But in 1215 there seemed to be neither an alternative royal dynasty nor a disgruntled member of the present royal family on whose behalf would-be rebels could claim to fight. John’s brothers were dead and his sons were much too young either to rebel or to be convincing figureheads for revolt. If he had lived, John’s nephew, Arthur of Brittany, would have been the obvious leader of opposition – as he had been in 1199 and 1202–3. But he had been removed. The accidents of birth and death, and the non-accident of Arthur’s disappearance, meant that in 1215 there were no royal princes whose discontents could serve as a focus for revolt.
The only possible claimant was Prince Louis of France but as the husband of Blanche of Castile, daughter of Henry II’s daughter Eleanor, he was a distant kinsman. Anyway, after the wars of the last thirty years or so, a son of Philip Augustus hardly made an attractive candidate for the throne of England. Yet if John’s enemies were to win widespread support when they asked men to risk life and limb by taking up arms they needed a good cause. It was in this awkward predicament that his opponents took their step into the unknown. They invented a new kind of focus for revolt: a programme of reform. Lacking a prince they devised a document, a charter of liberties. If they could not fight for the rights of a prince since none was to hand, they would fight for the rights of the whole realm, for what they referred to in Magna Carta itself as ‘the community of the whole land’.
In a way the rebels of 1215 were following a path marked out not by former rebels but by kings. More than a century earlier, on the occasion of his coronation in the year 1100, Henry I had granted a charter ‘to all his barons and faithful men’. In it he promised to ‘abolish all the evil customs by which the kingdom of England has been unjustly oppressed’ and listed some of his predecessor’s unpopular practices. Henry’s coronation charter had been a sort of election manifesto issued in 1100 when the new king was anticipating a challenge from his brother and was keen to win as much support as possible. Once firmly in control of the kingdom he paid little heed to the promises he had made. None the less the Coronation Charter was never entirely forgotten and by the winter of 1214 its ghost had risen up to haunt King John. His opponents were now using it as the framework around which they formulated their own demands. They could do this all the more easily since some of the grievances uppermost in their own minds had also been dealt with in 1100 – in particular, abuses of the system of royal patronage. When the rebels, by drawing up their big charter, a detailed programme of government reform, took their revolutionary step forward, they deliberately looked to the past, to Henry I’s charter and to what they believed had been a ‘golden age’ before the more oppressive government of recent kings. But precisely because they saw the past in this way, not as it really was, they in fact created something entirely new.
At the meeting of January 1215 John’s opponents took an oath that they would ‘stand fast together for the liberty of the church and realm’. They demanded that the king confirm the Coronation Charter and make further reforms; they threatened war if he did not agree to do as they wished. John played for time. He promised to reply to their demands at a meeting to take place at Northampton on 26 April. The barons now sent envoys to Rome to counter those whom John had dispatched before Christmas. In vain: although the pope asked John to listen to any legitimate requests the barons might make, he roundly condemned leagues and confederations that attempted to coerce the king with threats of force, and he ordered everyone to pay the scutage they owed. John demanded a new oath of allegiance. Men were to swear loyalty to him not only ‘against all men’, as was the customary formula, but also ‘against the charter’. The idea of a charter of liberties for which, and against which, men might fight to the death was gaining ground. And John still had other tricks in his locker. On 4 March he took the cross as a crusader, and handed out white crosses to those of his entourage who followed his example. Now, wrote Innocent III, those who opposed John were ‘worse than Saracens’. But few people thought the king’s crusading vow anything other than a cynical manoeuvre.
