WAR & PEACE: Curious Passage

On Christmas Day in the year 1214, the barons of England armed themselves capapie, and came before their King, the cruel and crafty John, to ask a government of liberty and by law. Twice John "Lackland" denied their plea. The plea became a battle cry, the petitioners an army. London threw open its gates to them, so did Lincoln and Exeter. Wales promised help, and the Scottish nobles spurred south to add the strength of their swords. The country had risen as a man: John found himself with but seven loyal horsemen in his train, facing a nation in arms.

He summoned the barons to confer on an island in the Thames between Staines and Windsor. On one bank camped King John; on the other side the barons set their pavilions on a marshy flat known as Runnymede. In one day's talk the points at issue were discussed, agreed on, signed. In the afternoon of June 15, 1215, King John, who could not write, set the royal seal four times to four copies of the Magna Charta.

On those parchments time set a greater seal. Keystone of English liberty, the Magna Charta became the symbol of government by law, of justice that may not be sold or delayed, of security for free men. All guarantees that have followed it, say historians, are but footnotes and commentary.

Last week, in the grandiose splendors of the Library of Congress, two attendants on the second-floor gallery carefully wrestled a 17-inch square bronze frame into a metal stand. One of wrathful King John's four copies, brown and dim with age, its Latin screed legible only to the learned, now rested safe in Washington, capital of a nation two centuries undiscovered when the barons camped at Runnymede.

A plump, spectacled Englishman, whose lineage stretches back to those nobles, ceremoniously gave the Magna Charta (for the duration of World War II) into the keeping of a slight, balding U. S. poet. Said Philip Henry Kerr (pronounced Carr), Marquess of Lothian, British Ambassador to the United States, to Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress:

"In these immortal words ... we see the nucleus of most of our liberties. . . . Samuel Adams appealed to 'the rights of Magna Charta.. . .' It was in their name that your ancestors threw the tea into Boston Harbor. ... It was in their name . . . that they drew up that Constitution which Mr. Gladstone described as 'the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.' And it was in their name that Abraham Lincoln fought a four years' war to loosen the fetters from the slaves and to preserve the Union. . . .

"It was, therefore, but natural that when the second great war of this century descended upon us this autumn, the British Government should have hesitated to imperil so priceless a possession by trusting it to the angry transit of the seas. . . ."