I. BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION…

I. BEFORE THE GREAT REBELLION

It is after the great Civil War that English political development becomes most directly instructive, because it is thenceforward that the modern political conditions begin to be directly traceable. Constitutional or parliamentary monarchy takes at that point a virtually new departure. But we shall be better prepared to follow the play of the forces of attraction and repulsion, union and strife, in the modern period, if we first realise how in the ages of feudal monarchy and personal monarchy, as the previous periods have been conveniently named, the same fundamental forces were at work in different channels. The further we follow these forces back the better we are prepared to conceive political movement in terms of naturalist as opposed to verbalist formulas. Above all things, we must get rid of the habit of explaining each phenomenon in terms of the abstraction of itself--as Puritanism by "the Puritan spirit," Christian civilisation by "Christianity," and English history by "the English character." We are to look for the causation of the Puritan spirit and English conduct and the religion of the hour in the interplay of general instincts and particular circumstances.

Sec. 1

At the very outset, the conventional views as to the bias of the "Anglo-Saxon race"[987] are seen on the least scrutiny to be excluded by the facts. Credited with an innate bent to seafaring, the early English are found to have virtually abandoned the sea after settling in England;[988] the new conditions altering the sea-going bent just as the older had made it, and continued to do in the case of the Scandinavians. Credited in the same fashion with a racial bias to commerce, they are found to have been uncommercial, unadventurous, home-staying; and it took centuries of continental influences to make them otherwise. Up to the fourteenth century "almost the whole of English trade was in the hands of aliens."[989] And of what trade the "free" Anglo-Saxons did conduct, the most important branch seems to have been the slave trade.[990] As to the mass of the population, whatever were their actual life-conditions--and as to this we have very little knowledge--they were certainly not the "free barbarians" of the old Teutonic legend. Unfree in some sense they mostly were; and all that we have seen of the early evolution of Greece and Rome goes to suggest that their status was essentially depressed. In the words of a close student, English economic history "begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population under Saxon rule--a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years of English economic evolution to set them free."[991] This is perhaps an over-statement: serfdom suggests general predial slavery; and this cannot be shown to have existed. But those who repel the proposition seem to take no account of the tendency towards popular depression in early settled communities.[992] If we stand by the terminology of Domesday Book, we are far indeed from the conception of a population of freemen.

That the mass of the "Saxon" English (who included many of non-Saxon descent) were more or less "unfree" is a conclusion repeatedly reached on different lines of research. Long ago, the popular historian Sharon Turner wrote that "There can be no doubt that nearly three-fourths of the Anglo-Saxon population were in a state of slavery" (History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4th ed. 1823, iii, 255); and he is here supported by his adversary Dunham (Europe during the Middle Ages, Cab. Cyc. 1834, iii, 49-52). J.M. Kemble later admitted that the "whole population in some districts were unfree" (The Saxons in England, reprint, 1876, i, 189). Yet another careful student sums up that "at the time of the Conquest we find the larger portion of the inhabitants of England in a state of villenage" (J.F. Morgan, England under the Normans, 1858, p. 61). (The interesting question of the racial elements of the population at and after the Conquest is fully discussed by the Rev. Geoffrey Hill, Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest, 1904, ch. i.)

Later and closer research does but indicate gradations in the status of the unfree--gradations which seem to have varied arbitrarily in terms of local law. (On this, however, see Morgan, p. 62.) The Domesday Book specifies multitudes of villani, servi, bordarii (or cotarii), as well as (occasionally) large numbers of sochmanni, and liberi homines. In Cornwall there were only six chief proprietors, with 1,738 villani, 2,441 bordarii, and 1,148 servi; in Devonshire, 8,246 villani, 4,814 bordarii, and 3,210 servi; in Gloucestershire, 3,071 villani, 1,701 bordarii, and 2,423 servi; while in Lincolnshire there were 11,322 sochmanni, 7,168 villani, 3,737 bordarii; and in Norfolk 4,528 villani, 8,679 bordarii, 1,066 servi, 5,521 sochmanni, and 4,981 liberi homines. (Cp. Sharon Turner, as cited, vol. iii, bk. viii, ch. 9.) Thus the largest numbers of ostensible freemen are found in the lately settled Danish districts, and the largest number of slaves where most of the old British population survived (Ashley, Economic History, 1888, i, 17, 18; Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1891, i, 88). "The eastern counties are the home of liberty" (Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, p. 23). The main totals are: bordarii, 82,119; villani, 108,407; servi, 25,156; that is, 215,000 heads of families, roughly speaking, all of whom were more or less "unfree," out of an entire enumerated male population of 300,000.

The constant tendency was to reduce all shades to one of nativi or born villeins (Stubbs, Constitutional History, 4th ed. i, 465); that is to say, the number of absolute serfs tends to lessen, their status being gradually improved, while higher grades tend to be somewhat lowered. Prof. Vinogradoff's research, which aims at correcting Mr. Seebohm's, does but disclose that villenage in general had three aspects:--"Legal theory and political disabilities would fain make it all but slavery; the manorial system ensures it something of the character of the Roman colonatus; there is a stock of freedom in it which speaks of Saxon tradition" (Villainage in England, 1892, p. 137; cp. Seebohm, as cited, p. 409; and Stubbs, Sec. 132, i, 462-65). Even the comparatively "free" socmen were tied to the land and were not independent yeomen (Ashley, i, 19); and even "freedmen" were often tied to a specified service by the act of manumission (Dunham, as cited, iii, 51). As to Teutonic slavery in general, cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French tr. 1878, i, 41-44, and U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. 1900, i, 116; as to France, cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'Histoire de France, edit. 1847, pp. 162-72; Histoire de la civilisation en France, 13e edit. iii, 172, 190-203; and as to the Netherlands, see above, pp. 295-96.

There is a tendency on the one hand to exaggerate the significance of the data, as when we identify the lot of an ancient serf or villein with that of a negro in the United States of sixty years ago;[993] and on the other hand to forget, in familiarity with scholarly research, the inevitable moral bearing of all degrees of bondage. The villanus "both is and is not a free man"; but the "not" is none the less morally significant: "though he may be liber homo, he is not francus";[994] and his name carries a slur. An immeasurable amount of moral history is conveyed in the simple fact that "slave" was always a term of abuse; that "villain" is just "villein"; that "caitiff" is just "captive"; and that "churl" is just "ceorl." So the "neif" (= naif = native) becomes the "knave";[995] the "scullion" the "blackguard"; and the homeless wanderer the "vagabond"; even as for the Roman "the guest," hostis, was "the enemy." The "rogue" has doubtless a similar descent, and "rogue and peasant-slave" in Tudor times, when slavery had ceased, stood for all things contemptible. Men degrade and impoverish their fellows, and out of the created fact of deprivation make their worst aspersions; never asking who or what it is that thus turns human beings into scullions, churls, blackguards, knaves, caitiffs, rogues, and villains. The Greeks knew that a man enslaved was a man demoralised; but saw in the knowledge no motive for change of social tactics. Still less did the Saxons; for their manumissions at the bidding of the priest were but penitential acts, in no way altering the general drift of things.

Green (Short History, ch. i, Sec. 6, ed. 1881, pp. 54, 55), laying stress on the manumissions, asserts that under Edgar "slavery was gradually disappearing before the efforts of the Church." But this is going far beyond the evidence. Green seems to have assumed that the laws framed by Dunstan were efficacious; but they clearly were not. (Cp. C. Edmond Maurice, Tyler, Bale, and Oldcastle, 1875, pp. 14-18.) Kemble rightly notes--here going deeper than Prof. Vinogradoff--that there was a constant process of new slave-making (Saxons, i, 183-84; cp. Maitland, p. 31); and in particular notes how "the honours and security of service became more anxiously desired than a needy and unsafe freedom" (p. 184). There is in short a law of worsenment in a crude polity as in an advanced one. Green himself says of the slave class that it "sprang mainly from debt or crime" (The Making of England, 1885, p. 192; cp. Short History, p. 13). But debt and "crime" were always arising. Compare his admissions in The Conquest of England, 2nd ed. pp. 444, 445. Elsewhere he admits that slaves were multiplied by the mutual wars of the Saxons (p. 13); and Kemble, recognising "crime" as an important factor, agrees (i, 186) with Eichhorn and Grimm in seeing in war and conquest the "principal and original cause of slavery in all its branches." A battle would make more slaves in a day than were manumitted in a year. Some slaves indeed, as in the Roman Empire, were able to buy their freedom (Maurice, as cited, p. 20, and refs.; Dunham, as cited, iii, 51); but there can have been few such cases. (Cp. C.-F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French tr. i, 41-44, as to the general tendencies of Teutonic slavery.) The clergy for a time promoted enfranchisement, and even set an example in order to widen their own basis of power; but as Green later notes (ch. v, Sec. 4, p. 239) the Church in the end promoted "emancipation, as a work of piety, on all estates but its own." Green further makes the vital admission that "the decrease of slavery was more than compensated by the increasing degradation of the bulk of the people.... Religion had told against political independence"--for the Church played into the hands of the king.

During the Danish invasions, which involved heavy taxation (Danegeld) to buy off the invaders, slavery increased and worsened; and Cnut's repetition of the old laws against the foreign slave trade can have availed little (Maurice, as cited, pp. 23-24). Prof. Abdy, after recognising that before the Conquest English liberties were disappearing like those of France (Lectures on Feudalism, 1890, pp. 322, 326-27, 331), argues that, though the tenure of the villein was servile, he in person was not bond (App. p. 428). "Bond" is, of course, a term of degree, like others; but if "not bond" means "freeman," the case will not stand. The sole argument is that "had he been so [bond], it is difficult to understand his admission into the conference [in the procedure of the Domesday Survey] apparently on an equality with the other members of the inquest." Now he was plainly not on an equality. The inquest was to be made through the sheriff, the lord of the manor, the parish priest, the reeve, the bailiff, and six villeins out of each hamlet (Id. p. 360). It is pretty clear that the villeins were simply witnesses to check, if need were, the statements of their superiors.

The weightiest argument against the darker view of Saxon serfdom is the suggestion of the late Prof. Maitland (Domesday Book, p. 223) that the process of technical subordination, broadly called feudalism, was really a process of infusion of law and order. But he confessedly made out no clear case, and historical analogy is against him.

Finally, though under the Normans the Saxon slaves appear to have gained as beside the middle grades of peasants (Morgan, England under the Normans, p. 225; Ashley, i, 18), it is a plain error to state that the Bristol slave-trade was suppressed under William by "the preaching of Wulfstan, and the influence of Lanfranc" (Green, Short History, p. 55; also in longer History, i, 127; so also Bishop Stubbs, i, 463, note. The true view is put by Maurice, as cited, p. 30). The historian incidentally reveals later (Short History, ch. vii, Sec. 8, p. 432, proceeding on Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hiberniae, lib. i, c. 18) that "at the time of Henry II's accession Ireland was full of Englishmen who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, in spite of Royal prohibitions and the spiritual menaces of the English Church." (Cp. Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 316, note.) He admits, too (p. 55), that "a hundred years later than Dunstan the wealth of English nobles was sometimes said to spring from breeding slaves for the market." The "market" was for concubines and prostitutes, as well as for labourers. (Cp. Southey, Book of the Church, ed. 1824, i, 115, following William of Malmesbury; and Hallam, as last cited.) Gibbon justifiably infers (ch. 38, Bohn ed. iv, 227) that the children of the Roman slave market of the days of Gregory the Great, non Angli sed angeli, were sold into slavery by their parents. "From the first to the last age," he holds, the Anglo-Saxons "persisted in this unnatural practice." Cp. Maurice, as cited, pp. 4-5. Gregory actually encouraged the traffic in English slaves after he became Pope. (Ep. to Candidus, cited in pref. to Mrs. Elstoh's trans. of the Anglo-Saxon Homily, p. xi.)

Thus, under Saxon, Danish, and Norman law alike, a slave trade persisted for centuries. As regards the conditions of domestic slavery, it seems clear that the Conquest lowered the status of the half-free; but on the other hand "there was a great decrease in the number of slaves in Essex between the years 1065 and 1085" (Morgan, as cited, p. 225; cp. Maitland, p. 35).

In Saxondom, for centuries before the Conquest, "history" is made chiefly by the primitive forces of tribal and local animosity, the Northmen coming in to complicate the insoluble strifes of the earlier English, partly uniting these against them, dominating some, and getting ultimately absorbed in the population, but probably constituting for long an extra source of conflict in domestic politics. A broad difference of accent, as in the Scandinavian States down to our own day, is often a strain on fellowship. In any case, the Anglo-Saxons at the time of the Conquest, as always from the time of their own entry, showed themselves utterly devoid of the "gift of union" which has been ascribed to their "race," as to the Roman. No "Celts" were ever more hopelessly divided: the Battle of Hastings is the crowning proof.[996] And in the absence of leading and stimulus from a higher culture, so little progressive force is there in a group of struggling barbaric communities that there was only the scantiest political and other improvement in Saxon England during hundreds of years. When Alfred strove to build up a civilisation, he turned as a matter of course to the Franks.[997] The one civilising force was that of the slight contacts kept up with the Continent, perhaps the most important being the organisation of the Church. It was the Norman Conquest, bringing with it a multitude of new contacts, and an entrance of swarms of French and Flemish artificers and clerics, that decisively began the civilisation of England. The Teutonic basis, barbarous as it was, showed symptoms of degeneration rather than of development. In brief, France was mainly civilised through Italy; England was mainly civilised through France.

Bishop Stubbs, after admitting as much (Sec. 91, i, 269, 270) and noting the Norman "genius for every branch of organisation," proceeds to say "that the Norman polity had very little substantial organisation of its own, and that it was native energy that wrought the subsequent transformation." His own pages supply the disproof. See in particular as to the legislative and administrative activity of Henry II, Sec. 147, i, 530-33. As to the arrest or degeneration of the Saxon civilisation, cp. Sec. 79, i, 227, 228; Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 1, 73; H.W. C. Davis, England under the Normans and the Angevins, 1905, p. 1; Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, 1867, i, 288, 308-12, 321, 343, 346, 347; Abdy, as cited above. Mr. Pearson's testimony, it should be noted, is that of a partisan and eulogist of the "race."

Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population "erscheint nicht uebergross," admits that the dependent stratum of the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land system. In time of war the class increased through the ruin of the small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the possessing class" (Geschichte des englischen Self-Government, 1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only in the multiplication of the dependent classes." Among the symptoms of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.

In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible cruelty.[998] William's enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition; and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all classes in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld book"--a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion, therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its first social and psychological effect was to set up new class relations, and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and close class union. When the people's speech began to compete with that of their masters, and the nobles separately began to be on good terms with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as between neighbouring nobles and their retainers; and in Scotland the weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England, especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing itself, tended to unite the nobles as a class for their own aggrandisement and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own share of power and privilege.

The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002] representing a special source of strife, although its non-military character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to throw in its lot with king or nobles, or with the democracy (as in Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the king's friend into the king's antagonist, is the most dramatic instance of the Church's necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English constitutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further, being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces, exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among competing interests.[1003]

The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004] could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the nobles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort. The assumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government shaped the process is one of the superstitions of racial and national vanity.

Dr. C.H. Pearson's reiteration of the old "race" dogma (History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, i, 277) is its sufficient reductio ad absurdum. In the English manner, he connects with old Welsh usages of revenge the late Irish tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to America"--as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow, constitutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions. In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the sixth century with Saxon usage of the eleventh, this while admitting the lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the Faustrecht, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century, and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson's.

Mr. J.H. Round's way of taking it for granted (The Commune of London, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought. Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the Anglo-Saxons.

One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his England under the Normans and Angevins (1905). After setting out with the avowal that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches (p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress, from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... passed by their more deliberate competitors." How a Teutonic race, given these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpassed and finally uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (id. p. 2), the theorist does not attempt to explain.

To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the political circumstances, was it due that there grew up in island England, instead of an all-powerful feudal nobility and a mainly depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of classes, in which the king's policy against the nobility restrained and feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making sub-tenants king's liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king is better for the people than the tyranny of nobles; and the destruction of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal prestige counts for something as against baronial self-assertion; but aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king, on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations, originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008] Even the class tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011] What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important military force, which has its own prestige.

Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end aggrandise the upper as against the lower classes, developing as they do the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper class, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law. In particular, the king's power is always aggrandised when nobility and people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed, had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014] encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle classes; but all the while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed class was necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the growth of class superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their servitude.[1019]

An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a matter of fact, Simon de Montfort's Parliament was the application by a naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain. There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons forced him to make the most of the burgher class, who had stood by him in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when deputies from all the districts met in general assembly and bound themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced, under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the power of the crown, the monarchic superstition availing to divide even the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna Carta by King John.

Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, Histor. View of the European Nations, Crichton's tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to the priority of the institution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, History of Spain, Hume's ed. i, 370; and Prescott, Hist. of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, Kirk's ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its existence in Sicily (circa 1232), see Milman, Hist. of Latin Christianity, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, Considerazioni sopra la Storia di Sicilia, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap. v); and Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohenstaufen (Aufg. 1857-58, B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, The Carafas of Maddaloni, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick's assemblies, too, were called Parlamente. He in turn had, of course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.

As to Simon's object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (Europe during the Middle Ages, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty," though the step was too congruous with general developments not to be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53; Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in the states-general of all the great European monarchies originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support against the barons. Freeman's statement (General Sketch of European History, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole English nation, nobles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together" against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, Geschichte des Self-government in England, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (Student's History, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III, writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish practice.

As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston, or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the favourite's assailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad government. Whether it is noble denouncing favoured noble or Pym impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal jealousy.

