On June 15 Elizabeth Windsor and her consort Phillip sailed down the Thames to commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta at Runnymede, just as King John did in 1215.

By any standards this was an incredible act of hypocrisy and political jujitsu.

Even in his lifetime Queen Liz’s ancestor, King John, was a hate figure.

He opposed Magna Carta and subsequently annulled it. He had no interest in the conditions of most of his people.

As for the posse of wise, freedom-loving barons, they too acted through self-interest.

While socialists will welcome any historical advance the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, like the ritual reinternment of Richard III, will be a pomp and circumstance version of medieval history, one that is more myth than fact.

This received history will largely ignore uncomfortable facts. It will pay homage to a power structure which still exists with many vestiges of the Norman conquest.

The barons’ efforts to force King John to sign the charter can be compared to an early form of bourgeois revolution.

They had no desire to end kingship; their main agenda was to improve their lot and that of their class.

As Lampedusa’s hero the Prince of Selina said: “If we want things to stay as they are things must change.”

In many ways the barons’ rising was an inevitable reaction to a century and a half of Norman Vis et Voluntas — the absolute “power and will” of the king.

This feudal system ensured that those incurring the monarch’s displeasure could be summarily dispossessed, or dispensed.

For example Jews who tried to attend the investiture of Richard I (John’s brother) were cruelly massacred.

Most of England’s land was held by the king and the church — a great deal still is — while, laws, taxation and the duties of service flowed downward in accordance with the king’s wishes.

The king appointed sheriffs and law officers to represent his will. The ultra-loyalist Sheriff of Nottingham is no myth.

The king granted town charters in return for payment and an oath of loyalty.

He granted land, titles and other privileges to retain power.

He collected intestacies from those who died without a will. Incredibly it was another 778 years — (1993) — before Elizabeth Windsor became the first monarch to agree to pay income tax — but not inheritance tax, and only voluntarily.

Her son Charles Windsor still benefits from royal privileges such as intestacies and feudal rights over river beds and foreshores in Cornwall.

We may hear much of William Pitt’s claim that Magna Carta was the “Bible of the English Constitution.”

This ignores the fact that in 1215, there was no Parliament.

There is still no written constitution and no-one voted for Magna Carta since there was no voting system.

Chartism and suffrage campaigns would not occur for another 600 years.

Working men and women would not get the vote for another 150 years with the Representation of the People Act 1918.

Democracy is less than a century old and owes nothing to monarchy, which mostly resisted it.

Ruling parties still sell titles to rich political donors.

In bad King John’s time there were few legitimate or effective way to challenge Vis et Veritas.

In fact the only people mentioned in Magna Carta, apart from King John, are 10 powerful clergy led by Stephen, Archbishop of Canterbury, and a cohort of 25 barons led by Wm Marshall, Earl of Pembroke.

Significantly clause one of the charter addresses not the freedom of the people, but the freedom of the church which shared power with the king and held a quarter of all land.

Archbishop Stephen Langton had brokered the deal with the barons during five days of negotiations at Windsor Castle.

John’s mis-footed efforts to stop the appointment of the new archbishop failed and in 1208 literally brought the church out on strike.

For five years the English clergy withheld their services and blessings. So John gave in, a deal that would ensure that the Pope would support him in annulling Magna Carta.

The 5,000 mostly Norman French barons were the only people who could muster sufficient force to challenge the king.

They intended Magna Carta as a peace treaty with benefits. But it did not work.

Within months of the Runnymede signing, civil war resumed with both sides using French mercenaries.

In October 1216 John died of dysentery at Newark while still resisting the demands of his barons.
 
Though we shall hear much about the great charter as “the cornerstone of English liberty” only two out of 63 clauses address freedom and justice issues and John ignored both.

Most of Magna Carta addresses the barons’ concerns such as demands to be consulted over the king’s rights to their land and to extract military service from their knights along with taxation, property rights, weights and measures and subduing their common enemy, Prince Llewellyn and the Welsh.

Much will be made of the totemic clause 39 (which later formed part of the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution).

The ancient latin text is translated as: “No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way ruined nor will we go or send against him except by the lawful judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.”

Clause 40 adds: “to no-one will we sell, to no-one will we deny or delay, right to justice.”

While recognising the historical significance of these statements they are not all they seem and 800 years later — in the age of Guantanamo, control orders, 28-day detention and cuts in legal aid, they have still to be to be fought for.

But in 1215 the law of the land meant the king’s writ.

Only a freeman had the right to be tried and “peers” meant they could only be tried by their social equals — ie barons by barons.

Most men and women were not free. They were unfree serfs, little more than slaves who were forced to provide labour and crops for the lord of the manor; they dare not move without his consent.

Magna Carta did very little for the peasantry and this festering sore eventually contributed to the famous Peasants Revolt in 1381 led by Watt Tyler.

Though it may have raised important questions of freedom Magna Carta did not settle them.

The king soon rejected the charter as did Pope Innocent III who said it was “illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people.”

The Charter was watered down and revised in 1216 (the Forest Charter) and 1225, while in 1265 the Battle of Evesham was a rerun of old enmities between King Edward I and the barons.

In 1621 when Sir Edward Coke MP appealed to Magna Carta — “the Charter of Liberty because it maketh freemen” — he was sent to the tower for treason by James I.

But absolutism could not last. The efforts of his successor Charles I to impose his “divine right to rule” resulted in civil war and regicide of the last absolutist king.

Royalist critics may claim “bad” King John’s mistake was not only greed but to have ignored his feudal duties to the barons on whom he depended, not least to provide him with knights for his wasteful military campaigns.

But Magna Carta was not a gift of kingship; it was a result of the injustices, contradictions and absurdities of monarchy which continue to this day.

The Walter Scott legend of peasant’s friend Robin Hood (Robyn Hode) — who supposedly stole from the rich to give to the poor — harked back to a supposed golden before “wicked King John.” There never was such a golden era.

As with Richard III it may be argued that King John was no worse than many English monarchs and better than some.

His brother, the saintly Richard I (Lionheart), who in reality spent little time in England, squandered his inheritance and reduced his people and Treasury to ruin through war and the third Crusade (sounds familiar doesn’t it).

While it was “bad King John” who signed Magna Carta it is Richard Coeur de Lion’s whose handsome statue stands outside Parliament, not far from that of Cromwell.

And many in Parliament who speak most of freedom would happily scrap the Human Rights Act.