as still adhered to the Crown. The King, marching through the whole
extent of England, from Dover to Berwick, laid the provinces waste on
each side of him, and considered every estate which was not his
immediate property as entirely hostile and the object of military
execution. The nobility of the North in particular, who had shown
greatest violence in the recovery of their liberties, and who, acting
in a separate body, had expressed their discontent even at the
concessions made by the Great Charter, as they could expect no mercy,
fled before him with their wives and families, and purchased the
friendship of Alexander, the young King of Scots, by doing homage to
him.

The barons, reduced to this desperate extremity, and menaced with the
total loss of their liberties, their properties, and their lives,
employed a remedy no less desperate; and making applications to the
court of France, they offered to acknowledge Louis, the eldest son of
Philip, for their sovereign, on condition that he would afford them
protection from the violence of their enraged Prince. Though the sense
of the common rights of mankind, the only rights that are entirely
indefeasible, might have justified them in the deposition of their
King, they declined insisting before Philip on a pretension which is
commonly so disagreeable to sovereigns and which sounds harshly in
their royal ears. They affirmed that John was incapable of succeeding
to the crown, by reason of the attainder passed upon him during his
brother's reign, though that attainder had been reversed, and Richard
had even, by his last will, declared him his successor. They pretended
that he was already legally deposed by sentence of the peers of
France, on account of the murder of his nephew, though that sentence
could not possibly regard anything but his transmarine dominions,
which alone he held in vassalage to that crown. On more plausible