by Dan Jones
As well as these specific reforms, Magna Carta dealt, of course, in grand ideas. Indeed, it is thanks to its broadest – and in some ways least politically successful – clauses that Magna Carta has remained famous for eight centuries. Earls and barons were only to be ‘amerced’ (fined) ‘by their peers’ and ‘in accordance with the nature of the offence’ (Clause 21). Judges, sheriffs and other royal officials were to be competent (Clause 45). Later, the charter expands the principle further, in what is perhaps one of most enduring clauses of any major constitutional document in the last thousand years:
No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any other way ruined, nor will we go or send against him, except by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land [nisi per legale judicium parium suorum]
In 1215 this statement, from Clause 39, was designed (albeit rather impractically) to stop John’s highly personal and arbitrary pursuit of his greatest men. Over the years, however, Clause 39 – in tandem with the next clause, which simply states of the king that ‘to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay, right or justice’ – has been taken to enshrine the principles of trial by jury, Habeas Corpus and the basic idea that justice should always restrain the power of government.
One of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta as granted in 1215. This is one of the two held at the British Library; the others are owned by Salisbury and Lincoln cathedrals respectively. Written on parchment, which is derived from sheepskin, its closely written Latin has many of its words abbreviated. There would have originally been many more copies in 1215, since once granted and ‘engrossed’, Magna Carta was replicated and distributed across England.
Yet for everything that was grand and far-reaching in Magna Carta, there was much that remained vague, woolly or fudged. In places, Magna Carta feels like frustratingly unfinished business. Clauses such as ‘no one is to be distrained to do more service for a knight’s fee… than is owed for it’ (Clause 16) were clearly pushing towards much more complex political issues: in this case, the issue at stake was John’s practice of insisting on military service or payment from those whose feudal tenure did not, in fact, require them to give it. But – perhaps due to the pressures of time or the intractability of negotiators – such issues were diplomatically abandoned, the bones of an idea left unfleshed. The king promised to ‘immediately restore all hostages and charters that have been given to us by Englishmen as security for peace and faithful service’ (Clause 49) and to expel both named individuals and ‘all foreign knights, crossbowmen, serjeants and mercenaries’ (clauses 50 and 51) – although how or where this decommissioning process was to take place was left unspoken.
In other places, King John’s manifest duplicity fairly leaps from the ancient parchment: the king promised to restore ‘lands, castles, liberties [and] rights’ to those whom he had maltreated (Clause 52), whether in England or Wales (Clause 56), yet in the case of dispute, or of complaints from his subjects that dated back to the reigns of Henry II and Richard I (clauses 53 and 57), the cases were to be adjourned for the duration of John’s crusade. Whether or not John really intended to leave England to torment the Infidel instead of his own subjects we may doubt. Surely many at the time did. Nevertheless, the king was protected as much as he was obligated by the crusader’s cross he had taken up in March 1215. He used the fact to wriggle as much as he possibly could.
John’s capacity for wriggling had obviously escaped no one involved in the making of Magna Carta, and it was for this reason that the most important clause of all was added to the agreement. Attention is often lavished on clauses 39 and 40 by those seeking in Magna Carta the foundation stones of Western democracy. But equally significant is Clause 61, for it is this, known as the ‘security’ [securitatem] clause, by which the men of 1215 sought to find some way to hold the king to his own word, as given in the charter. For, quite clearly, all the fine efforts in bringing the king to Runnymede, persuading him to grant the charter and having it sent far and wide across the country would come to nothing if John decided simply to break his promises and return to the mode of kingship he preferred: overbearing, extortionate and cruel.
The security clause sets up what must have seemed like a sensible enough scheme to tie the king to his word. If the king were to ‘transgress against any of the articles of peace’, a panel of twenty-five specially elected barons (see Appendix III) was entitled, under the terms of the charter, to ‘distrain and distress us in all ways possible, by taking castles, lands and possessions and in any other ways they can… saving our person and the persons of our queen and children’. If the king backslid, he would find himself under attack by his own subjects. Or to put it more simply, Magna Carta allowed for licensed civil war.
And yet here lay the great contradiction at the heart of Magna Carta. The barons had attempted for the first time in English history to create a mechanism that allowed the community of the realm to override the king’s universal authority when that same authority was abused. This would be the aim of many generations of rebels after them. But as they found, this was no easy task. In 1215 a document that was intended as a peace treaty ended up sanctioning a return to war. Indeed, it may be said that Magna Carta made war more and not less likely, for its explicit mechanism of enforcement was to invoke a large-scale baronial revolt of the sort that the charter was designed to halt! How could this possibly be a recipe for peace? Even as the barons renewed their homage on 19 June it was probably not obvious in their minds whether, or how, the agreement was really going to work.
