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King John was unprepared for rebellion in the summer of 1212. The success of his campaigns in the last three years in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland had suppressed actual or potential opposition at home, and there was nothing to connect the plot of 1212 with any earlier baronial resistance to the King. John's ignorance of baronial plans up to 16 August suggests that there was very little to arouse his sensitive suspicion earlier, and, indeed, the details of the plot could scarcely have been decided before July when John changed his plans to an expedition against the Welsh. There is perhaps no greater tribute to John's ability as a politician and administrator than the energy and skill with which he faced the situation. Throughout the winter months he made rapid preparations for the impending civil war. In addition to military measures the King was trying to adjust the political balance in the north in his own favour. During 1214 and the early months of 1215 John was working hard to retain the loyalty of those who were still probably wavering between him and his opponents.

Medieval government was concerned before all else with managing men. Governmental office at the more important levels tended inevitably to become the perquisite of a small group. There were those ‘in’ and those ‘out’. But so long as this small group was chosen reasonably, so long as the monopoly of office did not seem too impenetrable or unbreakable, so long as those ‘out’ did not come to answer the questions set out above with excessive rancour and indignation, then the government would work and the King's choice of officials pass with little challenge. Ultimately, King John did not accept these limitations on his freedom of action, for in this, as in other matters, his hand was forced by the loss of Normandy, Anjou, and the Touraine. He had to provide for loyal and efficient friends and agents who had lost both estate and office on the continent. This helped to create the situation existing in 1215 in which the opposition attacked not only the actions of the King's officials, but also their selection.

Continental scholars have often pointed out that the Magna Carta followed inevitably on John's defeat at Bouvines in 1214. They are right in two senses. First, Bouvines stripped John of any defence against the English barons; he had now been defeated in the end towards which the whole of his administrative and diplomatic effort had been directed. Secondly, the unrest among the English baronage that achieved its final explosive form in the Magna Carta was an unavoidable product of the manifold ways in which English resources had been exploited since the early years of the reign of Henry II to support Angevin policy and possessions on the continent. To this general policy, John was committed by birth and position just as his brother and father had been. That he failed in the defence of Normandy was important, for it subjected him to criticism. John's most decisive action was not that he lost Normandy, the Touraine, and the old Angevin influence in the Midi, but that for ten furious years he devoted all his efforts to regaining what he had lost. To argue that he should have accepted the decision of 1204 is unrealistic. Not even his son, Henry III, was prepared to abandon the old Angevin claims until 1259, and he only did so then under the pressure of events in England. Thus, in the chronology of John's reign, 1204, not 1199, is the crucial date.

In 1215 the King's opponents reviewed every important feature of royal policy and attempted to set limitations to his freedom of action. They did not see themselves as attacking or suppressing some new form of government, some absolutist or authoritarian system inimical to the established social and political order. If they were in any way self-critical, they saw themselves as confirming established methods of government and the customary conduct of relations between the King and his men, against a ruler who had distorted, altered, or ignored them. At its most general, the struggle was to them one of law on the one hand, against tyranny on the other. The forma securitatis of the Charter, its most radical ‘constitutional’ feature, sprang from the simple fact that many of the King's subjects no longer put any reliance on his good faith. John could not be trusted. If these men were to accept him as their lord once more, they were going to compel him to be a good lord. The principles of Magna Carta sprang from the particular maltreatment that each had received at his hands. Such maltreatment was usually expressed initially in a financial form.

The likening of King John to the Protestant Tudors was orthodoxy for their era until dramatists of the 1590S injected into the comparison the volatile contemporary ingredient of Arthur and the succession question, played down or ignored by Foxe and the Book of Homilies. The comparison between Elizabeth and Richard II from Camden and Peter Wentworth was compelling though it involved no orthodoxy and appealed to various viewpoints, from those of the Queen herself to the judgements of subjects discontented with her rule, or anxious about the future. The examination of Sir John Hayward — after Shakespeare's completion of the second tetralogy — seems to show a nervous tendency on Elizabeth's part to identify with a king whom some thought it had been right to depose; while her well-known announcement to William Lambarde: ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ is further and exceptional evidence that, whatever its significance, Elizabeth did see a link between herself and Richard in the aftermath of an unsuccessful revolt against her.

