Aquitaine, none of them owned lands there, and they refused to defend it. John raved and cursed,-and practised horrible cruelties on anyenemies he could catch, and generally behaved in a most unkingly fashion. But in 1206 he began quite a new quarrel with the English
Church and the Pope. His cause was at first a good one, for it was about the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Both the
Pope and the monks at Canterbury had refused to accept the man whom John named as Archbishop; and the Pope had even appointed one
Stephen Langton in his place. John swore
“by God’s teeth” that he would never receive
Langton as Archbishop; and for five years he held his own. The Pope tried every weapon at his command; he “excommunicated” John, that is to say, he cut him off from all Christian rites;
he put England under an “interdict,” which meant that no one could be buried with the full burial service, no one married in church, no church bells rung, and in fact all the best religious services and sacraments were suspended.
Finally, the Pope declared John deposed and told Philip to go and depose him.
Now, much as Englishmen hated their tyrannical King, they hated still more the idea of an Italian priest dealing thus with the crown and liberty of England; and most honest men were prepared to support even John against
Philip and the Pope.
John, for his part, confiscated all Churchproperty in England and bestowed it on a set of foreign favourites and parasites, mostly mercenary soldiers from Flanders. Then suddenly he gave away his own cause. In 1213 he became frightened, made the most abject submission to the Pope, and promised to hold his crown and country for the future as the Pope’s “vassal,”
and to pay tribute for it. This was too much for all Englishmen, and the country fairly boiled over with rage.
Yet “rebellion” was a dreadful thing. John was rich, powerful, and held all the important castles of England in his own hands. The man who gave the English barons courage to resist was the very man over whom all this fuss had begun — Stephen Langton. He called meetings of the leading barons, and either drew up or got them to draw up a list of their grievances and those of other classes of Englishmen. This document was to be taken to the King and, if he refused to listen, the barons were to rebel.
Nearly all the towns and most of the churchmen were on their side; yet they were only able to raise a little army of 2,000 men. Luckily
John again lost his head and agreed to all their demands. The document which they presented to him at Runnymede, near Windsor, in June,
1215, and which he signed, was called “Magna
Charta” — the “Great Charter of Liberties.”
John soon repented of signing it, sent for his hireling soldiers, sent to his “Holy
Father,” the Pope (who at once absolved him from his oath to observe the Charter, and hurled dreadful curses at the rebel barons),
and scattered the little national army like chaff before him. In despair some of the barons took the foolish step of calling in Prince
Louis of France and offering him the English crown. But within fifteen months England was saved. John, having grossly overeaten himself one night at Newark Abbey, died suddenly in October, 1216.
If you will consider the Great Charter for a few minutes you will see what a long road toward union and peace England had travelled since the last barons’ rebellion in 1174. In that year the fight had been one of barons against
King and people;now it was one of barons and people against King. All classes of the nation suffered and ,had called on the barons to lead them. They could not have done this if the barons had still held their lands in Normandy; and so it was the loss of those lands that finally made the barons Englishmen.
The nation had grown up; it had “come of age.” What it wanted was to make its King give security that he would not oppress it in future. So, by the Great Charter, it proposed
to “tie his hands “ in several ways. He is not to levy any more land-taxes without calling his
Great Council of all the great landowners
(barons and others), and asking their consent.
He is not to exact higher payments of rent or of other customary dues than earlier kings did.
He is to pay his debts to his creditors. His courts of justice shall sit regularly as those of
Henry II and Richard had sat; and they shall sit in a fixed place instead of rambling over
England and France in the train of the King.
(This “fixed place” came to be Westminster.)
All men shall be entitled to a fair trial, and shall not be deprived of their land without a fair trial. The great abuses of the game laws shall be abolished.
And so on. No doubt to many of the barons of this year, 1215, it was their own grievances of which they were thinking most — the grinding taxes, the loss of their Norman lands, their cruelly murdered kinsfolk. But in order to get these grievances redressed they were obliged to ask also for the redress of the grievances from which other classes were suffering; even “villeins”
are carefully protected by one of the articles of the Charter; even to the hated Scots and Welsh
“justice” is to be done. To the Church much more than justice is to be done; it is to be “made free,” which, I fear, means that the kings arenot to appoint its bishops. But later kings always found a way of avoiding this restriction.
The Reeds of Runnymede
At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
What say the reeds at Runnymede?
The lissom reeds that give and take,
That bend so far, but never break,
They keep the sleepy Thames awake
With tales of John at Runnymede.
At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Oh hear the reeds at Runnymede:
“You mustn’t sell, delay, deny,
A freeman’s right or liberty,
It wakes the stubborn Englishry,
We saw ‘em roused at Runnymede!
