baggage, and regalia. The affliction
for this disaster, and vexation from the distracted state of his
affairs, increased the sickness under which he then laboured; and
though he reached the castle of Newark, he was obliged to halt there,
[MN 17th Oct. Death,] and his distemper soon after put an end to his
life, in the forty-ninth year of his age, and eighteenth of his reign;
and freed the nation from the dangers to which it was equally exposed
by his success or by his misfortunes.
[FN [a] M. Paris, p. 195. [b] M. Paris, p. 198. Chron. Dunst. vol.
i. p. 75, 76. [c] W. Heming. p. 559. [d] M. Paris, p. 199. M. West.
p. 277. [e] Chron. Dunst. vol. i. p. 76.]

[MN and character of the king.] The character of this prince is
nothing but a complication of vices, equally mean and odious; ruinous
to himself, and destructive to his people. Cowardice, inactivity,
folly, levity, licentiousness, ingratitude, treachery, tyranny, and
cruelty; all these qualities appear too evidently in the several
incidents of his life, to give us room to suspect that the
disagreeable picture has been anywise overcharged by the prejudices of
the ancient historians. It is hard to say whether his conduct to his
father, his brother, his nephew, or his subjects, was most culpable;
or whether his crimes, in these respects, were not even exceeded by
the baseness which appeared in his transactions with the King of
France, the pope, and the barons. His European dominions, when they
devolved to him by the death of his brother, were more extensive than
have ever, since his time, been ruled by an English monarch; but he
first lost, by his misconduct, the flourishing provinces in France,
the ancient patrimony of his family: he subjected his kingdom to a
shameful vassalage under the see of Rome: he saw the prerogatives of
his crown diminished by law, and still more reduced by faction: and he
died at last, when in danger of being totally expelled by a foreign
power, and of either ending his life miserably in prison, or seeking
shelter, as a fugitive, from the pursuit of his enemies.

The prejudices against this prince were so violent, that he was
believed to have sent an embassy to the Miramoulin, or Emperor of
Morocco, and to have offered to change his religion and become
Mahometan, in order to purchase the protection of that monarch. But
though this story is told us, on plausible authority, by Matthew Paris
[f], it is in itself utterly improbable; e