Magna Carta in the 20th century

Although today only three of its clauses remain on the statute book, Magna Carta continues to flourish as a potent and internationally recognised symbol of freedom under the rule of law. Generations have valorised Magna Carta as the ‘corner stone of English liberty’ and guarantor of democratic government. In its most modern incarnation it is seen as a charter that heroically established the right to trial by jury and ensured that no one — not even the king — was above the law. While the history of the Great Charter is more complicated than this popular historical narrative allows, the repetition of this interpretation has enabled Magna Carta to become a powerful totem of liberty, right and justice through the ages. As the Dean of Harvard Law School, Erwin N Griswold, noted in 1965, ‘Magna Carta is not primarily significant for what it was but rather for what it was made to be’.

Contemporary references to Magna Carta are legion. Despite being 800 years old it still regularly appears in political debates, courtroom judgments and newspaper opinion pieces around the world. Such is the power and flexibility of its message that lawyers and commentators still reference it, even though today’s issues and technologies have little in common with medieval England. In 1966, for example, William A. Hyman drafted a ‘Magna Carta of Space’, while more recently in 2014 Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, made calls for a ‘Magna Carta for the internet’.

Magna Carta and human rights

Perhaps the most important modern legacy of Magna Carta is its influence on both the language and intent of contemporary international charters on human rights. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, consciously echoed the clauses of Magna Carta relating to freedom of movement, arbitrary arrest and trial by jury. It was hoped, as Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), the chairman of the committee, stated, that the Universal Declaration would help extend the Great Charter’s promise of liberty across the world and would hopefully become ‘the international Magna Carta of all men everywhere ’.

Magna Carta across the globe

As these international declarations of human rights demonstrate, Magna Carta is widely recognised as a key historical document across the globe, and it continues to be seen as an enduring symbol of freedom and the rule of law. One example of the document’s enduring international importance is the purchase by the Australian government in 1952 of a 1297 Magna Carta from an English private school for £12,500. This manuscript is now displayed prominently in Australia’s Parliament building in Canberra, not far from Magna Carta Place and its monument to the document, erected in 1997. Elsewhere across the Commonwealth, Magna Carta has been vaunted as an important document for individual political rights. It was publicly praised by Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) during his famous trial for his life at Pretoria in 1964 and looked to by women agitating for female suffrage in the Bahamas in the 1960s.

Magna Carta in America

Though it is widely recognised across the globe, it is perhaps in the USA that Magna Carta enjoys the greatest prestige today. Inherited from England by the early colonists, Magna Carta is considered the basis for the United States constitutional guarantees of equality under the law and due process as enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and US Bill of Rights. Murals depicting the sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede decorate the walls of numerous courthouses across America, including the Supreme Court^[1]. Such is America’s reverence for the document that in 2007 the American financier David Rubenstein paid $21.3 million (equivalent to roughly £13.5 million) to obtain a copy for the nation — the highest price ever paid for a single sheet of parchment.

With certain exceptions — including a plaque laid by the Prime Minister of India in 1997 and a small memorial lodge belonging to the National Trust — the site of Runnymede itself is dominated by American monuments. The most magnificent of the memorials is a flood-lit neo-classical rotunda erected in 1957 by the American Bar Association. Designed by the English architect Sir Edward Maufe (1883-1974), the rotunda is filled with American stars and houses a pedestal dedicated to ‘Magna Carta symbol of freedom under law’.

Gifting Magna Carta to the United States

This was not the first time that Magna Carta had been used to strengthen Anglo-American relations. At the outbreak of World War II, an original 1215 Magna Carta belonging to Lincoln Cathedral became stranded in the USA where it had been displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. As the war intensified the British government debated the idea of gifting the document to the USA as a means of strengthening American public opinion in favour of the British war effort, and with the ultimate goal of bringing America into the war. The British Government recognised in internal memoranda that ‘Magna Carta is a part of American, as well as of English, history and both peoples equally trace their personal liberties from the signing of that document’. By emphasising the common ‘history and traditions which the two countries have in common’ and which are based in a common ideal of liberty, the proposed gift of Magna Carta, it was thought, would ‘greatly heighten the emotional interest of Americans’ in the war against fascism . As one Foreign Office memorandum put it:

The gift of Magna Carta would be at once the most precious of gifts and the most gracious acts in American eyes; it would represent the only really adequate gesture which it is in our power to make in return for the means to preserve our country .

Magna Carta and the British Union of Fascists

Of all Magna Carta’s uses during World War Two, perhaps the most surprising is that made of it by the British Union of Fascists (BUF) who engaged Magna Carta to oppose Defence Regulation 18B. This regulation allowed the indefinite detention without charge of people suspected of posing a threat to national security, leading to the imprisonment of many BUF members including their leader Oswald Mosely (1896-1980) and his wife Diana.

Magna Carta in opposition to Fascism

Magna Carta was also referenced by those opposing fascism. In 1940 the German Jewish composer, Kurt Weill (1900-50), then living in New York, composed a ‘Ballad of Magna Carta’ which represented the war on the continent as one in defence of liberty against ‘tyrants’. The allies also made use of the Charter as an embodiment of those ideals over which the conflict was fought. It is no coincidence that the Airforce’s Memorial commemorating over 20,000 airmen who lost their lives in World War II was built on Cooper’s Hill overlooking the site of Runnymede. As Queen Elizabeth II noted at the opening of the memorial, there could be no better location for the monument:

It was in those fields of Runnymede seven centuries ago that our forefathers first planted a seed of liberty which helped to spread across the earth the conviction that man should be free and not enslaved .

A powerful protean symbol

Magna Carta has become closely associated with ideas of good governance, justice and liberty. The very fact that Magna Carta could be celebrated by the British Union of Fascists at the same time that the British government was negotiating its gift to the United States; or the fact that Helena Normanton could invoke it in support of women’s political rights, denied by a Parliament whose very building is permeated with the iconography of the Great Charter, goes to the very heart of why Magna Carta has endured for 800 years. It is a powerful protean symbol whose broad — and often misinterpreted — principles can be used to defend a range of political and legal positions and lend the semblance of political legitimacy to those that invoke it. This has been the case throughout the Great Charter’s history and, as the modern invocations suggest, it is still the case today.

Footnotes

[1] Just as in the Supreme Court of the United States – where Magna Carta appears on the door and in the courtroom itself – the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom is imbued with references to the Great Charter. The front of the Court boasts a grand frieze depicting King John granting Magna Carta completed in 1913, whilst the Court’s library doors, made in 2008, are etched with a facsimile of the Great Charter. Across Parliament Square, in Westminster Palace, Magna Carta is equally celebrated as part of the nation’s historical narrative. 18 grand sculptures of the Magna Carta barons and bishops, commissioned by Prince Albert in 1858, look down into the chamber of the House of Lords, whilst in St. Stephen’s Hall hangs an enormous, and unsettling, painting of King John sealing Magna Carta, painted as part of a series of pictures marking 'Great domestic events in British history' in 1927.