Page:Royalnavyhistory01clow.djvu/219

 at Calais, Gravelines, and Wissant; and Louis, accompanied by a considerable force, embarked. The squadrons were dispersed by a strong north-easter, and the ship in which Louis crossed anchored alone off Stonar, in Thanet. But it did not matter. There was no one to take advantage of the scattering of the invasion flotilla; there was not even a loyal galley-captain to seize Louis, and to send his head to the king. John, indeed, went to Dover, but, finding it impossible to raise an army, he retired to Winchester. Louis, perfectly undisturbed, assembled his fleet again, and landed, without resistance, at Sandwich. All Kent, except Dover Castle, which was defended by Hubert de Burgh, was easily subdued by Louis, who advanced and joined the barons in London. The whole kingdom would have quickly fallen to him, but that the situation was opportunely changed in an instant by the death of John, on October 19th, and by the patriotic and statesmanlike attitude of Richard, Earl of Pembroke, who, John's son and successor being but a child, became Guardian of the Kingdom, or Regent.

It may be noted, that the summoning by the barons of a French prince to assume the crown of England indicates that, up to the end of the reign of King John, there can scarcely have existed in the country much of the deeply rooted anti-French feeling, which, for many centuries afterwards, played so important a part in the relations between the two Powers. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the adoption of such a policy as that which was pursued by the barons of the beginning of the thirteenth century would have sufficed to array nearly all England against it from the first. The rise and growth of the traditional anti-French sentiment may be traced back to the time of the invasion of 1216. There is no convincing evidence that the conduct of the