Violence

With famine and disease came despair and ultimately violence. There had been only a light death toll amongst the leaders of baronial rebellion throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Richard Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, had been killed in the midst of his rebellion in 1234, but in Ireland and as a result of treachery rather than publicly stage-managed brutality. The slaying and subsequent mutilation of Simon de Montfort at Evesham in 1265 ushered in a new period of unease in dealings between rebels and kings. Above all, perhaps, Montfort’s brutal end demonstrated that, short of killing a king, there was no way to bind a king to his promises, even if he were as weak and changeable as Henry III. In the meantime, the families of those slain at Evesham continued to dream of vengeance. In 1271, Henry of Almain, Edward I’s cousin and the eldest son and heir of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, King of Germany, stopped at Viterbo in Italy on his way to join Edward I’s crusade. There, hearing Mass at the cathedral’s high altar, he was set upon by two of Simon de Montfort’s sons and brutally murdered in revenge for the killing of their father at Evesham. The deed was so notorious that it earned a place in the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno. Blood still called to blood, and the royal family found itself now part of a revenge tragedy.