It was no longer a Great Council, after the fashion of previous assemblies; it included four knights, elected by each English county. This Parliament gave such sanction as it was able to the exceptional authority of Montfort, and ordered that until the proposed arbitration could be carried out, the King's council should consist of nine persons, to be named by the Bishop of Chichester, and the Earls of Gloucester and Leicester. The effect was to give Simon for the time despotic power. ... It was at length agreed that all questions whatever, the employment of aliens alone excepted, should be referred to the Bishop of London, the justiciar Hugh le Despenser, Charles of Anjou, and the Abbot of Bec. If on any point they could not agree, the Archbishop of Rouen was to act as referee. ... It was ... not simply the expedient of a revolutionary chief in difficulties, but the expression of a settled and matured policy, when, in December 1264, [Montfort] issued in the King's name the ever-memorable writs which summoned the first complete Parliament which ever met in England. {809} The earls, barons, and bishops received their summons as of course; and with them the deans of cathedral churches, an unprecedented number of abbots and priors, two knights from every shire, and two citizens or burgesses from every city or borough in England. Of their proceedings we know but little; but they appear to have appointed Simon de Montfort to the office of Justiciar of England, and to have thus made him in rank, what he had before been in power, the first subject in the realm. ... Montfort ... had now gone so far, he had exercised such extraordinary powers, he had done so many things which could never really be pardoned, that perhaps his only chance of safety lay in the possession of some such office as this. It is certain, moreover, that something which passed in this Parliament, or almost exactly at the time of its meeting, did cause deep offence to a considerable section of the barons. ... Difficulties were visibly gathering thicker around him, and he was evidently conscious that disaffection was spreading fast. ... Negotiations went forward, not very smoothly, for the release of Prince Edward. They were terminated in May by his escape. It was the signal for a royalist rising. Edward took the command of the Welsh border; before the middle of June he had made the border his own. On the 29th Gloucester opened its gates to him. He had many secret friends. He pushed fearlessly eastward, and surprised the garrison of Kenilworth, commanded by Simon, the Earl's second son. The Earl himself lay at Evesham, awaiting the troops which his son was to bring up from Kenilworth. ... On the fatal field of Evesham, fighting side by side to the last, fell the Earl himself, his eldest son Henry, Despenser the