Henry the Second by the fair Rosamond;* and this nobleman is always included by Shakspeare among the discontented peers, but the Chronicles+ mention him as faithful to his half-brother, until the eve of the arrival of Lewis in England.

The Earl of Pembroke, who is coupled with Salisbury in this opposition to the King, appears also, at least up to the period of Magna Charta, on the side of John.§ Hubert de Burgh is correctly assigned by the poet to the King's side. Holinshed calls him "a right valiant man of war, as was anywhere to be seen,"|| but he was not yet ennobled ; and Shakspeare is perhaps right in representing him as hated by the nobles, and treated as an upstart. He makes him say, when charged by Salisbury with the murder,

"By Heaven, I think my sword's as sharp as yours. I would not have you, lord, forget yourself,

Lest I, by marking of your rage, forget

Your worth, your greatness, and nobility."

*He married the daughter of William d'Evreux, Earl of Salisbury, and was created Earl by John. The family was soon extinct in the male line. I do not know whether there is any representative through females.—Banks' Ext. Peerage, iii. 645 and 440.

The dignity of the peerage is asserted by Bigot.

Out, dunghill! darest thou brave a nobleman?

Hub. Not for my life, but yet I dare defend
My innocent life against an emperor."

We now regard Hubert de Burgh as the very essence of nobility; but, although at a later period of his life he was an eminent member of the aristocracy, he was, I believe, the artificer of his own fortune, and had not at this time attained the dignity of the peerage, though he had held important offices under the King.

*

The nobleman who is thus made to reproach Hubert de Burgh with his base descent is Roger Bigot, Earl of Norfolk,† who certainly was one of the barons who opposed King John.

If Shakspeare took from the old play the solicitations of the nobles in behalf of Arthur, he has varied its language in a way not unworthy of ob

* According to Dugdale (Bar. i. 693) he was nephew to William Fitz Adelm, a favourite and servant of Henry the Second, and ancestor to the Earls of Clanricarde. He was himself created Earl of Kent by Henry the Third, in the 13th year of his reign; and in that reign, though sometimes in much favour with the king, he was repeatedly charged, both by king and nobles, with crimes of all sorts, political and personal. These occurrences may have been the original foundation for the jealousy and contempt of Hubert, which the play ascribes to the peers.

+ His ancestor came in with the Conqueror, and his father was made Earl by Henry the First.

servation. In the former play Essex* thus addresses the King:

We crave, my lord, to please the Commons with,

The liberty of Lady Constance' son."

Pembroke, whom our poet makes the spokesman, presses the request on the part of himself and his compeers; but, although he refers to "the murmuring lips of discontent," he does not obtrude upon the ears of royalty the plebeian description of the people at large.

Though Shakspeare appears to have incorrectly dated the disaffection of some of the barons, it is true that at this time discontents prevailed among them. The peers were summoned to attend the King at Portsmouth, in order to a fresh expedition into France; but, meeting at Leicester, they resolved that they would not go with him beyond sea, unless he would restore to them their rights.+

It is remarkable that Shakspeare assigns no cause for the revolt of the barons, excepting that for which he had the least authority, the imprisonment and death of Arthur, whom the poet assumes to have been the rightful heir to the crown. torians mention his profligacy, effeminacy, neglect of business, and pecuniary exactions. To these no

His

* Geffry FitzPeter, Earl of Essex. Shakspeare only brings him forward once, in his character of chief justiciary. + Hov. p. 818.

allusion is made by Shakspeare, otherwise than in the following speech of Faulconbridge :

"How I have sped among the clergymen,*
The sum I have collected shall express.
But, as I travelled hither through the land,
I find the people strangely fantasied,
Possess'd with rumours, full of idle dreams,

Not knowing what they fear, but full of fear." Of his exactions from the church, Faulconbridge here speaks boastfully. The complaints of the people, which we are taught to believe well founded,† he treats as "idle dreams."

I have already said, that all the events connected with Arthur and Constance occurred before the quarrel with the Pope about Stephen Langton, the excommunication of John, and the confederacy against him between his barons and the Dauphin.

Shakspeare places the first communication with Lewis immediately after the death of Arthur, involves Salisbury in it, and refers to a meeting of malcontents at St. Edmund's Bury. The next act he opens with the preparations of the King of France to invade England, in conspiracy with the

The old play introduces Philip Faulconbridge compelling the friars to produce their hidden stores; and it is otherwise more full in enumerating the offences of the king.

+ Hol. 287, 317-19, 328.-Matt. Par. 208, 209. See Hume, ii. 78.

discontented barons, and John's surrender of his crown to the Pope, which did not occur until 1213, more than ten years after the death of Arthur.

Shakspeare commences the act with the legate's restoration of the crown, which he is said to have retained in his hands for five days; but he makes no use of the speech published in the Chronicle, as "The saucy speech of Cardinal Pandulph, the Pope's lewd legate, to King John, in the presumptuous Pope's behalf."* The plot now makes a start, from the reconciliation of John with the Pope, to the landing of Lewis the Dauphin in England, of which he claimed the crown in right of his wife, the daughter of John's sister. I would here observe, that, if Shakspeare intended to represent the barons as the protectors of the hereditary succession to the crown, interrupted only by the forfeiture of John, he and they passed over fair Elinor, "the damsel of Bretagne," who succeeded to all the rights of her brother Arthur, and was kept in prison by John, without remonstrance, so far as I know, from English or Bretons.† Lewis landed in 1216. In the interval, the foreign‡ and civil wars * Hol. 306.

+ Of her Breton succession she was deprived by her stepfather, who preferred his own daughter by Constance.

The principal occurrence was the battle of Bouvines, in 1214, wherein John and his allies were defeated.-See Lingard, iii. 40.