The Journal · Discoveries

The Army of God

7 August 2026

Nine of the twenty-five barons who forced King John to seal Magna Carta now stand in the family's direct line, and so does King John. The family descends from both sides of Runnymede, which is surely the honest way to own that story.

The four surviving exemplars of the 1215 Magna Carta, brought together at the British Library in 2015: the charter nine direct ancestors were appointed to enforce. Image: PA, BBC
The four surviving exemplars of the 1215 Magna Carta, brought together at the British Library in 2015: the charter nine direct ancestors were appointed to enforce. Image: PA, BBC

When the first crowns went up on this site, the family counted five Magna Carta sureties among its collateral connections and thought that handsome. The July research has finished the count, and it is stranger and better than that: nine of the twenty-five sureties, the barons appointed to enforce the charter against the King, now stand documented in the direct line. Not cousins. Grandfathers.

The roll is worth reading aloud. Richard de Clare and his son Gilbert, of the house this site has already climbed to Domesday. Robert de Vere, of the Oxford earls. Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, who helped draft the thing. John de Lacy, Constable of Chester, who had held Château Gaillard through the great siege. Robert de Ros of Helmsley, married to a Scottish king's daughter. William d'Aubigny of Belvoir, whose castle garrisoned the rebellion. Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, whose line later carried Edward the First into this tree. And at the head of them all, Robert FitzWalter, lord of Little Dunmow and Baynard's Castle, the man the barons elected to command their forces under the most magnificent job title in English history: Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church.

And here is the part that keeps this site honest with itself: King John stands in the direct line too, through his granddaughter Elizabeth, Edward I's daughter, on the Butler ladder. The family descends from the king who sealed the charter under duress and from the general of the army that forced him, from the crown and from the rebellion against it, in the same summer's research. Anyone tempted to read genealogy as a claim to have been on the right side of history should sit with that for a moment. Blood takes both sides of every argument, eventually.

Twenty-five barons put their names to the enforcement of Magna Carta. This family can now name more than a third of them at its own table, and the king they stood against at the head of it. The full roll, and the ladders that carry it, are drawn in The Royal Houses and told in Chapter 26.

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