We fill our streets and market-places with the statues of worthies of later days; Peel and Herbert and Lewis and Cobden yet live among us in bronze or marble. In those days honour to the statesman was not well distinguished from worship to the saint, and Waltheof and Simon and Thomas of Lancaster(42) were hailed as sainted patrons of England, and wonders were held to be wrought by their relics or at their tombs. The poets of three languages vied in singing the praises of the man who strove and suffered for right, and Simon, the guardian of England on the field and in the senate, was held to be her truer guardian still in the heavenly places from which our fathers deemed that the curse of Rome had no power to shut him out(43). The great work of the martyred Earl had a strange destiny. His personal career was cut short, his political work was brought to perfection, by a rival and a kinsman only less to be honoured than himself. On the field of Evesham Simon died and Edward triumphed. But it was on Edward that Simon’s mantle fell; it was to his destroyer that he handed on the torch which fell from his dying grasp. For a moment his work seemed to have died with him; for some years Parliaments were still summoned which were not after the model of the great Assembly which answered to the writs of the captive Henry. But the model still lived in men’s hearts, and presently the wisdom of the great Edward saw that his uncle’s gift could no longer be denied to his people. Parliaments after Simon’s model have been called together in unbroken succession from Edward’s day to our own(44). Next to the name of Simon we may honour the name of Edward himself and the names of the worthies who withstood him. To Roger Bigod of Norfolk and Humfrey Bohun of Hereford we owe the crowning of the work(45). The Parliament of England was now wrought into the fulness of its perfect form, and the most homely, but not the least important, of its powers was now fully acknowledged. No tax or gift could the King of England claim at the hands of Englishmen save such as the Lords and Commons of England had granted him of their free will(46).