Authorities: Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris; Walter of Coventry; Ralph of Coggeshall (Rolls Series); Letters of Innocent III.; Rymer’s Fœdera; K. Norgate—John Lackland; Stubbs—Select Charters; Mark Pattison—Stephen Langton (Lives of the English Saints); C. E. Maurice—Stephen Langton.
When Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury—the old Justiciar of Richard I.—ended his long life of public service on July 12th, A.D. 1205, King John exclaimed, with frank satisfaction, “Now for the first time I am King of England!” As long as Hubert was alive there was one man strong enough to restrain the king, and the primate and William the Marshall together had done something to guard England against the foulest and most ruthless tyranny of all its kings. To the end William the Marshall was a brave and patriotic statesman, but he served the crown rather than the people.
On Hubert’s death John meant to have for archbishop a creature of his will, and he was defeated by Pope Innocent III., who, dismissing the appeal of the monks of Canterbury for Reginald, their subprior, and John’s appeal for his nominee, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich, proposed the English-born Cardinal, Stephen Langton, “than whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to him in character and in learning.” The monks consented to Stephen’s appointment, but John’s reply was a flat refusal, and when on June 7th, 1207, Pope Innocent proceeded to consecrate Stephen Langton Archbishop of Canterbury, the king’s rage broke out. Innocent’s wise judgment gave England one of its noblest and greatest archbishops, and the service wrought by Langton for the liberties of England’s people was of deep and lasting value. But the immediate price to be paid for later profit was heavy.
John met Langton’s consecration by seizing the estates of Canterbury, driving the chapter into exile, and proclaiming that anyone who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy. The remonstrances and warnings of the pope were disregarded, and in March, 1208, all England was laid under an interdict, and there was an end to the public ministrations of religion in the country for six years—to the bitter distress of the common people.
Immediately the interdict came into force, John declared all the property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be confiscated, and there was no one to stay his hand from speedy spoliation. For the barons were willing enough to see the clergy robbed and the king’s treasury filled at the expense of the Church, and of the bishops only two were left in England—Peter des Roches, of Winchester, and John de Gray, of Norwich—and both these were willing tools of the king. Never did John enjoy his royal will and pleasure with such unhindered ferocity as in that year 1209. Had the barons stood by the Church they might have saved England unspeakable miseries, and as it was the laity were soon in as sorry a plight as the clergy, “and it seemed as though the king was courting the hatred of every class of his subjects, so burdensome was he to both rich and poor.”27
In 1211 came Pandulf from Pope Innocent with suggestions for peace. Let the king restore the property of the clergy, and receive Archbishop Langton, with his kinsmen and friends, and the other exiled bishops “fairly and in peace” and the interdict should be withdrawn. John declined to receive Langton as archbishop, and Pandulf, in the presence of the whole council, pronounced the papal sentence of excommunication on the king, absolving all his subjects from allegiance, and commanding their obedience to whomsoever should be sent as John’s successor.
John treated the excommunication with cheerful contempt, and pursued the evil tenour of his way. But his position was precarious, for the barons—especially the northern barons—were plotting his overthrow, and the pope had decided that Philip of France should depose John and reign in his stead. John was driven to capitulate to the pope at the end of 1212, and in May, 1213, Pandulf arrived, and the invasion by Philip was stopped, to the exceeding annoyance of the French king.
John met the papal legate at Ewell, near Dover, and in the presence of “the great men of the realm,” swore to carry out all Innocent’s demands, promising that Stephen should be received and recompense paid to the clergy for their losses. Then the King of England formally 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 added that he would send a yearly tribute of 1,000 marks. At the same time John declared that the act of homage was voluntary, done, “not at the driving of force nor the compulsion of fear, but of our own good free will and by the common counsel of our barons.”
There is no evidence that the pope asked for this abject submission, but there are good reasons why John desired that political protection of the papacy which he obtained by the act of homage.28 (Matthew Paris has a story that John was willing to pay homage and tribute to the Mohammedan Emir of Morocco in order to effect an alliance with some foreign power.)
The barons themselves appealed to the pope two years later to take their part against John, on the ground that it was only by their compulsion the king had been brought to pay homage to Rome, and though they were then to curse the papal overlordship they had helped procure, and England was to come to regard John’s surrender to the pope as “a thing to be detested for all time,” in that year 1213 the protection of the pope was invaluable to John and, as some thought, to the country. “For matters were in such a strait, and so great was the fear on all sides, that there was no more ready way of avoiding the imminent peril—perhaps no other way at all. 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.” (Walter of Coventry.)
