a fresh acknowledgement of the English
supremacy was wrested from him by Archbishop Edmund. But the triumphs of
his arms were renewed by Llewelyn the son of Gruffydd, who followed him in
1246. The raids of the new chieftain swept the border to the very gates of
Chester, while his conquest of Glamorgan seemed to bind the whole people
together in a power strong enough to meet any attack from the stranger. So
pressing was the danger that it called the king's eldest son, Edward, to
the field; but his first appearance in arms ended in a crushing defeat. The
defeat however remained unavenged. Henry's dreams were of mightier
enterprises than the reduction of the Welsh. The Popes were still fighting
their weary battle against the House of Hohenstaufen, and were offering its
kingdom of Sicily, which they regarded as a forfeited fief of the Holy See,
to any power that would aid them in the struggle. In 1254 it was offered to
the king's second son, Edmund. With imbecile pride Henry accepted the
offer, prepared to send an army across the Alps, and pledged England to
repay the sums which the Pope was borrowing for the purposes of his war. In
a Parliament at the opening of 1257 he demanded an aid and a tenth from the
clergy. A fresh demand was made in 1258. But the patience of the realm was
at last exhausted. Earl Simon had returned in 1253 from his government of
Gascony, and the fruit of his meditations during the four years of his
quiet stay at home, a quiet broken only by short embassies to France and
Scotland which showed there was as yet no open quarrel with Henry, was seen
in a league of the baronage and in their adoption of a new and startling
policy. The past half-century had shown both the strength and weakness of
the Charter: its strength as a rallying-point for the baronage and a
definite assertion of rights which the king could be made to acknowledge;
its weakness in providing no means for the enforcement of its own
stipulations. Henry had sworn again and again to observe the Charter and
his oath was no sooner taken than it was unscrupulously broken. The barons
had secured the freedom of the realm; the secret of their long patience
during the reign of Henry lay in the difficulty of securing its right
administration. It was this difficulty which Earl Simon was prepared to
solve when action was forced on him by the stir of the realm. A great
famine added to the sense of danger from Wales and from Scotland and to the
irritatio