THE HISTORY OF ENGLANDA STUDY IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

BY A. F. POLLARD, M. A. , LITT. D. 

CONTENTS

CHAP. I THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND, 55 B. C. -A. D. 1066 II THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND, 1066-1272 III EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 1272-1485 IV THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM, 1485-1603 V THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT, 1603-1815 VI THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND, 1603-1815 VII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONVIII A CENTURY OF EMPIRE, 1815-1911 IX ENGLISH DEMOCRACY

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLEBIBLIOGRAPHYINDEX

CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND

55 B. C. --A. D. 1066

"Ah, well, " an American visitor is said to have soliloquized on thesite of the battle of Hastings, "it is but a little island, and it hasoften been conquered. " We have in these few pages to trace theevolution of a great empire, which has often conquered others, out ofthe little island which was often conquered itself. The mere incidentsof this growth, which satisfied the childlike curiosity of earliergenerations, hardly appeal to a public which is learning to look uponhistorical narrative not as a simple story, but as an interpretation ofhuman development, and upon historical fact as the complex resultant ofcharacter and conditions; and introspective readers will look less fora list of facts and dates marking the milestones on this national marchthan for suggestions to explain the formation of the army, the spiritof its leaders and its men, the progress made, and the obstaclesovercome. No solution of the problems presented by history will becomplete until the knowledge of man is perfect; but we cannot approachthe threshold of understanding without realizing that our nationalachievement has been the outcome of singular powers of assimilation, ofadaptation to changing circumstances, and of elasticity of system. Change has been, and is, the breath of our existence and the conditionof our growth. 

Change began with the Creation, and ages of momentous development areshrouded from our eyes. The land and the people are the two foundationsof English history; but before history began, the land had received theinsular configuration which has largely determined its fortune; and thevarious peoples, who were to mould and be moulded by the land, haddifferentiated from the other races of the world. Several of thesepeoples had occupied the land before its conquest by the Anglo-Saxons, some before it was even Britain. Whether neolithic man supersededpalaeolithic man in these islands by invasion or by domestic evolution, we do not know; but centuries before the Christian era the Britonsoverran the country and superimposed themselves upon its swarthy, squatinhabitants. They mounted comparatively high in the scale ofcivilization; they tilled the soil, worked mines, cultivated variousforms of art, and even built towns. But their loose tribal organizationleft them at the mercy of the Romans; and though Julius Caesar's tworaids in 55 B. C. And 54 B. C. Left no permanent results, the conquestwas soon completed when the Romans came in earnest in A. D. 43. 

The extent to which the Romans during the three and a half centuries oftheir rule in Britain civilized its inhabitants is a matter of doubtfulinference. The remains of Roman roads, Roman walls, and Roman villasstill bear witness to their material activity; and an occupation of theland by Roman troops and Roman officials, spread over three hundred andfifty years, must have impressed upon the upper classes of the Britonsat least some acquaintance with the language, religion, administration, and social and economic arrangements of the conquerors. But, on thewhole, the evidence points rather to military occupation than tocolonization; and the Roman province resembled more nearly a Germanthan a British colony of to-day. Rome had then no surplus populationwith which to fill new territory; the only emigrants were the soldiers, the officials, and a few traders or prospectors; and of these most werepartially Romanized provincials from other parts of the empire, for aRoman soldier of the third century A. D. Was not generally a Roman oreven an Italian. The imperial government, moreover, considered theinterests of Britain not in themselves but only as subordinate to theempire, which any sort of distinctive national organization would havethreatened. This distinguishes Roman rule in Britain from British rulein India; and if the army in Britain gradually grew more British, itwas due to the weakness and not to the policy of the imperialgovernment. There was no attempt to form a British constitution, orweld British tribes into a nation; for Rome brought to birth nodaughter states, lest she should dismember her all-embracing unity. Sothe nascent nations warred within and rent her; and when, enfeebled anddistracted by the struggle, she relaxed her hold on Britain, she leftit more cultivated, perhaps, but more enervated and hardly stronger ormore united than before. 

Hardier peoples were already hovering over the prey. The Romans hadthemselves established a "count of the Saxon shore" to defend theeastern coasts of Britain against the pirates of the German Ocean; andit was not long after its revolt from Rome in 410, that the Angles andSaxons and Jutes discovered a chance to meddle in Britain, torn as itwas by domestic anarchy, and threatened with inroads by the Picts andScots in the north. Neither this temptation nor the alleged invitationfrom the British chief Vortigern to come over and help, supplied theoriginal impulse which drove the Angles and Saxons across the sea. Whatever its origin--whether pressure from other tribes behind, internal dissensions, or the economic necessities of a populationgrowing too fast for the produce of primitive farming--the restlessnesswas general; but while the Goths and the Franks poured south over theRoman frontiers on land, the Angles and Saxons obeyed a prophetic callto the sea and the setting sun. 

This migration by sea is a strange phenomenon. That nations shouldwander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribestransported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouthsof the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we areat a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the Anglesat least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out fromthe home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as theirdescendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; andthe process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conqueredBritain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years whichare said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and thelanding in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening seadeterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as muchas these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to dislodgethem, and the absence of centralized government and nationalconsciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and Kent, east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the nextmorsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easysuccess led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours, the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume andrapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, andall conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the homeof lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may betraced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the south theSaxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; inthe east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in the north theyretained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The districts in whichthey met and mingled have less distinctive names; Surrey was perhapsdisputed between all the Saxon kingdoms, Hampshire between West Saxons, South Saxons, and Jutes; while in the centre Mercia was a mixed marchor borderland of Angles and Saxons against the retiring Britons orWelsh. 

It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of thesuperiority of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders, likethe Israelites of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also toa woman and child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and otherplaces taken by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at theapproach of their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolledfrom east to west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while thatof the invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. TheEnglish hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and inthat case some of the British women would be spared. It no morerequired wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish Englishlanguage and institutions in Britain than it required wholesaleslaughter of the Irish to produce the same results in Ireland; and alarge admixture of Celtic blood in the English race can hardly bedenied. 

Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before theyceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by thisinternecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans andfamilies were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but theblending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal kingdomsinto hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. Theexpansion of Sussex and Kent was checked by Saxons who had landed inEssex or advanced up the Thames and the Itchen; East Anglia was hemmedin by tribes who had sailed up the Wash, the Humber, and theirtributaries; and the three great kingdoms which emerged out of theanarchy--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--seem to have owed thesupremacy, which they wielded in turn, to the circumstance that eachpossessed a British hinterland into which it could expand. ForNorthumbria there was Strathclyde on the west and Scotland on thenorth; for Mercia there was Wales; and for Wessex there were theBritish remnants in Devon and in Cornwall. 

But a kingdom may have too much hinterland. Scotland taxed forcenturies the assimilative capacity of united England; it was too muchfor Northumbria to digest. Northumbria's supremacy was distinguished bythe religious labours of Aidan and Cuthbert and Wilfrid in England, bythe missions of Willibrord on the Continent, and by the revival ofliterature and learning under Caedmon and Bede; but it spent itssubstance in efforts to conquer Scotland, and then fell a victim to thebarbaric strength of Mercia and to civil strife between its componentparts, Bernicia and Deira. Mercia was even less homogeneous thanNorthumbria; it had no frontiers worth mention; and in spite of itsmilitary prowess it could not absorb a hinterland treble the size ofthe Wales which troubled Edward I. Wessex, with serviceable frontiersconsisting of the Thames, the Cotswolds, the Severn, and the sea, andwith a hinterland narrowing down to the Cornish peninsula, developed aslower but more lasting strength. Political organization seems to havebeen its forte, and it had set its own house in some sort of orderbefore it was summoned by Ecgberht to assume the lead in Englishpolitics. From that day to this the sceptre has remained in his housewithout a permanent break. 

Some slight semblance of political unity was thus achieved, but it wasalready threatened by the Northmen and Danes, who were harrying Englandin much the same way as the English, three centuries earlier, hadharried Britain. The invaders were invaded because they had forsakenthe sea to fight one another on land; and then Christianity had come totame their turbulent vigour. A wave of missionary zeal from Rome and abackwash from unconquered Ireland had met at the synod of Whitby in664, and Roman priests recovered what Roman soldiers had lost. But thechurch had not yet armed itself with the weapons of the world, andChristian England was no more a match than Christian Britain had beenfor a heathen foe. Ecgberht's feeble successors in Wessex, and theirfeebler rivals in the subordinate kingdoms, gave way step by stepbefore the Danes, until in 879 Ecgberht's grandson Alfred the Greatwas, like a second King Arthur, a fugitive lurking in the recesses ofhis disappearing realm. 

Wessex, however, was more closely knit than any Celtic realm had been;the Danes were fewer than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors; and Alfredwas made of sterner stuff than early British princes. He was typical ofWessex; moral strength and all-round capacity rather than supremeability in any one direction are his title-deeds to greatness. Afterhard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader Guthrum. England south-west of Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester, was to be Alfred's, the rest to be Danish; and Guthrum succumbed to thepacifying influence of Christianity. Not the least of Alfred's gainswas the destruction of Mercia's unity; its royal house had disappearedin the struggle, and the kingdom was now divided; while Alfred lost hisnominal suzerainty over north-east England, he gained a realsovereignty over south-west Mercia. His children, Edward the Elder andEthelfleda, the Lady of the Mercians, and his grandson Athelstan, pushed on the expansion of Wessex thus begun, dividing the land as theywon it into shires, each with a burh (borough) or fortified centre forits military organization; and Anglo-Saxon monarchy reached its zenithunder Edgar, who ruled over the whole of England and asserted asuzerainty over most of Britain. 

It was transitory glory and superficial unity; for there was no realpossibility of a national state in Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Danish England, and the whole meaning of English history is missed in antedating thatachievement by several hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evadedifficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growthalone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are notdrawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and anunconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory inpolitical controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, hadsatirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a descriptionof the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theoristshave found in his _Germania_ an armoury of democratic weaponsagainst aristocracy and despotism. From this golden age the Angles andSaxons are supposed to have derived a political system in which mostmen were free and equal, owning their land in common, debating anddeciding in folkmoots the issues of peace and war, electing their kings(if any), and obeying them only so far as they inspired respect. Theseidyllic arrangements, if they ever existed, did not survive the stressof the migration and the struggle with the Celts. War begat the king, and soon the church baptized him and confirmed his power with unctionand biblical precedents. The moot of the folk became the moot of theWise (Witan), and only those were wise whose wisdom was apparent to theking. Community of goods and equality of property broke down in thevast appropriation involved in the conquest of Britain; and when, aftertheir conversion to Christianity, the barbarians learnt to write andleft authentic records, they reveal a state of society which bears someresemblance to that of medieval England but little to that of themythical golden age. 

Upon a nation of freemen in arms had been superimposed a class ofmilitary specialists, of whom the king was head. Specialization hadbroken down the system by which all men did an equal amount ofeverything. The few, who were called thegns, served the king, generallyby fighting his enemies, while the many worked for themselves and forthose who served the king. All holders of land, however, had to servein the national levy and to help in maintaining the bridges andprimitive fortifications. But there were endless degrees of inequalityin wealth; some now owned but a fraction of what had been the normalshare of a household in the land; others held many shares, and thepossession of five shares became the dividing line between the classfrom which the servants of the king were chosen and the rest of thecommunity. While this inequality increased, the tenure of land grewmore and more important as the basis of social position and politicalinfluence. Land has little value for nomads, but so soon as they settleits worth begins to grow; and the more labour they put into the land, the higher rises its value and the less they want to leave it; in apurely agricultural community land is the great source of everythingworth having, and therefore the main object of desire. 

But it became increasingly difficult for the small man to retain hisholding. He needed protection, especially during the civil wars of theHeptarchy and the Danish inroads which followed. There was, however, nogovernment strong enough to afford protection, and he had to seek itfrom the nearest magnate, who might possess armed servants to defendhim, and perhaps a rudimentary stronghold within which he might shelterhimself and his belongings till the storm was past. The magnatenaturally wanted his price for these commodities, and the only pricethat would satisfy him was the poor man's land. So many poor mensurrendered the ownership of their land, receiving it back to be heldby them as tenants on condition of rendering various services to thelandlord, such as ploughing his land, reaping his crops, and otherwork. Generally, too, the tenant became the landlord's "man, " and didhim homage; and, thirdly, he would be bound to attend the court inwhich the lord or his steward exercised jurisdiction. 

This growth of private jurisdiction was another sign of the times. Justice had once been administered in the popular moots, though fromvery early times there had been social distinctions. Each village hadits "best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of thelarger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probablythose who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads. Thisaristocracy sometimes shrank to one, and the magnate, to whom the poorsurrendered their land in return for protection, often acquired alsorights of jurisdiction, receiving the fines and forfeits imposed forbreaches of the law. He was made responsible, too, for the conduct ofhis poorer neighbours. Originally the family had been made to answerfor the offences of its members; but the tie of blood-relationshipweakened as the bond of neighbourhood grew stronger with attachment tothe soil; and instead of the natural unit of the family, an artificialunit was created for the purpose of responsibility to the law byassociating neighbours together in groups of ten, called peace-pledgesor frith-borhs. It is at least possible that the "Hundred" was afurther association of ten frith-borhs as a higher and more responsibleunit for the administration of justice. But the landless man wasworthless as a member of a frith-borh, for the law had little hold overa man who had no land to forfeit and no fixed habitation. So thelandless man was compelled by law to submit to a lord, who was heldresponsible for the behaviour of all his "men"; his estate became, soto speak, a private frith-borh, consisting of dependents instead of thefreemen of the public frith-borhs. These two systems, with manyvariations, existed side by side; but there was a general tendency forthe freemen to get fewer and for the lords to grow more powerful. 

This growth of over-mighty subjects was due to the fact that agovernment which could not protect the poorest could not restrain thelocal magnates to whom the poor were forced to turn; and the weaknessof the government was due ultimately to the lack of political educationand of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally minded;there was nothing to suggest national unity to their imagination. Theycould not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of crowned sovereigns, not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those symbols which bringhome to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to anational entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the"best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, butanything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of anoutside world with which they had no concern. Anglo-Saxon patriotismnever transcended provincial boundaries. 

The government, on the other hand, possessed no proper roads, noregular means of communication, none of those nerves which enable it tofeel what goes on in distant parts. The king, indeed, was beginning tosupply the deficiencies of local and popular organization: a specialroyal peace or protection, which meant specially severe penalties tothe offender, was being thrown over special places like highways, markets, boroughs, and churches; over special times like Sundays, holydays, and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons likepriests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an exampleof centralized administration; but its organization was still monasticrather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanseit of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, littlegovernment machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, itwas impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check thecentrifugal tendency of England to break up into its component parts. The monarchy was a man rather than a machine; a vigorous ruler couldmake some impression, but whenever the crown passed to a feeble king, the reign of anarchy recommenced. 

Alfred's successors annexed the Danelaw which Alfred had left toGuthrum, but their efforts to assimilate the Danes provoked in thefirst place a reaction against West Saxon influence which threatenedmore than once to separate England north of the Thames from Wessex, and, secondly, a determination on the part of Danes across the sea tosave their fellow-countrymen in England from absorption. Other causesno doubt assisted to bring about a renewal of Danish invasion; but theDanes who came at the end of the tenth century, if they began ashaphazard bands of rovers, greedy of spoil and ransom, developed intothe emissaries of an organized government bent on political conquest. Ethelred, who had to suffer from evils that were incurable as well asfor his predecessors' neglect, bought off the raiders with ever-increasing bribes which tempted them to return; and by levying Danegeldto stop invasion, set a precedent for direct taxation which theinvaders eventually used as the financial basis of efficientgovernment. At length a foolish massacre of the Danish "uitlanders" inEngland precipitated the ruin of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and after heroicresistance by Edmund Ironside, England was absorbed in the empire ofCanute. 

Canute tried to put himself into the position, while avoiding themistakes, of his English predecessors. He adopted the Christianreligion and set up a force of hus-earls to terrify local magnates andenforce obedience to the English laws which he re-enacted. His divisionof England into four great earldoms seems to have been merely a casualarrangement, but he does not appear to have checked the dangerouspractice by which under Edgar and Ethelred the ealdormen had begun toconcentrate in their hands the control of various shires. The greaterthe sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced themonarchy and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen topieces under his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line inthe person of Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead underwhose nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, andEast Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at lengthfor the crown itself. The strife resolved itself into a faction fightbetween the Mercian house of Leofric and the West Saxon house ofGodwine, whose dynastic policy has been magnified into patriotism by agreat West Saxon historian. The prize fell for the moment on Edward'sdeath to Godwine's son, Harold, whose ambition to sit on a throne costhim his life and the glory, which otherwise might have been his, ofsaving his country from William the Norman. As regent for one of thescions of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation ofhis rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on theveiled or open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him, and were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader fromFrance. 

The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument. Anglo-Saxondom had only been saved from Danish marauders by thepersonal greatness of Alfred; it had utterly failed to respond toEdmund's call to arms against Canute, and the respite under Edward theConfessor had been frittered away. Angles and Saxons invited foreignconquest by a civil war; and when Harold beat back Tostig and hisNorwegian ally, the sullen north left him alone to do the same byWilliam. William's was the third and decisive Danish conquest of ahouse divided against itself; for his Normans were Northmen with aFrench polish, and they conquered a country in which the soundestelements were already Danish. The stoutest resistance, not only in themilitary but in the constitutional and social sense, to the NormanConquest was offered not by Wessex but by the Danelaw, where personalfreedom had outlived its hey-day elsewhere; and the reflection that, had the English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more complete, so, too, would have been the Norman Conquest of England, may modify the viewthat everything great and good in England is Anglo-Saxon in origin. England, indeed, was still in the crudest stages of its making; it hadas yet no law worth the name, no trial by jury, no parliament, no realconstitution, no effective army or navy, no universities, few schools, hardly any literature, and little art. The disjointed and unrulymembers of which it consisted in 1066 had to undergo a severediscipline before they could form an organic national state. 

CHAPTER II

THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND

1066-1272

For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no historyof the English people. There is history enough of England, but it isthe history of a foreign government. We may now feel pride in thestrength of our conqueror or pretend claims to descent from William'scompanions. We may boast of the empire of Henry II and the prowess ofRichard I, and we may celebrate the organized law and justice, thescholarship and the architecture, of the early Plantagenet period; butthese things were no more English than the government of India to-dayis Hindu. With Waltheof and Hereward English names disappear fromEnglish history, from the roll of sovereigns, ministers, bishops, earls, and sheriffs; and their place is taken by names beginning with"fitz" and distinguished by "de. " No William, Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey, Gilbert, John, Stephen, Richard, or Robert had played any part inAnglo-Saxon affairs, but they fill the pages of England's history fromthe days of Harold to those of Edward I. The English language wentunderground, and became the patois of peasants; the thin trickle ofAnglo-Saxon literature dried up, for there was no demand for Anglo-Saxon among an upper class which wrote Latin and spoke French. Foreigners ruled and owned the land, and "native" became synonymouswith "serf. "

Their common lot, however, gave birth to a common feeling. The Normanwas more alien to the Mercian than had been Northumbrian or West-Saxon, and rival tribes at last discovered a bond of unity in the impartialrigour of their masters. The Norman, coming from outside and exemptfrom local prejudice, applied the same methods of government andexploitation to all parts of England, just as Englishmen bring the sameideas to bear upon all parts of India; and in both cases the steadypressure of a superimposed civilization tended to obliterate local andclass divisions. Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism made anEnglish nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English despotism has madea nation out of Irish septs, and will make another out of the hundredraces and religions of our Indian empire. The more efficient adespotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater theproblems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself ofits despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it hascreated. 

The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution ofthe Normans to the making of England. They had no written law of theirown, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon theirschismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, asmilitary experts, they had no equals in that age. They could not havestood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipmentand the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons hadtransferred the military business of the nation into the hands of largelandowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match forhis Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh wasinferior to the Norman castle, his shield and battle-axe to the weaponsof the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence thatwas forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and by theirsituation amid a hostile people. 

The problem for William and his companions was how to organize thismilitary superiority as a means of orderly government, and this problemwore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and hisbarons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been summed upin the phrase, the "feudal system, " which William is still popularlysupposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it hasbeen humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introducedinto England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar. Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being introducedfrom Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism wasintroduced from England into Normandy, and thence spread throughoutFrance. These speculations serve, at any rate, to show that feudalismwas a very vague and elusive system, consisting of generalizations froma vast number of conflicting data. Spelman was the first to attempt toreduce these data to a system, and his successors tended to forget moreand more the exceptions to his rules. It is now clear that much that wecall feudal existed in England before the Norman Conquest; that much ofit was not developed until after the Norman period; and that at no timedid feudalism exist as a completely rounded and logical system outsidehistorical and legal text-books. 

The political and social arrangements summed up in the phrase relatedprimarily to the land and the conditions of service upon which it washeld. Commerce and manufactures, and the organization of towns whichgrew out of them, were always exceptions to the feudal system; themonarchy saved itself, its sheriffs, and the shires to some extent fromfeudal influence; and soon it set to work to redeem the administrationof justice from its clutches. In all parts of the country, moreover, there was land, the tenure of which was never feudalized. Generally, however, the theory was applied that all land was held directly orindirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that there wasno land without a lord, and that from every acre of land some sort ofservice was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was held bymilitary service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be eithera layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to theking, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief. When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted itto the heir after the payment of a year's revenue, and on condition ofthe same service being rendered. If the heir were a minor, and thusincapable of rendering military service, the land was retained by thelord until the heir came of age; heiresses could only marry with thelord's leave some one who could perform his services. The tenant hadfurther to attend the lord's court--whether the lord was his king ornot--submit to his jurisdiction, and pay aids to the lord whenever hewas captured and needed ransom, when his eldest son was made a knight, and when his eldest daughter married. 

Other land was held by churchmen on condition of praying or singing forthe soul of the lord, and the importance of this tenure was that it wassubject to the church courts and not to those of the king. Some washeld in what was called free socage, the terms of which varied; but itsdistinguishing feature seems to have been that the service, which wasnot military, was fixed, and that when it was performed the lord had nofurther hold on the tenant. The great mass of the population were, however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords, and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as hecould make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, whocould obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, andnone at all against him. They could not leave their land, nor marry, nor enter the church, nor go to school without his leave. All theseforms of tenure and kinds of service, however, shaded off into oneanother, so that it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines betweenthem. Any one, moreover, might hold different lands on different termsof service, so that there was little of caste in the English system; itwas upon the land and not the person that the service was imposed; andWilliam's Domesday Book was not a record of the ranks and classes ofthe people, but a survey of the land, detailing the rents and servicedue from every part. 

The local agency by which the Normans enforced these arrangements wasthe manor. The Anglo-Saxons had organized shires and hundreds, but thelowest unit, township or vill seems to have had no organization except, perhaps, for agricultural purposes. The Danegeld, which William imposedafter the Domesday survey, was assessed on the hundreds, as thoughthere were no smaller units from which it could be levied. But thehundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient control of localdetails; it was divided into manors, the Normans using for this purposethe germs of dependent townships which had long been growing up inEngland; and the agricultural organization of the township wasdovetailed into the jurisdictional organization of the manor. The lordbecame the lord of all the land on the manor, the owner of a courtwhich tried local disputes; but he rarely possessed that criminaljurisdiction in matters of life and death which was common incontinental feudalism; and if he did, it was only by special royalgrant, and he was gradually deprived of it by the development of royalcourts of justice, which drew to themselves large parts of manorialjurisdiction. 

These and other matters were reserved for the old courts of the shireand hundred, which the Norman kings found it advisable to encourage asa check upon their barons; for the more completely the natives andvillagers were subjected to their lords, the more necessary was it forthe king to maintain his hold upon their masters. For this reasonWilliam imposed the famous Salisbury oath. In France the sub-tenant wasbound to follow and obey his immediate lord rather than the king. William was determined that every man's duty to the king should comefirst. Similarly, he separated church courts from the secular courts, in order that the former might be saved from the feudal influence ofthe latter; and he enforced the ecclesiastical reforms of Hildebrand, especially the prohibition of the marriage of the clergy, lest theyshould convert their benefices into hereditary fiefs for the benefit oftheir children. 

