by Edmund Burke
Whilst these two mighty armies overspread the opposite coasts, and the sea was covered with their fleets, and the decision of so vast an event was hourly expected, various thoughts arose in the minds of those who moved the springs of these affairs. John, at the head of one of the finest armies in the world, trembled inwardly, when he reflected how little he possessed or merited their confidence. Wounded by the consciousness of his crimes, excommunicated by the Pope, hated by his subjects, in danger of being at once abandoned by heaven and earth, he was filled with the most fearful anxiety. The legates of the Pope had hitherto seen everything succeed to their wish. But having made use of an instrument too great for them to wield, they apprehended, that, when it had overthrown their adversary, it might recoil upon the court of Rome itself; that to add England to the rest of Philip’s great possessions was not the way to make him humble; and that in ruining John to aggrandize that monarch, they should set up a powerful enemy in the place of a submissive vassal.
They had done enough to give them a superiority in any negotiation, and they privately sent an embassy to the King of England. Finding him very tractable, they hasted to complete the treaty. The Pope’s legate, Pandulph, was intrusted with this affair. He knew the nature of men to be such that they seldom engage willingly, if the whole of an hardship be shown them at first, but that, having advanced a certain length, their former concessions are an argument with them to advance further, and to give all because they have already given a great deal. Therefore he began with exacting an oath from the king, by which, without showing the extent of his design, he engaged him to everything he could ask. John swore to submit to the legate in all things relating to his excommunication. And first he was obliged to accept Langton as archbishop; then to restore the monks of Canterbury, and other deprived ecclesiastics, and to make them a full indemnification for all their losses. And now, by these concessions, all things seemed to be perfectly settled. The cause of the quarrel was entirely removed. But when the king expected for so perfect a submission a full absolution, the legate began a labored harangue on his rebellion, his tyranny, and the innumerable sins he had committed, and in conclusion declared that there was no way left to appease God and the Church but to resign his crown to the Holy See, from whose hands he should receive it purified from all pollutions, and hold it for the future by homage and an annual tribute.
John was struck motionless at a demand so extravagant and unexpected. He knew not on which side to turn. If he cast his eyes toward the coast of France, he there saw his enemy Philip, who considered him as a criminal as well as an enemy, and who aimed not only at his crown, but his life, at the head of an innumerable multitude of fierce people, ready to rush in upon him. If he looked at his own army, he saw nothing there but coldness, disaffection, uncertainty, distrust, and a strength in which he knew not whether he ought most to confide or fear. On the other hand, the Papal thunders, from the wounds of which he was still sore, were levelled full at his head. He could not look steadily at these complicated difficulties: and truly it is hard to say what choice he had, if any choice were left to kings in what concerns the independence of their crown. Surrounded, therefore, with these difficulties, and that all his late humiliations might not be rendered as ineffectual as they were ignominious, he took the last step, and in the presence of a numerous assembly of his peers and prelates, who turned their eyes from this mortifying sight, formally resigned his crown to the Pope’s legate, to whom at the same time he did homage and paid the first fruits of his tribute. Nothing could be added to the humiliation of the king upon this occasion, but the insolence of the legate, who spurned the treasure with his foot, and let the crown remain a long time on the ground, before he restored it to the degraded owner.
In this proceeding the motives of the king may be easily discovered; but how the barons of the kingdom, who were deeply concerned, suffered without any protestation the independency of the crown to be thus forfeited is mentioned by no historian of that time. In civil tumults it is astonishing how little regard is paid by all parties to the honor or safety of their country. The king’s friends were probably induced to acquiesce by the same motives that had influenced the king. His enemies, who were the most numerous, perhaps saw his abasement with pleasure, as they knew this action might be one day employed against him with effect. To the bigots it was enough that it aggrandized the Pope. It is perhaps worthy of observation that the conduct of Pandulph towards King John bore a very great affinity to that of the Roman consuls to the people of Carthage in the last Punic War, — drawing them from concession to concession, and carefully concealing their design, until they made it impossible for the Carthaginians to resist. Such a strong resemblance did the same ambition produce in such distant times; and it is far from the sole instance in which we may trace a similarity between the spirit and conduct of the former and latter Rome in their common design on the liberties of mankind.