Sec. 2

A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war retards civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phoenicians had contrived as much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion must have been small, and the political disintegration great.

Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church's code of Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters with other classes, or even their moral relations with each other save in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.

It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them. The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to retard civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.

The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in isolation and ignominy.

It may or may not have been a gain that Edward's victories over France practically determined the adoption of the middle-class, gallicised English speech[1032] by the upper classes, who had hitherto been French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke French, and so did his nobles. They had hitherto looked with true aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie--"rustici Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam," in the fashion satirised in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon, and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.

Cp. Pearson, Fourteenth Century, pp. 222, 233. Prof. Earle's quasi-theory of the cause of the recovery of the native tongue (Philology of the English Tongue, 3rd ed. pp. 44, 66) is purely fanciful. In the end, as he admits, it was not any native dialect, but the artificial composite "King's English," much modified by French, that survived. It is noteworthy that many locutions which pass in the Bible for specially pure archaic English, as "fourscore and ten," are simply translations of a French idiom, itself ancient Celtic translated into Romance. (Cp. the Introduction to the Study of the History of Language, by Strong, Logeman, and Wheeler, 1891, p. 393.)

The Rev. W. Denton, in his learned and instructive survey of the subject (England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 1-7), remarks that "from some cause, now difficult to trace, great encouragement was given to French in the reign of Henry III. Probably the foreign tastes and partialities of the king had something to do with this" (p. 4). They certainly had. As soon as he could wield power, "hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the Court" (Green, Short Hist., ch. iii, Sec. 5, p. 140), as had happened before under Henry II. Mr. Denton rightly notes (p. 6) how "in the reign of Henry III the descendants of Norman barons, and the sons of Anglo-Norman fathers, were proud of the name of Englishmen, and took up arms against the king's Norman and Angevin favourites, whom they despised as foreigners." This is the true line of causation. There is doubtless something in the theory that the general resort to the use of English in the schools was a result of the Black Death--the majority of the clergy being destroyed and the new teachers being unable to instruct in French (Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 202); but there were certainly other causes involved. Mr. de Montmorency (State Intervention in English Education, 1902, pp. 19-23) develops Gasquet's argument with much force, noting further that many of the foreign priests who survived forsook their charges. It might be added that the native peasantry necessarily counted for more in a social as in an economic sense, after the great fall in their numbers. But the fact that the Death came in the period of the successful French wars of Edward III is clearly of capital importance. But for the moral reaction from these wars, the tendency would have been to procure new relays of French priests.

It is indeed conceivable that, but for hostilities with France, French would have steadily gained ground through literature, depressing and discrediting the vernacular. On this view it was the continuance of resistance by the Welsh that probably prevented the absorption of the Saxon speech by that of the conquered British; and it is similarly arguable that it was the relation of hostility between the Carlovingian Franks and the more easterly Germans that determined the supremacy of the Romance speech in French. The point is worth psychological investigation.

Though, however, Chaucer's own new-English work is part of the result, the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is always important to remember, were the result of the young king's acting on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to domestic sedition, foreign war unified the mass of the people and fixed them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the movement on its moral side.[1036] One man's egoism could thus sway the whole nation's evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.

Sec. 3

In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)--a relation of cause and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie," which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in 1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle class, now hardened in class insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern risings had been crushed, the men of Essex were told by Richard, who had given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them, inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain, in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs, "were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of economics, that despite this temper serfage did gradually die out, the people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade's rebellion, in 1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as it did for the suppression of the system under which the nobles plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.

The question as to the rate at which the population recovered from the Black Death has been discussed by Prof. Thorold Rogers, Mr. Seebohm, and Prof. Cunningham (see the latter's Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1891, i, 304). Prof. Rogers, on the one hand, maintains that by 1377, when the tax rolls seem to give a population of about two and a half millions (cp. Dunton, England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 130), the population had recovered all it had lost in the Plague, he being of opinion that the England of that age could not at any time support more than two and a half millions. Mr. Seebohm, with whom Dr. Cunningham substantially concurs (see also Pearson, Fourteenth Century, p. 249, and Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 194), thinks that the return of the Plague in 1361 and 1369, and the unsettled state of the country, must have prevented recuperation; and, accepting the loose calculation that the Plague destroyed half the population (Mr. Pearson says "one-half or two-thirds"; Dr. Gasquet endorses the general view that "fully one half" were destroyed), he concludes that the population before 1348 may have been five millions.

The truth surely lies between these extremes. That the population should not at all have recovered in twenty-five years is extremely unlikely. That it should have restored a loss of thirty-three per cent in twenty-five years, which is what Prof. Rogers's position amounts to, is still more unlikely (see his Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 223, 226, where the mortality is estimated at one-third). It is besides utterly incongruous with Prof. Rogers's own repeated assertion that "during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries the population of England and Wales was almost stationary" (Industrial and Commercial History of England, pp. 46, 49; Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 337; Economic Interpretation of History, p. 53). How could a medieval population conceivably stand for half a century at a given figure, then, having been reduced by one-third, replace the loss in twenty-five years, and thereafter continue to subsist without further increase for two centuries more?

On the other hand, there is a natural tendency in every suddenly depleted population to reproduce itself for a time at a quickened rate; and in the England of the latter half of the fourteenth century the conditions would encourage such an effort. The lack of house-room and settlement which normally checked increase (cp. Stubbs, Sec. 493) was remedied for a large number of persons; and the general feeling would be all in favour of marriage and repopulation (cp. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 226, where, however, evidence obviously bad is accepted as to multiplied births), though just after the Plague there would be a great stimulus to the extension of pasture, since that needed fewer hands than tillage.

On the whole, we may reasonably surmise that the population before 1348 was, not five millions, but between three and four millions (so Green, ch. v, Sec. 4, p. 241, who, however, takes the somewhat excessive view that "more than one-half were swept away," and further, p. 239, that the population "seems to have all but tripled since the Conquest"), and that it was prevented regaining that figure in the next century by the economic preference of sheep-farming to tillage. Mr. Rogers expressly admits (Six Centuries, p. 233) that "the price of labour, proclamations and statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates," and repeatedly asserts that "the labourers remained masters of the situation." On his own principles, this goes to prove that their numbers remained lower than of old. He infers a "considerable loss of life" in the famine of 1315-16 from the immediate rise of agricultural wages (from 23 to 30 per cent), of which on the average 20 per cent was permanent. Here there is a presumption that even before 1315 the population was greater than afterwards. Yet again he states (p. 326, etc.) that "the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth were the golden age of the English labourer"--a proposition which staggers credence. Cp. W.J. Corbett, in Social England, ii, 382-84.

It is impossible, however, to attain demonstration either on that head or as regards the numbers of the population in the periods under notice. Mr. Rogers's claims to give decisive evidence show a serious misconception of what constitutes proof; and there is special reason to distrust his conclusion that population was no greater at the end of Elizabeth's reign than in that of Henry IV. Cp. Mr. Gibbins's Industrial History of England, pp. 107-108. Prof. J.E. Symes (in Social England, iii, 128, 129) decides that a "great increase of the population undoubtedly took place in the reign of Henry VIII," adopting the estimate that the total at the death of Henry VII was about two and a half millions, and at the death of Henry VIII about four millions. As to the population at the Conquest, see Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, bk. viii, c. 9, vol. iii, and Dunton, as cited, pp. 128-29. It was then probably below two millions; and in the reign of Edward II it may well have been over three millions; for Bishop Pecock about 1450 (cited by Dunton, p. 130 note) speaks of a long-continued decrease, such as would be caused by the wars in France and at home. But the assertion of Tyndale in 1532 (id. ib.), that the population was then less by a third than in the time of Richard II, must be dismissed as a delusion set up by the phenomena of agrarian depopulation in certain districts. On this see below, p. 405.

It is important to note, finally, that it was in the age of raised standard of comfort that there occurred the first wide diffusion of critical heresy in England. Wiclif's popular Lollardry was one phase of a movement that went deeper in thought and further afield in social reform than his, since he himself felt driven to confute certain opponents of belief in the Scriptures, and at the same time to repudiate the doctrine that vassals might resist tyrant lords.[1041] Had he not done so, he might have had a less peaceful end; but it is clear that many men were in the temper to apply to lay matters the demand for reform which he restricted to matters ecclesiastical.[1042] John Ball's rising, however, promptly elicited the much superior strength of the feudal military class; and though in 1395 there were still Lollards to petition to Parliament for the abolition of "unnecessary trades," as well as war and capital punishment and the Catholic practices afterwards rejected by Protestantism, their Utopia was as hopeless as that of the insurgent peasants. Even had the invasion of France not come about to bribe and demoralise the nation at large, turning it from domestic criticism to the plunder of a neighbouring State, the nobility of the period were utterly incapable of an intellectual ideal; and any sympathy shown by any section of them for Lollardry was the merest opportunism, proceeding on resentment of Papal exactions or on a premature hope of plundering the Church.[1043] The moment Lollardry openly leant towards criticism of nobility as well as clergy, they were ready to give it up to destruction; and the determining cause of the fall of Richard II was that, besides alienating the nobles at once by maintaining a peace policy, and by refusing to let them go to all lengths in oppressing the labourers, he alienated the clergy by sheltering the Lollards.[1044] It was the clergy who turned the balance, embracing the cause of Henry IV, who in turn systematically supported them,[1045] as did his son after him. Henry V, the national hero-king, and his father were the first burners of "Protestant" heretics; and it was under Henry IV, in 1401, that there was passed the Act suppressing the voluntary schools of the Lollards.[1046] Doubtless it was a push of the Lollards that carried the later Act of 1406, permitting all men and women to send their sons and daughters "to any school that pleaseth them in the realm;"[1047] but the limitation of school-keeping to the Church was an effective means of limiting the education given; and "by 1430 the Church had recovered from the Lollard revolt against her universal authority."

Mr. Lecky, in his theory of the English aristocracy, credits the nobility with an "eminently popular character" from time immemorial, and cites Comines as to "the singular humanity of the nobles to the people during the civil wars" (History of England in the Eighteenth Century, small ed. i, 212, 213). The nobility, in the circumstances, had need to treat the people better than those of France normally did (which was what Comines was thinking of). Their own wealth--what was left of it--came from the people, to whom, further, they looked for followers. And Comines in the same passage (bk. v, ch. xx) notes that the English people were "more than ordinarily jealous" of their nobility. Of course, the difference between French and English practice dates further back, as above noted.

Similarly misleading is Mr. Lecky's statement that "the Great Charter had been won by the barons, but ... it guaranteed the rights of all freemen." Mr. Gardiner expressly points out (Student's History, p. 182; cp. his Introduction to English History, pp. 66-67) that the Charter "was won by a combination between all classes of freemen." London had harboured and aided the barons' force; and the clergy were closely concerned. (Cp. McKechnie, Magna Carta, 1905, p. 41.) The representative assembly summoned by John in 1213 stood for the combination of the three classes. Green (Short History, illust. ed. i, 242, 243) uses language which countenances Mr. Lecky, but shows (pp. 235-43) the need the barons felt for aid, and the influence of the Church and the traders. Compare the language of his longer history (1885, i, 244), and his express admission as to the depression the baronage had undergone a century later (id. p. 300). Dr. Stubbs (Const. Hist. i, 571, 583) also indicates that the people co-operated, though he uses expressions (pp. 570, 579) which obscure the facts in Mr. Lecky's favour. Guizot (Essais, p. 282) recognises that the movement was national. Buckle, too, made the point clear long ago (3-vol. ed. ii, 114-20; 1-vol. ed. pp. 350-54). But it is noted even in what he called "the wretched work of Delolme," and was in Buckle's day a generally accepted truth. Cp. Ch. de Remusat, L'Angleterre du 18ieme siecle, 1856, i, 33.

It is worth noting in this connection that the Magna Carta, considered in itself, is a rather deceptive historical document. Not only did it need the defeat of John and his German and Flemish allies by the French at Bouvines to enable even the combined lords and commons and clergy to extort the Charter, but the combination was being progressively destroyed by John, by means of his army of French mercenaries, when the barons in despair persuaded the French king to send an invading force, which was able to land owing to the ruin of John's fleet in a storm. Thereupon John's French troops deserted him. Cp. Green, pp. 122-26; Stubbs, ii, 3, 9-16; and McKechnie, pp. 53-57, as to the King's energy and the weakness and inner divisions of the national combination. Thus it was indirectly to French action that England owed first the Magna Carta and then the check upon the King's vengeance, as it was to the Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, later, that it owed the initiative of a three-class Parliament. And, indeed, but for the King's death, the constitutional cause might well have collapsed in the end.

Sec. 4

The Wars of the Roses, by destroying in large part the nobility, relatively advantaged the middle class,[1048] as well as the king whose reign followed. Already under Edward IV the powers of Parliament were much curtailed, and indeed paralysed;[1049] this, which is charged as a sin upon the monarch, being the natural result of his gain of power on the ruin of the baronage. Edward IV only did what Edward I and III would have done if in their situation it had been possible, and what Edward II and Richard II sought to do, but were too weak to compass. The fourth Edward's situation and his force of will together made his power. Not only was the nobility half exterminated, but the trading and middle classes alike desired a strong ruler who should maintain order, by whatever straining of constitutional forms--the invariable sequel of anarchy--at least up to the point of intolerable taxation.[1050] The actual increase of commerce during the wars[1051] is a good proof of the separateness of class interests, and of the decline of the military ideal. Much of it would seem to have been due to the example set by the Hansa merchants, who had factories at London,[1052] Boston, and Lynn, and whose famous League was then powerful enough to force from Edward IV a renewal of its English privileges in return for a concession of a share in the Baltic trade.[1053] In any case, the new development was on the old lines of energetic self-seeking; and already in the reign of Edward IV the cloth manufacture was carried on by capitalists in the modern spirit.[1054] And as the tyrannies of the king were less general and oppressive than the tyrannies of the nobles, the erection of the regal power on the collapse of the old class cohesion gave a new scope for the strife of classes among and for themselves. No national ideal existed (as apart from the readiness to unite in hate of a foreign nation) in monarchic England any more than in old republican Greece or modern republican Italy. The trade gilds were strictly self-seeking institutions, aiming at keeping down the number of competitors in each trade, without providing in any way for the aspirants. Unitary egoism was the universal mainspring. The Church sought above all things to be protected against heresy; the town and trade corporations sought protection for their privileges; and the landowners sought to be supported against the labourers, who from the time of Henry VI are found revolting against enclosures of public land, and were temporarily reinforced by the disbanded retainers of the barons. Every modern force of social disintegration was already nascent.

Cp. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 395-96, 413, 425; Stubbs, Constitutional History, Sec.Sec. 486-92 (iii, 586-616). "In every great town there was, every few years, something of a struggle, something of a crisis ... between trade and craft, or craft and craft, or magistracy and commons" (Stubbs, iii, 616). Prof. Ashley (Introd. to Econ. Hist. i, 79) disputes that there was "any such contest in this country between burghers and artisans" as took place on the continent; and cites another passage from Bishop Stubbs (Sec. 131; i, 453) partly suggesting such a view. But Prof. Ashley goes on (pp. 79-84) to show that there was a good deal of struggling even in England between burghers and artisans. Cp. his conclusions, pp. 6-10, 42, as to the process of evolution towards at least formal unity. It is to be noted that the gilds dispensed charity (Stubbs, iii, 616, 619).

Sec. 5

Under Henry VII the same conditions subsisted. There was no sufficiently strong body of aristocracy left to rebel effectually against his exactions, though exactions had always been the great cause of discontent; and, all rivals collapsing, there grew up round the new dynasty that hedging superstition which had always counted for much, and which was in England to become a main factor in politics. Henry VII wrought assiduously and astutely to build up his power, seeking no less to increase the merchant class than to depress the aristocracy. From both he thus drew his revenue; from the latter by exaction; from the former by customs duties on the trade he carefully encouraged (as Richard had done before him), finding in such revenue his surest income.[1055] Gradually the monarchic system was made firm. Richard III owed his failure mainly to the sense of the illegality of his position; and the same inversion of the superstition troubled Henry VII in turn, as it had done Henry IV. It seems to have been his possession of the one train of artillery in the kingdom that mainly preserved his power against rebels.[1056] But with Henry VIII the dynasty was secure; and from this point onward the monarchic spell can be seen very clearly in English affairs. The instinct of "loyalty," a moral prepossession religiously sanctioned, becomes a social force as truly as the simpler instincts of self-seeking and class spirit. By virtue of it, and of his own force of brute will, Henry VIII could commit violences of almost every description, his own personality having some of the characteristics most likely to intensify the spell. Energy such as his hypnotised or terrorised all but the strongest. Even his crimes were not such as revolted average sympathy: the suppression of the Church, as in nearly all the "Teutonic" countries, was a direct bribe to many of the nobles and landowners,[1057] and for the multitude meant the overthrow of an alien jurisdiction; and his domestic procedure satisfied the popular ethic which demurs to mistresses but respects bigamy, and finds a wife's adultery more criminal than her husband's murder of her. For the rest, he had at the beginning of his reign executed his father's minions, and conciliated the scholars, who made opinion. Yet under Henry VIII we find middle-class England, heavily taxed for war, beginning to stand on its rights as upper-class England had done in earlier times; and in the new England as in the old the weakest class went to the wall. The ever-increasing mass of poor, thrown idle and hungry by the continuous rise of sheep-farms in the place of tillage, were the natural enemies of the governing class as well as of the landowners; and in cruelly repressing them the monarchy strengthened the landowners' allegiance.

