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A Short History Of England
By
G. K. Chesterton
Contents
IV THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS
V ST. EDWARD AND THE NO=
RMAN
KINGS
VII THE PROBL=
EM
OF THE PLANTAGENETS
VIII THE MEANING OF
MERRY ENGLAND
IX NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH =
WARS
XII SPAIN AND=
THE
SCHISM OF NATIONS
XIV THE TRIUMPH OF =
THE
WHIGS
XV THE WAR W=
ITH
THE GREAT REPUBLICS
XVI ARISTOCRACY AND=
THE
DISCONTENTS
XVII THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN=
It will be very reasonably asked wh=
y I
should consent, though upon a sort of challenge, to write even a popular es=
say
in English history, who make no pretence to particular scholarship and am
merely a member of the public. The answer is that I know just enough to know
one thing: that a history from the standpoint of a member of the public has=
not
been written. What we call the popular histories should rather be called th=
e anti-popular
histories. They are all, nearly without exception, written against the peop=
le;
and in them the populace is either ignored or elaborately proved to have be=
en
wrong. It is true that Green called his book "A Short History of the
English People"; but he seems to have thought it too short for the peo=
ple
to be properly mentioned. For instance, he calls one very large part of his
story "Puritan England." But England never was Puritan. It would =
have
been almost as unfair to call the rise of Henry of Navarre "Puritan
France." And some of our extreme Whig historians would have been pretty
nearly capable of calling the campaign of Wexford and Drogheda "Puritan
Ireland."
But it is especia=
lly
in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popular histories trample upon the
popular traditions. In this respect there is an almost comic contrast betwe=
en
the general information provided about England in the last two or three
centuries, in which its present industrial system was being built up, and t=
he
general information given about the preceding centuries, which we call broa=
dly
mediæval. Of the sort of waxwork history which is thought sufficient =
for
the side-show of the age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be
sufficient. A popular Encyclopædia appeared some years ago, professing
among other things to teach English History to the masses; and in this I ca=
me
upon a series of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to=
be all
authentic; but the interest attached to those that were necessarily imagina=
ry.
There is much vivid material in contemporary literature for portraits of men
like Henry II. or Edward I.; but this did not seem to have been found, or e=
ven
sought. And wandering to the image that stood for Stephen of Blois, my eye =
was
staggered by a gentleman with one of those helmets with steel brims curved =
like
a crescent, which went with the age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am tempted to
suspect that the head was that of a halberdier at some such scene as the
execution of Mary Queen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets were
mediæval; and any old helmet was good enough for Stephen.
Now suppose the
readers of that work of reference had looked for the portrait of Charles I.=
and
found the head of a policeman. Suppose it had been taken, modern helmet and
all, out of some snapshot in the Daily Sketch of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhur=
st.
I think we may go so far as to say that the readers would have refused to
accept it as a lifelike portrait of Charles I. They would have formed the
opinion that there must be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between
Stephen and Mary was much longer than the time that has elapsed between Cha=
rles
and ourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of the Cru=
sades
and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal and complete than=
any
change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all, that revolution shoul=
d be
the first thing and the final thing in anything calling itself a popular
history. For it is the story of how our populace gained great things, but
to-day has lost everything.
Now I will modest=
ly
maintain that I know more about English history than this; and that I have =
as
much right to make a popular summary of it as the gentleman who made the
crusader and the halberdier change hats. But the curious and arresting thing
about the neglect, one might say the omission, of mediæval civilizati=
on
in such histories as this, lies in the fact I have already noted. It is exa=
ctly
the popular story that is left out of the popular history. For instance, ev=
en a
working man, a carpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the
Great Charter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstr=
ous solitude
came from being before its time instead of after. He was not taught that the
whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with the parchment of charters; th=
at
society was once a system of charters, and of a kind much more interesting =
to
him. The carpenter heard of one charter given to barons, and chiefly in the
interest of barons; the carpenter did not hear of any of the charters given=
to
carpenters, to coopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another
instance, the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the
schools practically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appe=
ars in
a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagine anything=
of
what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepers did not conceive
themselves as taking part in any such romance as the adventure of Courtrai,
where the mediæval shopkeepers more than won their spurs--for they won
the spurs of their enemies.
I have a very sim=
ple
motive and excuse for telling the little I know of this true tale. I have m=
et
in my wanderings a man brought up in the lower quarters of a great house, f=
ed
mainly on its leavings and burdened mostly with its labours. I know that his
complaints are stilled, and his status justified, by a story that is told to
him. It is about how his grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild=
man
of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence.=
In
the light of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that h=
e enjoys;
and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yet more evolved
animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by the sacred name of
Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect (and to discover) tha=
t it
is not true. I know by now enough at least of his origin to know that he was
not evolved, but simply disinherited. His family tree is not a monkey tree,
save in the sense that no monkey could have climbed it; rather it is like t=
hat
tree torn up by the roots and named "Dedischado," on the shield of
the unknown knight.
The land on which we live once had =
the
highly poetic privilege of being the end of the world. Its extremity was ul=
tima
Thule, the other end of nowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of
northern seas, were lit up at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was
felt that the remotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pri=
de
than possession.
The sentiment was=
not
unsuitable, even in geography. About these realms upon the edge of everythi=
ng
there was really something that can only be called edgy. Britain is not so =
much
an island as an archipelago; it is at least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In f=
ew
of the kindred countries can one so easily and so strangely find sea in the
fields or fields in the sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the
ocean, but barely to miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though l=
ow
as a whole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehisto=
ric tradition
has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet dreamier than its =
own.
The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations
into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the Wel=
sh
of the western uplands, have something altogether different from the humdrum
docility of the inland Germans, or from the bon sens français which =
can
be at will trenchant or trite. There is something common to all the Britons,
which even Acts of Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is
insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of thi=
ngs.
Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplex their
critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like their coasts. =
They
have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it is expressed, perhaps, in
the Irish by a confusion of speech and in the English by a confusion of
thought. For the Irish bull is a license with the symbol of language. But
Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "a dumb ox of thought"; a
standing mystification in the mind. There is something double in the though=
ts
as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they are least attac=
hed
to the purely classical; the imperial plainness which the French do finely =
and
the Germans coarsely, but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly
colonists and emigrants; they have the name of being at home in every count=
ry.
But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of h=
ome
and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may =
be
only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the
finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English
poems--"Over the hills and far away."
The great rationa=
list
hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no he was the detached demigod=
of
"Cæsar and Cleopatra," was certainly a Latin of the Latins,=
and
described these islands when he found them with all the curt positivism of =
his
pen of steel. But even Julius Cæsar's brief account of the Britons le=
aves
on us something of this mystery, which is more than ignorance of fact. They
were apparently ruled by that terrible thing, a pagan priesthood. Stones now
shapeless yet arranged in symbolic shapes bear witness to the order and lab=
our
of those that lifted them. Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and w=
hile
such a basis may count for something in the elemental quality that has alwa=
ys
soaked the island arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire
suggests the presence of something which generally grows out of
Nature-worship--I mean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of mo=
dern
controversy Cæsar is silent. He is silent about whether the language =
was "Celtic";
and some of the place-names have even given rise to a suggestion that, in p=
arts
at least, it was already Teutonic. I am not capable of pronouncing upon the
truth of such speculations, but I am of pronouncing upon their importance; =
at
least, to my own very simple purpose. And indeed their importance has been =
very
much exaggerated. Cæsar professed to give no more than the glimpse of=
a
traveller; but when, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and
turned Britain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singular =
indifference
to questions that have excited so many professors. What they cared about was
getting and giving in Britain what they had got and given in Gaul. We do not
know whether the Britons then, or for that matter the Britons now, were Ibe=
rian
or Cymric or Teutonic. We do know that in a short time they were Roman.
Every now and then
there is discovered in modern England some fragment such as a Roman pavemen=
t.
Such Roman antiquities rather diminish than increase the Roman reality. They
make something seem distant which is still very near, and something seem de=
ad
that is still alive. It is like writing a man's epitaph on his front door. =
The
epitaph would probably be a compliment, but hardly a personal introduction.=
The
important thing about France and England is not that they have Roman remain=
s.
They are Roman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for
they are still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic tha=
n a
row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have but grown =
like
fungoids upon this original work of man; and our woods are mosses on the bo=
nes
of a giant. Under the seed of our harvests and the roots of our trees is a
foundation of which the fragments of tile and brick are but emblems; and un=
der
the colours of our wildest flowers are the colours of a Roman pavement.
Britain was direc=
tly
Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than she has been Protestant, and
very much longer than she has been industrial. What was meant by being Roma=
n it
is necessary in a few lines to say, or no sense can be made of what happened
after, especially of what happened immediately after. Being Roman did not m=
ean
being subject, in the sense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or =
in
the sense that the cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horri=
ble hopefulness
for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors and conquered were heathe=
n,
and both had the institutions which seem to us to give an inhumanity to
heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, the lack of all the sensitive
nationalism of modern history. But the Roman Empire did not destroy nations=
; if
anything, it created them. Britons were not originally proud of being Brito=
ns;
but they were proud of being Romans. The Roman steel was at least as much a
magnet as a sword. In truth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which
every people came to see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the
civic origin was a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome
itself obviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean it=
could
not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or the Americans
ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it had to have a hand=
le
that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empire necessarily became less Roman =
as
it became more of an Empire; until not very long after Rome gave conquerors=
to
Britain, Britain was giving emperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Briton=
s boasted,
came at length the great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine.=
And
it was Constantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamation =
which
all after generations have in truth been struggling either to protect or to
tear down.
About that revolu=
tion
no man has ever been able to be impartial. The present writer will make no =
idle
pretence of being so. That it was the most revolutionary of all revolutions,
since it identified the dead body on a servile gibbet with the fatherhood i=
n the
skies, has long been a commonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But the=
re
is another historic element that must also be realized. Without saying anyt=
hing
more of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why even pre-C=
hristian
Rome was regarded as something mystical for long afterwards by all European
men. The extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded
mediævalism, and therefore still haunts modernity. Rome was regarded =
as
Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost that Man had done. It=
was
divinely necessary that the Roman Empire should succeed--if only that it mi=
ght
fail. Hence the school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers
killed Christ, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere law m=
ight
fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not mere military
lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter. Therefore the
mediæval poet is eager to show that Roman government was simply good
government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole point of the Christi=
an
revolution to maintain that in this, good government was as bad as bad. Even
good government was not good enough to know God among the thieves. This is =
not
only generally important as involving a colossal change in the conscience; =
the
loss of the whole heathen repose in the complete sufficiency of the city or=
the
state. It made a sort of eternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It mu=
st
be incessantly remembered through the first half of English history; for it=
is
the whole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings.
The double rule of
the civilization and the religion in one sense remained for centuries; and
before its first misfortunes came it must be conceived as substantially the
same everywhere. And however it began it largely ended in equality. Slavery
certainly existed, as it had in the most democratic states of ancient times.
Harsh officialism certainly existed, as it exists in the most democratic st=
ates
of modern times. But there was nothing of what we mean in modern times by
aristocracy, still less of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as =
any
change was passing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens =
and equal
slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church at the expen=
se
of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to grasp that the great
exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, was slowly modified by b=
oth
causes. It was weakened both by the weakening of the Empire and by the
strengthening of the Church.
Slavery was for t=
he
Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain on the imagination. Arist=
otle
and the pagan sages who had defined the servile or "useful" arts,=
had
regarded the slave as a tool, an axe to cut wood or whatever wanted cutting.
The Church did not denounce the cutting; but she felt as if she was cutting
glass with a diamond. She was haunted by the memory that the diamond is so =
much
more precious than the glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the
pagan simplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so m=
uch less
immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a history of Engl=
and
there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory the Great; and thi=
s is
perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory the barbarian bondmen were
meant to be useful. The saint's mysticism was moved at finding them ornamen=
tal;
and "Non Angli sed Angeli" meant more nearly "Not slaves, but
souls." It is to the point, in passing, to note that in the modern cou=
ntry
most collectively Christian, Russia, the serfs were always referred to as
"souls." The great Pope's phrase, hackneyed as it is, is perhaps =
the
first glimpse of the golden halos in the best Christian Art. Thus the Churc=
h,
with whatever other faults, worked of her own nature towards greater social
equality; and it is a historical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy
worked with aristocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion =
of aristocracy;
in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to be first. The Irish bull that
"One man is as good as another and a great deal better" contains a
truth, like many contradictions; a truth that was the link between Christia=
nity
and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, the saint does not depress the hum=
an
dignity of others. He is not conscious of his superiority to them; but only
more conscious of his inferiority than they are.
But while a milli=
on
little priests and monks like mice were already nibbling at the bonds of the
ancient servitude, another process was going on, which has here been called=
the
weakening of the Empire. It is a process which is to this day very difficul=
t to
explain. But it affected all the institutions of all the provinces, especia=
lly
the institution of Slavery. But of all the provinces its effect was heavies=
t in
Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain, however,
cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of English history has =
been
made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt to tell it without refer=
ence
to that corporate Christendom in which it took part and pride. I fully acce=
pt
the truth in Mr. Kipling's question of "What can they know of England =
who
only England know?" and merely differ from the view that they will best
broaden their minds by the study of Wagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is theref=
ore
necessary, though very difficult, to frame in few words some idea of what
happened to the whole European race.
Rome itself, which
had made all that strong world, was the weakest thing in it. The centre had
been growing fainter and fainter, and now the centre disappeared. Rome had =
as
much freed the world as ruled it, and now she could rule no more. Save for =
the
presence of the Pope and his constantly increasing supernatural prestige, t=
he
eternal city became like one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism =
was
the result rather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy,
but there was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, and theref=
ore
(for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called his great pageant of
prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The Empire did
decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour.
By a process very
much more indirect even than that of the Church, this decentralization and
drift also worked against the slave-state of antiquity. The localism did in=
deed
produce that choice of territorial chieftains which came to be called
Feudalism, and of which we shall speak later. But the direct possession of =
man
by man the same localism tended to destroy; though this negative influence =
upon
it bears no kind of proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic
Church. The later pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which
increasingly resembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it =
was
at last too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord more dista=
nt
than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is, he could be
shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to the land, it could not =
be
long before the land belonged to him. Even in the old and rather fictitious
language of chattel slavery, there is here a difference. It is the differen=
ce
between a man being a chair and a man being a house. Canute might call for =
his
throne; but if he wanted his throne-room he must go and get it himself.
Similarly, he could tell his slave to run, but he could only tell his serf =
to
stay. Thus the two slow changes of the time both tended to transform the to=
ol
into a man. His status began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have
rights.
What the decline =
did
involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss of letters, of laws, of roa=
ds
and means of communication, the exaggeration of local colour into caprice. =
But
on the edges of the Empire this decivilization became a definite barbarism,
owing to the nearness of wild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly
and blindly as things are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocaly=
ptic
locust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, even in t=
hose
darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when we are speaking =
of
the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge of barbarians is not entirely=
an
exaggeration of what happened on some of the borders of the Empire; of such
edges of the known world as we began by describing in these pages. And on t=
he
extreme edge of the world lay Britain.
It may be true,
though there is little proof of it, that the Roman civilization itself was
thinner in Britain than in the other provinces; but it was a very civilized
civilization. It gathered round the great cities like York and Chester and
London; for the cities are older than the counties, and indeed older even t=
han
the countries. These were connected by a skeleton of great roads which were=
and
are the bones of Britain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to
break under barbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Pi=
cts
who lay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. The =
whole
of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances, generally
mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid to go away. It
seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought help from ruder races
living about that neck of Denmark where is now the duchy of Schleswig. Havi=
ng
been chosen only to fight somebody they naturally fought anybody; and a cen=
tury
of fighting followed, under the trampling of which the Roman pavement was
broken into yet smaller pieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with =
the historian
Green when he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmen =
than
the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people are supposed to h=
ave
landed; or when he suggests that their appearance is the real beginning of =
our
island story. It would be rather more true to say that it was nearly, though
prematurely, the end of it.
We should be startled if we were qu=
ietly
reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned witho=
ut
warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in
Cranford, after tidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a
broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young
ladies who had just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a
dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place i=
n British
history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to do with rational =
and
almost mechanical accounts of encampment and engineering, of a busy bureauc=
racy
and occasional frontier wars, quite modern in their efficiency and
inefficiency; and then all of a sudden we are reading of wandering bells and
wizard lances, of wars against men as tall as trees or as short as toadstoo=
ls.
The soldier of civilization is no longer fighting with Goths but with gobli=
ns;
the land becomes a labyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and
scholars can suggest but cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieft=
ain
towers up in the twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific
age comes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, the=
echoes
of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serve to sum up=
the
contrast. The British state which was found by Cæsar was long believe=
d to
have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between the one very dry discovery
and the other very fantastic foundation has something decidedly comic about=
it;
as if Cæsar's "Et tu, Brute," might be translated, "Wh=
at,
you here?" But in one respect the fable is quite as important as the f=
act.
They both testify to the reality of the Roman foundation of our insular
society, and show that even the stories that seem prehistoric are seldom
pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, the elves are not the Angles. All the
phrases that can be used as clues through that tangle of traditions are mor=
e or
less Latin phrases. And in all our speech there was no word more Roman than
"romance."
The Roman legions
left Britain in the fourth century. This did not mean that the Roman
civilization left it; but it did mean that the civilization lay far more op=
en
both to admixture and attack. Christianity had almost certainly come to
Britain, not indeed otherwise than by the routes established by Rome, but
certainly long before the official Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It h=
ad
certainly been largely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended
coasts. It may then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and
its new religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the description =
of
the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionately irrelevant.
This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter.
There is one
fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole of this period. Yet =
a modern
man must very nearly turn his mind upside down to understand it. Almost eve=
ry
modern man has in his head an association between freedom and the future. T=
he
whole culture of our time has been full of the notion of "A Good Time
Coming." Now the whole culture of the Dark Ages was full of the notion=
of
"A Good Time Going." They looked backwards to old enlightenment a=
nd
forwards to new prejudices. In our time there has come a quarrel between fa=
ith
and hope--which perhaps must be healed by charity. But they were situated
otherwise. They hoped--but it may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All
the motives that make a man a progressive now made a man a conservative the=
n.
The more he could keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free
state; the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignora=
nce and
privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. And this is
the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of all the great men=
of
the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If the most extreme modern
Republican were put back in that period he would be an equally extreme Papi=
st
or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what was left of the Empire; and the
Empire what was left of the Republic.
We may compare the
man of that time, therefore, to one who has left free cities and even free
fields behind him, and is forced to advance towards a forest. And the fores=
t is
the fittest metaphor, not only because it was really that wild European gro=
wth
cloven here and there by the Roman roads, but also because there has always
been associated with forests another idea which increased as the Roman order
decayed. The idea of the forests was the idea of enchantment. There was a
notion of things being double or different from themselves, of beasts behav=
ing
like men and not merely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like bea=
sts.
But it is precisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age =
of reason
had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which has sustained the
storied house of our imagination ever since has been the idea of the civili=
zed
knight amid the savage enchantments; the adventures of a man still sane in a
world gone mad.
The next thing to
note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric time none of the heroes a=
re
barbaric. They are only heroes if they are anti-barbaric. Men real or mythi=
cal,
or more probably both, became omnipresent like gods among the people, and
forced themselves into the faintest memory and the shortest record, exactly=
in
proportion as they had mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserv=
ed
the Christian rationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name beca=
use
he killed the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all. Eng=
lishmen
who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing of Irish history,
have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though they spell it Boroo and s=
eem
to be under the impression that it is a joke. It is a joke the subtlety of
which they would never have been able to enjoy, if King Brian had not broken
the heathen in Ireland at the great Battle of Clontarf. The ordinary English
reader would never have heard of Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached
the Gospel with his sword"; or of the Cid if he had not fought against=
the
Crescent. And though Alfred the Great seems to have deserved his title even=
as
a personality, he was not so great as the work he had to do.
But the paradox
remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For the age is the age of
legends. Towards these legends most men adopt by instinct a sane attitude; =
and,
of the two, credulity is certainly much more sane than incredulity. It does=
not
much matter whether most of the stories are true; and (as in such cases as
Bacon and Shakespeare) to realize that the question does not matter is the
first step towards answering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses
anything like an attempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its
legends, he will do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tendi=
ng
to correct the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made this pa=
rt
of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went on the curi=
ous
principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating
upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur is made utterly impersonal
because all legends are lies, but somebody of the type of Hengist is made q=
uite
an important personality, merely because nobody thought him important enoug=
h to
lie about. Now this is to reverse all common sense. A great many witty sayi=
ngs
are attributed to Talleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But t=
hey
would not be so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he =
had been
a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, nine times out=
of
ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody to tell them about. In=
deed
some allow that marvellous things were done, and that there may have been a=
man
named Arthur at the time in which they were done; but here, so far as I am
concerned, the distinction becomes rather dim. I do not understand the atti=
tude
which holds that there was an Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe =
in
the existence of Noah's Ark.
The other fact to=
be
remembered is that scientific research for the last few years has worked
steadily in the direction of confirming and not dissipating the legends of =
the
populace. To take only the obvious instance, modern excavators with modern
spades have found a solid stone labyrinth in Crete, like that associated wi=
th
the Minataur, which was conceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera=
. To
most people this would have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of
Jack's Beanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is simply=
the
fact. Finally, a truth is to be remembered which scarcely ever is remembere=
d in
estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past is always present: yet=
it
is not what was, but whatever seems to have been; for all the past is a par=
t of
faith. What did they believe of their fathers? In this matter new discoveri=
es
are useless because they are new. We may find men wrong in what they thought
they were, but we cannot find them wrong in what they thought they thought.=
It
is therefore very practical to put in a few words, if possible, something of
what a man of these islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his
ancestors and his inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpl=
er
things in their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we a=
re to
understand our fathers who first made this country anything like itself, it=
is
most important that we should remember that if this was not their real past=
, it
was their real memory.
After that blessed
crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was for these men hardly seco=
nd
to the creation of the world, St. Joseph of Arimathea, one of the few follo=
wers
of the new religion who seem to have been wealthy, set sail as a missionary,
and after long voyages came to that litter of little islands which seemed to
the men of the Mediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. =
He
came up upon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and
made his way to a valley which through all the oldest records is called Ava=
lon.
Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, or something in
some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistently regarded as a kin=
d of
Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at Lyonesse, is carried here, a=
s if
to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his staff in the soil; and it took root=
as
a tree that blossoms on Christmas Day.
A mystical
materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul of it was a b=
ody.
Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations that were its first f=
oes
it fought fiercely and particularly for a supernatural freedom to cure conc=
rete
maladies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywh=
ere
like the scattering of seed. All who took their mission from the divine tra=
gedy
bore tangible fragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St.
Joseph carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood=
of the
Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury; and it
became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not only for
Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and branching tradition =
it
is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was especially the reward of that
ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur feasted at a Round Table, a symb=
ol
of heroic comradeship such as was afterwards imitated or invented by
mediæval knighthood. Both the cup and the table are of vast importance
emblematically in the psychology of the chivalric experiment. The idea of a
round table is not merely universality but equality. It has in it, modified=
of
course, by other tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in
the very word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In
this the Round Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve =
as a
type; for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, t=
he king
was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a level of dig=
nity
was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but not of it; the privil=
ege that
inverted all privileges; the glimpse of heaven which seemed almost as
capricious as fairyland; the flying chalice which was veiled from the highe=
st
of all the heroes, and which appeared to one knight who was hardly more tha=
n a
child.
Rightly or wrongl=
y,
this romance established Britain for after centuries as a country with a
chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of universal knighthood. This fa=
ct,
or fancy, is of colossal import in all ensuing affairs, especially the affa=
irs
of barbarians. These and numberless other local legends are indeed for us
buried by the forests of popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is=
all
the harder for the serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with
these tales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme whi=
ch runs,
"When good =
King
Arthur ruled this land He was a no=
ble
king, He
stole three pecks of barley meal,"
is much nearer the true mediæ=
val
note than the aristocratic stateliness of Tennyson. But about all these
grotesques of the popular fancy there is one last thing to be remembered. It
must especially be remembered by those who would dwell exclusively on
documents, and take no note of tradition at all. Wild as would be the resul=
ts
of credulity concerning all the old wives' tales, it would not be so wild as
the errors that can arise from trusting to written evidence when there is n=
ot
enough of it. Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our his=
tory
would go into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none are =
explained.
A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporary thought, may be
very much more misleading than any fable. To know what word an archaic scri=
be
wrote without being sure of what thing he meant, may produce a result that =
is
literally mad. Thus, for instance, it would be unwise to accept literally t=
he
tale that St. Helena was not only a native of Colchester, but was a daughte=
r of
Old King Cole. But it would not be very unwise; not so unwise as some things
that are deduced from documents. The natives of Colchester certainly did ho=
nour
to St. Helena, and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more
serious story, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded
action of Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not b=
e nearly
so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic of the future =
may
do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters.
