Word: carta
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Many Americans and Englishmen have an idea that liberty was born with Magna Carta and grew steadily to maturity through the centuries. The Lion and the Throne exposes this fallacy. When Coke (rhymes with hook) was born (1552), the purpose of three centuries of English monarchs had been to ignore Magna Carta...
...century and a half later the Massachusetts Assembly was to declare the Stamp Act "against Magna Carta and the natural rights of Englishmen and, therefore, according to the Lord Coke, null and void." And it was to give effect to this same manner of ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court itself was brought into existence...
...members the potentially fatal error of begging for something that was already theirs by right of law. "Take heed," he said, "that we lose not our liberties by petitioning for liberty," and: "If my sovereign will not allow me my inheritance, I must fly to Magna Carta...
Coke's remedies were habeas corpus (its use as a safeguard against unjust imprisonment was only beginning to emerge) and that great milestone of liberty, the Petition of Right, which set out at length what Coke put bluntly in brief: "Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign." When Charles, cornered by lack of money, gave sour assent to the petition, there "broke out ringing of bells and bonfires" such as London had not seen for years. But the petition was Coke's last great achievement. When Parliament rose, he retired into the country...
...Confidence. In Brixham, England, Mrs. Rhoda Clarke refused to pay a ?1 ($2.80) dog license, told a magistrate's court the things she was protesting: "H-bomb tests, German rearmament, the flouting of the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Human Rights, and British Government policy...