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lawless dealings in Coeur de Lion's absence. The powers which Henry centred in the throne for good purposes, were prostituted to evil by his son. The weakness which an able king, for sagacious ends, had struck into the aristocratic element of the kingdom, had since been used for the suppression of all restraint upon monarchal tyranny. Could such a sovereign as Henry have continued to reign, until a forced repression of the baronial feuds might have permitted the gradual and free reaction of the popular on the kingly power, all would have been well, and the establishment of rational liberty hastened by at least two cen turies. Even as it was, there stood the People between the two opposing forces: alternately recognised in the necessities of both, and by both made conscious of their power. In the church questions, and that of resistance to invasion, which arose in the earlier portion of the reign, they took part with John; in the questions of civil freedom which immortalised its close, they joined the grand confederacy of his enemies. And most comforting is it to discern, that in the end, the very vice and falsehood of this despicable king were made the tributary slaves to truth and virtue. A man more able, though with an equal love of tyranny, would have husbanded and kept his power; this man could only feel that he existed when he felt that he was trampling on his fellow-men, and, making his power intolerable, he risked and lost it. We are told, notwithstanding, that with the Barons and not with the People the enduring triumph remained. A conclusion ill-considered. They who have followed the course of this history, and have seen what silently expanding influences have been in action ever since the Conquest, will not need to be told now what Power it was, secret but irresistible, that ultimately shaped the mere exclusive claims of a powerful faction as against their feudal lord, into a record of general rights, perhaps at the time unconscious, but certainly eternal, inalienable, nor ever afterward to be wholly denied to even the meanest Englishman.

John was in his thirty-second year when he began his reign ;' and his character was formed and known. It belongs to the few in history or in human nature, of which the infamy is altogether black and unredeemed. Who mourns,' cries Mathew of Paris on his death, who shall ever mourn for the death of King John? Hell, with all its pollution, is polluted by the soul of John.' While yet in youth and under care of Giraldus Cambrensis, that clerical and courtly tutor, though he professes to have discovered

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the germ of future excellence in his princely pupil, would seem to have discovered it through a marvellously dense mist, impenetrable He describes him a prey to the follies of youth, impressible as wax to vice, rude to his better advisers, more addicted to luxury than war and to effeminacy than hardship, and a gross dissembler. These qualities grew with his years. Combined with them, he had just enough of the ambition of his race to bring forth more strongly the pusillanimity of his spirit; and thus he was insolent and mean, at once the most abject and the most arrogant of men. The pitiless cruelties recorded of him surpass belief. The reckless madness with which he rushed into his quarrels, was exceeded by his impotent cowardice when resistance showed its front. He deserted the people when the people joined him against the church, he deserted the church when the church joined him against the people. The monks have reproached him with infidelity, but he had not faith enough to be an infidel. To be even that, requires some moral acuteness, some intellectual discrimination, however falsely applied. The story told of his having exclaimed, in hunting, over the body of a fat stag, How happily has this fellow lived, yet he never heard mass!' tells but the fellowship of his own nature with that of the beasts of the field. He differed from them only that he was a perjurer and a murderer. He had those appetites debauched and gross, and those sensual habits obstinate and furious, which are only so largely found where intellectual and moral sense are entirely absent. And in effect these did more to precipitate his ruin than his murders or his perjuries.

The first effective demonstration against his reign arose from an act of lust. Inflamed with passion for the young wife of the Count de la Marche, a powerful noble of Acquitaine, he divorced his own wife; tempted the countess and her father, the Count of Angouleme, with the dazzling prospect of a crown; and in defiance of opposition married her. It would be to weary the reader's patience to describe the strife that rose in Acquitaine; the espousal of the cause of the insurgents by Philip of France; the junction of these forces with the Breton party for poor young Arthur; and the struggle into which the war resolved itself, whether the race of Plantagenet or of Capet should be lords of France. It will suffice to state the result, without detail of the awful cruelties and horrors that accompanied its progress. When it began, John was master of the whole French coast, from the borders of Flanders

to the foot of the Pyrenees; when three years had passed, the best portion of that valuable territory was irrevocably lost to him, and after a separation of three hundred years, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Touraine, were reannexed to the French crown. Something ominous, men said, was in his jesting name of Lackland. There is not a doubt that he had also meanwhile caused his nephew to be murdered, with attendant circumstances of cowardice and guilt, of sad suffering and of exquisite pathos, not materially differing from that which the genius of the greatest of writers has thrown around the tragic history.

