The Conquering Family (48 page)
Read The Conquering Family Online
Authors: Thomas B. Costain
Tags: #History, #Non-Fiction, #Biography
LXIV. And, whereas, we have granted all these things for God’s sake, and for the amendment of our government, and for the better compromising the discord arisen betwixt us and our barons: we, willing that the same be firmly held and established for ever, do make and grant to our barons the security underwritten; to wit, That the barons shall chuse five and twenty barons of the Realm, whom they list, who shall, to their utmost power, keep and hold, and cause to be kept, the peace and liberties which we have granted and confirmed by this our present charter; insomuch, that if we, or our justice, or our bailiff, or any of our ministers, act contrary to the same in any thing, against any persons, or offend against any article of this peace and security,
and such our miscarriage be shewn to four barons of the said five and twenty, those four barons shall come to us, or to our justice, if we be out of the realm, and shew us our miscarriage, and require us to amend the same without delay; and if we do not amend it, or if we be out of the realm, our justice do not amend it within forty days after the same is shewn to us, or to our justice if we be out of the realm,
then the said four barons shall report the same to the residue of the said five and twenty barons; and then those five and twenty barons, with the commonalty of England, may distress us by all the ways they can; to wit, by seizing on our castles, lands, and possessions, and by what other means they can, till it be amended, as they shall adjudge; saving our own person, the person of our Queen, and the persons of our children:
and when it is amended, they shall be subject to us as before. And whoever of the realms will, may swear, that for the performance of these things he will obey the commands of the said five and twenty barons, and that, together with them, he will distress us to his power: and we will give public and free leave to swear to all that will swear, and will never hinder any one: and for all persons of the realm, that of their own accord will swear to the said five and twenty barons to distress us, we will issue our precept, commanding them to swear as aforesaid.
LXV. And if any of the said five and twenty barons die, or go out of the realm, or be any way hindered from acting as aforesaid, the residue of the said five and twenty barons shall chuse another in his room, according to their discretion, who shall swear as the others do.
LXVI. And as to all things which the said five and twenty barons are to do, if, peradventure, they be not all present, or cannot agree, or in case any of those that are summoned cannot or will not come, whatever shall be determined by the greater number of them that are present, shall be good and valid, as if all had been present.
LXVII. And the said five and twenty barons shall swear, that they will faithfully observe all the matters aforesaid, and cause them to be observed to their power.
LXVIII. And we will not obtain of any one for ourselves, or for any other, any thing whereby any of these concessions, or of these liberties may be revoked or annihilated; and if any such thing be obtained, it shall be null and void, nor shall ever be made use of by ourselves or any other.
LXIX. And all ill-will, disdain, and rancour, which has been between us and our subjects of the clergy and laity since the said discord began, we do fully release and pardon to them all. And moreover, all trespasses that have been committed by occasion of the said discord since Easter, in the sixteenth of our reign, to the restoring of the peace, we have fully released to all clerks and laymen: and so far as in us lies we have fully pardoned them: And further, we have caused letters patent to be made to them in testimony hereof, witnessed by Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury, Henry, archbishop of Dublin, and by the aforesaid bishops, and by Mr. Pandulphus, upon this security and these concessions. Whereby, we will and strictly command, that the church of England be free, and enjoy all the said liberties, and rights, and grants, well and in peace, freely and quietly, fully and entirely to them and their heirs, in all things, in all places, and for ever as aforesaid. And we and
our barons have sworn that all things above written, shall be kept on our parts, in good faith, without ill design. The witnesses are the persons above-named and many others.
LXX. This charter was given at the meadow called Running-Mead, betwixt Windsor and Stanes, the fifteenth day of June, in the seventeenth year of our reign.
