The England to which the Black Prince returned was in many ways different from the England which he had left. The country had suffered one great loss; the good Queen Philippa, so long the faithful wife of Edward III., had died in 1369. By her wisdom and virtue she had been of great use to the King, and had been beloved through all the kingdom. Deprived of her counsel, Edward fell under the influence of one of the ladies of her bedchamber, Alice Perrers, a woman of great wit and beauty, who ruled him at her will, and who was used as a tool by the different political parties. It was a melancholy end for the bright, vigorous King to come to. The external splendour and glory of his reign was gone. His court had lost its brilliancy. He himself seemed almost to have sunk into a premature dotage. But though the last years of his reign were not as brilliant as the former years, they are perhaps more important for the history of our country; for in them we see the beginning of a great political struggle, which left most important traces upon the development of our constitution; and we are also able to trace the remarkable increase of the power and influence of Parliament. In these struggles the Black Prince, for the first time in his life, appeared as a politician; and the part which he took in them earned for him as much glory as his victories of Poitiers or Najarez. All through Edward's reign Parliament had been increasing in power; but we shall not be able to understand the way in which it had developed, unless we go back and try to find out what it was at the beginning of Edward's reign. There had always been under the Norman kings a Great Council, composed of the chief men of the kingdom, by whose assent and consent the Crown acted. But besides the advice of their nobles, the kings felt the need of the money of their people; and to obtain this the more easily, they summoned some of them to sit side by side with their advisers in the Great Council. The old arrangement of the shires and the shire courts gave a means of getting representatives. First, knights, to be chosen from every shire, were summoned to the meetings of the Great Council; and finally, Simon de Montfort, in 1264, summoned also burgesses from the chief cities. Edward I.'s pressing need for money drove him to follow the example of Simon de Montfort, and summon these representatives to Parliament for the purpose of obtaining from them more easily grants of money.