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was inclined to break his word; but the members of the diet, who had sworn to keep the engagement, opposed any want of faith, and, using all their power, had the captive released towards the end of January, 1194. Richard could not direct his steps either towards France or Normandy, which was then invaded by the French; the safest way for him was to embark in one of the German ports, and sail straight to England; but it was then the most stormy season; he was obliged to wait more than a month at Anvers, and during that time the emperor's avarice was again tempted; the hope of doubling his profits overcame the fear of displeasing chiefs less powerful than himself, and whom, in his character of paramount lord, he had a thousand means of silencing. He therefore resolved to seize a second time the prisoner whom he had allowed to depart; but the secret of this treachery was not sufficiently well kept, and one of the hostages left in the emperor's hands, found means to warn the king. Richard immediately embarked in the galliot of a Norman trader, named Alain Tranchemer, and, having thus escaped the men-at-arms sent to take him, landed safely at the port of Sandwich.

Death and Character of Richard.

BURKE.

Richard, on his coming to England, found all things in the utmost confusion; but before he attempted to apply a remedy to so obstinate a disease, in order to wipe off any degrading ideas which might have arisen from his imprisonment, he caused himself to be new-crowned. Then, holding his Court of Great Council at Southampton, he made some useful regulations in the distribution of justice. He called some great offenders to a strict account. Count John deserved no favour, and he lay entirely at the king's mercy, who, by an unparalleled generosity, pardoned him his multiplied offences, only depriving him of the

power of which he had made so bad a use. Generosity did not oblige him to forget the hostilities of the king of France. But to prosecute the war money was wanting, which new taxes and new devices supplied with difficulty and with dishonour. All the mean expedients of a necessitous government were exercised on this occasion. All the grants which were made on the king's departure for the Holy Land, were revoked on the weak pretence that the purchasers had sufficient recompense whilst they held them. Necessity seemed to justify this as well as many other measures that were equally violent. The whole revenue of the crown had been dissipated; means to support its dignity must be found, and these means were the least unpopular, as most men saw with pleasure the wants of government fall upon those who had started into a sudden greatness by taking advantage of those

wants.

Richard renewed the war with Philip, which continued, though frequently interrupted by truces, for about five years. In this war Richard signalised himself by that irresistible courage which on all occasions gave him a superiority over the king of France. But his revenues were exhausted; a great scarcity reigned both in France and England; and the irregular manner of carrying on war in those days prevented a clear decision in favour of either party. Richard had still an eye upon the Holy Land, which he considered as the only province worthy of his arms; and this continually diverted his thoughts from the steady prosecution of the war in France. The Crusade, like a superior orb, moved along with all the particular systems of politics at that time, and suspended, accelerated, or put back, all operations, on motives foreign to the things themselves. In this war, it must be remarked, that Richard made a considerable use of the mercenaries who had been so serviceable to Henry the Second; and the king of France, perceiving how much his father Lewis had suffered by a want of that advantage, kept on foot a standing army in constant pay, which none of his predecessors had done before him, and which afterwards for a long time very unaccountably fell into disuse in both kingdoms.

Whilst this war was carried on by intervals and starts, it came to the ears of Richard that a nobleman of Limoges had found on his lands a considerable hidden treasure. The king, necessitous and rapacious to the last degree, and stimulated by the exaggeration and marvellous circumstances which always attend the report of such discoveries, immediately sent to demand the treasure, under pretence of the rights of seigniory. The Limosia, either because he had really discovered nothing, or that he was unwilling to part with so valuable an acquisition, refused to comply with the king's demand, and fortified his castle. Enraged at the disappointment, Richard relinquished the important affairs in which he was engaged, and laid siege to this castle with all the eagerness of a man who has his heart set upon a trifle. In this siege he received a wound from an arrow, and it proved mortal; but in the last, as in all the other acts of his life, something truly noble shone out amidst the rash and irregular motions of his mind. The castle was taken before he died. The man from whom Richard had received the wound was brought before him. Being asked why he levelled his arrow at the king, he answered with an undaunted countenance, "that the king with his own hand had slain his two brothers; that he thanked God who gave him an opportunity to revenge their deaths, even with the certainty of his own." Richard, more touched with the magnanimity of the man, than offended at the injury he had received, or the boldness of the answer, ordered that his life should be spared. He appointed his brother John to the succession; and with these acts ended a life and reign distinguished by a great variety of fortunes in different parts of the world, and crowned with great military glory, but without any accession of power to himself, or prosperity to his people, whom he entirely neglected, and reduced by his imprudence and misfortunes to no small indigence and distress.

