As the debate over forty-two-day detention demonstrated, there was also a powerful, if ambiguous, strain of British radicalism that venerated the nation’s law as the embodiment of its liberties. One of the most distinctive features of late medieval English society was its remarkable litigiousness, and resort to the courts remained a key way of both publicising and defending radical causes. Figures such as John Lilburne, John Wilkes and William Hone largely owed their prominence in the radical pantheon to their appearances before the bench. There was an important element of radical thinking that saw the law as it presently operated in Britain as largely a tool of the ruling classes, evident in the writing of Gerrard Winstanley, the Levellers, William Godwin and later the militant suffragettes. Even so, many of these same figures continued to believe that there was a historic set of freedoms, usually located in a misty Anglo-Saxon Utopia, which, if recovered, would gift people their full rights and liberties.
The veneration of British law – which generally meant English common law – points to one other feature of this ‘radical tradition’ that appeals to Conservatives, and even leaves it open to manipulation by the far right: its predominantly patriotic outlook. This became especially pronounced after 1815, as British radicals strove to dissociate themselves from loyalist accusations of treachery, given weight by the pro-French rhetoric of radicals such as Paine. However, even during the height of British revolutionary Francophilia, Paine’s associates in the London Corresponding Society had continued to base their arguments on English legal precedents – the 1689 Bill of Rights, for example – and framed their language in terms of what the historian James Epstein has accurately described as the British ‘constitutionalist idiom’.9 The Levellers too, while talking of natural human rights, invoked the language of the ‘freeborn Englishman’, liberty as the birthright of a particular nation.
This yoking together of freedom and Britishness has continued, through the writing of George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn, to the present day, with Gordon Brown’s calls for a new sense of national identity constructed around British values of ‘liberty, tolerance and fair play’. The BNP would certainly struggle to live up to the second of those values. It is hard to see how British radical movements such as the Chartists, which included prominent black members and supported the abolition of the slave trade, or the suffragettes, who included leading anticolonialists such as Sylvia Pankhurst, can fit into the BNP’s bleached-white vision of Britain. Yet, in the radical tradition’s appropriation by the far right, we can nonetheless see some of the dangers in claiming universal values such as tolerance, fairness and liberty as peculiarly British.
The debate over forty-two-day detention presents us with a problem, but also an opportunity. The problem rests in the persistent belief that our rights are defended by ancient charters of liberties such as Magna Carta and that such rights are under threat from laws such as the Counter-Terrorism Act. In fact, as we have seen, though portions of the Great Charter continue to have the force of law, they do not prevent people from being either forcibly detained or exiled against their will. The Counter-Terrorism Act represents not so much an assault on British freedom, but rather the very limited nature of British liberty itself. At the root of this weakness lies the untrammelled power of Parliament. As Judith Mather, a British political scientist who conducted a survey of European representative institutions in 2000, concluded:
If democracy requires the existence of popular rights, the British constitution provides for none. Parliament may make provision for freedom of expression, for regular elections, for freedom of the individual from arbitrary or unnecessary interference. Parliament may legislate to increase equality in any or all of its manifestations. However, Parliament need do none of these things and it has the ultimate authority within the Constitution to abolish popular rights, and to rewrite the constitutional documents that have hitherto enshrined them.10
Most recently, the British Parliament’s ability to ignore the will of the people has been amply demonstrated by the Commons’ vote in support of the invasion of Iraq, despite massive public demonstrations against the war.
