barons claimed: and his efforts to detach the clergy
from the league of his opponents utterly failed. The nation was against
the king. He was far indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers
still clung to him, men such as Geoffrey de Lucy, Geoffrey de Furnival,
Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the
administrative school of his father and who, dissent as they might from
John's mere oppression, still looked on the power of the Crown as the one
barrier against feudal anarchy: and beside them stood some of the great
nobles of royal blood, his father's bastard Earl William of Salisbury,
his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and Henry Earl of Cornwall, a
grandson of Henry the First. With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of
Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal the
elder, Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in the rising of the
younger Henry against Henry the Second, and stood by him as he died; he
had shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp and in the outlawry of
John. He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his after-course,
to recall the government to the path of freedom and law, but shrinking
from a strife which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and
looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to
bear upon the king than in forcing them from him by arms.

[Sidenote: John yields]

But cling as such men might to John, they clung to him rather as
mediators than adherents. Their sympathies went with the demands of the
barons when the delay which had been granted was over and the nobles
again gathered in arms at Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their
claims before the King. Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely
despotic idea of his sovereignty which John had formed than the
passionate surprise which breaks out in his reply. "Why do they not ask
for my kingdom?" he cried. "I will never grant such liberties as will
make me a slave!" The imperialist theories of the lawyers of his father's
court had done their work. Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry,
they had told on the more headstrong nature of his sons. Richard and John
both held with Glanvill that the will of the prince was the law of the
land; and to fetter that will by the customs and franchises which were
embodied in the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of
his rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of his
peop