For the principles of heredity and primogeniture were among thestrongest of feudal tendencies. Primogeniture had proved politicallyadvantageous; and one of the best things in the Anglo-Saxon monarchyhad been its avoidance of the practice, prevalent on the Continent, ofkings dividing their dominions among their sons, instead of leaving allunited to the eldest. But the principle of heredity, sound enough innational monarchy, was to prove very dangerous in the other spheres ofpolitics. Office tended to become hereditary, and to be regarded as theprivate property of the family rather than a position of nationaltrust, thus escaping national control and being prostituted forpersonal ends. The earldoms in England were so perverted; originallythey were offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires;gradually they became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king hadwas to deprive the earls of their power, and entrust it to a nominaldeputy, the sheriff. In France, the sheriff (_vice-comes_, _vicomte_)became hereditary in his turn, and a prolonged struggle over the sametendency was fought in England. Fortunately, the crown and countrytriumphed over the hereditary principle in this respect; the sheriffremained an official, and when viscounts were created later, inimitation of the French nobility, they received only a meaningless andcomparatively innocuous title. 

Some slight check, too, was retained upon the crown owing to a seriesof disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy hadalways been in theory elective, and William had been careful to observethe form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order tosecure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, andHenry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to makeelection promises in the form of a charter; and election promises, although they were seldom kept, had some value as reminders to kings oftheir duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually, too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage, and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as amakeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London'ssupport by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the orderand communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule, commercewas beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London was alreadydistancing Winchester in their common ambition to be the capital of thekingdom, and the support of it and of other towns began to be worthbuying by grants of local government, more especially as theirencouragement provided another check on feudal magnates. Henry, too, made a great appeal to English sentiment by marrying Matilda, thegranddaughter of Edmund Ironside, and by revenging the battle ofHastings through a conquest of Normandy from his brother Robert, effected partly by English troops. 

But the order, which the three Norman sovereigns evolved out of chaos, was still due more to their personal vigour than to the strength of theadministrative machinery which they sought to develop; and though thatmachinery continued to work during the anarchy which followed, it couldnot restrain the feudal barons, when the crown was disputed betweenHenry's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The barons, indeed, had been more successful in riveting their baronial yoke on the peoplethan the kings had been in riveting a monarchical yoke on the barons;and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of Anglo-Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear eachother to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the leastattempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. Therewas no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased withhis own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once inEnglish history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence. The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; withinits portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace andrefuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity tobroaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, andassert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to deposesovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization, had it been able to assert a power of putting down the barons fromtheir castles and raising the peasantry from their bondage. 

Deliverance could only come by royal power, and in Henry II, Matilda'sson, Anjou gave England a greater king than Normandy had done inWilliam the Bastard. Although a foreigner, who ruled a vast continentalempire and spent but a fraction of his days on this side of theChannel, he stands second to none of England's makers. He fashioned thegovernment which hammered together the framework of a national state. First, he gathered up such fragments of royal authority as survived theanarchy; then, with the conservative instincts and pretences of aradical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of hisgrandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws. Thisreaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church, andthe untoward incident of Becket's murder impaired the success ofHenry's efforts to establish royal supremacy. But this supremacy mustnot be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesiastical jurisdiction; hewanted to see that the clerical courts did their duty; he claimed thepower of moving them in this direction; and he hoped to make the crownthe arbiter of disputes between the rival spiritual and temporaljurisdictions, realizing that the only alternative to this supremeauthority was the arbitrament of war. He also contended that clergy whohad been unfrocked in the clerical courts for murder or other crimesshould be handed over as laymen to be further punished according to thelaw of the land, while Becket maintained that unfrocking was asufficient penalty for the first offence, and that it required a secondmurder to hang a former priest. 

Next, he sought to curb the barons. He instituted scutage, by which thegreat feudatories granted a money payment instead of bringing with themto the army hordes of their sub-tenants who might obey them rather thanthe king; this enabled the king to hire mercenaries who respected himbut not the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs at once, toexplode their pretensions to hereditary tenure of their office. By theassize of arms he called the mass of Englishmen to redress the militarybalance between the barons and the crown. By other assizes he enabledthe owners and possessors of property to appeal to the protection ofthe royal court of justice: instead of trial by battle they couldsubmit their case to a jury of neighbours; and the weapons of themilitary expert were thus superseded by the verdicts of peacefulcitizens. 

This method, which was extended to criminal as well as civil cases, ofascertaining the truth and deciding disputes by means of juratores, mensworn to tell the truth impartially, involved a vast educationalprocess. Hitherto men had regarded the ascertainment of truth as asupernatural task, and they had abandoned it to Providence or thepriests. Each party to a dispute had been required to produce oath-helpers or compurgators and each compurgator's oath was valuedaccording to his property, just as the number of a man's votes is stillproportioned to some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonlyhappened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there wasnothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank wasinnocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in theritual was its supervision by the priests, who knew something of theirparishioners' character. Military tenants, however, preferred theirprivilege of trial by battle. Now Henry began to teach men to rely upontheir judgment; and by degrees a distinction was even made betweenmurder and homicide, which had hitherto been confounded because "thethought of man shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth notthe thought of man. "

In order to carry out his judicial reforms, Henry developed the_curia regis_, or royal court of justice. That court had simplybeen the court of the king's barons corresponding to the court of histenants which every feudal lord possessed. Its financial aspect hadalready been specialized as the exchequer by the Norman kings, who hadrealized that finance is the first essential of efficient government. From finance Henry I had gone on to the administration of justice, because _justitia magnum emolumentum_, the administration ofjustice is a great source of profit. Henry II's zeal for justice sprangfrom similar motives: the more justice he could draw from the feudalcourts to his own, the greater the revenue he would divert from hisunruly barons into the royal exchequer. From the central stores of the_curia regis_ he dispensed a justice that was cheaper, moreexpeditious, and more expert, than that provided by the local courts. He threw open its doors to all except villeins, he transformed it froman occasional assembly of warlike barons into a regular court oftrained lawyers--mere servants of the royal household, the baronscalled them; and by means of justices in eyre he brought it into touchwith all localities in the kingdom, and convinced his people that therewas a king who meant to govern with their help. 

These experts had a free hand as regards the law they administered. Theold Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degeneratedinto antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred, which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they wereincomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blendedwith principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and withFrankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by theking's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever theircircuits took them, and became in time the common law of England, common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices. One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation, when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudaljurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following amongother foreign legal concepts--assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff, defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate, recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest, judge, jury, justice, verdict, taxation, charter, liberty, representation, parliament, and constitution. It is difficult to over-estimate the debt the English people owe to their powers of absorbingimports. The very watchwords of progress and catchwords of liberty, from the trial by jury which was ascribed to Alfred the Great to thecharter extorted from John, were alien immigrants. We call them alienbecause they were alien to the Anglo-Saxons; but they are the warp andwoof of English institutions, which are too great and too complex tohave sprung from purely insular sources. 

In spite of the fierce opposition of the barons, who rebelled in 1173, and of disputes with his fractious children which embittered hisclosing years, Henry II had laid the foundations of national monarchy. But in completing one part of the Norman Conquest, namely, theestablishment of royal supremacy over disorderly feudatories, he hadmodified the other, the arbitrary rule of the barons over the subjectpeople. William had only conquered the people by the help of hisbarons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower ordersand of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons toalienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if thefirst condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the secondwas the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicabledefect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficientdespotism, and is allowed to create it, to deal with evils that yieldto no milder treatment. His successors proceed to use that machineryfor personal ends. Richard I gilded his abuse of his father's powerwith the glory of his crusade, and the end afforded a plausiblejustification for the means he adopted. But John cloaked his tyrannywith no specious pretences; his greed and violence spared no section ofthe community, and forced all into a coalition which extorted from himthe Great Charter. 

This famous document betrays its composite authorship; no section ofthe community entered the coalition without something to gain, and nonewent entirely unrewarded from Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spelmanintroduced feudalism into England, his contemporary, Chief-justiceCoke, invented Magna Carta: and in view of the profound misconceptionswhich prevail with regard to its character, it is necessary to insistrather upon its reactionary than upon its reforming elements. The greatsource of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, butsometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally thechange has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in theirearlier stages of education men find it very difficult to graspanything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a goodillustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definiteperson or group of persons of very definite and tangible privileges, such as having a court of your own with its perquisites, or exemptionfrom the duties of attending the public courts of the shire or hundred, of rendering the services or of paying the dues to which the majoritywere liable. The value of a "liberty" was that through its enjoymentyou were not as other men; the barons would have eared little forliberties which they had to share with the common herd. To them libertymeant privilege and monopoly; it was not a general right to be enjoyedin common. Now Magna Carta is a charter not of "liberty, " but of"liberties"; it guaranteed to each section of the coalition thosespecial privileges which Henry II and his sons had threatened or takenaway. Some of these liberties were dangerous obstacles to the commonwelfare--for instance the "liberty" of every lord of the manor to tryall suits relating to property and possession in his own manorialcourt, or to be punished by his fellow-barons instead of by the judgesof the king's court. This was what the barons meant by their famousdemand in Magna Carta that every man should be judged by his peers;they insisted that the royal judges were not their peers, but onlyservants of the crown, and their demands in these respects werereactionary proposals which might have been fatal to liberty as weconceive it. 

Nor is there anything about trial by jury or "no taxation withoutrepresentation" in Magna Carta. What we mean by "trial by jury" was notdeveloped till long after 1215; there was still no national, but onlyclass taxation; and the great council, which was to give its assent toroyal demands for money, represented nobody but the tenants-in-chief ofwhom it was composed. All that the barons meant by this clause was thatthey, as feudal tenants-in-chief, were not to pay more than theordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved tothemselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as theypleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, theyare only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines fromtheir villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to rendertheir services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the king ornation if a lord exacted the uttermost farthing from his own chattels;legally, the villeins, who were the bulk of the nation, remained afterMagna Carta, as before, in the position of a man's ox or horse to-day, except that there was no law for the prevention of cruelty to animals. Finally, the provision that no one was to be arrested until he had beenconvicted would, if carried out, have made impossible theadministration of justice. 

On the other hand, the provisions for the fixing of the court of commonpleas at Westminster, for standard weights and measures, for theadministration of law by men acquainted with English customs, and someothers were wholesome reforms. The first clause, guaranteeing that thechurch should be free from royal (not papal) encroachments, was soundenough when John was king, and the general restraint of his authority, even in the interests of the barons, was not an unmixed evil. But it isas absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he grantedthe charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted someone to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a newreligious house (_novam religionem_); and to regard Magna Carta asa great popular achievement, when no vernacular version of it is knownto have existed before the sixteenth century, and when it containshardly a word or an idea of popular English origin, involves completemisunderstanding of its meaning and a serious antedating of Englishnationality. 

At no time, indeed, did foreign influence appear more dominant inEnglish politics than during the generation which saw Richard Isurrender his kingdom to be held as a fief of the empire, and Johnsurrender it to be held as a temporal fief of the papacy; or when, inthe reign of Henry III, a papal legate, Gualo, administered England asa province of the Papal States; when a foreign freebooter was sheriffof six English shires; and when aliens held in their hands the castlesand keys of the kingdom. It was a dark hour which preceded the dawn ofEnglish nationality, and so far there was no sign of Englishindignation at the bartering of England's independence. Resistancethere was, but it came from men who were only a degree less alien thanthose whose domination they resented. 

Yet a governing class, planted by Henry II, was striking root inEnglish soil and drawing nourishment and inspiration from Englishfeelings. It was reinforced by John's loss of Normandy, which compelledbi-national barons who held lands in both countries to choose betweentheir French and English sovereigns; and those who preferred Englandbecame more English than they had been before. The French invasion ofEngland, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened thecleavage; and there was something national, if little that was English, in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still more in the navalvictory which Hubert and the men of the Cinque Ports won over theFrench in the Straits of Dover in 1217. But not a vestige of nationalfeeling animated Henry III; and for twenty-five wearisome years afterhe had attained his majority he strove to govern England by means ofalien relatives and dependents. 

The opposition offered by the great council was baronial rather thannational; the revolt in which it ended was a revolt of the half-breedsrather than a revolt of the English; and the government theyestablished in 1258 was merely a legalized form of baronial anarchy. But there was this difference between the anarchy of Stephen's reignand that of Henry III's: now, when the foreigners fell out, the Englishbegan to come by their own. A sort of "young England" party fell foulof both the barons and the king; Simon de Montfort detached himselffrom the baronial brethren with whom he had acted, and boldly placedhimself at the head of a movement for securing England for the English. He summoned representatives from cities and boroughs to sit side byside with greater and lesser barons in the great council of the realm, which now became an English parliament; and for the first time sincethe Norman Conquest men of the subject race were called up todeliberate on national affairs. It does not matter whether this was thestroke of a statesman's genius or the lucky improvisation of a party-leader. Simon fell, but his work remained; Prince Edward, who copiedhis tactics at Evesham, copied his politics in 1275 and afterwards atWestminster; and under the first sovereign since the Norman Conquestwho bore an English name, the English people received their nationallivery and the seisin of their inheritance. 

CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

1272-1485

In 1265, simultaneously with the appearance of English townsfolk inparliament, an official document couched in the English tongue appearedlike a first peak above the subsiding flood of foreign language. When, three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, theywere noted as exceptions; but now the vernacular language of thesubject race was forcing its way into higher circles, and even intoliterary use. The upper classes were learning English, and those whosenormal tongue was English were thrusting themselves into, or at anyrate upon the notice of, the higher strata of society. 

The two normal ranks of feudal society had in England naturally beenFrench lords and English tillers of the soil; but commerce had neveraccommodated itself to this agricultural system, and the growth oftrade, of towns, of other forms of wealth than land, tendedconcurrently to break down French and feudal domination. A large numberof towns had been granted, or rather sold, charters by Richard I andJohn, not because those monarchs were interested in municipaldevelopment, but because they wanted money, and in their rights ofjurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a readymarketable commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king'sprice was generally the local merchant guild; and while thesetransactions developed local government, they did not necessarilypromote popular self-government, because the merchant guild was awealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the jurisdiction ithad bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as hehad done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and towndemocracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that therehad once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way tooligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies wereEnglish, and legally their members had been villeins; and theirexperience in local government prepared them for admittance to thatshare in national government which the development of taxation madealmost necessary. 

Henry II's scheme of active and comprehensive administration, indeed, led by a natural sequence to the parliament of Edward I and further. The more a government tries to do, the more taxation it must impose;and the broadening of the basis of taxation led gradually to thebroadening of the basis of representation, for taxation is the motherof representation. So long as real property only--that is to say, theownership of land--was taxed, the great council contained only thegreat landowners. But Henry II had found it necessary to tax personaltyas well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors inthe thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes onpersonalty to the great council. This representative system must not beregarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self-government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted apopular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance andmuttered, "_C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer_"; andEdward I's people would have been justified in entertaining thesuspicion that it was their money he wanted, not their advice, andstill less their control. He wished taxes to be voted in the royalpalace at Westminster, just as Henry I had insisted upon bishops beingelected in the royal chapel. In the royal presence burgesses andknights of the shire would be more liberal with their constituents'money than those constituents would be with their own when there wereneighbours to encourage resistance to a merely distant terror. 

The representation people had enjoyed in the shire and hundred mootshad been a boon, not because it enabled a few privileged persons toattend, but because by their attendance the mass were enabled to stayaway. If the lord or his steward would go in person, his attendanceexempted all his tenants; if he would not, the reeve and four "best"men from each township had to go. The "best, " moreover, were not chosenby election; the duty and burden was attached to the "best" holdings inthe township, and in the thirteenth century the sheriff was hard put toit to secure an adequate representation. This "suit of court" was, infact, an obligatory service, and membership of parliament was longregarded in a similar light. Parliament did not clamour to be created;it was forced by an enlightened monarchy on a less enlightened people. A parliamentary "summons" had the imperative, minatory sound which nowonly attaches to its police court use; and centuries later members wereoccasionally "bound over" to attend at Westminster, and prosecuted ifthey failed. On one occasion the two knights for Oxfordshire fled thecountry on hearing of their election, and were proclaimed outlaws. Members of parliament were, in fact, the scapegoats for the people, whowere all "intended" or understood to be present in parliament, butenjoyed the privilege of absence through representation. The greaterbarons never secured this privilege; they had to come in person whensummoned, just as they had to serve in person when the king went to thewars. Gradually, of course, this attitude towards representationchanged as parliament grasped control of the public purse, and with itthe power of taxing its foes and sparing its friends. In other thanfinancial matters it began to pay to be a member; and then it suitedmagnates not only to come in person but to represent the people in theLower House, the social quality of which developed with the growth ofits power. Only in very recent times has the House of Commons againincluded such representatives as these whose names are taken from theofficial returns for the parliaments of Edward I: John the Baker, William the Tailor, Thomas the Summoner, Andrew the Piper, Walter theSpicer, Roger the Draper, Richard the Dyer, Henry the Butcher, Durantthe Cordwainer, John the Taverner, William the Red of Bideford, CitizenRichard (Ricardus Civis), and William the priest's son. 

The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls andprelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant factof thirteenth-century English history. The people of England werebeginning to have a history which was not merely that of an aliengovernment; and their emergence is traceable not only in language, literature, and local and national politics, but also in the art ofwar. Edward I discovered in his Welsh wars that the long-bow was moreefficient than the weapons of the knight; and his grandson won Englishvictories at Crecy and Poitiers with a weapon which was within thereach of the simple yeoman. The discovery of gunpowder and developmentof artillery soon proved as fatal to the feudal castle as the long-bowhad to the mailed knight; and when the feudal classes had lost theirpredominance in the art of war, and with it their monopoly of the powerof protection, both the reasons for their existence and their capacityto maintain it were undermined. They took to trade, or, at least, tomoney-making out of land, like ordinary citizens, and thus entered intoa competition in which they had not the same assurance of success. 

Edward I's greatness consists mainly in his practical appreciation ofthese tendencies. He was less original, but more fortunate in hisopportunity, than Henry II. The time had come to set limits to theencroachments of feudalism and of the church, and Edward was able toimpose them because, unlike Henry II, he had the elements of a nationat his back. He was not able to sweep back these inroads, but he placedhigh-water marks along the frontiers of the state, and saw that theywere not transgressed. He inquired into the titles by which the greatlords held those portions of sovereign authority which they calledtheir liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenneproduced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibitedfurther subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, thepurchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of thevendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable, because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased. He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their usefulness to thecrown; he encouraged commerce by making profits from land liable toseizure for debt; and he defined the jurisdiction of the church, thoughhe had to leave it authority over all matters relating to marriage, wills, perjury, tithes, offences against the clergy, and ecclesiasticalbuildings. He succeeded, however, in defiance of its opposition, inmaking church property liable to temporal taxation, and in passing aMortmain Act which prohibited the giving of land to monasteries orother corporations without the royal licence. 

By thus increasing the national control over the church in England, hemade the church itself more national. It is sometimes implied that thechurch was equally national throughout the Middle Ages; but it isdifficult to speak of a national church before there was a nation, orto see that there was anything really English in a church ruled byLanfranc or Anselm, when there was not an Englishman on the bishops'bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable asvilleins of even taking orders in the church, and when the vernacularlanguage had been ousted from its services. But with the English nationgrew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliensin the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. Itwas, however, by secular authority that the English church wasdifferentiated from the church abroad. It was the barons and not thebishops who had resisted the assimilation of English to Roman canonlaw, and it was Edward I, and not Archbishops Peckham and Winchilsey, who defied Pope Boniface VIII. Archbishops, indeed, still placed theirallegiance to the pope above that to their king. 

The same sense of national and insular solidarity which led Edward todefy the papacy also inspired his efforts to conquer Wales andScotland. Indeed, it was the refusal of the church to pay taxes in thecrisis of the Scottish war that provoked the quarrel with Boniface. But, while Edward was successful in Wales, he encountered in Scotland agrowing national spirit not altogether unlike that upon which Edwardhimself relied in England. Nor was English patriotism sufficientlydeveloped to counteract the sectional feelings which took advantage ofthe king's embarrassments. The king's necessity was his subjects'opportunity, and the Confirmation of Charters extorted from him in 1297stands, it is said, to the Great Charter of 1215 in the relation ofsubstance to shadow, of achievement to promise. Edward, however, gaveaway much less than has often been imagined; he certainly did notabandon his right to tallage the towns, and the lustre of his motto, "Keep troth, " is tarnished by his application to the pope forabsolution from his promises. Still, he was a great king who servedEngland well by his efforts to eliminate feudalism from the sphere ofgovernment, and by his insistence on the doctrine that what touches allshould be approved by all. If to some catholic medievalists his reignseems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to befollowed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forceswhich he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in thesuperficial unity of Christendom. 

The miserable reign of his worthless successor, Edward II, illustratedthe importance of the personal factor in the monarchy, and also showedhow incapable the barons were of supplying the place of the feeblestking. Both parties failed because they took no account of the commonsof England or of national interests. The leading baron, Thomas ofLancaster, was executed; Edward II was murdered; and his assassin, Mortimer, was put to death by Edward III, who grasped some of thesignificance of his grandfather's success and his father's failure. Hefelt the national impulse, but he twisted it to serve a selfish anddynastic end. It must not, however, be supposed that the Hundred Years'War originated in Edward's claim to the French throne; that claim wasinvented to provide a colourable pretext for French feudatories tofight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There wasScotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward'sclutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne, from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there werebickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimedunder Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands whichEngland wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling itsfeet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural, especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural asovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much aFrenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England hadgrown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing Frenchbecame more and more unnatural. The claim to the throne, however, gavethe struggle a bitter and fruitless character; and the national means, which Edward employed to maintain the war, only delayed its inevitablyfutile end. It was supported by wealth derived from national commercewith Flanders and Gascony; national armies were raised by enlistment toreplace the feudal levy; the national long-bow and not the feudal war-horse won the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; and command of the seasecured by a national navy enabled Edward to win the victory of Sluysand complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extrasupplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of nationaltaxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and thensupplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance. 

Control of these supplies brought the House of Commons intoconstitutional prominence. It was no mere Third Estate after thecontinental model, for knights of the shire sat side by side withburgesses and citizens; and knights of the shire were the lesserbarons, who, receiving no special writ of summons, cast in their lotwith the Lower and not with the Upper House. Parliament had separatedinto two Houses in the reign of Edward II--for Edward I's ModelParliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted byclasses--but the House of Commons represented the _communities_ ofthe realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated allthese communities--shires, cities, and boroughs--and welded them into asingle community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for nationalfeeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and thesectionalism of feudal society; and it developed an _esprit decorps_ which counteracted the influence of the court. The advantageswhich the crown may have hoped to secure by bringing representatives upto Westminster, and thus detaching them from their basis of localresistance, were frustrated by the solidarity and consistency whichgrew up among members of parliament; and this growing nationalconsciousness supplanted local consciousness as the safeguard ofconstitutional liberty. 

Most of the principles and expedients of representative government wereadumbrated during this first flush of English nationalism, which hasbeen called "the age of the Commons. " The petitions, by which aloneparliament had been able to express its grievances, were turned intobills which the crown had to answer, not evasively, but by a thinlyveiled "yes" or "no. " The granting of taxes was made conditional uponthe redress of grievances; the crown finally lost its right to tallage;and its powers of independent taxation were restricted to the levyingof the "ancient customs" upon dry goods and wines. If it required morethan these and than the proceeds from the royal domains, royaljurisdiction, and diminishing feudal aids, it had to apply toparliament. The expense of the Hundred Years' War rendered suchapplications frequent; and they were used by the Commons to increasetheir constitutional power. Attempts were made with varying success toassert that the ministers of the crown, both local and national, wereresponsible to parliament, and that money-grants could only originatein the House of Commons, which might appropriate taxes to specificobjects and audit accounts so as to see that the appropriation wascarried out. 

The growth of national feeling led also to limitations of papal power. Early in Edward III's reign a claim was made that the king, in virtueof his anointing at coronation, could exercise spiritual jurisdiction, and the statutes of _Praemunire_ and _Provisors_ prohibited theexercise in England of the pope's powers of judicature and appointmentto benefices without the royal licence, though royal connivance andpopular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges fornearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamedagainst the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope atAvignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy, the king of France; and that captivity was followed by the "GreatSchism, " during which the quarrels of two, and then three, popes, simultaneously claiming to be the only head of the church on earth, undermined respect for their office. These circumstances combined withthe wealth and corruption of the church to provoke the Lollardmovement, which was the ecclesiastical aspect of the democratictendencies of the age. 

