These events of course did not tend to put the nation in better humour with the king, or to dispose the parliament to greater liberality. The contest with the crown however ended for the present in an attempt on the part of Henry to govern by the prerogative, which was so far successful that no effective resistance was made to it for many years. In the pressure of his embarrassments he several times re-assembled the legislative body, but no accommodation was effected by these advances; the parliament was found as impracticable as ever, and the king resumed his arbitrary courses. In 1253 he succeeded in obtaining a grant of money by consenting to a solemn ratification of the great charters—a ceremony which had already been repeatedly performed in the course of the reign ; and this enabled him to proceed at the head of a military force to Uuionne, where a revolt against the English dominion had been excited by Alphonse, king of Castile. The dispute was aeon settled by the arrangement of a marriage between Henry's eldest eon, Prince Edward, and Eleanor, the sister of Alphonse. [Enwann I.] After this Henry engaged in a project which speedily involved him in a complication of difficultiea—the acceptance of the nominal crown of Sicily for his second son Edmund from Pope Innocent IV., who pretended to have it at his disposal in consequence of Frederick IL, the late king, having died (1250) in a state of excom munication, and who had ever since been hawking about the empty title among the princes of Europe, without finding any one simple enough to close with his proposals till he applied to the King of England. The exorbitant extent to which Henry was forced to carry his exactions in order to meet his engagements with the pontiff raised a spirit of resistance, which grew stronger and stronger, till it broke out into an open revolt against the supremacy of the crown. What is called by most of the old chroniclera the mad parliament,' assembled at Oxford on the 11th of June 1258, by adjournment from West minster, where it bad met on the 2nd of May previous ; and placed the whole authority of the state in the handa of a committee of government, consisting of twelve persona appointed by the barons and as many by the king. The leader of the barons on thia occasion was the famous Simon do Montfort, who was a Frenchman by birth, being the youngest eon of tho Count de Moutfort, but who, in right of his mother, had succeeded to the English earldom of Leicester, and had so long ago as the year 1238 married Eleanor, countess-dowager of Pembroke, a sister of King Henry. After the enjoyment however of a long course of court favour ho had quarrelled with and been insulted by his royal brother-in•law in 1252, and, although they bad been apparently reconciled, it ia probable that the feelings then excited had never been extinguished in either. From the imperfect accounts and the partial temper of the annalists of the time, it is difficult to obtain a clear view of De Montfort:a character and objects ; but if his position may be reasonably suspected to have acted upon him with its natural temptations, and led him to form designs more ambitious than be could venture openly to profess, it must be admitted that he stands remarkably free from any well-established or even probable imputation affecting his actual conduct, and that he was undoubtedly a person both of eminent ability and of many excellent as well as popular moral qualities. Ilia cause was also undoubtedly in the main that of the national liberties, and he appears to have had throughout the national voice and heart with him. He and his friends aeon contrived to monopolise the whole power of the committee of government, and compelled the principal nominees of the king not only to relinquish their functions, but to fly from the kingdom. Dissensions now how ever broke out in the dominant party, and De Montfort found a rival aspirant to the supreme power in another of the great barons, Richard de Clare, earl of Gloucester.
The quarrels of the adverse factions enabled Henry, in the beginning of the year 1261, altogether to throw off the authority of the com mittee of government; and although the parliamentary party was on this occasion joined by Prince Edward, it was for the present effec tually put down, De Montfort himself being obliged to take refuge in France. He returned however in April 1263, and being now supported
by Gilbert, earl of Gloucester, the son of his late rival, proceeded to prosecute his quarrel with the crown by force of arms. Henry had now his son Edward on his aide; but the success of the in.surgenta nevertheless was such as to threaten the complete overthrow of the royal power, when an accommodation was effected through the inter ference of the king's younger brother, Richard, earl of Cornwall, called King of the Romans, to which dignity he had been elected a few years before. The result was to place De Montfort and his friends once more at the head of affairs, the king being reduced to a cipher, or a mere puppet in their hands, In the conree of a few months however we find the war between the two parties renewed. The contest of arms was suspended for a short time in the beginning of the following year (1261) by an appeal on the part of a number of the most influen tial barons and bishops to the arbitration of Louis IX. of France; but his award, which was upon the whole favourable to Henry, was very soon disregarded. On the 14th of May the forces of the barons, led by De Montfort, and those of the royalists, commanded by the king in person, and by his son Edward, met at Lewes, in Sussex, where the furmcr gained a complete victory, both Henry and his son being taken prisoners. This success of course once more placed all the power of the kingdom at the feet of the great baronial leader; his arrogance and assumption of superiority however, it is said, had already alienated from him some of his most powerful adherents, and disposed them to take measures for the restoration of the royal authority, when, on the Thursday of Whitaun-week 1265, Prince Edward contrived to make his escape from Dover Castle, and to join the Earl of Gloucester, who had now deserted the interest of De Montfort, and waited to receive him with an army at Ludlow in Shropshlro. This event immediately led to the retiewal of the war. On the 4th of August the two parties again encountered at Evesham ; Edward hero gave brilliant proof of the military talent which dietinguishod his future career; and the result was the defeat of the baronial forces with immense slaughter, De Montfort himself and his son Henry being both in the number of the slain. In this battle the king is said to have had a narrow escape: the earl, in whose camp he was, had compelled him to put on armour and mount a war-horse, from which be was thrown down in one of the charges, and would probably have been put to the sword or trampled to death had he not called out that he was Harry of Win cheater,' when his voice was heard by his son, who came up and rescued him.
The victory of Evesham however, although it liberated Henry and re-established the royal government, did not completely put down the defeated party. The adherents of De Montfort maintained themselves, notwithstanding all the efforts of Prince Edward, in various parts of the kingdom, for more than two years longer. Even after the parlia ment, in October 1267, had passed an Act of Concord, known by the name of the 'Dictum de Kenilworth,' by which easy terms of pardon were offered to all who would submit themselves, the insurrection was renewed by the people of London, with the Earl of Gloucester at their head ; but that rash and fickle personage almost immediately threw himself upon the king's mercy without drawing the sword, and was glad to obtain pardon through the mediation of the Kiug of the Romans, leaving his followers to their fate. A final arrangement was at last effected in a parliament which met at Marlborough on the 18th of November. The short remainder of the reign of Henry after this date passed without disturbance or any remarkable events. His son Edward, leaving everything tranquil, set out for the Holy Land in July 1210, from which he had not returned when Henry died at Westminster ou the Feast of St. Edmund, being the 16th of Novem ber 1272, in the sixty-seventh year of his age and the fifty-seventh of his reign.