This page describes Simon de Montfort, onetime Steward of England and Earl of Leicester, as a vampire in the World of Darkness. To be precise, as a Sabbat bishop of the Brujah antitribu. It is not intended as a scholarly source on Simon de Montfort (1208-1265), the father of representative government, nor on his father Simon de Montfort (died 1218), leader of the French/Catholic forces in the Albigensian Crusade.
Simon de Montfort, as he calls himself, appeared in New York in February 1995, and claimed to be a sabbat who had spent a long time in torpor. His claims were of course met with some skepticism, but he checked out on quizzes and firewalking, and was cleared by the Inquisition. Still, no-one much was very keen, but he was accepted as a provisional sabbat by a nomadic pack called 'the Smoking Mirrors', and soon demonstrated the qualities of the true sabbat in forays into Washington DC.
Simon proved an awesome warrior, truly devastating in personal combat. But at first he suffered a significant weakness in his ignorance of the modern world. He had constant trouble with safety catches, magazine releases, telephones, radios, aircraft, cameras, and flammable liquids. He once threw a Camarilla enforcer into the rotor disk of a helicopter they were both riding, with unfortunate effect. He acquired a local reputation for insane courage in the field, and for intractability in the headquarters, often arguing against orders. He also displayed a rigid code of honour and a volcanic temper.
De Montfort also became known for his impassioned speeches about the freedom of the Sabbat and the tyranny of the Camarilla. He waxed lyrical about loyalty to one's Sabbat comrades, and vociferously denounced tyranny in even subtle forms. Although plainly a Sabbat fanatic, he hardly ever mentioned Gehenna or the Antediluvians, and seemed to think of the Sabbat in purely political terms. He urged proselytising efforts among the anarchs, the Brujah, and Camarilla caitiff, and disparaged suggestions of rumbles with no political or military objective.
Then word began to get around that 'Simon de Montfort' was the name of an old Anarch hero, one of the founding members of the Sabbat, a former cardinal and leader against the Camarilla invasion. The older leaders began to speak of him as "shai Sabbat", and suddenly he was made a bishop.
Birth: October 1208, at Montfort l'Amaury, in France.
Embrace: Epiphany (January 6th) 1265, at Kenilworth Castle, in Warwickshire, England.
'Death': 2 August 1265, near Evesham, in Worcestershire.
Apparent age: 56
Sire: Raoul de Toulouse (Clan Brujah primogen of Toulouse, France, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).
Generation: Eighth at embrace. Now possibly seventh through diablerie.
Clan: antitribu of the Brujah.
Path: Honorable Accord (apparently).
Simon is tall (over six feet) and burly. He has straight raven hair shot with white, and going white at the temples. Grey eyes, as pale as wood ash, gleam in the lined and haggard ruins of his once-noble countenance.
He dresses all in black, and carries a silver-mounted sword-cane. On his lapel he wears a shield-shaped cloisonnŽ brooch, scarlet with a fork-tailed white lion rampant.
De Montfort is never restless, but moves with presence and resolve. His still moments are watchful rather than restful or quiet. And he favours four modes of speech: high-minded oratory, moralistic lecturing, sarcastic mockery, and infuriated tirades. In all of them he speaks forcefully and at length, stating his case and issuing his ultimatums, rarely arguing or rebutting.
In his idle moments, de Montfort is prone to brood over books of modern history, and suspiciously examine products of the new technology.
Although sorting people into stereotyped categories is always to some extent a distortion, it remains useful to say that Simon de Montfort is an Individualist of the Brujah antitribu and something of a Sabbat Loyalist (i.e: extreme anarchist). He seems to view the Sabbat's struggle with the Camarilla more in a political light than as a crusade against Gehenna, and has expressed an interest in converting rather than destroying some elements in the Camarilla.
De Montfort seems to be motivated by a fanatical (and sometimes slightly paranoid) hatred of tyranny and oppression. De Montfort hates tyranny in every form. He hates the tyranny of the blood-bond. He hates the tyranny of the Methuselahs. He hates the tyranny of the Camarilla. He hates the tyranny of clans. He even hates tyranny of vampires over mortals and of mortals over other mortals. Occasionally circumstances force him to condone tyrannical actions, but this makes him seethe with indignation.
