the Papacy, and Simon
was one of the first to sign the protest which the Parliament in 1246
addressed to the court of Rome. He was present at the Lent Parliament of
1248, and we can hardly doubt that he shared in its bold rebuke of the
king's misrule and its renewed demand for the appointment of the higher
officers of state by the Council. It was probably a sense of the danger of
leaving at home such a centre of all efforts after reform that brought
Henry to send him in the autumn of 1248 as Seneschal of Gascony to save for
the Crown the last of its provinces over sea.

[Sidenote: Simon in Gascony]

Threatened by France and by Navarre without as well as by revolt within,
the loss of Gascony seemed close at hand; but in a few months the stern
rule of the new Seneschal had quelled every open foe within or without its
bounds. To bring the province to order proved a longer and a harder task.
Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the Rhine: "they rode the country
by night," wrote the Earl, "like thieves, in parties of twenty or thirty or
forty," and gathered in leagues against the Seneschal, who set himself to
exact their dues to the Crown and to shield merchant and husbandman from
their violence. For four years Earl Simon steadily warred down these robber
bands, storming castles where there was need, and bridling the wilder
country with a chain of forts. Hard as the task was, his real difficulty
lay at home. Henry sent neither money nor men; and the Earl had to raise
both from his own resources, while the men whom he was fighting found
friends in Henry's council-chamber. Again and again Simon was recalled to
answer charges of tyranny and extortion made by the Gascon nobles and
pressed by his enemies at home on the king. Henry's feeble and impulsive
temper left him open to pressure like this; and though each absence of the
Earl from the province was a signal for fresh outbreaks of disorder which
only his presence repressed, the deputies of its nobles were still admitted
to the council-table and commissions sent over to report on the Seneschal's
administration. The strife came to a head in 1252, when the commissioners
reported that stern as Simon's rule had been the case was one in which
sternness was needful. The English barons supported Simon, and in the face
of their verdict Henry was powerless. But the king was now wholly with his
enemies; and his anger broke out in a violent altercation. The Earl offered
to resign