One of the most striking illustrations of popular development was thedemand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures, which Wycliffe met byhis translation of the Bible. At the same time Langland made literaturefor the common people out of their common lot, a fact that can hardlybe understood unless we remember that villeins, although they might befined by their lords for so doing, were sending their sons inincreasing numbers to schools, which were eventually thrown open tothem by the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrotein English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language ofthe court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records ofguilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedingsare taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to bewritten in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, eventhe laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturallyenough, in its usage of catholic Latin, tended to increase itsalienation from popular sympathies. Wycliffe represented this nationalfeeling when he appealed to national authority to reform a corruptCatholic church, and when he finally denied that power of miraculoustransubstantiation, upon which ultimately was based the claim of thepriesthood to special privileges and estimation. But his associationwith the extreme forms of social agitation, which accompanied theLollard movement, is less clear. 

Before the end of Edward III's reign the French war had produced a cropof disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availedto retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the socialdisorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the populationwas swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up themore attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts andmanufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the servicesfrom villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and theimposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt oftown artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did notlong impede their emancipation, and the process of commuting servicesfor rent seems to have gone on more rapidly in the first half of thefifteenth than in the fourteenth century. But the passionate preachingof social equality which inflamed the minds of the insurgents producedno further results; in their existing condition of political education, the peasant and artisan had perforce to be content with watching thestruggles of higher classes for power. 

Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped thewhirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of thewar as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth centurywhich nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronageshrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, norhas it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal"does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. Butthe peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords ofparliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament norelectors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another;and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. Theuse of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in thefourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could nothave in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; thatis to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had beenequal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been electedby his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been electedking of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those otherkings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to bepeers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they weresimply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king. 

The barons, however, of William I or Henry II had been a large class ofcomparatively small men, while the peers of Richard II were a smallclass of big men. The mass of lesser barons had been separated from thegreater barons, and had been merged in the landed gentry who wererepresented by the knights of the shire in the House of Commons. Thegreater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to theHouse of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issueof these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did notmean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father didnot involve the summons of his eldest son and successor. But graduallythe greater barons made this summons hereditary and robbed the crown ofall discretion in the matter, though it was not till the reign ofCharles I that the House of Lords decided in its own favour thequestion whether the crown had the power to refuse a writ of summons toa peer who had once received one. 

With this narrowing of the baronage, the barons lost the position theyhad held in the thirteenth century as leaders of constitutional reform, and this part was played in the fourteenth century by the knights ofthe shire. The greater barons devoted themselves rather to family thanto national politics; and a system of breeding-in amalgamated manysmall houses into a few great ones. Thomas of Lancaster held fiveearldoms; he was the rival of Edward II, and might well be called apeer of the crown. Edward III, perceiving the menace of these greathouses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means ofmarriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Princemarried the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulsterin the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress ofLancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married theheiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendantsof Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer;and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. Newtitles were imported from abroad to emphasize the new dignity of thegreater barons. Hitherto there had been barons only, and a few earlswhose dignity was an office; now by Edward III and Richard II therewere added dukes, marquises, and viscounts, and England might boast ofa peerage nearly, if not quite, as dangerous to the crown as that ofFrance. For Edward's policy failed: instead of securing the greathouses in the interests of the crown, it degraded the crown to thearena of peerage rivalries, and ultimately made it the prize of noblefactions. 

Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. Hemay perhaps be described as a "New" monarch born before his time. Hehad some of the notions which the Tudors subsequently developed withsuccess; but he had none of their power and self-control, and he wasfaced from his accession by a band of insubordinate uncles. Moreover, it needed the Wars of the Roses finally to convince the country of themeaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim tohis own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne asthe king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown againsttheir rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reducedalmost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords could notoverthrow by rebellion; and by insisting that the king should "live ofhis own, " without taxing the country, deprived him of the means oforderly government. Their ideal constitution approached so nearly toanarchy that it is impossible not to suspect collusion between them andthe Lords. The church alone could Henry placate by passing his statutefor burning heretics. 

Henry V took refuge from this domestic imbroglio in a spirited foreignpolicy, and put forward a claim more hollow than Edward III's to thethrone of France. There were temptations in the hopeless condition ofFrench affairs which no one but a statesman could have resisted; Henry, a brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but astatesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from thefact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation morecatholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory atAgincourt, married the French king's daughter, and was crowned king ofFrance. Then he died in 1422, leaving a son nine months old, withnothing but success in the impossible task of subduing France to savethe Lancastrian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting ambition abroadand problems shelved at home. 

Step by step the curse of war came home to roost. Henry V's abler butless brilliant brother, Bedford, stemmed till his death the rising tideof English faction and French patriotism. Then the expulsion of theEnglish from France began, and a long tale of failure discredited thegovernment. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not themeans to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war partyin the government resolved itself into a faction fight betweenLancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the governmentprovoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead ofliegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which wasadministered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the greatfactions at court; and these two great factions fostered and organizedlocal parties till the strife between them grew into the Wars of theRoses. 

Those wars are perhaps the most puzzling episode in English history. The action of an organized government is comparatively easy to follow, but it is impossible to analyze the politics of anarchy. The Yorkistclaim to the throne was not the cause of the war; it was, like EdwardIII's claim to the throne of France, merely a matter of tactics, andwas only played as a trump card. No political, constitutional, orreligious principle was at stake; and the more peaceable, organizedparts of the community took little share in the struggle. No greatbattle was fought south of the Thames, and no town stood a siege. Itlooks as though the great military and feudal specialists, whose powerlay principally on the Borders, were engaged in a final internecinestruggle for the control of England, in somewhat the same way as theOstmark or East Border of the Empire became Austria, and the Nordmarkor North Border became Prussia, and in turn dominated Germany. Certainly the defeat of these forces was a victory for southern andeastern England, and for the commercial and maritime interests on whichits growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point inthe wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. TheNew Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had notthe political genius to work out in detailed administration the resultsof the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III, who possessed the ability, made himself impossible as a king by thecrimes he had to commit in order to reach the throne. Thereconstruction of English government on a broader and firmer nationalbasis was therefore left to Henry VII and the House of Tudor. 

CHAPTER IV

THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM

1485-1603

England had passed through the Middle Ages without giving any sign ofthe greatness which awaited its future development. Edward III andHenry V had won temporary renown in France, but English sovereigns hadfailed to subjugate the smaller countries of Scotland and Ireland, which were more immediately their concern. Wycliffe and Chaucer, withperhaps Roger Bacon, are the only English names of first importance inthe realms of medieval thought and literature, unless we put Bede (673-735) in the Middle Ages; for insular genius does not seem to haveflourished under ecumenical inspiration; and even Wycliffe and Chaucermay be claimed as products of the national rather than of the catholicspirit. But with the transition from medieval to modern history, theconditions were altered in England's favour. The geographical expansionof Europe made the outposts of the Old World the _entrepôts_ forthe New; the development of navigation and sea-power changed the oceanfrom the limit into the link of empires; and the growth of industry andcommerce revolutionized the social and financial foundations of power. National states were forming; the state which could best adapt itselfto these changed and changing conditions would outdistance its rivals;and its capacity to adapt itself to them would largely depend on thestrength and flexibility of its national organization. It was theachievement of the New Monarchy to fashion this organization, and torescue the country from an anarchy which had already given other powersthe start in the race and promised little success for England. 

Henry VII had to begin in a quiet, unostentatious way with very scantymaterials. With a bad title and many pretenders, with an evil heritageof social disorder, he must have been sorely tempted to indulge in theheroics of Henry V. He followed a sounder business policy, and hisreign is dull, because he gave peace and prosperity at home withoutfighting a battle abroad. His foreign policy was dictated by insularinterests regardless of personal glory; and the security of his kingdomand the trade of his people were the aims of all his treaties withother powers. At home he carefully depressed the over-mighty subjectswho had made the Wars of the Roses; he kept down their number with suchsuccess that he left behind him only one English duke and one Englishmarquis; he limited their retainers, and restrained by means of theStar Chamber their habits of maintaining lawbreakers, packing juries, and intimidating judges. By a careful distribution of fines andbenevolences he filled his exchequer without taxing the mass of hispeople; and by giving office to ecclesiastics and men of humble originhe both secured cheaper and more efficient administration, andestablished a check upon feudal influence. He was determined that noEnglishman should build any castle walls over which the English kingcould not look, and that, as far as possible, no private person shouldpossess a franchise in which the king's writ did not run. He left tohis son, Henry VIII, a stable throne and a united kingdom. 

The first half of Henry VIII's reign left little mark on Englishhistory. Wolsey played a brilliant but essentially futile part on thediplomatic stage, where the rivalry and balance of forces between theEmperor Charles V and Francis I of France helped him to pose as thearbiter of Christendom. But he obtained no permanent national gains;and the final result of his foreign policy was to make the emperormaster of the papacy at the moment when Henry wanted the pope to annulhis marriage with the emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon. Henrydesired a son to succeed him and to prevent the recurrence of dynasticwars; he had only a daughter, Mary, and no woman had yet ruled orreigned in England. The death of all his male children by Catherineconvinced him that his marriage with his deceased brother Arthur'swidow was invalid; and his passion for Anne Boleyn added zest to hissuit for a divorce. The pope could not afford to quarrel with CharlesV, who cared little, indeed, for the cause of his aunt, but much forhis cousin Mary's claim to the English throne; and in 1529 Henry beganthe process, completed in the acts of Annates, Appeals, and Supremacy, by which England severed its connexion with Rome, and the king becamehead of an English church. 

It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due toso transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for ason; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In onesense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of theforces which had long been making for national independence, and thereligious complement of the changes which had emancipated the Englishstate, language, and literature from foreign control. 

The Catholic church naturally resisted its disintegration, and theseverance was effected by the secular arms of parliament and the crown. The nationalism of the English church was the result rather than thecause of the breach with Rome, and its national characteristics--supreme governance by the king, the disappearance of cosmopolitanreligious orders, the parliamentary authorization of services in thevernacular, of English books of Common Prayer, of English versions ofthe Bible, and of the Thirty-nine Articles--were all imposed byparliament after, and not adopted by the church before, the separation. There were, indeed, no legal means by which the church in England couldhave accomplished these things for itself; there were the convocationsof Canterbury and York, but these were two subordinate provinces of theCatholic church; and, whatever may be said for provincial autonomy inthe medieval church, the only marks of national autonomy were stampedupon it by the state. York was more independent of Canterbury thanCanterbury was of Rome; and the unity as well as the independence ofthe national church depends upon the common subjection of both itsprovinces to the crown. This predominance of state over church was aconsequence of its nationalization; for where the boundaries of the twocoincide, the state generally has the upper hand. The papacy was onlymade possible by the fall of the Western Empire; in the Eastern Empirethe state, so long as it survived, controlled the church; and theindependence of the medieval church was due to its catholicity, whilethe state at best was only national. It was in defence of thecatholicity, as opposed to the nationalism, of the church that More andFisher went to the scaffold in 1535, and nearly the whole bench ofbishops was deprived in 1559. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were bent ondestroying the medieval discord between the Catholic church and thenational state. Catholicity had broken down in the state with thedecline of the empire, and was fast breaking down in the church;nationalism had triumphed in the state, and was now to triumph in thechurch. 

In this respect the Reformation was the greatest achievement of thenational state, which emerged from the struggle with no rival for itsomnicompetent authority. Its despotism was the predominantcharacteristic of the century, for the national state successfully riditself of the checks imposed, on the one hand by the Catholic church, and on the other by the feudal franchises. But the supremacy was notexclusively royal; parliament was the partner and accomplice of thecrown. It was the weapon which the Tudors employed to pass Acts ofAttainder against feudal magnates and Acts of Supremacy against thechurch; and men complained that despotic authority had merely beentransferred from the pope to the king, and infallibility from thechurch to parliament. "Parliament, " wrote an Elizabethan statesman, "establisheth forms of religion. .. . "

But while Englishmen on the whole were pretty well agreed that foreignjurisdiction was to be eliminated, and that Englishmen were to beorganized in one body, secular and spiritual, which might be calledindifferently a state-church or a church-state, there was much moredifference of opinion with regard to its theological complexion. Itmight be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was farmore difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect theseverance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream, some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but allmingling imperceptibly with one another. The revolt of the nationagainst a foreign authority is the most easily distinguished of thesetendencies; another is the revolt of the laity against the clericalspecialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded asconsisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of theclergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after theyhad ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. TheRenaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival ofclerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and writeand understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles, secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealthand intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done ofmilitary specialists. The essential feature of the reformed serviceswas that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latinof ecclesiastical experts, that a Book of _Common_ Prayer was used, that congregational psalm-singing replaced the sacerdotal solo, and a communion was substituted for a priestly miracle. Religiousservice was to be something rendered by the people themselves, and notperformed for their benefit by the priest. 

Individual participation and private judgment in religion were indeedthe essence of Protestantism, which was largely the religious aspect ofthe revolt of the individual against the collectivism of the MiddleAges. The control exercised by the church had, however, been less theexpression of the general will than the discipline by authority ofmasses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at publicworship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But thegeneral emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence bythe Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of theScriptures and to a great deal of private and family religiousexercise, without which there could have been no ProtestantReformation. Lollardy, which was a violent outburst of this domesticpiety, was never completely suppressed; and it flamed out afresh whenonce political reasons, which had led the Lancastrians to support thechurch, induced the Tudors to attack it. 

Most spiritual of all the factors in the Reformation was the slow andpartial emancipation of men's minds from the materialism of the MiddleAges. It may seem bold, in face of the vast secularization of churchproperty and other things in the sixteenth century, to speak ofemancipation from materialism. Nevertheless, there was a distinct stepin the progress of men's minds from that primitive condition ofintelligence in which they can only grasp material symbols of the realconception. Rudimentary jurisprudence had confessed its inability topenetrate men's thoughts and differentiate their actions according totheir motives; there had been a time when possession had seemed morereal than property, and when the transference of a right wasincomprehensible without the transference of its concrete symbols. There could be no gift without its manual conveyance, no marriagewithout a ring, no king without a coronation. Many of these materialswaddling-clothes remain and have their value. A national flagstimulates loyalty, gold lace helps the cause of discipline. BishopGardiner, in the sixteenth century, defended images on the ground thatthey were documents all could read, while few could read theScriptures. To unimaginative men there could be no priest withoutvestments, no worship without ritual, no communion of the Spiritwithout the presence of the Body, no temple not made with hands, no Godwithout an image. To break the image, to abolish the vestments and theritual, to deny the transubstantiation, was to destroy the religion andreverence of the masses, who could only grasp matter and worship withtheir senses. 

Protestantism was, therefore, not a popular religion, and to thousandsof educated men it did not appeal. Few people are so immaterialisticthat they can dispense with symbols; many can idealize symbols in whichothers see nothing but matter; and only those devoid of artisticperception deny the religious value of sculpture, painting, and music. Protestantism might be an ideal religion if men were compounded of purereason; being what they were, many adopted it because they wereimpervious to artistic influence or impatient of spiritual discipline. It will hardly do to divide the nation into intelligent Protestants andilliterate Catholics: the point is that the somewhat crude symbolismwhich had satisfied the cravings of the average man had ceased to besufficient for his newer intelligent needs; he demanded either a highersymbolism or else as little as possible. Some felt the symbol a help, others felt it a hindrance to the realization of the ideal; so some mencan see better with, others without, spectacles, but that fact wouldhardly justify their abolition. 

Henry VIII confined his sympathies to the revolt of the nation againstRome and the revolt of the laity against the priests. The former heused to make himself Supreme Head of the church, the latter to subdueconvocation and despoil the monasteries. All civilized countries havefound it expedient sooner or later to follow his example with regard tomonastic wealth; and there can be little doubt that the withholding ofso much land and so many men and women from productive purposes impededthe material prosperity of the nation. But the devotion of the proceedsto the foundation of private families, instead of to educationalendowment, can only be explained and not excused by the exigencies ofpolitical tactics. His real services were political, not religious. Hetaught England a good deal of her insular confidence; he proclaimed theindivisible and indisputable sovereignty of the crown in parliament; henot only incorporated Wales and the county palatine of Chester withEngland, and began the English re-organization of Ireland, but heunited England north with England south of the Humber, and consolidatedthe Borders, those frayed edges of the national state. He carried onthe work of Henry II and Edward I, and by subduing rival jurisdictionsstamped a final unity on the framework of the government. 

The advisers of Edward VI embarked on the more difficult task of makingthis organization Protestant; and the haste with which they, andespecially Northumberland, pressed on the change provoked firstrebellion in 1549 and then reaction under Mary. They were alsoconfronted with social discontent arising out of the generalsubstitution of competition for custom as the ruling economicprinciple. Capital amassed in trade was applied to land, which began tobe treated as a source of money, not a source of men. Land held inseveralty was found more profitable than land held in common, largeestates than small holdings, and wool-growing than corn-growing. Smalltenants were evicted, small holdings consolidated, commons enclosed, and arable land converted to pasture. The mass of the agriculturalpopulation became mere labourers without rights of property on the soilthey tilled; thousands lost employment and swelled the ranks of sturdybeggars; and sporadic disorder came to a head in Kett's rebellion inNorfolk in 1549, which was with difficulty suppressed. But even thishighhanded expropriation of peasants by their landlords stimulatednational development. It created a vagrant mobile mass of labour, whichhelped to meet the demands of new industrial markets and to feedEnglish oversea enterprise. A race that sticks like a limpet to thesoil may be happy but cannot be great; and the ejection of Englishpeasants from their homesteads saved them from the reproach of home-keeping youths that they have ever homely wits. 

Mary's reign, however, checked the national impulse towards expansion, and thrust England for the moment back into the Middle Ages. First sheput herself and her kingdom under the aegis of Spain, to which in heartand mind she belonged, by marrying Philip II. Then with his assistanceshe restored the papal jurisdiction, and England surrendered itsnational independence. Those who repudiated their foreign jurisdictionwere naturally treated as contumacious by the papal courts in Englandand sent to the stake; and English adventurers were prohibited, in theinterests of Spain and Portugal, from trespassing in the New World. Finally England was plunged into war with France in order to helpPhilip, and lost Calais for its pains. Mary's reign showed that in asovereign good intentions and upright conversation exaggerate ratherthan redeem the evil effects of bigotry and blindness. She had, however, made it impossible for any successor to perpetuate in Englandthe Roman jurisdiction and the patronage of Spain. 

Elizabeth was a sovereign more purely British in blood than any othersince the Norman Conquest; and to her appropriately fell the task ofcompleting her country's national independence. Henry VIII's Act ofSupremacy and Edward VI's of Uniformity were restored with somemodifications, in spite of the opposition of the Catholic bishops, whocontended that a nation had no right to deal independently withecclesiastical matters, and suffered deprivation and imprisonmentrather than recognize a schismatic national church. Elizabeth rejectedPhilip's offers of marriage and paid no heed to his counsels of state. She scandalized Catholic Europe by assisting the revolted Scots toexpel the French from North Britain; and revenged the contempt, inwhich England had been held in Mary's reign, by supporting withimpunity the Dutch against Philip II and the Huguenots against the kingof France. She concealed her aggressions with diplomatic artifice andcaution; but at heart she was with her people, who lost no opportunity, in their new-found confidence, of plundering and insulting the Catholicpowers in their way. 

The astonishing success of England amid the novel conditions ofnational rivalry requires some attempt at explanation. It seems to havebeen due to the singular flexibility of the English character andnational system, and to the consequent ease with which they adaptedthemselves to changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case atpresent, a survey of English history suggests that the conventionalstolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of hischaracteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change theirmind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly Englandhas never suffered from that rigidity of social system which hashampered in the past the adaptability of its rivals. Even in feudaltimes there was little law about status; and when the customaryarrangement of society in two agricultural classes of landlord andtenant was modified by commerce, capitalism, and competition, noblesadapted themselves to the change with some facility. They took tosheep-farming and commercial speculations, just as later on they tookto keeping dairy-shops. It is the smallness rather than the source ofhis profits that excites social prejudice against the shopkeeper inEngland. On the Continent, however, class feeling prevented thegoverning classes from participating in the expansion of commerce. German barons, for instance, often with only a few florins a yearincome, could not supplement it by trade; all they could do was to robthe traders, robbery being a thoroughly genteel occupation. Henceforeign governments were, as a rule, less alive and less responsive tothe commercial interests of their subjects. Philip II trampled oncommercial opinion in a way no English sovereign could have done. Indeed, complaints were raised in England at the extent to which thecommercial classes had the ear of parliament and the crown; since theaccession of Henry VIII, it was said in 1559, they had succeeded bytheir secret influence in procuring the rejection of every bill theythought injurious to their interests. 

There was no feeling of caste to obstruct the efficiency of Englishadministration. The nobility were separated from the nation by no fixedline; there never was in England a nobility of blood, for all the sonsof a noble except the eldest were commoners. And while they wereconstantly sinking into the mass of the nation, commoners frequentlyrose to the rank of nobility. Before the end of the fourteenth centurywealth derived from trade had become an avenue to the House of Lords. The justices of the peace, on whom the Tudors relied for localadministration, were largely descended from successful city men whohad, like the Walsinghams, planted themselves out in the country; andElizabeth herself was great-great-granddaughter of a London mayor. Thissocial elasticity enabled the government to avail itself of able men ofall classes, and the efficiency of Tudor administration was mainly dueto these recruits, whose genius would have been elsewhere neglected. Further, it provided the government with agents peculiarly fitted bytraining and knowledge to deal with the commercial problems which werebeginning to fill so large a sphere in politics; and finally, itrendered the government singularly responsive to the public opinion ofthe classes upon whose welfare depended the expansion of England. 

Englishmen likewise took to the sea, when the sea became all-important, as readily as they took to trade. English command of the Narrow Seashad laid France open to the invasions of Edward III and Henry V, andhad checked the tide of French reconquest before the walls of Calais. English piracy in the Channel was notorious in the fifteenth century, and in the sixteenth it attained patriotic proportions. Henry VII hadencouraged Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland, but the papal partition ofnew-found lands between Spain and Portugal barred to England the doorof legitimate, peaceful expansion; and there can be little doubt thatthis prohibition made many converts to Protestantism among Englishseafaring folk. Even Mary could not prevent her subjects from preyingon Spanish and Portuguese commerce and colonies; and with Elizabeth'saccession preying grew into a national pastime. Hawkins broke intoSpanish monopoly in the West Indies, Drake burst into their Pacificpreserves, and circumvented their defences; and a host of followersplundered nearly every Spanish and Portuguese colony. 

At last Philip was provoked into a naval war for which the English wereand he was not prepared. Spanish rigidity embraced the Spanish marineas well as Spanish theology. Clinging to Mediterranean and medievaltraditions, Spain had failed to realize the conditions of sea-power ornaval tactics. England, on the other hand, had, largely under theinspiration of Henry VIII, adapted its navy to oceanic purposes. A typeof vessel had been evolved capable of crossing the ocean, ofmanoeuvring and of fighting under sail; to Drake the ship had becomethe fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply avehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea. The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to newconditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could bemade a Spanish admiral. 

England had disposed of similar claims to political and militaryauthority in 1569, when medieval feudalism made its last bid for thecontrol of English policy. For ten years Elizabeth had been guided bySir William Cecil, a typical "new man" of Tudor making, who hoped towean the common people from dependence upon their lords, and tocomplete the destruction of feudal privileges which still impeded theaction of national sovereignty. The flight of Mary Queen of Scots intoEngland in 1568 provided a focus for noble discontent with Cecil'srule, and the northern earls rebelled in 1569. The rebellion was easilysuppressed, but its failure did not deter the Duke of Norfolk, theearls' accomplice, from joining Ridolfi's plot with similar ends. Hewas brought to the block in 1572, and in him perished the lastsurviving English duke. For more than half a century England had to doits best--defeat the Spanish Armada, conquer Ireland, circumnavigatethe globe, lay the foundations of empire, produce the literature of theElizabethan age--without any ducal assistance. It was left for James I, who also created the rank of baronet in order to sell the title (1611), to revive the glories of ducal dignity in the persons of LudovicStuart, Duke of Richmond, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham(1623). 

