lay baron for a long time stood out from the rest as a leader. The bishops proclaimed their grievances and the oppressions of the court, but the bishops were forbidden by their order to take up arms against the king. The great earldoms of the former age were extinct in spirit if not in title, and possibly the king may have found means to keep their modern representatives silent or inactive. The great earldom of Leicester had been split in two, and one half, which bore the name of Leicester, was, at the beginning of the reign, in the king’s hands, although claimed by the Montforts. The earldom of Chester came, on the extinction of the heirs, to the crown in 1237; Essex and Hereford were held by one family; Cornwall by the king’s brother; Salisbury by his cousin. Gloucester alone retained anything like its old importance, and the Earl of Gloucester could not stand alone. Henry was wise enough to see this, and so avoided the restoration of Chester by keeping it as a provision for one of his sons. It was probably with the like object that he connived at the marriage of his sister with Simon de Montfort, to whom the Leicester inheritance must in the end come; and when the earldom of the Marshalls escheated he gave it to his half-brother. If all the great earldoms could be comfortably distributed among his near kinsmen the baronial party would be without its natural head, and might lie at his mercy. That this was a part of his plan we may infer from his treatment of the bishoprics. He no doubt thought that he had a safe hold on the clergy when his wife’s uncle was made archbishop of Canterbury, his half-brother, Ethelmer of Lusignan, bishop of Winchester, and another important bishopric, that of Hereford, was in the hands of a Provençal kinsman. Edward III., a hundred years after him, adopted somewhat the same plan of consolidating family power by marrying his sons to the heiresses of the earldoms; and at an earlier period in the history of the empire the German duchies more than once take the form of a compact family party. Unfortunately, however, the plan has seldom answered: people can hate their relations perhaps more cordially than they can hate any one else; and in a generation or two, when personal hatred is complicated with the rights of inheritance, wars between cousins are apt to become internecine. Even in the present reign we shall come upon one or two instances of this. One effect of this statecraft on Henry’s part was to keep the constitutional party divided and headless; another was to provoke opposition amongst those in whom he might otherwise have trusted. His treatment of the Gascons was such as at one period to throw even his son Edward and his brother Richard into opposition; and as early as 1242 we have seen Earl Richard of Cornwall taking an important place in the baronial councils; but the leading and crowning instance is Simon de Montfort, the personal enemy, the leader of constitutional opposition, the national champion,