De Montfort has 'admitted' a couple of times that he is the Simon de Montfort. He has referred on occasion to incidents in the career of that legendary figure as his own deeds. But when skeptics challenge him, he refuses to try to prove the identity. "It doesn't matter" he says "who a sabbat was or what he did. It matters only what he is or does. Watch what I do. Listen to what I say. Then if you doubt my strength or wisdom, go join another diocese. But if you doubt I am a true sabbat, if you doubt my faith and loyalty, come and discuss it with my sword."
Bishop Simon won't give a complete history of de Montfort, but between the records and the oral traditions it is possible to piece one together. Whether the current Bishop Simon is the real de Montfort or not, this is the story of that elder statesman of the Sabbat.
Simon de Montfort was born on the 22nd of October 1208 at Montfort l'Amaury in the Kingdom of France. He was the fourth son of the Constable of France, Simon de Montfort, comte of Evreux and Montfort. In 1218 Simon de Montfort the elder was killed in the Albigensian crusade. His eldest son Amaury inherited the lands and titles, and left Simon the younger (now the second surviving son) relatively poor.
In 1231 Simon somehow persuaded a kinsman, the Earl of Chester, to relinquish the earldom of Leicester, which had been confiscated from his father by King John in 1207. He also persuaded John's son, the young King Henry III, to bestow that earldom on him. Simon joined the English court, and became a great favourite of the king, who made him Steward of England, and Castellan of Dover and Kenilworth, two of the strongest castles in England. Simon married married King Henry's widowed sister Eleanor, and stood as godfather to Henry's son Edward.
The first break came in 1239. At the time of de Montfort's wedding, Henry had given his assent. But he had done so without the permission, and contrary to the plans, of his Ventrue control. Henry was raked over the coals, and took out his resentment by treating Simon to a public dressing-down, alleging seduction and deceit. He worked himself into a frenzy of baseless indignation, and ordered de Montfort confined to the Tower. Simon fled for refuge with his brother, who was now Constable of France. He and his royal wife lived a year in exile.
The pattern persisted for twenty-five years. Henry would cheat, betray, punish, or abuse de Montfort, usually because of the intolerable and unacknowledgeable pressures of Ventrue manipulation. Simon, never able to swallow an injustice, would lose his temper and treat the king to a tirade of infuriated sarcasm. Then he would go into exile or on crusade until Henry needed him to fight the French or the Welsh, or to keep the lid on a recalcitrant province.
During these twenty-five years de Montfort earned the reputation of being the best battle commander in Christendom, and one of the doughtiest knights. (He was offered, but refused, the post of Seneschal of France and the Governorship of Jerusalem.) He also earned the reputation of being able, courageous, proud, hot-tempered, and absolutely inflexible. Like many men of rigid principles, he was utterly intolerant of the compromises made by more adaptable types.
The most important such episode was de Montfort's stint as governor of the English provinces in France, 1247-1251. As Seneschal, de Montfort created a great stir, punishing rebels with great rigour, even though most of them were nobles. He even held nobles to account for their crimes against commoners. This produced a flood of protests for the outraged nobles, and other complaints, fewer but much more significant, from the vampire princes of Guyenne and Gascony. Less obvious, but really more important, it caught the attention and imagination of the Brujah of the south of France.
On orders from Clan Ventrue, Henry recalled de Montfort to Westminster for trial, but could not secure a conviction from his own Curia. Desperate, he stripped Earl Simon of his governorship, and refused to indemnify him for the expenses he had incurred in governing the province. But this was too much for the English lords who had just acquitted de Montfort of all wrongdoing. They threatened rebellion, and Henry was forced to back down. De Montfort returned to Gascony and ruled it with a rod of iron until 1252, when Henry paid his expenses and bought the office of Seneschal back from him. De Montfort retired to exile in France until 1253, when Henry recalled him to fight the Welsh.
