Magna Carta

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I find myself in a position that reminds me of the first intervention that I think I made in this Parliament. At Question Time, the noble Lord, Lord Hill, was asked about why some historian—I cannot remember which one—was being removed from the national curriculum. I stood up, from a little further back than I am now, and suggested to the noble Lord that we should not worry about the nuances of a particular historian but about the facts, because intellectual fashions change. I compared intellectual fashions to hemlines.

I am probably of an unfashionable hemline and an unfashionable tradition in history, for which the noble Lord, Lord Sewel, of course has to take some responsibility, as he was running the University of Aberdeen when I was there as a student. I come from a school of historians, which I do not think is popular now, which did not regard Magna Carta as being that big a deal. It was something that failed; it was the control of those outside resisting the creation of a modern, centralised state where you control power and did not deal with your overmighty subjects. It was a symbol of King John’s failure, and was then imposed on Henry III, who is nobody’s idea of a romantic hero. He did not assert full control of his kingdom until the age of 29, which is very old by medieval standards, and ended up, in the last part of his career, with the kingdom effectively run by his son, who had to win a battle and a civil war for him after the rebellion of Simon de Montfort. Magna Carta was issued a couple of times during that reign.

Magna Carta is reissued and referred back to every time the overmighty subjects beat up a king. “You have failed, we are going to impose something on you”, they say. When I discovered that I was very unfashionable, in terms of intellectual background, I did a bit of reading. Magna Carta itself refers back to a conveyance of rights from the reign of Henry I. The barons then imposed it on King John, who was known as Softsword—today that would be a sexual reference but then it referred to the fact that he was not very good at fighting, or at least was not perceived to be. The fact that the statues round here, dusty as they may be, are wearing armour and thumbing broadswords conveys quite a lot of what I read about that process. I always felt that a successful baron was like a medieval Hell’s Angels leader, in that he came in and asserted his rights by force, through his skill at arms.

Magna Carta has gone on to be something else and the idea has emerged, whether justifiably or not, that the rule of law comes from it and seems to be embodied in it. If I go past a copy or a facsimile of it here with Americans, they stop and go, “Wow”. I was always much more impressed by the draft Declaration of Rights when we had it on display here, with its crossings-out and ink-stains, which set out the tripartite idea of sovereignty: Lords, Commons and Crown together. It may just be an educational accident, but I am told that I am intellectually cynical. The idea of Parliament did not get going until a fair bit after Magna Carta. It was something that was generally called when the Executive—the English royal family—wanted money out of their subjects, usually to fight a war. That was something different.

Magna Carta may have set up an idea, but a study into the way that an idea grows and captures attention and the way you refer back to a golden age might be a more important thing than its point in history. It might be more important to look at the fact that it can suggest something else to somebody. The events themselves will be argued over, but the fact that you are still arguing over them is probably a greater contribution to an idea than any historical events will be. I hope that we can reflect that and do not make it out to be some great, almost religious, experience on the part of those imposing it. It was not. It was somebody saying, “We will deal with our problems now”. When they did not get their own way, they called in a French army to get rid of the king. That does not sound like the start of democracy to me.