The early Plantagenets

by William Stubbs

CHAPTER VII.

JOHN.

John’s succession—Arthur’s claims—Loss of Normandy—Quarrel with the Church—Submission to the Pope—Quarrel with the Barons—The Great Charter and its consequences—Arrival of Lewis—John’s death.

John and
Arthur.

The death of Richard placed John at last in the position for which he had toiled and intrigued so long; not, it is true, without a competitor, and that one whose claims were destined, after his own death, to be fatal to John’s retention of half his possessions. But the competitor was for the moment in the background, and in England at least never gained a footing or gathered the semblance of a party. Arthur was now twelve years old; his mother, Constance of Brittany, who was left a widow before he was born, had been married in the year of his birth to Earl Ranulf of Chester, whom she disliked, and who, after having been married to her for some years, found himself unable to manage her, and, following the example of Henry II., imprisoned her. She was an imprudent, probably a bad woman, as her later conduct tends to show; but it may be questioned whether, in her management of her hereditary state of Brittany, she went farther than any good patriot might go in opposition to the centralizing policy by which Richard carried out the schemes of his father. Anyhow she had made herself the champion of the independence of Brittany, and so had imperilled the chances of her son’s succession to the right of the inheritance. She seems to have been in constant opposition to Richard, and likewise to Eleanor, who alone after Richard’s death could have maintained Arthur’s rights. It is probably for this reason that, after Richard returned from the Crusade, we never again hear of Arthur as heir; that John therefore, although personally disliked, was accepted as an inevitable necessity; and that Arthur, when he was old enough to act for himself, ruined his own cause by his wanton attack upon his grandmother.

John
secures
Normandy.

John seems to have known that England was safely his own. He had bound the baronage by oath to agree to his succession as early as 1191; he had a faithful friend in the Archbishop of Canterbury, who transferred to him the devotion which he had always shown to Richard, and had consented to become his chancellor. He was willing to make any sort of promises to secure those of the magnates who were not already pledged to him. He spent, therefore, the first six weeks of his reign in France, making good his hold on Normandy, and providing for the maintenance of peace with Philip. Meanwhile he sent the archbishop to England, to smooth his way there and prepare for the coronation.

Parties in
England.

The difficulties which Hubert had to encounter were not caused by the question of the succession, but by the attitude of the great earls, all of whom had something to gain by the possible reversal of that repressive policy which had been pursued for the last twenty-six years, and some of whom had on former occasions taken a leading part against John, which he might now embrace the opportunity of avenging. A reactionary feudal party, a party of personal opponents, and a body of ambitious self-seekers, might all together, if they had taken up Arthur’s cause, have given John much trouble; but they contented themselves, as it was, with stating their grievances, and the archbishop was empowered to make any concessions that would appease them. The state of the country was not so peaceful as it had been during the last interregnum. The disturbers of public order took advantage of the attitude of the earls to plunder and ravage; but the strong arm of the justiciar avenged what he could not prevent, and, after a formal debate held between Hubert and the earls at Northampton, peace was restored, and the promises of John accepted as conclusive at all events for the present.

John’s
coronation.

On Ascension-day accordingly he presented himself at Westminster, and was there chosen, anointed, and consecrated with great splendor. On this occasion the ancient doctrine of election to the crown was vindicated in word and deed. Matthew Paris, the historian of this and the next reign, a writer who hated John with inveterate hatred, and who has therefore been suspected of having inserted in his work some things which never took place, has put in the mouth of the archbishop a somewhat elaborate speech, in which he declares that the crown of England is elective rather than hereditary, and that John’s title to the succession lies in the fact that he has been chosen king, as the first and strongest and most famous of the royal house. That some declaration of the kind was made is certain, for it is quoted by Lewis of France in the manifesto issued when he landed in England in 1216; but the historian draws suspicion upon his own account of it by saying that Hubert had a prophetic foresight in doing this; that he foresaw John’s misrule and insisted on his elective title as one that might be set aside hereafter. But in whatever terms the fact of the election was stated, and whether the claim of Arthur was denied or passed over in silence, it is important as showing the accepted doctrine of election in the thirteenth century. Arthur, according to the principles of inheritance of fiefs, as they were now admitted in England, was clearly his uncle’s heir. The election of John was, and perhaps was understood to be, a recurrence to the older rule by which the national choice of a king was directed to the ablest or eldest or most prominent member of the royal house.