J
OHN
It will be seen that the Great Charter went beyond that of Henry I in its specific mention of the rights of Englishmen. Consider Clause XLIII —the numbering was done later and will not be found in the original document—which says with a precision never before attempted that “no freeman shall be taken, nor imprisoned … but by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the laws of the land.” The parliamentary principle, which had been slowly and imperfectly evolved by the Anglo-Saxons, was affirmed in Clause XV, “We will impose no escuage” (generally called scutage, a helmet or war tax) “nor aids within our realm but
by the common council of our realm
…”
The rights of common men were dealt with in a more forthright manner than the brevity of Henry’s Charter had made possible. Clause XXIII says: “A freeman shall not be amerced for a small offence … and none of the said amercements shall be affeered
but by oath of good and lawful men of the vicinage
.”
If Saire de Quincey was responsible for the form of the Charter, he deserves more credit than he has ever been given, and a permanent place among those who have contributed to the liberties of mankind.
When all is said and done, however, the greatest thing about the Great Charter is that it was won by force from a hostile king. When John set down his signature at the bottom of this historic document, he was recognizing the right of the people to make demands and to have a hand in drafting the laws under which they lived and worked and had their being. The clauses are in most respects an amplification of the old laws, but they grow in stature and significance because the laws are here reduced to concrete form and sworn to as a covenant between ruler and people.
*
Taxes for the helmet, or war.
Twilight of a Tyrant
J
OHN
had been unperturbed, seemingly, while the Charter was being drawn up. Once it had been signed, he returned to Windsor Castle, locked himself in his room, and allowed the mask to drop. He indulged in the most prolonged tantrum of a lifetime, rolling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, bleating curses on the barons collectively and individually. This fit was followed by a period of intense thought and of long discussion with Pandulfo.
On the morning of Friday, June 26, John rode away from Windsor, accompanied by the papal legate. They went to Winchester, where the King stayed long enough to send letters to his agents in various cities, Ghent, Caen, Bordeaux, Naples, Genoa. He wanted these purveyors of flesh and blood, who were paid so much for each man delivered, to get him mercenaries, particularly the stout young men from the Low Countries and the German states around the Palatinate. He would pay well; nay, he would give them rich lands and houses and he would even turn over to their leaders the castles of his subjects when the defeat of the barons had been accomplished. Pandulfo started for Rome to let the Pope know what had befallen in England. This much done, John went to the Isle of Wight and waited there for his plans to mature. His pride had been so affronted that he did not want to face his familiars and the courtiers and their wives until the score had been wiped off the slate.
Pandulfo had no difficulty in convincing Innocent that John should be supported in his struggle with the barons. He was a much misunderstood man, declared this oily and sinister go-between, a king who deserved, in reality, the affection of his subjects. The barons were concerned only with winning back their feudal power and, in resisting John, they were fighting against Holy Church. Thus Pandulfo. The Pope listened and was in complete accord with his agent.
Pope Innocent was a sick man, with only a few months to live. The crowning achievement of a lifetime devoted to the consolidation of the power of the Church had been the submission of John. It had been the
first step, or so the Pontiff believed, toward the accomplishment of a great dream, the forming of a Christian empire of which the Pope would always be the head. Innocent conceived himself the temporal as well as the apostolic leader of the English state and saw the uprising of the barons as a repudiation of his authority. Under the circumstances he decided that prompt and sweeping steps were indicated. The hand which had hurled so many thunderbolts was raised again.
On August 24 Innocent issued a bull annulling the Charter. It was sharp in its condemnation of the national cause and ended with the words:
We can no longer pass over in silence such audacious wickedness, in contempt of the apostolic see, in infringement of the rights of the king.… We altogether quash the Charter and pronounce it to be, with all its obligations and guarantees, null and void.
At the same time he promulgated another bull, ordering the barons to lay down their arms in pain of excommunication.
Pandulfo returned with these powerful weapons as Stephen Langton was starting for Rome in the hope of convincing the Pope of the righteousness of the popular cause. The archbishop refused to publish the papal bulls and the agent triumphantly produced another by which Stephen Langton himself was suspended from office for a term of two years. This made it very clear that the waters at Rome had been most thoroughly muddied and that the only hope left was to see the Pope and convince him he had acted on false information. Accordingly Langton boarded the ship which had been waiting for him and started on the two-month journey to Italy.
