My first endeavors were to make myself head of
my company, which Richard I had just published, and soon afterwards I
procured myself to be chosen alderman.

"Opposition is the only state which can give a subject an opportunity of
exerting the disposition I was possessed of. Accordingly, king John
was no sooner seated on his throne than I began to oppose his measures,
whether right or wrong. It is true that monarch had faults enow. He was
so abandoned to lust and luxury, that he addicted himself to the most
extravagant excesses in both, while he indolently suffered the king of
France to rob him of almost all his foreign dominions: my opposition
therefore was justifiable enough, and if my motive from within had been
as good as the occasion from without I should have had little to excuse;
but, in truth, I sought nothing but my own preferment, by making myself
formidable to the king, and then selling to him the interest of that
party by whose means I had become so. Indeed, had the public good been
my care, however zealously I might have opposed the beginning of his
reign, I should not have scrupled to lend him my utmost assistance in
this struggle between him and pope Innocent the third, in which he was
so manifestly in the right; nor have suffered the insolence of that
pope, and the power of the king of France, to have compelled him in
the issue, basely to resign his crown into the hands of the former, and
receive it again as a vassal; by means of which acknowledgment the pope
afterwards claimed this kingdom as a tributary fief to be held of
the papal chair; a claim which occasioned great uneasiness to many
subsequent princes, and brought numberless calamities on the nation.

"As the king had, among other concessions, stipulated to pay an
immediate sum of money to Pandulph, which he had great difficulty to
raise, it was absolutely necessary for him to apply to the city, where
my interest and popularity were so high that he had no hopes without my
assistance. As I knew this, I took care to sell myself and country
as high as possible. The terms I demanded, therefore, were a place, a
pension, and a knighthood. All those were immediately consented to. I
was forthwith knighted, and promised the other two.

"I now mounted the hustings, and, without any regard to decency or
modesty, made as emphatical a speech in favor of the king as before
I had done against him. In this speech I justified all those measures
which I had before