Cecil's drastic methods of dealing with the opposition lords left thedoor of government open to men like Walsingham, who were determined togive full play to the new forces in English politics. Discontentedreactionaries were reduced to impotent silence, or driven abroad toside openly with the enemy. Pius V's bull excommunicating and deposingElizabeth (1570) shattered in a similar way the old Catholic party. Themajority acquiesced in the national religion; the extremists fled tobecome conspirators at foreign courts or Jesuit and missionary priests. The antagonism between England and Spain in the New World did more, perhaps, than Spanish Catholicism to make Philip the natural patron ofthese exiles and of their plots against the English government; and asSpain and England drew apart, England and France drew together. In 1572a defensive alliance was formed between them, and there seemed aprospect of their co-operation to drive the Spaniards out of theNetherlands. But Catholic France resented this Huguenot policy, and themassacre of St. Bartholomew put a violent end to the scheme, whileElizabeth and Philip patched up a truce for some years. There could, however, be no permanent compromise, on the one hand, between Spanishexclusiveness and the determination of Englishmen to force open thedoor of the New World and, on the other, between English nationalismand the papal resolve to reconquer England for the Catholic church. Philip made common cause with the papacy and with its British champion, Mary Queen of Scots, while Englishmen made common cause with Philip'srevolted subjects in the Netherlands. The acquisition of Portugal, itsfleet, and its colonial empire by Philip in 1580, the assassination ofWilliam of Orange in 1584, and the victories of Alexander of Parma inthe Netherlands forced Elizabeth into decisive action. The Dutch weretaken under her wing, a national expedition led by Drake paralyzedSpanish dominion in the West Indies in 1585 and then destroyed Philip'sfleet at Cadiz in 1587, and the Queen of Scots was executed. 

At last Philip attempted a tardy retaliation with the Spanish Armada. Its naval inefficiency was matched by political miscalculations. Philipnever imagined that a united England could be conquered; but helaboured under the delusion, spread by English Catholic exiles, thatthe majority of the English people only awaited a signal to riseagainst their queen. When this delusion was exploded and the navalincompetence of Spain exposed, his dreams of conquest vanished, and hecontinued the war merely in the hope of securing guarantees againstEnglish interference in the New World, in the Netherlands, and inFrance, where he was helping the Catholic League to keep Henry ofNavarre off the French throne. Ireland, however, was his most promisingsphere of operations. There religious and racial hostility to theEnglish was fusing discordant Irish septs into an Irish nation, and theappearance of a Spanish expedition was the signal for something like anational revolt. England had not been rich enough in men or money togive Ireland a really efficient government, but the extent of thedanger in 1598-1602 stimulated an effort which resulted in the firstreal conquest of Ireland; and Englishmen set themselves to do the samework, with about the same amount of benevolence, for the Irish that theNormans had done for the Anglo-Saxons. 

So far Tudor monarchy had proved an adequate exponent of Englishnationalism, because nationalism had been concerned mainly with theexternal problems of defence against foreign powers and jurisdictions. But with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the urgency of thoseproblems passed away; and during the last fifteen years of Elizabeth'sreign national feelings found increasing expression in parliament andin popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially inthe Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of anational spirit and technique, and their emancipation from theinfluence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a riftappeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one thing thealliance, forged by Henry VIII between the crown and parliament, against the church, was being changed into an alliance between thecrown and church against the parliament, because parliament wasbeginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in stateand church which threatened the principle of personal rule common tomonarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King, " was a shrewd aphorismof James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. Inother respects--such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levyindirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjectswithout cause shown, and to tamper with the privileges of the House ofCommons--the royal prerogative was called in question. Popularacquiescence in strong personal monarchy was beginning to waver nowthat the need for it was disappearing with the growing security ofnational independence. People could afford the luxuries of liberty andparty strife when their national existence was placed beyond the reachof danger; and a national demand for a greater share of self-government, which was to wreck the House of Stuart, was making itselfheard before, on March 24, 1603, the last sovereign of the line whichhad made England a really national state passed away. 

CHAPTER V

THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

1603-1815

National independence and popular self-government, although they wereintimately associated as the two cardinal dogmas of nineteenth-centuryliberalism, are very different things; and the achievement of completenational independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve anysolution of the question of popular self-government. Still, thatachievement had been largely the work of the nation itself, and anation which had braved the spiritual thunders of the papacy and thetemporal arms of Philip II would not be naturally submissive underdomestic tyranny. Perhaps the fact that James I was an alien hastenedthe admonition, which parliament addressed to him in the first sessionof the reign, to the effect that it was not prepared to tolerate in himmany things which, on account of her age and sex, it had overlooked inElizabeth. 

Parliament began the constitutional conflict thus foreshadowed with noclear constitutional theory; and its views only crystallized underpressure of James I's pretensions. James possessed an aptitude forpolitical speculation, which was rendered all the more dangerous by thefacilities he enjoyed for putting his theories into practice. He triedto reduce monarchy to a logical system, and to enforce that system aspractical politics. He had succeeded to the English throne in spite ofHenry VIII's will, which had been given the force of a parliamentarystatute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien frominheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which hadnever been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles ofsuccession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to suchmundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and theobvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; andhe was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditaryprinciple which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theoryof divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divineright which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was notnecessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, asat Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory, which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition of kings. According to James's view, Providence had not merely ordained the king_de facto_, but had pre-ordained the kings that were to be, byselecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to bedetermined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyondthe power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justiceor efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliamentcould no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit hisauthority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. Fromthis premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power wasabsolute; the king could do no wrong for which his subjects could callhim to account; he was responsible to God but not to man--a doctrinewhich the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacyover the church. He might, if he chose, make concessions to his people, and a wise sovereign like himself would respect the concessions of hispredecessors. But parliamentary and popular privileges existed by royalgrace; they could not be claimed as rights. 

This dogmatic assurance, to which the Tudors had never resorted, embittered parliamentary opposition and obscured the historicaljustification for many of James's claims. Historically, there was muchmore to be said for the contention that parliament existed by grace ofthe monarchy than for the counterclaim that the monarchy existed bygrace of parliament; and for the plea that parliament only possessedsuch powers as the crown had granted, than for the counter-assertionthat the crown only enjoyed such rights as parliament had conceded. Fewof James's arbitrary acts could not be justified by precedent, and nota little of his unpopularity was due to his efforts to exact from localgentry the performance of duties which had been imposed upon them byearlier parliaments. The main cause of dissatisfaction was the growingpopular conviction that constitutional weapons, used by the Tudors fornational purposes, were now being used by the Stuarts in the interestsof the monarchy against those of the nation; and as the breach widened, the more the Stuarts were led to rely on these weapons and on theirtheory of the divine right of kings, and the more parliament was drivento insist upon its privileges and upon an alternative theory to that ofJames I. 

This alternative theory was difficult to elaborate. There was no ideaof democracy. Complete popular self-government is, indeed, impossible;for the mass of men cannot rule, and the actual administration mustalways be in the hands of a comparatively few experts. The problem wasand is how to control them and where to limit their authority; and thisis a question of degree. In 1603 no one claimed that ministers wereresponsible to any one but the king; administration was his exclusivefunction. It was, however, claimed that parliamentary sanction must beobtained for the general principles upon which the people were to begoverned--that is to say, for legislation. The crown might appoint whatbishops it pleased, but it could not repeal the Act of Uniformity; itmight make war or peace, but could not impose direct and generaltaxation; it selected judges, but they could only condemn men to deathor imprisonment for offences recognized by the law. The subject was notat the mercy of the king except when he placed himself outside the law. 

The disadvantage, however, of an unwritten constitution is that thereare always a number of cases for which the law does not provide; andthere were many more in the seventeenth century than there are to-day. These cases constituted the debatable land between the crown andparliament. Parliament assumed that the crown could neither diminishparliamentary privilege nor develop its own prerogative withoutparliamentary sanction; and it read this assumption back into history. Nothing was legal unless it had been sanctioned by parliament; unlessthe crown could vouch a parliamentary statute for its claims they weredenounced as void. This theory would have disposed of much of theconstitution, including the crown itself; even parliament had grown byprecedent rather than by statute. There were, as always, precedents onboth sides. The question was, which were the precedents of growth andwhich were those of decay? That could only be decided by the force ofcircumstances, and the control of parliament over the national pursewas the decisive factor in the situation. 

The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue wassteadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing withthe nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenthcentury, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with theinflux of precious metals from the New World. Yet the expense ofgovernment automatically and inevitably increased, and disputes overforeign policy, over the treatment of Roman Catholics, over episcopaljurisdiction, over parliamentary privileges, and a host of minormatters made the Commons more and more reluctant to fill the emptyTreasury. The blunt truth is that people will not pay for what they donot consider their concern; and Stuart government grew less and less apopular affair. The more the Stuarts demanded, the greater theobstacles they encountered in securing compliance. 

James I levied additional customs which were called impositions, andthe judges in 1606 properly decided that these were legal. But theyincreased James's unpopularity; and, as a precaution, parliament wouldonly grant Charles I tonnage and poundage (the normal customs duties)for one year after his accession instead of for life. Charles contendedthat parliament had, owing to non-user, lost the right of refusingthese supplies to the crown; he proceeded to levy them by his ownauthority, and further demanded a general forced loan and benevolence. For refusing to pay, five knights were sent to prison by order of theprivy council "without cause shewn, " whereby the crown avoided ajudicial decision on the legality of the loan. This provoked thePetition of Right in 1628; but in 1629 Charles finally quarrelled withparliament over the question whether in assenting to the petition hehad abandoned his right to levy tonnage and poundage. For eleven yearshe ruled without parliament, raising supplies by various obsoleteexpedients culminating in ship money, on behalf of which many patrioticarguments about the necessities of naval defence were used. 

He was brought up sharply when he began to kick against thePresbyterian pricks of Scotland; and the expenses of the Bishops' Warput an end to the hand-to-mouth existence of his unparliamentarygovernment in England. The Long parliament went to the root of thematter by demanding triennial sessions and the choice of ministers whohad the confidence of parliament. It emphasized its insistence uponministerial responsibility to parliament by executing Strafford andafterwards Laud. Charles, who laboured under the impression common toreactionaries that they are defending the rights of the people, contended that, in claiming an unfettered right to choose his ownadvisers, he was championing one of the most obvious liberties of thesubject. Parliament, however, had realized that in politics principlesconsist of details as a pound consists of pence; and that if it wantedsound legislative principles, it must take care of the details ofadministration. Charles had ruled eleven years without parliament; butso had Wolsey, and Elizabeth had apologized when she called it togetheroftener than about once in five years. If the state had had morefinancial ballast, and the church had been less high and top-heavy, Charles might seemingly have weathered the storm and let parliamentsubside into impotence, as the Bourbons let the States-General ofFrance, without any overt breach of the constitution. After all, theoriginal design of the crown had been to get money out of parliament, and the main object of parliament had once been to make the king liveof his own. A king content with parsimony might lawfully dispense withparliament; and the eleven years had shown the precarious basis ofparliamentary institutions, given a thrifty king and an unambitiouscountry. Events were demonstrating the truth of Hobbes's maxim thatsovereignty is indivisible; peace could not be kept between a sovereignlegislature and a sovereign executive; parliament must control thecrown, or some day the eleven years would recur and become perpetual. In France, unparliamentary government was prolonged by the victory ofthe crown for a century and three-quarters. In England, Charles's wasthe last experiment, because parliament defeated the claim of the crownto rule by means of irresponsible ministers. 

In such a contest for the control of the executive there could be nofinal arbitrament save that of force; but Charles was only able tofight at all because parliament destroyed its own unanimity byattacking the church, and thus provided him with a party and an army. More than a temporary importance, however, attaches to the fact thatthe abeyance of monarchical power at once gave rise to permanentEnglish parties; and it was natural that those parties should begin byfighting a civil war, for party is in the main an organ for theexpression of combative instincts, and the metaphors of party warfareare still of a military character. Englishmen's combative instinctswere formerly curbed by the crown; but since the decline of monarchythey have either been vented against other nations, or expressed inparty conflicts. The instinct does not commonly require two forms ofexpression at once, and party strife subsides during a national war. Its methods of expression, too, have been slowly and partiallycivilized; and even a general election is more humane than a civil war. But the first attack of an epidemic is usually the most virulent, andparty strife has not a second time attained the dimensions of civilwar. 

One reason for this mitigation is that the questions at issue have beengradually narrowed down until, although they bulk large to heatedimaginations, they really cover a very small area of political life, and the main lines continue the same whichever party triumphs. Anotherreason is that experience has proved the necessity of the submission ofthe minority to the majority. This is one of the greatest achievementsof politics. In the thirteenth century Peter des Roches claimedexemption from the payment of a scutage on the ground that he had votedagainst it, and his claim was held to be valid. Such a contention meansanarchy, and considerable progress had been made before the seventeenthcentury towards the constitutional doctrine that the vote of themajority binds the whole community. But the process was incomplete, andthe causes of strife between Roundhead and Royalist were fundamental. Avictory of the Royalists would have been carried to extremes, as thevictory of the Roundheads was; and the result would almost certainlyhave been despotic government until a still more violent outbreakprecipitated the country into a series of revolutions. 

Liberty, like religious toleration, has been won through theinternecine warfare between various forms of despotism; and thestrength of the Royalists lay in the fact that parliament, in espousingPresbyterianism, weighted its cause with an ecclesiastical system asnarrow and tyrannical as Laud's. New presbyter was but old priest writlarge, and the balance between the two gave the decision into the handsof the Independents, whose numerical inferiority was redeemed byCromwell's military genius. When Presbyterians and Independents hadground the Royalists to powder at Marston Moor and Naseby, Charlessought to recover his authority through their quarrels. He fell betweentwo stools. His double dealings with both parties led to the secondcivil war, to his own execution, and to the abolition of monarchy andof the House of Lords in 1649. Having crushed Catholic Ireland andPresbyterian Scotland, to which Charles and his son had in turnappealed, Cromwell was faced with the problem of governing England. 

The victorious party was in a hopeless minority, and some of thefervour with which the Independents appealed to divine election mayhave been due to a consciousness that they would not have passed thetest of a popular vote. In their view, God had determined thefundamentals of the constitution by giving the victory to His elect;these fundamentals were to be enshrined in a written rigidconstitution, and placed beyond the reach of parliament or the people. Under the sovereignty of this inspired constitution (1653), whichprovided, among other things, for the union of England, Ireland, andScotland, a drastic reform of the franchise and redistribution ofseats, the government was to be in the hands of a "single person, " theProtector, and a single chamber, the House of Commons. The singleperson soon found the single chamber "horridly arbitrary, " andpreferred the freedom of military despotism. But his major-generalswere even more arbitrary than the single chamber, and in 1657 a freshconstitution was elaborated with a Second Chamber to make it popular. The Restoration had, in fact, begun almost as soon as the war was over;the single chamber republic of 1649-1653 had given place to a single-chamber monarchy, called the Protectorate, and a further step was takenwhen in 1657 the "other" House was added; Cromwell was within an ace ofmaking himself a king and his dynasty hereditary. Only his personalgenius, the strength of his army, and the success of his foreign policyenabled him thus to restore the forms of the old constitution withoutthe support of the social forces on which it had been based. His deathin 1658 was necessarily followed by anarchy, and anarchy by the recallof Charles II. 

The Restoration was not so much a restoration of monarchy, which hadreally been achieved in 1653, as a restoration of the church, ofparliament, and of the landed gentry; and each took its toll of profitfrom the situation. The church secured the most sectarian of itsvarious settlements, and the narrowness of its re-establishment keptnearly half the nation outside its pale. The landed gentry obtained thepredominant voice in parliament for a century and three-quarters, and, as a consequence, the abolition of its feudal services to the crown, the financial deficit being made up by an excise on beer instead of bya land-tax. Parliament emancipated itself from the dictation of thearmy, taking care never to run that risk again, and from therestrictions of a written, rigid constitution. It also recovered itsrotten boroughs and antiquated franchise, but lost its union with theparliaments of Ireland and Scotland. At first it seemed more royalistthan the king; but it soon appeared that its enthusiasm for themonarchy was more evanescent than its attachment to the church andlanded interest. Even in the first flush it refrained from restoringthe Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts and councils whichhad enabled the crown to dispense with parliamentary and common lawcontrol; and Charles II was never able to repeat his father'sexperiment of ruling for eleven years without a parliament. 

The ablest, least scrupulous, and most popular of the Stuarts, he beganhis reign with two objects: the emancipation of the crown from controlas far as possible, and the emancipation of the Roman Catholics fromtheir position of political inferiority; but the pursuit of bothobjects was strictly conditioned by a determination not to embark onhis travels again. The two objects were really incompatible. Charlescould only make himself autocratic with the support of the Anglicanchurch, and the church was determined to tolerate no relaxation of thepenal code against other Catholics. At first Charles had to submit toClarendon and the church; but in 1667 he gladly replaced Clarendon bythe Cabal administration, among the members of which the only bond ofunity was that it did not contain a sound Anglican churchman. With itsassistance he published his Declarations of Indulgence for RomanCatholics and Dissenters (1672), and sought to secure himself againstparliamentary recalcitrance by a secret treaty with Louis XIV (1670). This policy failed against the stubborn opposition of the church. TheCabal fell; Danby, a replica of Clarendon, came into office; and theTest Act of 1673 made the position of the Roman Catholics worse than itwas before the Declaration. 

This failure convinced Charles that one of his two designs must go bythe board. He threw over the less popular cause of his co-religionists;and henceforth devoted himself to the task of emancipating the crownfrom parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been arousedby Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and TitusOates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion ofEngland, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot. The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for morethan it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic producedone useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicialmurders, and a foolish attempt to exclude James from the succession, Asit subsided, Charles deftly turned the reaction to the ruin of theWhigs (1681). Of their leaders, Shaftesbury fled to Holland, and Sidneyand Russell were brought to the block; their parliamentary strongholdsin the cities and towns were packed with Tories; and for the last fouryears of his reign Charles ruled without a parliament, but with thegoodwill of the Tories and the church. 

This half of the nation would probably have acquiesced in the growth ofdespotism under James II, had not the new king ostentatiously ignoredthe wisdom of Charles II. He began (1685) with everything in hisfavour: a Tory parliament, a discredited opposition, which furtherweakened its case by Argyll's and Monmouth's rebellions, and a greatreputation for honesty. Within a couple of years he had thrown away allthese advantages by his revival of Charles II's abandoned RomanCatholic policy, and had alienated the Anglican church, by whosesupport alone he could hope to rule as an English despot. He suspendedand dispensed with laws, introduced Roman Catholics into the army, theuniversities, the privy council, raised a standing force of thirtythousand men, and finally prosecuted seven bishops for seditious libel. William III, the husband of James's daughter Mary, was invited byrepresentatives of all parties to come over as England's deliverer, andJames fled on his approach. He could not fight, like his father, because no English party supported his cause. 

The Revolution of 1688 was singularly negative so far as its resultswere expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. Thesecelebrated constitutional documents made little provision for nationalself-government. One king, it is true, had been evicted from thethrone, and Roman Catholics were to be always excluded; and thesemeasures disposed of divine hereditary right. But that had been aStuart invention, and kings had been deposed before James II. Whyshould self-government follow on the events of 1688 any more than onthose of 1399, 1461, or 1485? Future sovereigns were, indeed, torefrain from doing much that James had done. They were not to keep astanding army in time of peace, not to pardon ministers impeached bythe House of Commons, not to dismiss judges except on an address fromboth Houses of Parliament, not to suspend laws at all nor to dispensewith them in the way James had done, not to keep a parliament nor dowithout one longer than three years, and not to require excessive bail. Religious toleration, too, was secured in some measure, and freedom ofthe press to a limited extent. But all these enactments were safeguardsagainst the abuse of royal power and infringement of civil libertyrather than provisions for self-government. No law was passed requiringthe king to be guided by ministers enjoying the confidence ofparliament; he was still the real and irresponsible executive, andparliament was limited to legislation. The favourite Whig toast of"civil and religious liberty" implied an Englishman's right to freedomfrom molestation, but not a right to a voice in the government of thecountry. Responsible self-government was not guaranteed by the laws, but it was ensured by the facts, of the Revolution. 

The truth is, that the methods of English constitutional progress havebeen, down to this day, offensive strategy and defensive tactics. Positions have been taken up which necessitate the retirement of theforces of reaction, unless they are prepared to make attackspredestined to defeat; and so, nearly every Liberal advance has beenmade to appear the result of Tory aggression. The central position hasalways been control of the purse by parliament. At first it onlyembraced certain forms of direct taxation; gradually it was extendedand developed by careful spade-work until it covered every source ofrevenue. Entrenched behind these formidable earthworks, parliamentproceeded to dictate to the early Stuarts the terms of national policy. Charles I, provoked by its assumptions, made his attack on the centralposition, was foiled, and in his retreat left large portions of thecrown's equipment in the hands of parliament. Rasher attacks by JamesII resulted in a still more precipitate retreat and in the abandonmentof more of the royal prerogatives. The growth of the empire and of theexpenses of government riveted more firmly than ever the hold ofparliament over the crown; the greater the demands which it alone couldmeet, the higher the conditions it could impose upon their grant, untilparliament determined absolutely the terms upon which the office ofmonarchy should be held. In a similar way the Commons used theircontrol of the national purse to restrict the powers of the House ofLords; provocation has led to attacks on the central position, and thefailure of these attacks has been followed by surrender. Prudentleaders have preferred to retire without courting the preliminary ofdefeat. 

William III and his successors adopted this course when confronted withthe impregnable position of parliament after the Revolution; and hencelater constitutional gains, while no apparent part of the parliamentaryposition, were its inevitable consequences. William, absorbed in alife-and-death struggle with Louis XIV, required a constant stream ofsupplies from parliament; and to secure its regularity he had to relyon the good offices and advice of those who commanded most votes in theHouse of Commons. In the Lords, who then numbered less than twohundred, he could secure the balance of power through the appointmentof bishops. In the Commons his situation was more difficult. Thepartial demise of personal monarchy in 1688 led to a scramble for itseffects, and the scramble to the organization of the two principalcompetitors, the Whig and Tory parties. The Whigs formed a "junto, " orcaucus, and the Tories followed their example. William preferred theWhigs, because they sympathized with his wars; but the countrysometimes preferred the Tories, because it hated William's Dutchmen andtaxation. On William's death in 1702 the danger from Louis XIV wasconsidered so acute that a ministry was formed from all parties inorder to secure the united support of parliament; but gradually, inAnne's reign, the Tories who wanted to make peace left the ministry, until in 1708 it became purely Whig. In 1710 it fell, and the Toriestook its place. They wanted a Stuart restoration, even at the price ofundoing the Revolution, if only the Pretender would abandon his popery;while the Whigs were determined to maintain the Revolution even at theprice of a Hanoverian dynasty. They returned to power in 1714 with theaccession of George I, and monopolized office for more than half acentury. As time went on, many Whigs became hardly distinguishable fromTories who had relinquished Jacobitism; and from Lord North's accessionto office in 1770 down to 1830 the Tories enjoyed in their turn a half-century of nearly unbroken power. 

During this period the party system and cabinet government wereelaborated. Party supplanted the crown as the determining factor inBritish government, and the cabinet became the executive committee ofthe party possessing a majority in the House of Commons. Queen Anne hadnot the intellect nor vigour to assert her independence of ministers, and George I, who understood no English, ceased to attend cabinetmeetings. The royal veto disappeared, and even the king's choice ofministers was severely limited, not by law but by practicalnecessities. Ministers, instead of giving individual advice which thesovereign might reject, met together without the king and tenderedcollective advice, the rejection of which by the sovereign meant theirresignation, and if parliament agreed with them, its dissolution orsurrender on the part of the crown. For the purpose of tendering thisadvice and maintaining order in the cabinet, a chief was needed;Walpole, by eliminating all competitors during his long administration(1721-1742), developed the office of prime minister, which, without anylaw to establish it, became one of the most important of Britishinstitutions. Similarly the cabinet itself grew and was not created byany Act; indeed, while the cabinet and the prime minister were growing, it would have been impossible to induce any parliament to create them, for parliament was still jealous of royal influence, and even wanted toexclude from its ranks all servants of the crown. But, fortunately, theabsence of a written constitution enabled the British constitution togrow and adapt itself to circumstances without legal enactment. 