By 1259 Henry had angered his barons beyond endurance, by arbitrary and unjust conduct, by misappropriating war funds, by favouring his French relatives over the native nobles, and by military failure in France and Wales. When his brother Richard, the Holy Roman Emperor, sent a gift of fifty ships laden with grain to help relieve a dearth in England, Henry seized the cargos and sold them at inflated prices.
Led by the earls of Leicester and Gloucester, the barons in Parliament forced Henry to issue a set of corollaries to the Magna Carta. These 'Provisions of Oxford' guaranteed regular meetings of Parliament three times every year. They stripped foreigners of their offices and castles (de Montfort resigned his, and the Parliament gave them back). Most galling, they established a permanent Council of 24 barons to supervise the kingdom.
The English Ventrue were infuriated. They forced Henry to weasel and squirm in desperate attempts to nullify the Provisions. And it is probably about this time that they spitefully blocked moves by the Brujah to Embrace de Montfort.
It was all to no avail. The barons had money and soldiers and the King had not. In 1263 they made open rebellion, and put their armies under de Montfort's command. De Montfort forced the king to acquiesce in four months, and went again into exile. But Henry repudiated his word again in 1264. De Montfort returned from France, raised an army, and smashed a superior royal force at the battle of Lewes. He captured Henry and his son Edward Longshanks, and kept them captive. For fifteen months Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was in effect ruler of England.
As ruler of England, de Montfort summoned commoners to Parliament for the first time; two knights from each shire, two burghers from each borough. His Parliament abolished anti-Semitic laws, and de Montfort ordered Royal officials to protect Jews in the event of pogroms and riots. De Montfort held nobles to account for their crimes against commoners, and returned conquered territories to their rightful Welsh rulers. Unfortunately, these moves compounded with his volcanic temper and loathing of hypocrisy to seriously erode his support among the nobles.
In December 1264 Raoul de Toulouse, a Brujah member of the Primogen of Toulouse, came to Kenilworth Castle, where de Montfort was celebrating Christmas in state. At Epiphany (January 6th) 1265 he inducted de Montfort into Clan Brujah and the ranks of the undead. On the next two nights he fed de Montfort his blood, establishing a blood bond over Earl Simon's loyalties.
The exigencies of vampiric existence made it impossible for Earl Simon to keep a firm hand on the reins of power. Edward Longshanks escaped in May and raised a rebellion. Owing to his vampirism, de Monfort was forced to leave field command to his sons and allies, and his army was driven into Wales. Things still looked good, because his son Simon was able to raise a large army from the gentry and burghers in England. Eventually the elder de Montfort managed to cross the Severn, and moved back toward Kenilworth to link up with his son.
But Longshanks, moving with a rapidity worthy of Simon de Montfort at his peak, surprised and destroyed the younger de Monfort's army camped outside the walls of Kenilworth in a dawn raid on August 1. He made a forced march to Evesham, and there intercepted the vampire de Montfort's army, which was moving by night, but had paused to allow the captive king to hear Mass in Evesham Abbey.
The Battle of Evesham was fought at night, during a sudden thunderstorm. De Montfort was outnumbered and in a bad position, his army hungry and fatigued. They were defeated, of course. And slaughtered. Contrary to the usual practice of the time, Edward's army took no prisoners, nor allowed any flight. De Montfort had less than two hundred knights- 180 were killed.
In the rain and darkness, Raoul of Toulouse easily substituted the body of de Montfort's son Harry for the Earl's. By dawn, this had been dismembered, beheaded, disembowelled, castrated, and thrown to the dogs. Little wonder, then, that no-one discovered the imposture. Harry de Montfort, taken for his father, was buried by their altar by the monks of Evesham, removed to unconsecrated ground on the orders of the Crown, and eventually returned to the abbey at the direction of the Pope. Earl Simon was venerated as a saint by the people of England for fifty years, and miracles were claimed at his grave and the spot where he died. But the English Crown managed to block canonisation until the fad died down.