Coronation
oath.

Although we have a detailed account of John’s coronation we find no mention of a charter, such as Henry II. and Stephen had issued. Richard had not issued one, but had contented himself with the three strong promises included in the coronation oath—to defend the Church, to maintain justice, and to make good laws, abolishing evil customs. John did the same; and, as the oath was again required of him after his reconciliation with Langton in 1213, we may without hesitation infer that no charter was granted at the coronation.

Arrangement
of the
chapter.

Queen
Eleanor.

The history of John’s reign may conveniently be arranged in three divisions, which fell into a nearly chronological sequence; first, the foreign relations, including the war with Philip, the fate of Arthur, and the loss of Normandy; secondly, the dispute with the clergy, and the interdict and submission to Rome; and thirdly, the events that led to and flowed from the granting of Magna Carta. In each of these divisions of our period we find certain persons coming to the front as the mainstay of John’s power, at whose death that power, in one region or another, seems at once to suffer collapse. Of these the first is his mother, the great source and prop of his Continental position. Of her character enough has been said already; her better points come out most strongly in her old age, when we see her, between seventy and eighty years old, running about from one end of Europe to another to patch up truces, to make peaces, and to close wars which sprang mainly out of her own levity and intriguing of half a century past. She had engaged in a life-long quarrel with her first husband in 1150, and with her second in 1173; now in 1200 she fetches a grand-daughter of the second to marry the grandson of the first, as a pledge of harmony between the sons of the two. John’s fortunes are not wholly hopeless until he loses his mother.

Arthur’s
claims in
France.

Richard’s unexpected death occurred during a negotiation for peace with Philip; and John succeeded at once, just as Richard himself had done, to the claims in whole accumulation of dynastic and territorial grievances, which had been mounting up for fifty years; with the addition of Arthur’s claims, which gave Philip the opportunity of interfering in every possible question. Before the coronation these claims had been raised; Philip had determined to be beforehand, and had seized the city of Evreux on the receipt of the news of Richard’s death. At the same moment the barons of Anjou, Maine, and Touraine had declared Arthur their count, and Constance had delivered him bodily into Philip’s keeping. John, in revenge for this, had destroyed the walls and imprisoned the citizens of le Mans, which he regarded as the stronghold of Arthur’s party. He returned to Normandy directly after the coronation, on June 20, and made a truce with Philip for two months, during which Philip accepted Arthur’s homage for all the Continental estates of the family and constituted himself his champion. Immediately on the expiration of the truce the kings met again, and Philip then proposed by way of compromise that John should retain Normandy, and Arthur have the remaining states, Philip himself receiving the Vexin as a remuneration for his good offices in thus arbitrating. John refused this, and war broke out again, in which Philip showed himself so much more anxious for his own interest than for Arthur’s that the unhappy boy allowed himself to be removed from Philip’s protection and placed under John’s. He discovered his mistake, however, almost instantly, and fled from his uncle’s court to Angers, in company with his mother, who took the opportunity of finally breaking with the Earl of Chester, and without waiting for a divorce, bestowed herself in marriage on Guy, a brother of the Viscount Thouars.

Peace
between
John and
Philip, 1200.

John’s
marriage.

Upon this John and Philip made a fresh truce which grew into a peace, by which Arthur’s interests were finally sacrificed, and which was cemented by the marriage of Blanche of Castile, John’s niece, to Lewis, the son and heir of Philip. This was accomplished in May 1200. Philip’s matrimonial difficulties, which arose from his wanton repudiation of his second wife, Ingeburga of Denmark, exposed him at the time to a threat of interdict, and he probably thought it wise not to have both John and Innocent III. arrayed against him at once. John, seeing the marriage laws practically in abeyance, had taken advantage of the objection which had been raised by Archbishop Baldwin to his marriage, and released himself from his wife, Hawisia of Gloucester, on the ground of relationship. Now inspired either by love or territorial covetousness, he married Isabella, the child-heiress of the Count of Angoulême. This marriage offended on the one side of the Channel, Hugh of la Marche, who was betrothed to her, and on the other side the great kinsmen of the house of Gloucester, and the lady Hawisia herself, who subsequently married Geoffrey de Mandeville, one of the bitterest of John’s enemies.

Forfeiture of
Normandy.

Death of
Arthur.

Loss of Normandy
and
Anjou.

