ten
earls fought for Louis, the royal cause was only upheld by six. The
towns were mainly with the rebels, notably London and the Cinque Ports,
and cities so distant as Winchester and Lincoln, Worcester and
Carlisle. Yet the baronial cause excited little general sympathy. The
mass of the population stood aloof, and was impartially maltreated by
the rival armies.

John's son Henry had at his back the chief military resources of the
country; the two strongest of the earls, William Marshal, Earl of
Pembroke, and Randolph of Blundeville, Earl of Chester; the fierce
lords of the Welsh March, the Mortimers, the Cantilupes, the Cliffords,
the Braoses, and the Lacys; and the barons of the West Midlands, headed
by Henry of Neufbourg, Earl of Warwick, and William of Ferrars, Earl of
Derby. This powerful phalanx gave to the royalists a stronger hold in
the west than their opponents had in any one part of the much wider
territory within their sphere of influence. There was no baronial
counterpart to the successful raiding of the north and east, which John
had carried through in the last months of his life. A baronial centre,
like Worcester, could not hold its own long in the west. Moreover, John
had not entirely forfeited his hereditary advantages. The
administrative families, whose chief representative was the justiciar
Hubert de Burgh, held to their tradition of unswerving loyalty, and
joined with the followers of the old king, of whom William Marshal was
the chief survivor. All over England the royal castles were in safe
hands, and so long as they remained unsubdued, no part of Louis'
dominions was secure. The crown had used to the full its rights over
minors and vacant fiefs. The subjection of the south-west was assured
by the marriage of the mercenary leader, Falkes de Breaute, to the
mother of the infant Earl of Devon, and by the grant of Cornwall to the
bastard of the last of the Dunstanville earls. Though Isabella,
Countess of Gloucester, John's repudiated wife, was as zealous as her
new husband, the Earl of Essex, against John's son, Falkes kept a tight
hand over Glamorgan, on which the military power of the house of
Gloucester largely depended. Randolph of Chester was custodian of the
earldoms of Leicester and Richmond, of which the nominal earls, Simon
de Montfort and Peter Mauclerc, were far away, the one ruling Toulouse,
and the other Brittany. The band of foreign adventurers, the mainstay
of John's power, was still u