looking young woman, there could be discerned a likeness to the eldest Miss Peevor. Mr. Peevor's cousin, explained the step-mother, and his first wife, whom he married when quite a young man. The pale young lady with light hair, whose portrait graced the opposite wall, was mother to Cathy and Fred; while the pretty little girlish face which hung over the mantelpiece was unmistakably that of Lucy's mother, whose span of wedded life had been even shorter than that of her predecessors. Mr. Peevor was a man of deeply affectionate nature, observed the latest partner of his couch; and these successive losses had greatly affected his spirits, and made him more nervous and particular about trifles than he used to be. The poor widower did not marry again for several years after he lost Lucy's mother, who died when she was a baby; and Mrs. Peevor hoped he might now be granted a fair measure of happiness after his long, lonely widowhood: although, she added, relapsing into melancholy, there was no saying how long she herself might be spared to be a companion to him; her own health had been very feeble ever since Lottie's birth. Mr. each other. They were all good-tempered This revelation sufficed to dispel any lingering doubts remaining as to Mr. Peevor's solvency. He had evidently nothing of the reckless speculator about him. But as to what he was, and whence came the wealth so lavishly scattered, Yorke still knew nothing. Yorke hereon observed, by way of diverting her mind from the gloomy prospect of following her three predecessors, that he was sorry to see Miss Maria seemed to be in delicate health; to which Mrs. Peevor replied that she took after her poor mother in that respect, but had been much worse since her disappoint- That evening there was another heavy ment and then, without waiting to be dinner the parish doctor and his wife asked any questions, but evidently only being the only neighbours - but of people too happy to find a listener, she proceed- not quite of so much account as on the ed to relate the story of poor Miss Maria's previous day, since none were invited for wrongs, and the shameful conduct of the the night; and those who did not drive affianced lover, who broke off the engage- from their own homes came by train from ment almost at the last moment, after the London, being conveyed to and from the wedding-dress had come home, and even station in Mr. Peevor's carriages. Again the wedding-breakfast was ordered. It there was the same interminable succeswas all a question of money, although Mr. sion of courses, and the same strenuous Peevor had behaved most generously; efforts to qualify for the gout on the part indeed he was liberal to a fault. Mr. of the stout ladies and their middle-aged Peevor, of course, was furious, and even partners - gentlemen of uncertain accendeclared he would pursue the perjured tuation who composed the company; wretch with an action for breach of prom- the same lavish supply of costly wine, and ise, but he was prevailed on to desist: this the same unsteadiness of gait apparent in was before Mrs. Peevor was married to the servants afterwards. But the two him. He sold his house at Harrow young ladies, who had returned home just Weald, however, and left the neighbour-in time to dress for dinner, were in unusuhood; and poor Maria had never got over al spirits; for Miss Cathy had received a the affair. letter by the evening post to say her brother had got a few days' leave from his regiment, and would be with them next day. Fred was evidently the most From this conversation Yorke came to understand the relations which the different members of the family held towards important person in the family, and Lucy's | large but varying body of lower vassals, who bright eyes were brighter than usual at the prospect of his visit. "What a coxcomb I am, to be sure!" said Yorke to himself afterwards in the retirement of his room. "I was beginning to fancy the little girl was ready to join in the family plot and make eyes at me; while from the way in which she brightens up because, forsooth, a brother is coming home, she was evidently bored all the time with my company. But it is always my folly to be fancying that one woman or another is in love with me." From The Contemporary Review. THE POPE AND MAGNA CHARTA. BY CARDINAL MANNING. ABOUT two years ago, in speaking of the conflict of S. Edmund of Canterbury against Henry III. for the liberties of the Church, I pointed out that his contest was only one of many periods in the continuous resistance to royal excesses, in behalf of the laws and liberties of England, maintained by S. Anselm, S. Thomas, Archbishop Langton, and S. Edmund. I might have added, by Archbishop Richard, his immediate predecessor. This statement was next day met by the old taunt that the pope condemned Magna Charta. I then shortly pointed out the distinction, here again asserted, between the mode in which the Great Charter was obtained, and the contents or merits of the Great Charter itself. The former, not the latter, was condemned. Before I enter upon this point, I cannot refrain from quoting a passage from the preface of Professor Stubbs, in his vol ume of "Documents Illustrative of English History." And in doing so I must express my grateful sense of the service he has rendered to historical truth. His small volume stands alone for learning and discernment. Describing the period I was speaking