The peace did not last longer than Philip’s domestic difficulties, which came to an end on his consenting to receive back Ingeburga. Mischief began in 1201, both on the Norman frontier, where Hugh de Gournay played fast and loose between the kings, and in Poictou, where the barons were excited by the Count of la Marche to rebel against the severe repression exercised by John. The next year Philip summoned courage to call John before his court of the peers of France to answer the charges of the Poictevins, and on his non-appearance declared him to have forfeited his fiefs. Arthur, who was now fifteen, and who had lost his mother the year before, thought that this was his opportunity. He mustered his forces and attempted to seize the old queen Eleanor in the castle of Mirabel. Instead of taking her he was defeated and captured by John, who imprisoned him, and in whose hands he died, how we know not, on April 3, 1203. Philip did not hesitate to declare John the boy’s murderer; he held another court upon him, and again sentenced him to forfeiture. This time he undertook the execution of the sentence himself. He invaded Normandy, and took city after city. John did not raise a hand in its defence, and quitted the duchy finally in November. The next year, 1204, saw Anjou and the rest of the patrimony in Philip’s hands; the loss of most of the Guienne followed. Eleanor died on April 1, 1204, and on her death John’s cause became hopeless. He did little or nothing to redeem it. In 1206 he tried to recover Poictou, but was obliged to purchase a truce by resigning his claims on the northern provinces; and in 1214, as a part of a general scheme of attack upon Philip, in which he had the support of Flanders and the Empire, he made another expedition, but it also ended in a truce by which some small fragments of Eleanor’s inheritance were preserved to her grandchildren.

Separation
of England
and Normandy.

Thus then, after a union of a hundred and forty years, Normandy was separated from England. During a portion of those years,—the reigns of William Rufus and part of that of Henry I.,—they had been under different rulers, but they had been administered on the same principles and for the same interest all the time. The English had been ruled by Norman lords; their laws, institutions, customs, had been remodeled under Norman influences. But they had grown under and through the discipline. So far as English and Normans united, the Norman element gave strength, order, discipline to the English; so far as they were in opposition the Norman tyranny had called forth in the English patience, perseverance, and a sense of nationality which they had not shown before. The people had had to make common cause with the king against the Norman feudalism, and they had done this until their support became absolutely necessary to the royal power. Gradually the baronage were learning the like lesson; disciplined and educated under the royal training, they were finding that they were one in interest with the people; and that, as the royal power was becoming too great for either, the two might in time combine to curb it. They were becoming themselves more English—more English perhaps in blood, more English in the possession of English lands and by the gradual devolution of Norman lands into other hands; ready to be quite English when once they lost their Norman incumbrances. So when the time came for the barons who had lands in both countries to make their choice between John and Philip, the division was effected with little noise and less trouble. The Norman barons and prelates gave up their English lands, and the English—for henceforth these have a right to the name of English—barons and prelates gave up their Norman lands. There was very little internal division in Normandy itself, and Walter of Coutances, who had been Richard’s prime minister and justiciar, died a contented subject of Philip. The separation did much for England. Henceforth the king is mainly if not solely King of England, and the welfare of England the main if not the sole object of English counsels. It was Normandy that, by the exchange of masters, lost the share of the benefits won from John. Yet Normandy was for ages freer than the rest of France, in consequence of her early discipline under the house of Rollo, one part of which was the policy which made her run in harness with the English people. But to detail all the benefits of the separation would be to anticipate very much of the later history.

Hubert
Walter.

No sooner was Normandy lost than John’s ecclesiastical troubles began; and they began in the most dangerous way, for the very event that caused them robbed him of the only counsellor he had who could have guided him safely through them. Hubert Walter, the Archbishop of Canterbury—whose career we have traced first as a chaplain to Henry II., then as Bishop of Salisbury, counsellor, captain and chaplain to the third Crusade; then as Chief Justiciar of England, Archbishop of Canterbury, and legate, making laws and canons, leading armies, administering justice, collecting taxes, under Richard; and lastly, acting as Chancellor to John from the coronation to his death—Hubert Walter died on July 12, 1205.

Disputed
election
at Canterbury.