Thus arose the typical personal monarchy, employing middle-class ministers, who served it zealously and with increasing power, Thomas Cromwell far outgoing Wolsey. The passing coalition of nobles and yeomen in the north in the cause of the old religion was followed by the crushing of the remains of the old nobility, now being rapidly replaced by the new, established on the plunder of the Church. It is to be noted that in England, as in so many other countries, the virtual subjection of the old nobility to the crown was for a time followed by stirrings of new life in all directions, as if feudalism had everywhere meant a repression of possible energy. The process is seen in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella;[1058] in France under Richelieu and Mazarin; in Sweden under Gustavus Vasa; and is thus plainly a product not of doctrinal Protestantism, as some suppose, but of the comparative social and political liberty that follows on the restriction of ubiquitous feudal tyranny, so much more searching and pervasive a force than the simpler tyranny of the feudal king. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the Tudor suppression of the power of the old aristocracy was not as vital a determination of the nation's course as the overthrow of the Catholic Church.

As against Mr. Lecky's indiscriminate panegyric of the English nobility, it is instructive to note Hallam's judgment on the peerage under Henry VIII: "They yielded to every mandate of his imperious will ... they are responsible for the illegal trial, for the iniquitous attainder, for the sanguinary statute, for the tyranny which they sanctioned by law, and for that which they permitted to subsist without law. Nor was this selfish and pusillanimous subserviency more characteristic of the minions of Henry's favour than of the representatives of ancient and honourable houses, the Norfolks, the Arundels, and the Shrewsburys. We trace the noble statesmen of these reigns concurring in all the inconsistencies of the revolutions; supporting all the religions of Henry, Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth; adjudging the death of Somerset to gratify Northumberland, and of Northumberland to redeem their participation in his fault; setting up the usurpation of Lady Jane, and abandoning her on the first doubt of success, constant only in the rapacious acquisition of estates and honours from whatever source, and in adherence to the present power" (Constitutional History, 10th ed. i, 48).

Sec. 6

And now effectively arose the new political force of Protestant and Bible-worshipping fanaticism, turning the democratic instinct into its channel, and complicating afresh the old issues of classes. It is not to be forgotten that this was a beginning of popular culture, inasmuch as the desire to read the worshipped book must have counted for more than anything else in making reading common.[1059]

Practically, however, the opposed causes of Lollardism and orthodoxy may at the outset be regarded as the democratic and the conservative instincts, taking these channels in the absence of political development and knowledge.[1060] In imperial Rome, the spread of Christianity was substantially a movement of class cohesion among the illiterate slaves, aliens, and workers, the instinct of attraction taking this form when political grounds of union were lacking. So it was in the England of the period under notice; but whereas in imperial Rome the autocracy went far to annul class distinctions, and so helped the slaves' cult to absorb superstitious patricians, especially women, whose wealth maintained the poor of the Church as the emperor's doles had maintained the poor of the State, in England the vigour of class distinctions fostered differences of sect. The phenomena of political Protestantism in the Reformation era in England, as in Germany, offer many parallels to those of the French Revolution. The revolt of many priests from the routine and restrictions of their office is notable in both epochs. On the other hand, the mass of the well-to-do classes, being unprepared for change by any educative process, were as ready to restore Catholic usages as were those of France later; and when the innovating forces, consisting in a little reasoning and much rapine, had run to seed and to corruption under the Protectorate and Edward VI, the reaction towards the old forms set in powerfully. Nothing, however, could carry it to the length of restoring the Catholic Church's property; and the failure of Mary was due not nearly so much to Protestant dislike of the ceremonial of Rome as to the grip of the new owners on the confiscated lands. In England as in Scotland, in Germany, in the Scandinavian States, and in Switzerland, though Henry stood for a special initiative, the driving forces of the Reformation were mainly those of wealth-seeking; and the financial records of the Protectorate show a conspiracy of plunder to which the annals of monarchy could offer no parallel. The Protestant aristocracy simply encouraged the new Lollardism by way of gaining their personal ends, as they had crushed the old because it menaced their property.

"Crown lands to the value of five millions of our modern money had been granted away to the friends of Somerset and Warwick. The royal expenditure had mounted in seventy years to more than four times its previous total" (Green, ch. vii, Sec. 1, and p. 353). A system of wholesale corruption and waste had grown up under Henry VIII, who, after all his confiscations, was fain to seek funds by adulterating his coin. So Edward VI, the church and college plunder being gone, had to be granted taxes on manufactures which tended to stop them. "Yet I cannot find," says Sir Roger Twysden, "all this made the crown rich. Hayward observes Edward's debts were L251,000--at least said to be so. Camden, that Queen Elizabeth received the crown afflictissima ... aere alieno quod Henricus VIII et Edwardus VI contraxerant oppressa.... I cannot but reckon the treasure spent in fifteen years, more than half the kingdom to be sold" (Historical Vindication of the Church of England, ed. 1847, pp. 4, 5). So obviously had the treasure gone into the pockets of courtiers and their hangers-on, that the fact gives some excuse for the habitual miserliness of Elizabeth.

A new channel had thus been made for the forces of union and strife. An instructive part of the process was the movement towards a new sacerdotalism on the side of the new Calvinistic clergy--a movement much more clearly visible in Scotland than in England. Whether or not it be true that "it was by no means the intention of Knox and his fellow-labourers to erect a new hierarchy upon the ruins of the old,"[1061] it is clear that his immediate successors counted on wielding a power strictly analogous to that of the papacy. Andrew Melville, in haughty colloquy with King James and his councillors, threw down his Hebrew Bible on the table as his authority for his demands. Since all alike professed to accept it, the next step in the argument plainly was that it lay with the presbyter to interpret the sacred book;[1062] and Melville, who took the king by the sleeve and called him "God's silly [= weak] vassal," was quite ready to play Gregory to James's Henry had he been able. The effective check lay in the new Church's lack of revenue, the lands of the old Church having of course been retained by the nobles, who carried through the Reformation simply in order to get them. But even in its poverty, with an indifferent nobility[1063] in possession of the feudal power, the Scottish clergy were nearly as tyrannous socially as their teacher Calvin had been at Geneva; and for nearly two hundred years Scottish life was no freer and much more joyless, under the new presbyter, than under the old priest, though the democratic machinery of the Kirk obviated any need or opportunity for fiscal exaction.

Sec. 7

As it is with the Reformation period that the play of sheer opinion begins to appear distinctly in English politics, so it is in this period that the phenomena of reactions first begin to be in a manner traceable as distinct from military fluctuations. All faction, of course, is a form of the play of opinion; but after the fading away of feudalism the opinion is more easily to be contemplated as a force in itself, alongside of the simpler instincts; and the ebbing and flowing of causes suggests a certain consequence of action and reaction in human affairs. The gain-getting Protestant movement under the Protectorate was followed by the Catholic reaction under Mary; which again bred reaction by ferocity. Catholics grew cold in their allegiance when Romanism yielded such bloody fruits. Protestantism, besides, flourished on the continual poverty of the lower orders, and on the abeyance of international strife--conditions which necessarily set up new movements of combination and repulsion; and when Elizabeth succeeded to the throne, she served to represent, however incongruously, the religious leanings of the democracy, as well as to unite them in the name of patriotism against Rome and Spain. She, again, profited by the monarchic superstition, while she was menaced by its inversion; and it is to be observed that as a woman she gained immunity with her subjects for flaws of character which in a man would have been odious and despicable, where her rival, Mary of Scotland, suffered deposition for actions of a kind which in a man would have been almost spontaneously forgiven. Mary's complicity in the assassination of a base and unfaithful husband was an unpardonable crime from the reigning ethical point of view, which was purely masculine; and the same ethic held in amused toleration the constant bad faith and personal absurdity of Elizabeth,[1064] which rather flattered than endangered the pride of sex. Thus could monarchic politics be swayed by the prevailing psychology of a period, as well as by its class preponderances and interests. The personality of the monarch always counted for much in the determination of his power.

Where Elizabeth gained, however, James lost. Her power was consolidated by the triumph over the Armada, which in the old fashion fused religious strifes in a common warlike exultation, and definitely made England Protestant by setting her in deadly enmity towards the great Catholic power;[1065] just as the state of aggressive hostility towards France under Edward I and Edward III drew Englishmen of all classes into the habit of speaking English and discarding the hitherto common use of French. At the same time the Queen's collisions with Parliament and people were always the less dangerous because she was a woman, and so could yield without indignity where a man would have been humiliated and discredited--an advantage overlooked by the historians who praise her sagacity. Such as it was, it was in large part the sagacity of unscrupulousness; and her success is much more the measure of popular infatuation than of her wisdom. All the while, she had wiser councillors than almost any English monarch before or since; and much of her sagacity was theirs, perhaps even down to some of the unscrupulousness; though on the other hand her fickleness often put them in an evil aspect. Burghley might say what he would, in the loyalist manner, about her inspired judgment; but he knew that she imposed Leicester on the Dutch expedition against his advice, then starved her troops, then upset everything because of the easily predictable disobedience of Leicester in accepting the title of Governor-General from the Dutch.[1066] To say in the face of such methods, as does Mr. Green, that while she had little or no political wisdom, "her political tact was unerring," is to frame a spurious paradox. The more than countervailing admission that "in the profusion and recklessness of her lies Elizabeth stood without a peer in Christendom" is perhaps overcharged: she could not lie more habitually and systematically than did Philip; but in both alike the constant resort to falsehoods for which their antagonists were more or less prepared, is a proof of want of political tact, no less than of want of wisdom.[1067] That she should have been idolised as she was is one of the best proofs of the power of the monarchic feeling; for there has rarely been a less trustworthy woman on a throne. In any circle of sound human beings she would have been disliked and distrusted; yet English tradition celebrates her as admirably English, in the act of blackening by comparison foreign rulers who were at least not conspicuously falser,[1068] meaner,[1069] or more egotistic. What is true is that many of the forces with and against which she intrigued were either unscrupulous or irrational, and that her home tyrannies were no worse than those which would have been committed by Puritans or Catholics or Churchmen had these been free to go at each other's throats as religion bade. Her trickeries on the whole kept things in equilibrium. But conscienceless trickeries they were, and, as such, singular grounds for historical enthusiasm. And it cannot have been any concern for her celibacy, or subtle intuition of its effects on her character, that endeared her to her subjects; for her often alleged virginity, despite the gross scandals to the contrary, was an element in the hallucination concerning her. "Loyalty" haloed her personality. When, however, she was succeeded by a man certainly not worse or more ungenerous, the spell was for the most part broken. James was a Scotchman--a member, albeit a king, of a hostile nation long evilly spoken of; a prince without personal dignity; a pedant without gravity; and the indulgence paid to falsehood and folly in the capriciously headstrong Elizabeth ceased to be accorded to the unmanly and unregal ways of her not unconscientious successor, whose plans for pacifying Europe were much more creditable to him than were her diplomacies to her. But the very preservation of peace served to undo the king's prestige, inasmuch as it furthered the growth of sects and the spirit of criticism. And there can be no doubt that the psychological shrinkage of the monarchy in public esteem in the person of James prepared the way for the resistance to it in the reign of his son.

As against the foregoing views of Henry's and Elizabeth's characters, note should be taken of the doctrine of Dr. Gardiner (History, as cited, i, 43) that "Henry VIII must be judged by" [i.e. in view of the merits of] "the great men who supported his daughter's throne, and who defended the land which he set free when 'he broke the bonds of Rome.' Elizabeth must be judged by the Pyms and Cromwells, who ... owed their strength to the vigour with which she headed the resistance of England against Spanish aggression. She had cleared the way for liberty, though she understood it not." It seems necessary to enter a demurrer to such moral philosophy, of which there is too much in recent English historiography. Considering that the action of Henry towards all who thwarted him was one of brutal terrorism, and that, save as regards his bribes, he cowed alike his peers and his people, the courage shown by their descendants might as rationally be credited to Philip of Spain as to him. And to credit Elizabeth personally with the defeat of the Armada, and consequently with the strength of the later Pyms and Cromwells, is not only to reiterate the same paralogism but to negate common sense as regards the facts of the Armada episode, in which the nation did one half of the work, and the storm the other. Dr. Gardiner, like Mr. Froude, who preaches a similar doctrine, overlooks the consequence that Catholicism on these principles must be credited with the production of Henry and Elizabeth, and therefore with their alleged services. As against such an unmeaning theory we may note another verdict of Dr. Gardiner's (p. 33): "Elizabeth has a thousand titles to our gratitude, but it should never be forgotten that she left, as a legacy to her successor, an ecclesiastical system which, unless its downward course were arrested by consummate wisdom, threatened to divide the nation into two hostile camps, and to leave England, even after necessity had compelled the rivals to accept conditions of peace, a prey to theological rancour and sectarian hatred." How then is the account to be balanced? Dr. Cunningham, we may note, sums up as to the preceding reigns that "the scandalous confiscations of Henry VIII and Edward VI were fatal to rural economy and disastrous to mercantile dealings. The disintegration of society became complete; ... with some exceptions in regard to shipping and possibly in regard to the repair of the towns, there is no improvement, no reconstruction which can be traced to the reign of the Tudor kings" (English Industry, i, 433). Cp. Prof. Rogers's Industrial and Commercial History, p. 12.

Sec. 8

While such changes were being wrought at one end of the political organism, others no less momentous, and partly causative of those, had taken place at the other. By economic writers the period of the Reformation in England is now not uncommonly marked as that of a great alteration for the worse in the lot of the mass of the peasantry.[1070] The connection between the overthrow of the Catholic Church and the agrarian trouble, however, is not of the primary character that is thus supposed: it might be rather called accidental than causal. Suppression of the monasteries could at most only throw into prominence the poverty which the monasteries relieved, but which monasteries always tend to develop.[1071] Wholesale eviction of husbandmen to make way for sheep-farms had taken place, the Church helping, before Henry VIII began to meddle with the Church; and vagabondage and beggary were common in consequence.[1072] The distress was there to begin with, and was increasing, from what period onward it were hard to say.

The early fifteenth-century riots against "enclosures," above mentioned, arose out of the policy of systematically extending pasture, and point to a distress set up by the gradual growth of gain-seeking methods among landowners as against the common people,[1073] whose normal tendency to multiply was a constant force making for poverty, though it was met half-way by the aggression of landlords who found it more profitable to raise and export wool than to farm.[1074] A fresh source of dislocation was the enforcement of laws against the keeping of bands of retainers, a process to which Henry VII specially devoted himself,[1075] thus securing his throne on the one hand while intensifying the evil of depopulation and decreasing tillage, for which on the other hand he tried remedial measures,[1076] of the customary description. Laws were passed forbidding the peasantry to seek industrial employment in the cities--this course being taken as well in the interests of the trades as with the hope of restoring agriculture. One outcome of the circumstances was that sheep-farming, like the cloth manufacture, began to be carried on by capitalists;[1077] the moneyed classes beginning to reach out to the country, while the gentry began to draw towards the towns.[1078] Thus we find in existence long before the Reformation all the economic troubles which some writers attribute to the methods of the Reformation; though the Protestant nobles who scrambled for the plunder of the Church in the reigns of Henry and of Edward VI seem to have done more sheep-farming and depopulating than any others, thereby disposing the people the more to welcome Mary.[1079]

Even Prof. Thorold Rogers, who (overlooking the Act 4 Henry VII) seems to hold that the enclosures in the fifteenth century were not made at the expense of tillage, and that the earliest complaints are in the sixteenth century (History of Agriculture and Prices, iv, 63, 64 note, 109: cp. Cunningham, English Industry, i, 393 note), still shows that there were heavy complaints as early as 1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cc. 5, 6) of a general decay of towns and growth of pastures--long before Henry had meddled with the Church. Bishop Stubbs is explicit on the subject as regards the period of York and Lancaster:--"The price of wool enhanced the value of pasturage; the increased value of pasturage withdrew field after field from tillage; the decline of tillage, the depression of the markets, and the monopoly of the wool trade by the staple towns, reduced those country towns which had not encouraged manufacture to such poverty that they were unable to pay their contingent to the revenue, and the regular sum of tenths and fifteenths was reduced by more than a fifth in consequence. The same causes which in the sixteenth century made the enclosure of the commons a most important popular grievance, had begun to set class against class as early as the fourteenth century, although the thinning of the population by the Plague acted to some extent as a corrective" (Constitutional History, iii, 630; cp. Green, ch. v, Sec. 5, p. 251; ch. vi, Sec. 3, p. 285).

The troubles, again, were fluctuating, the movement of depopulation and sheep-farming being followed in due course by a revival of tillage, while contrary movements might be seen in different parts of the country, according as commercial advantage lay for the moment. In one district it might pay best to rear sheep; in another, by reason of nearness to town markets, it might pay best to grow corn; but the competition of corn imported from the Baltic in return for English exports would be a generally disturbing force. The very improvement of agricultural skill, too, in which Holland led the way,[1080] would tend to lessen employment in the rural districts. Peace and progress, in the absence of science, always thus provide new sources of distress, multiplying heads and hands without multiplying the employment which secures for the multitude a share in the fruits, but always aggrandising those who have contrived to become possessed of the prime monopolies. What went on was a perpetual transference and displacement of well-being, one class rising on another's distress; and after the apparently steady decay of the towns under Henry VIII,[1081] the new lead given to industry in the reign of Elizabeth, by the influx of Protestant refugees from the Netherlands, went to build up an urban middle class which for the time had no political motives to discontent.

