ir
armies. The King was, from the first, master of the field, and
immediately laid siege to the castle of Rochester, which was
obstinately defended by William de Albiney, at the head of a hundred
and forty knights with their retainers, but was at last reduced by
famine. John, irritated with the resistance, intended to have hanged
the governor and all the garrison; but on the representation of
William de Mauleon, who suggested to him the danger of reprisals, he
was content to sacrifice, in this barbarous manner, the inferior
prisoners only. The captivity of William de Albiney, the best officer
among the confederated barons, was an irreparable loss to their cause;
and no regular opposition was thenceforth made to the progress of the
royal arms. The ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel
and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants,
manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the
face of the kingdom.

Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages, and castles reduced
to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures
exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed
treasures, and reprisals no less barbarous, committed by the barons
and their partisans on the royal demesnes, and on the estates of such
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 entir