Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries. See http://www. Archive. Org/details/ashorthistory00chesuoft A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND by G. K. CHESTERTON LondonChatto & WindusMCMXVII Printed in England byWilliam Clowes and Sons, Limited, London and Beccles. All rights reserved CONTENTS PAGE I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN 6 III. THE AGE OF LEGENDS 19 IV. THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS 30 V. ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS 43 VI. THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES 58 VII. THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS 71 VIII. THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND 86 IX. NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS 104 X. THE WAR OF THE USURPERS 119 XI. THE REBELLION OF THE RICH 133 XII. SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS 151 XIII. THE AGE OF THE PURITANS 163 XIV. THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS 179 XV. THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS 195 XVI. ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS 209 XVII. THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN 223 XVIII. CONCLUSION 238 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLAND I INTRODUCTION It will be very reasonably asked why I should consent, though upon asort of challenge, to write even a popular essay in English history, whomake no pretence to particular scholarship and am merely a member of thepublic. The answer is that I know just enough to know one thing: that ahistory from the standpoint of a member of the public has not beenwritten. What we call the popular histories should rather be called theanti-popular histories. They are all, nearly without exception, writtenagainst the people; and in them the populace is either ignored orelaborately proved to have been wrong. It is true that Green called hisbook "A Short History of the English People"; but he seems to havethought it too short for the people to be properly mentioned. Forinstance, he calls one very large part of his story "Puritan England. "But England never was Puritan. It would have been almost as unfair tocall the rise of Henry of Navarre "Puritan France. " And some of ourextreme Whig historians would have been pretty nearly capable of callingthe campaign of Wexford and Drogheda "Puritan Ireland. " But it is especially in the matter of the Middle Ages that the popularhistories trample upon the popular traditions. In this respect there isan almost comic contrast between the general information provided aboutEngland in the last two or three centuries, in which its presentindustrial system was being built up, and the general information givenabout the preceding centuries, which we call broadly mediæval. Of thesort of waxwork history which is thought sufficient for the side-show ofthe age of abbots and crusaders, a small instance will be sufficient. Apopular Encyclopædia appeared some years ago, professing among otherthings to teach English History to the masses; and in this I came upon aseries of pictures of the English kings. No one could expect them to beall authentic; but the interest attached to those that were necessarilyimaginary. There is much vivid material in contemporary literature forportraits of men like Henry II. Or Edward I. ; but this did not seem tohave been found, or even sought. And wandering to the image that stoodfor Stephen of Blois, my eye was staggered by a gentleman with one ofthose helmets with steel brims curved like a crescent, which went withthe age of ruffs and trunk-hose. I am tempted to suspect that the headwas that of a halberdier at some such scene as the execution of MaryQueen of Scots. But he had a helmet; and helmets were mediæval; and anyold helmet was good enough for Stephen. Now suppose the readers of that work of reference had looked for theportrait of Charles I. And found the head of a policeman. Suppose it hadbeen taken, modern helmet and all, out of some snapshot in the _DailySketch_ of the arrest of Mrs. Pankhurst. I think we may go so far as tosay that the readers would have refused to accept it as a lifelikeportrait of Charles I. They would have formed the opinion that theremust be some mistake. Yet the time that elapsed between Stephen and Marywas much longer than the time that has elapsed between Charles andourselves. The revolution in human society between the first of theCrusades and the last of the Tudors was immeasurably more colossal andcomplete than any change between Charles and ourselves. And, above all, that revolution should be the first thing and the final thing inanything calling itself a popular history. For it is the story of howour populace gained great things, but to-day has lost everything. Now I will modestly maintain that I know more about English history thanthis; and that I have as much right to make a popular summary of it asthe gentleman who made the crusader and the halberdier change hats. Butthe curious and arresting thing about the neglect, one might say theomission, of mediæval civilization in such histories as this, lies inthe fact I have already noted. It is exactly the popular story that isleft out of the popular history. For instance, even a working man, acarpenter or cooper or bricklayer, has been taught about the GreatCharter, as something like the Great Auk, save that its almost monstroussolitude came from being before its time instead of after. He was nottaught that the whole stuff of the Middle Ages was stiff with theparchment of charters; that society was once a system of charters, andof a kind much more interesting to him. The carpenter heard of onecharter given to barons, and chiefly in the interest of barons; thecarpenter did not hear of any of the charters given to carpenters, tocoopers, to all the people like himself. Or, to take another instance, the boy and girl reading the stock simplified histories of the schoolspractically never heard of such a thing as a burgher, until he appearsin a shirt with a noose round his neck. They certainly do not imagineanything of what he meant in the Middle Ages. And Victorian shopkeepersdid not conceive themselves as taking part in any such romance as theadventure of Courtrai, where the mediæval shopkeepers more than wontheir spurs--for they won the spurs of their enemies. I have a very simple motive and excuse for telling the little I know ofthis true tale. I have met in my wanderings a man brought up in thelower quarters of a great house, fed mainly on its leavings and burdenedmostly with its labours. I know that his complaints are stilled, andhis status justified, by a story that is told to him. It is about howhis grandfather was a chimpanzee and his father a wild man of the woods, caught by hunters and tamed into something like intelligence. In thelight of this, he may well be thankful for the almost human life that heenjoys; and may be content with the hope of leaving behind him a yetmore evolved animal. Strangely enough, the calling of this story by thesacred name of Progress ceased to satisfy me when I began to suspect(and to discover) that it is not true. I know by now enough at least ofhis origin to know that he was not evolved, but simply disinherited. Hisfamily tree is not a monkey tree, save in the sense that no monkey couldhave climbed it; rather it is like that tree torn up by the roots andnamed "Dedischado, " on the shield of the unknown knight. II THE PROVINCE OF BRITAIN The land on which we live once had the highly poetic privilege of beingthe end of the world. Its extremity was _ultima Thule_, the other end ofnowhere. When these islands, lost in a night of northern seas, were litup at last by the long searchlights of Rome, it was felt that theremotest remnant of things had been touched; and more for pride thanpossession. The sentiment was not unsuitable, even in geography. About these realmsupon the edge of everything there was really something that can only becalled edgy. Britain is not so much an island as an archipelago; it isat least a labyrinth of peninsulas. In few of the kindred countries canone so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in thesea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely tomiss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistorictradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yetdreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, theScots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, havesomething altogether different from the humdrum docility of the inlandGermans, or from the _bon sens français_ which can be at will trenchantor trite. There is something common to all the Britons, which even Actsof Union have not torn asunder. The nearest name for it is insecurity, something fitting in men walking on cliffs and the verge of things. Adventure, a lonely taste in liberty, a humour without wit, perplextheir critics and perplex themselves. Their souls are fretted like theircoasts. They have an embarrassment, noted by all foreigners: it isexpressed, perhaps, in the Irish by a confusion of speech and in theEnglish by a confusion of thought. For the Irish bull is a license withthe symbol of language. But Bull's own bull, the English bull, is "adumb ox of thought"; a standing mystification in the mind. There issomething double in the thoughts as of the soul mirrored in many waters. Of all peoples they are least attached to the purely classical; theimperial plainness which the French do finely and the Germans coarsely, but the Britons hardly at all. They are constantly colonists andemigrants; they have the name of being at home in every country. Butthey are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love ofhome and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanationor may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhymewhich is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain ofall English poems--"Over the hills and far away. " The great rationalist hero who first conquered Britain, whether or no hewas the detached demigod of "Cæsar and Cleopatra, " was certainly a Latinof the Latins, and described these islands when he found them with allthe curt positivism of his pen of steel. But even Julius Cæsar's briefaccount of the Britons leaves on us something of this mystery, which ismore than ignorance of fact. They were apparently ruled by that terriblething, a pagan priesthood. Stones now shapeless yet arranged in symbolicshapes bear witness to the order and labour of those that lifted them. Their worship was probably Nature-worship; and while such a basis maycount for something in the elemental quality that has always soaked theisland arts, the collision between it and the tolerant Empire suggeststhe presence of something which generally grows out of Nature-worship--Imean the unnatural. But upon nearly all the matters of moderncontroversy Cæsar is silent. He is silent about whether the language was"Celtic"; and some of the place-names have even given rise to asuggestion that, in parts at least, it was already Teutonic. I am notcapable of pronouncing upon the truth of such speculations, but I am ofpronouncing upon their importance; at least, to my own very simplepurpose. And indeed their importance has been very much exaggerated. Cæsar professed to give no more than the glimpse of a traveller; butwhen, some considerable time after, the Romans returned and turnedBritain into a Roman province, they continued to display a singularindifference to questions that have excited so many professors. Whatthey cared about was getting and giving in Britain what they had got andgiven in Gaul. We do not know whether the Britons then, or for thatmatter the Britons now, were Iberian or Cymric or Teutonic. We do knowthat in a short time they were Roman. Every now and then there is discovered in modern England some fragmentsuch as a Roman pavement. Such Roman antiquities rather diminish thanincrease the Roman reality. They make something seem distant which isstill very near, and something seem dead that is still alive. It is likewriting a man's epitaph on his front door. The epitaph would probably bea compliment, but hardly a personal introduction. The important thingabout France and England is not that they have Roman remains. They areRoman remains. In truth they are not so much remains as relics; for theyare still working miracles. A row of poplars is a more Roman relic thana row of pillars. Nearly all that we call the works of nature have butgrown like fungoids upon this original work of man; and our woods aremosses on the bones of a giant. Under the seed of our harvests and theroots of our trees is a foundation of which the fragments of tile andbrick are but emblems; and under the colours of our wildest flowers arethe colours of a Roman pavement. Britain was directly Roman for fully four hundred years; longer than shehas been Protestant, and very much longer than she has been industrial. What was meant by being Roman it is necessary in a few lines to say, orno sense can be made of what happened after, especially of what happenedimmediately after. Being Roman did _not_ mean being subject, in thesense that one savage tribe will enslave another, or in the sense thatthe cynical politicians of recent times watched with a horriblehopefulness for the evanescence of the Irish. Both conquerors andconquered were heathen, and both had the institutions which seem to usto give an inhumanity to heathenism: the triumph, the slave-market, thelack of all the sensitive nationalism of modern history. But the RomanEmpire did not destroy nations; if anything, it created them. Britonswere not originally proud of being Britons; but they were proud of beingRomans. The Roman steel was at least as much a magnet as a sword. Intruth it was rather a round mirror of steel, in which every people cameto see itself. For Rome as Rome the very smallness of the civic originwas a warrant for the largeness of the civic experiment. Rome itselfobviously could not rule the world, any more than Rutland. I mean itcould not rule the other races as the Spartans ruled the Helots or theAmericans ruled the negroes. A machine so huge had to be human; it hadto have a handle that fitted any man's hand. The Roman Empirenecessarily became less Roman as it became more of an Empire; until notvery long after Rome gave conquerors to Britain, Britain was givingemperors to Rome. Out of Britain, as the Britons boasted, came at lengththe great Empress Helena, who was the mother of Constantine. And it wasConstantine, as all men know, who first nailed up that proclamationwhich all after generations have in truth been struggling either toprotect or to tear down. About that revolution no man has ever been able to be impartial. Thepresent writer will make no idle pretence of being so. That it was themost revolutionary of all revolutions, since it identified the dead bodyon a servile gibbet with the fatherhood in the skies, has long been acommonplace without ceasing to be a paradox. But there is anotherhistoric element that must also be realized. Without saying anythingmore of its tremendous essence, it is very necessary to note why evenpre-Christian Rome was regarded as something mystical for longafterwards by all European men. The extreme view of it was held, perhaps, by Dante; but it pervaded mediævalism, and therefore stillhaunts modernity. Rome was regarded as Man, mighty, though fallen, because it was the utmost that Man had done. It was divinely necessarythat the Roman Empire should succeed--if only that it might fail. Hencethe school of Dante implied the paradox that the Roman soldiers killedChrist, not only by right, but even by divine right. That mere lawmight fail at its highest test it had to be real law, and not meremilitary lawlessness. Therefore God worked by Pilate as by Peter. Therefore the mediæval poet is eager to show that Roman government wassimply good government, and not a usurpation. For it was the whole pointof the Christian revolution to maintain that in this, good governmentwas as bad as bad. Even good government was not good enough to know Godamong the thieves. This is not only generally important as involving acolossal change in the conscience; the loss of the whole heathen reposein the complete sufficiency of the city or the state. It made a sort ofeternal rule enclosing an eternal rebellion. It must be incessantlyremembered through the first half of English history; for it is thewhole meaning in the quarrel of the priests and kings. The double rule of the civilization and the religion in one senseremained for centuries; and before its first misfortunes came it must beconceived as substantially the same everywhere. And however it began itlargely ended in equality. Slavery certainly existed, as it had in themost democratic states of ancient times. Harsh officialism certainlyexisted, as it exists in the most democratic states of modern times. Butthere was nothing of what we mean in modern times by aristocracy, stillless of what we mean by racial domination. In so far as any change waspassing over that society with its two levels of equal citizens andequal slaves, it was only the slow growth of the power of the Church atthe expense of the power of the Empire. Now it is important to graspthat the great exception to equality, the institution of Slavery, wasslowly modified by both causes. It was weakened both by the weakening ofthe Empire and by the strengthening of the Church. Slavery was for the Church not a difficulty of doctrine, but a strain onthe imagination. Aristotle and the pagan sages who had defined theservile or "useful" arts, had regarded the slave as a tool, an axe tocut wood or whatever wanted cutting. The Church did not denounce thecutting; but she felt as if she was cutting glass with a diamond. Shewas haunted by the memory that the diamond is so much more precious thanthe glass. So Christianity could not settle down into the pagansimplicity that the man was made for the work, when the work was so muchless immortally momentous than the man. At about this stage of a historyof England there is generally told the anecdote of a pun of Gregory theGreat; and this is perhaps the true point of it. By the Roman theory thebarbarian bondmen were meant to be useful. The saint's mysticism wasmoved at finding them ornamental; and "Non Angli sed Angeli" meant morenearly "Not slaves, but souls. " It is to the point, in passing, to notethat in the modern country most collectively Christian, Russia, theserfs were always referred to as "souls. " The great Pope's phrase, hackneyed as it is, is perhaps the first glimpse of the golden halos inthe best Christian Art. Thus the Church, with whatever other faults, worked of her own nature towards greater social equality; and it is ahistorical error to suppose that the Church hierarchy worked witharistocracies, or was of a kind with them. It was an inversion ofaristocracy; in the ideal of it, at least, the last were to be first. The Irish bull that "One man is as good as another and a great dealbetter" contains a truth, like many contradictions; a truth that was thelink between Christianity and citizenship. Alone of all superiors, thesaint does not depress the human dignity of others. He is not consciousof his superiority to them; but only more conscious of his inferioritythan they are. But while a million little priests and monks like mice were alreadynibbling at the bonds of the ancient servitude, another process wasgoing on, which has here been called the weakening of the Empire. It isa process which is to this day very difficult to explain. But itaffected all the institutions of all the provinces, especially theinstitution of Slavery. But of all the provinces its effect was heaviestin Britain, which lay on or beyond the borders. The case of Britain, however, cannot possibly be considered alone. The first half of Englishhistory has been made quite unmeaning in the schools by the attempt totell it without reference to that corporate Christendom in which it tookpart and pride. I fully accept the truth in Mr. Kipling's question of"What can they know of England who only England know?" and merely differfrom the view that they will best broaden their minds by the study ofWagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo. It is therefore necessary, though verydifficult, to frame in few words some idea of what happened to the wholeEuropean race. Rome itself, which had made all that strong world, was the weakest thingin it. The centre had been growing fainter and fainter, and now thecentre disappeared. Rome had as much freed the world as ruled it, andnow she could rule no more. Save for the presence of the Pope and hisconstantly increasing supernatural prestige, the eternal city becamelike one of her own provincial towns. A loose localism was the resultrather than any conscious intellectual mutiny. There was anarchy, butthere was no rebellion. For rebellion must have a principle, andtherefore (for those who can think) an authority. Gibbon called hisgreat pageant of prose "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. " TheEmpire did decline, but it did not fall. It remains to this hour. By a process very much more indirect even than that of the Church, thisdecentralization and drift also worked against the slave-state ofantiquity. The localism did indeed produce that choice of territorialchieftains which came to be called Feudalism, and of which we shallspeak later. But the direct possession of man by man the same localismtended to destroy; though this negative influence upon it bears no kindof proportion to the positive influence of the Catholic Church. Thelater pagan slavery, like our own industrial labour which increasinglyresembles it, was worked on a larger and larger scale; and it was atlast too large to control. The bondman found the visible Lord moredistant than the new invisible one. The slave became the serf; that is, he could be shut in, but not shut out. When once he belonged to theland, it could not be long before the land belonged to him. Even in theold and rather fictitious language of chattel slavery, there is here adifference. It is the difference between a man being a chair and a manbeing a house. Canute might call for his throne; but if he wanted histhrone-room he must go and get it himself. Similarly, he could tell hisslave to run, but he could only tell his serf to stay. Thus the two slowchanges of the time both tended to transform the tool into a man. Hisstatus began to have roots; and whatever has roots will have rights. What the decline did involve everywhere was decivilization; the loss ofletters, of laws, of roads and means of communication, the exaggerationof local colour into caprice. But on the edges of the Empire thisdecivilization became a definite barbarism, owing to the nearness ofwild neighbours who were ready to destroy as deafly and blindly asthings are destroyed by fire. Save for the lurid and apocalypticlocust-flight of the Huns, it is perhaps an exaggeration to talk, evenin those darkest ages, of a deluge of the barbarians; at least when weare speaking of the old civilization as a whole. But a deluge ofbarbarians is not entirely an exaggeration of what happened on some ofthe borders of the Empire; of such edges of the known world as we beganby describing in these pages. And on the extreme edge of the world layBritain. It may be true, though there is little proof of it, that the Romancivilization itself was thinner in Britain than in the other provinces;but it was a very civilized civilization. It gathered round the greatcities like York and Chester and London; for the cities are older thanthe counties, and indeed older even than the countries. These wereconnected by a skeleton of great roads which were and are the bones ofBritain. But with the weakening of Rome the bones began to break underbarbarian pressure, coming at first from the north; from the Picts wholay beyond Agricola's boundary in what is now the Scotch Lowlands. Thewhole of this bewildering time is full of temporary tribal alliances, generally mercenary; of barbarians paid to come on or barbarians paid togo away. It seems certain that in this welter Roman Britain bought helpfrom ruder races living about that neck of Denmark where is now theduchy of Schleswig. Having been chosen only to fight somebody theynaturally fought anybody; and a century of fighting followed, under thetrampling of which the Roman pavement was broken into yet smallerpieces. It is perhaps permissible to disagree with the historian Greenwhen he says that no spot should be more sacred to modern Englishmenthan the neighbourhood of Ramsgate, where the Schleswig people aresupposed to have landed; or when he suggests that their appearance isthe real beginning of our island story. It would be rather more true tosay that it was nearly, though prematurely, the end of it. III THE AGE OF LEGENDS We should be startled if we were quietly reading a prosaic modern novel, and somewhere in the middle it turned without warning into a fairy tale. We should be surprised if one of the spinsters in _Cranford_, aftertidily sweeping the room with a broom, were to fly away on a broomstick. Our attention would be arrested if one of Jane Austen's young ladies whohad just met a dragoon were to walk a little further and meet a dragon. Yet something very like this extraordinary transition takes place inBritish history at the end of the purely Roman period. We have to dowith rational and almost mechanical accounts of encampment andengineering, of a busy bureaucracy and occasional frontier wars, quitemodern in their efficiency and inefficiency; and then all of a sudden weare reading of wandering bells and wizard lances, of wars against men astall as trees or as short as toadstools. The soldier of civilization isno longer fighting with Goths but with goblins; the land becomes alabyrinth of faërie towns unknown to history; and scholars can suggestbut cannot explain how a Roman ruler or a Welsh chieftain towers up inthe twilight as the awful and unbegotten Arthur. The scientific agecomes first and the mythological age after it. One working example, theechoes of which lingered till very late in English literature, may serveto sum up the contrast. The British state which was found by Cæsar waslong believed to have been founded by Brutus. The contrast between theone very dry discovery and the other very fantastic foundation hassomething decidedly comic about it; as if Cæsar's "Et tu, Brute, " mightbe translated, "What, _you_ here?" But in one respect the fable is quiteas important as the fact. They both testify to the reality of the Romanfoundation of our insular society, and show that even the stories thatseem prehistoric are seldom pre-Roman. When England is Elfland, theelves are not the Angles. All the phrases that can be used as cluesthrough that tangle of traditions are more or less Latin phrases. And inall our speech there was no word more Roman than "romance. " The Roman legions left Britain in the fourth century. This did not meanthat the Roman civilization left it; but it did mean that thecivilization lay far more open both to admixture and attack. Christianity had almost certainly come to Britain, not indeed otherwisethan by the routes established by Rome, but certainly long before theofficial Roman mission of Gregory the Great. It had certainly beenlargely swamped by later heathen invasions of the undefended coasts. Itmay then rationally be urged that the hold both of the Empire and itsnew religion were here weaker than elsewhere, and that the descriptionof the general civilization in the last chapter is proportionatelyirrelevant. This, however, is not the chief truth of the matter. There is one fundamental fact which must be understood of the whole ofthis period. Yet a modern man must very nearly turn his mind upside downto understand it. Almost every modern man has in his head an associationbetween freedom and the future. The whole culture of our time has beenfull of the notion of "A Good Time Coming. " Now the whole culture of theDark Ages was full of the notion of "A Good Time Going. " They lookedbackwards to old enlightenment and forwards to new prejudices. In ourtime there has come a quarrel between faith and hope--which perhaps mustbe healed by charity. But they were situated otherwise. They hoped--butit may be said that they hoped for yesterday. All the motives that makea man a progressive now made a man a conservative then. The more hecould keep of the past the more he had of a fair law and a free state;the more he gave way to the future the more he must endure of ignoranceand privilege. All we call reason was one with all we call reaction. Andthis is the clue which we must carry with us through the lives of allthe great men of the Dark Ages; of Alfred, of Bede, of Dunstan. If themost extreme modern Republican were put back in that period he would bean equally extreme Papist or even Imperialist. For the Pope was what wasleft of the Empire; and the Empire what was left of the Republic. We may compare the man of that time, therefore, to one who has left freecities and even free fields behind him, and is forced to advance towardsa forest. And the forest is the fittest metaphor, not only because itwas really that wild European growth cloven here and there by the Romanroads, but also because there has always been associated with forestsanother idea which increased as the Roman order decayed. The idea of theforests was the idea of enchantment. There was a notion of things beingdouble or different from themselves, of beasts behaving like men and notmerely, as modern wits would say, of men behaving like beasts. But it isprecisely here that it is most necessary to remember that an age ofreason had preceded the age of magic. The central pillar which hassustained the storied house of our imagination ever since has been theidea of the civilized knight amid the savage enchantments; theadventures of a man still sane in a world gone mad. The next thing to note in the matter is this: that in this barbaric timenone of the _heroes_ are barbaric. They are only heroes if they areanti-barbaric. Men real or mythical, or more probably both, becameomnipresent like gods among the people, and forced themselves into thefaintest memory and the shortest record, exactly in proportion as theyhad mastered the heathen madness of the time and preserved the Christianrationality that had come from Rome. Arthur has his name because hekilled the heathen; the heathen who killed him have no names at all. Englishmen who know nothing of English history, but less than nothing ofIrish history, have heard somehow or other of Brian Boru, though theyspell it Boroo and seem to be under the impression that it is a joke. Itis a joke the subtlety of which they would never have been able toenjoy, if King Brian had not broken the heathen in Ireland at the greatBattle of Clontarf. The ordinary English reader would never have heardof Olaf of Norway if he had not "preached the Gospel with his sword"; orof the Cid if he had not fought against the Crescent. And though Alfredthe Great seems to have deserved his title even as a personality, he wasnot so great as the work he had to do. But the paradox remains that Arthur is more real than Alfred. For theage is the age of legends. Towards these legends most men adopt byinstinct a sane attitude; and, of the two, credulity is certainly muchmore sane than incredulity. It does not much matter whether most of thestories are true; and (as in such cases as Bacon and Shakespeare) torealize that the question does not matter is the first step towardsanswering it correctly. But before the reader dismisses anything like anattempt to tell the earlier history of the country by its legends, hewill do well to keep two principles in mind, both of them tending tocorrect the crude and very thoughtless scepticism which has made thispart of the story so sterile. The nineteenth-century historians went onthe curious principle of dismissing all people of whom tales are told, and concentrating upon people of whom nothing is told. Thus, Arthur ismade utterly impersonal because all legends are lies, but somebody ofthe type of Hengist is made quite an important personality, merelybecause nobody thought him important enough to lie about. Now this is toreverse all common sense. A great many witty sayings are attributed toTalleyrand which were really said by somebody else. But they would notbe so attributed if Talleyrand had been a fool, still less if he hadbeen a fable. That fictitious stories are told about a person is, ninetimes out of ten, extremely good evidence that there was somebody totell them about. Indeed some allow that marvellous things were done, andthat there may have been a man named Arthur at the time in which theywere done; but here, so far as I am concerned, the distinction becomesrather dim. I do not understand the attitude which holds that there wasan Ark and a man named Noah, but cannot believe in the existence ofNoah's Ark. The other fact to be remembered is that scientific research for the lastfew years has worked steadily in the direction of confirming and notdissipating the legends of the populace. To take only the obviousinstance, modern excavators with modern spades have found a solid stonelabyrinth in Crete, like that associated with the Minataur, which wasconceived as being as cloudy a fable as the Chimera. To most people thiswould have seemed quite as frantic as finding the roots of Jack'sBeanstalk or the skeletons in Bluebeard's cupboard, yet it is simply thefact. Finally, a truth is to be remembered which scarcely ever isremembered in estimating the past. It is the paradox that the past isalways present: yet it is not what was, but whatever seems to have been;for all the past is a part of faith. What did they believe of theirfathers? In this matter new discoveries are useless because they arenew. We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannotfind them wrong in what they thought they thought. It is therefore verypractical to put in a few words, if possible, something of what a man ofthese islands in the Dark Ages would have said about his ancestors andhis inheritance. I will attempt here to put some of the simpler thingsin their order of importance as he would have seen them; and if we areto understand our fathers who first made this country anything likeitself, it is most important that we should remember that if this wasnot their real past, it was their real memory. After that blessed crime, as the wit of mystics called it, which was forthese men hardly second to the creation of the world, St. Joseph ofArimathea, one of the few followers of the new religion who seem tohave been wealthy, set sail as a missionary, and after long voyages cameto that litter of little islands which seemed to the men of theMediterranean something like the last clouds of the sunset. He came upupon the western and wilder side of that wild and western land, and madehis way to a valley which through all the oldest records is calledAvalon. Something of rich rains and warmth in its westland meadows, orsomething in some lost pagan traditions about it, made it persistentlyregarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain atLyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted hisstaff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on ChristmasDay. A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soulof it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negationsthat were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for asupernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances. Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering ofseed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangiblefragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St. Josephcarried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood ofthe Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury;and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, notonly for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous andbranching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it wasespecially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthurfeasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as wasafterwards imitated or invented by mediæval knighthood. Both the cup andthe table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of thechivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merelyuniversality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by othertendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the veryword "peers, " as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the RoundTable is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type;for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, theking was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of alevel of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, butnot of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse ofheaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flyingchalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and whichappeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child. Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuriesas a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror ofuniversal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in allensuing affairs, especially the affairs of barbarians. These andnumberless other local legends are indeed for us buried by the forestsof popular fancies that have grown out of them. It is all the harder forthe serious modern mind because our fathers felt at home with thesetales, and therefore took liberties with them. Probably the rhyme whichruns, "When good King Arthur ruled this land He was a noble king, He stole three pecks of barley meal, " is much nearer the true mediæval note than the aristocratic statelinessof Tennyson. But about all these grotesques of the popular fancy thereis one last thing to be remembered. It must especially be remembered bythose who would dwell exclusively on documents, and take no note oftradition at all. Wild as would be the results of credulity concerningall the old wives' tales, it would not be so wild as the errors that canarise from trusting to written evidence when there is not enough of it. Now the whole written evidence for the first parts of our history wouldgo into a small book. A very few details are mentioned, and none areexplained. A fact thus standing alone, without the key of contemporarythought, may be very much more misleading than any fable. To know whatword an archaic scribe wrote without being sure of what thing he meant, may produce a result that is literally mad. Thus, for instance, it wouldbe unwise to accept literally the tale that St. Helena was not only anative of Colchester, but was a daughter of Old King Cole. But it wouldnot be very unwise; not so unwise as some things that are deduced fromdocuments. The natives of Colchester certainly did honour to St. Helena, and might have had a king named Cole. According to the more seriousstory, the saint's father was an innkeeper; and the only recorded actionof Cole is well within the resources of that calling. It would not benearly so unwise as to deduce from the written word, as some critic ofthe future may do, that the natives of Colchester were oysters. IV THE DEFEAT OF THE BARBARIANS It is a quaint accident that we employ the word "short-sighted" as acondemnation; but not the word "long-sighted, " which we should probablyuse, if at all, as a compliment. Yet the one is as much a malady ofvision as the other. We rightly say, in rebuke of a small-mindedmodernity, that it is very short-sighted to be indifferent to all thatis historic. But it is as disastrously long-sighted to be interestedonly in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a largeproportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochsfor the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, theenslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrationsand massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of historyor even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to theseit would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and mostlocal sort. In any case, it is as well to record even so simple aconclusion as that what is prehistoric is unhistorical. But there is another way in which common sense can be brought to thecriticism of some prodigious racial theories. To employ the samefigure, suppose the scientific historians explain the historic centuriesin terms of a prehistoric division between short-sighted andlong-sighted men. They could cite their instances and illustrations. They would certainly explain the curiosity of language I mentionedfirst, as showing that the short-sighted were the conquered race, andtheir name therefore a term of contempt. They could give us very graphicpictures of the rude tribal war. They could show how the long-sightedpeople were always cut to pieces in hand-to-hand struggles with axe andknife; until, with the invention of bows and arrows, the advantageveered to the long-sighted, and their enemies were shot down in droves. I could easily write a ruthless romance about it, and still more easilya ruthless anthropological theory. According to that thesis which refersall moral to material changes, they could explain the tradition that oldpeople grow conservative in politics by the well-known fact that oldpeople grow more long-sighted. But I think there might be one thingabout this theory which would stump us, and might even, if it bepossible, stump them. Suppose it were pointed out that through all thethree thousand years of recorded history, abounding in literature ofevery conceivable kind, there was not so much as a mention of theoculist question for which all had been dared and done. Suppose not oneof the living or dead languages of mankind had so much as a word for"long-sighted" or "short-sighted. " Suppose, in short, the question thathad torn the whole world in two was never even asked at all, until somespectacle-maker suggested it somewhere about 1750. In that case I thinkwe should find it hard to believe that this physical difference hadreally played so fundamental a part in human history. And that isexactly the case with the physical difference between the Celts, theTeutons and the Latins. I know of no way in which fair-haired people can be prevented fromfalling in love with dark-haired people; and I do not believe thatwhether a man was long-headed or round-headed ever made much differenceto any one who felt inclined to break his head. To all mortalappearance, in all mortal records and experience, people seem to havekilled or spared, married or refrained from marriage, made kings or madeslaves, with reference to almost any other consideration except thisone. There was the love of a valley or a village, a site or a family;there were enthusiasms for a prince and his hereditary office; therewere passions rooted in locality, special emotions about sea-folk ormountain-folk; there were historic memories of a cause or an alliance;there was, more than all, the tremendous test of religion. But of acause like that of the Celts or Teutons, covering half the earth, therewas little or nothing. Race was not only never at any given moment amotive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed;they never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they beganeven to have a cant. The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularityof Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared andrepeopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain, as an escape fromthe singularity of this event, the possibility that it never happened. In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of theTeutonic society. His ideal picture of it is completed in small toucheswhich even an amateur can detect as dubious. Thus he will touch on theTeuton with a phrase like "the basis of their society was the free man";and on the Roman with a phrase like "the mines, if worked by forcedlabour, must have been a source of endless oppression. " The simple factbeing that the Roman and the Teuton both had slaves, he treats theTeuton free man as the only thing to be considered, not only then butnow; and then goes out of his way to say that if the Roman treated hisslaves badly, the slaves were badly treated. He expresses a "strangedisappointment" that Gildas, the only British chronicler, does notdescribe the great Teutonic system. In the opinion of Gildas, amodification of that of Gregory, it was a case of _non Angli seddiaboli_. The modern Teutonist is "disappointed" that the contemporaryauthority saw nothing in his Teutons except wolves, dogs, and whelpsfrom the kennel of barbarism. But it is at least faintly tenable thatthere was nothing else to be seen. In any case when St. Augustine came to the largely barbarized land, withwhat may be called the second of the three great southern visitationswhich civilized these islands, he did not see any ethnological problems, whatever there may have been to be seen. With him or his converts thechain of literary testimony is taken up again; and we must look at theworld as they saw it. He found a king ruling in Kent, beyond whoseborders lay other kingdoms of about the same size, the kings of whichwere all apparently heathen. The names of these kings were mostly whatwe call Teutonic names; but those who write the almost entirelyhagiological records did not say, and apparently did not ask, whetherthe populations were in this sense of unmixed blood. It is at leastpossible that, as on the Continent, the kings and courts were almost theonly Teutonic element. The Christians found converts, they foundpatrons, they found persecutors; but they did not find Ancient Britonsbecause they did not look for them; and if they moved among pureAnglo-Saxons they had not the gratification of knowing it. There was, indeed, what all history attests, a marked change of feeling towards themarches of Wales. But all history also attests that this is alwaysfound, apart from any difference in race, in the transition from thelowlands to the mountain country. But of all the things they found thething that counts most in English history is this: that some of thekingdoms at least did correspond to genuine human divisions, which notonly existed then but which exist now. Northumbria is still a truerthing than Northumberland. Sussex is still Sussex; Essex is still Essex. And that third Saxon kingdom whose name is not even to be found upon themap, the kingdom of Wessex, is called the West Country and is to-day themost real of them all. The last of the heathen kingdoms to accept the cross was Mercia, whichcorresponds very roughly to what we call the Midlands. The unbaptizedking, Penda, has even achieved a certain picturesqueness through thisfact, and through the forays and furious ambitions which constituted therest of his reputation; so much so that the other day one of thosemystics who will believe anything but Christianity proposed to "continuethe work of Penda" in Ealing: fortunately not on any large scale. Whatthat prince believed or disbelieved it is now impossible and perhapsunnecessary to discover; but this last stand of his central kingdom isnot insignificant. The isolation of the Mercian was perhaps due to thefact that Christianity grew from the eastern and western coasts. Theeastern growth was, of course, the Augustinian mission, which hadalready made Canterbury the spiritual capital of the island. The westerngrew from whatever was left of the British Christianity. The twoclashed, not in creed but in customs; and the Augustinians ultimatelyprevailed. But the work from the west had already been enormous. It ispossible that some prestige went with the possession of Glastonbury, which was like a piece of the Holy Land; but behind Glastonbury therewas an even grander and more impressive power. There irradiated to allEurope at that time the glory of the golden age of Ireland. There theCelts were the classics of Christian art, opened in the Book of Kelsfour hundred years before its time. There the baptism of the wholepeople had been a spontaneous popular festival which reads almost like apicnic; and thence came crowds of enthusiasts for the Gospel almostliterally like men running with good news. This must be rememberedthrough the development of that dark dual destiny that has bound us toIreland: for doubts have been thrown on a national unity which was notfrom the first a political unity. But if Ireland was not one kingdom itwas in reality one bishopric. Ireland was not converted but created byChristianity, as a stone church is created; and all its elements weregathered as under a garment, under the genius of St. Patrick. It was themore individual because the religion was mere religion, without thesecular conveniences. Ireland was never Roman, and it was alwaysRomanist. But indeed this is, in a lesser degree, true of our more immediatesubject. It is the paradox of this time that only the unworldly thingshad any worldly success. The politics are a nightmare; the kings areunstable and the kingdoms shifting; and we are really never on solidground except on consecrated ground. The material ambitions are not onlyalways unfruitful but nearly always unfulfilled. The castles are allcastles in the air; it is only the churches that are built on theground. The visionaries are the only practical men, as in thatextraordinary thing, the monastery, which was, in many ways, to be thekey of our history. The time was to come when it was to be rooted out ofour country with a curious and careful violence; and the modern Englishreader has therefore a very feeble idea of it and hence of the ages inwhich it worked. Even in these pages a word or two about its primarynature is therefore quite indispensable. In the tremendous testament of our religion there are present certainideals that seem wilder than impieties, which have in later timesproduced wild sects professing an almost inhuman perfection on certainpoints; as in the Quakers who renounce the right of self-defence, or theCommunists who refuse any personal possessions. Rightly or wrongly, theChristian Church had from the first dealt with these visions as beingspecial spiritual adventures which were to the adventurous. Shereconciled them with natural human life by calling them specially good, without admitting that the neglect of them was necessarily bad. She tookthe view that it takes all sorts to make a world, even the religiousworld; and used the man who chose to go without arms, family, orproperty as a sort of exception that proved the rule. Now theinteresting fact is that he really did prove it. This madman who wouldnot mind his own business becomes the business man of the age. The veryword "monk" is a revolution, for it means solitude and came to meancommunity--one might call it sociability. What happened was that thiscommunal life became a sort of reserve and refuge behind the individuallife; a hospital for every kind of hospitality. We shall see later howthis same function of the common life was given to the common land. Itis hard to find an image for it in individualist times; but in privatelife we most of us know the friend of the family who helps it by beingoutside, like a fairy godmother. It is not merely flippant to say thatmonks and nuns stood to mankind as a sort of sanctified league of auntsand uncles. It is a commonplace that they did everything that nobodyelse would do; that the abbeys kept the world's diary, faced the plaguesof all flesh, taught the first technical arts, preserved the paganliterature, and above all, by a perpetual patchwork of charity, kept thepoor from the most distant sight of their modern despair. We still findit necessary to have a reserve of philanthropists, but we trust it tomen who have made themselves rich, not to men who have made themselvespoor. Finally, the abbots and abbesses were elective. They introducedrepresentative government, unknown to ancient democracy, and in itself asemi-sacramental idea. If we could look from the outside at our owninstitutions, we should see that the very notion of turning a thousandmen into one large man walking to Westminster is not only an act orfaith, but a fairy tale. The fruitful and effective history ofAnglo-Saxon England would be almost entirely a history of itsmonasteries. Mile by mile, and almost man by man, they taught andenriched the land. And then, about the beginning of the ninth century, there came a turn, as of the twinkling of an eye, and it seemed that alltheir work was in vain. That outer world of universal anarchy that lay beyond Christendom heavedanother of its colossal and almost cosmic waves and swept everythingaway. Through all the eastern gates, left open, as it were, by the firstbarbarian auxiliaries, burst a plague of seafaring savages from Denmarkand Scandinavia; and the recently baptized barbarians were again floodedby the unbaptized. All this time, it must be remembered, the actualcentral mechanism of Roman government had been running down like aclock. It was really a race between the driving energy of themissionaries on the edges of the Empire and the galloping paralysis ofthe city at the centre. In the ninth century the heart had stoppedbefore the hands could bring help to it. All the monastic civilizationwhich had grown up in Britain under a vague Roman protection perishedunprotected. The toy kingdoms of the quarrelling Saxons were smashedlike sticks; Guthrum, the pirate chief, slew St. Edmund, assumed thecrown of East England, took tribute from the panic of Mercia, andtowered in menace over Wessex, the last of the Christian lands. Thestory that follows, page after page, is only the story of its despairand its destruction. The story is a string of Christian defeatsalternated with victories so vain as to be more desolate than defeats. It is only in one of these, the fine but fruitless victory at Ashdown, that we first see in the dim struggle, in a desperate and secondarypart, the figure who has given his title to the ultimate turning of thetide. For the victor was not then the king, but only the king's youngerbrother. There is, from the first, something humble and even accidentalabout Alfred. He was a great understudy. The interest of his early lifelies in this: that he combined an almost commonplace coolness, andreadiness for the ceaseless small bargains and shifting combinations ofall that period, with the flaming patience of saints in times ofpersecution. While he would dare anything for the faith, he wouldbargain in anything except the faith. He was a conqueror, with noambition; an author only too glad to be a translator; a simple, concentrated, wary man, watching the fortunes of one thing, which hepiloted both boldly and cautiously, and which he saved at last. He had disappeared after what appeared to be the final heathen triumphand settlement, and is supposed to have lurked like an outlaw in alonely islet in the impenetrable marshlands of the Parret; towards thosewild western lands to which aboriginal races are held to have beendriven by fate itself. But Alfred, as he himself wrote in words that arehis challenge to the period, held that a Christian man was unconcernedwith fate. He began once more to draw to him the bows and spears of thebroken levies of the western shires, especially the men of Somerset; andin the spring of 878 he flung them at the lines before the fenced campof the victorious Danes at Ethandune. His sudden assault was assuccessful as that at Ashdown, and it was followed by a siege which wassuccessful in a different and very definite sense. Guthrum, theconqueror of England, and all his important supports, were here pennedbehind their palisades, and when at last they surrendered the Danishconquest had come to an end. Guthrum was baptized, and the Treaty ofWedmore secured the clearance of Wessex. The modern reader will smile atthe baptism, and turn with greater interest to the terms of the treaty. In this acute attitude the modern reader will be vitally and hopelesslywrong. He must support the tedium of frequent references to thereligious element in this part of English history, for without it therewould never have been any English history at all. And nothing couldclinch this truth more than the case of the Danes. In all the facts thatfollowed, the baptism of Guthrum is really much more important than theTreaty of Wedmore. The treaty itself was a compromise, and even as suchdid not endure; a century afterwards a Danish king like Canute wasreally ruling in England. But though the Dane got the crown, he did notget rid of the cross. It was precisely Alfred's religious exaction thatremained unalterable. And Canute himself is actually now only rememberedby men as a witness to the futility of merely pagan power; as the kingwho put his own crown upon the image of Christ, and solemnly surrenderedto heaven the Scandinavian empire of the sea. V ST. EDWARD AND THE NORMAN KINGS The reader may be surprised at the disproportionate importance given tothe name which stands first in the title of this chapter. I put it thereas the best way of emphasizing, at the beginning of what we may call thepractical part of our history, an elusive and rather strange thing. Itcan only be described as the strength of the weak kings. It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as wellas to learn. I would ask the reader to forget his reading and everythingthat he learnt at school, and consider the English monarchy as it wouldthen appear to him. Let him suppose that his acquaintance with theancient kings has only come to him as it came to most men in simplertimes, from nursery tales, from the names of places, from thededications of churches and charities, from the tales in the tavern, andthe tombs in the churchyard. Let us suppose such a person going uponsome open and ordinary English way, such as the Thames valley toWindsor, or visiting some old seats of culture, such as Oxford orCambridge. One of the first things, for instance, he would find wouldbe Eton, a place transformed, indeed, by modern aristocracy, but stillenjoying its mediæval wealth and remembering its mediæval origin. If heasked about that origin, it is probable that even a public schoolboywould know enough history to tell him that it was founded by Henry VI. If he went to Cambridge and looked with his own eyes for the collegechapel which artistically towers above all others like a cathedral, hewould probably ask about it, and be told it was King's College. If heasked which king, he would again be told Henry VI. If he then went intothe library and looked up Henry VI. In an encyclopædia, he would findthat the legendary giant, who had left these gigantic works behind him, was in history an almost invisible pigmy. Amid the varying andcontending numbers of a great national quarrel, he is the only cipher. The contending factions carry him about like a bale of goods. Hisdesires do not seem to be even ascertained, far less satisfied. And yethis real desires are satisfied in stone and marble, in oak and gold, andremain through all the maddest revolutions of modern England, while allthe ambitions of those who dictated to him have gone away like dust uponthe wind. Edward the Confessor, like Henry VI. , was not only an invalid but almostan idiot. It is said that he was wan like an albino, and that the awemen had of him was partly that which is felt for a monster of mentaldeficiency. His Christian charity was of the kind that borders onanarchism, and the stories about him recall the Christian fools in thegreat anarchic novels of Russia. Thus he is reported to have covered theretreat of a common thief upon the naked plea that the thief neededthings more than he did. Such a story is in strange contrast to theclaims made for other kings, that theft was impossible in theirdominions. Yet the two types of king are afterwards praised by the samepeople; and the really arresting fact is that the incompetent king ispraised the more highly of the two. And exactly as in the case of thelast Lancastrian, we find that the praise has really a very practicalmeaning in the long run. When we turn from the destructive to theconstructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the village idiot isthe inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon thesacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victors inthe hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry ofBayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorifythe Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond hisconquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the storyabruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. But overthe bier of the decrepit zany, who died without striking a blow, overthis and this alone, is shown a hand coming out of heaven, and declaringthe true approval of the power that rules the world. The Confessor, therefore, is a paradox in many ways, and in none morethan in the false reputation of the "English" of that day. As I haveindicated, there is some unreality in talking about the Anglo-Saxon atall. The Anglo-Saxon is a mythical and straddling giant, who haspresumably left one footprint in England and the other in Saxony. Butthere was a community, or rather group of communities, living in Britainbefore the Conquest under what we call Saxon names, and of a bloodprobably more Germanic and certainly less French than the samecommunities after the Conquest. And they have a modern reputation whichis exactly the reverse of their real one. The value of the Anglo-Saxonis exaggerated, and yet his virtues are ignored. Our Anglo-Saxon bloodis supposed to be the practical part of us; but as a fact theAnglo-Saxons were more hopelessly unpractical than any Celt. Theirracial influence is supposed to be healthy, or, what many think the samething, heathen. But as a fact these "Teutons" were the mystics. TheAnglo-Saxons did one thing, and one thing only, thoroughly well, as theywere fitted to do it thoroughly well. They christened England. Indeed, they christened it before it was born. The one thing the Anglesobviously and certainly could not manage to do was to become English. But they did become Christians, and indeed showed a particulardisposition to become monks. Moderns who talk vaguely of them as ourhardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thusopening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with thegolden initial of a saint. By becoming monks they served us in many veryvaluable and special capacities, but not notably, perhaps, in thecapacity of ancestors. Along the northern coast of France, where the Confessor had passed hisearly life, lay the lands of one of the most powerful of the Frenchking's vassals, the Duke of Normandy. He and his people, who constituteone of the most picturesque and curious elements in European history, are confused for most of us by irrelevant controversies which would havebeen entirely unintelligible to them. The worst of these is the inanefiction which gives the name of Norman to the English aristocracy duringits great period of the last three hundred years. Tennyson informed alady of the name of Vere de Vere that simple faith was more valuablethan Norman blood. But the historical student who can believe in LadyClara as the possessor of the Norman blood must be himself a largepossessor of the simple faith. As a matter of fact, as we shall see alsowhen we come to the political scheme of the Normans, the notion is thenegation of their real importance in history. The fashionable fancymisses what was best in the Normans, exactly as we have found it missingwhat was best in the Saxons. One does not know whether to thank theNormans more for appearing or for disappearing. Few philanthropistsever became so rapidly anonymous. It is the great glory of the Normanadventurer that he threw himself heartily into his chance position; andhad faith not only in his comrades, but in his subjects, and even in hisenemies. He was loyal to the kingdom he had not yet made. Thus theNorman Bruce becomes a Scot; thus the descendant of the Norman Strongbowbecomes an Irishman. No men less than Normans can be conceived asremaining as a superior caste until the present time. But this alien andadventurous loyalty in the Norman, which appears in these other nationalhistories, appears most strongly of all in the history we have here tofollow. The Duke of Normandy does become a real King of England; hisclaim through the Confessor, his election by the Council, even hissymbolic handfuls of the soil of Sussex, these are not altogether emptyforms. And though both phrases would be inaccurate, it is very muchnearer the truth to call William the first of the English than to callHarold the last of them. An indeterminate debate touching the dim races that mixed without recordin that dim epoch, has made much of the fact that the Norman edges ofFrance, like the East Anglian edges of England, were deeply penetratedby the Norse invasions of the ninth century; and that the ducal house ofNormandy, with what other families we know not, can be traced back to aScandinavian seed. The unquestionable power of captaincy and creativelegislation which belonged to the Normans, whoever they were, may beconnected reasonably enough with some infusion of fresh blood. But ifthe racial theorists press the point to a comparison of races, it canobviously only be answered by a study of the two types in separation. And it must surely be manifest that more civilizing power has since beenshown by the French when untouched by Scandinavian blood than by theScandinavians when untouched by French blood. As much fighting (and moreruling) was done by the Crusaders who were never Vikings as by theVikings who were never Crusaders. But in truth there is no need of suchinvidious analysis; we may willingly allow a real value to theScandinavian contribution to the French as to the English nationality, so long as we firmly understand the ultimate historic fact that theduchy of Normandy was about as Scandinavian as the town of Norwich. Butthe debate has another danger, in that it tends to exaggerate even thepersonal importance of the Norman. Many as were his talents as a master, he is in history the servant of other and wider things. The landing ofLanfranc is perhaps more of a date than the landing of William. AndLanfranc was an Italian--like Julius Cæsar. The Norman is not in historya mere wall, the rather brutal boundary of a mere empire. The Norman isa gate. He is like one of those gates which still remain as he madethem, with round arch and rude pattern and stout supporting columns; andwhat entered by that gate was civilization. William of Falaise has inhistory a title much higher than that of Duke of Normandy or King ofEngland. He was what Julius Cæsar was, and what St. Augustine was: hewas the ambassador of Europe to Britain. William asserted that the Confessor, in the course of that connectionwhich followed naturally from his Norman education, had promised theEnglish crown to the holder of the Norman dukedom. Whether he did or notwe shall probably never know: it is not intrinsically impossible or evenimprobable. To blame the promise as unpatriotic, even if it was given, is to read duties defined at a much later date into the first feudalchaos; to make such blame positive and personal is like expecting theAncient Britons to sing "Rule Britannia. " William further clinched hiscase by declaring that Harold, the principal Saxon noble and the mostprobable Saxon claimant, had, while enjoying the Duke's hospitalityafter a shipwreck, sworn upon sacred relics not to dispute the Duke'sclaim. About this episode also we must agree that we do not know; yet weshall be quite out of touch with the time if we say that we do not care. The element of sacrilege in the alleged perjury of Harold probablyaffected the Pope when he blessed a banner for William's army; but itdid not affect the Pope much more than it would have affected thepeople; and Harold's people quite as much as William's. Harold's peoplepresumably denied the fact; and their denial is probably the motive ofthe very marked and almost eager emphasis with which the Bayeux Tapestryasserts and reasserts the reality of the personal betrayal. There ishere a rather arresting fact to be noted. A great part of thiscelebrated pictorial record is not concerned at all with the well-knownhistorical events which we have only to note rapidly here. It does, indeed, dwell a little on the death of Edward; it depicts thedifficulties of William's enterprise in the felling of forests forshipbuilding, in the crossing of the Channel, and especially in thecharge up the hill at Hastings, in which full justice is done to thedestructive resistance of Harold's army. But it was really after DukeWilliam had disembarked and defeated Harold on the Sussex coast, that hedid what is historically worthy to be called the Conquest. It is notuntil these later operations that we have the note of the new andscientific militarism from the Continent. Instead of marching uponLondon he marched round it; and crossing the Thames at Wallingford cutoff the city from the rest of the country and compelled its surrender. He had himself elected king with all the forms that would haveaccompanied a peaceful succession to the Confessor, and after a briefreturn to Normandy took up the work of war again to bring all Englandunder his crown. Marching through the snow, he laid waste the northerncounties, seized Chester, and made rather than won a kingdom. Thesethings are the foundations of historical England; but of these thingsthe pictures woven in honour of his house tell us nothing. The BayeuxTapestry may almost be said to stop before the Norman Conquest. But ittells in great detail the tale of some trivial raid into Brittany solelythat Harold and William may appear as brothers in arms; and especiallythat William may be depicted in the very act of giving arms to Harold. And here again there is much more significance than a modern reader mayfancy, in its bearing upon the new birth of that time and the ancientsymbolism of arms. I have said that Duke William was a vassal of theKing of France; and that phrase in its use and abuse is the key to thesecular side of this epoch. William was indeed a most mutinous vassal, and a vein of such mutiny runs through his family fortunes: his sonsRufus and Henry I. Disturbed him with internal ambitions antagonistic tohis own. But it would be a blunder to allow such personal broils toobscure the system, which had indeed existed here before the Conquest, which clarified and confirmed it. That system we call Feudalism. That Feudalism was the main mark of the Middle Ages is a commonplace offashionable information; but it is of the sort that seeks the pastrather in Wardour Street than Watling Street. For that matter, the veryterm "mediæval" is used for almost anything from Early English to EarlyVictorian. An eminent Socialist applied it to our armaments, which islike applying it to our aeroplanes. Similarly the just description ofFeudalism, and of how far it was a part and how far rather an impedimentin the main mediæval movement, is confused by current debates aboutquite modern things--especially that modern thing, the Englishsquirearchy. Feudalism was very nearly the opposite of squirearchy. Forit is the whole point of the squire that his ownership is absolute andis pacific. And it is the very definition of Feudalism that it was atenure, and a tenure by military service. Men paid their rent in steelinstead of gold, in spears and arrows against the enemies of theirlandlord. But even these landlords were not landlords in the modernsense; every one was practically as well as theoretically a tenant ofthe King; and even he often fell into a feudal inferiority to a Pope oran Emperor. To call it mere tenure by soldiering may seem asimplification; but indeed it is precisely here that it was not sosimple as it seems. It is precisely a certain knot or enigma in thenature of Feudalism which makes half the struggle of European history, but especially English history. There was a certain unique type of state and culture which we callmediæval, for want of a better word, which we see in the Gothic or thegreat Schoolmen. This thing in itself was above all things logical. Itsvery cult of authority was a thing of reason, as all men who can reasonthemselves instantly recognize, even if, like Huxley, they deny itspremises or dislike its fruits. Being logical, it was very exact aboutwho had the authority. Now Feudalism was not quite logical, and wasnever quite exact about who had the authority. Feudalism alreadyflourished before the mediæval renascence began. It was, if not theforest the mediævals had to clear, at least the rude timber with whichthey had to build. Feudalism was a fighting growth of the Dark Agesbefore the Middle Ages; the age of barbarians resisted bysemi-barbarians. I do not say this in disparagement of it. Feudalism wasmostly a very human thing; the nearest contemporary name for it washomage, a word which almost means humanity. On the other hand, mediævallogic, never quite reconciled to it, could become in its extremesinhuman. It was often mere prejudice that protected men, and pure reasonthat burned them. The feudal units grew through the lively localism ofthe Dark Ages, when hills without roads shut in a valley like agarrison. Patriotism had to be parochial; for men had no country, butonly a countryside. In such cases the lord grew larger than the king;but it bred not only a local lordship but a kind of local liberty. Andit would be very inadvisable to ignore the freer element in Feudalism inEnglish history. For it is the one kind of freedom that the English havehad and held. The knot in the system was something like this. In theory the King ownedeverything, like an earthly providence; and that made for despotism and"divine right, " which meant in substance a natural authority. In oneaspect the King was simply the one lord anointed by the Church, that isrecognized by the ethics of the age. But while there was more royalty intheory, there could be more rebellion in practice. Fighting was muchmore equal than in our age of munitions, and the various groups couldarm almost instantly with bows from the forest or spears from the smith. Where men are military there is no militarism. But it is more vital thatwhile the kingdom was in this sense one territorial army, the regimentsof it were also kingdoms. The sub-units were also sub-loyalties. Hencethe loyalist to his lord might be a rebel to his king; or the king be ademagogue delivering him from the lord. This tangle is responsible forthe tragic passions about betrayal, as in the case of William andHarold; the alleged traitor who is always found to be recurrent, yetalways felt to be exceptional. To break the tie was at once easy andterrible. Treason in the sense of rebellion was then really felt astreason in the sense of treachery, since it was desertion on a perpetualbattlefield. Now, there was even more of this civil war in English thanin other history, and the more local and less logical energy on thewhole prevailed. Whether there was something in those islandidiosyncracies, shapeless as sea-mists, with which this story began, orwhether the Roman imprint had really been lighter than in Gaul, thefeudal undergrowth prevented even a full attempt to build the _CivitasDei_, or ideal mediæval state. What emerged was a compromise, which menlong afterwards amused themselves by calling a constitution. There are paradoxes permissible for the redressing of a bad balance incriticism, and which may safely even be emphasized so long as they arenot isolated. One of these I have called at the beginning of thischapter the strength of the weak kings. And there is a complement of it, even in this crisis of the Norman mastery, which might well be calledthe weakness of the strong kings. William of Normandy succeededimmediately, he did not quite succeed ultimately; there was in his hugesuccess a secret of failure that only bore fruit long after his death. It was certainly his single aim to simplify England into a popularautocracy, like that growing up in France; with that aim he scatteredthe feudal holdings in scraps, demanded a direct vow from thesub-vassals to himself, and used any tool against the barony, from thehighest culture of the foreign ecclesiastics to the rudest relics ofSaxon custom. But the very parallel of France makes the paradoxstartlingly apparent. It is a proverb that the first French kings werepuppets; that the mayor of the palace was quite insolently the king ofthe king. Yet it is certain that the puppet became an idol; a popularidol of unparalleled power, before which all mayors and nobles bent orwere broken. In France arose absolute government, the more because itwas not precisely personal government. The King was already athing--like the Republic. Indeed the mediæval Republics were rigid withdivine right. In Norman England, perhaps, the government was toopersonal to be absolute. Anyhow, there is a real though recondite sensein which William the Conqueror was William the Conquered. When his twosons were dead, the whole country fell into a feudal chaos almost likethat before the Conquest. In France the princes who had been slavesbecame something exceptional like priests; and one of them became asaint. But somehow our greatest kings were still barons; and by thatvery energy our barons became our kings. VI THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES The last chapter began, in an apparent irrelevance, with the name of St. Edward; and this one might very well begin with the name of St. George. His first appearance, it is said, as a patron of our people, occurred atthe instance of Richard Coeur de Lion during his campaign inPalestine; and this, as we shall see, really stands for a new Englandwhich might well have a new saint. But the Confessor is a character inEnglish history; whereas St. George, apart from his place in martyrologyas a Roman soldier, can hardly be said to be a character in any history. And if we wish to understand the noblest and most neglected of humanrevolutions, we can hardly get closer to it than by considering thisparadox, of how much progress and enlightenment was represented by thuspassing from a chronicle to a romance. In any intellectual corner of modernity can be found such a phrase as Ihave just read in a newspaper controversy: "Salvation, like other goodthings, must not come from outside. " To call a spiritual thing externaland not internal is the chief mode of modernist excommunication. But ifour subject of study is mediæval and not modern, we must pit againstthis apparent platitude the very opposite idea. We must put ourselves inthe posture of men who thought that almost every good thing came fromoutside--like good news. I confess that I am not impartial in mysympathies here; and that the newspaper phrase I quoted strikes me as ablunder about the very nature of life. I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb;nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denyingits dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanksare the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubledby wonder. But this faith in receptiveness, and in respect for thingsoutside oneself, need here do no more than help me in explaining whatany version of this epoch ought in any case to explain. In nothing isthe modern German more modern, or more mad, than in his dream of findinga German name for everything; eating his language, or in other wordsbiting his tongue. And in nothing were the mediævals more free and sanethan in their acceptance of names and emblems from outside their mostbeloved limits. The monastery would often not only take in the strangerbut almost canonize him. A mere adventurer like Bruce was enthroned andthanked as if he had really come as a knight errant. And a passionatelypatriotic community more often than not had a foreigner for a patronsaint. Thus crowds of saints were Irishmen, but St. Patrick was not anIrishman. Thus as the English gradually became a nation, they left thenumberless Saxon saints in a sense behind them, passed over bycomparison not only the sanctity of Edward but the solid fame of Alfred, and invoked a half mythical hero, striving in an eastern desert againstan impossible monster. That transition and that symbol stand for the Crusades. In their romanceand reality they were the first English experience of learning, not onlyfrom the external, but the remote. England, like every Christian thing, had thriven on outer things without shame. From the roads of Cæsar tothe churches of Lanfranc, it had sought its meat from God. But now theeagles were on the wing, scenting a more distant slaughter; they wereseeking the strange things instead of receiving them. The English hadstepped from acceptance to adventure, and the epic of their ships hadbegun. The scope of the great religious movement which swept Englandalong with all the West would distend a book like this into hugedisproportion, yet it would be much better to do so than to dismiss itin the distant and frigid fashion common in such short summaries. Theinadequacy of our insular method in popular history is perfectly shownin the treatment of Richard Coeur de Lion. His tale is told with theimplication that his departure for the Crusade was something like theescapade of a schoolboy running away to sea. It was, in this view, apardonable or lovable prank; whereas in truth it was more like aresponsible Englishman now going to the Front. Christendom was nearlyone nation, and the Front was the Holy Land. That Richard himself was ofan adventurous and even romantic temper is true, though it is notunreasonably romantic for a born soldier to do the work he does best. But the point of the argument against insular history is particularlyillustrated here by the absence of a continental comparison. In thiscase we have only to step across the Straits of Dover to find thefallacy. Philip Augustus, Richard's contemporary in France, had the nameof a particularly cautious and coldly public-spirited statesman; yetPhilip Augustus went on the same Crusade. The reason was, of course, that the Crusades were, for all thoughtful Europeans, things of thehighest statesmanship and the purest public spirit. Some six hundred years after Christianity sprang up in the East andswept westwards, another great faith arose in almost the same easternlands and followed it like its gigantic shadow. Like a shadow, it was atonce a copy and a contrary. We call it Islam, or the creed of theMoslems; and perhaps its most explanatory description is that it was thefinal flaming up of the accumulated Orientalisms, perhaps of theaccumulated Hebraisms, gradually rejected as the Church grew moreEuropean, or as Christianity turned into Christendom. Its highestmotive was a hatred of idols, and in its view Incarnation was itself anidolatry. The two things it persecuted were the idea of God being madeflesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of thequestions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christianconversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art ormythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion, a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam wassomething like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full ofmad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus fromthe reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of hissoul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking thepopular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed, in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father ofCharlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire fromthe genius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalrycharge that nearly conquered the world. And if it be suggested that anote on such Oriental origins is rather remote from a history ofEngland, the answer is that this book may, alas! contain manydigressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarlynecessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted Christianity likea ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but especially in