During the great British floods of January 2014, nature reclaimed the meadow at Runnymede. To our medieval ancestors, such an event would have been a near-normal winter occurrence. To us, it was shocking front-page news. Thousands of people had to flee the comfort of their damp-coursed, draft-proof insulated homes. In north-west Surrey, the River Thames overflowed and turned the fields below the official American Magna Carta memorial into a lake. The main Windsor to Egham road was under 3 feet of water.
But then, something magical happened. Magical for historians, that is. As the flood waters receded, Runnymede – for a few days – reverted to what it must have looked like during the average thirteenth-century summer, before the days of land drainage and flood prevention schemes. The lake disappeared, but left parts of the meadow a swamp of filthy, treacherous, sucking mud. The Windsor to Staines road poked up above it by just a foot or so, and formed a link between odd stretches of similarly slightly higher, drier ground. For those few days, Runnymede revealed itself as the place where, in the Middle Ages, enemies could meet and negotiate – without fear of ambush or night-time assault – on a dry island of land, isolated by impassable marshland and accessible only by the narrow raised causeway road between Windsor and Staines.
Today Runnymede – all dried out again and safe by twenty-first-century standards – is getting a facelift.
I received an email from the American Bar Association announcing that the official, American, Magna Carta memorial here is being refurbished ahead of the 800th anniversary of the Great Charter on 15 June 2015. It’s being spruced up ready for the arrival of several thousand US lawyers who will participate in a special rededication ceremony here. Even the Magna Carta Tea Room is under new management and has been given a paint-job inside with stripped pine tables replacing the old Formica ones.
Not everything, however, is changing at Runnymede. It seems the myths linger on. At the car park entrance there’s still a small silver plaque on a pole, which announces:
Runnymede
the birthplace
of modern democracy
I want to write underneath, ‘No it isn’t! Magna Carta’s got nothing to do with democracy’, but there isn’t room.
And that’s not all. A couple of hundred yards away is one of the most desirable properties in this desirable neighbourhood. Not just a house, but a house on its own island in the Thames. It’s called Magna Carta Island. This is the spot that Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat claimed – without a sliver of evidence – was where the Great Charter was born. It’s up for sale. And if you have a £4 million budget for your new home, you can get 3.72 acres of mid-river privacy, containing not only the old cottage (which now has an outdoor swimming pool and boat mooring), but also, says the current owner, ‘the stone on which Magna Carta was signed.’ A bunch of baloney is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.
A hundred yards or so along the field path that leads from the tea room to the American memorial stands a small oak tree, not much more than a sapling. It’s difficult to imagine that one day it may grow to 100 feet high and have a stout trunk that five people together couldn’t hug. For now, it’s so insignificant that I’d missed it on our first visit here, and would have done so again if I hadn’t noticed a small plaque on a post in front of it. This is what it says:
This oak tree, planted with soil from Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, commemorates the bicentenary of the constitution of the United States of America. It stands in acknowledgement that the ideals of liberty and justice embodied in the constitution trace their lineage through institutions of English law to the Magna Carta, sealed at Runnymede on June 15th, 1215.
Planted December 2nd 1987, by John O. Marsh jr, Secretary of the Army of the United States of America.
The words are perfect. Perfect not just for those who idolise Magna Carta, but also for those who want to see beyond the myth to the true story of the Great Charter. There are no flamboyant, unsubstantiated claims about the 1215 Magna Carta being the birth of democracy or a constitution that defines how a nation is to be governed. The statement manages to put Magna Carta on a pedestal without flouting historical accuracy, and it does so in a couple of handfuls of resounding words: ‘the ideals of liberty and justice embodied in the constitution [that is, the constitution of the United States] trace their lineage through institutions of English law to the Magna Carta’. Historians and worshippers of Magna Carta across the globe can unite in intoning this sentence.
Magna Carta has been described as ‘England’s greatest export.’ It now belongs to the world. Not only was it shipped out to the American colonies in the seventeenth century to become the foundation of the constitution and to be relied upon in more and more cases where civil liberty is at stake, but also, when the British empire was broken up in the twentieth century, many of the new nations of the Commonwealth, such as Canada, India and Australia, recognised the influence of the Great Charter on their own systems of law and government. At the end of the Second World War, Germany and Japan, the nations which had suffered at first hand the arbitrary power of dictatorship, began to teach their children about the history and political significance of Magna Carta as part of the school syllabus. And in 1948, when the United Nations formulated its Declaration of Human Rights, the Great Charter was marked out as its inspiration. Eleanor Roosevelt told the UN General Assembly, ‘We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind. This Declaration may well become the international Magna Carta for all men everywhere.’
