often contested with their sovereigns for the spoils of whole nations.
These were birds of prey fighting with an eagle for doves whose blood the
victorious was to suck. Every nation, instead of being governed by one
master, was trampled upon by a hundred tyrants. The priests soon played
a part among them. Before this it had been the fate of the Gauls, the
Germans, and the Britons, to be always governed by their Druids and the
chiefs of their villages, an ancient kind of barons, not so tyrannical as
their successors. These Druids pretended to be mediators between God and
man. They enacted laws, they fulminated their excommunications, and
sentenced to death. The bishops succeeded, by insensible degrees, to
their temporal authority in the Goth and Vandal government. The popes
set themselves at their head, and armed with their briefs, their bulls,
and reinforced by monks, they made even kings tremble, deposed and
assassinated them at pleasure, and employed every artifice to draw into
their own purses moneys from all parts of Europe. The weak Ina, one of
the tyrants of the Saxon Heptarchy in England, was the first monarch who
submitted, in his pilgrimage to Rome, to pay St. Peter's penny
(equivalent very near to a French crown) for every house in his
dominions. The whole island soon followed his example; England became
insensibly one of the Pope's provinces, and the Holy Father used to send
from time to time his legates thither to levy exorbitant taxes. At last
King John delivered up by a public instrument the kingdom of England to
the Pope, who had excommunicated him; but the barons, not finding their
account in this resignation, dethroned the wretched King John and seated
Louis, father to St. Louis, King of France, in his place. However, they
were soon weary of their new monarch, and accordingly obliged him to
return to France.

Whilst that the barons, the bishops, and the popes, all laid waste
England, where all were for ruling the most numerous, the most useful,