Magna Carta ― The Seeds of Liberty and Parliament

Last time, a conqueror who crossed the sea set up a single strong kingship on the island of Britain. The king parceled out land, raised castles, and bound the island by the power of the sword. Yet within that immense power lay a single peril. If the king was wise, the realm held together; but if the king chased his own gain and piled misrule upon misrule, the burden fell straight onto his retainers and his people. Without a mechanism to check him, no one could stop a king’s caprice. At the beginning of the 13th century, under just such a king, the people of the island took an action that history would remember. They thrust a document upon the king, seeking to set a frame around his power. That single sheet, later called Magna Carta, the Great Charter, would plant on this island the idea that even a king has something he must obey.

John, the King of Misrule

At the center of the story stands a king of England named John. He came to the throne in 1199, but his reign was a succession of hardships. First, on the continent, he lost to the king of France much of the territory inherited from his forebears, beginning with Normandy, and the king’s prestige was gravely wounded. To try to win back the lost lands, he needed funds for war. To meet that cost, John levied heavy taxes and payments one after another upon his vassals, the barons.

The king stumbled, moreover, in his dealings with the Church. He quarreled with the Pope of Rome over the choice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and for a time, it is told, all of England was driven nearly into a state of excommunication. The king was eventually reconciled with the Pope, but that too served to show, at home and abroad, how the king’s position had weakened. Defeat on the continent, conflict with the Church, and mounting taxation. John’s reign was an age in which the king’s authority steadily faltered. That later ages came to call him ‘Lackland’ is said to derive from this figure who went on losing his territories.

The decisive blow was that an expedition to France ended, once again, in failure. Forced to bear heavy burdens, yet gaining no victory in return. The barons’ discontent at last passed its limit. They ceased to be obedient retainers of the king and became, instead, a body that thrust demands upon him. The conflict between king and barons advanced toward an open, head-on collision.

1215, the Oath at Runnymede

In June 1215, on a meadow called Runnymede by the bank of the Thames, King John was forced to grant the barons’ demands. Under pressure backed by force of arms, the king agreed to the articles they thrust upon him, and here Magna Carta was established. It was a long document of a preamble and more than sixty articles, originally a collection of highly practical arrangements meant to protect the barons’ concrete rights.

Much of it consists of detailed promises bearing on the feudal customs of the time. Yet some of the articles carried a weight that would be read and reread across the ages. Best known is the article to the effect that no free man shall be seized or stripped of his property except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. This expressed the idea that even a king must not punish a person by leaping over the established procedures. Further, the document is said to have included the notion that certain taxation required the consent of the barons by their counsel, and even a mechanism by which the barons might set the king right when promises were broken. A clear frame had been set around the king’s power.

This oath, however, soon faltered. John had from the start regarded the arrangement as against his will, and within that same year Pope Innocent III of Rome declared Magna Carta void. The country tilted once more toward strife, and the document lost its force for a time. Yet after John’s death, under those who supported his young successor, Magna Carta was confirmed and revived, even as it changed in form. That it did not end as a one-time arrangement but was confirmed again and again with each new king is what is said to have made this document special. In time the principles set down in it became a tradition, hard to erase, flowing at the very base of English politics.

The Rule of Law, and the Seed of Parliament

What Magna Carta left to later ages was less the individual articles themselves than the way of thinking behind them. That is the idea that not even a king can stand above the law. This notion, later called the rule of law, was by no means complete from the start. But to show clearly in a document that there was a rule to be obeyed apart from the king’s own will was to drive a wedge into the idea of an absolute royal power. In later ages, when people resisted a king’s tyranny, they would often return to this old document and make it the ground of their own rightness.

One more thing grew from this age: a mechanism for governing the realm by counsel. The notion that for the king to levy heavy taxes the consent of the powerful was required called for an assembly in which king and subjects deliberated together. In the latter half of the 13th century, such assemblies came to include not only barons and clergy but even representatives of the shires and towns. The parliament said to have been summoned by Simon de Montfort in 1265, and the assembly opened by Edward I in 1295, gathering representatives broadly from many estates and later called the Model Parliament, are reckoned great milestones. In time this assembly divided into an upper house of the powerful and a lower house of representatives of the shires and towns, and the prototype of the English Parliament took shape.

What we must take care of here is not to see this as the same thing as the birth of democracy in today’s sense. Those who joined the parliaments of the time were people of limited estate, and they did not broadly represent the voice of the people. What Magna Carta sought to protect, too, was first of all the rights of the privileged. Even so, the meaning of the fact that the idea of restraining the king’s power by law and by counsel was planted as a seed on this island is not small. That seed would grow slowly over many centuries and in time change its form into the great tree of parliamentary politics.

The strong kingship set up by conquest was thus led, little by little, into the frame of law and counsel. Magna Carta is the monument that marked that first step. Even so, the island’s road was still not level. The struggle between king and barons went on, and onto it would come to be layered a great upheaval of religion pressing in from across the sea, and an age of setting out onto unknown oceans. The island that held the seed of law would, in the next chapter, advance into a wholly new storm.