 King John's death was vital for the survival of Magna Carta if he'd won the war probably be no charter at all But the minority government of his nine-year-old son to win the war to win the hearts and minds of all the people fighting against them Decided that they would issue a new version of the charter After 1215 Magna Carta should in theory just have died It was part of a peace settlement the peace settlement failed the barons went back to war against the king The king went to war against the barons England was invaded by the French that should be the end of it But it contained principles that could still be used for negotiation between King John's nine-year-old son Henry III who succeeded in 1216 and the barons who were still at war against him and therefore It was reissued just every year later in November 1216 And then it was reissued again at the end of that civil war in 1217 and then again in 1225 as an attempt to Negotiate taxation between the English church and the king Thereafter it was reissued regularly whenever there were problems between the realm and its sovereign and by the end of the 13th century It had become totemic in the 1270s We find the church demanding that a copy of Magna Carta be displayed on the door of every major monastery and every cathedral church It had become a totem not just a legal settlement Magna Carta was very important for the whole development of Parliament first of all It asserted a fundamental principle that taxation needed the consent of the kingdom Secondly it made taxation absolutely necessary for the king because it stopped up so many other sources of revenue And thirdly in making concession to knights in the counties to burgesses in the towns It looked forward to their representation in Parliament They were going to have to be summoned to give consent to taxation And so Magna Carta laid the foundations for the tax-based parliamentary state You could argue that Magna Carta made a major difference to English politics in the 13th century Certainly cropped up again and again in political debate You could argue that it prevented kings of England from as it were exploiting their rights to the absolute full It put an end to arbitrary kingship And yet kings continued to tax, they continued to tyrannize their subjects For centuries thereafter What mattered about Magna Carta I think was Magna Carta the idea not necessarily Magna Carta the political tool It survived long after the tyranny of any individual king and therefore it became a point of principle rather than a practical politics