A Radical History Of Britain Read online

  This book, then, sets out to do two things. First, it aims to evaluate radicalism in its specific historical contexts, uncovering in many places the formerly secret history of both its successes and its failures. Second, it evaluates the enduring power of the idea of a ‘radical tradition’, by examining how each age has reinvented it to suit its own ends. Consequently, the book focuses predominantly on those events, groups and individuals that have loomed largest in this narrative of British dissent. For many radicals, the story began in 1215 when, according to one version of events, wicked King John was forced by his good barons to submit to the rule of law by setting his seal to Magna Carta, the founding stone of ‘British’ liberty.

  PART ONE

  A TALISMAN OF LIBERTY1

  Magna Carta is the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot.

  Lord Denning, on the 750th anniversary of Magna Carta2

  Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain?

  Tony Hancock

  1

  THE GREAT CHARTER

  King John has long been portrayed as the ultimate ‘bad king’ who had to be restrained by ‘good barons’ – often presented, as V. H. Galbraith put it, as ‘precursors of their much later descendants, the Whigs’.1 For Sellar and Yeatman in 1066 and All That, John was the ‘first memorable wicked uncle’.2 His contemporary reputation was even worse. Said to be slender and handsome in his youth, he had run to fat, his voracious appetite often leading him to make frequent penances for breaking the dietary restrictions commanded by the Church. Apart from his gluttony, John was also infamous for his lechery, fathering many illegitimate children. Lurid legends claimed that his second wife, Isabella of Angoulême (who was twenty years his junior), shared her husband’s voracious sexual appetite, taking many lovers, some of whom John strangled to death on the marital bed. In addition, he had a well-deserved reputation for faithlessness and treachery, having joined his brother Richard in a revolt against their father Henry II (a betrayal which, it was rumoured, precipitated the old king’s death) and then, in turn, fomented rebellion against Richard while his older brother, now King, was imprisoned in Germany. When he finally succeeded Richard to the English throne in 1199, he was ruthless in dealing with threats to his power, having his nephew and rival claimant to the Crown, Arthur of Brittany, murdered in Rouen prison in 1203 (some alleged the deed was done by a drunken John himself, others that Arthur’s death was the result of a botched castration). As John built up his war chest for a renewed campaign against the French, he pursued his aristocratic debtors with similar vigour: the wife and son of the Irish magnate William de Briouze were deliberately starved to death in Windsor Castle for the non-payment of exorbitant royal fines. Actions of this kind served to alienate most of the English aristocracy from him, but the murder of Arthur of Brittany left only an infant, John’s son Henry, as a plausible candidate for the throne. With no obvious adult claimant to lead a rebellion, the barons were forced to rely on a new device, a great charter securing the liberties of the realm, to secure support for their uprising.

  Were they alive today, King John and his barons would doubtless have been surprised by the historic veneration of Magna Carta as the founding stone of British freedom. The 1215 Charter was, after all, a document forged as England stood on the brink of civil war; after a mere ten weeks, it was a political dead letter. The circumstances that brought John to agree, at least initially, to the barons’ demands were catastrophic military failures and the crisis in royal finances that followed. His continental expedition, begun in 1213, had ended in disaster with defeat at the Battle of Bouvines on 27 July 1214. During three hours of intense and bloody fighting, John’s staunch ally William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, was captured. John himself had already returned to his lands in Aquitaine in a state of despondency following several unsuccessful clashes with the French King Philip.3 The failed French war had not only justified John’s childhood epithet of ‘lackland’ by leading to the loss of the English Crown’s possessions in Normandy, but had also emptied the royal coffers. The war had raised taxation to unprecedented levels. By 1211, the Crown’s total revenue had been £145,000, six times the amount that had been collected at the beginning of the reign. Now, in the wake of military failure, noble grievances against John’s rule coalesced into open and coordinated opposition, beginning with a widespread campaign of non-payment of scutage, originally a payment allowing knights to buy out of the military service that had become a general levy on the English elite. In January 1215, the King’s opponents took an oath that they would stand fast together for the liberty of the Church and the realm.