The long war being at an end Stephen Langton and four of the exiled bishops landed in June, and Stephen was now to do the work of archbishop, the work he had been solemnly consecrated to six years before.
John met the primate at Winchester, and swore on the gospels in the cathedral “that he would cherish, defend and maintain the holy Church and her ordained ministers; that he would restore the good laws of his forefathers, especially St. Edward’s, rendering to all men their rights; and that before the next Easter he would make full restitution of all property which had been taken away in connection with the interdict.” Then Stephen formally absolved the king from excommunication and gave him the kiss of peace, to the general rejoicing.
And now England was to see what sort of archbishop it was Pope Innocent had sent to Canterbury. With a king as cruel as he was vigorous, and as astute as he was unscrupulous, with barons who knew neither loyalty nor patriotism. Archbishop Stephen, out of such materials, was to win for his native land the Great Charter, and to have it written in black and white that all who would might read the several duties of king and people. In August Langton, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, read to the barons the old coronation charter of Henry I., and reminded them that the liberties promised in that document were to be recovered. “With very great joy 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.” Thus within three months of his setting foot in England Langton had started the movement for the Great Charter.
But not with king and barons only had the archbishop to deal. There were endless difficulties with the clergy concerning the restitution of their property, and the payment of compensation to be settled. And above all there was Nicholas, the papal legate, in England, usurping the primate’s functions, filling up vacant bishoprics and churches, regardless of the rights of the Church and of the archbishop. Nicholas was recalled to Rome when the interdict was finally removed, and in November, 1214, John made a public proclamation that free and undisturbed election to all the churches in his realm should be allowed henceforth. This was an attempt on the king’s part to have the Church on his side against the barons, for the battle was beginning between John and the barons which was to be fought to a bitter end.
John’s last campaign to recover the lost Angevine provinces for the English crown ended in disaster, and he returned to England in 1214 to face the full discontent of the barons whom he had harassed and insulted from the day he came to the throne, and of a country suffering from “the evil customs which the king’s father and brother had raised up for the oppression of the Church and realm, together with the abuses which the king himself had added thereto.”
The national grievances were enormous and intolerable. The whole administration of justice was corrupt, and no one could be sure how the arbitrary decisions of the king’s officers would be carried out. Liberty of the person was a farce when free men could be arrested, evicted from their lands, exiled and outlawed without legal warrant or a fair trial. “In a word, the entire system of government and administration set up under the Norman kings, and developed under Henry and Richard, had been converted by the ingenuity of John into a most subtle and effective engine of royal extortion, oppression and tyranny over all classes of the nation, from earl to villein.”29
Here and there the barons had struck against some act of personal injury, and the northern barons had been conspicuous in their resentment, refusing to follow John as their liege lord in his expeditions to France. But there was neither cohesion nor any sense of national injury amongst the barons until Stephen Langton, with a full sense of the responsibility laid on the successor of Lanfranc and Anselm, of Theobald and Thomas, took the lead, and by strong, courageous effort sought to end for all time in England such tyranny as the country had endured under John’s rule. To Langton this was no mere struggle between a despotic king and a set of turbulent nobles. It was a struggle to win recognition of law for all men, and to restore some measure of justice and the enjoyment of fair liberty throughout the land. The people had neither spokesman nor champion, and no man heeded their wrongs save Langton. More than 150 years were to pass before John Ball and Wat Tyler would appear at the head of a peasant army in revolt. In the reign of John, yeomen, peasant and artizan were dumb. It was Langton who saw that the barons fighting for their own rights could be made to fight for all England.
In November the barons came together at St. Edmundsbury, and in the abbey church “they swore on the high altar that if the king sought to evade their demand for the laws and liberties of the charter of King Henry I., they would make war upon him and withdraw from fealty to him till he should by a charter furnished with his seal confirm to them all that they demanded. 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.” (Roger of Wendover.)
