The “palladium of our liberties” would never have amounted to anything much without a whole succession of royal failures. Henry III, whose reign witnessed the first parliament; Charles I, whose defeat in the civil war put paid to Stuart dreams of absolutism; James II, whose flight into exile ensured the triumph of the Glorious Revolution: all played key roles in the evolution of our rights. No coincidence that the most celebrated of all the waymarks on the road to our freedom under the law, a charter enshrined as the very bedrock of the English constitution, should have been sealed by England’s most appalling king.
“Foul as it is,” wrote the 13th-century chronicler Matthew Paris, “hell itself is made more foul by the presence of John.” For eight centuries now, his reign and reputation have stood proof against all attempts at revisionism. John’s career was one long record of treachery, cruelty and cowardice. He betrayed his brother Richard I while the Lionheart was on crusade. He murdered his own nephew and thought nothing of starving women and children to death. He lost his family’s ancestral lands in France and returned from an attempt to recover them in 1214 with his tail between his legs. His response to this calamity was to impose an extortionate levy on the barons and knights of England. Provoked beyond endurance, a substantial number of them rebelled. By the summer of 1215, the insurgent barons had succeeded in backing John into a corner. In early June, they joined with the king’s negotiating team to hammer out an accord between the rival parties. The meeting place, as recorded by an attendant clerk, was “a meadow midway between Windsor and Staines, called Runnymede”. The disputes there were complex and protracted, and the agreement, by the time John finally brought himself to agree to it, ran to over 4,000 words. In due course, the continuous flow of its prose would end up subdivided into no fewer than 63 clauses. It was indeed a great charter: a “Magna Carta”.
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