Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/259

A.D. 1199.] secret gifts and lavish promises in the name of John. These inducements prevailed, and the barons there present took the oath of allegiance.

Immediately after the landing of John, he proceeded to the church of St. Peter, at Westminster, there to prefer formally his claim to the crown. He carried with him a document, which purported to be a will signed by Richard on his death-bed, in which no allusion was made to the claims of Arthur, but John was appointed unreservedly as the successor to the throne. There seems as little reason to suppose that Richard would have made such a will, as to doubt that John was capable of forging it; but whether the instrument was true or not, it had no influence upon the events which followed. The Archbishop Hubert was well aware that, according to the laws of primogeniture, Arthur, as the only son of an elder brother, had an undoubted right to the succession; the prelate, therefore, in addressing the people assembled in the church, assumed that the monarchy was entirely elective, and that no man could be entitled to the crown unless he wore chosen by the nation. He asserted that John had already been so chosen at the council held at Nottingham, and that there was no one of the family of the dead king better fitted to assume the regal dignity. He declared that John possessed those meritorious qualities which had belonged to King Richard—a statement which it would have been difficult to prove—and that for these reasons, as well as for having the same lineage, he was elected king. Whatever may have been the real temper of the assembly, no opposition was made to these statements, and the English crown was conferred upon the most vicious and worthless prince who ever wore it.



The new king began his reign amidst the disaffection, if not the hatred, of the people, while he was menaced on every side by the attacks of enemies from without. In the north, William the Lion, King of Scotland, was preparing to invade his territories; while on the Continent, all his vassals, except those of Normandy, were in insurrection, and the French king, his former ally, had declared war against him. The aspect of affairs was highly favourable to the designs of Philip, who, to further his own ends, declared himself in favour of the cause of the young Arthur. John, having sent an army under the command of William de Stateville to oppose the Scottish king, passed over into Normandy. Negotiations were then entered into by Philip, who demanded that all the Continental provinces subject to England, with the exception of Normandy, should be given up to Arthur, and that a large portion of Normandy should be resigned to the French crown. Such terms could not be accepted, and the war continued.

The young prince, whose claims to the English throne gave rise to so much of bloodshed and revolution, appeared to have been marked for misfortune from his birth. He was a posthumous child, his father, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, second son of Henry II., having been killed in a tournament several months before Arthur came into the world. The Bretons, who were perpetually struggling for independence against the overwhelming force of France on the one hand and of England on the other, hailed the birth of their native prince with enthusiastic joy, and when his grandfather desired to give him the name of Henry, they one and all insisted that he should be called Arthur—a name which was held in as much honour by them as among their kindred, the Britons of Wales. The latter people, who held tenaciously by their ancient traditions, handed down by the bards from generation to generation, believed firmly that they were destined once more to possess the whole island of Britain. The confidence they expressed in this wild hope, opposed as it was to all probability, caused them to be regarded both in England and France as having the gift of prophecy. The songs of their ancient poets, imaginative and obscure, were supposed to possess a hidden meaning which was traced in the political events occurring many years afterwards. Hence arose the strange stories related of Myrdhin, a Cambrian bard of the seventh century, who. after a lapse of five hundred years, had become celebrated under the name of the enchanter Merlin. To this source, also, is to be attributed the extraordinary fame of King Arthur, of whose existence no authentic records remain, but to whom the glowing imaginations of the Welsh poets attributed superhuman valour and virtues. The writings of