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English-Speaking Peoples (2): Churchill’s View of Magna Carta
History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Book 2
For 12 successive Fridays starting September 30th, Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn and radio host Hugh Hewitt are discussing Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the Hillsdale Dialogues segment of the Hugh Hewitt Show.
Following each discussion, the Churchill Project will offer companion pieces highlighting important episodes and themes in the book covered. Readers will note that our writers focus on aspects of the books which our discussants may not. Such is the depth of Churchill’s History. Every reader may take what they prize most from this vast mine of political wisdom and understanding.
Page references (parentheses) are to Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd Mead, 1956).
Magna Carta: charter of liberty
In Book 2 of The Birth of Britain, the first volume in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill names the 13th century as “a great age of Parliamentary development and experiment” in England (255). To be sure, many point to Magna Carta as the foundational document for representative democracy. Quintessentially English, it was signed in 1215 by King John at the behest of his barons, assembled at Runnymede. It represents a beacon of representative power over an autocratic authority. Yet Churchill, the savior of free government in 1940, offers a more nuanced analysis.
With typical pragmatism, Churchill argues that Magna Carta was, in some sense, merely a reform of feudalism. In fact, he claims that “there is no mention in Magna Carta of Parliament or representation of any but the baronial class” (255).
Nonetheless, Churchill recognizes the worth and novelty of Magna Carta as a proto-representative document. It constituted a law which even the sovereign must obey. This, Churchill writes, had serious implications. Through it, and the early development of Parliament, Churchill saw the enduring tradition and propensity of the English-speaking peoples to fight for free government and the rule of law.
King John’s laments
Many factors led to baronial malcontent in 1215. First and foremost was the drama following King Richard Cœur de Lion’s death. Though he left his kingdom to his brother, Prince John, his elder brother Geoffrey had left behind a son, Arthur, Duke of Brittany. Despite Arthur’s right under primogeniture, John ascended to the throne. However, England’s French provinces accepted Arthur as king, engendering fear in John and a political crisis for England.
To make matters worse, in 1202, King Philip II of France summoned John to Paris to answer charges by the barons of Poitou Province. Although King of England and previous ruler of Plantagenet France, John technically remained Philip’s vassal. Refusing to submit to the authority of a rival sovereign, John rejected the summons. In response, Philip invaded Normandy, reclaimed many cities, and bestowed them on the newly knighted Arthur. This left John in a precarious situation.
Arthur used this opportunity to take his grandmother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as a political hostage. Eleanor appealed to John, who “covered eighty miles…in forty-eight hours” to save his beloved mother and execute Arthur (245). By eliminating Arthur, John believed he had secured his political right. Imprudently, however, he failed to consider the threat of King Philip. In fact, Churchill notes, the murder of Arthur “hastened the loss of Normandy” (246).
Loss and redemption
Philip capitalized on Arthur’s murder by inciting rebellion in Normandy and Brittany. By the summer of 1204, Normandy had fallen to the French. In 1205, John lost two key political and economic advisors: Eleanor and Hubert Walter. Churchill notes the utter bankruptcy of John’s political prospects at this time: Walter’s death “deprived him of the only statesman whose advice he respected and whose authority stood between the crown and the nation” (249).
But King John did not surrender. Instead, he continued to prosecute the war against the French King. For this purpose, he required more funds. Dipping into the coffers of the baronage, the King in Churchill’s words “drove [them] to violent resistance” (248).
John also began seizing Church property, in response to which Pope Innocent III placed a six-year interdict on England. For more than half a decade, “the bells fell silent, [and] the doors of the churches were closed to the devout” (249). This incensed the faithful and created a dangerous coalition for any political leader to face: the nobility, laity, and Papal authority.
King John, however, was growing in political savvy. He offered Innocent a plea for forgiveness, which the Pope accepted. Innocent even allowed John to continue his “grandiose schemes” against King Philip (250). But when John left to fight in France, the barons united with Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton to draft a set of governing principles for the monarch.
Langton and the rule of law
Upon John’s return, Langton and the barons presented him with a “short document on parchment” at Runnymede (253). It contained what Churchill called “a system of checks and balances which would accord the monarchy its necessary strength but would prevent its perversion by a tyrant or a fool.” It was Magna Carta (253).
In Churchill’s estimation, from this moment, “government must…mean something more than the arbitrary rule of any man, and custom and the law must stand even above the King” (253). Herein lay the “foundation of principles and systems of government of which neither King John nor his nobles dreamed” (254). Churchill came to defend this very system in his own time.
Archbishop Langton provides insight into Churchill’s understanding of liberal parliamentary statesmanship, whose role Churchill highlights: Langton was “a commanding central figure, practical, resourceful, shifting from side to side as evils forced him.” Yet he was “quite unchanging and unchangeable in his broad, wise, brave, workaday, liberal purpose” (261).
