Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 38.djvu/299

 meeting of parliament on 13 Oct. It broke up in confusion, the king's party flew to arms, and Simon, lodging at Southwark with a very small train, would have been surrounded and captured had not the Londoners rushed out to rescue him. Four wealthy citizens who had been in the plot with the king were punished by imprisonment and by a fine, of which Simon applied the proceeds to strengthen the defences of the city. Fearing a similar trap, he disregarded the royal summons to another parliament at Reading. On 13 Dec. he joined with the other barons in an agreement to refer to the arbitration of St. Louis "all contentions and discords" between themselves and their sovereign re- specting the "Provisions" and swore to abide by the French king's decision. That decision the Mise of Amiens was given on 23 Jan. 1264. It quashed the "Provisions" altogether, and restored to the king the privileges which he claimed; but it reserved "the rights which the English people had acquired" before the passing of the "Provisions" That reservation saved everything. It justified the barons in setting aside the award; for ' it was easy for Simon to prove that the arbitrary power it gave to the crown was as contrary to the Charter as to the Provisions themselves ' (, Hist. Engl. People, i. 297-8). Before the Mise was agreed upon he had said : "Though all should forsake me I will stand firm, with my four sons, in the just cause to which my faith is pledged; nor will I fear to risk the fortune of war." But he was not forsaken; the whole English people was with him now. A broken leg, caused by a fall from his horse, had prevented him from attending the Mise of Amiens. He now despatched his eldest son to the western border, where he had secured the alliance of Llywelyn of Wales; he himself, as soon as he could move, went to se- cure London, and thence marched northward to relieve Northampton, where his second son was besieged by the king; but on hearing of its capture (5 April) he turned southward again, and in Holy Week laid siege to Rochester. On Henry's approach he again withdrew to London (26 April). He was, in fact, recalled by tidings of a plot for the betrayal of the city to Edward. After taking measures for its security he again set forth on the track of the royalists. On 12 May he encamped at Fletching, Sussex; the king was ten miles off at Lewes. One last appeal to Henry, signed by Simon and his young colleague, the new Earl of Gloucester, was answered by a formal defiance of "Simon of Montfort, Gilbert of Clare, and their fellows." On 14 May the decisive battle took place, and Simon's anxious night of thought and prayer, his stirring appeal to his followers, his daring and skilful plan of attack, were rewarded by the total defeat of the royalists and the capture of the king himself. A convention drawn up that night, and known as the Mise of Lewes, "furnished the basis of the new constitution which Simon proposed to create, and forms the link between it and the earlier one devised in 1258" (, ii. 90). That new constitution, set up at the midsummer parliament, empowered the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester and the Bishop of Chichester to elect a council of nine, by whose advice the king was tot govern, while the three electors were to remain as a court of appeal in case of disagreement among the nine, and were themselves to be removable at the will of the parliament. From that moment Simon was virtually governor of king and kingdom. His exceptional importance, and the exceptional danger to which it exposed him, were marked by his solitary exemption from a decree forbidding all persons to wear arms (16 July), and by a warning written to the barons by "a faithful Englishman," to bethink them of another leader in case he should die. Dangers indeed were thickening round him. In September he and his partisans were excommunicated by a papal legate. In November the lawless doings of the royalists on the Welsh border forced him to march against them. Llywelyn's help enabled him to subdue them for the moment, but Gloucester protected them, the great lords of the north were hostile, and ' it was the weakness of his party among the baronage at this great crisis which drove Earl Simon to a constitutional change of mighty issue in our history ' (, i. 300). By writs issued in the king's name on 14 and 24 Dec. he summoned to a parliament in London on 30 Jan. 1265, not only 120 churchmen, twenty-three lay barons, and two knights from every shire, but also two citizens from every borough in England. The only recorded event of the session was a quarrel between the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester. Gilbert accused Simon of illegally keeping foreign garrisons in the castles of which he had custody. The question was dropped for a while, but on Shrove Tuesday (17 Feb.) Simon forcibly prevented a tournament between his sons and Gloucester at Dunstable, and on 11 April he had to do the like again at Northampton. Gloucester here-upon joined the marcher lords, who were still in revolt, and openly welcomed back some of the foreign exiles. Simon, with the king in his train, followed him to Hereford, where another reconciliation was patched up on