Unfortunately, one other legacy of the patriotic element of the British ‘radical tradition’ has been the tendency to dismiss ‘foreign’ perspectives or ideas. Indeed, it might be said that the British emphasis on freedom as emerging organically from the steady progress of time tends by its very nature to be inimical to ideas full stop. There is a touch of this ideological jingoism in David Cameron’s recent call for a new British ‘bill of rights’, which would replace strange importations into our native law such as the 1998 Human Rights Act – according to Cameron, ‘practically an invitation to terrorists to come to Britain’.11 Yet, opportunistic as Cameron’s idea was, some body of specially protected British constitutional law, incorporating the rights of the citizen, is surely necessary if further assaults by the government on civil liberties are to be prevented. The cross-party opposition to forty-two-day detention has provided an opportunity for non-partisan discussion of what such a statement of rights should contain. One recent, astonishingly radical, product of this debate has been the draft bill of rights produced by the Commons Committee on Human Rights. Dispensing with the pessimistic and authoritarian language of ‘duties’, ‘values’ and ‘responsibilities’ favoured by the Brown government, the draft bill of rights incorporates not only classical civil liberties – freedom of expression, association and conscience – but key social and economic rights such as free health-care, free education and a decent standard of living.12
History can play a vital role in informing and inspiring this discussion of our rights and liberties. The 2006 Guardian competition to find Britain’s most overlooked moment of radical history offered a valuable reminder that, as a nation, we can call upon a rich democratic heritage. It has rightly emphasised the importance of place and community in sustaining the memory of that tradition, a tradition that is so much more than the stuff of history books. But such celebrations of our democratic heritage can be counterproductive if all they do is encourage backward-looking complacency, and we should remember that radical groups have attempted, sometimes successfully, to change the world they inhabit. As Patrick Wright has noted, it seems rather perverse to recall such dynamic movements by freezing them ‘as fond figures in the historical memory’.13
Instead, this book has emphasised the many ways in which radical movements have succeeded. We owe many of the political rights we now enjoy to the actions of these groups and individuals. It is important to remember their achievements, as all too often the history of progressive movements in this country is unfairly depicted as a string of heroic failures. Yet, right as it is to celebrate the victories of the British ‘radical tradition’, we do need to acknowledge its failures too. ‘Freedom’ did not, with apologies to Tennyson, ‘slowly broaden down / From precedent to precedent’. It moved in fits and starts, with many a backward step taken. As we have seen, the intense radical ferment of the 1640s and 1650s was largely forgotten until the late nineteenth century. The exercise of voting rights diminished over the course of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. Even with the passage of the 1832 Reform Act, alterations in the franchise and, most of all, population growth meant that fewer men as a proportion of the population now exercised the vote than did in the age of Queen Anne (5.2 as opposed to 4.7 per cent), and women for the first time had been formally disenfranchised.14
These failures and setbacks remind us that, especially given our antiquated constitutional and electoral system, our fragile freedoms need to be jealously guarded if they are not to be encroached upon. The recent debate over counter-terrorism laws and the supposed threat to our ‘Magna Carta rights’ offers a reminder that we should be sure we are venerating the substance of liberty and not merely its symbols. The radical journalist Thomas Wooler approached the nub of the problem in the first issue of his periodical, the Black Dwarf, back in January 1817:
States must either proceed, or
retrograde. While we contented ourselves with boasting of our advance, we have been silently, but rapidly falling back … The people ought to have remembered that they were the guardians of the constitution. Instead of that the simpletons expected protection from the constitution; which is in fact nothing but the recorded merits of our ancestors. The country has boasted of being free, because Magna Charta was enacted; when the least share of penetration would have taught us, that Magna Charta was only enacted because our ancestors were determined to be free. Our ancestors, with swords in their hands, and the tyrant John on his knees before them, would have been just as free, whether they had insisted upon the signature of Magna Charta, or not. Their freedom was in their power, and their will.15
Our freedom lies in our power. Pessimists may point to demonstrations against the war in Iraq as evidence of modern government’s capacity to ignore the will of the people. However, the millions who marched against that illegal war also remind us of the readiness of the British people once again, in the words of Shelley, to rise ‘like lions after slumber’. This is the lesson of Britain’s radical history: the struggle for our freedom goes on.
NOTES
Abbreviations
CWTP P. S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (2 vols, New York, 1969)
ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
TMEWC E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (rev. edn, London, 1968)
INTRODUCTION
1 H. E. Marshall, Our Island Story: A History of Britain for Boys and Girls from the Romans to Queen Victoria (Civitas reprint, Bath, 2005), p. 68.
2 My account of the cakes myth here is based on ibid., pp. 67–8.
3 For the origins of the story see A. P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great (Oxford, 1995), ch. 13.
4 Quoted in D. Horspool, Why Alfred Burned the Cakes: A King and his Eleven-Hundred-Year Afterlife (London, 2006), pp. 148–9; see also S. Keynes, ‘The cult of King Alfred’, Anglo-Saxon England, 28 (1999), 225–357.
