be unknighted (which the King supposed to signify that he would
die) before the Feast of the Ascension should be past. That was
the day after this humiliation. When the next morning came, and
the King, who had been trembling all night, found himself alive and
safe, he ordered the prophet – and his son too – to be dragged
through the streets at the tails of horses, and then hanged, for
having frightened him.
As King John had now submitted, the Pope, to King Philip’s great
astonishment, took him under his protection, and informed King
Philip that he found he could not give him leave to invade England.
The angry Philip resolved to do it without his leave but he gained
nothing and lost much; for, the English, commanded by the Earl of
Salisbury, went over, in five hundred ships, to the French coast,
before the French fleet had sailed away from it, and utterly
defeated the whole.
The Pope then took off his three sentences, one after another, and
empowered Stephen Langton publicly to receive King John into the
favour of the Church again, and to ask him to dinner. The King,
who hated Langton with all his might and main – and with reason
too, for he was a great and a good man, with whom such a King could
have no sympathy – pretended to cry and to be VERY grateful. There
was a little difficulty about settling how much the King should pay
as a recompense to the clergy for the losses he had caused them;
but, the end of it was, that the superior clergy got a good deal,
and the inferior clergy got little or nothing – which has also
happened since King John’s time, I believe.
When all these matters were arranged, the King in his triumph
became more fierce, and false, and insolent to all around him than
he had ever been. An alliance of sovereigns against King Philip,
gave him an opportunity of landing an army in France; with which he
even took a town! But, on the French King’s gaining a great
victory, he ran away, of course, and made a truce for five years.
And now the time approached when he was to be still further
humbled, and made to feel, if he could feel anything, what a
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wretched creature he was. Of all men in the world, Stephen Langton
seemed raised up by Heaven to oppose and subdue him. When he
ruthlessly burnt and destroyed the property of his own subjects,
because their Lords, the Barons, would not serve him abroad,
Stephen Langton fearlessly reproved and threatened him. When he
swore to restore the laws of King Edward, or the laws of King Henry
the First, Stephen Langton knew his falsehood, and pursued him
through all his evasions. When the Barons met at the abbey of
Saint Edmund’s-Bury, to consider their wrongs and the King’s
oppressions, Stephen Langton roused them by his fervid words to
demand a solemn charter of rights and liberties from their perjured
master, and to swear, one by one, on the High Altar, that they
would have it, or would wage war against him to the death. When
the King hid himself in London from the Barons, and was at last
obliged to receive them, they told him roundly they would not
believe him unless Stephen Langton became a surety that he would
keep his word. When he took the Cross to invest himself with some
interest, and belong to something that was received with favour,
Stephen Langton was still immovable. When he appealed to the Pope,
and the Pope wrote to Stephen Langton in behalf of his new
favourite, Stephen Langton was deaf, even to the Pope himself, and
saw before him nothing but the welfare of England and the crimes of
the English King.
At Easter-time, the Barons assembled at Stamford, in Lincolnshire,
in proud array, and, marching near to Oxford where the King was,
delivered into the hands of Stephen Langton and two others, a list
of grievances. ‘And these,’ they said, ‘he must redress, or we
will do it for ourselves!’ When Stephen Langton told the King as