David Starkey's Magna Carta (2015) - full transcript

Relations between a state

and its people can all

too easily break down,

from bickering to riot, from

anarchy to bloody revolution.

The rulers, whether they call

themselves kings and emperors

or presidents and prime

ministers, are arrogant,

power-grabbing and often

corrupt, while we, the ruled,

can be disorderly,

irrational and bloody-minded.

But, 800 years ago in

England, one such crisis -

local, limited, particular -

threw up a document that has

become a kind of universal model,

a sort of blueprint.

They didn't get it right first

time, but constantly revisited

and readjusted, it has

become a working constitution.

Its words still retain their power

to quicken the blood, with ideas

to keep governments in check

and fill autocratic regimes with fear.

It's called Magna Carta, and it

matters as much now as then.

More indeed, perhaps, as we

have forgotten so many of its lessons.

This is the river thames,

and I'm travelling

upstream from east to west.

Steam whistle blows

I'm on this lovely pleasure

steamer, and nowadays, indeed,

the river is largely a tourist attraction.

But back in the middle ages, it

was the superhighway of England.

It's the summer of 1215, and

England is bitterly divided about how

it should be governed and,

indeed, who should govern it.

It's what we might call

a constitutional crisis.

But it has gone beyond words

to the very brink of civil war.

Back there, some 20 miles downstream,

is the barons' main camp in London.

And over there, some five miles

upstream, is the king's camp in the

magnificent, almost impregnable

fortress of Windsor castle.

And here is runnymede.

"A new state of things

has begun in England,

"such a strange affair as

had never before been heard,

"for the body wished to rule the head

"and the people desired to

be masters over the king."

So wrote a monk who witnessed

the tense confrontations on these

watery meadows between king

John and his rebellious barons.

This stand-off is the very

stuff of school history lessons.

In fact, it was just the midpoint

of a bitter power struggle that

would threaten to tear England apart

and one that had started

several years earlier.

England in the 13th century.

Contrary to our popular perception,

this is not some dark age -

quite the reverse.

England is ruled by tiny

strips of parchment with

a government of writing and sealing.

It has seen an enormous explosion

in sophisticated law, offering

justice, settling disputes, dealing

with an increasingly complex world.

But it is this almost insatiable

demand for a fairer society

that will bring people to conflict

with their monarch, king John.

To offer justice is one of the fundamental

responsibilities of kingship.

And it was one that John,

whose tutor had been a leading

judge, found especially congenial.

It was also something that people wanted.

However, law and justice

are a two-edged sword.

They're a vital necessity.

On the other hand, they can be

so easily perverted into a means

for the king to exercise

excessive and arbitrary power

and to delve excessively

into his subjects' pockets.

And king John certainly

knew how to abuse power.

A ruthless megalomaniac, he was

accused of murdering his nephew

and dishonouring his noblemen's wives.

By all accounts, he was a bad king.

For most monastic chroniclers,

John was the very

measure of human depravity.

"Foul as it is," one declared,

"hell itself was defiled

by the foulness of John."

John's many defects of character

his violent rages, his lusts

and his shifty unreliability - also

damaged relations with his barons.

But their principal

grievance was to be financial.

John wanted to regain a

great continental empire

he had inherited but lost.

The expenditure needed would be enormous.

From 1206, and following the

loss of most of his lands in France,

John concentrated on England

and on raising and hoarding cash.

He targeted everybody - nobles

and townsmen, Jews and the Church,

and he used any and every means.

He was astonishingly successful.

He doubled royal revenue and more,

and by 1212, he had

accumulated a gigantic cash hoard

of at least £132,000 in

coin, in castle treasuries.

And then he blew the lot.

In the summer of 1212, John

lodged an ambitious counterattack

against king Philip Augustus

to recapture his lands in France.

But it ended in disaster.

Horse whinnies

at bouvines, north of Paris,

in the summer of 1214,

John's allies were comprehensively

put to flight by the French king.

Very few medieval battles

resulted in complete rout,

but this was one of them.

A weakened and impoverished

king John returned home

to find his realm in disarray, his

angry barons now in open revolt.

This is where the real

novelty of 1215 began.

