religion and hold his kingdom of them if they would help him. It
is related that the ambassadors were admitted to the presence of
the Turkish Emir through long lines of Moorish guards, and that
they found the Emir with his eyes seriously fixed on the pages of a
large book, from which he never once looked up. That they gave him
a letter from the King containing his proposals, and were gravely
dismissed. That presently the Emir sent for one of them, and
conjured him, by his faith in his religion, to say what kind of man
the King of England truly was? That the ambassador, thus pressed,
replied that the King of England was a false tyrant, against whom
his own subjects would soon rise. And that this was quite enough
for the Emir.
Money being, in his position, the next best thing to men, King John
spared no means of getting it. He set on foot another oppressing
and torturing of the unhappy Jews (which was quite in his way), and
invented a new punishment for one wealthy Jew of Bristol. Until
such time as that Jew should produce a certain large sum of money,
the King sentenced him to be imprisoned, and, every day, to have
one tooth violently wrenched out of his head – beginning with the
double teeth. For seven days, the oppressed man bore the daily
pain and lost the daily tooth; but, on the eighth, he paid the
money. With the treasure raised in such ways, the King made an
expedition into Ireland, where some English nobles had revolted.
It was one of the very few places from which he did not run away;
because no resistance was shown. He made another expedition into
Wales – whence he DID run away in the end: but not before he had
got from the Welsh people, as hostages, twenty-seven young men of
the best families; every one of whom he caused to be slain in the
following year.
To Interdict and Excommunication, the Pope now added his last
sentence; Deposition. He proclaimed John no longer King, absolved
all his subjects from their allegiance, and sent Stephen Langton
and others to the King of France to tell him that, if he would
invade England, he should be forgiven all his sins – at least,
should be forgiven them by the Pope, if that would do.
As there was nothing that King Philip desired more than to invade
England, he collected a great army at Rouen, and a fleet of
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Dickens, Charles – A Child’s History of England
seventeen hundred ships to bring them over. But the English
people, however bitterly they hated the King, were not a people to
suffer invasion quietly. They flocked to Dover, where the English
standard was, in such great numbers to enrol themselves as
defenders of their native land, that there were not provisions for
them, and the King could only select and retain sixty thousand.
But, at this crisis, the Pope, who had his own reasons for
objecting to either King John or King Philip being too powerful,
interfered. He entrusted a legate, whose name was PANDOLF, with
the easy task of frightening King John. He sent him to the English
Camp, from France, to terrify him with exaggerations of King
Philip’s power, and his own weakness in the discontent of the
English Barons and people. Pandolf discharged his commission so
well, that King John, in a wretched panic, consented to acknowledge
Stephen Langton; to resign his kingdom ‘to God, Saint Peter, and
Saint Paul’ – which meant the Pope; and to hold it, ever
afterwards, by the Pope’s leave, on payment of an annual sum of
money. To this shameful contract he publicly bound himself in the
church of the Knights Templars at Dover: where he laid at the
legate’s feet a part of the tribute, which the legate haughtily
trampled upon. But they DO say, that this was merely a genteel
flourish, and that he was afterwards seen to pick it up and pocket
it.
There was an unfortunate prophet, the name of Peter, who had
greatly increased King John’s terrors by predicting that he would