Magna Carta
1214–19

In the crisis of 1213-5 King John had two London headquarters: the Tower in the East; and the Temple in the West, where he was safe under the protection of the Templars. William Marshal, the hero of Magna Carta, will be prominent in the following paragraphs. For his life and career before 1213, please click here
 

COMETH THE HOUR, COMETH THE MAN: THE TEMPLE, WILLIAM MARSHAL AND THE ROAD TO RUNNYMEDE

March 1213. The King finalised a treaty with his Continental allies at the Temple, and then deposited 20,000 marks here for his ambassadors.

May-July 1213. The King submitted to the Pope. Archbishop Stephen Langton returned to England. For the negotiations, the King was staying at the Templars’ house near Dover. William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke was witness and guarantor to the King’s submission. The King’s excommunication was lifted, and in return he offered a golden mark which he borrowed from the Master of the Temple. The King had to renew his coronation oath: to abolish evil laws, establish good laws, judge all his subjects by the just sentences of his courts and render every man his rights.

25 August 1214. Archbishop Langton, preaching at St Paul’s Cathedral, produced a copy of Henry I’s Coronation Charter before the barons and had it read out. The barons swore to defend its liberties, Langton vowed to support them. Langton was reviving ‘The Book of the King’ (Deuteronomy 17), and Deuteronomy’s rediscovery in Jerusalem’s Temple centuries later under King (2 Kings 22, 2 Chronicles 34).

3 October 1213. The King was at the Temple, to confirm at St Paul’s Cathedral that the Pope was now the feudal lord of the King and his kingdom.

27 July 1214. The Battle of Bouvines. With this defeat John lost all prospect of the recovery of his French possessions. 

16-23 November 1214. The King was in the Temple. On 21 November he issued from the Temple the charter granting ‘with the common consent of our barons’ free elections to cathedral and conventual churches, and on 22 November a grant to St Paul’s Cathedral.  

7-15 January 1215. The King was in the Temple. A group of barons, armed and ready for war, confronted him, demanding his submission to a charter. The King procrastinated. ‘The Unknown Charter’ probably reflects these negotiations. On 15 January the cathedral and convent charter of 21 November 2014 was reissued from the Temple.

16-22 April 1215 (Eastertide). The King was in the Temple.

7-9 May 1215. The King was in the Temple. On 9 May the charter was issued from the Temple that guaranteed to the City of London the right freely to elect its own Lord Mayor. ‘Know that we have granted, and by this our present writing confirmed, to our barons of our city of London, that they may choose to themselves every year a mayor, who to us may be faithful, discreet, and fit for government of the city, so as, when he shall be chosen, to be presented unto us, or our justice if we shall not be present.’ In the Lord Mayor’s Show the Lord Mayor still processes on the day of his or her installation to the Royal Courts of Justice to appear before the Lord Chief Justice.  

17 May 1215. The barons captured London.

28 May 2015. The King received the imperial regalia of his grandmother the Empress Matilda from the custody of the Master of the Temple. He was going to assert his full majesty at the coming conference.

10 June 1215. The King arrived at Runnymede.

15 June 1215. The King sealed the Charter.

William Marshal Earl of Pembroke and Brother Aymeric, Master of the Temple, were listed among those who had advised the King. The Earl’s eldest son was one of the Twenty-Five surety barons, appointed to ensure the King’s conformity to the Charter’s terms.

King John distrusted William Marshal and conspired against him. William remained loyal; and in the deepening turmoil of 1214-5, William was the one fixed point whose allegiance was in no doubt.

William was at the centre of negotiations between John and the barons. He was at the Temple when the barons came here to a conference at Epiphany 1215 ‘fully armed and ready for war’.  The King will have had all his regalia on display on the Church’s altar, to present to the greater King to whom at the first Epiphany the Magi had brought their gold. So John will have sought both to confirm his own role as the Lord’s anointed King and to impress the barons.

The barons were unimpressed. They gave the King warning: they were pledging themselves, one and all, as a wall of defence for the house of the Lord and would stand firm for the liberty of the Church and the realm. The barons rightly suspected the King: during the negotiations themselves John sent emissaries (surely secretly) to the Pope.

It was William and Archbishop Langton who pledged on the King’s behalf that he would meet the barons again in April. By the end of April the barons realized that John had no intention of yielding. They applied pressure by besieging Brackley; William and Langton were again sent to appease them. On 5 May the rebel barons renounced their fealty to the King and the country was on the brink of civil war. The King had the Pope and all apparent right on his side; a fair part of the baronage was neutral or loyal to John; and on 9 May, from the Temple, John sought the vital support of London by granting its free governance.  

