Magna Carta — who's who

Born 1166, the youngest of Henry II's surviving sons, succeeded his brother Richard the Lionheart in 1199. By 1215 he has lost Normandy, Anjou, and most of the Plantagenet continental empire to Philip Augustus of France, in a series of military disasters culminating at the battle of Bouvines in July 1214. He has lost the political contest with Pope Innocent III over the appointment of Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury, ended only by his humiliating submission of England as a papal fief in 1213. He has lost the loyalty of large sections of the English baronage, who blame him for the lost lands, the ruinous taxation imposed to fund the failed wars, the arbitrary use of feudal incidents — wardships, marriages, reliefs — to crush enemies and enrich the crown, the personal cruelties (the death of Matilda de Briouze and her son in his prison), the sustained pattern of contempt for the customary obligations a king owed his great men. In May 1215 the rebel barons formally renounce their homage. They take London on 17 May. Negotiations open. On 15 June, in the meadow of Runnymede between Windsor and Staines, the king sets his seal to the document the barons have prepared.

The great northern and eastern barons who renounced their homage to John in May 1215 and forced the Runnymede meeting. Robert FitzWalter, lord of Dunmow, called himself Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church and was the political leader; Eustace de Vesci, Saer de Quincy earl of Winchester, William de Mowbray, Geoffrey de Mandeville earl of Essex, and the men of the same circle were the core. They called themselves the Army of God; their grievances were partly personal (John had imprisoned several of them or their relatives, fined them ruinously, exploited their wardships and marriages) and partly structural (the Plantagenet system of arbitrary feudal demands had become, in their view, intolerable under John's particular use of it). The twenty-five barons of clause 61's enforcement council were drawn from this group. Their political horizon was largely class-bound — the rights they secured were chiefly the rights of barons — but the language they forced on John was capable of being read more broadly, and the later reading is what made them, retrospectively, reformers rather than rebels.

Archbishop of Canterbury from 1213, the Paris-trained theologian whose appointment by Pope Innocent III over John's bitter objection had triggered the 1208-1213 interdict over England. Once installed, Langton played the unexpected role of mediator between the rebel barons and the king he had been imposed on. He preached a famous sermon at St Paul's in 1213 invoking the coronation charter of Henry I — itself a precedent for limited monarchy — and is generally credited with having shaped the political theology that lay behind the barons' demand for a written charter. He was present at the negotiations leading up to Runnymede; clause 1 of the charter, on the freedom of the English Church, is his particular contribution. He was suspended from office by Innocent III later in 1215 for his role in the rebellion. The presence of an educated theologian in the negotiating circle is part of what gives the 1215 charter its capacity for principled language amid the granular grievances.

Pope from 1198 to 1216, the most politically powerful pope of the high middle ages, the figure whose excommunication of John in 1209 and interdict over England had eventually forced John's submission of the kingdom as a papal fief in 1213. By 1215 John was, in feudal law, the pope's vassal, and the rebel barons' charter was therefore an attack on the pope's tenant. Innocent's bull of 24 August 1215, Etsi karissimus, annulled the charter in full as illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights, and shameful to the English people, and absolved John from his oath to observe it. The annulment is the immediate reason the 1215 charter as a working document lasted only about ten weeks before civil war resumed. Innocent's death the following year, and the political need of the regents of John's young son Henry III to reissue a modified version of the charter as a peace measure, are what allowed the document to survive at all into the longer English constitutional tradition.

Not a contemporary but the figure who, more than any other, made Magna Carta the constitutional document later centuries inherited. Lawyer, judge, Member of Parliament, the most learned common lawyer of the Elizabethan and early Stuart era. As Chief Justice he clashed repeatedly with James I over the limits of the royal prerogative; dismissed in 1616, he turned to opposition in Parliament and to the writing of his Institutes of the Laws of England, the second part of which is a clause-by-clause commentary on Magna Carta. Coke read the 1215 charter as the founding statement of English liberty against royal tyranny and gave clauses 39 and 40 the broad due-process and jury-trial reading that they have carried ever since. Drafted the Petition of Right of 1628 against Charles I's forced loans and arbitrary imprisonments, building the document explicitly on the Magna Carta clauses as he had taught the legal profession to read them. Without Coke, Magna Carta would probably be remembered as a feudal document of antiquarian interest. With him, it became the foundation stone of the Anglo-American constitutional tradition.

The liberi homines of clause 39 — the free men whose protection from arbitrary imprisonment and dispossession is the most enduring of the charter's specific guarantees. In 1215 the term meant something narrower than later centuries would read into it. A free man, in the feudal vocabulary of the early thirteenth century, was a man who held his land by free tenure rather than as a villein bound to the soil; perhaps a fifth of the English adult male population, by some estimates, qualified, and the protections of the charter therefore did not extend to the unfree majority of the country. The political meaning broadened slowly through the late medieval and early modern centuries as villeinage withered away and the term free man came to mean simply free Englishman or, eventually, simply person. By the time the United States Constitution adopted the principle of clause 39 in the Fifth Amendment, the qualification had effectively dropped away, and the protection had become — at least in formal law — universal. The history of who counts as a free man under the descendant clauses of Magna Carta is the history of the slow extension of the rule of law to populations the original drafters did not have in mind, and that history is still being written.