of, he says: : The political situation may generally be stated thus: Since the Conquest, the political constituents of the nation had been divided into two parties, which may be called the national and the feudal. The former comprised the king, the ministerial nobility, which were created by Henry I. and Henry II., and which, if less richly endowed than that of the Con quest, was more widely spread and had more English sympathies; the other contained the great nobles of the Conquest, and the always were intent on pursuing the policy of foreign feudalism. The national party was also generally in close alliance with the clergy, whose defence of the classes from whom they chiefly zeal for their own privileges extended to the ties maintained in the general recollection the sprang, and whose vindication of class liberpossibility of resisting oppression. The clergy may be roughly divided into three schools-the secular, or statesman school; the ecclesiastical, or professional; and the devotional, or spiritual. Of these the representative men are Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Winchester, and Anselm of Canterbury. Thomas the Martyr more or less combines the characters of the three throughout his life. The three stages through which he passed — that of chancellor, that of primate, and that of candidate for martyrdom (sit venia egregio auctori) — answer well to the three schools of the clergy. Throughout the whole period, the first of these schools was consistently on the side of the king, the last as consistently on the side of the nation; the second, when its own privileges were not in danger, as from the peace of the Church, in 1107, to the Beckett quarrel, and after the conclusion of that quarrel, continuously on the same side. No division of the clergy ever sympathized with the feudal party. Again Mr. Stubbs writes: From the beginning of the thirteenth century the struggle is between the barons, clergy, and people on one side, and the king and his personal partisans, English and foreign, on the other. The barons and prelates who drew up the charter were the sons of the ministerial nobles of Henry II., the imitators of S. Anselm and S. Hugh, of Henry of Winchester and Thomas of Canterbury.† But does not this show that if the spiritual prelates were with the people, they were certainly with the pope, by whom they were canonized? How, then, was not the pope with the people and its Christian liberties? I will now give evidence of my assertion that the barons, and not the contents of the charter, were condemned by Innocent III. I. Let us first examine the antecedents of the conflict between John and the barons, out of which the Great Charter arose. It is simply impossible to form an adequate conception of this conflict unless we go back to the reign of our earlier kings. Mr. Stubbs, in his valuable work "The Memorials of S. Dunstan," gives the promissio regis, or the oath taken at his Stubbs' Documents, pp. 31, 32: Oxford, 1874. † Ibid. p. 33. coronation by the Saxon king Edwy, |spect to inheritance, taxation, military which is as follows:service, and the like. This writing is written, letter by letter, after the writing that Archbishop Dunstan delivered to our lord at Kingston, on the day that they hallowed him king; and he forbade him to give any pledge except this pledge which he laid up on Christ's altar, as the bishop directed him: "In the name of the Holy Trinity I promise three things to the Christian people, my subjects: first that God's Church and all Christian people of my dominions hold true peace; the second is that I forbid robbery, and all unrighteous things, to all orders; the third, that I promise and enjoin in all dooms justice and mercy, that the gracious and merciful God, of His everlasting mercy, may forgive us all who liveth and reigneth." * Here we have the germ of the oaths and charters of the Norman times. It may be indeed true that there did not exist any very precise code to which the people of England, after the Conquest, were always appealing as to "the laws of good King Edward." Nevertheless there was a well-known tradition of ecclesiastical and popular liberties partly written, but chiefly unwritten, descending from the legislation and the usage of Saxon times. These liberties were frequently violated, even by the Saxon kings. Edward the Confessor wielded an authority, from his known integrity and fidelity to God and his people, which enabled him to promote ecclesiastics in a way hardly consistent with the perfect freedom of elections. The electors acquiesced in what was well done, though in the doing of it a good king set a dangerous example for bad kings to quote. The laws and liberties of England were guaranteed by the coronation oaths of every sovereign. Saxon and Dane alike swore to preserve them. William the Conqueror and his successors, in like manner, bound themselves by their coronation oaths to respect them. In the name of Christ I promise to the Christian people subject to me these three things. First, that I will order, and according to my power will take care, that the Church of God and all Christian people shall enjoy true peace by our will at all times: secondly, that I will forbid rapacity and iniquity to all degrees of men: thirdly, that I will en God, who is pitiful and merciful, may grant join equity and mercy in all judgments, that to me His mercy.