Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages, and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures, and reprisals no less barbarous, committed by the barons and their partisans on the royal demesnes, and on the estates of such as still adhered to the Crown.  The King, marching through the whole extent of England, from Dover to Berwick, laid the provinces waste on each side of him, and considered every estate which was not his immediate property as entirely hostile and the object of military execution.  The nobility of the North in particular, who had shown greatest violence in the recovery of their liberties, and who, acting in a separate body, had expressed their discontent even at the concessions made by the Great Charter, as they could expect no mercy, fled before him with their wives and families, and purchased the friendship of Alexander, the young King of Scots, by doing homage to him.

The barons, reduced to this desperate extremity, and menaced with the total loss of their liberties, their properties, and their lives, employed a remedy no less desperate; and making applications to the court of France, they offered to acknowledge Louis, the eldest son of Philip, for their sovereign, on condition that he would afford them protection from the violence of their enraged Prince.  Though the sense of the common rights of mankind, the only rights that are entirely indefeasible, might have justified them in the deposition of their King, they declined insisting before Philip on a pretension which is commonly so disagreeable to sovereigns and which sounds harshly in their royal ears.  They affirmed that John was incapable of succeeding to the crown, by reason of the attainder passed upon him during his brother’s reign, though that attainder had been reversed, and Richard had even, by his last will, declared him his successor.  They pretended that he was already legally deposed by sentence of the peers of France, on account of the murder of his nephew, though that sentence could not possibly regard anything but his transmarine dominions, which alone he held in vassalage to that crown.  On more plausible grounds they affirmed that he had already deposed himself by doing homage to the Pope, changing the nature of his sovereignty, and resigning an independent crown for a fee under a foreign power.  And as Blanche of Castile, the wife of Louis, was descended by her mother from Henry II, they maintained, though many other princes stood before her in the order of succession, that they had not shaken off the royal family in choosing her husband for their sovereign.