The Great Charter has gone global.
At the end of the field path, two men are at work with pressure washers on the memorial itself. It’s a sunny day and I decide to sit on the grass a little further up Cooper’s Hill. From here, I can see beyond the circle of classical columns now being scoured of their grime, and out across the flat grassy meadow to where speeding vans and cars drone along the old causeway road which 800 years ago brought together the armies of King John and the rebel barons. There’s a sudden screech. It’s the noise of a cherry picker, the motorised lifting platform the workmen are using to reach the roof of the memorial, its stonework still a grubby grey contrast to the stark white of the columns now gleaming in the sunlight.
It’s the end of our journey. We’ve gone from cloudy myth to shining beacon. Along the way, we’ve discovered that history, like life itself, is never a child’s fairy tale of good and evil.
King John was not, as the Victorians believed, the tyrant whose foulness would defile even hell itself. We should judge him not by our own standards, but by those of the thirteenth century. By that light, he failed as a king because he didn’t win personal glory on the battlefield, and he roused opposition because he, like his father and brother before him, was changing the old feudal relationship with his mightiest subjects. Yes, he was unpredictable and vengeful, but we shouldn’t forget that an inoffensive monarch in the Middle Ages was seen as weak and was more likely to be humiliated or overthrown than a brutal one. It was dog-eat-dog. At the end of the day, though, one of the most fascinating things about John is that – from whatever point of view we analyse him – we can never quite pin down the contradictions in his character.
The motives of the barons of England during the crisis of 1215 are just as elusive. The 170 or so earls and other lords of high rank had a range of grudges and loyalties. Most of these barons took no direct role in the creation of Magna Carta. Of the minority who did, few probably thought beyond the benefits to themselves, their families and their class.
Then what of the Charter itself, sealed here at Runnymede on 15 June 1215? It’s time to ask the question that – for fear of being thought a spoilsport, a nit-picker or guilty of treason – you perhaps haven’t dared utter till now.
Was Magna Carta all it’s cracked up to be? After all, it didn’t do much for one half of the population, women – in fact, it set out to limit their legal rights – and the other half, the men, didn’t do so well out of it either – not the overwhelming majority, anyway, who were near-slaves. It doesn’t sound like much of a beacon of fairness, does it?
We could say that the lasting value of the 1215 Magna Carta lies in the fact that three of its provisions are still on the Statute Book in England today 800 years later. They’re the ones guaranteeing the ancient customs of the City of London and promising freedom for the English church, plus clause 39 granting to ‘free men’ the right not to be punished except by ‘the law of the land’. In 1970, Parliament decided to cull from the Statute Book all dead and useless old laws. These three Magna Carta clauses were spared the axe, but I can’t help thinking that was more on sentimental grounds, rather than in any expectation that prosecutions would follow their breach.
But there is at least one reason why we should today still revere the original Magna Carta, in the form as agreed and sealed by King John. That is because it shows us that even a king must obey the law. The Great Charter doesn’t spell this out in so many words. But many of its clauses are examples of how the law of the land applies to the monarch as well as to his subjects. That was a breakthrough in the early thirteenth century. The 1215 Magna Carta therefore can rightly be quoted to show that any ruler – a twenty-first-century American one like President Bill Clinton, just as much as a thirteenth-century English one like King John – is no different from the rest of us in a court of law. A wonderful principle, given to us 800 years ago by the original Magna Carta.
The Great Charter, however, is much more than the words scratched in parchment here at Runnymede in 1215. Unlike the king and the barons, who were dead and buried centuries ago, it lives on. And like all living things, it’s grown over the years into something that – while it has resemblances to its appearance at birth – looks a lot different from the way it did in 1215. So the very words ‘Magna Carta’ have come to embrace both the original Charter and what it became over subsequent centuries.
The most striking example of this broader definition is clause 39 itself. It was an acorn from which a mighty oak could grow. It doesn’t matter that ‘free men’ – protected by Magna Carta from illegal and arbitrary action – made up only a small proportion of the population. What matters is that a principle was established: that arbitrary punishment is wrong. Extend this same principle to the wider population, as later generations did, and you have yourself a fundamental and universal civil liberty. The idea behind that right was clearly laid out in 1215.