The appointment to the archbishopric had been for many years a vexed question. The monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, claimed the right of free election; they were the chapter of the cathedral, and had the same right as any other chapter to elect their prelate. It was a right that was distinctly recognised by the canon law, had been granted by Stephen’s charter, and had been so far made good at each change in the primacy that certain forms of election by them had been required as needful to the validity of the appointment. But the bishops of the province of Canterbury, whose chief and judge the archbishop was, also claimed a right in the election, partly on mere grounds of equity, but partly also on the ground of a prescription which, based on the precedent of the Anglo-Saxon councils, had given them an active influence on each occasion since the reign of Henry I. And besides these the king had his right; the Archbishop of Canterbury was his chief constitutional counsellor, the counsellor of whom he could not rid himself without breaking at once with religion and state custom. The king had generally since the Conquest nominated the archbishop, sometimes with and sometimes without the co-operation of the other two bodies, but always practically by his own fiat; and the pacification between Henry I. and Anselm had contained an admission that the homage of the archbishop elect to the king was necessary to the full right to exercise his constitutional power. Usually, however, as was generally done where the canon law and national law ran counter or overlapped one another, the end in view was secured by adroit management, saving the rights of each party, for the time. The quarrel on this occasion began with the monks of Canterbury.

Election of
the sub-prior.

This famous convent, which deserves on more than one occasion credit for having set a courageous example of opposition to tyranny, was a very ambitious and disorderly body; and just at this moment, having compelled Archbishop Hubert to pull down his grand new church at Lambeth, they, or a part of them, were quite intoxicated with conceit. It was always a great object with them to have a monk for archbishop; such a leader would extend their privileges and foster their ideas of independence. So now, during the night following Hubert’s death, the younger monks—no doubt a majority of the body—elected the sub-prior, Reginald, as archbishop, and, without asking the royal consent, sent him off at once to Rome to ask for the archiepiscopal pall and consecration. No sooner had Reginald crossed the Channel than, forgetting the promise of secrecy with which his electors had bound him, he gave out that he was the new archbishop, and the news came back to England.

Nomination
of John de
Gray.

John was very angry; he had intended his minister John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, to be Hubert’s successor; the bishops were angry because their prescriptive and equitable right was disregarded; the senior monks were angry because they had been betrayed by the juniors, and the juniors because Reginald by his imprudent vanity had caused the premature discovery of their schemes. So all parties appealed to the Pope; and John, without waiting to hear what became of the appeal, had his nominee elected and put in possession of the estates of the see.

Conduct of
Innocent III.

Consecration
of Stephen
Langton, 1207.

We can hardly doubt that, if John had had an adviser like Hubert, he might have tided over the difficulty, but now he plunged deeper and deeper, and at last lost his footing altogether. The Pope let the appeals drag on their weary length. He suffered all the contending bodies to spend their strength and their money, and to involve and compromise themselves as much as they chose. Then after a year and a half he decided the cause. The bishops, he said, had no standing-ground; the canonical electors were the monks of the chapter. The sub-prior Reginald was rejected because he had not been canonically chosen; John de Gray was rejected because he had been elected whilst an appeal was pending. The course was, therefore, clear. The monks were the electors; their proctors, now at the Court of Rome, had full power from them to elect, and the king had promised to confirm their choice, having secretly agreed with them to elect only John de Gray; for thus he had tried to impose on the Pope, sending at the same time large sums of money to clear the eyes of the Pope’s advisers. Innocent III., however, was very wide-awake, and John’s insincerity had put his game in his own hands. It was of no use, he said, to waste time. If they all went back to England they would have to come to Rome again for the confirmation of the election and the gift of the pall. They all had full powers—why should it not be done pleasantly and on the spot? He had a man fit for the place—an Englishman, the first scholar of the day, a cardinal, in whose favor John had more than once written to him on other occasions; let them elect him, he would confirm and consecrate him, and then all would be done. Whether Innocent really expected that John would submit to this we cannot say; probably not. But he did it. Only one of the monks objected, and reminded his brethren of their obligation to the king; the rest, relying on their powers from the king and convent, and overawed by the dignity and urgency of Innocent, elected Langton. Innocent immediately wrote to John to report the decision and ask him to receive Langton as archbishop. John was furious—refused, threatened, and blustered. The Pope, in reply, declared that he had done no more than was his duty to the widowed Church, and, in June 1207, consecrated the archbishop.

The Interdict,
1208.