ourcorner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all theparish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and ask whythis stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He willsoon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, thatthe ecstasy of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island wasfilled with the fury of the Iconoclasts. It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islamthat it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was bornin a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it camefrom nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadicquality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific ifless creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. TheMoslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religionof the two. This rootless refinement was characteristically advanced inabstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra. In comparison the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive, but its instincts were very strong and very much the other way. It wasfull of local affections, which found form in that system of _fences_which runs like a pattern through everything mediæval, from heraldry tothe holding of land. There was a shape and colour in all their customsand statutes which can be seen in all their tabards and escutcheons;something at once strict and gay. This is not a departure from theinterest in external things, but rather a part of it. The very welcomethey would often give to a stranger from beyond the wall was arecognition of the wall. Those who think their own life all-sufficientdo not see its limit as a wall, but as the end of the world. The Chinesecalled the white man "a sky-breaker. " The mediæval spirit loved its partin life as a part, not a whole; its charter for it came from somethingelse. There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common graceof _Benedictus benedicat_, whereupon the unlettered Franciscantriumphantly retorted _Franciscus Franciscat_. It is something of aparable of mediæval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare itwould be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and_Benedictus benedicat_ is very precisely the motto of the earliestmediævalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by somethingwhich has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessedbless. But the point which is the clue to the Crusades is this: that forthem the beyond was not the infinite, as in a modern religion. Everybeyond was a place. The mystery of locality, with all its hold on thehuman heart, was as much present in the most ethereal things ofChristendom as it was absent from the most practical things of Islam. England would derive a thing from France, France from Italy, Italy fromGreece, Greece from Palestine, Palestine from Paradise. It was notmerely that a yeoman of Kent would have his house hallowed by thepriest of the parish church, which was confirmed by Canterbury, whichwas confirmed by Rome. Rome herself did not worship herself, as in thepagan age. Rome herself looked eastward to the mysterious cradle of hercreed, to a land of which the very earth was called holy. And when shelooked eastward for it she saw the face of Mahound. She saw standing inthe place that was her earthly heaven a devouring giant out of thedeserts, to whom all places were the same. It has been necessary thus to pause upon the inner emotions of theCrusade, because the modern English reader is widely cut off from theseparticular feelings of his fathers; and the real quarrel of Christendomand Islam, the fire-baptism of the young nations, could not otherwise beseized in its unique character. It was nothing so simple as a quarrelbetween two men who both wanted Jerusalem. It was the much deadlierquarrel between one man who wanted it and another man who could not seewhy it was wanted. The Moslem, of course, had his own holy places; buthe has never felt about them as Westerns can feel about a field or aroof-tree; he thought of the holiness as holy, not of the places asplaces. The austerity which forbade him imagery, the wandering war thatforbade him rest, shut him off from all that was breaking out andblossoming in our local patriotisms; just as it has given the Turks anempire without ever giving them a nation. Now, the effect of this adventure against a mighty and mysterious enemywas simply enormous in the transformation of England, as of all thenations that were developing side by side with England. Firstly, welearnt enormously from what the Saracen did. Secondly, we learnt yetmore enormously from what the Saracen did not do. Touching some of thegood things which we lacked, we were fortunately able to follow him. Butin all the good things which he lacked, we were confirmed like adamantto defy him. It may be said that Christians never knew how right theywere till they went to war with Moslems. At once the most obvious andthe most representative reaction was the reaction which produced thebest of what we call Christian Art; and especially those grotesques ofGothic architecture, which are not only alive but kicking. The East asan environment, as an impersonal glamour, certainly stimulated theWestern mind, but stimulated it rather to break the Moslem commandmentthan to keep it. It was as if the Christian were impelled, like acaricaturist, to cover all that faceless ornament with faces; to giveheads to all those headless serpents and birds to all these lifelesstrees. Statuary quickened and came to life under the veto of the enemyas under a benediction. The image, merely because it was called an idol, became not only an ensign but a weapon. A hundredfold host of stonesprang up all over the shrines and streets of Europe. The Iconoclastsmade more statues than they destroyed. The place of Coeur de Lion in popular fable and gossip is far morelike his place in true history than the place of the mere denationalizedne'er-do-weel given him in our utilitarian school books. Indeed thevulgar rumour is nearly always much nearer the historical truth than the"educated" opinion of to-day; for tradition is truer than fashion. KingRichard, as the typical Crusader, did make a momentous difference toEngland by gaining glory in the East, instead of devoting himselfconscientiously to domestic politics in the exemplary manner of KingJohn. The accident of his military genius and prestige gave Englandsomething which it kept for four hundred years, and without which it isincomprehensible throughout that period--the reputation of being in thevery vanguard of chivalry. The great romances of the Round Table, theattachment of knighthood to the name of a British king, belong to thisperiod. Richard was not only a knight but a troubadour; and culture andcourtesy were linked up with the idea of English valour. The mediævalEnglishman was even proud of being polite; which is at least no worsethan being proud of money and bad manners, which is what many Englishmenin our later centuries have meant by their common sense. Chivalry might be called the baptism of Feudalism. It was an attempt tobring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into amilitary system which already existed; to turn its discipline into aninitiation and its inequalities into a hierarchy. To the comparativegrace of the new period belongs, of course, that considerable cultus ofthe dignity of woman, to which the word "chivalry" is often narrowed, orperhaps exalted. This also was a revolt against one of the worst gaps inthe more polished civilization of the Saracens. Moslems denied evensouls to women; perhaps from the same instinct which recoiled from thesacred birth, with its inevitable glorification of the mother; perhapsmerely because, having originally had tents rather than houses, they hadslaves rather than housewives. It is false to say that the chivalricview of women was merely an affectation, except in the sense in whichthere must always be an affectation where there is an ideal. It is theworst sort of superficiality not to see the pressure of a generalsentiment merely because it is always broken up by events; the Crusadeitself, for example, is more present and potent as a dream even than asa reality. From the first Plantagenet to the last Lancastrian it hauntsthe minds of English kings, giving as a background to their battles amirage of Palestine. So a devotion like that of Edward I. To his queenwas quite a real motive in the lives of multitudes of hiscontemporaries. When crowds of enlightened tourists, setting forth tosneer at the superstitions of the continent, are taking tickets andlabelling luggage at the large railway station at the west end of theStrand, I do not know whether they all speak to their wives with a moreflowing courtesy than their fathers in Edward's time, or whether theypause to meditate on the legend of a husband's sorrow, to be found inthe very name of Charing Cross. But it is a huge historical error to suppose that the Crusades concernedonly that crust of society for which heraldry was an art and chivalry anetiquette. The direct contrary is the fact. The First Crusade especiallywas much more an unanimous popular rising than most that are calledriots and revolutions. The Guilds, the great democratic systems of thetime, often owed their increasing power to corporate fighting for theCross; but I shall deal with such things later. Often it was not so mucha levy of men as a trek of whole families, like new gipsies movingeastwards. And it has passed into a proverb that children by themselvesoften organized a crusade as they now organize a charade. But we shallbest realize the fact by fancying every Crusade as a Children's Crusade. They were full of all that the modern world worships in children, because it has crushed it out of men. Their lives were full, as therudest remains of their vulgarest arts are full, of something that weall saw out of the nursery window. It can best be seen later, forinstance, in the lanced and latticed interiors of Memling, but it isubiquitous in the older and more unconscious contemporary art; somethingthat domesticated distant lands and made the horizon at home. Theyfitted into the corners of small houses the ends of the earth and theedges of the sky. Their perspective is rude and crazy, but it isperspective; it is not the decorative flatness of orientalism. In aword, their world, like a child's, is full of foreshortening, as of ashort cut to fairyland. Their maps are more provocative than pictures. Their half-fabulous animals are monsters, and yet are pets. It isimpossible to state verbally this very vivid atmosphere; but it was anatmosphere as well as an adventure. It was precisely these outlandishvisions that truly came home to everybody; it was the royal councils andfeudal quarrels that were comparatively remote. The Holy Land was muchnearer to a plain man's house than Westminster, and immeasurably nearerthan Runymede. To give a list of English kings and parliaments, withoutpausing for a moment upon this prodigious presence of a religioustransfiguration in common life, is something the folly of which can butfaintly be conveyed by a more modern parallel, with secularity andreligion reversed. It is as if some Clericalist or Royalist writershould give a list of the Archbishops of Paris from 1750 to 1850, notinghow one died of small-pox, another of old age, another by a curiousaccident of decapitation, and throughout all his record should neveronce mention the nature, or even the name, of the French Revolution. VII THE PROBLEM OF THE PLANTAGENETS It is a point of prestige with what is called the Higher Criticism inall branches to proclaim that certain popular texts and authorities are"late, " and therefore apparently worthless. Two similar events arealways the same event, and the later alone is even credible. Thisfanaticism is often in mere fact mistaken; it ignores the most commoncoincidences of human life: and some future critic will probably saythat the tale of the Tower of Babel cannot be older than the EiffelTower, because there was certainly a confusion of tongues at the ParisExhibition. Most of the mediæval remains familiar to the modern readerare necessarily "late, " such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; butthey are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention andeven trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that whichlived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read historybackwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Agesbackwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yetis crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwardsfrom Cædmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even theauthorities he must trust know very little. If this be true ofShakespeare, it is even truer, of course, of Chaucer. If we really wantto know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way toask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turnsto the "Canterbury Tales, " which are still as amusing as Dickens yet asmediæval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to beasked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and whatwere the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury? They were, of course, taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, thoughmuch more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to acceptit as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derivedfrom saints, while ours are dictated by bankers. It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very goodman. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with completestupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by itsvery familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this oldersociety, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its originalfreshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillarlike the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero onthe top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during achronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brassband and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told thathe had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some suchpantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of theChristian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially berealized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in asense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those oflabour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but ratherthe staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must beapproximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effectsof the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage. The first few lines of Chaucer's poem, to say nothing of thousands inthe course of it, make it instantly plain that it was no case of secularrevels still linked by a slight ritual to the name of some forgottengod, as may have happened in the pagan decline. Chaucer and his friendsdid think about St. Thomas, at least more frequently than a clerk atMargate thinks about St. Lubbock. They did definitely believe in thebodily cures wrought for them through St. Thomas, at least as firmly asthe most enlightened and progressive modern can believe in those of Mrs. Eddy. Who was St. Thomas, to whose shrine the whole of that society isthus seen in the act of moving; and why was he so important? If there bea streak of sincerity in the claim to teach social and democratichistory, instead of a string of kings and battles, this is the obviousand open gate by which to approach the figure which disputed Englandwith the first Plantagenet. A real popular history should think more ofhis popularity even than his policy. And unquestionably thousands ofploughmen, carpenters, cooks, and yeomen, as in the motley crowd ofChaucer, knew a great deal about St. Thomas when they had never evenheard of Becket. It would be easy to detail what followed the Conquest as the feudaltangle that it was, till a prince from Anjou repeated the unifyingeffort of the Conqueror. It is found equally easy to write of the RedKing's hunting instead of his building, which has lasted longer, andwhich he probably loved much more. It is easy to catalogue the questionshe disputed with Anselm--leaving out the question Anselm cared mostabout, and which he asked with explosive simplicity, as, "Why was God aman?" All this is as simple as saying that a king died of eatinglampreys, from which, however, there is little to learn nowadays, unlessit be that when a modern monarch perishes of gluttony the newspapersseldom say so. But if we want to know what really happened to England inthis dim epoch, I think it can be dimly but truly traced in the story ofSt. Thomas of Canterbury. Henry of Anjou, who brought fresh French blood into the monarchy, brought also a refreshment of the idea for which the French have alwaysstood: the idea in the Roman Law of something impersonal andomnipresent. It is the thing we smile at even in a small Frenchdetective story; when Justice opens a handbag or Justice runs after acab. Henry II. Really produced this impression of being a police forcein person; a contemporary priest compared his restless vigilance to thebird and the fish of scripture whose way no man knoweth. Kinghood, however, meant law and not caprice; its ideal at least was a justicecheap and obvious as daylight, an atmosphere which lingers only inpopular phrases about the King's English or the King's highway. Butthough it tended to be egalitarian it did not, of itself, tend to behumanitarian. In modern France, as in ancient Rome, the other name ofJustice has sometimes been Terror. The Frenchman especially is always aRevolutionist--and never an Anarchist. Now this effort of kings likeHenry II. To rebuild on a plan like that of the Roman Law was not only, of course, crossed and entangled by countless feudal fancies andfeelings in themselves as well as others, it was also conditioned bywhat was the corner-stone of the whole civilization. It had to happennot only with but within the Church. For a Church was to these menrather a world they lived in than a building to which they went. Withoutthe Church the Middle Ages would have had no law, as without the Churchthe Reformation would have had no Bible. Many priests expounded andembellished the Roman Law, and many priests supported Henry II. And yetthere was another element in the Church, stored in its first foundationslike dynamite, and destined in every age to destroy and renew the world. An idealism akin to impossibilism ran down the ages parallel to all itspolitical compromises. Monasticism itself was the throwing off ofinnumerable Utopias, without posterity yet with perpetuity. It had, aswas proved recurrently after corrupt epochs, a strange secret of gettingpoor quickly; a mushroom magnificence of destitution. This wind ofrevolution in the crusading time caught Francis in Assissi and strippedhim of his rich garments in the street. The same wind of revolutionsuddenly smote Thomas Becket, King Henry's brilliant and luxuriousChancellor, and drove him on to an unearthly glory and a bloody end. Becket was a type of those historic times in which it is really verypractical to be impracticable. The quarrel which tore him from hisfriend's side cannot be appreciated in the light of those legal andconstitutional debates which the misfortunes of the seventeenth centuryhave made so much of in more recent history. To convict St. Thomas ofillegality and clerical intrigue, when he set the law of the Churchagainst that of the State, is about as adequate as to convict St. Francis of bad heraldry when he said he was the brother of the sun andmoon. There may have been heralds stupid enough to say so even in thatmuch more logical age, but it is no sufficient way of dealing withvisions or with revolutions. St. Thomas of Canterbury was a greatvisionary and a great revolutionist, but so far as England was concernedhis revolution failed and his vision was not fulfilled. We are thereforetold in the text-books little more than that he wrangled with the Kingabout certain regulations; the most crucial being whether "criminousclerks" should be punished by the State or the Church. And this wasindeed the chief text of the dispute; but to realise it we mustreiterate what is hardest for modern England to understand--the natureof the Catholic Church when it was itself a government, and thepermanent sense in which it was itself a revolution. It is always the first fact that escapes notice; and the first factabout the Church was that it created a machinery of pardon, where theState could only work with a machinery of punishment. It claimed to be adivine detective who helped the criminal to escape by a plea of guilty. It was, therefore, in the very nature of the institution, that when itdid punish materially it punished more lightly. If any modern man wereput back in the Becket quarrel, his sympathies would certainly be tornin two; for if the King's scheme was the more rational, the Archbishop'swas the more humane. And despite the horrors that darkened religiousdisputes long afterwards, this character was certainly in the bulk thehistoric character of Church government. It is admitted, for instance, that things like eviction, or the harsh treatment of tenants, waspractically unknown wherever the Church was landlord. The principlelingered into more evil days in the form by which the Church authoritieshanded over culprits to the secular arm to be killed, even for religiousoffences. In modern romances this is treated as a mere hypocrisy; butthe man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself ahypocrite about his own inconsistencies. Our world, then, cannot understand St. Thomas, any more than St. Francis, without accepting very simply a flaming and even fantasticcharity, by which the great Archbishop undoubtedly stands for thevictims of this world, where the wheel of fortune grinds the faces ofthe poor. He may well have been too idealistic; he wished to protect theChurch as a sort of earthly paradise, of which the rules might seem tohim as paternal as those of heaven, but might well seem to the King ascapricious as those of fairyland. But if the priest was too idealistic, the King was really too practical; it is intrinsically true to say hewas too practical to succeed in practice. There re-enters here, andruns, I think, through all English history, the rather indescribabletruth I have suggested about the Conqueror; that perhaps he was hardlyimpersonal enough for a pure despot. The real moral of our mediævalstory is, I think, subtly contrary to Carlyle's vision of a stormystrong man to hammer and weld the state like a smith. Our strong menwere too strong for us, and too strong for themselves. They were toostrong for their own aim of a just and equal monarchy. The smith brokeupon the anvil the sword of state that he was hammering for himself. Whether or no this will serve as a key to the very complicated story ofour kings and barons, it is the exact posture of Henry II. To his rival. He became lawless out of sheer love of law. He also stood, though in acolder and more remote manner, for the whole people against feudaloppression; and if his policy had succeeded in its purity, it would atleast have made impossible the privilege and capitalism of later times. But that bodily restlessness which stamped and spurned the furniture wasa symbol of him; it was some such thing that prevented him and his heirsfrom sitting as quietly on their throne as the heirs of St. Louis. Hethrust again and again at the tough intangibility of the priests'Utopianism like a man fighting a ghost; he answered transcendentaldefiances with baser material persecutions; and at last, on a dark and, I think, decisive day in English history, his word sent four feudalmurderers into the cloisters of Canterbury, who went there to destroy atraitor and who created a saint. At the grave of the dead man broke forth what can only be called anepidemic of healing. For miracles so narrated there is the same evidenceas for half the facts of history; and any one denying them must denythem upon a dogma. But something followed which would seem to moderncivilization even more monstrous than a miracle. If the reader canimagine Mr. Cecil Rhodes submitting to be horsewhipped by a Boer in St. Paul's Cathedral, as an apology for some indefensible death incidentalto the Jameson Raid, he will form but a faint idea of what was meantwhen Henry II. Was beaten by monks at the tomb of his vassal and enemy. The modern parallel called up is comic, but the truth is that mediævalactualities have a violence that does seem comic to our conventions. TheCatholics of that age were driven by two dominant thoughts: theall-importance of penitence as an answer to sin, and the all-importanceof vivid and evident external acts as a proof of penitence. Extravaganthumiliation after extravagant pride for them restored the balance ofsanity. The point is worth stressing, because without it moderns makeneither head nor tail of the period. Green gravely suggests, forinstance, of Henry's ancestor Fulk of Anjou, that his tyrannies andfrauds were further blackened by "low superstition, " which led him to bedragged in a halter round a shrine, scourged and screaming for the mercyof God. Mediævals would simply have said that such a man might wellscream for it, but his scream was the only logical comment he couldmake. But they would have quite refused to see why the scream should beadded to the sins and not subtracted from them. They would have thoughtit simply muddle-headed to have the same horror at a man for beinghorribly sinful and for being horribly sorry. But it may be suggested, I think, though with the doubt proper toignorance, that the Angevin ideal of the King's justice lost more by thedeath of St. Thomas than was instantly apparent in the horror ofChristendom, the canonization of the victim and the public penance ofthe tyrant. These things indeed were in a sense temporary; the Kingrecovered the power to judge clerics, and many later kings andjusticiars continued the monarchical plan. But I would suggest, as apossible clue to puzzling after events, that here and by this murderousstroke the crown lost what should have been the silent and massivesupport of its whole policy. I mean that it lost the people. It need not be repeated that the case for despotism is democratic. As arule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak. An autocratcannot be judged as a historical character by his relations with otherhistorical characters. His true applause comes not from the few actorson the lighted stage of aristocracy, but from that enormous audiencewhich must always sit in darkness throughout the drama. The king whohelps numberless helps nameless men, and when he flings his widestlargesse he is a Christian doing good by stealth. This sort of monarchywas certainly a mediæval ideal, nor need it necessarily fail as areality. French kings were never so merciful to the people as when theywere merciless to the peers; and it is probably true that a Czar who wasa great lord to his intimates was often a little father in innumerablelittle homes. It is overwhelmingly probable that such a central power, though it might at last have deserved destruction in England as inFrance, would in England as in France have prevented the few fromseizing and holding all the wealth and power to this day. But in Englandit broke off short, through something of which the slaying of St. Thomasmay well have been the supreme example. It was something overstrainedand startling and against the instincts of the people. And of what wasmeant in the Middle Ages by that very powerful and rather peculiarthing, the people, I shall speak in the next chapter. In any case this conjecture finds support in the ensuing events. It isnot merely that, just as the great but personal plan of the Conquerorcollapsed after all into the chaos of the Stephen transition, so thegreat but personal plan of the first Plantagenet collapsed into thechaos of the Barons' Wars. When all allowance is made for constitutionalfictions and afterthoughts, it does seem likely that here for the firsttime some moral strength deserted the monarchy. The character of Henry'ssecond son John (for Richard belongs rather to the last chapter) stampedit with something accidental and yet symbolic. It was not that John wasa mere black blot on the pure gold of the Plantagenets, the texture wasmuch more mixed and continuous; but he really was a discreditedPlantagenet, and as it were a damaged Plantagenet. It was not that hewas much more of a bad man than many opposed to him, but he was thekind of bad man whom bad men and good do combine to oppose. In a sensesubtler than that of the legal and parliamentary logic-chopping inventedlong afterwards, he certainly managed to put the Crown in the wrong. Nobody suggested that the barons of Stephen's time starved men indungeons to promote political liberty, or hung them up by the heels as asymbolic request for a free parliament. In the reign of John and his sonit was still the barons, and not in the least the people, who seized thepower; but there did begin to appear a _case_ for their seizing it, forcontemporaries as well as constitutional historians afterwards. John, inone of his diplomatic doublings, had put England into the papal care, asan estate is put in Chancery. And unluckily the Pope, whose counsels hadgenerally been mild and liberal, was then in his death-grapple with theGermanic Emperor and wanted every penny he could get to win. His winningwas a blessing to Europe, but a curse to England, for he used the islandas a mere treasury for this foreign war. In this and other matters thebaronial party began to have something like a principle, which is thebackbone of a policy. Much conventional history that connects theircouncils with a thing like our House of Commons is as far-fetched as itwould be to say that the Speaker wields a Mace like those which thebarons brandished in battle. Simon de Montfort was not an enthusiast forthe Whig theory of the British Constitution, but he was an enthusiastfor something. He founded a parliament in a fit of considerable absenceof mind; but it was with true presence of mind, in the responsible andeven religious sense which had made his father so savage a Crusaderagainst heretics, that he laid about him with his great sword before hefell at Evesham. Magna Carta was not a step towards democracy, but it was a step awayfrom despotism. If we hold that double truth firmly, we have somethinglike a key to the rest of English history. A rather loose aristocracynot only gained but often deserved the name of liberty. And the historyof the English can be most briefly summarized by taking the French mottoof "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, " and noting that the English havesincerely loved the first and lost the other two. In the contemporary complication much could be urged both for the Crownand the new and more national rally of the nobility. But it was acomplication, whereas a miracle is a plain matter that any man canunderstand. The possibilities or impossibilities of St. Thomas Becketwere left a riddle for history; the white flame of his audacioustheocracy was frustrated, and his work cut short like a fairy tale leftuntold. But his memory passed into the care of the common people, andwith them he was more active dead than alive--yes, even more busy. Inthe next chapter we shall consider what was meant in the Middle Ages bythe common people, and how uncommon we should think it to-day. And inthe last chapter we have already seen how in the Crusading age thestrangest things grew homely, and men fed on travellers' tales whenthere were no national newspapers. A many-coloured pageant ofmartyrology on numberless walls and windows had familiarized the mostignorant with alien cruelties in many climes; with a bishop flayed byDanes or a virgin burned by Saracens, with one saint stoned by Jews andanother hewn in pieces by negroes. I cannot think it was a small matterthat among these images one of the most magnificent had met his deathbut lately at the hands of an English monarch. There was at leastsomething akin to the primitive and epical romances of that period inthe tale of those two mighty friends, one of whom struck too hard andslew the other. It may even have been so early as this that somethingwas judged in silence; and for the multitude rested on the Crown amysterious seal of insecurity like that of Cain, and of exile on theEnglish kings. VIII THE MEANING OF MERRY ENGLAND The mental trick by which the first half of English history has beenwholly dwarfed and dehumanized is a very simple one. It consists intelling only the story of the professional destroyers and thencomplaining that the whole story is one of destruction. A king is at thebest a sort of crowned executioner; all government is an ugly necessity;and if it was then uglier it was for the most part merely because it wasmore difficult. What we call the Judges' circuits were first rather theKing's raids. For a time the criminal class was so strong that ordinarycivil government was conducted by a sort of civil war. When the socialenemy was caught at all he was killed or savagely maimed. The King couldnot take Pentonville Prison about with him on wheels. I am far fromdenying that there was a real element of cruelty in the Middle Ages; butthe point here is that it was concerned with one side of life, which iscruel at the best; and that this involved more cruelty for the samereason that it involved more courage. When we think of our ancestors asthe men who inflicted tortures, we ought sometimes to think of them asthe men who defied them. But the modern critic of mediævalism commonlylooks only at these crooked shadows and not at the common daylight ofthe Middle Ages. When he has got over his indignant astonishment at thefact that fighters fought and that hangmen hanged, he assumes that anyother ideas there may have been were ineffectual and fruitless. Hedespises the monk for avoiding the very same activities which hedespises the warrior for cultivating. And he insists that the arts ofwar were sterile, without even admitting the possibility that the artsof peace were productive. But the truth is that it is precisely in thearts of peace, and in the type of production, that the Middle Ages standsingular and unique. This is not eulogy but history; an informed manmust recognize this productive peculiarity even if he happens to hateit. The melodramatic things currently called mediæval are much older andmore universal; such as the sport of tournament or the use of torture. The tournament was indeed a Christian and liberal advance on thegladiatorial show, since the lords risked themselves and not merelytheir slaves. Torture, so far from being peculiarly mediæval, was copiedfrom pagan Rome and its most rationalist political science; and itsapplication to others besides slaves was really part of the slowmediæval extinction of slavery. Torture, indeed, is a logical thingcommon in states innocent of fanaticism, as in the great agnostic empireof China. What was really arresting and remarkable about the MiddleAges, as the Spartan discipline was peculiar to Sparta, or the Russiancommunes typical of Russia, was precisely its positive social scheme ofproduction, of the making, building and growing of all the good thingsof life. For the tale told in a book like this cannot really touch on mediævalEngland at all. The dynasties and the parliaments passed like a changingcloud and across a stable and fruitful landscape. The institutions whichaffected the masses can be compared to corn or fruit trees in onepractical sense at least, that they grew upwards from below. There mayhave been better societies, and assuredly we have not to look far forworse; but it is doubtful if there was ever so spontaneous a society. Wecannot do justice, for instance, to the local government of that epoch, even where it was very faulty and fragmentary, by any comparisons withthe plans of local government laid down to-day. Modern local governmentalways comes from above; it is at best granted; it is more often merelyimposed. The modern English oligarchy, the modern German Empire, arenecessarily more efficient in making municipalities upon a plan, orrather a pattern. The mediævals not only had self-government, but theirself-government was self-made. They did indeed, as the central powers ofthe national monarchies grew stronger, seek and procure the stamp ofstate approval; but it was approval of a popular fact already inexistence. Men banded together in guilds and parishes long before LocalGovernment Acts were dreamed of. Like charity, which was worked in thesame way, their Home Rule began at home. The reactions of recentcenturies have left most educated men bankrupt of the corporateimagination required even to imagine this. They only think of a mob as athing that breaks things--even if they admit it is right to break them. But the mob made these things. An artist mocked as many-headed, anartist with many eyes and hands, created these masterpieces. And if themodern sceptic, in his detestation of the democratic ideal, complains ofmy calling them masterpieces, a simple answer will for the moment serve. It is enough to reply that the very word "masterpiece" is borrowed fromthe terminology of the mediæval craftsmen. But such points in the GuildSystem can be considered a little later; here we are only concerned withthe quite spontaneous springing upwards of all these socialinstitutions, such as they were. They rose in the streets like a silentrebellion; like a still and statuesque riot. In modern constitutionalcountries there are practically no political institutions thus given bythe people; all are received by the people. There is only one thing thatstands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in somepower like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trades Unions. In agriculture, what had happened to the land was like a universallandslide. But by a prodigy beyond the catastrophes of geology it may besaid that the land had slid uphill. Rural civilization was on a whollynew and much higher level; yet there was no great social convulsions orapparently even great social campaigns to explain it. It is possibly asolitary instance in history of men thus falling upwards; at least ofoutcasts falling on their feet or vagrants straying into the promisedland. Such a thing could not be and was not a mere accident; yet, if wego by conscious political plans, it was something like a miracle. Therehad appeared, like a subterranean race cast up to the sun, somethingunknown to the august civilization of the Roman Empire--a peasantry. Atthe beginning of the Dark Ages the great pagan cosmopolitan society nowgrown Christian was as much a slave state as old South Carolina. By thefourteenth century it was almost as much a state of peasant proprietorsas modern France. No laws had been passed against slavery; no dogmaseven had condemned it by definition; no war had been waged against it, no new race or ruling caste had repudiated it; but it was gone. Thisstartling and silent transformation is perhaps the best measure of thepressure of popular life in the Middle Ages, of how fast it was makingnew things in its spiritual factory. Like everything else in themediæval revolution, from its cathedrals to its ballads, it was asanonymous as it was enormous. It is admitted that the conscious andactive emancipators everywhere were the parish priests and thereligious brotherhoods; but no name among them has survived and no manof them has reaped his reward in this world. Countless Clarksons andinnumerable Wilberforces, without political machinery or public fame, worked at death-beds and confessionals in all the villages of Europe;and the vast system of slavery vanished. It was probably the widest workever done which was voluntary on both sides; and the Middle Ages was inthis and other things the age of volunteers. It is possible enough tostate roughly the stages through which the thing passed; but such astatement does not explain the loosening of the grip of the greatslave-owners; and it cannot be explained except psychologically. TheCatholic type of Christianity was not merely an element, it was aclimate; and in that climate the slave would not grow. I have alreadysuggested, touching that transformation of the Roman Empire which wasthe background of all these centuries, how a mystical view of man'sdignity must have this effect. A table that walked and talked, or astool that flew with wings out of window, would be about as workable athing as an immortal chattel. But though here as everywhere the spiritexplains the processes, and the processes cannot even plausibly explainthe spirit, these processes involve two very practical points, withoutwhich we cannot understand how this great popular civilization wascreated--or how it was destroyed. What we call the manors were originally the _villae_ of the paganlords, each with its population of slaves. Under this process, howeverit be explained, what had occurred was the diminishment of the lords'claim to the whole profit of a slave estate, by which it became a claimto the profit of part of it, and dwindled at last to certain dues orcustomary payments to the lord, having paid which the slave could enjoynot only the use of the land but the profit of it. It must be rememberedthat over a great part, and especially very important parts, of thewhole territory, the lords were abbots, magistrates elected by amystical communism and themselves often of peasant birth. Men not onlyobtained a fair amount of justice under their care, but a fair amount offreedom even from their carelessness. But two details of the developmentare very vital. First, as has been hinted elsewhere, the slave was longin the intermediate status of a serf. This meant that while the land wasentitled to the services of the man, he was equally entitled to thesupport of the land. He could not be evicted; he could not even, in themodern fashion, have his rent raised. At the beginning