The King must have thought himself well prepared. But on 17 May the rebels captured London and the balance of power moved suddenly and irrevocably against John. He sent William to London to tell the rebels that he was ready to negotiate.

When agreement was at last reached at Runnymede on 15 June, William was named first among the magnates who had advised the King. The barons’ success was unsustainable; under the guise of fealty they had all but dethroned a king. John soon sought to repudiate the Charter: it had, he said, been sealed under duress from barons who had made themselves the judges in their own cause. (He had a point.) No wonder the King appealed to Rome to have the Charter annulled; and no wonder the Pope granted his request, annulling this ‘shameful and demeaning agreement, forced upon the King by violence and fear’.

24 August 1215. The Pope annulled Magna Carta.

King John distrusted William Marshal and conspired against him. William remained loyal; and in the deepening turmoil of 1214-5, William was the one fixed point whose allegiance was in no doubt. William was at the centre of negotiations between John and the barons. He was at the Temple when the barons came here to a conference at Epiphany 1215 ‘fully armed and ready for war’.  The King will have had all his regalia on display on the Church’s altar, to present to the greater King to whom at the first Epiphany the Magi had brought their gold. So John will have sought both to confirm his own role as the Lord’s anointed King and to impress the barons. The barons were unimpressed. They gave the King warning: they were pledging themselves, one and all, as a wall of defence for the house of the Lord and would stand firm for the liberty of the Church and the realm. The barons rightly suspected the King: during the negotiations themselves John sent emissaries (surely secretly) to the Pope.

It was William and Archbishop Langton who pledged on the King’s behalf that he would meet the barons again in April. By the end of April the barons realized that John had no intention of yielding. They applied pressure by besieging Brackley; William and Langton were again sent to appease them. On 5 May the rebel barons renounced their fealty to the King and the country was on the brink of civil war. The King had the Pope and all apparent right on his side; a fair part of the baronage was neutral or loyal to John; and on 9 May, from the Temple, John sought the vital support of London by granting its free governance. 

The King must have thought himself well prepared. But on 17 May the rebels captured London and the balance of power moved suddenly and irrevocably against John. He sent William to London to tell the rebels that he was ready to negotiate. When agreement was at last reached at Runnymede on 15 June, William was named first among the magnates who had advised the King.

The barons’ success was unsustainable; under the guise of fealty they had all but dethroned a king. John soon sought to repudiate the Charter: it had, he said, been sealed under duress from barons who had made themselves the judges in their own cause. (He had a point.) No wonder the King appealed to Rome to have the Charter annulled; and no wonder the Pope granted his request, annulling this ‘shameful and demeaning agreement, forced upon the King by violence and fear’.

19 October 1216 King John died.  The King's Council named William Marshal the guardian (rector) of the young King Henry III and of the realm.

12 NOVEMBER 1216. WILLIAM MARSHAL REISSUED THE CHARTER UNDER HIS OWN SEAL.

The Charter joined the host of other failed charters of the Middle Ages.  Civil war was inescapable.  The rebels turned to the French king for help, and on 21 May 1216 Prince Louis of France landed with his army at Thanet.  With the rebels' help the French quickly occupied ondon and most of eastern England.

King John died, 19 October 1216.  His son Henry was only nine years old.  Half the boy's supposed kingdom was in the hands of the French, the treasury was empty, the rebels were on the march.  The few barons who had remained loyal to John  and to his son had good reason to abandon Henry to his fate.  But they stayed firm; and chief among them was William.  He became Regent of the King and of the Realm.

'I have ventured into the wild sea,' said William to his own close advisors, 'where even the most expreienced sailors find no shore nor anchorage.  But if all the world had abandoned the King except me, I would put him on my shoulders and carry him without fail from island to island, from land to land, even if I had to beg for bread!'

William had to win back the barons' allegiance.  In a brilliant stroke, he and the Papal Legate reissued Magna Carta in November 1216; they sealed and so guaranteed it, since young Henry did not yet have a seal of his own.  The demands of the rebels, so fiercely resisted by John, were now being met, at Henry's own initiative.  The Charter's new version admitted that the old had in it 'weighty and doubtful' matters which must be left in abeyance for now until Henry could take further counsel and then do what was best for 'the common utility of all'.
 

