One chronicler asserts that as long ago as the year 1210 some of the barons had contemplated driving John from his throne and setting up as king in his stead a man who, though born on foreign soil and engaged throughout his whole life in the service of foreign powers, had yet a claim to rank as one of themselves, and certainly not as the least distinguished among them--Simon, count of Montfort and titular earl of Leicester.[1129] To modern eyes the cruelties of the war against the Albigenses, in which Simon was the leader of the “crusading” host, have somewhat obscured the nobler aspects of a character which was not without a heroic side. It was indeed by a strange instinct that--if the Dunstable annalist’s tale be true--the chiefs of the English revolutionary party fixed their hopes for a moment on the father of that other Simon de Montfort, at that time still but a boy, who was one day to seal with his blood the work of England’s deliverance which they professed to have at heart, but which in their narrow and short-sighted selfishness they were alike unworthy and incapable of achieving. The instinct was at any rate a loftier one than that which guided them in their choice of a rival to John five years later. The scheme put forth by the group of barons in London in the summer of 1215 for electing a new king “by the common consent of the whole realm” of course came to nothing; the magnates would have none of it, and the northern barons who had separated from the other malcontents before the sealing of the Charter had, as will be seen later, made an independent choice of their own. The mad little faction in London, headed now by Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville, acted by themselves and for themselves alone when they “chose for their lord” the eldest son of the king of France, “begging and praying him that he would come with a mighty arm to pluck them out of the hand of this tyrant.”[1130]