ple taught
others to despise it. The king, thus deserted, and now only solicitous
for his personal safety, rambled, or rather fled, from place to place,
at the head of a small party. He was in great danger in passing a marsh
in Norfolk, in which he lost the greatest part of his baggage, and his
most valuable effects. With difficulty he escaped to the monastery of
Swineshead, where, violently agitated by grief and disappointments, his
late fatigue and the use of an improper diet threw him into a fever, of
which he died in a few days at Newark, not without suspicion of poison,
after a reign, or rather a struggle to reign, for eighteen years, the
most turbulent and calamitous both to king and people of any that are
recorded in the English history.

It may not be improper to pause here for a few moments, and to consider
a little more minutely the causes which had produced the grand
revolution in favor of liberty by which this reign was distinguished,
and to draw all the circumstances which led to this remarkable event
into a single point of view. Since the death of Edward the Confessor
only two princes succeeded to the crown upon undisputed titles. William
the Conqueror established his by force of arms. His successors were
obliged to court the people by yielding many of the possessions and many
of the prerogatives of the crown; but they supported a dubious title by
a vigorous administration, and recovered by their policy, in the course
of their reign, what the necessity of their affairs obliged them to
relinquish for the establishment of their power. Thus was the nation
kept continually fluctuating between freedom and servitude. But the
principles of freedom were predominant, though the thing itself was not
yet fully formed. The continual struggle of the clergy for the
ecclesiastical liberties laid open at the same time the natural claims
of the people; and the clergy were obliged to show some respect for
those claims, in order to add strength to their own party. The
concessions which Henry the Second made to the ecclesiastics on the
death of Becket, which were afterwards confirmed by Richard the First,
gave a grievous blow to the authority of the crown; as thereby an order
of so much power and influence triumphed over it in many essential
points. The latter of these princes brought it very low by the whole
tenor of his conduct. Always abroad, the royal authority was felt in its
full vigor, without being supported by the di