now happily began to emerge from their slavery, and, taking advantage of the necessities and confusion of the late reign, increased in wealth and consequence, and had then first attained a free and regular form of administration.  The towns new to power declared heartily in favor of a prince who was willing to allow that their declaration could confer a right.  The nobility, who saw themselves beset by the Church, the law, and the burghers, had taken no measures, nor even a resolution, and therefore had nothing left but to concur in acknowledging the title of John, whom they knew and hated.  But though they were not able to exclude him from the succession, they had strength enough to oblige him to a solemn promise of restoring those liberties and franchises which they had always claimed without having ever enjoyed or even perfectly understood.  The clergy also took advantage of the badness of his title to establish one altogether as ill founded.  Hubert, Archbishop of Canterbury, in the speech which he delivered at the king’s coronation, publicly affirmed that the crown of England was of right elective.  He drew his examples in support of this doctrine, not from the histories of the ancient Saxon kings, although a species of election within a certain family had then frequently prevailed, but from the history of the first kings of the Jews:  without doubt in order to revive those pretensions which the clergy first set up in the election of Stephen, and which they had since been obliged to conceal, but had not entirely forgotten.

John accepted a sovereignty weakened in the very act by which he acquired it; but he submitted to the times.  He came to the throne at the age of thirty-two.  He had entered early into business, and had been often involved in difficult and arduous enterprises, in which he experienced a variety of men and fortunes.  His father, whilst he was very young, had sent him into Ireland, which kingdom was destined for his portion, in order to habituate that people to their future sovereign, and to give the young prince an opportunity of conciliating the favor of his new subjects.  But he gave on this occasion no good omens of capacity for government.  Full of the insolent levity of a young man of high rank without education, and surrounded with others equally unpractised, he insulted the Irish chiefs, and, ridiculing their uncouth garb and manners, he raised such a disaffection to the English government, and so much opposition to it, as all the wisdom of his father’s best officers and counsellors was hardly able to overcome.  In the decline of his father’s life he joined in the rebellion of his brothers, with so much more guilt as with more ingratitude and hypocrisy.  During the reign of Richard he was the perpetual author of seditions and tumults; and yet was pardoned, and even favored by that prince to his death, when he very unaccountably appointed him heir to all his dominions.