There had been plenty of earlier

revolts against royal misgovernment,

but they had taken the

form of rebellions in favour

of rival claimants to the throne.

In this winter of 1214-15, however,

there were no such rival claimants,

and John's opponents risked

being rebels without a cause.

Instead, they took the

revolutionary step of rebelling

not in the name of a

person, but of an idea.

Led by Robert fitzwalter,

the self-styled marshal of the

army of god, the barons decided

they would demand the king restore

their ancient rights and liberties.

There were precedents,

and talk turned to the

charter of liberties granted by

Henry I over 100 years previously.

It seemed the perfect solution.

Armed and ready for war, in early

January 1215, the barons went to

confront John about their grievances

at the Temple Church in London.

John was there under the

protection of the immensely rich,

immensely powerful crusading

order of the knights templar.

The barons entered and

demanded John agree to Henry I's

charter of liberties and reaffirm

by oath their ancient freedoms.

He refused.

According to one chronicler,

he angrily declared he would

never Grant them liberties

that would render him their slave.

John countered with an oath of

his own, by requiring his barons to

reswear their traditional

oath of allegiance,

but with an extra clause -

to follow him not only against all

men, but also against the charter.

The two sides were now

further apart than ever.

Both now manoeuvred for advantage.

John appealed to Rome, the barons hit back.

They renounced their allegiance

to the throne on the 5th of may.

And 12 days later, their forces

took London. This was decisive.

The loss of his capital forced

John into serious negotiation...

And to runnymede.

The watery meadows were

a convenient midway point

between the two rival forces.

But places between two armed camps,

each bitterly hostile to the

other, risked becoming battlefields.

Runnymede was chosen

precisely because it couldn't,

as the surrounding land

was and, indeed, still... damn!

..Is too wet and too boggy.

Horse neighs

there wasn't just one meeting at runnymede,

but several, as the two

sides negotiated terms.

By 10th June, a draft

document, not yet Magna Carta

but an outline settlement, was drawn up.

The king then confirmed

the settlement, known as the

articles of the barons, by ordering

his great seal to be fixed to it.

And here it is - the very document.

It is headed, "these are the

articles which the barons seek

"and the king agrees."

And to show, indeed, to guarantee

that the king had agreed to it,

here is his great seal, with

the king sitting in majesty.

Now, most of the articles are

arranged like a shopping list.

They are written very tersely,

like a telegram or a tweet,

so that the lines are only half

a dozen or a dozen words long.

Now, the barons' demands

are very prominent,

but equally, these articles show

just how much further the barons

had had to go in appealing

outside their own ranks,

promising justice not only to

the barons but to all free men.

Well, there's an article

that deals with that.

In other words, even in

this sort of sketch form,

this series of notes of a committee,

the embryo of Magna Carta

shows us that it is so much more

than just an appeal to

narrow, aristocratic self-interest.

So what actually did happen on

that famous day of 15th June 1215?

It's the date that textbooks

celebrate as the signing

of Magna Carta.

Except that it wasn't.

John didn't sign the charter.

There is no evidence

that the king could write,

and, in any case, royal documents

weren't authenticated with

the king's signature, but with his seal.

Probably, indeed, to complete

the demolition of the traditional

picture, on 15th June 1215,

there wasn't even a charter to sign.

No original sealed copy

of Magna Carta survives

and there is no evidence

that one ever existed.

Instead, what happened on 15th

June was a binding agreement,

solemn on both sides between

the king and the barons, that the king

would issue Magna Carta and that

the barons would swear fealty in return.

The articles of the barons

were then quickly transformed

from a rough shopping list

into a smooth, continuous,

unambiguous legal form to become...

Magna Carta, the great charter.

In a dense, almost impenetrable Latin text,

some 4,000 words were squeezed

just onto one membrane of parchment

made from dried and smoothed sheepskin.

13 copies were produced to

be circulated across the realm.

For the barons, the clauses that

really mattered in Magna Carta

dealt with the inheritance,

marriages and ownership of land.

These may seem remote

now, but they established what

half the world, from

Russia to China, still lacks -

that the state can't help

itself to private property at will.

And then there are the famous

clauses which best have come

to symbolise the universal

freedoms promised by Magna Carta -

clauses 39 and 40.

