The greatest constitutional document of all time has gone on display at the Library of Congress. I don’t use that superlative lightly. The original copy of Magna Carta, on loan from Lincoln Cathedral, represents the most significant political moment in the history of our species. When its wax was sealed almost exactly 800 years ago, the law was, for the first time, elevated above the government.
We’re so used to that idea today that it takes a real effort of imagination to see how radical it must have been when it was first proposed. For thousands of years, the law had been whatever the biggest guy in the tribe said it was. The idea that an invisible, impalpable power stood above the king as surely as it stood above the poorest beggar, a power that was the property of the people as a whole, was utterly revolutionary.
It was from that contract — Magna Carta was a contract, with an enforcement mechanism that was eventually to become a parliament — that most of our liberties eventually came: jury trials, uncensored newspapers, equality before the law, regular elections, habeas corpus, free contract, secure property. Again, it is easy to become blasé about these things, to assume that they are the natural condition of an advanced society. In fact, they were overwhelmingly developed in the language in which you’re reading these words.
When we call them universal values we are, frankly, being polite. Suppose that the Cold War or the World War II had ended differently. There’d have been nothing universal about them then. If we’re blunt about it, these values became universal because of a series of military victories by the English-speaking peoples.
This isn’t the first time that this copy, one of four surviving parchments from 1215, has visited the United States. When I took my kids to see it in its customary ecclesiastical home, there was no fuss, no line. But when the same desiccated scrap of paper was displayed in New York in 1939, an almost unbelievable 14 million people crushed in to see it. The war broke out while it was still on loan, and it was transferred to Fort Knox for safekeeping until 1945, the aptest imaginable symbol of what the Anglosphere was fighting for, namely a system that exalts the individual above the state rather than the reverse.
Americans have always cared rather more for Magna Carta than the British have — hence your respectful habit of referring to it as the Magna Carta. The site where it was sealed, in a meadow by the River Thames, lies in my electoral district. It went wholly unmarked until 1957, when a spare and stark stone was finally raised there. By the American Bar Association.
There are good reasons why the Great Charter (to give it its English name) was such a big deal in the United States. Having been reissued several times during the 14th and 15th centuries, it faded slightly from public life during the Tudor years. Then, in the 17th century, it was revived with an almost fanatical fervor by opponents of royal power, who pressed it into their contemporary quarrels. The Puritan colonists left England during these years and carried the mania for Magna Carta to their new homes. It was published on American soil as early as 1687, by William Penn. Several colonies asked to incorporate it into their charters.
The Lincoln copy has, rather appropriately, come to D.C. via Boston. Eighteenth-century Massachusetts radicals had made Magna Carta, literally, a symbol of freedom: The state’s first emblem showed a patriot with a sword in one hand and a copy of the Charter in the other. The Founders were in no doubt that they were reasserting ancient freedoms, which is why a copy of Magna Carta hangs alongside the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights in the National Archives.
I never come to Washington without queuing up and standing reverentially before those three sublime texts. Even so, a 1297 version of the charter is not quite the same as an original. June 15, 1215, was the moment when what we now take to be an eternal principle — the idea that governments shouldn’t get to make the rules up as they go along — took written, contractual form. Those spidery Latin words represent what T.S. Eliot, in a different context, calls the “intersection of the timeless with time.”
Yes, there’s a lot of junk text in there, too, about inheritance rights and the ransoming of Welsh hostages and fish traps in the Thames. Yes, it was a deal between a cornered king and some mutinous aristocrats. Yes, the king broke it the moment he thought he could. Yes, it was only by the merest chance, the abominable King John’s death from dysentery and the succession of his 9-year-old son, that Magna Carta’s rights became actual rather than notional.
Still, if you get the chance, take a look. Think what it means to live in a country where “the law of the land,” that phrase from Magna Carta that has passed into our everyday speech, takes precedence over the convenience of the state. Look at the places where this isn’t so: Russia, say, or Syria or Venezuela.
Magna Carta is the Torah of the English-speaking peoples: the text that sets us apart while at the same time speaking universal truths to the human race. We’re luckier than we know.
