[MUSIC] We're fortunate enough this morning to be in the Inner Temple in central London. And I'm pleased to say I'm joined by Professor Alan Cromartie, from the University of Reading. Alan, can you tell me what difference the Union of Crowns in 1603 made? >> The Union of Crowns in 1603 was absolutely central to the development of English political self-consciousness in the 17th century. And to the development of the role of Magna Carta within that self-consciousness. And the reason was quite simple. Down to 1603, England had, of course, been governed by the last of the Tudors, Queen Elizabeth. Elizabeth had her faults and was often quite unpopular with a number of her subjects. But she was unquestionably, culturally English. She had a good understanding of the English situation. People had a sense of her character. motives, they knew there were things that she probably wouldn't do. And there was a basic level of trust between monarch and people. Suddenly, from 1603 onwards, England was governed by a foreign dynasty. That foreign dynasty was Scottish. It was widely felt that Scotland was inferior to England because it had inferior constitutional safeguards. Scottish liberty was not as secure as English liberty was. One implication of the Union of Crowns was that the common law, the legal system that was unique to England, was increasingly a vessel of English nationalistic expectations. And great faith was reposed in it a, as the only possible safeguard against monarchical abuses of various sorts. Increasingly, this focused on an idea which had been developed by the common lawyers actually in the 15th century, which is the idea that the great thing about the English constitutional situation was that it was superior to the French one. The English had constitutional safeguards. Most openly safeguards for private property and the sort of safeguards that were embodied, in the jury system. And the consequence was they could not be oppressed in the way that the French were oppressed. The English were free and the French were unfree. And the prosperity of England was closely linked to the fact that it was a free country in a sense that France was not a free country. And the great anxiety that the English felt about both the early Stuarts, both James I and Charles I, was they might wish to take the country's constitution in a more French direction. That's to say, they might claim for themselves, in particular, the right to tax their people without consent, and therefore, of course, to impoverish their people. And an interest in the inherited constitutional safeguards that England enjoyed and that France, and arguably Scotland did not of course led people take a great interest in Medieval constitutional documents, of which Magna Carta was much the most important. >> What role did Sir Edward Coke play in that process? >> One of the advisors that James inherited when he came south was Sir Edward Coke, who was already established as one of the greatest technical authorities on English common law who has ever lived. He later developed into an absolutely unchallengeable authority on almost all technical and legal matters. Coke wasn't by temperament an anti-authoritarian figure. If anything, he was a loyal crown servant. But his first loyalty was to the English common law as he understood it. And there was, from, right from the start, tension between him and King James about whether the common law should be understood in the ways that judges understood it, or in the ways that intelligent laymen such as James himself might understand it. Down to about 1616, Coke remained a crown servant. But throughout the later part of the 1603-1616 period, there was tension between him and the king. Eventually, the king decided that he was too much of a nuisance as a leading judge to be kept on, and from that point on, Coke went into what one might want to call opposition. He sat in the parliament in the 1620s as an essentially oppositional figure. And was a leading figure in those parliaments. And not the least because he was an extraordinarily effective and apparently very funny public speaker. During this period, his views underwent a transition. And he came to adopt what might be called an oppositional understanding of the law on almost all the points at issue between the king and his subjects. Of which much the most important was whether the king was allowed to tax his subjects without consent by laying customs duties without parliament's consent. At some point, probably after 1628 he produced a commentary on most of the medieval legislation starting with Magna Carta. And his commentary on, on Magna Carta in the volume called The Second Part of the Institutes, which is essentially a commentary on, on the statute book, insisted that the Crown had been wrong in what it had asserted in James' reign about its right to tax and levy customs duties without consent. During the 1630s, for obvious reasons. Because Charles I was attempting to install a personal rule, a basically absolutist regime. The Second Part of the Institutes could not be published. But it was published in 1642 on the verge of civil war. And thereafter the ideas that Coke expressed about centrality of Magna Carta in securing English liberty became readily available to anyone who wanted to spend a few shillings on buying a copy of his commentary in English. >> How did Coke understand Magna Carta's historical role? >> From the perspective of someone like Coke, who was an Englishman and who wished to use Magna Carta to emphasize the constitutional safeguards for English liberty, there were two options. One option was to admit that in the early Middle Ages, from the Norman conquest on, England had been to all intents and purposes an absolutist state. A state, after all, that had been founded by a conqueror who presumably in his capacity as a conqueror wielded absolute power. But then by consent either King William or one of his successors had given back the powers that the conquest had given him. And a natural way, of course, of telling this story is to say that England had been an absolutist country down to 1215 when King John made his concessions. That wasn't, however, the route that Coke took. Coke preferred to say that Magna Carta in his own terminology was a declaratory statute, rather than an introductive one. That's to say that all it did was made an authoritative declaration of principles that were already widely recognised. It was tremendously important to Coke that Magna Carta was best understood as a declaration of the common law of England. And the common law was best understood as rationality, reason applied to English conditions. The English constitutional arrangement was the best conceivable constitutional arrangements because they resulted from the continuous application of rationality by judges like Edward Coke over a very, very long period. Coke occasionally implied, in consequence, that common law had not changed, because English conditions had not changed, since the time of the Druids. But he didn't actually have to make such extreme claims. What he did want to maintain was the English constitutional institutions had more or less continuously developed. What's often referred to as the idea of the ancient constitution. Is essentially the idea that England had always been governed by the common law, and that the common law had continuously developed. And that documents such as Magna Carta were simply occasional authoritative declarations of principles which had been accepted by the Saxons and even perhaps by their British predecessors.
