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The Charter and its Guardian, Parliamen
Henry III, 1216 - 1272; Part 6
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Henry III, 1216 - 1272; Part 6
Yet after all it was the work of a rebel, and no time was spared him to foster it. The quarrels between him and the young Gloucester grew keener. Prince Edward - contrived to escape, and set himself to overthrow Simon. He made friends with Gloucester, and promised that he would expel the foreigners and rule according to law; and Edward, unlike his father, was known to keep his promises. Thus deprived of allies, Simon had only his sons and vassals to support him. While he was struggling to raise men in Wales, Edward, with a much larger force, got between him and his castle of Kenilworth, where his second son was gathering troops. Simon tried to slip back to join his son, but Edward surprised and cut to pieces the younger de Montfort's army at Kenilworth, and then, turning on Earl Simon, hemmed him in at Evesham; on three sides lay the river Avon; the only bridge was guarded; on the north, Edward's men swarmed in to the attack. Simon saw that he was lost. "God have mercy on our souls", cried he, "for our bodies are the prince's." He died fighting bravely against overwhelming odds. Since Simon's cause rested on himself alone we might suppose that with his death his work too would perish: that the idea of a Parliament, extended so as to embrace town as well as county, would be looked on as the dangerous device of a rebel, and accordingly be left alone for the future. It is true that his party was destroyed; in the course of the next two years his sons were overcome, and the royal cause became again supreme. But it was Edward who had won and not Henry; Simon had at least secured this, that there was no return to the thriftless, faithless, purposeless rule of Henry III's earlier years. Simon de Montfort died a rebel with arms in his hand. Yet none the less he was a patriot and a remarkable statesman - remarkable not merely in the character of his work, but in the high-minded nature that enabled him to identify himself with a great cause. Like Stephen Langton he raised a baronial party from partisanship to patriotism. Just as Stephen Langton, originally forced on John by the power of the Pope, turned at the call of duty against the Papacy when the Papacy lent its support to the worthless King John, so Simon, himself a foreigner and a kinsman of the king, took arms against the king and his foreign favourites for the sake of good government. He is one example out of the many which history offers of an alien to whom England owes much. This half-Frenchman who founded our House of Commons may be well classed with the Dutchman who afterwards saved the liberties of Parliament, and with the Jew who showed Great Britain the meaning of Imperialism.
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Chronology
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