ESTIMATES OF THE ENGLISH KINGS.
VII.—JOHN.
Iexamining into the motives which appear to have influenced 1 the conduct of our Princes, we have hitherto been able to. recognize a considerable ingredient of good ; but we now come te. a King the actuating principle of whose life, if not always flagrantly evil, was always purely selfish in the narrowest and lowest sense of the term. It is not any absence of intellectual ability either in the field or in council, it is not the disastrous issue of his Continental enterprises, it is not his acts of violence and cruelty and his general misrule at home, it is not his fits of passion, and his frequent personal humiliations which really create in our minds that feeling of abhorrence with which the memory of John of Anjou has been almost universally regarded, from his own times down to the present. This feeling, if we mistake not, arises, from a conviction of the entire absence from the character of this, the worst, though not the weakest, of the Plantagenets, of all good and generous impulses. In nearly every one of our Princes, we are able (on careful examination) to find some traces of the better side of human nature ; but the paramount. spirit of John, after every allowance has been made for his special. misdeeds and his special failings, appears to have been evil, and evil in the most typical sense of the word. The essential characteristic of absolute evil is absolute selfishness, that selfishness which excludes all sympathy with anything beyond the supposed interests of the one individual himself. With such a nature there is but one motive, self-gratification, and but one restraining influence, fear,. and by these two balancing forces, it seems to us, the character of John can alone be explained. If we wished, indeed, to give am example of the true diabolic type of character, we could not find anywhere a better one ; and the epithet "base," which has been so generally bestowed by historians on this prince, is but another form of expressing the same judgment. Nothing could more conclusively overthrow the theory of the compatibility of intel- lectual grandeur of character with the spirit of absolute evil- It is, perhaps, scarcely possible for a very weak man intellec- tually to be a perfect incarnation of evil ; with an intellect of the highest order it is quite impossible. A certain amount of ability- seems to be needed for the full development of the character- istics of evil ; but the higher qualities of intellect imply also.a broad consideration of the relations of men and things, which is quite inconsistent with the narrow selfishness of pure evil. The wisdom of evil scarcely rises above the level of practised cunning, its courage above that of violent self-assertion, and its energy above that of fitful and capricious passion. Such a character is
fortunately rare in the pages of history ; but it is such a character, as it seems to us, that we have to consider in estimating the qualities of John of England.
In person, John was not so powerfully built as his brothers Henry and Richard. Like his brother Geoffrey, with whom there seems to have been much that was similar in disposition, he was only of middle heignt. But his features were handsome, and his manners very attractive. He was a very pleasant companion, possessed of a considerable amount of humour, sometimes of the grim Anglo-Norman type, but more usually of a lighter and more southern character. His volatile levity (the true offspring of his self-absorption) was conspicuous from his earliest years. Though he was capable of deep designs and bold enterprises, he was at the bottom a mere trifler. He was only earnest in his vindic- tive remembrance of injuries. Otherwise, his anger itself, though violent, excited rather contempt than fear. Like all the Angevins, he was well educated, and rather fond of learning and of learned men. He had sense enough to perceive the value of the one as an instrument of self-interest, and he perhaps respected the others, as among those least likely to come into active conflict with his personal ambition. Like his Angevin ancestors, also, he was very superstitious, with a scoffing indifference to religion. His ambition was sufficiently great to make him energetic in the assertion of his supposed or real rights and the furtherance of his desires, and he had a large share of the family abilities to assist and support him in this course. He had the quick military eye of his brother Richard, and some of the qualities of a soldier as well as a general. He was a coward rather morally than physically, though his pro- stration of spirit on some occasions was so abject that it assumed much of the outward appearance of physical timidity also, so com- pletely did the whole nature of the man then seem to grovel, that his unquestionable mental and physical endowments seemed in complete abeyance. He was often cruel, and cruel with the in- tensity of apprehension. He distrusted all men, because he was too conscious of the evil of his own nature to believe in the possi- bility of disinterested, and scarcely of interested, good faith in others. The same belief in evil, however, led him to appeal to the weaknesses and selfishness of others, with considerable advan- tage at particular conjunctures. On this he successfully relied for breaking up several of the combinations against him of his dis- affected Barons, and through a more sagacious appeal to this he secured to himself the support of a few—though a very few—staunch friends, and of some of the important municipalities of England. But he also lost much by his general distrust of good in others, for he several times, by acting on his groundless suspicions, created the very dangers which his violent precautions were meant to guard against. He watched every man nearly as closely as did his father Henry ; but he had not the patience to watch long enough, and his action was as excessive in its violence as it was generally pre- mature. Nor did he possess the exhaustless activity of mind and body of his father and brother. When not roused to rapid but fitful movement, he was sunk in indolence and the grossest sensual indulgences. In pursuing these last he had neither self- restraint nor common-sense. The ignobleness of his nature dis- closes itself here unmistakably. Not content with inflicting the most grievous injuries on the honour of the highest families in the land, he exulted in parading his infamy, and proclaim- ing publicly with contemptuous and coarse jests the downfall of his victims, and the dishonour of their relations. It was this conduct, far more than any acts of feudal oppres- sion, that enrolled against him that phalanx of Barons to whose exertions, guided by the wiser and nobler counsels of the Primate Langton, we owe the Magna Charta of our Constitution. It was, indeed, against the personal character of
John, rather than against the system of government which had prevailed more or less ever since the Norman Conquest, that the will of the Nation was at length roused and its liberties asserted.
