“This accident was extremely lucky, as it gave my quarrel with the king a popular colour, and so ingratiated me with the people, that when I set up my standard, which I soon after did, they readily and chearfully listed under my banners and embraced my cause, which I persuaded them was their own; for that it was to protect them against foreigners that I had drawn my sword. The word foreigners with an Englishman hath a kind of magical effect, they having the utmost hatred and aversion to them, arising from the cruelties they suffered from the Danes and some other foreign nations. No wonder therefore they espoused my cause in a quarrel which had such a beginning.
“But what may be somewhat more remarkable is, that when I afterwards returned to England from banishment, and was at the head of an army of the Flemish, who were preparing to plunder the city of London, I still persisted that I was come to defend the English from the danger of foreigners, and gained their credit. Indeed, there is no lie so gross but it may be imposed on the people by those whom they esteem their patrons and defenders.
“The king saved his city by being reconciled to me, and taking again my daughter, whom he had put away from him; and thus, having frightened the king into what concessions I thought proper, I dismissed my army and fleet, with which I intended, could I not have succeeded otherwise, to have sacked the city of London and ravaged the whole country.
“I was no sooner re-established in the king’s favour, or, what was as well for me, the appearance of it, than I fell violently on the archbishop. He had of himself retired to his monastery in Normandy; but that did not content me: I had him formally banished, the see declared vacant, and then filled up by another.
“I enjoyed my grandeur a very short time after my restoration to it; for the king, hating and fearing me to a very great degree, and finding no means of openly destroying me, at last effected his purpose by poison, and then spread abroad a ridiculous story, of my wishing the next morsel might choak me if I had had any hand in the death of Alfred; and, accordingly, that the next morsel, by a divine judgment, stuck in my throat and performed that office.
“This of a statesman was one of my worst stages in the other world. It is a post subjected daily to the greatest danger and inquietude, and attended with little pleasure and less ease. In a word, it is a pill which, was it not gilded over by ambition, would appear nauseous and detestable in the eye of every one; and perhaps that is one reason why Minos so greatly compassionates the case of those who swallow it: for that just judge told me he always acquitted a prime minister who could produce one single good action in his whole life, let him have committed ever so many crimes. Indeed, I understood him a little too largely, and was stepping towards the gate; but he pulled me by the sleeve, and, telling me no prime minister ever entered there, bid me go back again; saying, he thought I had sufficient reason to rejoice in my escaping the bottomless pit, which half my crimes committed in any other capacity would have entitled me to.”
Chapter xxi.
Julian’s adventures in the post of a soldier.