IV THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS
It is a quaint accident that we emp=
loy
the word "short-sighted" as a condemnation; but not the word
"long-sighted," which we should probably use, if at all, as a
compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady of vision as the other. We righ=
tly
say, in rebuke of a small-minded modernity, that it is very short-sighted t=
o be
indifferent to all that is historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted=
to
be interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a
large proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epo=
chs for
the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the enslavements, the
primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations and massacres upon which
their theories repose, are no part of history or even of legend. And rather
than trust with entire simplicity to these it would be infinitely wiser to
trust to legend of the loosest and most local sort. In any case, it is as w=
ell
to record even so simple a conclusion as that what is prehistoric is
unhistorical.
But there is anot=
her
way in which common sense can be brought to the criticism of some prodigious
racial theories. To employ the same figure, suppose the scientific historia=
ns
explain the historic centuries in terms of a prehistoric division between
short-sighted and long-sighted men. They could cite their instances and
illustrations. They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I
mentioned first, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race,=
and
their name theref=
ore
a term of contempt. They could give us very graphic pictures of the rude tr=
ibal
war. They could show how the long-sighted people were always cut to pieces =
in
hand-to-hand struggles with axe and knife; until, with the invention of bows
and arrows, the advantage veered to the long-sighted, and their enemies wer=
e shot
down in droves. I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still
more easily a ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis whi=
ch
refers all moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that=
old
people grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that old people
grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thing about this the=
ory
which would stump us, and might even, if it be possible, stump them. Suppos=
e it
were pointed out that through all the three thousand years of recorded hist=
ory,
abounding in literature of every conceivable kind, there was not so much as=
a
mention of the oculist question for which all had been dared and done. Supp=
ose
not one of the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word fo=
r "long-sighted"
or "short-sighted." Suppose, in short, the question that had torn=
the
whole world in two was never even asked at all, until some spectacle-maker
suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I think we should find it h=
ard
to believe that this physical difference had really played so fundamental a
part in human history. And that is exactly the case with the physical
difference between the Celts, the Teutons and the Latins.
I know of no way =
in
which fair-haired people can be prevented from falling in love with dark-ha=
ired
people; and I do not believe that whether a man was long-headed or round-he=
aded
ever made much difference to any one who felt inclined to break his head. To
all mortal appearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seem to
have killed or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or ma=
de slaves,
with reference to almost any other consideration except this one. There was=
the
love of a valley or a village, a site or a family; there were enthusiasms f=
or a
prince and his hereditary office; there were passions rooted in locality,
special emotions about sea-folk or mountain-folk; there were historic memor=
ies
of a cause or an alliance; there was, more than all, the tremendous test of
religion. But of a cause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half t=
he
earth, there was little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given mo=
ment
a motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed; t=
hey
never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they began even to =
have
a cant.
The orthodox mode=
rn
historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularity of Britain in being al=
one
of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and repeopled by a Germanic race. He =
does
not entertain, as an escape from the singularity of this event, the possibi=
lity
that it never happened. In the same spirit he deals with the little that ca=
n be
quoted of the Teutonic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in sma=
ll
touches which even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on =
the Teuton
with a phrase like "the basis of their society was the free man";=
and
on the Roman with a phrase like "the mines, if worked by forced labour,
must have been a source of endless oppression." The simple fact being =
that
the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he treats the Teuton free man as =
the
only thing to be considered, not only then but now; and then goes out of his
way to say that if the Roman treated his slaves badly, the slaves were badly
treated. He expresses a "strange disappointment" that Gildas, the
only British chronicler, does not describe the great Teutonic system. In the
opinion of Gildas, a modification of that of Gregory, it was a case of non
Angli sed diaboli. The modern Teutonist is "disappointed" that the
contemporary authority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and
whelps from the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable tha=
t there
was nothing else to be seen.
In any case when =
St.
Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, with what may be called the
second of the three great southern visitations which civilized these island=
s,
he did not see any ethnological problems, whatever there may have been to be
seen. With him or his converts the chain of literary testimony is taken up
again; and we must look at the world as they saw it. He found a king ruling=
in
Kent, beyond whose borders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the k=
ings
of which were all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly =
what
we call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirely hagiological
records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whether the populations we=
re
in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at least possible that, as on the
Continent, the kings and courts were almost the only Teutonic element. The
Christians found converts, they found patrons, they found persecutors; but =
they
did not find Ancient Britons because they did not look for them; and if they
moved among pure Anglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it.
There was, indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling tow=
ards
the marches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is always foun=
d,
apart from any difference in race, in the transition from the lowlands to t=
he
mountain country. But of all the things they found the thing that counts mo=
st
in English history is this: that some of the kingdoms at least did correspo=
nd
to genuine human divisions, which not only existed then but which exist now.
Northumbria is still a truer thing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sus=
sex;
Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even t=
o be
found upon the map, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is
to-day the most real of them all.
The last of the
heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, which corresponds very rou=
ghly
to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptized king, Penda, has even achieved=
a
certain picturesqueness through this fact, and through the forays and furio=
us
ambitions which constituted the rest of his reputation; so much so that the
other day one of those mystics who will believe anything but Christianity
proposed to "continue the work of Penda" in Ealing: fortunately n=
ot
on any large scale. What that prince believed or disbelieved it is now
impossible and perhaps unnecessary to discover; but this last stand of his
central kingdom is not insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perh=
aps
due to the fact that Christianity grew from the eastern and western coasts.=
The
eastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which had already m=
ade
Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The western grew from whate=
ver
was left of the British Christianity. The two clashed, not in creed but in
customs; and the Augustinians ultimately prevailed. But the work from the w=
est
had already been enormous. It is possible that some prestige went with the
possession of Glastonbury, which was like a piece of the Holy Land; but beh=
ind
Glastonbury there was an even grander and more impressive power. There
irradiated to all Europe at that time the glory of the golden age of Irelan=
d.
There the Celts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of K=
els four
hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the whole people had be=
en a
spontaneous popular festival which reads almost like a picnic; and thence c=
ame
crowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almost literally like men running with
good news. This must be remembered through the development of that dark dual
destiny that has bound us to Ireland: for doubts have been thrown on a nati=
onal
unity which was not from the first a political unity. But if Ireland was not
one kingdom it was in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not converted but
created by Christianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements
were gathered as under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was t=
he more
individual because the religion was mere religion, without the secular
conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was always Romanist.
But indeed this i=
s,
in a lesser degree, true of our more immediate subject. It is the paradox of
this time that only the unworldly things had any worldly success. The polit=
ics
are a nightmare; the kings are unstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we a=
re
really never on solid ground except on consecrated ground. The material
ambitions are not only always unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The
castles are all castles in the air; it is only the churches that are built =
on
the ground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in that extraord=
inary
thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be the key of our history.
The time was to come when it was to be rooted out of our country with a cur=
ious
and careful violence; and the modern English reader has therefore a very fe=
eble
idea of it and hence of the ages in which it worked. Even in these pages a =
word
or two about its primary nature is therefore quite indispensable.
In the tremendous
testament of our religion there are present certain ideals that seem wilder
than impieties, which have in later times produced wild sects professing an
almost inhuman perfection on certain points; as in the Quakers who renounce=
the
right of self-defence, or the Communists who refuse any personal possession=
s.
Rightly or wrongly, the Christian Church had from the first dealt with these
visions as being special spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous.
She reconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good,=
without
admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She took the view t=
hat
it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religious world; and used the =
man
who chose to go without arms, family, or property as a sort of exception th=
at
proved the rule. Now the interesting fact is that he really did prove it. T=
his
madman who would not mind his own business becomes the business man of the =
age.
The very word "monk" is a revolution, for it means solitude and c=
ame
to mean community--one might call it sociability. What happened was that th=
is communal
life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individual life; a hosp=
ital
for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later how this same function of=
the
common life was given to the common land. It is hard to find an image for i=
t in
individualist times; but in private life we most of us know the friend of t=
he
family who helps it by being outside, like a fairy godmother. It is not mer=
ely
flippant to say that monks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified
league of aunts and uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything th=
at
nobody else would do; that the abbeys kept the world's diary, faced the pla=
gues
of all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the pagan literatu=
re,
and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept the poor from the =
most
distant sight of their modern despair. We still find it necessary to have a
reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it to men who have made themselves
rich, not to men who have made themselves poor. Finally, the abbots and
abbesses were elective. They introduced representative government, unknown =
to
ancient democracy, and in itself a semi-sacramental idea. If we could look =
from
the outside at our own institutions, we should see that the very notion of
turning a thousand men into one large man walking to Westminster is not onl=
y an
act or faith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history of Anglo=
-Saxon
England would be almost entirely a history of its monasteries. Mile by mile,
and almost man by man, they taught and enriched the land. And then, about t=
he
beginning of the ninth century, there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an
eye, and it seemed that all their work was in vain.
That outer world =
of
universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heaved another of its colossal
and almost cosmic waves and swept everything away. Through all the eastern
gates, left open, as it were, by the first barbarian auxiliaries, burst a
plague of seafaring savages from Denmark and Scandinavia; and the recently
baptized barbarians were again flooded by the unbaptized. All this time, it
must be remembered, the actual central mechanism of Roman government had be=
en
running down like a clock. It was really a race between the driving energy =
of
the missionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis of =
the
city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stopped before the h=
ands
could bring help to it. All the monastic civilization which had grown up in
Britain under a vague Roman protection perished unprotected. The toy kingdo=
ms
of the quarrelling Saxons were smashed like sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chi=
ef,
slew St. Edmund, assumed the crown of East England, took tribute from the p=
anic
of Mercia, and towered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lan=
ds.
The story that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despair a=
nd
its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeats alternated with
victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats. It is only in one of
these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown, that we first see in the =
dim
struggle, in a desperate and secondary part, the figure who has given his t=
itle
to the ultimate turning of the tide. For the victor was not then the king, =
but
only the king's younger brother. There is, from the first, something humble=
and
even accidental about Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his
early life lies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, a=
nd readiness
for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations of all that peri=
od,
with the flaming patience of saints in times of persecution. While he would
dare anything for the faith, he would bargain in anything except the faith.=
He
was a conqueror, with no ambition; an author only too glad to be a translat=
or;
a simple, concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which=
he piloted
both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last.
He had disappeared
after what appeared to be the final heathen triumph and settlement, and is
supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in a lonely islet in the impenetrable
marshlands of the Parret; towards those wild western lands to which aborigi=
nal
races are held to have been driven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself
wrote in words that are his challenge to the period, held that a Christian =
man
was unconcerned with fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and
spears of the broken levies of the western shires, especially the men of
Somerset; and in the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fe=
nced
camp of the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was as succes=
sful
as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which was successful in a
different and very definite sense. Guthrum, the conqueror of England, and a=
ll his
important supports, were here penned behind their palisades, and when at la=
st
they surrendered the Danish conquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptiz=
ed,
and the Treaty of Wedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader
will smile at the baptism, and turn with greater interest to the terms of t=
he
treaty. In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopele=
ssly
wrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to the religious
element in this part of English history, for without it there would never h=
ave
been any English history at all. And nothing could clinch this truth more t=
han
the case of the Danes. In all the facts that followed, the baptism of Guthr=
um
is really much more important than the Treaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself=
was
a compromise, and even as such did not endure; a century afterwards a Danish
king like Canute was really ruling in England. But though the Dane got the
crown, he did not get rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred's religious
exaction that remained unalterable. And Canute himself is actually now only
remembered by men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power; as the
king who put his own crown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrender=
ed to
heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea.
V ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KI=
NGS
The reader may be surprised at the
disproportionate importance given to the name which stands first in the tit=
le
of this chapter. I put it there as the best way of emphasizing, at the
beginning of what we may call the practical part of our history, an elusive=
and
rather strange thing. It can only be described as the strength of the weak
kings.
It is sometimes
valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well as to learn. I would=
ask
the reader to forget his reading and everything that he learnt at school, a=
nd
consider the English monarchy as it would then appear to him. Let him suppo=
se
that his acquaintance with the ancient kings has only come to him as it cam=
e to
most men in simpler times, from nursery tales, from the names of places, fr=
om
the dedications of churches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, an=
d the
tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person going upon some open =
and
ordinary English way, such as the Thames valley to Windsor, or visiting some
old seats of culture, such as Oxford or Cambridge. One of the first things,=
for
instance, he would find would be Eton, a place transformed, indeed, by mode=
rn
aristocracy, but still enjoying its mediæval wealth and remembering i=
ts
mediæval origin. If he asked about that origin, it is probable that e=
ven
a public schoolboy would know enough history to tell him that it was founde=
d by
Henry VI. If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the coll=
ege chapel
which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral, he would proba=
bly
ask about it, and be told it was King's College. If he asked which king, he
would again be told Henry VI. If he then went into the library and looked up
Henry VI. in an encyclopædia, he would find that the legendary giant,=
who
had left these gigantic works behind him, was in history an almost invisible
pigmy. Amid the varying and contending numbers of a great national quarrel,=
he
is the only cipher. The contending factions carry him about like a bale of
goods. His desires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied. =
And
yet his real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, an=
d remain
through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while all the ambiti=
ons
of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust upon the wind.
Edward the Confes=
sor,
like Henry VI., was not only an invalid but almost an idiot. It is said tha=
t he
was wan like an albino, and that the awe men had of him was partly that whi=
ch
is felt for a monster of mental deficiency. His Christian charity was of the
kind that borders on anarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christ=
ian
fools in the great anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have
covered the retreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief ne=
eded
things more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to the claims =
made
for other kings, that theft was impossible in their dominions. Yet the two
types of king are afterwards praised by the same people; and the really
arresting fact is that the incompetent king is praised the more highly of t=
he
two. And exactly as in the case of the last Lancastrian, we find that the
praise has really a very practical meaning in the long run. When we turn fr=
om
the destructive to the constructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the
village idiot is the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his s=
eal
upon the sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victor=
s in
the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry of Bayeux,
woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorify the Norman
triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his conquest and the p=
lain
personal tale that excuses it, and the story abruptly ends with the breakin=
g of
the Saxon line at Battle. But over the bier of the decrepit zany, who died
without striking a blow, over this and this alone, is shown a hand coming o=
ut
of heaven, and declaring the true approval of the power that rules the worl=
d.
The Confessor,
therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none more than in the false
reputation of the "English" of that day. As I have indicated, the=
re
is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon at all. The Anglo-Saxon =
is a
mythical and straddling giant, who has presumably left one footprint in Eng=
land
and the other in Saxony. But there was a community, or rather group of
communities, living in Britain before the Conquest under what we call Saxon
names, and of a blood probably more Germanic and certainly less French than=
the
same communities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation whic=
h is
exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxon is
exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon blood is supp=
osed
to be the practical part of us; but as a fact the Anglo-Saxons were more
hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Their racial influence is supposed to=
be
healthy, or, what many think the same thing, heathen. But as a fact these
"Teutons" were the mystics. The Anglo-Saxons did one thing, and o=
ne
thing only, thoroughly well, as they were fitted to do it thoroughly well. =
They
christened England. Indeed, they christened it before it was born. The one
thing the Angles obviously and certainly could not manage to do was to beco=
me
English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particular dis=
position
to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our hardy ancestors ne=
ver
do justice to the real good they did us, by thus opening our history, as it
were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicl=
es,
as so many chronicles began, with the golden initial of a saint. By becoming
monks they served us in many very valuable and special capacities, but not
notably, perhaps, in the capacity of ancestors.
Along the northern
coast of France, where the Confessor had passed his early life, lay the lan=
ds
of one of the most powerful of the French king's vassals, the Duke of Norma=
ndy.
He and his people, who constitute one of the most picturesque and curious
elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant
controversies which would have been entirely unintelligible to them. The wo=
rst
of these is the inane fiction which gives the name of Norman to the English
aristocracy during its great period of the last three hundred years. Tennys=
on
informed a lady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valu=
able
than Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in Lady Clara=
as
the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a large possessor of the
simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see also when we come to the
political scheme of the Normans, the notion is the negation of their real
importance in history. The fashionable fancy misses what was best in the
Normans, exactly as we have found it missing what was best in the Saxons. O=
ne
does not know whether to thank the Normans more for appearing or for
disappearing. Few philanthropists ever became so rapidly anonymous. It is t=
he
great glory of the Norman adventurer that he threw himself heartily into his
chance position; and had faith not only in his comrades, but in his subject=
s,
and even in his enemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. T=
hus
the Norman Bruce becomes a Scot; thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbo=
w becomes
an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived as remaining as a
superior caste until the present time. But this alien and adventurous loyal=
ty
in the Norman, which appears in these other national histories, appears most
strongly of all in the history we have here to follow. The Duke of Normandy
does become a real King of England; his claim through the Confessor, his
election by the Council, even his symbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex,
these are not altogether empty forms. And though both phrases would be
inaccurate, it is very much nearer the truth to call William the first of t=
he
English than to call Harold the last of them.
An indeterminate
debate touching the dim races that mixed without record in that dim epoch, =
has
made much of the fact that the Norman edges of France, like the East Anglian
edges of England, were deeply penetrated by the Norse invasions of the ninth
century; and that the ducal house of Normandy, with what other families we =
know
not, can be traced back to a Scandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of
captaincy and creative legislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever t=
hey
were, may be connected reasonably enough with some infusion of fresh blood.=
But
if the racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it can ob=
viously
only be answered by a study of the two types in separation. And it must sur=
ely
be manifest that more civilizing power has since been shown by the French w=
hen
untouched by Scandinavian blood than by the Scandinavians when untouched by
French blood. As much fighting (and more ruling) was done by the Crusaders =
who
were never Vikings as by the Vikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth
there is no need of such invidious analysis; we may willingly allow a real
value to the Scandinavian contribution to the French as to the English
nationality, so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that
the duchy of Normandy was about as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. But=
the
debate has another danger, in that it tends to exaggerate even the personal
importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master, he is in
history the servant of other and wider things. The landing of Lanfranc is
perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. And Lanfranc was an
Italian--like Julius Cæsar. The Norman is not in history a mere wall,=
the
rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman is a gate. He is like o=
ne
of those gates which still remain as he made them, with round arch and rude
pattern and stout supporting columns; and what entered by that gate was
civilization. William of Falaise has in history a title much higher than th=
at
of Duke of Normandy or King of England. He was what Julius Cæsar was,=
and
what St. Augustine was: he was the ambassador of Europe to Britain.
William asserted =
that
the Confessor, in the course of that connection which followed naturally fr=
om
his Norman education, had promised the English crown to the holder of the
Norman dukedom. Whether he did or not we shall probably never know: it is n=
ot
intrinsically impossible or even improbable. To blame the promise as
unpatriotic, even if it was given, is to read duties defined at a much later
date into the first feudal chaos; to make such blame positive and personal =
is
like expecting the Ancient Britons to sing "Rule Britannia." Will=
iam
further clinched his case by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon nob=
le
and the most probable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke's
hospitality after a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the
Duke's claim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; ye=
t we
shall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care. The
element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probably affected the
Pope when he blessed a banner for William's army; but it did not affect the
Pope much more than it would have affected the people; and Harold's people
quite as much as William's. Harold's people presumably denied the fact; and
their denial is probably the motive of the very marked and almost eager
emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestry asserts and reasserts the reality of
the personal betrayal. There is here a rather arresting fact to be noted. A
great part of this celebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with=
the
well-known historical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It do=
es, indeed,
dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts the difficulties of Willi=
am's
enterprise in the felling of forests for shipbuilding, in the crossing of t=
he
Channel, and especially in the charge up the hill at Hastings, in which full
justice is done to the destructive resistance of Harold's army. But it was
really after Duke William had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex
coast, that he did what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. I=
t is
not until these later operations that we have the note of the new and scien=
tific
militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching upon London he marched r=
ound
it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cut off the city from the rest of
the country and compelled its surrender. He had himself elected king with a=
ll
the forms that would have accompanied a peaceful succession to the Confesso=
r,
and after a brief return to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring=
all
England under his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the north=
ern counties,
seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. These things are the
foundations of historical England; but of these things the pictures woven in
honour of his house tell us nothing. The Bayeux Tapestry may almost be said=
to
stop before the Norman Conquest. But it tells in great detail the tale of s=
ome
trivial raid into Brittany solely that Harold and William may appear as
brothers in arms; and especially that William may be depicted in the very a=
ct
of giving arms to Harold. And here again there is much more significance th=
an a
modern reader may fancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and=
the
ancient symbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of th=
e King
of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to the secular s=
ide
of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal, and a vein of such
mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sons Rufus and Henry I. distur=
bed
him with internal ambitions antagonistic to his own. But it would be a blun=
der
to allow such personal broils to obscure the system, which had indeed exist=
ed
here before the Conquest, which clarified and confirmed it. That system we =
call
Feudalism.
That Feudalism was
the main mark of the Middle Ages is a commonplace of fashionable informatio=
n;
but it is of the sort that seeks the past rather in Wardour Street than Wat=
ling
Street. For that matter, the very term "mediæval" is used f=
or
almost anything from Early English to Early Victorian. An eminent Socialist
applied it to our armaments, which is like applying it to our aeroplanes.
Similarly the just description of Feudalism, and of how far it was a part a=
nd
how far rather an impediment in the main mediæval movement, is confus=
ed
by current debates about quite modern things--especially that modern thing,=
the
English squirearchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of squirearchy.=
For
it is the whole point of the squire that his ownership is absolute and is
pacific. And it is the very definition of Feudalism that it was a tenure, a=
nd a
tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steel instead of gold, in
spears and arrows against the enemies of their landlord. But even these lan=
dlords
were not landlords in the modern sense; every one was practically as well as
theoretically a tenant of the King; and even he often fell into a feudal
inferiority to a Pope or an Emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering m=
ay
seem a simplification; but indeed it is precisely here that it was not so s=
imple
as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in the nature of
Feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history, but especially
English history.
There was a certa=
in
unique type of state and culture which we call mediæval, for want of a
better word, which we see in the Gothic or the great Schoolmen. This thing =
in
itself was above all things logical. Its very cult of authority was a thing=
of
reason, as all men who can reason themselves instantly recognize, even if, =
like
Huxley, they deny its premises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was
very exact about who had the authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical,
and was never quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism already fl=
ourished
before the mediæval renascence began. It was, if not the forest the
mediævals had to clear, at least the rude timber with which they had =
to
build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Ages before the Middle A=
ges;
the age of barbarians resisted by semi-barbarians. I do not say this in
disparagement of it. Feudalism was mostly a very human thing; the nearest
contemporary name for it was homage, a word which almost means humanity. On=
the
other hand, mediæval logic, never quite reconciled to it, could becom=
e in
its extremes inhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men, and p=
ure
reason that burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism =
of the
Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like a garrison.
Patriotism had to be parochial; for men had no country, but only a countrys=
ide.
In such cases the lord grew larger than the king; but it bred not only a lo=
cal
lordship but a kind of local liberty. And it would be very inadvisable to
ignore the freer element in Feudalism in English history. For it is the one
kind of freedom that the English have had and held.
The knot in the
system was something like this. In theory the King owned everything, like an
earthly providence; and that made for despotism and "divine right,&quo=
t;
which meant in substance a natural authority. In one aspect the King was si=
mply
the one lord anointed by the Church, that is recognized by the ethics of the
age. But while there was more royalty in theory, there could be more rebell=
ion
in practice. Fighting was much more equal than in our age of munitions, and=
the
various groups could arm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spea=
rs
from the smith. Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is mo=
re
vital that while the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the
regiments of it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties.
Hence the loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be=
a demagogue
delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible for the tragic
passions about betrayal, as in the case of William and Harold; the alleged
traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yet always felt to be exceptio=
nal.
To break the tie was at once easy and terrible. Treason in the sense of reb=
ellion
was then really felt as treason in the sense of treachery, since it was
desertion on a perpetual battlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil
war in English than in other history, and the more local and less logical
energy on the whole prevailed. Whether there was something in those island =
idiosyncracies,
shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, or whether the Roman
imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, the feudal undergrowth preven=
ted
even a full attempt to build the Civitas Dei, or ideal mediæval state.
What emerged was a compromise, which men long afterwards amused themselves =
by
calling a constitution.
There are paradox=
es
permissible for the redressing of a bad balance in criticism, and which may
safely even be emphasized so long as they are not isolated. One of these I =
have
called at the beginning of this chapter the strength of the weak kings. And
there is a complement of it, even in this crisis of the Norman mastery, whi=
ch
might well be called the weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy
succeeded immediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his
huge success a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death.=
It
was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popular autocracy, =
like
that growing up in France; with that aim he scattered the feudal holdings in
scraps, demanded a direct vow from the sub-vassals to himself, and used any
tool against the barony, from the highest culture of the foreign ecclesiast=
ics
to the rudest relics of Saxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes=
the
paradox startlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings w=
ere puppets;
that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king of the king. Yet=
it
is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popular idol of unparalleled
power, before which all mayors and nobles bent or were broken. In France ar=
ose
absolute government, the more because it was not precisely personal governm=
ent.
