The enduring democratic message of a royal charter

‘Magna …what ?’

Most contemporary readers and viewers of news would, on hearing or reading that phrase, ask. But not those interested in history, the rule of law, the rights of citizens, the supremacy of ethics over politics in the running of governments.

King Charles III of the United Kingdom in his speech on April 28, to the U.S. Congress in Washington DC used the phrase to thunderous applause. He is very much into the history of his country. He has to be, as a successor of King John (c.1167-1216) who unveiled, or was forced to unveil the Magna Carta. ‘John who?’ could well be the next question. So lacking in luck was King John that no monarch in England has been given that name ever since. There has been no King John II. But he is famous for having decreed and given, or made to decree and give, not just to his country and people, but to the world, the Magna Carta.

The over 800-year-old royal charter of rights sealed by King John at Runnymede, near Windsor, on June 15, 1215 owes its name to Latin, the language of Homer and Cicero, in which the phrase means Great Charter. Magna Carta has come to mean, for those interested in the evolution of the political rights of people, a metaphor for any text that inscribes such rights as inherent in people, rather than being concerted without checks in any individual or organ of state.

Singularly unpopular for his whimsies, King John had to make peace with a group of rebel barons who demanded that the King sign himself out of arbitrary power and, most important of all, proclaim that he was subservient to law or what, in today’s legal parlance would be called ‘due process’. In referring to the Magna Carta, King Charles III was drawing attention to the limits of his own or any sovereign, including, in today’s world, elected ‘sovereigns’. Small wonder that legislators in Washington DC greeted the reference with éclat.

Subtle language craftsmanship

Does King Charles write his own speeches? It is more than likely that for a state visit such as this to the U.S., the British monarch had his speeches drafted by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. This, not just because they were to come from Britain’s reigning King but because they were to be made in the world’s most powerful nation currently at war, a war seen by the world as one that has been started by the personal decision of U.S. President Donald Trump. And that is where Britain’s subtle ways with the language of William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and George Orwell came in handy. As also its interiorisation of Latinisms and Latin concepts that have grown into English usage. The term Magna Carta was per se coined, according to Wikipedia, by ‘scribes in the English Royal Chancery around 1215-1217’. Three clauses of the Magna Carta remain on Britain’s statute, of which the following is most impressive: ‘No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.’

The phrase has been used down the centuries as a metaphor.

As a barrister working for Indian South Africans’ political rights in the late 19th century, Mohandas K. Gandhi cited Queen Victoria’s extinguishing the overarching powers of the East India Company over the destiny of India in her Proclamation of 1858, as a Magna Carta. In 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt, while working on the UN Declaration of Human Rights as the committee’s Chair, famously called the UN document the “international Magna Carta of all men everywhere”. Winston Churchill referred to it as a “law which is above the King”, and argued that the reaffirmation of a supreme law justified the respect it has held through time.

Contextual messaging

King Charles was not handing down to the U.S. Congress a tedious lesson in the history of the historical Magna Carta. But he did something that was altogether classy. Knowing full well that he was addressing a House comprising both Republican and Democratic legislators, he knew that when he said to that gathering, that the Magna Carta made the King subservient to the law, his listeners would transpose his remarks right onto what is happening in the U.S., to its state and government.

The King made more than one reference to the Magna Carta, and mentioned the fact that the parchment linked the political history of Great Britain and the U.S. inextricably, that a large number of judgments in the U.S. courts cited Magna Carta, making that tract a U.K.-U.S. bond. But it was when he said very simply and matter-of-factly, that the Magna Carta had made “executive power subject to checks and balances”, that the House, after a moment of reflective absorption, rose in a thunderous standing ovation. All present, starting doubtless with Democrats, saw before them a direct successor to King John of Magna Carta fame, speaking of the Magna Carta’s limiting arbitrariness in the monarch — a huge, self-limiting, self-denying, self-critical exposition of ‘due process’ of the rule of law as being above the person of the ruler, with the Magna Carta being above the King.

The importance of the ‘Magna’ code

The speech’s salience in today’s Washington aside, it should be seen as having been made to all Parliaments and legislators across the world, affirming that all people of the world — whether in the west or east, north or south, geographically or metaphorically — live with the expectation that the laws governing them are made by their representatives, for a humane, just, and moral order. That they are implemented fairly, equitably, transparently. That those in charge of the process are not governed by whimsy, caprice or bias. And that they are subservient to such laws, not the other way around. And that waging wars, waging peace are part of that ‘Magna’ code.

The speech, having been made in the parliament of what is called, not unambitiously, the world’s oldest (continuous constitutional) democracy, was not partisan. It was not taking sides between elected legislators of diverse opinion and the executive. Indeed, it could not have, in good protocol and better prudence. It said, without stating it explicitly, that the spirit of the Magna Carta holds that those seeking and receiving popular mandates to form an executive are also under the scrutiny of parallel and co-extensive checks and balances. What has been called the “brooding spirit of the law” casts an obligation on the legislature and judiciary to ensure that democracy is not trampled, as it was in India during the infamous Emergency of 1975-77, by the robotic power of a “brute parliamentary majority,” or by subtler, more devious methods of manipulation and subversion that play on human emotions, sentiments, and suspicions, which can lead to ethnic tensions, presaging civil strife — a form of ‘within country’ war — such as every continent has known.

History has known heredity to give the world villains as kings, violence as creed. It has also known credulity to give the world duly elected counterparts of such kings, creeds. Today, when massively contested elections in India east and south (in terms of voting percentages) have brought about new governments in three, and reinstalled one, it is important, and indeed critical, for electors and the elected to note that over any formation of government, there exists a monitor of morality which obligates democratically and federally ethical conduct.

It is a curious felicity that a reigning king wearing a heritable crown should have spoken democratic home truths to a great Parliament citing a Latin code and receive a standing ovation.

There is hope for truth. Or, in Latin, spes veritatis est.

Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a teacher, former administrator, diplomat and Governor