8. Reform, radicalism and revolution: Magna Carta in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain*
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Magna Carta was invoked extensively across Great Britain and its empire. Building on the foundations laid in the seventeenth century it had become a document of international scope and influence as vigorously debated by radicals in Westminster as by lawyers in Bengal or rebels in Massachusetts.1 Throughout the period Magna Carta was used to champion press freedom and parliamentary reform, to challenge transportation and naval impressment, and in debates to regulate overseas trade and taxation.2 The range of media on which its image was reproduced was as broad and unusual as the principles and people it was engaged to defend. In the age of the industrial revolution its image was reproduced and sold on statuary, playing cards, fabrics, prints, porcelain and paintings; bought by an increasing pool of consumers eager to own something of Britain’s glorious heritage.3 Just as their seventeenth-century predecessors had done, radicals and revolutionaries continued to employ the Great Charter in order to embarrass the monarch, promote political reform and, if necessary, foment insurrection. However, where once Magna Carta was enlisted by parliament in their struggle for supremacy over the crown, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries’ reformers used it to challenge the very authority and power that (the unrepresentative) parliament had won.4
Yet for all these invocations Magna Carta was rarely read by those who used it and barely understood in its historical context. It had become little more than a heroic symbol of ‘English liberty’, the embodiment of an unwritten and reputedly ancient constitution. Citations of the Great Charter tended to be crude and anachronistic and beyond the general defence of due process famously given in chapters 39 and 40 (that ‘No freeman will be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in anyway ruined … save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no one shall we sell, to no one shall we deny or delay right or justice’) its advocates were less concerned with its specific clauses than with its iconographical significance. Magna Carta had become a slogan calculated to stir patriotic emotions and mobilize public support.
When discussing the history of Magna Carta and the ‘rights’ contained within it, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators frequently used the terms ‘Englishmen’ and ‘Britons’ interchangeably. Many who did so were simply indulging in ‘the nasty English habit’ of using the words synonymously, while others tacitly suggested that the ‘rights’ contained within England’s Magna Carta appealed to and were legitimately claimed by most British subjects.5 As Colin Kidd has noted, ‘English liberties embodied universal aspirations to freedom and self-government’ that were attractive to the wider British world where there was ‘a strong identification with the values and institutions of the English motherland’.6 Protestant Irish and colonial Americans claimed themselves to be of ‘English stock’ and ‘heirs to the precious English liberties of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors’, while their Welsh and Scottish compatriots perceived union with England entitled them to such rights.7 In this context, to describe Magna Carta as the ‘birthright’ and ‘inheritance’ of both ‘Englishmen’ and ‘Britons’ was perfectly acceptable.8 Indeed, as we shall see, even where protest against English domination took place, given the commanding role of England within Britain and its colonial possessions, it is unsurprising that such opposition was often couched in the language of English legal traditions such as Magna Carta and habeas corpus.9
The powerful public authority that Magna Carta had achieved as a symbolic document in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is evident in its almost ubiquitous visual representation in political cartoons and caricatures of the period. And it was not only those who opposed the government that invoked it. As in the seventeenth century, the Great Charter remained a protean document in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its malleability exploited to advocate a range of political perspectives. Loyalist propagandists claimed that only a strong monarch and elite parliament could defend the ‘constitution’ and ‘principles’ of 1215, while at the same time their radical opponents seeking parliamentary reform insisted that the government’s grip on power contravened the legal ‘birthright’ and ‘inheritance’ of the people’s ‘ancient’ liberties.10
Yet, for all their political contestation, the constitutional iconography of these popular prints, both loyalist and radical alike, was straightforward: the legitimate political actors defended the Charter from destruction or desecration, while the tyrannical and illegitimate trampled it underfoot, lost, tore, or stabbed it.11 By the eighteenth century, these representations of the Charter were combined with a canon of other symbolic achievements – habeas corpus, the Phrygian (or Liberty) Cap of antiquity, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights (1688) – which were little engaged with as things in themselves but in combination represented the liberties of freeborn Britons whose public reverence lent the semblance of political legitimacy. William Hone’s (1780–1842) pro-reform poem The Political House that Jack Built (1819) and M. Adams’ loyalist response A Parody on the Political House that Jack Built (1820) vividly demonstrate how these rich political symbols could be used by contested groups. Both authors agreed that Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and habeas corpus constituted ‘the WEALTH that lays In the House that Jack Built’, but fundamentally disagreed as to how this inheritance was to be best preserved. For the radical Hone, the unrepresentative, plutocratic parliamentarians and sycophantic soldiery, placemen, and privy councillors represented the greatest threat, while for the loyalist Adams it was ‘THE VERMIN’ reformer ‘who despises all Laws’ that would irrevocably ‘injure’ this ‘Wealth, That Lays in the House, That Jack Built’.12 Notably, neither Hone nor Adams explored the details of Magna Carta’s history or how it would be undermined by their opponents. Its image was only used as it presented an easily recognizable ideogram for ‘constitutional rights’.