John kept Christmas at Worcester, but his court was very small, and he realised that he stood alone. All through the years of the interdict the pope’s ban had not kept the nobles from attendance on the king; it was now when he stood reconciled to the Church that John found himself deserted. He moved to London at the new year, and there on the Epiphany came the confederate barons, making display of arms, and praying that the laws and liberties of Edward the Confessor written in the charter of Henry I. might be confirmed. John urged that the question was too big and too difficult to be settled off hand, and asked that it should be put off till Easter. This was agreed to on condition that the king pledged himself by three sureties to fulfil his promises. Archbishop Stephen, William the Marshall and the Bishop of Ely were accepted as sureties, and in accepting the post Langton proved his great statesmanship. There was no question of going over to the king’s side. The barons knew the archbishop as their chief ally, but John knew that Langton was to be trusted as implicitly as he trusted William the Marshall. Langton’s one desire was to see the written enactment granting constitutional liberties, and ending the worst of the royal abuses.
John did not waste the time allotted to him, but worked his hardest to gain friends and supporters against the barons, and to break up the confederacy. It was all to no purpose. His commissioners to the County Courts—in the southern and midland shires, sent to explain the king’s cause—met with no success. Nobles and churchmen alike stood aloof, and all John could do was to write to the knights at Poitou to send him mercenaries, and to appeal to his liege lord, the pope, against his rebellious subjects. Finally, he took the cross, hoping for the favours awarded to a crusader. These efforts were all of no avail. The mercenaries were inadequate. The pope’s letters of rebuke to the barons for their conspiracies and conjurations were unheeded, and at Easter, John (whom the pope had warned to harken to “just petitions”) was driven to send the primate and the Marshall for a definite statement of the laws and liberties demanded.
The barons, who were assembled at Brackley, presented “a certain schedule,” probably compiled with Langton’s assistance, and this was read to the king by the primate. “They might as well ask for my kingdom at once,” was John’s reply to the various items, and he swore he would never grant liberties that would mean his own enslavement. Both Langton and the Marshall strove to persuade the king to yield, but to no purpose; and all that remained was to return to the barons and to state that the king refused their demands. Then the barons, on hearing this, flew to arms, formally renounced their homage and fealty to the king, and chose a military leader for themselves—Robert Fitz-Walter. London welcomed the insurgents on May 24th, and John, with a handful of mercenaries, had the whole baronage against him. Capitulation was inevitable. From Windsor John sent envoys to the barons in London, promising, for the sake of peace and for the welfare and honour of his realm, to concede the laws and liberties demanded, and advising the appointment of time and place for a meeting for “the settlement of all these things.” The barons at once fixed the meeting for June 15th, in a meadow called Runnymead, between Staines and Windsor, and there, in the presence of well-nigh all the baronage of England, of Archbishop Stephen, and seven bishops, and “a multitude of most illustrious knights,” the Great Charter was signed. It was the work of Langton.30 It was he who had inspired the movement, had framed the articles, and had brought the struggle to a successful issue.
“One copy of the Great Charter still remains in the British Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still hanging from the brown, shrivelled parchment. It is impossible to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our own hands, the Great Charter to which from age to age patriots have looked back as the basis of English liberty.” (J. R. Green.)
Yet the Charter itself was in the main but the old charter of Henry I. writ large. It set up no new rights and conferred no new privileges. It sanctioned no constitutional changes, and proclaimed no new liberties. Its real importance is in the fact that it was a written document—“this great table of laws, won by the people of England from a tyrannous king, was the first great act which laid down in black and white the main points of the constitution and the several rights and duties of king and people.” (F. York Powell.)
“The bonds of unwritten custom, which the older grants did little more than recognize, had proved too weak to hold Angevins; and the baronage now threw them aside for the restraints of written law. It is in this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation’s memory and officially declared by the primate, to the age of written legislation, of parliaments and statutes, which was soon to come.” (J. R. Green.)
The first article of the Charter guaranteed the freedom of the English Church, and, in especial, the freedom of elections, “which was reputed most requisite.”
By the Great Charter the feudal rights of the king over his vassals were defined and settled, and the tenants of the barons were protected in similar way from the lawless exactions of their lords.
No scutage or aid was to be levied by the crown, “save by the common council of the realm”—except the three customary feudal aids for the ransoming of the king, the knighting of his eldest son, and the marriage of his eldest daughter. This common council, consisting of bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons, was to be summoned by special writ. The free rights of London and the other chartered towns were fully admitted.
The Court of Common Pleas (cases between subjects) was to sit at Westminster (and not to follow the king in his wanderings), and judges of assize were to go on circuit four times a year.