“When through our ranks the Barons came,
With little thought of praise or blame,
But resolute to play the game,
They lumbered up to Runnymede;
And there they launched in solid line,
The first attack on Right Divine —
The curt, uncompromising 4 Sign!’
That settled John at Runnymede.
“At Runnymede, at Runnymede,
Your rights were won at Runnymede!
No freeman shall be fined or bound,
Or dispossessed of freehold ground,
Except by lawful judgment found
And passed upon him by his peers! —
Forget not, after all these years,
The Charter signed at Runnymede.”
And still when mob or monarch lays
Too rude a hand on English ways,
The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,
Across the reeds at Runnymede.
And Thames, that knows the moods of kings,
And crowds and priests and suchlike things,
Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings
Their warning down from Runnymede!
John’s heir was a boy of nine years, who was to reign for fifty-six years as Henry III. A ,
wise Regent was quickly chosen for him, William
Marshall, Earl of Pembroke; the French prince was still in the land, but his friends soon deserted him, and he was glad to make a treaty and go away. The Pope supported the new ‘
government, for by John’s submission the j young King had become his “vassal.” The
Pope expected to make a good thing out of it,
and he intended Henry to help him, which
Henry, when he grew up, was only too ready to do. For the King, with many good qualities,
such as piety and mercy, with much learning and good taste for art and building, ^as quite un-English. He was the first king, since Edward the Confessor,
who had leaned wholly upon foreign favourites and despised his own sturdy people. He was frightfully extravagant,
and a natural, though not an intentional, liar.
England was to him only a very rich farm, out of which he could squeeze for himself and the “ Holy
Father,” the Pope at Rome, cash, more cash,
and ever more and more cash. His own share of it he spent on building beautiful churches,
such as Westminster Abbey, and in useless wars with his noble overlord, King Louis IX of
France, who always beat him, but allowed him to retain Southern Aquitaine, that is, Gascony.
Down till about 1232 Henry governed by native
English or Norman ministers; and, so long as
Langton lived, the Pope did not interfere much.
But soon after that the King’s extravagance and the Pope’s increasing demands for money began to be felt, and the nation grumbled. The barons were now thorough Englishmen, who had no interests outside England at all. They began to wonder whether Magna Charta was a mere bit of waste paper or not; the King observed few of its provisions, though he con-stantly swore to observe fthegi. In fact, he published it at the beginning of his reign with several important articles omitted. Yet it was difficult to catch him out. He was not in the least a “gory tyrant,” like his father; he simply maddened every one by his useless extravagances, by never paying his debts, and by never keeping his promises. At last the barons found that he had promised the Pope an enormous sum of money, in return for which the
Pope had promised to one of Henry’s sons the crown of Sicily. Sicily, forsooth! What had
England to do with an island in the Mediterranean, while French pirates were burning the towns on our south coast without a single King’s ship being sent to prevent them?
This was in 1257. The barons met the King in council after council and utterly refused to pay a penny for the Sicilian job. Endless documents were drawn up for the King to sign.
He signed them quite readily, promised whatever he was asked, but never kept his word.
The chief spokesman of the barons was one
Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester. The nation and all the best of the churchmen rallied heartily to Simon’s side, especially the men of
London, and things ended in a kind of war,
wherein, at the battle of Lewes in 1264, the
King and his eldest son, Prince Edward, fellinto Earl Simon’s hands. For a year Simon governed in the King’s name; but he was a hotheaded and rather grasping man, and quarrelled with his own best supporters. He even called in the aid of the Welsh. At last Prince
Edward escaped from captivity, rallied his father’s friends, defeated and slew Simon at
Evesham, and put his father back on the throne.
Little vengeance was taken; and the last seven years of Henry’s reign were peaceful, so peaceful indeed, that, though Prince Edward was away in Palestine when Henry died in 1272, no one questioned his right to be crowned king when he returned.
Two things rendered Henry’s long reign memorable; the coming of the Friars, and the beginning of Parliament. The Friars were the last offshoot of the dying tree of monkery.
Wise people began to see that a monk who shut himself up in a monastery might no doubt save his own soul, but could do little for the, souls of other people. What was wanted was men who could go about in the world preaching and doing good. Two great men, St. Dominic, a Spaniard, and St. Francis, an Italian, founded brotherhoods of “Friars” (the word means brothers), who were to fulfil this mission. It was a splendid idea, and St. Francis is one of the most beautiful figures in history. The Friars^Riie and lodged with the «-y poor in the filthy slums, and did such work as our clergy are doing to-day in all great cities. Others walked all over the land, preaching in the streets and villages. But soon this movement also began to fail; for pious laymen heaped lands and riches on these brotherhoods, until in little more than a century they had become as rich and as worldly as the monks. Moreover, the ordinary parish and town priests, who suffered even more than the laymen from the greedy demands of the Pope, began to think of monks and friars alike, as mere agents of the Pope, as something foreign to the “national Church.”
