into bondage, that Edward passed to the royal side; and now that the danger which he dreaded was over he returned to his older attitude.  In the first flush of victory, while the doom of Simon was as yet unknown, Edward had stood alone in desiring his captivity against the cry of the Marcher Lords for his blood.  When all was done he wept over the corpse of his cousin and playfellow, Henry de Montfort, and followed the Earl’s body to the tomb.  But great as was Edward’s position after the victory of Evesham, his moderate counsels were as yet of little avail.  His efforts in fact were met by those of Henry’s second son, Edmund, who had received the lands and earldom of Earl Simon, and whom the dread of any restoration of the house of De Montfort set at the head of the ultra-royalists.  Nor was any hope of moderation to be found in the Parliament which met in September 1265.  It met in the usual temper of a restoration-Parliament to legalize the outrages of the previous month.  The prisoners who had been released from the dungeons of the barons poured into Winchester to add fresh violence to the demands of the Marchers.  The wives of the captive loyalists and the widows of the slain were summoned to give fresh impulse to the reaction.  Their place of meeting added fuel to the fiery passions of the throng, for Winchester was fresh from its pillage by the younger Simon on his way to Kenilworth, and its stubborn loyalty must have been fanned into a flame by the losses it had endured.  In such an assembly no voice of moderation could find a hearing.  The four bishops who favoured the national cause, the bishops of London and Lincoln, of Worcester and Chichester, were excluded from it, and the heads of the religious houses were summoned for the mere purpose of extortion.  Its measures were but a confirmation of the violence which had been wrought.  All grants made during the king’s “captivity” were revoked.  The house of De Montfort was banished from the realm.  The charter of London was annulled.  The adherents of Earl Simon were disinherited and seizin of their lands was given to the king.

[Sidenote:  Simon’s Miracles]

Henry at once appointed commissioners to survey and take possession of his spoil while he moved to Windsor to triumph in the humiliation of London.  Its mayor and forty of its chief citizens waited in the castle yard only to be thrown into prison in spite of a safe-conduct, and Henry entered his capital in triumph as into an enemy’s city.  The surrender of Dover came to fill his cup of joy, for Richard and Amaury of Montfort had sailed with the Earl’s treasure to enlist foreign mercenaries, and it was by this port that their force was destined to land.  But a rising of the prisoners detained there compelled its surrender in October, and the success of the royalists seemed complete.  In reality their difficulties were but beginning.  Their triumph over Earl Simon had been a triumph over the religious sentiment of the time, and religion avenged itself in its own way.