of 1259.  He had been brought up with Earl Simon’s sons, and with the Earl himself his relations remained friendly even at the later time of their fatal hostilities.  But as yet he seems to have had no distrust of Simon’s purposes or policy.  His adhesion to the Earl recalled Henry from France; and the king was at once joined by Gloucester in London while Edward and Simon remained without the walls.  But the love of father and son proved too strong to bear political severance, and Edward’s reconciliation foiled the Earl’s plans.  He withdrew to the Welsh border, where fresh troubles were breaking out, while Henry prepared to deal his final blow at the government which, tottering as it was, still held him in check.  Rome had resented the measures which had put an end to her extortions, and it was to Rome that Henry looked for a formal absolution from his oath to observe the Provisions.  In June 1261 he produced a Bull annulling the Provisions and freeing him from his oath in a Parliament at Winchester.  The suddenness of the blow forbade open protest and Henry quickly followed up his victory.  Hugh Bigod, who had surrendered the Tower and Dover in the spring, surrendered the other castles he held in the autumn.  Hugh Despenser was deposed from the Justiciarship and a royalist, Philip Basset, appointed in his place.

[Sidenote:  Simon’s rising]

The news of this counter-revolution reunited for a moment the barons.  Gloucester joined Earl Simon in calling an autumn Parliament at St. Alban’s, and in summoning to it three knights from every shire south of Trent.  But the union was a brief one.  Gloucester consented to refer the quarrel with the king to arbitration and the Earl of Leicester withdrew in August to France.  He saw that for the while there was no means of withstanding Henry, even in his open defiance of the Provisions.  Foreign soldiers were brought into the land; the king won back again the appointment of sheriffs.  For eighteen months of this new rule Simon could do nothing but wait.  But his long absence lulled the old jealousies against him.  The confusion of the realm and a fresh outbreak of troubles in Wales renewed the disgust at Henry’s government, while his unswerving faithfulness to the Provisions fixed the eyes of all Englishmen upon the Earl as their natural leader.  The death of Gloucester in the summer of 1262 removed the one barrier to action; and in the spring of 1263 Simon landed again in England as the unquestioned head of the baronial party.  What immediately forced him to action was a march of Edward with a body of foreign troops against Llewelyn, who was probably by this time in communication if not in actual alliance with the Earl.  The chief opponents of Llewelyn among the Marcher Lords were ardent supporters of Henry’s misgovernment, and when a common hostility drew the Prince and Earl together, the constitutional position of Llewelyn as an English noble gave formal justification for co-operation with him.  At Whitsuntide the