Sir Thomas More, in the very passage of the Utopia in which he speaks of the wholesale eviction of husbandmen, tells how "handicraft men, yea, and almost the ploughmen of the country, with all other sorts of people, use much strange and proud new fangleness in their apparel, and too much prodigal riot and sumptuous fare at their table" (bk. i, Robinson's trans.). New wealth and new poverty co-existed. "Cheapness and dearness, plenty and scarcity, of corn and other food, depopulation and rapidly increasing numbers, really co-existed in the kingdom. There were places from which the husbandman and labourer disappeared, and the beasts of the field grazed where their cottages had stood; and there were places where men were multiplying to the dismay of statesmen." Cliffe Leslie, essay on The Distribution and Value of the Precious Metals, vol. cited, p. 268. The whole of this essay is well worth study. Cp. Prof. Ashley, Introduction to Economic History, ii, 50-54.

Sec. 9

Hence there was no continuous pressure of agrarian or industrial politics, and the stress of the instinct of strife went in other directions. The modern reader, seeking for the class politics of the later Tudor period, finds them as it were covered up, save for such an episode as the revolt of 1549, by the record of foreign policy and ecclesiastical strifes, and is apt to condemn the historian for leaving matters so. But in reality class politics was for the most part superseded by sect politics. The new pseudo-culture of bibliolatry, virtually a sophisticated barbarism, had made new paths for feeling; and these being the more durable, the miseries of the evicted rural populations, which forced a Poor Law on the administration, never set up anything approaching to a persistent spirit of insurrection. By the suppression of the old feudal nobility, as already noted, life in general had been made freer; and the monarch for the time being was become a relatively beneficent and worshipful power in the eyes of the mass of the people, while the landowners were grown weak for harm. The destructive passions were running in other channels, and religious hate swallowed up class hate. For the rest, the new aristocracy was thoroughly established; and in the life and work of Shakespeare himself we see the complete acceptance of the readjusted class relation, though we can also see in his pages the possibilities of a new upper class of rich merchants. In his impersonal way he flashes the light of Lear's tardy sympathy on the forlorn world of the homeless poor; and in many a phrase he condenses an intense criticism of the injustices of class rule; but even if, as seems certain, he did not write the Jack Cade scenes in Henry VI, he has little of the purposive democrat in him: rather--though here it is hard indeed to get behind the great humanist's mask--some touch of the fastidious contempt of the noble, himself fickle enough, for the changing voice of the ignorant populace.

On one point of current psychology, however, as on the great issue of religion, Shakespeare's very silence is more significant than speech. After the passionate outburst put in the mouth of the dying John of Gaunt, and the normal patriotism of Henry V, utterances of his early manhood, proceeding upon those of the older plays which he re-wrote, we find in his dramas a notable aloofness from current public passion. This would of course be encouraged by the regulations for the stage; but no regulation need have hindered him from pandering habitually to popular self-righteousness in the matter of national animosities. In 1596 the multitude were all on the side of the fire-eating Essex and against the prudent Burghley in the matter of aggressive war upon Spain; hope of plunder and conquest playing as large a part in their outcry as any better sentiment. The production of Henry V in 1599, with its laudatory allusion to Essex's doings in Ireland, whither he had been accompanied by Shakespeare's patron Southampton, would suggest, if the passage were of his penning,[1082] that the dramatist was one of Essex's partisans. But whichever way he then leaned, no man can gather from his later plays any encouragement to natural passion of any species. It is not merely that he avoids politics after having been compromised by contact with them:[1083] it is that he rises to a higher plane of thought and feeling.[1084] He, if any man, could see the fatuity with which Englishmen denounced cruelty in Spaniards while matching Spanish cruelty in Ireland, and cursed the Inquisition while mishandling Jesuit priests in the Inquisition's own temper. The story of English cruelty in Ireland in Elizabeth's and James's day is one of the most sickening in the history of the epoch.[1085] But no sense of guilt ever checked the blatant self-sufficiency with which the general run of Englishmen of the time inveighed against the misdeeds of the Spaniards: no twinge of self-criticism ever modified their righteous thanksgiving over the defeat of the Armada, which was manned partly to avenge their own massacre and torture of Catholic priests. Their Drakes and Hawkinses, playing the pirate and the slave-stealer, and holding with no qualms the conviction that they were doing God service, made current the cant of Puritanism in the pre-Puritan generation. Godly ruffianism could not later go further than it did in "the Elizabethan dawn"; for Milton's swelling phrase of "God and his Englishmen" did not outgo the self-satisfaction of the previous age, any more than of the later period of "Teutonic" self-glorification. To Shakespeare alone seems to have been possible the simple reflection that God's Spaniards, equating with God's Englishmen, left zero to the philosopher.

It seems clear that the mass of the people, and such leading men as Essex and Raleigh, desired a continuance of the state of war with Spain because of the opportunities it gave for piratical plunder. The queen, who had shared in the loot of a good many such expeditions, might have acquiesced but for Burghley's dissuasion. It was an early sign of predilection to the path of imperialism, on which Cromwell later put one foot, on which Chatham carried the nation far, and which it has in later days at times seemed bent on pursuing. In Elizabeth's day enterprises of plunder, as one writer has pointed out, "became the usual adventure of the times, by which the rich expected to increase their wealth and the prodigal to repair their fortunes"; and the general imagination was fired with similar hopes, till "the people were in danger of acquiring the habits and the calculations of pirates." (J. M'Diarmid, Lives of British Statesmen, 1820, i, 239, 240; cp. Furnivall and Simpson in the latter's School of Shakespeare, 1878, i, pp. x, 32-40; and see Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History, p. 12, as to the contemporary lack of commercial enterprise.) Cecil, in his opposition to the war policy of Essex, remarkably anticipates the view of rational historical science (see Camden's Annales, ed. 1717, iii, 770-71, as to the conflict.) Burghley had equally been the resisting force to the popular desire for an attack on France after the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. His remarkable hostility to militarism is set forth in his Advice to his son, on the head of the training to be given to his children: "Neither, by my consent, shalt thou train them up in wars; for he that sets up his rest to live by that profession can hardly be an honest man or a good Christian." Yet he planned well enough against the Armada. Cp. Creighton, Queen Elizabeth, pp. 236, 237.

Sec. 10

The culture history of the period from Chaucer to Shakespeare is perhaps clearer than the political. It is in the first great lull of the Wars of the Roses, under Edward IV, that we find printing established in England. Original literature had virtually died out, as in northern Europe, in the long stress of physical strife; but the love of reading took a new growth when peace intervened, and a printer found a public for reproductions of the literatures of the past. This culture proceeded under Henry VII, till at the advent of Henry VIII there was a mature movement of scholarship, a product of classical study and reflection, yielding for England the singular and memorable fruit of More's Utopia. That was truly a "Pallas of the brain," not "wild" as in the phrase of the conservative poet, but well-nigh pure of the blind passion of normal life,[1086] and therefore no more than a radiant vision for an age in which blind passion was still plenipotent. More's mind had ripened as it were independently of his temperament; and his life is the tragedy of an intelligence, more haunting and more profoundly instructive than any Hamlet. The serene spirit that dreamed and planned the Utopia grew to be capable of a bitterness of dogmatic fanaticism on a level with the normal passions of the time.[1087] It is matter for surprise that he has not ere now been studied or cited as an apparition of the "Celtic" mind on the arena of brutal English life,[1088] a prematurely penetrating intelligence thrust back upon and enveloped by a temperament kept passionate by the shocks of an animal environment. From his eyes, limned by the great Holbein, there looks out the sadness of flawed and frustrate wisdom; even as blood and passion and fleshly madness are written in the beastlike face of the king, whose little son, ruddy and hardy in his babyhood, pales and pines away through portrait after portrait to puberty and death, the victim of some secret malady.

Neither on the psychological line of More nor on that of Henry could the national culture proceed. It went on naively, being for long neither Puritan nor anti-Puritan, though the loquacious and commonplace utterance of preachers already abounded before the accession of Elizabeth. The Protestantism of the Protectorate was too much a matter of mere plunder to admit of a great religious literature; and nothing is more remarkable in the great imaginative efflorescence under Elizabeth than its un-Puritan secularity. It drew, indeed, from a soil too rich to be yet overrun by fanaticism. The multiplying printing-presses showered forth a hundred translations; the new grammar-schools bore their fruit; the nation grew by domestic peace, even while tillers of the soil were being made beggars; the magic of discovery and travel thrilled men to new exercises of mind and speech; the swarming life of the capital raised the theatre to fecund energy in a generation; and transformed feudalism survived in the guise rather of a guardian to art and letters than of organised class oppression. A new economic factor, conditioned by a new resource, was at work. In More's day there was no such thing as a professional writer, and there were few printed books. The great controversy between Protestants and Catholics gave a new and powerful stimulus to printing, and printing in turn invited literary effort, books finding multiplying purchasers. Then came the growth of the new theatre, an apparent means of livelihood to a crowd of poet-dramatists. No such sudden outcrop of manifold literature had ever before occurred in human history; the mental distance between Elyot and Bacon, between the old interludes and Shakespeare, is as great as that between Hesiod and Euripides. But the secret of continuous progress had not yet been found: it lies, if anywhere, with the science of the future: and the development after the reign of Elizabeth necessarily began to take new lines.

The later profusion of the poetic drama was the profusion of decay. Artistic abundance must mean artistic change or deterioration; but in the drama there was no recasting of the artistic formulas, no refining of the artistic sense, because there was no progress in general culture sufficient to force or educe it. Rather the extraordinary eloquence of the earlier and greater dramatists, and in particular of the greatest, bred a cultus of conventional rhetoric and declamation in which the power and passion of the masters were lost. Powerful men could not go on attending to an infinity of such blank-verse dramas; powerful men could not go on producing dramas, because the mind of the time made no progress complementary to the great flowering of the Elizabethan peace. That was essentially a late rebirth of the classic or bookish culture of the Renaissance. New germinal ideas, apart from those of religion, were yet to come. Already the spell of Bibliolatry was conquering the average intelligence, unprepared to digest Hebraism as the elite of the previous generation had digested classicism; and the Protestant principle led the Protestant peoples in the mass into the very attitude needed for a social hypnotism such as that of Jewry, the fatal exemplar. Bibliolatry is the culture of the ignorant; church government, the politics of the unenfranchised and the impractical; their conditions exclude them from a truer culture and more vital political interests. Already in Henry's time the newly-translated Scriptures were, to his wrath, "disputed, rhymed, sung, and jangled in every tavern and alehouse"; the very stress of his own personal rule being a main part of the cause. Under the Protectorate of Somerset the gross rapacity of the Protestant nobles identified the new Church with upper-class selfishness as completely as the old had ever been; and the Norfolk revolt of 1549 avowedly aimed at the overthrow of the gentry. When that was stamped out in massacre, the spirit of popular independence was broken, save in so far as it could play in the new channel of personal religion and ecclesiastical polemic, always being dug by the disputation of the new clergy. And when in the reign of Mary crowds of Protestant refugees fled to Geneva, of which the polity had already been introduced to the students of Oxford by Peter Martyr, there was set up a fresh ferment of Presbyterian theory among the educated class which the ecclesiastical conditions under Elizabeth could not but foster. The new dramatic literature and the new national life of anti-Spanish adventure kept it all substantially in the background for another generation; but the lack of progressive culture and the restriction of expansive enterprise at length gave the forces of pietism the predominance. Thus, in ways in which the historians of our literature and politics have but imperfectly traced, the balance of the nation's intellectual activity shifted towards the ground of religion and the ecclesiastical life. And only this change of mental drift can account for the new energy of resistance incurred by Charles when he took up with greater obstinacy the lines of policy of his father, meddling with church practice and normal government on the same autocratic principles. Religion and worship were not the sole grounds of quarrel, but they commanded all the other grounds.

The decadence of English poetic drama after the death of Shakespeare is one of the themes which elicit illustrations of the snares of empirical sociology. An able and original literary critic, Mr. G.C. Macaulay, at the close of a very competent study on Francis Beaumont, has formulated a theory of that decadence which calls for revision. He pronounces that by 1615 "the impulse which had moved the older generation was ... almost exhausted. This, as we have already seen, came in the form of an enthusiastic patriotism, ennobling human life, so far at least as Englishmen were concerned in it, and producing a united and national interest in the representation of its problems and destiny" (Francis Beaumont, 1883, p. 187).

Error here emerges at once. It was not national patriotism that evoked either the pre-Shakespearean or the Shakespearean drama. The rude foundations had been laid by many "interludes," by such homespun comedy as Ralph Roister Doister, and by the stilted tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex. The chronicle-plays of Greene and Peele and Marlowe, worked over by Shakespeare, are far from being the best of the pre-Shakespearean drama. Just after the Armada, Marlowe revealed his powers, not in patriotic plays, but in Tamburlaine, followed by The Jew of Malta, and Faustus. The best of the pre-Shakespearean plays on English history was Marlowe's Edward II, in which there was and could be no appeal to patriotic fervour. The best episode in Edward III stands out entirely from the "patriotic" part, which is nearly worthless. The superior episode is probably the work of Greene, whose best complete play, James IV, turns on fictitious Scottish history, and is only momentarily touched by patriotic feeling. Peele's Edward I is inferior as a whole to his David and Bethsabe. Kyd made his successes, literary or theatrical, with The Spanish Tragedy, Arden of Feversham, and the original Hamlet. Shakespeare's best work, from the start, is done not in the chronicle-plays but in his comedies, in his Falstaff scenes, and in his tragedies, from Romeo and Juliet onwards. These had nothing to do with patriotism, enthusiastic or otherwise. And Henry V, which had, is not a great play.

The chief florescence of Elizabethan drama is to be understood in the light of economic causation; and the decline is to be understood similarly. The rise of the London theatres, a process of expansion following on the maintenance of separate companies of players by noblemen and by the court, meant a means of livelihood for actors and playwrights, and of profit for entrepreneurs. Greene and Peele, and Kyd and Marlowe, and Jonson and Chapman, wrote not to evoke or respond to national patriotism, but to provide plays that would sell and "draw." The original genius of Marlowe stimulated the others, who nearly all imitated him. Orlando Furioso, Selimus, Alphonsus King of Arragon, David and Bethsabe, and even The Battle of Alcazar, have nothing to do with patriotism; and the touches of that in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay are subsidiary to the story. There is no extant play on the Armada.

It is pure supererogation, then, to argue that "everything had been done by the first Stuart king to cool down patriotism, and to diminish the self-respect and pride of Englishmen; while at the same time, by his insolent hitherto unheard-of (?) divine-right pretensions, he alarmed them for their political liberties, and by his ecclesiastical policy he exasperated theological controversy; thus contriving, both in politics and in religion, to destroy unity and foster party spirit to an extent which had been unknown for nearly half-a-century. The condition of things," adds Mr. Macaulay, "was unfavourable to everything national, and above all things to the national drama, which became rather the amusement of the idle than the embodiment of a popular enthusiasm." Need it be pointed out that all of Shakespeare's greatest work, after Hamlet, which was anything but "national," was produced after the accession of James? What had popular enthusiasm to do with Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale?

The really explanatory factors are (1) the economic, (2) the trend of popular culture. Shakespeare alone of the dramatists of his day made anything like a good income; and he did so in virtue of being an actor and a prudent partner in the proprietorship of his theatre. Kyd, Greene, and Peele all died in misery; and Marlowe must have lived his short life from hand to mouth. Jonson subsisted chiefly by his masques and by the gifts of patrons, and by his own avowal was always poor. Chapman can have fared no better. The concurrence of the abnormal genius of Shakespeare with his gift of commercial management is one of the rarest things in literary history: take that away, and the problem of the "decadence" is seen to be merely part of the statement of the "rise." When men of superior power, taught by the past, ceased to defy poverty by writing for the theatre--and even the vogue of Fletcher and Massinger represented no solid monetary success--plays could less than ever appeal to the "serious" and sectarian sections of the London public. Popular culture ran on the sterile lines of pietism, Puritanism, and the strifes engendered between these and sacerdotalism. All this had begun long before James, though he may have promoted the evolution. Literary art perforce turned to other forms. A successful national war could no more have regenerated the drama than the wars of Henry V could generate it. There was plenty of "national enthusiasm" later, in the periods of Marlborough and Chatham: there was no great drama; and the new fiction had as little to do with patriotism as had Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was not inspired by his politics.

It is well to recognise, finally, that in the nature of things aesthetic, every artistic convention must in time be "played out," the law of variation involving deviations or recoils. Blank-verse drama is a specially limited convention, which only great genius can vitalise. Even in this connection, however, there is danger in a priori theorising. Mr. Macaulay quotes from Schlegel the generalisation that "in the commencement of a degeneracy in the dramatic art, the spectators first lose the capability of judging of a play as a whole"; hence "the harmony of the composition, and the due proportion between all the various parts is apt to be neglected, and the flagging interest is stimulated by scenes of horror or strange and startling incidents." The implication is that the Jacobean drama degenerated in this way. Again the facts are opposed to the thesis. If we are to believe Shakespeare and Jonson and Beaumont, the audiences never appreciated plays as wholes. Scenes of "comic relief," utterly alien to the action, come in as early as Locrine. Scenes of physical and moral horror, again, abound in the pre-Shakespearean drama: in The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham, in David and Bethsabe, in Titus Andronicus (a pre-Shakespearean atrocity), in Selimus and Tancred and Gismunda, and Alphonsus Emperor of Germany (a Greene-Peele play wrongly ascribed to Chapman), they are multiplied ad nauseam. Rapes, assassinations, incest, tearing-out of eyes and cutting-off of hands, the kissing of a husband's excised heart by his wife, the unwitting eating of her children's flesh by a mother, the dashing out of a child's brains by its grandfather--such are among the flowers of the Elizabethan time. On Schlegel's theory, there was degeneration before there was success. Webster's "horrors" do not seem to have won him great vogue; and Ford's neurotic products had no great popularity. Doubtless weak performers tend to resort to violent devices; but they did so before Shakespeare; and Shakespeare did not stick at trifles in Lear and Othello.

