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 12 May; but on the 28th Gloucester was joined by Edward, and hostilities began at once. While the new allies secured the eastern side of the Severn valley, Simon hurried into Glamorgan, made in the king's name a treaty with Llywelyn (19 June), marched to Monmouth (28 June), and thence to Newport, intending to cross over to Bristol; but his transports were intercepted, and he was forced to return to Hereford. On Sunday, 2 Aug., he set out again, crossed the Severn, and late on the Monday night, or early on Tuesday morning, reached Evesham, where he hoped that his son would meet him. His godson, Edward, met him instead, with a force so overwhelming that Simon at once exclaimed, "Let us commend our souls to God, for our bodies are theirs." At the close of a three hours massacre "for battle none it was," as a chronicler says–he fell, almost the last of his little band, crying "God's grace!" as he passed away.

In the eyes of the king's party Simon was a "traitor." Setting that charge aside, the only faults of which he could be accused were ambition, avarice, pride, and a fierce and overbearing temper. Ambitious he undoubtedly was, especially in his youth. His perpetual wranglings with the king over money matters seem at times to indicate a grasping disposition; but Henry's slipperiness in such matters was incalculable; Simon's expenditure in the royal service must have been enormous; and, moreover, a considerable part of the claims which he pressed so persistently were not his own claims, but those of his wife, Henry's sister, whom he had married without any dowry at all, whose dowry on her first marriage Henry had never reclaimed for her from the Marshals, and who was anything but a thrifty housekeeper. The heavy expenses of Simon's visit to Rome in 1238 were defrayed by forced contributions from the tenants of the honour of Leicester, claimed apparently as arrears of dues unpaid since his recognition as their lord; but on his return, moved by a remonstrance from his friend Robert Grosseteste [see, bishop of Lincoln], he made restitution to them all. His will, made on 1 Jan. 1259, begins with an anxious injunction that his debts shall be paid, and that all claims made against him shall be satisfied without question and without delay; "where there is any doubt let it not rest on my side, cost what it may, so that I be free of it, for I would not remain in debt or under suspicion of debt to any one." He was certainly often in debt during his lifetime; probably the earl was as bad a manager as the countess; but it was not on self-indulgence that he spent; he was noted for his temperance, sobriety, and simplicity of life. His private life was in fact that of a saint; his closest friends were the holiest men of the day Grosseteste, Walter Cantelupe [q.v.], Adam Marsh [see ]; and Adam, at least, lectured him about his temper with a frankness which shows that his pride was of the kind that does not turn away from deserved rebuke. Though his wife was nearly as fiery as himself, he, at least, seems to have found her "good woman through all." They were seldom long apart without necessity; he appointed her sole executrix of his testamentary dispositions, and bade his sons be guided by her counsels; he left her in command of Kenilworth during his last campaign; and she spent her nine years of widowhood at Montargis, in a convent founded by his sister. For their children see, and the younger.

Piety and culture were the characteristics of Simon's home. He knew all the morning and night offices of the church by heart, and went through them almost as regularly as a priest, spending more of the night in devotion than in sleep. He was a fair Latin scholar, a lover of books, a pleasant and cheerful talker. Chroniclers and poets called him "the flower of all chivalry." Like his father, he was counted the finest soldier of his generation. At the siege of Rochester in 1264 it was remarked that he "showed the English the right way to assault a town, a matter about which they were at that time wholly ignorant;" while at Lewes his plan of attack was "laid with a care and foresight, and executed with a combination of resource and decision, which would be sufficient, even if we knew nothing more of his military prowess, to support his reputation as the first general of his day" (, p. 273). As a statesman he has been in modern times not so much overrated as misunderstood. He was not the inventor of the representative system, nor the creator of the House of Commons. We have no means of ascertaining how much or how little of the complicated executive machinery set up by the "Provisions of Oxford" was of his devising, nor do we know how far he himself was conscious that he had "created a new force in English policies" when he issued the writ "that first summoned the merchant and the trader to sit beside the knight of the shire, the baron and the bishop, in the parliament of the realm" (, i. 301). What Englishmen of his own day saw in him was not so much a reformer of government as a champion of righteousness, not so much a statesman as a hero. "While other men wavered and faltered and fell away, the en- 