KING JOHN AND MAGNA CHARTA.
“Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign.”
Runnymede spreads before you, the famous field on which the English people wrested from a tyrannous monarch their great table of laws. You see a green meadow stretching along the marge of “silver-footed Thames,” a pasturage in no degree distinguished from scores of others in that fair valley. Fronting it is a little island, set like an emerald in the shining waters. Meadow and island should enchain your attention, for here a deed is to be done of deep and solemn import, immeasurable in its effects upon the lives and fortunes of generations yet unborn.
Here you shall see the seed sown which is to shoot up into a goodly tree, bearing as its fruits that liberty, civilization, and knowledge in which we rejoice to-day. Long centuries of toil and struggle will elapse before it is deep-rooted in the soil; the weeds of error and wrong will threaten to choke it; the fierce sun of tyranny will scorch it; the piercing winds of privilege will numb it: but the hardy plant will not succumb. It will be tended by devoted hands, and watered with blood and tears, until it spreads its branches far and wide, and is reckoned the glory of the land. New-graffed with every generation, and branching into offshoots which bear little semblance to the parent stock, it still remains, worthy of all our reverence and regard as the sturdy root of the Constitution under which Britons dwell as the freest nation of the world.
Look at the meadow on this side of the Thames. Busy hands are setting up a pavilion of white and gold, for the sojourn of a king. Other pavilions are rising on Runnymede itself, and on the island too, where a canopied throne is set up. Now the actors in the scene begin to arrive. Mail-clad barons armed as for the fray, grim and determined, solemn of port and sober of converse, draw near. An archbishop with his train of priests joins the armed throng. All the magnates of England, spiritual and secular, are here—and they are here to coerce a king.
All is ready, and now the king leaves his bannered pavilion, and crossing the narrow waters to the isle proceeds towards the throne. Watch him closely, for his like has never before worn the English crown, and—please God—never will again. Look at his fierce, dark countenance, over which waves of passion continually spread, like the ripples on yonder waters. He is the scourge of his land, the worst monarch with which England has been cursed—worse even than Rufus. Bad son, bad husband, bad father, bad king, there is scarce a crime in the whole black calendar of which he may not be justly accused. He is cruel, false, greedy, untruthful, and vile; yet out of his wickedness wondrous good shall come.
He has fought his father, he has wronged his brother, and he has murdered the little nephew who stood in his way. The poor child Arthur, heir to the English throne and to England’s wide realms in France, fell into his hands twelve years ago. John offered him terms, but the lad, brimful of the spirit of his race, would strike no bargain with the “shameless king.” He was close pent in a Norman castle, and thither John dispatched his unwilling minister, Hubert de Burgh, to put out the lad’s eyes. But the frenzied appeals of the little prince so moved Hubert’s heart that he forswore his foul commission, preferring to brave the wrath of his ruthless master than to suffer the sting of conscience. But there were others with no bowels of compassion, and by their aid the lad was slain. How he actually died we do not know. Perhaps John inveigled the boy into a boat and there stabbed him and flung his body overboard, or perhaps he compassed his death by subtler means. Shakespeare tells us that, goaded to madness, the little prince leaped from the walls of his prison, crying,—
“O me! my uncle’s spirit is in these stones—
Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones.”