Magna Carta’s growth was, as we’ve seen, haphazard, often based on error, and at times it stalled and almost died. Kings routinely kept reissuing and reconfirming the Great Charter, often tweaking it here and there to head off the latest grievances which otherwise might fester into rebellion. Heroes, such as England’s Sir Edward Coke, and America’s James Madison, refashioned it further to meet the changing nature of their own conflicts with overmighty rulers. And, over many centuries, Magna Carta came to be regarded as the ancient and hallowed record of rights so fundamental they attained the force of morality itself: the right to trial by jury; the writ of habeas corpus requiring the release of a prisoner whose detention could not be justified before a judge; and the most comprehensive of all our rights, the need for due process of law before any of us can in any way be punished. With age, the Great Charter has established itself as – in the words of the most celebrated English judge of the twentieth century, Lord Denning – ‘the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot’.
It is inevitable when speaking of such a venerable document that we tend to have eyes on its history. But what of the Great Charter’s future?
The 800th birthday of Magna Carta is boosting both our understanding and our reverence for the old document. As well as the rededication of the memorial at Runnymede attended by American, British and Commonwealth lawyers, there are a vast range of other celebrations. The BBC is broadcasting peak-time programmes about the Great Charter on both TV and radio. The British government is sponsoring a Global Legal Forum with the theme of Magna Carta – over two thousand judges and lawyers are expected from more than a hundred nations. The British Library is holding its biggest ever exhibition featuring the two 1215 Magna Cartas; special coins and stamps are being issued.; and the British Council is organising commemorations in over 100 countries worldwide. Magna Carta certainly won’t be forgotten in the lifetime of anyone reading this book.
But could it become no more than an antiquarian relic, something to be marvelled at and treasured, like an Egyptian mummy, but of no practical use any more? In one sense, that has happened already.
Magna Carta cannot stop bad things happening. It can’t topple a dictator. It cannot shut down torture chambers. Faced with a prison gate that needs to be prised open to free those who have been thrown inside without a fair trial, we’d be better off with a crowbar than a copy of Magna Carta. It cannot do anything on its own. But what Magna Carta can do is inspire us to fight against arbitrary power wherever we can – whether that’s in a court of law, in an elected assembly, or in the columns of a newspaper. It may mean no more than simply standing up to be counted, or, if all else fails, it may mean doing what freedom fighters have sometimes had to do – take to the hills or to the streets.
At least part of the Great Charter’s inspiration comes from the thought that we are not alone. To battle against injustice in the name of Magna Carta is to do what Coke and the Parliamentarians did in their war against the Stuart kings. It’s what Madison and the founding fathers did in their battle for independence, and what the English Chartists did fighting for working-class rights in the early nineteenth century. It’s following in the footsteps of brilliant lawyers and respected judges. And it’s doing what thousands of people do every day when they claim the protection of ‘due process of law’. Whenever we cite Magna Carta in defence of our rights, we are making ourselves part of a long and honourable tradition. It inspires us and at the same time it strengthens our cause.
The need for such an ancient and hallowed weapon against injustice is not going to go away, unless – as seems unlikely – human beings become universally peaceful, loving and kind. Recent news headlines show no sign of a let-up in the number of outrages that accompany the exercise of arbitrary power: the return of military dictatorship to Egypt; the suppression of minorities in China. Imprisonment without trial in Burma; the illegal seizure of property and countless other violations of human rights in Zimbabwe; summary executions and religious persecution in the IS caliphate. Not all – in fact, few – of the victims on this woeful and ever-changing list will actually call on Magna Carta as the inspiration for their fightback. Many will have never even heard of the Great Charter. But their resistance to despotism will nevertheless be part of the same battle that Coke and Madison and millions of others have fought in the name of Magna Carta. What unites all those engaged in such struggles are basic human instincts for fairness, security and freedom from oppression, instincts that have their roots in a time long forgotten. Those roots emerged as the green shoots of a political philosophy right here on the meadow at Runnymede, when King John bought off his rebellious barons one June day in the year 1215 by agreeing to abide by certain rules.
There will always be Magna Carta. After the parchments have perished and Runnymede is permanently drowned, the Great Idea that Magna Carta represents will live on.
When the last human beings on earth face subjugation by an alien tyrant and some among them choose not to bow but to fight, there’ll be an Englishman surveying them from his heaven, Sir Edward Coke, who will shout down two medieval Latin words that forever mean justice and freedom.
Magna Carta!