But this continued only as long as the King acquiesced in it. When he had the courage to resist, it is true that in the first encounter which ensued, he was himself taken prisoner: but his partisans were not crushed by this; and soon after his wife, who had collected about her a considerable body of mercenaries, in concert with the Pope and the King of France, thought herself strong enough to invade England. Simon felt that he needed a greater, in other words, a broader, basis of support. And the design he then conceived has secured him an imperishable memory. He summoned first of all representatives of the knights of the shires, and directly afterwards representatives of the towns and the Cinque Ports, to form a Parliament in conjunction with the nobles of the realm. This was not an altogether new thing in the European world; we know that in the Cortes of Aragon, as early as the 12th century, by the side of the high nobility and the ecclesiastics there appeared also the Hidalgos and the deputies of the Commons; and Simon de Montfort might well be aware of this, since his father had been in so many ways connected with Aragon. In England itself under King John men had come very near it without however carrying it through: not till afterwards did the innovation appear a real necessity. In opposition to the one-sided power exercised by the foreigners, nothing was so much insisted on in daily talk and in the popular ballads as the propriety of calling the natives of the land to counsel, since to them its laws were best known. This justifiable wish met with adequate satisfaction now that the Commons were summoned; the public feeling against the foreigners, on which Simon de Montfort necessarily relied, thus found expression. The assembly which he called together doubtless sympathised with his party views. As he invited only those nobles to it who remained true to him (they were not more than twenty-three in number), so he appears to have summoned those only of the towns which adhered to him unconditionally. But the arrangement involved more than was contemplated from his point of view.