Magna Carta the greatest bargain ever struck.
We talk of personal freedom and equality as ‘universal values.’ But we’re being polite. We have them only thanks to the military victories of English-speaking nations
In a five-part series, the National Post marks the 800th anniversary of one of the most important documents in the history of the Western world.
The centenaries follow one another thick and fast. We are about to mark the 800th anniversary of the greatest bargain ever struck: Magna Carta, sealed on June 15, 1215, the first document ever to raise the rules over the ruler. But, before we turn to that miracle, let’s bow our heads for a moment at a centenary just past: that of the first major action by Canadian soldiers in the First World War.
The Second Battle of Ypres, fought in April and May 1915, was monstrous even by the standards of the Western Front. It was the first time that the Germans used chlorine gas. The men of the 2nd Canadian Brigade alone held their position as the yellow-green clouds engulfed the troops around them. It did not take long for the venom to dissolve the Allied line, leaving heaps of dead and dying men, their faces mottled, froth on their tortured lips. Later, the Canadians were hit by a second gas attack; their casualty rate was one in three.
Few Britons can talk of the Canadian war effort without a catch in their voice. The thought of those young men, every one a volunteer, crossing half the world to defend our country makes us emotional even a century later. Despite almost unimaginable fatalities — 67,000 Canadians killed and 250,000 wounded out of a total population of 7 million — the children of those veterans rushed to volunteer in the Second World War: a million men and women in all.
What made them do it? Was it simply affinity of blood and speech, a determination to stand by a kindred people? Obviously that was part of the explanation. But I can’t believe it was the whole story — that the First and Second World Wars were ethnic conflicts, different only in scale from, say, the breakup of Yugoslavia or the Hutu-Tutsi massacres. Read the letters that those volunteers sent home, listen to contemporary accounts of the conflict, and you find a clear sense that people were fighting “for freedom.” The values of the English-speaking peoples were repeatedly contrasted against the enemy’s authoritarianism. We were better than the Prussians and the Nazis, we told ourselves, because we elevated the law above the government, the individual above the collective, fair dealing over raison d’état.
But what made us that way? Was it something in our genes? Something in our soil? Hardly. The Anglosphere was dispersed across many continents and archipelagos. People of every creed and colour had adopted its values.
So what was it? And what is it? What magic formula still distinguishes Bermuda from Haiti, Hong Kong from China, Canada from Cuba? The answer to that question brings us to the second centenary, that of Magna Carta, which first established the principle that the law was not simply the will of the king or the biggest guy in the tribe.
We have so internalized that idea over the intervening eight centuries that it is now a struggle to see how revolutionary it must have seemed at the time. What, after all, was this thing that was said to stand above the barons, above the bishops, above the monarch himself ? No one could see it or hear it or touch it; yet it was the most powerful force in the realm. It ensured that the sovereign couldn’t simply make up the rules as he went along; that he was bound by what Magna Carta calls “the law of the land,” the folkright of the people themselves.
From that transformative idea came all the things we now take for granted. It ensured that people couldn’t be bullied or expropriated by their social superiors. The 18th century prime minister Pitt the Elder, who called Magna Carta “England’s Bible,” famously put it this way:
“The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter, the rain may enter — but the King of England may not enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement.”
Never mind how unusual that concept was in the 13th century, when the Charter was sealed; or even in the 18th, when Pitt spoke those words. Think how rare it is today. The appeal of the rule of law explains, for example, why people are keener to move from Ukraine to Canada than the other way around.
Grant constitutional government and much follows. The rule of law ensures sanctity of contract: the courts are there to offer redress to the individual, not as an instrument of state control. Secure property rights in turn lead to a market economy, and the higher living standards it ensures. Once we establish that the law stands above the executive, the people in government become representative rather than rulers.
Capitalism and democracy were lumped together loathingly by the Anglosphere’s enemies. The Nazis and the Communists used remarkably similar language to attack “decadent Anglo-Saxon capitalism,” “bourgeois democracy” and “soulless materialism” — much the same language, indeed, as the jihadi extremists today. They could see clearly enough that the principles established at Runnymede in 1215 — what the monument raised by the American Bar Association on the site calls “freedom under law” — were indeed the distinguishing characteristic of the English-speaking peoples.
To adapt Pitt ’s metaphor, Magna Carta is the Anglosphere’s Torah: the text that sets us apart while at the same time speaking universal truths to mankind.
