John was present when Richard expired at Chaluz, 6th of April 1199, and before visiting England he hastened to secure the submission of the various continental territories of the crown. Upon repairing to Anjou and the other original possessions of the Plaotagenets, he found the prevalent feeling strongly in favour of his nephew Arthur ; but both in Normandy, and also in Poitou and Aquitaine, where his mother's influence was predominant, his pretensions were readily acknowledged. Meanwhile in England, by tho activity of the justiciary Fitz-Peter, a unanimous resolution to receive him as king had been obtained from a great council held at Northampton. Soon after this John mado his appearance in person ; and he W39 solemnly crowned at Westminster, on the 26th of May, tho festival of the Ascension. The years of his reign are reckoned from Ascension-day to Ascension-day.
Philip Augustus having, for his own purposes, espoused the cause of Arthur, whom he had got into his possession, soon overran both Normandy and Anjou; but in May 1200, John purchased a peace by a heavy pecuniary payment and the cession of several towns and other territories to the French king, who on his part relinquished such of his conquests as were not thus permanently, made over to him, and also compelled Arthur to do homage to his undo for Brittany. The next year John, having become tired of his wife, or never having been attached to her, procured a divorce on the plea of consanguinity, and married Isabella, daughter of Aymar count of Angouleme, who had already been betrothed, and even privately espoused, to Hugh count of La Marche. The complaints of the count in consequence of this injury gave Philip such a pretence as he wanted for renewing the war: he immediately took Arthur again by the hand, and putting him forward as the legitimate lord of the old fiefs of the Plantagenets, rapidly obtained possession of all the most important towns and places of strength in those countries. Arthur however, while he wax besieging the castle of Mirabean in Poitou, which was held by John's mother, Queen Eleanor, was taken captive by his uncle (let of August 1202): the unfortunate young prince was immediately consigned to close custody in the castle of Falaiso, from which he was soon after removed to Rouen, and having never been seen more, was universally believed to have been there put out of existence by his uncles order. Indeed, it was generally said that he had been murdered by John's own hand, an imputation which the latter never took the trouble to deny. Arthur's sister Eleanor, to whom devolved his claim to the inheritance of the English crown, was carried over to England, and confined in the castle of Bristol, in which prison she remained till her death in 1241. Notwithstanding the capture of Arthur however the war in France went wholly against John; and before the end of the year 1204 Normandy, Anjou, Maine, and Touraino were rent from the crown of England, and re-annexed to that of France, from which they had been separated for nearly three centuries. Two years after wards John made an unsucoeeeful attempt to recover what he had thus lost.
While still at war with France, John became involved in another contest at home, which was eventually attended with still more fatal resulas. By insisting upon the right of the crown to nominate the
Archbishop of Canterbury, on that see becoming vacant in July 1205, he drew upon himself the formidable hostility of the whole body of the national clergy, and also of the able and imperious pontiff who then presided over the Western Church. (Irixocza-r 1111 John paid little regard either to the interdict under which his kingdom was laid in 1203, or to the bull of excommunication issued against him the following year, or even to that deposing him and absolving his subjects from their allegiance, which Innocent launched at him in 1212. In the midst of all this ecclesiastical thunder he chastised the Scottish king William, compelling him, in 1209, to avert further hostilities by the payment of a huge sum of money, and the delivery of his two daughters, with other hostages, as pledges for his observance of his engagements; he pawed over to Ireland in 1210, and reduced a rebellion of the Englith chieftains there ; and in 1212 he marched into Wales, and compelled Llewellyn, the prince of that country, to make his submission. In the last-mentioned year he also pnt down a confederacy of certain of his barons, which had been formed with the object of seizing his person.
At last however Innocent had recourse to more effective arms than his apostolic artillery. At the instigation of the pope, Philip Augustus prepared to invade England; and though John at first attempted to meet this threatening danger with some by conducting au army to France in April 1213, he aeon returned homo without having done anything ; and in the despair produced by the universal hatred in which he found himself to be held by his subjects, whom his lawless and oppressive government had long alienated and disgusted, he con sented, at Dover, on the 13th of May 1213, in an interview with Pandulf, the Papal legate, to submit to all the demands of the Holy See, of which the admission of the pope's nominee, Stephen de Langton, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, was the first. Two days after, ho made over to the pope the kingdoms of England and Ireland, to be hold of him and of the Roman Church in fee, and took to his holiness the ordinary oath taken by vassals to their lords. It was now agreed that there should be an oblivion of the past on both sides, that the bull of excommunication should be revoked by the pope, and that of John's disaffected English subjects those who were in confinement should be liberated, and those who had fled or been banished beyond seas should be permitted to return home. Philip, whose ambition was mortified by this pacification, would have persisted in his project of invasion, even m opposition to the express commands of the pope, but he was compelled to disband his army by the result of a battle fought in June between the English and French fleets, in the harbour of Damme, the first great victory in the naval annals of England, in which 300 of his vessels were captured, above 100 burned, and all his military stores and provisions, as well as his means of conveyance, taken from him.