England and of the English race
one with their own. Thus the two peoples became more and more united,
until finally all differences ceased.

2. In demanding and obtainign the Great Charter, the Church and the
nobility made common cause with all classes of the people. That
document represents the victory of the entire nation. We shall see
that the next eighty years will be mainly taken up with the efforts of
the nation to hold fast to what it had gained.

Henry III--1216-1272

204. Accession and Character.

John's eldest son, Henry, was crowned at the age of nine. During his
long and feeble reign of fifty-six years England's motto might well
have been the warning words of Scripture, "Woe to thee, O land, when
thy king is a child!" since a child he remained to the last; for if
John's heart was of millstone, Henry's was of wax.

Dante in one of his poems, written perhaps not long after Henry's
death, represents him as he sees him in imagination just on the
borderland of purgatory. The King is not in suffering, for as he has
done no particular good, so he has done no great harm. He appears "as
a man of simple life, spending his time singing psalms in a narrow
valley."

That shows one side of his negative character; the other was his love
of extravagance, vain display, and instability of purpose. Much of
the time he drifted about like a ship without compass or rudder.

205. Reissue of the Great Charter.

Louis, the French prince who had come to England in John's reign as an
armed claimant to the throne (S201), finding that both the barons and
the Church preferred an English to a foreign king, now retired.
During his minority Henry's guardians twice reissued the Great Charter
(S199): first, with the omission of the article which reserved the
power of taxation to the National Council (S199, No. 3); and,
secondly, with an addition declaring that no man should lose life or
limb for hunting in the royal forests (S119).

On the last occasion the Council granted the King in return a
fifteenth of their movable or personal property. This tax reached a
large class of people, like merchants in towns, who were not
landholders. On this account it had a decided influence in making
them desire to have a voice in the National Council, or Parliament, as
it began to be called in this reign (1246). It thus helped, as we
shall see later on, to prepare for a very important change in that
body.[1]

[1] The first tax on mo