Secret Wartime Plan to Give US Magna Carta

The origins of the Magna Carta date back to June 15th 1215 when the then King John applied his seal to the original document at Runnymede on the River Thames near London. Several copies of the Magna Carta were then made and four of these still exist today. One of these treasured copies belongs to Lincoln Cathedral where it is usually on display within the nearby Lincoln Castle. The Magna Carta is also well known and celebrated within the US as it is generally accepted to have been a major influence on the wording of the Bill Of Rights, one of the foundations on which America's democracy is built.

Full background to the history of Magana Carta can be found at Wikipedia.

But it has recently emerged that Winston Churchill wanted to gift Lincoln's copy of Magna Carta to the US as a 'goodwill gesture' likely to garner support for Britain as she faced what appeared to be certain invasion by Nazi Germany. Lincoln's 1215 copy of Magna Carta happened to be in the US at the outbreak of War in Britain. Until recently the plan to gift Lincoln's Magna Carta to the US was unknown as the files containing correspondence were still closed under Britain's secrecy laws.

However, research by the University of East Anglia's Professor Nicholas Vincent has revealed that the idea to gift America with a copy of Magna Carta was originally the pre-war brainchild of an American called J W Hamilton. He was tryng to establish a new International Magna Carta Day in recognition of the importance of the document to modern democracies. As part of his campaign he wrote to Government Minister Leo Amery setting out his idea and in June 1939 Amery wrote to the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, then British Prime Minsiter. Hamilton had argued that the gift of Magna Carta to the US "might do more finally to obliterate all recollection of previous disagreements by reasserting the common origin of our liberties than anything that could be imagined". The idea was supported by the notion that Lincoln Cathedral could be financially compensated by the British Government in order to carry out much needed maintenance work. However Chamberlain was not impressed by the idea and wrote back to Amery saying; "Such a gift would merely be represented in malevolent quarters as a clumsy bribe to gain American goodwill."

But as Chamberlain made way for Churchill at 10 Downing Street the desparation during Britain's darkest hours meant the idea of gifting Lincoln's Magna Carta to the US was raised again. At this time Prime Minister Churchill believed the only way to prevent Hitler's Nazi Germany from conquering Britain was to have America, led by President Fanklyn Roosevelt, as an ally. And it was while he was trying to persuade the Americans to abandon their neutrality that he approved the plan to give away Lincoln's treasured copy of Magna Carta.

The recently declassified documents unearthed by Professor Vincent show how Churchill's staff were preparing to give away the document. In a memo to Churchill from the Foreign Office dated March 18 1941, Sir Alexander Cadogan wrote; "I should like to say to the Americans "may we give you, at least as a token of our feeling, something of no intrinsic value whatsoever: a bit of parchment, more than 700 years old, rather the worse for wear? You know what it means to us. We believe it means as much to you. Will you accept it as a symbol and a seal of our compact to fight to the last against the forces of evil?"

Professor Vincent has uncovered dozens more documents confirming the preparations to give Magna Carta to the US. Vincent believes the Governemnt had not been able to reach a workable solution to persuade Lincoln Cathedral to part with ownership of the document and matters had become bogged down for months. But as discussions continued to overcome the obstacles, the whole project became irrelevant on 7th December 1941 when Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States in to the Second World War.

It appears British Government involvement in trying to gift Magna Carta to the US faded after Pearl Harbor. But Dr Nicholas Bennett, current Lincoln Cathedral Librarian, is reported saying that the Americans themselves then approached the Cathedral directly in 1942 trying to secure the copy of Magna Carta. No agreement was reached and the precious document was eventually returned back to Lincoln Cathedral in 1946.

Whether or not a gift of Magna Carta to the US would have encouraged America to abandon its neutrality sooner and affect the outcome of the War is a matter of speculation. Personally I think it doubtful, but this research has certainly given us an interesting insight in to the desperation of Churchill's Government during 1940/41 as Britain held out alone against Nazi Germany in Europe.