In spite of the fierce opposition of the barons, who rebelled in 1173,
and of disputes with his fractious children which embittered his
closing years, Henry II had laid the foundations of national monarchy.
But in completing one part of the Norman Conquest, namely, the
establishment of royal supremacy over disorderly feudatories, he had
modified the other, the arbitrary rule of the barons over the subject
people. William had only conquered the people by the help of his
barons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower orders
and of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons to
alienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if the
first condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the second
was the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicable
defect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficient
despotism, and is allowed to create it, to deal with evils that yield
to no milder treatment. His successors proceed to use that machinery
for personal ends. Richard I gilded his abuse of his father's power
with the glory of his crusade, and the end afforded a plausible
justification for the means he adopted. But John cloaked his tyranny
with no specious pretences; his greed and violence spared no section of
the community, and forced all into a coalition which extorted from him
the Great Charter.

This famous document betrays its composite authorship; no section of
the community entered the coalition without something to gain, and none
went entirely unrewarded from Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spelman
introduced feudalism into England, his contemporary, Chief-justice
Coke, invented Magna Carta: and in view of the profound misconceptions
which prevail with regard to its character, it is necessary to insist
rather upon its reactionary than upon its reforming elements. The great