Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. IIENRY, ELDEST SON OF JOHN. England has just been delivered from two impending evils. First, from an ecclesiastical despotism, whose aim all along has been to render the civil power subordinate to the spiritual authority; and secondly, from the degradation of a foreign yoke, which would have become more unbearable than the follies and the wickedness of John. The deliverance is to be ascribed to the rising genius and force of the people. The barons would never have obtained the charter, but for the soul and determination of the classes below them. And when neither king nor barons could decide the nation’s destiny?when these two powers came to open war, the people became the saviour of their country. Nor was it any mean part which they acted when the nobles madly dreamed of making over the kingdom to Louis, the son of the French monarch. At the very moment when barons and knights were nocking to his standard, the people stood aloof, and under the impulse of a fresh and still higher inspiration did they lift their voice and their arms against any such enslaving and dsgrading connection. A civil war took place. The nobles blindly put themselves in the attitude of hostility to the very men through whom the charter of their liberties had been secured, but the brave and true hearted archers of England made their shafts fly like the arrows of death, till they drove the French from our shores and victory sat upon their helmet. But we are touching on the events of another reign. SECTION I.?THE ACCESSION OF HENRY III. This prince, the eldest son of John, by Isabella of Angouleme, was led through the solemnities of a coronation at Gloucester, in the tenth year of his age. His youth and inexperience rendered it expedient that the care of his person and the government o…