Legacy Timeline - Magna Carta in Egham

: When King John died, his son, Henry III, was only nine years old and so the government of England was entrusted to a Regent, William Marshal. It is to Marshal we owe the survival of Magna Carta. A dead letter, declared null and void by the Pope and reneged upon by John, Magna Carta was reissued by Marshal, in Henry’s name, in November 1216 and again in 1217. Stripped of its most contentious articles, in particular clause 61 that made provision for 25 barons to police the settlement and King John, the new revised Magna Carta became a rallying and unifying document. This, combined with the new King’s young age, and a stunning victory for Marshal over the rebel barons at Lincoln brought about the collapse of the rebellion and consequently a lasting peace settlement.

: In November 1217 the Charter of the Forest was issued. This clarified and extended clause 47 of Magna Carta, which promised that forests made in King John’s reign would be disafforested. Royal forests, which could encompass not just woodland but open fields and riverbanks, had been increasing in size and number under successive kings. This turned a vital source of firewood and food for the free peasantry into vast private hunting reserves with their own courts and harsh justice for poachers and other transgressors. While the Charter of the Forest restored these rights to free peasants both it and Magna Carta offered little comfort to the unfree peasants, the villeins and slaves, who combined to make up as much as ninety percent of the population.

: When Henry III came of age he reissued Magna Carta again in 1225 in return for a grant of taxation. Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest were fast becoming England’s basic law, the essential ground-rules for the working of political society, and reissues became expected with each new reign or in response to any political crisis. A further significant step in the entrenchment of the charter came in 1297, in the reign of Edward I, when Magna Carta was copied onto the Statute Roll, confirming its special status. Equally important though were developments in the 14th century. Here we find a greater concentration on the now famous clauses 39 and 40 and some subtle yet significant changes in the language. ‘Lawful judgement of peers’ became understood to mean the right to trial by jury, ‘law of the land’ evolved into the wider and more encompassing ‘due process of law’ and most significantly, in the statutes of Edward III, ‘no freeman’ became ‘no man’.

: On the 6th July 1535 Thomas More, one of Henry VIII’s oldest and most trusted advisors, was standing trial for treason in Westminster. His offence was his refusal to accept the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England and the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. More believed that the Act of Supremacy was repugnant to the laws of God and the Church, “the Supreme Government of which … no Temporal Person may by any Law presume to take upon him”. More went further though. The Act of Supremacy was also contrary to the laws of man, chief among them Magna Carta, the very first clause of which reads: ‘The English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.’ This clause took on new importance during the Reformation but provided scant protection to the Church, its liberties or to its property in the face of Henry’s tyrannical will.

: From 1534 onward Magna Carta was available printed in English. This made it accessible to a much larger readership, particularly to lawyers. One such lawyer, Sir Edward Coke, picked up, dusted off and threw Magna Carta back into the political fray in the confrontation between Charles I and Parliament. Inspired by Magna Carta Coke drafted the 1628 Petition of Right. This was a response to the King’s attempts to bypass Parliament and raise money through forced loans, imprisoning those who refused him. When five knights challenged the lawfulness of their detention Charles argued that he had the power to imprison people at will. Coke disagreed and with his fellow MPs compelled the King to agree to the Petition. This reiterated the Magna Carta principles that taxes must have the consent of the realm, as now expressed through Parliament, and that no one should be detained without trial. While the Petition is one of our great constitutional documents it, like Magna Carta, nevertheless failed to prevent civil war.

: The concept of a charter constraining the power of kings came to the fore again in the 1680s. The conversion of James II to Catholicism and the birth of a son, whom it was assumed would be raised as a Catholic, increased the prospect of Protestant England being ruled by a Catholic dynasty. In response in 1688 English parliamentarians conspired with William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, husband of Mary Stewart, to replace James. Before they were offered the crown though, William and Mary were presented with the Declaration of Rights, a document that became the Bill of Rights. The Bill stated that it was illegal for the Crown to disregard the law, to raise money without parliamentary consent, or to raise an army in peacetime. These echoes of Magna Carta mean that the Bill is often seen as being of equal constitutional importance as the Great Charter.

