HOW THE PEOPLE OF THE CITIES ASSERTED THEIR RIGHT TO BE HEARD IN 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.
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
mediaeval 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 "ou l'on
parfait," 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 ke 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 "cortex" (the king's council) had been opened to the commoners as
early as the first half of the twelfth century. In the Germain Empire,
a number of important cities had obtained the rank of "imperial cities"
whose representatives must be heard in the imperial diet.
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.
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.