1217: WILLIAM MARSHAL: VICTORY AT LAST

20 May 1217: William Marshal (aged over 70) led the forces loyal to Henry III into battle at Lincoln, and routed the enemy  Henry III was at last safe on the throne.

6 November 1217: William Marshal again reissued the Charter under his own seal.  Particular clauses were removed and issued separately as the Charter of the Forest; the remaining reissued clauses from 1215 were from now on known as the Great Charter.

In the spring of 2017 Henry's fortunes began to improve.  The 1216 Charter was working: it remedied the complaints of the rebel barons who saw the danger that Louis would eventually reward his own retainers and not them.  But the enemy still occupied most of eastern England.  From early March Lincoln Castle was under siege.  Early in May Prince Louis of France divided his own forces in two:  he himself led a siege of Dover, and sent the rest of the army north to strengthen the siege of Lincoln.

William, now nearly 70 years old, decided to venture everything on a single battle at Lincoln before Louis could re-unite his forces.  William led the loyalist army, in person, into battle.  Impetuous as ever, he set off without a helmet; an esquire pointed this out, William duly put one on and then rushed into the fray.  William direted the battle with tactical brilliance and to overwhelming victory.  At its end his helmet bore the damage of three blows each one of which would have been fatal.

The 46 English barons on the rebels' side and over 300 unnamed knights simply surrendered.  The rebellion within England was over.  The French still had one further move to make: an attempt to reinforce Prince Louis in his siege of Dover.  William rode rapidly south to Sandwich, equipped a fleet and on 24 August watched as the French ships were captured, sunk or put to flight.  The war had ended at last; to bring peace quickly, Wiliam paid the French to leave; Henry III was safe on his thorne; and this article, centuries later, is written in English, not in French.

In November 1217 William issued and sealed Magna Carta yet again, this time as two separate charters.  He was concentrating now on the correction of King John's abuses.  A third of England was under the King's control as royal forest.  Successive kings had 'afforested' ever larger areas, as much to generate revenue as to use for hunting.  In 1217 William removed from the Great Charter all the clauses connnected with the royal forests, and issued them as a separate charter, the Charter of the Forest.  Vast tracts of land were to be 'disaforrested'. The terms of this charter could never be fully met; but they united the country behind Henry.

THE DEATH OF WILLIAM MARSHAL, 'THE GREATEST KNIGHT IN THE WORLD.' 

14 May 1219: William Marshal died.

20 May 1219: William Marshal buried 20 May was buried in the Temple’s Round Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury presided.

On his deathbed at Caversham William summoned Brother Aymeric, Master of the Temple, to prepare for William’s own admission to the Templars. William’s almoner Geoffrey, a Templar, brought him the Templar cloak which had secretly been made for him a year before. William had arranged to be buried in front of the rood-screen, in the Round of the Temple Church; Aymeric predeceased the sick Marshal by just a few days, having asked to be buried next to him: ‘For I greatly loved his company on earth; may God grant that we be companions in heaven.’

The silks that William had brought back from the Holy Land, 30 years before, duly covered the bier at his funeral. His cortège was led to the Temple Church by former rebels, now pacified. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London presided when William was laid to rest here on 20 May 1219. The Archbishop said:

‘Look, sirs, how it is with this life: when each of us comes to his end his senses are all gone, and he is nothing more than so much earth. You see before you the greatest knight in the world that ever lived in our time, and what is there to say now, by God? This is what we all must come to. We have before us our mirror; it is mine as much as yours. And now let us say the Our Father, praying that God may receive this Christian in his heavenly kingdom, in glory with his elect, believing as we do that he was truly good.’

In the 1840s the floor of the Church’s rotunda was excavated. A row of medieval coffins was discovered, across the centre of the Round; these burials would have been right in front of the rotunda’s altar and rood-screen. At least one of the knights would have stood over six feet tall – in the 13th century, a giant, and all the more imposing on a war-horse. Here, almost certainly, were the bones of the tall, handsome William Marshal, ‘the greatest knight in the world’.  

On 22 May 2019 we sang Choral Evensong in the Church in William’s memory. At the end of the service we stood over the very place of his burial and sang a Requiem on his behalf.  Much has been said about William in the Church; but this may have been the first time in over seven centuries that prayers were said for him and thanks given for his legacy, in the Church which he knew so well and in which he himself had asked to be buried.

1224. William Marshal the Younger, 2nd Earl of Pembroke married Eleanor, sister of King Henry III.

1225. King Henry III reissued the Great Charter, in order to secure a grant of taxation.