While Magna Carta would become an important symbol for parliamentary reformers in the later eighteenth century, it was in the decades immediately following the Glorious Revolution (1688) that the framework was established in which Magna Carta would emerge as an integral part of reformist propaganda.13 Following the jurisprudence of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart lawyer Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), the predominant seventeenth-century interpretation of Magna Carta was that it reaffirmed the ancient immemorial rights and liberties of the English and formed the basis of a fundamental, unalterable, law.14 However, the Revolution Settlement that restricted the power of the monarchy and vested sovereignty with parliament following the Glorious Revolution eventually, and unwittingly, challenged this long-held narrative by undermining the supposed independence vested in these ‘ancient’ immemorial laws. Parliament had become the state’s supreme law-making body whose capacity to enact, amend and repeal law (including clauses from Magna Carta) weakened the authority of the Great Charter as an ancient, immutable, law. The Bill of Rights (1689), a document that was ironically claimed as ‘our second Magna Charta’ by Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), placed Magna Carta’s former guardian, parliament, in the ascendancy and so supplanted the Great Charter as the immemorial bulwark of English liberties.15
Yet, Magna Carta endured and became an important instrument in political debates about the capacity of parliament to alter fundamental laws. As Anne Pallister has argued, once ‘the implications of the Revolution Settlement to individual liberty became obvious, the Charter once more re-emerged as … a weapon to be used against the new tyranny of a class-dominated sovereign parliament’.16 Magna Carta was raised in this regard in 1701, following the imprisonment by parliament of five Kentish petitioners who had presented a series of policy demands to the house of commons and asked that the Members ‘have regard to the voice of the people’.17 Their imprisonment made clear the capacity for parliament to act as arbitrarily as any monarch, prompting the publication of a range of anti-government pamphlets. The lawyer and whig politician John Somers (1651–1716) argued in his Jura Populi Anglicani (1701) that imprisoning the Kentish petitioners ‘was repugnant to Magna Charta… and all the other Acts which designed to secure our Liberties from the Invasion of our Kings’ leaving the public ‘expos’d to the Arbitrary Will of our Fellow Commoners’.18 The novelist Daniel Defoe (1660?–1731) similarly responded, presenting his ‘Legions Memorial’ to the speaker of the house of commons, Robert Harley (1661–1724), in which he urged the petitioners’ to be released exhorting that ‘Englishmen are no more to be Slaves to Parliaments than to Kings’19
The Great Charter and the rights of the subject were similarly invoked in 1716 by opponents to the Septennial Act (1 Geo. I, st. 2, c. 38) which increased the maximum length a parliament could sit from three to seven years. Stressing what he believed to be the contractual nature of parliamentary authority Archibald Hutcheson (1659?–1740), M.P. for Hastings, described the Bill as ‘a very dangerous step towards the undermining of that constitution which our ancestors have been so careful to preserve’.20 Passing it, Hutcheson argued, would equate to giving ‘up the Habeas Corpus act, and all the other privileges and immunities, which have been obtained to the people … from the date of Magna Charta to this very day’.21 For these men, clearly, parliament was to be limited by the ancient laws and liberties of the people; yet in practice, many also recognized that despite Coke’s contentions to the contrary, no government, however undesirable, could govern effectively if it was bound by the actions of their predecessors and no law, however ‘ancient’, was immutable. As the poet Jonathan Swift (1667– 1745) noted in 1710 in the tory newspaper The Examiner:
… in every Government … there is placed a supream, absolute, unlimited Power … [and] wherever is entrusted the Power of making Laws, that Power is without all Bounds; can repeal or enact at Pleasure whatever Laws it thinks fit … agreeable to our old Constitution; yet at the same Time they allow it to be defeasible by Act of Parliament; and so is Magna Charta too, if the Legislature think fit; which is a Truth so manifest, that no Man who understands the Nature of Government, can be in doubt concerning it.22
Such recognition of parliament’s growing sovereignty and the dichotomy this presented about the needs of an effective government at the expense of the ‘ancient rights’ of the subject led to wide-ranging discussions in the early eighteenth century regarding the mutability of the Great Charter and the ancient constitution it had come to represent.23 It was these debates that first led the noted jurist and judge Sir William Blackstone (1723–80) to Magna Carta in his The Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest (1759).24 A pioneering piece of historical scholarship, based on an examination of the original documents, Blackstone’s The Great Charter for the first time drew a proper distinction between the Magna Carta of 1215 and its subsequent reissues. It contained transcriptions of the various issues of Magna Carta alongside other key medieval documents that traced the history of Magna Carta from the Articles of the Barons of 1215 to the confirmation of the Charter by Edward I in 1300.25 In so doing Blackstone demonstrated categorically that Magna Carta had evolved as a legal document between 1215 and 1300 and as such was far from representing a fixed, fundamental, unalterable law. Magna Carta, it would seem, had been eclipsed and parliament’s sovereignty fully established.26
Yet, Magna Carta was not overshadowed for long and by the mid eighteenth century it once again re-emerged as an important symbol integral to propaganda challenging the arbitrary actions of parliament.27 Unsurprisingly, the actual, and rather problematic, history of Magna Carta was entirely ignored in this propaganda in which the Great Charter emerged as a simple symbol representing the liberties of freeborn Englishmen over which the government carelessly rode rough shod. Though it was widely used throughout the early eighteenth century to challenge the government during the Excise Crisis (1733) and to oppose naval impressment (which was represented as a violation of clause 39), it was the radical politician and newspaper editor John Wilkes (1725–97) who capitalized most successfully upon the Charter to mobilize public opinion in his favour following his arrest under a General Warrant in 1763.28