The circumstance that the cabinet was the executive committee of themajority in the House of Commons gave it the command of the LowerHouse, and by means of the Commons' financial powers, of the crown. This party system was deplored by many; Bolingbroke, a Tory leader outof office, called for a national party, and urged the crown toemancipate itself from Whig domination by choosing ministers from allsections. Chatham thought that in the interests of national efficiency, the ablest ministers should be selected, whatever their politicalpredilections. George III adapted these ideas to the purpose of makinghimself a king in deed. But his success in breaking down the party andcabinet system was partial and temporary; he only succeeded in humblingthe Whig houses by giving himself a master in the person of the youngerPitt (1784), who was supported by the majority of the nation. 

With the House of Lords the cabinet has had more prolonged andcomplicated troubles. Ostensibly and constitutionally the disputes havebeen between the two Houses of Parliament; and this was really the casebefore the development of the close connexion between the cabinet andthe Commons. Both Houses had profited by the overthrow of the crown inthe seventeenth century, and the extremes to which they sometimespushed their claims suggest that they were as anxious as the crown hadbeen to place themselves above the law. The House of Lords did succeedin making its judicial decisions law in spite of the crown and Commons, although the Commons were part of the "High Court of Parliament, " andno law had granted the Lords supreme appellate jurisdiction; hence theconstitutional position of the House of Lords was made by its owndecisions and not by Act of Parliament or of the crown. This claim toappellate jurisdiction, which was much disputed by the Commons duringthe reign of Charles II, was only conceded in return for a similarconcession to the Commons in financial matters. Here the Commonspractically made their resolutions law, though the Lords insisted thatthe privilege should not be abused by "tacking" extraneous provisionson to financial measures. 

There were some further disputes in the reigns of William III and Anne, but the only occasion upon which peers were actually made in order tocarry a measure, was when the Tories created a dozen to pass the Peaceof Utrecht in 1712. It is, indeed, a singular fact that no seriousconflict between the two Houses occurred during the whole of theGeorgian period from 1714 to 1830. The explanation seems to be thatboth Houses were simply the political agents of the same organizedaristocracy. The humble townsfolk who figured in the parliaments ofEdward I (see p. 65) disappeared when a seat in the House of Commonsbecame a position of power and privilege; and to the first parliament(1547) for which journals of the Commons proved worth preserving, theeldest son of a peer thought it worth while seeking election. Manysuccessors followed; towns were bribed or constrained to choose thenominees of peers and country magnates; burgage tenements were boughtup by noble families to secure votes; and the Restoration parliamenthad material reasons for treating Cromwell's reforms as void, andrestoring rotten boroughs and fancy franchises. By the time thatparliament had emancipated itself from the control of the crown, it hadalso emancipated itself to a considerable extent from the control ofthe constituencies. 

This political system would not have developed nor lasted so long as itdid, had it not had some virtue and some relevance to its environment. In every country's development there is a stage in which aristocracy isthe best form of government. England had outgrown monarchicaldespotism, but it was not yet fit for democracy. Political powerdepends upon education, and it would have been unreasonable to expectintelligent votes from men who could not read or write, had smallknowledge of politics, little practical training in localadministration, and none of the will to exercise control. Politics werestill the affair of the few, because only the few could comprehendthem, or were conscious of the uses and limitations of political power. The corrupt and misguided use of their votes by those who possessedthem was some reason for not extending the franchise to still moreignorant masses; and it was not entirely irrational to leave thecontrol of national affairs in the hands of that section of the nationwhich had received some sort of political education. 

The defects, however, of a political system, which restricts power to alimited class or classes, are that each class tends to exercise it inits own interests and resents its extension to others, even when theyare qualified for its use. If all other historical records haddisappeared, land laws, game laws, inclosure acts, and corn laws--afterthe Revolution a bounty was actually placed on the export of corn, whereby the community was taxed in order to deprive itself of food ormake it dearer--alone would prove that political power in the Georgianperiod was vested in a landed aristocracy, though England's commercialpolicy, especially towards Ireland, would show that mercantileinterests had also to be consulted. Similarly, the journals of theHouse of Commons would prove it to have been a close corporation lessanxious for the reign of law than for its own supremacy over the law. It claimed authority to decide by its own resolutions who had the rightto vote for its members and who had the right to a seat. It expelledmembers duly elected, and declared candidates elected who had been dulyrejected. It repudiated responsibility to public opinion as derogatoryto its liberties and independence; it excluded strangers, and punishedthe publication of debates and division-lists as high misdemeanours. Itwas a law unto itself, and its notions of liberty sometimes sank to thelevel of those of a feudal baron. 

Hence the comparative ease and success with which George III filled itssacred precincts with his paid battalions of "king's friends. " He wouldhave been powerless against a really representative House; but he couldbuy boroughs and votes as effectively as Whig or Tory dukes, and it washis intervention that raised a doubt in the mind of the House whetherit might not need some measure of reform. The influence of the crown, it resolved in 1780, had increased, was increasing, and ought to bediminished. But it could only be diminished by destroying that basis ofcorruption which supported the power of the oligarchs no less than thatof the crown. Reform would be a self-denying ordinance, if not an actof political suicide, as well as a blow at George III. Privilegedbodies do not reform themselves; proposals by Burke and by Pitt and byothers were rejected one after another; and then the French Revolutioncame to stiffen the wavering ranks of reaction. Not till the IndustrialRevolution had changed the face of England did the old political forcesacknowledge their defeat and surrender their claim to govern the nationagainst its will. 

CHAPTER VI

THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND

1603-1815

In the reign of Elizabeth Englishmen had made themselves acquaintedwith the world. They had surveyed it from Greenland's icy mountains toIndia's coral strand, and from the Orinoco to Japan, where WilliamAdams built the first Japanese navy; they had interfered in thepolitics of the Moluccas and had sold English woollens in Bokhara; theyhad sailed through the Golden Gate of California and up the Golden Hornof the Bosphorus; they had crossed the Pacific Ocean and the deserts ofCentral Asia; they had made their country known alike to the Great Turkand to the Grand Moghul. National unity and the fertile mingling ofclasses had generated this expansive energy, for the explorers includedearls as well as humble mariners and traders; and all ranks, from thequeen downwards, took shares in their "adventures. " They had thusacquired a body of knowledge and experience which makes it misleadingto speak of their blundering into empire. They soon learnt toconcentrate their energies upon those quarters of the globe in whichexpansion was easiest and most profitable. The East India Company hadreceived its charter in 1600, and the naval defeat of Spain had openedthe sea to all men; but, with the doubtful exception of Newfoundland, England secured no permanent footing outside the British Isles untilafter the crowns of England and Scotland had been united. 

This personal union can hardly be called part of the expansion ofEngland, but it had been prepared by some assimilation and cooperationbetween the two peoples, and it was followed by a great deal more. Theplantation of Ulster by English and Scots after the flight of the Irishearls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607 is one illustration, and NovaScotia is another; but Virginia, the first colony of the empire, was apurely English enterprise, and it cradled the first-born child of theMother of Parliaments. To Virginia men went for profit; principle drovethem to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the_Mayflower_ in 1620, had separated from the church and meant toseparate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of thatof Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common betweenthem; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their rightto compel all to think, or at least to worship, alike. Schism, however, appeals with ill grace and little success to authority; anddissentients from the dissenters formed Independent offshoots from NewEngland. But all these Puritan communities in the north were differentin character from Virginia in the south; they consisted of democratictownships, Virginia of plantations worked by slaves. Slave labour wasalso the economic basis of the colonies established on various WestIndian islands during the first half of the seventeenth century; andthis distinction between colonies used for exploitation and coloniesused for settlement has led to important constitutional variations inthe empire. Only those colonies in which large white communities aresettled have received self-government; those in which a few whitesexploit a large coloured population remain subject to the control ofthe home government. The same economic and social differences wereresponsible for the great American civil war between North and South inthe nineteenth century. 

There are three periods in British colonial expansion. The first, orintroductory period, was marked by England's rivalry with Spain andPortugal; the second by its rivalry with the Dutch; and the third byits rivalry with France; and in each the rivalry led to wars in whichBritain was victorious. The Elizabethan war with Spain was followed bythe Dutch wars of the Commonwealth and Charles II's reign, and then bythe French wars, which lasted, with longer or shorter intervals, from1688 to 1815. The wars with the Dutch showed how completely, in thelatter half of the seventeenth century, commercial interests outweighedthose of religion and politics. Even when English and Dutch were bothliving under Protestant republics, they fought one another rather thanthe Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. Their antagonism aroseover rival claims to sovereignty in the Narrow Seas, which the herringfisheries had made as valuable as gold mines, and out of competitionfor the world's carrying trade and for commerce in the East Indies. Thelast-named source of irritation had led to a "massacre" of Englishmenat Amboyna in 1623, after which the English abandoned the East Indianislands to the Dutch East India Company, concentrating their attentionupon India, where the acquisition of settlements at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay laid the foundations of the three great Presidencies of theBritish Empire in India. 

A fatal blow was struck at the Dutch carrying trade by the NavigationActs of 1650-1651, which provided that all goods imported into Englandor any of its colonies must be brought either in English ships or inthose of the producing country. The Dutch contested these Acts in astubborn naval war. The great Admirals, Van Tromp and Blake, were notunevenly matched; but the Dutch failed to carry their point. Theprinciple of the Navigation Acts was reaffirmed, with somemodifications, after the Restoration, which made no difference toEngland's commercial and colonial policy. A second Dutch waraccordingly broke out in 1664, and this time the Dutch, besides failingin their original design, lost the New Netherland colony they hadestablished in North America. Portions of it became New York, so namedafter the future James II, who was Duke of York and Lord High Admiral, and other parts were colonized as Pennsylvania by the Quaker, WilliamPenn. The great importance of this acquisition was that it drove outthe wedge dividing the New England colonies to the north from Virginiaand Maryland, which had been founded in Charles I's reign, mainly as arefuge for Roman Catholics, to the south; and this continuous line ofBritish colonies along the Atlantic seaboard was soon continuedsouthwards by the settlement of the two Carolinas. The colonization ofGeorgia, still further south, in the reign of George II, completed thethirteen colonies which became the original United States. 

France now overshadowed Holland as England's chief competitor. Canada, originally colonized by the French, had been conquered by the Englishin 1629, but speedily restored by Charles I; and towards the close ofthe seventeenth century France began to think of uniting Canada withanother French colony, Louisiana, by a chain of posts along theMississippi. Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, had greatly developedFrench commerce, navy, and navigation; and the Mississippi Company wasan important factor in French history early in the eighteenth century. This design, if successful, would have neutralized the advantageEngland had secured in the possession of the Atlantic seaboard of NorthAmerica, and have made the vast West a heritage of France. 

Nevertheless, the wars of William III and Anne were not in the maincolonial. Louis' support of James II, and his recognition of the OldPretender, were blows at the heart of the empire. Moderate success onJames's part might have led to its dismemberment, to the separation ofCatholic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands from the remainder of theBritish Isles; and dominion abroad would not long have surviveddisruption at home. The battle of the Boyne (1690) disposed of Irishindependence, and the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) ensured GreatBritain against the revival of separate sovereignties north and southof the Tweed. Scotland surrendered her independent parliament andadministration: it received instead the protection of the Navigationlaws, representation in both houses of the United Parliament, and theprivilege of free trade with England and its colonies--which put an endto the tariff wars waged between the two countries in the seventeenthcentury; and it retained its established Presbyterian church. Forty-five Scottish members were to sit in the House of Commons, and sixteenScottish peers elected by their fellows for each parliament in theHouse of Lords. Scottish peers who were not thus chosen could neithersit in the House of Lords nor seek election to the House of Commons. 

In time this union contributed materially to the expansive energy ofthe British Empire, but it did not substantially help Marlborough towin his brilliant victories in the war with France (1702-1713). Apartfrom the general defeat of Louis XIV's ambition to dominate Europe, themost important result, from the British point of view, was the definiteestablishment of Great Britain as a Mediterranean power by theacquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca. English expeditions againstCanada had not been very successful, but the Peace of Utrecht (1713)finally secured for the empire the outworks of the Canadian citadel--Hudson's Bay Territories, Newfoundland, and the future provinces ofNova Scotia and New Brunswick. The trading privileges which GreatBritain also secured in Spanish America both assisted the vast growthof British commerce under Walpole's pacific rule, and provoked the warwith Spain in 1739 which helped to bring about his fall. This war, which soon merged in the war of the Austrian Succession (1741-1748), was indecisive in its colonial aspects, and left the question of Frenchor English predominance in India and North America to be settled in theSeven Years' War of 1756-1763. 

War, however, decides little by itself, and three of the world'sgreatest soldiers, Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, founded nopermanent empires. An excellent servant, but a bad master, the soldierneeds to be the instrument of other than military forces if his laboursare to last; and the permanence of the results of the Seven Years' Waris due less to the genius of Pitt, Wolfe, Clive, and Howe than to thecauses which laid the foundations of their achievements. The future ofNorth America was determined not so much by Wolfe's capture of Quebec--which had fallen into British hands before--as by the fact that beforethe Seven Years' War broke out there were a million and a quarterBritish colonists against some eighty thousand French. If Canada hadnot fallen in the Seven Years' War, it would have succumbed to Britisharms in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The fate ofIndia seemed less certain, and the genius of Dupleix roused betterhopes for France; yet India, defenceless as it was against Europeanforces, was bound to fall a prize to the masters of the sea, unlesssome European state could control its almost impassable overlandapproaches. Clive, perhaps, was almost as much the brilliant adventureras Dupleix, but he was supported at need by an organized governmentmore susceptible than the French _ancien régime_ to the pressureof commercial interests and of popular ambitions. 

The conquest of Canada led to the loss of the thirteen Americancolonies. Their original bias towards separation had never beeneradicated, and the recurrent quarrels between the various legislaturesand their governors had only been prevented from coming to a head byfear of the Frenchmen at their gates and disunion among themselves. Charles II and James II wanted to centralize the New England colonieson a monarchical basis; and they began by attacking their charters inmuch the same way as they dealt with the Puritan corporations ofEnglish cities and boroughs. Those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, andRhode Island were forfeited, and these colonies were thus provided witha grievance common to themselves and to the mother-country. But, whilethe Revolution supplied a remedy at home, it did not in the colonies. Their charters, indeed, were restored; but when the Massachusettslegislature passed a bill similar to the Bill of Rights, the royalassent was not accorded, and the colonists remained liable to taxationwithout their own consent. This theoretical right of Great Britain totax the American colonies was wisely left in abeyance until GeorgeGrenville's righteous soul was vexed with the thought that colonists, for whose benefit the Seven Years' War had largely been waged, shouldescape contribution towards its expenses. Walpole had reduced theduties on colonial produce and had winked at the systematic evasion ofthe Navigation Acts by the colonists. Grenville was incapable of suchstatesmanlike obliquity. He tried to stop smuggling; he asserted theright of the home government to control the vast hinterland from whichthe colonists thought that the French had been evicted for theirparticular benefit; and he passed the Stamp Act, levying internaltaxation from the colonies without consulting their legislatures. 

Security from the French made the colonists think they were independentof the British, and, having an inordinate proportion of lawyers amongthem, they did not lack plausible arguments. They admitted the right ofthe British parliament to impose external taxes, such as customsduties, on the colonies, but denied its right to levy internaltaxation. The distinction was well established in Englishconstitutional history, and kings had long enjoyed powers over thecustoms which they had lost over direct taxation. But the Englishforefathers of the Puritan colonists had seen to it that control overdirect, led to control over indirect, taxation; and it may be assumedthat the American demand for the one would, if granted, soon have beenfollowed by a demand for the other. In any case, reasons for separationwould not have been long in forthcoming. It was not that the oldcolonial system was particularly harsh or oppressive; for the colonialproducer, if restricted (nominally) to the home market, was wellprotected there. But the colonists wanted complete control over theirown domestic affairs. It was a natural and a thoroughly British desire, the denial of which to-day would at once provoke the disruption of theempire; and there was no reason to expect colonial content with agovernment which was not giving much satisfaction in England. Apeaceful solution was out of the question, because the governingclasses, which steadily resisted English demands for reform, were notlikely to concede American demands for radical innovations. There wereno precedents for such a self-denying ordinance as the grant ofcolonial self-government, and law was on the side of George III. Butthings that are lawful are not always expedient, and legaljustification is no proof of wisdom or statesmanship. 

The English people supported George III until he had failed; but therewas not much enthusiasm for the war, except at places like Birmingham, which possessed a small-arms manufactory and other stimulants topatriotic fervour. It was badly mismanaged by George, and Whigs didtheir best to hamper his efforts, fearing, with some reason, thatsuccess in North America would encourage despotic enterprise at home. George would, however, in all probability have won but for theintervention of France and Spain (1778-1779), who hoped to wipe off thescores of the Seven Years' War, and for the armed neutrality of Russiaand Holland (1780), who resented the arrogant claims of the British toright of search on the high seas. At the critical moment Britain lostthe command of the sea; and although Rodney's naval victory (1782) andthe successful defence of Gibraltar (1779-1783) enabled her to obtaintolerable terms from her European enemies, American independence had tobe granted (1783). For Ireland was on the verge of revolt, and Britishdominion in India was shaken to its foundations. So the two greatsections of the English people parted company, perhaps to their mutualprofit. Certainly each government has now enough to do without solvingthe other's problems, and it is well-nigh impossible to conceive astate maintaining its equilibrium or its equanimity with two suchpartners as the British Empire and the United States struggling forpredominance within it. 

Meanwhile, Warren Hastings saved the situation in India by means thatwere above the Oriental but below the normal English standard ofmorality. He was impeached for his pains later on by the Whigs, whosemoral indignation was sharpened by resentment at the use of Anglo-Indian gold to defeat them at the general election of 1784. Ireland wasplacated by the grant of legislative independence (1782), a concessionboth too wide and too narrow to provide any real solution of herdifficulties. It was too wide because Grattan's parliament, as it iscalled, was co-ordinate with, and not subordinate to, the imperialparliament; and there was thus no supreme authority to settledifferences, which sooner or later were bound to arise between the two. It was too narrow, because the Irish executive remained responsible toDowning Street and not to the Irish parliament. The parliament, moreover, did not represent the Irish people; Catholics were excludedfrom it, and until 1793 were denied the vote; sixty seats were in thehands of three families, and a majority of the members were returned bypocket-boroughs. A more hopeless want of system can hardly be imagined:a corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted government, a divided people--such was the verdict of a contemporary politician. Atlength, after a Protestant revolt in Ulster, a Catholic rising in thesouth, and a French invasion, Pitt bribed and cajoled the borough-mongers to consent to union with Great Britain (1800). Thirty-two Irishpeers, twenty-eight temporal and four spiritual, were to sit in theHouse of Lords, and a hundred Irish members in the House of Commons. The realization of the prospect of Roman Catholic Emancipation, whichhad been held out as a further consideration, was postponed by theprejudices of George III until its saving grace had been lost. Grattan's prophecy of retribution for the destruction of Irish libertyhas often been quoted: "We will avenge ourselves, " he said, "by sendinginto the ranks of your parliament, and into the very heart of yourconstitution, one hundred of the greatest scoundrels in the kingdom";but it is generally forgotten that he had in mind the kind of membersnominated by peers and borough-mongers to represent them in anunreformed House of Commons. 

The loss of the American colonies threw a shadow over British colonialenterprise which had some lasting effects on the colonial policy of themother-country. The severance did not, as is often supposed, convinceGreat Britain that the grant of self-government to colonies was theonly means to retain them. But they had been esteemed mainly as marketsfor British exports, and the discovery that British exports to Americaincreased, instead of diminishing, after the grant of independence, raised doubts about the value of colonies which explain the comparativeindifference of public opinion towards them during the next half-century. For the commercial conception of empire was still in theascendant; and if the landed interest controlled the domestic politicsof the eighteenth century, the commercial interest determined theoutlines of British expansion. Territory was acquired or strongholdsseized in order to provide markets and guard trade communications. 

From this point of view India became, after the loss of the Americancolonies, the dominant factor in British external policy. The monetaryvalue of India to the British far exceeded that of all their otherforeign possessions put together. The East India Company's servantsoften amassed huge fortunes in a few years, and the influence of thiswealth upon British politics became very apparent in the last quarterof the century. It put up the price of parliamentary pocket-boroughs, and thus delayed reform; it enabled commercial men to force their wayinto the House of Lords by the side of landed magnates, and the youngerPitt doubled its numbers in his efforts to win the political support ofthe moneyed classes; and finally, it affected consciously orunconsciously men's views of the interests of the empire and of thepolicy to be pursued to serve them. 

The half-century which followed the American War of Independence wasnot, indeed, barren of results in other directions than those indicatedby the East India Company. Canada was saved from the seductions ofAmerican independence by a wise recognition of its established customsand religion (1774), and was strengthened by the influx of UnitedEmpire Loyalists who would not bow the knee to republican separatism. Provision was made for the government of these some what discordantelements by dividing Canada into two provinces, one predominantlyFrench, the other British, and giving each a legislature for thevoicing of its grievances (1791). So, too, the impulse of the SevenYears' War survived the War of Independence in other quarters of theglobe. Naval officers, released from war-like operations, were sent toexplore the Pacific; and, among them, Captain James Cook surveyed thecoasts of Australia and New Zealand (1770). The enthusiastic naturalistof the expedition, Joseph Banks, persistently sang the praises ofBotany Bay; but the new acquisition was used as a convict settlement(1788), which was hardly a happy method of extending Britishcivilization. The origin of Australia differed from that of NewEngland, in that the Pilgrim Fathers wanted to avoid the mother-country; while the mother-country wanted to avoid the convicts; but inneither case was there any imperialism in the aversion. 

India was, in fact, the chief outlet at that period for Britishimperial sentiment. It is true that Great Britain laid down in solemnofficial language, in 1784, that the acquisition of territory wasrepugnant to the principles of British government. But so had Frederickthe Great begun his career by writing a refutation of Machiavelli;circumstances, and something within which made for empire, proved toostrong for liberal intentions, and the only British war waged betweenthe Peace of Versailles in 1783 and the rupture with RevolutionaryFrance in 1793 resulted in the dismemberment of Tippoo Sultan's kingdomof Mysore (1792). The crusading truculence of the French republicans, and Napoleon's ambition, made the security of the British Isles Pitt'sfirst consideration; but when that was confirmed by naval victoriesover the French on the 1st of June, 1794, and at the battle of the Nilein 1798, over the Dutch at Camperdown and over the Spaniards at CapeSt. Vincent in 1797, over the Danes at Copenhagen in 1801, and over theFrench and Spaniards combined at Trafalgar in 1805, Great Britainconcentrated its energies mainly on extending its hold on India and theFar East, and on strengthening its communications with them. Thepurpose of the battle of the Nile was to evict Napoleon from Egypt, which he had occupied as a stepping-stone to India, and Malta wasseized (1800) with a similar object. Mauritius, too, was taken (1810), because it had formed a profitable basis of operations for Frenchprivateers against the East India trade; and the Cape of Good Hope wasconquered from the Dutch, the reluctant allies of the French, in 1795, as a better half-way house to India than St. Helena, which England hadacquired from the same colonial rivals in 1673. The Cape was restoredin 1802, but reconquered in 1806 and retained in 1815. 

In the Far East, British dominion was rapidly extended under thestimulus of the Marquess Wellesley, elder brother of the Duke ofWellington, who endeavoured in redundantly eloquent despatches toreconcile his deeds with the pacific tone of his instructions. Ceylonwas taken from the Dutch in 1796, and was not restored like Java, whichsuffered a similar conquest; and British settlements were soonafterwards founded at Singapore and on the Malay Peninsula. In Indiaitself Tippoo was defeated and slain in his capital at Seringapatam in1799, the Mahrattas were crushed at Assye and Argaum in 1803, the nabobwas forced to surrender the Carnatic, and the vizier the province ofOudh, until the whole coast-line of India and the valley of the Gangeshad passed directly or indirectly under British control. These regionswere conquered partly because they were more attractive and accessibleto the British, and partly to prevent their being accessible to theFrench; the poorer and more difficult mountainous districts of theDeccan, isolated from foreign infection, were left under native rulers. 