"No free man shall be seised or imprisoned,

"or stripped of his rights or possessions,

"or outlawed or exiled or deprived

of his standing in any other way,

"nor will we proceed with force

against him or send others to do so,

"except by the lawful

judgment of his equals

"or by the law of the land.

"To no-one will we sell, to no-one

deny or delay right or justice."

There was, indeed, there is,

something here that really matters.

The sense that Magna Carta protects

and defines those three key

fundamental freedoms of the

anglo-Saxon world - life,

liberty and property - is spot on.

With the 800th anniversary,

the British library is mounting

a special Magna Carta exhibition.

The centrepiece - one of

the original 1215 copies,

of which only four still survive.

This is a document which

is in Latin, a language which,

nowadays, very, very few

people can read readily.

Do you think this has an irretrievable

effect of distancing, of separating

and making it feel remote?

Well, it is written in medieval

Latin and it is written in medieval

handwriting as well, of course.

Which is even worse, yes!

And here it is on this

parchment made from sheepskin

and it isn't the most... in fact,

it is an actual sheep, isn't it?

We should see the head

there, we should see the legs

on either side and the tail

sticking out there. Absolutely.

And nobody could say that it is

the most beautiful collection item

that we have, but I never fail to be amazed

by the impression that it makes

on visitors to the library and how

much people value the opportunity

to be in proximity to this incredibly...

The sacred text, yes!

..Incredibly famous document.

And people do almost treat it

with the sort of reverence that you

might expect of a sacred text.

But, back in 1215,

Magna Carta came close to

becoming an obscure footnote in history.

Publicly, John had accepted Magna Carta

and reconciled himself with his subjects.

Privately, he burned with

resentment and threw a characteristic

fit of rage, gnashing his

teeth, as a chronicler reports,

scowling with his eyes and gnawing

on the very twigs and branches.

He would not keep his word a

second longer than he had to.

John immediately appealed to Rome

and to pope innocent III to

have Magna Carta annulled.

One clause in particular was

difficult for John to stomach.

Clause 61 set out how Magna

Carta was to be enforced.

It set up a committee of 25

barons to hold John to every last jot

and tittle by any and every

means, including the levying of war.

Now, the idea was seductive

but it proved to be disastrous,

because it tried to protect

Magna Carta by effectively

destroying royal sovereignty.

And no king, least of all John,

could possibly agree to that.

Pope innocent responded

swiftly to John's request to have

Magna Carta quashed.

He immediately spotted the

threat it posed to all autocrats,

himself included.

He sent a firm reply in a papal bull.

Magna Carta, the bull says,

had been "extorted by force

"and violence, such as would've

affrighted the most courageous man.

"It was unjust, illegal,

harmful to royal rights

"and shameful to

the English people."

So, a mere ten weeks after those

heady June days at runnymede,

Magna Carta had been declared

null and void and of non-effect

by the highest earthly authority

known to medieval man.

And, do you know, it

made not a jot of difference

to the behaviour of anybody involved.

Both sides now prepared for civil war.

John recruited mercenaries,

whilst the barons resorted

to the traditional tactic of backing

an alternative claimant to the throne.

In a measure of their desperation,

they offered the crown to

a frenchman, prince Louis.

Louis had a vague hereditary claim

but his real strength was that he

was the anybody-but-John candidate.

In the invasion we rarely talk about,

Louis arrived in London

with 7,000 French troops.

Whilst John travelled north to

places like here at Headingley,

to recapture the castles

of his rebellious barons.

The fate of Magna Carta

now hung in the balance

and it was fate that would

deal the decisive blow.

Thunderclap

on 19 October 1216, during a violent storm,

John died unexpectedly.

Thunderclap

at Newark castle in Nottinghamshire

his enemies alleged

from a surfeit of peaches.

his nine-year-old son

was crowned Henry III.

As he was underage, the real power lay

with his regent, William

the marshal, himself a baron.

He immediately re-issued

Magna Carta, but with a difference.

This is the tomb of William

the marshal, Earl of pembroke.

He was the most

successful jouster of the age

and arguably the man who,

as regent for the boy king Henry,

saved England, the plantagenet

dynasty and Magna Carta itself.

