Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/324

Rh 306 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Reign of John. Loss of Nor mandy. Union of Kormans and English. that the distinction between the two races was at all re membered in any hostile sense. Everything shows that all the inhabitants of the kingdom were fast drawing together, in opposition to men born out of the realm, whether in Normandy or anywhere else. Richard died, as he had lived, far away from England and Normandy, in a petty quarrel with a Southern vassal (1199). Constitutional progress had gone on silently in his absence. In the next reign freedom had to be won openly from a tyrant by force of arms. No period of our history, save those of the Conversion and the Conquest, is of greater importance than the seventesn years of John. A popular confusion has to be got rid of with regard to his accession at the death of Richard. John, the youngest son of Henry, was the only survivor of his brothers; but Geoffrey, the third son of Henry, had left a son Arthur. Richard seems at one time to have designed Arthur for his successor. But his last bequest was in favour of his brother; and, even without that bequest, all English precedent was in favour of the brother rather than of the nephew. Arthur does not seem to have had a single partisan either in Normandy or in England. John was received as duke, chosen and crowned as king, without opposition. But on the continent generally the new doctrine of hereditary right had made much greater advances than it had in England. Anjou acknowledged Arthur ; and Philip of France was led by an obvious policy to receive his homage for all the continental dominions of his uncle. But Arthur and his followers were soon crushed by the king-duke (1202), and the disappear ance of Arthur left little room for doubt that he had been put out of the way by his uncle. The king of the French called into being a new jurisprudence out of the romances of Charlemagne, and called on the twelve peers of France to sit in judgment on their felon brother. Sentence of forfeiture of all lands held of the French crown was pro nounced against John. The sentence was carried out by an easy conquest of continental Normandy. The islands clave to their duke, and they have ever since remained possessions of the English crown, keeping their local inde pendence and their ancient laws. On behalf of the duchy John did not strike a blow ; but he led more than one expe dition to secure or to win back his southern dominions, and the final result was that, of all the continental &quot;possessions of Henry and Richard, Aquitaine alone remained to their successors. The relations of England to the continent were thus completely changed. Under Henry and Richard England had been only one, though the greatest, among the endless possessions of her king. Now that Normandy, Maine, and Anjou became provinces of France, Aquitaine became distinctly a distant dependency of England To the crown of France the gain was beyond words ; the king was now a greater potentate than any of his vassals. He had won back those old possessions of the French duchy which had so long cut off its dukes and kings from the sea. To England the loss was the greatest of gains. It broke the last tie which bound any part of the inhabitants of Eng land to any land beyond the four seas of England. If any thing was still wanting to wipe out every trace of distinction between the descendants of those who a hundred and forty years earlier had been the conquerors and the conquered, the French conquest of Normandy did the work. Every man in England was now an Englishman, and nothing but an Englishman. One question only has to be asked : Why did Normandy, the old foe of France, submit so tamely to a French conquest ] The reason seems plain. Normandy was a conquered land. With Henry I. the line of her national dukes had ended. It the French king was a stranger, he was. not more a stranger than the king of England and count of Anjou. The duchy really lost nothing by passing from a state which might seem that of a dependency, to become an integral portion, often a royal apanage, of a kingdom of its own speech. Aquitaine, on the other hand, foreign alike to England, Normandy, and France, found its account in cleaving to the more distant sovereign. The nobles were drawn to France by community of feeling in many ways ; but the cities chive to the distant king, who was their ally and protector rather than their master. The English nation was now united : the smaller mass of the conquerors had been received and assimilated by the greater mass of the conquered. Events now thickly press one upon another, and all of them tended to draw all the sons of the soil closer and closer together. John, like Richard, was born in England; but, like Richard, he was in feeling neither English nor Norman. He surrounded John himself with foreign counsellors and with foreign soldiers. q ua &quot; He presently plunged into an ecclesiastical quarrel which Wltb showed the weak side of the ecclesiastical policy of the r Conqueror. It reeded William himself to carry out William s system. A disputed election to the see of Canterbury gave Innocent III. an opportunity for putting in a nominee of his own, and his choice it must have been unwittingly fell on one of the foremost of English patriots, on the first of the noble band who defied pope and king alike on behalf of the freedom of England. The candidate of the king and the candidate of the monks both gave way to Stephen Langton. John had so utterly turned away from him all the hearts of his people that none stood by him, even when the pope took upon him to declare the king of the English deposed from his crown, and to offer that crown to the king of the French. In his despair John became the man of the Roman pontiff, as his brother had become the man of the Roman Cresar. Archbishop Stephen now came back to England. The laws of king Eadward were renewed. When John flew to arms, the barons and people of England, with the primate at their head, swore to bring back the ancient laws, the laws of Eadward, the laws of Henry. Those names are now heard for the last time. John was constrained (1215) to sign the Great Charter ; and The( from that day Englishmen railed for the observance of the Great Charter, as they had hitherto called for the laws of Eadward. By that charter resistance to the royal power was legalized ; in the struggle that followed it was the king who was the rebel. John had hardly sealed the charter, when he sent to his overlord at Rome, and the pontiff took upon him to annul the recovered liberties and to denounce suspensions and excommunications against those who had won them. At the head of his foreign mercenaries, the king laid waste his own dominions. The barons in despair chose a new king, and offered the crown to Lewis of France. Such a choice seems to us yet more strange than the Elect speedy submission of Normandy to Lewis s father. That of ^ e the step was most unwise was presently proved; but at the time it was intelligible alike to Normans and to English men. If Lewis was a stranger, so was John. Personally Lewis promised far better than John, nor was it easy to find any other available candidate. If not Lewis himself, yet his wife, came by female descent of the royal stock ; and the only likely competitor, the emperor Otto, was at once closely allied with his uncle John and had shown that he could not keep the kingdoms which he Irad already. But, even before John died, men began to feel that, in inviting a French king, they had invited a French con quest. In a few months (1216) the death of John cut the knot ; all English feeling turned to the side of his young Succe and innocent son. He was indeed a minor, but a minor sion c was better than a stranger. Henry III. succeeded as a *J ^ national king, and a burst of national feeling drove the French out of the land. A long and weary time followed, in which the freedom of England was slowly growing up,