Decadence in art-forms, in short, is to be studied like other forms of decadence, in the light of the totality of conditions; and is not to be explained in terms of itself. Mr. Macaulay's thesis as a whole might be rebutted by simply citing the fact that the florescence of Spanish drama at the hands of Lope de Vega and Calderon occurred in a period of political decline, when "patriotic enthusiasm" had nothing to live upon. Vega began play-writing just after the defeat of the Armada; and his Dragontea, written in exultation over the death of Drake, is not a memorable performance. Velasquez, like Calderon, flourished under Philip IV, in a time of national depression and defeat.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 987: "The distinctive characteristics of the Saxon race--talents for agriculture, navigation, and commerce" (T. Colley Grattan, The Netherlands, 1830, p. 2).]

[Footnote 988: A.L. Smith, in Social England, i, 201, 202. When Alfred built ships he had to get "Frisian pirates" to man them. It was clearly the new agricultural facilities of England that turned the original pirates into thorough landsmen. Cp. Dr. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 3rd ed. 1896, App. E. pp. 640, 641.]

[Footnote 989: H. Hall, in Social England, i, 464. Cp. ii, 101; Prof. Ashley, Introduction to English Economic History, 1888-93, i, 111; Hallam, Middle Ages, 11th ed. iii, 327; Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, 1889, i, 1. When the Jews were expelled by Edward I, Lombards were installed in their place. Later, as we shall see, the Hansards seem to have tutored natives up to the point of undertaking their own commerce.]

[Footnote 990: Cp. A.L. Smith, as cited, p. 203.]

[Footnote 991: Seebohm, The English Village Community, 3rd ed. 1884, pref. p. ix. Cp. Prof. Ashley, Introduction to English Economic History, i, 13-16.]

[Footnote 992: Prof. Maitland, the most circumspect opponent of the "serf" view, did not consider this when he asked (Domesday Book and Beyond, ed. 1907, p. 222) how either the Saxon victors could in the mass have sunk to serfdom or the conquered Britons, whose language had disappeared, could be so numerous as to constitute the mass of the population.]

[Footnote 993: That the serf or villein was not necessarily an abject slave is noted by Kemble (Saxons in England, as cited, i, 213) and Stubbs (Const. Hist. 4th ed. i, 466).]

[Footnote 994: Maitland, Domesday Book, pp. 43, 46.]

[Footnote 995: This seems a more probable etymology than the derivation by spelling from Knabe.]

[Footnote 996: Cp. the Rev. G. Hill, Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest, 1904, pp. 60-61.]

[Footnote 997: Green, History (the longer), 1885, i, 79.]

[Footnote 998: Thierry, Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre, edit. 9e, 1851, i, 152-55; Duruy, Hist. de France, ed. 1880, i, 289.]

[Footnote 999: Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 1907, pp. 3-5.]

[Footnote 1000: Cp. Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 116, 1-vol. ed. p. 351; Stubbs, Const. Hist. i, 280; Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. i, 213. "The princes who lived upon the worst terms with their barons seem accordingly to have been the most liberal in grants ... to their burghs." Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iii.]

[Footnote 1001: The Conqueror himself not only took pains to protect and attach native freemen who accepted his rule, but sought to retain their laws and usages. Cp. Stubbs, i, 281, 290, 298. The statement that he aimed specially at the manumission of serfs (Sharon Turner, as last cited, i, 135, 136) proceeds on a fabricated charter. That, however, is not later than Henry I.]

[Footnote 1002: Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, bk. xiv, ch. i.]

[Footnote 1003: E.g. the rivalries of mendicant friars and secular priests and monks, and of the different orders of monks and friars with each other. Cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, 4th ed. ix, 145, 146, 155, 156; Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, iii, 123-26, 137, etc. The strifes between popes and prelates are innumerable, in all countries.]

[Footnote 1004: As to this see Dr. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 3rd ed. 1896, Appendix E. Cp. Green, Short History, ch. ii, Sec. 6, p. 88.]

[Footnote 1005: As to which see Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, 3rd ed. pp. 54-66.]

[Footnote 1006: This is explicitly admitted by Buckle (3-vol. ed. ii, 118; 1-vol. ed. p. 352), though he does not thereafter speak consistently on the subject.]

[Footnote 1007: Cp. Buckle, as last cited; Green. History (the larger), 1885, i. 300.]

[Footnote 1008: Stubbs, iii, 606.]

[Footnote 1009: Karl Hegel notes (Staedte und Gilden der germanischen Voelker im Mittelalter, pp. 33-34) that the Anglo-Saxon gilds seem to have had no connection with towns or communes, and that their societies might serve as a type for any class-association.]

[Footnote 1010: Cp. Green, Short History, ch. iv, Sec. 4, pp. 192, 193; ch. vi, Sec. 3, p. 285; Prof. Ashley, Introd. to English Economic History, 1888-93, i, 71, 75, 85, 87, 89; ii, 12, 14, 19, 49. Prof. Ashley notes a great change for the better in the fifteenth century (work cited, ii, 6), and a further advance in the sixteenth (ii, 42).]

[Footnote 1011: Cp. J.H. Round, The Commune of London, 1899, p. 224.]

[Footnote 1012: "After Crecy and Calais, Edward felt himself strong enough to disregard the Commons.... His power was for the most part great or small, as his foreign policy was successful or disastrous" (Pearson, English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 224, 225). See also Stubbs, iii, 608; and compare the case of Henry V.]

[Footnote 1013: Cp. Prof. Ashley, i, 88.]

[Footnote 1014: As to Flemish influence on early English progress, see Prof. Thorold Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History of England, 1892, pp. 10, 11, 301-303.]

[Footnote 1015: Hallam. Middle Ages, iii. 321, 322.]

[Footnote 1016: Gardiner, Student's History of England, p. 69; Gneist, as cited above, p. 376. Cp. Gardiner's Introduction to the Study of English History, p. 91: "Even the House of Commons, which was pushing its way to a share of power, was comparatively an aristocratic body. The labouring population in town and country had no share in its exaltation. Even the citizens, the merchants and tradesmen of the towns, looked down upon those beneath them without trust or affection." Magna Carta itself was a protection only for "freemen."]

[Footnote 1017: Cp. Gibbins. Industrial History of England, pp. 36, 37; Pearson, History of England during the Early and Middle Ages, ii, 378.]

[Footnote 1018: See Pearson's English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 23, 228, 253, etc.; cp. p. 225. In the thirteenth century Frederick II had enfranchised all the serfs on his own domains (Milman, Latin Christianity, vi, 153); and a similar policy had become general in the Italian cities. Louis VI and Louis VII of France had even enfranchised many of their serfs in the twelfth century, and Louis X carried out the policy in 1315. Cp. Duruy, Hist. de France, i, 291, note. England in these matters was not forward, but backward.]

[Footnote 1019: Froissart, liv. ii, ch. 106, ed. Buchon, 1837. The southern counties, however, were perhaps then as now less democratic, less "free," than the northern.]

[Footnote 1020: Compare Mackintosh's rhetoric as to Magna Carta constituting "the immortal claim of England on the esteem of mankind" (History of England, 1830, i, 222), and as to Simon de Montfort, whom he credits with inventing the idea of representation in Parliament for cities (p. 238).]

[Footnote 1021: Duruy, Hist. de France, i, 289.]

[Footnote 1022: Cp. Guizot, Essais sur l'histoire de France, 7e edit. p. 322.]

[Footnote 1023: This had, however, been employed as early as 1246.]

[Footnote 1024: Cp. Pearson, as last cited, p. 8.]

[Footnote 1025: As to what traffic actually took place in the Dark Ages, cp. Heyd, Histoire du commerce de Levant, Fr. tr. 1886, i, 94-99.]

[Footnote 1026: Cox, The Crusades, p. 146.]

[Footnote 1027: Pignotti, History of Tuscany, Eng. trans. 1823, iii, 256-62.]

[Footnote 1028: Hist. de la Civ. en France, ed. 13e, iii, 6e lecon.]

[Footnote 1029: Down even to the points of chastity and "training."]

[Footnote 1030: This is now pretty generally recognised. Among recent writers compare Green, Short History, ch. iv, Sec. 3; Pearson, as last cited, p. 220; Gardiner, Student's History of England, p. 235; and Introduction to the Study of English History, p. 91. See also Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 133; 1-vol. ed. p. 362. The sentimental view is still extravagantly expressed by Ducoudray, Histoire sommaire de la civilisation, 1886.]

[Footnote 1031: Pignotti, as cited, iii, 279; G. Villani, Cronica, xii, 54-56.]

[Footnote 1032: Cp. Thierry, Histoire de la Conquete, iv, 210. As Thierry notes (p. 247), John Ball's English is much less Gallicised than that which became the literary tongue.]

[Footnote 1033: "Depuis les dominateurs de l'Orient jusqu'aux maitres de Rome asservie ... quiconque detient la liberte d'autrui dans la servitude, perd la sienne...." (Morin, Origines de la democratie, pp. 137-38).]

[Footnote 1034: Cp. Busch, England unter den Tudors, 1892, i, 6.]

[Footnote 1035: Stubbs, Const. Hist., iii, 632, 633; Busch, England unter den Tudors, i, 81; Green, ch. vi, Sec. 3, pp. 267, 268, 287, 288.]

[Footnote 1036: Cp. Gardiner, Student's History, p. 330.]

[Footnote 1037: The clergy and the Parliament seem to have applauded the project of an invasion of France instantly and without reservation (Sharon Turner, History of England during the Middle Ages, ii, 383). And already in the minority of Henry VI "the Parliament was fast dying down into a mere representation of the baronage and the great landowners" (Green, ch. vi, p. 265). "Never before and never again for more than two hundred years were the Commons so strong as they were under Henry IV" (Stubbs, iii, 73).]

[Footnote 1038: Pearson, English History in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 250, 251. Among the minor forms of oppression were local vetoes on the grinding of the people's own corn by themselves in their handmills. Thus "the tenants of St. Albans extorted a licence to use querns at the time of Tyler's rebellion" (Morgan, England under the Normans, 1858, p. 161).]

[Footnote 1039: As to the failure of these laws see Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 196 sq.]

[Footnote 1040: Id. p. 200.]

[Footnote 1041: Lewis's Life of Wiclif, ed. 1820, pp. 224, 225; Lechler's John Wycliffe and his English Precursors, Eng. tr. 1-vol. ed. pp. 371-76; Prof. Montagu Burrows, Wiclif's Place in History, p. 19.]

[Footnote 1042: Green, Short History, ch. v, Sec. 4; Gardiner, Introduction, pp. 94-98; Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272.]

[Footnote 1043: Cp. Sharon Turner, England during the Middle Ages, ii, 263; iii, 108; Milman, Latin Christianity, viii, 213, 215.]

[Footnote 1044: Green, ch. v, Sec. 5, p. 255; Stubbs, iii, 609-10. He further refused the petition from the Commons in 1391, demanding that no "neif or villein" should be allowed to have his children educated. Cp. de Montmorency, State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 27.]

[Footnote 1045: Green, p. 258; Stubbs, iii. 32. It is plain that among the factious nobility, and even the courtiers, of the time there was a strong disposition to plunder the Church (Stubbs, iii, 43, 48, 53). Doubt is cast by Bishop Stubbs on Walsingham's story of the Lollard petition of 1410 for the confiscation of the lands of bishops and abbots, and the endowment therewith of 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,000 esquires, and 100 hospitals (Stubbs, iii, 65; cp. Milman, Latin Christianity, viii, 214; ix, 17-18); but in any case many laymen leant to such views, and the king's resistance was steadfast. Yet an archbishop of York, a bishop, and an abbot successively rebelled against him. On his hanging of the archbishop, see the remarkable professional reflections of Bishop Stubbs (iii, 53).]

[Footnote 1046: Act 2 Hen. IV, c. 15. Cp. de Montmorency, State Intervention in English Education, 1902, p. 36.]

[Footnote 1047: Stubbs, iii, 626; de Montmorency, p. 29; Act 7 Hen. IV, c. 17.]

[Footnote 1048: Schanz (Englische Handelspolitik, i, 349, 350) decides that the middle class was the only one which gained. The lower fared as ill as the upper. Cp. Stubbs, iii, 610.]

[Footnote 1049: Hallam (Constitutional History, 10th ed. 1, 10) doubts whether Henry VII carried the power of the Crown much beyond the point reached by Edward. Busch, who substantially agrees (England unter den Tudors, i, 8, note), misreads Hallam in criticising him, overlooking the "much." Edward had so incensed the London traders by his exactions that it was by way of undertaking to redress these and similar grievances that Richard III ingratiated himself (Green, pp. 293-94).]

[Footnote 1050: Cp. Green, pp. 285-86.]

[Footnote 1051: Stubbs, iii, 283; Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 326, 328; Green, ch. vi, Sec. 3, p. 282. This, however, did not mean the maintenance of English shipping, which declined. See Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; and cp. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry, Sec. 121. "France seems to have had a considerable share of foreign commerce near a century before England was distinguished as a commercial country" (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, bk. iii, ch. iv). Yet fishing and seafaring ranked as the main national industries (Busch, England unter den Tudors, i, 251).]

[Footnote 1052: See Stubbs, i, 675, as to the large foreign element in the London population, apart from the Hansa factory; and cp. Ashley, Introd. to Economic History, ii, 209.]

[Footnote 1053: The fact that the Scandinavian kings were eager to damage the Hansa by encouraging English and Dutch traders would be a special stimulus.]

[Footnote 1054: Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 392.]

[Footnote 1055: Busch, England unter den Tudors, i, 250-65. Edward had actually traded extensively on his own account, freighting ships to the Mediterranean with tin, wool, and cloth Green, p. 287; Henry, History of Great Britain, ed. 1823, xii, 309, 315-16; Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 10; Hall's Chronicle, under Henry VII.]

[Footnote 1056: Green, p. 295.]

[Footnote 1057: "Something like a fifth of the actual land in the kingdom was ... transferred from the holding of the Church to that of nobles and gentry" (Green, ch. vii, Sec. 1, p. 342).]

[Footnote 1058: Cp. E. Armstrong, Introduction to Martin Hume's Spain, 1898, pp. 13, 19, 29; Prescott, History of Ferdinand and Isabella, pt. i, ch. vi, end; Hallam, Middle Ages, iii, 331.]

[Footnote 1059: See Stubbs, iii, 626-28, as to the extent to which ability to read was spread among the common people. As to the general effect on mental life see the vigorous though uncritical panegyric of Hazlitt, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, ed. 1870, pp. 12-17.]

[Footnote 1060: As to the democratic element in Calvinism, which develops from Lollardism, see the interesting remarks of Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 339; 1-vol. ed. p. 481. Prof. Gardiner sums up (Introduction to the Study of English History, pp. 97, 98) "that as soon as Lollardism ceased to be fostered by the indignation of the labouring class against its oppressors, it dwindled away." Compare the conclusions of Prof. Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 272, and see above, p. 390. Prof. Rogers (p. 273) traces the success of the Reformation in the Eastern counties to the long work of Lollardism there. In the same district lay the chief strength of the Rebellion. Compare his Economic Interpretation of History, pp. 79-91.]

[Footnote 1061: Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 45.]

[Footnote 1062: Cp. Pulszky, The Theory of Law and Civil Society, p. 206. "Theocracy in itself, being the hierarchical rule of a priestly class, is but a species of aristocracy." And see Buckle's chapter, "An Examination of the Scotch Intellect during the Seventeenth Century" (3-vol. ed. iii, 211, 212; 1-vol. ed. pp. 752-53; and notes 36, 37, 38) for the express claims of the Scotch clergy to give out "the whole counsel of God."]

[Footnote 1063: Dr. Gardiner writes:--"Nor was it indifference alone which kept these powerful men aloof; they had an instinctive feeling that the system to which they owed their high position was doomed, and that it was from the influence which the preachers were acquiring that immediate danger was to be apprehended to their own position" (last cit.). One is at a loss to infer how the historian can know of or prove the existence of such an instinct.]

[Footnote 1064: In her partialities she was fully as ill-judging as Mary of Scotland. To the eye of the Spanish ambassador Dudley was "heartless, spiritless, treacherous, and false" (Bishop Creighton, Queen Elizabeth, ed. 1899, p. 65). Essex in turn was a furious fool.]

[Footnote 1065: As to the change in English feeling between 1580, when the Catholic missionaries were widely welcomed, and the years after 1588, see The Dynamics of Religion, by "M.W. Wiseman" (J.M. R.). Cp. Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 15: "Every threat uttered by a Spanish ambassador rallied to the national government hundreds who in quieter times would have looked with little satisfaction on the changed ceremonies of the Elizabethan Church."]

[Footnote 1066: Cp. Motley, History of the United Netherlands, 1867, i, 391 sq.]

[Footnote 1067: In his Introduction to the Study of English History (1881) Prof. Gardiner, through a dozen pages, discusses the action of Elizabeth's government solely in terms of her personality, never once mentioning her advisers. On this line he reaches the proposition that "the homage, absurd as it came to be, which was paid to the imaginary beauties of the royal person was in the main only an expression of the consciousness that peace and justice, the punishment of wickedness and vice, and the maintenance of good order and virtue, came primarily from the queen and secondarily from the Church." One is moved to suggest that the nonsense in question was not so bottomless as it is here virtually made out.]

[Footnote 1068: "There was no truth nor honesty in anything she said" (Bishop Creighton, Queen Elizabeth, p. 60; cp. pp. 76, 91, 112, 181, 216, 228-31).]