It was the rule of law, more than anything, that the Englishspeaking peoples defended in the three global conflagrations of the past century — the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War. How many states were on the side of constitutional freedom in all three of those conflicts? The list is a short one, but it includes the chief Anglosphere democracies.
Nowadays, we talk of personal freedom and an independent judiciary and regular elections and equality before the courts as “universal values.” But, in truth, we’re being polite. If they became universal values, it was as the result of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples, in whose language they had been refined and developed. Imagine that the Second World War or the Cold War, or even the First World War, had ended differently. There’d be nothing “universal” about them then.
Is it really fair to trace all those precepts back to a bargain struck between a cornered king and his mutinous nobles — a bargain, moreover, that the king broke the moment he could get away with it?
Yes. Magna Carta exceptionally contained its own enforcement mechanism. Plenty of kings had made coronation oaths in which they swore to uphold justice. But the Charter instituted something different: a form of conciliar government which ensured that someone other than the king stood as the final arbiter. The baronial council that it created developed directly into the Parliament that sits at Westminster today, a Parliament conceived, not as an instrument of majority will, but as a guarantor of freedom, property and due process.
I always wince when MPs are referred to as “legislators.” Pass- ing laws is an incidental part of their job, as is debating in the chamber, meeting constituents and serving on committees. Their core function is to constrain the executive and prevent it from seizing too much money or power.
What of the idea, which one hears often, that we have romanticized Magna Carta, investing it with a power that would not have been apparent to its authors? Such an interpretation fits with the cynicism that defines our generation; but it isn’t true. Magna Carta was thought of by contemporaries in much the same way as by subsequent generations — as a guarantee against state power. Several 13th and 14 th century parliaments obliged overweening kings to re- issue it: it had been reconfirmed more than 40 times by the beginning of the Tudor dynasty.
It’s true that the document faded a little from public consciousness during the 16th century, but it became a national obsession in the 17th. Supporters of parliamentary supremacy saw a clear parallel between their own fight against the autocratic Stuarts and the earlier battle against the abominable John. Again and again they cited Magna Carta as the basis of the “ancient constitution” that the authoritarian Scottish dynasty seemed bent on wrecking.
When, at the end of the English Civil War, the commander of the parliamentary forces, Sir Thomas Fairfax, was appointed Constable of the Tower of London, his first act was an encouraging one. He called for the greatest treasure in the Tower to be brought before him. Not a crown nor a sceptre, but a desiccated piece of parchment carrying barely legible Latin script. A Magna Carta. “This is that which we have fought for,” he breathed reverently, “and by God’s help we must maintain.”
The 17 th century saw the departure of the early American colonists, and they carried their mania for Magna Carta with them to their new homes. Both sides in the American Revolution drew on it, at least rhetorically. To Loyalists, it was a guarantee of parliamentary supremacy; to Patriots, a summary of rights and freedoms that stood above both Crown and Parliament. This latter interpretation directly informed the U.S. Constitution.
Here, in short, is the text that makes us who we are, we who speak this language. It inspired our remote medieval ancestors to define their identity as freemen rather than subjects. It inspired the proto-democrats of the 17 th century as they fought against the continental model favoured by their monarchs. It inspired the 18th century radicals as they campaigned to extend the franchise. It inspired Washington and Jefferson to undertake their great endeavour.
It explains why we never fell for fascism or communism, why we found uniformed despots laughable rather than inspiring. And, yes, ultimately, it explains why those young men were standing in the trenches at Ypres.
They had come from every province, from ever y background. Among them were not only Canadians of French and British heritage, but also smaller numbers of black, Indian and Chinese Canadians. They shared the conviction that they were defending a set of values and a way of life superior to the enemy’s.
And you know something? They were right. Daniel Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament and author of “Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World.” The exhibit MAGNA
CARTA: Law, Liberty and Legacy, featuring 1,300 exemplars of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest sealed by Edward I, on loan from Durham Cathedral, will be touring
Canada this summer. Sponsored by Magna Carta Canada, it will be in the National Capital Region at the Canadian Museum of History, Gatineau from June 12 to July 26; in Winnipeg at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights from August 15 to September 18; in Toronto at the Fort York National Historic Site from October 4 to November 7; and
in Edmonton at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta Visitor Centre from November 23 to December 29. Please see Magnacartacanada.ca for details.