Читать книгу Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John - William Sharp McKechnie - Страница 5

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The Great Charter is too often treated as the outcome of purely accidental causes. Students of its origin are sometimes content to explain it as a mere tangible product of the successful resistance called forth by the tyrannies of King John. That monarch’s personal misdeeds, it is maintained, goaded into determined action a fierce unflinching opposition which never rested until it had achieved success; and the outcome of this success was the winning of the Great Charter of Liberties. The moving causes of events of such tremendous moment are thus sought in the characteristics and vices of one man. If John had never lived and sinned, so it would appear, the foundations of English freedom would never have been laid.

Such shallow views of history unnecessarily belittle the magnitude and inevitable nature of the sequence of causes and effects upon which great issues really depend. The compelling logic of events forces a way for its own fulfilment, independent of the caprices, aims and ambitions of individual men. The incidents of John’s career are the occasions, not the causes, of the great national movement which laid the foundations of English liberties. The origin of Magna Carta lies too deep to be determined by any purely contingent or accidental phenomena. It is as unwise as it is unnecessary to suppose that the course of constitutional development in England was suddenly and violently wrested into a completely new channel, merely because of the incapacity or misdeeds of the temporary occupant of the throne. The source of the discontent fanned to flame by John’s oppressions must be sought in earlier reigns. The genesis of the Charter cannot be understood apart from its historical antecedents, and these are inextricably bound up with the whole story how England grew to be a nation.

In expounding the origin of the Charter, it is necessary briefly to narrate how the scattered Anglo-Saxon and Danish tribes and territories, originally unconnected, were gradually welded together and grew into England; how this fusion was made permanent by the growth of a strong form of centralized monarchical government which crushed out all attempts at local independence, and threatened to become the most absolute despotism in Europe; and how, finally, the Crown, because of the very plenitude of its power, challenged opposition and called into play forces which set limits to royal prerogatives and royal aggressions, and at the same time laid the foundations of the reign of law. A short survey of the early history of England forms a necessary preliminary to a right understanding of Magna Carta. Such a survey makes prominent two leading movements, one of which succeeds the other; namely, the establishment of a strong monarchy able to bring order out of anarchy, and the subsequent establishment of safeguards to prevent this source of order degenerating into an unrestrained tyranny, and so crushing out not merely anarchy but legitimate freedom as well. The later movement, in favour of liberty and the Great Charter, was the natural complement, and, in part, the consequence of the earlier movement in the direction of a strong government able to enforce peace. In historical sequence, order precedes freedom.

These two problems, each forming the counterpart of the other, necessarily arise in the history of every nation, and in every age; the problem of order, or how to found a central government strong enough to suppress anarchy, and the problem of freedom, or how to set limits to an autocracy threatening to overshadow individual liberty. Neither of these problems can ever be ignored, not even in the twentieth century; although to-day the accumulated political experience of ages has enabled modern nations, such at least as are sufficiently educated in self-government, to thrust them into the background, out of view. Deep political insight may still be acknowledged in Æsop’s fable of Jupiter and the frogs. King Log proves as ineffective against foreign invasion as he is void of offence to domestic freedom; King Stork secures the triumph of his subjects in time of war, but devours them in time of peace. All nations in their early efforts to obtain an efficient government have to choose between these two types of ruler—between an executive, harmless but weak; and one powerful enough effectively to direct the business of government at home and abroad, but ready to turn the powers entrusted to him for the good of all, to his own selfish uses and the trampling out of his subjects’ liberties.

On the whole, the miseries of the long centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule were mainly the outcome of the Crown’s weakness; while, at the Norman Conquest, England escaped from the mild sceptre of inefficiency, only to fall under the cruel sceptre of selfish strength. Yet the able kings of the new dynasty, powerful as they were, had to struggle in order to maintain their supremacy; for, although the conquered English races were incapable of concerted resistance against their Norman masters, the unruly alien barons fought vigorously to shake off the royal control.

During a century of Norman rule, constant warfare was waged between two great principles—the monarchic standing on the whole for order, seeking to crush anarchy, and the oligarchic or baronial, standing on the whole for liberty, protesting against the tyranny of autocratic power. Sometimes one of these was in the ascendant; sometimes the other. The history of medieval England is the swing of the pendulum between these two extremes.

The main plot, then, of early English history, centres round the attempt to found a strong monarchy, and yet to set limits to its strength. With this main plot subordinate plots are interwoven. Chief among these must be reckoned the necessity of defining the relations of the central to the local government, and the need of an acknowledged frontier between the domains of Church and State. On the other hand, all that interesting group of problems connected with the ideal form of government, much discussed in the days of Aristotle as in our own, is notably absent, never having been forced by the logic of events upon the mind of medieval Europe. Monarchy was apparently assumed as the only possible scheme of government; while the relative merits of aristocracy and democracy, or of the much-vaunted constitution known as “mixed,” were not canvassed, since these forms of constitution were not within the sphere of practical politics.

The student of history will do well to concentrate his attention at first on the main problem, while viewing the subsidiary ones in their relations to the central current.