Wilkes was arrested for libelling King George III (r. 1760–1820) in the infamous number 45 issue of his newspaper the North Briton and his subsequent struggles against the government for his own liberty, press freedom (against General Warrants) and ultimate election to parliament and the mayoralty of London all shamelessly exploited the symbol of Magna Carta to great effect achieving widespread – and at times violent – public support.29 Wilkes was a master propagandist who utilized the symbolism of the Great Charter to represent his causes as ones of national importance regarding the rights of freeborn Britons whose liberties – as he argued his arrest had proven – were under threat. Under Wilkes, Magna Carta became an ideograph that represented a form of ancient liberty, the ‘birthright of every subject’, which the government under Lord Bute (1713–92) and George III were undermining with their General Warrants and backstairs conniving.30
Wilkes, who by 1764 had been forced into exile in Paris, never lost an opportunity to appear with Magna Carta in popular propaganda, most notably on cheap political handbills and broadsides, in popular prints and on grand private portraits.31 In this he was consciously copying a tradition well established by the seventeenth-century polemicist John Lilburne (1614–57), whose name was inextricably connected with Magna Carta and freedom of the press.32 The two were frequently compared by eighteenth-century commentators and their resemblance was so keenly felt that Wilkes was presented with a Lilburne medal and copy of Theodorus Verax’s The Triall of Lieut. Colonell John Lilburne (1649) by supporters following his arrest in 1763.33
Enterprising businessmen seeking to profit from Wilkes’s popularity equally enhanced the Wilkite association with the Great Charter producing porcelain figurines, plates, jugs and teapots for the popular market depicting Wilkes, charter in hand.34 Even the illustrious manufactory Wedgwood at Etruria in Staffordshire produced highly desirable wares depicting Wilkes with Magna Carta for their wealthy customers, the designs for which were again copied and sold by less prestigious potteries to lower middling clients keen to celebrate their hero Wilkes.35 The fact that manufacturers went to such lengths demonstrates the popularity of both the document, and Wilkes, and the success he achieved in combining his causes with the idea of English liberty represented in the form of the Great Charter.
A similar example of the potency of Magna Carta as a visual invocation of national political legitimacy and liberty in the eighteenth century can be seen in the episode prompted by the arrest, in November 1762, of Arthur Beardmore (d. 1771) an attorney and editor of a whig journal The Monitor.36 Closely associated with Wilkes, Beardmore had led a sustained campaign against the earl of Bute’s ministry – in particular over the issues of General Warrants and illegal detention, the closeness of Bute to the king, and the tyranny of the Stamp Act (1712) which raised the price of newspapers beyond the pocket of the average reader.
Reasonably cheap, uncensored and scurrilous, newspapers proved an effective way of cultivating public hostility towards the tyranny of the government and it is no surprise that both Wilkes and Beardmore used them as their main medium of criticism.37 The king’s ministers responded using all legal means they could to dampen and terminate any critical publications. Arresting the printers and authors wholesale was the most effective method and this was often undertaken by the use of General Warrants, which – contrary to Magna Carta – were issued to arrest any person suspected of involvement in a publication and authorized the searching of their property until evidence of criminal activity was found.38 Liberty of expression and argument was regarded as fundamental to a legitimate political polity and the ‘birth-right of a Briton’ as the ‘firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country’; yet, General Warrants, Beardmore and Wilkes argued, threatened these rights by undermining the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the press to criticize illegitimate government.39 For publicizing such views Beardmore was arrested under a General Warrant in 1762 (followed closely by Wilkes in 1763).40
Upon his arrest Beardmore ensured that he was apprehended in his study while in the act of teaching his son Magna Carta.41 This tableau became the subject of a much reproduced painting by the radical portraitist Robert Edge Pine (1730–88) who would go on to paint Wilkes and whose own father, John Pine (1690–1756), had earlier reproduced the first detailed engraving of the Great Charter in 1733.42 Veneration of Magna Carta clearly ran in the family. Duplicated as a print by James Watson (1740–90) this popular image depicts Beardmore in fine cloak and wig pointing out chapter 29 of the 1225 charter stating in Latin, ‘Nullus liber homo cap[iatur] vel imprisionetur aut’ (‘No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned …’); listening intently his young son absorbs the principles of liberty.43 To emphasize the constitutional iconography of the print the inscription below notes Beardmore is a ‘Common Council-man of the City of London’ and quoting Deuteronomy explicitly connects Magna Carta’s sacred (almost religious) political principles of freedom with Beardmore’s act of resistance. The print was immensely popular, inspiring parodies such as that depicting the infamous eighteenth-century criminal ‘Dick Swift’ teaching his son an altered version of the ten commandments with the print of Beardmore pinned to the back wall.44
From such Wilkite prints contemporaries in Britain and the North American colonies – who by the late 1760s were beginning to agitate against what they considered to be a tyrannical British government – learnt how powerful the Great Charter was as a symbol of liberty for their own propaganda and at times conflated issues based around their invocation of Magna Carta.45 In 1768 in the lead up to the American War of Independence the Massachusetts house of representatives commissioned the famous Liberty Bowl which, with Magna Carta emblazoned on it, celebrated both John Wilkes as an opponent of the king and the ‘Glorious Ninety-Two’ American politicians who challenged British laws imposing heavy taxation on the American colonies.46 Helped by Beardmore and Wilkes the 1760s saw a strong revival of the tradition of Magna Carta as a powerful public resource, a symbol readily mobilized and contested by political factions. Its regular adornment on popular prints, porcelain and in the press ensured that the prominence of the Great Charter in the legal textbooks was translated into a shared cultural appreciation. Certainly, this was part of a process that was begun in the seventeenth century but with industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the rate and range of its appearance and dissemination was rapidly accelerated.
