Did Magna Carta Fail? The First Barons' War and Its Aftermath

Written by Simon Williams

Magna Carta collapsed within ten weeks of being sealed, annulled by the Pope and followed by a civil war that saw rebel barons invite a French prince to take the English throne, yet the document survived its own failure by being reissued three more times within a decade.

Key Facts

• Annulled: 24 August 1215, by Pope Innocent III
• Prince Louis landed: May 1216, in Kent, at rebel barons' invitation
• King John died: 19 October 1216, at Newark Castle, of dysentery
• Henry III crowned: 28 October 1216, at Gloucester Cathedral, aged nine
• Regent: William Marshal, who reissued Magna Carta that November
• War ended: Treaty of Lambeth, September 1217

Ten weeks. That is how long Magna Carta lasted before Pope Innocent III declared it null and void. By any conventional measure, the document that most people now associate with the birth of constitutional government was a spectacular and rapid failure, one that plunged England straight back into the civil war it had supposedly just ended.

What follows is not a comfortable story of a charter triumphantly taking hold. It is a story of collapse, invasion, and a king who died in the middle of a war of his own making. And yet, somehow, out of that wreckage came a document that survived. Understanding how requires looking honestly at just how badly things fell apart first.

This article picks up where Magna Carta Explained: The Charter That Redefined Royal Power leaves off, tracing the annulment, the war, and the reissues that followed.

Annulled Within Ten Weeks

Pope Innocent III annulled Magna Carta on 24 August 1215, describing it as "shameful, demeaning, illegal and unjust" and declaring it null and void forever. Innocent had every reason to side with John. Two years earlier, John had accepted England as a papal fief, making the pope his feudal overlord, and Innocent was not about to let a group of rebellious barons dictate terms to his own vassal.

With the pope's backing, John treated the charter as dead almost immediately. Neither side had negotiated at Runnymede in good faith for the long term, and both had reason to expect the peace would not hold. What neither side fully anticipated was how quickly, and how badly, the resulting war would spiral.

Invitation to a Frenchman

Facing renewed civil war and a king backed by the pope, the rebel barons made an extraordinary decision. They invited Prince Louis of France, son of King Philip II, to invade England and take the throne for himself, based on a claim through his wife Blanche of Castile, a granddaughter of Henry II.

Louis landed in Kent in May 1216 with a substantial force and was welcomed into London by the barons who had rejected their own king. For a period, Louis controlled large parts of southern and eastern England, and several English barons formally paid homage to him as their sovereign. It is a detail students often find genuinely startling: the same barons who had forced Magna Carta on John came within reach of ending the Plantagenet dynasty entirely.

The King Who Died Mid War

John never lived to see how the war ended. Suffering from dysentery, and reportedly weakened further by gout, he died at Newark Castle in Nottinghamshire on 19 October 1216, in the middle of the very conflict his conduct had caused.

A king who spent his final days fighting a war he had started, over a charter he had already broken, against an invader his own barons had invited in.

John's death changed the political calculation for almost everyone involved. Fighting a flawed adult king was one thing. Fighting to depose his nine year old son on behalf of a French prince was quite another, and English loyalty to the young Henry III began to reassert itself almost immediately.

A Nine Year Old King and a Canny Regent

Henry III was crowned at Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October 1216, just nine days after his father's death, at the age of nine. Real power rested with his regent, the elderly and widely respected knight William Marshal, who understood immediately that the surest way to win back baronial support was to give the barons what they had wanted from John all along.

Marshal reissued Magna Carta that same November, in Henry III's name, as a direct appeal to barons wavering between loyalty to the young king and their existing allegiance to Louis. It was a shrewd political calculation. Rather than defend the indefensible record of a discredited king, Marshal offered the rebels' own demands back to them, voluntarily, on behalf of a child who bore none of John's personal baggage.

Reissuing the Charter to Win the War

The 1216 reissue was not identical to the 1215 original. Clause 61, the security clause that had established a council of twenty five barons empowered to enforce the charter against the king, was removed entirely. It was simply too dangerous a precedent to hand back to a regency government trying to consolidate authority for a child king.

What remained was a charter shorn of its most confrontational provisions but still carrying its most significant ones, including the clauses on due process that would eventually matter far more than clause 61 ever had. The strategy worked. Baronial support for Louis began to erode steadily through 1217, and a further reissue that same year, alongside a new Charter of the Forest addressing separate grievances about royal woodland, consolidated the regency's position further.

The Treaty of Lambeth and the End of the War

The war formally ended with the Treaty of Lambeth in September 1217. Louis, his position collapsing as English baronial support drained away, agreed to renounce his claim to the English throne in exchange for a payment and safe passage back to France. He never returned.

What is striking about this ending is how anticlimactic it was compared to the drama that preceded it. No decisive battle settled the matter. A French prince who had briefly held London and the loyalty of half the English baronage was simply paid to go home, and a regency government led by an elderly knight had, through reissuing rather than defending Magna Carta, out manoeuvred him entirely.

So, Did It Fail?