  That month, both sides met in London to discuss negotiating terms, although the parties came armed. At the same time, both John and the barons attempted to bring Pope Innocent III into the struggle. The Pope, though stressing that the King should listen to all reasonable grievances from his barons, had condemned all leagues and combinations against John and upheld his right to levy scutage. Both sides were preparing to use force. The King had borrowed money from the Knights Templar to pay for foreign mercenaries and took the cross as a crusader on 4 March, a move which, though deeply cynical – John had been excommunicated in 1213 for his failure to recognise Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury – led Pope Innocent to talk of those who opposed John as ‘worse than saracens’. On 5 May the barons, led by Robert Fitzwalter (whose daughter, Matilda, the King had reputedly tried to seduce), formally renounced their fealty to John.

  By the late spring/early summer of 1215, the tide was clearly turning in the rebels’ favour. On 17 May, the City of London opened its gates to them, despite John’s attempt to curry favour with them by permitting the City to elect its own mayor. London now became the rebellion’s capital, predisposed to their cause by the disproportionately heavy tax burden that the City had had to carry during John’s wars. In Wales, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, Prince of Gwynedd, and the Briouzes, led by Giles, Bishop of Hereford, scored notable victories over the King’s forces, even moving into England by taking Shrewsbury under their control.

  Though John retained some influential supporters, including William Marshal, a powerful magnate and soldier of international repute, and Earl Warenne, Henry II’s half-brother, it was obvious to him that he would need to make concessions, if only in the short term, in order to buy himself enough time to build up his military strength. June saw the exchange of peace proposals. On the 10th, John agreed to accept the articles in the barons’ proposed Charter as the terms for further negotiation, though some of the northern rebels still refused to lay down their arms. Five days later, terms were settled and the King went to Runnymede meadow to confirm the final draft of the Charter. The choice of the site was probably due to its proximity to London. According to the contemporary account of Ralph of Coggeshall, both the King and the barons were followed by well-armed retinues: before the final negotiations could begin in earnest, each side had to swear upon the gospels that they would conduct themselves peacefully. The discussions continued for several days on the basis of the barons’ articles, until on 19 June a ‘firm peace’ was agreed. Only at this point did Chancery clerks begin drafting copies of the Charter and setting the royal seal to them.

  There was not, then, one dramatic moment from which the Charter emerged. It was the final product of a protracted process of negotiation. Initially, it was only known as Magna Carta because it was such a large document (sixty-three chapters, or clauses, in the 1215 version) and to distinguish it from the smaller Forest Charter issued at the same time. But the contract of the Charter of 1215 was remarkably broad-ranging too. Its main architects, the barons, had had to appeal to a wider portion of the English population in order to gain support, making it much more than a document pandering to the aristocracy. Its broadest provision lay in chapter 40 – ‘to no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice’. The Charter’s pr
ovisions as a whole constituted an indictment not only of John’s reign but of his father’s and brother’s as well.

  But though the genesis of the Charter was protracted, its immediate life as a peace settlement was very short-lived. Chapters 52 and 61 had attempted to hold John to its terms by referring all disagreements with the King’s actions in depriving anyone of ‘lands, castles, liberties or his rights’ to a committee of twenty-five barons, which, with the ‘commune of all the land’, could in response ‘distress and distrain us [meaning John] in every way they can, namely by seizing our lands, castles and possessions’. These parts of John’s Charter are often portrayed as a constitutional watershed, for the first time subjecting English kings to the rule of law. Yet these clauses represented not so much a check on royal power as the complete abnegation of it. The committee was essentially a cabal of the King’s enemies who immediately began dispossessing John of his castles. The inclusion of these clauses made the resumption of armed hostility inevitable. No king who valued his title could have submitted in the long term to such a blatant assault on his authority. By July, John had written to Innocent III asking him to annul the Charter. The papal letters reached England in September: they pronounced the rebels excommunicated and stated that the settlement reached in June was ‘not only shameful and base but also illegal and unjust’. The Pope finished by declaring the Charter ‘null and void of all validity for ever’.