In many respects, a striking parallel presents itself between this ancient king of England and Charles XII. of Sweden. They were both inordinately desirous of war, and rather generals than kings. Both were rather fond of glory, than ambitious of empire. Both of them made and deposed sovereigns. They both carried on

their wars at a distance from home. They were both made prisoners by a friend and ally. They were both reduced by an adversary inferior in war, but above them in the arts of rule. After spending their lives in remote adventures, each perished at last near home, in enterprises not suited to the splendour of their former explots. Both died childless; and both, by the neglect of their affairs, and the severity of their government, gave their subjects provocation and encouragement to revive their freedom. In all these respects the two characters were alike; but Richard fell as much short of the Swedish hero in temperance, chastity, and equality of mind, as he exceeded him in wit and eloquence. Some of his sayings are the most spirited that we find in that time; and some of his verses remain which, in a barbarous age, might have passed for poetry.

Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest.

From "Old England."

C. KNIGHT.

The same combination against the power of the Crown which produced the great charter of our liberties, relieved the people from many regal oppressions by a charter of the forests. We cannot look upon an old forest without thinking of the days when men who had been accustomed to the free range of their green woods were mulcted or maimed for transgressing the ordinances of their new hunter-kings. Our poet Cowper put his imagination in the track of following out the customs of the Norman age in his fragment upon Yardley Oak, which was supposed to have existed before the Normans:

"Thou wast a bauble once; a cup and ball,

Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay,
Seeking her food, with ease might have purloin'd

The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down
Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs
And all thine embryo vastness at a gulp.
But fate thy growth decreed; autumnal rains
Beneath thy parent tree mellow'd the soil
Design'd thy cradle; and a skipping deer,
With pointed hoof dibbling the glebe, prepared
The soft receptacle, in which, secure,

Thy rudiments should sleep the winter through."

The severity of the old forest laws of England has become a byword, and no wonder when we know that with the Conqueror a sovereign's paternal care for his subjects was understood to apply to red deer, not to Saxon men; and that accordingly, of the two, the lives of the former alone were esteemed of any particular value. But it was not the severity merely that was, after the Conquest, introduced (whether into the spirit or into the letter of the forest laws is immaterial), but also the vast extent of fresh land then afforested, and to which such laws were for the first time applied, that gave rise to so much opposition and hatred between the Norman conquerors and the Saxon forest inhabitants; and that in particular parts of England infused such continuous vigour into the struggle commenced at the invasion, long after that struggle had ceased elsewhere. The Conqueror is said to have possessed in this country no less than sixty-eight forests, and these even were not enough; so the afforesting process went on reign after reign, till the awful shadow of Magna Charta began to pass more and more frequently before royal eyes, producing first a check, and then a retreat: dis-afforesting then began, and the forest laws gradually underwent a mitigating process. But this was the work of the nobility of England, and occupied the said nobility a long time first to determine upon, and then to carry out the people in the interim could not afford to wait, but took the matter to a certain extent into their own hands; free bands roved the woods, laughing at the king's laws, and killing and eating his deer, and living a life of perfect immunity from punishment, partly through bravery and address, and still more through the impenetrable character of the woods that covered a large portion of the whole country from the Trent to the Tyne. Among

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