it was merelythat the slave was owned, but at least he could not be disowned. At theend he had really become a small landlord, merely because it was not thelord that owned him, but the land. It is hardly unsafe to suggest thatin this (by one of the paradoxes of this extraordinary period) the veryfixity of serfdom was a service to freedom. The new peasant inheritedsomething of the stability of the slave. He did not come to life in acompetitive scramble where everybody was trying to snatch his freedomfrom him. He found himself among neighbours who already regarded hispresence as normal and his frontiers as natural frontiers, and amongwhom all-powerful customs crushed all experiments in competition. By atrick or overturn no romancer has dared to put in a tale, this prisonerhad become the governor of his own prison. For a little time it wasalmost true that an Englishman's house was his castle, because it hadbeen built strong enough to be his dungeon. The other notable element was this: that when the produce of the landbegan by custom to be cut up and only partially transmitted to the lord, the remainder was generally subdivided into two types of property. Onethe serfs enjoyed severally, in private patches, while the other theyenjoyed in common, and generally in common with the lord. Thus arose themomentously important mediæval institutions of the Common Land, ownedside by side with private land. It was an alternative and a refuge. Themediævals, except when they were monks, were none of them Communists;but they were all, as it were, potential Communists. It is typical ofthe dark and dehumanized picture now drawn of the period that ourromances constantly describe a broken man as falling back on the forestsand the outlaw's den, but never describe him as falling back on thecommon land, which was a much more common incident. Mediævalismbelieved in mending its broken men; and as the idea existed in thecommunal life for monks, it existed in the communal land for peasants. It was their great green hospital, their free and airy workhouse. ACommon was not a naked and negative thing like the scrub or heath wecall a Common on the edges of the suburbs. It was a reserve of wealthlike a reserve of grain in a barn; it was deliberately kept back as abalance, as we talk of a balance at the bank. Now these provisions for ahealthier distribution of property would by themselves show any man ofimagination that a real moral effort had been made towards socialjustice; that it could not have been mere evolutionary accident thatslowly turned the slave into a serf, and the serf into a peasantproprietor. But if anybody still thinks that mere blind luck, withoutany groping for the light, had somehow brought about the peasantcondition in place of the agrarian slave estate, he has only to turn towhat was happening in all the other callings and affairs of humanity. Then he will cease to doubt. For he will find the same mediæval men busyupon a social scheme which points as plainly in effect to pity and acraving for equality. And it is a system which could no more be producedby accident than one of their cathedrals could be built by anearthquake. Most work beyond the primary work of agriculture was guarded by theegalitarian vigilance of the Guilds. It is hard to find any term tomeasure the distance between this system and modern society; one canonly approach it first by the faint traces it has left. Our daily lifeis littered with a debris of the Middle Ages, especially of dead wordswhich no longer carry their meaning. I have already suggested oneexample. We hardly call up the picture of a return to ChristianCommunism whenever we mention Wimbledon Common. This truth descends tosuch trifles as the titles which we write on letters and postcards. Thepuzzling and truncated monosyllable "Esq. " is a pathetic relic of aremote evolution from chivalry to snobbery. No two historic things couldwell be more different than an esquire and a squire. The first was aboveall things an incomplete and probationary position--the tadpole ofknighthood; the second is above all things a complete and assuredposition--the status of the owners and rulers of rural Englandthroughout recent centuries. Our esquires did not win their estates tillthey had given up any particular fancy for winning their spurs. Esquiredoes not mean squire, and esq. Does not mean anything. But it remains onour letters a little wriggle in pen and ink and an indecipherablehieroglyph twisted by the strange turns of our history, which haveturned a military discipline into a pacific oligarchy, and that into amere plutocracy at last. And there are similar historic riddles to beunpicked in the similar forms of social address. There is somethingsingularly forlorn about the modern word "Mister. " Even in sound it hasa simpering feebleness which marks the shrivelling of the strong wordfrom which it came. Nor, indeed, is the symbol of the mere soundinaccurate. I remember seeing a German story of Samson in which he borethe unassuming name of Simson, which surely shows Samson very muchshorn. There is something of the same dismal _diminuendo_ in theevolution of a Master into a Mister. The very vital importance of the word "Master" is this. A Guild was, very broadly speaking, a Trade Union in which every man was his ownemployer. That is, a man could not work at any trade unless he wouldjoin the league and accept the laws of that trade; but he worked in hisown shop with his own tools, and the whole profit went to himself. Butthe word "employer" marks a modern deficiency which makes the modern useof the word "master" quite inexact. A master meant something quite otherand greater than a "boss. " It meant a master of the work, where it nowmeans only a master of the workmen. It is an elementary character ofCapitalism that a shipowner need not know the right end of a ship, or alandowner have even seen the landscape, that the owner of a goldmine maybe interested in nothing but old pewter, or the owner of a railwaytravel exclusively in balloons. He may be a more successful capitalistif he has a hobby of his own business; he is often a more successfulcapitalist if he has the sense to leave it to a manager; buteconomically he can control the business because he is a capitalist, not because he has any kind of hobby or any kind of sense. The highestgrade in the Guild system was a Master, and it meant a mastery of thebusiness. To take the term created by the colleges in the same epoch, all the mediæval bosses were Masters of Arts. The other grades were thejourneyman and the apprentice; but like the corresponding degrees at theuniversities, they were grades through which every common man couldpass. They were not social classes; they were degrees and not castes. This is the whole point of the recurrent romance about the apprenticemarrying his master's daughter. The master would not be surprised atsuch a thing, any more than an M. A. Would swell with aristocraticindignation when his daughter married a B. A. When we pass from the strictly educational hierarchy to the strictlyegalitarian ideal, we find again that the remains of the thing to-dayare so distorted and disconnected as to be comic. There are CityCompanies which inherit the coats of arms and the immense relativewealth of the old Guilds, and inherit nothing else. Even what is goodabout them is not what was good about the Guilds. In one case we shallfind something like a Worshipful Company of Bricklayers, in which, it isunnecessary to say, there is not a single bricklayer or anybody who hasever known a bricklayer, but in which the senior partners of a few bigbusinesses in the City, with a few faded military men with a taste incookery, tell each other in after-dinner speeches that it has been theglory of their lives to make allegorical bricks without straw. Inanother case we shall find a Worshipful Company of Whitewashers who dodeserve their name, in the sense that many of them employ a large numberof other people to whitewash. These Companies support large charitiesand often doubtless very valuable charities; but their object is quitedifferent from that of the old charities of the Guilds. The aim of theGuild charities was the same as the aim of the Common Land. It was toresist inequality--or, as some earnest old gentlemen of the lastgeneration would probably put it, to resist evolution. It was to ensure, not only that bricklaying should survive and succeed, but that everybricklayer should survive and succeed. It sought to rebuild the ruins ofany bricklayer, and to give any faded whitewasher a new white coat. Itwas the whole aim of the Guilds to cobble their cobblers like theirshoes and clout their clothiers with their clothes; to strengthen theweakest link, or go after the hundredth sheep; in short, to keep the rowof little shops unbroken like a line of battle. It resisted the growthof a big shop like the growth of a dragon. Now even the whitewashers ofthe Whitewashers Company will not pretend that it exists to prevent asmall shop being swallowed by a big shop, or that it has done anythingwhatever to prevent it. At the best the kindness it would show to abankrupt whitewasher would be a kind of compensation; it would not bereinstatement; it would not be the restoration of status in anindustrial system. So careful of the type it seems, so careless of thesingle life; and by that very modern evolutionary philosophy the typeitself has been destroyed. The old Guilds, with the same object ofequality, of course, insisted peremptorily upon the same level system ofpayment and treatment which is a point of complaint against the modernTrades Unions. But they insisted also, as the Trades Unions cannot do, upon a high standard of craftsmanship, which still astonishes the worldin the corners of perishing buildings or the colours of broken glass. There is no artist or art critic who will not concede, however distanthis own style from the Gothic school, that there was in this time anameless but universal artistic touch in the moulding of the very toolsof life. Accident has preserved the rudest sticks and stools and potsand pans which have suggestive shapes as if they were possessed not bydevils but by elves. For they were, indeed, as compared with subsequentsystems, produced in the incredible fairyland of a free country. That the most mediæval of modern institutions, the Trades Unions, do notfight for the same ideal of æsthetic finish is true and certainlytragic; but to make it a matter of blame is wholly to misunderstand thetragedy. The Trades Unions are confederations of men without property, seeking to balance its absence by numbers and the necessary characterof their labour. The Guilds were confederations of men with property, seeking to ensure each man in the possession of that property. This is, of course, the only condition of affairs in which property can properlybe said to exist at all. We should not speak of a negro community inwhich most men were white, but the rare negroes were giants. We shouldnot conceive a married community in which most men were bachelors, andthree men had harems. A married community means a community where mostpeople are married; not a community where one or two people are verymuch married. A propertied community means a community where most peoplehave property; not a community where there are a few capitalists. But infact the Guildsmen (as also, for that matter, the serfs, semi-serfs andpeasants) were much richer than can be realized even from the fact thatthe Guilds protected the possession of houses, tools, and just payment. The surplus is self-evident upon any just study of the prices of theperiod, when all deductions have been made, of course, for the differentvalue of the actual coinage. When a man could get a goose or a gallon ofale for one or two of the smallest and commonest coins, the matter is inno way affected by the name of those coins. Even where the individualwealth was severely limited, the collective wealth was very large--thewealth of the Guilds, of the parishes, and especially of the monasticestates. It is important to remember this fact in the subsequenthistory of England. The next fact to note is that the local government grew out of thingslike the Guild system, and not the system from the government. Insketching the sound principles of this lost society, I shall not, ofcourse, be supposed by any sane person to be describing a moralparadise, or to be implying that it was free from the faults and fightsand sorrows that harass human life in all times, and certainly not leastin our own time. There was a fair amount of rioting and fighting inconnection with the Guilds; and there was especially for some time acombative rivalry between the guilds of merchants who sold things andthose of craftsmen who made them, a conflict in which the craftsmen onthe whole prevailed. But whichever party may have been predominant, itwas the heads of the Guild who became the heads of the town, and notvice versâ. The stiff survivals of this once very spontaneous uprisingcan again be seen in the now anomalous constitution of the Lord Mayorand the Livery of the City of London. We are told so monotonously thatthe government of our fathers reposed upon arms, that it is valid toinsist that this, their most intimate and everyday sort of government, was wholly based upon tools; a government in which the workman's toolbecame the sceptre. Blake, in one of his symbolic fantasies, suggeststhat in the Golden Age the gold and gems should be taken from the hiltof the sword and put upon the handle of the plough. But something verylike this did happen in the interlude of this mediæval democracy, fermenting under the crust of mediæval monarchy and aristocracy; whereproductive implements often took on the pomp of heraldry. The Guildsoften exhibited emblems and pageantry so compact of their most prosaicuses, that we can only parallel them by imagining armorial tabards, oreven religious vestments, woven out of a navvy's corderoys or a coster'spearl buttons. Two more points must be briefly added; and the rough sketch of this nowforeign and even fantastic state will be as complete as it can be madehere. Both refer to the links between this popular life and the politicswhich are conventially the whole of history. The first, and for that agethe most evident, is the Charter. To recur once more to the parallel ofTrades Unions, as convenient for the casual reader of to-day, theCharter of a Guild roughly corresponded to that "recognition" for whichthe railwaymen and other trades unionists asked some years ago, withoutsuccess. By this they had the authority of the King, the central ornational government; and this was of great moral weight with mediævals, who always conceived of freedom as a positive status, not as a negativeescape: they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akinto loneliness. Their view remains in the phrase about giving a man thefreedom of a city: they had no desire to give him the freedom of awilderness. To say that they had also the authority of the Church issomething of an understatement; for religion ran like a rich threadthrough the rude tapestry of these popular things while they were stillmerely popular; and many a trade society must have had a patron saintlong before it had a royal seal. The other point is that it was fromthese municipal groups already in existence that the first men werechosen for the largest and perhaps the last of the great mediævalexperiments: the Parliament. We have all read at school that Simon de Montfort and Edward I. , whenthey first summoned Commons to council, chiefly as advisers on localtaxation, called "two burgesses" from every town. If we had read alittle more closely, those simple words would have given away the wholesecret of the lost mediæval civilization. We had only to ask whatburgesses were, and whether they grew on trees. We should immediatelyhave discovered that England was full of little parliaments, out ofwhich the great parliament was made. And if it be a matter of wonderthat the great council (still called in quaint archaism by its old titleof the House of Commons) is the only one of these popular or electivecorporations of which we hear much in our books of history, theexplanation, I fear, is simple and a little sad. It is that theParliament was the one among these mediæval creations which ultimatelyconsented to betray and to destroy the rest. IX NATIONALITY AND THE FRENCH WARS If any one wishes to know what we mean when we say that Christendom wasand is one culture, or one civilization, there is a rough but plain wayof putting it. It is by asking what is the most common, or rather themost commonplace, of all the uses of the word "Christian. " There is, ofcourse, the highest use of all; but it has nowadays many other uses. Sometimes a Christian means an Evangelical. Sometimes, and morerecently, a Christian means a Quaker. Sometimes a Christian means amodest person who believes that he bears a resemblance to Christ. But ithas long had one meaning in casual speech among common people, and itmeans a culture or a civilization. Ben Gunn on Treasure Island did notactually say to Jim Hawkins, "I feel myself out of touch with a certaintype of civilization"; but he did say, "I haven't tasted Christianfood. " The old wives in a village looking at a lady with short hair andtrousers do not indeed say, "We perceive a divergence between herculture and our own"; but they do say, "Why can't she dress like aChristian?" That the sentiment has thus soaked down to the simplest andeven stupidest daily talk is but one evidence that Christendom was avery real thing. But it was also, as we have seen, a very localizedthing, especially in the Middle Ages. And that very lively localism theChristian faith and affections encouraged led at last to an excessiveand exclusive parochialism. There were rival shrines of the same saint, and a sort of duel between two statues of the same divinity. By aprocess it is now our difficult duty to follow, a real estrangementbetween European peoples began. Men began to feel that foreigners didnot eat or drink like Christians, and even, when the philosophic schismcame, to doubt if they were Christians. There was, indeed, much more than this involved. While the internalstructure of mediævalism was thus parochial and largely popular, in thegreater affairs, and especially the external affairs, such as peace andwar, most (though by no means all) of what was mediæval was monarchical. To see what the kings came to mean we must glance back at the greatbackground, as of darkness and daybreak, against which the first figuresof our history have already appeared. That background was the war withthe barbarians. While it lasted Christendom was not only one nation butmore like one city--and a besieged city. Wessex was but one wall orParis one tower of it; and in one tongue and spirit Bede might havechronicled the siege of Paris or Abbo sung the song of Alfred. Whatfollowed was a conquest and a conversion; all the end of the Dark Agesand the dawn of mediævalism is full of the evangelizing of barbarism. And it is the paradox of the Crusades that though the Saracen wassuperficially more civilized than the Christian, it was a sound instinctwhich saw him also to be in spirit a destroyer. In the simpler case ofnorthern heathenry the civilization spread with a simplier progress. Butit was not till the end of the Middle Ages, and close on theReformation, that the people of Prussia, the wild land lying beyondGermany, were baptized at all. A flippant person, if he permittedhimself a profane confusion with vaccination, might almost be inclinedto suggest that for some reason it didn't "take" even then. The barbarian peril was thus brought under bit by bit, and even in thecase of Islam the alien power which could not be crushed was evidentlycurbed. The Crusades became hopeless, but they also became needless. Asthese fears faded the princes of Europe, who had come together to facethem, were left facing each other. They had more leisure to find thattheir own captaincies clashed; but this would easily have beenoverruled, or would have produced a petty riot, had not the truecreative spontaneity, of which we have spoken in the local life, tendedto real variety. Royalties found they were representatives almostwithout knowing it; and many a king insisting on a genealogical tree ora title-deed found he spoke for the forests and the songs of a wholecountry-side. In England especially the transition is typified in theaccident which raised to the throne one of the noblest men of the MiddleAges. Edward I. Came clad in all the splendours of his epoch. He had taken theCross and fought the Saracens; he had been the only worthy foe of Simonde Montfort in those baronial wars which, as we have seen, were thefirst sign (however faint) of a serious theory that England should beruled by its barons rather than its kings. He proceeded, like Simon deMontfort, and more solidly, to develop the great mediæval institution ofa parliament. As has been said, it was superimposed on the existingparish democracies, and was first merely the summoning of localrepresentatives to advise on local taxation. Indeed its rise was onewith the rise of what we now call taxation; and there is thus a threadof theory leading to its latter claims to have the sole right of taxing. But in the beginning it was an instrument of the most equitable kings, and notably an instrument of Edward I. He often quarrelled with hisparliaments and may sometimes have displeased his people (which hasnever been at all the same thing), but on the whole he was supremely therepresentative sovereign. In this connection one curious and difficultquestion may be considered here, though it marks the end of a storythat began with the Norman Conquest. It is pretty certain that he wasnever more truly a representative king, one might say a republican king, than in the fact that he expelled the Jews. The problem is so muchmisunderstood and mixed with notions of a stupid spite against a giftedand historic race as such, that we must pause for a paragraph upon it. The Jews in the Middle Ages were as powerful as they were unpopular. They were the capitalists of the age, the men with wealth banked readyfor use. It is very tenable that in this way they were useful; it iscertain that in this way they were used. It is also quite fair to saythat in this way they were ill-used. The ill-usage was not indeed thatsuggested at random in romances, which mostly revolve on the one ideathat their teeth were pulled out. Those who know this as a story aboutKing John generally do not know the rather important fact that it was astory against King John. It is probably doubtful; it was only insistedon as exceptional; and it was, by that very insistence, obviouslyregarded as disreputable. But the real unfairness of the Jews' positionwas deeper and more distressing to a sensitive and highly civilizedpeople. They might reasonably say that Christian kings and nobles, andeven Christian popes and bishops, used for Christian purposes (such asthe Crusades and the cathedrals) the money that could only beaccumulated in such mountains by a usury they inconsistently denouncedas unchristian; and then, when worse times came, gave up the Jew to thefury of the poor, whom that useful usury had ruined. That was the realcase for the Jew; and no doubt he really felt himself oppressed. Unfortunately it was the case for the Christians that they, with atleast equal reason, felt him as the oppressor; and that _mutual_ chargeof tyranny is the Semitic trouble in all times. It is certain that inpopular sentiment, this Anti-Semitism was not excused asuncharitableness, but simply regarded as charity. Chaucer puts his curseon Hebrew cruelty into the mouth of the soft-hearted prioress, who weptwhen she saw a mouse in a trap; and it was when Edward, breaking therule by which the rulers had hitherto fostered their bankers' wealth, flung the alien financiers out of the land, that his people probably sawhim most plainly at once as a knight errant and a tender father of hispeople. Whatever the merits of this question, such a portrait of Edward was farfrom false. He was the most just and conscientious type of mediævalmonarch; and it is exactly this fact that brings into relief the newforce which was to cross his path and in strife with which he died. While he was just, he was also eminently legal. And it must beremembered, if we would not merely read back ourselves into the past, that much of the dispute of the time was legal; the adjustment ofdynastic and feudal differences not yet felt to be anything else. Inthis spirit Edward was asked to arbitrate by the rival claimants to theScottish crown; and in this sense he seems to have arbitrated quitehonestly. But his legal, or, as some would say, pedantic mind made theproviso that the Scottish king as such was already under his suzerainty, and he probably never understood the spirit he called up against him;for that spirit had as yet no name. We call it to-day Nationalism. Scotland resisted; and the adventures of an outlawed knight namedWallace soon furnished it with one of those legends which are moreimportant than history. In a way that was then at least equallypractical, the Catholic priests of Scotland became especially thepatriotic and Anti-English party; as indeed they remained eventhroughout the Reformation. Wallace was defeated and executed; but theheather was already on fire; and the espousal of the new national causeby one of Edward's own knights named Bruce, seemed to the old king amere betrayal of feudal equity. He died in a final fury at the head of anew invasion upon the very border of Scotland. With his last words thegreat king commanded that his bones should be borne in front of thebattle; and the bones, which were of gigantic size, were eventuallyburied with the epitaph, "Here lies Edward the Tall, who was the hammerof the Scots. " It was a true epitaph, but in a sense exactly opposite toits intention. He was their hammer, but he did not break but make them;for he smote them on an anvil and he forged them into a sword. That coincidence or course of events, which must often be remarked inthis story, by which (for whatever reason) our most powerful kings didnot somehow leave their power secure, showed itself in the next reign, when the baronial quarrels were resumed and the northern kingdom, underBruce, cut itself finally free by the stroke of Bannockburn. Otherwisethe reign is a mere interlude, and it is with the succeeding one that wefind the new national tendency yet further developed. The great Frenchwars, in which England won so much glory, were opened by Edward III. , and grew more and more nationalist. But even to feel the transition ofthe time we must first realize that the third Edward made as strictlylegal and dynastic a claim to France as the first Edward had made toScotland; the claim was far weaker in substance, but it was equallyconventional in form. He thought, or said, he had a claim on a kingdomas a squire might say he had a claim on an estate; superficially it wasan affair for the English and French lawyers. To read into this that thepeople were sheep bought and sold is to misunderstand all mediævalhistory; sheep have no trade union. The English arms owed much of theirforce to the class of the free yeomen; and the success of the infantry, especially of the archery, largely stood for that popular element whichhad already unhorsed the high French chivalry at Courtrai. But the pointis this; that while the lawyers were talking about the Salic Law, thesoldiers, who would once have been talking about guild law or glebelaw, were already talking about English law and French law. The Frenchwere first in this tendency to see something outside the township, thetrade brotherhood, the feudal dues, or the village common. The wholehistory of the change can be seen in the fact that the French had earlybegun to call the nation the Greater Land. France was the first ofnations and has remained the norm of nations, the only one which is anation and nothing else. But in the collision the English grew equallycorporate; and a true patriotic applause probably hailed the victoriesof Crecy and Poitiers, as it certainly hailed the later victory ofAgincourt. The latter did not indeed occur until after an interval ofinternal revolutions in England, which will be considered on a laterpage; but as regards the growth of nationalism, the French wars werecontinuous. And the English tradition that followed after Agincourt wascontinuous also. It is embodied in rude and spirited ballads before thegreat Elizabethans. The Henry V. Of Shakespeare is not indeed the HenryV. Of history; yet he is more historic. He is not only a saner and moregenial but a more important person. For the tradition of the wholeadventure was not that of Henry, but of the populace who turned Henryinto Harry. There were a thousand Harries in the army at Agincourt, andnot one. For the figure that Shakespeare framed out of the legends ofthe great victory is largely the figure that all men saw as theEnglishman of the Middle Ages. He did not really talk in poetry, likeShakespeare's hero, but he would have liked to. Not being able to do so, he sang; and the English people principally appear in contemporaryimpressions as the singing people. They were evidently not onlyexpansive but exaggerative; and perhaps it was not only in battle thatthey drew the long bow. That fine farcical imagery, which has descendedto the comic songs and common speech of the English poor even to-day, had its happy infancy when England thus became a nation; though themodern poor, under the pressure of economic progress, have partly lostthe gaiety and kept only the humour. But in that early April ofpatriotism the new unity of the State still sat lightly upon them; and acobbler in Henry's army, who would at home have thought first that itwas the day of St. Crispin of the Cobblers, might truly as well assincerely have hailed the splintering of the French lances in a storm ofarrows, and cried, "St. George for Merry England. " Human things are uncomfortably complex, and while it was the April ofpatriotism it was the Autumn of mediæval society. In the next chapter Ishall try to trace the forces that were disintegrating the civilization;and even here, after the first victories, it is necessary to insist onthe bitterness and barren ambition that showed itself more and more inthe later stages, as the long French wars dragged on. France was at thetime far less happy than England--wasted by the treason of its noblesand the weakness of its kings almost as much as by the invasion of theislanders. And yet it was this very despair and humiliation that seemedat last to rend the sky, and let in the light of what it is hard for thecoldest historian to call anything but a miracle. It may be this apparent miracle that has apparently made Nationalismeternal. It may be conjectured, though the question is too difficult tobe developed here, that there was something in the great moral changewhich turned the Roman Empire into Christendom, by which each greatthing, to which it afterwards gave birth, was baptized into a promise, or at least into a hope of permanence. It may be that each of its ideaswas, as it were, mixed with immortality. Certainly something of thiskind can be seen in the conception which turned marriage from a contractinto a sacrament. But whatever the cause, it is certain that even forthe most secular types of our own time their relation to their nativeland has become not contractual but sacramental. We may say that flagsare rags, that frontiers are fictions, but the very men who have said itfor half their lives are dying for a rag, and being rent in pieces for afiction even as I write. When the battle-trumpet blew in 1914 modernhumanity had grouped itself into nations almost before it knew what ithad done. If the same sound is heard a thousand years hence, there is nosign in the world to suggest to any rational man that humanity will notdo exactly the same thing. But even if this great and strangedevelopment be not enduring, the point is that it is felt as enduring. It is hard to give a definition of loyalty, but perhaps we come near itif we call it the thing which operates where an obligation is felt to beunlimited. And the minimum of duty or even decency asked of a patriot isthe maximum that is asked by the most miraculous view of marriage. Therecognized reality of patriotism is not mere citizenship. The recognizedreality of patriotism is for better for worse, for richer for poorer, insickness and in health, in national growth and glory and in nationaldisgrace and decline; it is not to travel in the ship of state as apassenger, but if need be to go down with the ship. It is needless to tell here again the tale of that earthquake episode inwhich a clearance in the earth and sky, above the confusion andabasement of the crowns, showed the commanding figure of a woman of thepeople. She was, in her own living loneliness, a French Revolution. Shewas the proof that a certain power was not in the French kings or in theFrench knights, but in the French. But the fact that she saw somethingabove her that was other than the sky, the fact that she lived the lifeof a saint and died the death of a martyr, probably stamped the newnational sentiment with a sacred seal. And the fact that she fought fora defeated country, and, even though it was victorious, was herselfultimately defeated, defines that darker element of devotion of which Ispoke above, which makes even pessimism consistent with patriotism. Itis more appropriate in this place to consider the ultimate reaction ofthis sacrifice upon the romance and the realities of England. I have never counted it a patriotic part to plaster my own country withconventional and unconvincing compliments; but no one can understandEngland who does not understand that such an episode as this, in whichshe was so clearly in the wrong, has yet been ultimately linked up witha curious quality in which she is rather unusually in the right. No onecandidly comparing us with other countries can say we have speciallyfailed to build the sepulchres of the prophets we stoned, or even theprophets who stoned us. The English historical tradition has at least aloose large-mindedness which always finally falls into the praise notonly of great foreigners but great foes. Often along with much injusticeit has an illogical generosity; and while it will dismiss a great peoplewith mere ignorance, it treats a great personality with heartyhero-worship. There are more examples than one even in this chapter, forour books may well make out Wallace a better man than he was, as theyafterwards assigned to Washington an even better cause than he had. Thackeray smiled at Miss Jane Porter's picture of Wallace, going intowar weeping with a cambric pocket-handkerchief; but her attitude wasmore English and not less accurate. For her idealization was, ifanything, nearer the truth than Thackeray's own notion of a mediævalismof hypocritical hogs-in-armour. Edward, who figures as a tyrant, couldweep with compassion; and it is probable enough that Wallace wept, withor without a pocket-handkerchief. Moreover, her romance was a reality, the reality of nationalism; and she knew much more about the Scottishpatriots ages before her time than Thackeray did about the Irishpatriots immediately under his nose. Thackeray was a great man; but inthat matter he was a very small man, and indeed an invisible one. Thecases of Wallace and Washington and many others are here only mentioned, however, to suggest an eccentric magnanimity which surely balances someof our prejudices. We have done many foolish things, but we have atleast done one fine thing; we have whitewashed our worst enemies. If wehave done this for a bold Scottish raider and a vigorous Virginianslave-holder, it may at least show that we are not likely to fail in ourfinal appreciation of the one white figure in the motley processions ofwar. I believe there to be in modern England something like a universalenthusiasm on this subject. We have seen a great English critic write abook about this heroine, in opposition to a great French critic, solelyin order to blame him for not having praised her enough. And I do notbelieve there lives an Englishman now, who if he had the offer of beingan Englishman then, would not discard his chance of riding as thecrowned conqueror at the head of all the spears of Agincourt, if hecould be that English common soldier of whom tradition tells that hebroke his spear asunder to bind it into a cross for Joan of Arc. X THE WAR OF THE USURPERS The poet Pope, though a friend of the greatest of Tory Democrats, Bolingbroke, necessarily lived in a world in which even Toryism wasWhiggish. And the Whig as a wit never expressed his political point moreclearly than in Pope's line which ran: "The right divine of kings togovern wrong. " It will be apparent, when I deal with that period, that Ido not palliate the real unreason in divine right as Filmer and some ofthe pedantic cavaliers construed it. They professed the impossible idealof "non-resistance" to any national and legitimate power; though Icannot see that even that was so servile and superstitious as the moremodern ideal of "non-resistance" even to a foreign and lawless power. But the seventeenth century was an age of sects, that is of fads; andthe Filmerites made a fad of divine right. Its roots were older, equallyreligious but much more realistic; and though tangled with many otherand even opposite things of the Middle Ages, ramify through all thechanges we have now to consider. The connection can hardly be statedbetter than by taking Pope's easy epigram and pointing out that it is, after all, very weak in philosophy. "The right divine of kings togovern wrong, " considered as a sneer, really evades all that we mean by"a right. " To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to beright in doing it. What Pope says satirically about a divine right iswhat we all say quite seriously about a human right. If a man has aright to vote, has he not a right to vote wrong? If a man has a right tochoose his wife, has he not a right to choose wrong? I have a right toexpress the opinion which I am now setting down; but I should hesitateto make the controversial claim that this proves the opinion to beright. Now mediæval monarchy, though only one aspect of mediæval rule, wasroughly represented in the idea that the ruler had a right to rule as avoter has a right to vote. He might govern wrong, but unless he governedhorribly and extravagantly wrong, he retained his position of right; asa private man retains his right to marriage and locomotion unless hegoes horribly and extravagantly off his head. It was not really even sosimple as this; for the Middle Ages were not, as it is often the fashionto fancy, under a single and steely discipline. They were verycontroversial and therefore very complex; and it is easy, by isolatingitems whether about _jus divinum_ or _primus inter pares_, to maintainthat the mediævals were almost anything; it has been seriouslymaintained that they were all Germans. But it is true that the influenceof the Church, though by no means of all the great churchmen, encouraged the sense of a sort of sacrament of government, which wasmeant to make the monarch terrible and therefore often made the mantyrannical. The disadvantage of such despotism is obvious enough. Theprecise nature of its advantage must be better understood than it is, not for its own sake so much as for the story we have now to tell. The advantage of "divine right, " or irremovable legitimacy, is this;that there is a limit to the ambitions of the rich. "_Roi ne puis_"; theroyal power, whether it was or was not the power of heaven, was in onerespect like the power of heaven. It was not for sale. Constitutionalmoralists have often implied that a tyrant and a rabble have the samevices. It has perhaps been less noticed that a tyrant and a rabble mostemphatically have the same virtues. And one virtue which they verymarkedly share is that neither tyrants nor rabbles are snobs; they donot care a button what they do to wealthy people. It is true thattyranny was sometimes treated as coming from the heavens almost in thelesser and more literal sense of coming from the sky; a man no moreexpected to be the king than to be the west wind or the morning star. But at least no wicked miller can chain the wind to turn only his ownmill; no pedantic scholar can trim the morning star to be his ownreading-lamp. Yet something very like this is what really happened toEngland in the later Middle Ages; and the first sign of it, I fancy, wasthe fall of Richard II. Shakespeare's historical plays are something truer than historical;they are traditional; the living memory of many things lingered, thoughthe memory of others was lost. He is right in making Richard II. Incarnate the claim to divine right; and Bolingbroke the baronialambition which ultimately broke up the old mediæval order. But divineright had become at once drier and more fantastic by the time of theTudors. Shakespeare could not recover the fresh and popular part of thething; for he came at a later stage in a process of stiffening which isthe main thing to be studied in later mediævalism. Richard himself waspossibly a wayward and exasperating prince; it might well be the weaklink that snapped in the strong chain of the Plantagenets. There mayhave been a real case against the _coup d'état_ which he effected in1397, and his kinsman Henry of Bolingbroke may have had strong sectionsof disappointed opinion on his side when he effected in 1399 the firsttrue usurpation in English history. But if we wish to understand thatlarger tradition which even Shakespeare had lost, we must glance back atsomething which befell Richard even in the first years of his reign. Itwas certainly the greatest event of his reign; and it was possibly thegreatest event of all the reigns which are rapidly considered in thisbook. The real English people, the men who work with their hands, liftedtheir hands to strike their masters, probably for the first andcertainly for the last time in history. Pagan slavery had