[Sidenote:  England]

Such was the people which had been growing into a national unity and a national vigour while English king and English baronage battled for rule.  But king and baronage themselves had changed like townsman and ceorl.  The loss of Normandy, entailing as it did the loss of their Norman lands, was the last of many influences which had been giving through a century and a half a national temper to the baronage.  Not only the “new men,” the ministers out of whom the two Henries had raised a nobility, were bound to the Crown, but the older feudal houses now owned themselves as Englishmen and set aside their aims after personal independence for a love of the general freedom of the land.  They stood out as the natural leaders of a people bound together by the stern government which had crushed all local division, which had accustomed men to the enjoyment of a peace and justice that imperfect as it seems to modern eyes was almost unexampled elsewhere in Europe, and which had trained them to something of their old free government again by the very machinery of election it used to facilitate its heavy taxation.  On the other hand the loss of Normandy brought home the king.  The growth which had been going on had easily escaped the eyes of rulers who were commonly absent from the realm and busy with the affairs of countries beyond the sea.  Henry the Second had been absent for years from England:  Richard had only visited it twice for a few months:  John had as yet been almost wholly occupied with his foreign dominions.  To him as to his brother England had as yet been nothing but a land whose gold paid the mercenaries that followed him, and whose people bowed obediently to his will.  It was easy to see that between such a ruler and such a nation once brought together strife must come:  but that the strife came as it did and ended as it did was due above all to the character of the king.

[Sidenote:  John]

“Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John.”  The terrible verdict of his contemporaries has passed into the sober judgement of history.  Externally John possessed all the quickness, the vivacity, the cleverness, the good-humour, the social charm which distinguished his house.  His worst enemies owned that he toiled steadily and closely at the work of administration.  He was fond of learned men like Gerald of Wales.  He had a strange gift of attracting friends and of winning the love of women.  But in his inner soul John was the worst outcome of the Angevins.  He united into one mass of wickedness their insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical indifference to honour or truth.  In mere boyhood he tore with brutal levity the beards of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as their lord.  His ingratitude and perfidy brought his father with sorrow to the grave.  To his brother he was the worst of traitors.  All Christendom