Читать книгу The Rise of the Democracy - Joseph Clayton - Страница 26

Stephen Langton was consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury in June, 1207, on the nomination of Pope Innocent III.; the monks of Canterbury, who had proposed their own superior, consenting to the appointment, for Langton had a high reputation for learning and was known to be of exalted character. But King John, who had wanted a man of his own heart for the archbishopric—John of Gray, Bishop of Norwich, commonly spoken of as "a servant of Mammon, and an evil shepherd that devoured his own sheep"—was enraged, and refusing to acknowledge Langton, defied the Pope, drove the monks out of the country, and declared that anyone who acknowledged Stephen Langton as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. So it came about that the great English statesman who broke down the foulest and worst tyranny the land had known, and won for England the Great Charter of its liberties, was a nominee of the Pope, and was to find himself under the displeasure of the Papal legate when the Charter had been signed! For six years John kept Stephen out of Canterbury, while England lay under an interdict, with its King excommunicate and outside the pale of the Church. Most of the bishops fled abroad, "fearing the King, but afraid to obey him for dread of the Pope," and John laid hands on Church property and filled the royal treasury with the spoils of churchmen and Jews. But in 1213 John's position had become precarious, for the northern barons were plotting his overthrow, and the Pope had absolved all his subjects from allegiance, and given sentence that "John should be thrust from his throne and another worthier than he should reign in his stead," naming Philip of France as his successor. John was aware that he could not count on the support of the barons in a war with France, and a prophecy of Peter, the Wakefield Hermit, that the crown would be lost before Ascension Day, made him afraid of dying excommunicate. Accordingly John decided to get the Pope on his side. He agreed to receive Pandulf, the Papal legate; to acknowledge Stephen; make good the damage done to the Church, and, in addition, voluntarily ("of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons") surrendered "to God and to the Holy Mother Church of Rome, and to Pope Innocent and his Catholic successors," the whole realm of England and Ireland, "with all rights thereunto appertaining, to receive them back and hold them thenceforth as a feudatory of God and the Roman Church." He swore fealty to the Pope for both realms, and promised a yearly tribute of 1,000 marks.

This abject submission to the Pope was a matter of policy. John cared nothing for any appearance of personal or national humiliation, and as he had broken faith with all in England, so, if it should suit his purpose, would he as readily break faith with Rome. But the immediate advantage of having the Pope for his protector seemed considerable. "For when once he had put himself under apostolical protection and made his realms a part of the patrimony of St. Peter, there was not in the Roman world a sovereign who durst attack him or would invade his lands, in such awe was Pope Innocent held above all his predecessors for many years past."^[10]

Stephen landed in June, 1213, and at Winchester John was formally absolved and the coronation oaths were renewed. It was very soon seen what manner of man the Archbishop was. In August a great gathering of the barons took place in St. Paul's, and there Langton recited the coronation charter of Henry I., and told all those assembled that these rights and liberties were to be recovered; and "the barons swore they would fight for these liberties, even unto death if it were needful, and the Archbishop promised that he would help with all his might." The weakness of the barons hitherto had been their want of cohesion, their endless personal feuds, and the lack of any feeling of national responsibility. Langton laboured to create a national party and to win recognition of law and justice for all in England; and the Great Charter was the issue of his work.

The state of things was intolerable. The whole administration of justice was corrupt. The decisions of the King's courts were as arbitrary as the methods employed to enforce sentence. Free men were arrested, evicted, exiled, and outlawed without even legal warrant or the semblance of a fair trial. All the machinery of government set up by the Norman kings, and developed under Henry II., had, in John's hands, become a mere instrument of despotic extortion, to be used against anybody and everybody, from earl to villein, who could be fleeced by the King's servants.

John saw the tide rising against him, and endeavoured to divide barons from Churchmen by proclaiming that the latter should have free and undisturbed right of election when bishoprics and other ecclesiastical offices were vacant. But the attempt failed. Langton was too resolute a statesman, and his conception of the primacy of Canterbury was too high for any turning back from the work he had set himself to accomplish. The rights of election in the Church were important, but the restoration of justice and order and the ending of tyranny were, in his eyes, hardly less important. John, who had been at war in France, returned defeated from his last attempt to recover for the Crown the lost Angevin provinces, to face a discontent that was both wide and general. The people, and in especial the barons and knights whom for fourteen years John had robbed, insulted, and spurned, and whose liberties he had trampled upon, were ready at last under wise leadership to end the oppression.

In November, 1214, the Archbishop saw that the time was come for action, and again the barons met in council. Before the high altar in the Abbey Church of St. Edmundsbury they swore that if the King sought to evade their demand for the laws and liberties of Henry I.'s charter, they would make war upon him until he pledged himself to confirm their rights in a charter under royal seal. "They also agreed that after Christmas they would go all together to the King and ask him for a confirmation of these liberties, and that meanwhile they would so provide themselves with horses and arms that if the King should seek to break his oath, they might, by seizing his castles, compel him to make satisfaction. And when these things were done every man returned to his own home."^[11]

John now asked for time to consider these requests, and for the next six months worked hard to break up the barons' confederacy, to gain friends and supporters, and to get mercenaries from Poitou. It was all to no purpose. As a last resource he took the Cross, expecting to be saved as a crusader from attack, and at the same time he wrote to the Pope to help his faithful vassal. The Pope's letters rebuking the barons for conspiracy against the King were unheeded, and the mercenaries were inadequate when John was confronted by the whole baronage in arms.