MAGNA CARTA: the UNLIKELY DOCUMENT

The miraculous tale of the charter that made our free and prosperous society possible

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.

On the banks of the Thames at Runnymede, 800 years ago, a real-life miracle happened. Bad King John was forced to put the royal seal on the Magna Carta and, in so doing, to give effective constitutional protection to the key rights that make a decent society possible.

Magna Carta promises fair rules accessible to everyone: security of the person, protection of property including for women, a right to a say in how you are governed and, in particular, not to be taxed without your consent. And it’s actually a miracle in three ways.

First, it’s remarkable that all these key principles made it into one document, a feat that has eluded most theorists. And not just as a vague wish that government might somewhere, somehow become less tyrannical but as a set of working procedural protections.

Second, it’s a feat to find all these principles and protections in a document that was not an aspiration for the future but an attempt to preserve a system that already existed and, to a surprising extent, worked. The barons, prelates, knights and commoners who fought to bring John to heel really did enjoy the blessings of liberty to a remarkable degree and they wanted to keep them.

Third, and in many ways most startling, it actually worked. For eight centuries, against long odds and at great personal risk, men and women of principle and courage have defended the rights of Magna Carta, refined them and extended them, making possible the society we enjoy today.

It’s hard to get our minds around that, especially in a society that’s obsessed with novelty. We breathlessly embrace the latest musical trend, clothing style or health fad. If you don’t have the latest operating system on your smartphone you’re a hopeless chump.

Indeed, I personally feel that with the advent of Windows 10 later this summer I will at last begin to live. But legal systems aren’t like operating systems. They don’t change as the seasons do or as chips get faster. And it’s not just a matter of having found one way to make a decent society.

The principles in Magna Carta and the system that grew out of it are the only principles and the only system ever found that reliably give rights and dignity to the ordinary person. Nowhere else do we find the organic development of representative institutions that control the executive, be it king, tsar, emperor, chief or president, by the power of the purse, that was fully developed in Britain by 1415, with the commons represented, sitting separately, controlling its own affairs and holding primacy on money bills.

Nowhere else do we find the writ of habeas corpus, the doctrine that a man’s home is his castle, the jury system or the “law of the land” that, even before Magna Carta, was expressly held to bind the King. Nowhere else do we find a ruler deposed and executed for claiming his word was law, as happened to Richard II in 1399.

It didn’t happen all at once, of course. The system had to be defended against attack and subversion and it had to be refined. Habeas corpus, for instance, wasn’t fully articulated until the 17 th century. But the foundations were there and they proved solid.

Nowhere else do we find an Edward Coke rallying his countrymen against tyrannical innovation by appealing to a document already four-centuries old when he inspired his fellows to present Charles I with the Petition of Right. Nowhere else do we find successful revolutions to restore liberty … except in the societies Britain founded. And nowhere else do we find a colonial power, Britain, defied by armed rebels over violations of traditional liberty who, when the fighting is over, concede the justice of the revolt, reform their own institutions, grant representative democracy to their other colonies without warfare and join with the sons and daughters of those rebels to fight mighty wars in defence of liberty.

Among many other things, the British Parliament presented the American Congress with an elaborate gold replica of Magna Carta to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And the exemplar of Magna Carta that had been on display in the United States when the Second World War broke out was stored in Fort Knox during that conflict as a great treasure, just as the Roundhead general who captured the Tower of London during the English Civil War three centuries earlier had insisted they bring him the greatest treasure it contained: not jewels or gold but a Magna Carta.

The rights contained in the Great Charter have been front- ally challenged by scornful tyrants and zealots down through the centuries, requiring courage in foreign wars as well as in domestic turmoil. They have too often been neglected or brazenly violated at home, especially on matters of race. But it has always been possible to challenge our governments to live up to their ideals and, with much misery and heartache, that challenge has so far always been successful.

It’s such an amazing story that if we didn’t know it had happened we’d find it hard to believe. As fiction it would not be credible. But it did happen, in a tale full of preposterous villains like King John and James I, heroes like Alfred the Great, Stephen Langton and Edward Coke, and one victory after another snatched from the jaws of defeat.

It is our story too. Consider the tale of Joseph Howe, charged with libelling the colonial administration in Nova Scotia where he would later be a father of self-government. Urging the jury to acquit him by exercising popular sovereignty and striking down the British law saying truth was no defence in libel cases, he asked: “Will you permit the sacred fire of liberty brought by your fathers from the venerable temples of Britain, to be quenched and trodden out on the simple altars they have raised?” The answer was a ringing “No” then, as it must be today and tomorrow and next year and next century.

It’s amazing that Magna Carta could even come into existence and that it could have survived and flourished over all those centuries, so that former British prime minister Winston Churchill could write in 1956 that: “‘The facts embodied in it (Magna Carta) and the circumstances giving rise to them were buried or misunderstood. The underlying idea of the sovereignty of the law, long existent in feudal custom, was raised by it into a doctrine for the national State. And when in subsequent ages the State, swollen with its own authority, has attempted to ride roughshod over the rights or liberties of the subject it is to this doctrine that appeal has again and again been made, and never as yet, without success.”

It is an exceptional privilege to have inherited, not just these rights and ideals, but the extraordinary society built upon them. Liberty under law has given us, not just books we can read without fear, but a prosperous economy, a vital civil society and, when tested, the military resources to defend hearth, home and Magna Carta against all comers. But it’s also a heavy responsibility.

It would be a tragedy if we were now to be bullied or seduced into abandoning them, to believe that collective rights merely extend individual ones, that we must override due process to improve social justice, that parliamentary scrutiny is outdated in an era of endless progress. As C.S. Lewis wrote years ago, the difference between refining values, improving our adherence to them, and throwing them away and starting over “is the difference between a man who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own, and have them perfectly fresh?’ and a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.’” We have gone a considerable distance down that road already, with results clearly visible in dysfunctional governments and public dissatisfaction. It is time to get back to our wholesome roots.

It’s now been 800 years since King John was forced to concede that people have inherent rights, that a government that tramples those rights is no government at all; that everyone is entitled to a fair system of rules accessible to everyone, security of the person, protection of their property and a say in how they’re governed; the whole idea that citizens own their government and not the other way around. And it now falls to us to preserve those rights that have been handed down to us over all those centuries.

The first step in doing so is to remember that story and to tell it. We must understand how Magna Carta came about, how the rights it contains were preserved and expanded over the centuries and what challenges they face today that we, in turn, must meet to discharge the obligation placed upon us by those who went before and pass on to our posterity the blessings of liberty: a free, open, prosperous, decent society.

The principles contained within it are the only ones ever found that reliably give rights and dignity to the ordinary person

The exhibit MAGNA CARTA: Law, Liberty and Legacy, featuring 1300 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 Aug. 15 to Sept. 18; in Toronto at the Fort York National Historic Site from Oct. 4 to Nov. 7; and in Edmonton at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta Visitor Centre from Nov. 23 to Dec. 29. Please see Magnacartacanada.ca for details.