* This was the bond given by the king to his people, upon which he received the threefold sanction of election by the nation, unction by the Church, and homage from his vassals. This oath is also a limitation of the excesses of William I. and William Rufus. It is also a renunciation of the unlawful customs of the latter, and a restoration of the lawful freedom of the people. This, in fact, is what was intended by the "laws of King Edward." And in this outline we see exactly the causes of conflict, namely, the oppression of the Church by the royal power in the case of vacancies and elections, and the oppression of the barons and tenants by exactions of money and taxation.* The charter of Henry I. runs as follows: In the year of the incarnation of our Lord 1051, Henry, son of William the king, after the death of his brother William, by the grace of God king of the English, to all the faithful health. 1. Know ye that by the mercy of God, and But the conflict between traditional lib-common counsel of the barons of the whole erties and royal customs, which began king of the same kingdom; and forasmuch as kingdom of England, I have been crowned before the Conquest, became sharper and the kingdom has been oppressed by unjust less tolerable after the Conquest. The exactions, I, in the fear of God, and in the rule of our foreign kings was especially love I bear towards you, first set free the Holy despotic, and, under them, the conflict Church of God, so that I will not sell or between legal rights and royal usages pledge (its goods). Nor on the death of brought on the conflict of S. Anselm with archbishop, bishop, or abbot will I receive Henry I., and the martyrdom of S. anything of the domain of the Church, nor of Thomas of Canterbury under Henry II. These laws and liberties may be divided and classed under two heads: first, the liberties of the Church, in its tribunals, goods, appeals, and elections; and secondly, the liberties of the people in re • Memorials of S. Dunstan, p. 355. its members, until a successor shall enter upon it. And all evil customs by which the I will take away, which evil customs I here in kingdom of England was unjustly oppressed part recite. Then follow the articles. Stubbs' Documents, p. 99. The second article relates to inheritance. | scourge for their own back; and that The third and fourth to widows. their own turn would come next. In The fifth to coinage and false money. truth, the conflict is always one and the The sixth to pleas and debts; the six same-the king sometimes against the following to dues, and sureties, and mur- barons, sometimes against the bishops, der, and forests, and the like. sometimes against both: it is always the same in kind-that is, of the royal customs violating the laws and liberties, civil and ecclesiastical, of the English people. The thirteenth is, "The law of King Edward I restore to you, with the amendments by which my father, with the advice of his barons, amended it."* I have given this outline of the charter of Henry I. more fully because it is in germ the Magna Charta of Runnymede. In the following reign Stephen issued two charters in the same express terms. The first, which is the shorter, runs as follows: We come now to the reign of John. Mr. Stubbs says that the reign of Richard had separated the interests of the crown from the interests of the people. The reign of John brought the interests of the people and those of the barons into the closest harmony. Both alike suffered from arbitrary and excessive taxation, Know ye that I have granted, and by this from delay of justice, exactions of milimy present charter have confirmed, to all my tary service out of England, that is, in barons and men in England, all the liberties France, outrages of every kind, both puband good laws which Henry, king of the En-lic and domestic. Before I go into detail, glish, my uncle, gave and granted to them; I will give the picture of King John from a and I grant to them all good laws and good recent historian. customs which they had in the time of King Edward. Nevertheless Stephen went to war with his barons and his bishops. Both parties fought with foreign mercenary troops, to the great misery of the English people.† Mr. Greene, in his "History of the English People," a book of great value, but marred by great inaccuracies, like the hisin English the line of the old chronicler : torical writings of Lord Macaulay, quotes Sordida fœdatur, fœdante Johanne, Gehenna. "Foul as it is, hell itself is defiled by the fouler presence of John." The terrible verdict of the king's contemporaries has passed into the sober judgment of history. In his inner soul, John was the worst outcome of the Angevins. He united into one mass of wickunbridled lust, their cruelty and tyranny, their shamelessness, their superstition, their cynical indifference to honour or truth. In mere boyhood, he had torn with brutal levity the beards of the Irish chieftains who came to own him as their lord. His ingratitude and perfidy had brought down his father's hairs with sorrow to the grave. To his brother he had been edness their insolence, their selfishness, their Henry II. swore, at his consecration, to respect the same laws and liberties. He also issued a charter of liberties; and in a parliament in London, "he renewed the peace, and laws, and customs which obtained from ancient times throughout England." Through the whole of his reign Henry endeavoured