King John’s vices and the Magna Carta

Setting aside the Shakespeare-slandered Richard III, has any English monarch gotten more bad press over the centuries than King John?

His father, Henry II, who planned to divide up his Angevin empire between his first three heirs, jokingly called his fifth son “John Lackland.”

But, outliving Richard and his other siblings, John did get to be king. And he got to be dubbed “Softsword” by his nobles irritated by the conditions John accepted from France’s increasingly dominant Philip II. (Yes, the nickname has a double meaning.)

Does the man ever get any respect? Well, he does, actually for something he really, really did not want to do: affix his royal seal to the Magna Carta, which is 800 years old this week.

He conceded that a king lives under the same law as his people.

And he started the ball rolling toward our modern democracy by inspiring the framers of our Constitution.

“When the long tally is added,” wrote Winston Churchill, “it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns.”

And vices John had.

Historians say he was blasphemous, a charge a bit more serious in that day; spawned an even dozen bastards (that we know of); was excommunicated for a while in 1209 by Pope Innocent III; lost Normandy, Brittany, Maine and Anjou to the French, and doesn’t come out particularly well in those Robin Hood tales.

Plus, according to the stories, he was a mean drunk. Intoxicated, “he slew Arthur (his nephew, a captive) with his own hand and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine.”

Actually, Shakespeare also did a play — unpopular and rarely performed — about “The Troublesome Reign of King John” (spoiler alert: he’s poisoned by an unhappy monk). Because of the anniversary, London’s famous Globe Theatre will stage it this year.

In more modern times, James Goldman wrote another play about Henry’s never-ending squabbles with his sons and wife; it became the movie “Lion in Winter,” which depicted John as pimply, craven and rather stupid.

Oh, he wasn’t a complete rotter. Under his 17-year rule, the famous London Bridge spanned the Thames; he raised the construction money by selling the rights to build those shops, homes and even a church atop it. He opened the English market to Bordeaux winemakers.

He also oversaw much-improved government record-keeping. This, no doubt, was useful in his endless hunt for cash. Although seen as a fair judge, he micromanaged the courts, levying stiff fines for minor offenses, and took every chance to seize lands.

It was the constant squeezing of the barons that led to the clash. “Scutlage,” a word that has gotten a bit dusty, was a major burr under the breast plate. It allowed a king to fine a noble for staying home when the crown went to war. John applied it to the max, especially against the northern nobles who refused to accompany him across the English Channel on his ultimately disastrous campaigns.

The last was a complete flop. When he got back to England, the rebels were waiting for him.

While negotiations sputtered on and off and a few castles were lost and taken, it seemed John had the better hand — but then somebody left the London gates open while he was away in the field.

It’s been 800 years since that tense June 15 in the meadow at Runnymede, not far from Windsor Castle, when John met with his rebellious barons to sign an agreement for a peace that nobody intended to keep.

Called the “Great Charter,” the document (four copies survive) is seen as the “fountainhead of freedom” that showers us with protections and human rights even today. They come mainly from No. 39 of the 63 provisions:

“No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised (removed from his property) or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined … except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land,” it reads in Latin — no doubt written by the clergy, which had its own issues with John fixed in there, too.

Basically, that rudimentary establishment of due process and equality before the law are the root stock of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth amendments in our Bill of Rights.

The barons, many of whom were deeply in debt to him and others, wanted to blunt his excessive taxes. So the parchment, also called the “Articles of the Barons,” put down in ink a lot of old customs that John had trampled on: the rights of all free citizens to own and inherit property; of widows who owned property and who choose not to remarry to avoid stiff fines.

For something ultimately so important, it also covered what seem some pretty mundane things:

▪ The king and others had to remove their fish traps on the Thames and other English rivers.

▪ Sheriffs or bailiffs could not seize corn or horses and carts from Freemen.

▪ It called for standard measurement of wine, ale and corn as well as standard widths of cloth.

▪ It released the Welsh and Scot hostages the king was holding to discourage uprising in those regions.

▪ And “As soon as peace is restored, we will banish from the kingdom all foreign born knights, crossbowmen, serjeants, and mercenary soldiers who have come with horses and arms to the kingdom’s hurt.”

It wasn’t all sweetness and light. It banned arrests for killing someone based on just the word of a woman — the exception was that she could accuse you of killing her husband. In several circumstances, people were protected from having to repay the money they owned to the always vulnerable Jewish lenders.

And while the barons, the Catholic Church and the free men made out pretty well, the serfs were still out of luck.

John, as we’ve shown, seems a poor choice to promote our freedoms and accept limits on sovereign power, so a council of 25 neutral barons were picked to keep an eye on him, while the rebel army would stand down and give London back.

Both sides immediately ignored the agreement and, as soon as the ink was dry, were at one another’s throats again. So it might have seemed the great charter was not worth the parchment it was written on, but it had staying power, becoming the foundation of other important acts that together created the British parliamentary democracy.

The civil war went on. Prince Louis of France invaded, King Alexander II of Scotland came down to join him. John fought them all to a stalemate, but became ill and died. Poisoned ale, poisoned plums or a “surfeit of peaches” were all suggested. But it was really dysentery.

The war eventually ended as forces loyal to the throne won significant battles; John’s son, Henry III, grew into the throne.

He reissued the Great Charter, much more willingly than his father, but still had his own war with barons, which he won decisively.

But King Henry III did not warrant a play by Shakespeare, not even a bad one.

This story was originally published June 14, 2015 at 5:00 AM with the headline "King John’s vices and the Magna Carta."