Judged as the peace treaty it was meant to be in June 1215, Magna Carta failed completely. It lasted ten weeks, triggered a civil war, and nearly cost England its ruling dynasty. No reasonable assessment of 1215 alone can call that a success.

Judged as a legal document, though, its failure is precisely what allowed it to survive. Because it collapsed so quickly, it became available for reissue, again and again, stripped of its most dangerous clauses and refined into something more durable each time. The version that eventually mattered to history was not the 1215 charter that failed at Runnymede. It was the reissues that followed its failure, a distinction explored further in Why Is Magna Carta Important? Its Lasting Legacy Explained. If you are building a study plan around this period of civil war and constitutional crisis, the Medieval Law Study Guides Bundle covers the wider legal context in depth.

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This article is part of the Magna Carta series. Explore all articles at Medieval Laws.

Deepen Your Understanding

→ Magna Carta Explained: The Charter That Redefined Royal Power — The pillar article covering the charter's origins and its overall legacy.

→ Why Was King John Forced to Seal Magna Carta in 1215? — The chain of failures that produced the charter this article shows collapsing.

→ Why Is Magna Carta Important? Its Lasting Legacy Explained — How the reissues that followed this failure eventually shaped centuries of law.

→ What If King John Refused to Sign the Magna Carta? — A counterfactual exploring an alternative to the chaos described in this article.

→ King John: The Controversial English Monarch — The full reign of the king who died in the middle of this war.

Note for the cluster map: this article is the fourth of six planned Magna Carta articles on the medieval-laws blog (Cluster J). The remaining two, a facts listicle and the legacy article, complete the cluster this week.

People Also Ask

Did Magna Carta fail?

As a peace treaty intended to end conflict between King John and his barons in 1215, Magna Carta failed almost immediately, annulled by the Pope within ten weeks and followed by a civil war. As a legal document, however, its failure allowed it to be reissued repeatedly over the following decade in a stronger and more durable form, which is why most historians treat its short term collapse and its long term success as two separate questions rather than a single verdict.

What was the First Barons' War?

The First Barons' War was the civil war that broke out in England after Pope Innocent III annulled Magna Carta in August 1215. Rebel barons invited Prince Louis of France to invade and claim the English throne, and he landed in Kent in May 1216 with significant baronial support. The war continued past King John's death in October 1216 and ended with the Treaty of Lambeth in September 1217, when Louis renounced his claim and returned to France.

How did King John die?

King John died on 19 October 1216 at Newark Castle in Nottinghamshire, most commonly attributed to dysentery, possibly worsened by gout he had suffered from since the previous year. He died in the middle of the First Barons' War, a conflict caused directly by his own conduct and the collapse of Magna Carta. His death significantly weakened baronial support for Prince Louis, since many barons were reluctant to depose a child king in favour of a French claimant.

Who became king after John died?

Henry III, John's nine year old son, was crowned king at Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October 1216, just nine days after his father's death. Because of his age, effective power rested with his regent, William Marshal, a widely respected knight who had served multiple English kings. Marshal reissued Magna Carta that same November in Henry III's name, a decision widely credited with helping to win back baronial support during the ongoing war.

Why did Prince Louis of France invade England?

Prince Louis of France invaded England in 1216 at the invitation of rebel barons who had lost faith in King John following the annulment of Magna Carta. Louis claimed the throne through his wife, Blanche of Castile, a granddaughter of Henry II. He landed in Kent, was welcomed into London, and briefly controlled significant territory with the support of English barons, before his position collapsed following John's death and he was paid to leave under the Treaty of Lambeth in 1217.

Was Magna Carta reissued after 1215?

Yes, Magna Carta was reissued in November 1216, shortly after King John's death, in a trimmed down form that removed the security clause empowering barons to seize royal castles. It was reissued again in 1217 alongside the new Charter of the Forest, and a further reissue in 1225 became the definitive medieval version of the text. This pattern of repeated reissue, each version shorn of the most confrontational original provisions, is what ultimately allowed the charter to survive.

Primary Sources and Further Reading

• The British Library — Shameful and Demeaning: The Annulment of Magna Carta, covering the papal bull of 24 August 1215 and its immediate aftermath. bl.uk/magna-carta
• The National Archives — Magna Carta, 1215, covering the outbreak of the First Barons' War and the reissues that followed. nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/magna-carta
• Church, S. (2015) — King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant, Pan Macmillan. A modern biography covering the final year of John's reign and his death at Newark, available via WorldCat.
• Carpenter, D. (2015) — Magna Carta, Penguin Classics. Covers the 1216, 1217 and 1225 reissues in detail, available via WorldCat.

Note: the exact cause of King John's death is recorded by medieval chroniclers as dysentery, though some modern accounts note the diagnosis cannot be confirmed with certainty by modern medical standards. The characterisation of the barons' invitation to Prince Louis as a near miss for the Plantagenet dynasty reflects the current scholarly consensus on how close the conflict came to a change of dynasty, rather than a claim that this outcome was inevitable.

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