The conflation of Langton—a figure of Papal authority—with the liberal movement may appear contradictory. But Churchill similarly was a beautiful contradiction. He was a statesman from an imperial age who championed democracy and representative government. One wonders if Churchill saw himself in Langton. After all, Churchill too had shifted sides as his political principles demanded. Nonetheless, he remained a bulwark for freedom, an unchanging force for liberalism.
Churchill’s emphasis on Langton displays the ideals of statesmanship for representative, free government—ideals Churchill had come to embody in his own time. His reflection on Langton and Magna Carta illuminates the enduring power of this document, and the principles it cultivated.
Magna Carta and free government
Even so, Churchill highlights the tension that exists at the very core of the Charter. In its function, Magna Carta is “a legal contract” that deals “with the details of feudal administration” (255). It contains no “spacious statement of the principles of democratic government or the rights of man” (255). Yet it receives immense veneration for its democratic virtue. Churchill wrestles with this apparent contradiction, and in reconciling it, discovers the thread that weaves Magna Carta into the fabric of free government. The key to understanding, Churchill writes, is the important precedent of property law, which the Charter establishes…
…even in its own day men of all ranks above the status of villeins had an interest in securing that the tenure of land should be secure from arbitrary encroachment. Moreover, the greatest magnate might hold, and often did hold, besides his estate in chief, parcels of land under the most diverse tenures, by knight service, by the privileges of “socage,” or as a tenant at will. Therefore in securing themselves the barons of Runnymede were in fact establishing the rights of the whole landed class, great and small—the simple knight with two hundred acres, the farmer or small yeoman with sixty. And there is evidence that their action was so understood throughout the country (256).
Churchill held the security of property rights “of prime importance for the future development of English society and English institutions”: a supreme law that transcended the Crown (256). This new “sovereignty of law” was now “a doctrine of the national State.” It laid the grounds for the modern Parliament (257).
“Mother of Parliaments”
Churchill explains how the law-based tenets of Magna Carta evolved towards the authority and proceedings of legitimate government: The Provisions of Oxford of 1258 created an elected council to govern with the King. This council amassed such power that it ruled alone for a period under Simon de Montfort.
The great power of the Provisions inspired an equally forceful response from King Henry III. By Papal permission, Henry rejected the Provisions, dismissed the council, and reinstated a more absolute monarchy. De Montfort mounted a counterattack and in July 1262, civil war descended upon Britain. Although Henry eventually triumphed over de Montfort in this Second Barons’ War, the Provisions resumed their role in 1267. Thus the “seed-time of [the] Parliamentary system” was achieved (273).
Churchill considered these Provisions of Oxford to be the “Mother of Parliaments” (273). With their turn towards the practical functions of government, they solidified and expanded upon Magna Carta. They stemmed, Churchill writes, from the same baronial interest “at Runnymede” to serve “national freedom” (279).
“The fire for representative government”
The continuity from Magna Carta to the Provisions underlined for Churchill the natural inclination of the English-speaking peoples: the unrelenting pursuit of free government. Indeed, their willingness to endure civil war in defense of the Provisions demonstrated an unwavering commitment to firmly inaugurating the legislative and administrative functions of the Parliament. With this fighting spirit, “de Montfort had lighted a fire never to be quenched in English history”—the fire for representative government (284).
Although Churchill’s treatment of Magna Carta begins with a practical analysis of its feudal implications, it becomes clear that the Great Charter inspired much more than land reform. Churchill follows the early development of the Parliamentary system from the seeds planted at Runnymede to the nascent representative institutions of the Provisions of Oxford. Churchill’s initial skepticism blooms into a deeper analysis of the genesis of free government.
Still today, Magna Carta holds inestimable value for the development of Western representative democracy—and the statecraft of Winston Churchill. In the end, Churchill would render one of the greatest services to Magna Carta’s legacy of freedom in the halls of British democracy. It was Churchill’s understanding that “when in subsequent ages…
the State, swollen with its own authority, has attempted to ride roughshod over the rights or liberties of the subject it is to this doctrine that appeal has again and again been made, and never, as yet, without success (257).
In Book 2 of The Birth of Britain, Churchill encapsulates the power of 13th century English political developments. Truly, Magna Carta began the slow and steady process of the English-speaking peoples toward freedom in government and the rule of law. Without this necessary document, that “great fire” for representative rule might never have been ignited.
The author
Mr. Foley is a Winston Churchill Fellow at Hillsdale College and a member of the Class of 2024. He is pursuing a B.A. in Politics and French, and is Vice President of the Pi Delta Phi French honor society. He was recently a Fellow of the Hudson Institute Political Studies Summer Program in Washington, D.C.