СНАР.
IV.

§ 5. The Quarrel with the Pope.

at hand of a king who lived in Paris. The change, allimportant for the growth of the French monarchy, was not unimportant for the growth of the English nation. Practically it cut England loose from the Continent. No doubt the bond thus broken was not quite as strong as it had been a century before. The great Norman houses of the Conquest, with their vast landed estates on both sides of the Channel, were mainly things of the past. They had perished, or had been brought low in one or other of their many struggles to throw off the yoke of the Conqueror and his successors. Still there were some families remaining which held lands both in England and Normandy; and, at all events, as long as a king of England ruled at Rouen, the French tongue could never be entirely a foreign speech, or the native of a French-speaking land entirely a foreigner in London. The loss of Normandy by John was therefore a distinct step in the direction of the formation of an English nationality.

Even the result of the quarrel with the Pope worked incidentally in the same direction. In spite of the distractions caused by the strife between Anselm and William, or between Becket and Henry, the rulers of the Church had on the whole been found on the side of the Crown. Nominated directly or indirectly by the kings, they often held official positions in the government of the State. But it was not only in this class that the kings had found support. The clergy were interested at least as much as other men in the maintenance of order, and their wide popular sympathies brought them in close connection with those classes which had most to fear from a repetition of the anarchy of the days of Stephen. Suddenly a storm burst from a clear sky. John nominated John de Gray, a favourite of his own, to the metropolitan see of Canterbury. The Pope, Inno

cent III., nominated Stephen Langton, under the transparent pretext of the confirmation of an election made in his presence. If John had only proceeded with decent moderation he might have rallied the bishops to his side as Henry had rallied them against Becket. But he acted, according to his nature, with insensate violence, seized the estates of the see for his nominee, and, when the Pope laid the kingdom under an interdict, gave up the clergy to the lawless violence of his subjects, and practised lawless violence on them himself. Innocent at last threatened to bring Philip II. of France against him, that he might strip him of England as he had before stripped him of Normandy. Deserted by his subjects, John humbled himself at the feet of the Pope's legate Pandulph, and received his crown back from him to hold from henceforth as the vassal of the Pope.

At first sight it would seem as if no heavier blow could be struck at the rising nationality. Innocent, indeed, believed that he had taken a long step towards the realisation of his great idea of the establishment of a fatherly control over the kings of the earth, in order that they might learn to do righteousness and exercise justice. The idea of Innocent was more straightforward and practical than the idea of Gregory VII. Innocent saw that it was not enough for the accomplishment of the great object of his desire to draw a strict line of separation between the spiritual and the temporal. A theorist might distinguish where the one ended and the other began. To a practical ruler it was impossible. No act could be done which was not in some way either moral or immoral, and if it was the business of the Pope to make men moral or immoral, he might as well come into direct connection with those by whom men were governed. It was simpler to declare that as all men held their lands from kings, kings held their crowns

F

from the Pope. Innocent's theory would soon be tested by experience. But even for the moment, the clergy were rather bound together against John than bound together to the Pope. They had shared in the miseries caused by John's oppression, and they had learned to look for friends amongst those who had been equally maltreated with themselves. The barons of England were near and the Pope was a long way off. If John continued to oppress, clergy and barons might join to resist oppression without waiting till their complaints could travel to Rome to be discussed and debated in the Papal courts, especially as, in spite of the high ideas of the Pope, it was known that he was surrounded by greedy and unscrupulous officials who needed to be bribed at every step.

In this way the interference of the Pope, which seemed to transfer the mainspring of English politics to a distant country, only served to bind all classes of Englishmen more closely together than before. Happily the new archbishop was a thorough Englishman. In him the scattered elements of the opposition to John's tyranny found a common leader. The barons, who rose in arms to wrest from the king some security that they should not be in future pillaged and oppressed at random, gained a definiteness of object by entrusting to him the preparation of the document in which their claims were made. The Great Charter, founded on an earlier charter of Henry I., bears the impress of the mind of the man whom Innocent III., not knowing what he did, had obtruded on the English Church and nation.

The Great Charter differed from similar concessions made by the sovereigns of the Continent to their nobles. It was demanded and received not merely by the class of Englishmen which was the most powerful,

but by the English people in its entirety. The clergy, the great barons, the lower vassals and freeholders, even the merchants and the peasants, found their interests consulted in it. For the first time the English people appeared as a united whole. The local divisions of the days before the Conquest were gone. The class divisions of the days after the Conquest were also gone. In their stead had arisen a union based on mutual concessions and strong by mutual support. The great importance of the Charter does not lie in the wisest of its provisions, but in the fact that it sprang from a rearrangement of political forces. The Norman and Angevin kings had thought to establish a centralised despotism, and the result had been the bringing of the English nation to the birth.

CHAP.

IV.

Institutions

Such a change in the forces of politics rendered $9. New necessary a change of institutions to give it effect. The needed. old Great Council of the immediate vassals of the crown must in some way or another change its basis, and become the Great Council of the nation, whilst the holder of the kingly office also must be inspired with the new national spirit. Unless that could be done, little would be gained. Unity of direction, the vigilance of personal superintendence, the permanent action of a presiding intelligence, are as necessary for the well-being of a state as the expression of popular will by which the ruler is prevented from providing for his own wants instead of providing for the wants of the nation. Such a change, however, could only be tentatively carried out. Some time passes before a nation finds out exactly what it wants, and a longer time before it finds out what are the most suitable means for supplying its necessities.

tative

The efforts of the barons were very tentative indeed. §10. TenThey forced John to promise that he would not, except Efforts. in certain specified cases, levy any scutage or aid upon

СНАР.
IV.

his own vassals without the consent of the Great Council of the realm. As, however, the aids and scutages due to the crown were only levied on its immediate feudal tenants, there was no thought of providing any new assembly to guard the rights of those who were interested. All that was done was to try to make the Great Council to be in reality what it was already in theory, an assembly not merely of the prelates and great barons, but of the whole of the tenants in chief. John, therefore, was constrained to promise that he would summon for purposes of feudal taxation, the archbishops, bishops, abbots, and greater barons by special writ, whilst he would summon all the lesser tenants in chief by a general announcement conveyed by the sheriffs. There was no likelihood that such a plan would meet the necessities of the case. The smaller tenants in chief would not take the trouble to appear any more than they had done before, and the sub-tenants by knight-service, the freeholders who were not knights at all, and the inhabitants of the towns, had no part or lot in the assembly. The Great Council would continue to be a council of prelates and barons; and if prelates and barons were to be left alone to deal with the king, they might be inclined, if they proved successful, to kick over the ladder by which they had risen to power. Nor was the new arrangement for the exercise of the royal authority any more satisfactory. John was still to be king, but a committee of twenty-five barons was to be appointed to watch over him in the exercise of his office. If he broke the Charter, they were to make war on him and to seize his castles and lands. Probably nothing better could have been suggested at the moment, but it is evident that a system under which a king could only exercise his authority under the constant threat of legalised rebellion could not form part of a permanent constitution for the country.