Calling an exhibition Taking Liberties offers up more than one hostage to
fortune. The first is the challenge the phrase makes to other conceptions of
the main story told at the British Library’s show – that of Britain’s
struggle from around the time of Magna Carta for the political and social
rights we enjoy, or pine for, today. But another relates to the very idea
that Britons have taken what liberties they have at all. As you walk through
what is an impressive gathering of public and private records of this uneven
struggle, it is difficult not to notice how often they testify to
disappointment. The copy of Magna Carta, one of two in the Library’s
collection and of only four in existence, is worth venerating in part
because it is remarkable that it survived at all. In 1215, it was almost
immediately overtaken by events, first by King John’s swift securing of
papal rejection, and then by the barons’ decision to revert to a less
refined way of cornering their sovereign: inviting another to take his
place. Prince Louis of France was still very much in evidence when John
succumbed to a bout of overeating and died the following year, and it was
only because the regency for his nine-year-old son was in such dire
circumstances that a document both sides had previously decided to ignore
was revived. John’s seal on the Charter may have been forced out of him, but
its long-term future was as a royal grant, not a liberty “taken” at all.
Magna Carta’s reincarnation as the “palladium of English liberties” must have
seemed very far off, but exhibits from more recent times carry the same
quality of only fitting into a story of a successful struggle in long
retrospect. Take the vast reproduction of the daguerreotype of the
Chartists’ Kennington Common meeting in 1848 (the irony that the original
belongs to the Queen is not lost on the curators). This photograph,
apparently the first ever taken of a crowd, bears witness to the culminating
failure of a popular attempt to reinvigorate the spirit of Magna Carta for
the Victorian age – as the petition that was delivered after this monster
meeting was not just rejected, but ridiculed by the “reformed” House of
Commons. But it also gives a false idea of the passion with which the
attempt to take this liberty was prosecuted. Stones were piled up on the
roof of the British Library’s former home at the British Museum for pelting
the Chartist insurgents, and batons like the one on display at the
exhibition were distributed for beating some sense into their muddled
revolutionary heads. But the Chartists of Kennington Common never marched
across the river, let alone revolted. Their fiery Irish talisman Feargus
O’Connor took fright at government threats and called off the progress at
the last minute. The petition was delivered to Parliament in three hansom
cabs. Perhaps somewhere in the Queen’s photograph is the face of Hector
Berlioz, who attended the aborted Kennington Common uprising and commented
that the English Chartists knew “as much about starting a riot as the
Italians know about writing a symphony”.
Democracy in Britain was a liberty eked out by degrees, not “taken”. The
exhibition, which runs until March 1, is a team effort, spearheaded by Linda
Colley, who has contributed a graceful extended essay (Taking Stock of
Taking Liberties: A personal view. 48pp. British Library. Paperback, £6.95),
to set alongside the more unabashedly celebratory catalogue (by Mike Ashley:
Taking Liberties: The struggle for Britain’s freedoms and rights. British
Library. £25; paperback, £15.95). The arrangement of exhibits is not an
attempt to construct a whiggish motorway of the journey to freedom, but to
present this story as a network of diversions and cul-de-sacs. Consequently,
the display of what should be the crown jewels of English liberty – not only
Magna Carta, but the Bill of Rights (1689) and the unrolled Great Reform Act
(1832), with its new constituencies stitched in as the debate progressed –
leaves this British subject at least with mixed feelings. The exhibition
makes no bones of the facts that Magna Carta is mostly about feudal
arrangements, that the Bill of Rights was a bigoted Protestant document
which scarcely advanced Parliamentary sovereignty (and certainly represented
a step back in those terms from what had obtained less than forty years
earlier), or that the Reform Act was less than a half-stride towards
democracy. But as objects, they are also hard to warm to:
near-indecipherable to the untrained eye, and proof only that Britain’s
fabled “unwritten constitution” is in fact a written one, but in divers
spidery hands.
The show acknowledges this distance between viewer and object, and tries to
bridge it, in its most innovative feature, the interactive element. As you
enter Taking Liberties, you are offered a paper wristband with a barcode on
it, so that you proceed through an exhibition on freedom with the curious
sensation that you’re wearing a manacle. The barcode is the appropriately
surveillance-age method for reading your personal record of answers to
various questions about rights. What you have to do is thrust your hand,
like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, into various bocche della verità placed
around the show, and once your code has been read, to respond to the
electronic grilling this sets off. Your answers will be aggregated to an
anonymous graphic at the end of the show to illustrate visitors’ views of
rights today. It is a cleverly imaginative way to “engage” the visitor, but
one that admits that much of the appeal of the show is rather unemotional.
The exhibition’s highlights may make it seem more like an argument than an
entertainment, but among the less central, more ambivalent exhibits, the
emotions can be stirred. For a Scot, the inclusion of the Declaration of
Arbroath (1320), with its promise that “as long as but a hundred of us
remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English
rule”, may set the pulse racing. A Welsh visitor would have to make do with
the largely more pragmatic Pennal Letter, from Owain Glyn Dwr, inviting the
French to help eject the “barbarous Saxons”. Part of the appeal of those two
items might be how distant was the future that they imagined from the one
that actually unfolded, with the two countries institutionally subsumed in
an Englishness from which both are only just beginning to re-emerge. This is
the opposite sense from that encouraged by selectively reading Magna Carta
or the Bill of Rights, or even the Chartists’ appeal for manhood suffrage,
as containing the “seeds” of the freedoms we know now.
But the exhibition shows too that taking liberties, or trying to take them,
could involve some very personal sacrifices. Here is a copy of the Chartist
Thomas Cooper’s ten-volume Purgatory of Suicides, written while serving a
jail sentence for his part in riots for reform in 1842. We can look at Emily
Wilding Davison’s tiny purse, and the unused return portion of her ticket to
Epsom racecourse, as well as the footage of her martyrdom and the dignified
propaganda of her suffragette funeral. The victims were not, of course, all
on one side, as evidenced by the inclusion of Charles I’s death warrant,
signed and sealed by fifty-nine regicides, nine of whom would be executed in
turn after the Restoration.
As we approach the present day, Taking Liberties performs a complicated
balancing act between acknowledging Britain’s part in the expansion of ideas
of human rights, from Thomas Paine to H. G. Wells, as well as the shadier
compromises made in our names. So along with a copy of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, two letters from colonial officers are
displayed, which query the wisdom of letting the natives in on some of the
finer points. The Prime Minister attended the opening of an exhibition with
which no politician would miss the chance of being associated, but he would
have had to walk past videos of various lawyers and his own party colleagues
criticizing his government’s attempts to extend detention without trial.
Taking Liberties doesn’t fill the visitor with the same sort of swelling
pride that American citizens traditionally feel on viewing the more
permanent displays of their less piecemeal icons of freedom at the
Washington National Archives. But perhaps being made to question the
narrative, rather than revere it, is no bad thing.
TAKING LIBERTIES
British Library to March 1, 2009
David Horspool is History editor of the TLS. His new book, The English
Rebel, will be published later this year.