  The Pope’s response emboldened John but failed to weaken the resolve of his enemies, including Stephen Langton, who was suspended for failing to disavow the Charter. The King now laid siege to Rochester Castle, held by the barons, hoping that its fall would allow him to make a decisive move on London. The rebel garrison held out for seven weeks while the barons appealed to the French for support, offering Prince Louis the English throne in return. In the meantime, Alexander II of Scotland had been granted Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland by the barons, and the northern rebels quickly pledged homage to the Scottish King. By December, Wales too had come under the de facto control of the ambitious Llywelyn, with the invasion of south-west Wales and the capture of the English strongholds at Cardigan and Carmarthen. The situation in the borders led John to divide his army in two, leaving one force to keep an eye on the rebels in London while he went north – in his own reported words, to ‘run the little sandy fox-cub [Alexander] to earth’. The King’s army harried the land as it went. The Chronicler Roger of Wendover reported:

  [these] limbs of the devil covered the whole country like locusts. Sword in hand, they ransacked towns, houses, cemeteries, churches, robbing everyone, sparing neither women nor children. They put the king’s enemies in chains until they paid a heavy ransom. Even priests at the altar were seized, tortured and robbed. Knights and others were hung up by their feet and legs or by their hands, fingers and thumbs, salt and vinegar were thrown into their eyes; others were roasted over burning coals and then dropped into cold water.4

  On 13 January 1216, John attacked what was then Scotland’s richest town, Berwick, setting it aflame before turning his army south again to head for rebel-dominated East Anglia. By March he had captured Colchester, but though he held the upper hand militarily, he had been unable to persuade any of the significant rebel leaders to submit to his authority. Moreover, his assault on Scotland had been a strategic mistake. John had failed to capture London and his army was now forced to fight on two fronts.

  Louis’s forces disembarked at Sandwich in Kent on 22 May. Yet though John had mustered forces in the county so as to resist the likely invasion, he chose not to fight, but instead withdrew westwards. Louis entered London and was paid homage by the citizens and rebels on 2 June. Four days later, the French Prince left London for Winchester, but John had already fled from his temporary base, seeking refuge in Corfe Castle. By September, two-thirds of the barons had abandoned the King, as had one-third of his household knights and some of his most trusted servants. He continued his peregrinations around the country, attempting to shore up remaining loyal garrisons at Lincoln and Dover. On the night of 9 October, at Lynn in Norfolk, he suffered an attack of dysentery, brought on according to Coggeshall by his gluttonous consumption of ‘raw peaches and new cider’. (An even more colourful story attributed his sickness to eating poisoned plums.5) The King’s health declined over the next few days, and his fortunes sank even lower as part of his baggage train was lost in the waters of the Wash. His entourage struggled on to Newark, where he died on the night of 18 October.

  According to his request, he was buried in Worcester Cathedral, still under his force’s control.6 Despite the sanctified setting of his burial, chroniclers were convinced that John’s soul had headed straight to hell, Matthew Paris repeating a reputed comment of the time that ‘Foul as it is, Hell itself is made fouler by the presence of John.’ Later historians have been no more generous about the King’s character. Kate Norgate’s 1902 biography called him a man of ‘almost superhuman wickedness’, and Sir James Ramsey dubbed him ‘a selfish and cruel tyrant of the worst type’.7

  For Rudyard Kipling, the Charter stood as an impregnable bulwark against both the tyranny of power-crazed kings such as John and the anarchy of the unfettered mob.

  And still when Mob or Monarch lays

  Too rude a hand on English ways

  The whisper wakes, the shudder plays,

  Across the reeds at Runnymede.

  And Thames that knows the moods of kings,

  And crowds and priests and suchlike things,

  Rolls deep and dreadful as he brings

  Their warning down from Runnymede.

