush, Henry ordered the execution of some 315 archers who had surrendered: they were beheaded in his presence at Flimwell in Ticehurst. This uncharacteristically brutal action was said to be taken on the advice of Richard of Cornwall, king of Germany, but perhaps this was also a lesson in terror that Henry had learned from Montfort in Gascony. The next day, the king took a fine of 100 marks from the monks of Battle Abbey for the participation of their peasants at Flimwell. At Winchelsea on 4 May, or shortly thereafter, Henry received the homage and fealty of the men of the Cinque Ports and plans were made to blockade Montfort in London, ending the war once and for all. On 6 May, however, the earl marched out of London.

  Having learned of Montfort’s movements while at Battle Abbey on 9 May, Henry moved to Lewes with his army on 10/11 May. The king took up residence in Lewes priory, while the castle of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, provided a strong centrepiece for a defensive position. Montfort made camp at his manor of Fletching, some 8 miles north of Lewes on 11 May. On the morning of 12 May, the royalists dispersed a Montfortian scouting party, and Warenne engaged in a skirmish with a foraging party. In the afternoon, a delegation led by the bishop of Chichester brought an offer of terms to the king. The Provisions of Oxford were to be reaffirmed, with disputed points to be arbitrated by an ecclesiastical panel. A separate delegation, including the bishops of London and Worcester, offered £30,000 in reparations for damages (particularly to Richard of Cornwall).

  Although Henry is said to have found the offer attractive, he was dissuaded from agreeing by his brother Richard and his son Edward. According to the Song of Lewes, Edward declared that: ‘peace is forbidden to them, unless they all bind themselves with halters on their necks, and bind themselves over to us for hanging or for drawing’. 18 In response, on 13 May, Montfort sent a letter of defiance ‘from the woods of Lewes,’ in which he tried, somewhat disingenuously, to separate his attack on the royalists from an attack on the king. Rejected by the king, the Montfortians withdrew their homage and fealty.

  On 14 May 1264 at Lewes, Simon de Montfort once again proved his outstanding generalship, while the Lord Edward demonstrated both the skill and energy for which he would later become famous, but without sufficient discretion.

  Montfort’s cavalry force probably stood at no more than 500, one-third the size of that of the king, although each side had several thousand foot-soldiers. Before dawn, Montfort moved his troops up from the west onto the Downs overlooking Lewes. The king held a hastily convened council of war with his brother Richard, their respective sons, the Lord Edward and Henry of Almain, and Roger de Leyburn. The battle most likely took place by the town walls, near the present county prison, Montfort having descended from the heights overlooking the town. The royal army was divided into three divisions, with Edward on the right along with Warenne and William de Valence, Richard in the centre with his son Henry, and the king on the left. Montfort’s army also had three divisions opposite the royalists, with the Londoners facing Edward on the left, Gilbert de Clare, John FitzJohn and William de Munchensy in the centre opposite Richard, and Montfort’s sons Henry and Guy on the right opposite the king. Montfort himself appears to have been in command of a fourth division held back as a strategic reserve, and he himself will have had the only clear view of all elements of both armies.

  Edward smashed through the cavalry and into the Londoners on foot behind them, after which he pursued them off the field for several miles. The centre under Richard and the left wing under the king fared less well. The fighting was heavy, as Montfort presumably threw his reserve in here. The king had two horses killed under him, but despite his personal bravery was forced to withdraw to the priory. Edward, upon his return to the field, engaged the Montfortians, who by then held the town, but much of his contingent fl
ed the battle at this point. Edward made his way to his father in the priory, and the royalists also still held the castle and had taken several valuable prisoners such as John Giffard of Brimpsfield. Although clearly a victory for Montfort, Lewes was not politically decisive. Montfort needed a quick settlement, and this was reached on the following day in what has come to be known as the Mise of Lewes.

  The king surrendered his sword to the earl of Gloucester, Gilbert de Clare – not Montfort – and agreed to the enforcement of the Provisions of Oxford.