Unsurprisingly, during a period dominated by agitation for parliamentary reform and challenges to the repressive measures implemented by the British government following the American and French revolutions, the instances in which the liberties of Magna Carta were depicted proliferated. Its appearance in the print media and in major political trials of radicals was pervasive. It was exploited by both supporters and opponents of Charles James Fox (1749–1806) during the Regency Crisis of 1788; invoked on tokens disseminated by members of the London Corresponding Society celebrating their acquittal at their trials in 1794; used to challenge the suspension of habeas corpus in 1817; and raised during the Queen Caroline affair of 1820.47 Of all these early nineteenth-century invocations, however, it was perhaps most audaciously used in court by the Cato Street conspirators at their trials for high treason in 1820. These Spencean radicals had conspired to assassinate the entire British cabinet at a banquet but were arrested in their hideout having been betrayed by an agent provocateur.48 For one of the conspirators, William Davidson (1786–1820), the plot to murder the cabinet was perfectly justified by Magna Carta.49 He likened himself and his co-conspirators to the twenty-five barons nominated in clause 61 to uphold the Great Charter should the government tyrannically ignore its provisions. Describing clause 61, Davidson argued that the Great Charter,
ordained that twenty-five barons should be nominated to see that the terms of the charter were not infringed; and, if it was found that his Majesty’s Ministers were guilty of such infringement, then four barons were to call upon them for redress. If this were not granted, then the four barons were to return to their brethren … to take up arms, and assert their rights. Such an act was not considered in times of old as an act of treason towards the king, however hostile it might be towards his ministers.50
Needless to say this highly inaccurate interpretation of clause 61 did not persuade the judge and Davidson was sentenced with six of his other coconspirators to be hanged, drawn and quartered: the last time this sentence was passed at the Old Bailey.51
While it was invoked predominantly by those challenging the government and seeking parliamentary reform, many loyalist prints also engaged Magna Carta throughout the period to contest what they perceived to be the dangerous Jacobin propaganda of the reformers. Presenting Magna Carta as the basis of an authentic ancient liberty, these loyalists argued that the Great Charter was being undermined by British radicals eager to replicate the excesses of French republicanism, which – when ‘contrasted’ with England’s unwritten ‘ancient constitution’ – offered nothing but misery, poverty and slavery. This argument was made in The Palace of John Bull, Contrasted with the Poor “House that Jack Built” (1820) whose title page displayed ‘the fair SCALES of JUSTICE’ weighing up the radicals’ Phrygian cap and quill against the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights and Magna Carta. While the scales were weighed down with the substance of these weighty ‘Laws of renown’, the radicals’ republican ideals were unsurprisingly found to be hollow and wanting.52 An earlier print of 1792 by Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) entitled The Contrast, similarly asserted this popular loyalist point. First printed in the aftermath of the September Massacres and the arrest of Louis XVI, the print employed the familiar iconography of ‘British Liberty’ – represented in this case by Britannia holding the scales of justice and Magna Carta – to undermine radical arguments about the benefits of republicanism and ‘French Liberty’ which were represented in the print by an ugly, blood-stained, Medusa-like Marianne.53
Although invoked by both loyalist and radical alike, engagement with Magna Carta remained unsubtle and unsophisticated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and largely copied the iconographical tropes already established by the likes of Wilkes and Beardmore in the 1760s. The most obvious example of this can be seen in the exploitation of Magna Carta by the radical M.P. Sir Francis Burdett (1770–1844) who was committed to the Tower of London in 1810 on the orders of the house of commons for breach of parliamentary privilege having publicly criticized, in a deliberately provocative open letter to his constituents, another prosecution by the commons of the London-based radical John Gale Jones (1769–1838).54
Throughout his career Burdett was a staunch advocate of radical parliamentary reform with a deep and long held attachment to the Cokean interpretation of the existence of an ‘ancient constitution’ underpinned by Magna Carta.55 For Burdett, Magna Carta represented a powerful emblem of the ‘ancient’ freedoms and ‘birthright of Britons’ that had been long lost through the misrule of a corrupt political establishment in need of reform.56 Upon his imprisonment in 1810 Burdett drew extensively on these ideas appealing to the Great Charter with enormous popular success. Indeed, the published open letter to his constituents for which he was imprisoned eulogized the Charter throughout and opened with Magna Carta’s clauses 39 and 40 as its epigraph.57 Published in William Cobbett’s Political Register Burdett’s letter continued the debate of a century earlier regarding the sovereignty of an unrepresentative parliament. He informed his constituents that the Commons’ vote imprisoning Gale Jones amounted ‘to a declaration, that an Order of theirs is to be of more weight than Magna Charta and the Laws of the Land’; as such, Burdett questioned ‘Whether our liberty be still … secured by the laws of our forefathers, or … at the absolute mercy of a part of our fellow-subjects, collected together by means which it is not necessary for me to describe’.58 The corollary of the argument was that a reformed parliament, elected on a wide franchise, would not dare to so infringe the rights of their subjects and, as they represented the people, could not but abide by the ‘ancient constitution’ as its guardians.
