Today is ‘Democracy Day’, 750 years to the day since the first parliament of representatives met at Westminster.
20 January 1265 is not a date with which most people are familiar; nor are its main actors, Simon de Montfort or Henry III household names. The story – in bare outline – is one, it is fair to say, in which necessity was the mother of “the mother of all parliaments” (a phrase happily coined 150 years ago this week). Seven years earlier, Henry had been forced to limit his power in the Provisions of Oxford. He did so under great duress and threw off the shackles as soon as he could, dragging the nation into a civil war which he lost at Lewes in 1264. The rebel to whom he lost, Simon de Montfort, was hardly universally acclaimed himself, however, and it was his attendant need to generate some form of workable legitimacy that led to call the nation’s first representative parliament in 1265. In both instances – Henry III’s Provisions and Simon de Montfort’s parliament – it was their weakness, rather than their strength, that drove reform.
It was a similar story fifty years earlier. In the rather better known events of 1215, King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta because of his weakness before the barons. When back on his feet the following year, aided in no small measure by Pope Innocent III’s annulment of the document, John tore the charter up, metaphorically speaking, and tried to assert complete royal supremacy. As it happens, he was only partially successful and the charter was preserved and reissued, thanks largely to Archbishop Stephen Langton. Once again, it was the weakness of power that led to reform.
Perhaps the only date in national constitutional history more famous than 1215, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, tells a similar tale, with the incoming William and Mary of Orange compelled to concede the limitations of the Bill of Rights because they were too weak to do otherwise. Parliament held the whip hand and a limited constitutional monarchy was the only kind it was willing to accept. Other notable acts and dates are susceptible to the same analysis: Catholic emancipation, Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, etc. – all might be seen as concessions made by the powerful become unduly weak.
There are two ways of reading such history which are not entirely consonant with one another.
History is a Whiggish story of progress as Magna Carta prepared the grounds for the Provisions of Oxford which prepared the way for the first parliament which provided the foundations for the combative parliament of the Glorious Revolution which was the groundplan on which the Great and then Second Reform Acts were built… and so on. If you doubt the reality of progress, try arguing King John’s or Henry III’s case today.
History is not a Whiggish story of progress. All of the above were the result of accident not design. No one planned ahead for Magna Carta (which was, after all, largely ignored for centuries). It was only because Henry lost the Battle of Lewes in 1264 that we ended up with Simon de Montfort’s parliament. It was only because support for James II melted away that William and Mary found themselves on the throne. History is determined simply by force or, at best, by pragmatism. Power is shared not according to any great principled vision, still less one of admirable self-sacrifice, but by sheer compulsion. For all we admire Gladstone’s principle, it is Disraeli’s realism – Disrealism? – that writes history.
There is also a theological reading, which skirts round the details of historical accident and pragmatism and makes a principled point, irrespective or how far principle played a role in events themselves. It is that power is made perfect in weakness.
We instinctively think that it is in the exercise of power – “the capacity to direct or influence the behaviour of others” – that there lies a solution. And yet it is precisely the divesting of power over the centuries – from kings to parliaments to people – that has redeemed it. In a faint imitation of the way in which God’s goodness is revealed at his moment of greatest weakness, so ours is when we empty ourselves of power – whether personally through restraint or structurally through reform – for the good of the other.
This is a risky business. We forget how many and cogent were the arguments against democracy in the 19th century, by those who feared mobocracy or anarchy. And for all our adoration of democracy, it remains a risky business today.
Nick Spencer
Image from wikimedia available in the public domain.
