"Hurrah! now I will be king for myself, not king for my brother!" and plotted to do evil with his new power. In "Ivanhoe" it is stated that he even tried to have his brother killed when at last he reached home from his prison beyond the seas. It is very likely, as you will see from what did happen later. A large part of what is now France in those days still was under English rule; or, more correctly, England was ruled by the king of that part of France and by the warriors who had come from there. Richard and John, _both Frenchmen_ by descent, had a young nephew named Arthur, who ruled over Normandy, Aquitaine, Bretagne and other French land, and this land John had long desired to add to his own private farm. One day Richard was killed while attacking a rebellious castle, and John at once said to himself, "Now is my chance!" He promptly made a prisoner of boy Arthur, and shut him up in a great tower. Very piteous tales are told of what happened next. Some say that John ordered a hardhearted servant to burn out Arthur's beautiful blue eyes with a hot iron. What John himself said was that "the boy died in prison," and that to him as next of kin belonged those fair lands of Aquitaine beyond the English Channel. But what the world said, and especially the Pope, who at that time was the all-powerful ruler of all Christian men in matters of right and religion, was, "You murdered him for his lands; but it shall profit you nothing, for not one penny of his wealth shall come to you. Another man shall be the heir." And it was so. This made John very angry, but that did not give him the money for which he had so deeply sinned. We in our day wonder that he himself was not put in prison and killed in punishment for the deed. But kings had great powers in those days. They could condemn a man to death if they would; if it was not done too often, the rest of the world felt to make sure that more heads were not loose on their shoulders, and were too grateful to find them safe to murmur about the fate of other heads, lest a worse thing befall. Perhaps, when things became _too_ bad, some revengeful man who had been deeply injured would try to meet evil with evil by murdering the king, or by getting up a war against him. In either case, many innocent men had to suffer from the evils that grew out of it.