William the marshal wisely saw the

clause for a committee of barons to

enforce Magna Carta was dangerously

unworkable and stripped it out.

The result was an

astonishing reversal of fortune.

Henry, burdened with none

of his father's political baggage,

proved to be a much more

attractive king than John.

Whilst Magna Carta,

hitherto discredited as the

occasion of civil war, factional strife

and foreign intervention,

was suddenly transformed

into the squeaky-clean manifesto

of an optimistic new regime.

Not all the barons were

convinced by the regime change

and some fought on.

Steel clashes

but marshal, famed not only

for his political acumen but also

for his prowess in combat, routed

them at the battle of Lincoln fair.

Louis and his troops fled

back to the safety of France.

Peace and stability were

restored to the realm.

Then, in 1225, when Henry

III was old enough to assume

full executive power, Magna Carta

was reissued it its definitive form.

This time, the charter

emphasised that it was granted

by the king's full and free consent.

The taint of war and coercion

which had dogged the

first Magna Carta was gone.

The charter had achieved

something truly revolutionary

and almost by accident.

The great charter, despite its name,

contained no great general

statement of principle.

However, its multitude of

detailed clauses did imply one -

that the king, however great his power,

however much the law was his law,

was, finally, under the law.

Not surprisingly, kings, the good

ones as well as the bad ones,

found the idea difficult to accept

and it would be disputed for

centuries in peace and war.

However, Magna Carta quietly,

but with enormous cumulative

effect, laid the foundations

of the two key institutions

that in time would bridle

the English monarchy.

They were both based here

in the heart of royal England,

Westminster.

Colloquially, we call this building

here the houses of parliament.

Actually, it's the palace of Westminster.

But it was the principal

and indeed the only palace

properly so-called of the

medieval kings of England.

How it becomes a seat of

parliament is a very long story.

But the story, like so much

of our political structure,

begins with Magna Carta.

The demands of the great charter

led to an assembly of bishops and

barons who met to approve

taxation and sanction its collection.

This assembly was the embryo

of the modern parliament,

with its two houses of lords and commoners.

The precedent of this relatively

painless way of raising taxation

was irresistible for revenue-hungry kings

like Edward I and Edward III,

with their perpetual endless wars

against the Welsh, the

Scots and the French.

Parliament used the Grant of taxation

to extort concessions from the crown.

Kings didn't like it, but if

they wanted the money -

and they almost always

did - they had to lump it.

Monarchs also found themselves

grappling with the new idea

of a legal system whose first

home was Westminster hall here.

Magna Carta called for professional judges

and a fixed place for the law courts.

Before, kings administered

justice themselves

and the courts moved with the

king. Magna Carta changed that.

The king's law was becoming

the common law of England.

For hundreds of years Magna Carta

determined the rules of engagement

between the king and his

subjects, but it was not to last.

Fierce cries

four centuries on from the meeting

at runnymede, England found herself

in another crisis more

bloody and more protracted

than even the confrontation with king John.

On the throne was Charles I.

The second king of the house

of Stuart, his reign began in 1625,

but it's hard to imagine

two more different men.

John, lecherous, murderous

and systematically dishonest,

was a pantomime villain, whilst Charles,

dignified and devoted to his family,

was the very model of a good man.

All of which raises some

awkward questions -

why was such a good man such a bad king?

And why does Magna Carta

wake from slumber to play

a key role in these tragic events?

Those great creations of

Magna Carta, parliament

and the common law courts still flourished,

but the real locus of royal

government had moved to

different institutions, to the

court, the council and the church.

And to a different place,

the palace of whitehall.

This splendid interior now

known as the banqueting house,

was the principal reception room

of Charles's palace of whitehall.

In the very latest classical

style, it's designed by inigo Jones,

the most fashionable architect of the day.

Whilst the ceiling is painted

by sir Peter Paul rubens,

the most famous contemporary artist.

But rubens' ceiling is

more than lavish decoration,

it also has a powerful political message.

The central oval represents

the ascent to heaven

of Charles I's father, James I.

James declared that

"the state of monarchy is the

most supremest thing on earth,

"even by god himself."

Kings are called gods.

Ruben's genius transmutes

James's words into soaring,

swirling imagery in which kings

not only reign by divine right

but are divinities themselves.