In June 1215 the barons chose twenty-five of their number for the commission envisaged in cap. 60 of Magna Carta. Three members of the Twenty-Five had been guarantors of the safe-conduct given to the barons in January. Two certainly, and probably a further four, had only turned against the King within the last month. Only eight of the Twenty-Five had major territorial interests in the north. Four of these, William de Fors, John de Lacy, Robert de Ros, and John fitz Robert, were recent recruits to the rebellion. The composition of the committee represents a marked dilution of the opposition to the King, a dilution in the sense that the old recalcitrant element of 1214 was now in a small minority. The period between January and June was one of repeated, almost continuous negotiation. Throughout, a vital role was played by two men who must have had a moderating influence on both parties, Archbishop Stephen Langton and William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke.

When Shakespeare chose to produce a sequence of plays on the reign of King Henry VI he was choosing material of traditional and orthodox significance, of relatively recent relevance, and of current topical interest. Traditionally, the reign was a terrible example of misrule, political and military failure, and escalating civil war. Like Gorboduc, nearly thirty years earlier, the Henry VI plays made their immediate impact by the kind of telling contrast with the present which carried a grim warning. That the reign displayed features ‘for the which God is often angry with princes’, as Wentworth had recently argued, was clear to all, though opinions might divide as to why these appalling developments had occurred. Despite the obvious theme of order and disorder to which Tillyard most notably drew attention, no clear providential explanation is prominently advanced in the text. The great providential scheme of Hall, showing how England suffered for the deposition of Richard II, is nowhere explicit. Those who comment upon England's woes attribute them firmly to evident short-term causes, for example the unscrupulous ambition of the great nobles and the weakness of the inexperienced young king.

The northern problem of John's time was a result of two factors. First, he, and to a lesser extent his two predecessors, integrated the north much more closely than ever before in the administration of the whole realm. Secondly, he did this on an insecure political basis; his royal authority, as represented by his officers and supporters, was too isolated. The north began to feel the full weight of royal government in the middle years of the reign of Henry II. By then it bore on a group of families already in established and privileged positions, who were mentally maladjusted to it because of the earlier administrative history of the north, who saw little reason why they should accept it now, and who resisted it at every step, ultimately, at the end of John's reign, by civil war.

The knights were divided in the 1215 rebellion and their support was sought both by the King and the rebel barons. A superficial glance at the Magna Carta might suggest that most of them were staunch supporters of the rising, for it benefited them in numerous ways. Moreover, part of the baronial programme depended on the knights for its execution and simply assumed their co-operation, as in cap. 48 of the Charter, which arranged for local inquiries by juries of knights; and in the writs of 19 and 27 June, which provided for these inquiries and for the seizure of the estates of those who refused to take the oath to the Twenty-Five. But this is not the whole story. Some of the concessions to the knights in the Magna Carta point to possible differences with their lords. Furthermore, King John, not the barons, was the first to make an open appeal for knightly support in his famous writ summoning four knights from each shire to a council at Oxford in November 1213. He too assumed that he could rely on the knights for support, even those who held their fees of the great rebel lords. Many knights simply followed their lords, either against or for the King.

In many ways the northern rebels of 1215 were typical members of their class. They were great landlords and keen business men, active enclosers and improvers of their lands, owners of vast sheep flocks, benefactors and patrons of great monasteries, founders both of religious houses and of market and municipal privileges. In certain matters, however, their relations with the King marked them out. By and large they were the ‘outs’, excluded from the spoils of office, despite a family tradition of service to the Crown in many cases, despite the earlier administrative experience that some of them enjoyed, and despite the expectancy of office that their social position gave them. In addition, many of them had personal wrongs, grievances, and problems to set right. William de Mowbray, Richard de Percy, Peter de Bros, Roger de Montbegon, Robert de Ros, John de Lacy, Gilbert de Gant, Maurice de Gant, Nicholas de Stuteville, Robert de Vaux, and Matilda de Caux were all in situations, or had been parties to transactions, which, in each case, could have become a deeply rooted grievance and ultimately a casus belli. On the whole the rebellion was not one in which an active and adventurous landowning class broke the fetters which the monarchy had placed on its development. It was a rebellion rather of the aggrieved, of the failures; a protest against the quasi-monopoly of privilege by the King and his friends; at its most significant a call, not to break bonds, but to impose them on the most active and experimental administrative force of the day, the monarchy.

