Edward Plantagenet, alike when acting as the chief adviser of his aged father and after he had succeeded him on the throne, not only accepted the main provisions of the Great Charter,[283] but adopted also, along with them, a new scheme of government which formed their necessary counterpart. To Edward is due the first dim conception of “parliamentary government,” to this extent at least, that the king, as head of the executive government, should take a national council into partnership with him in the work of national administration. His political ideals were the natural result of the experience obtained during the later years of his father’s reign; and he endeavoured to embody in his scheme of government the best parts of the various experiments in which that reign abounded. His policy, although founded on that of his uncle Simon de Montfort, was profoundly modified by his own individual genius. The very fact of the adoption of Earl Simon’s ideals by the heir to the throne entirely altered their chances of success. All such schemes had been foredoomed to failure so long as they merely emanated from an opposition leader however powerful; but their triumph was speedily assured now that they were accepted as a programme of reform by the monarch himself. Henceforth the new political ideals, summed up in the conception of a national Parliament, were to be fostered by the Crown’s active support, not merely thrust upon the monarchy from without. ----- Footnote 283: The best proof of this will be found in a comparison of Magna Carta with the Statute of Marlborough, and the chief statutes of Edward’s reign, notably that of Westminster I. ----- Under the protection of Edward I.—the last of the four great master-builders of the constitution—the _Commune Concilium_ of the Angevin kings (itself a more developed form of the Curia Regis of the Conqueror and his sons) grew into the English Parliament. This implied no sudden dramatic change, but a long slow process of adjustment, under the guiding hand of Edward.