Magna Carta was a treaty of peace between the king and his people, and so is a complete national act. It is the first act of the kind, for it differs from the charters issued by Henry I., Stephen, and Henry II. not only in its greater fulness and perspicuity, but by having a distinct machinery provided to carry it out. Twenty-five barons were nominated to compel the king to fulfil his part. It was not, as has been sometimes said, a selfish attempt on the part of the barons and bishops to secure their own privileges; it provided that the commons of the realm should have the benefit of every advantage which the two elder estates had won for themselves, and it bound the barons to treat their own dependents as it bound the king to treat the barons. Of its sixty-three articles, some provided securities for personal freedom; no man was to be taken, imprisoned, or damaged in person or estate, but by the judgment of his peers and by the law of the land. Others fixed the rate of payments due by the vassal to his lord. Others presented rules for national taxation, and for the organization of a national council, without the consent of which the king could not tax. Others decreed the banishment of the alien servants of John. Although it is not the foundation of English liberty, it is the first, the clearest, the most united, and historically the most important of all the great enunciations of it; and it was a revelation of the possibility of freedom to the mediæval world. The maintenance of the Charter becomes from henceforth the watchword of English freedom. [Sidenote: Attempts to annul the Charter. ] The remaining sixteen months of John’s reign were a mere anarchy, of which it would be difficult to unravel all the causes. In the first place may be counted the savage wrath of the king at being thus defeated and fettered; then the unfortunate interference of the Pope, who quashed the Charter by a Bull of August 25, and on December 16, anathematized the barons singly and collectively; he also peremptorily suspended Archbishop Langton for his share in bringing about the result.