Have you ever suffered the misfortune to sit next to some know-it-all reflecting on the cinematic masterpiece that is the 1942 movie Casablanca and pronouncing in a loud stage whisper that Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) never actually said “Play it again Sam”? So what if it was Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) who actually said, “Play it Sam”? After all it is our memory which may have fallen short not the truly extraordinary performances, beautiful cinematography and utterly compelling storyline.
I was reminded of this whilst reading a newspaper article debunking some of the mythology which has grown up around Magna Carta. He explained with a journalistic authority that might lead one to assume that he was present at Runnymede on the morning of 15 June, 1215 and had been personally briefed by King John’s Head of Communications that, ‘In fact, almost everything attributed to the Magana Carta is wrong’:
The right to trial by jury had actually came about by order of Pope Innocent III rather than Magna Carta; and
Habeus corpus, protection against arbitrary imprisonment, again, it is claimed pre-dated Magna Carta.
So what is Magna Carta and why does it matter today? My answer would be that it is an unbroken thread linking us to an innate human desire to be free; to be wary of power in all its forms; to be fair in our treatment of others whether you are a widow or a Baron; it is about courage in standing up to the Pope and the King and demanding to be treated as citizens and not subjects; it is ultimately an attempt at a peace treaty seeking to resolve differences through dialogue and collective observance of common law rather than the arbitrary use of violence.
This sense of an ‘unbroken thread’ linking through history to the Magna Carta will be felt by current members of the Houses of Parliament whose creation in 1295 can be traced to the Great Council in Clauses 12 and 14 whose consent was required in order for the king to levy taxation. It is particularly felt in the House of Lords where grand statues of the sixteen barons and two bishops who witnessed the signing of the Magna Carta. Moreover, sections of the wording in the Letters Patent issued by the Queen and read each time a new member is introduced have been taken from Magna Carta.
The Prime Minister David Cameron quoted from H.E. Marshall’s classic book Our Island Story which described Magna Carta as [the] ‘foundation of all our laws and liberties’ and added that Magna Carta “paved the way for the democracy, the equality, the respect and the laws that make Britain, Britain.” Lord Bingham, a former Lord Chief Justice described how the Magna Carta wording, ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay the right to justice’ as having the “power to make the blood race.”
This brings me back to where I started: The misquotes of Casablanca perhaps arise because we haven’t actually watched it lately. The misunderstanding of the Magna Carta perhaps arise because we haven’t read it lately. So here’s a challenge for this Magna Carta Weekend, try and correct both and feel the “blood race” again.
Lord Bates is undertaking a 23 mile walk from Runnymede to Westminster on Sunday 14 June with John Glen MP to pay homage to the Magna Carta and raise funds for Fair Trials International https://www.justgiving.com/Michael-Bates9
The Charter is also the first step along the long road to the reformation.
Innocent III is a reforming Pope who has made significant changes to canon law establishing new human rights. He is also a Protector of England and the Monarchy. John presents the Charter as a threat to the Pope’s reforms by saying that the Barons are promoting violence and instilling fear; only weeks later the Charter is annulled.
King John came to the throne by virtue of a primogeniture succession now abandoned by the Queen. He is bound by a long standing Dark Ages convention to prevent violence against women.
Primogeniture is adopted by the nobility in response to the Canons of Adamnan. The cannons are first published as the ‘Annals of Ulster’ or the ‘Law of the Innocents’. They require that men should be the protectors of women, children and the clergy and that the first born male is in the strongest position to do this. Women are thus locked out of front line warfare. Adamnan is witness to the violence of Celtic wars. His Mother Ronnat observes:
“Such was the thickness of the slaughter into which they came to, that the soles of one woman would touch the neck of another. Though they beheld the battlefield, they saw nothing more touching and pitiful than the head of a woman in one place and the body in another, and her little babe upon the breasts of the corpse, a stream of milk upon one of its cheeks, and a stream of blood upon the other.”
The Monarchies of Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and now the United Kingdom have abandoned primogeniture. Uniquely amongst them the Queen is a Religious Head of State. She is to Protestants what the Pope is to Catholics.
A question must therefore be asked of the Church of England Synod: upon whose authority did the Queen as Nobility abandon the law of Adamnan and its protections offered to women, children and the clergy.
Ref: The Papal Bull Annulling Magna Carta
http://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-papal-bull-annulling-magna-carta
An Old-Irish Treatise on the Law of Adamnan
http://www.voskrese.info/spl/CainAdamnan.html