This interpretation of the arbitrary and unconstitutional actions of the house of commons against Gale Jones and Burdett gained traction. Throughout his imprisonment colourful prints and porcelain – reminiscent of Wilkes – proliferated depicting Burdett as the champion of Magna Carta and British liberty and, following Beardmore before him, Burdett even arranged to be arrested at home teaching his son Magna Carta while a growing mob outside caused a disturbance.59 According to M. Dorothy George, hardly ever before had a public character been so hero-worshipped or glamorized in satirical prints.60 Burdett represented an attack on ‘corruption’ in all its facets and recalling Wilkes and Beardmore, the Charter was the centrepiece in a symbolic performance calculated to mobilize public opinion against the government and the sovereignty of an unrepresentative parliament.61
Such powerful radical propaganda created a strong connection between Magna Carta and parliamentary reform in the popular imagination. Indeed, so strong was it that when the Reform Act of 1832 was passed, granting new political rights in the form of a limited extension of the franchise, it was explicitly presented as a new Magna Carta. Early published editions of the Act were issued under the title of The Great Charter of 1832 while a popular ceramic cordial bottle representing the lord chancellor, Henry Brougham (1778–1868) – who played a crucial role in the passage of the Bill through the house of lords – identified the Act as ‘The Second Magna Charta’.62 Other M.P.s involved in passing the legislation similarly relished the comparison. The M.P. Thomas Coke (1754–1842), a descendent of the seventeenth-century lawyer Sir Edward Coke, commissioned a relief celebrating the Reform Act depicting him with his whig parliamentary colleagues forcing King John to seal the Charter at Runnymede.63
This was not the last time that Magna Carta would be raised in connection with parliamentary reform in the nineteenth century. The Great Reform Act of 1832 was but the first in a series of legislative developments that paved the way to universal suffrage in Great Britain in 1928 and in the agitation for these later reforms Magna Carta continued to be lionized. Most prominent in this respect, however, was its use by the Chartists between 1838 and the early 1850s. The first mass working-class movement for democratic rights, Chartism took its name from the People’s Charter that contained the six points of parliamentary reform for which they agitated.64 The choice of the word ‘charter’ in this context was significant. It consciously drew upon the powerful symbolism of Magna Carta as the foundation stone of English liberties. The allusion to Magna Carta was one which all politically engaged contemporaries would have been aware. It continued the long tradition of radical appropriation of the Great Charter and in so doing represented the People’s Charter as a new Magna Carta that would ultimately secure the political rights of all classes, completing the process begun in 1215.65 Yet, again, as with Wilkes or Burdett, the Chartist’s invocation of Magna Carta was made without any serious reference to its actual historical contexts. It was largely used in an anachronistic way to claim rights that were never guaranteed in the Charter and that were quite unknown to the medieval mind.