John was obdurate: proposal after proposal was made, offer after offer; letter followed letter, embassy followed embassy. John seized the possessions of the convent of Christ Church and threatened to wreak vengeance on the monks. Then the Pope answered threat with threat: if John did not receive the archbishop the kingdom must be laid under interdict. It would then be unlawful to perform the services of the Church, the dead would be unburied, the sacraments would cease to be administered, or would be celebrated only in private; the people would be forced by the want of spiritual necessaries to compel the king to compliance. Still he held out, and in March 1208 the interdict was proclaimed. He then declared that he would be avenged on the bishops; many of them fled, and he seized their lands. Again, after a while, negotiations were resumed. Langton came to Dover to meet the king, but John would not face him. The Pope threatened personal excommunication; if that were not effective, it should be followed by a Bull of deposition and the absolution of the English from their obedience. If that were done, the execution of the sentence would be committed to one who would be only too glad to add England to his dominions, and to gratify the hatred that he had nursed for so many years, even to Philip of France, the conqueror of Normandy and Anjou.

John’s obduracy.

For a long time John showed himself impenetrable. He was quite content that his people should be deprived of the sacraments, that the clergy should be exiled, that the whole administration of the country should be paralyzed, almost as it had been in the days of Stephen. Even the terrors of personal excommunication had been too lavishly used of late to make much impression, for Philip had thriven under the anger of Innocent, and John had at this very moment his nephew, the Emperor Otho, a partner in the tribulation. The threat of deposition might be a mere threat; it would be very strange if the Pope should prefer the King of France to the King of England; and, if he did, John had a great army and fleet and treasure.

Persistence
of Innocent.

Panic of
John.

But if he thought that Innocent III., would be swayed either by the ordinary motives of Popes or by the ordinary aims of policy, he was much mistaken. That great Pope had set before himself a grand purpose of righteousness as it appeared to him; he was ready to set up the Hohenstaufen again and to depress the Welf, and to set Philip, the ally of the Hohenstaufen, and the husband of Ingeburga, above the other kings of the West, if he could gain his object. Innocent persisted. His legates openly warned John what the result would be if the sentence of deposition were to issue; and their words came true. John found or fancied himself involved in a web of conspiracy; warnings reached him from Wales and Scotland that his enemies were intriguing all around him, that he and his children would be put out of the throne and a new race of kings brought in. Then arose Peter of Wakefield and prophesied that on the next Ascension day John should be a king no more. Then came the news that Philip was equipping his fleet. So the man whom neither spiritual nor temporal weapons could bring to submission, moved by the prophecy of an impostor, lowered his flag and made the most abject submission that any king of the English has ever made.

On the 15th of May, 1213, he met Pandulf, the Pope’s subdeacon and envoy, at Ewell, near Dover, and swore fealty to the Pope; he consented at last to receive Langton, to restore the bishops and the monks of Canterbury, and indemnify them for their wrongs: he would do all that was asked of him, hold his kingdoms as fiefs of the Apostolic see and pay tribute for them.

The barons and people looked on in amazed acquiescence; they did not, it would seem, all at once realize the shame of the transaction, or see that for them to be vassals of the Pope’s vassal was to sink a long step in the scale of freedom, whether political or ecclesiastical. They acquiesced, some gladly welcoming any solution of the difficulty, some, we are told, with grief and shame. And so that part of the drama of the reign ends.

Political
result.

John made friends with the Pope; but the struggle had thrown the Church into an attitude of opposition to the crown in which she had never stood since the Conquest. It was a providential determination, by which the clergy—who, with the people, had hitherto supported the royal power against the barons—were, just at the moment when the royal power was becoming dangerous, dislodged from the side of the crown and almost compelled to make common cause with the baronial party and the people; awaking all at once to the need of common action, mutual forbearance, and the sense of national unity. Such was the effect of the struggle. Henceforth the Church in union with the barons and the people helps to limit the power which in the earlier days she had striven to strengthen.

The baronial
quarrel.