The legates, having thus triumphed over the king, passed back into France, but without relaxing the interdict or excommunication, which they still left hanging over him, lest he should be tempted to throw off the chains of his new subjection. Arriving in France, they delivered their orders to Philip with as much haughtiness as they had done to John. They told him that the end of the war was answered in the humiliation of the King of England, who had been rendered a dutiful son of the Church, — and that, if the King of France should, after this notice, proceed to further hostilities, he had to apprehend the same sentence which had humbled his adversary. Philip, who had not raised so great an army with a view of reforming the manners of King John, would have slighted these threats, had he not found that they were seconded by the ill dispositions of a part of his own army. The Earl of Flanders, always disaffected to his cause, was glad of this opportunity to oppose him, and, only following him through fear, withdrew his forces, and now openly opposed him. Philip turned his arms against his revolted vassal. The cause of John was revived by this dissension, and his courage seemed rekindled. Making one effort of a vigorous mind, he brought his fleet to an action with the French navy, which he entirely destroyed on the coast of Flanders, and thus freed himself from the terror of an invasion. But when he intended to embark and improve his success, the barons refused to follow him. They alleged that he was still excommunicated, and that they would not follow a lord under the censures of the Church. This demonstrated to the king the necessity of a speedy absolution; and he received it this year from the hands of Cardinal Langton.
That archbishop no sooner came into the kingdom than he discovered designs very different from those which the Pope had raised him to promote. He formed schemes of a very deep and extensive nature, and became the first mover in all the affairs which distinguish the remainder of this reign. In the oath which he administered to John on his absolution, he did not confine himself solely to the ecclesiastical grievances, but made him swear to amend his civil government, to raise no tax without the consent of the Great Council, and to punish no man but by the judgment of his court. In these terms we may Bee the Great Charter traced in miniature. A new scene of contention was opened; new pretensions were started; a new scheme was displayed. One dispute was hardly closed, when he was involved in another; and this unfortunate king soon discovered that to renounce his dignity was not the way to secure his repose. For, being cleared of the excommunication, he resolved to pursue the war in France, in which he was not without a prospect of success; but the barons refused upon new pretences, and not a man would serve. The king, incensed to find himself equally opposed in his lawful and unlawful commands, prepared to avenge himself in his accustomed manner, and to reduce the barons to obedience by carrying war into their estates. But he found by this experiment that his power was at an end. The Archbishop followed him, confronted him with the liberties of his people, reminded him of his late oath, and threatened to excommunicate every person who should obey him in his illegal proceedings. The king, first provoked, afterwards terrified at this resolution, forbore to prosecute
the recusants.
The English barons had privileges, which they knew to have been violated; they had always kept up the memory of the ancient Saxon liberty; and if they were the conquerors of Britain, they did not think that their own servitude was the just fruit of their victory. They had, however, but an indistinct view of the object at which they aimed; they rather felt their wrongs than understood the cause of them; and having no head nor council, they were more in a condition of distressing their king and disgracing their country by their disobedience than of applying any effectual remedy to their grievances. Langton saw these dispositions, and these wants. He had conceived a settled plan for reducing the king, and all his actions tended to carry it into execution. This prelate, under pretence of holding an ecclesiastical synod, drew together privately some of the principal barons to the Church of St. Paul in London. There, having expatiated on the miseries which the kingdom suffered, and having explained at the same time the liberties to which it was entitled, he produced the famous charter of Henry the First, long concealed, and of which, with infinite difficulty, he had procured an authentic copy. This he held up to the barons as the standard about which they were to unite. These were the liberties which their ancestors had received by the free concession of a former king, and these the rights which their virtue was to force from the present, if (which God forbid!) they should find it necessary to have recourse to such extremities. The barons, transported to find an authentic instrument to justify their discontent and to explain and sanction their pretensions, covered the Archbishop with praises, readily confederated to support their demands, and, binding themselves by every obligation of human and religious faith, to vigor, unanimity, and secrecy, they depart to confederate others in their design.