5 Quoted in P. Readman, ‘The place of the past in English culture, c. 1890–1914’, Past and Present, 186 (2005), 147–201, at 182.
6 Horspool, Why Alfred Burned the Cakes, p. 194.
7 Marshall, Our Island Story, p. 73.
8 Ibid., p. 71.
9 See John Clare, ‘Any questions? This week, making history’, Daily Telegraph, 15 June 2005.
10 A. Roberts, ‘Parenting: death, poison, treachery – the best bedtime read’, The Times, 3 July 2005.
11 T. Hunt, ‘Conscription of the past’, Guardian, 11 June 2005.
12 A. Fraser, ‘Great stories that will bring the past to life for a new generation’, Daily Telegraph, 23 June 2006.
13 Marshall, Our Island Story, p. 72.
14 Ibid., p. 73.
15 Ibid., p. 157.
16 Ibid., p. 87.
17 For the ‘Norman yoke’ see C. Hill, ‘The Norman yoke’, in his Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), ch. 3; and M. Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest (Manchester, 1999).
18 Marshall, Our Island Story, pp. 167–8.
19 Ibid., p. 227.
20 Ibid., ch. 78.
21 R. Mitchell, ‘H. E. Marshall’, in H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, eds, ODNB.
22 Marshall, Our Island Story, p. 15.
23 Mitchell, ‘Marshall’, ODNB.
24 Marshall, Our Island Story, p. 364.
25 H. E. Marshall, The Story of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1907), p. vi.
26 M. Sawer, ‘Pacemakers for the World?’, in her, ed., Elections: Full, Free and Fair (Annandale, NSW, 2001), ch. 1.
27 For Don see S. Merrifield, ‘Don, Charles Jardine (1820–1866)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne, 1972).
28 Quoted in P. A. Pickering, ‘A Wider Field in a New Country: Chartism in Colonial Australia’, in Sawer, ed., Elections: Full, Free and Fair, ch. 2, p. 34.
29 Ibid., p. 39.
30 Quoted in P. A. Pickering, ‘“The hearts of millions”: Chartism and popular monarchism in the 1840s’, History, 88 (2003), 227–48, at 238.
31 Ibid., 232; see also R. G. Hall, ‘Creating a People’s History: Political Identity and History in Chartism, 1832–1848’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts, eds, The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge, 1999), ch. 10, esp. p. 237.
32 Ibid., p. 232.
33 G. Brown, ‘The golden thread that runs through our history’, Guardian, 8 July 2004.
34 OED.
35 Nathaniel Bacon, An historical and political discourse of the laws and government of England (1689 edn), p. 175; see the similar use of ‘radical’ made by Sir Robert Filmer in his ‘The Anarchy of a limited or Mixed Monarchy’, published in The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest (1679 edn), pp. 281–2.
36 See C. Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke, 1994), ch. 5.
37 Quoted in G. Burgess and M. Festenstein, eds, English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 4.
38 C. Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’, in M. Cornforth, ed., Rebels and Their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton (London, 1978), ch. 3.
39 I owe the athletic metaphor to Burgess’s Introduction in Burgess and Festenstein, eds, English Radicalism.
40 G. E. Aylmer, ‘Collective mentalities in mid-seventeenth century England: III varieties of radicalism’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 38 (1988), 1–25; for another important but slightly more elaborate working definition see J. C. Davis, ‘Radicalism in a traditional society: the evaluation of radical thought in the English Commonwealth 1649–1660’, History of Political Thought, 3 (1982), 193–213.
41 See E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).
42 Nora’s original term was lieu de mémoire, ‘memory place’, P. Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (3 vols, New York, 1996–8).
PART ONE: A TALISMAN OF LIBERTY
1 David Redden, vice-chairman of Sotheby’s, New York, quoted in J. Barron, ‘Magna Carta is going on the auction block’, New York Times, 25 September 2007.
2 A. Pallister, Magna Carta: The Heritage of Liberty (Oxford, 1971), p. 1.
CHAPTER 1
1 V. H. Galbraith, ‘Penrose Memorial Lecture: Runnymede revisited’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 110 (1966), 307–317, at 310.