And in whitehall, Charles could be forgiven

for thinking that rubens'

extravagant painting

told no more than the simple truth.

But only a few hundred yards

away, there was another palace,

a very different palace,

the palace of Westminster.

Here, the king summoned

and dissolved parliament but

without the agreement of the lords

and commons, he could do nothing.

So, who was the real king of England?

The Magna Carta limited

king of Westminster or Charles,

absolute monarch of whitehall?

Normally, the choice never needed

to be made, but there was one

area of conflict which threatened

to destabilise everything.

Religion.

The tension had been present

ever since the reformation

when Henry VIII made the English

king head of the English church,

giving the monarchy huge new powers.

Under Charles I, it

became acute, since the king

and his leading subjects disagreed

fundamentally about religion.

The king wanted a ceremonious religion,

that his opponents both feared

and denounced as Roman catholic.

His subjects, on the other hand,

wanted a stripped down, radical

protestantism that the king

sneeringly dismissed as puritan.

With the fire fanned by this

underlying tension about religion,

relations between Charles and the

house of commons quickly broke down.

Parliament refused to agree to taxes

to pay for Charles' military adventures.

Charles, desperate for money,

demanded customs duties

and forced loans and when a

few brave people refused to pay,

he imprisoned them and imposed martial law.

But one man thought he had

the solution to the impasse,

sir Edward Coke.

Coke was lord chief justice

and one of the most successful

lawyers ever.

He was also a brutal

prosecutor, leading the case

against sir Walter Raleigh

and the gunpowder conspirators.

Coincidentally, Coke's legal

practice was in the temple

which had become one of the inns of court.

Coke was the law.

Naturally, as a proud

as well as principled man,

he thought that the law should be supreme.

So, just like the barons who

confronted king John on this

very spot long ago when

it was the headquarters of

the knights templar,

Coke turned to Magna Carta

to bridle another overweening king.

On 17th may 1628, sir Edward

Coke Rose in the house of commons

and declared that Magna

Carta is such a fellow,

that he will have no sovereign.

The words were deliberately,

dangerously, disturbingly bold.

The sovereign was the king.

Now Coke was declaring there was

another greater sovereign, Magna

Carta, which, as fundamental law,

neither parliament nor the

king himself could touch.

Coke took the key principles of Magna Carta

and tried to turn them

into constitutional law,

into what would become

known as the petition of right.

Charles resisted as vehemently

as John had fought off Magna Carta.

But, likewise in vain.

Desperate for a

parliamentary Grant of money,

Charles gave his assent to

the petition on 7th June 1628,

though probably in as bad faith as John.

In 1629, Charles did away

with parliament and the law

and lawyers, contrary to what

Coke hoped, did nothing to stop him.

Matters came to a head in the

summer of 1642, when Charles

raised his standard over Nottingham

and declared war on parliament.

The bloody clash followed

that would tear England apart.

Though it would take seven years,

eventually the king was beaten

and for the first time in history, in 1649,

an English king would

be put on public trial under

the watchful eyes of

cromwell's new model army.

Charles was brought under

armed guard into the great hall

at Westminster here.

The king was dressed entirely

in black, with the silver star of the

order of the garter on his shoulder

and its blue ribbon round his neck.

He kept his hat firmly on throughout,

as did his judges in a sartorial

stand-off of mutual contempt.

They, for his office of king, he,

for their claim to be his judges.

Worse was to come.

As a prosecuting counsel

Rose, Charles tapped him on the

shoulder with his silver topped

cane and commanded him to hold.

The counsel ignored him.

Then, as the charges were read out,

the top fell off Charles' cane.

The king looked round, expecting

that somebody would pick it up.

Nobody did. Instead, he, the

king, had to stoop to retrieve it.

The charge continued that he

had employed a tyrannical power

to rule according to his will

and to overthrow the rights

and liberties of the people.

Charles' response was that

a monarch was not subject to

earthly authority and he

refused to enter a plea.

But here in the great hall,

legalities were soon set aside.

The show trial found Charles Stuart guilty.

He was sentenced to death

for crimes against the people.

The place of his execution

was quite deliberate,

outside the banqueting house.