De Montfort's loyalest supporters held out for a year and a half. In Dover and Kenilworth castles they withstood siege and assault. But too many reformists had been killed at Kenilworth and Evesham, too much prestige had been lost, and Raoul of Toulouse would not allow de Montfort to help. De Montfort sat by, helpless, while Dover negotiated a surrender in 1266, while Kenilworth succumbed to starvation in 1267. The last holdout, Sir John d'Eyvill, marched down from the fens at Christmas 1267, and captured London with the co-operation of its citizens. But he was betrayed by the Earl of Gloucester, and the rebellion collapsed. Simon and Raoul escaped London by the river and fled to Toulouse.
Simon spent thirty years in Toulouse, rancour against Raoul building up beneath his blood bond. He was forced to remain passive while his friends and allies suffered persecution at the hands of Edward Longshanks and the Church, while his sons fell in the mercenary service of the King of Sicily.
In 1295 a band of three Spanish Brujah came through Toulouse- Ramon di Asturias, Luis di Pamplona, and Luis Velascu di Salamanca. They had been abandoned to the mercies of the Inquisition by their sires in the 1250s, but had survived and prevailed. They had learned to break the blood bond from Hungarian Tzimisce vampires who had performed experiments with vitae. They helped de Montfort break his blood bond, and taught him the trick.
Free of the hateful yoke of the blood bond, de Montfort confronted Raoul in a street in Toulouse, his heart full of resentment. They fought, and de Montfort left Raoul out to wait for sunrise. But at that time he did not know of the power of the Amaranth--rather, he feared that drinking his regnant's blood again would re-awaken the blood-bond. So he did not diabolise his sire. Rather, he fled Toulouse.
De Montfort, di Asturias, di Pamplona, and Velascu joined the Anarch revolt, and wandered the France and Spain for a few years. Di Pamplona met Final Death in Paris in 1298, and the survivors fled to Scotland. They soon overcame the isolated vampires of the small Scots cities, established a rebel domain, and launched a campaign into the north of England. This was hard-fought. Di Asturias was destroyed, and De Montfort suffered a period of torpor 1332-1341 after an assassination attempt.
The high point of the campaign came in 1381, when De Montfort moved on London under the cover of the Peasant's Revolt. (At this time de Montfort was calling himself 'Robin Hood', after the folklore figure based on his loyal followers in the Fens 1265-1268.) Even after the defeat of the peasants the anarchs retained control of English cities as far south as Lincoln and Chester.
The struggle swayed back and forth in secrecy until the foundation of the Camarilla in 1450, at which point de Montfort established a powerbase in the House of York to counterbalance Camarilla control over Henry VI. De Montfort launched a major campaign in 1461, using hordes of hastily-embraced childer shock-troops against the vampires, and the armies of the House of York against their puppets. Fighting was fierce, but the princes of the English cities were swept away by the anarch hordes. De Montfort took London. Although the Camarilla briefly recovered London for a year in 1470-71, in 1475 the anarchs in England were secure enough send assistance to their comrades in France.
From about 1480 things began to go wrong in anarch England. Perhaps an early-generation agent provocateur from the Camarilla was at work. There were grumblings, defections, some internal quarrels. And in 1485 a well-planned uprising, backed by invasion from the continent, drove the anarchs out of almost all cities south of York. Over the next eight years more cities fell to the Camarilla- York, Newcastle, Carlisle, Berwick...
In October 1493 a peace conference was called at Thorns, in Hampshire. The Camarilla offered to pardon the rebels, to accept the anarchs back into the fold as equals. But they did not offer to institute measures to curb the arbitrary powers of princes nor protect the rights of younger vampires. Nevertheless a great many of the rebels accepted the terms and joined the Camarilla, and many leaders of clan Brujah sold out. A tiny rump of the anarch movement survived, including of course de Montfort. They formed an organisation later known as the Sabbat.
During the sixteenth century de Montfort helped to protect the Sabbat's Scandinavian refuge, and also took part in the development of the Path of Honorable Accord (out of the Road of Chivalry). He campaigned in Germany in the early 1600s.
