"Nothing is so hard to realise as chaos; and nothing nearer to chaos can be conceived than the government of Henry III. Henry was, like all the Plantagenets, clever; like very few of them, he was devout; and if the power of conceiving a great policy would constitute a great King, he would certainly have been one. ... He aimed at making the Crown virtually independent of the barons. ... His connexion with Louis IX., whose brother-in-law he became, was certainly a misfortune to him. In France the royal power had during the last fifty years been steadily on the advance; in England it had as steadily receded; and Henry was ever hearing from the other side of the Channel maxims of government and ideas of royal authority which were utterly inapplicable to the actual state of his own kingdom. This, like a premature Stuart, Henry was incapable of perceiving; a King he was, and a King he would be, in his own sense of the word. It is evident that with such a task before him, he needed for the most shadowy chance of success, an iron strength of will, singular self-control, great forethought and care in collecting and husbanding his resources, a rare talent for administration, the sagacity to choose and the self-reliance to trust his counsellors. And not one of these various qualities did Henry possess. ... Henry had imbibed from the events and the tutors of his early childhood two maxims of state, and two alone: to trust Rome, and to distrust the barons of England. ... He filled the places of trust and power about himself with aliens, to whom the maintenance of Papal influence was like an instinct of self-preservation. Thus were definitely formed the two great parties out of whose antagonism the War of the Barons arose, under whose influence the relations between the crown and people of England were remodelled, and out of whose enduring conflict rose, indirectly, the political principles which contributed so largely to bring about the Reformation of the English Church. The few years which followed the fall of Hubert de Burgh were the heyday of Papal triumph. And no triumph could have been worse used. ... Thus was the whole country lying a prey to the ecclesiastical aliens maintained by the Pope, and to the lay aliens maintained by the King, ... when Simon de Montfort became ... inseparably intermixed with the course of our history. ... In the year 1258 opened the first act of the great drama which has made the name of Simon de Montfort immortal. ... The Barons of England, at Leicester's suggestion, had leagued for the defence of their rights. They appeared armed at the Great Council. ... {808} They required as the condition of their assistance that the general reformation of the realm should be entrusted to a Commission of twenty-four members, half to be chosen by the crown, and half by themselves.