The rest of his ignominious reign was spent in war against the barons and Prince Louis of France.  “They have placed twenty-five kings over me!” he shouted, in his fury, referring to the twenty-five leading men who had been appointed to see that the Great Charter did not become a dead letter.  But the twenty-five did their duty, and the war was on.

In the midst of it John suddenly died.  The old record said of him—­and said rightly—­that he was “a knight without truth, a king without justice, a Christian without faith."[2] The Church returned good for evil, and permitted him to be buried in front of the high altar of Worcester cathedral.

[2] The late Professor W. Stubbs, of Oxford, says, in his “Early Plantagenets,” p. 152:  “John ended thus a life of ignominy in which he has no rival in the whole long list of our sovereigns....He was in every way the worst of the whole list:  the most vicious, the most profane, the most tyrannical, the most false, the most short-sighted, the most unscrupulous.”  A more recent writer (Professor Charles Oman, of the University of Oxford), says of John, “No man had a good word to say for him...; he was loathed by every one who knew him.”

203.  Summary.

John’s reign may be regarded as a turning point in English history.

1.  Through the loss of Normandy, the Norman nobility found it for their interest to make the welfare of England and of the English race one with their own.  Thus the two peoples became more and more united, until finally all differences ceased.

2.  In demanding and obtainign the Great Charter, the Church and the nobility made common cause with all classes of the people.  That document represents the victory of the entire nation.  We shall see that the next eighty years will be mainly taken up with the efforts of the nation to hold fast to what it had gained.

Henry III—­1216-1272

204.  Accession and Character.

John’s eldest son, Henry, was crowned at the age of nine.  During his long and feeble reign of fifty-six years England’s motto might well have been the warning words of Scripture, “Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child!” since a child he remained to the last; for if John’s heart was of millstone, Henry’s was of wax.

Dante in one of his poems, written perhaps not long after Henry’s death, represents him as he sees him in imagination just on the borderland of purgatory.  The King is not in suffering, for as he has done no particular good, so he has done no great harm.  He appears “as a man of simple life, spending his time singing psalms in a narrow valley.”

That shows one side of his negative character; the other was his love of extravagance, vain display, and instability of purpose.  Much of the time he drifted about like a ship without compass or rudder.

205.  Reissue of the Great Charter.