Their forethought was insufficient permanently to prevent royal influence from bending canonical election to its will. Henry III., indeed, in his reissues was made to repeat the phrase quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit, but omitted all reference alike to canonical election and to the charters of 21st November, 1214, and 15th January, 1215. Later in his reign, he took advantage of this, with the Pope’s connivance or support, to reduce again the rights of cathedral chapters in the appointment of bishops to the sinecure they had been before.
It is true that Henry III. was prone, alike by nature and from policy, to lean on the papal arm, and that the Curia at Rome rather than the Curia Regis for a time dominated the appointment to vacant sees. Henry and Innocent IV. indeed formed a tacit alliance for dividing all fat livings among their respective creatures, king’s men or pope’s men, who had little interest in England or its welfare. Edward I., impatient of foreign dictation as he was, had to submit to a partial continuance of “provisions” for hangers-on of the papacy in his insular domains; but the national church had little to gain. The canons elected the nominee of king or pope, as each was, for the moment, in the ascendant.[[348]]
An interesting, if purely academic, question might be raised as to how far the rights guaranteed by Magna Carta to the English church were meant to imply freedom from papal as well as from royal interference. It is clear that the movement which culminated in the charter of 21st November, 1214, originated in England, not at Rome; and apparently Nicholas, the papal legate at that date, opposed the endeavours of Stephen Langton to obtain it. The archbishop indeed looked upon the legate as the chief obstacle to the reform by the king of the grievances of the national church.[[349]] In spite of Magna Carta, then, the independence of the national church retrograded, rather than advanced, during the long alliance between Henry III. and the successive occupants of the papal throne.[[350]]
II. Civil and Political Rights. After providing thus briefly for the church, chapter one proceeds to give equal prominence, but at greater length, to the grant or confirmation of secular customs and liberties. This takes here the form of a general enacting clause, leaving details to be specified in the remaining sixty-two chapters of the Charter. Some of the more important points involved have already been discussed in the Historical Introduction—for example, the feudal form of the grant, better suited, according to modern ideas, to the conveyance of a specific piece of land, than to the securing of the political and civil liberties of a mighty nation; and the vexed question as to what classes of Englishmen were intended, under the description of “freemen,” to participate in these rights.[[351]]
Another interesting point, though of minor importance, calls for separate treatment. John does not state that his grants of civil and political rights had been made spontaneously. Whether deliberately or not, there is here a marked distinction between the phraseology applied to secular and to ecclesiastical rights respectively. While the concessions to churchmen are said to have been granted “mera et spontanea voluntate,” no such statement is made about the concessions to the freemen. John may have favoured this omission as strengthening his contention that the Great Charter had been sealed by him under compulsion. In the third re-issue of Henry III. (1225) this defect was remedied—the words “spontanea et bona voluntate nostra” being used in its preamble.[[352]] Some importance seems to have been attributed to this addition, which formed the essence of a concession bought by the surrender of one-fifteenth of the moveable property of all estates of the realm.
[336]. Some editions of the Charter place here the division between c. 1 and c. 2.
[338]. See these charters in Appendix.
[339]. It is perhaps worthy of note that while the charters of Henry I. and Stephen spoke only of “holy church,” John speaks of the “English church.” This change suggests a growth of patriotism among the prelates, led by Stephen Langton.