No free man was to be seized, imprisoned, ousted of his land, outlawed, banished, or in any way brought to ruin, save by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.
To no man was justice to be sold, denied, or postponed by the king.
The free right of Englishmen and foreigners to pass in and out of the country in time of peace was granted.
The king’s mercenaries, “all the gang that came with horses and arms to the hurt of the realm,” were to be sent out of England.
Finally, by a supplementary document, the barons present at Runnymead were to choose out of the whole baronage twenty-five sworn guardians of the Charter, who, in the event of any violation of its articles, were not to hesitate from making war on the king till the matter had been put right.
Well might John exclaim, in a wild burst of rage, when the Charter was signed, and he was alone with his foreign troops, “They have given me five-and-twenty over-kings!”
The twenty-five were to ensure the king’s obedience to the Charter, but who was to ensure the obedience of the twenty-five?—all of whom were of the party of revolt against the king. A safeguard was obviously necessary, and a second court of barons, thirty-eight in number, was chosen—(which included William the Marshall)—and these first swore obedience to the twenty-five, and then a second oath to enforce on king and barons mutual respect.31
The Great Charter was signed, and within a week it was published throughout all England. But the “sort of peace” patched up between John and the barons was not to last. None of the barons believed that the king would abide by the oaths he had sworn, and they, for their part, prepared for war.32
To the Continent John looked for aid, “seeking to be revenged upon his enemies by two swords, the sword of the spirit and the sword of the flesh, so that if one failed he could count upon the other for success.” He had appealed to the pope in May, and Innocent’s reply had been a general condemnation of all disturbers of the peace. Pandulf, the papal legate, was at Runnymead, and in August, when the barons were openly making ready for hostilities, he and Peter des Roches, of Winchester, called on Stephen Langton to enforce the papal sentence of excommunication against certain of the barons. Langton, who was about to set out to Rome for a general council, declined to do this until he had seen the pope and discussed the whole question with him. He believed the sentence had been drawn up by the pope under a misunderstanding. Thereupon Pandulf and Peter des Roches, by virtue of their authority, declared Stephen disobedient to the papal mandate, and pronounced his suspension from his office of archbishop.
Langton made no protest against the sentence but went to Rome, and was present at the general council in November. His chiefest work for England was done when the Charter was signed at Runnymead. With the king and the barons at civil war, the country ravaged by John’s foreign bands of merciless savages, and the barons praying Louis, the son of Philip of France, to take the English crown, what could Archbishop Stephen accomplish? Pope Innocent had declared the Charter annulled on the ground that both king and barons had made the pope the over-lord of England, and that in consequence nothing in the government and constitution of the country could be altered without his knowledge and sanction. But as the legate, the primate, and the bishops had all left for Rome, the pope’s disallowing of the Charter never got published in England at all, though it was known that he had sent letters.
The sentence of suspension was removed from Langton in February, 1216. A few months later the great pope, Innocent III., passed away, and in October John was dead.
In 1217 Stephen Langton was back again at Canterbury, to remain for eleven more years the primate of England. With William the Marshall and Hubert de Burgh, Stephen worked for the preservation of public peace during those early years of Henry III. We find him in 1223 demanding a fresh confirmation of the Charter in the council at Oxford, and two years later its solemn proclamation is required by the archbishop and the barons as the price of a new subsidy. Equally resolute is Archbishop Stephen for public order, threatening with all the pains and penalties of excommunication the barons, who (in spite of Hubert de Burgh’s letters from the pope declaring Henry to be of age) were anxious to keep the royal castles in their own hands. “At a time when constitutional freedom was hardly known, when insurrection seemed the only possible means of checking despotism, he (Langton) organized and established a movement for freedom which by every act and word of his life he showed to be in opposition to mere anarchy.” (C. E. Maurice.)
Stephen Langton was never canonized, though application was made to Rome to that end shortly after his death in 1228. His learning had made him famous in Paris before Pope Innocent summoned him to Rome to become cardinal priest of St. Chrysogonus. His wise statesmanship was proved by the victory he won for England’s liberties over so energetic and ruthless a despot as John, and with such material as the barons. His strength of character and disinterested patriotism were impaired by no taint of baseness or self seeking. If Stephen Langton is not numbered with the saints, he ranks high in the great list of England’s primates, serving religion as faithfully as he served justice and social order, and his name is resplendent for all time in the charters of English liberty.