The seals with which, in place of the non-existent royal seal, this Charter was confirmed in the King’s name were those of Gualo the Cardinal Legate and William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, “governor of ourself and our realm.” The form of the document must have been determined by Gualo and William conjointly; and it reflects the utmost credit upon the wisdom, tact, and moderation of both. Their explanation, given in the clause just quoted, as to the omissions in the new Charter was reasonable and true. The matters omitted were such as a provisional government, especially under the existing circumstances, could not safely deal with. They were all, more or less, matters of controversy; they were also matters affecting the relations of the Crown not with the nation as a whole, but with certain members or sections of the nation; matters, in a word, as to which it would have been neither politic nor just to tie the hands of a King who was not yet capable of acting for himself--above all at a moment when any surrender of the powers and claims of the Crown might have deprived him and his counsellors of the already sufficiently small means which they possessed of carrying on the war against the invader. Most “grave and doubtful” of all was the question which had furnished the immediate pretext, though it was certainly not the sole incentive, for the rising of the barons against John: the question of scutage. If the limitations imposed by the twelfth and fourteenth articles of the Great Charter upon the King’s rights of scutage were not actually new, they had been obsolete so long as to be practically an innovation on the established custom of the realm. This fact was the coign of vantage on which John had taken his stand when appealing to the Pope against the barons; and it was on this ground that Innocent had condemned the Charter. The accession of a child-King was not the moment for gratuitously surrendering on his part a claim whose illegality was, to say the least, not proven, and which the Pope, as overlord of the kingdom, had upheld; and the postponement of this question enabled Gualo at once to give the papal sanction to the new Charter. The publication of the Charter, with that sanction, left no valid excuse for the continuance of a refusal to recognize the native sovereign. Henry was now as definitely pledged as Louis to the redress of all grievances which were really national, and the security for the fulfilment of the pledge was at least as strong on Henry’s side as on the side of the stranger.