The scheming accidents of history can be so fascinating. 800 years ago, the barons and the nobility within England tried to curb the powers of an obsessed king to ensure that he remained within his obligations to his subjects. To avoid invasion, the king signed the treaty, but ultimately discarded these attempts to curb his power - leading to his assassination via spiked cider. As Napoleon would say, you cannot separate your inherent obligations and duties to your peers from your ability to rule. As his child was too young to rule, a more loyal, older baron became the king for a while and he ratified the treaty to take the wind out of the rebels sails. Over hundreds of years, the treaty was used by one side or the other to score points until this happened: Decapitation and a further, more peaceful, revolution tamed the English monarchy; once Parliament was top dog, its members lost interest in constitutions. Except among radicals, who waved it despairingly through the 18th and 19th centuries, Magna Carta went out of fashion in England. But it found new life in America. The first colonies were established just at the time that Coke had turned to needling James I, and the spirit of that argument shaped them. Coke wrote the first Virginia charter, guaranteeing the settlers’ rights as free English subjects; William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, first published Magna Carta in America. The title of his book—“The Excellent Privilege of Liberty and Property Being the Birth-Right of the Free-born Subjects of England”—made his point pretty clearly. The spirit of Coke strode through the incipient nation. Lawyers were over-represented among America’s Founding Fathers, and as students they were made to read him. They did not always find his prose inspiring—the young Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I do wish the devil had old Coke for I am sure I was never so tired of an old dull scoundrel in all my life”—but they recognised the importance of his vision to their cause. A more mature Jefferson was to write later to James Madison that “a sounder whig never wrote…nor of profounder learning…in what were called English liberties.” The rebellious colonists quoted Magna Carta against the British Parliament just as the 17th-century parliamentarians had quoted it against the king. The Massachusetts Assembly, protesting against taxation without representation, said that the Stamp Act was “against the Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen and therefore according to Lord Coke null and void”. When rebellious Massachusetts needed a new state seal, because the royal governor held the existing one, Paul Revere—he of the legendary Ride—engraved a replacement depicting a militiaman with a sword in one hand and Magna Carta in the other. The first Continental Congress in 1774 justified its rebellion on the ground that the colonists were doing “as Englishmen, their ancestors in like cases have usually done, for asserting and vindicating their rights and liberties”. And the echoes of that crucial chapter are clearly audible in the American Bill of Rights.
Posted on: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 04:01:41 +0000
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