to enforce his royal "customs," the "avitas consuetudines" of his ancestors, as against the laws and liberties of England. On one occasion, when he swore by God's eyes that he would exact a certain payment from tenants of land, S. Thomas, to protect the people from an oppressive cus-lieved him to be the murderer of his nephew, tom, withstood him, saying, "By the eyes by which you have sworn, not a penny shall be paid from all my land!" The constitutions of Clarendon were in direct violation of the laws and liberties to which the king had bound himself by oath and by charter. They violated the liberties of the Church in its tribunals, appeals, the worst of traitors. All Christendom be Arthur of Brittany. He had abandoned one wife and was faithless to another. His punishments were refinements of cruelty, the starvation of children, the crushing old men under copes of lead. His court was a brothel, where no woman was safe from the royal lust, and where his cynicism loved to publish the news of his victims' shame. He was as craven in his superstition as he was daring in his impiety. He scoffed at priests, and turned his back on the mass, even amidst the solemnities of his coronation, but he never stirred on a journey without hanging relics round his neck.† At his coronation in 1199, John swore, in the hands of Hubert, archbishop of Stubbs' Documents, p. 129. ↑ Greene's History of the English People, p. 118. John had shown himself to be vicious, sensual, violent, false, tyrannical, and a violator of his coronation oath by infractions of the liberties of the Church and of the laws of the land. But hitherto the authority and statesmanship of Archbishop Hubert had in some degree restrained him. In 1205 the archbishop died; and on hearing of his death, John said exultingly, "Now for the first time I am king of England." || The Canterbury, to preserve the liberties of the | oured to compel them to renew their homChurch, and the laws of the land.* age. His despotism became minutely In the year 1200, John began his ca- vexatious. He forbade the taking of birds reer of tyranny by seizing all the posses- throughout England; and commanded sions of the archbishop of York. The the hedges and ditches which protected archbishop excommunicated the officers the harvest-lands to be destroyed.* He who had seized his manors. John was exacted homage of all freeholders, even enraged at this, but still more enraged be- from boys of twelve years old; and comcause the archbishop had forbid the col-pelled, for that purpose, the Welsh to lection of a plough-tax in his diocese. come to Woodstock. He then turned his In the year 1203, the shameless vices of exactions and cruelties, which are well the king, and the loss of his castles in known, against the Jews, both men and Normandy, caused the barons who were women. In the year 1210, he exacted by with him in France to forsake the court.‡ violence, vellent nollent, a hundred thouHe then returned to England, and exacted sand pounds sterling from the clergy, of the barons a seventh part of their which Matthew Paris calls exactio nefaria. goods: he committed also all manner of At the same time, he starved to death the rapine by violence against the Church and wife and son of one of his nobles. convents.§ rapine and violence of John on every class of his people steadily growing more intol erable, the pope on their appeal absolved his subjects from their allegiance, and forbade them to consort with him in mensa, consilio et colloquio. Geoffrey of Norwich, a judge of the exchequer, therefore resigned his office. He was thrown into prison and laden with a cope of lead, under which he soon died. Many nobles, prelates, and others, fled from England and died in exile. By John's command twentyeight youths, surrendered by the Welsh as hostages, were hanged at Nottingham before he would take his food. He was then warned of the defection of his barons, from whom, by terror, he extorted sons, The pope annulled the election and nephews, and kinsmen as hostages. I chose Stephen Langton, who was already have simply taken the chief points of the cardinal priest of St. Chrysogenus. This narrative of Matthew Paris. But it is imwas in the year 1207. He was elected by possible to give an adequate idea of the the monks, and consecrated in Rome. misery of the people of England under the John in his fury, refused to receive the tyranny of John. A perpetual cry went archbishop, and drove the monks of Can-up from the face of the whole land. It is terbury out of England. The pope, after sending many envoys and writing many letters to the king without effect, threatened to lay an interdict upon the kingdom. John persisted in his obstinacy, and the interdict was promulgated on March 23, 1208. He then confiscated the property of the bishops, abbots, priors, and clergy; and seized all their goods for his own use. He inflicted all manner of personal indignities and cruelties upon ecclesiastics. Being conscious that his enormities had alienated the barons from him, he endeav From this date opens a new chapter in John's history. In order to force his favourite, John de Gray, into the see of Canterbury, he overbore the freedom of the electors. said that there was hardly a noble family Matthew Paris, Ed. Madden, London, 1866, vol. then, with the unanimous assent of the ii. p. 80. f Ibid. p. 87. Ibid. pp. 96, 97. Ibid. p. 99. Ibid. p. 104. Ibid. p. 114. |