the king. They had been already embodied in successive charters, on which no shadow of censure from Rome had ever fallen.
- The very same laws and liberties, with only three or four exceptions, were, within a year of the condemnation of the Great Charter of John, confirmed by Gualio, legate of the pope, in the charter of Henry III.; and these exceptions were not made by the pope, but by the barons themselves, into whose hands the government of the kingdom during the minority of the king had fallen.[1]
It would seem to me, therefore, to be proved even to demonstration that the pope condemned not the Charter, but the barons; not the laws and liberties set down in the Charter but the way and action by which the barons had wrung it from their sovereign. The pope quashed and annulled the Charter as a contract, and forbade either side to plead or to act upon it; but not one word as to its contents is to be found.
The only argument that I can conceive to the contrary is that the pope, in his letter of cassation, describes the Charter as "turpis et vilis, illicita et iniqua."[2] But this, again, is evidently said of the whole action by which the king was forced by his own liegemen into a submission and a humiliation second only to that of the surrender of his crown. There is not a shadow of evidence to show that these epithets apply to the laws or liberties as expressed in the Charter.
On all these grounds, therefore, I affirm once more that in condemning the Charter, Innocent condemned the action of the barons, and not the liberties of England.
In order to bring this out more clearly, we will sum up the chief contents of the great charter of liberties.
It begins with a recital of the charter of liberties issued on January 15, 1215, and confirmed by the pope, which begins "Anglicana Ecclesia libera sit, et habeat jura sua integra, et libertates suas illæsas."
This certainly was not condemned by Innocent.
Then follow sixty-two articles, relating to inheritance, taxation, common pleas, trial by peers, weights, measures, imprisonment, safe-conducts, and the like.
A man must be not a little credulous who can believe that Innocent III. saw in these details the subject-matter of a pontifical condemnation. They had been the laws and liberties of England for generations; and no pope had ever seen in them matter for his supreme cognizance. What Innocent was really dealing with was what I may call the constitutional law of Christian kingdoms, and of the jurisprudence of the Christian world. In this, authority and liberty are both sacred; despotism and rebellion both crimes against God and man. The pope, as supreme judge, took cognizance of these causæ majores, these high causes of Christian civilization; but that he should occupy himself about such matters as the details of Magna Charta could only come — as an Englishman, I take leave to say — into the head of an Englishman, and then only if he be either innocent of history or a scientific historian. The thirty-fifth article runs: —
- Let there be one measure for wine throughout all our kingdom, and one measure for beer, and one measure for oats — that is, the London quartern; and one breadth for cloth, dyed russet, and hauberk—that is, two ells within the listings; and let it be with weights as with measures.
The pastoral vigilance of popes is great, but it hardly reaches to the weights and measures and quarterns and ells and gallons of Christendom.
Mr. Stubbs seems to me to confirm the view I have been maintaining. He says: —
- In the ecclesiastical disputes, which are the next feature of the reign, John had to contend with the greatest of all the successors of Peter, and with a spirit in the national Church which was unquestionably maintained by the knowledge of the great power and success of the pope in other parts of Christendom. The barons refrained from taking advantage of those peculiar difficulties, nor did their overt opposition to the king begin until his relations with the papacy had changed. As soon as the papal authority begins to back the royal tyranny, the barons determined to resist; and the Church, having recovered, in Archbishop Langton, its natural leader, resumes its ordinary attitude as the supporter of freedom.[3]
And afterwards he adds: —
- ↑ Mr. Greene says that the articles omitted in the first charter of Henry III. were re-inserted under the influence of Archbishop Langton. I do not find the evidence of this statement. Neither Matthew Paris nor Hovenden, so far as I can see, say so: and the Annals of Dunstaple, quoted by Mr. Stubbs (Documents, etc., p. 323), expressly say that in the year 1225, when the king had attained majority: — "Libertates prius ab eo puero concessas, jam major factus, indulsit." This does not indeed exclude, but it does not imply, any re-insertion of articles.
- ↑ Rymer, tom. i. 204.
- ↑ Stubbs' Documents, p. 269.
