மேக்னகார்ட்டா - Magna Carta ( 5 )

On History: anyone who thinks that the Magna Carta is an infallible guide to our current liberties has another thing coming. For Andrew Marr, the actual document is full of awkward surprises

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

Will we ever forget? As Britain struggles with the legal dilemmas involved in anti-terrorist laws, the phrase returns: “going all the way back to Magna Carta”. Tony Benn, the veteran left-winger, described proposals to extend detention of suspects to 42 days without trial as “the day Magna Carta was repealed”. A few years ago, a BBC poll found that June 15th, the day it was signed, was the favourite date for a proposed “British Day” holiday.

Never mind that it wasn’t signed. From Diggers to Chartists; from jowly Whig historians to lean American revolutionaries; from Protestant bigots to today’s civil-liberties campaigners, the lure of the waxy parchment has resisted all nay-sayers, revisionists and mockers. A fairly squalid act of crisis management, three days of haggling between a failing king and a bunch of local warlords, which happened nearly 800 years ago on a small Thames island, which soon failed and was quickly repudiated, has come to stand for all rights, all liberties. That’s brand loyalty.

It is an easy trick to point out how little of the Great Charter is even comprehensible so long after the riven feudal society which spawned it has gone. How can one possibly translate for a modern audience the meaning of the archaic story of King John, his bitter feuds with his father and brothers, his savage territorial wars, sprawling across the blood-ties of European royalty, and the endless struggles with contemptuous barons?

Here was a man whose father had imprisoned his mother; who fought his brothers and tried to betray his eldest, the obsessive Crusader Richard the Lionheart. He then fought his nephew Arthur for power. He may have killed Arthur with a botched castration, or by knifing him and throwing him into the Seine. (We should not feel too sorry for Arthur who, in turn, had tried to kidnap his own grandmother.) He was forced to grovel to Pope Innocent III, himself a ruthless character who threatened England with invasion and for a while put the church there on strike, threatening the people with Hell, because John would not accept his nominee as Archbishop of Canterbury. Although John had it coming, there are no heroes here.

These are tales which, post-Shakespeare, would need to be translated into drug feuds in Colombian shanty-towns or New York mafia families to make sense; in which there is no virtuous power, and merely a struggle for ascendancy involving endless family betrayal and the corruption of all law. The story of John’s loss of the crown jewels in a tidal wrong turn is like a subplot from “The Sopranos”.

Reading through it now (translated from the original, in Latin, of course) one finds the bulk of the text is a dense web of deals about inheritance, power and property which essentially bolstered the position of the barons, territorial hard-men, rather than “the people”. Given the importance of Magna Carta to English identity, it is worth noting that of the 25 barons who forced John to submit, 19 still have French names. No heroes, they. Their main beef against him was that he had lost his French war and was trying to make them pay for it. But the notion that they were sturdy English patriots is somewhat undercut by the fact that when John repudiated the Charter, they promptly invited the French prince Louis to invade. Louis conquered half of England and plunged the country into full-scale civil war. Had John not died rather suddenly, possibly of over-eating, then his French cousin might well have been King Louis of England as well as being Louis VIII of France.

Anyone who thinks that despite all this, the Great Charter is an infallible guide to our current liberties might like to reflect on clauses such as “Heirs may be given in marriage, but not to someone of lower social standing” or the two clauses robbing Jews of interest on loans made to people who died. The power it sought to entrench was the power of hard-faced landowners and city rulers.

So why has it lasted? It does contain the deathless promise that all “freemen” should have its proclaimed liberties “forever” and promises (Tony Benn’s point) that no freeman should be imprisoned unlawfully. But above all, it permits the barons legal right to revolt if the monarch fails to abide by his Runnymede deal. In vivid language, the king allows them to “distrain upon and assail us in every way possible, with the support of the whole community of the land, by seizing our castles, lands, possessions, or anything else saving only our own person and those of the queen and our children, until they have secured such redress as they have determined upon.”

There we have it. There’s the language of power. This is not the foundation for common law, or an early charter of human rights. Its main message is that tyrants may be toppled. In England’s cathedrals and museums, gawped at by millions, there lies a ticking alibi for bloody insurrection.  

Andrew Marr presents "The Andrew Marr Show" on BBC1 and "Start the Week" on Radio 4. His "History of Modern Britain" has been a bestseller. He is a former editor of the Independent. His last column for Intelligent Life magazine called for more books on scientists 
(Courtesy : moreintelligentlife  ) 

--கே.எஸ்.இராதாகிருஷ்ணன்.
20-06-2015.