the French troops who served under John, and made a great part of his army, immediately went over to the enemy, unwilling to serve against their sovereign in a cause which now began to look desperate.  The son of the King of France was acknowledged in London, and received the homage of all ranks of men.  John, thus deserted, had no other ally than the Pope, who indeed served him to the utmost of his power, but with arms to which the circumstances of the time alone can give any force.  He excommunicated Louis and his adherents; he laid England under an interdict; he threatened the King of France himself with the same sentence:  but Philip continued firm, and the interdict had little effect in England.  Cardinal Langton, by his remarkable address, by his interest in the Sacred College, and his prudent submissions, had been restored to the exercise of his office; but, steady to the cause he had first espoused, he made use of the recovery of his authority to carry on his old designs against the king and the Pope.  He celebrated divine service in spite of the interdict, and by his influence and example taught others to despise it.  The king, thus deserted, and now only solicitous for his personal safety, rambled, or rather fled, from place to place, at the head of a small party.  He was in great danger in passing a marsh in Norfolk, in which he lost the greatest part of his baggage, and his most valuable effects.  With difficulty he escaped to the monastery of Swineshead, where, violently agitated by grief and disappointments, his late fatigue and the use of an improper diet threw him into a fever, of which he died in a few days at Newark, not without suspicion of poison, after a reign, or rather a struggle to reign, for eighteen years, the most turbulent and calamitous both to king and people of any that are recorded in the English history.

It may not be improper to pause here for a few moments, and to consider a little more minutely the causes which had produced the grand revolution in favor of liberty by which this reign was distinguished, and to draw all the circumstances which led to this remarkable event into a single point of view.  Since the death of Edward the Confessor only two princes succeeded to the crown upon undisputed titles.  William the Conqueror established his by force of arms.  His successors were obliged to court the people by yielding many of the possessions and many of the prerogatives of the crown; but they supported a dubious title by a vigorous administration, and recovered by their policy, in the course of their reign, what the necessity of their affairs obliged them to relinquish for the establishment of their power.  Thus was the nation kept continually fluctuating between freedom and servitude.  But the principles of freedom were predominant, though the thing itself was not yet fully formed.  The continual struggle of the clergy for the ecclesiastical liberties laid open at the same time the natural claims of the people; and the clergy were obliged to show