The first civil war in 1215 had begun with the baronial muster at Stamford, the formal defiance of the King, and the march on London. The second civil war into which the country slid in the autumn had no such dramatic opening. Indeed, the first move, the siege of Rochester, was the King's. At London there was some attempt to maintain the organization created by the security clause of the Charter, but the baronial effort was now much dispersed. The geography of the land, the decentralization of the King's treasure, the delegation of administrative authority to almost independent royal agents, the distribution of mercenary troops throughout the royal castles, all tended to produce, not one civil war, but many, of which the setting, strategic forces, tactical problems, and personnel varied from one region to another.

The activity of the northern rebels was not confined to their own shires. Many influences cut across county and regional boundaries, blurring the distinctive characteristics of each locality and group of rebels. The most obvious of these was the widespread distribution of the lands of many English baronies. Several of the northern rebel lords held estates outside the northern counties. In some cases these southern holdings were large. The spread of territorial interests was only one of the factors that confused the Northerners with other groups. The political inconsistency, if not inconstancy, of certain individuals, had similar effects. Although King John retained the loyalty and support of his old friends and officials to a remarkable degree in the last years of his reign, there was some leakage to the ranks of the rebels, or at least in some cases a lack of demonstrative eagerness, especially at the nadir of the King's fortunes after the landing of Prince Louis.

It follows from the circumstances of the assassin's birth into English drama, delivered out of the indirect language of prose sources, that, early on, his role was a secondary one. He has the function of an instrument in the schemes of a more important figure, who is usually either protagonist or antagonist in the play; his appearances tend to be confined to one or more episodes, and he does not initiate action himself, The role is, in short, a bit-part. One way of demonstrating this is to consider the typical length of an assassin's role. During the period 1587–1592, a leading male part could run to anything between 550 and 800 lines; a leading female role, between 200 and 350 lines. In contrast, most assassins' parts are tiny: Tremelio in Mucedorus speaks eleven lines, the two murderers in Henry VI, Part 2 have seven between them, and Abraham in Selimus has twenty-two. There are in fact three plays of this period which give assassins moderately large parts: King Leir, Arden of Faversham, and King John.

This introductory chapter presents an overview of the rebellion of the northern lords against King John. The rebellion that King John faced was thus quite novel. It was the first of a long line that led through the Provisions of 1258–9 and the Ordinances of 1311 down to the Grand Remonstrance of 1641. Of all these Magna Carta was the ancestor and was so recognized by its progeny.

Contemporaries gave various titles to the men who rebelled against King John in 1215. Many were satisfied with the term barones or barones Angliae. But this was very loose and must have seemed inaccurate to those with detailed knowledge of events, for by no means all the great tenants-in-chief of the King were against him. Hence they sought greater precision, often referring to individual rebels, just as the government records of the period specified the rebels either by name or by such phrases as barones contra nos or inimici nostri. Another label was supplied by the rebels themselves, ‘the Army of God and Holy Church’. This lacked brevity, claimed too much, and failed to stick. But between the extremes of this portentous title and the more general term barones there stood a third title, ‘Northerner’, which quickly became the most popular nickname for the rebels. The term ‘Northerner’ had a history of its own that reflected the history of the rebellion itself. Despite the fact that it almost always appears in narrative sources written after the event, its changing sense can be followed closely.

Once John had gone and the war had ended, the lines of political division altered. The Charter was quickly reissued, in a more limited form. Very soon ex-rebels and the native loyalists were working easily together; Brian de Lisle, Hugh de Balliol, Robert de Vieuxpont, by the side of Thomas of Moulton, Robert de Percy, or Robert de Ros. Loyalist and rebel now found a common interest and a common bond in unseating John's foreigners, in breaking the grip which Robert de Gaugy, William de Fors, and Faulkes de Breauté still had on the administration. In 1225 the reissue of Magna Carta was attested by ten of the Twenty-Five of 1215. The waters John had parted had closed once more.