slowly perished, not so much by decaying as bydeveloping into something better. In one sense it did not die, butrather came to life. The slave-owner was like a man who should set up arow of sticks for a fence, and then find they had struck root and werebudding into small trees. They would be at once more valuable and lessmanageable, especially less portable; and such a difference between astick and a tree was precisely the difference between a slave and aserf--or even the free peasant which the serf seemed rapidly tending tobecome. It was, in the best sense of a battered phrase, a socialevolution, and it had the great evil of one. The evil was that while itwas essentially orderly, it was still literally lawless. That is, theemancipation of the commons had already advanced very far, but it hadnot yet advanced far enough to be embodied in a law. The custom was"unwritten, " like the British Constitution, and (like that evolutionary, not to say evasive entity) could always be overridden by the rich, whonow drive their great coaches through Acts of Parliament. The newpeasant was still legally a slave, and was to learn it by one of thoseturns of fortune which confound a foolish faith in the common sense ofunwritten constitutions. The French Wars gradually grew to be almost asmuch of a scourge to England as they were to France. England wasdespoiled by her own victories; luxury and poverty increased at theextremes of society; and, by a process more proper to an ensuingchapter, the balance of the better mediævalism was lost. Finally, afurious plague, called the Black Death, burst like a blast on the land, thinning the population and throwing the work of the world into ruin. There was a shortage of labour; a difficulty of getting luxuries; andthe great lords did what one would expect them to do. They becamelawyers, and upholders of the letter of the law. They appealed to a rulealready nearly obsolete, to drive the serf back to the more directservitude of the Dark Ages. They announced their decision to the people, and the people rose in arms. The two dramatic stories which connect Wat Tyler, doubtfully with thebeginning, and definitely with the end of the revolt, are far fromunimportant, despite the desire of our present prosaic historians topretend that all dramatic stories are unimportant. The tale of Tyler'sfirst blow is significant in the sense that it is not only dramatic butdomestic. It avenged an insult to the family, and made the legend of thewhole riot, whatever its incidental indecencies, a sort of demonstrationon behalf of decency. This is important; for the dignity of the poor isalmost unmeaning in modern debates; and an inspector need only bring aprinted form and a few long words to do the same thing without havinghis head broken. The occasion of the protest, and the form which thefeudal reaction had first taken, was a Poll Tax; but this was but apart of a general process of pressing the population to servile labour, which fully explains the ferocious language held by the government afterthe rising had failed; the language in which it threatened to make thestate of the serf more servile than before. The facts attending thefailure in question are less in dispute. The mediæval populace showedconsiderable military energy and co-operation, stormed its way toLondon, and was met outside the city by a company containing the Kingand the Lord Mayor, who were forced to consent to a parley. Thetreacherous stabbing of Tyler by the Mayor gave the signal for battleand massacre on the spot. The peasants closed in roaring, "They havekilled our leader"; when a strange thing happened; something which givesus a fleeting and a final glimpse of the crowned sacramental man of theMiddle Ages. For one wild moment divine right was divine. The King was no more than a boy; his very voice must have rung out tothat multitude almost like the voice of a child. But the power of hisfathers and the great Christendom from which he came fell in somestrange fashion upon him; and riding out alone before the people, hecried out, "I am your leader"; and himself promised to grant them allthey asked. That promise was afterwards broken; but those who see in thebreach of it the mere fickleness of the young and frivolous king, arenot only shallow but utterly ignorant interpreters of the whole trendof that time. The point that must be seized, if subsequent things are tobe seen as they are, is that Parliament certainly encouraged, andParliament almost certainly obliged, the King to repudiate the people. For when, after the rejoicing revolutionists had disarmed and werebetrayed, the King urged a humane compromise on the Parliament, theParliament furiously refused it. Already Parliament is not merely agoverning body but a governing class. Parliament was as contemptuous ofthe peasants in the fourteenth as of the Chartists in the nineteenthcentury. This council, first summoned by the king like juries and manyother things, to get from plain men rather reluctant evidence abouttaxation, has already become an object of ambition, and is, therefore, an aristocracy. There is already war, in this case literally to theknife, between the Commons with a large C and the commons with a smallone. Talking about the knife, it is notable that the murderer of Tylerwas not a mere noble but an elective magistrate of the mercantileoligarchy of London; though there is probably no truth in the tale thathis blood-stained dagger figures on the arms of the City of London. Themediæval Londoners were quite capable of assassinating a man, but not ofsticking so dirty a knife into the neighbourhood of the cross of theirRedeemer, in the place which is really occupied by the sword of St. Paul. It is remarked above that Parliament was now an aristocracy, being anobject of ambition. The truth is, perhaps, more subtle than this; but ifever men yearn to serve on juries we may probably guess that juries areno longer popular. Anyhow, this must be kept in mind, as against theopposite idea of the _jus divinum_ or fixed authority, if we wouldappreciate the fall of Richard. If the thing which dethroned him was arebellion, it was a rebellion of the parliament, of the thing that hadjust proved much more pitiless than he towards a rebellion of thepeople. But this is not the main point. The point is that by the removalof Richard, a step above the parliament became possible for the firsttime. The transition was tremendous; the crown became an object ofambition. That which one could snatch another could snatch from him;that which the House of Lancaster held merely by force the House of Yorkcould take from it by force. The spell of an undethronable thing seatedout of reach was broken, and for three unhappy generations adventurersstrove and stumbled on a stairway slippery with blood, above which wassomething new in the mediæval imagination; an empty throne. It is obvious that the insecurity of the Lancastrian usurper, largelybecause he was a usurper, is the clue to many things, some of which weshould now call good, some bad, all of which we should probably callgood or bad with the excessive facility with which we dismiss distantthings. It led the Lancastrian House to lean on Parliament, which wasthe mixed matter we have already seen. It may have been in some waysgood for the monarchy, to be checked and challenged by an institutionwhich at least kept something of the old freshness and freedom ofspeech. It was almost certainly bad for the parliament, making it yetmore the ally of the mere ambitious noble, of which we shall see muchlater. It also led the Lancastrian House to lean on patriotism, whichwas perhaps more popular; to make English the tongue of the court forthe first time, and to reopen the French wars with the fine flag-wavingof Agincourt. It led it again to lean on the Church, or rather, perhaps, on the higher clergy, and that in the least worthy aspect ofclericalism. A certain morbidity which more and more darkened the end ofmediævalism showed itself in new and more careful cruelties against thelast crop of heresies. A slight knowledge of the philosophy of theseheresies will lend little support to the notion that they were inthemselves prophetic of the Reformation. It is hard to see how anybodycan call Wycliffe a Protestant unless he calls Palagius or Arius aProtestant; and if John Ball was a Reformer, Latimer was not a Reformer. But though the new heresies did not even hint at the beginning ofEnglish Protestantism, they did, perhaps, hint at the end of EnglishCatholicism. Cobham did not light a candle to be handed on toNonconformist chapels; but Arundel did light a torch, and put it to hisown church. Such real unpopularity as did in time attach to the oldreligious system, and which afterwards became a true national traditionagainst Mary, was doubtless started by the diseased energy of thesefifteenth-century bishops. Persecution can be a philosophy, and adefensible philosophy, but with some of these men persecution was rathera perversion. Across the channel, one of them was presiding at the trialof Joan of Arc. But this perversion, this diseased energy, is the power in all the epochthat follows the fall of Richard II. , and especially in those feuds thatfound so ironic an imagery in English roses--and thorns. Theforeshortening of such a backward glance as this book can alone claim tobe, forbids any entrance into the military mazes of the wars of York andLancaster, or any attempt to follow the thrilling recoveries andrevenges which filled the lives of Warwick the Kingmaker and the warlikewidow of Henry V. The rivals were not, indeed, as is sometimesexaggeratively implied, fighting for nothing, or even (like the lion andthe unicorn) merely fighting for the crown. The shadow of a moraldifference can still be traced even in that stormy twilight of a heroictime. But when we have said that Lancaster stood, on the whole, for thenew notion of a king propped by parliaments and powerful bishops, andYork, on the whole, for the remains of the older idea of a king whopermits nothing to come between him and his people, we have saideverything of permanent political interest that could be traced bycounting all the bows of Barnet or all the lances of Tewkesbury. Butthis truth, that there was something which can only vaguely be calledTory about the Yorkists, has at least one interest, that it lends ajustifiable romance to the last and most remarkable figure of thefighting House of York, with whose fall the Wars of the Roses ended. If we desire at all to catch the strange colours of the sunset of theMiddle Ages, to see what had changed yet not wholly killed chivalry, there is no better study than the riddle of Richard III. Of course, scarcely a line of him was like the caricature with which his muchmeaner successor placarded the world when he was dead. He was not even ahunchback; he had one shoulder slightly higher than the other, probablythe effect of his furious swordsmanship on a naturally slender andsensitive frame. Yet his soul, if not his body, haunts us somehow as thecrooked shadow of a straight knight of better days. He was not an ogreshedding rivers of blood; some of the men he executed deserved it asmuch as any men of that wicked time; and even the tale of his murderednephews is not certain, and is told by those who also tell us he wasborn with tusks and was originally covered with hair. Yet a crimsoncloud cannot be dispelled from his memory, and, so tainted is the veryair of that time with carnage, that we cannot say he was incapable evenof the things of which he may have been innocent. Whether or no he was agood man, he was apparently a good king and even a popular one; yet wethink of him vaguely, and not, I fancy, untruly, as on sufferance. Heanticipated the Renascence in an abnormal enthusiasm for art and music, and he seems to have held to the old paths of religion and charity. Hedid not pluck perpetually at his sword and dagger because his onlypleasure was in cutting throats; he probably did it because he wasnervous. It was the age of our first portrait-painting, and a finecontemporary portrait of him throws a more plausible light on thisparticular detail. For it shows him touching, and probably twisting, aring on his finger, the very act of a high-strung personality who wouldalso fidget with a dagger. And in his face, as there painted, we canstudy all that has made it worth while to pause so long upon his name;an atmosphere very different from everything before and after. The facehas a remarkable intellectual beauty; but there is something else on theface that is hardly in itself either good or evil, and that thing isdeath; the death of an epoch, the death of a great civilization, thedeath of something which once sang to the sun in the canticle of St. Francis and sailed to the ends of the earth in the ships of the FirstCrusade, but which in peace wearied and turned its weapons inwards, wounded its own brethren, broke its own loyalties, gambled for thecrown, and grew feverish even about the creed, and has this one graceamong its dying virtues, that its valour is the last to die. But whatever else may have been bad or good about Richard of Gloucester, there was a touch about him which makes him truly the last of themediæval kings. It is expressed in the one word which he cried aloud ashe struck down foe after foe in the last charge at Bosworth--treason. For him, as for the first Norman kings, treason was the same astreachery; and in this case at least it was the same as treachery. Whenhis nobles deserted him before the battle, he did not regard it as a newpolitical combination, but as the sin of false friends and faithlessservants. Using his own voice like the trumpet of a herald, hechallenged his rival to a fight as personal as that of two paladins ofCharlemagne. His rival did not reply, and was not likely to reply. Themodern world had begun. The call echoed unanswered down the ages; forsince that day no English king has fought after that fashion. Havingslain many, he was himself slain and his diminished force destroyed. Soended the war of the usurpers; and the last and most doubtful of all theusurpers, a wanderer from the Welsh marches, a knight from nowhere, found the crown of England under a bush of thorn. XI THE REBELLION OF THE RICH Sir Thomas More, apart from any arguments about the more mystical meshesin which he was ultimately caught and killed, will be hailed by all as ahero of the New Learning; that great dawn of a more rational daylightwhich for so many made mediævalism seem a mere darkness. Whatever wethink of his appreciation of the Reformation, there will be no disputeabout his appreciation of the Renascence. He was above all things aHumanist and a very human one. He was even in many ways very modern, which some rather erroneously suppose to be the same as being human; hewas also humane, in the sense of humanitarian. He sketched an ideal, orrather perhaps a fanciful social system, with something of the ingenuityof Mr. H. G. Wells, but essentially with much more than the flippancyattributed to Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not fair to charge the Utopiannotions upon his morality; but their subjects and suggestions mark what(for want of a better word) we can only call his modernism. Thus theimmortality of animals is the sort of transcendentalism which savours ofevolution; and the grosser jest about the preliminaries of marriagemight be taken quite seriously by the students of Eugenics. He suggesteda sort of pacifism--though the Utopians had a quaint way of achievingit. In short, while he was, with his friend Erasmus, a satirist ofmediæval abuses, few would now deny that Protestantism would be toonarrow rather than too broad for him. If he was obviously not aProtestant, there are few Protestants who would deny him the name of aReformer. But he was an innovator in things more alluring to modernminds than theology; he was partly what we should call a Neo-Pagan. Hisfriend Colet summed up that escape from mediævalism which might becalled the passage from bad Latin to good Greek. In our loose moderndebates they are lumped together; but Greek learning was the growth ofthis time; there had always been a popular Latin, if a dog-Latin. Itwould be nearer the truth to call the mediævals bi-lingual than to calltheir Latin a dead language. Greek never, of course, became so general apossession; but for the man who got it, it is not too much to say thathe felt as if he were in the open air for the first time. Much of thisGreek spirit was reflected in More; its universality, its urbanity, itsbalance of buoyant reason and cool curiosity. It is even probable thathe shared some of the excesses and errors of taste which inevitablyinfected the splendid intellectualism of the reaction against the MiddleAges; we can imagine him thinking gargoyles Gothic, in the sense ofbarbaric, or even failing to be stirred, as Sydney was, by the trumpetof "Chevy Chase. " The wealth of the ancient heathen world, in wit, loveliness, and civic heroism, had so recently been revealed to thatgeneration in its dazzling profusion and perfection, that it might seema trifle if they did here and there an injustice to the relics of theDark Ages. When, therefore, we look at the world with the eyes of Morewe are looking from the widest windows of that time; looking over anEnglish landscape seen for the first time very equally, in the levellight of the sun at morning. For what he saw was England of theRenascence; England passing from the mediæval to the modern. Thus helooked forth, and saw many things and said many things; they were allworthy and many witty; but he noted one thing which is at once ahorrible fancy and a homely and practical fact. He who looked over thatlandscape said: "Sheep are eating men. " This singular summary of the great epoch of our emancipation andenlightenment is not the fact usually put first in such very curthistorical accounts of it. It has nothing to do with the translation ofthe Bible, or the character of Henry VIII. , or the characters of HenryVIII. 's wives, or the triangular debates between Henry and Luther andthe Pope. It was not Popish sheep who were eating Protestant men, or_vice versa_; nor did Henry, at any period of his own brief and ratherbewildering papacy, have martyrs eaten by lambs as the heathen had themeaten by lions. What was meant, of course, by this picturesqueexpression, was that an intensive type of agriculture was giving way toa very extensive type of pasture. Great spaces of England which hadhitherto been cut up into the commonwealth of a number of farmers werebeing laid under the sovereignty of a solitary shepherd. The point hasbeen put, by a touch of epigram rather in the manner of More himself, byMr. J. Stephen, in a striking essay now, I think, only to be found inthe back files of _The New Witness_. He enunciated the paradox that thevery much admired individual, who made two blades of grass grow insteadof one, was a murderer. In the same article, Mr. Stephen traced the truemoral origins of this movement, which led to the growing of so muchgrass and the murder, or at any rate the destruction, of so muchhumanity. He traced it, and every true record of that transformationtraces it, to the growth of a new refinement, in a sense a more rationalrefinement, in the governing class. The mediæval lord had been, bycomparison, a coarse fellow; he had merely lived in the largest kind offarm-house after the fashion of the largest kind of farmer. He drankwine when he could, but he was quite ready to drink ale; and science hadnot yet smoothed his paths with petrol. At a time later than this, oneof the greatest ladies of England writes to her husband that she cannotcome to him because her carriage horses are pulling the plough. In thetrue Middle Ages the greatest men were even more rudely hampered, butin the time of Henry VIII. The transformation was beginning. In the nextgeneration a phrase was common which is one of the keys of the time, andis very much the key to these more ambitious territorial schemes. Thisor that great lord was said to be "Italianate. " It meant subtler shapesof beauty, delicate and ductile glass, gold and silver not treated asbarbaric stones but rather as stems and wreaths of molten metal, mirrors, cards and such trinkets bearing a load of beauty; it meant theperfection of trifles. It was not, as in popular Gothic craftsmanship, the almost unconscious touch of art upon all necessary things: rather itwas the pouring of the whole soul of passionately conscious artespecially into unnecessary things. Luxury was made alive with a soul. We must remember this real thirst for beauty; for it is anexplanation--and an excuse. The old barony had indeed been thinned by the civil wars that closed atBosworth, and curtailed by the economical and crafty policy of thatunkingly king, Henry VII. He was himself a "new man, " and we shall seethe barons largely give place to a whole nobility of new men. But eventhe older families already had their faces set in the newer direction. Some of them, the Howards, for instance, may be said to have figuredboth as old and new families. In any case the spirit of the whole upperclass can be described as increasingly new. The English aristocracy, which is the chief creation of the Reformation, is undeniably entitledto a certain praise, which is now almost universally regarded as veryhigh praise. It was always progressive. Aristocrats are accused of beingproud of their ancestors; it can truly be said that English aristocratshave rather been proud of their descendants. For their descendants theyplanned huge foundations and piled mountains of wealth; for theirdescendants they fought for a higher and higher place in the governmentof the state; for their descendants, above all, they nourished every newscience or scheme of social philosophy. They seized the vast economicchances of pasturage; but they also drained the fens. They swept awaythe priests, but they condescended to the philosophers. As the new Tudorhouse passes through its generations a new and more rationalistcivilization is being made; scholars are criticizing authentic texts;sceptics are discrediting not only popish saints but pagan philosophers;specialists are analyzing and rationalizing traditions, and sheep areeating men. We have seen that in the fourteenth century in England there was a realrevolution of the poor. It very nearly succeeded; and I need not concealthe conviction that it would have been the best possible thing for allof us if it had entirely succeeded. If Richard II. Had really sprunginto the saddle of Wat Tyler, or rather if his parliament had notunhorsed him when he had got there, if he had confirmed the fact of thenew peasant freedom by some form of royal authority, as it was alreadycommon to confirm the fact of the Trade Unions by the form of a royalcharter, our country would probably have had as happy a history as ispossible to human nature. The Renascence, when it came, would have comeas popular education and not the culture of a club of æsthetics. The NewLearning might have been as democratic as the old learning in the olddays of mediæval Paris and Oxford. The exquisite artistry of the schoolof Cellini might have been but the highest grade of the craft of aguild. The Shakespearean drama might have been acted by workmen onwooden stages set up in the street like Punch and Judy, the finerfulfilment of the miracle play as it was acted by a guild. The playersneed not have been "the king's servants, " but their own masters. Thegreat Renascence might have been liberal with its liberal education. Ifthis be a fancy, it is at least one that cannot be disproved; themediæval revolution was too unsuccessful at the beginning for any one toshow that it need have been unsuccessful in the end. The feudalparliament prevailed, and pushed back the peasants at least into theirdubious and half-developed status. More than this it would beexaggerative to say, and a mere anticipation of the really decisiveevents afterwards. When Henry VIII. Came to the throne the guilds wereperhaps checked but apparently unchanged, and even the peasants hadprobably regained ground; many were still theoretically serfs, butlargely under the easy landlordism of the abbots; the mediæval systemstill stood. It might, for all we know, have begun to grow again; butall such speculations are swamped in new and very strange things. Thefailure of the revolution of the poor was ultimately followed by acounter-revolution; a successful revolution of the rich. The apparent pivot of it was in certain events, political and evenpersonal. They roughly resolve themselves into two: the marriages ofHenry VIII. And the affair of the monasteries. The marriages of HenryVIII. Have long been a popular and even a stale joke; and there is atruth of tradition in the joke, as there is in almost any joke if it issufficiently popular, and indeed if it is sufficiently stale. A jocularthing never lives to be stale unless it is also serious. Henry waspopular in his first days, and even foreign contemporaries give us quitea glorious picture of a young prince of the Renascence, radiant with allthe new accomplishments. In his last days he was something very like amaniac; he no longer inspired love, and even when he inspired fear, itwas rather the fear of a mad dog than of a watch-dog. In this changedoubtless the inconsistency and even ignominy of his Bluebeard weddingsplayed a great part. And it is but just to him to say that, perhaps withthe exception of the first and the last, he was almost as unlucky in hiswives as they were in their husband. But it was undoubtedly the affairof the first divorce that broke the back of his honour, andincidentally broke a very large number of other more valuable anduniversal things. To feel the meaning of his fury we must realize thathe did not regard himself as the enemy but rather as the friend of thePope; there is a shadow of the old story of Becket. He had defended thePope in diplomacy and the Church in controversy; and when he wearied ofhis queen and took a passionate fancy to one of her ladies, Anne Boleyn, he vaguely felt that a rather cynical concession, in that age of cynicalconcessions, might very well be made to him by a friend. But it is partof that high inconsistency which is the fate of the Christian faith inhuman hands, that no man knows when the higher side of it will really beuppermost, if only for an instant; and that the worst ages of the Churchwill not do or say something, as if by accident, that is worthy of thebest. Anyhow, for whatever reason, Henry sought to lean upon thecushions of Leo and found he had struck his arm upon the rock of Peter. The Pope denied the new marriage; and Henry, in a storm and darkness ofanger, dissolved all the old relations with the Papacy. It is probablethat he did not clearly know how much he was doing then; and it is verytenable that we do not know it now. He certainly did not think he wasAnti-Catholic; and, in one rather ridiculous sense, we can hardly saythat he thought he was anti-papal, since he apparently thought he was apope. From this day really dates something that played a certain part inhistory, the more modern doctrine of the divine right of kings, widelydifferent from the mediæval one. It is a matter which furtherembarrasses the open question about the continuity of Catholic things inAnglicanism, for it was a new note and yet one struck by the olderparty. The supremacy of the King over the English national church wasnot, unfortunately, merely a fad of the King, but became partly, and forone period, a fad of the church. But apart from all controvertedquestions, there is at least a human and historic sense in which thecontinuity of our past is broken perilously at this point. Henry notonly cut off England from Europe, but what was even more important, hecuts off England from England. The great divorce brought down Wolsey, the mighty minister who had heldthe scales between the Empire and the French Monarchy, and made themodern balance of power in Europe. He is often described under thedictum of _Ego et Rex Meus_; but he marks a stage in the English storyrather because he suffered for it than because he said it. _Ego et RexMeus_ might be the motto of any modern Prime Minister; for we haveforgotten the very fact that the word minister merely means servant. Wolsey was the last great servant who could be, and was, simplydismissed; the mark of a monarchy still absolute; the English wereamazed at it in modern Germany, when Bismarck was turned away like abutler. A more awful act proved the new force was already inhuman; itstruck down the noblest of the Humanists. Thomas More, who seemedsometimes like an Epicurean under Augustus, died the death of a saintunder Diocletian. He died gloriously jesting; and the death hasnaturally drawn out for us rather the sacred savours of his soul; histenderness and his trust in the truth of God. But for Humanism it musthave seemed a monstrous sacrifice; it was somehow as if Montaigne were amartyr. And that is indeed the note; something truly to be calledunnatural had already entered the naturalism of the Renascence; and thesoul of the great Christian rose against it. He pointed to the sun, saying "I shall be above that fellow" with Franciscan familiarity, whichcan love nature because it will not worship her. So he left to his kingthe sun, which for so many weary days and years was to go down only onhis wrath. But the more impersonal process which More himself had observed (asnoted at the beginning of this chapter) is more clearly defined, andless clouded with controversies, in the second of the two parts ofHenry's policy. There is indeed a controversy about the monasteries; butit is one that is clarifying and settling every day. Now it is true thatthe Church, by the Renascence period, had reached a considerablecorruption; but the real proofs of it are utterly different both fromthe contemporary despotic pretence and from the common Protestant story. It is wildly unfair, for instance, to quote the letters of bishops andsuch authorities denouncing the sins of monastic life, violent as theyoften are. They cannot possibly be more violent than the letters of St. Paul to the purest and most primitive churches; the apostle was therewriting to those Early Christians whom all churches idealize; and hetalks to them as to cut-throats and thieves. The explanation, for thoseconcerned for such subtleties, may possibly be found in the fact thatChristianity is not a creed for good men, but for men. Such letters hadbeen written in all centuries; and even in the sixteenth century they donot prove so much that there were bad abbots as that there were goodbishops. Moreover, even those who profess that the monks wereprofligates dare not profess that they were oppressors; there is truthin Cobbett's point that where monks were landlords, they did not becomerack-renting landlords, and could not become absentee landlords. Nevertheless, there was a weakness in the good institutions as well as amere strength in the bad ones; and that weakness partakes of the worstelement of the time. In the fall of good things there is almost always atouch of betrayal from within; and the abbots were destroyed more easilybecause they did not stand together. They did not stand together becausethe spirit of the age (which is very often the worst enemy of the age)was the increasing division between rich and poor; and it had partlydivided even the rich and poor clergy. And the betrayal came, as itnearly always comes, from that servant of Christ who holds the bag. To take a modern attack on liberty, on a much lower plane, we arefamiliar with the picture of a politician going to the great brewers, oreven the great hotel proprietors, and pointing out the uselessness of alitter of little public-houses. That is what the Tudor politicians didfirst with the monasteries. They went to the heads of the great housesand proposed the extinction of the small ones. The great monastic lordsdid not resist, or, at any rate, did not resist enough; and the sack ofthe religious houses began. But if the lord abbots acted for a moment aslords, that could not excuse them, in the eyes of much greater lords, for having frequently acted as abbots. A momentary rally to the cause ofthe rich did not wipe out the disgrace of a thousand petty interferenceswhich had told only to the advantage of the poor; and they were soon tolearn that it was no epoch for their easy rule and their carelesshospitality. The great houses, now isolated, were themselves broughtdown one by one; and the beggar, whom the monastery had served as a sortof sacred tavern, came to it at evening and found it a ruin. For a newand wide philosophy was in the world, which still rules our society. Bythis creed most of the mystical virtues of the old monks have simplybeen turned into great sins; and the greatest of these is charity. But the populace which had risen under Richard II. Was not yetdisarmed. It was trained in the rude discipline of bow and bill, andorganized into local groups of town and guild and manor. Over half thecounties of England the people rose, and fought one final battle for thevision of the Middle Ages. The chief tool of the new tyranny, a dirtyfellow named Thomas Cromwell, was specially singled out as the tyrant, and he was indeed rapidly turning all government into a nightmare. Thepopular movement was put down partly by force; and there is the new noteof modern militarism in the fact that it was put down by cynicalprofessional troops, actually brought in from foreign countries, whodestroyed English religion for hire. But, like the old popular rising, it was even more put down by fraud. Like the old rising, it wassufficiently triumphant to force the government to a parley; and thegovernment had to resort to the simple expedient of calming the peoplewith promises, and then proceeding to break first the promises and thenthe people, after the fashion made familiar to us by the modernpoliticians in their attitude towards the great strikes. The revolt borethe name of the Pilgrimage of Grace, and its programme was practicallythe restoration of the old religion. In connection with the fancy aboutthe fate of England if Tyler had triumphed, it proves, I think, onething; that his triumph, while it might or might not have led tosomething that could be called a reform, would have rendered quiteimpossible everything that we now know as the Reformation. The reign of terror established by Thomas Cromwell became an Inquisitionof the blackest and most unbearable sort. Historians, who have no shadowof sympathy with the old religion, are agreed that it was uprooted bymeans more horrible than have ever, perhaps, been employed in Englandbefore or since. It was a government by torturers rendered ubiquitous byspies. The spoliation of the monasteries especially was carried out, notonly with a violence which recalled barbarism, but with a minuteness forwhich there is no other word but meanness. It was as if the Dane hadreturned in the character of a detective. The inconsistency of theKing's personal attitude to Catholicism did indeed complicate theconspiracy with new brutalities towards Protestants; but such reactionas there was in this was wholly theological. Cromwell lost that fitfulfavour and was executed, but the terrorism went on the more terribly forbeing simplified to the single vision of the wrath of the King. Itculminated in a strange act which rounds off symbolically the story toldon an earlier page. For the despot revenged himself on a rebel whosedefiance seemed to him to ring down three centuries. He laid waste themost popular shrine of the English, the shrine to which Chaucer had onceridden singing, because it was also the shrine where King Henry hadknelt to repent. For three centuries the Church and the people hadcalled Becket a saint, when Henry Tudor arose and called him a traitor. This might well be thought the topmost point of autocracy; and yet itwas not really so. For then rose to its supreme height of self-revelation that stillstranger something of which we have, perhaps fancifully, found hintsbefore in this history. The strong king was weak. He was immeasurablyweaker than the strong kings of the Middle Ages; and whether or no hisfailure had been foreshadowed, he failed. The breach he had made in thedyke of the ancient doctrines let in a flood that may almost be said tohave washed him away. In a sense he disappeared before he died; for thedrama that filled his last days is no longer the drama of his owncharacter. We may put the matter most practically by saying that it isunpractical to discuss whether Froude finds any justification forHenry's crimes in the desire to create a strong national monarchy. Forwhether or no it was desired, it was not created. Least of all ourprinces did the Tudors leave behind them a secure central government, and the time when monarchy was at its worst comes only one or twogenerations before the time when it was weakest. But a few yearsafterwards, as history goes, the relations of the Crown and its newservants were to be reversed on a high stage so as to horrify the world;and the axe which had been sanctified with the blood of More and soiledwith the blood of Cromwell was, at the signal of one of that slave's owndescendants, to fall and to kill an English king. The tide which thus burst through the breach and overwhelmed the Kingas well as the Church was the revolt of the rich, and especially of thenew rich. They used the King's name, and could not have prevailedwithout his power, but the ultimate effect was rather as if they hadplundered the King after he had plundered the monasteries. Amazinglylittle of the wealth, considering the name and theory of the thing, actually remained in royal hands. The chaos was increased, no doubt, bythe fact that Edward VI. Succeeded to the throne as a mere boy, but thedeeper truth can be seen in the difficulty of drawing any real linebetween the two reigns. By marrying into the Seymour family, and thusproviding himself with a son, Henry had also provided the country withthe very type of powerful family which was to rule merely by pillage. Anenormous and unnatural tragedy, the execution of one of the Seymours byhis own brother, was enacted during the impotence of the childish king, and the successful Seymour figured as Lord Protector, though even hewould have found it hard to say what he was protecting, since it was noteven his own family. Anyhow, it is hardly too much to say that everyhuman thing was left unprotected from the greed of such cannibalprotectors. We talk of the dissolution of the monasteries, but whatoccurred was the dissolution of the whole of the old civilization. Lawyers and lackeys and money-lenders, the meanest of lucky men, lootedthe art and economics of the Middle Ages like thieves robbing a church. Their names (when they did not change them) became the names of thegreat dukes and marquises of our own day. But if we look back and forthin our history, perhaps the most fundamental act of destruction occurredwhen the armed men of the Seymours and their sort passed from thesacking of the Monasteries to the sacking of the Guilds. The mediævalTrade Unions were struck down, their buildings broken into by thesoldiery, and their funds seized by the new nobility. And this simpleincident takes all its common meaning out of the assertion (in itselfplausible enough) that the Guilds, like everything else at that time, were probably not at their best. Proportion is the only practical thing;and it may be true that Cæsar was not feeling well on the morning of theIdes of March. But simply to say that the Guilds declined, is about astrue as saying that Cæsar quietly decayed from purely natural causes atthe foot of the statue of Pompey. XII SPAIN AND THE SCHISM OF NATIONS The revolution that arose out of what is called the Renascence, andended in some countries in what is called the Reformation, did in theinternal politics of England one drastic and definite thing. That thingwas destroying the institutions of the poor. It was not the only thingit did, but it was much the most practical. It was the basis of all theproblems now connected with Capital and Labour. How much the theologicaltheories of the time had to do with it is a perfectly fair matter fordifference of opinion. But neither party, if educated about the facts, will deny that the same time and temper which produced the religiousschism also produced this new lawlessness in the rich. The most extremeProtestant will probably be content to say that Protestantism was notthe motive, but the mask. The most extreme Catholic will probably becontent to admit that Protestantism was not the sin, but rather thepunishment. The most sweeping and shameless part of the process was notcomplete, indeed, until the end of the eighteenth century, whenProtestantism was already passing into scepticism. Indeed a very decentcase could be made out for the paradox that Puritanism was first andlast a veneer on Paganism; that the thing began in the inordinate thirstfor new things in the _noblesse_ of the Renascence and ended in theHell-Fire Club. Anyhow, what was first founded at the Reformation was anew and abnormally powerful aristocracy, and what was destroyed, in anever-increasing degree, was everything that could be held, directly orindirectly, by the people _in spite of_ such an aristocracy. This facthas filled all the subsequent history of our country; but the nextparticular point in that history concerns the position of the Crown. TheKing, in reality, had already been elbowed aside by the courtiers whohad crowded behind him just before the bursting of the door. The King isleft behind in the rush for wealth, and already can do nothing alone. And of this fact the next reign, after the chaos of Edward VI. 