That misgovernment of this kind should have gone on unchecked in defiance of the provisions of the Charter was owing to the disunion and sluggishness of the English baronage.  On the first arrival of the foreigners Richard, the Earl Marshal, a son of the great Regent, stood forth as their leader to demand the expulsion of the strangers from the royal Council.  Though deserted by the bulk of the nobles he defeated the foreign troops sent against him and forced the king to treat for peace.  But at this critical moment the Earl was drawn by an intrigue of Peter des Roches to Ireland; he fell in a petty skirmish, and the barons were left without a head.  The interposition of a new primate, Edmund of Abingdon, forced the king to dismiss Peter from court; but there was no real change of system, and the remonstrances of the Archbishop and of Robert Grosseteste, the Bishop of Lincoln, remained fruitless.  In the long interval of misrule the financial straits of the king forced him to heap exaction on exaction.  The Forest Laws were used as a means of extortion, sees and abbeys were kept vacant, loans were wrested from lords and prelates, the Court itself lived at free quarters wherever it moved.  Supplies of this kind however were utterly insufficient to defray the cost of the king’s prodigality.  A sixth of the royal revenue was wasted in pensions to foreign favourites.  The debts of the Crown amounted to four times its annual income.  Henry was forced to appeal for aid to the great Council of the realm, and aid was granted in 1237 on promise of control in its expenditure and on condition that the king confirmed the Charter.  But Charter and promise were alike disregarded; and in 1242 the resentment of the barons expressed itself in a determined protest and a refusal of further subsidies.  In spite of their refusal however Henry gathered money enough for a costly expedition for the recovery of Poitou.  The attempt ended in failure and shame.  At Taillebourg the king’s force fled in disgraceful rout before the French as far as Saintes, and only the sudden illness of Lewis the Ninth and a disease which scattered his army saved Bordeaux from the conquerors.  The treasury was utterly drained, and Henry was driven in 1244 to make a fresh appeal with his own mouth to the baronage.  But the barons had now rallied to a plan of action, and we can hardly fail to attribute their union to the man who appears at their head.  This was the Earl of Leicester, Simon of Montfort.

[Sidenote:  Simon of Montfort]

Simon was the son of another Simon of Montfort, whose name had become memorable for his ruthless crusade against the Albigensian heretics in Southern Gaul, and who had inherited the Earldom of Leicester through his mother, a sister and co-heiress of the last Earl of the house of Beaumont.  But as Simon’s tendencies were for the most part French John had kept the revenues of the earldom in his own hands, and on his death the claim of his elder son, Amaury, was