Katherine’s interview for ArtScene with host Erika Funke – She discusses the curious origins of her ‘novelized history’ about Simon de Montfort, the founder of modern democracy.
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ArtScene, with host/producer Erika Funke, is a daily short program which brings attention to the area’s arts and cultural events. Join her weekdays at 11:00am for interviews, reviews and commentaries on films, books, jazz, and classical music.
Dear Mrs. Ashe,
I am a fan of Simon as big as you are. Unfortunately, I do not write in English so I would have a hard time to prove it. I really believe he is the greatest political hero of Europe. My opinion is that his dominican friends of his childhood and his franciscan friends of his adulthood had a strong influence on Simon de Montfort’s life ethics… I believe that his relation to Frederick II von Hohenstaufen was crucial to his political achievements….I believe that his father’s legacy made him fight and die for his political, social and moral principles…I am so happy that, after 7 generations, a Montfort(Orsini-Del Balzo-de Luxembourg) woman became the queen of England.
Thank you for working so hard to make Simon famous in USA!
Hello Valentine,
I’m delighted to hear from someone so knowledgeable about Simon and with such interesting views. I’m intrigued by your remark about Frederic II. Certainly,had he approved Simon’s viceroyship in Palestine, Simon would likely never have left the East, the Khoresines might not have succeeded in overrunning Palestine, and there might have been no need for Saint Louis’ crusade. But Simon would probably not have been in England, on hand to rescue the Provisions of Oxford and put them into effect. So in the world of alternative outcomes, Frederic was crucial to Simon’s political career. But I sense that this negative influence — in making it impossible for Simon to stay in the East — isn’t what you have in mind.
One outcome of my research was the discovery, for me, that almost everything that happened in Simon’s life was crucial to his motivations and to his being at Oxford at the right moment, equipped with the skills and means of putting the newly conceived parliamentary government into effect. My book runs to four volumes in all for this very reason: I could not cut events without the thread of causality collapsing.
I do hope you can tells us more of the Orsini-Del Balzo-de Luxembourg queen’s relationship to Simon. Is she descended from one of his son Guy’s daughters? Guy was married to an Aldobrandesca.
As for English queens, Elizabeth I might have been descended from Simon through the Tudors. Henry Tudor (Henry VII), after seizing the throne from Richard III, the last of the Plantagenets, made a considerable effort to present himself as being of royal blood. He claimed descent from the unified line of the princes of Wales, which would also have made him a descendent of Simon de Montfort via Simon’s daughter Eleanor who was wed to Llewellyn, the prince of north Wales. Katherine, a daughter from that union, wed the prince of southern Wales, thus bring together the two chief lines of princely Welsh families. Henry’s undoubted ancestor Owen Tudor (perhaps accurately, perhaps not) was represented as descended from that unified Welsh royal line. For the great tournament of The Field of the Cloth of Gold Henry VIII had his genealogical tree painted upon a wall of Winchester Hall with Simon de Montfort prominent among the ancestors of the Tudors.
I certainly agree with you regarding the influence of the Dominicans and Franciscans in Simon’s life, and of his father’s fame as one of the driving motivations in his high sense of honor. As for his being the greatest political hero of Europe, I would say he should be the greatest political hero of all countries that have elective governments.
Thanks for you informed and thought provoking comments.
Katherine
Dear Katherine,
Thank you for your answer and, please, forgive my English writing, as I think in Romanian. I am going to send you a letter with the main features of my approach on Simon. I have been studying him for 15 years now, I have been to Evesham many times and I could say that he is the centre of my entire life!
I am very happy knowing that thanks to your work, Simon sacrifice, finally, shows its worth!
Valentine,
I’m thrilled to meet you and will be most interested to get your letter on yours views of Simon. How did you become interested in him? Are you presently in Roumania? Is there much interest in him in Roumania? Your English is just fine!
Simon’s sacrifice shows its worth not in my work, but in all the countries that have elective governments. The most I can do is point to him and try to make people aware of what it meant in a world of monarchy to achieve a government sensitive to the will of the people. This evolution toward democracy is still in progress — but then the millennium begun in Simon’s time is not yet completed.
Katherine,
I am sending my letter to the contacts us… It is too long to be posted here. I am telling you my view on the relation between Simon and Frederick II. And another letter will follow today, in which I am sending some documents(from the Internet) on the other aspects I have mentioned in my first comment.
Thank you again!
Hello Valentine,
While you point out that the Melfi Constitution of 1231 considerably predates the Provisions of Oxord and includes the common men as advisors to the Emperor Frederic, the commons had only an advisory capacity, but by the Provisions,in England, the elected representatives of the commons were full sharers in the power of the government — with which the king was required to comply. Frederic enlarged his advisors beyond the class limits of the aristocracy, but the Provisions gave them real power, and the slightly later Ordinances consolidated and confirmed that power. Of course later monarchs etched away at Parliament’s power. Cromwell brought it back (with a vengeance.)
You who are reading, reenacting, going to Renaissance faires, opting out of the 21st century if just for a little while to be in the Middle Ages. What is it we are looking for? Not a time when life was easier. It is as if we have some fundamental “hard wired” hunger for elements of that past time: for a knowledge of herbs, for loyalty to a personally known and nearby figure of leadership, for clothing that celebrates the human shape instead of merely covering it, or concealing it.
For a social system that is knowable: for a system where we are not cast out at the end of high school or college into a vastly complex world where we must sink or swim. In the Middle Ages, and for eons back through time, men and women knew their place in the world from birth, though there was room for the energetic and ambitious to move upward, or the very unfortunate to move downward.
But for most people life was going to be what it was for their parents. What old people knew had value because the world had not changed so greatly during their lifespan as to make their experience irrelevant. The young could feel comfort in the wisdom of their parents.
It is this comfort of continuity, I believe, that we seek in the Middle Ages. We have the traditional culture imprinted within us. We are drawn to it as a magnet draws iron.
For the last third of a century I have spent my most contented hours researching the life and times of Simon de Montfort. His life was far from happy, the complexities that beset him were very “modern”: in addition to his loving the wrong women, he struggled with high interest rates and the jealousy of his fellow lords — what amounted to his co-workers.
But though his problems were not so different from current issues, his solutions — honor, truthfulness, care for his family, fidelity to the principles he had come to believe in — are eternal and yet seem to be slipping from view in our current time amidst the hurly burly of ambition, insecurity and a culture that seems more and more to be holding greed and celebrity as the principal virtues.
How can we capture for ourselves what we perceive to be of worth in the Middle Ages?