Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/69

 n s. ix. JAN. 24, i9i4.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

Alas ! no more is heard of Robin Baron. Langbaine first wrote of him in 1680, when, if the poet had been alive, he would still have been only 50. Yet Langbaine has nothing to tell of him beyond what he gathered from two of his books :

" This Author was a young Gentleman, bred first at Cambridge, and afterwards brought up in the worthy Society of Gray's Inn."

Had he married and retired to Norfolk ? had he died before the restoration of his King ? It is curious that even in that case the Jonson of his age should have passed away so silently. I have searched the Registers of Somerset House for thirty years after 1655 without finding any record of Robert Baron's will, or of letters of administration granted to his heirs.

Was he the " Henry Howard alias Robert Baron " who was a prisoner of the Marshal- General of the Army on 1 April, 1658 ?* or the " Robert Baron " whose name appears in a petition of prisoners of the Fleet dated 11 March, 1677/8 ?f Bold's lines imply that he was short of money in 1 655.

One might at first sight wish to identify him with a Baron who was an active agent for Charles II. just before the Restoration. 3: But this man was certainly Hartgill Baron, or " Captain Baron," who became after the Restoration a Clerk of the Privy Seal, and received a grant of the office of " Rainger & Bayliff of Battleswalke alias Battles Bayly within the fforest of Windsor for the terme of 21 years, "|| which he resigned before 17 June, 1670, to oblige Prince Rupert. If

The fate of Robert Baron after 1655 remains, therefore, a mystery.

G. C. MOORE SMITH. Sheffield.

A JUSTIFICATION OF KING JOHN.

IN a former note (US. vii. 43) I endeavoured to show that King John was not the mur- derer of his nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany; and the late MB. H. MURRAY LANE, Chester Herald, clearly proved, at 11 S. iv. 464, that the 100/. paid to John Fitz Geoffrey, the Constable of Bristol

" btate Papers, Domestic,' clxxx. 134, 25.

t Hist. MSS. Comm., App. to Ninth Report, House of Lords' MSS.

t 'State Papers, Domestic, May-July, 1657,' vol. civ. p. 66.

S ' State Pap., Dom., Charles II.,' vol. liv., 1662

[May 13]. I! P

latent Roll 14 Car. II., 25 Nov.

' State Pap., Dom., Charles II.,' vol. xcv. p. 282.

Castle, was not paid to him as the execu- tioner of Arthur's sister Eleanor, called the- " Maid of Brittany," but as her executor ; and since she died in the year 1241, at the age of about 60, she could not have been starved to death by her uncle King John,, as is stated in some accounts concerning her..

The history of King John has been com- piled from records made by his enemies the opponents of the policy he endeavoured to carry out. This policy was the upholding of the civil power as against the ecclesias- tical, and the amelioration of the condition of his subjects of Saxon descent, most of whom were the serfs or slaves of the barons,, the descendants of the Norman conquerors of England.

King John was of Angevin, not of Norman descent, and the Normans and the Angevins had never been friends.

Above all, his policy was to help his brother-in-law, Raymond, Count of Toulouse, in his struggle with the invading Crusaders, who, inspired by Pope Innocent III., and commanded by Simon de Montfort (lately deprived by King John of his Earldom of Leicester), were waging a war for the exter- mination of the Albigenses Christian here- tics -who were probably the remnants of the Arian Christian Visigoths in the King- dom of Toulouse, which was destroyed by the Orthodox Frank King Clovis in the year 507. This Visigoth Kingdom of Tou- louse was almost identical with the inherit- ance of King John's mother, Eleanor, Duchess of Aquitaine, and the Albigenses were the subjects of Raymond, Count of Toulouse.

The chroniclers were chiefly monks, all of them ecclesiastics, one of them a poet- eulogist of King John's enemy, Philip Augustus, King of France, and their accounts have been accepted, almost without altera- tion, by the historians who have followed them, notwithstanding that some of them were not even John's subjects. In a widely circulated History of England published in 1905, giving the account of the death of John, we read that at " his desire he was buried in Worcester Cathedral and in the habit of a monk."

Now it is true that King John was buried in Worcester Cathedral, but not " in the habit of a monk."

Sylvester, Bishop of Worcester (probably of Saxon descent), carried out the King's wish to be buried in his cathedral, and it may have been to show his appreciation of the protection given by King John to the Saxons that the Bishop had the body of the King