Councillor Andrew Varley - Bury St Edmunds 2004
Bury St. Edmunds Celebration June 13, 2004
Mr Mayor, my Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen,
Firstly let me say how delighted I am to welcome all our distinguished
guests who have joined us today to celebrate Magna Carta and to witness
the conferral of the Freedom of this Borough on the D-Day Veterans
Association. Master of the Rolls and Lady Philips, Vice-Lord Lieutenant
and Mrs Kerr, High Sheriff, Lady Euston, General and Mrs Wooley and
other representatives of our great American allies, civic dignitaries
from our sister Magna Carta Towns, and all our guests from within the
Borough and beyond, it is wonderful to see you all here in our beautiful
town on this splendid day. There is another guest I should like to
welcome who will not be able to join us until later and that is the Lord
Abbot of Bury St Edmunds. It may surprise some of you to hear that such
a being exists in corporeal form. He is Abbot Stephen Ortiger and he
will be preaching at the Cathedral service by kind invitation of the
Dean. It is the custom in the present day English Benedictine
Congregation to confer on distinguished monks titular abbacies
commemorating those ancient monasteries suppressed during the
reformation. It is pleasant to think that we have the successor with us
today of that Abbot who stood by whilst the barons swore their oath at
the High Altar – probably hoping to God that, through no choice of his
own, he had ended up on the winning side.
We are all, of course, familiar with the cock-up theory of history –
each of us in our own small way can probably point to our own lives to
provide examples. How else explain how I come to be speaking here today?
When all the more intellectually challenging, academically
sophisticated, and plain dotty theories have fallen away, trampled
underfoot by the inexorable march of events (and whose mind did not turn
to the death of communism as we watched the poignant moments of
President Reagan’s funeral the other day?), it is somehow comforting to
know that so often the great events of the past were the result of
miscalculation, incompetence, lack of foresight, the simple failure to
be at the right place at the right time. What if Marshall Grouchy had
marched to the sound of the guns and beaten Blucher to the field of
Mr Mayor, in taking for granted that this actually happened in Bury, I am respecting pious belief and ignoring those inconvenient and unimaginative historians who say that not such event ever took place.
The great American cultural historian Jacques Barzun makes the remark
that: Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist
style, it is understood that hasty moral judgements about people in the
past is a form of injustice. So, if we say that the barons, led by
Cardinal Stephen Langton, were interested only in preserving their own
rights and the feudal law of England (in passing it is interesting that
so many historians now find the root of the idea of personal freedom in
Germanic customary law rather than in Roman jurisprudence) and so imply
that they therefore fall short of our own irreproachable motives in
public life, we are missing the whole point of the Magna Carta episode.
The document was of its age, in many respects a re-echoing of previous
charters, especially that of Henry I, it sought to limit monarchy by
reasserting feudal rights and privileges – which existed for those
further down the social scale quite as much as for our friends the
barons. It contained seeds, however, which were to grow into mighty
English oaks. The most famous articles, for example, number 39:
No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or deprived of his freehold
or outlawed or banished or in any way ruined, nor will we take or order
action against him except by the lawful judgement of his equals and
according to the law of the land.
And number 40:
To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or
justice.
Just like a seed in the earth, Magna Carta faded and lay dormant
throughout the late Middle Ages and Tudor times until resurrected by the
great jurist Sir Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice at the time of James I.
It sprang up, vigorously interpreted as we now understand it, during the
seventeenth century struggles between king and parliament. It is
interesting, as an aside, to note that Shakespeare, who lived and died
within Coke’s lifespan, was able to write the play King John without
making the slightest reference to the Magna Carta.
What Coke and his contemporaries began, succeeding centuries and their
men of law have confirmed and that seed nurtured here and planted at
Which brings us to the other elements of today. We are honoured by the
presence of our American allies and by the part they are to play in
today’s ceremonies. They too have a claim on Magna Carta. It is part of
the birthright of American freedom, it was the basis of the early
colonial charters which led to the American Constitution.
Freedom and Democracy is the theme of these celebrations: if Magna Carta
enshrines the legal basis of our freedom, then the heroism of the men
who landed on the
Accident did not bring these two events together under the theme of
Freedom and Democracy. It was the Freedoms of Magna Carta that the men
of D Day were defending so that we can continue to enjoy them. They
include the rights to elect our own representatives – our own members of
parliament are present and many councillors - and to have access to
justice and recourse even to the court of the Master of the Rolls.
We must never forget these great lessons and examples of the past. But
our own times tell us – as indeed do these two events we celebrate today
- that it should not be a complacent remembrance. As was once said,
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal
vigilance.
Mr Mayor, Master of the Rolls, Vice-Lord Lieutenant, High Sheriff, my lords, ladies, gentlemen, and distinguished guests, I give you the Magna Carta Association and its aims.
Please visit our original site: www.magnacharta.org