: In 1707 the Act of Union created Great Britain, unifying the English and Scottish parliaments, but what remained to be forged was a unified sense of British identity. This had to be invented. A cornerstone of this new identity was the idea that there was a distinctly British model of liberty, one bound up with principles of fair and impartial justice, individual liberty, the protection of private property and, of course, a monarchy bound by the law. These Magna Carta principles, though written in response to a purely English and thirteenth century context, became symbolic totems upon which the new British identity was hung, with Magna Carta appearing in numerous political cartoons, popular prints and frequently in the hands of Britannia herself.

: Sir Edward Coke’s reading of Magna Carta reverberates back through American history. Many of the charters that established colonies in America date from the time of Coke, who personally wrote the charter establishing Virginia. These charters borrowed phrases and ideas copiously from Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, establishing the idea that colonists were entitled to the same rights as freeborn Englishmen. This principle was central in the American Revolutionary War. Revolutionaries took inspiration from clause 12 of the charter in their great rallying cry: ‘No taxation without representation’. Founding Fathers John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, all of whom read Coke as young lawyers, then echoed the charter’s language in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Later, in the nineteenth century, Abraham Lincoln, described the Declaration as “the Magna Carta of human liberty”.

: In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century those pressing for the reform of Parliament and freedom of the press found themselves facing an increasingly oppressive government, fearful that behind radical demands for change lay revolutionary intent. In defending themselves reformers reached for Magna Carta. When Arthur Beardmore and Sir Francis Burdett were arrested for outspoken criticism of the government they contrived to be taken either teaching their son or hearing their son translate Magna Carta respectively. Images of these fathers being arrested while teaching their sons about their rights as free born Englishmen caught the public imagination making Beardmore and Burdett celebrities. Similarly, when the jury acquitted reformer Thomas Hardy and his fellow London Corresponding Society defendants of treason commemorative tokens were struck that showed their lawyers, Erskine and Gibbs, with the words Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

: Did freeborn Englishmen and women, convicted of crimes and deported to Australia, carry with them into this new territories the rights they had held in England? The political philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that they did. To Bentham the very idea of a penal colony, where jury trials were deemed inappropriate by the imperial government, contravened the British constitution as outlined by Magna Carta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Petition of Right and the Bill of Rights. The whole governance of New South Wales, Bentham wrote in 1803, was “repugnant to Magna Carta”.

: In the 1830s Chartists called for a People’s Charter, a Magna Carta for the common man, presenting petitions to Parliament in 1839, 1842 and 1848. Their charter included calls for the vote to be extended, the secret ballot and for MPs to be paid, enabling working class men to stand for election. While these were political innovations the Chartists looked to an idealised past to strengthen their case. Reverend Joseph Raynor Stevens declared “We stand upon our rights, we seek no change, we say give us the good old laws of England unchanged … What are these laws?” to which the crowd replied “Magna Carta”. Despite the 1848 petition having over six million signatures, Parliament rejected these calls. While the Chartists failed to achieve their aims in the 1840s, they had sufficiently moved public opinion for some of their demands to be included in the 1867 and 1884 Reform Acts.

: Magna Carta protects both the rights of the individual and an individual’s right to property. How then would Magna Carta apply in cases where people owned people? This was a key question in the debates surrounding slavery. Did Magna Carta apply to slaves? Were they the individuals or the property that it protected? In the 1842 case of Prigg vs. Pennsylvania, Associate Justice Joseph Storey ruled it was the ‘positive unqualified right on the part of the owner of the slave to own that slave’. Jurists were divided on this question, rulings often coming down to whether the state was pro or anti-slavery. Abolitionists too cited Magna Carta. In 1854 Frederick Douglass, the African-American reformer, returning from a trip to England, where he had spent time with the Chartists, saw Magna Carta as applicable to all and said ‘Let the engine of Magna Carta beat against the Jericho walls of slavery’.