Passing under the great Ruben's ceiling,

and his father ascending to heaven,

Charles stepped from a window

directly onto a high scaffold

at the front of the building.

This time, it had taken a civil

war and the beheading of a king

to enforce the principles of Magna Carta.

But, the resort to violence

destroyed the freedom it

sought to protect, leading to

a military dictatorship under

lord protector cromwell, who proved

just as despotic as any monarch

and who famously denounced

Magna Carta as Magna farta.

The restoration of the Stuart

monarchy after cromwell's

death, seemed a blessed relief.

However, religious tensions resurfaced

when James ii secretly

converted to catholicism and then

married a catholic, sparking

panic among the protestant elite.

It seemed as though the bad old

days of the civil war had returned.

But James ii, in contrast

with his father, Charles I's

iron resolve, lost his

nerve and fled abroad.

The royal family indivisibly

united in the civil war split with

James' daughter, Mary, and

her husband, William of orange,

leading the resistance.

The result was a bloodless coup

which opened the way to a radically

new political settlement, an

updated version of Magna Carta called

the bill of rights in deference

to Coke's petition of right.

The crown was offered to William

and Mary on condition

that they accepted its terms.

On the 13th February 1689,

it was back to the banqueting house

for the denouement of what became

known as the glorious revolution.

William and Mary took their

place under the canopy on the dais,

the lords, to the right, and

the commons, to the left,

led by their respective speakers,

approached the steps of the throne.

The clerk read out the bill of rights

and a nobleman offered

William and Mary the crown.

William accepted it and

the pair were proclaimed king

and queen to the sound of trumpets.

Nothing would ever quite be the same again.

England or Great Britain as it

would soon become with union with

Scotland, had exchanged

the sovereignty of kings,

not as Coke would have wished

for the sovereignty of the law,

but for another sovereignty,

that of parliament.

However, Coke's dream for Magna

Carta as fundamental law didn't die.

It was to change its identity and

move far away from its birthplace.

Runnymede is the most English of places

and Magna Carta, the

most English of events.

But what perhaps is most

English of all, is that there is nothing

much to Mark the spot of one of the

most famous events in human history.

Nothing English, but there is this.

It's erected in 1957 by the

American bar association to

commemorate Magna Carta,

symbol of freedom under the law.

It's here because Magna

Carta matters in america too.

It's our very first English export

there, because Magna Carta was

carried in the minds of the

English colonists themselves.

The settlers came here to this wild

and untamed land for

many different reasons.

Some were economic migrants,

some were escaping religious

persecution back home.

But they all thought of themselves

as English, bringing with them

the rights of englishmen as

they set up their little Englands

across the sea.

From the beginning, the idea

was formally written into their laws.

Starting with the charter of Virginia,

drafted by Edward Coke himself in 1606,

the settlers were given the same

rights as if they had been abiding

and born within this, our realm of England.

And the ark of the covenant

of those English rights was

Magna Carta, which retained

all its old subversive power as it

crossed the Atlantic ocean.

But these rights were to

be turned on their colonial

masters in one of the great

upheavals in world history.

In 1765, the government

of king George III imposed

a tax on the sale of paper.

The notorious stamp act produced

an immediate outcry that it was

against Magna Carta and the

natural rights of englishmen.

Tensions between the

governed and the governors

escalated into a demand for

independence, soon all-out war.

As the conflict raged, one American

patriot, George Mason wrote,

"we claim nothing but the Liberty

and privileges of englishmen,

"in the same degree as if we

continued among our brethren

"in Great Britain."

Soon it became clear to those who

would become known as

the founding fathers, that they

would have to draft their own Magna Carta.

This elegantly understated

Georgian building, built as the seat

of government of the state of Pennsylvania,

is america's runnymede.

And it is here america's founding

fathers, principal among them,

Thomas Jefferson, whose cane

still rests across a desk, ratified that

most precious of American documents

the declaration of independence.

But alongside the declaration's

thrillingly new or at least newish

claim, that all men are created

equal and endowed with certain

inalienable rights, the declaration

also uses a much older language,

as old, indeed, as Magna Carta

which Jefferson consciously invokes.

Like another king John,

Jefferson accused George III

and his government of

taxing without consent,

interfering with freedom of

trade and punishing in life,

limb and property

without due process of law.

