Old historians generally gave kings bad characters, but in the reaction from this indiscriminate censure we get a school of writers who praise too much. Treacle has taken the place of vinegar in writing history. Thus, Green makes heroes of the coarse Saxon savages and heathen; Froude has painted the picture of Henry VIII so his own mother—much more his multitudinous wives—would not recognize it; even Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot have their eulogists. Nevertheless, no one, so far as I have read, has had a good word to say of King John. Green vouchsafes “the sober judgment of history” in ratification of the Billingsgatish opinion: “Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John.” I have no kalsomine to mix for him who seems by all accounts to have been worse than his Satanic Majesty, in that John _is_ “as black as he is painted.” Yet it is to this royal monster that England owes her Great Charter of Rights and Freedom, and one of her red letter days. The boy whose impudence and mean spirit made everybody detest him; the youth who so embittered the last hours of his fond father, Henry II, that he died cursing him; the prince who plotted the dethronement and death of his brother, King Richard, absent on a crusade, and murdered the rightful heir, the boy Arthur; the husband who deserted his own wife and abducted the wife of his friend; the soldier who was always provoking quarrels and always running away from fighting, and abandoned all his continental possessions to his enemy without striking a blow; the churchman so abjectly superstitious that he dared not go hunting without a string of relics around his neck, yet quarrelled with the Pope about the right to rob the Church revenues, and ended by basely resigning his crown into the Pope’s hands and kissing the toe of his legate; the lawgiver of his realm who reduced bribery to a department of the royal exchequer, and opened book accounts with the subjects whose hush-money and blood-money bought justice and the perversion of justice, wherein it was recorded that one man paid to have the king’s anger appeased, another “that the king should hold his tongue about Henry Pinel’s wife,” and that a poor woman paid two hundred livres for the privilege of visiting her husband in prison; the father of his people who hired foreign plunderers to rob and murder his children, who starved women and children to death in dungeons, crushed old men under loads of lead, extorted rich men’s money by pulling their teeth, one each day; who was so licentious that noble ladies had to flee the realm to be safe from his approach or his violence—this “awful example” of the race of kings was the chosen instrument for inciting England to demand a charter as complete in its guarantees as his encroachments, as beneficent as he was pestilent, as monumental grandly as he was meanly. And so at last it came about that King John had not a friend left at home or abroad.