  The marchers, including Roger de Leyburn, Roger Mortimer and James Audley, were allowed their freedom, but Edward and Henry of Almain were held as hostages. The disputed points of the Provisions of Oxford were to be arbitrated by Louis IX – although this never happened – and a council would be established to oversee the king’s administration. The justification for this new arrangement was articulated and celebrated in the Song of Lewes, which trumpeted the end of arbitrary kingship, to be replaced by a new regime, which worked for the good of the entire community of the realm. Nevertheless, this bold new world would prove to be decidedly short-lived. The regime of Simon de Montfort, despite possessing both the king and the heir to the throne, could never be fully secure.

  Rather than undertake any form of arbitration, Louis IX supported the efforts of Queen Eleanor to raise a force at Damme in Flanders with which to invade. She sought assistance not only from the French king, but also from his brother Alphonse of Poitiers, and she gathered a considerable force not only from the Low Countries and France, but also from Gascony and her own homeland of Savoy. Meanwhile, the papal legate Guy Foulquois awaited in France armed with papal sanctions – both excommunication and interdict – against the new regime. Finally, not all internal resistance had been broken at Lewes, and the freedom of the Lord Edward’s supporters among the marcher lords posed a particular danger.

  In June 1264, Montfort held a parliament in London, to which he summoned four knights to be elected from each shire. On 28 June, this parliament issued an ordinance for the governance of the kingdom, which completely abrogated the independent authority of the king. The king was to be governed by a council of nine – to be named by a triumvirate composed of Montfort, the earl of Gloucester and the bishop of Chichester – at least three of whom were to be in attendance on him at all times. No appointments to great offices of state, or for that matter even to the offices within the king’s own household, could be made without the consent of this council. According to one contemporary chronicle, the king only accepted these constraints upon his prerogative when threatened with deposition and replacement of the Plantagenet line through the election of a new ruler.19

  The mayor and aldermen of London certainly embraced this radical vision of limited monarchy, reportedly renewing their fealty to the king on 17 March 1265 in the most contingent of terms, saying ‘Lord, as long as you will be a good king and lord to us, we will be your faithful and devoted men’.20 Meanwhile, in August 1264, the baronial government sent a draft proposal known as the Peace of Canterbury to Louis IX for his endorsement. Going beyond the terms of the Mise of Lewes, and even the ordinance established by the June parliament, this ‘peace’ called for the continued restraint of royal power throughout the rest of the lifetime of Henry III and into that of the Lord Edward. Famously, Louis replied ‘that he would rather break clods behind a plow than have this sort of princely rule’. 21 Similarly, the papal legate refused to endorse this scheme and continued to threaten excommunication and interdict on the barons.

  Some pressure on Montfort was relieved when Urban IV died on 2 October, thereby ending the commission to the legate Guy Foulquois. But, a month later, a failed attempt to rescue the Lord Edward from Wallingford Castle – initiated by Queen Eleanor – demonstrated the continuing resistance to his rule, and was followed by Edward’s internment, along with Richard of Cornwall and his son Henry of Almain, in Kenilworth for added security. Montfort was at the height of his power following the defeat of Edward’s marcher allies in December 1264 and his effective confiscation of the earldom of Chester from the Lord Edward.

  In January 1265, summonses were sent out for the Hilary parliament, widely remembered because both burgesses and knights were called to attend; even so, only 5 earls and 18 other magnates were summoned as opposed to 120 ecclesiastics, suggesting the limited nature of Montfort’s support. This was a very partisan assembly, not some sort of proto-democratic representative body.

  Montfort soon succumbed to the very failing he had long decried in Henry III, the misdirection of patronage. Too much was concentrated too quickly into his own hands and into those of his sons. The Devon and Cornwall estates of Richard of Cornwall – who languished in prison throughout the period from Lewes to Evesham – had been granted to Guy de Montfort. Along with land, Montfort had amassed 11,000 marks in cash prior to his death. He was operating on a kingly scale, travelling with an entourage of upwards of 100 retainers in the spring of 1265, considerably more than Henry III had ever maintained in his own household. On 28 May, Simon de Montfort presented the temporalities to the new abbot of Chester: here was the new ‘king’, exercising his power in the open. But on that very same day, the Lord Edward escaped from his enforced captivity in a daring and dramatic dash to freedom. A day later, at Ludlow, Edward entered into a pact with Gilbert de Clare, Montfort’s former ally and the son of Edward’s former opponent. Montfort and Gloucester had begun to quarrel almost at once following the victory at Lewes, disagreeing over the ransoming of the many prisoners taken there, most of whom Montfort had reserved to himself.

