Ramilies with patriotic regret
and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth generation
were not Englishmen: most of them were born in France: they spent the
greater part of their lives in France: their ordinary speech was French:
almost every high office in their gift was filled by a Frenchman: every
acquisition which they made on the Continent estranged them more and
more from the population of our island. One of the ablest among them
indeed attempted to win the hearts of his English subjects by espousing
an English princess. But, by many of his barons, this marriage was
regarded as a marriage between a white planter and a quadroon girl would
now be regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the honourable
surname of Beauclerc; but, in his own time, his own countrymen
called him by a Saxon nickname, in contemptuous allusion to his Saxon
connection.

Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting
all France under their government, it is probable that England would
never have had an independent existence. Her princes, her lords, her
prelates, would have been men differing in race and language from
the artisans and the tillers of the earth. The revenues of her great
proprietors would have been spent in festivities and diversions on the
banks of the Seine. The noble language of Milton and Burke would have
remained a rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed grammar, or a
fixed orthography, and would have been contemptuously abandoned to the
use of boors. No man of English extraction would have risen to eminence,
except by becoming in speech and habits a Frenchman.

England owes her escape from such calamities to an event which her
historians have generally represented as disastrous. Her interest was so
directly opposed to the interests of her rulers that she had no hope but
in their errors and misfortunes. The talents and even the virtues of her
first six French Kings were a curse to her. The follies and vices of the
seventh were her salvation. Had John inherited the great qualities of
his father, of Henry Beauclerc, or of the Conqueror, nay, had he even
possessed the martial courage of Stephen or of Richard, and had the King
of France at the same time been as incapable as all the other successors
of Hugh Capet had been, the House of Plantagenet must have risen to
unrivalled ascendancy in Europe. But, just at this conjuncture, France,
for the first time since the death of