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While these events were in progress, the contemptible chief actor was loud in his complaints that his English nobles had forsaken him. They certainly saw pass into subjection to France, those large and opulent provinces so long won and guarded by the swords of their fathers; and made no sign of resistance. But this had a deeper significance than mere disgust with John. They had elected their country. They were no longer foreign proprietors on a soil which was not their own. They were Englishmen, resolved to cast their fortunes and their fate with England. Soon after this, indeed, they raised a counter-cry louder than that of their recreant king, accusing him of "foreign favouritism. With the name, opprobrious now, of Foreigner, they branded the Angevin, the Norman, and the Poitevin nobles, whom he had brought into England at the close of his foreign wars, and whom he now delighted to parade about his person, to load with dignities and wealth, and to encourage in vigorous efforts to plunder and oppress the native population. Even the fond historian of Norman Conquest' here admits that the conquering noble and the conquered peasant had found a point of contact and a common sympathy. He can no longer resist the conclusion, that in the soil of England there was at length germinating a national spirit, common to all who traversed it. Without doubt it was so. And not a new fine was levied on one of the old domains, not a new toll on one of the old bridges or highways, that did not now bring the English baron and lord of the manor nearer in his interests and rights to the English farmer and citizen.

The second great struggle of John's reign was in result not less disastrous than the first. Innocent the Third was upon the throne of the Vatican, and John provoked him to a desperate quarrel. But even in wickedness (if Mathew of Paris is to be believed) Innocent was a match for John; and in intellect he was

incomparably his superior. Twelve hundred of his letters are extant, attesting his ability and energy. The dispute originated in the old conflicting question of the appointment of bishops. The king refused, on the death of the primate Hubert, to recognise, for the new archbishop, a choice of the monkish chapter; in opposition to which he named a primate of his own. The dispute was referred to Rome. Innocent pronounced for the monks (of course); but affecting to discover a flaw in the appointment they had made, he annulled their archbishop as well as the king's, and nominated one of his own. There was a lettered Englishman of great distinction living at the time in Rome, who had taught with singular applause in the Paris schools, had been invested with the chancellorship of the Paris university, stood high in the English church, and had lately received the purple. Innocent named him, and the monks accepted him, as the English primate; his virtues less availing for that choice, than the impression that he was best adapted, by his inflexible constancy and courage, to confront and disarm the opposition of the English king. But Innocent lived to repent, more bitterly than John, the appointment to the archbishopric of Canterbury, of Cardinal Stephen de Langton.

By the teeth of God, John swore, Langton should not set his foot in England; and he challenged the pope to do his worst. Innocent was prepared. He had secretly intrusted to the Bishops of London, Ely, and Worcester, that tremendous power of the Interdict, by which the Romish church assailed rebellious kings through the sides of their unoffending subjects. These bishops waited on the king; and warning him of the day appointed for the descent of the church's wrath, enjoined him on their knees to avert her vengeance by submission. He drove them from his presence with laughter and contempt; and they launched their bolt and fled. Instantly the churches closed; the bells ceased to toll or chime; no solemn service was performed; the relics of the saints were laid upon ashes in the silent church, and their statues and pictures veiled with black; the administration of the sacraments, except to infants and the dying, was suspended; marriages could only be rudely performed, to the danger of their sacredness and efficacy, in a porch or churchyard; and the bodies of the dead were buried silently, and in unconsecrated ground.

England remained under this Interdict four years. At the end of the first year Innocent fulminated against the still recusant monarch a bull of Excommunication; but so rigorous a watch was

kept at the ports that it could not be officially published in England, and till then it was inoperative. A change was meanwhile noted in the king. At first he had affected the utmost gaiety, while his people were struck with horror. But as habit reconciled the latter to the suspension of church usages; as they saw, despite the Interdict, the course of life move on; as the papal frown had not withered the harvest, nor dried up the rain, nor blotted out the sun; they recovered heart, and resumed their wonted cheerfulness. Not so the king. His moody fits returned, and his abuse of the clergy became every day less loud. What he had taught his subjects in this particular he seemed suddenly anxious to unteach; and by proclamation he declared, that whosoever, by word or deed, should now maltreat the clergy, should be hanged forthwith on the nearest oak.' He had, in short, been struck with profound alarm. Excommunication, he knew, was but the forerunner of Deposition; and it was already current in the mouths of his enemies that the pope had blessed the banner round which Philip was rallying his forces for invasion. To meet so dread an extremity, on what could he rely? For his answer, he had but to think of the forest laws he had made more cruel; of the odious and oppressive taxation by which he had plundered every class; and of the lawless imprisonments, the forced hostages, the groundless seizures of lands and castles, and the violent and wanton indulgences of lust, that had converted the most powerful of the barons into the most inveterate of his foes.

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What course his terrors took might seem a figment of romance, but that Mathew of Paris vouches so gravely for it, and gives such grave authority. From the land he had governed so un-christianly, he turned to the Mohammedan Emir who had just then conquered Spain, and whose genius and prowess threatened to extirpate the religion of Christ from the whole of the south of Europe. He entrusted to two of his creatures, Thomas Hardington and Ralf Fitz-Nicholas, and to a priest named Robert of London, a mission to this eastern warrior; and Robert of London afterwards described its result to the old historian. He said that the palace of the Moor was a strange and wondrous place; and that the splendid yet uncouth shapes they saw on passing through its endless halls and galleries, moved their extreme amazement. At last they stood before the Emir, Mohammed-al-Nassir, a man of grave look and middle stature, who, throughout the interview, kept his eyes fixed upon a book which lay open before him. After

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