The King was already a thing--like the Republic. Indeed the mediæval
Republics were rigid with divine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the
government was too personal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though
recondite sense in which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. W=
hen
his two sons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost l=
ike that
before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slaves became somet=
hing
exceptional like priests; and one of them became a saint. But somehow our
greatest kings were still barons; and by that very energy our barons became=
our
kings.
The last chapter began, in an appar=
ent
irrelevance, with the name of St. Edward; and this one might very well begin
with the name of St. George. His first appearance, it is said, as a patron =
of
our people, occurred at the instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his
campaign in Palestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new
England which might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character=
in English
history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrology as a Roman
soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history. And if we wis=
h to
understand the noblest and most neglected of human revolutions, we can hard=
ly
get closer to it than by considering this paradox, of how much progress and
enlightenment was represented by thus passing from a chronicle to a romance=
.
In any intellectu=
al
corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as I have just read in a
newspaper controversy: "Salvation, like other good things, must not co=
me
from outside." To call a spiritual thing external and not internal is =
the
chief mode of modernist excommunication. But if our subject of study is
mediæval and not modern, we must pit against this apparent platitude =
the
very opposite idea. We must put ourselves in the posture of men who thought
that almost every good thing came from outside--like good news. I confess t=
hat
I am not impartial in my sympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I
quoted strikes me as a blunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in =
my
private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking
his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and
denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that
thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness dou=
bled
by wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for things outsi=
de
oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining what any version of
this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing is the modern German mo=
re
modern, or more mad, than in his dream of finding a German name for everyth=
ing;
eating his language, or in other words biting his tongue. And in nothing we=
re
the mediævals more free and sane than in their acceptance of names and
emblems from outside their most beloved limits. The monastery would often n=
ot
only take in the stranger but almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like B=
ruce
was enthroned and thanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a
passionately patriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a
patron saint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not =
an Irishman.
Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left the numberless Sax=
on
saints in a sense behind them, passed over by comparison not only the sanct=
ity
of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero,
striving in an eastern desert against an impossible monster.
That transition a=
nd
that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romance and reality they were =
the
first English experience of learning, not only from the external, but the
remote. England, like every Christian thing, had thriven on outer things
without shame. From the roads of Cæsar to the churches of Lanfranc, it
had sought its meat from God. But now the eagles were on the wing, scenting=
a
more distant slaughter; they were seeking the strange things instead of
receiving them. The English had stepped from acceptance to adventure, and t=
he
epic of their ships had begun. The scope of the great religious movement wh=
ich
swept England along with all the West would distend a book like this into h=
uge disproportion,
yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss it in the distant and
frigid fashion common in such short summaries. The inadequacy of our insular
method in popular history is perfectly shown in the treatment of Richard Co=
eur
de Lion. His tale is told with the implication that his departure for the
Crusade was something like the escapade of a schoolboy running away to sea.=
It
was, in this view, a pardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was m=
ore
like a responsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearl=
y one
nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was of an
adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is not unreasonably
romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best. But the point of t=
he
argument against insular history is particularly illustrated here by the
absence of a continental comparison. In this case we have only to step acro=
ss
the Straits of Dover to find the fallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's
contemporary in France, had the name of a particularly cautious and coldly
public-spirited statesman; yet Philip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The
reason was, of course, that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans,
things of the highest statesmanship and the purest public spirit.
Some six hundred
years after Christianity sprang up in the East and swept westwards, another
great faith arose in almost the same eastern lands and followed it like its
gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was at once a copy and a contrary. We ca=
ll
it Islam, or the creed of the Moslems; and perhaps its most explanatory
description is that it was the final flaming up of the accumulated
Orientalisms, perhaps of the accumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as t=
he
Church grew more European, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its
highest motive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itsel=
f an
idolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being made flesh
and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the questions
smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian conversion
favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or mythology was at
once a development and a reaction from that conversion, a sort of minority
report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was something like a Christian
heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of t=
he
Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the
expense of the sincerity of his soul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured =
into
Italy, breaking the popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope,
until routed, in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father =
of Charlemagne.
It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from the genius of
Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry charge that nearly
conquered the world. And if it be suggested that a note on such Oriental
origins is rather remote from a history of England, the answer is that this
book may, alas! contain many digressions, but that this is not a digression=
. It
is quite peculiarly necessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted
Christianity like a ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but
especially in our corner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a w=
alk
to all the parish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and =
ask
why this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He will s=
oon
learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that the ecs=
tasy
of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island was filled with the =
fury
of the Iconoclasts.
It was an element=
in
this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam that it knew no boundarie=
s.
Its very home was homeless. For it was born in a sandy waste among nomads, =
and
it went everywhere because it came from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the
early Middle Ages this nomadic quality in Islam was masked by a high
civilization, more scientific if less creatively artistic than that of
contemporary Christendom. The Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the
more rationalist religion of the two. This rootless refinement was
characteristically advanced in abstract things, of which a memory remains in
the very name of algebra. In comparison the Christian civilization was still
largely instinctive, but its instincts were very strong and very much the o=
ther
way. It was full of local affections, which found form in that system of fe=
nces
which runs like a pattern through everything mediæval, from heraldry =
to the
holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customs and stat=
utes
which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons; something at once
strict and gay. This is not a departure from the interest in external thing=
s,
but rather a part of it. The very welcome they would often give to a strang=
er
from beyond the wall was a recognition of the wall. Those who think their o=
wn
life all-sufficient do not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the
world. The Chinese called the white man "a sky-breaker." The
mediæval spirit loved its part in life as a part, not a whole; its
charter for it came from something else. There is a joke about a Benedictine
monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat, whereupon the
unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat. It is
something of a parable of mediæval history; for if there were a verb
Franciscare it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis
afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its
birth, and Benedictus benedicat is very precisely the motto of the earliest=
mediævalism.
I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something which has in its
turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed bless. But the point
which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that for them the beyond was not=
the
infinite, as in a modern religion. Every beyond was a place. The mystery of
locality, with all its hold on the human heart, was as much present in the =
most
ethereal things of Christendom as it was absent from the most practical thi=
ngs
of Islam. England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy
from Greece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was not mer=
ely
that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by the priest of the pa=
rish
church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, which was confirmed by Rome. Rome
herself did not worship herself, as in the pagan age. Rome herself looked
eastward to the mysterious cradle of her creed, to a land of which the very
earth was called holy. And when she looked eastward for it she saw the face=
of
Mahound. She saw standing in the place that was her earthly heaven a devour=
ing
giant out of the deserts, to whom all places were the same.
It has been neces=
sary
thus to pause upon the inner emotions of the Crusade, because the modern
English reader is widely cut off from these particular feelings of his fath=
ers;
and the real quarrel of Christendom and Islam, the fire-baptism of the young
nations, could not otherwise be seized in its unique character. It was noth=
ing
so simple as a quarrel between two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the
much deadlier quarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who cou=
ld
not see why it was wanted. The Moslem, of course, had his own holy places; =
but he
has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or a roof-tree=
; he
thought of the holiness as holy, not of the places as places. The austerity
which forbade him imagery, the wandering war that forbade him rest, shut him
off from all that was breaking out and blossoming in our local patriotisms;
just as it has given the Turks an empire without ever giving them a nation.=
Now, the effect of
this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemy was simply enormous in=
the
transformation of England, as of all the nations that were developing side =
by
side with England. Firstly, we learnt enormously from what the Saracen did.
Secondly, we learnt yet more enormously from what the Saracen did not do.
Touching some of the good things which we lacked, we were fortunately able =
to
follow him. But in all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed l=
ike
adamant to defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right th=
ey were
till they went to war with Moslems. At once the most obvious and the most
representative reaction was the reaction which produced the best of what we
call Christian Art; and especially those grotesques of Gothic architecture,
which are not only alive but kicking. The East as an environment, as an
impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated the Western mind, but stimulated it
rather to break the Moslem commandment than to keep it. It was as if the
Christian were impelled, like a caricaturist, to cover all that faceless
ornament with faces; to give heads to all those headless serpents and birds=
to
all these lifeless trees. Statuary quickened and came to life under the vet=
o of
the enemy as under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an
idol, became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stone s=
prang
up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclasts made more
statues than they destroyed.
The place of Coeu=
r de
Lion in popular fable and gossip is far more like his place in true history
than the place of the mere denationalized ne'er-do-weel given him in our
utilitarian school books. Indeed the vulgar rumour is nearly always much ne=
arer
the historical truth than the "educated" opinion of to-day; for
tradition is truer than fashion. King Richard, as the typical Crusader, did
make a momentous difference to England by gaining glory in the East, instea=
d of
devoting himself conscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary mann=
er
of King John. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave England=
something
which it kept for four hundred years, and without which it is incomprehensi=
ble
throughout that period--the reputation of being in the very vanguard of
chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table, the attachment of knightho=
od
to the name of a British king, belong to this period. Richard was not only a
knight but a troubadour; and culture and courtesy were linked up with the i=
dea
of English valour. The mediæval Englishman was even proud of being
polite; which is at least no worse than being proud of money and bad manner=
s,
which is what many Englishmen in our later centuries have meant by their co=
mmon
sense.
Chivalry might be
called the baptism of Feudalism. It was an attempt to bring the justice and
even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already
existed; to turn its discipline into an initiation and its inequalities int=
o a
hierarchy. To the comparative grace of the new period belongs, of course, t=
hat
considerable cultus of the dignity of woman, to which the word
"chivalry" is often narrowed, or perhaps exalted. This also was a
revolt against one of the worst gaps in the more polished civilization of t=
he
Saracens. Moslems denied even souls to women; perhaps from the same instinct
which recoiled from the sacred birth, with its inevitable glorification of =
the
mother; perhaps merely because, having originally had tents rather than hou=
ses,
they had slaves rather than housewives. It is false to say that the chivalr=
ic view
of women was merely an affectation, except in the sense in which there must
always be an affectation where there is an ideal. It is the worst sort of
superficiality not to see the pressure of a general sentiment merely becaus=
e it
is always broken up by events; the Crusade itself, for example, is more pre=
sent
and potent as a dream even than as a reality. From the first Plantagenet to=
the
last Lancastrian it haunts the minds of English kings, giving as a backgrou=
nd
to their battles a mirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I=
. to
his queen was quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of his contemp=
oraries.
When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth to sneer at the
superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets and labelling luggage at=
the
large railway station at the west end of the Strand, I do not know whether =
they
all speak to their wives with a more flowing courtesy than their fathers in
Edward's time, or whether they pause to meditate on the legend of a husband=
's
sorrow, to be found in the very name of Charing Cross.
But it is a huge
historical error to suppose that the Crusades concerned only that crust of
society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry an etiquette. The direct
contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especially was much more an unanimo=
us
popular rising than most that are called riots and revolutions. The Guilds,=
the
great democratic systems of the time, often owed their increasing power to
corporate fighting for the Cross; but I shall deal with such things later.
Often it was not so much a levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new
gipsies moving eastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by
themselves often organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we
shall best realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children's Crusa=
de. They
were full of all that the modern world worships in children, because it has
crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as the rudest remains of their
vulgarest arts are full, of something that we all saw out of the nursery
window. It can best be seen later, for instance, in the lanced and latticed
interiors of Memling, but it is ubiquitous in the older and more unconscious
contemporary art; something that domesticated distant lands and made the
horizon at home. They fitted into the corners of small houses the ends of t=
he
earth and the edges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it=
is perspective;
it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In a word, their world, l=
ike
a child's, is full of foreshortening, as of a short cut to fairyland. Their
maps are more provocative than pictures. Their half-fabulous animals are
monsters, and yet are pets. It is impossible to state verbally this very vi=
vid
atmosphere; but it was an atmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precis=
ely
these outlandish visions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal
councils and feudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land =
was
much nearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably neare=
r than
Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, without pausing =
for
a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religious transfiguration in co=
mmon
life, is something the folly of which can but faintly be conveyed by a more
modern parallel, with secularity and religion reversed. It is as if some
Clericalist or Royalist writer should give a list of the Archbishops of Par=
is
from 1750 to 1850, noting how one died of small-pox, another of old age,
another by a curious accident of decapitation, and throughout all his record
should never once mention the nature, or even the name, of the French
Revolution.
VII THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS=
span>
It is a point of prestige with what=
is
called the Higher Criticism in all branches to proclaim that certain popular
texts and authorities are "late," and therefore apparently worthl=
ess.
Two similar events are always the same event, and the later alone is even
credible. This fanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the mo=
st
common coincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably say=
that
the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the Eiffel Tower, becau=
se
there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the Paris Exhibition. Most of=
the
mediæval remains familiar to the modern reader are necessarily
"late," such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but they are n=
one
the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and even trust. That wh=
ich
lingers after an epoch is generally that which lived most luxuriantly in it=
. It
is an excellent habit to read history backwards. It is far wiser for a mode=
rn
man to read the Middle Ages backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge f=
or
himself, and who yet is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to re=
ad
them forwards from Cædmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom e=
ven
the authorities he must trust know very little. If this be true of Shakespe=
are,
it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really want to know what was
strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of =
it
in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns to the "Canterbury Ta=
les,"
which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as mediæval as Durham
Cathedral, what is the very first question to be asked? Why, for instance, =
are
they called Canterbury Tales; and what were the pilgrims doing on the road =
to
Canterbury? They were, of course, taking part in a popular festival like a
modern public holiday, though much more genial and leisurely. Nor are we,
perhaps, prepared to accept it as a self-evident step in progress that their
holidays were derived from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.
It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of= an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity, and needing, = as do so many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign = town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn = that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a bra= ss band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had = been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea o= f a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The mater= ials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not n= eed the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimps= e of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.<= o:p>
The first few lin=
es
of Chaucer's poem, to say nothing of thousands in the course of it, make it
instantly plain that it was no case of secular revels still linked by a sli=
ght
ritual to the name of some forgotten god, as may have happened in the pagan
decline. Chaucer and his friends did think about St. Thomas, at least more
frequently than a clerk at Margate thinks about St. Lubbock. They did
definitely believe in the bodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas,=
at
least as firmly as the most enlightened and progressive modern can believe =
in
those of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that
society is thus seen in the act of moving; and why was he so important? If =
there
be a streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratic histor=
y,
instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obvious and open gate=
by
which to approach the figure which disputed England with the first Plantage=
net.
A real popular history should think more of his popularity even than his
policy. And unquestionably thousands of ploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and
yeomen, as in the motley crowd of Chaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thom=
as
when they had never even heard of Becket.
It would be easy =
to
detail what followed the Conquest as the feudal tangle that it was, till a
prince from Anjou repeated the unifying effort of the Conqueror. It is found
equally easy to write of the Red King's hunting instead of his building, wh=
ich
has lasted longer, and which he probably loved much more. It is easy to
catalogue the questions he disputed with Anselm--leaving out the question
Anselm cared most about, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as,
"Why was God a man?" All this is as simple as saying that a king =
died
of eating lampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays,
unless it be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapers=
seldom
say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England in this dim
epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story of St. Thomas =
of
Canterbury.
Henry of Anjou, w=
ho
brought fresh French blood into the monarchy, brought also a refreshment of=
the
idea for which the French have always stood: the idea in the Roman Law of
something impersonal and omnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a
small French detective story; when Justice opens a handbag or Justice runs
after a cab. Henry II. really produced this impression of being a police fo=
rce in
person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to the bird a=
nd
the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood, however, meant law
and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justice cheap and obvious as
daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only in popular phrases about the Kin=
g's
English or the King's highway. But though it tended to be egalitarian it did
not, of itself, tend to be humanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Ro=
me,
the other name of Justice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especial=
ly
is always a Revolutionist--and never an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings
like Henry II. to rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only=
, of
course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies and feelings in
themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned by what was the
corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happen not only with but
within the Church. For a Church was to these men rather a world they lived =
in
than a building to which they went. Without the Church the Middle Ages would
have had no law, as without the Church the Reformation would have had no Bi=
ble.
Many priests expounded and embellished the Roman Law, and many priests
supported Henry II. And yet there was another element in the Church, stored=
in
its first foundations like dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy a=
nd
renew the world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parall=
el
to all its political compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off o=
f innumerable
Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, as was proved
recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of getting poor quickly;=
a
mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind of revolution in the crusad=
ing
time caught Francis in Assissi and stripped him of his rich garments in the
street. The same wind of revolution suddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henr=
y's
brilliant and luxurious Chancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory =
and
a bloody end.
Becket was a type=
of
those historic times in which it is really very practical to be impracticab=
le.
The quarrel which tore him from his friend's side cannot be appreciated in =
the
light of those legal and constitutional debates which the misfortunes of the
seventeenth century have made so much of in more recent history. To convict=
St.
Thomas of illegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Chur=
ch against
that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St. Francis of bad
heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun and moon. There may have
been heralds stupid enough to say so even in that much more logical age, bu=
t it
is no sufficient way of dealing with visions or with revolutions. St. Thoma=
s of
Canterbury was a great visionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as
England was concerned his revolution failed and his vision was not fulfille=
d.
We are therefore told in the text-books little more than that he wrangled w=
ith
the King about certain regulations; the most crucial being whether
"criminous clerks" should be punished by the State or the Church.=
And
this was indeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we must re=
iterate
what is hardest for modern England to understand--the nature of the Catholic
Church when it was itself a government, and the permanent sense in which it=
was
itself a revolution.
It is always the
first fact that escapes notice; and the first fact about the Church was tha=
t it
created a machinery of pardon, where the State could only work with a machi=
nery
of punishment. It claimed to be a divine detective who helped the criminal =
to
escape by a plea of guilty. It was, therefore, in the very nature of the
institution, that when it did punish materially it punished more lightly. If
any modern man were put back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would
certainly be torn in two; for if the King's scheme was the more rational, t=
he
Archbishop's was the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened
religious disputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk
the historic character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance, =
that
things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, was practically
unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principle lingered into more =
evil
days in the form by which the Church authorities handed over culprits to the
secular arm to be killed, even for religious offences. In modern romances t=
his
is treated as a mere hypocrisy; but the man who treats every human
inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsist=
encies.
Our world, then,
cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St. Francis, without accepting =
very
simply a flaming and even fantastic charity, by which the great Archbishop
undoubtedly stands for the victims of this world, where the wheel of fortune
grinds the faces of the poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wish=
ed
to protect the Church as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules mig=
ht
seem to him as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King=
as capricious
as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic, the King was
really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say he was too practical =
to
succeed in practice. There re-enters here, and runs, I think, through all
English history, the rather indescribable truth I have suggested about the
Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardly impersonal enough for a pure despot. =
The
real moral of our mediæval story is, I think, subtly contrary to
Carlyle's vision of a stormy strong man to hammer and weld the state like a
smith. Our strong men were too strong for us, and too strong for themselves.
They were too strong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The sm=
ith
broke upon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself. =
Whether
or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story of our kings a=
nd
barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. to his rival. He became lawless
out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in a colder and more remote
manner, for the whole people against feudal oppression; and if his policy h=
ad
succeeded in its purity, it would at least have made impossible the privile=
ge
and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlessness which stamped a=
nd
spurned the furniture was a symbol of him; it was some such thing that
prevented him and his heirs from sitting as quietly on their throne as the
heirs of St. Louis. He thrust again and again at the tough intangibility of=
the
priests' Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendental=
defiances
with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and, I think, deci=
sive
day in English history, his word sent four feudal murderers into the cloist=
ers
of Canterbury, who went there to destroy a traitor and who created a saint.=
At the grave of t=
he
dead man broke forth what can only be called an epidemic of healing. For
miracles so narrated there is the same evidence as for half the facts of
history; and any one denying them must deny them upon a dogma. But something
followed which would seem to modern civilization even more monstrous than a
miracle. If the reader can imagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be
horsewhipped by a Boer in St. Paul's Cathedral, as an apology for some
indefensible death incidental to the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint=
idea
of what was meant when Henry II. was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vas=
sal
and enemy. The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that
mediæval actualities have a violence that does seem comic to our
conventions. The Catholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts:
the all-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importance=
of
vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravagant humili=
ation
after extravagant pride for them restored the balance of sanity. The point =
is
worth stressing, because without it moderns make neither head nor tail of t=
he
period. Green gravely suggests, for instance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of
Anjou, that his tyrannies and frauds were further blackened by "low
superstition," which led him to be dragged in a halter round a shrine,
scourged and screaming for the mercy of God. Mediævals would simply h=
ave
said that such a man might well scream for it, but his scream was the only
logical comment he could make. But they would have quite refused to see why=
the
scream should be added to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would
have thought it simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for b=
eing
horribly sinful and for being horribly sorry.
But it may be
suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper to ignorance, that the Ang=
evin
ideal of the King's justice lost more by the death of St. Thomas than was
instantly apparent in the horror of Christendom, the canonization of the vi=
ctim
and the public penance of the tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense
temporary; the King recovered the power to judge clerics, and many later ki=
ngs
and justiciars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as a po=
ssible
clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderous stroke the c=
rown
lost what should have been the silent and massive support of its whole poli=
cy.
I mean that it lost the people.
It need not be
repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As a rule its cruelty to
the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocrat cannot be judged as a
historical character by his relations with other historical characters. His
true applause comes not from the few actors on the lighted stage of
aristocracy, but from that enormous audience which must always sit in darkn=
ess
throughout the drama. The king who helps numberless helps nameless men, and
when he flings his widest largesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth.
This sort of monarchy was certainly a mediæval ideal, nor need it
necessarily fail as a reality. French kings were never so merciful to the
people as when they were merciless to the peers; and it is probably true th=
at a
Czar who was a great lord to his intimates was often a little father in
innumerable little homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central
power, though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as in F=
rance,
would in England as in France have prevented the few from seizing and holdi=
ng
all the wealth and power to this day. But in England it broke off short, th=
rough
something of which the slaying of St. Thomas may well have been the supreme
example. It was something overstrained and startling and against the instin=
cts
of the people. And of what was meant in the Middle Ages by that very powerf=
ul
and rather peculiar thing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter.
In any case this
conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It is not merely that, just=
as
the great but personal plan of the Conqueror collapsed after all into the c=
haos
of the Stephen transition, so the great but personal plan of the first
Plantagenet collapsed into the chaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allowanc=
e is
made for constitutional fictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that
here for the first time some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The
character of Henry's second son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last
chapter) stamped it with something accidental and yet symbolic. It was not =
that
John was a mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the textur=
e was
much more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discredited Plantagenet,
and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that he was much more of a=
bad
man than many opposed to him, but he was the kind of bad man whom bad men a=
nd
good do combine to oppose. In a sense subtler than that of the legal and
parliamentary logic-chopping invented long afterwards, he certainly managed=
to
put the Crown in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen's t=
ime
starved men in dungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the
heels as a symbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and=
his
son it was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized th=
e power;
but there did begin to appear a case for their seizing it, for contemporari=
es
as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, in one of his diplom=
atic
doublings, had put England into the papal care, as an estate is put in
Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels had generally been mild and
liberal, was then in his death-grapple with the Germanic Emperor and wanted
every penny he could get to win. His winning was a blessing to Europe, but a
curse to England, for he used the island as a mere treasury for this foreign
war. In this and other matters the baronial party began to have something l=
ike
a principle, which is the backbone of a policy. Much conventional history t=
hat
connects their councils with a thing like our House of Commons is as
far-fetched as it would be to say that the Speaker wields a Mace like those
which the barons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusi=
ast
for the Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was an enthusiast f=
or
something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absence of mind;
but it was with true presence of mind, in the responsible and even religious
sense which had made his father so savage a Crusader against heretics, that=
he
laid about him with his great sword before he fell at Evesham.
Magna Carta was n=
ot a
step towards democracy, but it was a step away from despotism. If we hold t=
hat
double truth firmly, we have something like a key to the rest of English
history. A rather loose aristocracy not only gained but often deserved the =
name
of liberty. And the history of the English can be most briefly summarized by
taking the French motto of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," a=
nd
noting that the English have sincerely loved the first and lost the other t=
wo.
In the contempora=
ry
complication much could be urged both for the Crown and the new and more
national rally of the nobility. But it was a complication, whereas a miracl=
e is
a plain matter that any man can understand. The possibilities or
impossibilities of St. Thomas Becket were left a riddle for history; the wh=
ite
flame of his audacious theocracy was frustrated, and his work cut short lik=
e a
fairy tale left untold. But his memory passed into the care of the common
people, and with them he was more active dead than alive--yes, even more bu=
sy.
