Читать книгу Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John - William Sharp McKechnie - Страница 15

Table of Contents

Many attempts have been made to explain why the storm, long brewing, broke at last in 1214, and culminated precisely in June of the following year. Sir William Blackstone^[60] shows how carefully historians have sought for some one specific feature or event, occurring in these years, of such moment as by itself to account for the rebellion crowned for the moment with success at Runnymede. Thus Matthew Paris, he tells us, attributes the whole movement to the sudden discovery of Henry I.’s charter, long forgotten as he supposes, while other chroniclers agree in assigning John’s inordinate debauchery as the cause of the civil dissensions, dwelling on his personal misdeeds, real and imaginary. “Sordida foedatur foedante Johanne, gehenna.”^[61] Blackstone himself suggests a third event, the appointment as Regent in John’s absence of the hated alien and upstart, Peter des Roches, and his misconduct in that office.

There is absolutely no necessity to seek in such trivial causes the explanation of a great movement, really inevitable, the antecedents of which were deeply rooted in the past. The very success of Henry Plantagenet in performing the great task of restoring order in England, for effecting which special powers had been allowed to him, made the continuance of these powers to his successors unnecessary. From the day of Henry’s death, if not earlier, forces were at work which only required to be combined in order to control the licence of the Crown. When the battle of order had been finally won—the complete overthrow of the rebellion of 1173 may be taken as a crucial date in this connection—the battle of liberty had, almost necessarily, to be begun. The clamant problem of the hour was no longer how to prop up the weakness of the Crown; but rather how to place restrictions on its unbridled strength.

We need not wonder that the crisis came at last, but rather why it was so long delayed. Events, however, were not ripe for rebellion before John’s accession, and a favourable occasion did not occur previous to 1215. The doctrine of momentum accounts in politics for the long continuance of old institutions in a condition even of unstable equilibrium; an entirely rotten system of government may remain for ages until at the destined moment comes the final shock. John conferred a great boon on future generations, when by his arrogance and by his misfortunes he combined against him all classes and interests in the community.

The chief factor in the coalition which ultimately triumphed over John was undoubtedly the baronial party led by those strenuous nobles of the north, who were, beyond doubt, goaded into active opposition by their own personal and class wrongs, not by any altruistic promptings to sacrifice themselves for the common good. Their complaints, too, as they appear reflected in the imperishable record of Magna Carta, are mainly grounded on breaches of the technical rules of feudal usage, not upon the broad basis of constitutional principle.

The feudal grievances most bitterly resented may be ranged under one or other of two heads—increase in the weight of feudal obligations and infringement, of feudal jurisdictions. The Crown, while it exacted from its tenants the fullest measure of services legally exigible, interfered persistently at the same time with those rights and privileges which had originally balanced the obligations. The barons were compelled to give more, while they received less.

With the first group of baronial grievances posterity can sympathize in a whole-hearted way, since the increase of feudal obligations inflicted undoubted hardships on the Crown tenants, while the redress of these involved no real danger to constitutional progress. One and all of the grievances included in this first group could be condemned (as they were condemned by various chapters of Magna Carta) without unduly reducing the efficiency of the monarchy which still formed under John, as it had done under William I., the sole source of security against the dangers of feudal anarchy. Posterity, however, cannot equally sympathize with the efforts of the barons to redress their second class of wrongs. However great may have been the immediate hardships inflicted on members of the aristocracy by the suppression of their feudal courts, lovers of constitutional progress can only rejoice that all efforts to restore them failed. Those clauses of Magna Carta which aimed at reversing the great currents flowing towards royal justice, and away from private baronial justice, produced no permanent effect, and posterity has had reason to rejoice in their failure.

Each group of feudal grievances—those connected with the increase of feudal obligations, and those connected with the curtailment of feudal immunities—requires special and detailed treatment.^[62] To each class a double interest attaches, since the resentment aroused by both formed so vital an element in the spread of that spirit of determined resistance to King John, which led to the winning of Magna Carta, and since, further, an intimate knowledge of the exact nature of these grievances throws a flood of light on many otherwise obscure clauses of the Great Charter, and enables us to estimate how far the promised remedies were ultimately carried into practice in later reigns.

The grievances of the barons, many and varied as they were, were not, however, the only wrongs calling for redress. It is probable that the baronial party, if they had acted in isolation from the other estates of the realm, would have failed in 1215 as they had already failed in 1173. If the Crown had retained the active sympathy of Church and common people, John might have successfully defied the baronage as his father had done before him. He had, on the contrary, alienated from the monarchy all estates and interests, and had broadened the basis of opposition to the throne by ill-treating the mercantile classes and the peasantry who, from the reign of William I. to that of Henry II., had remained the fast, if humble, friends of the Crown. The order-loving tradesmen of the towns had been previously willing to purchase protection from Henry at the price of heavy, even crushing taxation; but when John continued to exact the price, and yet failed to furnish good government in return, his hold on the nation was completely lost. So far from protecting the humble from oppression, he was himself the chief central oppressor, and he let loose, besides, his foreign officers and favourites as petty local oppressors in all the numerous offices of sheriff, castellan, and bailiff. Far from using the perfected machinery of Exchequer, Curia, and local administration in the interests of good government, John valued them merely as instruments of extortion and outrage—as ministers to his lust and greed.

