Such considerations almost justify enthusiasts, who hold that the granting of Magna Carta was the turning-point in English history. Henceforward it was more difficult for the king to invade the rights of others. Where previously the vagueness of the law lent itself to evasion, its clear re-statement and ratification in 1215 pinned down the king to a definite issue. He could no longer plead that he sinned in ignorance; he must either keep the law, or openly defy it—no middle course was possible.
When all this has been said, it may still be doubted whether the belief of enthusiasts in the excessive importance of Magna Carta has been fully justified. Many other triumphs, almost equally important, have been won in the cause of liberty, and under circumstances almost equally notable; and many statutes have been passed embodying these. Why then should Magna Carta be invariably extolled as the palladium of English liberties? Is not, when all is said, the extreme merit attributed to it mainly of a sentimental or imaginative nature? Such questions must be answered partly in the affirmative. Much of its value does depend on sentiment. Yet all government is, in a sense, founded upon sentiment—sometimes affection, sometimes fear. Psychological considerations are all-powerful in the practical affairs of life. Intangible and even unreal phenomena have played an important part in the history of every nation. The tie that binds the British colonies at the present day to the Mother Country is largely one of sentiment; yet the troopers from Canada and New Zealand who responded to the call of Britain in her hour of need produced practical results of an obvious nature. The element of sentiment in politics can never be ignored.
It is no disparagement to Magna Carta, then, to confess that part of its power has been read into it by later generations, and lies in the halo, almost of romance, which has gradually gathered round it in the course of centuries. It became a battle cry for future ages, a banner, a rallying point, a stimulus to the imagination. For a king, thereafter, openly to infringe the promises contained in the Great Charter, was to challenge the bitterness of public opinion—to put himself palpably in the wrong. For an aggrieved man, however humble, to base his rights upon its terms was to enlist the warm sympathy of all. Time and again, from the Barons’ War against Henry III. to the days of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, the possibility of appealing to the words of Magna Carta has afforded a practical ground for opposition; an easily intelligible principle to fight for; a fortified position to hold against the enemies of the national freedom. The exact way in which this particular document—dry as its details at first sight may seem—has, when considered as a whole, fired the popular imagination, is difficult to determine. Such a task lies rather within the sphere of the student of psychology than of the student of history, as usually conceived. However difficult it may be to explain this phenomenon, there is no doubt of its existence. The importance of the Great Charter, originally flowing both from the intrinsic and from the extrinsic features already described, has greatly increased, as traditions, associations, and aspirations have clustered more thickly round it. These have augmented in each succeeding age the reverence in which it has been held, and have made ever more secure its hold upon the popular imagination.
Thus Magna Carta, in addition to its legal value, has a political value of an equally emphatic kind. Apart from and beyond the salutary effect of the many useful laws it contained, its moral influence has contributed to a marked advance of the national spirit, and therefore of the national liberties. A few of the aspects of this advance deserve to be emphasized. The King, by granting the Charter in solemn form, admitted that he was not an absolute ruler—admitted that he had a master over him in the laws which he had often violated, but which he now swore to obey. Magna Carta has thus been truly said to enunciate and inaugurate “the reign of law” or “the rule of law” in the phrase made famous by Professor Dicey.[[222]]
It marks also the commencement of a new grouping of political forces in England; indeed without such a rearrangement the winning of the Charter would have been impossible. Throughout the reign of Richard I. the old tacit understanding between the king and the lower classes had been endangered by the heavy drain of taxation; but the actual break-up of the old alliance only came in the crisis of John’s reign. Henceforward can be traced a gradual change in the balance of parties in the commonwealth. No longer are Crown and people united, in the name of law and order, against the baronage, standing for feudal disintegration. The mass of humble freemen and the Church are for the moment in league with the barons, in the name of law and order, against the Crown, recently become the chief law-breaker.
The possibility of the existence of such an alliance, even on a temporary basis, involved the adoption by its chief members of a new baronial policy. Hitherto each great baron had aimed at his own independence or aggrandisement, striving on the one hand to gain new franchises for himself, or to widen the scope of those he already had, and on the other to weaken the king and to keep him outside these franchises. This policy, which succeeded both in France and in Scotland, had before John’s reign already failed signally in England, and the English barons now, on the whole, came to admit the hopelessness of renewing the struggle for feudal independence. They substituted for this ideal of an earlier age a more progressive policy. The king, whose interference they could no longer hope completely to shake off, must at least be taught to interfere justly and according to rule; he must walk only by law and custom, not by the caprices of his evil heart. The barons sought henceforward, to control the royal power they could not exclude; they desired some determining share in the national councils, if they could no longer hope to create little nations of their own within the four corners of their fiefs. Magna Carta was the fruit of this new policy.
It has been often repeated, and with truth, that the Great Charter marks also a stage in the growth of national unity or nationality. Here, however, it is necessary to guard against exaggeration. It is merely one movement in a process, rather than a final achievement. We must somewhat discount, while still agreeing in the main with, statements which declare the Charter to be “the first documentary proof of the existence of a united English nation”; or with the often-quoted words of Dr. Stubbs, that “The Great Charter is the first great public act of the nation, after it has realised its own identity.”[[223]]
A united English nation, whether conscious or unconscious[unconscious] of its identity, cannot be said to have existed in 1215, except under several qualifications. The conception of “nationality,” in the modern sense, is of comparatively recent origin, and requires that the lower as well as the higher classes should be comprehended within its bounds. Further, the coalition which wrested the Charter from the royal tyrant was essentially of a temporary nature, and quickly fell to pieces again. Even while the alliance continued, the interests of the various classes, as has been already shown, were far from identical. Political rights were treated as the monopoly of the few (as is evidenced by the retrograde provisions of chapter 14 for the composition of the Commune concilium); and civil rights were far from universally distributed. The leaders of the “national” movement certainly gave no political rights to the despised villeins, who comprised more than three quarters of the entire population of England; while their civil rights were almost completely ignored in the provisions of the Charter.
Magna Carta undoubtedly marked one step, an important step, in the process by which England became a nation; but that step was neither the first nor yet the final one.
V. Magna Carta. Its defects.