But the very moment that closes the ecclesiastical quarrel begins a new one—the baronial quarrel, which opens the way for the vindication of national liberty and the consolidation of constitutional life, as typified by Magna Carta. To realize this we must glance back for a moment to the beginning of the reign, and recur to the negotiations which Archbishop Hubert had had with the earls before he obtained their consent to receive John as king, and the promise he had made that all their lawful demands should be satisfied. What those demands were we cannot tell exactly; probably they wanted the custody of their own castles and some other privileges of which they had been deprived by the strong government of the late king, for he had no doubt availed himself of every plea to restrict their forest privileges and perhaps to extend the royal right of wardship. It is from Magna Carta itself, rather than from the historians who have told the story, that we gather the nature of their grievances. The promises made at Northampton in 1199 had never been fulfilled; in 1201, when the earls repeated their demands, John replied by laying his hands on their castles and by compelling them to surrender their heirs as pledges of their good behaviour. Matters had after that gone on from bad to worse. Not content with insisting on the feudal service of the knights, he had increased the rate of carucage and scutage, the two great imposts that affected the land, and multiplied the occasions of the exaction. Year after year he had collected his forces as if for a French war, had brought them to the coast at great expense, and then exacted money from the barons as the price of their discharge. He had not led them to battle; he had let Normandy fall out of his hands, he had spoiled them and put them to shame, implicating them in his own cowardice. Year after year taxation increased, whilst the king and the kingdom became more really helpless; for all Englishmen hated his hosts of mercenaries, and distrusted his project of creating a fleet which, far more than any national army would be at his own absolute disposal. And this went on until, in 1207, he began to plunder the clergy, thus giving a respite to the people and the barons. Whilst the king could maintain himself by confiscation and plunder of the clergy he abstained from confiscation and plunder of the laity; and this partly accounts for the equanimity with which the interdict was borne. Men acquiesced in the loss of their religious rights so long as they were in a manner compensated by immunity from taxation. The interdict, too, paralyzed national action. John was unable to conduct anything like a great war as long as that blight lay upon the land; he could attack Wales or Ireland or Scotland, but he could not attack France, under the circumstances; and he was not by any means idle now, what few military successes he did achieve being won against the Irish. For the nation this state of inactivity was less destructive, less expensive than war. So, until the crisis of 1213 came, the barons sat still; they had no eminent leader; Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the man in whom as a statesman they had the most confidence, was the king’s prime minister and justiciar. This, then, was the state of things when the pacification at Ewell put an end to the national paralysis, promised the restoration of the Church, a successful resistance to Philip, and possibly a recovery of the royal inheritance across the Channel.

Refusal of the
barons to
serve.

John’s journey
to the
North.

The first token of the new life immediately showed itself. It was necessary that some delay should take place before the interdict was taken off. By the principles of law the injured persons must be replaced in their rights before the constraining measures could be suspended. Langton must be received before the king was absolved, the bishops must be indemnified for their losses before the interdict could be relaxed. John did not see this; he knew that Philip was preparing for an invasion; he demanded the feudal support of his vassals for a French war; they replied that they would not serve under an excommunicated king. John was provoked, but obliged to wait. In July Langton landed, came to Winchester, and absolved the king, exacting from him an oath to observe the promises made at his coronation, to maintain good laws and abolish evil customs. John, now absolved, renewed his command to the barons, and they declined to join in an expedition which took them away from England. Within the four seas they would serve, as bound by their tenure, but abroad they would not go. They did not trust the king or believe that it was possible to recover Normandy. John was savagely wroth. Time was being lost. Philip was gaining strength. True, his fleet had been destroyed, and the Pope had withdrawn his commission, but there were abundant causes of enmity, and at last perhaps the desire of revenge was uppermost. But John always revenged his wrongs on the guiltless and neutral; he determined, whilst his ministers were arranging for the suspension of the interdict, to go into the North of England and punish the barons, for they were chiefly the Northern barons who had refused to follow him. He set off at full speed, and Langton after him, to persuade him to let the matter be settled by the lawyers. At Northampton the archbishop overtook him and convinced him of the folly of his threats; he went north, however, as far as Durham, and then returned rapidly to London, where in the month of October he met the papal legate, Bishop Nicolas of Tusculum, who had come to receive his formal homage, and did homage to him as the Pope’s representative.

Appeal to the
laws of
Henry I.

