Prince Edward was not always blameless. He had been employed against the Welsh, and after the campaign, not knowing whither to turn for means of paying his troops, he broke into the chests of the Knights Templars, to whom his mother’s jewels had been pledged, and carried off not only these, but much property besides that had been committed to the keeping of the order by other parties.
As to the unfortunate Jews, each party considered them fair game; and there were frequent attacks upon them, and frightful massacres, when the choice of death or of Christianity was offered to them, and the Barons seized their treasures. The curses of Deuteronomy, of the trembling heart, and the uncertainty of life and possession, were indeed fulfilled on the unhappy race.
For four years the committee of twenty-four held their power with few fluctuations, until matters were driven to extremity by a proposal to render the present state of things permanent, and at the same time by an attack on the property of the moderate and popular King of the Romans on the part of the Barons.
On this the royal party determined to submit the dispute to the arbitration of the King of France, whose wise and fair judgments were so universally famed that the Barons readily consented, with the exception of Leicester, who was convinced that Louis would incline to the side of Henry, both as fellow-king and as brother-in-law, and therefore refused to attend the conference, or to consider himself bound by its decisions.
The judgment of Louis IX, was perfectly just and moderate. He declared that Magna Charta was indeed binding on the King of England, and that he had no right to transgress it; but that the coercion in which he had been placed by the Mad Parliament was illegal, and that the Acts of Oxford were null, since no subjects had a right to deprive their sovereign of the custody of his castles, nor of the choice of his ministers.
As Montfort had foreseen, the Barons would not accept this decision, and its sole effect was to release Prince Edward’s conscience, and open the way to civil war. The two Eleanors, of Provence and Castile, were left under the charge of St. Louis; and their namesakes of the other party, the Countess of Leicester and her daughter, the Damoiselle de Montfort, fortified themselves in their castle of Kenilworth, while arms were taken up on either side.
Leicester, who held that the guilt of perjury rested with the other party, and who had with him the clergy opposed to the Italian usurpation, deemed it a holy war, and marked the breasts of his soldiers with white crosses, imagining himself the champion of the truth, as he had been taught to think himself, when bearing his first arms under his father in what was esteemed the Provençal Crusade. Alas, when honorable and devout minds have the fine edge of conscience blunted! Thus did the gallant and beloved “Sir Simon the Righteous” become a traitor and a rebel.
The scholars of Oxford, who had not at all forgotten their quarrel with king and legate, came out en masse under the banner of the University (for once disloyal), to join Leicester’s second son, Simon, who was collecting a body of troops to lead to his father in London.
Prince Edward, however, attacked them at Northampton, and effected a breach in the wall. Young Montfort attempted a desperate sally, but was defeated, and his life only saved by his cousin, the Prince, who extricated him from beneath his fallen steed, and made him prisoner.
The King and Prince next marched to seize the Cinque Ports, and, while in Sussex, Leicester followed them, and came up with them in a hollow valley near Lewes. Here, with a sort of satire, the Barons sent to offer the King 30,000 marks if he would make peace, and a like sum to the King of the Romans if he would bring him to terms. The proposals were angrily repelled by Edward, who, with accusations of his godfather as traitor and “foi menti,” sent him a personal challenge.