The founding fathers sat at these tables

and being 18th-century gentlemen,

they wore powder, wigs and knee breeches,

but they were also substantial landowners,

masters of dozens of slaves, and so,

like the great land-owning

barons at runnymede,

they saw themselves as

cutting a tyrant down to size.

Today, Americans still take

their history, and therefore ours,

very seriously.

Magna Carta was not only to

provide much of the rhetoric

of the American revolution,

the great charter also remains fundamental

to the American constitution

and the everyday conduct of

American government itself.

I'm here in the crypt of the

American capitol in Washington.

Above me is one of the

biggest, most impressive

and most famous buildings in the world.

It's the seat of the American

congress or parliament.

To one side is the senate

chamber, to the other

is the house of representatives,

and directly above me is

the central lobby or rotunda,

with its huge, massive dome.

Down here in the crypt is this -

it's a golden copy of Magna Carta -

complete with John's seal, also in gold,

and it stands as a kind

of intellectual foundation,

timeless and incorruptible

for the soaring structure

of American government

and political ambition above.

For while the American revolution

rejected English political authority,

it did not reject the

authority of English law.

And to this day, Magna Carta,

with all its clauses, including the

removal of fish-weirs on the medway,

stands in full on the statute

books of 17 of the 52 states.

The institutions of

Magna Carta also took root.

Congress, where I've

just been, is the parliament.

The senate is the lords

and the house of

representatives is the commons.

Whilst the white house is

the seat of the president,

who is king George III without his wig.

But this is novel and has

no real English equivalent.

It's the supreme court, and its

cast bronze doors have a story to tell.

The four panels on the left-hand door

deal with the origins of

law in the ancient world,

but here, on the right-hand

door, three out of the four panels

represent the actual origins of

the supreme court in English law.

Down at the bottom, of course, we've

got Magna Carta - John and a baron.

Here, we've got the great

lawgiver English king, Edward I.

And up there, on the third panel,

we have sir Edward

Coke confronting James I,

and it's Coke who really matters.

Coke's attempt in 1628

to use the petition of right

to make Magna Carta fundamental

law inviolable by parliament

or by the king failed in England,

but it succeeded in america

where the founding fathers

made the constitution

effectively untouchable,

fundamental law to be

interpreted not by congress,

still less by the president, but by

the judges of the supreme court.

And it is to Magna Carta

that the supreme court

judges turn again and again...

From 1790 to the present,

it has been cited an astonishing 400 times.

But Magna Carta is not only a

mantra in the supreme court.

It is a ready-made banner,

quickly raised in the political arena.

As was the case when another monarch -

only this time it was a

president, Richard Nixon -

thought he was above the law.

I have been guided by

the principle that the law

must deal fairly with every man.

Seven centuries have now passed

since the English barons

proclaimed the same principle

by compelling king John

at the point of a sword

to accept the great

doctrine of Magna Carta.

In 1974, facing impeachment

over his involvement in

the Watergate scandal,

Nixon resigned rather than

face the wrath of Magna Carta.

But in more recent times, a

much more threatening shadow

has been thrown over all

our constitutional liberties.

Siren blares

with the attack on the twin towers,

the bush administration

announced america was at war -

war on terror.

For the foreseeable future,

the security of the western

world was Paramount.

Rights and freedoms - for which

the war was ostensibly being waged -

would have to take a back seat.

Accusations of torture,

waterboarding and extraordinary rendition

hit the very heart of the

United States government.

But there were those who were

prepared to challenge the executive

in the name of Magna

Carta and the constitution.

As suspected terrorists were

interned in Guantanamo bay,

lawyers, working for free,

brought cases against

the bush administration

for unlawful detention without trial.

One of the key lawyers,

David remes, visited the camp.

You were shocked by Guantanamo?

I was shocked, I was

overwhelmed... It was...

The men were so abject.

They were in despair and

the power exercised over them

by the prison authorities was absolute.

Were you ashamed?

No, I was outraged.

You know, we come here,

we see those proud phrases

in which Liberty and freedom

and right and god and nature

are plastered over these

huge marble monuments.

Didn't the hypocrisy

stink in your nostrils?

Yes.

And what did you do?

