Disappointed and ashamed, John returned, resolved to master the barons, and found them not only resolved but prepared and organized to resist him, perhaps even encouraged by his ill success. They had found in Stephen Langton a leader worthy of the cause, and able to exalt and inform the defenders of it. Among those defenders were men of very various sorts; some who had personal aims merely, some who were fitted by education, accomplishments, and patriotic sympathies for national champions, some who were carried away by the general ardor. In general they may be divided into three classes; those Northern barons who had begun the quarrel, the constitutional party who joined the others in a great meeting held at St. Edmund’s, in November, 1214, and those who adhered later to the cause, when they saw that the king was helpless. It was the two former bodies that presented to him their demands a few weeks after he returned from France. He at once refused all, and began to manœuvre to divide the consolidated phalanx. First he tried to disable them by demanding the renewal of the homages throughout the country and the surrender of the castles. He next tried to detach the clergy by granting a charter to secure the freedom of election to bishoprics; he tried to make terms with individual barons; he delayed meeting them from time to time; he took the cross, so that if any hand was raised against him it might be paralyzed by the cry of sacrilege; he wrote urgently to the Pope to get him to condemn the propositions, and excommunicate the persons, of the barons. They likewise presented their complaints at Rome, resisted all John’s blandishments, and declined to relax one of their demands or to give up one of their precautions. [Sidenote: March of the barons. ] Negotiations ceased, and preparations for war began about Easter 1215; the confederates met at Stamford, then marched to Brackly, Northampton, Bedford, Ware, and so to London, where they were received on the 24th of May. The news of their entry into London determined the action of those who still seemed to adhere to the king, and they joined them, leaving him almost destitute of forces, attended by a few advisers whose hearts were with the insurgents, and a body of personal adherents who had little or no political weight beside their own unpopularity. [Sidenote: Magna Carta. ] Then John saw himself compelled to yield, and he yielded; he consented to bind himself with promises in which there was nothing sincere but the reluctance with which he conceded them. Magna Carta, the embodiment of the claims which the archbishop and barons had based on the charter of Henry I., was granted at Runnymede, on June 15, 1215.