In the next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages by =
the
common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And in the last
chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age the strangest things =
grew
homely, and men fed on travellers' tales when there were no national
newspapers. A many-coloured pageant of martyrology on numberless walls and
windows had familiarized the most ignorant with alien cruelties in many cli=
mes;
with a bishop flayed by Danes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint
stoned by Jews and another hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was=
a
small matter that among these images one of the most magnificent had met his
death but lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at least som=
ething
akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period in the tale of tho=
se
two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard and slew the other. It may =
even
have been so early as this that something was judged in silence; and for the
multitude rested on the Crown a mysterious seal of insecurity like that of
Cain, and of exile on the English kings.
VIII THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND=
The mental trick by which the first=
half
of English history has been wholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple
one. It consists in telling only the story of the professional destroyers a=
nd
then complaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at t=
he best
a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity; and if =
it
was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it was more difficu=
lt.
What we call the Judges' circuits were first rather the King's raids. For a
time the criminal class was so strong that ordinary civil government was
conducted by a sort of civil war. When the social enemy was caught at all he
was killed or savagely maimed. The King could not take Pentonville Prison a=
bout
with him on wheels. I am far from denying that there was a real element of
cruelty in the Middle Ages; but the point here is that it was concerned with
one side of life, which is cruel at the best; and that this involved more
cruelty for the same reason that it involved more courage. When we think of=
our
ancestors as the men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of
them as the men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediævalism
commonly looks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight=
of the
Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at the fact th=
at
fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumes that any other ideas th=
ere
may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. He despises the monk for avoi=
ding
the very same activities which he despises the warrior for cultivating. And=
he
insists that the arts of war were sterile, without even admitting the
possibility that the arts of peace were productive. But the truth is that i=
t is
precisely in the arts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Mid=
dle
Ages stand singular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed=
man
must recognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hate it. T=
he
melodramatic things currently called mediæval are much older and more
universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture. The
tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on the gladiatorial s=
how,
since the lords risked themselves and not merely their slaves. Torture, so =
far
from being peculiarly mediæval, was copied from pagan Rome and its mo=
st
rationalist political science; and its application to others besides slaves=
was
really part of the slow mediæval extinction of slavery. Torture, inde=
ed,
is a logical thing common in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great
agnostic empire of China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the
Middle Ages, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russi=
an communes
typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme of production, =
of
the making, building and growing of all the good things of life.
For the tale told=
in
a book like this cannot really touch on mediæval England at all. The
dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changing cloud and across a sta=
ble
and fruitful landscape. The institutions which affected the masses can be
compared to corn or fruit trees in one practical sense at least, that they =
grew
upwards from below. There may have been better societies, and assuredly we =
have
not to look far for worse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontane=
ous
a society. We cannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of t=
hat
epoch, even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons wi=
th the
plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local government always
comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merely imposed. T=
he
modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, are necessarily more
efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, or rather a pattern. The
mediævals not only had self-government, but their self-government was
self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers of the national monarchies
grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp of state approval; but it was
approval of a popular fact already in existence. Men banded together in gui=
lds
and parishes long before Local Government Acts were dreamed of. Like charit=
y,
which was worked in the same way, their Home Rule began at home. The reacti=
ons
of recent centuries have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporate i=
magination
required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as a thing that bre=
aks
things--even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these
things. An artist mocked as many-headed, an artist with many eyes and hands,
created these masterpieces. And if the modern sceptic, in his detestation of
the democratic ideal, complains of my calling them masterpieces, a simple
answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word
"masterpiece" is borrowed from the terminology of the mediæ=
val
craftsmen. But such points in the Guild System can be considered a little
later; here we are only concerned with the quite spontaneous springing upwa=
rds
of all these social institutions, such as they were. They rose in the stree=
ts
like a silent rebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern
constitutional countries there are practically no political institutions th=
us
given by the people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing
that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some =
power
like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions.
In agriculture, w=
hat
had happened to the land was like a universal landslide. But by a prodigy
beyond the catastrophes of geology it may be said that the land had slid
uphill. Rural civilization was on a wholly new and much higher level; yet t=
here
was no great social convulsions or apparently even great social campaigns to
explain it. It is possibly a solitary instance in history of men thus falli=
ng
upwards; at least of outcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying in=
to
the promised land. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; y=
et,
if we go by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. The=
re had
appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, something unknown to=
the
august civilization of the Roman Empire--a peasantry. At the beginning of t=
he
Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society now grown Christian was as m=
uch
a slave state as old South Carolina. By the fourteenth century it was almos=
t as
much a state of peasant proprietors as modern France. No laws had been pass=
ed
against slavery; no dogmas even had condemned it by definition; no war had =
been
waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was
gone. This startling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure =
of
the pressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was making =
new
things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in the mediæval
revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was as anonymous as it w=
as
enormous. It is admitted that the conscious and active emancipators everywh=
ere
were the parish priests and the religious brotherhoods; but no name among t=
hem
has survived and no man of them has reaped his reward in this world. Countl=
ess
Clarksons and innumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or publ=
ic
fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe;=
and
the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest work ever d=
one
which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was in this and other
things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough to state roughly the st=
ages
through which the thing passed; but such a statement does not explain the
loosening of the grip of the great slave-owners; and it cannot be explained
except psychologically. The Catholic type of Christianity was not merely an
element, it was a climate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I =
have
already suggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which w=
as the
background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man's dignity must
have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or a stool that flew with
wings out of window, would be about as workable a thing as an immortal chat=
tel.
But though here as everywhere the spirit explains the processes, and the
processes cannot even plausibly explain the spirit, these processes involve=
two
very practical points, without which we cannot understand how this great
popular civilization was created--or how it was destroyed.
What we call the
manors were originally the villae of the pagan lords, each with its populat=
ion
of slaves. Under this process, however it be explained, what had occurred w=
as
the diminishment of the lords' claim to the whole profit of a slave estate,=
by
which it became a claim to the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to
certain dues or customary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave
could enjoy not only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be
remembered that over a great part, and especially very important parts, of =
the whole
territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by a mystical communi=
sm
and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not only obtained a fair amount =
of
justice under their care, but a fair amount of freedom even from their
carelessness. But two details of the development are very vital. First, as =
has
been hinted elsewhere, the slave was long in the intermediate status of a s=
erf.
This meant that while the land was entitled to the services of the man, he =
was
equally entitled to the support of the land. He could not be evicted; he co=
uld
not even, in the modern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it =
was
merely that the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At =
the end
he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not the lord t=
hat
owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest that in this (by on=
e of
the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the very fixity of serfdom was a
service to freedom. The new peasant inherited something of the stability of=
the
slave. He did not come to life in a competitive scramble where everybody was
trying to snatch his freedom from him. He found himself among neighbours who
already regarded his presence as normal and his frontiers as natural fronti=
ers,
and among whom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition.=
By
a trick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisoner h=
ad
become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it was almost true
that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it had been built strong
enough to be his dungeon.
The other notable
element was this: that when the produce of the land began by custom to be c=
ut
up and only partially transmitted to the lord, the remainder was generally
subdivided into two types of property. One the serfs enjoyed severally, in
private patches, while the other they enjoyed in common, and generally in
common with the lord. Thus arose the momentously important mediæval
institutions of the Common Land, owned side by side with private land. It w=
as
an alternative and a refuge. The mediævals, except when they were mon=
ks,
were none of them Communists; but they were all, as it were, potential
Communists. It is typical of the dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of =
the
period that our romances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on
the forests and the outlaw's den, but never describe him as falling back on=
the
common land, which was a much more common incident. Mediævalism belie=
ved
in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in the communal life for
monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great gre=
en
hospital, their free and airy workhouse. A Common was not a naked and negat=
ive
thing like the scrub or heath we call a Common on the edges of the suburbs.=
It
was a reserve of wealth like a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberat=
ely
kept back as a balance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these
provisions for a healthier distribution of property would by themselves show
any man of imagination that a real moral effort had been made towards socia=
l justice;
that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident that slowly turned t=
he
slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasant proprietor. But if anybody s=
till
thinks that mere blind luck, without any groping for the light, had somehow
brought about the peasant condition in place of the agrarian slave estate, =
he
has only to turn to what was happening in all the other callings and affair=
s of
humanity. Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediæ=
;val
men busy upon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and=
a craving
for equality. And it is a system which could no more be produced by accident
than one of their cathedrals could be built by an earthquake.
Most work beyond =
the
primary work of agriculture was guarded by the egalitarian vigilance of the
Guilds. It is hard to find any term to measure the distance between this sy=
stem
and modern society; one can only approach it first by the faint traces it h=
as
left. Our daily life is littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especial=
ly
of dead words which no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested=
one
example. We hardly call up the picture of a return to Christian Communism
whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends to such trifles as
the titles which we write on letters and postcards. The puzzling and trunca=
ted
monosyllable "Esq." is a pathetic relic of a remote evolution from
chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things could well be more different t=
han
an esquire and a squire. The first was above all things an incomplete and
probationary position--the tadpole of knighthood; the second is above all
things a complete and assured position--the status of the owners and rulers=
of
rural England throughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their
estates till they had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs.
Esquire does not mean squire, and esq. does not mean anything. But it remai=
ns
on our letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherable hierog=
lyph
twisted by the strange turns of our history, which have turned a military
discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into a mere plutocracy at las=
t.
And there are similar historic riddles to be unpicked in the similar forms =
of
social address. There is something singularly forlorn about the modern word
"Mister." Even in sound it has a simpering feebleness which marks=
the
shrivelling of the strong word from which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symb=
ol
of the mere sound inaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in
which he bore the unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very
much shorn. There is something of the same dismal diminuendo in the evoluti=
on
of a Master into a Mister.
The very vital
importance of the word "Master" is this. A Guild was, very broadly
speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his own employer. That is, a=
man
could not work at any trade unless he would join the league and accept the =
laws
of that trade; but he worked in his own shop with his own tools, and the wh=
ole
profit went to himself. But the word "employer" marks a modern
deficiency which makes the modern use of the word "master" quite
inexact. A master meant something quite other and greater than a
"boss." It meant a master of the work, where it now means only a
master of the workmen. It is an elementary character of Capitalism that a
shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or a landowner have even s=
een
the landscape, that the owner of a goldmine may be interested in nothing but
old pewter, or the owner of a railway travel exclusively in balloons. He ma=
y be
a more successful capitalist if he has a hobby of his own business; he is o=
ften
a more successful capitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; =
but economically
he can control the business because he is a capitalist, not because he has =
any
kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highest grade in the Guild system w=
as a
Master, and it meant a mastery of the business. To take the term created by=
the
colleges in the same epoch, all the mediæval bosses were Masters of A=
rts.
The other grades were the journeyman and the apprentice; but like the
corresponding degrees at the universities, they were grades through which e=
very
common man could pass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and =
not
castes. This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprenti=
ce marrying
his master's daughter. The master would not be surprised at such a thing, a=
ny
more than an M.A. would swell with aristocratic indignation when his daught=
er
married a B.A.
When we pass from=
the
strictly educational hierarchy to the strictly egalitarian ideal, we find a=
gain
that the remains of the thing to-day are so distorted and disconnected as t=
o be
comic. There are City Companies which inherit the coats of arms and the imm=
ense
relative wealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is g=
ood about
them is not what was good about the Guilds. In one case we shall find somet=
hing
like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it is unnecessary to sa=
y,
there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who has ever known a bricklayer,
but in which the senior partners of a few big businesses in the City, with a
few faded military men with a taste in cookery, tell each other in after-di=
nner
speeches that it has been the glory of their lives to make allegorical bric=
ks
without straw. In another case we shall find a Worshipful Company of
Whitewashers who do deserve their name, in the sense that many of them empl=
oy a
large number of other people to whitewash. These Companies support large
charities and often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is
quite different from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of th=
e Guild
charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was to resist ineq=
uality--or,
as some earnest old gentlemen of the last generation would probably put it,=
to
resist evolution. It was to ensure, not only that bricklaying should survive
and succeed, but that every bricklayer should survive and succeed. It sough=
t to
rebuild the ruins of any bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new
white coat. It was the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like
their shoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen the=
weakest
link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the row of little
shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growth of a big shop =
like
the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers of the Whitewashers Compa=
ny
will not pretend that it exists to prevent a small shop being swallowed by a
big shop, or that it has done anything whatever to prevent it. At the best =
the
kindness it would show to a bankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of
compensation; it would not be reinstatement; it would not be the restoratio=
n of
status in an industrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careles=
s of
the single life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the type i=
tself
has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object of equality, of
course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system of payment and
treatment which is a point of complaint against the modern Trades Unions. B=
ut
they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, upon a high standard of
craftsmanship, which still astonishes the world in the corners of perishing
buildings or the colours of broken glass. There is no artist or art critic =
who
will not concede, however distant his own style from the Gothic school, that
there was in this time a nameless but universal artistic touch in the mould=
ing
of the very tools of life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and sto=
ols
and pots and pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed no=
t by
devils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequent sys=
tems,
produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country.
That the most
mediæval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do not fight for =
the
same ideal of æsthetic finish is true and certainly tragic; but to ma=
ke
it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand the tragedy. The Trades Uni=
ons
are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence =
by
numbers and the necessary character of their labour. The Guilds were
confederations of men with property, seeking to ensure each man in the
possession of that property. This is, of course, the only condition of affa=
irs
in which property can properly be said to exist at all. We should not speak=
of
a negro community in which most men were white, but the rare negroes were
giants. We should not conceive a married community in which most men were
bachelors, and three men had harems. A married community means a community
where most people are married; not a community where one or two people are =
very
much married. A propertied community means a community where most people ha=
ve
property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But in fact the
Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs and peasants) we=
re
much richer than can be realized even from the fact that the Guilds protect=
ed
the possession of houses, tools, and just payment. The surplus is self-evid=
ent
upon any just study of the prices of the period, when all deductions have b=
een
made, of course, for the different value of the actual coinage. When a man
could get a goose or a gallon of ale for one or two of the smallest and
commonest coins, the matter is in no way affected by the name of those coin=
s.
Even where the individual wealth was severely limited, the collective wealth
was very large--the wealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of
the monastic estates. It is important to remember this fact in the subseque=
nt history
of England.
The next fact to =
note
is that the local government grew out of things like the Guild system, and =
not
the system from the government. In sketching the sound principles of this l=
ost
society, I shall not, of course, be supposed by any sane person to be
describing a moral paradise, or to be implying that it was free from the fa=
ults
and fights and sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly n=
ot
least in our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting in c=
onnection
with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time a combative rivalry
between the guilds of merchants who sold things and those of craftsmen who =
made
them, a conflict in which the craftsmen on the whole prevailed. But whichev=
er
party may have been predominant, it was the heads of the Guild who became t=
he
heads of the town, and not vice versâ. The stiff survivals of this on=
ce
very spontaneous uprising can again be seen in the now anomalous constituti=
on
of the Lord Mayor and the Livery of the City of London. We are told so
monotonously that the government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it =
is
valid to insist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of governm=
ent,
was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman's tool became
the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggests that in the
Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hilt of the sword and=
put
upon the handle of the plough. But something very like this did happen in t=
he
interlude of this mediæval democracy, fermenting under the crust of
mediæval monarchy and aristocracy; where productive implements often =
took
on the pomp of heraldry. The Guilds often exhibited emblems and pageantry so
compact of their most prosaic uses, that we can only parallel them by imagi=
ning
armorial tabards, or even religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corde=
roys
or a coster's pearl buttons.
Two more points m=
ust
be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this now foreign and even fantast=
ic
state will be as complete as it can be made here. Both refer to the links
between this popular life and the politics which are conventially the whole=
of
history. The first, and for that age the most evident, is the Charter. To r=
ecur
once more to the parallel of Trades Unions, as convenient for the casual re=
ader
of to-day, the Charter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that
"recognition" for which the railwaymen and other trades unionists=
asked
some years ago, without success. By this they had the authority of the King,
the central or national government; and this was of great moral weight with
mediævals, who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not =
as a
negative escape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty
akin to loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man the=
freedom
of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of a wilderness. To s=
ay
that they had also the authority of the Church is something of an
understatement; for religion ran like a rich thread through the rude tapest=
ry
of these popular things while they were still merely popular; and many a tr=
ade
society must have had a patron saint long before it had a royal seal. The o=
ther
point is that it was from these municipal groups already in existence that =
the
first men were chosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great
mediæval experiments: the Parliament.
We have all read =
at
school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I., when they first summoned Commo=
ns
to council, chiefly as advisers on local taxation, called "two
burgesses" from every town. If we had read a little more closely, those
simple words would have given away the whole secret of the lost mediæ=
val
civilization. We had only to ask what burgesses were, and whether they grew=
on
trees. We should immediately have discovered that England was full of little
parliaments, out of which the great parliament was made. And if it be a mat=
ter
of wonder that the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old
title of the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or elective=
corporations
of which we hear much in our books of history, the explanation, I fear, is
simple and a little sad. It is that the Parliament was the one among these
mediæval creations which ultimately consented to betray and to destroy
the rest.
IX NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS
If any one wishes to know what we m=
ean
when we say that Christendom was and is one culture, or one civilization, t=
here
is a rough but plain way of putting it. It is by asking what is the most
common, or rather the most commonplace, of all the uses of the word
"Christian." There is, of course, the highest use of all; but it =
has
nowadays many other uses. Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical.
Sometimes, and more recently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Chris=
tian
means a modest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. B=
ut
it has long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and it me=
ans
a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did not actually s=
ay
to Jim Hawkins, "I feel myself out of touch with a certain type of
civilization"; but he did say, "I haven't tasted Christian food.&=
quot;
The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair and trousers do
not indeed say, "We perceive a divergence between her culture and our
own"; but they do say, "Why can't she dress like a Christian?&quo=
t;
That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest and even stupidest
daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was a very real thing. But =
it
was also, as we have seen, a very localized thing, especially in the Middle
Ages. And that very lively localism the Christian faith and affections
encouraged led at last to an excessive and exclusive parochialism. There we=
re
rival shrines of the same saint, and a sort of duel between two statues of =
the
same divinity. By a process it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real
estrangement between European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreign=
ers
did not eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schism=
came,
to doubt if they were Christians.
There was, indeed,
much more than this involved. While the internal structure of mediæva=
lism
was thus parochial and largely popular, in the greater affairs, and especia=
lly
the external affairs, such as peace and war, most (though by no means all) =
of
what was mediæval was monarchical. To see what the kings came to mean=
we
must glance back at the great background, as of darkness and daybreak, agai=
nst
which the first figures of our history have already appeared. That backgrou=
nd
was the war with the barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only o=
ne
nation but more like one city--and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall=
or Paris
one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might have chronicled the
siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. What followed was a conquest
and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Ages and the dawn of
mediævalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism. And it is the
paradox of the Crusades that though the Saracen was superficially more
civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinct which saw him also to=
be
in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case of northern heathenry the
civilization spread with a simplier progress. But it was not till the end of
the Middle Ages, and close on the Reformation, that the people of Prussia, =
the
wild land lying beyond Germany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if=
he
permitted himself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be
inclined to suggest that for some reason it didn't "take" even th=
en.
The barbarian per=
il
was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in the case of Islam the alien
power which could not be crushed was evidently curbed. The Crusades became
hopeless, but they also became needless. As these fears faded the princes of
Europe, who had come together to face them, were left facing each other. Th=
ey
had more leisure to find that their own captaincies clashed; but this would
easily have been overruled, or would have produced a petty riot, had not the
true creative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in the local life, tende=
d to
real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almost without know=
ing it;
and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree or a title-deed found he s=
poke
for the forests and the songs of a whole country-side. In England especially
the transition is typified in the accident which raised to the throne one of
the noblest men of the Middle Ages.
Edward I. came cl=
ad
in all the splendours of his epoch. He had taken the Cross and fought the
Saracens; he had been the only worthy foe of Simon de Montfort in those
baronial wars which, as we have seen, were the first sign (however faint) o=
f a
serious theory that England should be ruled by its barons rather than its
kings. He proceeded, like Simon de Montfort, and more solidly, to develop t=
he
great mediæval institution of a parliament. As has been said, it was
superimposed on the existing parish democracies, and was first merely the
summoning of local representatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed its =
rise
was one with the rise of what we now call taxation; and there is thus a thr=
ead of
theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing. But in
the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings, and notably=
an
instrument of Edward I. He often quarrelled with his parliaments and may
sometimes have displeased his people (which has never been at all the same
thing), but on the whole he was supremely the representative sovereign. In =
this
connection one curious and difficult question may be considered here, thoug=
h it
marks the end of a story that began with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty
certain that he was never more truly a representative king, one might say a
republican king, than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem is=
so
much misunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupid spite against a gifte=
d and
historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it.
The Jews in the
Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular. They were the capitali=
sts
of the age, the men with wealth banked ready for use. It is very tenable th=
at
in this way they were useful; it is certain that in this way they were used=
. It
is also quite fair to say that in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage
was not indeed that suggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on
the one idea that their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a sto=
ry
about King John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was=
a story
against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insisted on as
exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviously regarded as
disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews' position was deeper and =
more
distressing to a sensitive and highly civilized people. They might reasonab=
ly
say that Christian kings and nobles, and even Christian popes and bishops, =
used
for Christian purposes (such as the Crusades and the cathedrals) the money =
that
could only be accumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently
denounced as unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew =
to
the fury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the real =
case
for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed. Unfortunately it
was the case for the Christians that they, with at least equal reason, felt=
him
as the oppressor; and that mutual charge of tyranny is the Semitic trouble =
in
all times. It is certain that in popular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was =
not
excused as uncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts h=
is
curse on Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who we=
pt when
she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking the rule by whi=
ch
the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth, flung the alien
financiers out of the land, that his people probably saw him most plainly at
once as a knight errant and a tender father of his people.
Whatever the meri=
ts
of this question, such a portrait of Edward was far from false. He was the =
most
just and conscientious type of mediæval monarch; and it is exactly th=
is
fact that brings into relief the new force which was to cross his path and =
in strife
with which he died. While he was just, he was also eminently legal. And it =
must
be remembered, if we would not merely read back ourselves into the past, th=
at
much of the dispute of the time was legal; the adjustment of dynastic and
feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. In this spirit Edward =
was
asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to the Scottish crown; and in this
sense he seems to have arbitrated quite honestly. But his legal, or, as some
would say, pedantic mind made the proviso that the Scottish king as such was
already under his suzerainty, and he probably never understood the spirit he
called up against him; for that spirit had as yet no name. We call it to-day
Nationalism. Scotland resisted; and the adventures of an outlawed knight na=
med Wallace
soon furnished it with one of those legends which are more important than
history. In a way that was then at least equally practical, the Catholic
priests of Scotland became especially the patriotic and Anti-English party;=
as
indeed they remained even throughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated =
and
executed; but the heather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new
national cause by one of Edward's own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old
king a mere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head =
of a
new invasion upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words the great
king commanded that his bones should be borne in front of the battle; and t=
he
bones, which were of gigantic size, were eventually buried with the epitaph,
"Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammer of the Scots." It =
was
a true epitaph, but in a sense exactly opposite to its intention. He was th=
eir
hammer, but he did not break but make them; for he smote them on an anvil a=
nd
he forged them into a sword.
That coincidence =
or
course of events, which must often be remarked in this story, by which (for
whatever reason) our most powerful kings did not somehow leave their power
secure, showed itself in the next reign, when the baronial quarrels were
resumed and the northern kingdom, under Bruce, cut itself finally free by t=
he
stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwise the reign is a mere interlude, and it is w=
ith
the succeeding one that we find the new national tendency yet further
developed. The great French wars, in which England won so much glory, were
opened by Edward III., and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel=
the
transition of the time we must first realize that the third Edward made as
strictly legal and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward had made =
to Scotland;
the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equally conventional in f=
orm.
He thought, or said, he had a claim on a kingdom as a squire might say he h=
ad a
claim on an estate; superficially it was an affair for the English and Fren=
ch
lawyers. To read into this that the people were sheep bought and sold is to
misunderstand all mediæval history; sheep have no trade union. The
English arms owed much of their force to the class of the free yeomen; and =
the
success of the infantry, especially of the archery, largely stood for that
popular element which had already unhorsed the high French chivalry at
Courtrai. But the point is this; that while the lawyers were talking about =
the
Salic Law, the soldiers, who would once have been talking about guild law or
glebe law, were already talking about English law and French law. The Frenc=
h were
first in this tendency to see something outside the township, the trade
brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The whole history of t=
he
change can be seen in the fact that the French had early begun to call the
nation the Greater Land. France was the first of nations and has remained t=
he
norm of nations, the only one which is a nation and nothing else. But in the
collision the English grew equally corporate; and a true patriotic applause
probably hailed the victories of Crecy and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed=
the
later victory of Agincourt. The latter did not indeed occur until after an
interval of internal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a
later page; but as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars were =
continuous.