The final overthrow of Napoleon, to which Great Britain had contributedmore by its efforts in the Spanish Peninsular War (1808-1814) than atthe crowning mercy of Waterloo, confirmed its conquests in India andits control of the trade routes of the world. Its one permanent failureduring the war was Whitelocke's expedition to Buenos Ayres in 1807;that attack was not repeated because the Spaniards having, by theirrevolt against Napoleon, become England's allies, it was hardly fair toappropriate their colonies; and so South America was left to work outits destinies under Latin and not Teutonic influence. Most of the WestIndian islands, however, with British Honduras and British Guiana onthe mainland, had been acquired for the empire, which had now securedfootholds in all the continents of the world. The development of thosefootholds into great self-governing communities, the unique and realachievement of the British Empire, was the work of the nineteenthcentury; and its accomplishment depended upon the effects of thechanges known to us as the Industrial Revolution. 

CHAPTER VII

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

The Industrial Revolution is a phrase invented by Arnold Toynbee, andnow generally used to indicate those economic changes which turnedEngland from an agricultural into an industrial community. The periodduring which these changes took place cannot from the nature of thingsbe definitely fixed; but usually it is taken to extend from about themiddle of the eighteenth century to the close of the reign of GeorgeIII. Two points, however, must be remembered: first, that there was acommercial as well as an agricultural and an industrial stage ofdevelopment; and secondly, that this period contains merely the centraland crucial years of a process of specialization and expansion whichoccupied centuries of English economic history. There was also beforethe agricultural stage a pastoral stage; but that lies beyond the scopeof English history, because both the English people and the Celts theyconquered had passed out of the pastoral stage before recorded Englishhistory begins. Each of these stages corresponds to a different socialorganization: the pastoral stage was patriarchal, the agriculturalstage was feudal, the commercial stage was plutocratic, and theindustrial stage leads towards democracy. The stages, of course, overlap one another, and every national community to-day is partlypastoral, partly agricultural, partly commercial, and partlyindustrial. We can only call a nation any one of these things in thesense that they denote its dominant characteristic. 

This evolution has been the result of man's increasing control overnature. In the pastoral stage he takes of the produce of nature, providing little or nothing himself. In the agricultural stage hemanipulates the soil and subdues it, he harnesses the wind and thestreams to grind his corn, and to water his land; Providence may haveplaced all things under his feet, but he takes long to discover theiruse and the means to use them. In the commercial and industrial stageshe employs the wind and water, steam and electricity, for transport, communications, and manufactures. But he can only develop this masteryby the interdependent processes of specialization, co-operation, andexpansion. A lonely shepherd can live on his flocks without help; asingle family can provide for its own agricultural subsistence, and thenormal holding of the primitive English family, the "hide" as it wascalled, was really a share in all the means of livelihood, corn-land, pasture-land, rights of common and of cutting wood. This familyindependence long survived, and home-brewing, home-baking, home-washing, are not even now extinct. Each family in the primitive villagedid everything for itself. When its needs and standard of comfort grew, increased facilities beyond the reach of the individual household wereprovided by the lord of the manor, as, for instance, a mill, abakehouse, a wine-press. Indeed, the possession of these things mayhave helped him into the lordship of the manor. Certainly, some of themare mentioned in early Anglo-Saxon days among the qualifications forthegnhood, and when the lord possessed these things, he claimed amonopoly; his tenants were bound to grind their corn at his mill, andso forth. But there were things he did not care to do, and a villagerhere and there began to specialize in such trades as the blacksmith's, carpenter's, and mason's. This specialization involved co-operation andthe expansion of household economy into village economy. Others must dothe blacksmith's sowing and reaping, while he did the shoeing for thewhole village. 

Thus village industries grew up, and in unprogressive countries, suchas India, where, owing to distance and lack of communications, villageswere isolated and self-sufficing, this village economy becamestereotyped, and the village trades hereditary. But in western Europe, as order was slowly evolved after the chaos of the Dark Ages, communications and trade-routes were opened up; and whole villagesbegan to specialize in certain industries, leaving other commodities tobe produced by other communities. For the exchange of these commoditiesmarkets and fairs were established at various convenient centres; andthis in turn led to the specialization of traders and merchants, whodid not make, but only arranged for the barter of, manufactures. Through the development of local industries and markets, villages grewinto towns, and towns expanded with the extent of the area theysupplied. A town which supplied a nation with cutlery, for instance, was necessarily bigger than a town which only supplied a county. Thisexpansion of markets meant that towns and cities were more and morespecializing in some one or more industries, leaving the great majorityof their needs to be supplied from elsewhere; and the whole process wasbased on the growing complexity of civilization, on the multiplyingnumber of implements required to do the work of the world. 

The comparatively simple organization of feudal society broke downunder the stress of these changes; a middle class, consisting ofneither lords nor villeins, was needed to cope with industry andcommerce. Handworkers also were required, so that from the middle ofthe fourteenth century we find a regular flight from the land to thetowns in progress. Another great change took place. No one had beenrich according to modern notions in the early Middle Ages, and no onehad been destitute; there was no need of a Poor Law. But with theexpansion of the sphere of men's operations, the differences betweenthe poor and the rich began to increase. There is little to choosebetween a slow runner and a swift when the race covers only ten yards;there is more when it covers a hundred, and a great deal when it coversa mile. So, too, when operations are limited to the village market, ability has a limited scope, and the able financier does not grow sovery much richer than his neighbour. But when his market comprises anation, his means for acquiring wealth are extended; the rich becomericher, and the poor, comparatively at any rate, poorer. Hence, when inthe fourteenth and following centuries the national market expands intoa world market, we find growing up side by side capitalism anddestitution; and the reason why there are so many millionaires and somuch destitution to-day, compared with earlier times, is that the worldis now one market, and the range of operations is only limited by theglobe. 

The control of the world's supplies tends to get into the hands of afew big producers or operators instead of being in the hands of a vastnumber of small ones; and this has come about through ever-expandingmarkets and ever-increasing specialization. Even whole nationsspecialize more or less; some produce the corn-supply of the world, some its coal, some its oil, and some do its carrying trade. It is nowa question whether there should not be some limits to this process, andit is asked whether a nation or empire should not be self-supporting, irrespective of the economic advantages of expansion andspecialization, and of the fact that the more self-supporting it is, the less trade can it do with others; for it cannot export unless itimports, and if each nation makes everything it wants itself it willneither sell to, nor buy from, other nations. 

There have been two periods in English history during which thesegeneral tendencies have been especially marked. One was at the close ofthe Middle Ages, and the other during the reign of George III. Thebreak-up of the manorial system, the growth of a body of mobile labour, and of capital seeking investment, the discovery of new worlds and newmarkets, heralded the advent of the middle class and of the commercialage. Custom, which had regulated most things in the Middle Ages, gaveway to competition, which defied all regulation; and England became anation of privateers, despoiling the church, Spain, Ireland, and oftenthe commonwealth itself. Scores of acts against fraudulentmanufacturers and against inclosures were passed in vain, because theyran counter to economic conditions. The products of the new factories, like Jack of Newbury's kerseys, could not equal in quality the olderhome-made article, because the home-made article was produced undernon-economic conditions. Spinsters today knit better garments thanthose turned out in bulk, because neither time nor money is anyconsideration with them; they knit for occupation, not for a living, and they can afford to devote more labour to their produce than theycould possibly do if they depended upon it for subsistence. The casewas the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared withthem the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturerwas to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certainquantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home wereenabled to hold their own against the factory products until thedevelopment of machinery in the eighteenth century; and until that timethe factory system, although factories existed on a rudimentary scale, did not fully develop. So far as it did develop, it meant an increasein the efficiency and in the total wealth of the nation, but a decreasein the prosperity of thousands of individual households. 

The effect of inclosures was very similar. The old system of thevillagers cultivating in turn strips of land in open fields wasundoubtedly unsound, if the amount of wealth produced is the solecriterion; but it produced enough for the individual village-community, and the increased production accruing from inclosures went to swell thetotal wealth of the nation and of those who manipulated it at the costof the tillers of the soil. The cost to the community was potentialrather than actual; common lands which are now worth millions wereappropriated by landlords in defiance of the law. This illegality wasremedied in 1549, not by stopping the inclosures but by making themlegal, provided that "sufficient" commons were left; if the incloserconsidered his leavings enough, the gainsaying of the tenants was to beignored, or punished as treason or felony in case of persistence. England, however, was still fairly big for its three or four millionsof souls, and an Act of Queen Elizabeth provided that every new cottagebuilt should stand in four acres of its own. This anticipation of thedemand for three acres and a cow did something to check excessivespecialization; for the tenants of these cottages added a littlecultivation on their own account to their occupations as hiredlabourers or village artisans. In the seventeenth century the land-hunger of the landlords was generally sated by schemes for draining andembanking; and vast tracts of fen and marsh, such as Hatfield Chase andBedford Level, were thus brought under cultivation. 

Commerce rather than industrialism or agriculture is the distinctivefeature of English economy during the seventeenth and first half of theeighteenth century. By means of newly developed trade-routes, the Eastand the West were tapped for such products as tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar, rum, spices, oranges, lemons, raisins, currants, silks, cotton, rice, and others with which England had previously somehow orother dispensed; and the principal bone of contention was the carryingtrade of the world. Shipbuilding was the most famous English industry;and when Peter the Great visited England, he spent most of his time inthe Deptford yards. For some of these imports England paid by herservices as carrier; and so far as India was concerned it was a case ofrobbery rather than exchange. But exports were more and more requiredto pay for the ever-increasing imports. It is impossible to statecategorically either that the imports provoked the exports or theexports the imports; for the supply creates the demand as much as thedemand creates the supply. There can have been no conscious demand fortobacco in England before any Englishman had smoked a pipe; and when anEnglish merchant in Elizabeth's reign took a thousand kerseys toBokhara, he did so without waiting for an order. Both exports andimports, however, can only develop together; the dimensions to whichEnglish commerce had attained by Walpole's time involved exports aswell as imports; and the exports could not have been provided withoutdeveloping English industries. 

In particular, England had to export to the colonies because thecolonies had by the Navigation Acts to export to England; and Walpole'sabolition or reduction of duties on colonial produce illustrated andencouraged the growth of this trade. In return for colonial tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar, England sent chiefly woollen and afterwards cottonmanufactures. These woollens had long been manufactured on the domesticsystem in the sheep-rearing districts of England, particularlyYorkshire; many a cottage with its four acres for farming had also itsspinning-wheel, and many a village its loom; and the cloth whenfinished was conveyed by pack-horses or waggons to the markets andfairs to be sold for export or home consumption. But between 1764 and1779 a series of inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton, transformed the simple spinning-wheel into an elaborate machine capableof doing the work of many spinners; and once more an advance innational productivity was made at the expense of the individual workerswho took to breaking the machines to stop their loss of work. 

Similar changes followed in cotton-spinning and other industries, andthe result was to alter the whole economic structure of England. Thecottager could not afford the new and expensive machinery, and hisspinning-wheels and hand-looms were hopelessly beaten in thecompetition. Huge factories were required for the new inventions, wherethe workers were all huddled together instead of working in theirscattered homes; and large populations grew up around these new andartificial manufacturing centres. Their locality was, however, determined by natural causes; at first water-power was the bestavailable force to drive the new machines, and consequently townssprang up along the banks of rivers. But Watt's application of steam-power to machinery soon supplanted water; and for steam-power coal andiron were the greatest necessities. Factories therefore tended tocongregate where coal and iron were found; and the need for thesematerials created the coal and iron industries. Moreover, the pack-horse, the waggon, and the old unmetalled roads soon proved inadequatefor the new requirements of transport. For a time canals became thefavourite substitute, and many were constructed. Then Macadam inventedhis method of making roads; finally, Stephenson developed the steamlocomotive, and the railway system came into existence. 

Closely connected with these changes was a renewal of the inclosuremovement. The introduction of turnips and other roots, and thedevelopment of the rotation of crops increased the value of the soiland revived the stimulus to inclosure; and hundreds of inclosure actswere hurriedly passed by a parliament which contained norepresentatives of those who suffered from the process. It was assistedby the further specialization consequent upon the industrialrevolution; while the agricultural labourer gave up spinning under thestress of factory competition, the spinner deserted his cottage andfour acres in the country, to seek a dwelling near the factory whichemployed him; and the Elizabethan Act, insisting upon the allocation offour acres to each new cottage built, was repealed. But for thatrepeal, factory slums would be garden cities, unless the incubus ofthis provision had stopped the factory development. The final result ofthe inclosure movement upon the country was to deprive the public ofmost of its commons and open spaces, to deprive the agriculturallabourer of all right in the soil he tilled, and to rob him of thatmagic of property which, in Arthur Young's phrase, turned sand intogold. 

The inevitable adjustment of the population to these altered economicconditions entirely changed its distribution. Hitherto the progressiveand predominant parts of England had been the south and east;conservatism found its refuge in the north and west, which rebelledagainst the Tudors and fought for Charles I. The south and east hadbeen the manufacturing centres because iron was smelted with wood andnot with coal. Now that coal was substituted for wood, thejuxtaposition of coal and iron mines in the north attracted thither theindustries of the nation, while the special features of its climatemade South Lancashire the home of cotton-spinning. The balance ofpopulation and political power followed. To-day southern England, apartfrom London and some other ports, hardly does more than subsist, andits occupations are largely parasitic. The work and the wealth and thetrade which support the empire and its burdens have their origin andbeing in the north. 

The population not only shifted, but rapidly increased. The uprootingof peasants from their little plots of land which acted in medievalEngland and acts to-day in France as a check upon breeding, and theirherding in crowded tenements, weakened both moral and prudentialrestraints in the towns; while in the country the well-meant but ill-considered action of the justices of the peace in supplementing thebeggarly wages of the labourers by grants out of the rates proportionedto the number of each man's children produced a similar effect. Theresult was an increase in the population welcome to patriots who hopedfor hordes of soldiers and sailors to fight Napoleon, but startling toeconomists like Malthus, who inferred therefrom a natural lawconstraining population to outrun the earth's increase. Malthus did notforesee the needs of the empire, nor realize that the rapid growth inthe population of his day was largely due to the absence from theproletariate of a standard of comfort and decency. Without theIndustrial Revolution Great Britain would not have been able to peoplethe lands she had marked for her own. 

This increase and shifting of the people put the finishing touch to theincongruities of the old political system, in which vast centres ofpopulation teeming with life and throbbing with industry wereunrepresented, while members sat in parliament for boroughs so decayedthat nothing was left of them but a green mound, a park, or a ruinedwall. The struggle with the French Revolution and then with Napoleongave the vested interests a respite from their doom; and for seventeenyears after its close the Tories sat, clothed in the departing gloriesof the war, upon the safety-valve of constitutional reform. Then in1832, after one general election fought on this issue, and afterfurther resistance by the House of Lords on behalf of the liberties ofborough-proprietors and faggot-voters, the threat to create peersinduced a number to abstain sufficient to ensure the passing of thefirst Reform Bill. It was a moderate measure to have brought thecountry to the verge of political revolution; roughly, it disfranchiseda number of poor voters, but enfranchised the mass of the middle andlower middle-class. Absolutely rotten boroughs were abolished, but alarge number of very small ones were retained, and the representationof the new towns was somewhat grudging and restricted. A more drasticmeasure, giving the vote to most of the town artisans was--beingintroduced by a Tory minister, Disraeli, in 1867--passed by the Houseof Lords without difficulty. The last alteration of the franchise, giving the vote to agricultural labourers was--being introduced byGladstone in 1884--only passed by the House of Lords at the second timeof asking and after an agitation. 

Political emancipation was but one of the results of the IndustrialRevolution; commercial expansion was another. England had nowdefinitely and decisively specialized in certain industries; she couldonly do so by relying upon external sources for her supply of otherwants. The more her new industries gave her to export, the more sherequired to import from customers upon whose wealth her own prosperitydepended. In particular, England became dependent upon foreignproducers for her food supplies. During the war the foreign supply ofcorn was so hampered that it was as dear to import as to grow at home;but after the peace the price began to fall, and the farmers andlandlords, whose rents depended ultimately upon the price of corn, demanded protection corresponding to that which extensive tariffs onimported articles gave to the manufacturers. The manufacturers, on theother hand, wanted cheap food for their workpeople in order to be ableto pay them low wages. As a compromise, the Corn Laws of 1814 and 1828provided a sliding scale of duties which rose as prices fell, and fellas prices rose, a preference being given to colonial wheat. 

The Reform Act of 1832, however, and the rapid increase ofmanufactures, transferred the balance of power in parliament from thelanded to the manufacturing classes; factory hands were persuaded thatthe repeal of the duties would largely increase the value of theirwages; and the failure of the potato-crop in Ireland in 1845-46rendered an increase of imported food-stuffs imperative. Sir RobertPeel accordingly carried a measure in 1846 providing for the gradualabolition of the corn-duties, saving only a registration duty of oneshilling, which was removed some twenty years later. This repeal of theCorn Laws did not appreciably affect the price of corn, the greatreduction of which was subsequently effected by the vast expansion ofcorn-growing areas in the colonies and abroad. But it enormouslyincreased the supply at once, and gradually gave England the fullbenefit of growing areas and declining prices. It is obvious that theretention of the duty, which had been fixed at 24_s_. 8_d_. In 1828when the price was 62_s_. Or less a quarter, would have preventedprices falling as they subsequently did below the value of the duty;and it is no less certain that it would have impeded the development ofcorn-growing districts in the colonies and abroad, and of Britishimports from, and exports to, them. 

The enormous increase in the import of corn helped, in fact, to doubleBritish exports within ten years. This was the result of the generalfreeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds ofActs, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing aninfinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made thecustoms costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry theystimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by AdamSmith, whose _Wealth of Nations_ appeared in 1776, reduced andsimplified these duties; but 443 Acts still survived when in 1825Huskisson and other enlightened statesmen secured their consolidationand reduction to eleven. This Tariff Reform, as its supporters calledit, was a step towards Free Trade. Peel gradually adopted itsprinciples, induced partly by the failure of his efforts to useexisting duties for purposes of retaliation; and between 1841 and 1846he abolished the duties on 605 articles and reduced them on 1035 more, imposing a direct income-tax to replace the indirect taxes thusrepealed. The process was completed by Gladstone, and what is calledFree Trade was established as the fundamental principle of Englishfinancial policy. 

This does not mean that no duties are imposed on exports or imports; itsimply means that such duties as are levied are imposed for the sake ofrevenue, and to protect neither the consumer from the export ofcommodities he desires to purchase, nor the manufacturer from theimport of those he wishes to make. The great interests connected withland and manufactures had ceased to hang together, and fell separately. Protection of manufactured goods did not long survive the successfulattack which manufacturers had levelled against the protected produceof the landlords and the farmers. The repeal of the Navigation Actsrounded off the system; British shipping, indeed, needed no protection, but the admission of colonial goods free of duty and the removal of theembargo on their trade with foreign countries may not have compensatedthe colonies for the loss of their preference in the British market. The whole trend of affairs, however, both conscious and unconscious, was to make the world one vast hive of industry, instead of an infinitenumber of self-sufficient, separate hives; the village market hadexpanded into the provincial market, the provincial into the national, the national into the imperial, and the imperial into the world market. 

We have not by any means exhausted the results of the IndustrialRevolution, and most of our social problems may be traced directly orindirectly to this source. Its most general effect was to emphasize andexaggerate the tendency towards specialization. Not only have mostworkers now but one kind of work; that work becomes a smaller andsmaller part of increasingly complex industrial processes; andconcentration thereon makes it more and more difficult for the workerto turn to other labour, if his employment fails. The specialist's lackof all-round capacity is natural and notorious. Hence most seriousresults follow the slightest dislocation of national economy. Thisspecialization has also important psychological effects. A farmer, withhis varied outdoor occupations, feels little craving for relief andrelaxation. The factory hand, with his attention riveted for hours at astretch on the wearisome iteration of machinery, requires recreationand distraction: naturally he is a prey to unwholesome stimulants, suchas drink, betting, or the yellow press. The more educated and morallyrestrained, however, seek intellectual stimulus, and the modern populardemand for culture arises largely from the need of something to relievethe grey monotony of industrial labour. 

So, too, the problems of poverty, local government, and sanitation havebeen created or intensified by the Industrial Revolution. It madecapitalists of the few and wage-earners of the many; and the tendencyof wages towards a minimum and of hours of labour towards a maximum hasonly been counteracted by painful organization among the workers, andlater on by legislation extorted by their votes. Neither theEvangelical nor the Oxford movement proved any prophylactic against theimmorality of commercial and industrial creeds. While those tworeligious movements were at their height, new centres of industrialpopulation were allowed to grow up without the least regard for healthor decency. Under the influence of _laissez-faire_ philosophy, eachwretched slum-dweller was supposed to be capable, after his ten ortwelve hours in the factory, of looking after his own and hischildren's education, his main-drainage, his risks from infection, andthe purity of his food and his water-supply. The old system of localgovernment was utterly inadequate and ill adapted to the newconditions; and the social and physical environment of the workingclasses was a disgrace to civilization pending the reconstruction ofsociety, still incomplete, which the Industrial Revolution imposed uponthe country in the nineteenth century. 

CHAPTER VIII

A CENTURY OF EMPIRE

1815-1911

The British realms beyond the seas have little history before thebattle of Waterloo, a date at which the Englishman's historicaleducation has commonly come to an end; and if by chance it has gone anyfurther, it has probably been confined to purely domestic events or toforeign episodes of such ephemeral interest as the Crimean War. It maybe well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order tosketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problemswhich it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinatepart in English history after 1815; so far as England was concerned, itwas a period of excursions and alarms rather than actual hostilities;and the fortunes of English-speaking communities were not greatlyaffected by the revolutions and wars which made and marred continentalnations, a circumstance which explains, if it does not excuse, thealmost total ignorance of European history displayed in Britishcolonies. 

The interventions of Britain in continental politics were generally onbehalf of the principles of nationality and self-government. Under theinfluence of Castlereagh and Canning the British government graduallybroke away from the Holy Alliance formed to suppress all protestsagainst the settlement reached after Napoleon's fall; and Britaininterposed with decisive effect at the battle of Navarino in 1827, which secured the independence of Greece from Turkey. More diplomaticintervention assisted the South American colonies to assert theirindependence of the Spanish mother-country; and British volunteershelped the Liberal cause in Spain and Portugal against reactionarymonarchs. Belgium was countenanced in its successful revolution againstthe House of Orange, and Italian states in their revolts against nativeand foreign despots; the expulsion of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons fromItaly, and its unification on a nationalist basis, owed something toBritish diplomacy, which supported Cavour, and to British volunteerswho fought for Garibaldi. The attitude of Britain towards the Balkannationalities, which were endeavouring to throw off the Turkish yoke, was more dubious; while Gladstone denounced Turkish atrocities, Disraeli strengthened Turkey's hands. Yet England would have been asenthusiastic for a liberated and united Balkan power as it had been fora united Italy but for the claims of a rival liberator, Russia. 

Russia was the bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classicalscholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancientGreece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincingdemonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north wasto inflict upon the British heirs of Hellas. India was the real sourceof this nervousness. British dominion, after further wars with theMahrattas, the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas, had extended up to the frontiersof Afghanistan; but there was always the fear lest another sword shouldtake away dominion won by the British, and in British eyes it was anoffence that any other power should expand in Asia. The Russian andBritish spheres of influence advanced till they met in Kabul; and forfifty years the two powers contested, by more or less diplomaticmethods, the control of the Amir of Afghanistan. Turkey flanked theoverland route to India; and hence the protection of Turkey againstRussia became a cardinal point in British foreign policy. On behalf ofTurkey's integrity Great Britain fought, in alliance with France andSardinia, the futile Crimean War of 1854-1856, and nearly went to warin 1877. 

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 introduced a fresh complication. Relations between England and France had since Waterloo been friendly, on the whole; but France had traditional interests in Egypt, which werestrengthened by the fact that a French engineer had constructed theSuez Canal, and by French colonies in the Far East, to which the canalwas the shortest route. Rivalry with England for the control of Egyptfollowed. The Dual Control, which was established in 1876, wasterminated by the refusal of France to assist in the suppression ofEgyptian revolts in 1882; and Great Britain was left in sole butinformal possession of power in Egypt, with the responsibility for itsdefence against the Mahdi (1884-1885) and for the re-conquest of theSudan (1896-1898), which is now under the joint Egyptian and Britishflags. 

