try baffled and affronted in every enterprise.

[* Rymer, vol. i. p. 141.]

In an age when personal valor was regarded as the chief accomplishment,
such conduct as that of John, always disgraceful, must be exposed to
peculiar contempt; and he must thenceforth have expected to rule his
turbulent vassals with a very doubtful authority. But the government
exercised by the Norman princes had wound up the royal power to so high
a pitch, and so much beyond the usual tenor of the feudal constitutions,
that it still behoved him to be debased by new affronts and disgraces,
ere his barons could entertain the view of conspiring against him in
order to retrench his prerogatives.

The church, which at that time declined not a contest with the most
powerful and most vigorous monarchs, took first advantage of John's
imbecility; and, with the most aggravating circumstances of insolence
and scorn, fixed her yoke upon him.

{1207.} The papal chair was then filled by Innocent III., who, having
attained that dignity at the age of thirty-seven years, and being
endowed with a lofty and enterprising genius gave full scope to
his ambition, and attempted, perhaps more openly than any of his
predecessors, to convert that superiority which was yielded him by all
the European princes, into a real dominion over them. The hierarchy,
protected by the Roman pontiff, had already carried to an enormous
height its usurpations upon the civil power; but in order to extend them
farther, and render them useful to the court of Rome, it was necessary
to reduce the ecclesiastics themselves under an absolute monarchy, and
to make them entirely dependent on their spiritual leader. For this
purpose, Innocent first attempted to impose taxes at pleasure upon the
clergy; and in the first year of this century, taking advantage of the
popular frenzy for crusades, he sent collectors over all Europe, who
levied by his authority the fortieth of all ecclesiastical revenues for
the relief of the Holy Land, and received the voluntary contributions
of the laity to a like amount.[*] The same year, Hubert, archbishop of
Canterbury, attempted another innovation, favorable to ecclesiastical
and papal power: in the king's absence, he summoned, by his legantine
authority, a synod of all the English clergy, contrary to the inhibition
of Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, the chief justiciary; and no proper censure was
ever passed on this encroachment, the first of the kind, upon the royal