For all these inaccuracies, however, Magna Carta remained a powerful totem celebrated by the crowd. At a great Chartist meeting on Hartshead Moor, near Leeds, in 1838 the demagogue Joseph Rayner Stephens (1805–79) addressed those gathered, inaccurately invoking Magna Carta as ensuring free speech, freedom of association and even freedom from the workhouse; he told them,
We are seeking nothing new … We stand upon our old rights – we seek no change – we say give us the good old laws of England unchanged (Cheers.) … and what are those laws? What is that constitution by which we seek to abide? – (Magna Charta) – Aye, Magna Charta! The good old laws of English freedom – free meetings – freedom of speech – freedom of workshops – freedom of homesteads – free and happy firesides, and no workhouses. (Cheers)66
A year later when Stephens was imprisoned for disturbing the public peace the Manchester Chartist R. J. Richardson (1808?–1861) threatened to march into the city with 100,000 men holding copies of Magna Carta in their hands.67
The Chartists were by no means the last political movement to invoke Magna Carta in the long nineteenth century which saw the Charter persist as a useful symbol of legitimate political rights. Led by the eccentric lawyer Dr. Edward Kenealy (1819–80), the Magna Charta Association established in 1874 promoted a broad reformist agenda that built upon the earlier demands of the Chartists. Receiving widespread national support, it became, according to Rohan McWilliam, ‘the most significant movement of popular agitation between the decline of Chartism in the 1840s and rise of organised socialism in the 1880s’.68 The suffragettes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also used Magna Carta in their own propaganda to legitimize direct political action. In 1911 the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women drew on the example of the Magna Carta barons and ‘How Militant Methods Won the Great Charter’ to encourage their readers to continue in their shock tactics.69 Others such as the first practising female barrister Helena Normanton (1882–1957) engaged with Magna Carta as a historical precedent that supported the right of women to vote. For Normanton,
it is expressly contrary to Magna Carta to refuse, deny, or delay, right or justice. The right of franchise is still unconstitutionally withheld from women, but the spirit of Magna Carta sounds a trumpet-call to them to struggle ever more valiantly to realise its noble ideal.70
Ironically, these later appeals to Magna Carta were made at almost precisely the same time that the clauses of the Great Charter were being repealed by parliament. Beginning in 1828 and concluding in 1969 the biggest excision of Magna Carta’s clauses from the Statute took place in 1863 as part of the Statute Law Revision Act (26 & 27 Vic. c.125).71 Today only three clauses remain in English law.72 However, the fact that Magna Carta was losing its basis in law seemed to matter very little to those who invoked it. From the early eighteenth century the Charter had been engaged with less as a legal instrument than as a versatile and powerful totem of an ancient English liberty. It lent the semblance of political legitimacy to anyone who wished to capitalize upon it and its ability to stir emotional public support has ensured its legacy as a powerful international symbol of freedom up to the present day.
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* Note to the reader: unless otherwise stated, all clauses cited in this essay relate to the Great Charter sealed by King John in 1215. Small parts of this essay have previously appeared in print as ‘Radicalism and reform’, in Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, ed. C. Breay and J. Harrison (2015), pp. 161–6. The use of Magna Carta by parliamentary reformers is the subject of this essay, but, for further discussion of the subject, see also A. Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty (Oxford, 1971), pp. 59–75.
1 For its invocation by British subjects in Bengal, see British Library, India Office Records, IOR/H/144, ‘The Humble Petition of the British Subjects Residing in the Province of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa and their Several Dependencies’, 26 Feb. 1779; Observations on the Foregoing Petition of the British Subjects Residing in Bengal (1779), p. 37. For its invocation by revolutionaries in North America see A. E. Dick Howard, The Road from Runnymede: Magna Carta and Constitutionalism in America (Charlottesville, Va., 1968), pp. 133–240.
2 On press freedom, see below in this essay and R. V. Turner, Magna Carta through the Ages (2003), pp. 176–7. For an example of the uses of Magna Carta to challenge transportation and naval impressment, see J. Bentham, A Plea for the Constitution (1803), pp. 16–19, 55– 7; J. E. Oglethorpe, The Sailor’s Advocate (1728); The Case of The King Against Alexander Broadfoot, at the Session of Oyer and Terminer and Goal Delivery Held for the City of Bristol and County of the Same City, on 30 of August, 1743 (Oxford, 1758), pp. 3, 25–26; Nauticus, The Rights of the Sailors Vindicated (1772), pp. vi-vii, xiii, 20. For its use in contemporary debates on overseas trade, see An Essay towards a Scheme or Model for Erecting a National East-India Joynt-Stock or Company (1691), p. 6.
3 For examples of this material, see Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, pp. 168–89.
4 Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, pp. 43–75.
5 K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), p. 275, n. 6. Though beyond the scope of this essay, the suggestion that such rights could be legitimately claimed by all British subjects engendered contentious discussions within the British empire. Whilst the jurisdiction of ‘English liberties’ remained a contested issue well into the 20th century, one recurring feature of the debates was the suggestion that such rights were ‘inherited’ in the colonies along racial lines (see M. Taylor, ‘Magna Carta in the nineteenth century’, in Magna Carta: the Foundation of Freedom, 1215–2015, ed. N. Vincent (2014), pp. 136–53, at pp. 150–3;Exclusionary Empire: English Liberty Overseas, 1600–1900, ed. J. P. Greene (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 55, 66, 193, 228; Australia’s Empire, ed. D. M. Schreuder and S. Ward (Oxford, 2009), p. 21; D. O’Brien, ‘Magna Carta, the “sugar colonies” and “fantasies of empire”’, in Magna Carta and its Modern Legacy, ed. R. Hazell and J. Melton (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 99–122).
6 C. Kidd, ‘Integration: patriotism and nationalism’, in A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain, ed. H. Dickinson (Oxford, 2002), pp. 369–80, at p. 376. See also C. Kidd, ‘North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms’, Hist. Jour., xxxix (1996), 361–82; Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, pp. 154–6.
7 Kidd, ‘Integration’, p. 376.
8 One of the most striking contemporary pamphlets to claim Magna Carta was ‘the Glory of Britain and Ireland’ (see H. Hone and G. Cruikshank, The Queen and Magna Charta; Or, the Thing that John Signed (1820)). Throughout, it consciously depicted Scots, Irish and English altogether celebrating ‘the thing that John signed’.