[Footnote 1069: Her practice of leaving her truest servants to bear their own outlays in her service, begun with Cecil (Creighton, p. 63), was copied from Charles V and Philip II, but was carried farther by her than ever by them. All the while she heaped gifts on her favourites.]

[Footnote 1070: E.g., Mr. Gibbins's Industrial History of England, pp. 84-89, 105. The point of view seems to have been set up by Cobbett's History of the Reformation.]

[Footnote 1071: Cp. Ashley, Introd. to Economic History, ii, 312-15.]

[Footnote 1072: Cp. More's Utopia, bk. i (Arber's ed. p. 41; Morley's, p. 64); and Bacon's History of Henry VII, Bohn ed. p. 369. More expressly charges certain Abbots with a share in the process of eviction.]

[Footnote 1073: Cp. Green, ch. vi, Sec. 3. Green goes on to speak of the earlier Statutes of Labourers as setting up the "terrible heritage of a pauper class" (p. 286, also p. 250). This is a fresh error of the same sort as that above dealt with. A pauper class was inevitable, whatever laws were made.]

[Footnote 1074: Bishop Stubbs puts it (iii, 283) that the increase of commerce during the Wars of the Roses was "to some extent a refuge for exhausted families, and a safety-valve for energies shut out of their proper sphere." The proposition in this form is obscure.]

[Footnote 1075: On this see Stubbs, ch. xxi, Sec.Sec. 470, 471.]

[Footnote 1076: Act 4 Hen. VII, c. 12, preamble, and c. 19.]

[Footnote 1077: Cp. Moreton on Civilisation, 1836, p. 106; Cunningham, English Industry, i, 392.]

[Footnote 1078: Cp. Cliffe Leslie, Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, p. 267; Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution, pp. 63, 66; Gibbon's Memoirs, beginning.]

[Footnote 1079: Gardiner, Introd. to Eng. Hist. 1881, p. 118; Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, i, 434.]

[Footnote 1080: Rogers, Story of Holland, p. 217, and Six Centuries, p. 184; W.T. McCullagh's Industrial History of the Free Nations, 1846, ii, 42, 272; Gibbins, pp. 104, 109.]

[Footnote 1081: Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, iv, 106, 108, citing Acts 6 Hen. VIII, c. 6, and 32 Hen. VIII, cc. 18, 19.]

[Footnote 1082: It is in the prologue to Act v, 11. 30-34. I affirm without hesitation that the prologues to all five Acts are non-Shakespearean, and plainly by one other hand. Compare the chorus prologues to Dekker's Old Fortunatus, which are in exactly the same style. In the latest biography, however (Lee's, p. 174), there is no recognition of any such possibility. It is surprising that Steevens and Ritson, who pronounced the prologue to Troilus and Cressida non-Shakespearean, should not have suspected those to Henry V, which are so signally similar in style. Dekker's connection with Troilus and Cressida is indicated by Henslowe's Diary. The style is a nearly decisive clue to his authorship of the Henry V prologues.]

[Footnote 1083: Lee's Life, pp. 175, 176.]

[Footnote 1084: A theory of this is suggested in the author's Montaigne and Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 1085: Cp. Froude, History of England, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507, 508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky's _History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century_, i, 8; Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox, Key to the Irish Question, 1890, ch. xxix; and the author's The Saxon and the Celt, pp. 148-54.]

[Footnote 1086: Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, Sec. 4, p. 311.]

[Footnote 1087: See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character of Sir Thomas More," in the Amenities of Literature.]

[Footnote 1088: Compared with Henry VIII, More might be pronounced a specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!]

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH

Sec. 1

Nearly all the conceivable materials of disaffection, save personal misconduct on the king's part,[1089] went to prepare the Great Rebellion. Religious antipathies, indeed, no longer rested on the naked ground of lands taken and in danger of being re-taken;[1090] but there had been developed an intense animus of Protestant against Catholic, the instinct of strife running the more violently in that channel because so few others were open, relatively to the store of restless brute force in the country. Perhaps, indeed, Presbyterians hated Episcopalians and Arminians, at bottom, nearly as much as they did Catholics; but the chronic panics, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, the mythology of the Marian period, and the story of the massacres of Alva and of St. Bartholomew's Day, served to unite Protestants in this one point of anti-Papalism, and had set up as it were a new human passion in the sphere of English politics. And to this passion James and Charles in turn ran counter with an infatuated persistence. James, who was so much more annoyed by Puritans than by Papists, planned for his son, with an eye to a dowry, the Spanish marriage, which of all possible matches would most offend the English people; and when that fell through, another Catholic bride was found in the daughter of the King of France. The pledges, so natural in the circumstances, to "tolerate" Catholics in England, were a standing ground of panic to the intolerant Protestants, even though unfulfilled; and the new king stood in the sinister position of sheltering in his household the religion for which he dared not claim freedom in the country. Such a ground of unpopularity could be balanced only by some signal grounds of favour; but James and Charles alike chose unpopular grounds of war, and failed badly to boot. To crown all, they exhibited to the full the hereditary unwisdom of their dynasty in the choice of favourites;[1091] and the almost unexampled animosity incurred by Buckingham could not but reflect somewhat towards Charles, whose refined and artistic tastes, besides, made him the natural enemy of the text-worshipping and mostly art-hating Puritans.

Thus everything made for friction between king and subjects; and when Charles, to raise necessary funds, resorted to measures of no abnormal oppressiveness as compared with those of the Tudors, he was doggedly resisted by Parliaments professedly standing on law, but really actuated by a fixed suspicion of all his aims. Teeth were on edge all round. When a merchant, mulcted in a heavy customs duty, happened to be a Puritan, he resisted with a special zest; and one such declared before the Privy Council that "in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the merchants so screwed and wrung as in England."[1092] The King, unhappily for himself, conciliated nobody. Not content with alienating nobles by imposing huge fines in revival of the forest laws, he incensed the Corporation of London by confiscating their estates in Ulster, conferred by his father, and levying a fine of L70,000 to boot, for alleged breaches of Charter.[1093] Besides selling many trade monopolies, he passed vexatious sumptuary laws, fixing the prices of poultry, butter, and coals, and insisting on the incorporation of all tradesmen and artificers.[1094] The friction was well-nigh universal; and but for the remarkable prosperity built up by the long peace,[1095] the trouble might have come much sooner. But it is idle to keep up the pretence that what was at stake was the principle of freedom. The first demand of the Parliamentary Opposition was for the more thorough persecution of the Catholics. Parliamentarians such as Eliot were more oppressive in religious matters than Laud himself. He sought only uniformity of worship, they uniformity of doctrine; and they punished for heresy more unpardonably than did the Star Chamber for gross libel.

See Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, small ed. v, 191, as to Eliot's plans to fit out the fleet by means of "those penalties the Papists have already incurred"--a proposal which, says Dr. Gardiner, "if it had been translated into figures, would have created a tyranny too monstrous to be contemplated with equanimity." And Eliot was all for a persecution of the Arminians (id. vii, 42-43). In 1645 the Corporation of London petitioned Parliament to suppress "all sects without toleration."

Nor were they less oppressive in their fiscal policy. After beginning a revolt against illegal taxation, Pym secured the imposition of taxes on beverages (1643), on flesh, salt, textile goods, and many other commodities, "at the sword's point," against the general resistance of the people.[1096] There were at work a hundred motives of strife; and it was only the preternatural ill-luck or unwisdom of Charles that united Parliament against him so long. It needed all the infatuation of an express training in the metaphysics of divine right to enable a king of England, even after James I, to blunder through the immense network of superstition that hedged him round; indeed, the very intensity of the royalist superstition best explains the royal infatuation. So fixed was the monarchic principle in the minds of the people, who, then as later, swore by monarchy but hated paying for it, that in the earlier years of the struggle not even the zealots could have dreamt of the end that was to be. Regicide entered no man's mind, even as a nightmare.

Sec. 2

On Charles, as the greatest "architect of ruin" in English political history, psychological interest fastens with only less intensity than on his great antagonist. The astonishing triple portrait by Vandyke reveals, with an audacity that is positively startling when we think of the other effigies by the same artist, a character stamped at once with impotence and untruth. One slight suggestion of strength lies in the look of grave self-esteem--a quality which would in Charles be fostered from the first by his refined revolt from the undignified ways of his father; but it is withal the very countenance of duplicity. Puritan prejudice could not exaggerate the testimony of the daring artist. We seem to understand at once how he deceived and alienated Holland and Spain as well as the parties among his own subjects. And it was the very excess of duplicity, or rather the fatal combination of duplicity with infirmity of purpose,[1097] that destroyed the man. As the war wore on, and above all after it was closed, the discords of the Parliament and the army were such that the most ordinary practical sagacity could have turned them to the triumph of the king's cause. This is the most instructive phase of the Rebellion. The Presbyterian majority which had grown up in Parliament--a growth still imperfectly elucidated--represented only one of the great warring sects of the day; and if, after Independency, led by Cromwell, had come to daggers drawn with the despots of the Commons, Charles had only agreed to any working settlement whatever, he might with perfect confidence have left the conflicting forces to throttle each other afterwards. Any arrangement he might have made, whether with the Presbyterians or with Cromwell, would have broken down of itself, and he might have set up his own polity in the end. But he so enjoyed his intrigues, as it were indemnifying himself by them for his weakness of will, that he thought to triumph by them alone, and would not wait for the slower chemistry of normal political development; so that the Independents, driven desperate by his deceits, had to execute him in self-preservation.

Sec. 3

As it was, the history of the Rebellion remains none the less the tragi-comedy of the old constitutionalism. Parliament, resisting as illegal the supremacy of the king, went from one illegality to another in resisting him, till his tyrannies became trivial in comparison. And Cromwell, who must have set out with convictions about the sanctity of law, although doubtless fundamentally moved by the all-pervading fear of Popery, was led by an ironical fate, step by step, into a series of political crimes which, if those of Charles deserved beheading, could be coped with only in the medieval hell.

Cp. Hallam, ii, 252; and Cowley's Essays, ed. 1868, p. 139 et seq. To say nothing of Cromwell's illegal exactions, his selling of at least fifty Englishmen into slavery in the West Indies (on which see Cowley, p. 168; Hallam, ii, 271, note; and Carlyle, Letters and Speeches, ed. 1857, iii, 100--where the victims are put at "hundreds")--albeit no worse than the similar selling of Irish and Scotch prisoners--was an act which, if committed earlier by any king, would have covered his name with historical infamy. Prof. Firth points out that the practice began under James I, but it was then applied only to felons and vagrants. Cromwell's example was followed under Charles II with regard to the Covenanting rebels in Scotland; and the plan was again followed in the cases of Monmouth's rebellion and that of 1715. (Cited in note on Lomas's ed. of Carlyle's Cromwell, ii, 438.) As regards Ireland, the selling of prisoners into slavery was not restricted to the case of the survivors of Drogheda (Carlyle's Cromwell, as cited, ii, 53; ed. Lomas, i, 469). It is proved that Cromwell's agents captured not only youths, but girls, for export to the West Indies (Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement, 2nd ed. p. 89); and that the slavery there was of the cruellest sort (Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, ii, 109), though it has to be kept in view that it was not perpetual; the victim being strictly an "indentured labourer," only for a certain number of years at the mercy of his owner (Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. iii, 309-10, note; iv, 111-13). Of course the limitation of the term made the servitude all the more severe (Lomas's note cited).

In the end, the Protector terrorised his own law courts as Charles had never dared to do. See Clarendon, bk. xv, ed. Oxford, 1843, p. 862, and Hallam, ii, 253, 271, 272, note. Cromwell's language, as recorded by Clarendon, would startle some of his admirers by its indecency if they took the trouble to read the passage. Cp. Vaughan, Hist. of England under the Stuarts, etc., p. 524 (citing Whitelocke and Ludlow), as to the law courts. Vaughan overlooks the selling of royalists as slaves.

It was small wonder that posterity came to canonise the king; for in terms even of the Roundhead principles of impeachment he was a political saint in comparison with the "usurper." And royalists might well imagine Cromwell as haunted by remorse; for nothing short of the "besotted fanaticism" of which, as Hallam pronounces, he had sucked the dregs, could keep him self-complacent over the retrospect of the Civil War when he was governing by the major-generals, after failing to govern with farcically packed Parliaments. His fanaticism was, of course, in the ratio of his will-power, but each supported the other. The modern exaltation of his character, as against the earlier and rather saner habit of crediting him with great powers, relatively high purposes, and great misdeeds,[1098] has tended to throw in the shade the blazing lesson of his career, which is that, like most of his colleagues, he had set out with no political insight or foresight whatever. His conscientious beginnings are so utterly at issue with his endings that it is indeed almost superfluous to condemn either--as superfluous as to denounce the infatuation of Charles. But it is of importance to remember that his very success as a Carlylean ruler only emphasises the failure of his original politics. He succeeded by way of repudiating nearly every principle on behalf of which he had taken up arms. Even apart from the invigorating spectacle of his executive genius,[1099] he may well stir our sympathy, which is more subtly and deeply exercised by his inner tragedy, by the deadliness of his success in the light of his aims, than by the simpler ill-fortune of Charles. But as politicians our business is not to divide our sympathies between the powerful pietist who was forced to give the lie to his life to save it, and the weak liar who lost his life because he was at bottom faithful to his life's creed. The superiority of Cromwell in strength of will and in administrative faculty is too glaring to need acknowledging; and the lesson that a strong man can tyrannise grossly where a weak man cannot tyrannise trivially, is not one that particularly needs pressing. What it is essential to note is that the course of events which forced and led Cromwell into despotism was for the next generation a strong argument against free Parliamentary government.

Our generation, proceeding mainly on the work of Carlyle, who never really elucidates or even seeks to comprehend political and social developments, has in large part lost sight of the fact that Cromwell was more and more clearly becoming a military despot; and that with twenty more years of life he might have established a new military and naval empire. Yet at the time of his death his financial position was that of a military adventurer at his wits' end, and his unscrupulous attack on Spain was plainly planned by way of coming at money.[1100] Dr. Gardiner, who has been the first English[1101] historian to handle the case with comprehensive insight, rightly compares the position of Cromwell with that of Napoleon. He was in fact just another sample of the recurrent type of the military ruler establishing himself as despot on the ruins of faction. "Except for four months ... the whole of the Protectorate was a time either of war or of active preparation for war; and even during those months the Protector was hesitating, not whether he should keep the peace or not, but merely what enemy he should attack."[1102] Finally he made war on Spain, by the admission of the friendly historian, "after the fashion of a midnight conspirator," deceiving the other side in order to gain a mean advantage.[1103] To such a policy there was no limit in national conscience, any more than in his. He had a standing army of 57,000 men, an immense force for the England of that day; his revenue stood at two millions and a quarter, nearly four times the figure of twenty years before; and still he was in desperate financial straits, his outlays being nearly half a million in excess of the income.[1104] The result was "a war for material gains"; and it consists with all we know of history to say that with continued success in such undertakings during a lengthened life he would have won the mass of his countrymen to his allegiance.

A few dates and details make the process dramatically clear. Admiral Blake won his first notable victory over Van Tromp in February, 1653; and in April Cromwell felt himself in a position to expel the recalcitrant Parliament, though that had always specially favoured the navy. In this act he had the general approval of the people;[1105] but he took care to change some of the naval commanders.[1106] The next Parliament was the nominated one called the "Barebones," wherein none were elected, and which went to pieces in the strife of its factions, since even nomination could not secure concord among Puritans. Then came the Parliament of 1654, elected from purged constituencies. From this were excluded a hundred members who refused to sign an engagement not to alter the system in force; and finally the remnant was angrily dissolved, and military rule established under the major-generals. Yet again, in 1656, driven by need of money, the Protector called another packed Parliament, from which he nevertheless lawlessly excluded 102 elected members; and on their protesting there was a distinct increase of the already obvious public displeasure at such repeated acts of tyranny. This was in September; but in October came the news of Stayner's capture of the Spanish treasure-ships; and in November the treasure arrived--what the naval officers had left of it. On this the Parliament promptly voted everything that its master asked for;[1107] new taxes were laid to carry on the wanton war with Spain; and in January 1657 it was proposed to offer him the Crown. Yet when, after a six months' adjournment, that Parliament debated points on which he wanted submission, he furiously dissolved it as he had done its predecessors.

Such is the process of imperialism. With a few more years of ostensibly profitable conquest, Cromwell, acclaimed and urged on in the career of aggression by such different types of poet as Waller[1108] and Marvell,[1109] would as a matter of course have been made king, with the final consent of the army, and would have ruled as the crowned imperator. In that case his Puritanism, instead of putting any conscientious check on his egoism, would have fed it as Mohammed's faith did his.[1110] Thus his early death was one of the important "accidents" of history.[1111]

Sec. 4

As it was, Cromwell lived only long enough to create an intellectual as well as a conservative reaction. Surprise has been sometimes expressed, and must have been oftener felt, at the virtual High Toryism of the doctrine of Hobbes,[1112] who was so little conservative in his general habit of mind. The truth is that in 1651, or at least in 1660, the monarchism of Hobbes was the ostensible Liberalism of the hour. Parliamentarism had meant first sectarian tyranny, then anarchy, then military despotism; and there was not the slightest prospect of a parliamentary government which should mean religious or intellectual freedom all round. Hobbes would infallibly have been at least thrown into prison by the Long Parliament if in its earlier time of power he had published his remarks on the Pentateuch. They punished for much milder exercises of critical opinion. A strong monarchy was become, from the point of view of many enlightened men, positively the best available security for general freedom of life, at a time when the spirit of religion had multiplied tenfold the normal impulses to social tyranny and furnished the deepest channel of social ill-will compatible with national unity. It lay in Christianity, as it lay earlier in Judaism, to breed an intensity of religious strife such as the pagan world never knew. Various countries had seen sects arise and grapple with each other on the score of this or that interpretation of the Hebrew sacred books, and men of conservative bias felt that they were face to face with insane forces incompatible with a democratic system. Religious lore, above all other learning, could make men more "excellently foolish," as Hobbes put it, than was possible to mere ignorance, making new and uncontrollable motives to disunion.