Meanwhile, British expansion to the east of India, the Burmese wars, and annexation of Burma (1885) brought the empire into a contact withFrench influence in Siam similar to its contact with Russian inAfghanistan. Community of interests in the Far East, as well as theneed of protection against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, andItaly produced the _entente cordiale_ between France and Russia in1890. Fortunately, the dangerous questions between them and GreatBritain were settled by diplomacy, assisted by the alliance betweenGreat Britain and Japan. The British and Russian spheres of action onthe north-west, and the British and French spheres to the east, ofIndia were delimited; southern Persia, the Persian Gulf, and the MalayPeninsula were left to British vigilance and penetration, northernPersia to Russian, and eastern Siam to French. Freed from these causesof friction, Great Britain, Russia, and France exert a restraininginfluence on the predominant partner in the Triple Alliance. 

The development of a vast dominion in India has created for the Britishgovernment problems, of which the great Indian mutiny of 1857 wasmerely one illustration. No power has succeeded in permanentlygoverning subject races by despotic authority; in North and SouthAmerica the natives have so dwindled in numbers as to leave theconquerors indisputably supreme; in Europe and elsewhere in formertimes the subject races fitted themselves for self-government, and thenabsorbed their conquerors. The racial and religious gulf forbids asimilar solution of the Indian question, while the abandonment of hertask by Great Britain would leave India a prey to anarchy. Thedifficulties of despotic rule were mitigated in the past by the utterabsence of any common sentiments and ideas among the many races, religions, and castes which constituted India; and a Machiavellianperpetuation of these divisions might have eased the labours of itsgovernors. But a government suffers for its virtues, and the steadyefforts of Great Britain to civilize and educate its Eastern subjectshave tended to destroy the divisions which made common action, commonaspirations, public opinion and self-government impossible in India. The missionary, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, and the politicalreformer have all helped to remove the bars of caste and race byconverting Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees to a common Christianity orby undermining their attachment to their particular distinctions. Theyhave built railways and canals, which made communications and contactunavoidable; they have imposed common measures of health, common legalprinciples, and a common education in English culture and methods ofadministration. The result has been to foster a consciousness ofnationality, the growth of a public opinion, and a demand for a greatershare in the management of affairs. The more efficient a despotism, themore certain is its supersession; and the problem for the Indiangovernment is how to adjust and adapt the political emancipation of thenatives of India to the slow growth of their education and sense ofmoral responsibility. At present, caste and racial and religiousdifferences, especially between Mohammedans and Hindus, thoughweakening, are powerful disintegrants; not one per cent of thepopulation can read or write; and the existence of hundreds of nativestates impedes the progress of national agitation. 

A somewhat similar problem confronts British administration in Egypt, where the difficulty of dealing with the agitation for national self-government is complicated by the fact that technically the Britishagent and consul-general is merely the informal adviser of the khedive, who is himself the viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey. Ultimately the samesort of dilemma will have to be faced in other parts of Africa underBritish rule--British East Africa and Uganda, the Nigerianprotectorates and neighbouring districts, Rhodesia and British CentralAfrica--as well as in the Malay States, Hong Kong, and the West Indies. There are great differences of opinion among the white citizens of theempire with regard to the treatment of their coloured fellow-subjects. Australia and some provinces of the South African Union would excludeIndian immigrants altogether; and white minorities have an invinciblerepugnance to allowing black majorities to exercise a vote, exceptunder stringent precautions against its effect. We have, indeed, improved upon the Greeks, who regarded all other races as outside thescope of Greek morality; but we do not yet extend to coloured races thesame consideration that we do to white men. 

So far as the white population of the empire is concerned, the problemof self-government was solved in the nineteenth century by procedurecommon to all the great dominions of the crown, though theemancipation, which had cost the mother-country centuries of conflict, was secured by many colonies in less than fifty years. Three normalstages marked their progress, and Canada led the way in each. The firstwas the acquisition of representative government--that is to say, of alegislature consisting generally of two Houses, one of which waspopularly elected but had little control over the executive; the secondwas the acquisition of responsible government--that is to say, of anexecutive responsible to the popular local legislature instead of tothe home Colonial Office; and the third was federation. Canada hadpossessed the first degree of self-government ever since 1791 (see p. 169), and was rapidly outgrowing it. Australia, however, did not passout of the crown colony stage, in which affairs are controlled by agovernor, with or without the assistance of a nominated legislativecouncil, until 1842, when elected members were added to the council ofNew South Wales, and it was given the power of the purse. Thisdevelopment was due to the exodus of the surplus population, created bythe Industrial Revolution, from Great Britain, which began soon after1820, and affected Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Various companies and associations were founded under the influence ofLord Durham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and others, for the purpose ofsettling labourers in these lands. Between 1820 and 1830 severalsettlements were established in Western Australia, in 1836 SouthAustralia was colonized, and gradually Victoria, Queensland, andTasmania were organized as independent colonies out of offshoots fromthe parent New South Wales. Each in turn received a representativeassembly, and developed individual characteristics. 

Cape Colony followed on similar lines, variegated by the presence of arival European race, the Dutch. Slowly, in the generation whichsucceeded the British conquest, they accumulated grievances againsttheir rulers. English was made the sole official language; Dutchmagistrates were superseded by English commissioners; slavery wasabolished, with inadequate compensation to the owners; little supportwas given them in their wars with the natives, which the homegovernment and the missionaries, more interested in the woes of negroesin South Africa than in those of children in British mines andfactories, attributed to Dutch brutality; and a Hottentot police wasactually established. In 1837 the more determined of the Dutch"trekked" north and east to found republics in Natal, the Orange RiverFree State, and the Transvaal. Purged of these discontented elements, the Cape was given representative government in 1853, and Natal, whichhad been annexed in 1844, received a similar constitution in 1856. 

Meanwhile, Canada had advanced through constitutional struggles andopen rebellion to the second stage. It had received its baptism of fireduring the war (1812-1814) between Great Britain and the United States, when French and British Canadians fought side by side against a commonenemy. But both provinces soon experienced difficulties similar tothose between the Stuarts and their parliaments; their legislativeassemblies had no control over their executive governments, and in 1837Papineau's rebellion broke out in Lower, and Mackenzie's in Upper, Canada. Lord Durham was sent out to investigate the causes ofdiscontent, and his report marks an epoch in colonial history. The ideathat the American War of Independence had taught the mother-country thenecessity of granting complete self-government to her colonies is apersistent misconception; and hitherto no British colony had received afuller measure of self-government than had been enjoyed by the Americancolonies before their Declaration of Independence. The grant of thisresponsible self-government was one of the two principalrecommendations of Lord Durham's report. The other was the union of thetwo provinces, which, it was hoped, would give the British a majorityover the French. This recommendation, which ultimately provedunworkable, was carried out at once; the other, which has been thesaving of the empire, was left for Lord Elgin to elaborate. He made ita principle to choose as ministers only those politicians who possessedthe confidence of the popular assembly, and his example, followed byhis successors, crystallized into a fundamental maxim of Britishcolonial government. It was extended to Nova Scotia and New Brunswickin 1848, and to Newfoundland (which had in 1832 received a legislativeassembly) in 1855. 

To Lord John Russell, who was prime minister from 1846 to 1851, to hiscolonial secretary, the third Earl Grey, and to Lords Aberdeen andPalmerston, who succeeded as premiers in 1852 and 1855, belongs thecredit of having conferred full rights of self-government on most ofthe empire's oversea dominions. Australia, where the discovery of goldin 1851 added enormously to her population, soon followed in Canada'swake, and by 1856 every Australian colony, with the exception ofWestern Australia, had, with the consent of the Imperial parliament, worked out a constitution for itself, comprising two legislativechambers and a responsible cabinet. New Zealand, which had begun to besparsely settled between 1820 and 1840, and had been annexed in thelatter year, received in 1852 from the Imperial parliament aConstitution Act, which left it to Sir George Grey, the Governor, towork out in practice the responsibility of ministers to thelegislature. Other colonies were slower in their constitutionaldevelopment; Cape Colony was not granted a responsible administrationtill 1872; Western Australia, which had continued to receive convictsafter their transportation to other Australian colonies had beensuccessfully resisted, did not receive complete self-government till1890, and Natal not until 1893. 

The latest British colonies to receive this livery of the empire werethe Transvaal and the Orange River colonies. A chequered existence hadbeen their fate since their founders had trekked north in 1837. TheOrange River Free State had been annexed by Britain in 1848, hadrebelled, and been granted independence again in 1854. The Transvaalhad been annexed in 1877, had rebelled, and had been granted almostcomplete independence again after Majuba in 1881. The Orange FreeState, relieved of the diamond fields which belonged to it in theneighbourhood of Kimberley in 1870, pursued the even tenor of its way;but the gold mines discovered in the Transvaal were not so near itsborders, and gave rise to more prolonged dissensions. Crowds ofcosmopolitan adventurers, as lawless as those who disturbed the peacein Victoria or California, flocked to the Rand. They were not of thestuff of which Dutch burghers were made, and the franchise was deniedthem by a government which did not hesitate to profit from theirlabours. The Jameson Raid, a hasty attempt to use their wrongs tooverthrow President Kruger's government in 1895, "upset the apple-cart"of Cecil Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape, who had added Rhodesiato the empire and was planning, with moderate Dutch support, tofederate South Africa. Kruger hardened his heart against theUitlanders, and armed himself to resist the arguments of the Britishgovernment on their behalf. Both sides underestimated the determinationand resources of the other. But Kruger was more ignorant, if not moreobstinate, than Mr. Chamberlain; and his ultimatum of October 1899precipitated a war which lasted two years and a half, and cost the tworepublics their independence. The Transvaal was given, and the OrangeRiver Colony was promised, representative government by theConservatives; but the Liberals, who came into power at the end of1905, excused them this apprenticeship, and granted them fullresponsible government in 1906-1907. 

British colonies have tried a series of useful experiments with thepower thus allotted them of managing their own affairs, and havecontributed more to the science of politics than all the arm-chairphilosophers from Aristotle downwards; and an examination in theirresults would be a valuable test for aspiring politicians and civilservants. The Canadian provinces, with two exceptions, dispense with asecond chamber; elsewhere in the empire, second chambers are universal, but nowhere outside the United Kingdom hereditary. Their members areeither nominated by the prime minister for life, as in the Dominion ofCanada, or for a term of years, which is fixed at seven in New Zealand;or they are popularly elected, sometimes on a different propertyqualification from the Lower House, sometimes for a different period, sometimes by a different constituency. In the Commonwealth of Australiathey are chosen by each state voting as a whole, and this method, bywhich a big majority in one locality outweighs several small majoritiesin others, has sometimes resulted in making the Upper House moreradical and socialistic than the Lower; the system of nominationoccasionally has in Canada a result equally strange to English ideas, for the present Conservative majority in the House of Commons isconfronted with a hostile Liberal majority in the Upper House, placedthere by Sir Wilfrid Laurier during his long tenure of office. The mosteffective provision against deadlocks between the two Houses is one inthe constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, by which, if theycannot agree, both are dissolved. 

Other contrasts are more bewildering than instructive. In Canada themovement for women's suffrage has made little headway, and even less inSouth Africa; but at the Antipodes women share with men the privilegeof adult suffrage in New Zealand, in the Commonwealth of Australia, andin every one of its component states; an advocate of the cause wouldperhaps explain the contrast by the presence of unprogressive French inCanada, and of unprogressive Dutch in South Africa. Certainly, the all-British dominions have been more advanced in their politicalexperiments than those in which the flighty Anglo-Saxon has beentempered by more stolid elements; and the pendulum swings little morein French Canada than it does in Celtic Ireland. In New Zealand old agepensions were in force long before they were introduced into themother-country; and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes, payment of M. P. 's, and powers of local option and prohibition have beenfor years in operation. Both the Dominion and the Commonwealth levytaxes on land far exceeding those imposed by the British budget of1909. Australia is, in addition, trying a socialistic labour ministryand compulsory military training. It has also tried the more seriousexperiment of developing a standard of comfort among its proletariatebefore peopling the country; and is consequently forced to exclude bylegislation all sorts of cheap labour, which might develop itsindustries but would certainly lower its level of wages. It believes inhigh protection, but takes care by socialistic legislation that highwages shall more than counterbalance high prices; protection is to itmerely the form of state socialism which primarily benefits theemployer. It has also nationalized its railways and denationalized allchurches and religious instruction in public schools. There is, indeed, no state church in the empire outside Great Britain. But the mostsignificant, perhaps, of Antipodean notions is the doctrine, inculcatedin the Queensland elementary schools, of the sanctity of stateproperty. 

Finally, the colonies have made momentous experiments in federation. New Zealand's was the earliest and the briefest; after a few years'experience of provincial governments between 1852 and 1870, it reducedits provincial parliaments to the level of county councils, and adopteda unitary constitution. In Canada, on the other hand, the union of theUpper and Lower Provinces proved unworkable owing to racialdifferences; and in 1867 the federation called the Dominion of Canadawas formed by agreement between Upper and Lower Canada (henceforthcalled Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. PrinceEdward Island and British Columbia joined soon afterwards; and freshprovinces have since been created out of the Hudson Bay and North-westTerritories; Newfoundland alone has stood aloof. Considerable powersare allotted to the provinces, including education; but thedistinguishing feature of this federation is that all powers notdefinitely assigned by the Dominion Act to the provinces belong to theDominion. This is in sharp contrast to the United States, where eachindividual state is the sovereign body, and the Federal government onlypossesses such powers as the states have delegated to it by theconstitution. 

In this respect the Australian federation called the Commonwealth, which was formed in 1900, resembles the United States rather thanCanada. The circumstance that each Australian colony grew up round aseaport, having little or no overland connexion with other Australiancolonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred inthese ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment. Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government, remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party, however, inclines towards a centralizing policy, and the general trendseems to be in that direction. It will probably be strengthened by theconstruction of transcontinental railways and by a further growth ofthe nationalist feeling of Australia, which is already marked. 

The Union of South Africa, formed in 1909, soon after the Boer colonieshad received self-government, went almost as far towards unification asNew Zealand, and became a unitary state rather than a federation. Thegreater expense of maintaining several local parliaments as well as acentral legislature, and the difficulty of apportioning their powers, determined South African statesmen to sweep away the old legislaturesaltogether, and to establish a united parliament which meets at CapeTown, a single executive which has its offices at Pretoria, and ajudicature which is located at Bloemfontein. Thus almost every varietyof Union and Home Rule exists within the empire, and arguments fromanalogy are provided for both the British political parties. 

Two extremes have been, and must be, avoided. History has falsified theimpression prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century that thecolonies would sooner or later follow the example of the United States, and sever their connexion with the mother-country. It has no lessclearly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a centralizedgovernment of the empire in Downing Street. The union or federation ofCanada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa has strengthened theclaims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, withfull rights and powers of self-government; and it remains to be seenwhether the federating process can be carried to a higher level, andimperial sentiment crystallized in Imperial Federation. ImperialConferences have become regular, but we may not call them councils; nomajority in them has power to bind a minority, and no conference canbind the mother-country or a single dominion of the crown. As aneducational body the Imperial Conference is excellent; but no one wouldventure to give powers of taxation or of making war and peace to aconclave in which Great Britain, with its forty-four millions of peopleand the navy and army it supports, has no more votes than Newfoundland, with its quarter of a million of inhabitants and immunity from imperialburdens. 

Education is, however, at the root of all political systems. Where themass of the people know nothing of politics, a despotism is essential;where only the few are politically educated, there needs must be anaristocracy. Great Britain lost its American colonies largely throughignorance; and no imperial organization could arise among a group ofstates ignorant of each other's needs, resources, and aspirations. TheImperial Conference is not to be judged by its meagre tangible results;if it has led British politicians to appreciate the varying characterand depth of national feeling in the Dominions, and politicians overseato appreciate the delicacies of the European diplomatic situation, thedependence of every part of the empire upon sea-power, and thecomplexities of an Imperial government which has also to consider theinterests of hundreds of millions of subjects in India, in tropicalAfrica, in the West Indies, and in the Pacific, the Conference willhave helped to foster the intellectual conditions which must underlieany attempt at an imperial superstructure. 

For the halcyon days of peace, prosperity, and progress can hardly beassumed as yet, and not even the most distant and self-containedDominions can afford to ignore the menace of blood and iron. No power, indeed, is likely to find the thousand millions or so which it wouldcost to conquer and hold Canada, Australia, or South Africa; but alucky raid on their commerce or some undefended port might cost manymillions by way of ransom. A slackening birth-rate is, moreover, areminder that empires in the past, like that of Rome, have civilizedthemselves out of existence in the competition with races which bredwith primitive vigour, and had no costly standards of comfort. Thereare such races to-day; the slumbering East has wakened, and the tidewhich flowed for four centuries from West to East is on the turn. Thevictory of Japan over Russia was an event beside which the great BoerWar sinks into insignificance. Asiatics, relieved by the _PaxBritannica_ from mutual destruction, are eating the whites out ofthe islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and threatening SouthAfrica, Australia, and the western shores of America. No armaments andno treaties of arbitration can ward off their economic competition; andit is not certain that their myriads, armed with Western morality andmethods of warfare, will be always content to refrain from turningagainst Europe the means of expansion which Europe has used with somuch success against them. The British Empire will need all the wisdomit can command, if it is to hold its own in the parliament of reason orthe arbitrament of war. 

CHAPTER IX

ENGLISH DEMOCRACY

The modern national state is the most powerful political organism everknown, because it is the conscious or unconscious agency of a people'swill. Government is no longer in England the instrument of a family ora class; and the only real check upon its power is the circumstancethat in some matters it acts as the executive committee of one partyand is legitimately resisted by the other. Were there no parties, thegovernment would be a popular despotism absolutely uncontrolled. Theoretically it is omnicompetent; parliament--or, to use moretechnical phraseology, the Crown in Parliament--can make anything lawthat it chooses; and no one has a legal right to resist, or authorityto pronounce what parliament has done to be unconstitutional. No Act ofParliament can be illegal or unconstitutional, because there are nofundamental laws and no written constitution in this country; and whenpeople loosely speak of an Act being unconstitutional, all that theymean is that they do not agree with it. Other countries, like theUnited States, have drawn up a written constitution and established aSupreme Court of Judicature to guard it; and if the Americanlegislature violates this constitution by any Act, the Supreme Courtmay declare that Act unconstitutional, in which case it is void. Butthere is no such limitation in England upon the sovereignty ofparliament. 

This sovereignty has been gradually evolved. At first it was royal andpersonal, but not parliamentary or representative; and medieval kingshad to struggle with the rival claims of the barons and the church. Bycalling in the assistance of the people assembled and represented inparliament, the monarchy triumphed over both the barons and the church;but when, in the seventeenth century, the two partners to this victoryquarrelled over the spoils, parliament and not the crown establishedits claim to be the real representative of the state; and in the casesof Strafford, Danby, and others it even asserted that loyalty to theking might be treason to the state. The church, vanquished at theReformation, dropped more and more out of the struggle for sovereignty, because, while the state grew more comprehensive, the church grew moreexclusive. It was not that, after 1662, it seriously narrowed itsformulas or doctrines, but it failed to enlarge them, and a larger andlarger proportion of Englishmen thus found themselves outside its pale. The state, on the other hand, embraced an ever-widening circle ofdissent; and by degrees Protestant Nonconformists, Roman Catholics, Quakers, Jews, Atheists, Mohammedans, believers, misbelievers, andunbelievers of all sorts, were admitted to the fullest rights ofcitizenship. State and church ceased to correspond; one became thewhole, the other only a part, and there could be no serious rivalrybetween the two. 

The state had to contend, however, with more subtle and seriousattacks. This great Leviathan, as Hobbes called it, was not at first apopular institution; and it frightened many people. The Americancolonists, for instance, thought that its absolute sovereignty was toodangerous a thing to be left loose, and they put sovereignty under atriple lock and key, giving one to the judicature, one to thelegislature, and a third to the executive. Only by the co-operation ofthese three keepers can the American people loose their sovereignty anduse it to amend their constitution; and so jealously is sovereigntyconfined that anarchy often seems to reign in its stead. There was, indeed, some excuse for distrusting a sovereignty claimed by George IIIand the unreformed British parliament; and it was natural enough thatpeople should deny its necessity and set up in its place Declarationsof the Rights of Man. Sovereignty of Hobbes's type was a somewhat novelconception; men had not grasped its possibilities as an engine ofpopular will, because they were only familiar with its exploitation bykings and oligarchs; and so closely did they identify the thing withits abuses that they preferred to do without it altogether, or at leastto confine it to the narrowest possible limits. Government and thepeople were antagonistic: the less government there was, the less harmwould be done to the people, and so a general body of individualistic, _laissez-faire_ theory developed, which was expressed in variousDeclarations of the Rights of Man, and set up against the "paternaldespotism" of the eighteenth century. 

These Rights of Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the firstFrench Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and theirsuccessor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government andover-government, between individualism and socialism has continued tothis day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed inpossession prefer a policy of _laissez faire_; they are all forLiberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing whatsoeverthey like with what they are pleased to call their own. But those whohave little to call their own, and much that they would like, preferstrong government if they can control it; and the strength ofgovernment has steadily grown with popular control. This is due to morethan a predatory instinct; it is natural, and excusable enough, thatpeople should be reluctant to maintain what is no affair of theirs; buteven staunch Conservatives have been known to pay Radical taxes withcomparative cheerfulness when their party has returned to power. 

Government was gradually made the affair of the people by the series ofReform Acts extending from 1832 to 1885; and it is no mere accidentthat this half-century also witnessed the political emancipation of theBritish colonies. Nor must we forget the Acts beginning with the repealof the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and Roman Catholic Emancipation(1829), which extended political rights to men of all religiouspersuasions. These and the Franchise Acts made the House of Commonsinfinitely more representative than it had been before, and gave it itsconclusive superiority over the House of Lords. Not that the Peersrepresent no one but themselves; had that been true, the House of Lordswould have disappeared long ago. In reality it came to embody a fairlycomplete representation of the Conservative party; and as a party doesnot need two legislative organs, the House of Lords retired wheneverthe Conservatives controlled the House of Commons, and only resumed itsproper functions when the Liberals had a majority. Hence its mostindefensible characteristic as a Second Chamber became its strongestpractical bulwark; for it enlisted the support of many who had noparticular views about Second Chambers in the abstract, but were keenlyinterested in the predominance of their party. 

The restraint thus imposed by the House of Lords upon populargovernment checked the development of its power and the extension ofits activity, which would naturally have followed upon the acquisitionby the people of control over the House of Commons and indirectly overthe Cabinet. Other causes co-operated to induce delay. The mostpowerful was lack of popular education; constitutional privileges areof no value to people who do not understand how they may be used, orare so unimaginative and ill-disciplined as to prefer such immediateand tangible rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation totheir football club or local charity, or a gracious word from aninterested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in thedirection of national government. This participation is, in fact, sominute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, thata high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and theEducation Acts of 1870 and 1889 were indispensable preliminaries toanything like a real democracy. A democracy really educated in politicswill express views strange to our ears with an emphasis of which evenyet we have little conception. 

Other obstacles to the overthrow of the rule of _laissez faire_were the vested interests of over-mighty manufacturers and landlords inthe maintenance of that anarchy which is the logical extreme of Libertyand Property; and such elementary measures of humanity as the FactoryActs were long resisted by men so humane as Cobden and John Bright asarbitrary interventions with the natural liberty of man to drivebargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed tobe no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as thatprimitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the lifeof man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean, " and that it might asurgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such aremedy was reinforced by crude analogies between a perverted Darwinismand politics. Darwin's demonstration of evolution by means of thestruggle for existence in the natural world was used to support theassumption that a similar struggle among civilized men was natural andtherefore inevitable; and that all attempts to interfere with theconflict between the weak and the strong, the scrupulous and theunscrupulous, were foredoomed to disastrous failure. It was forgottenthat civilization itself involves a more or less conscious repeal of"Nature, " and that the progress of man depends upon the conquest ofhimself and of his surroundings. In a better sense of the word, theevolution of man's self-control and conscience is just as "natural" asthe gratification of his animal instincts. 