All the while both sides carried on with their preparations for civil war. John raised loans to pay mercenaries brought over from Flanders and Poitou – and was, in consequence, represented as a king who used ‘aliens’ to oppress his own subjects. The northern barons mustered in arms at Stamford, then marched to Northampton to be there in time for the meeting with the king. As they marched they were joined by others led by John’s old enemy Robert FitzWalter, and also by Geoffrey de Mandeville and Giles, bishop of Hereford. In January 1214 Geoffrey had, no doubt rashly, agreed to pay twenty thousand marks for the hand of John’s ex-wife, Isabel of Gloucester, yet since then had been unable to establish his right to the vast Gloucester estate. As for Bishop Giles, he was a Briouze. Although not all the rebels came from the north of England, the ‘Northerners’ were sufficiently prominent among them for this to become a label commonly affixed to the rebels as a whole. When they got to Northampton, they waited for the king, but he stayed away. On 5 May they formally renounced their fealty. The first civil war of 1215 had begun.
The rebels, led by Robert FitzWalter, who styled himself Marshal of the Army of God and the Holy Church, won a decisive victory when the city of London opened its gates to them. This was on 17 May, just ten days after John had granted the Londoners a new charter confirming their traditional liberties and allowing them to elect a new mayor every year. Evidently his bid to win their support had come too late. As lord of Castle Baynard, Robert had some influence in London, but most likely it was John’s taxation of the Londoners that had turned them against him. From then on, throughout 1215 and 1216 London was the capital of the rebellion. And the city was rewarded in Magna Carta with clauses 12 and 13. After this, although there was no actual fighting, the barons won a landslide of support. The king retained the loyalty of a few magnates such as William Marshal, but he soon realised that he would have to make – or appear to make – big concessions if he were to buy time in which to build up enough military power to have a hope of reversing the tide. Mediators went to and fro. Documents setting out peace proposals were drafted and discussed. One such document, now known as the Articles of the Barons, survives in the British Library. On 15 June terms were agreed and John went to Runnymede where he confirmed the final draft of the Charter. Over the next few days the envoys for the barons worked hard to persuade the rest of the rebels to accept the terms. Not all were satisfied, and a group of Northerners rode away, refusing to lay down their arms. It was an ominous sign. None the less most of the rebels were persuaded. On 19 June they renewed their homage to the king and peace was proclaimed.
Despite the existence of Henry I’s Coronation Charter and similar charters issued by King Stephen at the beginning of his reign in 1135 and 1136, the fact remains that never before had there been anything quite like Magna Carta. As the product of rebellion it was conceived and drawn up in an atmosphere of crisis. John and his enemies were bidding against each other for political and military support. In these circumstances the barons could not afford to be identified with a programme that suited only their own sectional interests. They ended up by demanding a charter of liberties that was long, detailed and contained something for everyone. Thus Magna Carta took shape not just as a criticism of the way John had been treating his barons, but as a thoroughgoing commentary on a whole system of government. This meant that when, after some last-minute wriggling which enabled him to win a point or two, John bowed to the demands of the rebels he was in effect accepting the first written constitution in European history. Paradoxically, in more recent times English people have tended to pride themselves on their unwritten constitution.
There is much that is paradoxical in the history of Magna Carta. Despite its huge later success and mythical status as the cornerstone of English liberties, in 1215 Magna Carta was an abysmal failure. It was intended as a peace treaty, a formula to put an end to the conflict between king and barons. But civil war broke out again within three months of the meeting at Runnymede. The fact is that, as drawn up in June 1215, Magna Carta was bound to fail. Naturally no king could look kindly upon a document to which his consent had been extorted by force. No one could have expected John to implement its terms with enthusiasm. But the problem with Magna Carta went much deeper than this. The rebels had foreseen John’s reluctance. They had anticipated that he would try to wriggle out of the commitments made at Runnymede and so in the charter itself they set up mechanisms designed to meet this eventuality:
52. If, without lawful judgement of his peers, we have deprived anyone of lands, castles, liberties or rights, we will restore them to him at once. And if any disagreement arises on this let it be settled by the judgement of the twenty-five barons
Who were these twenty-five?