's, affords a very arresting proof. Mary Tudor, daughter of the divorced Queen Katherine, has a bad nameeven in popular history; and popular prejudice is generally more worthyof study than scholarly sophistry. Her enemies were indeed largely wrongabout her character, but they were not wrong about her effect. She was, in the limited sense, a good woman, convinced, conscientious, rathermorbid. But it is true that she was a bad queen; bad for many things, but especially bad for her own most beloved cause. It is true, when allis said, that she set herself to burn out "No Popery" and managed toburn it in. The concentration of her fanaticism into cruelty, especiallyits concentration in particular places and in a short time, did remainlike something red-hot in the public memory. It was the first of theseries of great historical accidents that separated a real, if notuniversal, public opinion from the old _régime_. It has been summarizedin the death by fire of the three famous martyrs at Oxford; for one ofthem at least, Latimer, was a reformer of the more robust and humantype, though another of them, Cranmer, had been so smooth a snob andcoward in the councils of Henry VIII. As to make Thomas Cromwell seem bycomparison a man. But of what may be called the Latimer tradition, thesaner and more genuine Protestantism, I shall speak later. At the timeeven the Oxford Martyrs probably produced less pity and revulsion thanthe massacre in the flames of many more obscure enthusiasts, whose veryignorance and poverty made their cause seem more popular than it reallywas. But this last ugly feature was brought into sharper relief, andproduced more conscious or unconscious bitterness, because of that othergreat fact of which I spoke above, which is the determining test of thistime of transition. What made all the difference was this: that even in this Catholic reignthe property of the Catholic Church could not be restored. The very factthat Mary was a fanatic, and yet this act of justice was beyond thewildest dreams of fanaticism--that is the point. The very fact that shewas angry enough to commit wrongs for the Church, and yet not boldenough to ask for the rights of the Church--that is the test of thetime. She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was notallowed to deprive great men of their property--or rather of otherpeople's property. She could punish heresy, she could not punishsacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who hadnot gone to church, and sparing men who had gone there to steal thechurch ornaments. What forced her into it? Not certainly her ownreligious attitude, which was almost maniacally sincere; not publicopinion, which had naturally much more sympathy for the religioushumanities which she did not restore than for the religious inhumanitieswhich she did. The force came, of course, from the new nobility and thenew wealth they refused to surrender; and the success of this earlypressure proves that the nobility was already stronger than the Crown. The sceptre had only been used as a crowbar to break open the door of atreasure-house, and was itself broken, or at least bent, with the blow. There is a truth also in the popular insistence on the story of Maryhaving "Calais" written on her heart, when the last relic of themediæval conquests reverted to France. Mary had the solitary and heroichalf-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are oftenpathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on oldenemies often blinds them to new ones. In a later generation Cromwellexhibited the same error reversed, and continued to keep a hostile eyeon Spain when he should have kept it on France. In our own time theJingoes of Fashoda kept it on France when they ought already to have hadit on Germany. With no particular anti-national intention, Marynevertheless got herself into an anti-national position towards the mosttremendous international problem of her people. It is the second of thecoincidences that confirmed the sixteenth-century change, and the nameof it was Spain. The daughter of a Spanish queen, she married a Spanishprince, and probably saw no more in such an alliance than her father haddone. But by the time she was succeeded by her sister Elizabeth, who wasmore cut off from the old religion (though very tenuously attached tothe new one), and by the time the project of a similar Spanish marriagefor Elizabeth herself had fallen through, something had matured whichwas wider and mightier than the plots of princes. The Englishman, standing on his little island as on a lonely boat, had already feltfalling across him the shadow of a tall ship. Wooden _clichés_ about the birth of the British Empire and the spaciousdays of Queen Elizabeth have not merely obscured but contradicted thecrucial truth. From such phrases one would fancy that England, in someimperial fashion, now first realized that she was great. It would be fartruer to say that she now first realized that she was small. The greatpoet of the spacious days does not praise her as spacious, but only assmall, like a jewel. The vision of universal expansion was wholly veileduntil the eighteenth century; and even when it came it was far lessvivid and vital than what came in the sixteenth. What came then was notImperialism; it was Anti-Imperialism. England achieved, at the beginningof her modern history, that one thing human imagination will always findheroic--the story of a small nationality. The business of the Armada wasto her what Bannockburn was to the Scots, or Majuba to the Boers--avictory that astonished even the victors. What was opposed to them wasImperialism in its complete and colossal sense, a thing unthinkablesince Rome. It was, in no overstrained sense, civilization itself. Itwas the greatness of Spain that was the glory of England. It is onlywhen we realize that the English were, by comparison, as dingy, asundeveloped, as petty and provincial as Boers, that we can appreciatethe height of their defiance or the splendour of their escape. We canonly grasp it by grasping that for a great part of Europe the cause ofthe Armada had almost the cosmopolitan common sense of a crusade. ThePope had declared Elizabeth illegitimate--logically, it is hard to seewhat else he could say, having declared her mother's marriage invalid;but the fact was another and perhaps a final stroke sundering Englandfrom the elder world. Meanwhile those picturesque English privateers whohad plagued the Spanish Empire of the New World were spoken of in theSouth simply as pirates, and technically the description was true; onlytechnical assaults by the weaker party are in retrospect rightly judgedwith some generous weakness. Then, as if to stamp the contrast in animperishable image, Spain, or rather the empire with Spain for itscentre, put forth all its strength, and seemed to cover the sea with anavy like the legendary navy of Xerxes. It bore down on the doomedisland with the weight and solemnity of a day of judgment; sailors orpirates struck at it with small ships staggering under large cannon, fought it with mere masses of flaming rubbish, and in that last hour ofgrapple a great storm arose out of the sea and swept round the island, and the gigantic fleet was seen no more. The uncanny completeness andabrupt silence that swallowed this prodigy touched a nerve that hasnever ceased to vibrate. The hope of England dates from that hopelesshour, for there is no real hope that has not once been a forlorn hope. The breaking of that vast naval net remained like a sign that the smallthing which escaped would survive the greatness. And yet there is trulya sense in which we may never be so small or so great again. For the splendour of the Elizabethan age, which is always spoken of as asunrise, was in many ways a sunset. Whether we regard it as the end ofthe Renascence or the end of the old mediæval civilization, no candidcritic can deny that its chief glories ended with it. Let the readerask himself what strikes him specially in the Elizabethan magnificence, and he will generally find it is something of which there were at leasttraces in mediæval times, and far fewer traces in modern times. TheElizabethan drama is like one of its own tragedies--its tempestuoustorch was soon to be trodden out by the Puritans. It is needless to saythat the chief tragedy was the cutting short of the comedy; for thecomedy that came to England after the Restoration was by comparison bothforeign and frigid. At the best it is comedy in the sense of beinghumorous, but not in the sense of being happy. It may be noted that thegivers of good news and good luck in the Shakespearian love-storiesnearly all belong to a world which was passing, whether they are friarsor fairies. It is the same with the chief Elizabethan ideals, oftenembodied in the Elizabethan drama. The national devotion to the VirginQueen must not be wholly discredited by its incongruity with the coarseand crafty character of the historical Elizabeth. Her critics mightindeed reasonably say that in replacing the Virgin Mary by the VirginQueen, the English reformers merely exchanged a true virgin for a falseone. But this truth does not dispose of a true, though limited, contemporary cult. Whatever we think of that particular Virgin Queen, the tragic heroines of the time offer us a whole procession of virginqueens. And it is certain that the mediævals would have understood muchbetter than the moderns the martyrdom of _Measure for Measure_. And aswith the title of Virgin, so with the title of Queen. The mysticalmonarchy glorified in _Richard II. _ was soon to be dethroned much moreruinously than in _Richard II. _ The same Puritans who tore off thepasteboard crowns of the stage players were also to tear off the realcrowns of the kings whose parts they played. All mummery was to beforbidden, and all monarchy to be called mummery. Shakespeare died upon St. George's Day, and much of what St. George hadmeant died with him. I do not mean that the patriotism of Shakespeare orof England died; that remained and even rose steadily, to be the noblestpride of the coming times. But much more than patriotism had beeninvolved in that image of St. George to whom the Lion Heart haddedicated England long ago in the deserts of Palestine. The conceptionof a patron saint had carried from the Middle Ages one very unique andas yet unreplaced idea. It was the idea of variation without antagonism. The Seven Champions of Christendom were multiplied by seventy timesseven in the patrons of towns, trades and social types; but the veryidea that they were all saints excluded the possibility of ultimaterivalry in the fact that they were all patrons. The Guild of theShoemakers and the Guild of the Skinners, carrying the badges of St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew, might fight each other in the streets; butthey did not believe that St. Crispin and St. Bartholomew were fightingeach other in the skies. Similarly the English would cry in battle onSt. George and the French on St. Denis; but they did not seriouslybelieve that St. George hated St. Denis or even those who cried upon St. Denis. Joan of Arc, who was on the point of patriotism what many modernpeople would call very fanatical, was yet upon this point what mostmodern people would call very enlightened. Now, with the religiousschism, it cannot be denied, a deeper and more inhuman divisionappeared. It was no longer a scrap between the followers of saints whowere themselves at peace, but a war between the followers of gods whowere themselves at war. That the great Spanish ships were named afterSt. Francis or St. Philip was already beginning to mean little to thenew England; soon it was to mean something almost cosmicallyconflicting, as if they were named after Baal or Thor. These are indeedmere symbols; but the process of which they are symbols was verypractical and must be seriously followed. There entered with thereligious wars the idea which modern science applies to racial wars; theidea of _natural_ wars, not arising from a special quarrel but from thenature of the people quarrelling. The shadow of racial fatalism firstfell across our path, and far away in distance and darkness somethingmoved that men had almost forgotten. Beyond the frontiers of the fading Empire lay that outer land, as looseand drifting as a sea, which had boiled over in the barbarian wars. Most of it was now formally Christian, but barely civilized; a faint aweof the culture of the south and west lay on its wild forces like a lightfrost. This semi-civilized world had long been asleep; but it had begunto dream. In the generation before Elizabeth a great man who, with allhis violence, was vitally a dreamer, Martin Luther, had cried out in hissleep in a voice like thunder, partly against the place of bad customs, but largely also against the place of good works in the Christianscheme. In the generation after Elizabeth the spread of the new wilddoctrines in the old wild lands had sucked Central Europe into a cyclicwar of creeds. In this the house which stood for the legend of the HolyRoman Empire, Austria, the Germanic partner of Spain, fought for the oldreligion against a league of other Germans fighting for the new. Thecontinental conditions were indeed complicated, and grew more and morecomplicated as the dream of restoring religious unity receded. They werecomplicated by the firm determination of France to be a nation in thefull modern sense; to stand free and foursquare from all combinations; apurpose which led her, while hating her own Protestants at home, to givediplomatic support to many Protestants abroad, simply because itpreserved the balance of power against the gigantic confederation ofSpaniards and Austrians. It is complicated by the rise of a Calvinisticand commercial power in the Netherlands, logical, defiant, defending itsown independence valiantly against Spain. But on the whole we shall beright if we see the first throes of the modern international problems inwhat is called the Thirty Years' War; whether we call it the revolt ofhalf-heathens against the Holy Roman Empire, or whether we call it thecoming of new sciences, new philosophies, and new ethics from the north. Sweden took a hand in the struggle, and sent a military hero to the helpof the newer Germany. But the sort of military heroism everywhereexhibited offered a strange combination of more and more complexstrategic science with the most naked and cannibal cruelty. Other forcesbesides Sweden found a career in the carnage. Far away to thenorth-east, in a sterile land of fens, a small ambitious family ofmoney-lenders who had become squires, vigilant, thrifty, thoroughlyselfish, rather thinly adopted the theories of Luther, and began to lendtheir almost savage hinds as soldiers on the Protestant side. They werewell paid for it by step after step of promotion; but at this time theirprincipality was only the old Mark of Brandenburg. Their own name wasHohenzollern. XIII THE AGE OF THE PURITANS We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the mostexciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words suchas "snark" or "boojum" were systematically substituted for the names ofthe chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a kingwas given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrenderingthe boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition ofa boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on thesnark. Yet something very like this situation is created by most modernattempts to tell the tale of the theological troubles of the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, while deferring to the fashionable distastefor theology in this generation--or rather in the last generation. Thusthe Puritans, as their name implies, were primarily enthusiastic forwhat they thought was pure religion; frequently they wanted to impose iton others; sometimes they only wanted to be free to practise itthemselves; but in no case can justice be done to what was finest intheir characters, as well as first in their thoughts, if we never byany chance ask what "it" was that they wanted to impose or to practise. Now, there was a great deal that was very fine about many of thePuritans, which is almost entirely missed by the modern admirers of thePuritans. They are praised for things which they either regarded withindifference or more often detested with frenzy--such as religiousliberty. And yet they are quite insufficiently understood, and are evenundervalued, in their logical case for the things they really did careabout--such as Calvinism. We make the Puritans picturesque in a way theywould violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publiclyburnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thingin which they were interested at all. We have seen that in the first instance the new doctrines in Englandwere simply an excuse for a plutocratic pillage, and that is the onlytruth to be told about the matter. But it was far otherwise with theindividuals a generation or two after, to whom the wreck of the Armadawas already a legend of national deliverance from Popery, as miraculousand almost as remote as the deliverances of which they read sorealistically in the Hebrew Books now laid open to them. The augustaccident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too wellwith their concentration on the non-Christian parts of Scripture. It mayhave satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of theEnglish being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which waseasily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride that took even heavierhold upon the Germans. It is by such things that a civilized state mayfall from being a Christian nation to being a Chosen People. But even iftheir nationalism was of a kind that has ultimately proved perilous tothe comity of nations, it still was nationalism. From first to last thePuritans were patriots, a point in which they had a marked superiorityover the French Huguenots. Politically, they were indeed at first butone wing of the new wealthy class which had despoiled the Church andwere proceeding to despoil the Crown. But while they were all merely thecreatures of the great spoliation, many of them were the unconsciouscreatures of it. They were strongly represented in the aristocracy, buta great number were of the middle classes, though almost wholly themiddle classes of the towns. By the poor agricultural population, whichwas still by far the largest part of the population, they were simplyderided and detested. It may be noted, for instance, that, while theyled the nation in many of its higher departments, they could producenothing having the atmosphere of what is rather priggishly calledfolklore. All the popular tradition there is, as in songs, toasts, rhymes, or proverbs, is all Royalist. About the Puritans we can find nogreat legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature. All these things, however, are simply things that other people mighthave noticed about them; they are not the most important things, andcertainly not the things they thought about themselves. The soul of themovement was in two conceptions, or rather in two steps, the first beingthe moral process by which they arrived at their chief conclusion, andthe second the chief conclusion they arrived at. We will begin with thefirst, especially as it was this which determined all that externalsocial attitude which struck the eye of contemporaries. The honestPuritan, growing up in youth in a world swept bare by the great pillage, possessed himself of a first principle which is one of the three or fouralternative first principles which are possible to the mind of man. Itwas the principle that the mind of man can alone directly deal with themind of God. It may shortly be called the anti-sacramental principle;but it really applies, and he really applied it, to many things besidesthe sacraments of the Church. It equally applies, and he equally appliedit, to art, to letters, to the love of locality, to music, and even togood manners. The phrase about no priest coming between a man and hisCreator is but an impoverished fragment of the full philosophicdoctrine; the true Puritan was equally clear that no singer orstory-teller or fiddler must translate the voice of God to him into thetongues of terrestrial beauty. It is notable that the one Puritan man ofgenius in modern times, Tolstoy, did accept this full conclusion;denounced all music as a mere drug, and forbade his own admirers to readhis own admirable novels. Now, the English Puritans were not onlyPuritans but Englishmen, and therefore did not always shine in clearnessof head; as we shall see, true Puritanism was rather a Scotch than anEnglish thing. But this was the driving power and the direction; and thedoctrine is quite tenable if a trifle insane. Intellectual truth was theonly tribute fit for the highest truth of the universe; and the nextstep in such a study is to observe what the Puritan thought was thetruth about that truth. His individual reason, cut loose from instinctas well as tradition, taught him a concept of the omnipotence of Godwhich meant simply the impotence of man. In Luther, the earlier andmilder form of the Protestant process only went so far as to say thatnothing a man did could help him except his confession of Christ; withCalvin it took the last logical step and said that even this could nothelp him, since Omnipotence must have disposed of all his destinybeforehand; that men must be created to be lost and saved. In the purertypes of whom I speak this logic was white-hot, and we must read theformula into all their parliamentary and legal formulæ. When we read, "The Puritan party demanded reforms in the church, " we must understand, "The Puritan party demanded fuller and clearer affirmation that men arecreated to be lost and saved. " When we read, "The Army selected personsfor their godliness, " we must understand, "The Army selected thosepersons who seemed most convinced that men are created to be lost andsaved. " It should be added that this terrible trend was not confinedeven to Protestant countries; some great Romanists doubtfully followedit until stopped by Rome. It was the spirit of the age, and should be apermanent warning against mistaking the spirit of the age for theimmortal spirit of man. For there are now few Christians ornon-Christians who can look back at the Calvinism which nearly capturedCanterbury and even Rome by the genius and heroism of Pascal or Milton, without crying out, like the lady in Mr. Bernard Shaw's play, "Howsplendid! How glorious!. .. And oh what an escape!" The next thing to note is that their conception of church-government wasin a true sense self-government; and yet, for a particular reason, turned out to be a rather selfish self-government. It was equal and yetit was exclusive. Internally the synod or conventicle tended to be asmall republic, but unfortunately to be a very small republic. Inrelation to the street outside the conventicle was not a republic but anaristocracy. It was the most awful of all aristocracies, that of theelect; for it was not a right of birth but a right before birth, andalone of all nobilities it was not laid level in the dust. Hence wehave, on the one hand, in the simpler Puritans a ring of real republicanvirtue; a defiance of tyrants, an assertion of human dignity, but aboveall an appeal to that first of all republican virtues--publicity. One ofthe Regicides, on trial for his life, struck the note which all theunnaturalness of his school cannot deprive of nobility: "This thing wasnot done in a corner. " But their most drastic idealism did nothing torecover a ray of the light that at once lightened every man that cameinto the world, the assumption of a brotherhood in all baptized people. They were, indeed, very like that dreadful scaffold at which theRegicide was not afraid to point. They were certainly public, they mayhave been public-spirited, they were never popular; and it seems neverto have crossed their minds that there was any need to be popular. England was never so little of a democracy as during the short time whenshe was a republic. The struggle with the Stuarts, which is the next passage in our history, arose from an alliance, which some may think an accidental alliance, between two things. The first was this intellectual fashion of Calvinismwhich affected the cultured world as did our recent intellectual fashionof Collectivism. The second was the older thing which had made thatcreed and perhaps that cultured world possible--the aristocratic revoltunder the last Tudors. It was, we might say, the story of a father and ason dragging down the same golden image, but the younger really fromhatred of idolatry, and the older solely from love of gold. It is atonce the tragedy and the paradox of England that it was the eternalpassion that passed, and the transient or terrestrial passion thatremained. This was true of England; it was far less true of Scotland;and that is the meaning of the Scotch and English war that ended atWorcester. The first change had indeed been much the same materialistmatter in both countries--a mere brigandage of barons; and even JohnKnox, though he has become a national hero, was an extremelyanti-national politician. The patriot party in Scotland was that ofCardinal Beaton and Mary Stuart. Nevertheless, the new creed did becomepopular in the Lowlands in a positive sense, not even yet known in ourown land. Hence in Scotland Puritanism was the main thing, and was mixedwith Parliamentary and other oligarchies. In England Parliamentaryoligarchy was the main thing, and was mixed with Puritanism. When thestorm began to rise against Charles I. , after the more or lesstransitional time of his father, the Scotch successor of Elizabeth, theinstances commonly cited mark all the difference between democraticreligion and aristocratic politics. The Scotch legend is that of JennyGeddes, the poor woman who threw a stool at the priest. The Englishlegend is that of John Hampden, the great squire who raised a countyagainst the King. The Parliamentary movement in England was, indeed, almost wholly a thing of squires, with their new allies the merchants. They were squires who may well have regarded themselves as the real andnatural leaders of the English; but they were leaders who allowed nomutiny among their followers. There was certainly no Village Hampden inHampden Village. The Stuarts, it may be suspected, brought from Scotland a more mediævaland therefore more logical view of their own function; for the note oftheir nation was logic. It is a proverb that James I. Was a Scot and apedant; it is hardly sufficiently noted that Charles I. Also was not alittle of a pedant, being very much of a Scot. He had also the virtuesof a Scot, courage, and a quite natural dignity and an appetite for thethings of the mind. Being somewhat Scottish, he was very un-English, andcould not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, andseemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far moreinconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of thesort that sees everything in black and white; and it is thereforeremembered--especially the black. From the first he fenced with hisParliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner. The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentlemanwho wished to finish the chapter in order to find out what happened toCharles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attemptto make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and perished on thescaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power ofthe purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at firstcarried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of theParliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patienceand genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the same death as his greatservant. Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, through ramificationsgenerally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into thegreat modern query of whether a King can raise taxes without the consentof his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the greatBuckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax whichCharles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovatorsalways of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squiresmade a legend of the mediæval Magna Carta; and they were so far in atrue tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we havealready noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truthscover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of verydifferent certainty, and should be considered separately. For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of thefacts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold thatthe seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is notpossible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumnof the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic andactively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I. To raiseShip Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II. To free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals fromCharles I. Was the same which afterward claimed the common lands fromthe village communities. It was the same institution which only twogenerations before had eagerly helped to destroy, not merely things ofpopular sentiment like the monasteries, but all the things of popularutility like the guilds and parishes, the local governments of towns andtrades. The work of the great lords may have had, indeed it certainlyhad, another more patriotic and creative side; but it was exclusivelythe work of the great lords that was done by Parliament. The House ofCommons has itself been a House of Lords. But when we turn to the other or anti-despotic aspect of the campaignagainst the Stuarts, we come to something much more difficult to dismissand much more easy to justify. While the stupidest things are saidagainst the Stuarts, the real contemporary case for their enemies islittle realized; for it is connected with what our insular history mostneglects, the condition of the Continent. It should be remembered thatthough the Stuarts failed in England they fought for things thatsucceeded in Europe. These were roughly, first, the effects of theCounter-Reformation, which made the sincere Protestant see StuartCatholicism not at all as the last flicker of an old flame, but as thespread of a conflagration. Charles II. , for instance, was a man ofstrong, sceptical, and almost irritably humorous intellect, and he wasquite certainly, and even reluctantly, convinced of Catholicism as aphilosophy. The other and more important matter here was the almostawful autocracy that was being built up in France like a Bastille. Itwas more logical, and in many ways more equal and even equitable thanthe English oligarchy, but it really became a tyranny in case ofrebellion or even resistance. There were none of the rough Englishsafeguards of juries and good customs of the old common law; there was_lettre de cachet_ as unanswerable as magic. The English who defied thelaw were better off than the French; a French satirist would probablyhave retorted that it was the English who obeyed the law who were worseoff than the French. The ordering of men's normal lives was with thesquire; but he was, if anything, more limited when he was themagistrate. He was stronger as master of the village, but actuallyweaker as agent of the King. In defending this state of things, inshort, the Whigs were certainly not defending democracy, but they werein a real sense defending liberty. They were even defending some remainsof mediæval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild. Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements, which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such thingsmight well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbeswas a single monster and for France a single man. As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanismwas pure, it was unfortunately passing. And the very type of thetransition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man whois popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is inhistory much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism. He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all hislife, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as heemerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism ofthe English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one ofthe Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less ofthe Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchybecame at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praisedand most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity, toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key tothe comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathyin many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot withoutabsurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires, a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly notwithout patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed animpersonal and ideal government, had something English in its veryunreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his, and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to thehigh inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he hadto compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic ratherthan cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated withbestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusivenessregarded as beasts--or as the modern euphemism would put it, asaborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such humanslaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to asort of human sacrifice in the very centre and forum of it; he is not arepresentative regicide. In a sense that piece of headsmanship wasrather above his head. The real regicides did it in a sort of trance orvision; and he was not troubled with visions. But the true collisionbetween the religious and rational sides of the seventeenth-centurymovement came symbolically on that day of driving storm at Dunbar, whenthe raving Scotch preachers overruled Leslie and forced him down intothe valley to be the victim of the Cromwellian common sense. Cromwellsaid that God had delivered them into his hand; but it was their own Godwho delivered them, the dark unnatural God of the Calvinist dreams, asoverpowering as a nightmare--and as passing. It was the Whig rather than the Puritan that triumphed on that day; itwas the Englishman with his aristocratic compromise; and even whatfollowed Cromwell's death, the Restoration, was an aristocraticcompromise, and even a Whig compromise. The mob might cheer as for amediæval king; but the Protectorate and the Restoration were more of apiece than the mob understood. Even in the superficial things wherethere seemed to be a rescue it was ultimately a respite. Thus thePuritan régime had risen chiefly by one thing unknown tomediævalism--militarism. Picked professional troops, harshly drilled buthighly paid, were the new and alien instrument by which the Puritansbecame masters. These were disbanded and their return resisted by Toriesand Whigs; but their return seemed always imminent, because it was inthe spirit of the new stern world of the Thirty Years' War. A discoveryis an incurable disease; and it had been discovered that a crowd couldbe turned into an iron centipede, crushing larger and looser crowds. Similarly the remains of Christmas were rescued from the Puritans; butthey had eventually to be rescued again by Dickens from theUtilitarians, and may yet have to be rescued by somebody from thevegetarians and teetotallers. The strange army passed and vanishedalmost like a Moslem invasion; but it had made the difference that armedvalour and victory always make, if it was but a negative difference. Itwas the final break in our history; it was a breaker of many things, andperhaps of popular rebellion in our land. It is something of a verbalsymbol that these men founded New England in America, for indeed theytried to found it here. By a paradox, there was something prehistoric inthe very nakedness of their novelty. Even the old and savage things theyinvoked became more savage in becoming more new. In observing what iscalled their Jewish Sabbath, they would have had to stone the strictestJew. And they (and indeed their age generally) turned witch-burning froman episode to an epidemic. The destroyers and the things destroyeddisappeared together; but they remain as something nobler than thenibbling legalism of some of the Whig cynics who continued their work. They were above all things anti-historic, like the Futurists in Italy;and there was this unconscious greatness about them, that their verysacrilege was public and solemn like a sacrament; and they wereritualists even as iconoclasts. It was, properly considered, but a verysecondary example of their strange and violent simplicity that one ofthem, before a mighty mob at Whitehall, cut off the anointed head of thesacramental man of the Middle Ages. For another, far away in the westernshires, cut down the thorn of Glastonbury, from which had grown thewhole story of Britain. XIV THE TRIUMPH OF THE WHIGS Whether or no we believe that the Reformation really reformed, there canbe little doubt that the Restoration did not really restore. Charles II. Was never in the old sense a King; he was a Leader of the Opposition tohis own Ministers. Because he was a clever politician he kept hisofficial post, and because his brother and successor was an incrediblystupid politician, he lost it; but the throne was already only one ofthe official posts. In some ways, indeed, Charles II. Was fitted for themore modern world then beginning; he was rather an eighteenth-centurythan a seventeenth-century man. He was as witty as a character in acomedy; and it was already the comedy of Sheridan and not ofShakespeare. He was more modern yet when he enjoyed the pureexperimentalism of the Royal Society, and bent eagerly over the toysthat were to grow into the terrible engines of science. He and hisbrother, however, had two links with what was in England the losingside; and by the strain on these their dynastic cause was lost. Thefirst, which lessened in its practical pressure as time passed, was, ofcourse, the hatred felt for their religion. The second, which grew as itneared the next century, was their tie with the French Monarchy. We willdeal with the religious quarrel before passing on to a much moreirreligious age; but the truth about it is tangled and far from easy totrace. The Tudors had begun to persecute the old religion before they hadceased to belong to it. That is one of the transitional complexitiesthat can only be conveyed by such contradictions. A person of the typeand time of Elizabeth would feel fundamentally, and even fiercely, thatpriests should be celibate, while racking and rending anybody caughttalking to the only celibate priests. This mystery, which may be veryvariously explained, covered the Church of England, and in a greatdegree the people of England. Whether it be called the Catholiccontinuity of Anglicanism or merely the slow extirpation of Catholicism, there can be no doubt that a parson like Herrick, for instance, as lateas the Civil War, was stuffed with "superstitions" which were Catholicin the extreme sense we should now call Continental. Yet many similarparsons had already a parallel and opposite passion, and thought ofContinental Catholicism not even as the errant Church of Christ, but asthe consistent Church of Antichrist. It is, therefore, very hard now toguess the proportion of Protestantism; but there is no doubt about itspresence, especially its presence in centres of importance like London. By the time of Charles II. , after the purge of the Puritan Terror, ithad become something at least more inherent and human than the mereexclusiveness of Calvinist creeds or the craft of Tudor nobles. TheMonmouth rebellion showed that it had a popular, though aninsufficiently popular, backing. The "No Popery" force became the crowdif it never became the people. It was, perhaps, increasingly an urbancrowd, and was subject to those epidemics of detailed delusion withwhich sensational journalism plays on the urban crowds of to-day. One ofthese scares and scoops (not to add the less technical name of lies) wasthe Popish Plot, a storm weathered warily by Charles II. Another was theTale of the Warming Pan, or the bogus heir to the throne, a storm thatfinally swept away James II. The last blow, however, could hardly have fallen but for one of thoseillogical but almost lovable localisms to which the English temperamentis prone. The debate about the Church of England, then and now, differsfrom most debates in one vital point. It is not a debate about what aninstitution ought to do, or whether that institution ought to alter, butabout what that institution actually is. One party, then as now, onlycared for it because it was Catholic, and the other only cared for itbecause it was Protestant. Now, something had certainly happened to theEnglish quite inconceivable to the Scotch or the Irish. Masses ofcommon people loved the Church of England without having even decidedwhat it was. It had a hold different indeed from that of the mediævalChurch, but also very different from the barren prestige of gentilitywhich clung to it in the succeeding century. Macaulay, with a widelydifferent purpose in mind, devotes some pages to proving that anAnglican clergyman was socially a mere upper servant in the seventeenthcentury. He is probably right; but he does not guess that this was butthe degenerate continuity of the more democratic priesthood of theMiddle Ages. A priest was not treated as a gentleman; but a peasant wastreated as a priest. And in England then, as in Europe now, manyentertained the fancy that priesthood was a higher thing than gentility. In short, the national church was then at least really national, in afashion that was emotionally vivid though intellectually vague. When, therefore, James II. Seemed to menace this practising communion, hearoused something at least more popular than the mere priggishness ofthe Whig lords. To this must be added a fact generally forgotten. I meanthe fact that the influence then called Popish was then in a real senseregarded as revolutionary. The Jesuit