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kings, had four sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. Eleanor, his queen, was first married to Louis the Seventh of France, and some sixteen years after the marriage was divorced on suspicion of conjugal infidelity. Within six weeks after the divorce, she was married to Henry, then Earl of Anjou, and much younger than herself. She brought him large possessions indeed, but not enough to offset the trouble she caused in his family and kingdom. Unfaithful to her first husband, and jealous of the second, she instigated his sons into rebellion against him. In 1189, after a reign of thirty-five years, Henry died, invoking the vengeance of Heaven on the ingratitude of his children, and was succeeded by Richard, Henry and Geoffrey having died before him. Geoffrey, Duke of Bretagne in right of Constance his wife, left one son, Arthur. In 1190, when Arthur was a mere child, Richard contracted him in marriage with the daughter of Tancred, King of Sicily, at the same time owning him as our most dear nephew, and heir, if by chance we should die without issue." At Richard's death, however, in 1199, John produced a testament of his brother's, giving him the crown. Anjou, Touraine, and Maine were the proper patrimony of the Plantagenets, and therefore devolved to Arthur as the acknowledged representative of that House, the rule of lineal succession being there fully established. To the ducal chair of Bretagne Arthur was the proper heir in right of his mother, who was then Duchess-regnant of that province. John claimed the dukedom of Normandy, as the proper inheritance from his ancestor, William the Conqueror, and his claim was there admitted. Poitou, Guienne, and five other French provinces were the inheritance of Eleanor his mother; but she made over her title to him; and there also his claim was recognized. The English crown he claimed in virtue of his brother's will, but took care to strengthen that claim by a parliamentary election. In the strict order of inheritance, all these possessions, be it observed, were due to Arthur; but that order, it appears,

was not then fully established, save in the provinces belong ing to the House of Anjou.

As Duke of Bretagne, Arthur was a vassal of France, and therefore bound to homage as the condition of his title. Constance, feeling his need of a protector, engaged to Philip Augustus, King of France, that he should do homage also for the other provinces, where his right was clogged with no such conditions. Philip accordingly met him at Mans, received his oath, gave him knighthood, and took him to Paris. Philip was cunning, ambitious, and unscrupulous, and his plan was to drive his own interests in Arthur's name: with the Prince entirely in his power, he could use him as an ally or a prisoner, whichever would best serve his turn; and in effect "Arthur was a puppet in his hands, to be set up or knocked down, as he desired to bully or cajole John out of the territories he claimed in France." In the year 1200, Philip was at war with John in pretended maintenance of Arthur's rights; but before the end of that year the war ended in a peace, by the terms of which John was to give his niece, Blanche of Castile, in marriage to Louis the Dauphin, with a dowry of several valuable fiefs; and Arthur was to hold even his own Bretagne as a vassal of John. At the time of this treaty Constance was still alive; and Arthur, fearing, it is said, his uncle's treachery, remained in the care of Philip. In less than two years, however, the peace was broken. John, though his former wife was still living, having seized and married Isabella of Angouleme, already betrothed to the Count de la Marche, the Count headed an insurrection, and Philip joined him, brought Arthur again upon the scene, and made him raise the flag of war against his uncle. For some time Philip was carrying all before him, till at length Arthur was sent with a small force against the town of Mirabeau, where his grandmother Eleanor was stationed; and, while he was besieging her in the castle, John "used such diligence, that he was upon his enemies' necks ere they could understand any thing of his coming." His

mother was quickly relieved, Arthur fell into his hands, and was conveyed to the castle of Falaise; and Philip withdrew from the contest, as the people would have nothing to do with him but as the protector of their beloved Prince. The capture of Arthur took place in July, 1202, he being seventeen or eighteen years old.

The King then betook himself to England, and had his coronation repeated. Shortly after, he returned to France, where, a rumour being spread abroad of Arthur's death, the nobles made great suit to have him set at liberty. prevailing in this, they banded together, and "began to levy sharp wars against King John in divers places, insomuch that it was thought there would be no quiet in those parts so long as Arthur lived." A charge of murder being then carried to the French Court, the King was summoned thither for trial, but refused to go; whereupon he " was found guilty of felony and treason, and adjudged to forfeit all the lands which he held by homage." Thence sprang up a war in which John was totally stripped of his French possessions, and at last stole off with inexpressible baseness to England.