61. The barons shall choose any twenty-five barons of the realm they wish . . . so that if we or any of our servants offend in any way . . . then those twenty-five barons together with the community of the whole land shall distrain and distress us in every way they can, namely by seizing castles, lands and possessions . . . until in their judgement amends have been made.
After Magna Carta had been sealed and peace proclaimed, the committee of Twenty-Five set themselves up in London and went to work. But it was a committee of John’s enemies. They decided, for example, that Nicholas de Stuteville, not the king, should have possession of Knaresborough and Boroughbridge castles. Clearly if everything was to depend on the judgement of a committee of twenty-five barons chosen by the king’s enemies and if, further, these twenty-five were empowered to seize his castles, lands and property whenever they thought it necessary, then the king had in effect been dethroned. This was not merely to reform the realm; this was to destroy the sovereignty of the Crown. No king could have submitted to this, except as a tactical manoeuvre designed to gain time. So deep was the distrust between king and rebel barons that it is unlikely that any agreement could have preserved the peace for long. But a peace treaty that included Causes 52 and 61 made it certain that the renewal of war would come sooner rather than later. The barons had created a political monstrosity, a constitution that could not possibly survive. The Magna Carta of 1215 was the cause of its own undoing.
For the moment John pretended to comply with Magna Carta’s terms. Many copies of the document were made and circulated. Arrangements were made for the text of the charter to be translated into French or English (or both) and read out at meetings of county courts throughout England. But by mid-July John had written secretly to the pope asking him to annul the charter. Throughout the rest of July and August he carried on pretending to comply. In May 1215 John had, in his preparation for war and with Archbishop Stephen’s agreement, taken possession of Rochester Castle, but he now acquiesced in the Twenty-Five’s decision that it should be restored to the archbishop. Then, early in September, the papal letters arrived. Innocent announced that Magna Carta was
not only shameful and base but also illegal and unjust. We refuse to overlook such shameless presumption which dishonours the Apostolic See, injures the king’s right, shames the English nation, and endangers the crusade. Since the whole crusade would be undermined if concessions of this sort were extorted from a great prince who had taken the cross, we, on behalf of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and by the authority of Saints Peter and Paul His apostles, utterly reject and condemn this settlement. Under threat of excommunication we order that the king should not dare to observe and the barons and their associates should not insist on it being observed. The charter with all its undertakings and guarantees we declare to be null and void of all validity for ever.
Few if any of the rebel barons were diverted one jot from their chosen course of action by Innocent III’s threats. The only real effect of the best rhetoric the papal chancery could deploy was to undermine the position of those churchmen, like the archbishop of Canterbury, who were still hoping that a spirit of compromise might avert civil war. When Archbishop Stephen refused to condemn the charter, the pope’s commissioners suspended him from office – and this was the archbishop for whose appointment the pope had fought so hard and long.
John was sufficiently encouraged by Innocent’s words to decide that the time had come for him to throw off the mask. He had continued to recruit foreign mercenaries during the last few weeks and from Dover, where he had been awaiting their arrival, he marched towards London. Barring the way was Rochester Castle, held for Stephen Langton by Reginald of Cornhill. Although for many years Reginald had been one of the king’s most important administrators he, like many of his friends and co-workers, preferred to side with those who wanted fundamental reform. When the barons sent troops under the command of William d’Albini to reinforce Rochester, Reginald opened the castle gates to them. Their plan was that the castle should keep John at bay until they had received reinforcements from France. Both John and the rebels had sent envoys to the French court asking for aid, but the rebels had more to offer. Realising that Magna Carta was now dead in the water, they offered the crown of England to Prince Louis of France. Although at one level the selection of an anti-king marked a return to a much more traditional form of rebellion, it is a measure of just how desperate and determined John’s enemies were that they were now prepared to countenance a French king. Louis was happy to accept the offer. Once again an ambitious political leader showed that he had no compunction in going against the pope’s strongly expressed wishes. It was just a question of how quickly he could assemble an army and bring it to England.