believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, Arthur of Britanny.  He abandoned one wife and was faithless to another.  His punishments were refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing old men under copes of lead.  His court was a brothel where no woman was safe from the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his victims’ shame.  He was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in his impiety.  Though he scoffed at priests and turned his back on the mass even amidst the solemnities of his coronation, he never stirred on a journey without hanging relics round his neck.  But with the wickedness of his race he inherited its profound ability.  His plan for the relief of Chateau Gaillard, the rapid march by which he shattered Arthur’s hopes at Mirebeau, showed an inborn genius for war.  In the rapidity and breadth of his political combinations he far surpassed the statesmen of his time.  Throughout his reign we see him quick to discern the difficulties of his position, and inexhaustible in the resources with which he met them.  The overthrow of his continental power only spurred him to the formation of a league which all but brought Philip to the ground; and the sudden revolt of England was parried by a shameless alliance with the Papacy.  The closer study of John’s history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall.  The awful lesson of his life rests on the fact that the king who lost Normandy, became the vassal of the Pope, and perished in a struggle of despair against English freedom, was no weak and indolent voluptuary but the ablest and most ruthless of the Angevins.

[Sidenote:  Innocent the Third]

From the moment of his return to England in 1204 John’s whole energies were bent to the recovery of his dominions on the Continent.  He impatiently collected money and men for the support of those adherents of the House of Anjou who were still struggling against the arms of France in Poitou and Guienne, and in the summer of 1205 he gathered an army at Portsmouth and prepared to cross the Channel.  But his project was suddenly thwarted by the resolute opposition of the Primate, Hubert Walter, and the Earl of Pembroke, William Marshal.  So completely had both the baronage and the Church been humbled by his father that the attitude of their representatives revealed to the king a new spirit of national freedom which was rising around him, and John at once braced himself to a struggle with it.  The death of Hubert Walter in July, only a few weeks after his protest, removed his most formidable opponent, and the king resolved to neutralize the opposition of the Church by placing a creature of his own at its head.  John de Grey, Bishop of Norwich, was elected by the monks of Canterbury at his bidding, and enthroned as Primate.  But in a previous though informal gathering the convent had already chosen its sub-prior, Reginald, as Archbishop.  The rival