seemed to the English not merely aconspirator but a sort of anarchist. There is something appalling aboutabstract speculations to many Englishmen; and the abstract speculationsof Jesuits like Suarez dealt with extreme democracy and thingsundreamed of here. The last Stuart proposals for toleration seemed thusto many as vast and empty as atheism. The only seventeenth-centuryEnglishmen who had something of this transcendental abstraction were theQuakers; and the cosy English compromise shuddered when the two thingsshook hands. For it was something much more than a Stuart intrigue whichmade these philosophical extremes meet, merely because they werephilosophical; and which brought the weary but humorous mind of CharlesII. Into alliance with the subtle and detached spirit of William Penn. Much of England, then, was really alarmed at the Stuart scheme oftoleration, sincere or insincere, because it seemed theoretical andtherefore fanciful. It was in advance of its age or (to use a moreintelligent language) too thin and ethereal for its atmosphere. And tothis affection for the actual in the English moderates must be added (inwhat proportion we know not) a persecuting hatred of Popery almostmaniacal but quite sincere. The State had long, as we have seen, beenturned to an engine of torture against priests and the friends ofpriests. Men talk of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes; but theEnglish persecutors never had so tolerant an edict to revoke. But atleast by this time the English, like the French, persecutors wereoppressing a minority. Unfortunately there was another province ofgovernment in which they were still more madly persecuting themajority. For it was here that came to its climax and took on itsterrific character that lingering crime that was called the governmentof Ireland. It would take too long to detail the close network ofunnatural laws by which that country was covered till towards the end ofthe eighteenth century; it is enough to say here that the whole attitudeto the Irish was tragically typified, and tied up with our expulsion ofthe Stuarts, in one of those acts that are remembered for ever. JamesII. , fleeing from the opinion of London, perhaps of England, eventuallyfound refuge in Ireland, which took arms in his favour. The Prince ofOrange, whom the aristocracy had summoned to the throne, landed in thatcountry with an English and Dutch army, won the Battle of the Boyne, butsaw his army successfully arrested before Limerick by the militarygenius of Patrick Sarsfield. The check was so complete that peace couldonly be restored by promising complete religious liberty to the Irish, in return for the surrender of Limerick. The new English Governmentoccupied the town and immediately broke the promise. It is not a matteron which there is much more to be said. It was a tragic necessity thatthe Irish should remember it; but it was far more tragic that theEnglish forgot it. For he who has forgotten his sin is repeating itincessantly for ever. But here again the Stuart position was much more vulnerable on the sideof secular policy, and especially of foreign policy. The aristocrats towhom power passed finally at the Revolution were already ceasing to haveany supernatural faith in Protestantism as against Catholicism; but theyhad a very natural faith in England as against France; and even, in acertain sense, in English institutions as against French institutions. And just as these men, the most unmediæval of mankind, could yet boastabout some mediæval liberties, Magna Carta, the Parliament and the Jury, so they could appeal to a true mediæval legend in the matter of a warwith France. A typical eighteenth-century oligarch like Horace Walpolecould complain that the cicerone in an old church troubled him withtraces of an irrelevant person named St. Somebody, when he was lookingfor the remains of John of Gaunt. He could say it with all the _naïveté_of scepticism, and never dream how far away from John of Gaunt he wasreally wandering in saying so. But though their notion of mediævalhistory was a mere masquerade ball, it was one in which men fighting theFrench could still, in an ornamental way, put on the armour of the BlackPrince or the crown of Henry of Monmouth. In this matter, in short, itis probable enough that the aristocrats were popular as patriots willalways be popular. It is true that the last Stuarts were themselves farfrom unpatriotic; and James II. In particular may well be called thefounder of the British Navy. But their sympathies were with France, among other foreign countries; they took refuge in France, the elderbefore and the younger after his period of rule; and France aided thelater Jacobite efforts to restore their line. And for the new England, especially the new English nobility, France was the enemy. The transformation through which the external relations of Englandpassed at the end of the seventeenth century is symbolized by two veryseparate and definite steps; the first the accession of a Dutch king andthe second the accession of a German king. In the first were present allthe features that can partially make an unnatural thing natural. In thesecond we have the condition in which even those effecting it can hardlycall it natural, but only call it necessary. William of Orange was likea gun dragged into the breach of a wall; a foreign gun indeed, and onefired in a quarrel more foreign than English, but still a quarrel inwhich the English, and especially the English aristocrats, could play agreat part. George of Hanover was simply something stuffed into a holein the wall by English aristocrats, who practically admitted that theywere simply stopping it with rubbish. In many ways William, cynical ashe was, carried on the legend of the greater and grimmer Puritanism. Hewas in private conviction a Calvinist; and nobody knew or cared whatGeorge was except that he was not a Catholic. He was at home the partlyrepublican magistrate of what had once been a purely republicanexperiment, and among the cleaner if colder ideals of the seventeenthcentury. George was when he was at home pretty much what the King ofthe Cannibal Islands was when he was at home--a savage personal rulerscarcely logical enough to be called a despot. William was a man ofacute if narrow intelligence; George was a man of no intelligence. Aboveall, touching the immediate effect produced, William was married to aStuart, and ascended the throne hand-in-hand with a Stuart; he was afamiliar figure, and already a part of our royal family. With Georgethere entered England something that had scarcely been seen therebefore; something hardly mentioned in mediæval or Renascence writing, except as one mentions a Hottentot--the barbarian from beyond the Rhine. The reign of Queen Anne, which covers the period between these twoforeign kings, is therefore the true time of transition. It is thebridge between the time when the aristocrats were at least weak enoughto call in a strong man to help them, and the time when they were strongenough deliberately to call in a weak man who would allow them to helpthemselves. To symbolize is always to simplify, and to simplify toomuch; but the whole may be well symbolized as the struggle of two greatfigures, both gentlemen and men of genius, both courageous and clearabout their own aims, and in everything else a violent contrast at everypoint. One of them was Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke; the other wasJohn Churchill, the famous and infamous Duke of Marlborough. The storyof Churchill is primarily the story of the Revolution and how itsucceeded; the story of Bolingbroke is the story of theCounter-Revolution and how it failed. Churchill is a type of the extraordinary time in this, that he combinesthe presence of glory with the absence of honour. When the newaristocracy had become normal to the nation, in the next fewgenerations, it produced personal types not only of aristocracy but ofchivalry. The Revolution reduced us to a country wholly governed bygentlemen; the popular universities and schools of the Middle Ages, liketheir guilds and abbeys, had been seized and turned into what theyare--factories of gentlemen, when they are not merely factories ofsnobs. It is hard now to realize that what we call the Public Schoolswere once undoubtedly public. By the Revolution they were alreadybecoming as private as they are now. But at least in the eighteenthcentury there were great gentlemen in the generous, perhaps toogenerous, sense now given to the title. Types not merely honest, butrash and romantic in their honesty, remain in the record with the namesof Nelson or of Fox. We have already seen that the later reformersdefaced from fanaticism the churches which the first reformers haddefaced simply from avarice. Rather in the same way theeighteenth-century Whigs often praised, in a spirit of pure magnanimity, what the seventeenth-century Whigs had done in a spirit of puremeanness. How mean was that meanness can only be estimated by realizingthat a great military hero had not even the ordinary military virtuesof loyalty to his flag or obedience to his superior officers, that hepicked his way through campaigns that have made him immortal with thewatchful spirit of a thieving camp-follower. When William landed atTorbay on the invitation of the other Whig nobles, Churchill, as if toadd something ideal to his imitation of Iscariot, went to James withwanton professions of love and loyalty, went forth in arms as if todefend the country from invasion, and then calmly handed the army overto the invader. To the finish of this work of art but few could aspire, but in their degree all the politicians of the Revolution were upon thisethical pattern. While they surrounded the throne of James, there wasscarcely one of them who was not in correspondence with William. Whenthey afterwards surrounded the throne of William, there was not one ofthem who was not still in correspondence with James. It was such men whodefeated Irish Jacobitism by the treason of Limerick; it was such menwho defeated Scotch Jacobitism by the treason of Glencoe. Thus the strange yet splendid story of eighteenth-century England is oneof greatness founded on smallness, a pyramid standing on a point. Or, tovary the metaphor, the new mercantile oligarchy might be symbolized evenin the externals of its great sister, the mercantile oligarchy ofVenice. The solidity was all in the superstructure; the fluctuation hadbeen all in the foundations. The great temple of Chatham and WarrenHastings was reared in its origins on things as unstable as water and asfugitive as foam. It is only a fancy, of course, to connect the unstableelement with something restless and even shifty in the lords of the sea. But there was certainly in the genesis, if not in the later generationsof our mercantile aristocracy, a thing only too mercantile; somethingwhich had also been urged against a yet older example of that polity, something called _Punica fides_. The great Royalist Strafford, goingdisillusioned to death, had said, "Put not your trust in princes. " Thegreat Royalist Bolingbroke may well be said to have retorted, "And leastof all in merchant princes. " Bolingbroke stands for a whole body of conviction which bulked very bigin English history, but which with the recent winding of the course ofhistory has gone out of sight. Yet without grasping it we cannotunderstand our past, nor, I will add, our future. Curiously enough, thebest English books of the eighteenth century are crammed with it, yetmodern culture cannot see it when it is there. Dr. Johnson is full ofit; it is what he meant when he denounced minority rule in Ireland, aswell as when he said that the devil was the first Whig. Goldsmith isfull of it; it is the whole point of that fine poem "The DesertedVillage, " and is set out theoretically with great lucidity and spirit in"The Vicar of Wakefield. " Swift is full of it; and found in it anintellectual brotherhood-in-arms with Bolingbroke himself. In the timeof Queen Anne it was probably the opinion of the majority of people inEngland. But it was not only in Ireland that the minority had begun torule. This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had manyaspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of thevirtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little tyrant of the fields"that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good kingis not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it alsoinvolved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for hisoppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on thepopulace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; andthough Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to hissoul, it was no great loss to his empire. Bolingbroke had thus a whollyrationalistic theory of Jacobitism. He was, in other respects, a fineand typical eighteenth-century intellect, a free-thinking Deist, a clearand classic writer of English. But he was also a man of adventurousspirit and splendid political courage, and he made one last throw forthe Stuarts. It was defeated by the great Whig nobles who formed thecommittee of the new régime of the gentry. And considering who it waswho defeated it, it is almost unnecessary to say that it was defeated bya trick. The small German prince ascended the throne, or rather was hoisted intoit like a dummy, and the great English Royalist went into exile. Twentyyears afterwards he reappears and reasserts his living and logical faithin a popular monarchy. But it is typical of the whole detachment anddistinction of his mind that for this abstract ideal he was willing tostrengthen the heir of the king whom he had tried to exclude. He wasalways a Royalist, but never a Jacobite. What he cared for was not aroyal family, but a royal office. He celebrated it in his great book"The Patriot King, " written in exile; and when he thought that George'sgreat-grandson was enough of a patriot, he only wished that he might bemore of a king. He made in his old age yet another attempt, with suchunpromising instruments as George III. And Lord Bute; and when thesebroke in his hand he died with all the dignity of the _sed victaCatoni_. The great commercial aristocracy grew on to its full stature. But if we wish to realize the good and ill of its growth, there is nobetter summary than this section from the first to the last of thefoiled _coups d'état_ of Bolingbroke. In the first his policy made peacewith France, and broke the connection with Austria. In the second hispolicy again made peace with France, and broke the connection withPrussia. For in that interval the seed of the money-lending squires ofBrandenburg had waxed mighty, and had already become that prodigy whichhas become so enormous a problem in Europe. By the end of this epochChatham, who incarnated and even created, at least in a representativesense, all that we call the British Empire, was at the height of hisown and his country's glory. He summarized the new England of theRevolution in everything, especially in everything in which thatmovement seems to many to be intrinsically contradictory and yet wasmost corporately consistent. Thus he was a Whig, and even in some wayswhat we should call a Liberal, like his son after him; but he was alsoan Imperialist and what we should call a Jingo; and the Whig party wasconsistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense thatall our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphaticallywhat may be called a commercialist--one might almost say Carthaginian. In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized butwas not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he coulduse the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, JamesWolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was ayoung clerk of the East India Company, Robert Clive, who threw open tothe English the golden gates of India. But it was precisely one of thestrong points of this eighteenth-century aristocracy that it wieldedwithout friction the wealthier _bourgeoisie_; it was not there that thesocial cleavage was to come. He was an eloquent parliamentary orator, and though Parliament was as narrow as a senate, it was one of greatsenators. The very word recalls the roll of those noble Roman phrasesthey often used, which we are right in calling classic, but wrong incalling cold. In some ways nothing could be further from all this fineif florid scholarship, all this princely and patrician geniality, allthis air of freedom and adventure on the sea, than the little inlandstate of the stingy drill-sergeants of Potsdam, hammering mere savagesinto mere soldiers. And yet the great chief of these was in some wayslike a shadow of Chatham flung across the world--the sort of shadow thatis at once an enlargement and a caricature. The English lords, whosepaganism was ennobled by patriotism, saw here something drawn out longand thin out of their own theories. What was paganism in Chatham wasatheism in Frederick the Great. And what was in the first patriotism wasin the second something with no name but Prussianism. The cannibaltheory of a commonwealth, that it can of its nature eat othercommonwealths, had entered Christendom. Its autocracy and our ownaristocracy drew indirectly nearer together, and seemed for a time to bewedded; but not before the great Bolingbroke had made a dying gesture, as if to forbid the banns. XV THE WAR WITH THE GREAT REPUBLICS We cannot understand the eighteenth century so long as we suppose thatrhetoric is artificial because it is artistic. We do not fall into thisfolly about any of the other arts. We talk of a man picking out notesarranged in ivory on a wooden piano "with much feeling, " or of hispouring out his soul by scraping on cat-gut after a training as carefulas an acrobat's. But we are still haunted with a prejudice that verbalform and verbal effect must somehow be hypocritical when they are thelink between things so living as a man and a mob. We doubt the feelingof the old-fashioned orator, because his periods are so rounded andpointed as to convey his feeling. Now before any criticism of theeighteenth-century worthies must be put the proviso of their perfectartistic sincerity. Their oratory was unrhymed poetry, and it had thehumanity of poetry. It was not even unmetrical poetry; that century isfull of great phrases, often spoken on the spur of great moments, whichhave in them the throb and recurrence of song, as of a man thinking toa tune. Nelson's "In honour I gained them, in honour I will die withthem, " has more rhythm than much that is called _vers libres_. PatrickHenry's "Give me liberty or give me death" might be a great line in WaltWhitman. It is one of the many quaint perversities of the English to pretend tobe bad speakers; but in fact the most English eighteenth-century epochblazed with brilliant speakers. There may have been finer writing inFrance; there was no such fine speaking as in England. The Parliamenthad faults enough, but it was sincere enough to be rhetorical. TheParliament was corrupt, as it is now; though the examples of corruptionwere then often really made examples, in the sense of warnings, wherethey are now examples only in the sense of patterns. The Parliament wasindifferent to the constituencies, as it is now; though perhaps theconstituencies were less indifferent to the Parliament. The Parliamentwas snobbish, as it is now, though perhaps more respectful to mere rankand less to mere wealth. But the Parliament was a Parliament; it didfulfil its name and duty by talking, and trying to talk well. It did notmerely do things because they do not bear talking about--as it does now. It was then, to the eternal glory of our country, a great"talking-shop, " not a mere buying and selling shop for financial tipsand official places. And as with any other artist, the care theeighteenth-century man expended on oratory is a proof of his sincerity, not a disproof of it. An enthusiastic eulogium by Burke is as rich andelaborate as a lover's sonnet; but it is because Burke is reallyenthusiastic, like the lover. An angry sentence by Junius is ascarefully compounded as a Renascence poison; but it is because Junius isreally angry--like the poisoner. Now, nobody who has realized thispsychological truth can doubt for a moment that many of the Englisharistocrats of the eighteenth century had a real enthusiasm for liberty;their voices lift like trumpets upon the very word. Whatever theirimmediate forbears may have meant, these men meant what they said whenthey talked of the high memory of Hampden or the majesty of Magna Carta. Those Patriots whom Walpole called the Boys included many who reallywere patriots--or better still, who really were boys. If we prefer toput it so, among the Whig aristocrats were many who really were Whigs;Whigs by all the ideal definitions which identified the party with adefence of law against tyrants and courtiers. But if anybody deduces, from the fact that the Whig aristocrats were Whigs, any doubt aboutwhether the Whig aristocrats were aristocrats, there is one practicaltest and reply. It might be tested in many ways: by the game laws andenclosure laws they passed, or by the strict code of the duel and thedefinition of honour on which they all insisted. But if it be reallyquestioned whether I am right in calling their whole world anaristocracy, and the very reverse of it a democracy, the true historicaltest is this: that when republicanism really entered the world, theyinstantly waged two great wars with it--or (if the view be preferred) itinstantly waged two great wars with them. America and France revealedthe real nature of the English Parliament. Ice may sparkle, but a realspark will show it is only ice. So when the red fire of the Revolutiontouched the frosty splendours of the Whigs, there was instantly ahissing and a strife; a strife of the flame to melt the ice, of thewater to quench the flame. It has been noted that one of the virtues of the aristocrats wasliberty, especially liberty among themselves. It might even be said thatone of the virtues of the aristocrats was cynicism. They were notstuffed with our fashionable fiction, with its stiff and wooden figuresof a good man named Washington and a bad man named Boney. They at leastwere aware that Washington's cause was not so obviously white norNapoleon's so obviously black as most books in general circulation wouldindicate. They had a natural admiration for the military genius ofWashington and Napoleon; they had the most unmixed contempt for theGerman Royal Family. But they were, as a class, not only against bothWashington and Napoleon, but against them both for the same reason. Andit was that they both stood for democracy. Great injustice is done to the English aristocratic government of thetime through a failure to realize this fundamental difference, especially in the case of America. There is a wrong-headed humour aboutthe English which appears especially in this, that while they often (asin the case of Ireland) make themselves out right where they wereentirely wrong, they are easily persuaded (as in the case of America) tomake themselves out entirely wrong where there is at least a case fortheir having been more or less right. George III. 's Government laidcertain taxes on the colonial community on the eastern seaboard ofAmerica. It was certainly not self-evident, in the sense of law andprecedent, that the imperial government could not lay taxes on suchcolonists. Nor were the taxes themselves of that practically oppressivesort which rightly raise everywhere the common casuistry of revolution. The Whig oligarchs had their faults, but utter lack of sympathy withliberty, especially local liberty, and with their adventurous kindredbeyond the seas, was by no means one of their faults. Chatham, the greatchief of the new and very national _noblesse_, was typical of them inbeing free from the faintest illiberality and irritation against thecolonies as such. He would have made them free and even favouredcolonies, if only he could have kept them as colonies. Burke, who wasthen the eloquent voice of Whiggism, and was destined later to show howwholly it was a voice of aristocracy, went of course even further. EvenNorth compromised; and though George III. , being a fool, might himselfhave refused to compromise, he had already failed to effect theBolingbroke scheme of the restitution of the royal power. The case forthe Americans, the real reason for calling them right in the quarrel, was something much deeper than the quarrel. They were at issue, not witha dead monarchy, but with a living aristocracy; they declared war onsomething much finer and more formidable than poor old George. Nevertheless, the popular tradition, especially in America, has picturedit primarily as a duel of George III. And George Washington; and, as wehave noticed more than once, such pictures though figurative are seldomfalse. King George's head was not much more useful on the throne than itwas on the sign-board of a tavern; nevertheless, the sign-board wasreally a sign, and a sign of the times. It stood for a tavern that soldnot English but German beer. It stood for that side of the Whig policywhich Chatham showed when he was tolerant to America alone, butintolerant of America when allied with France. That very wooden signstood, in short, for the same thing as the juncture with Frederick theGreat; it stood for that Anglo-German alliance which, at a very muchlater time in history, was to turn into the world-old Teutonic Race. Roughly and frankly speaking, we may say that America forced thequarrel. She wished to be separate, which was to her but another phrasefor wishing to be free. She was not thinking of her wrongs as a colony, but already of her rights as a republic. The negative effect of so smalla difference could never have changed the world, without the positiveeffect of a great ideal, one may say of a great new religion. The realcase for the colonists is that they felt they could be something, whichthey also felt, and justly, that England would not help them to be. England would probably have allowed the colonists all sorts ofconcessions and constitutional privileges; but England could not allowthe colonists equality: I do not mean equality with her, but even witheach other. Chatham might have compromised with Washington, becauseWashington was a gentleman; but Chatham could hardly have conceived acountry not governed by gentlemen. Burke was apparently ready to granteverything to America; but he would not have been ready to grant whatAmerica eventually gained. If he had seen American democracy, he wouldhave been as much appalled by it as he was by French democracy, andwould always have been by any democracy. In a word, the Whigs wereliberal and even generous aristocrats, but they were aristocrats; thatis why their concessions were as vain as their conquests. We talk, witha humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secessionof America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do notknow; but I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. Ibelieve we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not reallydrive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were ledon by a light that went before. That light came from France, like the armies of Lafayette that came tothe help of Washington. France was already in travail with thetremendous spiritual revolution which was soon to reshape the world. Herdoctrine, disruptive and creative, was widely misunderstood at the time, and is much misunderstood still, despite the splendid clarity of stylein which it was stated by Rousseau in the "Contrat Social, " and byJefferson in The Declaration of Independence. Say the very word"equality" in many modern countries, and four hundred fools will leap totheir feet at once to explain that some men can be found, on carefulexamination, to be taller or handsomer than others. As if Danton had notnoticed that he was taller than Robespierre, or as if Washington was notwell aware that he was handsomer than Franklin. This is no place toexpound a philosophy; it will be enough to say in passing, by way of aparable, that when we say that all pennies are equal, we do not meanthat they all look exactly the same. We mean that they are absolutelyequal in their one absolute character, in the most important thing aboutthem. It may be put practically by saying that they are coins of acertain value, twelve of which go to a shilling. It may be putsymbolically, and even mystically, by saying that they all bear theimage of the King. And, though the most mystical, it is also the mostpractical summary of equality that all men bear the image of the King ofKings. Indeed, it is of course true that this idea had long underlainall Christianity, even in institutions less popular in form than were, for instance, the mob of mediæval republics in Italy. A dogma of equalduties implies that of equal rights. I know of no Christian authoritythat would not admit that it is as wicked to murder a poor man as a richman, or as bad to burgle an inelegantly furnished house as a tastefullyfurnished one. But the world had wandered further and further from thesetruisms, and nobody in the world was further from them than the group ofthe great English aristocrats. The idea of the equality of men is insubstance simply the idea of the importance of man. But it was preciselythe notion of the importance of a mere man which seemed startling andindecent to a society whose whole romance and religion now consisted ofthe importance of a gentleman. It was as if a man had walked naked intoParliament. There is not space here to develop the moral issue in full, but this will suffice to show that the critics concerned about thedifference in human types or talents are considerably wasting theirtime. If they can understand how two coins can count the same though oneis bright and the other brown, they might perhaps understand how two mencan vote the same though one is bright and the other dull. If, however, they are still satisfied with their solid objection that some men aredull, I can only gravely agree with them, that some men are very dull. But a few years after Lafayette had returned from helping to found arepublic in America he was flung over his own frontiers for resistingthe foundation of a republic in France. So furious was the onward strideof this new spirit that the republican of the new world lived to be thereactionary of the old. For when France passed from theory to practice, the question was put to the world in a way not thinkable in connectionwith the prefatory experiment of a thin population on a colonial coast. The mightiest of human monarchies, like some monstrous immeasurable idolof iron, was melted down in a furnace barely bigger than itself, andrecast in a size equally colossal, but in a shape men could notunderstand. Many, at least, could not understand it, and least of allthe liberal aristocracy of England. There were, of course, practicalreasons for a continuous foreign policy against France, whether royal orrepublican. There was primarily the desire to keep any foreigner frommenacing us from the Flemish coast; there was, to a much lesser extent, the colonial rivalry in which so much English glory had been gained bythe statesmanship of Chatham and the arms of Wolfe and of Clive. Theformer reason has returned on us with a singular irony; for in order tokeep the French out of Flanders we flung ourselves with increasingenthusiasm into a fraternity with the Germans. We purposely fed andpampered the power which was destined in the future to devour Belgium asFrance would never have devoured it, and threaten us across the seawith terrors of which no Frenchman would ever dream. But indeed muchdeeper things unified our attitude towards France before and after theRevolution. It is but one stride from despotism to democracy, in logicas well as in history; and oligarchy is equally remote from both. TheBastille fell, and it seemed to an Englishman merely that a despot hadturned into a demos. The young Bonaparte rose, and it seemed to anEnglishman merely that a demos had once more turned into a despot. Hewas not wrong in thinking these allotropic forms of the same alienthing; and that thing was equality. For when millions are equallysubject to one law, it makes little difference if they are also subjectto one lawgiver; the general social life is a level. The one thing thatthe English have never understood about Napoleon, in all their myriadstudies of his mysterious personality, is how impersonal he was. I hadalmost said how unimportant he was. He said himself, "I shall go down tohistory with my code in my hand;" but in practical effects, as distinctfrom mere name and renown, it would be even truer to say that his codewill go down to history with his hand set to it in signature--somewhatillegibly. Thus his testamentary law has broken up big estates andencouraged contented peasants in places where his name is cursed, inplaces where his name is almost unknown. In his lifetime, of course, itwas natural that the annihilating splendour of his military strokesshould rivet the eye like flashes of lightning; but his rain fell moresilently, and its refreshment remained. It is needless to repeat herethat after bursting one world-coalition after another by battles thatare the masterpieces of the military art, he was finally worn down bytwo comparatively popular causes, the resistance of Russia and theresistance of Spain. The former was largely, like so much that isRussian, religious; but in the latter appeared most conspicuously thatwhich concerns us here, the valour, vigilance and high national spiritof England in the eighteenth century. The long Spanish campaign triedand made triumphant the great Irish soldier, afterwards known asWellington; who has become all the more symbolic since he was finallyconfronted with Napoleon in the last defeat of the latter at Waterloo. Wellington, though too logical to be at all English, was in many waystypical of the aristocracy; he had irony and independence of mind. Butif we wish to realize how rigidly such men remained limited by theirclass, how little they really knew what was happening in their time, itis enough to note that Wellington seems to have thought he had dismissedNapoleon by saying he was not really a gentleman. If an acute andexperienced Chinaman were to say of Chinese Gordon, "He is not actuallya Mandarin, " we should think that the Chinese system deserved itsreputation for being both rigid and remote. But the very name of Wellington is enough to suggest another, and withit the reminder that this, though true, is inadequate. There was sometruth in the idea that the Englishman was never so English as when hewas outside England, and never smacked so much of the soil as when hewas on the sea. There has run through the national psychology somethingthat has never had a name except the eccentric and indeed extraordinaryname of Robinson Crusoe; which is all the more English for being quiteundiscoverable in England. It may be doubted if a French or German boyespecially wishes that his cornland or vineland were a desert; but manyan English boy has wished that his island were a desert island. But wemight even say that the Englishman was too insular for an island. Heawoke most to life when his island was sundered from the foundations ofthe world, when it hung like a planet and flew like a bird. And, by acontradiction, the real British army was in the navy; the boldest of theislanders were scattered over the moving archipelago of a great fleet. There still lay on it, like an increasing light, the legend of theArmada; it was a great fleet full of the glory of having once been asmall one. Long before Wellington ever saw Waterloo the ships had donetheir work, and shattered the French navy in the Spanish seas, leavinglike a light upon the sea the life and death of Nelson, who died withhis stars on his bosom and his heart upon his sleeve. There is no wordfor the memory of Nelson except to call him mythical. The very hour ofhis death, the very name of his ship, are touched with that epiccompleteness which critics call the long arm of coincidence and prophetsthe hand of God. His very faults and failures were heroic, not in aloose but in a classic sense; in that he fell only like the legendaryheroes, weakened by a woman, not foiled by any foe among men. And heremains the incarnation of a spirit in the English that is purelypoetic; so poetic that it fancies itself a thousand things, andsometimes even fancies itself prosaic. At a recent date, in an age ofreason, in a country already calling itself dull and business-like, withtop-hats and factory chimneys already beginning to rise like towers offunereal efficiency, this country clergyman's son moved to the last in aluminous cloud, and acted a fairy tale. He shall remain as a lesson tothose who do not understand England, and a mystery to those who thinkthey do. In outward action he led his ships to victory and died upon aforeign sea; but symbolically he established something indescribable andintimate, something that sounds like a native proverb; he was the manwho burnt his ships, and who for ever set the Thames on fire. XVI ARISTOCRACY AND THE DISCONTENTS It is the pathos of many hackneyed things that they are intrinsicallydelicate and are only mechanically made dull. Any one who has seen thefirst white light, when it comes in by a window, knows that daylight isnot only as beautiful but as mysterious as moonlight. It is the subtletyof the colour of sunshine that seems to be colourless. So patriotism, and especially English patriotism, which is vulgarized with volumes ofverbal fog and gas, is still in itself something as tenuous and tenderas a climate. The name of Nelson, with which the last chapter ended, might very well summarize the matter; for his name is banged and beatenabout like an old tin can, while his soul had something in it of a fineand fragile eighteenth-century vase. And it will be found that the mostthreadbare things contemporary and connected with him have a real truthto the tone and meaning of his life and time, though for us they havetoo often degenerated into dead jokes. The expression "hearts of oak, "for instance, is no unhappy phrase for the finer side of that Englandof which he was the best expression. Even as a material metaphor itcovers much of what I mean; oak was by no means only made intobludgeons, nor even only into battle-ships; and the English gentry didnot think it business-like to pretend to be mere brutes. The mere nameof oak calls back like a dream those dark but genial interiors ofcolleges and country houses, in which great gentlemen, not degenerate, almost made Latin an English language and port an English wine. Somepart of that world at least will not perish; for its autumnal glowpassed into the brush of the great English portrait-painters, who, morethan any other men, were given the power to commemorate the largehumanity of their own land; immortalizing a mood as broad and soft astheir own brush-work. Come naturally, at the right emotional angle, upona canvass of Gainsborough, who painted ladies like landscapes, as greatand as unconscious with repose, and you will note how subtly the artistgives to a dress flowing in the foreground something of the divinequality of distance. Then you will understand another faded phrase andwords spoken far away upon the sea; there will rise up quite freshbefore you and be borne upon a bar of music, like words you have neverheard before: "For England, home, and beauty. " When I think of these things, I have no temptation to mere grumbling atthe great gentry that waged the great war of our fathers. But indeed thedifficulty about it was something much deeper than could be dealt withby any grumbling. It was an exclusive class, but not an exclusive life;it was interested in all things, though not for all men. Or rather thosethings it failed to include, through the limitations of this rationalistinterval between mediæval and modern mysticism, were at least not of thesort to shock us with superficial inhumanity. The greatest gap in theirsouls, for those who think it a gap, was their complete and complacentpaganism. All their very decencies assumed that the old faith was dead;those who held it still, like the great Johnson, were consideredeccentrics. The French Revolution was a riot that broke up the veryformal funeral of Christianity; and was followed by various othercomplications, including the corpse coming to life. But the scepticismwas no mere oligarchic orgy; it was not confined to the Hell-Fire Club;which might in virtue of its vivid name be regarded as relativelyorthodox. It is present in the mildest middle-class atmosphere; as inthe middle-class masterpiece about "Northanger Abbey, " where we actuallyremember it is an antiquity, without ever remembering it is an abbey. Indeed there is no clearer case of it than what can only be called theatheism of Jane Austen. Unfortunately it could truly be said of the English gentleman, as ofanother gallant and gracious individual, that his honour stood rooted indishonour. He was, indeed, somewhat in the position of such anaristocrat in a romance, whose splendour has the dark spot of a secretand a sort of blackmail. There was, to begin with, an uncomfortableparadox in the tale of his pedigree. Many heroes have claimed to bedescended from the gods, from beings greater than themselves; but hehimself was far more heroic than his ancestors. His glory did not comefrom the Crusades but from the Great Pillage. His fathers had not comeover with William the Conqueror, but only assisted, in a somewhatshuffling manner, at the coming over of William of Orange. His ownexploits were often really romantic, in the cities of the Indian sultansor the war of the wooden ships; it was the exploits of the far-offfounders of his family that were painfully realistic. In this the greatgentry were more in the position of Napoleonic marshals than of Normanknights, but their position was worse; for the marshals might bedescended from peasants and shopkeepers; but the oligarchs weredescended from usurers and thieves. That, for