Battle of Lewes Festival 2025: a look at a family quarrel that got out of hand

To understand a historical event, one should consider the views of all those present, multiplied by the number of people who have written about it. This is, of course, quite impossible, so we end up using some form or other of shorthand.

Amongst other things, the Battle of Lewes was a family quarrel that got out of hand. It would probably not have happened without de Montfort; he and Henry III were brothers in law; and the breakdown of their relationship tends to echo that between the monarchy and a large section of the English baronage.

Simon came to England as a minor French nobleman with a tentative claim to the Earldom of Leicester. Henry liked the young man, and allowed him to buy the title – though the investiture was delayed for nearly a decade. The new earl became something of a royal favourite, and a useful member of the council of state. In 1238 he married – in secret, but with royal approval – Henry’s sister Eleanor. However, the marriage caused a number of problems. As far as the English barons were concerned, the marriage of a royal princess was a matter of enormous political significance, about which they should quite definitely have been consulted. She should been married to one of them, or their sons; failing that, she could have been used to forge an alliance with one of the continental royal houses – and not allowed to indulge in a clandestine marriage to some foreign interloper. But then she should not have been allowed to marry anyway, as she had taken a vow of chastity.

Eleanor was, as it happens, a very devout woman. However, I suspect that her vow had very little to do with piety. She knew perfectly well what was expected of her, and – having been married at the age of nine, and widowed at the age of 16 – probably felt that she had done her bit. To make matters much worse, though, her previous husband had been William Marshall the younger – which brings us once more to the problem of the Marshall inheritance, which hangs over the 13th Century like a bad smell.

William the elder had – through a combination of martial prowess and unwavering loyalty to the House of Plantagenet – acquired vast wealth and extensive landholdings. However, he had also managed to fall out with an Irish bishop, who laid a curse on him. It must have been a very effective curse, because all of the Marshall's sons died without legitimate male issue. This meant that his inheritance had to be divided between his five daughters and their husbands, which was complicated and difficult, and led to a great deal of ill feeling. Responsibility for sorting this out lay, ultimately, with the King – and, to put it politely, Henry III was not very good with money. This was a problem for de Montfort. Leicester was not one of the more profitable earldoms, and he wished to maintain his wife in a manner befitting her station. Please note: Eleanor's father was a king, as were two of her brothers. One of her sisters was a queen, and another was an empress. Her station was very high indeed.

The relationship between the Earl and the King started to break down when the latter found out that the former had been borrowing money, and using him – without permission – as a guarantor. It got worse – much worse – when Simon, after a notably dismal campaign in Gascony, lost his temper and told his brother in law that he was a useless idiot who should be locked up before he did any more harm to himself or anyone else. Yes, that’ll do it.

Simon was not the leader of the Baronial opposition in 1258 when the Provisions of Oxford were imposed upon the King to restrict his power; however, when others were bullied or bribed into deserting the cause, he held to his oath, and left the country in disgust. This impressed the younger barons, and when he returned, they flocked to his banner. At Lewes, the King was made prisoner: at Evesham, Simon was murdered. This brought the unhappy business to an end. Almost.

Simon’s marriage to Eleanor meant that Edward was his nephew, and Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was also his brother in law. Thus when in 1271 the exiled Montfort sons Guy and Simon stabbed Richard's son Henry of Almain to death in an Italian church, they were murdering their cousin.

As I said: family quarrel.