such an act: "John felt that he must bind the Pope to his personal interest by some special tie of such a nature that the interest of the papacy itself would prevent Innocent from casting it off or breaking it." But secondly, the statement formerly made about the cry of indignation heard in England when the news was known has little or no foundation. The vehement denunciation of the act by the partisan Matthew Paris, as "a thing to be detested for all time", was written many years afterwards. "Some", says Davis, "stigmatised the transaction as ignominious, but the most judicial chronicler of his day calls it a prudent move, for, he adds, there was hardly any other way in which John could escape from all his dangers. Even the hostile barons whose plans received an unexpected check did not venture either now or later to dispute the validity of the transaction" (cf. Adams, "Political Hist. of Eng.", II, 315). For such vassalage there were abundant precedents, both within and without the British Isles. Only twenty years earlier, as Hoveden states, Richard Coeur de Lion resigned his crown to the Emperor Henry, engaging to receive it as a fief of the empire for an annual payment of five thousand pounds; while the Scottish patriots a century later, to defeat the claims of Edward I, acknowledged the pope as their feudal lord and pretended that Scotland had always been a fief of the Holy See. It would be most misleading to interpret these and other similar transactions merely in the light of modern sentiment. Perhaps one of the most regrettable features in the incident of John's submission and absolution is the encouragement which the sense of papal protection seems to have given him to proceed in his career of wrongdoing. His later action toward his subjects was no more straightforward or constitutional than before, and he seems to have deceived or gained over the legate to his side. But Archbishop Langton and his barons by this time knew him well, and by inflexible persistence they forced John to accept their terms. Taking as their foundation an earlier, document granted by Henry I at the beginning of his reign, they drew up a charter of liberties, many times confirmed with slight variations in the course of the next century, and destined to be famous through all time as Magna Charta. This great treaty between the king and his people, which Stubbs has described (Const. Hist., II, p. 1) as "the consummation of the work for which unconsciously kings, prelates and lawyers had been laboring for a century, the summing up of one period of national life and the starting point of another", begins with a religious preamble declaring that John was moved to issue this charter out of reverence for God, for the benefit of his own soul, for the exaltation of Holy Church, and for the amendment of his kingdom, and, further, that he had acted therein by the advice of Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, of the other bishops, and of Pandulf "subdeacon of the Lord Pope and member of his household", as also of the secular lords, the more important of whom are mentioned by name. As in the charter of Henry I, so here, the first article promises freedom to the Church in England (quod ecclesia Anglicana libera sit et habeat jura sua integra et libertates suas illaesas) and specifies in particular the freedom of election of bishops, which, as the document further explains, had already been promised by the king and ratified by Pope Innocent. For the rest it will be sufficient to say that Magna Charta in substance lays down the principle that the king has no right to violate the law, and, if he attempts to do so, may be constrained by force to obey it. In particular, justice is not to be sold, or delayed, or refused to any man. No freeman is to be taken or imprisoned or outlawed except by the lawful judgment of his peers. No scutage or tax, other than the three regular aids, is to be imposed except by the consent of the common council of the kingdom. Twenty-five barons were appointed to watch over the execution of the Charter, but they were far from retaining the sympathy of all. "Before the conference at Runnymede came to an end", says Mackechnie, "confidence in the good intentions of the 25 executors, drawn it must be remembered entirely from the section of the baronage most unfriendly to John, seems to have been completely lost" (Mackechnie, "Magna Carta", p. 53). The indignation, therefore, formerly expressed at the subsequent action of Innocent III in declaring the charter null and void is now generally admitted to be unreasonable. The barons had themselves claimed the credit of making England a papal fief (Lingard, II, 333; Rymer, I, 185), and it was certainly contrary to feudal usage for a vassal to contract obligations of this serious kind without reference to the overlord.
That the papal condemnation was not directed in principle against English popular liberties, may be inferred from the fact that the Charter was confirmed in November, 1216, upon the accession of the child king, Henry III, at a time when the papal legate Gualo was all-powerful, and was strongly supported by the new pope, Honorius III. The long reign which then began with a regency, despite the personal piety of Henry, was a period of much distress in England. The king's weakness and his partiality for foreign favorites involved him in a vast expenditure, while, on the other hand, the taxation thus necessitated could only have been carried through without disturbance by a strong central government, which was here entirely lacking. Cabals and intrigues of all kinds abounded, and the situation was complicated by constant demands for money made by the Holy See. The exactions of the various legates and the never ending "provisions" of papal nominees to canonries and rich livings were undoubtedly the cause of very bitter feeling at the time, and have formed the favorite theme of historians ever since. It would be useless to deny the existence of very serious abuses, more especially the fact that a large number of French and Italian clergy provided to English benefices never visited the country at all, and were content with simply drawing the revenues. But on the other hand there is much to be said in extenuation of the papal action, which unfortunately has been set before English readers in the most unfavorable light, owing to the bitter antipapalist feeling of the great St. Albans chronicler, Matthew Paris. How much Paris's judgment was warped by his prejudices, may be clearly seen in his unfriendly references to the friars, though they were then, at least relatively, in their first fervor. Lingard says of him that he seems to have collected and preserved every scandalous anecdote that would gratify his censorious disposition, and he adds a very strong personal expression of opinion regarding Paris's untrustworthiness (Hist. of Eng., II, 479). It is not wonderful that in that outspoken age Matthew Paris and others like him, finding their pockets touched by the papal demands, should have raised an outcry which went a good deal beyond the actual damage inflicted. This very period, when England, it is alleged, was ground under the heel of papal tyranny, "was in all other fields of action, except the political, an epoch of unexampled progress" (Tout in "Polit. Hist. of England", III, 81). Again, the pope's need of money, owing to the life-and-death struggle with the Hohenstaufen, was real enough. In the eyes of Gregory IX and Innocent IV the wars with the excommunicated German emperor were as genuine a crusade in behalf of the Church of God as that undertaken against the Turks. Moreover, with regard to the provision of foreigners to English benefices even after making all allowances for the bitter feeling against aliens which manifested itself so often in the reign of Henry III, it is impossible to deny that the world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and especially the ecclesiastical world, was cosmopolitan to a degree of which we
