Advice to Charles
While Charles Clark is deciding how to respond to the law lords' ruling, can I suggest he digs out Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons”? Specifically the scene in which Sir Thomas More finds out that Richard Rich, his protégé, is going to betray him. More’s daughter, Margaret Roper, and son in law urge him to have Rich arrested.
t“Father”, says Margaret “That man is bad”.
“There is no law against that”, More replies. And continues: “The law, Roper, the law. I know what’s legal, not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal”. Meanwhile, Richard Rich has scarpered. “And go he should”, says More “if he was the devil himself until he broke the law”. But Roper protests. "He would cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil."
More replies. “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast, and if you cut them down do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?”
posted by Tony @ Monday, February 14, 2005
2 Comments:
The same point is made in a very different way in T. H. White's The Once and Future King. Arthur knows perfectly well that Lancelot is cuckolding him but is willing to turn a blind eye to what is going on. However, when he is forced to reognise the situation he can accept no other course of action than to allow his own law to take its course, however dreadful the outcome will be for all concerned, even to the extent of refusing to warn Lancelot and Guinevere when he knows that they are going to be discovered and then insisting on the presence of a normal guard at Guinevere's execution (but Lancelot gets through and saves her of course).
The moral point of the book is to describe how the rule of law was imposed in the Middle Ages over the preceding chaos, and -- sadly -- how the attempt failed because personal jealousy and ambition could not be subordinated to the common good.
Peter
From Peter Harvey (again).
I know that that quote from Bolt’s play is widely respected, and in itself it is a splendid statement of the need for the rule of law, but I must say that More as a person has left me with very equivocal feelings, at least as Bolt presents him.
The problem is that he achieved nothing practical: for all his moralising about the rule of law he was never able to impose it and his only achievement was to feed his ego at the expense of his family – something that is a known occupational risk of being a martyr. In the end Henry VIII did divorce Catherine of Aragon (which has left him with an enduring and serious image problem in this neck of the woods) and marry Anne Boleyn; and to do so he founded his own Church, which is a good example of English pragmatism against European/Catholic insistence on intellectual coherence, and the Church of England became part of history and thus (sic) became part of the natural order of what is right in England/Britain (but note that other countries do not make this automatic assumption about the development of their national histories). However, the political fudge that formed the basis of the nation’s constitution for so long is now beginning to melt, with the inevitable sticky results.
It would have been nice if More had been able to have the law obeyed, but England wasn’t the country for it. I really think that he would have done better to know when he was beaten and he should have retired with his family to a place in the country where he could have bored all the locals with stories of how he was in the right but no-one would listen to him, and look how the country was going to the dogs as a result.
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