The quarrel of John with Pope Innocent did not break out till 1207. It was about the election of Cardinal Langton to the See of Canterbury. First came the interdict; then, some two years after, the excommunication; and finally, at a like interval, the deposition; Philip being engaged to go with an army, and execute the sentence; wherein he was likely to succeed, till at length, in the Spring of 1213, John made his full submission. The next year, he was desperately involved in the famous contest with his barons, which resulted in the establishment of the Great Charter. Of this great movement, so decisive for the liberties of England, Langton was the life and soul. As Primate he had been forced upon the King by the Pope; but he now stood by his country against both Pope and King. No sooner had John confirmed the Charter than his tyranny and perfidy broke out afresh; whereupon the barons,

finding that no laws nor oaths could curb the faithless and cruel devil within him, offered the crown to Louis the Dauphin on condition of his helping them put down the hated tyrant. John died in 1216.

The point where all the parts of King John centre and converge into one has been rightly stated to be the fate of Arthur. This is the heart, whose pulsations are felt throughout the entire structure. The alleged right of Arthur to the throne draws on the wars between Philip and John, and finally the loss from the English crown of the provinces in France. And so far the drama is strictly true to historical fact. But, besides this, the real or reputed murder of Arthur by John is set forth as the main cause of the troubles which distracted the latter part of John's reign, and ended only with his life. Which was by no means the case. For though, by the treatment of his nephew, John did greatly outrage the loyalty and humanity of the nation, still that was but one act in a life-long course of cruelty, cowardice, lust, and perfidy, which stamped him all over with baseness, and finally drew upon him the general hatred and execration of his subjects. Had he not thus sinned away and lost the hearts of the people, he might have safely defied the papal interdict; for who can doubt that they would have braved the thunders of the Vatican for him, since they did not scruple afterwards to do so against him? But the fact or the mode of Arthur's death was far from being the main cause of that loss. Pope Innocent the Third was a very great man: his proceedings against John were richly deserved: at that time there was no other power in Europe that could tame or restrain the savagery of such lawless and brutal oppressors; and the Church had, by her services to liberty and humanity, well earned the prerogatives then exercised in her name. The death of Arthur, though the consequences thereof survived in a general weakening of the English State, had quite ceased to be an active force in European

B

politics when the ecclesiastical tempest broke loose upon John.

Here, then, we have a breach of history in the very central point of the drama; this too without any apparent reason in the laws of the dramatic form. Such a flaw at the heart of the piece must greatly disarrange the order of the work as a representation of facts, and make it very untrue to the ideas and sentiments of the English people at the time; for it implies all along that Arthur was clearly the rightful sovereign, and that he was so regarded; whereas in truth the rule of lineal descent was not then settled in the State, and the succession of John to the throne was so far from being irregular, that of the last five occupants four had derived their main title from election, the same right whereby John himself held it.

The same objection holds proportionably against another feature of the play. The life of the Austrian Archduke who had behaved so harshly and so meanly towards Richard the First is prolonged five or six years beyond its actual period, for no other purpose, apparently, than that Richard's natural son may have the honour of revenging his father's wrongs and death. Richard fell in a quarrel with Vidomar, Viscount of Limoges, one of his own vassals. A treasure having been found on Vidomar's estate, the King refused the offer of a part, and insisted on having the whole; and while, to enforce this claim, he was making war on the owner, he was wounded with an arrow by one of Vidomar's archers. This occurred in 1199, when Leopold of Austria had been dead several years. The play, however, drives the sin against history to the extreme point of making Austria and Limoges the same person. Now, if such an exploit were needful for the proper display of Falconbridge's character, it does not well appear but that the real Vidomar would have answered the purpose; at all events, the thing might surely have been compassed without so signal a breach of historical truth. Here, however, the vice stops with itself, instead of vitiating the other parts, as in the former case.