9 Kumar, The Making of English National Identity, p. 156. In Ireland the Irish nationalist and political writer Wolfe Tone (1763–98) invoked Magna Carta regarding Catholic rights in Ireland, while American colonists in the decade leading up to, and during, the America War of Independence readily looked to the Great Charter to support their claims against the actions of the British government (see The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone 1763–98, ed. T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell and C. J. Woods (3 vols., Oxford, 2007), i. 177; Turner, Magna Carta through the Ages, pp. 212–17).
10 W. Cobbett, ‘A letter to the freemen of the city of Coventry, 4 April 1818’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, xxx (1818), cols. 379–410, esp. cols. 381–2.
11 For a description of the numerous prints, see M. D. George, English Political Caricature 1793–1832: a Study of Opinion and Propaganda (2 vols., Oxford, 1959), i. 44, 54, 60, 69, 83, 95, 125, 126, 132, 137, 144, 146, 157, 182, 195, 199; i. 13, 23, 81, 125, 126, 175, 181.
12 W. Hone, The Political House that Jack Built (1819), passim; M. Adams, A Parody on the Political House that Jack Built: or the Real House that Jack Built (1820), pp. 2–3.
13 Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, p. 42.
14 F. Thompson, Magna Carta: its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, 1300–1629 (1948), pp. 354–75; S. D. White, Sir Edward Coke and the Grievances of the Commonwealth (Manchester, 1979), pp. 245–70.
15 H. St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, A Collection of Political Tracts (1748), p. 246; Turner, Magna Carta through the Ages, p. 171.
16 Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, p. 42.
17 M. Goldie, ‘The English system of liberty’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, ed. M. Goldie and R. Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 40–78, at p. 61.
18 J. Somers, Baron Somers, Jura Populi Anglicani: Or, the Subjects Right of Petitioning Set Forth (1701), p. 17.
19 W. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (36 vols., 1811), v. 1256.
20 Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, vii. 339.
21 Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, vii. 347.
22 The Examiner, no. 33, 22 March 1710, in Jonathan Swift, The works of the Reverend Dr. Jonathan Swift (20 vols., Dublin, 1772), v. 320–2.
23 See Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, pp. 43–58.
24 N. Vincent, Magna Carta: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012), pp. 97–8.
25 R. Sweet, Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004), pp. 234–5, 280; Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, p. 169.
26 William Blackstone, The Great Charter and Charter of the Forest (Oxford, 1759), passim.
27 Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, pp. 59–75.
28 British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1868,0808.3563, Excise in Triumph (1733); Oglethorpe, The Sailor’s Advocate, pp. 4–5; The Case of The King Against Alexander Broadfoot, pp. 3, 25–6; Turner, Magna Carta through the Ages, pp. 176–7, 179.
29 For the events surrounding Wilkes’s arrest see, P. D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996), pp. 27–56.
30 Thomas, John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty, p. 161.
31 For some of the many examples of this material, see Brit. Museum, 1887,0307,II.46, ‘Porcelain Figurine of John Wilkes’, Derby, c.1768; Brit. Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, 1868,0808.4320, John Wilkes Esqr. & Liberty. Wilkes, and Liberty. A New Song (1763); 1873,0809.1475, English Liberty Established, Or a Mirrour for Posterity: John Wilkes (1768).
32 E. Vallance, ‘Reborn John? The eighteenth-century afterlife of John Lilburne’, Hist. Workshop Jour., lxxiv (2012), 1–26, at p. 16.
33 Vallance, ‘Reborn John?’, p. 16.
34 Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, pp. 170–3.
35 G. A. Godden, Illustrated Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain (1966), p. 146; Victoria & Albert Museum, 414:1109/&A-1885, ‘John Wilkes Teapot’, Wedgwood, c.1770; Brighton Museum, DA328528, Thomas Radford, ‘John Wilkes Teapot’, Derby, c.1770.
36 A. H. Cash, John Wilkes: the Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (2006), pp. 88–9.
37 See B. Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620–1800 (1996), pp. 29–52.
38 H. Barker, Newspapers, Politics and English Society, 1695–1855 (Harlow, 2000), p. 71.
39 The North Briton, no. 1, 5 Jun. 1762, in J. Wilkes, The North Briton from No. 1 to No. XLVI. Inclusive. With Several Useful and Explanatory Notes not Printed in any Former Edition (1769), p. 1.
40 Thomas, John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty, pp. 23, 27–30. Interestingly, upon Wilkes’s arrest Beardmore acted as his solicitor.
41 Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, p. 60, n. 3.
42 Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, pp. 216–217.
43 Brit. Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, 1902,1011.6373, J. Watson, Arthur Beardmore, Common Council-man of the City of London, Teaching his Son Magna Charta (1765). See also Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, p. 174.
44 Brit. Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, 1851,0308.607, Dick Swift Thieftaker of the City of London Teaching his Son the Commandments (1765). See also Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, p. 175.
