by Will Durant
In 1162 he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. As if by some magic incantation, he now changed his ways abruptly and thoroughly. He gave up his stately palace, his royal raiment, his noble friends. He sent in his resignation as chancellor. He put on coarse garb, wore a haircloth next to his skin, lived on vegetables, grains, and water, and every night washed the feet of thirteen beggars. He became now an unyielding defender of all the rights, privileges, and temporalities of the Church. Among these rights was the exemption of the clergy from trial by civil courts. Henry, who aspired to spread his rule over all classes, raged to find that crimes by the clergy often went unpunished by ecclesiastical courts. Assemblying the knights and bishops of England at Clarendon (1164), he persuaded them to sign the Constitutions of Clarendon, which ended many clerical immunities; but Becket refused to put his archiepiscopal seal upon the documents. Henry promulgated the new laws nevertheless, and summoned the ailing prelate to trial at the royal court. Becket came, and quietly withstood his own bishops, who joined in declaring him guilty of feudal disobedience to his suzerain the King. The court ordered his arrest; he announced that he would appeal the case to the Pope; and in his archiepiscopal robes, which none dared touch, he walked unharmed from the room. That evening he fed a great number of the poor in his London home. During the night he fled in disguise, by devious routes, to the Channel; crossed the turbulent strait in a frail vessel, and found haven in a monastery at St. Omer in the realm of the king of France. He submitted his resignation as archbishop to Pope Alexander III, who defended his stand, reinvested him with his see, but sent him for a time to live as a simple Cistercian monk in the abbey of Pontigny.
Henry banished from England all of Becket’s relatives, of any age or sex. When Henry came to Normandy Thomas left his cell, and from a pulpit at Vézelay pronounced excommunication upon those English clergymen who upheld the Constitutions of Clarendon (1166). Henry threatened to confiscate the property of all priories, in England, Normandy, Anjou, and Aquitaine, affiliated with the abbey of Pontigny if its abbot continued to harbor Becket; the frightened abbot begged Thomas to leave, and the ailing rebel lived for a time on alms in a dingy inn at Sens. Alexander III, prodded by Louis VII of France, commanded Henry to restore the Archbishop to his see or face an interdict of all religious services in the territories under English rule. Henry yielded. He came to Avranches, met Becket, promised to remedy all his complaints, and held the Archbishop’s stirrup as the triumphant prelate mounted to return to England (1169). Back in Canterbury, Thomas repeated his excommunication of the bishops who had opposed him. Some of these went to Henry in Normandy and roused him to fury with perhaps exaggerated accounts of Becket’s behavior. “What!” exclaimed Henry, “shall a man who has eaten my bread … insult the King and all the kingdom, and not one of the lazy servants whom I nourish at my table does me right for such an affront?” Four knights who heard him went to England, apparently without the knowledge of the King. On December 30, 1170, they found the Archbishop at the altar of the cathedral in Canterbury; and there they cut him down with their swords.
All Christendom rose in horror against Henry, branding him with a spontaneous and universal excommunication. After secluding himself in his chambers and refusing food for three days, the King issued orders for the apprehension of the assassins, sent emissaries to the Pope to declare his innocence, and promised to perform any penance that Alexander might require. He rescinded the Constitutions of Clarendon, and restored all the previous rights and property of the Church in his realm. Meanwhile the people canonized Becket, and proclaimed that many miracles were worked at his tomb; the Church officially pronounced him a saint (1172); and soon thousands were making pilgrimage to his shrine. Finally Henry, too, came to Canterbury as a penitent pilgrim; all the last three miles he walked with bare and bleeding feet on the flinty road; he prostrated himself before the tomb of his dead foe, begged the monks to scourge him, and submitted to their blows. His strong will broke under the weight of general obloquy and mounting troubles in his realm. His wife Eleanor, banished and imprisoned by the adulterous King, plotted with her sons to depose him. His eldest son Henry led feudal rebellions against him in 1173 and 1183, and died in revolt. In 1189 his sons Richard and John, impatiently awaiting his death, allied themselves with Philip Augustus of France in war upon their father. Driven from Le Mans, he denounced the God who had taken from him this town of his birth and love; and dying at Chinon (1189), he cursed with his last breath the sons who had betrayed him, and the life that had given him power and glory, riches and mistresses, enemies, contumely, treacheries, and defeat.
He had not quite failed. He had surrendered to Becket dead what he had refused to Becket living; yet in that bitter dispute it was Henry’s contention that won the accolade of time: from reign to reign, after him, the secular courts spread their jurisdiction over clerical, as well as lay, subjects of the king.37 He liberated English law from feudal and ecclesiastical limitations, and set it upon the path of development that has made it one of the supreme legal achievements since imperial Rome. Like his great-grandfather the Conqueror he strengthened and unified the government of England by reducing to discipline and order a rebellious and anarchic nobility. There he succeeded too well: the central government became strong to the verge of irresponsible and incalculable despotism; and the next round in the historic alternation between order and liberty belonged to the aristocracy and freedom.