It was a logical step to take and yet, as events shaped themselves, it brought the cause of the people close to disaster. Langton was unable to make any impression on Innocent. While he kicked his heels in impotence in unfriendly anterooms, the barons in England, lacking his wise leadership, were soon at odds with each other. They permitted John to gain the upper hand in the civil war which ensued. That the King lost in the end was due to his capacity for making mistakes greater even than those for which Robert Fitz-Walter and his badly organized Army of God and Holy Church were responsible.
Langton was coldly received in Rome. His fellow cardinals turned their backs on him, and it was a long time before he was allowed an audience with the Pontiff. Innocent was harsh and accusatory with the man on whom he had once lavished his highest favors. The archbishop faced the torrent of censure with admirable calm and an unbending will to stand by the cause he had espoused and led. They parted in anger, and from that moment the papal doors were closed to the Englishman.
The situation came to a head amid a scene of great magnificence. The
Fourth Lateran Council, summoned by the Pope, marked the apex of apostolic power which had been achieved during his pontificate and which would never again be equaled. The heads of the Church attended from all parts of Christendom, from as far east as Antioch and as far west as Iceland, coming by ship when possible and laboring over mountain passes and rocky roads to reach the center of the world, the Eternal City. When this brilliant assembly opened, there were present all the cardinals and apostolic officers, 412 bishops, 800 heads of monastic orders, as well as innumerable priors and sub-priors, and representatives from every ruler in Europe. John had sent the abbot of Beaulieu, Thomas de Huntington, and Geoffrey de Crowcombe as his deputies, with very special instructions to look well after his interests. Never before had so many miters been seen at one time, and so many wise and kindly faces under them (and some that were harsh and dictatorial and simoniacal and nepotistic), nor such a combination of the rich vestments of the high churchmen with the simple brown and gray robes of the monkish heads.
Stephen Langton, under the disgrace of suspension, was not allowed to attend as a delegate. He sat among the spectators and, having human weaknesses as well as other men, suffered much distress of mind because of his exclusion. Letters that he wrote at the time to friends in England show how low he had fallen in spirit. He thought seriously of surrendering his high rank as cardinal and archbishop and joining the order of the Carthusians, one of the most rigid of all monastic orders. If he had joined the English Charterhouse at Witham, he would have spent the rest of his life in seclusion and contemplation, existing in poverty and in tattered garb, eating one meal a day and never tasting meat. The opportunity that eremitical life offered for writing no doubt appealed to the disillusioned primate. He was much in the street of the Saxons, where the faces of fellow countrymen were often seen. Here stood St. Mary’s Church which a Saxon king had built.
He was present when the situation in England came up for action but was neither allowed to speak nor to introduce any explanation of what had happened. Crowded among the spectators at one side, he heard himself denounced as a troublemaker and the barons scored as disobedient vassals.
The assembled leaders of the Church had come to Rome with certain grave problems to solve, particularly the growth of heretical opinion. The creeds of the Cathari and the Waldenses were to be crushed, the crusade against the Albigenses in southern France to be strengthened, the first development within the Church of a form of inquisition to be declared. With all this on their hands they paid little attention to the trouble in the island over which the Pontiff had assumed suzerainty. They did not have the least inkling that something sublime had happened in England, that the spirit of liberty, after lying in chains through the long, icy centuries
of the Dark Ages, had begun to stir. With unanimity they confirmed the suspension of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury and voted into effect the excommunication of the barons who had not obeyed the Pope by laying down their arms.
Pope Innocent presided over this famous Council with the mark of death on his face and wasted figure. He was so ill that for many days he had not been able to eat any food but oranges, and it was doubted if his strength would carry him through. The exultation of this official climax to his supreme pontificate, however, enabled him to stand the fatigue. With glowing eyes he voiced his belief in the temporal superiority of the Church, in the words of the prophet, “Lo! I have set thee this day over the nations and over the kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, and to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” His thin face was transfigured as he thus expressed his faith, and the Council stirred as one man and gave him its fervent approval. It did not enter the heads of the great leaders of the Church that, in their willingness to march behind his blazing chariot, they had stamped on the one constructive movement for the benefit of downtrodden humanity which had been started in centuries.