Richard the Lion-hearted, it will be remembered, was the great supporter of Otho, the papal claimant of the empire. England at that time was in close alliance with the See of Rome. After the death of Richard his brother John, the youngest son of Henry II., was raised to the vacant throne. According to our present laws of succession his nephew, Arthur, duke of Brittany, the only son and heir of his elder brother, Geoffrey Plantagenet, would have been king. But crowns at this time were as much elective as hereditary.
The whole reign of John—1199-1216—is a history of weakness and violence, of wickedness and degradation, of the most cruel, sensual, and faithless of monarchs. But the hand of the Lord is most manifest in the affairs of England at this time. Never had a viler prince worn a crown; yet God in His mercy, and in His care for England, overruled his many faults for the benefit of the church and the people of England. We speak of course in general terms. But from this reign may be dated England's wholesome dread of popery, and her enthusiasm for civil and religious liberty. Disastrous to the last degree as was the reign of John; humiliating to the king and to the nation; yet the united voice of history affirms that it was then that the foundations were laid of "the English character, the English liberties, and the English greatness; and to this reign, from the attempt to degrade the kingdom to a fief of the Roman See, may be traced the first signs of that independence, that jealousy of the papal usurpations, which led eventually to the Reformation." The overruling hand of God, in His special care of England, has been manifest in all her revolutions ever since. Scarcely any benefit resulted to either Church or State in France from the pope's interference with Philip, excepting that they were made to feel the awfulness of the papal power. But no Magna Charta was signed, no House of Commons arose.
One of John's first and great scandals, reveals in the clearest light the unprincipled character of Innocent's policy. John had been married twelve years to a daughter of the Earl of Gloucester before he came to the throne. After that, aspiring to a royal connection, he sought a dissolution, and the obsequious Archbishop of Bordeaux dissolved the marriage bond. He suddenly became enamored with a lady who was the betrothed bride of the Count de la Mark, carried her off, and was married to her, while his own wife was living. But what will the pope now say about the holy sacrament of matrimony—he whose horror of such connections has been so inexorably displayed in the case of Philip and Agnes? Fast and thick we may expect his thunderbolts to fly at the adulterous king; but no! no censure is uttered from Rome against either the king or the archbishop. He confirms the dissolution of the marriage in the face of God, the church, and the world. Such was the glaring wickedness of "his holiness, his infallibility." But why show such partiality to John? He was the supporter of Otho, and the enemy of the house of Swabia.
But if the pope was quiescent, the world was scandalized. Such an outrage on a great vassal was a violation of the first law of feudalism. The barons of Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, Maine, were eager to avenge the indignity offered to Hugh de la Mark, and from that day they held themselves absolved from their fealty to John. They appealed to Philip, king of France, for redress. Philip Augustus felt his strength, and summoned the English king to answer in his courts of Paris for the wrongs done to the Count de la Mark. John appeared not; this led to a ruinous war, and to the loss of immense territories in France to England. In a few months Philip wrested from John the great inheritance of Rollo—the great Anglo-Norman dukedom, which in the days of his father Henry II. was equal in the extent of its territories, its revenues, its forces, its wealth, to the whole of that over which the French monarch swayed his scepter.