er to this day. But in England
it broke off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomas
may well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrained
and startling and against the instincts of the people. And of what was
meant in the Middle Ages by that very powerful and rather peculiar
thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.

In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is
not merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conqueror
collapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so the
great but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into the
chaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutional
fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the first
time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry's
second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last chapter) stamped
it with something accidental and yet symbolic. It was not that John was
a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture was
much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited
Plantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he
was much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was the
kind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sense
subtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping invented
long afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong.
Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen's time starved men in
dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the heels as a
symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his son
it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized the
power; but there did begin to appear a _case_ for their seizing it, for
contemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in
one of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, as
an estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had
generally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the
Germanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winning
was a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the island
as a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters the
baronial party began to have something like a principle, which is the
backbone of a policy. Much convent