but by the English people in its entirety. The clergy, the great barons, the lower vassals and freeholders, even the merchants and the peasants, found their interests consulted in it. For the first time the English people appeared as a united whole. The local divisions of the days before the Conquest were gone. The class divisions of the days after the Conquest were also gone. In their stead had arisen a union based on mutual concessions and strong by mutual support. The great importance of the Charter does not lie in the wisest of its provisions, but in the fact that it sprang from a rearrangement of political forces. The Norman and Angevin kings had thought to establish a centralised. despotism, and the result had been the bringing of the English nation to the birth. CHAP. IV. Institutions Such a change in the forces of politics rendered $9. New necessary a change of institutions to give it effect. The needed. old Great Council of the immediate vassals of the crown must in some way or another change its basis, and become the Great Council of the nation, whilst the holder of the kingly office also must be inspired with the new national spirit. Unless that could be done, little would be gained. Unity of direction, the vigilance of personal superintendence, the permanent action of a presiding intelligence, are as necessary for the well-being of a state as the expression of popular will by which the ruler is prevented from providing for his own wants instead of providing for the wants of the nation. Such a change, however, could only be tentatively carried out. Some time passes before a nation finds out exactly what it wants, and a longer time before it finds out what are the most suitable means for supplying its necessities. tative The efforts of the barons were very tentative indeed. § 10. Ten They forced John to promise that he would not, except Eforts. in certain specified cases, levy any scutage or aid upon his own vassals without the consent of the Great Council of the realm. As, however, the aids and scutages due to the crown were only levied on its immediate feudal tenants, there was no thought of providing any new assembly to guard the rights of those who were interested. All that was done was to try to make the Great Council to be in reality what it was already in theory, an assembly not merely of the prelates and great barons, but of the whole of the tenants in chief. John, therefore, was constrained to promise that he would summon for purposes of feudal taxation, the archbishops, bishops, abbots, and greater barons by special writ, whilst he would summon all the lesser tenants in chief by a general announcement conveyed by the sheriffs. There was no likelihood that such a plan would meet the necessities of the case. The smaller tenants in chief would not take the trouble to appear any more than they had done before, and the sub-tenants by knight-service, the freeholders who were not knights at all, and the inhabitants of the towns, had no part or lot in the assembly. The Great Council would continue to be a council of prelates and barons; and if prelates and barons were to be lest alone to deal with the king, they might be inclined, if they proved successful, to kick over the ladder by which they had risen to power. Nor was the new arrangement for the exercise of the royal authority any more satisfactory. John was still to be king, but a committee of twenty-five barons was to be appointed to watch over him in the exercise of his office. If he broke the Charter, they were to make war on him and to seize his castles and lands. Probably nothing better could have been suggested at the moment, but it is evident that a system under which a king could only exercise his authority under the constant threat of legalised rebellion could not form part of a permanent constitution for the country. CHAP. IV. § 11. Germ of the Repre System. If, however, the Great Charter offered no remedy here, there were in existence forces which would sooner or later come to the front. In the counties the old shiremote, under the Norman name of the county court, was more than ever flourishing. It was accustomed to sentative elect persons to assess taxation locally in concert with the judges. Sooner or later, the system which prevailed locally was certain to make itself felt in the conduct of the general affairs of the nation. Even John himself had dimly recognised the value of the support which might thus be gained, and had summoned elected knights on one or two occasions to meet him on affairs of public importance. The time had not yet arrived when the representative system could take permanent shape. For the barons the immediate question was not so much how the Great Council was to be constituted in the future, as how the existing king was to be controlled or deposed. John soon showed that no promises could bind him, and the barons, in despair of a successful resistance, invited Lewis-the son of the king of France, and the husband of John's niece—to replace him on the throne, much in the same way that their descendants invited William of Orange to replace James II. Accession of Henry III. and the mod. fied Charter. Happily John's death rendered the step unnecessary, § 12. and his son, then a mere boy, was soon universally accepted as Henry III. Those who acted in his name declared their adhesion to the Great Charter. But the clause binding the king to levy the feudal aids and scutages only on a grant from the Council was omitted. When Henry grew up to manhood, he showed himself less vigorously tyrannical than his father. But he was a weak and heartless spendthrift, throwing money freely away on himself, and still more freely on a swarm of foreigners, the relatives and connexions of his mother СНАР. $13. Extinction of Papal Influence. and of his wife, for whom he seemed to think that nothing in England was too good His ever-craving need drove back those whose money he demanded upon the theory of the invalidity of a royal demand for taxation without the consent of the Council, while at the same time it led them to make the foundations of that Council as broad as possible in order that all classes might present a united front to a common danger. In such a conflict, with dangers on every side, the national institutions of Englishmen were hardened as in the fire. Above all there was the danger lest, in a contest in defence of property, however nobly waged, the habit of looking after the right to money should lead to mere selfish faction, and that when once the king had been restrained, the strong would trample on the weak, and the rich would grind the faces of the poor Never is it more necessary than in times of civil strife to keep warm the heart and to maintain the sense of brotherhood. Nor was the civil strife of the thirteenth century without special dangers of its own. Hitherto the ecclesiastical organisation, with the Pope at its head, had kept alive a sense of unity amidst the distractions of feudal warfare. Everywhere through Western Christendom, the Church had been the protector of the helpless, the advocate of peace, the protector against violence and wrong. Everywhere the Pope could be looked up to as the common father. But there were signs that it would not be so much longer. Innocent III. had taken part distinctly with John, wicked and bloodthirsty as he was, as soon as John had acknowledged him as his feudal superior; and though Honorius II., who followed him, had done much to help on the pacification which ensued on the accession of Henry, neither his influence nor that of his successors was likely to be exercised in giving any support to the growth of a constitutional control by subjects over their sovereign. As an ecclesiastical autocracy, the papacy was certain to oppose the development of free institutions in the state; whilst, as a universal system, the highest merit of which was that it placed itself above distinctions of race, of language, and of government, it was qually certain to look askance upon the tightening bonds of nationality which were causing Englishmen to regard foreigners as unfit to take part in the management of English affairs. And at the same time that the papacy was losing its intelligent perception of the real wants of Englishmen, circumstances led it to make the heaviest demands upon the purses of Englishmen. Two successive popes, Gregory IX. and Innocent IV., engaged in a deadly struggle with the Emperor Frederick II. The object of that struggle, even at its commencement, had very little of a spiritual nature in it. The popes no longer, as in the eleventh century, burned with zeal for the reform of the Church and the world. They wanted chiefly to maintain their independence as temporal sovereigns. For this they fought; for this they sent emissary after emissary to England, subjecting the English clergy and laity to taxation, and infringing on the rights of lay patrons as well as clerical expectants by the appointment of needy Italians to English benefices. It was not long before the pope came to be regarded as merely one foreign bloodsucker the more, as mischievous as the brothers-in-law of the king, who cared for nothing in England except its wealth. СНАР. IV. Friars. In the sturdy growth of a national feeling lay the $14. The strength of England. But it was not without its own risks. There was a danger lest a claim to power, arising from the desire to guard the purse, should end in a struggle for pelf rather than in an increase of righteous rule, and that the pursuit of material objects should lead in the end to disintegration rather than to union. Once |