: Many Britons believed themselves to be both providentially blessed and duty bound to export ‘civilisation’ to less developed regions of the world. Liberty and justice, in their British guises, were seen as central components of this civilisation, and they, along with the British constitution, were seen as being underpinned by Magna Carta. The 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi, which established British rule in New Zealand, was seen as securing for the indigenous Maori ‘their Lands, Rights, and Privileges’, and constituting, in effect, a ‘Maori Magna Carta’. The benefits of British justice were also invoked at times of crisis to justify empire. When serious uprisings occurred in India in 1857 and 1858 the British government responded in part by promising imperial subjects that due regard would be paid to ‘the ancient Rights, Usages and Customs of India’ and that they enjoyed the same rights as freeborn Englishmen.

: The case of the Indian community in South Africa, whose rights were being restricted by white colonists, highlighted the hypocrisy of British claims that their empire offered equality under the law. In response a young Ghandi founded the newspaper Indian Opinion to combat discrimination both popular and legal in the form of the Registration and Immigration Acts. After much negotiation and non-violent resistance the 1914 Indian Relief Act was passed, protecting Indian rights and recognising Hindu and Muslim marriages. Gandhi declared the Act to be “the Magna Charta of our liberty in this land”. Under the British constitution, he said, “there should be no legal racial inequality between different subjects of the Crown, no matter how much practice may vary according to local circumstance”. Ghandi had referred to Magna Carta to remind his readers that not all imperial subjects enjoyed its protection or were treated equally under the law.

: At the same time the Victorians were repealing obsolete Magna Carta’s clauses from the statute book the idea that the charter represented a cornerstone of the British constitution was becoming firmly embedded in the growing market of children’s literature. From Dickens depiction of the ‘miserable brute’ King John to Kipling’s ‘Your rights were won at Runnymede!’ in their histories of England published in 1851 and 1911 the story of Magna Carta became part of a sweeping national narrative of the evolution of liberty. The epitome of this tradition can be found in Marshall’s ‘Our Island Story’ published in 1905. Here the barons were portrayed as fighting “not for themselves, as barons and Normans, but for the whole English people” and the charter as “the foundation of all our laws and liberty”. This was the narrative that influenced generations of school children.

: Despite the reality that Magna Carta offered little to women, as a sacred text of the establishment it was nevertheless targeted for adaptation to serve the Suffragette cause. ‘How Militant Methods Won the Great Charter’. This was the title of an article written in 1911 for the Votes for Women newspaper that sought to legitimise the suffragette’s use of militant direct action. In a more scholarly vein, writing in 1915, Helena Normanton, the first female barrister to practice Law in England, published an essay entitled ‘Magna Carta and Women’. In this she argued that the refusal to extend the vote to women was contrary to clauses 39 and 40 of Magna Carta, which prohibited the refusal, denial or delay of right or justice. Likewise, Richard Pankhurst, husband of Emmeline, argued that since great statues like Magna Carta applied equally to men and women why not the statutes concerning the vote.

: The Lincoln Magna Carta, which had been the centre piece of the British pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, remained in the United States at Fort Knox for safekeeping for the duration of Second World War. Churchill’s government even considered gifting this copy of Magna Carta to the United States, to underscore the two countries’ shared democratic heritage. These plans had to be quietly shelved, however, when it was realised that the Lincoln Magna Carta was not the British government’s property to give. The shared liberal, democratic heritage of the two countries represented in Magna Carta nevertheless shone through in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s third inaugural address, delivered on 20th January 1941. “The democratic aspiration”, Roosevelt said, “is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history. It permeated the ancient life of early peoples. It blazed anew in the middle ages. It was written in Magna Charta.”

: Over a thousand British citizens were detained without trial during the Second World War. Article 18B of the Defence (General) Regulations gave the Home Secretary the authority to intern people if he had “reasonable cause” to suspect them of “hostile associations”. This included members of the British Union of Fascists but also naturalised German and Austrian citizens. When Robert Liversidge was interned his lawyers sued the government for unlawful detention, citing Magna Carta. The Law Lords supported the Home Secretary. Lord Macmillan ruled that liberty was the “gift of the law and, as Magna Carta recognises, may by the law be forfeited or abridged.” Clause 39 of Magna Carta might start with ‘No free man shall be arrested, or imprisoned … except by the lawful judgement of his equals’ but ends ‘or by the law of the land.’ Internship was the law and so not incompatible with Magna Carta.

