at Calais, Gravelines, and Wissant; and Louis, accompanied by a considerable force, embarked. The squadrons were dispersed by a strong north-easter, and the ship in which Louis crossed anchored alone off Stonar, in Thanet. But it did not matter. There was no one to take advantage of the scattering of the invasion flotilla; there was not even a loyal galley-captain to seize Louis, and to send his head to the king. John, indeed, went to Dover, but, finding it impossible to raise an army, he retired to Winchester. Louis, perfectly undisturbed, assembled his fleet again, and landed, without resistance, at Sandwich. All Kent, except Dover Castle, which was defended by Hubert de Burgh,[1] was easily subdued by Louis, who advanced and joined the barons in London.[2] The whole kingdom would have quickly fallen to him, but that the situation was opportunely changed in an instant by the death of John,[3] on October 19th, and by the patriotic and statesmanlike attitude of Richard, Earl of Pembroke, who, John's son and successor being but a child, became Guardian of the Kingdom, or Regent.
It may be noted, that the summoning by the barons of a French prince to assume the crown of England indicates that, up to the end of the reign of King John, there can scarcely have existed in the country much of the deeply rooted anti-French feeling, which, for many centuries afterwards, played so important a part in the relations between the two Powers. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, the adoption of such a policy as that which was pursued by the barons of the beginning of the thirteenth century would have sufficed to array nearly all England against it from the first. The rise and growth of the traditional anti-French sentiment may be traced back to the time of the invasion of 1216. There is no convincing evidence that the conduct of the
- ↑ Hubert de Burgh was a nephew of William FitzAdeline, steward of Henry II. After serving Richard I., he was made by John Seneschal of Poitou, and later Justiciary of England. His defence of Dover Castle, and his defeat of the French off the South Foreland in 1217, entitle him to high rank as a commander. On the death of Pembroke he became Regent; and in 1221 he married, as his fourth wife, Margaret, sister of the King of Scots, and was created Earl of Kent. In spite of his services, the influence of foreign interests procured his disgrace and imprisonment; and, although he was restored to favour in 1234, he passed much of the rest of his life in retirement. He died at Bansted, Surrey, in May, 1243.
- ↑ Coggeshall, 881; Matt. Paris, 195; Rog. of Wend., 367.
- ↑ On July 23rd, 1217, the Sheriff of Devonshire was ordered to find ships, at the king's cost, to carry to France Isabella, widow of King John.—Close Rolls, 315.
