The infamous works of such men as these have most often been
done under the hypocritical and lying banner of the rights of the
people as though to gain his ends the devil should bear the cross of
Christ. It is so to-day; it was so in the time of Simon de Montfort.
I have said that the King was the fountain of all power in the England
of Simon; it was therefore his supreme object to get possession of the
King's body that he might have control of the executive machinery of
the country and thus in fact be king _de facto_. It was this which he
achieved upon the battlefield of Lewes in 1264.
For some ten years before that battle the Barons of England had been
restless under the yoke of the central government, the Crown, which
stood not for them but for us all. They had already wrung from Henry
III. under compulsion, when he was within their power and not a free
agent, certain concessions which now he refused to confirm to them.
They called him liar and covered him with the same abuse that their
successors hurled at Charles I.; but Henry stood firm, he refused
what had been dragged from him by force, and Simon de Montfort, Earl
of Leicester, raised an army not from the people but from his own
feudal adherents and his friends and took the field, striking into the
valley of the Severn, where he seized Hereford, Gloucester, Worcester
and Bridgnorth with their castles.
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