And the English tradition that followed after Agincourt was continuous also=
. It
is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before the great Elizabethans. The
Henry V. of Shakespeare is not indeed the Henry V. of history; yet he is mo=
re
historic. He is not only a saner and more genial but a more important perso=
n.
For the tradition of the whole adventure was not that of Henry, but of the =
populace
who turned Henry into Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at
Agincourt, and not one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the
legends of the great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as the =
Englishman
of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, like Shakespeare's he=
ro,
but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so, he sang; and the Engli=
sh
people principally appear in contemporary impressions as the singing people.
They were evidently not only expansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was=
not
only in battle that they drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, whi=
ch
has descended to the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even
to-day, had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though the=
modern
poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lost the gaiety =
and
kept only the humour. But in that early April of patriotism the new unity of
the State still sat lightly upon them; and a cobbler in Henry's army, who w=
ould
at home have thought first that it was the day of St. Crispin of the Cobble=
rs,
might truly as well as sincerely have hailed the splintering of the French
lances in a storm of arrows, and cried, "St. George for Merry
England."
Human things are
uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April of patriotism it was the
Autumn of mediæval society. In the next chapter I shall try to trace =
the
forces that were disintegrating the civilization; and even here, after the
first victories, it is necessary to insist on the bitterness and barren
ambition that showed itself more and more in the later stages, as the long
French wars dragged on. France was at the time far less happy than
England--wasted by the treason of its nobles and the weakness of its kings
almost as much as by the invasion of the islanders. And yet it was this very
despair and humiliation that seemed at last to rend the sky, and let in the
light of what it is hard for the coldest historian to call anything but a
miracle.
It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalism eternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult to be developed here, that there was something in the great moral change which turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each great thing, to which it afterwards gave bi= rth, was baptized into a promise, or at least into a hope of permanence. It may = be that each of its ideas was, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of this kind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage = from a contract into a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even for the most secular types of our own time their relation to their native l= and has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flags are rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said it for half the= ir lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for a fiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modern humanity had grouped its= elf into nations almost before it knew what it had done. If the same sound is h= eard a thousand years hence, there is no sign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will not do exactly the same thing. But even if = this great and strange development be not enduring, the point is that it is felt= as enduring. It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come n= ear it if we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to be= unlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot is the maximum t= hat is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. The recognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognized reality of patriotism is= for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, in nati= onal growth and glory and in national disgrace and decline; it is not to travel = in the ship of state as a passenger, but if need be to go down with the ship.<= o:p>
It is needless to
tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode in which a clearance in=
the
earth and sky, above the confusion and abasement of the crowns, showed the
commanding figure of a woman of the people. She was, in her own living
loneliness, a French Revolution. She was the proof that a certain power was=
not
in the French kings or in the French knights, but in the French. But the fa=
ct
that she saw something above her that was other than the sky, the fact that=
she
lived the life of a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped =
the
new national sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought for=
a
defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herself ultimately
defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which I spoke above, w=
hich
makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. It is more appropriate in =
this
place to consider the ultimate reaction of this sacrifice upon the romance =
and
the realities of England.
I have never coun=
ted
it a patriotic part to plaster my own country with conventional and
unconvincing compliments; but no one can understand England who does not
understand that such an episode as this, in which she was so clearly in the
wrong, has yet been ultimately linked up with a curious quality in which sh=
e is
rather unusually in the right. No one candidly comparing us with other
countries can say we have specially failed to build the sepulchres of the
prophets we stoned, or even the prophets who stoned us. The English histori=
cal
tradition has at least a loose large-mindedness which always finally falls =
into
the praise not only of great foreigners but great foes. Often along with mu=
ch
injustice it has an illogical generosity; and while it will dismiss a great
people with mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with hearty hero-=
worship.
There are more examples than one even in this chapter, for our books may we=
ll
make out Wallace a better man than he was, as they afterwards assigned to
Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane
Porter's picture of Wallace, going into war weeping with a cambric
pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude was more English and not less accurat=
e.
For her idealization was, if anything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own
notion of a mediævalism of hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who
figures as a tyrant, could weep with compassion; and it is probable enough =
that
Wallace wept, with or without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her romance =
was
a reality, the reality of nationalism; and she knew much more about the
Scottish patriots ages before her time than Thackeray did about the Irish p=
atriots
immediately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but in that matter he
was a very small man, and indeed an invisible one. The cases of Wallace and
Washington and many others are here only mentioned, however, to suggest an
eccentric magnanimity which surely balances some of our prejudices. We have
done many foolish things, but we have at least done one fine thing; we have
whitewashed our worst enemies. If we have done this for a bold Scottish rai=
der
and a vigorous Virginian slave-holder, it may at least show that we are not
likely to fail in our final appreciation of the one white figure in the mot=
ley
processions of war. I believe there to be in modern England something like a
universal enthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic w=
rite
a book about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solely in
order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do not believe
there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of being an Englishm=
an
then, would not discard his chance of riding as the crowned conqueror at the
head of all the spears of Agincourt, if he could be that English common sol=
dier
of whom tradition tells that he broke his spear asunder to bind it into a c=
ross
for Joan of Arc.
The poet Pope, though a friend of t=
he
greatest of Tory Democrats, Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in wh=
ich
even Toryism was Whiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his politi=
cal
point more clearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of
kings to govern wrong." It will be apparent, when I deal with that per=
iod,
that I do not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some=
of the
pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible ideal of
"non-resistance" to any national and legitimate power; though I c=
annot
see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the more modern idea=
l of
"non-resistance" even to a foreign and lawless power. But the
seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; and the Filmerites
made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equally religious but much
more realistic; and though tangled with many other and even opposite things=
of
the Middle Ages, ramify through all the changes we have now to consider. The
connection can hardly be stated better than by taking Pope's easy epigram a=
nd
pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right
divine of kings to govern wrong," considered as a sneer, really evades=
all
that we mean by "a right." To have a right to do a thing is not at
all the same as to be right in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a
divine right is what we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a m=
an
has a right to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right=
to choose
his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right to express the
opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitate to make the
controversial claim that this proves the opinion to be right.
Now mediæval
monarchy, though only one aspect of mediæval rule, was roughly
represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as a voter has a
right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governed horribly and
extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; as a private man
retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless he goes horribly and
extravagantly off his head. It was not really even so simple as this; for t=
he
Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashion to fancy, under a single a=
nd
steely discipline. They were very controversial and therefore very complex;=
and
it is easy, by isolating items whether about jus divinum or primus inter pa=
res,
to maintain that the mediævals were almost anything; it has been
seriously maintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the
influence of the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen, enc=
ouraged
the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which was meant to make the
monarch terrible and therefore often made the man tyrannical. The disadvant=
age
of such despotism is obvious enough. The precise nature of its advantage mu=
st
be better understood than it is, not for its own sake so much as for the st=
ory
we have now to tell.
The advantage of
"divine right," or irremovable legitimacy, is this; that there is=
a
limit to the ambitions of the rich. "Roi ne puis"; the royal powe=
r,
whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in one respect like the
power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutional moralists have often
implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the same vices. It has perhaps been
less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble most emphatically have the same
virtues. And one virtue which they very markedly share is that neither tyra=
nts
nor rabbles are snobs; they do not care a button what they do to wealthy
people. It is true that tyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the
heavens almost in the lesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky;=
a
man no more expected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning
star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his own=
mill;
no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his own reading-lamp. Y=
et
something very like this is what really happened to England in the later Mi=
ddle
Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, was the fall of Richard II.
Shakespeare's
historical plays are something truer than historical; they are traditional;=
the
living memory of many things lingered, though the memory of others was lost=
. He
is right in making Richard II. incarnate the claim to divine right; and
Bolingbroke the baronial ambition which ultimately broke up the old
mediæval order. But divine right had become at once drier and more
fantastic by the time of the Tudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh
and popular part of the thing; for he came at a later stage in a process of
stiffening which is the main thing to be studied in later mediævalism.
Richard himself was possibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might we=
ll
be the weak link that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There
may have been a real case against the coup d'état which he effected =
in 1397,
and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sections of
disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the first true
usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand that larger
tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back at something
which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. It was certainly=
the
greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly the greatest event of all =
the
reigns which are rapidly considered in this book. The real English people, =
the
men who work with their hands, lifted their hands to strike their masters,
probably for the first and certainly for the last time in history.
Pagan slavery had
slowly perished, not so much by decaying as by developing into something
better. In one sense it did not die, but rather came to life. The slave-own=
er
was like a man who should set up a row of sticks for a fence, and then find
they had struck root and were budding into small trees. They would be at on=
ce
more valuable and less manageable, especially less portable; and such a
difference between a stick and a tree was precisely the difference between a
slave and a serf--or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly
tending to become. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a social=
evolution,
and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while it was essentially
orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, the emancipation of the
commons had already advanced very far, but it had not yet advanced far enou=
gh
to be embodied in a law. The custom was "unwritten," like the Bri=
tish
Constitution, and (like that evolutionary, not to say evasive entity) could
always be overridden by the rich, who now drive their great coaches through
Acts of Parliament. The new peasant was still legally a slave, and was to l=
earn
it by one of those turns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the
common sense of unwritten constitutions. The French Wars gradually grew to =
be
almost as much of a scourge to England as they were to France. England was =
despoiled
by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at the extremes of socie=
ty;
and, by a process more proper to an ensuing chapter, the balance of the bet=
ter
mediævalism was lost. Finally, a furious plague, called the Black Dea=
th,
burst like a blast on the land, thinning the population and throwing the wo=
rk
of the world into ruin. There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of get=
ting
luxuries; and the great lords did what one would expect them to do. They be=
came
lawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. They appealed to a rule al=
ready
nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more direct servitude of the
Dark Ages. They announced their decision to the people, and the people rose=
in
arms.
The two dramatic
stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubtfully with the beginning, and definit=
ely
with the end of the revolt, are far from unimportant, despite the desire of=
our
present prosaic historians to pretend that all dramatic stories are
unimportant. The tale of Tyler's first blow is significant in the sense tha=
t it
is not only dramatic but domestic. It avenged an insult to the family, and =
made
the legend of the whole riot, whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of
demonstration on behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of t=
he
poor is almost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspector need only brin=
g a printed
form and a few long words to do the same thing without having his head brok=
en.
The occasion of the protest, and the form which the feudal reaction had fir=
st
taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but a part of a general process of pres=
sing
the population to servile labour, which fully explains the ferocious langua=
ge
held by the government after the rising had failed; the language in which it
threatened to make the state of the serf more servile than before. The facts
attending the failure in question are less in dispute. The mediæval p=
opulace
showed considerable military energy and co-operation, stormed its way to Lo=
ndon,
and was met outside the city by a company containing the King and the Lord
Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. The treacherous stabbing of
Tyler by the Mayor gave the signal for battle and massacre on the spot. The
peasants closed in roaring, "They have killed our leader"; when a
strange thing happened; something which gives us a fleeting and a final gli=
mpse
of the crowned sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For one wild moment divi=
ne
right was divine.
The King was no m=
ore
than a boy; his very voice must have rung out to that multitude almost like=
the
voice of a child. But the power of his fathers and the great Christendom fr=
om
which he came fell in some strange fashion upon him; and riding out alone
before the people, he cried out, "I am your leader"; and himself
promised to grant them all they asked. That promise was afterwards broken; =
but
those who see in the breach of it the mere fickleness of the young and friv=
olous
king, are not only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole t=
rend
of that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are to be
seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, and Parliament
almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people. For when, after=
the
rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and were betrayed, the King urged a
humane compromise on the Parliament, the Parliament furiously refused it.
Already Parliament is not merely a governing body but a governing class.
Parliament was as contemptuous of the peasants in the fourteenth as of the
Chartists in the nineteenth century. This council, first summoned by the ki=
ng
like juries and many other things, to get from plain men rather reluctant e=
vidence
about taxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore=
, an
aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to the knife, bet=
ween
the Commons with a large C and the commons with a small one. Talking about =
the
knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tyler was not a mere noble but an
elective magistrate of the mercantile oligarchy of London; though there is
probably no truth in the tale that his blood-stained dagger figures on the =
arms
of the City of London. The mediæval Londoners were quite capable of
assassinating a man, but not of sticking so dirty a knife into the
neighbourhood of the cross of their Redeemer, in the place which is really
occupied by the sword of St. Paul.
It is remarked ab=
ove
that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being an object of ambition. The tr=
uth
is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but if ever men yearn to serve on jurie=
s we
may probably guess that juries are no longer popular. Anyhow, this must be =
kept
in mind, as against the opposite idea of the jus divinum or fixed authority=
, if
we would appreciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which dethroned him w=
as a
rebellion, it was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that had just
proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion of the people. But th=
is
is not the main point. The point is that by the removal of Richard, a step
above the parliament became possible for the first time. The transition was
tremendous; the crown became an object of ambition. That which one could sn=
atch
another could snatch from him; that which the House of Lancaster held merel=
y by
force the House of York could take from it by force. The spell of an
undethronable thing seated out of reach was broken, and for three unhappy
generations adventurers strove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blo=
od,
above which was something new in the mediæval imagination; an empty
throne.
It is obvious that
the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largely because he was a usurper=
, is
the clue to many things, some of which we should now call good, some bad, a=
ll
of which we should probably call good or bad with the excessive facility wi=
th
which we dismiss distant things. It led the Lancastrian House to lean on
Parliament, which was the mixed matter we have already seen. It may have be=
en
in some ways good for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged by an
institution which at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom =
of speech.
It was almost certainly bad for the parliament, making it yet more the ally=
of
the mere ambitious noble, of which we shall see much later. It also led the
Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, which was perhaps more popular; to
make English the tongue of the court for the first time, and to reopen the
French wars with the fine flag-waving of Agincourt. It led it again to lean=
on
the Church, or rather, perhaps, on the higher clergy, and that in the least
worthy aspect of clericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darke=
ned
the end of mediævalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties
against the last crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of
these heresies will lend little support to the notion that they were in the=
mselves
prophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybody can call Wyclif=
fe a
Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius a Protestant; and if John Ball=
was
a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer. But though the new heresies did not
even hint at the beginning of English Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hin=
t at
the end of English Catholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed =
on
to Nonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch, and put it to his =
own
church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the old religious
system, and which afterwards became a true national tradition against Mary,=
was
doubtless started by the diseased energy of these fifteenth-century bishops.
Persecution can be a philosophy, and a defensible philosophy, but with some=
of
these men persecution was rather a perversion. Across the channel, one of t=
hem
was presiding at the trial of Joan of Arc.
But this perversi=
on,
this diseased energy, is the power in all the epoch that follows the fall of
Richard II., and especially in those feuds that found so ironic an imagery =
in
English roses--and thorns. The foreshortening of such a backward glance as =
this
book can alone claim to be, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of=
the
wars of York and Lancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveri=
es
and revenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlik=
e widow
of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimes exaggeratively
implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion and the unicorn) mere=
ly
fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moral difference can still be traced
even in that stormy twilight of a heroic time. But when we have said that
Lancaster stood, on the whole, for the new notion of a king propped by
parliaments and powerful bishops, and York, on the whole, for the remains of
the older idea of a king who permits nothing to come between him and his
people, we have said everything of permanent political interest that could =
be
traced by counting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. =
But this
truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be called Tory about=
the
Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends a justifiable romance to=
the
last and most remarkable figure of the fighting House of York, with whose f=
all
the Wars of the Roses ended.
If we desire at a=
ll
to catch the strange colours of the sunset of the Middle Ages, to see what =
had
changed yet not wholly killed chivalry, there is no better study than the
riddle of Richard III. Of course, scarcely a line of him was like the
caricature with which his much meaner successor placarded the world when he=
was
dead. He was not even a hunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than=
the
other, probably the effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slen=
der
and sensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as th=
e crooked
shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogre shedding riv=
ers
of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it as much as any men of that
wicked time; and even the tale of his murdered nephews is not certain, and =
is
told by those who also tell us he was born with tusks and was originally
covered with hair. Yet a crimson cloud cannot be dispelled from his memory,
and, so tainted is the very air of that time with carnage, that we cannot s=
ay
he was incapable even of the things of which he may have been innocent. Whe=
ther
or no he was a good man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular o=
ne;
yet we think of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. H=
e anticipated
the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to
have held to the old paths of religion and charity. He did not pluck
perpetually at his sword and dagger because his only pleasure was in cutting
throats; he probably did it because he was nervous. It was the age of our f=
irst
portrait-painting, and a fine contemporary portrait of him throws a more
plausible light on this particular detail. For it shows him touching, and
probably twisting, a ring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung
personality who would also fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there
painted, we can study all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon
his name; an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The
face has a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on t=
he face
that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing is death; the
death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, the death of something
which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St. Francis and sailed to the
ends of the earth in the ships of the First Crusade, but which in peace wea=
ried
and turned its weapons inwards, wounded its own brethren, broke its own
loyalties, gambled for the crown, and grew feverish even about the creed, a=
nd
has this one grace among its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to =
die.
But whatever else=
may
have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch about =
him
which makes him truly the last of the mediæval kings. It is expressed=
in
the one word which he cried aloud as he struck down foe after foe in the la=
st
charge at Bosworth--treason. For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason
was the same as treachery; and in this case at least it was the same as
treachery. When his nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regar=
d it
as a new political combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithle=
ss servants.
Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, he challenged his rival t=
o a
fight as personal as that of two paladins of Charlemagne. His rival did not
reply, and was not likely to reply. The modern world had begun. The call ec=
hoed
unanswered down the ages; for since that day no English king has fought aft=
er
that fashion. Having slain many, he was himself slain and his diminished fo=
rce
destroyed. So ended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful=
of
all the usurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere,=
found
the crown of England under a bush of thorn.
XI THE REBELLION OF THE RICH=
span>
Sir Thomas More, apart from any arg=
uments
about the more mystical meshes in which he was ultimately caught and killed,
will be hailed by all as a hero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a m=
ore
rational daylight which for so many made mediævalism seem a mere
darkness. Whatever we think of his appreciation of the Reformation, there w=
ill
be no dispute about his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all th=
ings
a Humanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern, which
some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; he was also
humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, or rather perha=
ps a
fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuity of Mr. H. G. Wells,=
but
essentially with much more than the flippancy attributed to Mr. Bernard Sha=
w.
It is not fair to charge the Utopian notions upon his morality; but their
subjects and suggestions mark what (for want of a better word) we can only =
call
his modernism. Thus the immortality of animals is the sort of transcendenta=
lism
which savours of evolution; and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of
marriage might be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He
suggested a sort of pacifism--though the Utopians had a quaint way of achie=
ving
it. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist of medi&ael=
ig;val
abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism would be too narrow rather th=
an
too broad for him. If he was obviously not a Protestant, there are few
Protestants who would deny him the name of a Reformer. But he was an innova=
tor
in things more alluring to modern minds than theology; he was partly what we
should call a Neo-Pagan. His friend Colet summed up that escape from
mediævalism which might be called the passage from bad Latin to good
Greek. In our loose modern debates they are lumped together; but Greek lear=
ning
was the growth of this time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a
dog-Latin. It would be nearer the truth to call the mediævals bi-ling=
ual
than to call their Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so
general a possession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say
that he felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of this=
Greek
spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, its balance of
buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable that he shared some =
of
the excesses and errors of taste which inevitably infected the splendid
intellectualism of the reaction against the Middle Ages; we can imagine him
thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense of barbaric, or even failing to be
stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpet of "Chevy Chase." The weal=
th
of the ancient heathen world, in wit, loveliness, and civic heroism, had so
recently been revealed to that generation in its dazzling profusion and per=
fection,
that it might seem a trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the
relics of the Dark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eye=
s of
More we are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over an E=
nglish
landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the level light of the s=
un
at morning. For what he saw was England of the Renascence; England passing =
from
the mediæval to the modern. Thus he looked forth, and saw many things=
and
said many things; they were all worthy and many witty; but he noted one thi=
ng
which is at once a horrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who
looked over that landscape said: "Sheep are eating men."
This singular sum=
mary
of the great epoch of our emancipation and enlightenment is not the fact
usually put first in such very curt historical accounts of it. It has nothi=
ng
to do with the translation of the Bible, or the character of Henry VIII., or
the characters of Henry VIII.'s wives, or the triangular debates between He=
nry
and Luther and the Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant
men, or vice versa; nor did Henry, at any period of his own brief and rathe=
r bewildering
papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had them eaten by lions.
What was meant, of course, by this picturesque expression, was that an
intensive type of agriculture was giving way to a very extensive type of
pasture. Great spaces of England which had hitherto been cut up into the
commonwealth of a number of farmers were being laid under the sovereignty o=
f a
solitary shepherd. The point has been put, by a touch of epigram rather in =
the
manner of More himself, by Mr. J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think,
only to be found in the back files of The New Witness. He enunciated the pa=
radox
that the very much admired individual, who made two blades of grass grow
instead of one, was a murderer. In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the
true moral origins of this movement, which led to the growing of so much gr=
ass
and the murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so much humanity. He tra=
ced
it, and every true record of that transformation traces it, to the growth o=
f a
new refinement, in a sense a more rational refinement, in the governing cla=
ss.
The mediæval lord had been, by comparison, a coarse fellow; he had me=
rely
lived in the largest kind of farm-house after the fashion of the largest ki=
nd
of farmer. He drank wine when he could, but he was quite ready to drink ale;
and science had not yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than
this, one of the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she
cannot come to him because her carriage horses are pulling the plough. In t=
he true
Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered, but in the tim=
e of
Henry VIII. the transformation was beginning. In the next generation a phra=
se
was common which is one of the keys of the time, and is very much the key to
these more ambitious territorial schemes. This or that great lord was said =
to
be "Italianate." It meant subtler shapes of beauty, delicate and
ductile glass, gold and silver not treated as barbaric stones but rather as
stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing=
a
load of beauty; it meant the perfection of trifles. It was not, as in popul=
ar
Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary
things: rather it was the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscio=
us
art especially into unnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul. =
We
must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is an explanation--and an
excuse.
The old barony had
indeed been thinned by the civil wars that closed at Bosworth, and curtaile=
d by
the economical and crafty policy of that unkingly king, Henry VII. He was
himself a "new man," and we shall see the barons largely give pla=
ce
to a whole nobility of new men. But even the older families already had the=
ir
faces set in the newer direction. Some of them, the Howards, for instance, =
may
be said to have figured both as old and new families. In any case the spiri=
t of
the whole upper class can be described as increasingly new. The English
aristocracy, which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably
entitled to a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as v=
ery high
praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of being proud of
their ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocrats have rather =
been
proud of their descendants. For their descendants they planned huge foundat=
ions
and piled mountains of wealth; for their descendants they fought for a high=
er
and higher place in the government of the state; for their descendants, abo=
ve
all, they nourished every new science or scheme of social philosophy. They
seized the vast economic chances of pasturage; but they also drained the fe=
ns.
They swept away the priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As =
the
new Tudor house passes through its generations a new and more rationalist c=
ivilization
is being made; scholars are criticizing authentic texts; sceptics are
discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers; specialists are
analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep are eating men.
We have seen that=
in
the fourteenth century in England there was a real revolution of the poor. =
It
very nearly succeeded; and I need not conceal the conviction that it would =
have
been the best possible thing for all of us if it had entirely succeeded. If
Richard II. had really sprung into the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his
parliament had not unhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed =
the
fact of the new peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was
already common to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a roy=
al charter,
our country would probably have had as happy a history as is possible to hu=
man
nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have come as popular education =
and
not the culture of a club of æsthetics. The New Learning might have b=
een
as democratic as the old learning in the old days of mediæval Paris a=
nd
Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the school of Cellini might have been but=
the
highest grade of the craft of a guild. The Shakespearean drama might have b=
een
acted by workmen on wooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy,=
the
finer fulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The player=
s need
not have been "the king's servants," but their own masters. The g=
reat
Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. If this be a
fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; the mediæval
revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one to show that it
need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudal parliament prevailed, and
pushed back the peasants at least into their dubious and half-developed sta=
tus.
More than this it would be exaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of =
the
really decisive events afterwards. When Henry VIII. came to the throne the
guilds were perhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants=
had
probably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, but largely
under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediæval system still
stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; but all such
speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. The failure of the
revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by a counter-revolution; a
successful revolution of the rich.
