thirteenth century works. From the
principal tower, now used as a museum, we may get the best view of the
famous battlefield under Mount Harry, one of the most famous sites of
the thirteenth century in England, for the battle that was fought
there seemed to have decided everything; in fact it decided nothing,
for its result was entirely reversed at Evesham by the military genius
of Prince Edward.

The cause contested upon these noble hills to the north-west of Lewes
is one which continually recurs all through English history; the cause
of the Aristocracy against the Crown. The monarchies of western
Europe, which slowly emerged from the anarchy of the Dark Ages and
helped to make the Middle Age the glorious and noble thing it was,
are, if we consider them spiritually at least, democratic weapons, or
rather, politically, they seem to sum up the national energy and to
express it. In them was vested, and this as of divine right, the
executive. Without the Crown nothing could be done, no writ issued, no
fortress garrisoned. In the Crown was gathered all the national ends,
it was a symbol at once of unity and of power. Against this glorious
thing in England we see a constant and unremitting rebellion on the
part of the aristocracy. It was so in the time of King John when the
rascal barons curbed and broke the central government; it was so in
the time of Henry III. when Simon de Montfort led, and for a time
successfully, the rebellion. It has been so always and not least in
the Great Rebellion of the seventeenth century so falsely represented
as a democratic movement, when the parvenu aristocracy founded upon
the lands and wealth of the raped Church in the sixteenth century,
broke the Crown up and finally established in England a puppet king, a
mere Venetian Doge incapable, as we have seen in the last few years,
of defending the people against an unscrupulous and treasonous
plutocracy led by a lawyer as certainly on the make as Thomas
Cromwell. The infamous works of such men as these have most often been
done under the hypocritical and lying banner of the rights of the
people as though to gain his ends the devil should bear the cross of
Christ. It is so to-day; it was so in the time of Simon de Montfort.

I have said that the King was the fountain of all power in the England
of Simon; it was therefore his supreme object to get possession of the
King's body that he might have control of the executive machinery of
the country