  The presentation of the Charter as the bulwark of English liberties has long been identified as originating in the work of the seventeenth-century common lawyer Sir Edward Coke, whose Institutes (published posthumously in 1642) included extensive commentary upon Magna Carta. Coke eulogised it as ‘declaratory of the principal grounds of the fundamental laws of England’.8 He was not, though, a proto-Whig in the strict sense of being a believer in constitutional ‘progress’: he saw the Charter’s role as to document old freedoms, not establish new rights.9 For Coke, Magna Carta was the embodiment of the ancient and pure laws of Anglo-Saxon England, regained after their destruction by the Normans – he spoke of the ‘great weightinesse and weightie greatness’ of the contents of the Charter, which he believed to be ‘the fountaine of all the fundamentall lawes of the realm … [and] a confirmation of restitution of the common law’.10 Close attention to the matter of the Charter was vital for anyone who wished to understand English law: ‘As the goldfiner will not out of the dust, threds, or shreds of gold, let passe the least crum, in respect of the excellency of the metal: so ought not the learned reader to let any passe any syllable of this law, in respect of the excellency of the matter.’11 So influential has Coke’s interpretation been that one of the most respected twentieth-century commentators on Magna Carta, W. S. MacKechnie, suggested that there were effectively two Great Charters: one conceded by John to his barons in 1215, and the other created by Sir Edward Coke in the early seventeenth century.12 The suggestion that Coke’s reading of Magna Carta was less a commentary on it than a wholesale reinvention is not new. Robert Brady, the late seventeenth-century Tory historian who challenged many of the assumptions about England’s ‘ancient constitution’, described Coke as writing about the law ‘as if it had grown up with the Trees, Herbs and Grass’.13

  Is it pointless to talk about a separation between the myth of the Charter, created by Coke and other seventeenth-century commentators, and its substance? Given the vagueness of some of its chapters, and given the divisions among modern scholars about their meaning, it is unsurprising that a variety of interpretations has emerged. Moreover, the Charter agreed in 1215, the one that is still celebrated to this day and whose remaining copies are cherished by institutions such as the British Library, was not the one that Coke and, indeed, all legal commentators from the thirteenth century onwards were actually referring to when they
spoke of Magna Carta. This was, in fact, the Charter of 1225, issued by John’s son Henry III, which was confirmed at least twenty-five times and by all the kings from Henry III to Henry V, the last-known confirmation being delivered in 1416. The authoritative text for legal purposes was the inspeximus (a term for a faithful verbatim recitation of an existing document) of Edward I, issued in 1297. It is this text that still remains on the statute books, though, as we shall see, in a very truncated form. Although John’s Charter formed the basis for the 1225 version, the latter was much reduced in size and left out the key security provisions inserted in 1215.14

  The leading modern authority on the Charter, Sir James Holt, argues that it was the fourteenth century, not the seventeenth, that represented the decisive period for the development of the myth of Magna Carta. Significant legal additions were made to the 1225 version in the fourteenth century that considerably broadened its provisions. It was then that the concentration on the twenty-ninth chapter (which combined chapters 39–41 of the 1215 text) first emerged. Between 1331 and 1368, Parliament passed six acts that reinterpreted this clause in terms that went far beyond the intention and sense of the original Charter. It was then also that the phrase ‘lawful judgement of peers’ came to include trial by peers and thereby trial by jury – a process that was in only embryonic form in 1215. The phrase ‘law of the land’ was also given a powerful new twist and rendered as ‘due process of law’, including only indictments brought by a jury or by original writ and thereby limiting royal intrusions into the common-law courts.

  Crucially for the later radical appropriation of the Charter, these subsequent statutes also made its terms more socially inclusive. The words ‘no free man’ became in the statutes of Edward III of 1331 and 1352 simply ‘no man’. In 1354, in the statute that refers for the first time to ‘due process of law’, ‘no free man’ became ‘no man of whatever estate or condition he may be’. As we shall see, by the time of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the revised Magna Carta had become an important support to a much broader idea of popular freedom.