The view that each individual should be left without further help fromthe state to cope with his environment might be acceptable to landlordswho had already obtained from parliament hundreds of Inclosure Acts, and to manufacturers whose profits were inflated by laws making itcriminal for workmen to combine. They might rest from politicalagitation and be thankful for their constitutional gains; at any ratethey had little to hope from a legislature in which working men hadvotes. But the masses, who had just secured the franchise, werereluctant to believe that the action of the state had lost its virtueat the moment when the control of the state came within their grasp. The vote seems to have been given them under the amiable delusion thatthey would be happy when they got it, as if it had any value whateverexcept as a means to an end. Nor is it adequate as a means: it is notsufficient for a nation by adult suffrage to express its will; thatwill has also to be carried into execution, and it requires a strongexecutive to do so. Hence the reversal of the old Liberal attitudetowards the royal prerogative, which may be best dated from 1872, whenGladstone abolished the purchase of commissions in the army by means ofthe royal prerogative, after the proposed reform had been rejected as abill by the House of Lords. No Liberal is likely in the future tosuggest that "the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished"; because the prerogative of the crown hasbecome the privilege of the people. 

The Franchise Acts had apparently provided a solution of the oldantithesis of Man _versus_ the State by comprehending all men_in_ the state; and the great value of those reforms was that theytended to eliminate force from the sphere of politics. When men couldvote, there was less reason in rebellion; and the antithesis of Man_versus_ the State has almost been reduced to one of Woman _versus_ theState. But representative government, which promised to be ideal whenevery man, or every adult, had a vote, is threatened in variousquarters. Its operations are too deliberate and involved to satisfyimpatient spirits, and three alternative methods of procedure areadvocated as improvements upon it. One is the "direct action" ofworking men, by which they can speedily obtain their objects through ageneral or partial strike paralyzing the food supply or other nationalnecessities. This is obviously a dangerous and double-edged weapon, theadoption of which by other sections of the community--the Army andNavy, for instance, or the medical profession--might mean nationaldissolution. 

Another method is the Referendum, by which important decisions adoptedby parliament would be referred to a direct popular vote. This proposalis only logical when coupled with the Initiative, by which a directpopular vote could compel parliament to pass any measure desired by themajority of voters; otherwise its object is merely obstructive. Thethird method is the supersession of parliament by the action of theexecutive. The difficulties which Liberal measures have experienced inthe House of Lords, and the impossibility of the House of Commonsdealing by debate with the increasing complexities of nationalbusiness, have encouraged a tendency in Liberal governments to entrustto their departments decisions which trench upon the legislativefunctions of parliament. The trend of hostile opinion is to regardparliament as an unnecessary middleman, and to advocate in its stead asort of plebiscitary bureaucracy, a constitution under whichlegislation drafted by officials would be demanded, sanctioned, orrejected by direct popular vote, and would be discussed, like theInsurance Bill, in informal conferences outside, rather than inside, parliament; while administration by a vast army of experts would bepartially controlled by popularly elected ministers; for socialistswaver between their faith in human equality and their trust in thesuperman. Others think that the milder method of Devolution, or "HomeRule all round, " would meet the evils caused by the congestion ofbusiness, and restore to the Mother of Parliaments her time-honouredfunction of governing by debate. 

Parliament has already had to delegate legislative powers to otherbodies than colonial legislatures; and county councils, boroughcouncils, district councils, and parish councils share with it invarious degrees the task of legislating for the country. They can, ofcourse, only legislate, as they can only administer, within the limitsimposed by Act of Parliament; but their development, like themultiplication of central administrative departments, indicates thelatest, but not the final, stages in the growth and specialization ofEnglish government. A century and a half ago two Secretaries of Statewere all that Great Britain required; now there are half-a-dozen, and adozen other departments have been added. Among them are the LocalGovernment Board, the Board of Education, the Board of Trade, the Boardof Agriculture, while many sub-departments such as the Public HealthDepartment of the Local Government Board, the Bankruptcy Department ofthe Board of Trade, and the Factory Department of the Home Office, havemore work to do than originally had a Secretary of State. It isprobable, moreover, that departments will multiply and subdivide at anever-increasing rate. 

All this, however, is merely machinery provided to give effect topublic opinion, which determines the use to which it shall be put. Butits very provision indicates that England expects the state to-day todo more and more extensive duty for the individual. For one thing thestate has largely taken the place of the church as the organ of thecollective conscience of the community. It can hardly be said that theAnglican church has an articulate conscience apart from questions ofcanon law and ecclesiastical property; and other churches are, asbodies, no better provided with creeds of social morality. The EighthCommandment is never applied to such genteel delinquencies as making afalse return of income, or defrauding a railway company or the customs;but is reserved for the grosser offences which no member of thecongregation is likely to have committed; and it is left to the stateto provide by warning and penalty against neglect of one's duty toone's neighbour when one's neighbour is not one individual but the sumof all. It was not by any ecclesiastical agitation that some humanitywas introduced into the criminal code in the third decade of thenineteenth century; and the protest against the blind cruelty ofeconomic _laissez faire_ was made by Sadler, Shaftesbury, Ruskin, and Carlyle rather than by any church. Their writings and speechesawoke a conscience in the state, which began to insist by means oflegislation upon humaner hours and conditions of labour, upon decentsanitation, upon a standard of public education, and upon provisionbeing made against fraudulent dealings with more helpless fellow-men. 

This public conscience has inevitably proved expensive, and the expensehas had to be borne either by the state or by the individual. Now, itmight have been possible, when the expense of these new standards ofpublic health and comfort began to be incurred, to provide by an heroiceffort of socialism for a perpetuation of the individualistic basis ofsocial duty. That is to say, if the state had guaranteed to everyindividual an income which would enable him to bear his share of thisexpense, it might also have imposed upon him the duty of meeting it, ofpaying fees for the education of his children, for hospital treatment, for medical inspection, and so forth. But that effort was not, andperhaps could not, in the existing condition of public opinion, bemade; and the state has therefore got into the habit of providing andpaying for all these things itself. When the majority of male adultsearn twenty shillings or less a week, and possess a vote, there wouldbe no raising of standards at all, if they had to pay the cost. Hencethe state has been compelled step by step to meet the expense ofburdens imposed by its conscience. Free education has thereforefollowed compulsory education; the demands of sanitary inspectors andmedical officers of health have led to free medical inspection, medicaltreatment, the feeding of necessitous school children, and otherpiecemeal socialism; and, ignoring the historical causes of thisdevelopment, we are embarked on a wordy warfare of socialists andindividualists as to the abstract merits of antagonistic theories. 

It is mainly a battle of phrases, in which few pause to examine whattheir opponents or they themselves mean by the epithets they employ. Inthe sense in which the individualist uses the term socialist, there arehardly any socialists, and in the sense in which the socialist uses theterm individualist, there are practically no individualists. In realitywe are all both individualists and socialists. It is a question ofdegree and not of dogma; and most people are at heart agreed that someeconomic socialism is required in order to promote a certain amount ofmoral and intellectual individualism. The defect of so-called economicindividualism is that it reduces the mass of workers to one dead levelof common poverty, in which wages, instead of increasing like capital, barely keep pace with the rise of rent and prices, in which men occupydwellings all alike in the same mean streets, pursuing the same routineof labour and same trivial round of relaxation, and in which thereseems no possibility of securing for the individual adequateopportunities for that development of his individuality by which alonehe can render his best service to the community. 

That service is the common end and object towards which men of allparties in English history have striven through the growth of consciousand collective action. A communist has maintained that we are allcommunists because we have developed a common army, a common navy, anda common national government, in place of the individualistic forcesand jurisdictions of feudal barons. We have, indeed, nationalized thesethings and many others as well, including the crown, the church, theadministration of justice, education, highways and byways, posts andtelegraphs, woods and forests. Even the House of Lords has beenconstrained to abandon its independence by a process akin to thatmedieval _peine forte et dure_, by which the obstinate individualistwas, when accused, compelled to surrender his ancient immunity andsubmit to the common law; and this common control, which came intobeing as the nation emerged out of its diverse elements in thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and slowly gathered force asit realized its strength under the Tudors, has attained fresh momentumin the latest ages as the state step by step extended to all sorts andconditions of men a share in the exercise of its power. 

This is the real English conquest, and it forms the chief content ofEnglish history. It is part of the triumph of man over the forces ofnature and over himself, and the two have gone hand in hand. An Englishstate could hardly exist before men had made roads, but it could nomore exist until they had achieved that great victory of civilizedgovernment by which a minority agrees for the sake of peace to submitto the greater number. Steam and railways and telegraphs have placedfurther powers in the hands of men; they have conquered the land andthe sea and the air; and medical science has built up their physiqueand paved the way for empire in tropical climes. But while he hasconquered nature, man has also conquered himself. He has tamed hiscombative instincts; he has reduced civil strife to political combats, restrained national conflicts by treaties of arbitration, and subduedprivate wars to judicial proceedings; it is only in partially civilizedcountries that gentlemen cannot rule their temper or bend their honourto the base arbitrament of justice. He looks before and after, andforgoes the gratification of the present to insure against theaccidents of the future, though the extent to which the community as awhole can follow the example of individuals in this respect remains atthe moment a test of its self-control and sense of collectiveresponsibility. 

Whether this growth of power in the individual and in the state is agood or an evil thing depends on the conscience of those who wield it. The power of the over-mighty subject has generally been a tyranny; andall power is distrusted by old-fashioned Liberals and philosophicAnarchists, because they have a traditional suspicion that it will fallinto hostile or unscrupulous hands. But the forces of evil cannot beovercome by _laissez faire_, and power is an indispensable weaponof progress. A powerless state means a helpless community; and anarchyis the worst of all forms of tyranny, because it is irresponsible, incorrigible, and capricious. Weakness, moreover, is the parent ofpanic, and panic brings cruelty in its train. So long as the state wasweak, it was cruel; and the hideous treason-laws of Tudor times weredue to fear. The weak cannot afford to be tolerant any more than thepoor can afford to be generous. Cecil thought that the state could notafford to tolerate two forms of religion; to-day it tolerates hundreds, and it laughs at treason because it is strong. We are humanitarian, notbecause we are so much better than our ancestors, but because we canafford the luxury of dissent and conscientious objections so muchbetter than they could. Political liberty and religious freedom dependupon the power of the state, inspired, controlled, and guided by themind of the community. 

Last of all, through this power man has acquired faith, not inmiraculous intervention, but in his capacity to work out his owndestinies by means of the weapons placed in his hands and the dominionput under his feet. He no longer believes that the weakest must go tothe wall, and the helpless be trampled under foot in the march ofcivilization; nature is no longer a mass of inscrutable, iron decrees, but a treasury of forces to be tamed and used in the redemption ofmankind by man; and mankind is no longer a mob of blind victims topanic and passion, but a more or less orderly host marching on to moreor less definite goals. The individual, however, can do little byhimself; he needs the strength of union for his herculean tasks; and hehas found that union in the state. It is not an engine of tyranny, butthe lever of social morality; and the function of English government isnot merely to embody the organized might and the executive brain ofEngland, but also to enforce its collective and coordinatingconscience. 

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE

B. C. 55. Julius Caesar's first invasion of Britain. A. D. 43-110. Roman occupation of Britain. 410-577. Period of Anglo-Saxon colonization and conquest. 597-664. Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. 617-685. Northumbrian supremacy. 685-825. Mercian supremacy. 8O2-839. Ecgberht establishes West Saxon supremacy. 855. Danes first winter in England. 878. Peace of Wedmore between Alfred and the Danes. 900 (?). Death of Alfred. 9OO (?)-975. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edgar. Reconquest of the Danelaw. 978-1013. Ethelred the Unready. Return of the Danes. 1016. Edmund Ironside. 1016-1035. Canute. 1042. -1060. Edward the Confessor and the growth of Norman Influence. 1066. Harold and the Battle of Hastings. WILLIAM I. 1066-1071. The Norman Conquest. Submergence of the Anglo-Saxons. 1085-1086. Domesday Book. The Salisbury Oath. 1087-1100. WILLIAM II. 1100-1135. HENRY I and the beginnings of an administrative system. The Exchequer and _Curia Regis_. 1135-1154. STEPHEN and Matilda. The period of baronial independence, _i. E. _ anarchy. 1154-1189. HENRY II restores order, curbs the military power of the barons by scutage (1159), the Assize of Arms (1181), and the substitution of sworn inquest for the ordeal and trial by battle, and their jurisdiction by the development of the royal court of justice through assizes of Clarendon, Northampton, etc. Teaches the people to rely on their judgment. Restrains the sheriffs, and attempts to limit ecclesiastical jurisdiction by the constitutions of Clarendon (1164). Quarrel with Becket. 1189-1199. RICHARD I. Crusade and wars In France. 1199-1210. JOHN'S tyranny. Loss of Normandy (1204). Quarrel with the church and baronage. Tries to retrieve his position by spirited foreign policy. Defeated at Bouvines (1214) and forced to sign Magna Carta (1215). 1216-1272. HENRY III. Beginnings of national government under De Burgh. Naval victory (1217). Alien domination of Henry's favourites provokes baronial resistance. Growth of native wealth and influence, and of an English party in the Barons' War (1258- 1265). Simon De Montfort. Townsfolk summoned to Parliament. 1272-1307. EDWARD I, the first English king since the Norman Conquest. Emergence of the English people, their language, national weapons, towns, commerce. The Model Parliament(1275, 1295). Confirmation of the charters(1297). National resistance to the Papacy, and national enterprises against Wales and Scotland. 1307-1327. EDWARD II. The relapse of Monarchy. Baronage becoming peerage. Thomas of Lancaster. 1327-1377. EDWARD III. Growth of nationalism in religion, politics, literature, trade, and war. The Commons take the constitutional lead abandoned by the peers. Lollardy and hostility to the Papacy. Decay of manorial system: emancipation of villeins: growth of industry and towns. 1377-1399. RICHARD II, Revolt of the peasants and artisans (1381). Tries to emancipate himself from the control of the peers, and is deposed. 1399-1413. HENRY IV and the Lancastrian dynasty. Revolt of the Percies (1403). Henry's troubles with over-mighty subjects. 1413-1422. HENRY V seeks escape from domestic troubles in foreign war. 1415. Battle of Agincourt. Treaty of Troyes (1420). 1422. HENRY VI. Rivalry between Beaufort and Gloucester leads to growth of Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, and these with local anarchy produce the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485). 1461. EDWARD IV secures the throne, and in 1471 defeats both the Lancastrians and Warwick the King-maker. 1483. RICHARD III. 1485. HENRY VII and the House of Tudor. 1487. Organization of the Star Chamber to repress disorder and over- mighty subjects. Diaz doubles the Cape of Good Hope. 1492. Columbus discovers West Indies. 1496-1497. Cabot discovers Newfoundland and Labrador. 1509. HENRY VIII. 1512-1529. Wolsey. 1529-1536. The Reformation Parliament. The submission of the Clergy, Acts of Annates, Appeals (1532-1533) and Supremacy (1534). 1536. Suppression of the Monasteries and Pilgrimage for Grace. 1539. Act of Six Articles. 1547-1553. EDWARD VI and the Protestant Reformation. 1549. First Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. Kett's rebellion. 1552. Second Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. 1553-1558. MARY and the Roman Catholic reaction. Spanish control in England. 1558. ELIZABETH. 1559. The Elizabethan settlement of religion. 1560. Elizabeth assists the Scots to expel the French. 1568-1569. Flight of Mary Queen of Scots into England, and rebellion of the northern earls. 1570. Papal excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth. 1571. Ridolfi's plot. 1572. Execution of Norfolk and extinction of English dukedoms. Beginning of the Dutch Republic. Massacre of St. Bartholomew. 1577-1580. Drake sails round the world. 1587. Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. 1588. Spanish Armada. 1599-1601. Conquest of Ireland. 1600. Foundation of East India Company. 1603. JAMES VI of Scotland and I of England. 1607. Foundation of Virginia. 1608. Plantation of Ulster. 1620. Sailing of the Mayflower. 1623. Re-creation of dukedoms. Massacre of Amboyna. 1625. CHARLES I. 1628. Petition of Right. 1629. First British capture of Quebec. 1629-1640. The "Eleven Years' Tyranny. "1638-1639. National Covenant. Bishops' war in Scotland. 1640. The Long Parliament. 1642. First Civil War. 1648. Second Civil War. 1649. THE COMMONWEALTH. Abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords. 1650-1651. Navigation Acts and Dutch War. 1653. THE PROTECTORATE. First Cromwellian constitution. 1657. Second Cromwellian constitution. 1658. Cromwell's death. 1660. The Restoration. CHARLES II. 1662. The last Act of Uniformity. 1664. War with the Dutch: conquest of New Netherlands1667. Fall of Clarendon. The Cabal administration. 1670. Treaty of Dover. 1672. Declaration of Indulgence. 1673. Danby. The Test Act. 1678. Titus Gates' Plot. 1679. Habeas Corpus Act. 1681. Charles II's triumph over the Whigs. 1685. JAMES II. Monmouth's and Argyll's rebellions. 1688. The Revolution. WILLIAM III and MARY. 1689. Bill of Rights. Toleration Act. 1690. Battle of the Boyne. 1694. Bank of England established. 1696. The Whig _Junto_. 1701. Act of Settlement. 1702. ANNE. War with France. 1704. Capture of Gibraltar. England becomes a Mediterranean power. 1707. Act of Union with Scotland. 1708. Capture of Minorca. 1708-1710. Whig ministry. 1710-1714. Tory ministry. 1713. Peace of Utrecht. 1714. GEORGE I and the Hanoverian dynasty. 1721-1742. Walpole's administration. Evolution of the Cabinet and Prime Minister. Growth of imports and exports, 1727. GEORGE II. 1739. War with Spain. 1741-1748. War of the Austrian Succession. Clive in India. 1756-1763. Seven Years' War. 1757. Battle of Plassey. 1759. Capture of Quebec. 1760. GEORGE III. 1764-1779. Inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton. Beginning of the Industrial Revolution. 1765. Grenville's Stamp Act. 1770. Lord North Prime Minister. Captain Cook surveys Australia and New Zealand. 1774. The Quebec Act. 1776. Declaration of American Independence. Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_. 1778-1779. France and Spain join the Americans. 1780. The "Armed Neutrality. " Warren Hastings saves India. 1781. Fall of Yorktown. 1782. Volunteer movement In Ireland. Irish parliamentary independence. 1783. American Independence granted. 1784. Pitt Prime Minister: his India Bill. 1788. Convict settlement in Australia. 1789. French Revolution. 1791. The Canadian Constitutional Act. 1794. The "Glorious First of June. "1795-1796. Conquest of the Cape and of Ceylon. 1797. Battles of St. Vincent and Camperdown. 1798. Battle of the Nile. Irish rebellion. 1799. Wellesley in India. Capture of Seringapatam. Partition of Mysore and the Carnatic. 1800. Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Seizure of Malta. 1801. Battle of Copenhagen. 1802. Peace of Amiens. 1803. Battles of Assye and Argaum. Defeat of the Mahrattas. 1805. Battle of Trafalgar. 1806. Second capture of the Cape. 1808-1814. Peninsular War. 1810. Capture of Mauritius. 1812-1814. War with the United States. 1814. Corn Laws passed. 1815. Battle of Waterloo. 1820. GEORGE IV. 1825. Huskisson's Tariff Reform. 1827. Battle of Navarino. 1828. Corn Laws revised. 1828-1829. Repeal of Test Act. Roman Catholic Emancipation. 1830. WILLIAM IV. Whigs return to power. 1832. First Reform Act. Representative Government established in Newfoundland. 1834-1835. Reform of the Poor Law and Municipal corporations. 1837. QUEEN VICTORIA. Mackenzie and Papineau's rebellions in Canada. Great Boer "trek. "1840. Annexation of New Zealand. 1841-1846. Peel's Free Trade policy. 1842. Representative government in Australia. 1846. Corn Laws repealed. 1848. Responsible self-government In Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. 1849. Repeal of the Navigation Acts. 1852. Responsible government developed In Australia and New Zealand. 1853. Representative government in Cape Colony. 1854-1856. Crimean War. 1855. Responsible government in Newfoundland. 1856. Representative government in Natal. 1857. Indian Mutiny. 1858. Transference of India to the Crown. 1867. Disraeli's Reform Act. Federation of the Dominion of Canada. 1869. Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Opening of the Suez Canal. 1870. Compulsory education. 1872. Abolition of purchase in the army by executive action. Responsible government in Cape Colony. 1876. Queen proclaimed Empress of India. 1876-1877. Russo-Turkish War. Dual control established in Egypt. Annexation of the Transvaal. 1881. Transvaal granted independence. 1882. British administration of Egypt begins. 1885. Fall of Khartoum. Gladstone's Reform Act. Annexation of Burma. 1887. Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy. 1889. Establishment of County Councils. 1890. Free Education. Franco-Russian _entente_. Responsible government in Western Australia. 1893. Responsible government in Natal. 1894. Establishment of district and parish councils. 1895. Jameson Raid. 1896-1898. Reconquest of the Sudan. 1899-1903. The Great Boer War. 1900. Establishment of the Australian Commonwealth. 1901. EDWARD VII. 1904. Russo-Japanese War. 1905. Anglo-Japanese alliance. 1906-1907. Responsible government granted to the Transvaal and Orange River Colonies. 1909. The Union of South Africa. 1910. GEORGE V. 1911. Asquith's Parliament Act. Capital of India transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. Beginnings of National Insurance. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. R. GREEN'S _Short History of the English People_ (Macmillan), and C. R. L. FLETCHER'S _Introductory History of England_, 4 vols. (Murray), both eminently readable in very different styles, illustrate thediverse methods of treatment to which English history lends itself. More elaborate surveys are provided by LONGMANS' _Political History ofEngland_, 12 vols. (edited by W. Hunt and R. L. Poole), and METHUEN'S_History of England_, 7 vols. (edited by C. Oman). 

The student of Constitutional History should begin with F. W. MAITLAND'S _Lectures on Constitutional History_ (Cambridge UniversityPress), and for a compendium of facts may use Medley's _ConstitutionalHistory of England_ (Blackwell). 

Periods can be studied in greater detail in--J. R. GREEN: _The Makingof England_ and _The Conquest of England_ (Macmillan). FREEMAN: _NormanConquest, _ 6 vols. , and _William Rufus_, 2 vols. (Oxford UniversityPress). NORGATE: _England under the Angevins_, 2 vols. , and _JohnLackland_ (Macmillan). RAMSAY: _Lancaster and York_, 2 vols. FROUDE:_History of England_, 1529-1588, 12 vols. (Longmans). GARDINER:_History of England_, 1603-1642, 10 vols. ; _Civil War_, 1642-1649, 4vols. ; _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, 1649-1656, 4 vols. (Longmans). MACAULAY: _History of England_, 1685-1702 (Longmans). LECKY: _Historyof England_, 1714-1793, 7 vols. ; _Ireland_, 1714-1800, 5 vols. (Longmans). SPENCER WALPOLE: _History of England_, 1815-1846, 6 vols. HERBERT PAUL: _History of Modern England_, 1846-1895, 5 vols. (Macmillan). MORLEY: _Life of Gladstone_, 2 vols. (Macmillan). 

English Constitutional History is detailed in--STUBBS: _ConstitutionalHistory to 1485_, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press). HALLAM:_Constitutional History_, 1485-1760, 3 vols. (Murray). ERSKINE MAY:_Constitutional History, _ 1760-1860, 3 vols. (Longmans). ANSON: _Lawand Custom of the Constitution, _ 3 vols. (Oxford University Press). DICEY: _Custom of the Constitution_ (Macmillan). 

For Ecclesiastical History see STEPHENS and HUNT'S _History of theChurch of England, _ 7 vols. (Macmillan); for Colonial History, SEELEY'S_Expansion of England_ (Macmillan), and _The British Empire_ (ed. Pollard; League of the Empire); for Economic and Industrial History, CUNNINGHAM'S _Growth of Industry and Commerce_, 3 vols. ; ASHLEY'S_Economic History_, 2 vols. (Macmillan), and TOYNBEE'S _IndustrialRevolution_; for sketches of movements and biographies, see MACAULAY'S_Essays_ (Longmans), STUBB'S _Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History_(Oxford University Press), and POLLARD'S _Factors in Modern History_(Constable).