asserted. Not only was John hated more bitterly for the deepest personal wrongs, but there was the most deep-rooted distrust of his good-faith. Dissimulation and treachery were so habitually employed by him as the agents of his policy, that they became blunted and useless weapons in his hands. No one could and no one did at last believe in what he professed, and he lost even the possibility of retracing his steps. He had destroyed all belief in the possibility of his becoming a good king, and he had to submit to the brand of evil which his own conduct had stamped upon his fame.

Among the lower classes, and the inhabitants of some of the towns, who came less into personal contact with him, or who shared in some of his more politic acts of bounty and grace, there were, no doubt, less repugnance to the character of John, and a greater disposition to condone his faults, than among the higher orders, and the large cities such as London. But even here there could be little enthusiasm for a prince who, with all his pecuniary exactions, had lost nearly all the Continental possessions of his family. This, indeed, which perhaps told most against him with the common people, was not regarded with any particular sorrow by the Barons. It had been for some time felt that the acquisition of additional possessions in France, and the overthrow of the House of Capet, might reduce England and the English Barons to a position of decided inferiority,

and it was now felt that the acquisition of the whole of France would add a dangerous weight to the power of the Crown. While the sceptre was wielded by such a man as Richard the Lion-hearted, this feeling of apprehension was almost lost in one of national greatness and glory. But it was instinctively felt that it was not the nation, but the personal position of the King that would be aggrandised with such a man as John; and against this personal aggrandisement there was a general revolt of their feelings as well as their understandings. Never had the national cause or the national honour been the mainspring of the actions of John. Even his greatest act of resolution, his protracted stand against the Papal pretensions, was a mere result of personal pride and resentment, nerved by the popular support. When his own excesses had shaken this support, and he was terrified at the impending French invasion, on a reconciliation with Rome being offered to him at the price of national degradation, he not only made the concession, in which his brother had, to some extent, anticipated him by his homage to the German Emperor, though under peculiar circumstances and for great ends, but seemed to delight in parading the humiliation of the national dignity, while exulting in his own personal deliverance and bettered position. Such a man, his Barons reasoned, should not be made greater through their means. To this personal antipathy, which led to the desertion of

his vassals on more than one critical occasion, the loss: of Normandy, the Angevin States, and a large part of Aquitaine was in a great measure due, though the conduct of the King himself, ever vacillating between action and indolence, and between pertinacious assertion of his rights and their sudden and wanton sacrifice, contributed to this fatal result, while it afforded some additional excuse for the conduct of the defaulters. But John himself preferred a mercenary to a feudal force, and this hireling soldiery, while they were more than a match for the retainers of the English Barons, and enabled the King to almost crush the defenders of the Great Charter, often betrayed his interests on the Continent by a sudden desertion to the enemy. Meanwhile, from the land of the Troubadours, came the angry complaint, I will make a sharp-edged sirvente, which I will send to the King of England, to cover him with shame, which, indeed, he ought to have, if he remembers the deeds of his forefathers, if he compares them with his indolence in thus leaving Poitou and Touraine in the possession of Philip. All Guienneregrets Richard, who spared no treasure to defend it. But this man has no feeling. He loves jousts and hunting, to have hounds and hawks, to drawl on a life without honour, and see himself plundered without resistance. I speak but to correct a King, who loses his subjects because he will not assist them. You, Sire! you suffer your honour to fall into the

mire; and such is your infatuation, that, far from being sensible to reproach, you seem to take pleasure in the invectives with which you are loaded!'

For once the language of the poets of Southern France was but the expression of the bare truth, as well as the echo of the sentiments of John's English subjects. Well, too, had they fathomed the degradation of his character in saying that he could feel no shame. This point alone was wanting to complete the features of this portrait of evil. John was an able man, incapable of using his abilities except to his own destruction; a crafty man without sagacity; a suspicious man without insight; a learned man without wisdom; a rash man without courage; an obstinate man without firmness; a social man without sympathy; and an evil man without shame.

93

HENRY THE THIRD.

It is not difficult to state the main characteristics of Henry of Winchester. Without being a fool in understanding, he was (perhaps with one exception) the weakest in mental capacity of all the Plantagenets. He was, in himself, in everything, simply insignificant, so far as a very weak man can be insignificant. It is, however, an unfortunate fact that weakness by no means implies powerlessness to do harm to others, but that, on the contrary, it is one of the greatest sources of evil and mischief, though the moral responsibility attaching to the weak-doer himself may be comparatively slight. A very weak man is, by virtue of that very nature, at the mercy of his own imperfect power of judgment, as well as of the mistaken or ill-disposed suggestions of others, and, without any malicious intentions on his own part, perhaps even from a misdirection of good intentions, may destroy the happiness of those who have deserved best at his hands. To deal with such a man is even more dangerous sometimes than to cope with an avowed enemy. Under extremely