The Good Reign of Bad King John
THE two races, so long hostile, soon found that they had common interests and common enemies. Both were alike aggrieved by the tyranny of a bad king. The great grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other in friendship; and the first pledge of their reconciliation was the Great Charter,* won by their united exertions, and framed for their common benefit.
Here commences the history of the English nation. In no country has the enmity of race been carried farther than in England.* In no country has that enmity been more completely effaced. In the time of Richard the First, the ordinary imprecation of a Norman gentleman was “May I become an Englishman!” His ordinary form of indignant denial was “Do you take me for an Englishman?” The descendant of such a gentleman a hundred years later was proud of the English name.
The Great Charter is better known by its Latin name, Magna Carta. To what extent it represented a common benefit for Normans and Englishmen (Anglo-Saxons) is a matter for dispute. The Charter was drawn up largely by barons of Norman descent, and when John reneged on it they were still Continental enough to ask Philip II of France to send his son Louis (later Louis VIII ‘the Lion’) to claim the English crown, a scheme which happily fell through. On the other, the Charter subsequently shaped constitutional government in England upon liberal principles that did indeed spread common benefits right across the English-speaking world, and they mark them out as radically different to most European states to this day. See The Signing of the Great Charter.
Macaulay published the first two volumes of his History of England in 1848, some eighty years before the grip tightened of Nazism in Germany and Apartheid in South Africa.