Not only was John hated more bitterly for the deepest personal wrongs, but there was the most deep-rooted distrust of his good- faith. Dissimulation and treachery were so habitually employed by him as the agents of his policy, that they became blunted and use- less weapons in his hands. No one could and no one did at last believe in what he professed, and he lost even the possibility of re- tracing his steps. He had destroyed all belief in the possibility of his becoming a good king, and he had to submit to the brand of evil which his own conduct had stamped upon his fame.
Among the lower classes, and the inhabitants of some of the towns, who came less into personal contact with him, or who
shared in some of his more politic acts of bounty and grace, there were, no doubt, less repugnance to the character of John, and a
greater disposition to condone his faults, than among the higher orders, and the large cities such as London. But even here there could be little enthusiasm for a prince who, with all his pecuniary exactions, had lost nearly all the Continental possessions of his family. This, indeed, which
perhaps told most against him with the common people, was not regarded with any particular sorrow by the Barons. It had been for some time felt that the acquisition of addi- tional possessions in France, and the overthrow of the House of Capet, might reduce England and the English Barons to a position of decided inferiority, and it was now felt that the acquisition of the whole of France would add a dangerous weight to the power of the Crown. W hile the sceptre was wielded by such a man as Richard the Lion-hearted, this feeling of apprehen- sion was almost lost in one of national greatness and glory. But it was instinctively felt that it was not the nation, but the per- sonal position of the King that would be aggrandized with such a man as John ; and against this personal aggrandizement there was a general revolt of their feelings as well as their understandings. Never had the national cause or the national honour been the main- spring of the actions of John. Even his greatest act of resolution, his protracted stand against the Papal pretensions, was a mere result of personal pride and resentment, nerved by the popular support. When his own excesses had shaken this support, and he was terri- fied at the impending French invasion, on a reconciliation with Rome being offered to him at the price of national degradation, he not only made the concession, in which his brother had, to some extent, anticipated him by his homage to the German Emperor, though under peculiar circumstances and for great ends, but seemed to delight in parading the humiliation of the national dignity, while exulting in his own personal deliverance and bettered position. Such a man, his Barons reasoned, should not be made greater through their means. To this personal antipathy, which led to the desertion of his vassals on more than one critical occasion, the loss of Normandy, the Angevin States, and a large part of Aquitaine was in a great measure due, though the conduct of the King himself, ever vacillating between action and indolence, and between pertinacious assertion of his rights and their sudden and wanton sacrifice, contributed to this fatal result, while it afforded some additional excuse for the conduct of the defaulters. But John himself preferred a mercenary to a feudal force, and this hireling soldiery, while they were more than a match for the retainers of the Eng- lish Barons, and enabled the King to almost crush the defenders of the Great Charter, often betrayed his interests on the Conti- nent by a sudden desertion to the enemy. Meanwhile, from the land of the Troubadors, came the angry complaint, "I will make a sharp-edged sirvente, which I will send to the King of England, to cover him with shame, which, indeed, he ought to have, if he remembers the deeds of his forefathers, if he compares them with his indolence in thus leaving Poitou and Touraine in the possession of Philip. All Guienne regrets Richard, who spared no treasure to defend it. But this man has no feeling. He loves jousts and hunting, to have hounds and hawks, to drawl on a life without honour, and to see himself plundered without resistance. I speak but to correct a King, who loses his subjects because he will not assist them. You, Sire ! you suffer your honour to fall into the mire ; and such is your infatuation, that, far from being sensible to reproach, you seem to take pleasure in the invectives with which you are loaded ! "
For once the language of the poets of Southern France was but the expression of the bare truth, as well as the echo of the senti- ments of John's English subjects. Well, too, had they fathomed the degradation of his character in saying that he could feel no shame. This point alone was wanting to complete the features of this portrait of evil. John was an able man, incapable of using his abilities except to his own destruction ; a crafty man without sagacity ; a suspicious man without insight ; a learned man with- out wisdom ; a rash man without courage ; an obstinate man with- out firmness ; a social man without sympathy ; and an evil man without shame.
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