ctuary in the church of the
Franciscans, they escaped the punishment due to so great an enormity
[m].
[FN [m] Rymer, vol. i. p. 879. vol. ii. p. 4, 5. Chron. T. Wykes, p.
94. W. Heming. p. 589. Trivet, p. 240.]

[MN 1267.] The merits of the Earl of Gloucester, after he returned to
his allegiance, had been so great in restoring the prince to his
liberty, and assisting him in his victories against the rebellious
barons, that it was almost impossible to content him in his demands;
and his youth and temerity, as well as his great power, tempted him,
on some new disgust, to raise again the flames of rebellion in the
kingdom. The mutinous populace of London, at his instigation, took to
arms; and the prince was obliged to levy an army of thirty thousand
men in order to suppress them. Even this second rebellion did not
provoke the king to any act of cruelty; and the Earl of Gloucester
himself escaped with total impunity. He was only obliged to enter
into a bond of twenty thousand marks, that he should never again be
guilty of rebellion: a strange method of enforcing the laws, and a
proof of the dangerous independence of the barons in those ages!
These potent nobles were, from the danger of the precedent, averse to
the execution of the laws of forfeiture and felony against any of
their fellows; though they could not, with a good grace, refuse to
concur in obliging them to fulfil any voluntary contract and
engagement into which they had entered.

[MN 1270.] The prince, finding the state of the kingdom tolerably
composed, was seduced, by his avidity for glory and by the prejudices
of the age, as well as by the earnest solicitations of the King of
France, to undertake an expedition against the infidels in the Holy
Land [n]; and he endeavoured previously to settle the state in such a
manner as to dread no bad effects from his absence. As the formidable
power and turbulent disposition of the Earl of Gloucester gave him
apprehensions, he insisted on carrying him along with him, in
consequence of a vow which that nobleman had made to undertake the
same voyage: in the mean time, he obliged him to resign some of his
castles, and to enter into a new bond not to disturb the peace of the
kingdom [o]. He sailed from England with an army, and arrived in
Lewis's camp before Tunis in Africa, where he found that monarch
already dead from the intemperance of the climate and the fatigues of
his enterprise. The great, if not only, wea