After years of abusive taxation, military defeats in France, and conflicts with the Papacy, King John of England (John Lackland) faces a baronial revolt that takes London in May 1215. Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton mediates, and on June 15, 1215 both sides seal at Runnymede a 63-clause peace agreement known as Magna Carta. Among its most influential provisions: clause 12, forbidding the king from imposing taxes without the consent of the "common counsel of the realm"; clause 39, establishing that no free man shall be arrested, imprisoned, or dispossessed except by lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land; and clause 61, creating a council of 25 barons to monitor compliance, even authorizing reprisals against the king. Pope Innocent III annulled the charter two months later and civil war resumed, but the document was reissued several times after John's death in 1216, until its definitive confirmation in the 1297 Statute. Its verifiable historical achievement is not the invention of universal individual rights — a reading modern historiography largely considers a later myth — but the first written establishment in England of the principle that the king himself is subject to the law.