This plot was in the hands of too many to be perfectly concealed; and John saw, without knowing how to ward it off, a more dangerous blow levelled at his authority than any of the former. He had no resources within his kingdom, where all ranks and orders were united against him by one common hatred. Foreign alliance he had none, among temporal powers. He endeavored, therefore, if possible, to draw some benefit from the misfortune of his new circumstances: he threw himself upon the protection of the Papal power, which he had so long and with such reason opposed. The Pope readily received him into his protection, but took this occasion to make him purchase it by another and more formal resignation of his crown. His present necessities and his habits of humiliation made this second degradation easy to the king. But Langton, who no longer acted in subservience to the Pope, from whom he had now nothing further to expect, and who had put himself at the head of the patrons of civil liberty, loudly exclaimed at this indignity, protested against the resignation, and laid his protestation on the altar.
A.D. 1214.This was more disagreeable to the barons than the first resignation, as they were sensible that he now degraded himself only to humble his subjects. They were, however, once more patient witnesses to that ignominious act, — and were so much overawed by the Pope, or had brought their design to so little maturity, that the king, in spite of it, still found means and authority to raise an army, with which he made a final effort to recover some part of his dominions in France. The juncture was altogether favorable to his design. Philip had all his attention abundantly employed in another quarter, against the terrible attacks of the Emperor Otho in a confederacy with the Earl of Flanders. John, strengthened by this diversion, carried on the war in Poitou for some time with good appearances. The Battle of Bouvines, which was fought this year, put an end to all these hopes. In this battle, the Imperial army, consisting of one hundred and fifty thousand men, were defeated by a third of their number of French forces. The Emperor himself, with difficulty escaping from the field, survived but a short time a battle which entirely broke his strength. So signal a success established the grandeur of France upon immovable foundations. Philip rose continually in reputation and power, whilst John continually declined in both; and as the King of France was now ready to employ against him all his forces, so lately victorious, he sued, by the mediation of the Pope’s legate, for a truce, which was granted to him for five years. Such truces stood in the place of regular treaties of peace, which were not often made at that time.
A.D. 1215.The barons of England had made use of the king’s absence to bring their confederacy to form; and now, seeing him return with so little credit, his allies discomfited, and no hope of a party among his subjects, they appeared in a body before him at London. All in complete armor, and in the guise of defiance, they presented a petition, very humble in the language, but excessive in the substance, in which they declared their liberties, and prayed that they might be formally allowed and established by the royal authority. The king resolved not to submit to their demands; but being at present in no condition to resist, he required time to consider of so important an affair. The time which was granted to the king to deliberate he employed in finding means to avoid a compliance. He took the cross, by which he hoped to render his person sacred; he obliged the people to renew their oath of fealty; and, lastly, he had recourse to the Pope, fortified by all the devices which could be used to supply the place of a real strength, he ventured, when the barons renewed their demands, to give them a positive refusal; he swore by the feet of God (his usual oath) that he would never grant them such liberties as must make a slave of himself.