The Great Seal of King John. Once Magna Carta was granted, the royal seal would have been applied to the various copies then produced by industrious scribes. Only one of the four surviving 1215 copies, at the British Library, still has remnants of its seal. Unfortunately, that copy is also partially burnt, the result of a fire at the Westminster home of Sir Robert Cotton in 1731, when it was still part of the collection that he later bequeathed to the nation.
All this notwithstanding, it remains true that John had been forced at Runnymede to issue a longer and more comprehensive statement of what purported to be English law and custom than had been demanded or received from any of his predecessors. It combined detailed legal process with grand pronouncements about relations between Church and Crown and king and subjects. If any one idea could be said to run beneath or through all the clauses of Magna Carta, it is that which had been expressed by the theologian John of Salisbury in his Policraticus, composed almost six decades previously, in 1159. Salisbury compared a prince with a tyrant and concluded that the essential difference between the two was that while both made and enforced laws, the prince also subjected himself to the law.5 This was a law that the king granted but that the free people of England (rich men, mostly) owned jointly as the community of the realm. Magna Carta was simultaneously an attempt to reach agreement between king and barons about what the existing laws of the land were (as defined by ‘custom’), to spell out some more general spirit in which new laws should be made, and – perhaps most importantly of all – to find some formula by which the king could be forced to stick to what he had agreed.
Unfortunately, it was this third element of enforcing Magna Carta that caused it to fail almost immediately. Yet, in searching for a way to restrain a powerful monarch, King John’s enemies had begun to seek an answer to the basic constitutional question that would return to preoccupy England repeatedly during the Middle Ages.
9
War and Invasion
1215–1216
For all its ambitions and fine words, in 1215 Magna Carta was a failure. It failed to keep the peace. It failed to bind the king to the letter of the law or to any more elevated principles of government. It failed to reconcile John with the Northerners. It was annulled by the pope within weeks of its promulgation, and England was soon to be swallowed up by a civil war that brought back memories of the darkest days of the Anarchy. In immediate political terms, the
refore, the charter was a disaster. Eventually, Magna Carta would rise to become one of the most revered documents, both of the Middle Ages and of eight centuries of English history. But there would have been few people willing to bet on that that during the autumn of 1215.
If John had ever entertained the slightest intention of sticking to the terms of Magna Carta – and this is far from certain – he had abandoned it by July, when he wrote to Pope Innocent III requesting that the charter be annulled. He claimed that its terms had been extracted from him under dur-ess and were, as a result, not binding. The pope, as John’s overlord and crusading sponsor, was only too happy to agree. By September 1215, papal letters had been delivered to England, expressing Innocent’s strong indignation that a vassal of his should be treated so by mere subjects, and releasing John from his obligation to obey the terms of the charter. Pope Innocent took a bombastic tone from the start:
Although our well-beloved son in Christ, John illustrious King of the English, grievously offended God and the Church… the king at length returned to his senses… But the enemy of the human race [i.e. Satan] who always hates good impulses, by his cunning wiles stirred up against him the barons of England so that, with a wicked inconstancy, the men who supported him when injuring the Church rebelled against him when he turned from his sin… 1
An illustrated detail from Matthew Paris’s major historical work, Chronica Majora (1250s). It shows Prince Louis ‘the Lion’, heir to the French crown, arriving in England in 1216 after he was invited by rebellious barons to invade and replace John. In this ambition he was very nearly successful, and only with the defeats at Lincoln and the naval battles of Dover and Sandwich in 1217 was Louis persuaded to accept a large bribe and return home.
Innocent accused the barons of having thrown over their oaths of fealty, ‘conspiring as vassals against their lord and as knights against their king… and dared to make war on him, occupying and devastating his territory and even seizing the City of London, which had been treacherously surrendered to them’. The barons were accused of being unreasonable, treacherous and truculent, of exhibiting such ‘shameless presumption’ that ‘the king’s rights [were] injured, the English nation shamed and the whole plan for a crusade seriously endangered’. The pope concluded by saying that ‘we utterly reject and condemn this settlement [Magna Carta] and under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe it and that the barons and their associates should not require it to be observed’. Magna Carta was ‘null, and void of all validity forever’. Nine barons and all the citizens of London were excommunicated, for good measure.
This was hardly a gesture of goodwill. As a result, civil war resumed. By now, many of the English barons had given up believing that John might be reformed, tamed or otherwise controlled. Certainly, John’s own behaviour did not suggest a penitent soul: he had taken to threatening Archbishop Langton (who held Rochester Castle and refused to give it up, resulting in its siege), and from 17 September he was seizing baronial property by force. John’s opponents therefore began once again to resist his rule. Royal officials were ignored or replaced with the barons’ own men. All money owed to the Crown was withheld.
