Saving Magna Carta

The Rule of Law

Magna Carta was sealed by King John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. However, its survival was in doubt. It served two purposes, a peace treaty and the grant of liberties to the rebel barons and the English People. If the peace did not hold, Magna Carta would disappear from the pages of history. Even while the King was negotiating the final language riding to Runnymede from Windsor Castle, he was behind the barons' backs petitioning the Pope to declare Magna Carta null and void. His envoys made the two month journey between England and Rome and back numerous times in 1215, carrying letters from the King to Rome asking for relief and returning with the replies from the Pope. The barons themselves also were not blameless. A group of northern barons had left Runnymede early, before the agreement was finalized, to escape being bound by the Charter. They soon began looting the King's estates in England's north.

Outwardly, the Charter was being complied with. Chapter 61 established a tribunal of 25 barons to hear compliants against the King, impose penalties and ensure compliance. However, King John had secretly secured credit from the Knights Templar to purchase European mercenaries to have fresh troops when he resumed his war with the barons. The Pope, in this Age of Faith, who had been the King's enemy during the controversy over the selection of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, became the King's ally after John acquiesced to the Pope's choice of Stephen Langton, an Englishman and a professor at the newly created University of Paris, as the new Archbishop of Canterbury; after John transferred the kingdoms of England and Ireland to Rome and leased them back for an annual rent of 1,000 silver marks; and after John agreed to lead the Fifth Crusade.

It was Langton who had informed the barons in St. Paul's of the existence of the Coronation Charter of Henry I, which became the template for Magna Carta. It was Langton who had, with William Marshal, the greatest knight in the Middle Ages, served as the mediator in the negotiations of Magna Carta between the King and the barons.

Why were the barons at odds with King John? Most historians regard him as the worst king in English history; a history rich in royal villians. He was a serial killer--his victims included his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, the wife and son of one of his closest barons and hostages taken from Welsh chieftains--their young sons. He was a sexual preditor--he raped and sexually assaulted the barons' wives and daughters. He was a monumentally incompetent general who lost an enormous portion of the European territories his father Henry II had amassed; the Angevin Empire that went from the Spanish border with France to the Scottish border with England. His nemesis, King Philip Augustus of France, captured those lands and with them created the modern nation of France.

So, it was no surprise when England's barons needed an ally two years earlier against King John, they would seek out King Philip. He agreed to invade England in return for the barons' commitment to recognize his son Prince Louis as the new King of England. Philip assembled a massive fleet of ships in the harbors of France and Flanders, only to see much of it set adrift in the Channel and the rest of it torched before the ships could set sail.

As it became apparent that the peace would not hold, the barons petitioned Philip again, asking for a new invasion of England.

England was on a knife's edge. The opposing forces: King John alligned with the Pope with his potent spiritual weapons of excommunication and interdict and bolstered by John's European mercenaries; and the barons with a potential ally in Philip Augustus. Waiting in the wings, the King of Scotland, Alexander II and the English barons who were gauging which way the wind was blowing.

Soon, England, France, Scotland and Rome, all would be pulled into the conflict as the peace treaty of Magna Carta unravelled.

The plot spun around like a revolving door.

Who would win? Who would lose? How would Magna Carta survive?

Those questions are answered in Episode 8: Saving Magna Carta.