such a state of things continued, when the scenes so wonderfully dramatized by Shakespeare became history. He had received his crown on the Feast of the Ascension; and now a hermit of Yorkshire broached the terrible prophecy, "... in rude harsh-sounding rhymes, That, ere the next Ascension day at noon, His highness should deliver up his crown." 9. ENGLAND A FIEF OF ROME. Anselm had opened the door to the next step, and Pandulph appears on the scene, an Italian legate, as the consequence of an English one. On Ascension day, King John on his knees resigns his crown into the hands of the legate, "granting to God and the Church of Rome, the Apostles Peter and Paul, and to Pope Innocent III. and his successors, the whole kingdom of England and Ireland." For five whole days Innocent was sole king of England, Pandulph holding the crown for him. Then, in consideration of immense promises of tribute, John received it back, to be held by him, but only as the Pope's vassal. This was enough. The spirit of the early English revived. The barons demanded of John a restoration of Edward the Confessor's laws, and the liberties of Church and State which he had sworn to observe. But when he had promised to do better, he refused of course to keep his promise. This just suited Innocent, and so the Pope took his vassal under his protection, and sent another legate, who with bell, book, and candle excommunicated the nobility not only, but the primate himself. He was with them, and in fact at their head. The interdict had been removed; but curses and excommunications were the blessings which Rome still showered on the land. 10. MAGNA CHARTA. It is amid these scenes, and under the worst of princes and the most cruel of popes, that liberty begins to reappear. Stephen Langton drafts Magna Charta, and its first sentence reads thus: "The Church of England shall be free." Mark that," the Church of England," her identity not forfeited. Her ancient liberties are reaffirmed, and, with other immortal principles of right, the primate and the barons, at Runnymede, in sight of Windsor Castle, force the wretched King to accept and confirm them. Of course he complies, and of course he retracts. The Pope sustains his vassal, and annuls the Great Charter. Just so; but, all the more, it lives; it grows and strengthens; it makes terra firma for the English Constitution to this day; the eventual rejection of the Paparchy is involved in it, and we in America, under the common law and our own constitutions, are the inheritors of its blessings. II. HENRY THE THIRD. Henry III. accepted his crown under conditions made by John, somewhat modified indeed, but with promise of tribute. But he afterwards confirmed Magna Charta, and Stephen Langton made him keep his promise for a time. He tries to evade his pledges, but over and over again he is brought to book. He invites a legate into England to "reform the Church"; that is, to make it more subservient to the pontiffs. Groans and grumblings are heard, and the legate withdraws. From this reign we receive that sturdy expression of attachment to "the common law," as we now call it, Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari. So spoke our forefathers to King and Pope alike. Even Henry remonstrates against papal exactions; but when the threats of the pontiff extort eleven thousand marks from the clergy, his avarice is satisfied for a season. Langton dies, but the great Bishop Grossetête survives to perpetuate his spirit. He exposes the fact, that foreign priests sent into English benefices by the Pope gorge themselves with church revenues more than three times as great as those of the Crown. The Plantagenets produced two or three of the worst kings that England ever knew; but the others were all great in their several ways, and the dynasty, as such, has bequeathed' inestimable blessings to our race. Under the feeble kings, the people grew strong; the nobler Plantagenets, for one reason or another, worked with the people in a long, determined resistance to the Paparchy. Thus, with momentary intermissions, was kept alive a continuons assertion of the ancient liberties, summed up in the first sentence of the charter,"Ecclesia Anglicana libera sit." 12. TWO EDWARDS. In Edward the First we come back to the name of the Confessor, so dear to Anglo-Saxons, as one of themselves. And Edward himself, with all his Angevine faults, reflects in some particulars the spirit of his people. He is inclined to be more than half an Englishman. In subduing Wales and humbling Scotland, he is not merely wielding the hammer of the despotic aggressor, but is making England out of Saxons and Britons, welding all into unity, and, as the remote effect, creating Great Britain. In his day the Paparchy passes into the "privy paw" of Boniface VIII., who "came in like a fox, ruled like a lion, and died like a dog." His was the memorable bull Unam Sanctam, which defined as "necessary to salvation that every human soul should be subject to the Pope of Rome," of which more by and by. He was hateful to the French king, whose creature, Clement V., consigned his memory to infamy, and strove to abolish his very name. Lord took the affair into his own hand, and thereafter the power of the pontiffs began to decline. Boniface had found Edward too stout for him even in his pitch of pride. When he claimed Scotland as his own fief, and ordered Edward to sink his claims and withdraw his troops, the heroic sovereign disdained his pretensions. More than that, Edward's Statute of Mortmain, limiting the accumulation of property by the "dead-hand" of corporations, was perhaps the first practical retaliatory blow that the Paparchy felt from England. His The poor son was sent to Wales to be born, and became the first Prince of Wales by this cunning stratagem: for Edward had promised the Welsh a "faultless prince, and a native of their own soil." See the portraits of father and son in the matchless "Bard" of the poet Gray, which every student of English history should learn by heart: "Mark the year and mark the night When Severn shall re-echo with affright The shrieks of death, through Berkeley's roof that ring, Such the end of the second Edward's ignominy. His reign is marked, however, by the rise of a brilliant star in the horizon of darkness, for now was born John Wiclif. 13. THE THIRD EDWARD. Of the papal usurpation says quaint old Thomas Fuller,1 "It went forward until the Statute of Mortmain. It went backward slowly when the Statute of Provisors was made under Edward III.; swiftly when his Statute of Præmunire was made. It fell down when the Papacy was abolished, in the reign of Henry VIII." Thus he refers to the times of the third Edward two of the great moves which were fatal to the Paparchy. The stout Tudor could have done nothing without them: so that the Reformation did not actually begin when he fell in love with Anne Boleyn.2 1 Quoting, "Habent imperia suos terminos, huc cum venerint, sistunt, retrocedunt, ruunt." - Vol. ii. p. 296. 2 See Note W". |