2 A similar characterisation was offered by John Arden, who described King John in the notes on his play as ‘corpulent, short, with dark hair turning to grey and going bald, well-trimmed beard, a grinning wolfish mouth full of bad teeth’. J. Arden, Left-Handed Liberty: A Play about Magna Carta (London, 1965), p. v.
3 For these wars, see F. McLynn’s Lionheart and Lackland: King Richard, King John and the Wars of Conquest (London, 2006), esp. pp. 404–10.
4 Quoted in D. Danziger and J. Gillingham, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta (London, 2003), p. 267.
5 See W. Morris, Signs of Change: Seven Lectures Delivered on Various Occasions (London, 1888), pp. 65–6.
6 My narrative of the events surrounding Magna Carta is based on Danziger and Gillingham, 1215.
7 Quoted in J. Gillingham, ‘Historians without Hindsight: Coggeshall, Diceto and Howden on the Early Years of John’s Reign’, in S. D. Church, ed., King John: New Interpretations (Woodbridge, 1999), ch. 1, p. 1.
8 Pallister, Magna Carta, p. 3.
9 On this see Sir J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1992), p. 9.
10 Ibid., p. 10.
11 M. Ashley, Magna Carta in the Seventeenth Century (Charlottesville, 1965), p. 4.
12 Ibid., p. 1.
13 Holt, Magna Carta, p. 5.
14 Sir Ivor Jennings, Magna Carta and Its Influence on the World Today (London, 1965), pp. 9–11.
15 Sir Herbert Butterfield, Magna Carta in the Historiography of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Reading, 1968), pp. 7–9.
16 Holt, Magna Carta, pp. 10–11.
17 Ashley, Magna Carta, p. 31.
&nb
sp; 18 See R. B. Seaberg, ‘The Norman Conquest and the feudal law: the Levellers and the argument from continuity’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 791–806.
19 Pallister, Magna Carta, p. 18.
20 Ibid., p. 15.
21 Ibid., p. 17.
22 Ibid., p. 41.
23 Ibid., p. 47.
24 Ibid., p. 55.
25 Ibid., p. 60.
26 Ibid., p. 64.
27 Ibid., p. 57.
28 Ibid., p. 77.
29 Ibid., p. 69; see also M. Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792–1799 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 106.
30 Pallister, Magna Carta, p. 74.
31 Morris, Signs of Change, p. 64.
32 ‘Runnymede issue still before the world: archbishop on the lesson of Magna Carta’, The Times, 11 June 1965.
33 ‘Freedom society protests’, The Times, 11 June 1965.
34 750th Anniversary of Magna Carta 15th June 1215–1965 (London, 1965).
35 Jennings, Magna Carta, pp. 36–8.
36 ‘An English hillside … for ever America’, Daily Mirror, 15 May 1965; ‘Kennedy family coming for memorial inauguration’, The Times, 8 May 1965; ‘The Queen inaugurates Kennedy memorial – three acres of America in Runnymede’, The Times, 15 May 1965; Lord Denning, ‘Runnymede, fount of English liberty’, The Times, 9 June 1965.
37 A. O’Hagan, ‘Magna Carta means nothing to the Scots’, Daily Telegraph, 31 May 2006.
38 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992).
39 Jennings, Magna Carta, p. 23.
40 Quoted in L. Blom-Cooper, ‘The role of the judge in modern society’, Political Quarterly, 57 (1986), 144–55, at 144.
41 Quoted in J. Pilger, Freedom Next Time (London, 2006), p. 38.
42 Ibid., pp. 20–1.
43 On the case of the Chagos Islanders see R. Gifford, ‘The Chagos Islands – the land where human rights hardly ever happen’, Law, Social Justice and Global Development, 1 (2004), http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/global/issue/2004-1/gifford.html; Pilger, Freedom Next Time, ch. 1; S. Bangaroo, ‘A short analysis of the exile of an indigenous population from beginning to end’, Hertfordshire Law Journal, 3 (2005), 3–7; ‘Foreign Office challenges Chagos Island [sic] ruling’, Guardian, 5 February 2007.
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