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.