Hence, after 1300, there were few gifts of land to monks or friars; people preferred rather,
to found schools and colleges. Both at Oxford and Cambridge colleges had been founded before that year.
The second thing, the beginning of Parliament, is even more important. Ever since
Magna Charta had been signed the idea that the nation ought in some way to control the
King was in the air; and the question was what shape this control should take. As you know,
Parliament to-day consists of two houses,
Lords and Commons. The House of Lords is a direct descendant of the barons of the thirteenth century. The eldest son of a baron,earl, marquis, or duke inherits the right to receive from the King a letter calling him byname to Parliament whenever it meets. The
King can “create” a man a baron, and the creation carries with it this right to receive the letter of summons. Perhaps there were nearly two hundred great barons in Henry Ill’s reign;
there are now over six hundred. The bishops always received a similar letter of summons, and,
until the Reformation, so did the leading abbots.
It was in the reign of Henry III that this Great
Council began to take its shape. The King no doubt disliked it, for he disliked all control,
and its business certainly was to control him.
But he found that he could not do without it.
The origin of the House of Commons is quite different. It, to-day, also has over six hundred members, chosen from different towns and districts of the United Kingdom, by all persons who have the right to vote. Now, in the reign of Henry III, and even earlier, as I told you,
the King had been in the habit of sending officials into each county and town to consult with the chief landowners and citizens, and to discover what amount of taxes that county or city could bear. These people met In the old Saxon court of justice, called the “County Court,”
to which all free landowners ought to come;
and they elected “knights” or gentlemen tospeak for them. In Henry Ill’s reign the brilliant idea occurred to somebody, “ Why not send these elected knights or gentlemen to meet the King himself in some general assembly?
Each of them can speak for his own county,
and the King will get a fair idea of what amount of money the whole of England is able to give him.”
Now no general assembly other than that of the Great Council of barons existed, so the elected knights from the counties and the elected citizens from the towns used occasionally to be called to the Great Council, and there met the barons and the King. Then there would be a great Talking or “ Parliamentum” (French farter, to talk). Such knights and citizens would naturally grow bolder when they found themselves met together, and found that the barons were much the same sort of fellows as themselves, and had the same ideas about the King’s extravagance and his ridiculous foreign wars. It was on such occasions that they thoroughly realized that the barons were their natural leaders. Soon, they too would begin to present petitions about the grievances of their districts, and to beg the King to make particular laws. Earl Simon has got much fame because, while he was ruling in 1265,
there met, for the first time, in one assembly,barons, bishops, abbots, “knights of the shire,”
and citizens. You will see in the next chapter how Edward I shaped these assemblies into regular parliaments, and what powers they won for themselves.
My Father’s Chair.
There are four good legs to my Father’s
Chair —
Priest and People and Lords and Crown.
I sit on all of ‘em fair and square,
And that is the reason it don’t break down.
I won’t trust one le
g, nor two, nor three,
To carry my weight when I sit me down;
I want all four of ‘em under me —
Priest and People and Lords and Crown.
I sit on all four and I favour none —
Priest, nor People, nor Lords, nor Crown —
And I never tilt in my Chair, my son,
And that is the reason it don’t break down!
When your time comes to sit in my Chair,
Remember your Father’s habits and rules:
Sit on all four legs, fair and square,
And never be tempted by one-legged stools!
CHAPTER V
THE THREE EDWARDS, 1272 — 1377
Edward I, II, and III (notice the grand old
Saxon name; we are all one people now) may be called Edward the Lawgiver, Edward the
Poltroon, Edward the Knight. The greatest of these was Edward I.
He ranks with the half dozen greatest
“makers of England,” with Alfred, William the Conqueror, Henry II, Henry VIII, Elizabeth, and Victoria the Great. I should, indeed,
say “makers of Britain,” for it was Edward who planned, and almost carried out, the union of the whole island under one crown. It was he who gave the abiding shape to our Parliament, who dealt the first successful blow to the pretensions of the Pope, and who first armed his soldiers with the all-conquering longbow. His care for our coast defences was an example to his descendants. His legal reforms were hardly less than those of Henry
II, and at the end of his reign the law of
England and the law courts of England hadtaken the shape that they bore down to the nineteenth century.
Edward I was a brave, truthful, honourable man, of rather narrow sympathies, and could be very cruel to his foes. He had learned much from his father’s muddled reign; he would engage in no rash foreign adventures to please the Pope or any one else. Of course, he must defend his one foreign possession, Gascony;
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 831