The reason for leaving out restrictions upon the royal power so vital to the feudatories is readily apparent. The Council was distinctly royalist; as such, especially in view of the fact that John, the great offender, was dead, it did not favor restricting the royal power. Further, the barons in effect were themselves the king, and being so, there was no particular object in limiting their own power over themselves. That the Fourteenth Chapter would be observed, whether it were specified or not, dealing as it did with the summoning of the Council, went as a matter of course.[84] [Second reissue of the Charter] One of the objects in the minds of the Council in reissuing the Charter was to win adherents from the standard of Louis. In this they were partly successful; but it took the decisive defeat delivered to the French prince at the Fair of Lincoln in May of the following year, coupled with the loss of his reinforcing fleet in August, to bring about peace. A treaty between Pembroke and Louis followed in September, and secured to the belligerent barons the liberties of the realm and the restoration of their lands. General pacification between the parties came the 6th November following, with the second reissuance of the Charter, this time in the form which later generations of kings should be called upon to confirm. [Its omissions] There was introduced into this draft of the Charter a change which materially affects taxation. Though Chapters Twelve and Fourteen of John’s issue are ignored, there is in the Forty-Fourth Chapter a distinct reference to the levying of scutage.[85] “Scutage,” it says “shall be taken as it was wont to be taken in the time of King Henry our uncle.” In other words the consent of the barons was to be no longer a prerequisite to the levying of a scutage. The only restriction placed by written law upon the king was that he should take scutages according to the custom of Henry II,--that is, that they should not exceed in amount twenty shillings on the knight’s fee. The barons who remade the Charter thus abandoned the semblance of taxation by the baronage which was provided for under the terms of John’s enactment. It was only a shadow which they left behind, but nevertheless it was the shadow from which something substantial could emerge, the germ from which a creature of immense vigor might develop. The omission, it is not too much to say, is an exceedingly apt vindication of the contention that at the time the Charter of John was enacted, the framers of the instrument intended to create no barriers against the royal power of levying general taxation; if they had had in mind so fundamental a change, it is unlikely that in 1217, even though the radical faction was still feeling the sting of defeat, these provisions should have been allowed to lapse.[86] It is profoundly indicative both of the modest ambition of the barons in 1215 and the obscurity of their political vision in 1217.