The lower orders were by no means exempt from the increased taxation which proved so galling to the feudal tenants. When John, during his quarrel with Rome, repaid each new anathema of the Pope by fresh acts of spoliation against the national Church, the sufferings of the clergy were shared by the poor. In confiscating the goods of the monasteries, he destroyed the chief provision for poor-relief known to the thirteenth century. The alienation of the affections of the great masses of lower-class Englishmen thus effected was never wholly undone, even by the reconciliation of John with the Pope. Notwithstanding the completeness and even abjectness of John’s surrender to Rome, he took no special pains to reinstate himself in the good graces of the Church at home. Innocent, secure at the Lateran, had issued his thunderbolts; and John’s counter-strokes had fallen, not on him, but on the English clergy—from the prelate to the parish priest, from the abbot to the humblest monk. The measures taken, in 1213 and afterwards, to make good to these victims some part of the heavy losses sustained, were quite inadequate. The interests of the Church universal were often widely different from those of the national Church, and such diversity was never more clearly marked than in the last years of the reign of John.

After 1213, John’s alliance with Rome brought new dangers in its train. The united action of two tyrants, each claiming supreme powers, lay and spiritual respectively, threatened to exterminate the freedom of the English nation and the English Church. “The country saw that the submission of John to Innocent placed its liberty, temporally and spiritually, at his mercy; and immediately demanded safeguards.”^[63]

This union of tyrants naturally led to another union which checkmated it, for the baronial opposition allied itself with the ecclesiastical opposition. The urgency of their common need thus brought prelates and barons into line—for the moment. The necessary leader was found in Stephen Langton, who succeeded in preventing the somewhat divergent interests of the two estates from leading them in opposite directions.

All things were thus ripe for rebellion, and even for united rebellion; an opportunity only was required. Such an opportunity came in a tempting form in 1214; for the King had then lost prestige and power by his failure in the wars with France. He had lost the confidence of his subjects by his quarrel with Rome, and he failed to regain it by his reconciliation. He had lost the friendship of the national Church. His unpopularity and vacillating nature had been thoroughly demonstrated. Finally he had himself, in 1191, when plotting against his absent brother Richard, successfully attacked and ousted the Regent Longchamp from office, thus furnishing an example of rebellion, and of successfully concerted action against the central government.

The result was that, when the barons—the wildest spirits of the northern counties taking always the lead—began active operations at a juncture of John’s fortunes most favourable to their aspirations, not only had they no opposition to dread from churchman or merchant, from yeoman or peasant, but they might count on the sympathy of all and the active co-operation of many. Further, John’s policy of misrule had combined against him two interests usually opposed to each other, the party of progress and the party of reaction. The influence of each of these may be clearly read in the various chapters of Magna Carta.

The progressive party consisted mainly of the heads of the more recently created baronial houses, men trained in the administrative methods of Henry II., who desired merely that the system of government they knew should be properly enforced and carried out to its logical conclusions. They demanded chiefly that the King should conduct the business of the Exchequer and Curia according to the rules laid down by Henry II. Routine and order under the new system were what this party desired, and not a return to the unruly days of Stephen. Many of the innovations of the great Angevin had now been loyally and finally accepted by all classes of the nation; and these accordingly found a permanent resting-place in the provisions of the Great Charter. In temporary co-operation with this party, the usually rival party of reaction was willing to act for the moment against the common enemy. There still existed in John’s reign magnates of the old feudal school, who hoped to wrest from the weakened hand of the King some measure of feudal independence. They had indeed accepted such reforms as suited them, but still bitterly opposed many others. In particular, they resisted the encroachments of the royal courts of law which were gradually superseding their private jurisdictions. For the moment, John’s crafty policy, so well devised to gain immediate ends, and so unwise in the light of subsequent history, combined these two streams, usually ready to thwart each other, into a united opposition to his throne. Attacked at the same moment by the votaries of traditional usage and by the votaries of reform, by the barons, the trading classes, and the clergy, no course was left him but to surrender at discretion. The movement which culminated at Runnymede may thus best be understood as the resultant of a number of different but converging forces, some of which were progressive and some reactionary.

60. The Great Charter, p. vii.

61. Several of the most often-repeated charges of personal wrongs inflicted by King John upon the wives and daughters of his barons have been in recent years refuted. See Miss Norgate, John Lackland, p. 289.

62. See infra the two sections (II. and III.) immediately following.

63. Stubbs, Select Charters, 270.