It is not to be assumed, indeed, that a revolution begun on any motive whatever would have maintained itself at the then developed stage of political intelligence; for the English people, which constantly accuses others of lack of faculty for union, had never shown itself any better fitted for rational compromise than the Irish, given conditions of equal stress. Scandinavian, German, Dutch, English--all the Teutonic sections alike had in all ages shown in the fullest degree the force of the primary passions of self-assertion and mutual repulsion, cordially uniting only, if at all, for purposes of aggression. But in the case under notice it was the religious passions that dug the channels of strife; and they must be held to have added to the volume of blind emotion. Thus intensified, the principle had shown itself potent to wreck any commonwealth; and there remained only the choice between a usurper governing through an army and a "legitimate" monarch governing as of old by way of Parliament and a civil service. Parliament had been the most offensive tyrant of all, for while making most parade of legality it had been the most self-seeking,[1113] and perhaps even the least respectable as regards its personnel. The Liberals of the latter time had their cue given to them by the memorable Falkland, who, grievedly "ingeminating Peace, Peace," had recoiled from the intolerant Puritans, and sadly joined the intolerant Royalists. Macaulay's thrust at him for this,[1114] if technically just, was hardly seemly on the critic's part, for Falkland represented exactly the temper of Macaulay's own politics. He was an ideal Whig of the later school--the very saint of moderation. Falkland had indeed special ground for withdrawal from the Puritan party, in that he was convinced that Hampden and Pym had deceived him as to the king's complicity in the Irish Rebellion and other matters. He had been "persuaded to believe many things which he had since found to be untrue."[1115] But in most things the Puritans must have jarred on him.[1116] Where he had consented to go, albeit deliberately to his death, as a Cavalier, his disciples might well become theoretic monarchists when the whole torrent of public opinion went for the Restoration.

Of course, the hope of social freedom was destined to frustration under the restored monarchy just as before, since there was still no culture force sufficient to purify the animal instinct of antagonism. The Restoration only meant that the Episcopalian dog was uppermost and the Nonconformist under. But all the same, Commonwealth principles were profoundly discredited; and it is notable that never since has Republican principle ostensibly regained in England the stature it had reached in the hotbeds of the Great Rebellion and the Protectorate. The long struggle against the king had educated many of the strivers into democratism, as did the later struggle of the American colonies against George III. Even in the Parliament of Richard Cromwell, after Republican hopes had been so blasted, there were forty-seven avowed Republicans,[1117] the remnant of the breed. With the return of the monarchy it virtually disappears from English politics for a hundred and thirty years;[1118] when again it rises for a moment in the hot air of the French Revolution, only to disappear again for nearly another century. It was after the Rebellion, and not before, that the dogma of divine right became completely current orthodoxy in England.[1119]

Sec. 5

The collapse of Republicanism meant the collapse of the class politics that had grown up in the war and in the Commonwealth alongside of the creed politics. The creed politics itself, when carried to the lengths of the doctrine of the Independents, meant a challenge to the political system; and among the more advanced reasoners of the period were some who saw that to put down kingly tyranny was of little avail while class inequalities remained. The Long Parliament, though not going this length, went far in the way of putting down some established abuses; and there are many records of a more searching spirit of innovation. It is important to realise that alike under Charles I and Cromwell the Parliaments tended to be partly composed of and ruled by the more audacious spirits of the time, simply because these had the advantage in discussion wherever they were. The incapacity for speech which in later times has made the Conservative party welcome adventurers as its mouthpieces meant the partial obliteration of the conservative class in the early days of unorganised parliamentary strife; and Cromwell's own Parliaments baffled him in virtue of their large elements of upstart intelligence. He himself, having entered the war from a mixture of motives in which there was no idea of social reconstruction, was merely irritated by the ideals of the more radical agitators, which he could not out-argue, but on which he promptly put his foot. It is true that in the immense ferment set up by the Rebellion impracticable ideas abounded, and that they suggested risks of civil anarchy, even as the multitude of sectaries threatened chaos in religion. We find indeed an express affirmation of anarchism in the literature of the period;[1120] and generally the English Revolution had in it most of the subversive elements which later evolved the French, the determining difference being that the English was not attacked from the outside. But there were practical plans also. Lilburne had a really constructive scheme of popular enfranchisement,[1121] which might have built up a democratic force of resistance to royalism as such; but Cromwell, while ready to overthrow any part of the constitution that hampered him, would build up nothing in its place. He would have no alteration of the social structure, save in so far as he must protect his Independents from the Presbyterians and Episcopalians alike. And of course, when his polity fell, the ideals of the independents of politics--who had represented only a tribe of scattered intelligences, much fewer than the mere religious sectaries, who were themselves but a vigorous minority--speedily disappeared from English affairs. The standards of the average orthodox class became the standards of public life.

On the side of international relations, finally, Cromwell and the Commonwealth did nothing to improve politics. Commerce began to spread afresh; and commercial and racial jealousy, under the Puritan as later under the Restoration rule, bred war with the Dutch, just as religious hatreds had made war between England and Spain. The final proof of Cromwell's lack of political wisdom is given in his utterly fantastic scheme for a constitutional union of the English and Dutch republics, a scheme which could not have worked for a week. When this proposal was declined by the Dutch States-General, he seems to have been as ready as any filibuster in England to go to war with the States;[1122] and it is evident that the Navigation Act of 1651 was at once an act of revenge for the insults put upon the English ambassadors by the Dutch Orangeist populace, against the will of the Dutch Government, and a wanton effort to punish the States for declining the Protector's absurd proposals.[1123] The two Protestant republics thereupon grappled like two worrying dogs; and for their first ostensible victory the English Parliament publicly thanked God as unctuously as for any of the victories of the Civil War.[1124] In their hands and Cromwell's international politics sank at once to the normal levels of primitive instinct.

Mr. Frederic Harrison (Cromwell, ch. xiii) glorifies Cromwell's foreign policy on the score that it made England great in the eyes of foreign countries. Exactly so might we eulogise the foreign policy of Louis XIV or Philip II or Napoleon--so long as it succeeded. Cromwell, up to the time when he began to scheme an empire of naval aggression, simply aimed at a Protestant combination as other rulers aimed at Catholic combinations. There was nothing new in the idea; and it would have been astonishing if he had not maintained the naval power of the country. It was to this very end that the luckless Charles imposed his ship-money, which Hampden and his backers refused to pay. As regards home politics, again, Mr. Harrison praises Cromwell for preserving order with unprecedented success, making no allowance for the fact that Cromwell was the first Englishman who governed through a standing army, and making no attempt to refute Ludlow's statements (cited by Hallam, ii, 251, note; cp. Vaughan, p. 524, note) as to the gross tyranny of the major-generals, or to meet the charge against Cromwell of selling scores of royalists into slavery at Barbadoes. Mr. Harrison finally justifies Cromwell's policy in the main on the score of "necessity," despite the proverbial quotation. It was exactly on the plea of necessity that Charles justified himself in his day, when Cromwell joined in resisting him. Mr. Harrison again extols the "generosity" and "moral elevation" of the intervention for the Vaudois, when on the same page he has to admit the infamy of the Cromwellian treatment of Ireland. He sees no incongruity in Milton's emotion over the "slaughtered saints" of Protestantism, while Catholic ecclesiastics were with his approval being slain like dogs. Moral and social science must hold the balances more evenly than this.

Sec. 6

While thus showing that in his foreign relations in general he had no higher principle than that which led him to protect the Protestant Vaudois, Cromwell himself could not or would not tolerate Catholicism in England. What was immeasurably worse, he had put thousands of Irish Catholics to the sword, and reduced tens of thousands more to the life conditions of wild animals. His policy in Ireland, if judged by the standards we apply to the rule of other men, must be pronounced one of blind brutality. He had helped to make a civil war in England because his class was at times arbitrarily taxed, and had fears that its worship would be interfered with; and in so doing he felt he had the support and sanction of Omnipotence. When it came to dealing with Irishmen who stood up for their race ideals and their religion, he acted as if for him principles of moral and religious right did not exist.[1125] His most ferocious deeds he justified by reference to the Ulster massacre of 1641, as if all Irishmen had been concerned in that, and as if the previous English massacres had not been tenfold more bloody. Under his own Government, by the calculation of Sir William Petty, out of a population of 1,466,000, 616,000 had in eleven years perished by the sword, by plague, or by famine artificially produced. Of these, 504,000 were reckoned to be of Irish and 112,000 of English descent. And it was planned to reduce the survivors to a life of utter destitution in Connaught and Clare. By the settlement of 1653, ten of the thirty-two Irish counties were allotted to the "Adventurers" who in 1641 had advanced sums of money to aid in putting down the Irish Rebellion; twelve were divided among Cromwell's soldiers; seven, with all the cities and corporations of the kingdom, were reserved for the Commonwealth; and three of the most barren counties--for the most part unreclaimed--were left for the natives. The settlement could not be carried out as planned by the Government, and as evidently desired by Fleetwood, the Lord Deputy, and many of the officers. The very greed of the soldiery defeated the project of a "universal transplantation," for they were as eager for Irish labour as for Irish land.[1126] But the confiscation of the land was carried out to the full, and multitudes were forced into Connaught. The worst tyranny of Charles is thus as dust in the balance with Cromwell's expropriation of myriads of conquered Irish. For them he had neither the show of law nor the pretence of equity. They were treated as conquered races had been treated, not by the Romans, who normally sought to absorb in their polity the peoples they overcame, but by barbarians in their mutual wars, where the loser was driven to the wilderness. Far from seeking to grapple as a statesman with the problem of Irish disaffection, he struck into it like a Berserker, on the same inspiration of animal fury as took him into the breach at Drogheda; and his or his officers' enactments, providing for the slaughter of all natives who did not carry certificates of having taken the anti-Royalist oath, are to be matched in history only with the treatment of the conquered Slavs by the Christianising Germans in the Dark Ages.

Dr. Gardiner and Mr. Harrison partly defend the massacre of Drogheda as justified by the "laws of war" of the time. It is true that for the period it was not very much out of the way. The Royalist Manley, describing it, says only (History of the Rebellions, 1691, p. 227): "I would not condemn the promiscuous slaughter of the Citizens and Souldiers, of Cruelty, because it might be intended for Example and Terror to others, if the like Barbarity had not been committed elsewhere." But Manley seems to have forgotten the friars, whose slaughter neither laws of war nor European custom exonerated. There were really no "laws of war" in the case. Dr. Gardiner (Student's History, p. 562; Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. i, 118) puts it that these laws "left garrisons refusing, as that of Drogheda had done, to surrender an indefensible post ... to the mercy or cruelty of the enemy." But it is unwarrantable to call Drogheda an "indefensible post." Dr. Gardiner's thesis that any captured post, however hard to take, is ipso facto proved to have been indefensible, may be dismissed as a very bad sophism. Elsewhere he himself puts it (p. 132, note) that men "defending a fortified town after the defences had been captured" were liable to be slain--a very different thing. Drogheda contained 3,000 foot, mostly English, "the flower of Ormond's army," as Dr. Gardiner avows.

Mr. Harrison (Oliver Cromwell, p. 136) perhaps errs in saying that its commander, Sir Arthur Aston, an officer of "great name and experience ... at that time made little doubt of defending it against all the power of Cromwell." Cp. Gardiner, Com. and Prot., small ed. i, 128, as to Aston's straits. It had, however, actually resisted siege by the Catholics for three years, and it was only by desperate efforts that Cromwell carried it. He went into the breach with the forlorn hope, and he gave the order for slaughter, as he himself admits, in the fury of action. The first order, be it observed, was to slay all "in arms in the town"--this at a time when men commonly carried arms in time of peace, and members wore their swords in Parliament. It simply meant a massacre of the male inhabitants. The garrison was not so slaughtered: when the surrender of the garrison came, Cromwell's blood-lust was slaked, and he spared all but every tenth man--for slavery in the Barbadoes. Nor did his men merely slay those taken in arms. He tells that "their friars were knocked on the head promiscuously"; and it is impossible wholly to refuse to believe the royalist statement of the time, that men, women, and children were indiscriminately slaughtered. Dr. Gardiner, on somewhat insufficient grounds (History of the Commonwealth, i, 135, 136, note), entirely rejects the personal testimony of the brother of Anthony a Wood (Anthony's Autobiography, ed. Oxford, 1848, pp. 51, 52) as to Cromwell's men holding up children as shields when pursuing some soldiers of the garrison who defended themselves. Dr. Gardiner is himself in error in respect of one charge of improbability which he brings against the narrative, as quoted by himself. But in any case his own narrative, as he evidently feels, shows the Cromwellian troops to have been sufficiently ferocious. Quarter was promised, and then withheld (Gardiner, i, 117, note, 118); and by Dr. Gardiner's own showing the "Parliamentary" account itself avows that the final surrender of the defenders on the "mount" was obtained by sheer treachery--a fact which Dr. Gardiner gloses even while showing it. A Puritan drunk with the lust of battle is a beast like any other. Cromwell himself had to quiet his conscience with his usual drug of religion. But if this act had been done by Cavaliers or Catholics upon a Puritan garrison and Independent priests, he and his party would have held it up to horror for ever.

The only defence he could make was that this was vengeance for the great Irish Massacre--that is to say, that he had shown he could be as bloody as the Irish, who on their part had all the English massacres of the previous generation to avenge--a circumstance carefully ignored by clerical writers who still justify Cromwell in the name of Christianity, as seeking to make future massacres impossible. All the while, there was not the slightest pretence of showing that the garrison of Drogheda had been concerned in the old massacre. Compare, on this, the emphatic verdict of Dr. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, i, 139. Mr. Harrison (p. 145) quotes Cromwell's challenge to opponents to show any instance of a man "not in arms" being put to death with impunity--this after he had avowed the slaughter of all priests and chaplains! His general assertion of the scrupulousness of his party was palpably false; and it is idle to say that he must have believed it true. That Ireton's Puritan troops slew numbers of disarmed and unarmed Irish with brutal cruelty and treachery against Ireton's reiterated orders, is shown by Dr. Gardiner; and he tells how Ireton hanged a girl who tried to escape from Limerick (Commonwealth, ii, 48, 53). Is it then to be supposed that Cromwell's men were more humane when he was hounding them on to massacre? As to the further slaughter of natives, there stands the assertion of Father French (Narrative of the Earl of Clarendon's Settlement and Sale of Ireland, Dublin, rep. 1846, p. 86) that under the Proclamation which commanded the soldiers to slay any men met on the highway without a certificate of having "taken the engagement" abjuring the monarchy, "silly Peasants who out of Ignorance or want of care ... left their tickets at home, were barbarously murdered." In the circumstances the statement is only too credible.

There remains to be considered the old plea that the massacre of Drogheda made an end of serious resistance, and so saved life. Thus Carlyle: "Wexford Storm followed (not by forethought, it would seem, but by chance of war) in the same fashion; and there was no other storm or slaughter needed in that country" (Cromwell, Comm. on Letter CV). This is one of Carlyle's innumerable misstatements of fact. Even on his own view, the Wexford slaughter had to follow that of Drogheda. But, as Gardiner shows, Cromwell's bloodshed at Drogheda and Wexford, "so far from sparing effusion of blood," though "successful at Ross and at a few lesser strongholds, had only served to exasperate the garrisons of Duncannon, of Kilkenny, and of Clonmel; and in his later movements Cromwell, always prepared to accept the teaching of events(!), had discovered that the way of clemency was the shortest road to conquest" (Com. and Prot. i, 157; cp. p. 137). The laudation here too is characteristic; but it disposes of Carlyle's.

Carlyle would never be at pains enough to check his presuppositions by the records. As Gardiner tells (p. 123, note), he denounces an editor for printing a postscript in which Cromwell admitted the slaughter of "many inhabitants" of Drogheda. This, said Carlyle, had no authority in contemporary copies. "It appears," writes Dr. Gardiner, "in the official contemporary copy in Letters from Ireland." What is more, the editor in question had given the reference!

There are men who to-day will still applaud Cromwell because he quenched the Irish trouble for the time in massacre and devastation; and others, blenching at the atrocity of the cure, speak of it with bated breath as doing him discredit, while they bate nothing of their censure of the arbitrariness of Charles. Others excuse all Puritan tyranny because of its "sincerity," as if that plea would not exculpate Torquemada and Alva. The plain truth is that Cromwell in no way rose above the moral standards of his generation in his dealings with those whom he was able to oppress. He found in his creed his absolution for every step to which blind instinct led him, in Ireland as in England; and it seems to be his destiny to lead his admirers into the same sophistries--pious with a difference--as served to keep him on good terms with his conscience after suppressing an English Parliament or slaughtering an Irish garrison.

Take, for instance, the fashion in which D'Aubigne shuffles over the Irish massacres, after quoting Cromwell's worst cant on the subject: "This extract will suffice. Cromwell acted in Ireland like a great statesman, and the means he employed were those best calculated promptly to restore order in that unhappy country. And yet we cannot avoid regretting that a man--a Christian man--should have been called to wage so terrible a war, and to show towards his enemies greater severity than had ever, perhaps, been exercised by the pagan leaders of antiquity. 'Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God'" (The Protector, 3rd ed. p. 159).

