Magna Carta, 1776 and All That By Matthew W Barzun at the British Library 11 May 2015 The Eccles Centre for American Studies The Twentieth Annual Douglas W Bryant Lecture under the auspices of the Eccles Centre for American Studies www.bl.uk/ecclescentre Published by The British Library ISBN 0 7123 4474 8 Copyright © 2016 The British Library Board Magna Carta, 1776 and All That By Matthew W Barzun at the British Library 11 May 2015 The Eccles Centre for American Studies The Twentieth Annual Douglas W Bryant Lecture under the auspices of the Eccles Centre for American Studies www.bl.uk/ecclescentre MATTHEW W BARZUN has been America’s ambassador to the UK since 2013. In post, he has established innovative ways to engage with British audiences, especially young people. Previously he served as U.S. Ambassador to Sweden from 2009-2011. Ambassador Barzun was a pioneer in the early days of the internet, becoming the fourth employee of CNET Networks in 1993 and working there until 2004 in a variety of roles including Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President. Before the President’s election in 2008, Ambassador Barzun was among the first to join Barack Obama’s National Finance Committee where he produced the first $25 per-person fundraiser. President Obama selected him as National Finance Chair for his 2012 re-election campaign. Ambassador Barzun has served on the boards of many non-profits focused on education, public policy, and interfaith relations. He lives in London with his wife, three children and their dog, Lincoln, and Kentucky remains his home. Magna Carta, 1776 and All That What an honour it is for me to give the Douglas W Bryant Lecture, especially on its 20th anniversary. What Roly didn’t say about Doug Bryant was that he lived in the Massachusetts town right next to where I grew up. My hometown is Lincoln – not very well known in these parts or in America for that matter. Mr Bryant’s hometown, on the other hand, is known by every American schoolchild, and perhaps some of you have heard of it as well. It’s called Lexington, and was where – when American revolutionaries could see the whites of certain red-clad soldiers’ eyes – the first shots were fired in a long- ago war. Just an interesting fact. And I’ll quickly mention another one in the spirit of balance. This year is also the anniversary – the 200th – of the end of the War of 1812. That was the one when those red-clad soldiers took some revenge and burned down a certain white house. I want to thank the teams at the British Library and the Eccles Centre for American Studies for organizing such a great event. I’m disappointed, though, that my good friend Sir Robert Worcester – chair of the [Magna Carta’s] 800th Anniversary Committee – is unable to join us. Bob (he insists I call him Bob) is, as most of you know, a renowned market researcher and recently collected some interesting data given our subject tonight. His firm questioned 17,000 adults across 23 countries to gauge awareness of Magna Carta. The country with the highest percentage of people saying they’d heard of it was, unsurprisingly, the UK at 79 percent. Then it was the US on 65 percent. So we came in second. Or first if you don’t count the home country. But do you know who was last, with just six percent of people saying they’d heard of Magna Carta? Six percent? Want to guess? I’ll tell you: the French. Just another interesting fact. OK. As we approach the June anniversary of Magna Carta’s sealing, I sense that we’re at that point in the commemorations when everything’s been said, just not everyone’s said it. So I hope you indulge me as I try something a little different. 2 Magna Carta, 1776 and All That Now it’s true that Magna Carta’s influence on America has been immense. My own great x10 grandfather, John Winthrop – who in 1630 left England for a new life in the New World, in a city he named Boston – knew that a stable society was built on a fundamental law. And as Governor of Massachusetts he called for a law that was ‘in resemblance to a Magna Charta.’ So it began even before we were a country. And we invoked the spirit of Magna Carta when we declared independence from this country, and turned to it when we built our new country. First, as each former colony wrote their state constitutions, and then as the founding fathers drafted our federal constitution bringing those disparate states together in union. Magna Carta has since been cited in more than 100 Supreme Court opinions. In fact, the Court’s monumental doors show a depiction – cast in bronze – of King John sealing Magna Carta at Runnymede. This is all wonderfully heady stuff. But I want to look at Magna Carta’s legacy in a slightly different way. And I’m going to do it by reference to another creation we imported from Britain: whisky. At the beginning of the War of Independence then–General George Washington was concerned that his troops didn’t have enough liquor. He actually suggested that public distilleries be constructed throughout the states because ‘the benefits arising from the moderate use of strong liquor have been experienced in all armies and are not to be disputed’. So it could be said that if the ideals of independence were fuelled by Magna Carta, the fight for independence was fuelled by whisky. But I turn to whisky not to extol its military merits. Nor to get dragged into a debate about the relative merits of American and British version – I am a diplomat after all. And much less to attempt to resolve the dispute of whether you spell it with or without an ‘e’. Rather, I think that the method of producing whisky – regardless of what side of the Atlantic it’s done – can be a helpful model for thinking about how the principles enshrined in Magna Carta, liberty and the rule of law, have guided our nations and our pursuit of a more peaceful, more just world. Too often, it’s tempting to imagine that these principles were sealed in parchment forever in 1215 and handed down like a recipe. Or neatly Magna Carta, 1776 and All That 3 packaged as a product and sent out for export – like a ready-made powder transported across oceans with the label: ‘Just add water.’ But that’s not at all how the history of Magna Carta transpired. And it’s not at all how whisky is made – not how the grain gets to the glass. So bear with me here. There are three stages to producing whisky. First, fermentation. Combine whatever grains you find wherever you are, yeast, and water to form what’s called a mash, and let it all bubble up. Stop here and you get: beer. For something stronger you have to go to step two. That is distillation – a refining process where you throw things out in pursuit of something cleaner and stronger. Stop here and you get: vodka. The final step is maturation. Time is a part of it, yes. But not just time. It’s time in a barrel, the liquid expanding and contracting in and out of the wood. That’s what gives the distinct colour, complexity, and character to whisky. So, just like with whisky, the first step in the process towards realizing liberty and the rule of law – the ‘fermentation’ if you will – started with the raw materials. Because if we take a hard look at whether the heady ideals we now associate with Magna Carta are what it was all about back in 1215, the clear answer is no. Eight hundred years ago, it was all pretty earthy stuff. In its original form it is a confusing, bubbling soup – the mash if you will – of fermenting anger, distrust, hope, faith, belief, passion, rights, and wrongs. Magna Carta is not a theoretical tract. First and foremost it is a practical document conceding concrete remedies for real, daily abuses. The fishweirs, the scutage, the escheats, the disafforestation of the 1215 Magna Carta became the beer, so to speak – and perhaps a very bitter one – that would much later yield something of greater character. The legal scholar A E Dick Howard reminds us of this in his book on Magna Carta. How we find ourselves today saying things like ‘as it says in Chapter 39 of Magna Carta’ as though it had been written in nicely ordered chapters by authors conscious of compiling a ‘great work’. In fact, back then there were no chapters, nor even the name Magna Carta; that all came later. 4 Magna Carta, 1776 and All That And as we see with the 1297 version held at the National Archives in Washington DC and the many other iterations, Magna Carta evolved over the years. Many times it was ripped up and re-written. It was a living document – and the different interpretations over time reveal the early fermentation that would eventually result in the principles we hold so dear. So now let’s fast forward past the Renaissance and early Enlightenment to 1776, by which time the fermentation process was very far along indeed, due in part to the masterful cooking of England’s great jurist, Sir Edward Coke. And in America the raw ingredients had grown with new grievances. Foremost among them, the American colonists wanted to be subject to the rule of law – not subjects of an arbitrary power.