The apparent pivo=
t of
it was in certain events, political and even personal. They roughly resolve
themselves into two: the marriages of Henry VIII. and the affair of the
monasteries. The marriages of Henry VIII. have long been a popular and even=
a
stale joke; and there is a truth of tradition in the joke, as there is in
almost any joke if it is sufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficie=
ntly
stale. A jocular thing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. H=
enry
was popular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quit=
e a
glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with all the =
new
accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like a maniac; he no
longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, it was rather the fea=
r of
a mad dog than of a watch-dog. In this change doubtless the inconsistency a=
nd
even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddings played a great part. And it is but =
just
to him to say that, perhaps with the exception of the first and the last, he
was almost as unlucky in his wives as they were in their husband. But it was
undoubtedly the affair of the first divorce that broke the back of his hono=
ur,
and incidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable and unive=
rsal
things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize that he did not reg=
ard
himself as the enemy but rather as the friend of the Pope; there is a shado=
w of
the old story of Becket. He had defended the Pope in diplomacy and the Chur=
ch
in controversy; and when he wearied of his queen and took a passionate fanc=
y to
one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn, he vaguely felt that a rather cynical
concession, in that age of cynical concessions, might very well be made to =
him
by a friend. But it is part of that high inconsistency which is the fate of=
the
Christian faith in human hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it
will really be uppermost, if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of
the Church will not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthy =
of
the best. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon the cushio=
ns
of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter. The Pope den=
ied
the new marriage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness of anger, dissolved all
the old relations with the Papacy. It is probable that he did not clearly k=
now
how much he was doing then; and it is very tenable that we do not know it n=
ow.
He certainly did not think he was Anti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridicul=
ous
sense, we can hardly say that he thought he was anti-papal, since he appare=
ntly
thought he was a pope. From this day really dates something that played a c=
ertain
part in history, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, wid=
ely different
from the mediæval one. It is a matter which further embarrasses the o=
pen
question about the continuity of Catholic things in Anglicanism, for it was=
a
new note and yet one struck by the older party. The supremacy of the King o=
ver
the English national church was not, unfortunately, merely a fad of the Kin=
g,
but became partly, and for one period, a fad of the church. But apart from =
all
controverted questions, there is at least a human and historic sense in whi=
ch
the continuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry not on=
ly
cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, he cuts off
England from England.
The great divorce
brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had held the scales between the
Empire and the French Monarchy, and made the modern balance of power in Eur=
ope.
He is often described under the dictum of Ego et Rex Meus; but he marks a s=
tage
in the English story rather because he suffered for it than because he said=
it.
Ego et Rex Meus might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we hav=
e forgotten
the very fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolsey was the l=
ast
great servant who could be, and was, simply dismissed; the mark of a monarc=
hy
still absolute; the English were amazed at it in modern Germany, when Bisma=
rck
was turned away like a butler. A more awful act proved the new force was
already inhuman; it struck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, =
who
seemed sometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a sain=
t under
Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death has naturally drawn o=
ut
for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; his tenderness and his trust =
in
the truth of God. But for Humanism it must have seemed a monstrous sacrific=
e;
it was somehow as if Montaigne were a martyr. And that is indeed the note;
something truly to be called unnatural had already entered the naturalism of
the Renascence; and the soul of the great Christian rose against it. He poi=
nted
to the sun, saying "I shall be above that fellow" with Franciscan
familiarity, which can love nature because it will not worship her. So he l=
eft
to his king the sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down =
only
on his wrath.
But the more
impersonal process which More himself had observed (as noted at the beginni=
ng
of this chapter) is more clearly defined, and less clouded with controversi=
es,
in the second of the two parts of Henry's policy. There is indeed a controv=
ersy
about the monasteries; but it is one that is clarifying and settling every =
day.
Now it is true that the Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a
considerable corruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different bo=
th
from the contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant stor=
y. It
is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops and such
authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life, violent as they often are.
They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St. Paul to the pu=
rest
and most primitive churches; the apostle was there writing to those Early
Christians whom all churches idealize; and he talks to them as to cut-throa=
ts
and thieves. The explanation, for those concerned for such subtleties, may
possibly be found in the fact that Christianity is not a creed for good men,
but for men. Such letters had been written in all centuries; and even in the
sixteenth century they do not prove so much that there were bad abbots as t=
hat
there were good bishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the monks we=
re profligates
dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truth in Cobbett's poi=
nt
that where monks were landlords, they did not become rack-renting landlords,
and could not become absentee landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness=
in
the good institutions as well as a mere strength in the bad ones; and that
weakness partakes of the worst element of the time. In the fall of good thi=
ngs
there is almost always a touch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were
destroyed more easily because they did not stand together. They did not sta=
nd
together because the spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy=
of
the age) was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had part=
ly divided
even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as it nearly always
comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag.
To take a modern
attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we are familiar with the picture =
of a
politician going to the great brewers, or even the great hotel proprietors,=
and
pointing out the uselessness of a litter of little public-houses. That is w=
hat
the Tudor politicians did first with the monasteries. They went to the head=
s of
the great houses and proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great
monastic lords did not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and =
the
sack of the religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a mome=
nt
as lords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords, for
having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause of the ri=
ch
did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferences which had t=
old
only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon to learn that it was =
no
epoch for their easy rule and their careless hospitality. The great houses,=
now
isolated, were themselves brought down one by one; and the beggar, whom the
monastery had served as a sort of sacred tavern, came to it at evening and
found it a ruin. For a new and wide philosophy was in the world, which still
rules our society. By this creed most of the mystical virtues of the old mo=
nks
have simply been turned into great sins; and the greatest of these is chari=
ty.
But the populace
which had risen under Richard II. was not yet disarmed. It was trained in t=
he
rude discipline of bow and bill, and organized into local groups of town and
guild and manor. Over half the counties of England the people rose, and fou=
ght
one final battle for the vision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the n=
ew
tyranny, a dirty fellow named Thomas Cromwell, was specially singled out as=
the
tyrant, and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. =
The popular
movement was put down partly by force; and there is the new note of modern
militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynical professional troops,
actually brought in from foreign countries, who destroyed English religion =
for
hire. But, like the old popular rising, it was even more put down by fraud.
Like the old rising, it was sufficiently triumphant to force the government=
to
a parley; and the government had to resort to the simple expedient of calmi=
ng
the people with promises, and then proceeding to break first the promises a=
nd
then the people, after the fashion made familiar to us by the modern politi=
cians
in their attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt bore the name of the
Pilgrimage of Grace, and its programme was practically the restoration of t=
he
old religion. In connection with the fancy about the fate of England if Tyl=
er
had triumphed, it proves, I think, one thing; that his triumph, while it mi=
ght
or might not have led to something that could be called a reform, would have
rendered quite impossible everything that we now know as the Reformation.
The reign of terr=
or
established by Thomas Cromwell became an Inquisition of the blackest and mo=
st
unbearable sort. Historians, who have no shadow of sympathy with the old
religion, are agreed that it was uprooted by means more horrible than have
ever, perhaps, been employed in England before or since. It was a governmen=
t by
torturers rendered ubiquitous by spies. The spoliation of the monasteries
especially was carried out, not only with a violence which recalled barbari=
sm,
but with a minuteness for which there is no other word but meanness. It was=
as
if the Dane had returned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency=
of
the King's personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate the consp=
iracy
with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reaction as there was in
this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitful favour and was execu=
ted,
but the terrorism went on the more terribly for being simplified to the sin=
gle
vision of the wrath of the King. It culminated in a strange act which rounds
off symbolically the story told on an earlier page. For the despot revenged
himself on a rebel whose defiance seemed to him to ring down three centurie=
s.
He laid waste the most popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which
Chaucer had once ridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King
Henry had knelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people ha=
d called
Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor. This might
well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet it was not really s=
o.
For then rose to =
its
supreme height of self-revelation that still stranger something of which we
have, perhaps fancifully, found hints before in this history. The strong ki=
ng
was weak. He was immeasurably weaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ag=
es;
and whether or no his failure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach =
he
had made in the dyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almos=
t be
said to have washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for=
the
drama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his own character=
. We
may put the matter most practically by saying that it is unpractical to dis=
cuss
whether Froude finds any justification for Henry's crimes in the desire to
create a strong national monarchy. For whether or no it was desired, it was=
not
created. Least of all our princes did the Tudors leave behind them a secure
central government, and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only =
one
or two generations before the time when it was weakest. But a few years aft=
erwards,
as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its new servants were to be
reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world; and the axe which had =
been
sanctified with the blood of More and soiled with the blood of Cromwell was=
, at
the signal of one of that slave's own descendants, to fall and to kill an
English king.
The tide which th=
us
burst through the breach and overwhelmed the King as well as the Church was=
the
revolt of the rich, and especially of the new rich. They used the King's na=
me,
and could not have prevailed without his power, but the ultimate effect was
rather as if they had plundered the King after he had plundered the
monasteries. Amazingly little of the wealth, considering the name and theor=
y of
the thing, actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no do=
ubt,
by the fact that Edward VI. succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but the =
deeper
truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real line between the two
reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thus providing himself wit=
h a
son, Henry had also provided the country with the very type of powerful fam=
ily
which was to rule merely by pillage. An enormous and unnatural tragedy, the
execution of one of the Seymours by his own brother, was enacted during the
impotence of the childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord
Protector, though even he would have found it hard to say what he was
protecting, since it was not even his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too =
much
to say that every human thing was left unprotected from the greed of such
cannibal protectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but wha=
t occurred
was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lacke=
ys
and money-lenders, the meanest of lucky men, looted the art and economics of
the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names (when they did n=
ot
change them) became the names of the great dukes and marquises of our own d=
ay.
But if we look back and forth in our history, perhaps the most fundamental =
act
of destruction occurred when the armed men of the Seymours and their sort
passed from the sacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The
mediæval Trade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by
the soldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simple i=
ncident
takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itself plausible enou=
gh)
that the Guilds, like everything else at that time, were probably not at th=
eir
best. Proportion is the only practical thing; and it may be true that
Cæsar was not feeling well on the morning of the Ides of March. But
simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about as true as saying that
Cæsar quietly decayed from purely natural causes at the foot of the
statue of Pompey.
XII SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS=
span>
The revolution that arose out of wh=
at is
called the Renascence, and ended in some countries in what is called the
Reformation, did in the internal politics of England one drastic and defini=
te
thing. That thing was destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not t=
he
only thing it did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of =
all
the problems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much the theologica=
l theories
of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter for difference of
opinion. But neither party, if educated about the facts, will deny that the
same time and temper which produced the religious schism also produced this=
new
lawlessness in the rich. The most extreme Protestant will probably be conte=
nt
to say that Protestantism was not the motive, but the mask. The most extreme
Catholic will probably be content to admit that Protestantism was not the s=
in,
but rather the punishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the proc=
ess
was not complete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, when Pro=
testantism
was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decent case could be made
out for the paradox that Puritanism was first and last a veneer on Paganism;
that the thing began in the inordinate thirst for new things in the nobless=
e of
the Renascence and ended in the Hell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first foun=
ded
at the Reformation was a new and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what =
was
destroyed, in an ever-increasing degree, was everything that could be held,
directly or indirectly, by the people in spite of such an aristocracy. This
fact has filled all the subsequent history of our country; but the next par=
ticular
point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. The King, in real=
ity,
had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers who had crowded behind him =
just
before the bursting of the door. The King is left behind in the rush for
wealth, and already can do nothing alone. And of this fact the next reign,
after the chaos of Edward VI.'s, affords a very arresting proof.
Mary Tudor, daugh=
ter
of the divorced Queen Katherine, has a bad name even in popular history; and
popular prejudice is generally more worthy of study than scholarly sophistr=
y.
Her enemies were indeed largely wrong about her character, but they were not
wrong about her effect. She was, in the limited sense, a good woman, convin=
ced,
conscientious, rather morbid. But it is true that she was a bad queen; bad =
for
many things, but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true,
when all is said, that she set herself to burn out "No Popery" and
managed to burn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty,
especially its concentration in particular places and in a short time, did
remain like something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of the=
series
of great historical accidents that separated a real, if not universal, publ=
ic
opinion from the old régime. It has been summarized in the death by =
fire
of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one of them at least, Latimer, w=
as a
reformer of the more robust and human type, though another of them, Cranmer,
had been so smooth a snob and coward in the councils of Henry VIII. as to m=
ake
Thomas Cromwell seem by comparison a man. But of what may be called the Lat=
imer
tradition, the saner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At
the time even the Oxford Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion =
than
the massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose very ign=
orance
and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it really was. But this
last ugly feature was brought into sharper relief, and produced more consci=
ous
or unconscious bitterness, because of that other great fact of which I spoke
above, which is the determining test of this time of transition.
What made all the
difference was this: that even in this Catholic reign the property of the
Catholic Church could not be restored. The very fact that Mary was a fanati=
c,
and yet this act of justice was beyond the wildest dreams of fanaticism--th=
at
is the point. The very fact that she was angry enough to commit wrongs for =
the
Church, and yet not bold enough to ask for the rights of the Church--that is
the test of the time. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, =
she
was not allowed to deprive great men of their property--or rather of other =
people's
property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish sacrilege. She was =
forced
into the false position of killing men who had not gone to church, and spar=
ing
men who had gone there to steal the church ornaments. What forced her into =
it?
Not certainly her own religious attitude, which was almost maniacally since=
re;
not public opinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religiou=
s humanities
which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanities which she did.
The force came, of course, from the new nobility and the new wealth they
refused to surrender; and the success of this early pressure proves that the
nobility was already stronger than the Crown. The sceptre had only been use=
d as
a crowbar to break open the door of a treasure-house, and was itself broken=
, or
at least bent, with the blow.
There is a truth =
also
in the popular insistence on the story of Mary having "Calais"
written on her heart, when the last relic of the mediæval conquests
reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroic half-virtue of the Tud=
ors:
she was a patriot. But patriots are often pathetically behind the times; for
the very fact that they dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones.=
In
a later generation Cromwell exhibited the same error reversed, and continue=
d to
keep a hostile eye on Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our o=
wn
time the Jingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to ha=
ve
had it on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Mary neverth=
eless
got herself into an anti-national position towards the most tremendous
international problem of her people. It is the second of the coincidences t=
hat
confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the name of it was Spain. The
daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanish prince, and probably saw=
no
more in such an alliance than her father had done. But by the time she was
succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who was more cut off from the old religi=
on
(though very tenuously attached to the new one), and by the time the projec=
t of
a similar Spanish marriage for Elizabeth herself had fallen through, someth=
ing
had matured which was wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The
Englishman, standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already =
felt
falling across him the shadow of a tall ship.
Wooden clich&eacu=
te;s
about the birth of the British Empire and the spacious days of Queen Elizab=
eth
have not merely obscured but contradicted the crucial truth. From such phra=
ses
one would fancy that England, in some imperial fashion, now first realized =
that
she was great. It would be far truer to say that she now first realized that
she was small. The great poet of the spacious days does not praise her as
spacious, but only as small, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion
was wholly veiled until the eighteenth century; and even when it came it was
far less vivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was
not Imperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginnin=
g of
her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always find heroi=
c--the
story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada was to her what
Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers--a victory that astoni=
shed
even the victors. What was opposed to them was Imperialism in its complete =
and
colossal sense, a thing unthinkable since Rome. It was, in no overstrained
sense, civilization itself. It was the greatness of Spain that was the glor=
y of
England. It is only when we realize that the English were, by comparison, as
dingy, as undeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can apprec=
iate
the height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We can only
grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause of the Armada
had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. The Pope had declared
Elizabeth illegitimate--logically, it is hard to see what else he could say,
having declared her mother's marriage invalid; but the fact was another and
perhaps a final stroke sundering England from the elder world. Meanwhile th=
ose
picturesque English privateers who had plagued the Spanish Empire of the New
World were spoken of in the South simply as pirates, and technically the
description was true; only technical assaults by the weaker party are in
retrospect rightly judged with some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp=
the
contrast in an imperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain f=
or
its centre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with a =
navy
like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomed island with t=
he weight
and solemnity of a day of judgment; sailors or pirates struck at it with sm=
all
ships staggering under large cannon, fought it with mere masses of flaming
rubbish, and in that last hour of grapple a great storm arose out of the sea
and swept round the island, and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The
uncanny completeness and abrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched=
a
nerve that has never ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that
hopeless hour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn h=
ope.
The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the small thi=
ng
which escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there is truly a sense in
which we may never be so small or so great again.
For the splendour=
of
the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as a sunrise, was in many wa=
ys a
sunset. Whether we regard it as the end of the Renascence or the end of the=
old
mediæval civilization, no candid critic can deny that its chief glori=
es
ended with it. Let the reader ask himself what strikes him specially in the
Elizabethan magnificence, and he will generally find it is something of whi=
ch
there were at least traces in mediæval times, and far fewer traces in
modern times. The Elizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies--its
tempestuous torch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needles=
s to
say that the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for the com=
edy
that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison both foreign a=
nd
frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of being humorous, but not in=
the
sense of being happy. It may be noted that the givers of good news and good
luck in the Shakespearian love-stories nearly all belong to a world which w=
as
passing, whether they are friars or fairies. It is the same with the chief
Elizabethan ideals, often embodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national
devotion to the Virgin Queen must not be wholly discredited by its incongru=
ity
with the coarse and crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her criti=
cs
might indeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the Virgin=
Queen,
the English reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a false one. But t=
his
truth does not dispose of a true, though limited, contemporary cult. Whatev=
er
we think of that particular Virgin Queen, the tragic heroines of the time o=
ffer
us a whole procession of virgin queens. And it is certain that the
mediævals would have understood much better than the moderns the
martyrdom of Measure for Measure. And as with the title of Virgin, so with =
the
title of Queen. The mystical monarchy glorified in Richard II. was soon to =
be
dethroned much more ruinously than in Richard II. The same Puritans who tore
off the pasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the re=
al crowns
of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to be forbidden, and =
all
monarchy to be called mummery.
Shakespeare died =
upon
St. George's Day, and much of what St. George had meant died with him. I do=
not
mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare or of England died; that remained a=
nd
even rose steadily, to be the noblest pride of the coming times. But much m=
ore
than patriotism had been involved in that image of St. George to whom the L=
ion
Heart had dedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The
conception of a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very uniq=
ue
and as yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism=
. The
Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy times seven in the
patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the very idea that they were=
all
saints excluded the possibility of ultimate rivalry in the fact that they w=
ere
all patrons. The Guild of the Shoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, car=
rying
the badges of St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the
streets; but they did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were
fighting each other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle=
on St.
George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriously believe that=
St.
George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St. Denis. Joan of Arc,=
who
was on the point of patriotism what many modern people would call very
fanatical, was yet upon this point what most modern people would call very
enlightened. Now, with the religious schism, it cannot be denied, a deeper =
and
more inhuman division appeared. It was no longer a scrap between the follow=
ers
of saints who were themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of =
gods
who were themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named after S=
t.
Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to the new Engla=
nd;
soon it was to mean something almost cosmically conflicting, as if they were
named after Baal or Thor. These are indeed mere symbols; but the process of
which they are symbols was very practical and must be seriously followed. T=
here
entered with the religious wars the idea which modern science applies to ra=
cial
wars; the idea of natural wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from=
the
nature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism first fell
across our path, and far away in distance and darkness something moved that=
men
had almost forgotten.
Beyond the fronti=
ers
of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as loose and drifting as a sea, w=
hich
had boiled over in the barbarian wars. Most of it was now formally Christia=
n,
but barely civilized; a faint awe of the culture of the south and west lay =
on
its wild forces like a light frost. This semi-civilized world had long been
asleep; but it had begun to dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a gre=
at
man who, with all his violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had c=
ried
out in his sleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad
customs, but largely also against the place of good works in the Christian =
scheme.
In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wild doctrines in t=
he
old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclic war of creeds. In th=
is
the house which stood for the legend of the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, the
Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the old religion against a league of
other Germans fighting for the new. The continental conditions were indeed
complicated, and grew more and more complicated as the dream of restoring
religious unity receded. They were complicated by the firm determination of
France to be a nation in the full modern sense; to stand free and foursquare
from all combinations; a purpose which led her, while hating her own
Protestants at home, to give diplomatic support to many Protestants abroad,
simply because it preserved the balance of power against the gigantic
confederation of Spaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a
Calvinistic and commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant,
defending its own independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we
shall be right if we see the first throes of the modern international probl=
ems
in what is called the Thirty Years' War; whether we call it the revolt of h=
alf-heathens
against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it the coming of new
sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north. Sweden took a ha=
nd
in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the help of the newer Germany.=
But
the sort of military heroism everywhere exhibited offered a strange combina=
tion
of more and more complex strategic science with the most naked and cannibal
cruelty. Other forces besides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far awa=
y to
the north-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family of mone=
y-lenders
who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughly selfish, rather thinly
adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lend their almost savage hinds=
as
soldiers on the Protestant side. They were well paid for it by step after s=
tep
of promotion; but at this time their principality was only the old Mark of
Brandenburg. Their own name was Hohenzollern.
We should be very much bored if we =
had to
read an account of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in wh=
ich
unmeaning words such as "snark" or "boojum" were
systematically substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects=
in
dispute; if we were told that a king was given the alternative of becoming a
snark or finally surrendering the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury =
by
the public exhibition of a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross
reflection on the snark. Yet something very like this situation is created =
by
most modern attempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable
distaste for theology in this generation--or rather in the last generation.
Thus the Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic for w=
hat
they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose it on othe=
rs;
sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise it themselves; but in no =
case
can justice be done to what was finest in their characters, as well as firs=
t in
their thoughts, if we never by any chance ask what "it" was that =
they
wanted to impose or to practise. Now, there was a great deal that was very =
fine
about many of the Puritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern
admirers of the Puritans. They are praised for things which they either
regarded with indifference or more often detested with frenzy--such as
religious liberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are
even undervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did care=
about--such
as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently
repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are
interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they we=
re
interested at all.
We have seen that=
in
the first instance the new doctrines in England were simply an excuse for a
plutocratic pillage, and that is the only truth to be told about the matter.
But it was far otherwise with the individuals a generation or two after, to
whom the wreck of the Armada was already a legend of national deliverance f=
rom
Popery, as miraculous and almost as remote as the deliverances of which they
read so realistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The august=
accident
of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well with their
concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It may have satisfie=
d a
certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the English being announ=
ced
in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was easily turned into that her=
esy
of a tribal pride that took even heavier hold upon the Germans. It is by su=
ch
things that a civilized state may fall from being a Christian nation to bei=
ng a
Chosen People. But even if their nationalism was of a kind that has ultimat=
ely
proved perilous to the comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From fi=
rst
to last the Puritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked
superiority over the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at fir=
st
but one wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church and we=
re
proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely the creatur=
es
of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconscious creatures of it.
They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, but a great number were =
of
the middle classes, though almost wholly the middle classes of the towns. By
the poor agricultural population, which was still by far the largest part of
the population, they were simply derided and detested. It may be noted, for
instance, that, while they led the nation in many of its higher departments,
they could produce nothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggish=
ly
called folklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts, r=
hymes,
or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find no great legen=
d.
We must put up as best we can with great literature.
All these things,
however, are simply things that other people might have noticed about them;
they are not the most important things, and certainly not the things they
thought about themselves. The soul of the movement was in two conceptions, =
or
rather in two steps, the first being the moral process by which they arrive=
d at
their chief conclusion, and the second the chief conclusion they arrived at=
. We
will begin with the first, especially as it was this which determined all t=
hat
external social attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honest=
Puritan,
growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage, possessed
himself of a first principle which is one of the three or four alternative
first principles which are possible to the mind of man. It was the principle
that the mind of man can alone directly deal with the mind of God. It may
shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle; but it really applies, an=
d he
really applied it, to many things besides the sacraments of the Church. It
equally applies, and he equally applied it, to art, to letters, to the love=
of
locality, to music, and even to good manners. The phrase about no priest co=
ming
between a man and his Creator is but an impoverished fragment of the full
philosophic doctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer or =
story-teller
or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into the tongues of
terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man of genius in mod=
ern
times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion; denounced all music as a m=
ere
drug, and forbade his own admirers to read his own admirable novels. Now, t=
he
English Puritans were not only Puritans but Englishmen, and therefore did n=
ot
always shine in clearness of head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rat=
her
a Scotch than an English thing. But this was the driving power and the
direction; and the doctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectu=
al
truth was the only tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and t=
he
next step in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was the tr=
uth
about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinct as well as
tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of God which meant simply
the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier and milder form of the Protest=
ant
process only went so far as to say that nothing a man did could help him ex=
cept
his confession of Christ; with Calvin it took the last logical step and said
that even this could not help him, since Omnipotence must have disposed of =
all
his destiny beforehand; that men must be created to be lost and saved. In t=
he
purer types of whom I speak this logic was white-hot, and we must read the =
formula
into all their parliamentary and legal formulæ. When we read, "T=
he
Puritan party demanded reforms in the church," we must understand, &qu=
ot;The
Puritan party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men are created =
to
be lost and saved." When we read, "The Army selected persons for
their godliness," we must understand, "The Army selected those pe=
rsons
who seemed most convinced that men are created to be lost and saved." =
It
should be added that this terrible trend was not confined even to Protestant
countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followed it until stopped by Rom=
e.
