David Starkey on the significance of Magna Carta

This summer it will be 800 years since Magna Carta was sealed. Historian David Starkey examines the charter and its significance in his new book. He talks to Chris Bond.
The four original surviving copies of Magna Carta were brought together for the first time at the British Library as part of its 800th anniversary.  (Clare Kendall/British Library/PA Wire)The four original surviving copies of Magna Carta were brought together for the first time at the British Library as part of its 800th anniversary.  (Clare Kendall/British Library/PA Wire)
The four original surviving copies of Magna Carta were brought together for the first time at the British Library as part of its 800th anniversary. (Clare Kendall/British Library/PA Wire)

YOU might assume that pretty much everyone in this country has at least heard of Magna Carta.

Not so, says David Starkey. “I was getting off the train at Canterbury recently and a man walked over to me and said he had seen me on Question Time. He asked me what I was doing next and I told him I was writing about Magna Carta and a girl who was next to him said, ‘what’s Magna Carta?’ So there is a task of illumination,” he says.

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This summer marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta which is widely regarded as one of the most famous documents in the world. It established, for the first time, the principle that everybody, including the king, was subject to the law, and has become synonymous with the idea of British liberties.

The first Magna Carta was agreed by King John of England in a field at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, in order to make peace with a clutch of rebel barons who forced him to endorse the document after they captured London.

In the intervening centuries its significance has stretched far beyond our shores. The charter has influenced ideas of liberty, human rights and even political systems. It exerted a crucial influence on what became the American constitution and has become a powerful, international rallying cry against the arbitrary use of power.

But behind the lofty and grandiose ideals it has come to symbolise is a far more complicated and colourful story. Crucially there wasn’t just a single document but three key, and essentially very different, versions dating from 1215, 1216 and 1225.

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“The Great Charter”, as it’s also referred to, is the focus of David Starkey’s latest book, Magna Carta: The True Story Behind The Charter.

Unlike his TV programme – David Starkey’s Magna Carta – (he’s at pains to point out the title wasn’t his idea) which offered a bird’s eye view of history over the past eight centuries, his book focuses on the decade between the initial 1215 document and the watered down version agreed a decade later.

So what was it, apart from the obvious fact of the impending anniversary, that compelled him to examine the story behind the charter more closely?

“I am a Tudor historian and the Tudor period was where Magna Carta seems to go to sleep and I’ve always been interested in why this is,” he says. “Magna Carta has a very broad sweep but there’s a very narrow focus on it as the original example of English politics at work.

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“I’m sure if you said the words ‘Magna Carta’ to people most of them will have an awareness of it and perhaps recognise 1215 as a memorable date. But I think if you pushed them on it most people probably wouldn’t be able to tell you what it was.”

Starkey is an Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, but his forthright views and truculent TV persona, he was once dubbed the “rudest man in Britain”, sometimes overshadow the fact that he is in fact a formidable historian.

He can also be mild-mannered and polite and, dare I say, modest. “I’m making no claims to any great originality but I have attempted to tell both the story of how Magna Carta happened and why, and I have tried to turn these documents into physical objects that come alive,” he explains.

Magna Carta is often viewed as a victory for people over the monarchy and a cornerstone of democracy, but Starkey believes the story behind it is just as important as the charter itself.

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It is a “classic Starkey narrative”, he says of his book. “The people involved are wonderful. You have King John and Philip Augustus the French king and then there’s Pope Innocent III, one of the great holy monsters of the Middle Ages.”

The charter came about because a group of barons and knights had become exasperated by the king’s arbitrary rule and high taxes. “John has to seal the most humiliating charter any English king has ever sealed. You have a king without a capital and without his financial and administrative centre.”

Magna Carta and 1215 are both ingrained in the nation’s collective memory, but Starkey points out that what was in effect a peace treaty designed to head off civil war didn’t do its job.

“It was rejected by the Pope and was a complete failure,” he says.

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It threw the country, and indeed Europe, into chaos. “Almost immediately you have a civil war that John starts to lose and he has to turn to France for help and we’re faced with a repeat of the Norman conquests.”

But the creation of an Anglo-French realm didn’t happen because in October the following year John died, leaving his nine year-old son Henry as the heir to the throne.

Starkey says that William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, who became regent until Henry was old enough to rule, seized the opportunity to save the charter.

“After John died he had the wit to rethink Magna Carta but with all the difficult bits left out. The 1215 charter has 63 clauses, but the revised version in 1216 has 40-odd, so that’s about one third of the text. It’s a bit like the NHS starting out on the left and then some changes are made and the right grudgingly accepts it.”

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The 1225 version of Magna Carta is little different from the reworked document of 1216, but it still contained some key components that we recognise today.

“What it does is establish the rule that the king must respect the law,” he says. It also guaranteed the freedom of trade between towns and cities and standardised weights and measures.

Starkey believes that in many respects Magna Carta has had a greater impact on the United States than Britain.

“American law is based on English law and this is much more a part of their history than it is ours. It is entrenched in the American constitution and can’t be touched by Congress or the president. In England we never go down that route, we do something completely different.”

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Although nearly a third of the text was deleted or substantially rewritten within ten years, and almost all the clauses have been repealed in modern times, Magna Carta has left an indelible mark on English history.

But 800 years after it was first reluctantly agreed by King John on the banks of the River Thames, is Magna Carta still significant? “Only three clauses survive and those that remain do so nominally,” says Starkey.

“So if you take it clause by clause then it doesn’t have much relevance, but if you take the big principles behind it then Magna Carta remains absolutely central.”

Magna Carta: The True Story Behind The Charter, published by Hodder & Stoughton, is out now priced £18.99. David Starkey is appearing at the Ilkley Festival on May 14 and Harrogate Theatre on June 24.

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