good or evil, was theparadox of England; the typical aristocrat was the typical upstart. But the secret was worse; not only was such a family founded onstealing, but the family was stealing still. It is a grim truth that allthrough the eighteenth century, all through the great Whig speechesabout liberty, all through the great Tory speeches about patriotism, through the period of Wandewash and Plassy, through the period ofTrafalgar and Waterloo, one process was steadily going on in the centralsenate of the nation. Parliament was passing bill after bill for theenclosure, by the great landlords, of such of the common lands as hadsurvived out of the great communal system of the Middle Ages. It is muchmore than a pun, it is the prime political irony of our history, thatthe Commons were destroying the commons. The very word "common, " as wehave before noted, lost its great moral meaning, and became a meretopographical term for some remaining scrap of scrub or heath that wasnot worth stealing. In the eighteenth century these last and lingeringcommons were connected only with stories about highwaymen, which stilllinger in our literature. The romance of them was a romance of robbers;but not of the real robbers. This was the mysterious sin of the English squires, that they remainedhuman, and yet ruined humanity all around them. Their own ideal, naytheir own reality of life, was really more generous and genial than thestiff savagery of Puritan captains and Prussian nobles; but the landwithered under their smile as under an alien frown. Being still at leastEnglish, they were still in their way good-natured; but their positionwas false, and a false position forces the good-natured into brutality. The French Revolution was the challenge that really revealed to theWhigs that they must make up their minds to be really democrats or admitthat they were really aristocrats. They decided, as in the case of theirphilosophic exponent Burke, to be really aristocrats; and the resultwas the White Terror, the period of Anti-Jacobin repression whichrevealed the real side of their sympathies more than any stricken fieldsin foreign lands. Cobbett, the last and greatest of the yeomen, of thesmall farming class which the great estates were devouring daily, wasthrown into prison merely for protesting against the flogging of Englishsoldiers by German mercenaries. In that savage dispersal of a peacefulmeeting which was called the Massacre of Peterloo, English soldiers wereindeed employed, though much more in the spirit of German ones. And itis one of the bitter satires that cling to the very continuity of ourhistory, that such suppression of the old yeoman spirit was the work ofsoldiers who still bore the title of the Yeomanry. The name of Cobbett is very important here; indeed it is generallyignored because it is important. Cobbett was the one man who saw thetendency of the time as a whole, and challenged it as a whole;consequently he went without support. It is a mark of our whole modernhistory that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quietby the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by thistime that the Party System has been popular only in the same sense thata football match is popular. The division in Cobbett's time was slightlymore sincere, but almost as superficial; it was a difference ofsentiment about externals which divided the old agricultural gentry ofthe eighteenth century from the new mercantile gentry of thenineteenth. Through the first half of the nineteenth century there weresome real disputes between the squire and the merchant. The merchantbecame converted to the important economic thesis of Free Trade, andaccused the squire of starving the poor by dear bread to keep up hisagrarian privilege. Later the squire retorted not ineffectively byaccusing the merchant of brutalizing the poor by overworking them in hisfactories to keep up his commercial success. The passing of the FactoryActs was a confession of the cruelty that underlay the new industrialexperiments, just as the Repeal of the Corn Laws was a confession of thecomparative weakness and unpopularity of the squires, who had destroyedthe last remnants of any peasantry that might have defended the fieldagainst the factory. These relatively real disputes would bring us tothe middle of the Victorian era. But long before the beginning of theVictorian era, Cobbett had seen and said that the disputes were onlyrelatively real. Or rather he would have said, in his more robustfashion, that they were not real at all. He would have said that theagricultural pot and the industrial kettle were calling each otherblack, when they had both been blackened in the same kitchen. And hewould have been substantially right; for the great industrial discipleof the kettle, James Watt (who learnt from it the lesson of the steamengine), was typical of the age in this, that he found the old TradeGuilds too fallen, unfashionable and out of touch with the times to helphis discovery, so that he had recourse to the rich minority which hadwarred on and weakened those Guilds since the Reformation. There was noprosperous peasant's pot, such as Henry of Navarre invoked, to enterinto alliance with the kettle. In other words, there was in the strictsense of the word no commonwealth, because wealth, though more and morewealthy, was less and less common. Whether it be a credit or discredit, industrial science and enterprise were in bulk a new experiment of theold oligarchy; and the old oligarchy had always been ready for newexperiments--beginning with the Reformation. And it is characteristic ofthe clear mind which was hidden from many by the hot temper of Cobbett, that he did see the Reformation as the root of both squirearchy andindustrialism, and called on the people to break away from both. Thepeople made more effort to do so than is commonly realized. There aremany silences in our somewhat snobbish history; and when the educatedclass can easily suppress a revolt, they can still more easily suppressthe record of it. It was so with some of the chief features of thatgreat mediæval revolution the failure of which, or rather the betrayalof which, was the real turning-point of our history. It was so with therevolts against the religious policy of Henry VIII. ; and it was so withthe rick-burning and frame-breaking riots of Cobbett's epoch. The realmob reappeared for a moment in our history, for just long enough to showone of the immortal marks of the real mob--ritualism. There is nothingthat strikes the undemocratic doctrinaire so sharply about directdemocratic action as the vanity or mummery of the things done seriouslyin the daylight; they astonish him by being as unpractical as a poem ora prayer. The French Revolutionists stormed an empty prison merelybecause it was large and solid and difficult to storm, and thereforesymbolic of the mighty monarchical machinery of which it had been butthe shed. The English rioters laboriously broke in pieces a parishgrindstone, merely because it was large and solid and difficult tobreak, and therefore symbolic of the mighty oligarchical machinery whichperpetually ground the faces of the poor. They also put the oppressiveagent of some landlord in a cart and escorted him round the county, merely to exhibit his horrible personality to heaven and earth. Afterwards they let him go, which marks perhaps, for good or evil, acertain national modification of the movement. There is something verytypical of an English revolution in having the tumbril without theguillotine. Anyhow, these embers of the revolutionary epoch were trodden out verybrutally; the grindstone continued (and continues) to grind in thescriptural fashion above referred to, and, in most political crisessince, it is the crowd that has found itself in the cart. But, ofcourse, both the riot and repression in England were but shadows of theawful revolt and vengeance which crowned the parallel process inIreland. Here the terrorism, which was but a temporary and desperatetool of the aristocrats in England (not being, to do them justice, atall consonant to their temperament, which had neither the cruelty andmorbidity nor the logic and fixity of terrorism), became in a morespiritual atmosphere a flaming sword of religious and racial insanity. Pitt, the son of Chatham, was quite unfit to fill his father's place, unfit indeed (I cannot but think) to fill the place commonly given himin history. But if he was wholly worthy of his immortality, his Irishexpedients, even if considered as immediately defensible, have not beenworthy of _their_ immortality. He was sincerely convinced of thenational need to raise coalition after coalition against Napoleon, bypouring the commercial wealth then rather peculiar to England upon herpoorer Allies, and he did this with indubitable talent and pertinacity. He was at the same time faced with a hostile Irish rebellion and apartly or potentially hostile Irish Parliament. He broke the latter bythe most indecent bribery and the former by the most indecent brutality, but he may well have thought himself entitled to the tyrant's plea. Butnot only were his expedients those of panic, or at any rate of peril, but (what is less clearly realized) it is the only real defence of themthat they were those of panic and peril. He was ready to emancipateCatholics as such, for religious bigotry was not the vice of theoligarchy; but he was not ready to emancipate Irishmen as such. He didnot really want to enlist Ireland like a recruit, but simply to disarmIreland like an enemy. Hence his settlement was from the first in afalse position for settling anything. The Union may have been anecessity, but the Union was not a Union. It was not intended to be one, and nobody has ever treated it as one. We have not only never succeededin making Ireland English, as Burgundy has been made French, but we havenever tried. Burgundy could boast of Corneille, though Corneille was aNorman, but we should smile if Ireland boasted of Shakespeare. Ourvanity has involved us in a mere contradiction; we have tried to combineidentification with superiority. It is simply weak-minded to sneer at anIrishman if he figures as an Englishman, and rail at him if he figuresas an Irishman. So the Union has never even applied English laws toIreland, but only coercions and concessions both specially designed forIreland. From Pitt's time to our own this tottering alternation hascontinued; from the time when the great O'Connell, with his monstermeetings, forced our government to listen to Catholic Emancipation tothe time when the great Parnell, with his obstruction, forced it tolisten to Home Rule, our staggering equilibrium has been maintained byblows from without. In the later nineteenth century the better sort ofspecial treatment began on the whole to increase. Gladstone, anidealistic though inconsistent Liberal, rather belatedly realized thatthe freedom he loved in Greece and Italy had its rights nearer home, andmay be said to have found a second youth in the gateway of the grave, in the eloquence and emphasis of his conversion. And a statesman wearingthe opposite label (for what that is worth) had the spiritual insight tosee that Ireland, if resolved to be a nation, was even more resolved tobe a peasantry. George Wyndham, generous, imaginative, a man amongpoliticians, insisted that the agrarian agony of evictions, shootings, and rack-rentings should end with the individual Irish getting, asParnell had put it, a grip on their farms. In more ways than one hiswork rounds off almost romantically the tragedy of the rebellion againstPitt, for Wyndham himself was of the blood of the leader of the rebels, and he wrought the only reparation yet made for all the blood, shamefully shed, that flowed around the fall of FitzGerald. The effect on England was less tragic; indeed, in a sense it was comic. Wellington, himself an Irishman though of the narrower party, waspreeminently a realist, and, like many Irishmen, was especially arealist about Englishmen. He said the army he commanded was the scum ofthe earth; and the remark is none the less valuable because that armyproved itself useful enough to be called the salt of the earth. But intruth it was in this something of a national symbol and the guardian, asit were, of a national secret. There is a paradox about the English, even as distinct from the Irish or the Scotch, which makes any formalversion of their plans and principles inevitably unjust to them. Englandnot only makes her ramparts out of rubbish, but she finds ramparts inwhat she has herself cast away as rubbish. If it be a tribute to a thingto say that even its failures have been successes, there is truth inthat tribute. Some of the best colonies were convict settlements, andmight be called abandoned convict settlements. The army was largely anarmy of gaol-birds, raised by gaol-delivery; but it was a good army ofbad men; nay, it was a gay army of unfortunate men. This is the colourand the character that has run through the realities of English history, and it can hardly be put in a book, least of all a historical book. Ithas its flashes in our fantastic fiction and in the songs of the street, but its true medium is conversation. It has no name but incongruity. Anillogical laughter survives everything in the English soul. It survived, perhaps, with only too much patience, the time of terrorism in which themore serious Irish rose in revolt. That time was full of a quitetopsy-turvey tyranny, and the English humorist stood on his head to suitit. Indeed, he often receives a quite irrational sentence in a policecourt by saying he will do it on his head. So, under Pitt's coercionistrégime, a man was sent to prison for saying that George IV. Was fat; butwe feel he must have been partly sustained in prison by the artisticcontemplation of how fat he was. That sort of liberty, that sort ofhumanity, and it is no mean sort, did indeed survive all the drift anddownward eddy of an evil economic system, as well as the dragooning of areactionary epoch and the drearier menace of materialistic socialscience, as embodied in the new Puritans, who have purified themselveseven of religion. Under this long process, the worst that can be said isthat the English humorist has been slowly driven downwards in the socialscale. Falstaff was a knight, Sam Weller was a gentleman's servant, andsome of our recent restrictions seem designed to drive Sam Weller to thestatus of the Artful Dodger. But well it was for us that some suchtrampled tradition and dark memory of Merry England survived; well forus, as we shall see, that all our social science failed and all ourstatesmanship broke down before it. For there was to come the noise of atrumpet and a dreadful day of visitation, in which all the daily workersof a dull civilization were to be called out of their houses and theirholes like a resurrection of the dead, and left naked under a strangesun with no religion but a sense of humour. And men might know of whatnation Shakespeare was, who broke into puns and practical jokes in thedarkest passion of his tragedies, if they had only heard those boys inFrance and Flanders who called out "Early Doors!" themselves in atheatrical memory, as they went so early in their youth to break downthe doors of death. XVII THE RETURN OF THE BARBARIAN The only way to write a popular history, as we have already remarked, would be to write it backwards. It would be to take common objects ofour own street and tell the tale of how each of them came to be in thestreet at all. And for my immediate purpose it is really convenient totake two objects we have known all our lives, as features of fashion orrespectability. One, which has grown rarer recently, is what we call atop-hat; the other, which is still a customary formality, is a pair oftrousers. The history of these humorous objects really does give a clueto what has happened in England for the last hundred years. It is notnecessary to be an æsthete in order to regard both objects as thereverse of beautiful, as tested by what may be called the rational sideof beauty. The lines of human limbs can be beautiful, and so can thelines of loose drapery, but not cylinders too loose to be the first andtoo tight to be the second. Nor is a subtle sense of harmony needed tosee that while there are hundreds of differently proportioned hats, ahat that actually grows larger towards the top is somewhat top-heavy. But what is largely forgotten is this, that these two fantastic objects, which now strike the eye as unconscious freaks, were originallyconscious freaks. Our ancestors, to do them justice, did not think themcasual or commonplace; they thought them, if not ridiculous, at leastrococo. The top-hat was the topmost point of a riot of Regency dandyism, and bucks wore trousers while business men were still wearingknee-breeches. It will not be fanciful to see a certain oriental touchin trousers, which the later Romans also regarded as effeminatelyoriental; it was an oriental touch found in many florid things of thetime--in Byron's poems or Brighton Pavilion. Now, the interesting pointis that for a whole serious century these instantaneous fantasies haveremained like fossils. In the carnival of the Regency a few fools gotinto fancy dress, and we have all remained in fancy dress. At least, wehave remained in the dress, though we have lost the fancy. I say this is typical of the most important thing that happened in theVictorian time. For the most important thing was that nothing happened. The very fuss that was made about minor modifications brings into reliefthe rigidity with which the main lines of social life were left as theywere at the French Revolution. We talk of the French Revolution assomething that changed the world; but its most important relation toEngland is that it did not change England. A student of our history isconcerned rather with the effect it did not have than the effect itdid. If it be a splendid fate to have survived the Flood, the Englisholigarchy had that added splendour. But even for the countries in whichthe Revolution was a convulsion, it was the last convulsion--until thatwhich shakes the world to-day. It gave their character to all thecommonwealths, which all talked about progress, and were occupied inmarking time. Frenchmen, under all superficial reactions, remainedrepublican in spirit, as they had been when they first wore top-hats. Englishmen, under all superficial reforms, remained oligarchical inspirit, as they had been when they first wore trousers. Only one powermight be said to be growing, and that in a plodding and prosaicfashion--the power in the North-East whose name was Prussia. And theEnglish were more and more learning that this growth need cause them noalarm, since the North Germans were their cousins in blood and theirbrothers in spirit. The first thing to note, then, about the nineteenth century is thatEurope remained herself as compared with the Europe of the great war, and that England especially remained herself as compared even with therest of Europe. Granted this, we may give their proper importance to thecautious internal changes in this country, the small conscious and thelarge unconscious changes. Most of the conscious ones were much upon themodel of an early one, the great Reform Bill of 1832, and can beconsidered in the light of it. First, from the standpoint of most realreformers, the chief thing about the Reform Bill was that it did notreform. It had a huge tide of popular enthusiasm behind it, which whollydisappeared when the people found themselves in front of it. Itenfranchised large masses of the middle classes; it disfranchised verydefinite bodies of the working classes; and it so struck the balancebetween the conservative and the dangerous elements in the commonwealththat the governing class was rather stronger than before. The date, however, is important, not at all because it was the beginning ofdemocracy, but because it was the beginning of the best way everdiscovered of evading and postponing democracy. Here enters thehomoeopathic treatment of revolution, since so often successful. Wellinto the next generation Disraeli, the brilliant Jewish adventurer whowas the symbol of the English aristocracy being no longer genuine, extended the franchise to the artisans, partly, indeed, as a party moveagainst his great rival, Gladstone, but more as the method by which theold popular pressure was first tired out and then toned down. Thepoliticians said the working-class was now strong enough to be allowedvotes. It would be truer to say it was now weak enough to be allowedvotes. So in more recent times Payment of Members, which would once havebeen regarded (and resisted) as an inrush of popular forces, was passedquietly and without resistance, and regarded merely as an extension ofparliamentary privileges. The truth is that the old parliamentaryoligarchy abandoned their first line of trenches because they had bythat time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in theconcentration of colossal political funds in the private andirresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale ofpeerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymanderingof the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this innerobstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when thereis a permanent block on the line. The façade and outward form of thisnew secret government is the merely mechanical application of what iscalled the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as somesuppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system. But if this was the evolution of parliamentary reform, as represented bythe first Reform Bill, we can see the other side of it in the socialreform attacked immediately after the first Reform Bill. It is a truththat should be a tower and a landmark, that one of the first things doneby the Reform Parliament was to establish those harsh and dehumanisedworkhouses which both honest Radicals and honest Tories branded with theblack title of the New Bastille. This bitter name lingers in ourliterature, and can be found by the curious in the works of Carlyle andHood, but it is doubtless interesting rather as a note of contemporaryindignation than as a correct comparison. It is easy to imagine thelogicians and legal orators of the parliamentary school of progressfinding many points of differentiation and even of contrast. TheBastille was one central institution; the workhouses have been many, andhave everywhere transformed local life with whatever they have to giveof social sympathy and inspiration. Men of high rank and great wealthwere frequently sent to the Bastille; but no such mistake has ever beenmade by the more business administration of the workhouse. Over the mostcapricious operations of the _lettres de cachet_ there still hoveredsome hazy traditional idea that a man is put in prison to punish him forsomething. It was the discovery of a later social science that men whocannot be punished can still be imprisoned. But the deepest and mostdecisive difference lies in the better fortune of the New Bastille; forno mob has ever dared to storm it, and it never fell. The New Poor Law was indeed not wholly new in the sense that it was theculmination and clear enunciation of a principle foreshadowed in theearlier Poor Law of Elizabeth, which was one of the many anti-populareffects of the Great Pillage. When the monasteries were swept away andthe mediæval system of hospitality destroyed, tramps and beggars becamea problem, the solution of which has always tended towards slavery, evenwhen the question of slavery has been cleared of the irrelevant questionof cruelty. It is obvious that a desperate man might find Mr. Bumble andthe Board of Guardians less cruel than cold weather and the bareground--even if he were allowed to sleep on the ground, which (by averitable nightmare of nonsense and injustice) he is not. He is actuallypunished for sleeping under a bush on the specific and stated groundthat he cannot afford a bed. It is obvious, however, that he may findhis best physical good by going into the workhouse, as he often found itin pagan times by selling himself into slavery. The point is that thesolution remains servile, even when Mr. Bumble and the Board ofGuardians ceased to be in a common sense cruel. The pagan might have theluck to sell himself to a kind master. The principle of the New PoorLaw, which has so far proved permanent in our society, is that the manlost all his civic rights and lost them solely through poverty. There isa touch of irony, though hardly of mere hypocrisy, in the fact that theParliament which effected this reform had just been abolishing blackslavery by buying out the slave-owners in the British colonies. Theslave-owners were bought out at a price big enough to be calledblackmail; but it would be misunderstanding the national mentality todeny the sincerity of the sentiment. Wilberforce represented in this thereal wave of Wesleyan religion which had made a humane reaction againstCalvinism, and was in no mean sense philanthropic. But there issomething romantic in the English mind which can always see what isremote. It is the strongest example of what men lose by beinglong-sighted. It is fair to say that they gain many things also, thepoems that are like adventures and the adventures that are like poems. It is a national savour, and therefore in itself neither good nor evil;and it depends on the application whether we find a scriptural text forit in the wish to take the wings of the morning and abide in theuttermost parts of the sea, or merely in the saying that the eyes of afool are in the ends of the earth. Anyhow, the unconscious nineteenth-century movement, so slow that itseems stationary, was altogether in this direction, of which workhousephilanthropy is the type. Nevertheless, it had one national institutionto combat and overcome; one institution all the more intensely nationalbecause it was not official, and in a sense not even political. Themodern Trade Union was the inspiration and creation of the English; itis still largely known throughout Europe by its English name. It was theEnglish expression of the European effort to resist the tendency ofCapitalism to reach its natural culmination in slavery. In this it hasan almost weird psychological interest, for it is a return to the pastby men ignorant of the past, like the subconscious action of some manwho has lost his memory. We say that history repeats itself, and it iseven more interesting when it unconsciously repeats itself. No man onearth is kept so ignorant of the Middle Ages as the British workman, except perhaps the British business man who employs him. Yet all whoknow even a little of the Middle Ages can see that the modern TradeUnion is a groping for the ancient Guild. It is true that those wholook to the Trade Union, and even those clear-sighted enough to call itthe Guild, are often without the faintest tinge of mediæval mysticism, or even of mediæval morality. But this fact is itself the most strikingand even staggering tribute to mediæval morality. It has all theclinching logic of coincidence. If large numbers of the most hard-headedatheists had evolved, out of their own inner consciousness, the notionthat a number of bachelors or spinsters ought to live together incelibate groups for the good of the poor, or the observation of certainhours and offices, it would be a very strong point in favour of themonasteries. It would be all the stronger if the atheists had neverheard of monasteries; it would be strongest of all if they hated thevery name of monasteries. And it is all the stronger because the man whoputs his trust in Trades Unions does not call himself a Catholic or evena Christian, if he does call himself a Guild Socialist. The Trade Union movement passed through many perils, including aludicrous attempt of certain lawyers to condemn as a criminal conspiracythat Trade Union solidarity, of which their own profession is thestrongest and most startling example in the world. The struggleculminated in gigantic strikes which split the country in everydirection in the earlier part of the twentieth century. But anotherprocess, with much more power at its back, was also in operation. Theprinciple represented by the New Poor Law proceeded on its course, andin one important respect altered its course, though it can hardly besaid to have altered its object. It can most correctly be stated bysaying that the employers themselves, who already organized business, began to organize social reform. It was more picturesquely expressed bya cynical aristocrat in Parliament who said, "We are all Socialistsnow. " The Socialists, a body of completely sincere men led by severalconspicuously brilliant men, had long hammered into men's heads thehopeless sterility of mere non-interference in exchange. The Socialistsproposed that the State should not merely interfere in business butshould take over the business, and pay all men as equal wage-earners, orat any rate as wage-earners. The employers were not willing to surrendertheir own position to the State, and this project has largely faded frompolitics. But the wiser of them were willing to pay better wages, andthey were specially willing to bestow various other benefits so long asthey were bestowed after the manner of wages. Thus we had a series ofsocial reforms which, for good or evil, all tended in the samedirection; the permission to employees to claim certain advantages asemployees, and as something permanently different from employers. Ofthese the obvious examples were Employers' Liability, Old Age Pensions, and, as marking another and more decisive stride in the process, theInsurance Act. The latter in particular, and the whole plan of the social reform ingeneral, were modelled upon Germany. Indeed the whole English life ofthis period was overshadowed by Germany. We had now reached, for good orevil, the final fulfilment of that gathering influence which began togrow on us in the seventeenth century, which was solidified by themilitary alliances of the eighteenth century, and which in thenineteenth century had been turned into a philosophy--not to say amythology. German metaphysics had thinned our theology, so that many aman's most solemn conviction about Good Friday was that Friday was namedafter Freya. German history had simply annexed English history, so thatit was almost counted the duty of any patriotic Englishman to be proudof being a German. The genius of Carlyle, the culture preached byMatthew Arnold, would not, persuasive as they were, have alone producedthis effect but for an external phenomenon of great force. Our internalpolicy was transformed by our foreign policy; and foreign policy wasdominated by the more and more drastic steps which the Prussian, nowclearly the prince of all the German tribes, was taking to extend theGerman influence in the world. Denmark was robbed of two provinces;France was robbed of two provinces; and though the fall of Paris wasfelt almost everywhere as the fall of the capital of civilization, athing like the sacking of Rome by the Goths, many of the mostinfluential people in England still saw nothing in it but the solidsuccess of our kinsmen and old allies of Waterloo. The moral methodswhich achieved it, the juggling with the Augustenburg claim, the forgeryof the Ems telegram, were either successfully concealed or were butcloudily appreciated. The Higher Criticism had entered into our ethicsas well as our theology. Our view of Europe was also distorted and madedisproportionate by the accident of a natural concern for Constantinopleand our route to India, which led Palmerston and later Premiers tosupport the Turk and see Russia as the only enemy. This somewhat cynicalreaction was summed up in the strange figure of Disraeli, who made apro-Turkish settlement full of his native indifference to the Christiansubjects of Turkey, and sealed it at Berlin in the presence of Bismarck. Disraeli was not without insight into the inconsistencies and illusionsof the English; he said many sagacious things about them, and oneespecially when he told the Manchester School that their motto was"Peace and Plenty, amid a starving people, and with the world in arms. "But what he said about Peace and Plenty might well be parodied as acomment on what he himself said about Peace with Honour. Returning fromthat Berlin Conference he should have said, "I bring you Peace withHonour; peace with the seeds of the most horrible war of history; andhonour as the dupes and victims of the old bully in Berlin. " But it was, as we have seen, especially in social reform that Germanywas believed to be leading the way, and to have found the secret ofdealing with the economic evil. In the case of Insurance, which was thetest case, she was applauded for obliging all her workmen to set apart aportion of their wages for any time of sickness; and numerous otherprovisions, both in Germany and England, pursued the same ideal, whichwas that of protecting the poor against themselves. It everywhereinvolved an external power having a finger in the family pie; but littleattention was paid to any friction thus caused, for all prejudicesagainst the process were supposed to be the growth of ignorance. Andthat ignorance was already being attacked by what was callededucation--an enterprise also inspired largely by the example, andpartly by the commercial competition of Germany. It was pointed out thatin Germany governments and great employers thought it well worth theirwhile to apply the grandest scale of organization and the minutestinquisition of detail to the instruction of the whole German race. Thegovernment was the stronger for training its scholars as it trained itssoldiers; the big businesses were the stronger for manufacturing mind asthey manufactured material. English education was made compulsory; itwas made free; many good, earnest, and enthusiastic men laboured tocreate a ladder of standards and examinations, which would connect thecleverest of the poor with the culture of the English universities andthe current teaching in history or philosophy. But it cannot be saidthat the connection was very complete, or the achievement so thorough asthe German achievement. For whatever reason, the poor Englishmanremained in many things much as his fathers had been, and seemed tothink the Higher Criticism too high for him even to criticize. And then a day came, and if we were wise, we thanked God that we hadfailed. Education, if it had ever really been in question, woulddoubtless have been a noble gift; education in the sense of the centraltradition of history, with its freedom, its family honour, its chivalrywhich is the flower of Christendom. But what would our populace, in ourepoch, have actually learned if they had learned all that our schoolsand universities had to teach? That England was but a little branch on alarge Teutonic tree; that an unfathomable spiritual sympathy, all-encircling like the sea, had always made us the natural allies ofthe great folk by the flowing Rhine; that all light came from Luther andLutheran Germany, whose science was still purging Christianity of itsGreek and Roman accretions; that Germany was a forest fated to grow;that France was a dung-heap fated to decay--a dung-heap with a crowingcock on it. What would the ladder of education have led to, except aplatform on which a posturing professor proved that a cousin german wasthe same as a German cousin? What would the guttersnipe have learnt as agraduate, except to embrace a Saxon because he was the other half of anAnglo-Saxon? The day came, and the ignorant fellow found he had otherthings to learn. And he was quicker than his educated countrymen, forhe had nothing to unlearn. He in whose honour all had been said and sung stirred, and steppedacross the border of Belgium. Then were spread out before men's eyes allthe beauties of his culture and all the benefits of his organization;then we beheld under a lifting daybreak what light we had followed andafter what image we had laboured to refashion ourselves. Nor in anystory of mankind has the irony of God chosen the foolish things socatastrophically to confound the wise. For the common crowd of poor andignorant Englishmen, because they only knew that they were Englishmen, burst through the filthy cobwebs of four hundred years and stood wheretheir fathers stood when they knew that they were Christian men. TheEnglish poor, broken in every revolt, bullied by every fashion, longdespoiled of property, and now being despoiled of liberty, enteredhistory with a noise of trumpets, and turned themselves in two yearsinto one of the iron armies of the world. And when the critic ofpolitics and literature, feeling that this war is after all heroic, looks around him to find the hero, he can point to nothing but a mob. XVIII CONCLUSION In so small a book on so large a matter, finished hastily enough amidthe necessities of an enormous national crisis, it would be absurd topretend to have achieved proportion; but I will confess to some attemptto correct a disproportion. We talk of historical perspective, but Irather fancy there is too much perspective in history; for perspectivemakes a giant a pigmy and a pigmy a giant. The past is a giantforeshortened with his feet towards us; and sometimes the feet are ofclay. We see too much merely the sunset of the Middle Ages, even when weadmire its colours; and the study of a man like Napoleon is too oftenthat of "The Last Phase. " So there is a spirit that thinks it reasonableto deal in detail with Old Sarum, and would think it ridiculous to dealin detail with the Use of Sarum; or which erects in Kensington Gardens agolden monument to Albert larger than anybody has ever erected toAlfred. English history is misread especially, I think, because thecrisis is missed. It is usually put about the period of the Stuarts; andmany of the memorials of our past seem to suffer from the samevisitation as the memorial of Mr. Dick. But though the story of theStuarts was a tragedy, I think it was also an epilogue. I make the guess, for it can be no more, that the change really camewith the fall of Richard II. , following on his failure to use mediævaldespotism in the interests of mediæval democracy. England, like theother nations of Christendom, had been created not so much by the deathof the ancient civilization as by its escape from death, or by itsrefusal to die. Mediæval civilization had arisen out of the resistanceto the barbarians, to the naked barbarism from the North and the moresubtle barbarism from the East. It increased in liberties and localgovernment under kings who controlled the wider things of war andtaxation; and in the peasant war of the fourteenth century in England, the king and the populace came for a moment into conscious alliance. They both found that a third thing was already too strong for them. Thatthird thing was the aristocracy; and it captured and called itself theParliament. The House of Commons, as its name implies, had primarilyconsisted of plain men summoned by the King like jurymen; but it soonbecame a very special jury. It became, for good or evil, a great organof government, surviving the Church, the monarchy and the mob; it didmany great and not a few good things. It created what we call theBritish Empire; it created something which was really far morevaluable, a new and natural sort of aristocracy, more humane and evenhumanitarian than most of the aristocracies of the world. It hadsufficient sense of the instincts of the people, at least until lately, to respect the liberty and especially the laughter that had becomealmost the religion of the race. But in doing all this, it deliberatelydid two other things, which it thought a natural part of its policy; ittook the side of the Protestants, and then (partly as a consequence) ittook the side of the Germans. Until very lately most intelligentEnglishmen were quite honestly convinced that in both it was taking theside of progress against decay. The question which many of them are nowinevitably asking themselves, and would ask whether I asked it or no, iswhether it did not rather take the side of barbarism againstcivilization. At least, if there be anything valid in my own vision of these things, we have returned to an origin and we are back in the war with thebarbarians. It falls as naturally for me that the Englishman and theFrenchman should be on the same side as that Alfred and Abbo should beon the same side, in that black century when the barbarians wastedWessex and besieged Paris. But there are now, perhaps, less certaintests of the spiritual as distinct from the material victory ofcivilization. Ideas are more mixed, are complicated by fine shades orcovered by fine names. And whether the retreating savage leaves behindhim the soul of savagery, like a sickness in the air, I myself shouldjudge primarily by one political and moral test. The soul of savagery isslavery. Under all its mask of machinery and instruction, the Germanregimentation of the poor was the relapse of barbarians into slavery. Ican see no escape from it for ourselves in the ruts of our presentreforms, but only by doing what the mediævals did after the otherbarbarian defeat: beginning, by guilds and small independent groups, gradually to restore the personal property of the poor and the personalfreedom of the family. If the English really attempt that, the Englishhave at least shown in the war, to any one who doubted it, that theyhave not lost the courage and capacity of their fathers, and can carryit through if they will. If they do not do so, if they continue to moveonly with the dead momentum of the social discipline which we learntfrom Germany, there is nothing before us but what Mr. Belloc, thediscoverer of this great sociological drift, has called the ServileState. And there are moods in which a man, considering that conclusionof our story, is half inclined to wish that the wave of Teutonicbarbarism had washed out us and our armies together; and that the worldshould never know anything more of the last of the English, except thatthey died for liberty. THE END PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES. [Illustration: Publisher's logo]