In 1637 de Montfort returned once again to England, seized London, and began a methodical campaign to win England over from the tyranny of the Camarilla. This erupted into a series of civil wars in Great Britain, in which both sides among the vampires employed mortal troops to seize control of cities. The Sabbat, based in London and Cambridge, was generally associated with the Parliamentary interest until Pride's Purge in 1648, when they discovered that the Camarilla had outmanoeuvred them and seized a firm control of the Army through generals Pride and Cromwell.
By 1653 the Sabbat's attempt to liberate England had failed utterly. Camarilla stooges began a campaign to ferret out Sabbat vampires and their sympathisers, under guise of attempts by Cromwell's dictatorial government to impose Puritan standards in religion. De Montfort fled to Jamestown, Virginia. He had given up hope of overthrowing tyranny in England, and hoped to establish an ideal state in the New World.
Life was precarious for the Sabbat pioneers of America, because the cities were at first very small. But it was at first quite peaceful, and vampires were able to go about their unlives without concern for the feudal rights of princes, or for warfare between the Sabbat and Camarilla. The Camarilla controlled the French colonies in Canada and Louisiana, and the Sabbat controlled the English Thirteen Colonies, but there was no strife between them.
From about 1765, however, things changed. A Ventrue elder with a coterie of strong childer to support him invaded New York, and other Camarilla vampires migrated to America, renewing the war. De Montfort (who had moved to Williamsburg in 1699) conducted a largely successful defence of the South, but the struggle in New England was closely-fought.
Eventually, of course, both sides adopted the use of mortal armies to threaten one another's herds, contacts, and havens. Open warfare broke out in 1775, and led to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.
The Camarilla organised their campaign as a military conquest. An expeditionary force consisted of a vampire 'banneret' with a coterie of 'knights'. Each was accompanied by a British or German army commanded by Dominated officers. The Sabbat opposed these with war-parties of vampires which moved with revolutionary armies, and which would attack the Camarilla vampires with hordes of hastily-embraced cannon-fodder.
De Montfort moved north to join the fight, surrounding himself with a crack war-party of Sabbat veterans. He also made a ghoul of a promising young officer named Benedict Arnold. They fought with distinction against the British on the Canadian front, from Ticonderoga to Saratoga by way of Quebec and Lake Champlain.
After the battle of Bemis Heights (October 1777) de Montfort led his war-party, reinforced by ghouls, against the Camarilla force accompanying general Burgoyne. The Sabbat triumphed (despite heavy casualties) and wiped their opponents out. Unluckily, they ran into a company of British troops while effecting their withdrawal, and this cut them to ribbons with musket fire.
General Burgoyne was bewildered without vampire control, but the American rebels under Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold had never been Dominated, and were used to independent action. Burgoyne's nerve broke, and he surrendered his army.
The faithful (blood-bound) Arnold had recovered de Montfort's torpid form before sunrise the night of his being shot, and for some time kept it safe in a coffin. But Arnold knew of no way to contact de Montfort's Sabbat comrades for help. Eventually realising that de Montfort's torpor was going to be protracted, and unable to think of anything better to do, he had de Montfort buried in a war cemetery at West Point.
Eventually Arnold's blood bond wore off. Beset by money problems, jealous of other revolutionary generals, and anxious to obtain a supply of vampire blood, he gave in to blandishments offered by a Camarilla spy. In return for certain valuable considerations, he agreed to betray West Point to the British and de Montfort's grave to the Camarilla.
As history records, Arnold's courier was captured and his plot discovered. He fled to the British, and fought on their side for years, always hoping to take West Point and reveal de Montfort's grave. His efforts failed, and after the war he retired to England and sank into a suggestive obscurity.
Text and character copyright © 1996, 1999 by Brett Evill. World of Darkness and its several features copyright © 1991-1998 by White Wolf. This work is protected under the Berne Convention, and may not be copied or altered without permission. Use of words and phrases that constitute trademarks of the White Wolf Game Studios does not imply genericity, and is not intended as a challenge to those trademarks.