: ‘An International Magna Carta for all of mankind’, these were the words used to describe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Eleanor Roosevelt. The widow of President Roosevelt, Eleanor was the main architect and driving force behind the Declaration’s ratification by the United Nations General Assembly on the 18th December 1948. The Declaration was a direct response to the atrocities committed during the Second World War. Upon its adoption, the Member States of the United Nations pledged to work together to promote the thirty Articles of human rights. These include rights far removed from those debated in Runnymede in 1215, such as the right to an education and freedom of religion, speech and assembly. Many of these principles, in various forms, are today part of the constitutional laws of democratic nations around the world.

: From the streets of Budapest to the meadows of Runnymede, in 1957 a monument was unveiled that commemorated both a thirteenth century event and symbolised rising Cold War tensions. The American Bar Association funded Magna Carta memorial, fulfilling a major objective of the Magna Carta Trust, celebrates ‘Freedom under Law’ as part of the shared Anglo-American heritage. Speaking at the dedication ceremony, from Runnymede to the world, Sir Hartley Shawcross MP said “the most obvious danger to a free way of life is the spread of international communism” and, referring to events in Hungary, “however great and powerful, brutal and merciless, the totalitarian state may be, in the end the individual will transcend the state. His rights are of the spirit and they will prevail.”

: In 1971 Darcus Howe, on trial at the Old Bailey, argued that he should be tried by a jury of his peers, as guaranteed by Magna Carta, black working class people and not rich white barons. Howe found himself in the dock after police intimidation of the black community in Notting Hill prompted demonstrations, during which he and eight others had been arrested. The police argued that the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill was a drugs den but despite numerous raids had failed to find any evidence. Howe and others argued this was an excuse for the police surveillance of the black power movement. While Howe’s call for a black jury was a political stunt it exposed the political nature of the trial. Howe was acquitted and in his ruling Judge Clarke referred to institutional racism, the first acknowledgement of this problem by either the judiciary, government or police themselves.

: Beginning in 1967 2000 Chagos Islanders were forcibly removed from their homes to make way for a US military base. The islanders have campaigned ever since for their right to return. Their lawyers argue that the actions of the British Government were unlawful, citing clause 39 of Magna Carta that states that no free man shall be exiled ‘except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land’. In 2000 a British Court ruled that their removal was indeed unlawful. However, in 2004 a new law was passed that asserted that nobody had the right to live in the British Indian Ocean Territory. Its legality questioned again, the Law Lords voted in favor of the Government ruling that ‘The right of abode is a creature of the law. The law gives it and the law may take it away’.

: ‘No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights’. This clause has taken on new importance in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks and the war on terror. In this struggle the power of the state to curtail individual liberties in the pursuit of national security has grown considerably. Detention without trial, extraordinary rendition, secret evidence in courts have all hit the headlines and rekindled debate about the balance between the right of the majority to live in security and the right of the individual to liberty and privacy. In 2008 the government sought to extend the period for which terror suspects could be detained without trial to 90 days. In the subsequent parliamentary debate the veteran MP Tony Benn said should the Bill pass it would represent “the day Magna Carta was repealed”. 42 days was the compromise.

: We live in an age when the state and corporations have enormously powerful tools at their disposal to peer into our private lives, from our online shopping habits to the personal likes and dislikes we freely share on social media. Whether this vast pool of data is screened for our security, by agencies like GCHQ, or scandal, by phone-hacking newspapers, the erosion of privacy can seem irreversible. Conversely the revelations of Snowden, Manning and Wikileaks have demonstrated that state secrets are equally vulnerable to widespread exposure. Such concerns have prompted figures like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the internet, to question whether we need a Magna Carta for the digital age, a charter to protect our rights online and to keep the internet the free, open and neutral.