3. Magna Carta
Richard I the Lion-Hearted succeeded without challenge to his father’s throne. Son of the adventurous, impulsive, irrepressible Eleanor, he followed in her steps rather than in those of the somber and competent Henry. Born in Oxford in 1157, he was delegated by his mother to administer her dominions in Aquitaine. There he imbibed the skeptical culture of Provence, the “gay science” of the troubadours, and was never afterward an Englishman. He loved adventure and song more than politics and administration; he crowded a century of romance into his forty-two years, and gave to the poets of his time the compliment of imitation as well as the encouragement of patronage. The first five months of his reign were spent in gathering funds for a crusade; he appropriated for the purpose the full treasury left by Henry II; he removed thousands of officials, and reappointed them for a consideration; he sold charters of freedom to cities that could pay, and acknowledged Scotland’s independence for 15,000 marks—not that he loved money less, but adventure more. Within half a year of his accession he was off to Palestine. He cared as little for his own safety as for others’ rights; he taxed his realm to the utmost, and squandered revenue in luxury, feasting, and display; but he galloped through the final decade of the twelfth century with such bravado and bravery that his fellow poets ranked him above Alexander, Arthur, and Charlemagne.
He fought and loved Saladin, failed and swore to conquer him, turned homeward, and was captured on the way (1192) by Duke Leopold of Austria, whom he had offended in Asia. Early in 1193 Leopold surrendered him to the Emperor Henry VI, who held a grudge against Henry II and Richard; despite the law, generally recognized in Europe, against the detention of a Crusader, Henry VI kept the King of England prisoner in a castle at Dürnstein on the Danube, and demanded for him from England a ransom of 150,000 marks ($15,000,000)—double the whole annual revenue of the British crown. In the meantime Richard’s brother John tried to seize the throne; resisted, he fled to France, and joined Philip Augustus in attacking England. Philip, violating a pledge of peace, attacked and seized English possessions in France, and offered great bribes to Henry VI to keep Richard prisoner. Richard fretted in comfortable durance, and wrote an excellent ballad38 appealing to his country for ransom. Through this turmoil Eleanor governed successfully as regent, with the wise counsel of her justiciar Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury; but they found it hard to raise the ransom. Finally released (1194), Richard hurried to England, levied taxes and troops, and led an army across the Channel to avenge himself and Britain against Philip. Tradition holds that he refused th
e sacraments for years lest he be required to forgive his faithless enemy. He recovered all the territory that Philip had captured, and resigned himself to a peace that allowed Philip to live. In the interlude he quarreled with a vassal, Adhemar, Viscount of Limoges, who had found a cache of gold on his land. Adhemar offered Richard a part, Richard demanded all, and besieged him. An arrow from Adhemar’s castle struck the King, and Richard Coeur de Lion died in his forty-third year in a dispute over a mess of gold.
His brother John (1199–1216)* succeeded him after some opposition and distrust; and Archbishop Walter made him swear a coronation oath that his throne was held by the election of the nation (i.e., the nobles and prelates) and the grace of God. But John, having been false to his father, his brother, and his wife, was not sorely hampered by one more vow. Like Henry II and Richard I he gave little evidence of religious belief. It was said that he had never taken the Eucharist since coming of age, not even on his coronation day.39 The monks charged him with atheism, and told how, having caught a fat stag, he had remarked: “How plump and well fed is this animal! and yet, I dare swear, he never heard Mass”—which the monks resented as an allusion to their corpulence.40 He was a man of much intellect and little scruple; an excellent administrator; “no great friend to the clergy,” and therefore, said Holinshed, a bit maligned by monastic chroniclers;41 not always in the wrong, but often alienating men by his sharp temper and wit, his scandalous humor, his proud absolutism, and the tax exactions to which he felt driven in defending Continental England against Philip Augustus.
In 1199 John secured permission from Pope Innocent III to divorce Isabel of Gloucester on grounds of consanguinity, and soon thereafter he married Isabella of Angoulême, despite her betrothal to the count of Lusignan. The nobility of both countries took offense, and the count appealed to Philip for redress. About the same time the barons of Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, and Maine protested to Philip that John was oppressing their provinces. By feudal fealties going back to the cession of Normandy to Rollo, the territorial lords of France, even in provinces owned by England, acknowledged the French king as their feudal suzerain; and by feudal law John, as Duke of Normandy, was vassal to the king of France. Philip summoned his royal vassal to come to Paris and defend himself against divers charges and appeals. John refused. The French feudal court declared his possessions in France forfeited, and awarded Normandy, Anjou, and Poitou to Arthur, Count of Brittany, a grandson of Henry II. Arthur laid claim to the throne of England, raised an army, and besieged at Mirabeau Queen Eleanor, who, though eighty, led a force in defense of her unruly son. John rescued her, captured Arthur, and apparently ordered his death. Philip invaded Normandy. John was too busy honeymooning at Rouen to lead his troops; they were defeated; John fled to England; and Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed to the French crown.