It was the spirit of the age, and should be a permanent warning against
mistaking the spirit of the age for the immortal spirit of man. For there a=
re
now few Christians or non-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism whi=
ch
nearly captured Canterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pasca=
l or
Milton, without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, "=
;How
splendid! How glorious!... and oh what an escape!"
The next thing to
note is that their conception of church-government was in a true sense
self-government; and yet, for a particular reason, turned out to be a rather
selfish self-government. It was equal and yet it was exclusive. Internally =
the
synod or conventicle tended to be a small republic, but unfortunately to be=
a
very small republic. In relation to the street outside the conventicle was =
not
a republic but an aristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, =
that
of the elect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, and=
alone
of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence we have, on the =
one
hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republican virtue; a defiance =
of
tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but above all an appeal to that fir=
st
of all republican virtues--publicity. One of the Regicides, on trial for his
life, struck the note which all the unnaturalness of his school cannot depr=
ive
of nobility: "This thing was not done in a corner." But their most
drastic idealism did nothing to recover a ray of the light that at once
lightened every man that came into the world, the assumption of a brotherho=
od
in all baptized people. They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold=
at
which the Regicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they
may have been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems never =
to
have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular. England was
never so little of a democracy as during the short time when she was a
republic.
The struggle with=
the
Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history, arose from an alliance,
which some may think an accidental alliance, between two things. The first =
was
this intellectual fashion of Calvinism which affected the cultured world as=
did
our recent intellectual fashion of Collectivism. The second was the older t=
hing
which had made that creed and perhaps that cultured world possible--the
aristocratic revolt under the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story =
of a
father and a son dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really
from hatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is at o=
nce
the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternal passion that
passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion that remained. This was tr=
ue
of England; it was far less true of Scotland; and that is the meaning of the
Scotch and English war that ended at Worcester. The first change had indeed
been much the same materialist matter in both countries--a mere brigandage =
of
barons; and even John Knox, though he has become a national hero, was an
extremely anti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that =
of Cardinal
Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did become popular in t=
he
Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in our own land. Hence in
Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixed with Parliamentary and
other oligarchies. In England Parliamentary oligarchy was the main thing, a=
nd
was mixed with Puritanism. When the storm began to rise against Charles I.,
after the more or less transitional time of his father, the Scotch successo=
r of
Elizabeth, the instances commonly cited mark all the difference between
democratic religion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of
Jenny Geddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The English l=
egend
is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raised a county against the K=
ing.
The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed, almost wholly a thing of
squires, with their new allies the merchants. They were squires who may well
have regarded themselves as the real and natural leaders of the English; but
they were leaders who allowed no mutiny among their followers. There was
certainly no Village Hampden in Hampden Village.
The Stuarts, it m=
ay
be suspected, brought from Scotland a more mediæval and therefore more
logical view of their own function; for the note of their nation was logic.=
It
is a proverb that James I. was a Scot and a pedant; it is hardly sufficient=
ly
noted that Charles I. also was not a little of a pedant, being very much of=
a
Scot. He had also the virtues of a Scot, courage, and a quite natural digni=
ty
and an appetite for the things of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was
very un-English, and could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to spl=
it
hairs, and seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been f=
ar
more inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of th=
e sort
that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore remembered--es=
pecially
the black. From the first he fenced with his Parliament as with a mere foe;
perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we need
not be so careful as the gentleman who wished to finish the chapter in orde=
r to
find out what happened to Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was
foiled in an attempt to make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and
perished on the scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming t=
he
power of the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at firs=
t carried
all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the Parliamentary class,
the discipline of the new army, and the patience and genius of Cromwell; and
Charles died the same death as his great servant.
Historically, the
quarrel resolved itself, through ramifications generally followed perhaps in
more detail than they deserve, into the great modern query of whether a King
can raise taxes without the consent of his Parliament. The test case was th=
at
of Hampden, the great Buckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality =
of a
tax which Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovat=
ors always
of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires made a lege=
nd
of the mediæval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a true tradition
that the concession of John had really been, as we have already noted,
anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths cover two parts of=
the
problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very different certainty, and shou=
ld
be considered separately.
For the first poi=
nt
about democracy, no candid person, in face of the facts, can really conside=
r it
at all. It is quite possible to hold that the seventeenth-century Parliament
was fighting for the truth; it is not possible to hold that it was fighting=
for
the populace. After the autumn of the Middle Ages Parliament was always
actively aristocratic and actively anti-popular. The institution which forb=
ade
Charles I. to raise Ship Money was the same institution which previously
forbade Richard II. to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and
minerals from Charles I. was the same which afterward claimed the common la=
nds
from the village communities. It was the same institution which only two ge=
nerations
before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things of popular sentiment
like the monasteries, but all the things of popular utility like the guilds=
and
parishes, the local governments of towns and trades. The work of the great
lords may have had, indeed it certainly had, another more patriotic and
creative side; but it was exclusively the work of the great lords that was =
done
by Parliament. The House of Commons has itself been a House of Lords.
But when we turn =
to
the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaign against the Stuarts, we c=
ome
to something much more difficult to dismiss and much more easy to justify.
While the stupidest things are said against the Stuarts, the real contempor=
ary
case for their enemies is little realized; for it is connected with what our
insular history most neglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be
remembered that though the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things
that succeeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of the Cou=
nter-Reformation,
which made the sincere Protestant see Stuart Catholicism not at all as the =
last
flicker of an old flame, but as the spread of a conflagration. Charles II.,=
for
instance, was a man of strong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous
intellect, and he was quite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of
Catholicism as a philosophy. The other and more important matter here was t=
he
almost awful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. I=
t was
more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable than the Engli=
sh
oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case of rebellion or even
resistance. There were none of the rough English safeguards of juries and g=
ood
customs of the old common law; there was lettre de cachet as unanswerable as
magic. The English who defied the law were better off than the French; a Fr=
ench
satirist would probably have retorted that it was the English who obeyed the
law who were worse off than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives =
was
with the squire; but he was, if anything, more limited when he was the magi=
strate.
He was stronger as master of the village, but actually weaker as agent of t=
he
King. In defending this state of things, in short, the Whigs were certainly=
not
defending democracy, but they were in a real sense defending liberty. They =
were
even defending some remains of mediæval liberty, though not the best;=
the
jury though not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a localism not witho=
ut
liberal elements, which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved
such things might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for =
Hobbes
was a single monster and for France a single man.
As to the mere fa=
cts,
it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism was pure, it was
unfortunately passing. And the very type of the transition by which it pass=
ed
can be found in that extraordinary man who is popularly credited with makin=
g it
predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in history much less the leader of Puritani=
sm
than the tamer of Puritanism. He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his
youth, possibly all his life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his
period; but as he emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the
Positivism of the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He=
is
one of the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less =
of the
Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy became at la=
st
merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised and most of what is
blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity, toleration and modern
efficiency of many of his departures; the key to the comparative coarseness,
earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy in many others. He was the rever=
se
of an idealist; and he cannot without absurdity be held up as an ideal; but=
he
was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English; not without public
spirit, certainly not without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, wh=
ich
destroyed an impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its =
very
unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his, and
certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the high inhum=
an
ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had to compromise b=
ut
with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather than cruelty in the a=
ct
that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with bestial cruelty the native Ir=
ish,
whom the new spiritual exclusiveness regarded as beasts--or as the modern
euphemism would put it, as aborigines. But his practical temper was more ak=
in
to such human slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, th=
an
to a sort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not =
a representative
regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship was rather above his head. =
The
real regicides did it in a sort of trance or vision; and he was not troubled
with visions. But the true collision between the religious and rational sid=
es
of the seventeenth-century movement came symbolically on that day of driving
storm at Dunbar, when the raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forc=
ed
him down into the valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense.
Cromwell said that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their o=
wn
God who delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, as =
overpowering
as a nightmare--and as passing.
It was the Whig
rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day; it was the Englishman w=
ith
his aristocratic compromise; and even what followed Cromwell's death, the
Restoration, was an aristocratic compromise, and even a Whig compromise. The
mob might cheer as for a mediæval king; but the Protectorate and the
Restoration were more of a piece than the mob understood. Even in the
superficial things where there seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a
respite. Thus the Puritan régime had risen chiefly by one thing unkn=
own
to mediævalism--militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drill=
ed
but highly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritans be=
came
masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Tories and Whigs;
but their return seemed always imminent, because it was in the spirit of the
new stern world of the Thirty Years' War. A discovery is an incurable disea=
se;
and it had been discovered that a crowd could be turned into an iron centip=
ede,
crushing larger and looser crowds. Similarly the remains of Christmas were
rescued from the Puritans; but they had eventually to be rescued again by
Dickens from the Utilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody f=
rom
the vegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanished almo=
st
like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armed valour and
victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. It was the final
break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, and perhaps of popul=
ar
rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbal symbol that these men
founded New England in America, for indeed they tried to found it here. By a
paradox, there was something prehistoric in the very nakedness of their
novelty. Even the old and savage things they invoked became more savage in
becoming more new. In observing what is called their Jewish Sabbath, they w=
ould
have had to stone the strictest Jew. And they (and indeed their age general=
ly)
turned witch-burning from an episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the
things destroyed disappeared together; but they remain as something nobler =
than
the nibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work. =
They
were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy; and there=
was
this unconscious greatness about them, that their very sacrilege was public=
and
solemn like a sacrament; and they were ritualists even as iconoclasts. It w=
as,
properly considered, but a very secondary example of their strange and viol=
ent
simplicity that one of them, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the
anointed head of the sacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far a=
way
in the western shires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had gr=
own
the whole story of Britain.
Whether or no we believe that the
Reformation really reformed, there can be little doubt that the Restoration=
did
not really restore. Charles II. was never in the old sense a King; he was a
Leader of the Opposition to his own Ministers. Because he was a clever
politician he kept his official post, and because his brother and successor=
was
an incredibly stupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only
one of the official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II. was fitted for=
the
more modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth-century than a
seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in a comedy; and it=
was
already the comedy of Sheridan and not of Shakespeare. He was more modern y=
et
when he enjoyed the pure experimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eag=
erly
over the toys that were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and
his brother, however, had two links with what was in England the losing sid=
e;
and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. The first, which
lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, of course, the hatr=
ed
felt for their religion. The second, which grew as it neared the next centu=
ry,
was their tie with the French Monarchy. We will deal with the religious qua=
rrel
before passing on to a much more irreligious age; but the truth about it is
tangled and far from easy to trace.
The Tudors had be=
gun
to persecute the old religion before they had ceased to belong to it. That =
is
one of the transitional complexities that can only be conveyed by such
contradictions. A person of the type and time of Elizabeth would feel
fundamentally, and even fiercely, that priests should be celibate, while
racking and rending anybody caught talking to the only celibate priests. Th=
is
mystery, which may be very variously explained, covered the Church of Engla=
nd,
and in a great degree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catho=
lic continuity
of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism, there can be =
no
doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as late as the Civil War, w=
as
stuffed with "superstitions" which were Catholic in the extreme s=
ense
we should now call Continental. Yet many similar parsons had already a para=
llel
and opposite passion, and thought of Continental Catholicism not even as the
errant Church of Christ, but as the consistent Church of Antichrist. It is,
therefore, very hard now to guess the proportion of Protestantism; but ther=
e is
no doubt about its presence, especially its presence in centres of importan=
ce
like London. By the time of Charles II., after the purge of the Puritan Ter=
ror,
it had become something at least more inherent and human than the mere excl=
usiveness
of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. The Monmouth rebellion sh=
owed
that it had a popular, though an insufficiently popular, backing. The "=
;No
Popery" force became the crowd if it never became the people. It was,
perhaps, increasingly an urban crowd, and was subject to those epidemics of
detailed delusion with which sensational journalism plays on the urban crow=
ds
of to-day. One of these scares and scoops (not to add the less technical na=
me
of lies) was the Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Anoth=
er
was the Tale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm t=
hat finally
swept away James II.
The last blow,
however, could hardly have fallen but for one of those illogical but almost
lovable localisms to which the English temperament is prone. The debate abo=
ut
the Church of England, then and now, differs from most debates in one vital
point. It is not a debate about what an institution ought to do, or whether
that institution ought to alter, but about what that institution actually i=
s.
One party, then as now, only cared for it because it was Catholic, and the
other only cared for it because it was Protestant. Now, something had certa=
inly
happened to the English quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Mas=
ses
of common people loved the Church of England without having even decided wh=
at
it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediæval Chur=
ch,
but also very different from the barren prestige of gentility which clung t=
o it
in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widely different purpose in min=
d,
devotes some pages to proving that an Anglican clergyman was socially a mere
upper servant in the seventeenth century. He is probably right; but he does=
not
guess that this was but the degenerate continuity of the more democratic
priesthood of the Middle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but=
a
peasant was treated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, man=
y entertained
the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the
national church was then at least really national, in a fashion that was
emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When, therefore, James II.
seemed to menace this practising communion, he aroused something at least m=
ore
popular than the mere priggishness of the Whig lords. To this must be added=
a
fact generally forgotten. I mean the fact that the influence then called Po=
pish
was then in a real sense regarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the
English not merely a conspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something
appalling about abstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract
speculations of Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and things=
undreamed
of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thus to many as va=
st
and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-century Englishmen who had somet=
hing
of this transcendental abstraction were the Quakers; and the cosy English
compromise shuddered when the two things shook hands. For it was something =
much
more than a Stuart intrigue which made these philosophical extremes meet,
merely because they were philosophical; and which brought the weary but
humorous mind of Charles II. into alliance with the subtle and detached spi=
rit
of William Penn.
Much of England,
then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme of toleration, sincere or
insincere, because it seemed theoretical and therefore fanciful. It was in
advance of its age or (to use a more intelligent language) too thin and
ethereal for its atmosphere. And to this affection for the actual in the
English moderates must be added (in what proportion we know not) a persecut=
ing
hatred of Popery almost maniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as =
we
have seen, been turned to an engine of torture against priests and the frie=
nds
of priests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but the Engl=
ish
persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But at least by this =
time
the English, like the French, persecutors were oppressing a minority.
Unfortunately there was another province of government in which they were s=
till
more madly persecuting the majority. For it was here that came to its climax
and took on its terrific character that lingering crime that was called the
government of Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network o=
f unnatural
laws by which that country was covered till towards the end of the eighteen=
th
century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitude to the Irish was
tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion of the Stuarts, in one =
of
those acts that are remembered for ever. James II., fleeing from the opinio=
n of
London, perhaps of England, eventually found refuge in Ireland, which took =
arms
in his favour. The Prince of Orange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to t=
he
throne, landed in that country with an English and Dutch army, won the Batt=
le
of the Boyne, but saw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the
military genius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace
could only be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish=
, in
return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Government occupied t=
he
town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matter on which there is
much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity that the Irish should remem=
ber
it; but it was far more tragic that the English forgot it. For he who has
forgotten his sin is repeating it incessantly for ever.
But here again the
Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the side of secular policy, and
especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats to whom power passed finally =
at
the Revolution were already ceasing to have any supernatural faith in
Protestantism as against Catholicism; but they had a very natural faith in
England as against France; and even, in a certain sense, in English
institutions as against French institutions. And just as these men, the most
unmediæval of mankind, could yet boast about some mediæval
liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury, so they could appeal t=
o a
true mediæval legend in the matter of a war with France. A typical
eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpole could complain that the
cicerone in an old church troubled him with traces of an irrelevant person
named St. Somebody, when he was looking for the remains of John of Gaunt. He
could say it with all the naïveté of scepticism, and never dream
how far away from John of Gaunt he was really wandering in saying so. But
though their notion of mediæval history was a mere masquerade ball, it
was one in which men fighting the French could still, in an ornamental way,=
put
on the armour of the Black Prince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this
matter, in short, it is probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as
patriots will always be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were
themselves far from unpatriotic; and James II. in particular may well be ca=
lled
the founder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France, amo=
ng
other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elder before and t=
he
younger after his period of rule; and France aided the later Jacobite effor=
ts
to restore their line. And for the new England, especially the new English
nobility, France was the enemy.
The transformation
through which the external relations of England passed at the end of the
seventeenth century is symbolized by two very separate and definite steps; =
the
first the accession of a Dutch king and the second the accession of a German
king. In the first were present all the features that can partially make an
unnatural thing natural. In the second we have the condition in which even
those effecting it can hardly call it natural, but only call it necessary.
William of Orange was like a gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a forei=
gn
gun indeed, and one fired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still=
a
quarrel in which the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could
play a great part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a ho=
le in
the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that they were si=
mply
stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical as he was, carried =
on
the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. He was in private convict=
ion
a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared what George was except that he was no=
t a
Catholic. He was at home the partly republican magistrate of what had once =
been
a purely republican experiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of t=
he
seventeenth century. George was when he was at home pretty much what the Ki=
ng
of the Cannibal Islands was when he was at home--a savage personal ruler sc=
arcely
logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man of acute if narrow
intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Above all, touching the
immediate effect produced, William was married to a Stuart, and ascended the
throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was a familiar figure, and already a =
part
of our royal family. With George there entered England something that had
scarcely been seen there before; something hardly mentioned in mediæv=
al
or Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot--the barbarian fr=
om
beyond the Rhine.
The reign of Queen
Anne, which covers the period between these two foreign kings, is therefore=
the
true time of transition. It is the bridge between the time when the aristoc=
rats
were at least weak enough to call in a strong man to help them, and the time
when they were strong enough deliberately to call in a weak man who would a=
llow
them to help themselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplif=
y too
much; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two great fig=
ures,
both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clear about their own
aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at every point. One of them=
was
Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other was John Churchill, the famous =
and
infamous Duke of Marlborough. The story of Churchill is primarily the story=
of
the Revolution and how it succeeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story =
of
the Counter-Revolution and how it failed.
Churchill is a ty=
pe
of the extraordinary time in this, that he combines the presence of glory w=
ith
the absence of honour. When the new aristocracy had become normal to the
nation, in the next few generations, it produced personal types not only of=
aristocracy
but of chivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed by =
gentlemen;
the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, like their guilds =
and
abbeys, had been seized and turned into what they are--factories of gentlem=
en,
when they are not merely factories of snobs. It is hard now to realize that
what we call the Public Schools were once undoubtedly public. By the Revolu=
tion
they were already becoming as private as they are now. But at least in the
eighteenth century there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps too =
generous,
sense now given to the title. Types not merely honest, but rash and romanti=
c in
their honesty, remain in the record with the names of Nelson or of Fox. We =
have
already seen that the later reformers defaced from fanaticism the churches
which the first reformers had defaced simply from avarice. Rather in the sa=
me
way the eighteenth-century Whigs often praised, in a spirit of pure
magnanimity, what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done in a spirit of pur=
e meanness.
How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizing that a great
military hero had not even the ordinary military virtues of loyalty to his =
flag
or obedience to his superior officers, that he picked his way through campa=
igns
that have made him immortal with the watchful spirit of a thieving
camp-follower. When William landed at Torbay on the invitation of the other
Whig nobles, Churchill, as if to add something ideal to his imitation of
Iscariot, went to James with wanton professions of love and loyalty, went f=
orth
in arms as if to defend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed t=
he
army over to the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could
aspire, but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution were upon
this ethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James, there was =
scarcely
one of them who was not in correspondence with William. When they afterwards
surrounded the throne of William, there was not one of them who was not sti=
ll
in correspondence with James. It was such men who defeated Irish Jacobitism=
by
the treason of Limerick; it was such men who defeated Scotch Jacobitism by =
the
treason of Glencoe.
Thus the strange =
yet
splendid story of eighteenth-century England is one of greatness founded on
smallness, a pyramid standing on a point. Or, to vary the metaphor, the new
mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized even in the externals of its great
sister, the mercantile oligarchy of Venice. The solidity was all in the
superstructure; the fluctuation had been all in the foundations. The great
temple of Chatham and Warren Hastings was reared in its origins on things as
unstable as water and as fugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to
connect the unstable element with something restless and even shifty in the
lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the lat=
er
generations of our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile;
something which had also been urged against a yet older example of that pol=
ity,
something called Punica fides. The great Royalist Strafford, going disillus=
ioned
to death, had said, "Put not your trust in princes." The great
Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, "And least of =
all
in merchant princes."
Bolingbroke stands
for a whole body of conviction which bulked very big in English history, but
which with the recent winding of the course of history has gone out of sigh=
t.
Yet without grasping it we cannot understand our past, nor, I will add, our
future. Curiously enough, the best English books of the eighteenth century =
are
crammed with it, yet modern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Joh=
nson
is full of it; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Irela=
nd,
as well as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith is ful=
l of
it; it is the whole point of that fine poem "The Deserted Village,&quo=
t;
and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in "The Vi=
car
of Wakefield." Swift is full of it; and found in it an intellectual br=
otherhood-in-arms
with Bolingbroke himself. In the time of Queen Anne it was probably the opi=
nion
of the majority of people in England. But it was not only in Ireland that t=
he
minority had begun to rule.
This conviction, =
as
brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many aspects; perhaps the most
practical was the point that one of the virtues of a despot is distance. It=
is
"the little tyrant of the fields" that poisons human life. The th=
esis
involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps =
the
best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good
king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on =
the populace.
If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murd=
er
of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great lo=
ss
to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a wholly rationalistic theory of
Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fine and typical eighteenth-century
intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clear and classic writer of English. Bu=
t he
was also a man of adventurous spirit and splendid political courage, and he
made one last throw for the Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig nobl=
es
who formed the committee of the new régime of the gentry. And
considering who it was who defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say tha=
t it
was defeated by a trick.
The small German
prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted into it like a dummy, and=
the
great English Royalist went into exile. Twenty years afterwards he reappears
and reasserts his living and logical faith in a popular monarchy. But it is
typical of the whole detachment and distinction of his mind that for this
abstract ideal he was willing to strengthen the heir of the king whom he had
tried to exclude. He was always a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he c=
ared
for was not a royal family, but a royal office. He celebrated it in his gre=
at
book "The Patriot King," written in exile; and when he thought th=
at
George's great-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he mig=
ht
be more of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with such un=
promising
instruments as George III. and Lord Bute; and when these broke in his hand =
he
died with all the dignity of the sed victa Catoni. The great commercial
aristocracy grew on to its full stature. But if we wish to realize the good=
and
ill of its growth, there is no better summary than this section from the fi=
rst
to the last of the foiled coups d'état of Bolingbroke. In the first =
his
policy made peace with France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the
second his policy again made peace with France, and broke the connection wi=
th Prussia.
For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires of Brandenburg h=
ad
waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy which has become so enorm=
ous
a problem in Europe. By the end of this epoch Chatham, who incarnated and e=
ven
created, at least in a representative sense, all that we call the British
Empire, was at the height of his own and his country's glory. He summarized=
the
new England of the Revolution in everything, especially in everything in wh=
ich
that movement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet was m=
ost
corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some ways what we
should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was also an Imperiali=
st
and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party was consistently the Ji=
ngo
party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that all our public men were then=
aristocrats;
but he was very emphatically what may be called a commercialist--one might
almost say Carthaginian. In this connection he has the characteristic which
perhaps humanized but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I me=
an
that he could use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank,
James Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a=
young
clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open to the English
the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of the strong points of
this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wielded without friction the
wealthier bourgeoisie; it was not there that the social cleavage was to com=
e.
He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though Parliament was as narro=
w as
a senate, it was one of great senators. The very word recalls the roll of t=
hose
noble Roman phrases they often used, which we are right in calling classic,=
but
wrong in calling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this =
fine
if florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, all this =
air
of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inland state of the st=
ingy
drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savages into mere soldiers. And =
yet
the great chief of these was in some ways like a shadow of Chatham flung ac=
ross
the world--the sort of shadow that is at once an enlargement and a caricatu=
re.
The English lords, whose paganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here
something drawn out long and thin out of their own theories. What was pagan=
ism
in Chatham was atheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first
patriotism was in the second something with no name but Prussianism. The
cannibal theory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat other comm=
onwealths,
had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our own aristocracy drew indirec=
tly
nearer together, and seemed for a time to be wedded; but not before the gre=
at
Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture, as if to forbid the banns.
XV THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS<=
/span>
We cannot understand the eighteenth
century so long as we suppose that rhetoric is artificial because it is
artistic. We do not fall into this folly about any of the other arts. We ta=
lk
of a man picking out notes arranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with m=
uch
feeling," or of his pouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a
training as careful as an acrobat's. But we are still haunted with a prejud=
ice
that verbal form and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they a=
re
the link between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feeling =
of
the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded and pointed as=
to
convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of the eighteenth-century wort=
hies
must be put the proviso of their perfect artistic sincerity. Their oratory =
was
unrhymed poetry, and it had the humanity of poetry. It was not even unmetri=
cal
poetry; that century is full of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of
great moments, which have in them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a=
man
thinking to a tune. Nelson's "In honour I gained them, in honour I will
die with them," has more rhythm than much that is called vers libres.
Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" might be a gre=
at
line in Walt Whitman.
It is one of the =
many
quaint perversities of the English to pretend to be bad speakers; but in fa=
ct
the most English eighteenth-century epoch blazed with brilliant speakers. T=
here
may have been finer writing in France; there was no such fine speaking as in
England. The Parliament had faults enough, but it was sincere enough to be
rhetorical. The Parliament was corrupt, as it is now; though the examples of
corruption were then often really made examples, in the sense of warnings,
where they are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament w=
as indifferent
to the constituencies, as it is now; though perhaps the constituencies were
less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliament was snobbish, as it is n=
ow,
though perhaps more respectful to mere rank and less to mere wealth. But the
Parliament was a Parliament; it did fulfil its name and duty by talking, and
trying to talk well. It did not merely do things because they do not bear
talking about--as it does now. It was then, to the eternal glory of our
country, a great "talking-shop," not a mere buying and selling sh=
op
for financial tips and official places. And as with any other artist, the c=
are
the eighteenth-century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity,=
not
a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich and elaborat=
e as
a lover's sonnet; but it is because Burke is really enthusiastic, like the
lover. An angry sentence by Junius is as carefully compounded as a Renascen=
ce
poison; but it is because Junius is really angry--like the poisoner. Now,
nobody who has realized this psychological truth can doubt for a moment that
many of the English aristocrats of the eighteenth century had a real enthus=
iasm
for liberty; their voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. Whatever t=
heir
immediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said when they
talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta. Those
Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys included many who really were
patriots--or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer to put it so,
among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs; Whigs by all the
ideal definitions which identified the party with a defence of law against
tyrants and courtiers. But if anybody deduces, from the fact that the Whig
aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt about whether the Whig aristocrats were
aristocrats, there is one practical test and reply. It might be tested in m=
any
ways: by the game laws and enclosure laws they passed, or by the strict cod=
e of
the duel and the definition of honour on which they all insisted. But if it=
be
really questioned whether I am right in calling their whole world an aristo=
cracy,
and the very reverse of it a democracy, the true historical test is this: t=
hat
when republicanism really entered the world, they instantly waged two great
wars with it--or (if the view be preferred) it instantly waged two great wa=
rs
with them. America and France revealed the real nature of the English
Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a real spark will show it is only ice. So =
when
the red fire of the Revolution touched the frosty splendours of the Whigs,
there was instantly a hissing and a strife; a strife of the flame to melt t=
he
ice, of the water to quench the flame.
It has been noted
that one of the virtues of the aristocrats was liberty, especially liberty
among themselves. It might even be said that one of the virtues of the
aristocrats was cynicism. They were not stuffed with our fashionable fictio=
n,
with its stiff and wooden figures of a good man named Washington and a bad =
man
named Boney. They at least were aware that Washington's cause was not so
obviously white nor Napoleon's so obviously black as most books in general
circulation would indicate. They had a natural admiration for the military
genius of Washington and Napoleon; they had the most unmixed contempt for t=
he German
Royal Family. But they were, as a class, not only against both Washington a=
nd
Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason. And it was that they b=
oth
stood for democracy.
Great injustice is
done to the English aristocratic government of the time through a failure to
realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America. The=
re
is a wrong-headed humour about the English which appears especially in this,
that while they often (as in the case of Ireland) make themselves out right
where they were entirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of
America) to make themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a ca=
se
for their having been more or less right. George III.'s Government laid cer=
tain
taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard of America. It was
certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law and precedent, that the
imperial government could not lay taxes on such colonists. Nor were the tax=
es
themselves of that practically oppressive sort which rightly raise everywhe=
re
the common casuistry of revolution. The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but
utter lack of sympathy with liberty, especially local liberty, and with the=
ir
adventurous kindred beyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults.
Chatham, the great chief of the new and very national noblesse, was typical=
of
them in being free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against th=
e colonies
as such. He would have made them free and even favoured colonies, if only he
could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who was then the eloquent voice of
Whiggism, and was destined later to show how wholly it was a voice of
aristocracy, went of course even further. Even North compromised; and though
George III., being a fool, might himself have refused to compromise, he had
already failed to effect the Bolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the r=
oyal
power. The case for the Americans, the real reason for calling them right in
the quarrel, was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue,
not with a dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war =
on something
much finer and more formidable than poor old George. Nevertheless, the popu=
lar tradition,
especially in America, has pictured it primarily as a duel of George III. a=
nd
George Washington; and, as we have noticed more than once, such pictures th=
ough
figurative are seldom false. King George's head was not much more useful on=
the
throne than it was on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-bo=
ard
was really a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that sold=
not
English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policy which
Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, but intolerant of Ame=
rica
when allied with France. That very wooden sign stood, in short, for the same
thing as the juncture with Frederick the Great; it stood for that Anglo-Ger=
man
alliance which, at a very much later time in history, was to turn into the
world-old Teutonic Race.
Roughly and frank=
ly
speaking, we may say that America forced the quarrel. She wished to be
separate, which was to her but another phrase for wishing to be free. She w=
as
not thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already of her rights as a
republic. The negative effect of so small a difference could never have cha=
nged
the world, without the positive effect of a great ideal, one may say of a g=
reat
new religion. The real case for the colonists is that they felt they could =
be
something, which they also felt, and justly, that England would not help th=
em
to be. England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts of conce=
ssions
and constitutional privileges; but England could not allow the colonists
equality: I do not mean equality with her, but even with each other. Chatham
might have compromised with Washington, because Washington was a gentleman;=
but
Chatham could hardly have conceived a country not governed by gentlemen. Bu=
rke
was apparently ready to grant everything to America; but he would not have =
been
ready to grant what America eventually gained. If he had seen American
democracy, he would have been as much appalled by it as he was by French
democracy, and would always have been by any democracy. In a word, the Whigs
were liberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats; that=
is
why their concessions were as vain as their conquests. We talk, with a
humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secession of
America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do not know; but=
I
strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I believe we counted
for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really drive away the American
colonists, nor were they driven. They were led on by a light that went befo=
re.
That light came f=
rom
France, like the armies of Lafayette that came to the help of Washington.
France was already in travail with the tremendous spiritual revolution which
was soon to reshape the world. Her doctrine, disruptive and creative, was
widely misunderstood at the time, and is much misunderstood still, despite =
the
splendid clarity of style in which it was stated by Rousseau in the
"Contrat Social," and by Jefferson in The Declaration of
Independence. Say the very word "equality" in many modern countri=
es,
and four hundred fools will leap to their feet at once to explain that some=
men
can be found, on careful examination, to be taller or handsomer than others=
. As
if Danton had not noticed that he was taller than Robespierre, or as if
Washington was not well aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is =
no
place to expound a philosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way =
of a
parable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not mean that t=
hey
all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutely equal in their =
one
absolute character, in the most important thing about them. It may be put
practically by saying that they are coins of a certain value, twelve of whi=
ch
go to a shilling. It may be put symbolically, and even mystically, by saying
that they all bear the image of the King. And, though the most mystical, it=
is
also the most practical summary of equality that all men bear the image of =
the
King of Kings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underla=
in all
Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were, for
instance, the mob of mediæval republics in Italy. A dogma of equal du=
ties
implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authority that would n=
ot
admit that it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a rich man, or as bad to
burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefully furnished one. But the
world had wandered further and further from these truisms, and nobody in the
world was further from them than the group of the great English aristocrats.
The idea of the equality of men is in substance simply the idea of the
importance of man. But it was precisely the notion of the importance of a m=
ere
man which seemed startling and indecent to a society whose whole romance and
religion now consisted of the importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man=
had
walked naked into Parliament. There is not space here to develop the moral
issue in full, but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned abo=
ut
the difference in human types or talents are considerably wasting their tim=
e.
If they can understand how two coins can count the same though one is bright
and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two men can vote the
same though one is bright and the other dull. If, however, they are still
satisfied with their solid objection that some men are dull, I can only gra=
vely
agree with them, that some men are very dull.
But a few years a=
fter
Lafayette had returned from helping to found a republic in America he was f=
lung
over his own frontiers for resisting the foundation of a republic in France=
. So
furious was the onward stride of this new spirit that the republican of the=
new
world lived to be the reactionary of the old. For when France passed from
theory to practice, the question was put to the world in a way not thinkabl=
e in
connection with the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial
coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable =
idol
of iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, and recast=
in
a size equally colossal, but in a shape men could not understand. Many, at
least, could not understand it, and least of all the liberal aristocracy of
England. There were, of course, practical reasons for a continuous foreign
policy against France, whether royal or republican. There was primarily the
desire to keep any foreigner from menacing us from the Flemish coast; there
was, to a much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which so much English
glory had been gained by the statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe=
and
of Clive. The former reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in
order to keep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasing=
enthusiasm
into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed and pampered the power
which was destined in the future to devour Belgium as France would never ha=
ve
devoured it, and threaten us across the sea with terrors of which no French=
man
would ever dream. But indeed much deeper things unified our attitude towards
France before and after the Revolution. It is but one stride from despotism=
to
democracy, in logic as well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote =
from
both. The Bastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot
had turned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to an Engl=
ishman
merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. He was not wrong in
thinking these allotropic forms of the same alien thing; and that thing was
equality. For when millions are equally subject to one law, it makes little
difference if they are also subject to one lawgiver; the general social lif=
e is
a level. The one thing that the English have never understood about Napoleo=
n,
in all their myriad studies of his mysterious personality, is how impersona=
l he
was. I had almost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, "I sha=
ll
go down to history with my code in my hand;" but in practical effects,=
as
distinct from mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his =
code
will go down to history with his hand set to it in signature--somewhat ille=
gibly.
Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates and encouraged contented
peasants in places where his name is cursed, in places where his name is al=
most
unknown. In his lifetime, of course, it was natural that the annihilating
splendour of his military strokes should rivet the eye like flashes of
lightning; but his rain fell more silently, and its refreshment remained. I=
t is
needless to repeat here that after bursting one world-coalition after anoth=
er
by battles that are the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally wo=
rn
down by two comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and the =
resistance
of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that is Russian, religious; =
but
in the latter appeared most conspicuously that which concerns us here, the
valour, vigilance and high national spirit of England in the eighteenth
century. The long Spanish campaign tried and made triumphant the great Irish
soldier, afterwards known as Wellington; who has become all the more symbol=
ic
since he was finally confronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the lat=
ter
at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in ma=
ny
ways typical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. But=
if
we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by their class, how
little they really knew what was happening in their time, it is enough to n=
ote
that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissed Napoleon by saying he
was not really a gentleman. If an acute and experienced Chinaman were to sa=
y of
Chinese Gordon, "He is not actually a Mandarin," we should think =
that
the Chinese system deserved its reputation for being both rigid and remote.=
But the very name=
of
Wellington is enough to suggest another, and with it the reminder that this,
though true, is inadequate. There was some truth in the idea that the
Englishman was never so English as when he was outside England, and never
smacked so much of the soil as when he was on the sea. There has run through
the national psychology something that has never had a name except the
eccentric and indeed extraordinary name of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the
more English for being quite undiscoverable in England. It may be doubted i=
f a
French or German boy especially wishes that his cornland or vineland were a
desert; but many an English boy has wished that his island were a desert
island. But we might even say that the Englishman was too insular for an
island. He awoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundat=
ions
of the world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by a co=
ntradiction,
the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of the islanders were
scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet. There still lay on =
it,
like an increasing light, the legend of the Armada; it was a great fleet fu=
ll
of the glory of having once been a small one. Long before Wellington ever s=
aw
Waterloo the ships had done their work, and shattered the French navy in the
Spanish seas, leaving like a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelso=
n,
who died with his stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There i=
s no
word for the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour of=
his
death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epic completeness w=
hich
critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophets the hand of God. His =
very
faults and failures were heroic, not in a loose but in a classic sense; in =
that
he fell only like the legendary heroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by =
any
foe among men. And he remains the incarnation of a spirit in the English th=
at
is purely poetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, and s=
ometimes
even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age of reason, in a
country already calling itself dull and business-like, with top-hats and
factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers of funereal efficien=
cy,
this country clergyman's son moved to the last in a luminous cloud, and act=
ed a
fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson to those who do not understand Engl=
and,
and a mystery to those who think they do. In outward action he led his ship=
s to
victory and died upon a foreign sea; but symbolically he established someth=
ing
indescribable and intimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he=
was
the man who burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire.
XVI ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS
It is the pathos of many hackneyed =
things
that they are intrinsically delicate and are only mechanically made dull. A=
ny
one who has seen the first white light, when it comes in by a window, knows
that daylight is not only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is
the subtlety of the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So
patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with vol=
umes
of verbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tender a=
s a
climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, might very =
well
summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beaten about like an old t=
in
can, while his soul had something in it of a fine and fragile
eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the most threadbare thin=
gs
contemporary and connected with him have a real truth to the tone and meani=
ng
of his life and time, though for us they have too often degenerated into de=
ad
jokes. The expression "hearts of oak," for instance, is no unhappy
phrase for the finer side of that England of which he was the best expressi=
on.
Even as a material metaphor it covers much of what I mean; oak was by no me=
ans
only made into bludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English
gentry did not think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere
name of oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors of coll=
eges
and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate, almost made L=
atin
an English language and port an English wine. Some part of that world at le=
ast
will not perish; for its autumnal glow passed into the brush of the great
English portrait-painters, who, more than any other men, were given the pow=
er
to commemorate the large humanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as
broad and soft as their own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotio=
nal
angle, upon a canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, =
as
great and as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the arti=
st gives
to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divine quality of
distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase and words spoken far
away upon the sea; there will rise up quite fresh before you and be borne u=
pon
a bar of music, like words you have never heard before: "For England,
home, and beauty."
When I think of t=
hese
things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling at the great gentry that wag=
ed
the great war of our fathers. But indeed the difficulty about it was someth=
ing
much deeper than could be dealt with by any grumbling. It was an exclusive
class, but not an exclusive life; it was interested in all things, though n=
ot
for all men. Or rather those things it failed to include, through the
limitations of this rationalist interval between mediæval and modern
mysticism, were at least not of the sort to shock us with superficial
inhumanity. The greatest gap in their souls, for those who think it a gap, =
was
their complete and complacent paganism. All their very decencies assumed th=
at
the old faith was dead; those who held it still, like the great Johnson, we=
re
considered eccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the v=
ery formal
funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various other complications,
including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticism was no mere oligarc=
hic
orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club; which might in virtue of i=
ts
vivid name be regarded as relatively orthodox. It is present in the mildest
middle-class atmosphere; as in the middle-class masterpiece about "Nor=
thanger
Abbey," where we actually remember it is an antiquity, without ever
remembering it is an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what=
can
only be called the atheism of Jane Austen.
Unfortunately it
could truly be said of the English gentleman, as of another gallant and
gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted in dishonour. He was, ind=
eed,
somewhat in the position of such an aristocrat in a romance, whose splendour
has the dark spot of a secret and a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin
with, an uncomfortable paradox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have
claimed to be descended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves;=
but
he himself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not come f=
rom
the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not come over with
William the Conqueror, but only assisted, in a somewhat shuffling manner, at
the coming over of William of Orange. His own exploits were often really
romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultans or the war of the wooden ship=
s;
it was the exploits of the far-off founders of his family that were painful=
ly
realistic. In this the great gentry were more in the position of Napoleonic
marshals than of Norman knights, but their position was worse; for the mars=
hals
might be descended from peasants and shopkeepers; but the oligarchs were de=
scended
from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was the paradox of Englan=
d;
the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart.
But the secret was
worse; not only was such a family founded on stealing, but the family was
stealing still. It is a grim truth that all through the eighteenth century,=
all
through the great Whig speeches about liberty, all through the great Tory
speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, thro=
ugh
the period of Trafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in =
the
central senate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for th=
e enclosure,
by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as had survived out of =
the
great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is much more than a pun, it is=
the
prime political irony of our history, that the Commons were destroying the
commons. The very word "common," as we have before noted, lost its
great moral meaning, and became a mere topographical term for some remaining
scrap of scrub or heath that was not worth stealing. In the eighteenth cent=
ury
these last and lingering commons were connected only with stories about
highwaymen, which still linger in our literature. The romance of them was a
romance of robbers; but not of the real robbers.
This was the
mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remained human, and yet ru=
ined
humanity all around them. Their own ideal, nay their own reality of life, w=
as
really more generous and genial than the stiff savagery of Puritan captains=
and
Prussian nobles; but the land withered under their smile as under an alien
frown. Being still at least English, they were still in their way good-natu=
red;
but their position was false, and a false position forces the good-natured =
into
brutality. The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to =
the Whigs
that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admit that they
were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of their philosophic
exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats; and the result was the White Terr=
or,
the period of Anti-Jacobin repression which revealed the real side of their
sympathies more than any stricken fields in foreign lands. Cobbett, the last
and greatest of the yeomen, of the small farming class which the great esta=
tes
were devouring daily, was thrown into prison merely for protesting against =
the
flogging of English soldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersa=
l of
a peaceful meeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldi=
ers
were indeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And it=
is
one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of our history,
that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work of soldiers who
still bore the title of the Yeomanry.
The name of Cobbe=
tt
is very important here; indeed it is generally ignored because it is import=
ant.
Cobbett was the one man who saw the tendency of the time as a whole, and
challenged it as a whole; consequently he went without support. It is a mar=
k of
our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They =
are
kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by=
this
time that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense that a
football match is popular. The division in Cobbett's time was slightly more
sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference of sentiment about
externals which divided the old agricultural gentry of the eighteenth centu=
ry
from the new mercantile gentry of the nineteenth. Through the first half of=
the
nineteenth century there were some real disputes between the squire and the
merchant. The merchant became converted to the important economic thesis of
Free Trade, and accused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to ke=
ep
up his agrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively by a=
ccusing
the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in his factories to
keep up his commercial success. The passing of the Factory Acts was a
confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrial experiments, jus=
t as
the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of the comparative weakness and
unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyed the last remnants of any
peasantry that might have defended the field against the factory. These
relatively real disputes would bring us to the middle of the Victorian era.=
But
long before the beginning of the Victorian era, Cobbett had seen and said t=
hat
the disputes were only relatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his
more robust fashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that
the agricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each other blac=
k,
when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And he would have be=
en
substantially right; for the great industrial disciple of the kettle, James
Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steam engine), was typical of the
age in this, that he found the old Trade Guilds too fallen, unfashionable a=
nd
out of touch with the times to help his discovery, so that he had recourse =
to
the rich minority which had warred on and weakened those Guilds since the
Reformation. There was no prosperous peasant's pot, such as Henry of Navarre
invoked, to enter into alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was =
in
the strict sense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more a=
nd
more wealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit=
, industrial
science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of the old oligarchy; =
and
the old oligarchy had always been ready for new experiments--beginning with=
the
Reformation. And it is characteristic of the clear mind which was hidden fr=
om
many by the hot temper of Cobbett, that he did see the Reformation as the r=
oot
of both squirearchy and industrialism, and called on the people to break aw=
ay
from both. The people made more effort to do so than is commonly realized.
There are many silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educ=
ated
class can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppress the
record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of that great
mediæval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayal of
which, was the real turning-point of our history. It was so with the revolts
against the religious policy of Henry VIII.; and it was so with the
rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's epoch. The real mob
reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to show one of=
the
immortal marks of the real mob--ritualism. There is nothing that strikes the
undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about direct democratic action as the
vanity or mummery of the things done seriously in the daylight; they astoni=
sh
him by being as unpractical as a poem or a prayer. The French Revolutionists
stormed an empty prison merely because it was large and solid and difficult=
to
storm, and therefore symbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which =
it
had been but the shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a pa=
rish
grindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult to break, a=
nd
therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery which perpetually
ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressive agent of some
landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county, merely to exhibit his
horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let him go, which
marks perhaps, for good or evil, a certain national modification of the
movement. There is something very typical of an English revolution in having
the tumbril without the guillotine.
Anyhow, these emb=
ers
of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out very brutally; the grindstone
continued (and continues) to grind in the scriptural fashion above referred=
to,
and, in most political crises since, it is the crowd that has found itself =
in
the cart. But, of course, both the riot and repression in England were but
shadows of the awful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel proces=
s in
Ireland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperate tool of
the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, at all consonant=
to
their temperament, which had neither the cruelty and morbidity nor the logic
and fixity of terrorism), became in a more spiritual atmosphere a flaming s=
word
of religious and racial insanity. Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit=
to
fill his father's place, unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place
commonly given him in history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortali=
ty,
his Irish expedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not
been worthy of their immortality. He was sincerely convinced of the national
need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, by pouring the
commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon her poorer Allies, a=
nd
he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time
faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and a partly or potentially hostile Ir=
ish
Parliament. He broke the latter by the most indecent bribery and the former=
by
the most indecent brutality, but he may well have thought himself entitled =
to
the tyrant's plea. But not only were his expedients those of panic, or at a=
ny
rate of peril, but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defe=
nce
of them that they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipate=
Catholics
as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of the oligarchy; but he was
not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He did not really want to enlist
Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarm Ireland like an enemy. Hence h=
is
settlement was from the first in a false position for settling anything. The
Union may have been a necessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not
intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only
never succeeded in making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French,
but we have never tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille
was a Norman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Our va=
nity
has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combine identific=
ation
with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at an Irishman if he
figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figures as an Irishman. So =
the
Union has never even applied English laws to Ireland, but only coercions and
concessions both specially designed for Ireland. From Pitt's time to our own
this tottering alternation has continued; from the time when the great
O'Connell, with his monster meetings, forced our government to listen to
Catholic Emancipation to the time when the great Parnell, with his obstruct=
ion,
forced it to listen to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maint=
ained
by blows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort of s=
pecial
treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, an idealistic though
inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized that the freedom he loved in
Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, and may be said to have found a
second youth in the gateway of the grave, in the eloquence and emphasis of =
his
conversion. And a statesman wearing the opposite label (for what that is wo=
rth)
had the spiritual insight to see that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, =
was
even more resolved to be a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative=
, a
man among politicians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions,
shootings, and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, =
as Parnell
had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one his work rounds off
almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion against Pitt, for Wyndham
himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels, and he wrought the on=
ly
reparation yet made for all the blood, shamefully shed, that flowed around =
the
fall of FitzGerald.
The effect on Eng=
land
was less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, himself an
Irishman though of the narrower party, was preeminently a realist, and, like
many Irishmen, was especially a realist about Englishmen. He said the army =
he
commanded was the scum of the earth; and the remark is none the less valuab=
le
because that army proved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the
earth. But in truth it was in this something of a national symbol and the
guardian, as it were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the
English, even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any for=
mal version
of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. England not only m=
akes
her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts in what she has herself
cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thing to say that even its
failures have been successes, there is truth in that tribute. Some of the b=
est
colonies were convict settlements, and might be called abandoned convict
settlements. The army was largely an army of gaol-birds, raised by
gaol-delivery; but it was a good army of bad men; nay, it was a gay army of
unfortunate men. This is the colour and the character that has run through =
the
realities of English history, and it can hardly be put in a book, least of =
all
a historical book. It has its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the s=
ongs
of the street, but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but
incongruity. An illogical laughter survives everything in the English soul.=
It
survived, perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in wh=
ich
the more serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quite topsy-=
turvey
tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suit it. Indeed, he
often receives a quite irrational sentence in a police court by saying he w=
ill
do it on his head. So, under Pitt's coercionist régime, a man was se=
nt
to prison for saying that George IV. was fat; but we feel he must have been
partly sustained in prison by the artistic contemplation of how fat he was.
That sort of liberty, that sort of humanity, and it is no mean sort, did in=
deed
survive all the drift and downward eddy of an evil economic system, as well=
as
the dragooning of a reactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialis=
tic
social science, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselv=
es even
of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said is that the
English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the social scale. Fals=
taff
was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman's servant, and some of our recent
restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to the status of the Artful
Dodger. But well it was for us that some such trampled tradition and dark
memory of Merry England survived; well for us, as we shall see, that all our
social science failed and all our statesmanship broke down before it. For t=
here
was to come the noise of a trumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in whi=
ch
all the daily workers of a dull civilization were to be called out of their
houses and their holes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked unde=
r a
strange sun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of w=
hat nation
Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in the darkest pas=
sion
of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys in France and Flanders =
who
called out "Early Doors!" themselves in a theatrical memory, as t=
hey
went so early in their youth to break down the doors of death.
XVII THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN<=
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