I see that there have been more attempts at the whitewashing of King John.
But the gentleman who wrote has a further interest in the matter;for he believes that King John was innocent,not only on this point,but as a whole.He thinks King John has been very badly treated;though I am not sure whether he would attribute to that Plantagenet a saintly merit or merely a humdrum respectability.
I sympathise with the whitewashing of King John,merely because it is a protest against our waxwork style of history.Everybody is in a particular attitude,with particular moral attributes;Rufus is always hunting and Coeur-de-Lion always crusading;Henry VIII always marrying,and Charles I always having his head cut off;Alfred rapidly and in rotation making his people's clocks and spoiling their cakes;and King John pulling out Jews'teeth with the celerity and industry of an American dentist.Anything is good that shakes all this stiff simplification,and makes us remember that these men were once alive;that is,mixed,free,flippant,and inconsistent.It gives the mind a healthy kick to know that Alfred had fits,that Charles I prevented enclosures,that Rufus was really interested in architecture,that Henry VIII was really interested in theology.
And as these scraps of reality can startle us into more solid imagination of events,so can even errors and exaggerations if they are on the right side.It does some good to call Alfred a prig,Charles I a Puritan,and John a jolly good fellow;if this makes us feel that they were people whom we might have liked or disliked.I do not myself think that John was a nice gentleman;but for all that the popular picture of him is all wrong.Whether he had any generous qualities or not,he had what commonly makes them possible,dare-devil courage,for instance,and hot-headed decision.But,above all,he had a morality which he broke,but which we misunderstand.
The mediaeval mind turned centrally upon the pivot of Free Will.In their social system the mediaevals were too much PARTI-PER-PALE,as their heralds would say,too rigidly cut up by fences and quarterings of guild or degree.But in their moral philosophy they always thought of man as standing free and doubtful at the cross-roads in a forest.While they clad and bound the body and (to some extent)the mind too stiffly and quaintly for our taste,they had a much stronger sense than we have of the freedom of the soul.For them the soul always hung poised like an eagle in the heavens of liberty.Many of the things that strike a modern as most fantastic came from their keen sense of the power of choice.
For instance,the greatest of the Schoolmen devotes folios to the minute description of what the world would have been like if Adam had refused the apple;what kings,laws,babies,animals,planets would have been in an unfallen world.So intensely does he feel that Adam might have decided the other way that he sees a complete and complex vision of another world,a world that now can never be.
This sense of the stream of life in a man that may turn either way can be felt through all their popular ethics in legend,chronicle,and ballad.
It is a feeling which has been weakened among us by two heavy intellectual forces.The Calvinism of the seventeenth century and the physical science of the nineteenth,whatever other truths they may have taught,have darkened this liberty with a sense of doom.We think of bad men as something like black men,a separate and incurable kind of people.
