SPARK XI.
HOW THE STAR WAS PRESENT AT THE GREAT GIFT OF THE BARONS.
If you think about it for a moment you will see that we cannot stop to tell of all the wonderful things which the Iron Star saw in its travels, nor can we talk of an event for every year. We must do as sometimes you see the swallows do when they go skimming across a lake, not stopping at every wave, yet now and then making a little splash as a beakful of water is scooped up, or perhaps a floating fly. And possibly you are wondering just why we took that last little dip of ours into the Crusades; but there was a reason.
You will remember that one of the first things that our Star did was to travel, and the boy and girl of that day travelled with it, thus seeing things which they never would have seen had they stayed at home. So now, the Crusades were the cause of many a young Englishman's starting off for a new land, and such of them as came back brought with them new ideas and memories of many strange bits of knowledge to talk about in the long evenings. To a land of wool and leather they brought back silks and other luxuries, and they had discovered that there were good things to eat in the world besides beef and mutton or wild venison; and the dignified manners and stately speech of the Arab chiefs, whom they met in moments of truce, had their effect as models in spite of race hatred. These were not bad matters for England to know about.
Unfortunately, in such a time the best and bravest men are apt to be among the first to go, while those who stay at home are more likely to be of the less worthy. Prince John, who stayed at home, so proved himself. First, when King Richard was away fighting, and his mother, Queen Eleanor, was regent—that is to say, was ruling the land for him until he returned—John lived in England like a prince, and a very bad prince at that. He ran in debt, he lived fast, and by his example he set such a wicked fashion for his friends to imitate that, outside of his set, no one could live and be safe and happy, the prince acting very much as though he were already king. When it was reported that Richard was a prisoner, instead of planning how to help him, John said to himself,
"Hurrah! now I will be king for myself, not king for my brother!" and plotted to do evil with his new power. In "Ivanhoe" it is stated that he even tried to have his brother killed when at last he reached home from his prison beyond the seas. It is very likely, as you will see from what did happen later.
A large part of what is now France in those days still was under English rule; or, more correctly, England was ruled by the king of that part of France and by the warriors who had come from there. Richard and John, both Frenchmen by descent, had a young nephew named Arthur, who ruled over Normandy, Aquitaine, Bretagne and other French land, and this land John had long desired to add to his own private farm. One day Richard was killed while attacking a rebellious castle, and John at once said to himself,
"Now is my chance!"
He promptly made a prisoner of boy Arthur, and shut him up in a great tower. Very piteous tales are told of what happened next. Some say that John ordered a hardhearted servant to burn out Arthur's beautiful blue eyes with a hot iron. What John himself said was that "the boy died in prison," and that to him as next of kin belonged those fair lands of Aquitaine beyond the English Channel.
But what the world said, and especially the Pope, who at that time was the all-powerful ruler of all Christian men in matters of right and religion, was,
"You murdered him for his lands; but it shall profit you nothing, for not one penny of his wealth shall come to you. Another man shall be the heir." And it was so.
This made John very angry, but that did not give him the money for which he had so deeply sinned. We in our day wonder that he himself was not put in prison and killed in punishment for the deed. But kings had great powers in those days. They could condemn a man to death if they would; if it was not done too often, the rest of the world felt to make sure that more heads were not loose on their shoulders, and were too grateful to find them safe to murmur about the fate of other heads, lest a worse thing befall.
Perhaps, when things became too bad, some revengeful man who had been deeply injured would try to meet evil with evil by murdering the king, or by getting up a war against him. In either case, many innocent men had to suffer from the evils that grew out of it.
But one day a better way was found. Louis of Daneshold was now a grave, broadshouldered, powerful man. The Crusades had knit together the knights and barons of England into a close brotherhood, and for the king to harm one was likely to arouse the wrath of all. The young men who had faced the Saracens and fought shoulder to shoulder in Palestine were now in England the men of mark, whose words had to be listened to and heeded by all who would keep out of trouble. Hotheaded John was not one to put a check on his tongue when it would be wise to do so, and hardly was Richard buried when John found himself at odds with Louis and his comrades. They would not submit to his evil doings as king. They would not permit him to take for his own use the lands, cattle, money which they had earned by hard fighting. And finally, when he had a war of his own on his hands in Flanders, fighting French nobles, the English lords flatly refused to follow him across the water, since they had neither love for him as a king nor confidence in him as a leader; and as to the war itself it was king against baron, and they sided with the baron. As a consequence, John came back to England again, well beaten; and he did not love those barons!
For a time after his return he tried to smooth things over and bring back the old way of kingly rule once more. But those stern-eyed men, clad in steel, had tasted freedom. They knew their own strength now. Was it likely that Louis of Daneshold, with the blood of Norse ancestors in his veins, and those Crusader comrades of his, every whit as sturdy fighters, would hold in great respect a tricky king, a murderer of little boys, a man who could not lead to victory in his own battle? No! a thousand times no! And iron clanged on iron when word from the King was brought to the nobles as they camped at London. Down came the mailed hand of many a knight with a resounding blow.
"No compromise! no treaty, save on our own terms!" was their warcry, and what those terms were, John Lackland of England was soon to know. One thousand two hundred and fifteen was the year; twenty-four years after Richard's last Crusade, and his death. The world had been moving fast meanwhile. Freedom was thought more of. The younger men had grown up to be great captains in their turn; and in this year they did a deed which was far reaching, for we feel the effects of it to this day.
Helmeted, and sword in hand, with a host of stalwart men-at-arms at their back, they called on John at Runnymede. It was not a friendly call. There was too much iron present for that. Iron glove meant iron hand that day, and John Lackland knew it. Sternly those assembled barons told him that the time for smooth words was past. "The divine right" of kings had been held up to the broad light of a modern day, and found to be motheaten by time. Its fabric was thin as cobweb, and there was nothing "divine" about it; nothing but the plain fact that "king's right" was merely the might of the strong, not the right of the just, and if it must come to that, they were muscular Christians too, and could behead a man as well as another. So then and there they laid before him a written agreement or "charter," as they called it, and told him to place at the end of it the written signature of the king, which would thus make it the law of the land.
It was a bitter moment for that sullen king. He would have refused to sign it had he dared. But there, to right and left of him, scowled the menacing faces of the fiercest fighters in all England. Crusader waved his hand to Crusader across the hall, and in that greeting the low clash of steel rippled through the ranks. To refuse that signature meant—not the death of his friends, his comrades, his helpers in doing evil. That result not greatly would have troubled him. No! It meant what to him was a more serious matter. It was his own life now which he must buy by his signature, or die. He was not ready for that, so John Lackland of England signed the charter.
What a great thing for England and the world it was! for among other things the agreement read that
"NO FREEMAN SHALL BE IMPRISONED OR PUT TO DEATH, OR HAVE HIS PROPERTY
TAKEN FROM HIM, BUT BY THE JUDGMENT OF HIS PEERS (his equals) OR BY
THE LAW OF THE LAND!"
And now, seven hundred years later, if it is claimed that a man does wrong and breaks the law he is arrested and brought before a judge. But before that judge can sentence him to death or long imprisonment the whole story is told before twelve men, called a jury, who decide whether he deserves punishment or not. And this is the great gift handed down to us by those barons of old from the days when, if he wished a person's death, it was enough for a king to say, "I do not like that man!"
To this day we speak of that agreement as "the great charter;" or more often, we use the words of the Latin language in which it was written (since all learned men then, whether Saxon, Norman, French or Dane, could read and understand that common tongue) words which mean the same, and we call it