struggle.  He at once resolved on resistance.  The French award had luckily reserved the rights of Englishmen to the liberties they had enjoyed before the Provisions of Oxford, and 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.  London was the first to reject the decision; in March 1264 its citizens mustered at the call of the town-bell at Saint Paul’s, seized the royal officials, and plundered the royal parks.  But an army had already mustered in great force at the king’s summons, while Leicester found himself deserted by the bulk of the baronage.  Every day brought news of ill.  A detachment from Scotland joined Henry’s forces.  The younger De Montfort was taken prisoner.  Northampton was captured, the king raised the siege of Rochester, and a rapid march of Earl Simon’s only saved London itself from a surprise by Edward.  But, betrayed as he was, the Earl remained firm to the cause.  He would fight to the end, he said, even were he and his sons left to fight alone.  With an army reinforced by 15,000 Londoners, he marched in May to the relief of the Cinque Ports which were now threatened by the king.  Even on the march he was forsaken by many of the nobles who followed him.  Halting at Fletching in Sussex, a few miles from Lewes, where the royal army was encamped, Earl Simon with the young Earl of Gloucester offered the king compensation for all damage if he would observe the Provisions.  Henry’s answer was one of defiance, and though numbers were against him, the Earl resolved on battle.  His skill as a soldier reversed the advantages of the ground; marching at dawn on the 14th of May he seized the heights eastward of the town, and moved down these slopes to an attack.  His men with white crosses on back and breast knelt in prayer before the battle opened, and all but reached the town before their approach was perceived.  Edward however opened the fight by a furious charge which broke the Londoners on Leicester’s left.  In the bitterness of his hatred for the insult to his mother he pursued them for four miles, slaughtering three thousand men.  But he returned to find the battle lost.  Crowded in the narrow space between the heights and the river Ouse, a space broken by marshes and by the long street of the town, the royalist centre and left were crushed by Earl Simon.  The Earl of Cornwall, now King of the Romans, who, as the mocking song of the victors ran, “makede him a castel of a mulne post” ("he weened that the mill-sails were mangonels” goes on the sarcastic verse), was taken prisoner, and Henry himself captured.  Edward cut his way into the Priory only to join in his father’s surrender.

[Sidenote:  Simon’s rule]