Tri-Service

"Churchill Wanted to Give Copy of Magna Carta to US"

Plans to give a copy of the Magna Carta to the United States in return for its support in the Second World War have been revealed in a new exhibition telling the story of the historic document.

The idea, described by one official as the "only really adequate gesture which it is in our power to make in return for the means to preserve our country", was dreamt up after the US Congress passed the 1941 Lend-Lease Act, which offered material support to the UK in its fight against the Nazis.

The Whitehall documents say the US action is "based on enlightened self-interest", but "nonetheless represents a landmark in the history of liberty".

It goes on to say that Britain, as "principal beneficiary" of lend-lease, should present the document to the US, which has "few monuments to the past" but traces its own concept of liberty back to the medieval agreement. It adds:

"Its inhabitants live almost entirely in the present and they crave tangible evidence of their early European background much as the nouveau riche crave ancestors".

The plan was later cancelled when it emerged none of the surviving documents were the property of the Government that wanted to hand them over.

Two original copies of the 1215 document will go on show at the British Library exhibition, called Magna Carta: Law, Liberty, Legacy, from this Friday along with Thomas Jefferson's handwritten copy of the Declaration of Independence and a copy of the Bill of Rights.

Its co-curator Julian Harrison said: "We hope that, by seeing Magna Carta alongside other documents it has inspired - including the Declaration of Independence and US Bill of Rights - our visitors will be encouraged to reflect on the charter's influence over the past 800 years and what it means to them today.

"Magna Carta established for the first time that everybody was subject to the law and that nobody, not even the king, was above the law, principles that we often take for granted."