Most drastically of all, plans to replace the king were thrown into action. The barons wrote to Louis the Lion, the twenty-seven-year-old son of Philip Augustus, inviting him to come to England, join the war and take the crown for himself. ‘This was folly,’ wrote William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, with the benefit of hindsight.2 But his view was not universally shared. Since Edward the Confessor’s day, the English crown had been seized by force on four occasions by princes who were in blood and worldly outlook essentially French noblemen.*1 The difference between supporting the young Henry Plantagenet in 1153–4 and Louis of the House of Capet in 1215–16 may not have struck many noblemen as immediately obvious, even though Henry II could claim to be the grandson of Henry I.
Under extreme pressure, John’s hold on England began to weaken. Louis was not the only foreign prince to be invited to invade: the barons of Northern England invited Alexander II, King of Scots, to take over control of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland. In Wales, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth was able to process grandly around, capturing English-held castles and styling himself as ‘prince’. And by December, there was already an advance party of French knights in London. John was now battling against three foreign princes, a massive and highly disaffected swathe of his own aristocracy and – as it would transpire – time itself.
Since it was the North that had caused John the bulk of his problems it was here that he first went, marching his men towards the perpetually besieged borderlands town of Berwick, which he took in the first days of 1216 and then burned for good measure. According to the prejudiced but well-informed chronicler Roger of Wendover, John’s campaign in the North was calculated to cause maximum terror and remind his subjects that he was, despite everything, still their king. John burned villages and houses, and allowed his mercenaries to rape, murder and steal more or less as they chose. Thirsty as ever for money, he forced men to pay for their own freedom (and that of their families) from the advancing wall of slaughter. He was, said the chronicler Walter of Coventry, ‘on the warpath’.3
King John’s carved wooden effigy surmounting his tomb in Worcester Cathedral. In the words of Sellar & Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, the end of John’s ‘awful reign’ in 1216 came about through ‘a surfeit of peaches and no cider’. Had he lived and continued to further alienate a dwindling group of loyal barons, then the rebels and Prince Louis of France might have proved strong enough to overturn the Plantagenet monarchy.
After a successful campaign against the Scots, John turned towards the South-East of England. For several months his brutalizing campaign was successful. He swung through Lincoln and Fotheringay before heading into East Anglia, down to Essex and then west towards Oxford. As he went, resistance melted, and castles were turned over to him merely at the sight of his army. By March 1216 even hardline Northerners such as Eustace de Vesci had come to contemplate making peace once more. But peace did not come. In April rumours from France suggested that Louis was about to set sail from Calais. John fortified the Kentish coast and frantically sent a fleet across the Channel, which tried, unsuccessfully, to blockade Louis in port. It was not enough. The French prince landed in England at the end of May 1216, marched through Kent and was greeted in London with huge cheers on 2 June. He promised to restore England’s old laws and govern justly.
A flood of damaging defections now battered John. A new papal legate, Guala Bicchieri, had arrived in England to fortify John’s cause. But this did not stop several previously loyal barons – including John’s own half-brother William Longspée, Earl of Salisbury – from abandoning the king. Over the summer, Louis’s troops pushed John out of the South-East once more. In the North, the Scots piled back across the border. Castles held for the king hunkered down to endure long sieges. The country was split between two rival kings. A long and attritional war, similar in character if not cause to the Anarchy, seemed to have begun.
In October 1216, however, the war took an unexpected, but merciful turn. Despite a string of military successes in the early autumn, John had been disappointed to learn that Innocent III had died. He had also received word from Dover that the castle there – one of his vital strongholds against Louis’s assault – could not hold out against the French for much longer. Then, while staying at Lynn in Norfolk, John fell violently ill with dysentery. He tried to push through it, but he was very unwell. On 12 October, the sickening king marched his troops north across the River Wellstream, where it ran into the Wash. He, or someone advising him, had not considered the peculiar territorial conditions of the land in the area. The tide was not out far enough and quicksands swallowed up much of the king’s baggage train, along with several of his horses and some of his men. The royal treasure, including John’s coronation regalia, was contained in the baggage train and was never seen again.*2
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bsp; John escaped, but he was now both sick and furious. He lodged a night at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire, where he was supposedly treated to a feast of ripe peaches and new cider. If these were meant to ease his dysentery, they had quite the opposite effect. His court travelled on, but by 16 October John was in such desperate agony that he had to be carried on a stretcher. He reached Newark and died on the evening of 18 October, after being persuaded – reluctantly – to forgive his enemies.
John’s dying wish was that his son Henry, then nine years old, should be his successor. He could scarcely have bequeathed any more troubles on the boy.
*1 These occasions were: William the Conqueror in 1066; Henry I’s lightning coup against his brother Robert Curthose in 1100; Stephen’s seizure of the crown in 1135, which began the Anarchy; and Henry II’s deal to inherit the crown in 1154, extracted by military means the previous year.