During this hasty journey to Durham and back events ever memorable in English history had taken place. On the 4th of August the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz Peter held a great assembly at St. Albans, at which attended not only the great barons of the realm but the representatives of the people of the townships of all the royal estates. The object of the gathering was to determine the sum due to the bishops as an indemnity for their losses. There no doubt the commons and the barons had full opportunity of discussing their grievances, and the justiciar undertook, in the name of his master, that the laws of Henry I. should be put in force. Not that they knew much about the laws of Henry I., but that the prevailing abuses were regarded as arising from the strong governmental system consolidated by Henry II., and they recurred to the state of things which preceded that reign, just as under Henry I. men had recurred to the reign and laws of Edward the Confessor. On the 25th of the same month the archbishop, at a council at St. Paul’s, actually produced the charter issued by Henry I. at his coronation, and proposed that it should be presented to the king as the embodiment of the institutions which he had promised to maintain. Upon this foundation Magna Carta was soon to be drawn up. Almost directly after this, in October, the justiciar died; and John, who had hailed the death of Hubert Walter as a relief from an unwelcome adviser, spoke of Geoffrey with a cruel mockery as gone to join his old fellow-minister in hell. Both had acted as restraints on his desire to rule despotically, and the last public act of Geoffrey Fitz Peter had been to engage him to an undertaking which he had resolved not to keep.

John goes to
France, 1214.

But matters did not proceed very rapidly. It is more than a year before we hear much more of the baronial demands. The new legate showed himself desirous to gratify the king; and although the Northern barons still refused to go on foreign service, he managed to prevent an open struggle. The king went to Poictou in February, 1214, and did not return until the next October. In the meanwhile the damages of the bishops were ascertained and the interdict taken off on the 29th of June. The war on the Continent occupied men’s minds a good deal. Philip won the battle of Bouvines over the forces of Flanders, Germany and England, on the 27th of July; and John did nothing in Poictou to make the North Country barons regret their determination not to follow him. The great confederacy against Philip which Richard had planned, and which John had been laboring to bring to bear on his adversary, was defeated, and Philip stood forth for the moment as the mightiest king in Europe.

The party of
the barons.

Disappointed and ashamed, John returned, resolved to master the barons, and found them not only resolved but prepared and organized to resist him, perhaps even encouraged by his ill success. They had found in Stephen Langton a leader worthy of the cause, and able to exalt and inform the defenders of it. Among those defenders were men of very various sorts; some who had personal aims merely, some who were fitted by education, accomplishments, and patriotic sympathies for national champions, some who were carried away by the general ardor. In general they may be divided into three classes; those Northern barons who had begun the quarrel, the constitutional party who joined the others in a great meeting held at St. Edmund’s, in November, 1214, and those who adhered later to the cause, when they saw that the king was helpless. It was the two former bodies that presented to him their demands a few weeks after he returned from France. He at once refused all, and began to manœuvre to divide the consolidated phalanx. First he tried to disable them by demanding the renewal of the homages throughout the country and the surrender of the castles. He next tried to detach the clergy by granting a charter to secure the freedom of election to bishoprics; he tried to make terms with individual barons; he delayed meeting them from time to time; he took the cross, so that if any hand was raised against him it might be paralyzed by the cry of sacrilege; he wrote urgently to the Pope to get him to condemn the propositions, and excommunicate the persons, of the barons. They likewise presented their complaints at Rome, resisted all John’s blandishments, and declined to relax one of their demands or to give up one of their precautions.

March of
the barons.

Negotiations ceased, and preparations for war began about Easter 1215; the confederates met at Stamford, then marched to Brackly, Northampton, Bedford, Ware, and so to London, where they were received on the 24th of May. The news of their entry into London determined the action of those who still seemed to adhere to the king, and they joined them, leaving him almost destitute of forces, attended by a few advisers whose hearts were with the insurgents, and a body of personal adherents who had little or no political weight beside their own unpopularity.

Magna
Carta.

Then John saw himself compelled to yield, and he yielded; he consented to bind himself with promises in which there was nothing sincere but the reluctance with which he conceded them. Magna Carta, the embodiment of the claims which the archbishop and barons had based on the charter of Henry I., was granted at Runnymede, on June 15, 1215.

Magna Carta was a treaty of peace between the king and his people, and so is a complete national act. It is the first act of the kind, for it differs from the charters issued by Henry I., Stephen, and Henry II. not only in its greater fulness and perspicuity, but by having a distinct machinery provided to carry it out. Twenty-five barons were nominated to compel the king to fulfil his part. It was not, as has been sometimes said, a selfish attempt on the part of the barons and bishops to secure their own privileges; it provided that the commons of the realm should have the benefit of every advantage which the two elder estates had won for themselves, and it bound the barons to treat their own dependents as it bound the king to treat the barons. Of its sixty-three articles, some provided securities for personal freedom; no man was to be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate, but by the judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Others fixed the rate of payments due by the vassal to his lord. Others presented rules for national taxation, and for the organization of a national council, without the consent of which the king could not tax. Others decreed the banishment of the alien servants of John. Although it is not the foundation of English liberty, it is the first, the clearest, the most united, and historically the most important of all the great enunciations of it; and it was a revelation of the possibility of freedom to the mediæval world. The maintenance of the Charter becomes from henceforth the watchword of English freedom.

