During this hasty journey to Durham and back events ever memorable in English history had taken place. On the 4th of August the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz Peter held a great assembly at St. Albans, at which attended not only the great barons of the realm but the representatives of the people of the townships of all the royal estates. The object of the gathering was to determine the sum due to the bishops as an indemnity for their losses. There no doubt the commons and the barons had full opportunity of discussing their grievances, and the justiciar undertook, in the name of his master, that the laws of Henry I. should be put in force. Not that they knew much about the laws of Henry I., but that the prevailing abuses were regarded as arising from the strong governmental system consolidated by Henry II., and they recurred to the state of things which preceded that reign, just as under Henry I. men had recurred to the reign and laws of Edward the Confessor. On the 25th of the same month the archbishop, at a council at St. Paul’s, actually produced the charter issued by Henry I. at his coronation, and proposed that it should be presented to the king as the embodiment of the institutions which he had promised to maintain. Upon this foundation Magna Carta was soon to be drawn up. Almost directly after this, in October, the justiciar died; and John, who had hailed the death of Hubert Walter as a relief from an unwelcome adviser, spoke of Geoffrey with a cruel mockery as gone to join his old fellow-minister in hell. Both had acted as restraints on his desire to rule despotically, and the last public act of Geoffrey Fitz Peter had been to engage him to an undertaking which he had resolved not to keep.
John goes to
France, 1214.
But matters did not proceed very rapidly. It is more than a year before we hear much more of the baronial demands. The new legate showed himself desirous to gratify the king; and although the Northern barons still refused to go on foreign service, he managed to prevent an open struggle. The king went to Poictou in February, 1214, and did not return until the next October. In the meanwhile the damages of the bishops were ascertained and the interdict taken off on the 29th of June. The war on the Continent occupied men’s minds a good deal. Philip won the battle of Bouvines over the forces of Flanders, Germany and England, on the 27th of July; and John did nothing in Poictou to make the North Country barons regret their determination not to follow him. The great confederacy against Philip which Richard had planned, and which John had been laboring to bring to bear on his adversary, was defeated, and Philip stood forth for the moment as the mightiest king in Europe.
The party of
the barons.
Disappointed and ashamed, John returned, resolved to master the barons, and found them not only resolved but prepared and organized to resist him, perhaps even encouraged by his ill success. They had found in Stephen Langton a leader worthy of the cause, and able to exalt and inform the defenders of it. Among those defenders were men of very various sorts; some who had personal aims merely, some who were fitted by education, accomplishments, and patriotic sympathies for national champions, some who were carried away by the general ardor. In general they may be divided into three classes; those Northern barons who had begun the quarrel, the constitutional party who joined the others in a great meeting held at St. Edmund’s, in November, 1214, and those who adhered later to the cause, when they saw that the king was helpless. It was the two former bodies that presented to him their demands a few weeks after he returned from France. He at once refused all, and began to manœuvre to divide the consolidated phalanx. First he tried to disable them by demanding the renewal of the homages throughout the country and the surrender of the castles. He next tried to detach the clergy by granting a charter to secure the freedom of election to bishoprics; he tried to make terms with individual barons; he delayed meeting them from time to time; he took the cross, so that if any hand was raised against him it might be paralyzed by the cry of sacrilege; he wrote urgently to the Pope to get him to condemn the propositions, and excommunicate the persons, of the barons. They likewise presented their complaints at Rome, resisted all John’s blandishments, and declined to relax one of their demands or to give up one of their precautions.
March of
the barons.
Negotiations ceased, and preparations for war began about Easter 1215; the confederates met at Stamford, then marched to Brackly, Northampton, Bedford, Ware, and so to London, where they were received on the 24th of May. The news of their entry into London determined the action of those who still seemed to adhere to the king, and they joined them, leaving him almost destitute of forces, attended by a few advisers whose hearts were with the insurgents, and a body of personal adherents who had little or no political weight beside their own unpopularity.
Magna
Carta.
Then John saw himself compelled to yield, and he yielded; he consented to bind himself with promises in which there was nothing sincere but the reluctance with which he conceded them. Magna Carta, the embodiment of the claims which the archbishop and barons had based on the charter of Henry I., was granted at Runnymede, on June 15, 1215.
Magna Carta was a treaty of peace between the king and his people, and so is a complete national act. It is the first act of the kind, for it differs from the charters issued by Henry I., Stephen, and Henry II. not only in its greater fulness and perspicuity, but by having a distinct machinery provided to carry it out. Twenty-five barons were nominated to compel the king to fulfil his part. It was not, as has been sometimes said, a selfish attempt on the part of the barons and bishops to secure their own privileges; it provided that the commons of the realm should have the benefit of every advantage which the two elder estates had won for themselves, and it bound the barons to treat their own dependents as it bound the king to treat the barons. Of its sixty-three articles, some provided securities for personal freedom; no man was to be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate, but by the judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Others fixed the rate of payments due by the vassal to his lord. Others presented rules for national taxation, and for the organization of a national council, without the consent of which the king could not tax. Others decreed the banishment of the alien servants of John. Although it is not the foundation of English liberty, it is the first, the clearest, the most united, and historically the most important of all the great enunciations of it; and it was a revelation of the possibility of freedom to the mediæval world. The maintenance of the Charter becomes from henceforth the watchword of English freedom.