The victory of Lewes placed Earl Simon at the head of the state.  “Now England breathes in the hope of liberty,” sang a poet of the time; “the English were despised like dogs, but now they have lifted up their head and their foes are vanquished.”  But the moderation of the terms agreed upon in the Mise of Lewes, a convention between the king and his captors, shows Simon’s sense of the difficulties of his position.  The question of the Provisions was again to be submitted to arbitration; and a parliament in June, to which four knights were summoned from every county, placed the administration till this arbitration was complete in the hands of a new council of nine to be nominated by the Earls of Leicester and Gloucester and the patriotic Bishop of Chichester.  Responsibility to the community was provided for by the declaration of a right in the body of barons and prelates to remove either of the Three Electors, who in turn could displace or appoint the members of the Council.  Such a constitution was of a different order from the cumbrous and oligarchical committees of 1258.  But it had little time to work in.  The plans for a fresh arbitration broke down.  Lewis refused to review his decision, and all schemes for setting fresh judges between the king and his people were defeated by a formal condemnation of the barons’ cause issued by the Pope.  Triumphant as he was indeed Earl Simon’s difficulties thickened every day.  The queen with Archbishop Boniface gathered an army in France for an invasion; Roger Mortimer with the border barons was still in arms and only held in check by Llewelyn.  It was impossible to make binding terms with an imprisoned king, yet to release Henry without terms was to renew the war.  The imprisonment too gave a shock to public feeling which thinned the Earl’s ranks.  In the new Parliament which he called at the opening of 1265 the weakness of the patriotic party among the baronage was shown in the fact that only twenty-three earls and barons could be found to sit beside the hundred and twenty ecclesiastics.

[Sidenote:  Summons of the Commons]

But it was just this sense of his weakness which prompted the Earl to an act that has done more than any incident of this struggle to immortalize his name.  Had the strife been simply a strife for power between the king and the baronage the victory of either would have been equally fatal in its results.  The success of the one would have doomed England to a royal despotism, that of the other to a feudal aristocracy.  Fortunately for our freedom the English baronage had been brought too low by the policy of the kings to be able to withstand the crown single-handed.  From the first moment of the contest it had been forced to make its cause a national one.  The summons of two knights from each county, elected in its county court, to a Parliament in 1254, even before the opening of the struggle, was a recognition of the political weight of the country gentry which was confirmed by the summons of four