r faithful report of the court and character
of Honorius must have tended to dissolve the bonds of allegiance, and
to exasperate the seditious temper of the British army. The spirit of
revolt, which had formerly disturbed the age of Gallienus, was revived
by the capricious violence of the soldiers; and the unfortunate, perhaps
the ambitious, candidates, who were the objects of their choice, were
the instruments, and at length the victims, of their passion. [95]
Marcus was the first whom they placed on the throne, as the lawful
emperor of Britain and of the West. They violated, by the hasty murder
of Marcus, the oath of fidelity which they had imposed on themselves;
and their disapprobation of his manners may seem to inscribe an
honorable epitaph on his tomb. Gratian was the next whom they adorned
with the diadem and the purple; and, at the end of four months, Gratian
experienced the fate of his predecessor. The memory of the great
Constantine, whom the British legions had given to the church and to
the empire, suggested the singular motive of their third choice. They
discovered in the ranks a private soldier of the name of Constantine,
and their impetuous levity had already seated him on the throne, before
they perceived his incapacity to sustain the weight of that glorious
appellation. [96] Yet the authority of Constantine was less precarious,
and his government was more successful, than the transient reigns of
Marcus and of Gratian. The danger of leaving his inactive troops in
those camps, which had been twice polluted with blood and sedition,
urged him to attempt the reduction of the Western provinces. He landed
at Boulogne with an inconsiderable force; and after he had reposed
himself some days, he summoned the cities of Gaul, which had escaped
the yoke of the Barbarians, to acknowledge their lawful sovereign.
They obeyed the summons without reluctance. The neglect of the court
of Ravenna had absolved a deserted people from the duty of allegiance;
their actual distress encouraged them to accept any circumstances of
change, without apprehension, and, perhaps, with some degree of hope;
and they might flatter themselves, that the troops, the authority, and
even the name of a Roman emperor, who fixed his residence in Gaul, would
protect the unhappy country from the rage of the Barbarians. The first
successes of Constantine against the detached parties of the Germans,
were magnified by the voice of adulation into splendid