Pope Innocent III, at odds with Philip, had done what he could to help John; John now quarreled with Innocent. On the death of Hubert Walter (1205) the King persuaded the older monks of Canterbury to elect John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, to the vacant see. A group of younger monks chose Reginald, their subprior, as archbishop. The rival candidates hurried to Rome, seeking papal confirmation; Innocent rejected them both, and appointed to the see Stephen Langton, an English prelate who for the past twenty-five years had lived in Paris, and was now a professor of theology in the university there. John protested that Langton had no preparation for the office of primate of England, a position involving political as well as ecclesiastical functions. Ignoring John’s demurrers, Innocent, at Viterbo in Italy, consecrated Stephen archbishop of Canterbury (1207). John defied Langton to set foot on English soil; threatened to burn the cloisters over the heads of the rebellious Canterbury monks; and swore “by the teeth of God” that if the Pope laid an interdict on England he would banish every Catholic clergyman from the land, and would put out the eyes and cut off the nose of some of them for good measure. The interdict was pronounced (1208); all religious services of the clergy in England were suspended except baptism and extreme unction; churches were closed by the clergy, church bells were silenced, and the dead were buried in unconsecrated ground. John confiscated all episcopal or monastic properties, and gave them to laymen. Innocent excommunicated the King; John ignored the decree, and waged successful campaigns in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The people trembled under the interdict, but the nobles acquiesced in the spoliation of Church property as transiently diverting the royal appetite from their own wealth.
Proud of his apparent victory, John offended many by his excesses. He neglected his second wife to beget illegitimate children upon careless mistresses; jailed Jews to milk their money from them; allowed some imprisoned prelates to die of hardships; alienated nobles by adding insults to taxes; and strictly enforced the unpopular forestry laws. In 1213 Innocent used his last resort: he promulgated a decree of deposition against the English King, released John’s subjects from their oath of allegiance, and declared the King’s possessions to be now the lawful spoil of whoever could wrest them from his sacrilegious hands. Philip Augustus accepted the invitation, assembled an impressive army, and marched to the Channel coast. John prepared to resist invasion; but now he discovered that the nobles would not support him in a war against a Pope armed with physical as well as spiritual force. Furious against them, and seeing the imminence of defeat, he struck a bargain with Pandulf, the papal legate: if Innocent would withdraw his decrees of excommunication, interdict, and deposition, and would change from foe to friend, John pledged himself to return all confiscated ecclesiastical property, and to submit his crown and his kingdom to the Pope in feudal vassalage. It was so agreed; John surrendered all England to the Pope, and received it back, after five days, as a papal fief subject to perpetual tribute and fealty (1213).
John embarked for Poitou to attack Philip, and commanded the barons of England to follow him with arms and men. They refused. The victory of Philip at Bouvines deprived John of German and other allies to whom he had looked for aid against an expanding France. He returned to England to face an embittered aristocracy. The nobles resented his inordinate taxation for disastrous wars, his violations of precedent and law, his bartering of England for Innocent’s forgiveness and support. To force the issue, John required of them a scutage—a money payment in lieu of military service. They sent him instead a deputation demanding a return to the laws of Henry I, which had protected the rights of the nobles and limited the powers of the king. Receiving no satisfactory answer, the nobles collected their armed forces at Stamford; and while John dallied at Oxford they sent emissaries to London, who won the support of the commune and the court. At Runnymede on the Thames, near Windsor, the forces of the aristocracy encamped opposite the few supporters of the King. There John made his second great surrender, and signed (1215) Magna Carta, the most famous document in English history.
John, by the grace of God King of England … to his archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons … and all his faithful subjects, greeting. Know ye that we … have by this our present Charter confirmed, for us and our heirs forever:
1. That the Church of England shall be free, and have her whole rights and liberties inviolable….
2. We grant to all the freemen of our kingdom, for us and for our heirs forever, all the below-written liberties….
12. No scutage or aid shall be imposed … unless by the general council of our kingdom….
14. For holding the general council concerning the assessment of aids and scutage … we shall cause to be summoned the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons of the realm* … and all others who hold of us in chief. …
15. We will not in future grant to anyone that he may take aid of his own free [non-slave] tenants, except to ransom his body, and to make his eldest son a knight, and once to marry his eldest daughter; and for this there shall be only a reasonable aid….
17. Common pleas shall not follow our court, but shall be held in some fixed place….
36. Nothing
henceforth shall be given or taken for a writ of inquisition … but it shall be granted freely [i.e., no man shall be long imprisoned without trial]….
39. No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseised [dispossessed], or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed … unless by the lawful judgment of his peers [his equals in rank], or by the law of the land.
40. We will sell to no man, we will not deny to any man, either justice or right.
41. All merchants shall have safe and secure conduct to go out of, and to come into, England, and to stay there, and to pass as well by land as by water, for buying or selling… without any unjust tolls….
60. All the aforesaid customs and liberties … all people of our kingdom, as well clergy as laity, shall observe, as far as they are concerned, towards their dependents….
Given under our hand, in the presence of witnesses, in the meadow called Runnymede, the 15th day of June, in the 17th year of our reign.42