Attempts to
annul the
Charter.

The remaining sixteen months of John’s reign were a mere anarchy, of which it would be difficult to unravel all the causes. In the first place may be counted the savage wrath of the king at being thus defeated and fettered; then the unfortunate interference of the Pope, who quashed the Charter by a Bull of August 25, and on December 16, anathematized the barons singly and collectively; he also peremptorily suspended Archbishop Langton for his share in bringing about the result.

But we are not to lay all the blame of what followed on John. It is true that within a few weeks after the crisis, he had thrown off all semblance of compliance, but the barons were elated with their success, and showed very little moderation. They trusted him no more than he trusted them. They divided the country among their chiefs, some with the idea of enforcing the Charter, many no doubt with the desire of humiliating the king. Langton’s departure for Rome, left them without the prudent, sincere, and honest English counsel that was needed for the successful vindication of the national cause, and gave the chief place amongst them to men who had personal wrongs to avenge and personal objects to attain. Hence the great body that had united to produce the Charter broke up into its former elements; some returned to the king’s side, the more violent intrigued with France and Scotland.

The Crown
offered to
Lewis.

John’s successes.

John showed himself incapable of using his opportunity. The Earl of Essex, the husband of his first wife, took the lead on the baronial side; but Robert Fitz Walter and Eustace de Vesey, two of the second rank, were leagued with Philip, and under their influence John was declared to have forfeited his crown. Lewis, the heir of France, was selected to be the king of the English. War could be delayed no longer. The barons began by besieging the castles of Northampton and Oxford. John brought up his mercenaries to besiege Rochester, a castle which the confederates held in the name of the absent archbishop. He had the first measure of success, and, in spite of the attempt of the barons to relieve Rochester, captured it, showed a politic mercy to its defenders, and then traversed the South of England, securing the population as he went. He kept Christmas at Nottingham, then marched north and seized Berwick, striking consternation into the Scots. The Earl of Salisbury, his half-brother, commanded in the Midland district, and London became the last and almost the only refuge of the malcontents. Colchester was taken by the king in March, 1216; and up to this point he exhibited military skill and energy that shows him to have been not entirely devoid of the qualities of his father and brother.

Success
of
Lewis.

Death of
John.

But now a new actor appears. Lewis, after a long delay, arrived in England in May, and at once gave spirit and consistency to his party. John retired before him and took up a position at Winchester. Lewis marched by Canterbury to London, and there received the homage and fealties of his friends. In spite of the sentence of excommunication actually passed upon him and his adherents by the new legate, Gualo, he then marched on Winchester, John retiring still; took Winchester, and besieged Windsor and Dover. The Northern lords joined him first, then the great earls, even the Earl of Salisbury himself. John was desperate; he roved up and down the country at the head of his banditti, burning and plundering and slaying; whilst Lewis was gathering strength and friends every hour. At last, on October 19, death overtook the king at Newark. From that very day the strength of Lewis, which was based on the popular and baronial hatred of John, began to decline. It melted away as quickly as it had grown, and in less than a year he was obliged to make peace and leave England alone. John ended thus a life of ignominy in which he has no rival in the whole long list of our sovereigns. There is no need to attempt an elaborate analysis of his character. History has set upon it a darker and deeper mark than she has on any other king. He was in every way the worst of the whole list: the most vicious, the most profane, the most tyrannical, the most false, the most short-sighted, the most unscrupulous.

There was an old legendary prophecy, spoken in a dream by an angel to Fulk the Good, Count of Anjou, when he had in an ecstasy of fervent charity carried on his shoulders a leprous beggar for two leagues to the church of Marmoutier. He was told that to the ninth generation his successors should extend the bounds of their dominion until it was immensely great. The prophecy had been fulfilled—to Anjou had been added Maine and Normandy, Aquitaine and England; Palestine too was ruled by his descendants; and at last, in the person of Otho IV., the seed of the good count had reached the summit of earthly ambition. But the time fixed by the legend was come. John was the representative, of the last generation, with which the blessing ended, and the inheritance of Fulk the Good, passed into other hands.