King Charles III delivered a speech yesterday with remarkable and refreshing references to the shared moral, philosophical, and legal sources on which the United States and the United Kingdom draw. Here are a couple of excerpts from the King’s speech to a joint meeting of the US Congress.
As I look back across the centuries, Mr Speaker, there emerge certain patterns; certain self-evident truths from which we can learn and draw mutual strength. With the Spirit of 1776 in our minds, we can perhaps agree that we do not always agree – at least in the first instance! Indeed, the very principle on which your Congress was founded – no taxation without representation – was at once a fundamental disagreement between us, and at the same time a shared democratic value which you inherited from us. Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it… So perhaps, in this example, we can discern that our Nations are in fact instinctively like-minded – a product of the common democratic, legal and social traditions in which our governance is rooted to this day. Drawing on these values and traditions, time and again, our two countries have always found ways to come together. And by Jove, Mr. Speaker, when we have found that way to agree, what great change is brought about – not just for the benefit of our peoples, but of all peoples.
The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. 250 years ago (or, as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day….) they declared Independence. By balancing contending forces and drawing strength in diversity, they united thirteen disparate colonies to forge a Nation on the revolutionary idea of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. They carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment – as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English Common Law and Magna Carta.
These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional Monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated – often verbatim – in the American Bill of Rights of 1791. And those roots go even further back in our history: the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances. This is the reason why there stands a stone, by the River Thames at Runnymede where Magna Carta was signed in the year 1215. This stone records that an acre of that ancient and historic site was given to the U.S.A. by the people of the United Kingdom, to symbolise our shared resolve in support of liberty, and in memory of President John F. Kennedy.