It is too much even to say, as a more scrupulous critic has done, that the phenomenon of the Commonwealth represented a great attempt at a higher life on the part of men nobler and wiser than their contemporaries.[1127] It was simply the self-assertion of energetic men of whom some were in some respects ahead of their time; while the others were as bad as their time, and in some respects rather behind it--men bewildered by fanaticism, and incapable of a consistent ethic, whose failure was due as distinctly to their own intellectual vices as to their environment. No serious poetry of any age is more devoid of moral principle than the verses in which Marvell and Waller exult over the wanton attack on Spain, and kindle at the prospect of a future of unscrupulous conquest. Both men were religious; both as ready to sing of "Divine Love" as of human hate; and both in their degree were good types of the supporters of Cromwell. The leaders from the very outset are visibly normal agitators, full of their own grievances, and as devoid of the spirit of fellow-feeling, of concern for all-round righteousness, as any of the men they impeached. Their movement went so far as it did because, firstly, they were vigorous men resisting a weak man, and later their own natural progress to anarchy was checked by the self-assertion of the strongest of them all. Thus their and his service to progressive political science is purely negative. They showed once for all that an ignorance guided by religious zeal and "inspiration" is more surely doomed to disaster than the ignorance of mere primary animal instinct; and that of the many forms of political optimism, that of Christian pietism is for the modern world certainly not the least pernicious. The Puritan name and ideal are in these days commonly associated with high principle and conscientiousness; and it is true that in the temper and the tactic of the early revolutionary movement, despite much dark fanaticism, there was a certain masculine simplicity and sincerity not often matched in our politics since. But as the years went on, principles gave way, dragged down by fanaticism and egoism; and the Puritan temper, lacking light, bred deadly miasmas. Milton himself sinks from the level of the Areopagitica to that of the Eikonoklastes, an ignoble performance at the behest of the Government, who just then were suppressing the freedom of the press.[1128] In strict historical truth the Puritan name and the ideal must stand for utter failure to carry on a free polity, in virtue of incapacity for rational association; for the stifling of some of the most precious forces of civilisation--the artistic; and further for the grafting on normal self-seeking of the newer and subtler sin of solemn hypocrisy.

This holds good of the Puritan party as a whole. It is possible, however, to take too low a view of the judgment of any given section of it. Dr. Gardiner, for instance, somewhat strains the case when he says (Student's History, p. 567) of the Barebone Parliament: "Unfortunately, these godly men [so styled by Cromwell] were the most crotchety and impracticable set ever brought together. The majority wanted to abolish the Court of Chancery without providing a substitute, and to abolish tithes without providing any other means for the support of the clergy." It seems clear that it was the intention of the majority to provide an equivalent for the tithes (see Vaughan, pp. 508, 509; cp. Hallam, ii, 243, 244); and the remark as to the Court of Chancery appears to miss the point. The case against that Court was that it engrossed almost all suits, and yet intolerably delayed them; the proposal was to let the other Courts do the work. Cp. Dr. Gardiner's Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 241, 262; and as to the tithes, i, 192; ii, 32, 240, 275, 276.

It would be hard to show that either Cromwell or the men he used and overrode were, under trial, more conscientious than the average public men of later times. Well-meaning he and many of them were; but, then, most men are well-meaning up to their lights; the moral test for all is consistency with professed principle under changing conditions. And hardly one was stedfastly true to the principles he put forward. They prevaricated under pressure--under harder pressure, no doubt--like other politicians, with only the difference that they could cite random texts and "the Lord" in their justification. And inasmuch as their godly strifes were as blind and as insoluble as those of any factions in history, they furnished no aid and no encouragement to posterity to attempt anew the great work of social regeneration. If that is ever to be done, it must be with saner inspiration and better light than theirs. It is time that, instead of extolling them as men of superior moral stature and inspiration, we now realise they brought to a bewildering problem a vain enlightenment.

On this view, it may be noted, we have a sufficient explanation of the dissimulations of which Cromwell was undoubtedly guilty. Between the antiquated asperity of Villemain, who, while extolling his capacity, charges him with fourberie habituelle (Hist. de Cromwell, 5e edit. p. 272), and the foregone condonations of Carlyle, there is a mean of common sense. Cromwell was a man of immense energy and practical capacity, but with no gift for abstract thought, and spellbound by an incoherent creed. Consequently he was bound to come to serious confusion when he had to deal with tense complexities of conduct and violently competing interests. Coming into desperate positions, for which his religion was worse than no preparation, and in which it could not possibly guide him aright, he must needs trip over the snares of diplomacy, and do his equivocations worse than a more intellectual man would. Cromwell's lying sounds the more offensive because of its constant twang of pietism; but that was simply the dialect in which he had been brought up. Had he lived in our day he would have been able to prevaricate with a wider vocabulary, which makes a great difference.

Sec. 7

Lest such a criticism should be suspected of prejudice, it may be well to note that a contemporary Doctor of Divinity has at some points exceeded it. It is Dr. Cunningham who argues that, in consequence of the Puritan bias leading to a cult of the Old Testament rather than the New, there occurred under Puritan auspices "a retrogression to a lower type of social morality, which showed itself both at home and abroad."[1129] He traces Puritan influence specially "(a) in degrading the condition of the labourer; (b) in reckless treatment of the native [= coloured] races; (c) in the development of the worst forms of slavery."[1130] The present writer, who rarely finds it necessary to oppose a Protestant clergyman on such an issue, is disposed to think the charge overdrawn, for the following reasons: (1) The English treatment of Ireland was to the full as cruel in the Elizabethan period, before Puritanism had gone far, as under Cromwell; (2) the Catholic Spaniards in Mexico and Peru were as cruel as the Puritan colonists in New England. It is true that "in all the terrible story of the dealings of the white man with the savage there are few more miserable instances of cold-blooded cruelty than the wholesale destruction of the Pequod nation--men, women, and children--by the Puritan settlers"[1131] of Connecticut. But when Catholics and pre-Puritan Protestants and Dutch Protestants act similarly, the case is not to be explained on Dr. Cunningham's theory. The fallacy seems to lie in supposing that the New Testament has ever been a determinant in these matters. Mosheim confesses that in the wars of the Crusades the Christians were more ferocious than the Saracens;[1132] and Seneca was at least as humane as Paul.

There is distinct validity, on the other hand, in the charge that Puritanism worsened the life of the working classes, first by taking away their ecclesiastical holidays and gild-festivals, and finally by taking all recreation out of their Sunday. The latter step may be regarded as the assertion of the economic interest of the Protestant clergy against the social needs of their flocks. It was not that the labourers were well off before the Rebellion--here again we must guard against false impressions[1133]--but that "Puritan ascendancy rendered the lot of the labourer hopelessly dull."[1134] There is reason to believe, further, that the Stuart administration, applying the Elizabethan Poor Law, took considerable pains to relieve distress,[1135] and that the Commonwealth, on the contrary, treated the lapsed mass without sympathy;[1136] and it is not unlikely that, as has been suggested, this had something to do with the popular welcome given to the Restoration.[1137] The conclusion is that "neither the personal character nor the political success of the Puritans need lead us to ignore their baleful influence on society,"[1138] which was, in the opinion of Arnold, despite his passion for their favourite literature, to imprison and turn the key upon the English spirit for two hundred years. Here again the impartial naturalist will detect exaggeration, but much less than in the current hyperboles to the contrary.

For the rest, the commercial and industrial drift of England, the resort to the mineral wealth[1139] that was to be the economic basis of later commerce and empire, the pursuit of capitalistic manufacture, the building up of a class living on interest as the privileged class of the past had lived on land monopoly--all went on under Puritanism as under Catholicism,[1140] Anglicanism, Calvinism, Lutheranism. The early Puritans, taking up the Catholic tradition, denounced usury; but the clergy of industrial and burgher-ruled States, beginning with Calvin, perforce receded from that veto.[1141] Even under Elizabeth there was a good deal of banking,[1142] and under Cromwell English merchants and money-dealers had learned all the lessons the Dutch could teach them, weighing the Protector's borrowing credit in the scales of the market as they would any other. The spirit of pitiless commercial competition flourished alike under Roundhead and Cavalier,[1143] save in so far as it was manacled by invidious monopolies; the lust of "empire" was as keen among the middle class in Cromwell's day as in Elizabeth's and our own; and even the lot of the workers began to approximate to its modern aspect through the greater facility of transfer[1144] which followed on the old rigidity of feudal law and medieval usage. The industrial age was coming to birth.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1089: Even on this side the king was not fortunate. It would perhaps do him little harm that "he spoke and behaved with indelicacy to ladies in public" (Hallam, citing Milton's Defensio and Warburton's Notes on Clarendon, vii. 626); but his frigidity and haughtiness were more serious matters. He actually caned Vane for entering a room in the palace reserved for persons of higher rank (id., citing Carte's Ormond, i, 356). In the next reign people contrasted his aloofness with his son's accessibility (see Pepys' Diary, passim). Hallam sums up that "he had in truth none who loved him, till his misfortunes softened his temper, and excited sympathy" (10th ed. ii, 226).]

[Footnote 1090: That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the tithes that had been appropriated by the nobility. (Compare Burton, History of Scotland, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet, Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, vii, 278; Laing, History of Scotland, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour, Annals of the Stuart Kings, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley, History of the Rebellions, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637, which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry's Memoirs, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.]

[Footnote 1091: It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the nobility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (id. ii, 86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set up the civil war of the Fronde.]

[Footnote 1092: Hallam, Const. Hist. ii, 7.]

[Footnote 1093: Id. ii, 10-11.]

[Footnote 1094: Id. p. 25. Cp. p. 35.]

[Footnote 1095: As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.]

[Footnote 1096: Cunningham, English Industry and Commerce, ii, 219.]

[Footnote 1097: Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited, ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once observes how bad his judgment generally was.]

[Footnote 1098: It is an error to assert, as is often done, that before Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell and the Historians" in Essays in Sociology, vol. 2.]

[Footnote 1099: It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all the constitutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation. But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic taste and practice of the nation.]

[Footnote 1100: He had, indeed, proposed to the Dutch a joint campaign for the conquest of Spanish America (Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, ii, 478). But even in that case he would have counted on plunder.]

[Footnote 1101: Villemain, however, had previously made some approach to such a view; and Sir John Seeley has left record of how Sir James Stephen suggested to students a research concerning "the buccaneering Cromwell" (Expansion of England, p. 115).]

[Footnote 1102: Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 89, 90.]

[Footnote 1103: Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (1897), ii, 475-76. It is startling to contrast this explicit avowal of Dr. Gardiner with the assertion of Dr. Holland Rose (art. in the Monthly Review, July, 1902), that the historian averred to him that English foreign policy always came out well on investigation.]

[Footnote 1104: Cromwell's Place in History, p. 97. Cp. p. 101; Burnet, History of his Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, pp. 44, 49, 50; Thurloe, State Papers, 1742, vii, 295.]

[Footnote 1105: Letter of De Bordeaux to Servien, May 5, 1653, given by Guizot, Histoire de la republique d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, tom. i, end.]

[Footnote 1106: Letter cited.]

[Footnote 1107: Guizot, Republique d'Angleterre, ed. 1854, ii, 216.]

[Footnote 1108: On a War with Spain. Cp. the poem, Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.]

[Footnote 1109: Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Dryden's Heroic Stanzas on the death of the Protector show how he would have swelled the acclaim.]

[Footnote 1110: A similar idea, I find, is well expressed by Seeley, Expansion of England, p. 114.]

[Footnote 1111: As to the element of historic "accident," cp. MM. Langlois and Seignobos, Introduction aux etudes historiques, 2e ed. p. 253.]

[Footnote 1112: Hallam, discriminating the shades of opinion, lays it down that "A favourer of unlimited monarchy was not a Tory, neither was a Republican a Whig. Lord Clarendon was a Tory: Hobbes was not; Bishop Hoadly was a Whig: Milton was not" (History, as cited, iii, 199). But though Hobbes's political doctrine was odious to the Tory clergy, and even to legitimists as such, it certainly made for Toryism in practice. In the words of Green: "If Hobbes destroyed the old ground of royal despotism, he laid a new and a firmer one." Cp. T. Whittaker, in Social England, iv, 280, 281, as to the conflict between "divine right" royalism and Hobbes's principle of an absolute sovereignty set up by social consent to begin with.]

[Footnote 1113: As to the "high pretensions to religion, combined with an almost unlimited rapacity" (Petty) on the part of many leading Puritans, cp. Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 167, 172, 187, 194, 302, 358, etc.]

[Footnote 1114: In the essay on "Hallam's Constitutional History" (1828). In the History the verdict is more favourable.]

[Footnote 1115: Lives of the Friends of the Lord Chancellor Clarendon, by Lady T. Lewis, i, 70; cited in Falklands, by T.L. (Author of Life of Sir Kenelm Digby), 1897, pp. 121-22.]

[Footnote 1116: On the general question of his course see the defence of T.L. (work cited, p. 129 sq.), and that by Mr. J.A. R. Marriott, Life and Times of Viscount Falkland, 2nd. ed. 1908, p. 331 sq.]

[Footnote 1117: As against from 100 to 140 "neuters" and Royalists, and 170 lawyers or officers (Hallam, ii, 269, note, citing the Clarendon Papers, iii, 443).]

[Footnote 1118: Republicans there still were in the reigns of William and Anne (see Hallam, iii, 120, 230; cp. the author's essay on "Fletcher of Saltoun" in Our Corner, Jan., 1888), but they never acted openly as such.]

[Footnote 1119: See below, ch. iii, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 1120: E.g., Richard Overton's pamphlet (1646) entitled An Arrow against all Tyrants and Tyranny, wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms, and Properties of Mankind, are discovered and undeniably maintained. Its main doctrines are that "To every individual in nature is given an individual property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any"; and that "no man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man's." See a long and interesting extract in the History of Passive Obedience since the Reformation, Amsterdam, 1689, i, 59. As to the other anarchists, of whom Lilburne was not one, see Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, i, 47, 48.]

[Footnote 1121: Cp. Gardiner, Cromwell's Place in History, pp. 37-50; History of the Great Civil War, 1889, ii, 53-55, 310-12; iii, 527. While grudgingly noting his straightforwardness, Dr. Gardiner assumes to discredit Lilburne as impracticable, yet is all the while demonstrating that Cromwell's constructive work utterly collapsed. Lilburne explicitly and accurately predicted that the tyrannies of the new regime would bring about the Restoration (Guizot, Histoire de la republique d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 52).]

[Footnote 1122: Dr. Gardiner says he was not, but does not explain away Cromwell's acquiescence. As to the war-spirit in England, see van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 140, 141.]

[Footnote 1123: Guizot, Histoire de la republique d'Angleterre et de Cromwell, ed. Bruxelles, 1854, i, 202-11; van Kampen, Geschichte der Niederlande, ii, 150, 151; Davies, History of Holland, 1841, ii, 709.]

[Footnote 1124: Guizot, as cited, i, 243.]

[Footnote 1125: There is a hardly credible story (Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, ii, 30) that in supporting Owen's scheme for a liberal religious establishment he declared: "I had rather that Mahometanism were permitted amongst us than that one of God's children should be persecuted." If the story be true, so much the worse for his treatment of Catholics.]

[Footnote 1126: Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, small ed. iv, 118. Dr. Gardiner actually praises Cromwell for "good sense" (p. 98) in seeing that the general plantation decreed by the Declaration of 1653 "was absolutely impracticable." It had been his own decree!]

[Footnote 1127: Mr. Harrison, as cited, p. 210. Mr. Allanson Picton, in his lectures on the Rise and Fall of the English Commonwealth, has with more pains and circumspection sought to make good a similar judgment. But the nature of his performance is tested by his contending on the one hand that the ideal of the Commonwealth was altogether premature, and on the other that Cromwell governed with the real consent of the nation.]

[Footnote 1128: Gardiner, Commonwealth and Protectorate, i, 193-96; cp. Whittaker, in Social England, iv, 288, 289.]

[Footnote 1129: Growth of English Industry and Commerce, i, 106.]

[Footnote 1130: Id. p. 107.]

[Footnote 1131: Id. p. 108, 109, citing Bancroft, i, 401, 402. Seeley ignored these and many other matters when he pronounced that the annals of Greater Britain are "conspicuously better than those of Greater Spain, which are infinitely more stained with cruelty and rapacity." In the usual English fashion, he left out of account, too, the horrors of the English conquests of Ireland.]

[Footnote 1132: Ecclesiastical History, 12 cent., pt. i, ch. ii, Sec. 2.]

[Footnote 1133: See Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History, p. 13, as to the distress about 1630.]

[Footnote 1134: Cunningham, as cited, p. 107.]

[Footnote 1135: Redlich and Hirst, Local Government in England, 1903, ii, 361; and Miss Leonard's Early History of English Poor Relief, as there cited.]

[Footnote 1136: See Child's testimony, cited below, p. 467. That, however, specifies no superiority in the methods of the monarchy.]

[Footnote 1137: Redlich and Hirst, as cited, ii, 363, note.]

[Footnote 1138: Cunningham, p. 109.]

[Footnote 1139: See Rogers, Industrial and Commercial History, p. 4, as to the iron trade.]

[Footnote 1140: As to usury in the reign of Henry VII see Busch, England unter den Tudors, i, 257, 389. On the general canonist teaching there is a very thorough research in Prof. Ashley's Introduction to Economic History, vol. ii, ch. vi.]

[Footnote 1141: Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, vol. ii (Modern Times), pp. 74-87.]

[Footnote 1142: Id. p. 100.]

[Footnote 1143: Id. pp. 87, 88, 102.]

[Footnote 1144: Cunningham, op. cit. p. 90. As to the upset of gild monopolies in the sixteenth century, see p. 76.]

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