Do you know where Churchill made this state­ment? “Here is a law which is above the King which even he must not break. This reaf­fir­ma­tion of a supreme law and its expres­sion in a gen­eral char­ter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone jus­ti­fies the respect in which men have held it.” —J.F.

Yes, in a book in 1956. Churchill was explain­ing Magna Carta, the Great Char­ter of Free­doms, one of the tow­er­ing bench­marks of West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion. In his His­tory of the English-Speaking Peo­ples, vol. 1, The Birth of Britain (Lon­don: Cas­sell, 1956), 256-57. Churchill wrote:

King John of Eng­land signs Magna Carta (Wikipedia Commons)

If the thirteenth-century mag­nates under­stood lit­tle and cared less for pop­u­lar lib­er­ties or Par­lia­men­tary democ­racy, they had all the same laid hold of a prin­ci­ple which was to be of prime impor­tance for the future devel­op­ment of Eng­lish soci­ety and Eng­lish insti­tu­tions. Through­out the doc­u­ment it is implied that here is a law which is above the King and which even he must not break. This reaf­fir­ma­tion of a supreme law and its expres­sion in a gen­eral char­ter is the great work of Magna Carta; and this alone jus­ti­fies the respect in which men have held it. The reign of Henry II, accord­ing to the most respected author­i­ties, ini­ti­ates the rule of law. But the work as yet was incom­plete: the Crown was still above the law; the legal sys­tem which Henry had cre­ated could become, as John showed, an instru­ment of oppression.

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