Chương Chương 33 · The Royal Councils Of Their Country

As long as people were “nomads,” wandering tribes of shepherds, all men

had been equal and had been responsible for the welfare and safety of

the entire community.

But after they had settled down and some had become rich and others

had grown poor, the government was apt to fall into the hands of those

who were not obliged to work for their living and who could devote

themselves to politics.

I have told you how this had happened in Egypt and in Mesopotamia

and in Greece and in Rome. It occurred among the Germanic population

of western Europe as soon as order had been restored. The western

European world was ruled in the first place by an emperor who was

elected by the seven or eight most important kings of the vast Roman

Empire of the German nation and who enjoyed a great deal of imaginary

and very little actual power. It was ruled by a number of kings who

sat upon shaky thrones. The every-day government was in the hands of

thousands of feudal princelets. Their subjects were peasants or serfs.

There were few cities. There was hardly any middle class. But during

the thirteenth century (after an absence of almost a thousand years)

the middle class—the merchant class—once more appeared upon the

historical stage and its rise in power, as we saw in the last chapter,

had meant a decrease in the influence of the castle folk.

[Illustration: THE SPREADING OF THE IDEA OF POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY]

Thus far, the king, in ruling his domains, had only paid attention to

the wishes of his noblemen and his bishops. But the new world of trade

and commerce which grew out of the Crusades forced him to recognise

the middle class or suffer from an ever-increasing emptiness of his

exchequer. Their majesties (if they had followed their hidden wishes)

would have as lief consulted their cows and their pigs as the good

burghers of their cities. But they could not help themselves. They

swallowed the bitter pill because it was gilded, but not without a

struggle.

In England, during the absence of Richard the Lion Hearted (who had

gone to the Holy Land, but who was spending the greater part of his

crusading voyage in an Austrian jail) the government of the country had

been placed in the hands of John, a brother of Richard, who was his

inferior in the art of war, but his equal as a bad administrator. John

had begun his career as a regent by losing Normandy and the greater

part of the French possessions. Next, he had managed to get into a

quarrel with Pope Innocent III, the famous enemy of the Hohenstaufens.

The Pope had excommunicated John (as Gregory VII had excommunicated the

Emperor Henry IV two centuries before). In the year 1213 John had been

obliged to make an ignominious peace just as Henry IV had been obliged

to do in the year 1077.

Undismayed by his lack of success, John continued to abuse his royal

power until his disgruntled vassals made a prisoner of their anointed

ruler and forced him to promise that he would be good and would

never again interfere with the ancient rights of his subjects. All

this happened on a little island in the Thames, near the village of

Runnymede, on the 15th of June of the year 1215. The document to which

John signed his name was called the Big Charter—the Magna Carta. It

contained very little that was new. It re-stated in short and direct

sentences the ancient duties of the king and enumerated the privileges

of his vassals. It paid little attention to the rights (if any) of

the vast majority of the people, the peasants, but it offered certain

securities to the rising class of the merchants. It was a charter of

great importance because it defined the powers of the king with more

precision than had ever been done before. But it was still a purely

mediæval document. It did not refer to common human beings, unless they

happened to be the property of the vassal, which must be safe-guarded

against royal tyranny just as the Baronial woods and cows were

protected against an excess of zeal on the part of the royal foresters.

A few years later, however, we begin to hear a very different note in

the councils of His Majesty.

John, who was bad, both by birth and inclination, solemnly had promised

to obey the great charter and then had broken every one of its many

stipulations. Fortunately, he soon died and was succeeded by his son

Henry III, who was forced to recognise the charter anew. Meanwhile,

Uncle Richard, the Crusader, had cost the country a great deal of money

and the king was obliged to ask for a few loans that he might pay his

obligations to the Jewish money-lenders. The large land-owners and the

bishops who acted as councillors to the king could not provide him with

the necessary gold and silver. The king then gave orders that a few

representatives of the cities be called upon to attend the sessions

of his Great Council. They made their first appearance in the year

1265. They were supposed to act only as financial experts who were not

supposed to take a part in the general discussion of matters of state,

but to give advice exclusively upon the question of taxation.

Gradually, however, these representatives of the “commons” were

consulted upon many of the problems and the meeting of noblemen,

bishops and city delegates developed into a regular Parliament, a place

“où l’on parlait,” which means in English where people talked, before

important affairs of state were decided upon.

But the institution of such a general advisory board with certain

executive powers was not an English invention, as seems to be the

general belief, and government by a “king and his parliament” was by

no means restricted to the British Isles. You will find it in every

part of Europe. In some countries, like France, the rapid increase

of the Royal power after the Middle Ages reduced the influence of

the “parliament” to nothing. In the year 1302 representatives of the

cities had been admitted to the meeting of the French Parliament, but

five centuries had to pass before this “Parliament” was strong enough

to assert the rights of the middle class, the so-called Third Estate,

and break the power of the king. Then they made up for lost time and

during the French Revolution, abolished the king, the clergy and the

nobles and made the representatives of the common people the rulers of

the land. In Spain the “cortes” (the king’s council) had been opened to

the commoners as early as the first half of the twelfth century. In the

German Empire, a number of important cities had obtained the rank of

“imperial cities” whose representatives must be heard in the imperial

diet.

[Illustration: THE HOME OF SWISS LIBERTY]

In Sweden, representatives of the people attended the sessions of

the Riksdag at the first meeting of the year 1359. In Denmark the

Daneholf, the ancient national assembly, was re-established in 1314,

and, although the nobles often regained control of the country at the

expense of the king and the people, the representatives of the cities

were never completely deprived of their power.

In the Scandinavian country, the story of representative government is

particularly interesting. In Iceland, the “Althing,” the assembly of

all free landowners, who managed the affairs of the island, began to

hold regular meetings in the ninth century and continued to do so for

more than a thousand years.

[Illustration: THE ABJURATION OF PHILIP II]

In Switzerland, the freemen of the different cantons defended their

assemblies against the attempts of a number of feudal neighbours with

great success.

Finally, in the Low Countries, in Holland, the councils of the

different duchies and counties were attended by representatives of the

third estate as early as the thirteenth century.

In the sixteenth century a number of these small provinces rebelled

against their king, abjured his majesty in a solemn meeting of the

“Estates General,” removed the clergy from the discussions, broke

the power of the nobles and assumed full executive authority over the

newly-established Republic of the United Seven Netherlands. For two

centuries, the representatives of the town-councils ruled the country

without a king, without bishops and without noblemen. The city had

become supreme and the good burghers had become the rulers of the land.

THE MEDIÆVAL WORLD

WHAT THE PEOPLE OF THE MIDDLE AGES THOUGHT OF THE WORLD IN WHICH