I represented these men in court,

I fought to have them released, and...

I hope that the lawyers'

efforts and communications

had an influence.

I believe they did.

The supreme court did rule

that detention without

trial was unconstitutional,

repeatedly citing Magna Carta.

But victory was short-lived.

A lesser appeals court bypassed the ruling

by declaring that - in time of

war, ordinary rules do not apply.

The supreme court apparently

ruled in favour of these men and yet,

nothing has been done.

Guantanamo is still there.

The shame is still there.

If I'd been able to sit down

with one of those judges

of the court of appeal, how

would they have justified it?

Well, the principle would be

that the courts have no function,

no valid role to play in executive

decisions in the context of war.

At the same time that remes was

fighting his Guantanamo cases,

britain, too, was facing

a parallel challenge

to its legal and constitutional integrity.

In 2008, at the height of the crisis,

senior politician

and then shadow home

secretary, David Davis, resigned.

This Sunday is the

anniversary of Magna Carta.

The document that guarantees

that most fundamental of British freedoms -

the right not to be imprisoned by

the state without charge or reason.

But yesterday this house

decided to allow the state

to lock up potentially innocent citizens

for up to six weeks without charge.

The view that the then government

was eroding piece by piece

all sorts of our civil liberties,

mostly through altering

the structure of the law...

How long you could be held without charge

was the issue at point there

and it struck me as a

grotesque assault on liberties...

Directly on Magna Carta...

Directly on Magna Carta,

directly on delay of justice,

directly on the things

that we... We believe in...

And they're things that our

country has become famous for.

But the impact of David Davis'

own little act of jihadism, of

political suicide, was short-lived.

We have already taken a

wide range of measures,

including stopping suspects

from travelling to the region

by seising passports...

Every passing month brings yet

more infringement of personal liberties

in the name of the "war on terror".

..If we are going to deal

with extremists of all sorts

in our society and uphold our British

values, that we are able to take...

What does constitute suspicious

activity that would warrant

that phone call to you?

Is it possible that we've become complacent

about our long tradition of freedom

from arbitrary state authority?

Are we sacrificing more

and more of our liberties

at the altar of "security",

and perhaps even sleepwalking

towards authoritarianism?

Why as a nation that was once so assertive,

so sensitive about freedom,

why have we become so casual?

Why are we prepared apparently

to sacrifice it without question?

Well, it comes down to this

problem that people think that security

is more important than freedom

and future historians

will look back on our time

and say the great success of

al-qaeda was not the people they killed,

it's the way they transformed

the western states,

turned them from being incredibly

freedom-orientated societies

to being rather more

introverted, nervous societies.

So, is it time to reawaken Magna

Carta from its great slumber?

Well, on past record, perhaps not.

Magna Carta has often

proved quite impotent.

Henry VIII paid scant

attention to its first clause

to protect the freedom of the church.

Nor did its ringing declaration -

"to no-one will we sell,

delay or deny justice" -

stop internment in northern

Ireland or Guantanamo bay.

So, in this day and age,

is Magna Carta really

little more than a myth?

I spoke to one of sir Edward

Coke's professional descendants,

retired chief justice for

England and wales, lord judge.

Occasionally people will

say that Magna Carta's a myth,

it didn't make all the provisions

that people attribute to it.

And in that sense they're

right, Magna Carta did not.

But when we think that what

we regard as precious to us -

precious liberties, precious

freedoms are threatened -

we think Magna Carta.

It's a banner, it summarises our belief

that government should be controlled.

It summarises our belief

in equality before the law.

Whether that's

historically accurate or not,

it means that Magna Carta is living,

and if something is

living, it isn't a myth.

Magna Carta makes no

grand, general statements

about liberty and freedom.

It's not got right first time.

It has to be reworked again and again.

And yet, the outcome of

this process of trial and error

is a profound change

of political behaviour.

Consultation and accommodation

between ruler and ruled

ceased to be exceptional crisis

management and have become instead

a matter of habit of how

we English do things.

But in this 800th

anniversary year, parliament,

our habits of political freedom

and the idea of England herself,

are all facing acute challenge...

perhaps the most

fundamental of modern times.

Will the memory of Magna Carta

help to carry us through again?

It would be nice to think so.