There's some corner of a foreign field that is forever America

Happy 4 July, fellow freedom-lovers

There is a patch of London’s commuter belt that is forever America, testimony to the great shared inheritance of England and the United States. This tiny bit of US territory is located at Runnymede, where in 1215 King John was forced into a peace treaty with his leading barons, an event that would have a profound impact on world history. It came about over frustration at the misrule of the king’s family, known to us as the Plantagenets, but it established fundamental principles about the rule of law. This Magna Carta, as it became known later that century, would help form the basis of the rule of law and due process in England and around the globe.

England does not really go in for national monuments, and when it does they are often eccentric. There is no great shrine to Alfred the Great, for example, the great founder of our nation, but we do have, right in the middle of London, a large marble memorial to the animals that gave their lives in the fight against fascism. And Runnymede, which you could say is the birthplace of English liberty, would be a deserted lay-by were it not for the Americans.

Beside the Thames, some 10 miles outside London’s western suburbs, this place ‘between Windsor and Staines’, as it is called in the original document, is a rather subdued spot, with the sound of constant traffic close by. Once there you might not know it was such a momentous place were it not for an enclosure with a small Romanesque circus, paid for by the American Association of Lawyers in 1957.

American lawyers are possibly not the most beloved group on earth, but it would be an awful world without them, and for that we must thank the men who on June 15, 1215 forced the king of England to agree to a document, ‘The Great Charter of the Liberties’.

Although John went back on the agreement almost immediately, and the country fell into civil war, by the end of the century Magna Carta had been written into English law; today, 800 years later, it is considered the most important legal document in history. As the great 18th-century statesman William Pitt the Elder put it, Magna Carta is ‘the Bible of the English Constitution’.

It was also, perhaps more importantly to the world, a huge influence on the United States. That is why today the doors to America’s Supreme Court feature eight panels showing great moments in legal history, one with an angry-looking King John facing a baron in 1215.

Magna Carta failed as a peace treaty, but after John’s death in 1216 the charter was reissued the following year, an act of desperation by the guardians of the new boy king Henry III. In 1300 his son Edward I reconfirmed the Charter when there was further discontent among the aristocracy; the monarch may have been lying to everyone in doing so, but he at least helped establish the precedent that kings were supposed to pretend to be bound by rules.

From then on Parliament often reaffirmed Magna Carta to the monarch, with 40 such announcements by 1400. Clause 39 heavily influenced the so-called ‘six statutes’ of Edward III, which declared, among other things, that ‘no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be… could be dispossessed, imprisoned, or executed without due process of law’, the first time that phrase was used.

Magna Carta was last issued in 1423 and then barely referenced in the later 15th or 16th centuries, with the country going through periods of dynastic fighting followed by Tudor despotism and religious conflict. By Elizabeth I’s time, Magna Carta was so little cared about that Shakespeare’s play King John didn’t even mention it.

The first print edition of Magna Carta appeared, in Latin, in 1508, followed by an English translation in 1534. As the number of books published and sold rocketed in the 16th century, along with literacy levels, there came a new interest in the law. This period saw the growth of two conflicting ideas: on the one hand absolutism, which had developed out of the practical reality of monarchies becoming centralised and monarchs more powerful, but also increasingly radical beliefs about representative government.

Elizabeth’s Scottish successor James I used to lecture parliament about his belief in the divine right of kings, yet there was also a rival idea developing — that the rights of ordinary Englishmen were natural and ancient and had only been usurped by monarchs. Magna Carta would be essential to this, even if many interpretations of English history used to justify it were quite creative.

The most influential of the constitutionalists was the jurist Edward Coke, who saw the Great Charter as reaffirmation of ancient English rights. Coke was a fervent believer in English liberties, as he set out in his book The Excellent Privilege of Liberty and Property Being the Birth-Right of the Free-born Subjects of England. Coke and parliamentarian John Hampden used Magna Carta as an argument for an Ancient Constitution that the Stuarts were trying to take away. They might have used some creative history along the way; Coke thought parliament as old as king Arthur and even dated it back to the City of Troy where the first Britons had come from.

