The Mediaeval Villain

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 hotheaded 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