This peace, the triumph of that English policy which had been struggling ever since the days of Hubert de Burgh with the Continental policy of Henry and his foreign advisers, was the work of the Earl of Leicester.  The revolution had doubtless been mainly Simon’s doing.  In the summer of 1258, while the great change was going on, a thunderstorm drove the king as he passed along the river to the house of the Bishop of Durham where the Earl was then sojourning.  Simon bade Henry take shelter with him and have no fear of the storm.  The king refused with petulant wit.  “If I fear the thunder, I fear you, Sir Earl, more than all the thunder in the world.”  But Simon had probably small faith in the cumbrous system of government which the Barons devised, and it was with reluctance that he was brought to swear to the Provisions of Oxford which embodied it.  With their home government he had little to do, for from the autumn of 1258 to that of 1259 he was chiefly busied in negotiation in France.  But already his breach with Gloucester and the bulk of his fellow councillors was marked.  In the Lent Parliament of 1259 he had reproached them, and Gloucester above all, with faithlessness to their trust.  “The things we are treating of,” he cried, “we have sworn to carry out.  With such feeble and faithless men I care not to have ought to do!” The peace with France was hardly signed when his distrust of his colleagues was verified.  Henry’s withdrawal to the French court at the close of the year for the formal signature of the treaty was the signal for a reactionary movement.  From France the king forbade the summoning of a Lent Parliament in 1260 and announced his resumption of the enterprise against Sicily.  Both acts were distinct breaches of the Provisions of Oxford, but Henry trusted to the divisions of the Twenty-four.  Gloucester was in open feud with Leicester; the Justiciar, Hugh Bigod, resigned his office in the spring; and both of these leaders drew cautiously to the king.  Roger Mortimer and the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk more openly espoused the royal cause, and in February 1260 Henry had gained confidence enough to announce that as the barons had failed to keep their part of the Provisions he should not keep his.

[Sidenote:  The Counter Revolution]

Earl Simon almost alone remained unshaken.  But his growing influence was seen in the appointment of his supporter, Hugh Despenser, as Justiciar in Bigod’s place, while his strength was doubled by the accession of the King’s son Edward to his side.  In the moment of the revolution Edward had vehemently supported the party of the foreigners.  But he had sworn to observe the Provisions, and the fidelity to his pledge which remained throughout his life the chief note of his temper at once showed itself.  Like Simon he protested against the faithlessness of the barons in the carrying out of their reforms, and it was his strenuous support of the petition of the knighthood that brought about the additional Provisions