Much of the Parliamentarians’ idea of the past was a sort of anti-French fantasy in which the Normans took away the ancient rights of freeborn Englishmen, who used to sit around a forest discussing the minutiae of law-making or perhaps cricket. Yet it remained a powerful force, and after James II was ejected Magna Carta was cited as precedent and justification, leading to the 1689 Bill of Rights, the cornerstone of the (unwritten) English constitution. The Bill of Rights confirmed English freedoms such as the right to have a reasonable bail when being tried, freedom from cruel and unusual punishments and freedom of speech, as well as preventing royal interference with the law and taxation.

After this, Magna Carta would continue to have great appeal to political liberals. Arthur Beardmore, a friend of radical 18th-century politician John Wilkes, was arrested for libelling the authoritarian politician Lord Bute in 1762, and when they came to arrest him, he just happened to be teaching his son about Magna Carta; it was obviously a contrived PR stunt, but Bute was unpopular and Beardmore was released.

In America, the Puritans and other bickering Protestant sects would make Magna Carta central to their beliefs, and here Edward Coke had even more of an influence. It was Coke who helped to draft the charter of the newly-established Virginia Company in 1606, which set the rules of government for the English colonies in the new world. On this continent, he wrote, there would be ‘all liberties, franchises and immunities … as if they had been abiding and born within this our realm of England’. Instructions issued in 1618 by the Virginia Company to Governor Sir George Yeardley were called the ‘Great Charter’ by Virginians, and the General Assembly of Virginia became the first such parliament in the western hemisphere.

Similar English liberties were guaranteed in the charters of the other colonies, among them Massachusetts, Connecticut and the Carolinas. When North Carolina was established, its proprietors authorised its governor to grant land on the same terms as the Grant Deed of Grant of Virginia, ‘a species of Magna Carta’. Puritan Massachusetts’s first emblem showed a man with a sword in one hand and a copy of Magna Carta in the other.

The importance of this ancient document became even greater in the debates and quarrels that followed after Britain had kicked the French out of North America in 1763. This would lead to rebellion and independence, and the most famous slogan of the revolutionary era — ‘no taxation without representation’ — is similar in spirit to Clause 14, which states that ‘And for us to have common counsel of the realm for the levying of an aid’.

When the American Constitution came to be written it was heavily influenced by Magna Carta, and the famous Fifth Amendment borrows from Clause 39: ‘No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury… nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ Likewise, the Sixth Amendment, which states that ‘the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed’, was similar to Clause 40.

In England, most of Magna Carta was taken off the statute books in the 19th century when the law was tidied up. Today just four clauses — 1, 13, 39 and 40 — remain, and they are there for emotional reasons as much as anything, as the rights within are guaranteed by subsequent laws. Clause 39 in particular remains one of the most important sentences in history:

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

Magna Carta’s importance was illustrated by the fact that, when a copy belonging to Lincoln cathedral was taken to New York to be exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1939, 14 million people went to see it. No one observing the world that year could deny that the rule of law was quite important in the scheme of things.

When war broke out, the Americans looked after the precious document and the British government, desperate to win over US support against the Nazis, tried to force Lincoln cathedral to donate their copy to the American people, as a goodwill gift — ironically just the sort of coercion that Magna Carta was supposed to stop.

Today that remains among only four of the original 40 copies from 1215 to still exist; another is at Salisbury cathedral and two at the British Library in London, one severely damaged by fire. A further 23 copies of reissues made between 1215 and 1300 survive in a variety of locations, in London, Oxford, Durham, Hereford and Canberra. Other Magna Cartas may turn up; one from 1217 was only discovered and identified as such in 1989, while a copy from 1300 was found in Sandwich, Kent in a Victorian scrapbook in 2015. Despite being badly damaged it is estimated to be worth $15m.

Magna Carta remains such an important part of American life that when in 2007 a copy of the 1297 Confirmation was sold by billionaire Ross Perot, it secured $21.3m at auction from the founder of a private equity firm, David Rubenstein, who announced that he intended to put it on public display and said: ‘Today is a good day for our country. This document stands the test of time.’ As good as his word, Rubenstein put it in the National Archives in Washington.

A generation after the war, following the assassination of John F Kennedy, the House of Commons honoured their fallen ally with a memorial at the spot where it begun. One acre of land at Runnymede was transferred to the people of the United States as a gift from the Queen and her Government, and is still technically US soil. The Kennedy memorial features a quote from his inaugural address: ‘Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, or oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.’

Happy 4 July!

This is a sort-of quasi-extract from my short history book on Magna Carta, which is priced just $2.99 for the meantime.