45 A. Lock, ‘Magna Carta: the Atlantic crossing’, History Today, lxv (2015), 31–7, at pp. 36–7.
46 Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Acc. no. 49.45, P. Revere, Jr., Sons of Liberty Bowl, 1768.
47 Brit. Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, 1952,0403.3, ‘Design for a column with a statue of William III, intended to be erected at Runnymede, 1788; 1868,0808.5828, Revolution Pillar (1788); 1868,0808.8364, G. Cruikshank, Liberty Suspended (1817); Manchester, People’s History Museum, 1993.371–94, ‘Erskine and Gibbs and Trial by Jury’, token, 1794; Hone and Cruikshank, The Queen and Magna Charta. See also Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, pp. 176–7, 181.
48 M. Chase, ‘Cato Street conspirators’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004–15) <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/58584> [accessed 26 March 2018].
49 For more on William Davidson, see H. Mackey, ‘The complexion of the accused: William Davidson, the black revolutionary in the Cato Street conspiracy’, Negro Educational Rev., xxiii (1972), 132–47.
50 G. T. Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy (1820), p. 341.
51 C. Emsley, T. Hitchcock and R. Shoemaker, ‘Punishments at the Old Bailey: drawn and quartered’, in Old Bailey Proceedings Online <http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Punishment.jsp#death> [accessed 27 Sept. 2017].
52 The Palace of John Bull, Contrasted with the Poor “House that Jack Built” (1820).
53 Brit. Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings, 1861,1012.47, T. Rowlandson, The Contrast: British Liberty, French Liberty, Which is Best? (1792); Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, p. 158.
54 Pallister, Magna Carta: the Heritage of Liberty, pp. 67–9. Gale Jones had been imprisoned for publicly questioning the legitimacy of parliament to exclude strangers from the house of commons during its debates of the failed Walcheren expedition.
55 M. Baer, ‘Burdett, Sir Francis, fifth baronet (1770–1844)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3962> [accessed 26 March 2018]..
56 Turner, Magna Carta through the Ages, p. 185; The London Magazine and Review, January to April 1825, new ser., i (1825), 518.
57 F. Burdett, Sir Francis Burdett to his Constituents; Denying the Power of the House of Commons to Imprison the People of England (1810), pp. 3–12. The letter was first published in William Cobbett’s Political Register, xvii (1810), Sir Francis Burdett to his Constituents, cols. 417–22.
58 Burdett, Sir Francis Burdett to his Constituents, p. 5.
59 Brit. Museum., Dept. of Prints and Drawings, 1868,1212.1, I. Cruikshank, The Arrest of Sir Fs Burdett. MP (1810); R. K. Huch, The Radical Lord Radnor: the Public Life of Viscount Folkestone, Third Earl of Radnor (1779–1869) (Minneapolis, Minn., 1977), p. 65.
60 George, English Political Caricature 1793–1832, ii. 125.
61 George, English Political Caricature 1793–1832, ii. 125–7. See also Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, pp. 178–80.
62 The Great Charter of 1832; Comprised in the Three Reform Bills (1832); People’s History Museum, NMLH.1992.1073, ‘Ceramic cordial bottle with Lord Brougham and a Second Magna Charta’, Doulton & Watts, 1832.
63 N. B. Penny, ‘The whig cult of Fox in early nineteenth-century sculpture’, Past & Present, lxx (1976), 94–105, at p. 104. The relief can still be seen at the Coke family seat at Holkham Hall, Norfolk.
64 D. Thompson, ‘Chartism, success or failure?’, in People for the People: Radical Ideas and Personalities in British History, ed. D. Rubinstein (1973), pp. 90–7, at p. 92.
65 M. Chase, Chartism: a New History (Manchester, 2007), p. 8. This argument was most powerfully put in the Chartist pamphlet J. Watkins, The Five Cardinal Points of the People’s Charter (Whitby, 1839), pp. 4–6.
66 Northern Star, 16 Oct. 1838, p. 2.
67 Taylor, ‘Magna Carta in the nineteenth century’, p. 147.
68 J. A. Hamilton and R. McWilliam, ‘Kenealy, Edward Vaughan Hyde (1819–1880)’, in O.D.N.B. <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15356> [accessed 26 March 2018]; R. McWilliam, ‘Radicalism and popular culture: the Tichborne case and the politics of “fair play” 1867–1886’, in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain 1850–1914, ed. E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 44–64, at p. 44.
69 Votes for Women, 27 Jan. 1911. See also Taylor, ‘Magna Carta in the nineteenth century’, pp. 149–50.
70 H. Normanton, ‘Magna Carta and Women’, The Englishwomen, lxxvii (1915), 129–42, at p. 135.
71 Breay and Harrison, Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, p. 221.
72 Vincent, Magna Carta: a Very Short Introduction, pp. 101–2. The clauses still on Statute all date from the reissue of Magna Carta confirmed by Edward I and enrolled on the Statute in 1297. They are: clause 1 confirming the liberties of the English Church; clause 9 confirming the liberties and customs of the city of London and other cities, towns and ports; and, the most famous, clause 29 stating that ‘No freeman will be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in anyway ruined … save by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land. To no one shall we sell, to no one shall we deny or delay right or justice’.