Mark Carney: From Lincoln to Lothbury – Magna Carta and the Bank of England Lecture by Mr Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England and Chairman of the Financial Stability Board, as part of the Lincoln Lectures 2015, Lincoln, 16 July 2015. *  *  *  I am particularly grateful to Professor Nicholas Vincent for commenting on an earlier draft of this speech, and to James Bell, Ben Nelson and Iain de Weymarn for assistance in its preparation. A burst of inflation. A crisis in the public finances. Public sector bailouts. Infighting in Europe. Not eight years ago, but eight hundred. That was the economic context for the striking of Magna Carta. To many today, Magna Carta is a document of profound, almost mythical, significance. It is seen as the cornerstone of the United Kingdom’s constitutional arrangements and as a blueprint for the constitutions of many other nations, including the United States. It is credited with establishing the foundations of parliamentary democracy, creating a framework for the rule of law, protecting individual liberty, defending the rights of the innocent, and limiting the role of the State. It is undoubtedly true that Magna Carta – or more correctly the idea of Magna Carta – has played a central role in British political development over the centuries, not least as a banner under which those seeking liberty from oppression have rallied. But many modern scholars argue that its significance, in and of itself, has been overstated.
17  The coronation charter of Henry I issued in 1100 (which was also endorsed by Henry II at his own coronation in 1154) is a pertinent example because it was effectively the draft on which Magna Carta was later based, containing several of the clauses now regarded as the most significant. The original text was written in one continuous flow. Its division into clauses is a modern construct. 18  Moreover it came after a lacuna of sixty years during which the House of Plantagenet had issued no similar conciliatory charters and whose actions in the meantime had caused sufficient damage to the relationship between nobility and monarchy as to make an uprising inevitable. BIS central bankers’ speeches  5  Despite the efforts of Coke and others, Charles I’s rejection of all enterprise to constrain his authority led to the English Civil War and to the king’s beheading in 1649. Meanwhile, Coke’s unstoppable Magna Carta redux had been set in motion. In contradiction to their behaviour at home, James and Charles had been busily granting royal charters promising the liberties of Englishmen to the American colonists. Coke himself had been involved in the drafting of the first charter of the Virginia Company in 1606, and similar English liberties were extended in the charters of Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Carolina over the next sixty years. Some have argued that references to Magna Carta, however irrelevant its provisions might by then have been, were used as a way of “drumming up” New World settlers.