Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/753

 The second article relates to inheritance.

The third and fourth to widows.

The fifth to coinage and false money.

The sixth to pleas and debts; the six following to dues, and sureties, and murder, and forests, and the like.

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: —


 * Know ye that I have granted, and by this my present charter have confirmed, to all my barons and men in England, all the liberties and good laws which Henry, king of the English, my uncle, gave and granted to them; and I grant to them all good laws and good 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.

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 custom, 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, elections.

In the reign of Henry II., the conflict was chiefly with S. Thomas and the Church. The barons sided with the king. They were siding with the stronger, little knowing that they were preparing a scourge for their own back; and that their own turn would come next. In truth, the conflict is always one and the same — the king sometimes against the barons, sometimes against the bishops, 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.

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, from delay of justice, exactions of military service out of England, that is, in France, outrages of every kind, both public and domestic. Before I go into detail, I will give the picture of King John from a recent historian.

Mr. Greene, in his "History of the English People," a book of great value, but marred by great inaccuracies, like the historical writings of Lord Macaulay, quotes in English the line of the old chronicler: —


 * "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 wickedness their insolence, their selfishness, their unbridled 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 the worst of traitors. All Christendom believed him to be the murderer of his nephew, 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