  Now the powerful earl joined the marchers who were already committed to the royalist side.

  On 12 June, Montfort sent out letters summoning an ecclesiastical council to meet in Gloucester. He then met with Llywelyn, making an ill-advised pact with him on 19 June. By then, however, Gloucester had fallen to the royalists. Montfort was forced to move south from Hereford to Monmouth and on to Newport by 4 July, where he hoped to ferry his men across the Severn and effect a union with his son. This was prevented, however, by Edward and Gloucester, who forced Montfort to fall back on Abergavenny and Hay-on-Wye before returning to Hereford, where he remained throughout the rest of July. Having failed to bring the elder Simon to battle in July, Edward was now most concerned to prevent the younger Simon from linking up with his father. Simon the younger had moved his forces from London to Winchester, which he sacked on 16 July, and then on to Oxford from where he could threaten Gloucester. By 31 July, he had withdrawn from Oxford to the Montfortian fortress of Kenilworth. On 1 August, Edward took a bold gamble, riding through the night from Worcester to Kenilworth, after a clever diversionary feint toward Shrewsbury, and arriving before Kenilworth near dawn on 2 August. Although the younger Simon de Montfort escaped into the castle, Edward captured the earl of Oxford, William Munchensy, and a number of other valuable prisoners.

  Edward returned to Worcester at once, but at the same time the elder Simon crossed to the east side of the Severn at Kempsey. From there, he moved on to Evesham during the night of 3–4 August, with his ultimate goal being to evade Edward’s army and move on to Kenilworth and thus combine the Montfortian forces. But Edward was also on the move during the night of 3–4 August, shadowing Montfort’s movements and dividing his own forces in order to trap the earl. Edward and Gloucester approached Evesham from the north; Edward from further east at Cleeve Prior and Gloucester from Alcester. Meanwhile, a third royalist force under Roger Mortimer approached from the west from Pershore, following the route taken earlier by Montfort himself. It would appear that Edward displayed the banners captured at Kenilworth a few days earlier and that, initially, Montfort believed his son’s forces had come to his rescue. But he was soon disabused of this notion by his barber, Nicholas, who had climbed to the top of the bell tower in Evesham and saw that the city was surrounded by royalist forces: ‘We are all dead’, he reported from his elevated vantage point, ‘for it is not your son as you believed, b
ut the son of the king on one direction, the earl of Gloucester from another, and Roger Mortimer from a third.’22

  The chronicles are all in agreement that Simon de Montfort refused to flee from Evesham, but the simple reality is that he had no alternative. Edward had skilfully out-manoeuvered him this time, perhaps with the lessons learned at Lewes. Montfort appears to have formed his cavalry into a wedge in order to break through the royalist lines and lead his foot-soldiers out. He marched out to the north, and although he had some initial success in breaking the Edwardian line, this was only temporary. The infantry seems to have failed to march out, let alone to have engaged, leaving Montfort’s cavalry on their own. More than 20 Montfortian knights were killed, an astounding number in the context of medieval warfare, with its emphasis on capture and ransoms. The king himself, in a suit of Montfort’s armour, was wounded in the neck before being recognized.

  Following the battle, Montfort was buried alongside his son, Henry, and Hugh Despenser before the high altar in Evesham with the king’s permission. The Lord Edward is said to have attended the services for Henry, with whom he had grown up. But these niceties mask the brutal nature of the battle of Evesham.

  Montfort’s corpse had been mutilated on the field of battle – his head, hands and feet were chopped off, as were his genitals, which were repositioned astride his nose. The pent-up rage of the royalist forces could not be contained. Unlike Lewes, the battle of Evesham was decisive: the Provisions of Oxford died with Simon de Montfort.