3. With his enemies gathering abroad, John had doubtless no wish to be entangled in a long quarrel at home, and the archbishop's mediation allowed him to withdraw with seeming dignity. After a demonstration therefore at Durham John marched hastily south again, and reached London in October. His justiciar Geoffry Fitz-Peter at once laid before him the claims of the Council of St. Alban's and St. Paul's, but the death of Geoffry at this juncture freed him from the pressure which his minister was putting upon him. "Now, by God's feet," cried John, "I am for the first time king and lord of England," and he intrusted the vacant justiciarship to a Poitevin, Peter des Roches, the Bishop of Winchester, whose temper was in harmony with his own. But the death of Geoffry only called the archbishop to the front, and Langton at once demanded the king's assent to the charter of Henry the First.
4. In seizing on this charter as a basis for national action, Langton showed a political ability of the highest order. The enthusiasm with which its recital was welcomed showed the sagacity with which the archbishop had chosen his ground. From that moment the baronage was no longer drawn together in secret conspiracies by a sense of common wrong or a vague longing for common deliverance; they were openly united in a definite claim of national freedom and national law. Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrimage, the nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no longer with John's delays. If he refused to restore their liberties they swore to make war on him till he confirmed them by charter under the king's seal, and they parted to raise forces with the purpose of presenting their demands at Christmas. John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of election, while he imbittered still more the strife with his nobles by demanding scutage [A] from the northern nobles who had refused to follow him to Poitou. But the barons were now ready to act, and early in January, in the memorable year 1215, they appeared in arms to lay, as they had planned, their demands before the king.
5. John was taken by surprise. He asked for a truce till Easter-tide, and spent the interval in fevered efforts to avoid the blow. Again he offered freedom to the Church, and took vows as a crusader against whom war was a sacrilege, while he called for a general oath of allegiance and fealty from the whole body of his subjects. But month after month only showed the king the uselessness of further resistance. Though Pandulf, the Pope's legate, was with him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the way of aid from Rome; the commissioners whom he sent to plead his cause at the shire courts brought back news that no man would help him against the charter that the barons claimed; and his efforts to detach the clergy from the league of his opponents utterly failed. The nation was against the king. He was far indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers still clung to him, men such as Geoffry de Lucy, Geoffry de Furnival, Thomas Basset, and William Briwere, statesmen trained in the administrative school of his father, and who, dissent as they might from John's mere oppression, still looked on the power of the crown as the one barrier against feudal anarchy; and beside them stood some of the great nobles of royal blood, Earl William of Salisbury, his cousin Earl William of Warenne, and Henry, Earl of Cornwall, a grandson of Henry the First. With him too remained Ranulf, Earl of Chester, and the wisest and noblest of the barons, William Marshal, the elder Earl of Pembroke. William Marshal had shared in the rising of the younger Henry against Henry II, and stood by him as he died; he had shared in the overthrow of William Longchamp, and in the outlawry of John. He was now an old man, firm, as we shall see in his aftercourse, to recall the government to the path of freedom and law, but shrinking from a strife which might bring back the anarchy of Stephen's day, and looking for reforms rather in the bringing constitutional pressure to bear upon the king than in forcing them from him by arms.
6. But cling as such men might to John, they clung to him rather as mediators than adherents. Their sympathies went with the demands of the barons when the delay which had been granted was over and the nobles again gathered in arms at Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their claims before the king. Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely despotic idea of his sovereignty which John had formed than the passionate surprise which breaks out in his reply. "Why do they not ask for my kingdom?" he cried. "I will never grant such liberties as will make me a slave!" The imperialist theories of the lawyers of his father's court had done their work. Held at bay by the practical sense of Henry, they had told on the more headstrong nature of his sons. Richard and John both held with Glanvill that the will of the prince was the law of the land; and to fetter that will by the customs and franchises which were embodied in the baron's claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of his rights.
King John and the Charter.
7. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of his people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the close of May, London threw open her gates to the forces of the barons, now arrayed under Robert Fitz Walter as "Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church." Exeter and Lincoln followed the example of the capital; promises of aid came from Scotland and Wales, the northern barons marched hastily under Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the nobles who had as yet clung to the king, but whose hopes of conciliation were blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the summons of the "Army of God." Pandulf, indeed, and Archbishop Langton still remained with John, but they counseled as Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counseled his acceptance of the charter. None, in fact, counseled its rejection save his new justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches and other foreigners who knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But even the number of these was small; there was a moment when John found himself with but seven knights at his back and before him a nation in arms. Quick as he was, he had been taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the short respite he had gained from Christmas to Easter, he had summoned mercenaries to his aid and appealed to his new suzerain, the Pope. Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath in his heart, John bowed to necessity, and called the barons to a conference on an island in the Thames between Windsor and Staines, near a marshy meadow by the river-side, the meadow of Runnymede.
8. The king encamped on one bank of the river, the barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their delegates met on the 15th of July in the island between them, but the negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of unconditional submission. The Great Charter was discussed and agreed to in a single day.
John Richard Green.