Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 38.djvu/293

 (Archives de I'Orient Latin, i. 402-3;, p. xix note). Their request was not granted; but that they should have ever seriously made it to the emperor is a striking proof of the high repute in which Simon already stood alike in east and west. Next spring, however, Simon was back in Europe. In Burgundy he received a command to join the English king in Poitou, where Henry, having just landed with an army of invasion, wanted his help, and was glad to purchase it by a very insufficient indemnity for the forced sale of the Leicester woods. Simon did good service at the battle of Saint es, 22 July, and was one of the few barons who stayed with the king, "to the great damage of their own fortunes and interests," when the rest went back to England in the autumn. A year later king and earl alike went home, and the royal appreciation of Simon's services was shown by liberal grants to him and his wife.

In 1244 Simon appears for the first time as taking part in English politics. Matthew Paris states that the parliament of that year appointed twelve commissioners to answer the king's demand for money; that of these twelve Simon was one; and that their answer took the form of a remonstrance against the king's wastefulness and his non-observance of the charters, and a demand for the appointment of responsible ministers of state. He inserts under the same year a draft scheme of administrative reform which he says "the magnates devised with the king's consent," and which in a remarkable way "anticipates several of the later points of the programme of Simon de Montfort" (, ii. 63). Yet he also says that when Henry refused all concession, and sought to treat with the different orders singly, Simon was one of the bearers of the royal appeal to the clergy. From these obscure notices no theory can be formed as to Simon's actual position or policy. In May 1246 his name follows that of the Earl of Cornwall at the head of a remonstrance against the demands of the pope. In 1247 he went to France "on secret business" for the king, returning 13 Oct. At the close of the year he again took the cross. It seems to have been contemplated that he should lead the English contingent in the crusade about to set forth under Louis of France; the pope desired the English clergy to supply the earl with funds, and in August 1248 the Bishops of Lincoln and Worcester promised him four thousand marks from their dioceses whenever he should start for the Holy Land. By that time, however, his crusade was indefinitely postponed. In the spring Henry III had asked him to undertake the government of Gascony, which nobody else had ever been able to manage. Simon, "not wishing," as he says, "that the king should suffer for lack of aught that I could do for him," accepted the task on condition that he should be secured in the office of governor for seven years, should have absolute control over the revenues and feudal services of the land during that time, and should be entitled to claim the obedience of the people as if he were the king himself. For the government and internal pacification of the country he took the whole responsibility on himself; only in case of attack from the neighbouring sovereigns did he stipulate for aid from Henry. A commission on these terms was issued to him on 1 May 1248, the king undertaking to give him two thousand marks, and to supply him with fifty knights for a year.

In the autumn he set out. On 20 Sept. he was at Lorris, making a truce for two months with the queen-regent of France. At Epiphany 1249 he reappeared at Westminster to report the success of his first three months' work in the south. Two of the worst troublers of the land were in prison; a third, Gaston of Beam, had been forced to make a truce; a fourth, the king of Navarre, had in a personal interview been persuaded to submit to arbitration all his disputes with the English king; the turbulent robber-knights, the stubborn burghers of the Gascon towns, had all been made to feel the strength of their new ruler's hand. He was back again by the end of June, when he suppressed a faction fight at Bordeaux, and threw the heads of one of the rival factions into prison; he put down by sheer force a similar tumult at Bazas; he razed the castle of Fronsac, and seized the estates of its lord, who was accused of traitorous dealings with France; he captured Gaston of B6arn and sent him over sea to beg pardon of the king. By the end of the year the whole country appeared subdued; so "manfully and faithfully," as Matthew Paris says, had the earl laboured at his task, "striving in all things to follow his father's steps, or even to outgo them."

Simon was in truth imitating but too well his father's high-handed severity and repression of independence among a people whom the ordinary machinery of civil government was powerless to control, and who were above all others quick to resent any interference with the local franchises and the un- bridled license which for ages they had regarded as their birthright. The mutterings of a coming storm reached his ears early in 1250. In March he went to Paris to negotiate a five years' truce between Henry and the queen-regent. Thence, on Easter eve (27 March), was written to King Henry the 