(253) McManis Faulkner Fiftieth Anniversary:

Edition of 1789 of which 125 copies are signed 1-125, 29 copies are signed A-Bb as artist’s proofs and ten are signed as dedication copies, 3 sets of progressives

June 12, 2021

16-3/4” x 24"

8 Colors

Paper: Finch Fine Cover Ultra-smooth100 pound

Model: Madison Anne Gordon

Client: McManis Faulkner

1-125: Saint Hieronymus Press

A-Aa: Artist’s own use

Progressives: McManis Faulkner

Dedication copies Madison Gordon; James McManis; William Faulkner; Elizabeth Pipkin; Tyler Atkinson; Christine Peek; Brandon Rose; Michael Reedy; Sara Wigh; Jyl Savard; McManis Faulkner

The nation has no right to expect that it will always have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln. — Supreme Court Justice David Davis (1815 - 1886) ex parte Milligan (1866)

Covenants, without the sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at all. — Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Leviathan, 1651

The third Plantagenet ruler, John Lackland (1166-1216), maintained that, as he was appointed by God and not by man, he was accountable to God alone for his earthly acts. Conveniently, God saw eye-to-with John, and thus whatever John did was, perforce, lawful. His barons did not agree and took umbrage at John’s highhanded perfidy and calamitous ineptitude, forcing him to sign the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, which asserted that no one, not even the king, was above the law.

Treacherous, tyrannous, cowardly and cruel, Bad King John immediately reneged. When he died the next year after a surfeit of peaches, the loud and near-universal judgement of his contemporaries was that he had been a bad man, a bad king, and to no one’s surprise his soiled soul went howling straight to Hell.

Regicide Oliver Cromwell (English, 1599-1658) attempted to rehabilitate John on the grounds that he had stood up to the Pope, but Cromwell was a poor champion. After Cromwell’s posthumous execution in 1661, King John’s reputation as the worst monarch in English history was set in stone.

Those of wealth and high office who display contempt for the rule of law have made themselves the enemies of society, and should be punished with the censure they have earned. Law, and the enforcement of law, stands between us and a “life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.” Bad King John found out the hard way that he was not above the law.