[Illustration: =“GOD WILLS IT!”= (_From the picture by James Archer, R.S.A. By permission of the Autotype Co._)] [Illustration: =Crusaders on the March.= (_From the picture by Sir John Gilbert, R.A., in the South Kensington Museum._)] [Illustration: =King Richard and the Young Archer.= (_From the fresco by John Cross in the Houses of Parliament._)] [Illustration] KING JOHN AND MAGNA CHARTA. “_Magna Charta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign._” Runnymede spreads before you, the famous field on which the English people wrested from a tyrannous monarch their great table of laws. You see a green meadow stretching along the marge of “silver-footed Thames,” a pasturage in no degree distinguished from scores of others in that fair valley. Fronting it is a little island, set like an emerald in the shining waters. Meadow and island should enchain your attention, for here a deed is to be done of deep and solemn import, immeasurable in its effects upon the lives and fortunes of generations yet unborn. Here you shall see the seed sown which is to shoot up into a goodly tree, bearing as its fruits that liberty, civilization, and knowledge in which we rejoice to-day. Long centuries of toil and struggle will elapse before it is deep-rooted in the soil; the weeds of error and wrong will threaten to choke it; the fierce sun of tyranny will scorch it; the piercing winds of privilege will numb it: but the hardy plant will not succumb. It will be tended by devoted hands, and watered with blood and tears, until it spreads its branches far and wide, and is reckoned the glory of the land. New-graffed with every generation, and branching into offshoots which bear little semblance to the parent stock, it still remains, worthy of all our reverence and regard as the sturdy root of the Constitution under which Britons dwell as the freest nation of the world. Look at the meadow on this side of the Thames. Busy hands are setting up a pavilion of white and gold, for the sojourn of a king. Other pavilions are rising on Runnymede itself, and on the island too, where a canopied throne is set up. Now the actors in the scene begin to arrive. Mail-clad barons armed as for the fray, grim and determined, solemn of port and sober of converse, draw near. An archbishop with his train of priests joins the armed throng. All the magnates of England, spiritual and secular, are here—and they are here to coerce a king.