The barons, on this answer, immediately fly to arms: they rise in every part; they form an army, and appoint a leader; and as they knew that no design can involve all sorts of people or inspire them with extraordinary resolution, unless it be animated with religion, they call their leader the Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church. The king was wholly unprovided against so general a defection. The city of London, the possession of which has generally proved a decisive advantage in the English civil wars, was betrayed to the barons. He might rather be said, to be imprisoned than defended in the Tower of London, to which close siege was laid; whilst the marshal of the barons’ army, exercising the prerogatives of royalty, issued writs to summon all the lords to join the army of liberty, threatening equally all those who should adhere to the king and those who betrayed an indifference to the cause by their neutrality. John, deserted by all, had no resource but in temporizing and submission. Without questioning in any part the terms of a treaty which he intended to observe in none, he agreed to everything the barons thought fit to ask, hoping that the exorbitancy of their demands would justify in the eyes of the world the breach of his promises. The instruments by which the barons secured their liberties were drawn up in form of charters, and in the manner by which grants had been usually made to monasteries, with a preamble signifying that it was done for the benefit of the king’s soul and those of his ancestors. For the place of solemnizing this remarkable act they chose a large field, overlooked by Windsor, called Running-mede, which, in our present tongue, signifies the Meadow of Council, — a place long consecrated by public opinion, as that wherein the quarrels and wars which arose in the English nation, when divided into kingdoms or factions, had been terminated from the remotest times. Here it was that King John, on the 15th day of June, in the year of our Lord 1215, signed those two memorable instruments which first disarmed the crown of its unlimited prerogatives, and laid the foundation of English liberty. One was called the Great Charter; the other, the Charter of the Forest. If we look back to the state of the nation at that time, we shall the better comprehend the spirit and necessity of these grants.
Besides the ecclesiastical jurisprudence, at that time, two systems of laws, very different from each other in their object, their reason, and their authority, regulated the interior of the kingdom: the Forest Law, and the Common Law. After the Northern nations had settled here, and in other parts of Europe, hunting, which had formerly been the chief means of their subsistence, still continued their favorite diversion. Great tracts of each country, wasted by the wars in which it was conquered, were set apart for this kind of sport, and guarded in a state of desolation b
y strict laws and severe penalties. When, such waste lands were in the hands of subjects, they were called Chases; when in the power of the sovereign, they were denominated Forests. These forests lay properly within the jurisdiction of no hundred, county, or bishopric; and therefore, being out both of the Common and the Spiritual Law, they were governed by a law of their own, which was such as the king by his private will thought proper to impose. There were reckoned in England no less than sixty-eight royal forests, some of them of vast extent. In these great tracts were many scattered inhabitants; and several persons had property of woodland, and other soil, inclosed within their bounds. Here the king had separate courts and particular justiciaries; a complete jurisprudence, with all its ceremonies and terms of art, was formed; and it appears that these laws were better digested and more carefully enforced than those which belonged to civil government. They had, indeed, all the qualities of the worst of laws. Their professed object was to keep a great part of the nation desolate. They hindered communication and destroyed industry. They had a trivial object, and most severe sanctions; for, as they belonged immediately to the king’s personal pleasures, by the lax interpretation of treason in those days, all considerable offences against the Forest Law, such as killing the beasts of game, were considered as high treason, and punished, as high treason then was, by truncation of limbs and loss of eyes and testicles. Hence arose a thousand abuses, vexatious suits, and pretences for imposition upon all those who lived in or near these places. The deer were suffered to run loose upon their lands; and many oppressions were used with relation to the claim of commonage which the people had in most of the forests. The Norman kings were not the first makers of the Forest Law; it subsisted under the Saxon and Danish kings. Canute the Great composed a body of those laws, which still remains. But under the Norman kings they were enforced with greater rigor, as the whole tenor of the Norman government was more rigorous. Besides, new forests were frequently made, by which private property was outraged in a grievous manner. Nothing, perhaps, shows more clearly how little men are able to depart from the common course of affairs than that the Norman kings, princes of great capacity, and extremely desirous of absolute power, did not think of peopling these forests, places under their own uncontrolled dominion, and which might have served as so many garrisons dispersed throughout the country. The Charter of the Forests had for its object the disafforesting several of those tracts, the prevention of future afforestings, the mitigation and ascertainment of the punishments for breaches of the Forest Law.
